Which wasn’t much. A distance she’d not think twice about jumping most days of the week; but most days of the week it wasn’t raining, she wasn’t pissed, there wasn’t a cold deep river down below. But he couldn’t have gone anywhere else. He had to be on that platform, behind that hut, crouched in the shadow of that crane or winch—stop overthinking it; make the bloody jump. She stepped up onto the wall, made the beginner’s error of looking down, and it might have all been over in that same second if some survival instinct hadn’t kicked in, the kind that decided she might as well jump as step back onto the nice safe stairs. Maybe not a survival instinct, then. Maybe her internal idiot. Either way, she jumped, and for half a moment was a statistic waiting to happen, and then landed on the platform, its wooden decking solid as a road, but twice as slippery. She went down on her hands and knees, and had to grab one of the crane’s metal joists to haul herself up. Some of the shapes took solid form: crates and buckets and a toolbox, some metal poles and an industrial-sized bobbin wrapped with cable. And then there was movement from behind the toilet-sized cabin; it might have been a shadow flung from the far bank of the river, except shadows didn’t assemble themselves into solid human shapes. The vanishing man stepped out of the dark and unvanished.
“You’re under arrest,” she told him.
He punched her in the face.
Or would have done; she leaned sideways and his fist missed her by a whisker, but she slipped and went down again anyway. Her coat, she thought—her coat was going to be such a mess. Partly because she’d just landed on her back in an oily puddle. But mostly because her hand had just found her Service weapon—Devon’s Service weapon—and as she pulled it from her shoulder holster it snagged on her coat’s lining, so the shot she fired tore a nasty hole parallel to its middle button. She didn’t hit him—hadn’t intended to—but she stopped him in his tracks.
“I should have fucking mentioned,” she said. “Stop or I shoot.”
And suddenly there were bees everywhere, a swarm of bright red bees dancing around her; around the vanishing man too, who looked down at her with quite a charming grin. He raised his hands above his head, though kept his eyes on Emma rather than raise them to the bridge where the nasty squad had gathered, their laser-sighted guns trained on the pair of them. A metallic voice was suggesting she drop her weapon now. She dropped her weapon. And still they danced, the flight of red bees, humming over her upper body as if awaiting the order to dive and sting. It could easily happen. She’d be the last to know. But even that couldn’t stop Emma doing what she did next, which was roll sideways and vomit two tequila shots, a beer and two black coffees.
Some of which went on her coat.
Shirley said, “Like fuck I don’t. Right now, it’s all I want to do.”
She was still holding the gun; Patrice was still chained to the radiator. JK Coe was leaning against the wall, which seemed to be his preferred location. Because, it occurred to her, standing like that, nobody could come up behind him.
But someone could come up behind her, and did.
Catherine said, “Shirley, Marcus is dead. Nothing can change that. And if you kill this man now, it will haunt you forever.”
“I’ve killed men before.”
“While they were chained to a radiator?”
She didn’t reply.
“This is different,” Catherine explained.
Shirley thought: I can handle different. What she couldn’t handle was the thought of this man walking around a world he’d ejected Marcus from.
She raised the gun and levelled it at Patrice, who watched her without changing expression.
But the gun felt heavy in her hand.
Catherine said, “Shirley. Please. If you kill him like this, you might never sleep again.”
“Sleep’s overrated.”
“Take it from me, it’s really not. Sometimes it’s the only thing that can get you out of bed in the morning. The knowledge that you can get back into it come night.”
“He was my friend.”
“He was mine too. He was a good man. And he wouldn’t want you to do this.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
JK Coe said, “She’s right.”
“What?”
“Marcus wouldn’t want you to kill him.”
“How would you know?”
“Psych Eval. Remember?”
The gun felt so very very heavy.
“Marcus thought you were a prick,” she told him.
“He was your friend, not mine.”
Catherine said, “Shirley. This isn’t an op. It would be an execution.”
“I don’t care.”
“You will.”
It felt like the heaviest thing she’d ever held in her hand.
“I don’t want him to be alive when Marcus isn’t,” she said.
“I know.”
“He should die.”
“But you shouldn’t kill him.”
Silently, Coe offered his hand. She looked at it, then at the gun in her own. Then at Patrice, who was still on his back, cuffed to the radiator. A short time ago, he’d been indestructible; storming Slough House, killing Marcus, killing Sam.
Shirley really wanted him dead.
But she didn’t want to kill him. Not like this.
And she felt so very very tired.
She heard Catherine sigh softly as she lowered the gun into Coe’s waiting hand.
Anger Fucking Management. Marcus would be proud.
Then Coe shot Patrice three times in the chest.
“There you go,” he said, and handed the gun back to Shirley.
River rolled and threw up Thames water, then opened his eyes. He was staring at wet pavement. He rolled again and a blurry face, inches from his own, took shape, slipped out of focus, then slipped back in again.
“Louisa,” he said, or tried to. It came out “Larghay.”
“In future,” she told him, “pick up a fucking phone, yeah?”
Then she pulled away and all he could see was the rain, still steadily falling.
In the glow from the streetlights, the drops looked like diamonds.
The rain had stopped, which was such a longed-for, such an unexpected outcome, that all around the city people were saying it twice: the rain has stopped. The rain has stopped. Slough House was all but empty that night, twenty-four hours after the attack. There was still a stain on the wall behind what had been Marcus’s desk; another on the carpet in Louisa’s room, where Bad Sam had fallen; and a third in Coe and Cartwright’s office, beneath the radiator. But the bodies had been removed, and someone, probably Catherine, had cleared away the smashed chair and assorted debris. The broken doors were propped against walls, waiting for the paperwork to go through enough channels that somebody, somewhere, would give up and sign a chitty allowing them to be replaced. Until then, Slough House would be largely open-plan.
Jackson Lamb’s door was undamaged, but stood ajar, allowing a little grey light to spill onto the landing. The room opposite, once Catherine Standish’s, was in darkness, though its door too was open. And on the stairs was a noise, a series of noises, made by someone on their way up; someone unused to the creaking staircase, the damp walls, the various odours of neglect in the stairwell, which it would take industrial solvents or environmental catastrophe to shift.
When Claude Whelan reached the uppermost landing he paused, as if unsure the ascent had been worth it.
“In here,” something growled.
Suppressing a shudder, he went in.
Lamb was behind his desk. His shoeless feet rested on top of it, his right heel showing through a hole in one sock, and most of his toes through a hole in the other. There was a bottle in front of him, and a glass in his hand, whose emptiness was presumably a temporary anomaly. The room’s only light source was to his right, a lamp set on a thigh-level ziggurat of dusty books: telephone directories, Whelan thought. An analogue man in a digital world. Whether that was obsolescence or survival trait, time would tell.