In the days to come, news will find its way to Slough House from various corners of the wider world, one a continent away. There has been a boating accident on the Barents Sea, four friends on a fishing trip having come unstuck in wild weather, and rumours are beginning to circulate that Vassily Rasnokov, Moscow’s First Desk, was involved. No body has been recovered, but that’s not an uncommon outcome in such circumstances: the wind whips up the waves, and the water reveals its depths, and what happens in the gap between can remain forever an undisclosed secret. And if other possibilities exist—that, for example, Vassily has pulled off a vanishing act, the better to slip into anonymous retirement—that’s a problem for his own Service to ponder, and is presumably unconnected with the recent off-the-books purchase by Regent’s Park of an undistinguished flat on the Holloway Road. Here, a small but operationally experienced team has assembled; its codename Rosebud; its remit, to discover the identity of the man who burned to death in a dosshouse near the Westway, and to wait by the open door of his vacant life, to see who, if anyone, steps through it. It’s a job requiring a humdrum dedication to detail, a million miles removed from high-tech movie-spookery, yet nor is it the daily trudge that the minions of Slough House endure. Because for Rosebud, a positive result to their investigation might lead them into the realms of gold, whereas for the slow horses, the end result of unvarying labour tends to be reams of dross, and no matter how much shit they shovel, they always remain in the stables.

On a more prosaic level, the Extraordinary Meeting of the Limitations Committee called to inquire into Diana Taverner’s suitability as First Desk is an unexpectedly meek affair, there being no one to present a prosecution case. Mention is made of whispers on Westminster Corridors—that old chimera Waterproof has been bandied about—but since the supposed victim of the Park’s machinations, one Sophie de Greer, makes a brief online appearance apologising for her failure to follow the procedure for taking sick leave, such mention is swiftly dismissed as groundless gossip. Following a short address by Taverner herself, in which she recommends that any future such sessions be preceded by the Park’s own assessment of the evidence, the Committee, under the careful stewardship of Oliver Nash, bemoans the unexplained absence of the meeting’s instigator, one Anthony Sparrow, before declaring the proceedings, in effect, a waste of time. The company deconvenes, the firing squad remains unassembled, and when Diana re-enters the hub that morning, it is to a standing ovation from supporters and detractors alike, who can at least find common ground in their appreciation of a skilled operator. Diana herself doesn’t mind why anyone applauds, so long as they do so on their feet. Not that she is unaware of how differently things might have gone. “For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble,” she murmurs in passing, but only Josie hears, and, since she isn’t sure she’s meant to, that young woman makes no reply. For the rest of that day, Diana fulfils promises made on her behalf by Jackson Lamb: resettlement arrangements for Sophie de Greer; the ironing out of administrative wrinkles for the multifarious friends of Alessandro Botigliani; and while this is small enough recompense for how things have turned out, finds such busywork irksome all the same.

As to Sparrow’s whereabouts, these will not become clear for another day or two, but at the moment of Diana’s triumph he is cowering under a hastily assembled pyramid of earth and leaves, simultaneously straining to hear every creak and whistle in the surrounding wood—the same wood in which he made first contact with Benito, an encounter he now quite seriously regrets—and striving to deny that he’s hearing anything at all, a reframing of the narrative which for some reason is less effective than usual. On one level he is certain that those hunting him down, after allowing him a sporting four minutes’ start, intend no more than to scare and humiliate him, while on another he is confident that they will beat him to a soup with sticks and stones. He is correct about one of these outcomes, but it will be some while before he reaches the stage of not caring which it is, so long as it happens without further delay.

Also involved in assembling piles of leaves is Claude Whelan, who is doing a little tidying in the garden—nothing complicated, nothing ambitious; a man’s got to know his limitations—while he thinks back over his recall to arms, in particular dwelling on the surprising discovery that the things he’d have expected to be good at, such as ferreting out the whereabouts of Sophie de Greer, he failed to achieve, while the moments of heroism he has always quite genuinely thought beyond him proved to be his finest, well, not hour. But minutes. He spent some minutes being heroic. And when the dust has settled, he decides, and after he’s been debriefed by Oliver Nash—a process whose conclusion will leave one of the two in possession of more information than when it started—he might contact Shirley Dander, who, though never having been Sophie de Greer, and indeed having no clue as to why anyone might think otherwise, proved an interesting companion: a Robin to his Batman, say. Not that he has thoughts of anything untoward—no, he currently believes that, until Claire has concluded her negotiations with God, and decided whether or not she is coming home, his own behaviour will remain irreproachable on that front; besides, Shirley has neither the shape nor appearance that he generally finds beguiling—but still, there was a moment when she took leave of him, climbing out of the car while a London sunrise struggled to be born, during which he felt they’d made a connection he’d seldom found anywhere else. He suspects she felt this too. “So long,” she’d said to him, “partner.” Then she was gone. He wonders if she’s thinking about him now.

She isn’t, and not only because Catherine has just stepped into her office, the look on her face an unwelcoming welcome. Shirley is about to be reminded that she has no business being in Slough House today; she’s so certain of this that it’s barely worth Catherine opening her mouth to speak.

“You’re supposed to be at the San.”

“Yeah, there was a thing happened? I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

“It’s still operational. And you’ve not been discharged.”

It figures, thinks Shirley, that Catherine has already established this fact. Catherine was probably on the phone to the San before dawn, checking on Shirley’s whereabouts; adding unscheduled departure to her tally of crimes and misdemeanours, and waiting to pounce as soon as Shirley reappeared.

“What did you imagine you were doing?” Catherine goes on. “Taking on what sounds like a battalion of thugs?”

At a loss for an accurate answer, Shirley says, “Yeah, it’s what Thelma and Louise would have done.”

“Well, I’ve no idea who those people are. But if Thelma and Louise drove off a cliff, would you do that too?”

Shirley doesn’t know where to start.

“Don’t you understand? I’m worried about you.”

“I’m—”

And Shirley is about to say what she always says, I’m fine, but instead remembers the feelings she had on waking, could it be only yesterday? She’s not fine; she just hasn’t hit the ground yet. And she doesn’t want to tell Catherine this, but suspects that Catherine knows; suspects, in fact, that Catherine has experienced something similar in her long-ago past.

Catherine is now standing in front of Shirley’s desk. “I don’t want you in danger, can you not get your head round that? We’ve had too much grief already. People keep getting hurt. People keep dying. We have to look out for one another.”

“You’ve already told me that.”

Catherine, who doesn’t remember having done so, looks puzzled, but decides not to pursue it. “You need to go back. Today. While everything’s still a confused mess, and you’ll be able to get away with it.”

“Why do you care?”

That one, Catherine finds easier. “What’s the alternative?” she asks, and now it’s Shirley’s turn to be puzzled, while out in the corridor Lech Wicinski is leaving another voicemail.

It’s John Bachelor whom Lech is trying to contact. Lech has only the haziest notion of what’s been going on these past twenty-four hours, but he’s aware that the safe house is no longer occupied: he called in on his way to work that morning—a lengthy detour, justified on the ground that he had his fingertips, at least, on a live operation—but it was deserted. Recalling the crusty array of takeaway cartons, sticky glasses, and the furry atmosphere that smoking leaves, he at least has the satisfaction of knowing who has been in occupation, but since he is also aware that Lamb’s practice is to keep his horses in the dark unless he has absolute reason not to, this knowledge is accompanied by the depressing awareness that whatever happened, he is unlikely to be made privy to the details. Unless Bachelor can share these with him, but so far, all Bachelor has shared is frequent half-minutes or so of voicemail emptiness, into which Lech has poured requests for contact.

He will keep trying Bachelor, on and off, for the next few days, with the same result, but will finally receive a late-night return call, which will pull him from a rare pleasant dream. But Bachelor, aside from making no apology, will make no sense, and simply ramble about loss and beauty and similar abstracts until Lech, not without regret, will disconnect. He already knows about loss and beauty, and what little Bachelor might teach him is not worth broken sleep. But sleep won’t come again, and a little later Lech will be walking London’s pavements until dawn, maskless but scarred as a phantom, attempting to outwalk his thoughts. All that lies in the near future; in the immediate present Lech dawdles back to his desk, whose nearby window, awaiting a glazier, is still shrouded with cardboard, and as he sits hears a murmur of conversation from upstairs, where Louisa has joined Ashley, to clarify a detail or two:

“So Lamb sliced an atomic chili into your nuts and berries.”

“Yep.”

“And you didn’t notice.”

“Nope.”

“Just as well Roddy ate some first, then.”

“It was,” says Ash. “Imagine. It could have been me whose mouth was vulcanised.”

But she appears reasonably sanguine, as if this had never been a likely prospect.

“Yes,” says Louisa, “imagine. But instead it was Roddy. Meaning he was thrashing about on the floor like a dying trout while you were on the phone to Lamb, pretending it was you who’d figured out Rasnokov’s firetrap.”

“Well,” says Ash. “I’d have called Taverner, but it wasn’t clear she was still in the picture.”

“Lamb won’t give you credit for delivering information.”

“No. But he might give me credit for stealing Ho’s work.”

Louisa nods thoughtfully, remembering what she’d thought about Ash: that her anger was going to have to find an outlet, or the woman would explode. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “Roddy’s a knob.”

“But he’s your knob?”

“Roddy is not my knob, no. In fact, let’s pretend you never said that. Roddy’s a knob, but you need to be careful about fucking him over. Lech’s still getting calls from his service providers, asking why he’s cancelled his payments.”

“Yeah, but Lech didn’t fix Roddy up with a date.”

Because Ash has spoken to Leia Six this morning; less out of a need to placate Roddy than to test her own powers of persuasion.

“A date? He can barely talk.”

“This is Roddy. Preventing him from talking is like giving him a makeover.”

Still, both will be somewhat surprised when Roddy, as yet unable to speak, has a reasonably successful first date with Leia Six; and more so when, still unable to speak, he has a reasonably successful second. But by the third date his mouth will be more or less recovered, and he will turn up at Slough House the following morning with a black eye.

“So who knows?” Ash continues. “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“You think so?”

“Nope.”

“Welcome to Slough House,” says Louisa, getting to her feet. “Oh, one other thing? You want to shift your stuff back where it was. River’ll be needing his desk.”

“He’s coming back?”

“Better believe it,” Louisa says.

She leaves, not pausing to look up the remaining flight towards Lamb’s room, from which no noise issues. But he is there, one of his hands holding a cigarette, the other nursing a shot glass. The blind on his window is down, and the lamp by his desk, balanced on a pile of yellowing phone directories, casts the room’s only light, his cigarette tip apart. And in this self-imposed gloom, he is thinking, if he is thinking at all, of Vassily Rasnokov, who is either floating on a cold sea or preparing to slip into a life he’s been building for years; a life warmed up for him by a now-defunct scarecrow, whose body lies unclaimed in a vault somewhere in Greater London. Eyes closed, cigarette shedding its chrysalis of ash even as a smoky butterfly rises to the ceiling, Lamb barely breathes as he contemplates the future that awaits one who’s walked away from the spy trade: a carrel in a European library, say, or a stool on a beach bar under a Bahamian sun. Or a life of unrelieved ordinariness, in which the papertrails established by a now-dead understudy—the water bills and council tax debits, the credit cards and gym memberships, the electronic footprints, the economic handholds; each of them locking a life into place the way pegs hold down a tent—lead remorselessly to their only possible destination: in the end, whatever role you choose, you reach the end of the drama; the paperwork is shuffled into binbags, and the tent blows away. But the triumph lies in making the choice, rather than accepting the part you’re given. Lamb’s cigarette glows like a candle, briefly, and if his eyelids flicker, and his gaze appears fixed on the drab painting of a bridge which is his office’s sole decoration, that’s likely no more than chance; just as, if his lips move beneath their filtered burden, and their mumble sounds like Rosebud, he’s assuredly thinking of that team on the Holloway Road. But perhaps, in fact, he mumbles nothing at all, and his exit line remains unspoken. It’s possible the trembling of his lips is a quiet belch. Well, nobody’s perfect.

From the street below, a snatch of what might be music drifts upwards, though is more likely the accidental percussion of daily life: heel on pavement, tyre on a loose drain lid. Whatever it is, this theme penetrates Slough House for a moment, probably through that cardboard-patched window, and dances round in the dust-deckled air, attempting to get a party going. But this enterprise is doomed from the start, and lasts no longer than it takes a sudden draught to slam a door, after which the building—its creaky stairs and broken skirting boards—its rackety furniture and stained ceilings—its peeling paper and plasterwork—its bewildered wiring, its confused pipes—its ups and downs and highs and lows and all its debts and credits—slumps into its usual stupor, as the morning’s wax surrenders to the afternoon’s wane. And if, outside, the day carries on with its usual background business, inside it pauses for a drawn-out beat, and then drops like a curtain.