“He was asking for a couple of quid.”
“Same thing.”
“For Children in Need.”
“He was dressed as a fucking rabbit. I assumed he was dangerous.”
“That’s probably the only reason you’re not in prison,” Marcus conceded.
“Yeah, well. They wouldn’t have got me at all if it wasn’t for those pesky kids.”
Who had caught it on camera, and stuck it on YouTube. The whole dressed-as-a-rabbit thing was mitigation, of course, and the arresting officer had been charity-mugged herself three times that morning, and in the end the assault charges had been sidestepped on condition Shirley sign up for AFM.
Anger Fucking Management. Twice a week, in Shoreditch.
(“Don’t set off any new trends,” Marcus warned her when he found out. “I took an idiot round Shoreditch once. That’s how hipsters started.”)
“And I’m assuming River and Louisa are fuck-ups,” he said now.
“Well, duh.”
“Catherine was an issue. Min was a fuck-up.”
“And Ho’s a dickhead, but you always get outliers. So what’s Jasper Konrad, that’s what I want to know. And what is it with the air piano?” She mimicked his action, trilling up and down a non-existent instrument. “Who’s he think he is, Elton John?”
“You want to know what he’s hearing in his head, go ask him. But don’t blame me if the voices tell him to carve you up.”
“Yeah, ’cause he looks like he could be dangerous. Probably takes two of him to scramble an egg.” She stopped pretending to play the piano. “Tell you what, though,” she said. “If I was River, I’d be worried.”
“How so?”
“Youngish white guy, fucked up and seething. We’ve already got one of those. It’s like River’s being replaced.”
Marcus said, “You have a weird way of looking at things.”
“You wait and see. Then tell me I’m wrong.”
She started banging at her keyboard again, her actual one, and Marcus couldn’t tell if she was working out aggression, or writing an email.
Suppressing a sigh, he returned to work.
When he emerged from the footpath a car was heading down the lane, and it slowed at the sight of him, seemed about to halt, then sped up. He resolutely did not turn to watch it—they wanted him to react. Best keep his powder dry. And he was not quite defenceless, as they would discover to their cost.
No, he would make straight for the shop; in/out, back to camp. It might not be a simple exfiltration—the woman behind the counter was a chatty one; you could barely prise yourself loose with a crowbar—but lately, it occurred to him, she had been chatting less, listening more; coaxing out details it might have been wiser to preserve. He’d been explaining to her how history was never a closed book. Look at Russia: complete basket case. That hadn’t been the plan, but that was the thing about history: push it down in one place, it springs up in another, like ill-laid lino.
He’d said, “And there’s always a price to pay. You make decisions, and people die, and that’s what you live with, day and night, ever after. But I wouldn’t have done things any differently.”
She’d said, “David, you worked at the Ministry of Transport. I’m sure people were inconvenienced, but I don’t suppose many of them died.”
Of course he had. The Ministry of Transport was his cover story; the alibi that papered over forty-something years of working life. So in the village, that’s what he’d been: a pen-pusher with a brief for trains or roads or airports—you couldn’t expect him to remember. It was hard enough keeping track of what he’d actually done, without recalling everything he’d merely pretended to do.
So he’d laughed it off, “Figure of speech, dear lady,” but she’d have been on the phone as soon as he’d left, letting them know his cover was springing leaks. These were the lengths to which they were going. They were replacing members of his community, so that those he’d lived among for years were no longer to be trusted.
(“The best of us are thieves and scoundrels,” he’d told River more than once. “As for the worst . . . ”
“Slough House,” River would say. “Jackson Lamb. Remember?”)
And River was his most obvious asset, his most trusted fellow human. What if they replaced him too? He could open the door to his only grandson and find a viper slithering inside.
If that happened, measures would have to be taken. Because he was not quite defenceless, as they would discover to their cost.
He crossed the lane, glad of his wellingtons, and entered the shop, setting the bell above the door jangling. What was it he’d wanted? Basic supplies: bread and bacon, milk and teabags. But already there was the sense of entering enemy territory, of having wandered into the path of stoats, because the lady of the shop was staring at him in something like horror, something like pity; was coming round the counter with one hand washing the other, her mouth stretching ever wider.
“Oh, David,” she said. “David, your trousers . . . ”
And when the O.B. looked down it took him a moment to understand what she was getting at, because he was certainly wearing trousers, tucked into his wellingtons, and the lady of the shop had reached him and taken his hand before it dawned on him that what he was looking at was not the thick dark tweed of everyday use, but the dark-red paisley-patterned cotton of his pyjamas.
And morning gives way to afternoon, and evening falls, as it usually does. In Kent, daylight slinks away across the fields as streetlights wink on one by one, each casting a tight umbrella over its own little stage, while in the heart of London darkness loiters in corners, and peeps from behind curtains. In Slough House, the heating has died with as much effort as it took to come to life, the death rattle of its pipes sounding a knell over the afternoon’s activities, such as they were. In the end, Lamb has shown neither his face nor any other part of his anatomy, but the expectation of a dismal event can be as draining as its occurrence, and the atmosphere retains an edge of disquiet, despite the horses’ departure. First to go was Roderick Ho, followed closely by Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander. JK Coe may have been next—he was simply there one moment and then not, like the shine on an apple—but what’s certain is that Louisa Guy and River Cartwright left together, their destination the nearest pub in which they might expect to encounter no one they know. Moira Tregorian is last to leave, but before doing so yields to the temptation of entering Lamb’s office, which has overcome its top-floor location to assert a natural inclination towards cellardom. Dankness is its signature odour, with notes of stale flatulence and mouldy bread. A suspicious mind might even conjecture that smoking has taken place here. The blinds, as ever, are drawn, and the overhead bulbs have blown, so for illumination Moira is forced to rely on the lamp atop a pile of telephone directories to one side of the desk. The light this casts is yellow and sickly, and mostly serves to rearrange shadows. On Lamb’s desk, the piles of paper have an unread look and are curling at the edges; on his shelves, the clutter is a challenge to the tidy-minded intruder. Tidy-minded Moira Tregorian certainly is, but simple-minded she isn’t, quite, and she overcomes the urge to begin instilling order. Instead, she hovers a moment, wondering about this man into whose orbit she has been cast, whom she has yet to encounter, and who seems to collect empty bottles. It is clear that her predecessor has let things slide to the extent that bringing Mr. Lamb to heel might prove a wearisome business. Moira Tregorian sighs to punctuate this thought, then turns the lamp off and makes her way down the stairs and into the damp and gloomy air of Aldersgate Street.
Behind her Slough House creaks and bangs, and surrenders to the chill.