Log In
Or create an account ->
Imperial Library
Home
About
News
Upload
Forum
Help
Login/SignUp
Index
Like most forms of corruption, it began with men in suits.
PART ONE
On a night hot as hell in the borough of Finsbury a door opens and a woman steps into a yard. Not the front street—this is Slough House, and the front door of Slough House famously never opens, never closes—but a yard that sees little natural light, and whose walls are consequently fuzzy with mildew. The odour is of neglect, whose constituent humours, with a little effort, can be made out to be food and fats from the takeaway, and stale cigarettes, and long-dried puddles, and something rising from the drain that gurgles in a corner and is best not investigated closely. It is not yet dark—it’s the violet hour—but already the yard is shadowy with night. The woman doesn’t pause there. There’s nothing to see.
It must have been a nursery at one time, nestling quietly under the eaves, because beneath the plain white of the ceiling Catherine could make out faint shapes from a previous scheme, stars and crescent moons, decorations to enchant the tenant of a crib. But that was in the distant past, judging by the plaster dust lying in icing-sugar drifts by the skirting board. The floor, too, was bare—no protection for infant feet—though a thin rug had been laid next to the single bed, and the padlock on the outside of the door was heavy-duty, beyond what even the most mischief-prone child warranted. A nursery no more. Though not the securest of prisons.
Catherine kept a spare set of doorkeys in a matchbox taped to the underside of her desk, where Louisa had stumbled upon them quite early in her Slough House career. She collected them now, and headed off to St. John’s Wood by cab. It was into the twenties already, bright sunlight blindly bouncing off glass and metal surfaces: enough to make you want to sit in a dark room, even if you didn’t want to do that anyway. She’d never been to Catherine’s flat before. For a while she wondered what that said about her, about the whole of the Slough House crew, and the paper-thin friendships their daily lives were scribbled on, but mostly she concentrated on not thinking; on simply moving in a bubble through London; not being at her desk, not filling the space left by Min.
Thirty-nine minutes . . .
Time was, walking up Slough House’s stairs made every day midwinter for Louisa. Now, she carried her own weather with her. Stepping through the yard, pushing open the door that always stuck, didn’t affect her. It was a mood she was already part of, wherever she happened to be.
There were many thorns in Ingrid Tearney’s garden—the constant need for vigilance; the ever-present threat of terrorism; Diana Taverner—and here was another: a summons from the Home Secretary. Until recently, such phone calls had been a minor nuisance, requiring her to attend the minister’s office and deliver platitudes while maintaining eye contact, as if soothing a worried puppy. But Peter Judd didn’t look to her for reassurance, he sized her up for weaknesses. In company he claimed they got on like a house on fire, but it was clear which of them provided the petrol.
PART TWO
You could feasibly throw a tennis ball and cover the distance between Slough House and St. Giles Cripplegate, but if you wanted your ball back, it might take a while. For there was no straight route through the Barbican, which resembled an Escher drawing assembled in brick by a spook architect, its primary purpose being not so much to keep you from getting where you were going, but to leave you unsure about where you’d been. Every path led to a junction resembling the one you’d just left, offering routes to nowhere you wanted to go. And set down in the middle of all this, like a paddle steamer in an airport, was the fourteenth-century church of St. Giles, within whose walls John Milton prayed and Shakespeare daydreamed; which had survived fire, war and restoration, and which now reposed serenely on a brick-tiled square, offering quiet for those needing respite from the city’s buzz, and a resting place for poor sods who’d got lost, and given up hope of rescue. Today there was a book sale under way, with pallets of paperbacks laid on trestle tables along the north aisle, and an honour-box on a chair awaiting donations. A few moody browsers were picking over the goods. Apparently ignoring them, Jackson Lamb clumped past and sat on a bench in the nave, near the back. Three rows ahead, an old dear was picking her way through a private litany of petition and remorse. The way her shoulders trembled, Lamb could tell her lips were moving as she prayed.
The Thames looked low. Years gone by, there were stories of the river freezing; of ice fairs thrown in the shadows of the bridges, and skaters weaving past long-lived landmarks, but Sean Donovan didn’t remember hearing it had ever dried up. When that day came, the stink would surely drive the capital out of its mind.
Caviar had been on the menu at Anna Livia Plurabelle’s, and while Judd had refrained from indulging, now, as he brushed a vacant bench with a rolled-up copy of the Standard, he recalled an article he’d read on how the roe was harvested. Sturgeon were big fish, four foot long, and kept in tanks significantly smaller than that. When their time came, they were dispatched by hand, this, apparently, ensuring minimal damage to the roe. Given the size of the fish, those tasked with its demise tended towards the muscular, as well as—by implication—the violent. The resulting image had been indelible: stocky bruisers, sleeves rolled up, punching fish to death. Thuggery run riot in the kitchens of the rich.
It was the violet hour once more, and still the heat had not lifted. As River eased out of the car he felt his stomach muscles complaining, and before he was fully upright had reached into his jeans for the painkillers Louisa had given him. Four left. He popped them from their plastic sheath and dry swallowed. The last one stuck in his throat, which would keep him entertained for the next minute or so.
River didn’t drop more than a foot or so, landing on the cement floor with enough of a bump to remind every last bone of the debt he owed Nick Duffy. A thought filed away for later.
Catherine Standish admired the empty bottle.
The pub was off Great Portland Street, and she remembered being here once before, a wake for a dead agent, Dieter Hess. The usual pious utterances, when the truth was, like most doubles, you could trust the man as far as you could chuck a ten-pound note: where it fell, he’d be waiting. But that was the nature of the beast. A spook threw shadows like a monkey puzzle tree’s; you could catch whiplash hearing one describe yesterday’s weather.
A tidy battlefield is a good battlefield, thought Nick Duffy. He wasn’t positive that particular gem appeared in those art of war texts City dickheads read on the tube, but it fitted his mood. From his current perspective, the fencing, the skip, the mounds of urban debris had transformed into landmarks: areas of cover for what was yet to come, which, ideally, wouldn’t last more than a minute. The klieg lights were poised to turn the area outside the derelict factory into a stage, and once that happened, anyone treading the boards would find their dramatic career cut short. They called it dying when it happened on stage. They called it that when it happened elsewhere, too.
The motorway was quiet in the way motorways sometimes are, its traffic-buzz little more than static, with only the occasional comet of oncoming headlights. Catherine sat in the front next to Ho; Lamb in the back. They’d left Craig Dunn at the farmhouse, having called—at Catherine’s insistence—an ambulance. Lamb was toying with a cigarette, rubbing the filtered end absent-mindedly against his cheek, occasionally losing it in his thinning mat of hair. Catherine had made it clear that if he lit it, he’d be dumped on the hard shoulder.
It was the hour after lunchtime, and the heat had changed its tune; a subtle variation that brought the promise of release, if only because it seemed unlikely it could keep up this tempo forever. In the mis-shaped square near Paddington the trees hung listlessly over desiccated garden beds, and pigeons hunkered in their shade, more like stones than birds. They barely fluttered when a dog barked in the road, and didn’t stir at all when Jackson Lamb stomped down the path, his shirt untucked, one shoelace undone. He wore a pair of plastic sunglasses and carried a manila folder, tied shut with a length of pink ribbon. Anyone else would have been taken for a lawyer. Lamb looked like he’d just lifted it from a bin.
← Prev
Back
Next →
← Prev
Back
Next →