“I’d lock ’em in a room and let ’em fight for the gun.”
“There’s always Louisa, of course. She’s pretty reliable.”
“Well, it’s a sliding scale, isn’t it?” said Lamb. “Least fucked-up employee of the week. We should have a plaque.”
“I’ll make a note,” said Catherine. Then she rose and crossed the landing to her own office, from which she emerged a moment later wearing her coat.
She made little noise on the staircase, well used to its repertoire of squeaks and groans. Even the back door behaved for once, and she exited Slough House with little effort and less noise.
A few moments later, the heating went off.
And a chill descends on Slough House, as chills are wont to do; a chill accompanied by a series of gurgles and bangs as the ancient boiler begins its nightly ordeal of sucking warmth from the air. From the top floor, this process sounds like the rattling of old tin bones, and nowhere are bones rattled more fussily than in Jackson Lamb’s office. He listens to his radiator die its death, and smokes a last cigarette, and drains a final glass. And then he rises, leaving his lamp to cast its weary glow on an empty room; he wrestles himself into his raincoat, and trudges down to the next landing, his heavy tread coaxing maximum complaint from each stair.
Outside the kitchen, he pauses. The offices here are doorless now, and he can see into Louisa Guy’s room, with its recently scrubbed and disinfected patch of carpet the approximate size and shape of Dead Sam Chapman. He does not know, but would not be surprised to learn, that Louisa is asleep already, early as it is; he suspects she has achieved some semblance of peace these past few months, and in those circumstances, sleep would be his own drug of choice. To the other side lies River Cartwright’s room; now JK Coe’s room too. Sleep is probably not on Cartwright’s immediate agenda, but then, thinks Lamb, Cartwright has some fairly radical new information to absorb; that, for instance, he owes his birth, his very existence, to the messianic schemes of one mad spook, just as he owes his lifetime since to the handed-down dreams of another. For Lamb has no doubt that David Cartwright has slipped past the point of no return; has embarked on an irrevocable descent into mental twilight, haunted by the realisation that what he helped sow across the Channel years ago has bloomed in carnage-colours on his own doorstep. How the younger Cartwright will come to terms with this—if he ever does—is, as Catherine Standish recently observed, a topic for another day; whether the older Cartwright will be brought to book for his ancient sins, Lamb wastes little time contemplating. He has been a joe most of his working life; is still a joe whenever the lights go out. And one thing joes learn quickly is that those who write the rules rarely suffer their weight.
As for Coe, Lamb meant what he said earlier to Standish: that JK Coe might work out—though, for Lamb, “working out” might not indicate as positive an outcome as that phrase usually conveys. Might be useful to Lamb would be another way of putting it, not always an unmitigated delight to those so designated. But whatever his future holds, at this precise moment JK Coe, too, is casting his eyes around an empty room; in his case, the sitting room he has spent little time in this past year or more, ever since the evening he spent here naked and petrified, at the mercy of a dangerous man. There hasn’t been a night between that one and this that Coe hasn’t stared wide-eyed at the dark, wondering what torment it holds, but for some reason he feels he might sleep dreamlessly tonight. And gazing round, he decides that come the weekend he will rearrange the furniture, or perhaps heave it down to the pavement for locals to pillage, and replace it all. And he spreads his hands in front of him, splays them wide, and sees very little trembling. The music in his head is not quite silent, but his fingers at least are resting.
Another flight of stairs. There are stains on these walls which are highly mysterious even to Lamb; stains that seem to arrive of their own accord, and yet own the appearance of having been there always. He is aware that his slow horses occasionally harbour similar thoughts about himself.
On the next landing, he pauses again. One of the rooms here is Roderick Ho’s, and Ho’s whereabouts, activities, hopes, dreams and desires have only ever concerned Lamb when Lamb is busy thwarting one or other of them. So it doesn’t matter to him that Ho is currently explaining to Kim—his girlfriend—that he was unable to carry out the favour she wanted because of something that came up at work; or that, when she petulantly suggests that he has misrepresented his talents to her—that he is, in short, little more than an unreliable fantasist—Ho’s response, babes, is to close his eyes and replay in his mind what never happened: his sudden emergence from his hiding place, his overpowering of the lone gunman, his bringing Marcus back to life . . . Little light finds its way through his closed lids, though some small part of a tear squeezes out. But no matter.
The other room is Marcus and Shirley’s, now Shirley’s alone. It smells fresh, because a painter has been, but the painter has plied his trade very much in the ethos of Slough House, which is to say, with little enthusiasm and less care. It is true that the wall behind what was Marcus’s desk is now whiter than it has been in years, but only the middle section has been repainted, leaving even the most casual onlooker to wonder what has been painted over, and even to imagine that this freshness hides an undercoat of dubious quality. Something not quite eradicable, of a morbidly stuccoed texture, and lingering effect.
But Lamb won’t spend his days staring at this wall. That will fall to Shirley Dander, who is out clubbing now; has hit the dance floor unfashionably early, and to everyone watching appears to be celebrating something marvelous; flailing her limbs in an uncoordinated mess of ecstasy, just violent enough to prevent anyone getting close, and piercing her fraudulent joy. She is a dervish tonight, a priestess in her own brand-new religion, and the object of her adoration is fury. For Shirley is not managing her anger; she is allowing it to take root, and will nurture it within, and when the time is ripe, will cut it loose.
Lamb knows none of this, of course. But he can guess. He can guess.
A final dog-legged set of stairs. Now he is at the back door, which sticks—it always sticks—as if reluctant to see him leave, but leave he does, with a grunt and a roll of the shoulder. Locking it behind him, he stands in the mildewed yard, looking up for the few brave stars London has to offer. But none are shining on Slough House. Instead, a feeble light stains the window of his own office, some storeys above; a light kept mostly in check by the ever-drawn blinds, but managing still to press itself against the grimy glass. For a moment, Lamb is transfixed by what his room—his lair—his life—looks like from the outside, but this passes. Then, with his collar turned up, he leaves the yard, and no one sees him go.
Acknowledgments
My long-time publisher is Soho Press. I’m glad about that. If Joss Whedon created a publishing house, it would be Soho Press. The folk there are smart, keen, funny, insanely knowledgeable about really pointless stuff, supportive, caring, snappy dressers, and almost certainly concealing dark, terrible secrets in their complicated pasts. So thank you Abby Koski, Amara Hoshijo, Carin Siegfried, Daniel Ehrenhaft, Janine Agro, Juliet Grames, Kevin Murphy, Mark Doten, Meredith Barnes, Paul Oliver, Rachel Kowal, Rudy Martinez, and especially Bronwen Hruska. Bronwen: when you’re not around, they sometimes refer to you as “Mama Bear.” I just thought you should know this.
Back in the UK, my editor Mark Richards pointed me in the direction of the dazzle ship—literally; we were standing on a rooftop at the time—and I’m grateful to him for that and much else. Thanks too to the whole of the John Murray team. Yassine Belkacemi is a star.