And while it was true that national security had been stepped up to the highest notch, things hadn’t yet reached the pass where anyone was screaming down a telephone: “Get me the slow horses!”
Louisa said, “If there was something we could do, we’d be doing it. But we don’t have the resources or the information to do anything useful here in the office. And in case you haven’t noticed yet, they don’t put us out on the streets.”
“No, well. That’s as may be.”
“Which is why Marcus and Shirley are blowing off steam. I can’t speak for Coe, but my guess is he’s zoning out at his desk. And Ho’ll be grooming his beard. I think that’s all of us accounted for.”
“Is Mr. Lamb not expected?” Moira asked.
“Lamb?”
“Mr. Lamb, yes.”
River and Louisa exchanged a glance. “He’s not been around much lately,” Louisa said.
“Hence,” said River, and waved a vague hand. Hence people talking in kitchens and torturing each other in offices. When the cat was away, Lamb had been known to remark, the mice started farting about with notions of democratic freedom. Then the cat returned in a tank.
(“Remind me,” River had once asked him, “back in the Cold War—whose side were you on?”)
“Only he’s invited me to lunch.”
In the silence that followed, the radiator on the landing belched in an oddly familiar way, as if it were working up an impression.
“I think I may have just had a small stroke,” Louisa said at last. “You can’t possibly have said what I thought I just heard.”
River said, “Have you met Jackson?”
“He sent me an email.”
“Is that a no?”
“We haven’t met in person.”
“Have you heard about him?”
Moira Tregorian said, “I’m told he’s a bit of a character.”
“Did nobody tell you which bit?”
“There’s no need for—”
Louisa said, “Seriously, you haven’t met him, but he sent you an email asking you to lunch? When?”
“He just said ‘soon.’”
“Which might mean today.”
“Well . . . Yes, I thought it might.”
“Action stations,” murmured River.
They escaped, but before they disappeared into their separate rooms River said, “So, you okay for later?”
“Yeah, no, what? Later?”
“Quick drink,” said River. “Thing is—”
Here it comes, thought Louisa.
“—I’m worried about my grandfather.”
Though the rain had stopped, it still shook from the trees when the wind blew, spattering the windows, and still dripped from the guttering over the porch, which was thick with leaves. A lagoon had appeared in the lane, drowning the grassy verge, and in the village a burst main had closed the road for a day and a half, water pumping through the tarmac in its familiar, implacable way. Fire you could fight, and even half-way tame; water went where it chose, taking a hundred years to wear away a rock, or a minute and a half to pick the same rock up and carry it two miles distant. It altered the landscape too, so that when he looked from his window at first light he might have been transported elsewhere in his sleep; the whole house shipped off to a realm where trees groped upwards from the depths, and a tracery of hedgework scraped the surfaces of lakes. Bewildered by difference, you could lose your bearings. Which was the last thing you wanted to happen to you, because one day it would be the last thing that did.
It was important to keep track of where you were.
Knowing when you were was equally critical.
A good job, thought David Cartwright—River’s grandfather; the O.B.—that he had a head for dates.
January 4th. The year, as ever, the current one.
His house was in Kent; old house, big garden, not that he did as much of that since Rose had died. Winter provided an alibi: Can’t wait to be back out there, my boy. Life’s better with a trowel in your hand. Gardening, come to that, was what he’d been doing first time he’d laid eyes on River. Funny way to meet your grandson, already seven years old. River’s mother’s fault, he’d thought then, but such straightforward judgments seemed less clear now. He was tying his tie, as he had these thoughts; watching his hands in the mirror as they made complicated movements beyond the reach of his conscious brain. Some things were best done without thinking. Raising a daughter, it had turned out, not one of them.
Tie seemed straight enough, though. Important to maintain standards. You read about these old chaps in their pee-stained corduroys, with their vests on backwards, and dribble on their chins.
“That ever happens to me,” he’d instructed River more than once, “shoot me like a horse.”
“Exactly like a horse,” River would reply drily.
Dammit, that was the name they gave them, there at Slough House. The slow horses. Treading on a young man’s toes, that was; reminding him of the balls-up he’d made of things.
Not that his own copybook was free of blot. If they’d had a Slough House in his day, who knew? He might have whiled his own career away in terminal frustration; forced to sit it out on the bench, watching others carried shoulder-high round the boundary. Laps of honour and whatnot. That was what the boy thought, of course; that it was all about guts and glory—truth was, it was all about flesh and blood. Medals weren’t won in the sunshine. Backs were stabbed in the dark. It was a messy business, and maybe the boy was better off out of it, though there was no telling him that, of course. Wouldn’t be a Cartwright otherwise. Just like his mother, whom David Cartwright had missed acutely for years, without admitting it to anyone, even Rose.
. . . All these thoughts and he was still here in the hallway. What was it he’d been going to do? A blank moment came and went so smoothly it left barely a ripple. He was going to walk to the village. He needed to stock up on bread and bacon and whatever. His grandson might call round later, and he wanted to have some food in.
His grandson was called River.
Before he left, though, he needed to check his tie was straight.
In the same way a tongue keeps probing a sore tooth, the conversation in Marcus and Shirley’s office kept returning to Roderick Ho—specifically, the wholly improbable, end-of-days-indicating, suggestion that he no longer flew solo.
“You think he’s really found a woman?”
“He might have. It’s surprising what some people leave lying around.”
“Because it could easily turn out to be a chick with a dick or whatever. And he’d be the last to know.”
“Even Ho—”
Shirley said, “Seriously, trust me. Last to know.”
“Yeah, okay,” Marcus said. “But he seems convinced.” He directed a sour look towards the doorway, and Ho’s office beyond. “Says he’s a one-woman man now.”
“He probably meant cumulatively.”
Marcus, who hadn’t been laid since his wife’s car was repo’ed, grunted.
Louisa had peered round the door three minutes back to give them a heads-up on a possible Lamb appearance: as a result, the pair were staring at their screens; a reasonable facsimile of work, except that Shirley was still wet. Marcus’s monitor throbbed in front of him. Even after all this time in Slough House he found it hard to adjust to its routines; switch mind and body off, become an automaton, processing random information sets. Burnt-out vehicles, that was his spreadsheet: burnt-out cars and vans—hardly an unusual sight in British cities. He’d seen one himself last week, in a supermarket car-park; a black husk squatting in a pool of sooty residue. It would have been joy-ridden there then set alight, as the simplest way of eradicating evidence—the kids who’d taken it convinced that the forces of law and order were itching to go CSI on their gangsta asses; ready to swab DNA from seats, prints from the steering wheel. Safer just to torch that baby, and watch it crack and buckle in the heat.