Dead Lions

Now that the roadworks have finally gone, Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, is calmer; nowhere you’d choose to have a picnic, but no longer the vehicle-related crime scene it once resembled. The area’s pulse has normalised, and while noise levels remain high, they’re less pneumatic, and include the occasional snatch of street music: cars sing, taxis whistle, and locals stare in bafflement at the freely flowing traffic. Once it was wise to pack a lunch if you were heading down the street on a bus. Now you could while away half an hour trying to cross it.

It’s a case, perhaps, of the urban jungle reclaiming its own, and any jungle boasts wildlife if you look hard enough. A fox was spotted one mid-morning, padding from White Lion Court into the Barbican Centre, and up among the complex’s flower beds and water features can be found both birds and rats. Where the greenery bends over standing water, frogs hide. After dark, there are bats. So it would be no surprise if a cat dropped in front of our eyes from one of the Barbican towers and froze as it hit the bricks; looking all directions at once without moving its head, as cats can. It’s a Siamese. Pale, short-haired, slant-eyed, slender and whispery; able, like all its kind, to slip through doors barely open and windows thought shut, and it’s only frozen for a moment. Then it’s off.

It moves like a rumour, this cat; over the pedestrian bridge, then down the stairs to the station and out onto the street. A lesser cat might have paused before crossing the tributary road, but not ours; trusting instincts, ears and speed, it’s on the pavement opposite before a van driver finishes braking. And then it vanishes, or seems to. The driver peers angrily, but all he can see is a black door in a dusty recess between a newsagent’s and a Chinese restaurant; its ancient black paintwork spattered with roadsplash, a single yellowing milk bottle on its step. And no sign of our cat.

Who has, of course, gone round the back. No one enters Slough House by the front door; instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it. But our cat’s feet are too subtle to require violence and it’s through that door in a blink, and up a doglegged flight of stairs to a pair of offices.

Here on the first floor—ground level being assigned to other properties; to the New Empire Chinese, and whatever the newsagent’s is called this year—is where Roderick Ho labours, in an office made jungly by electrical clutter: abandoned keyboards nest in corners, and brightly coloured wires billow like loops of intestine from backless monitors. Gunmetal bookshelves hold software manuals, lengths of cable, and shoeboxes almost certainly containing oddly shaped bits of metal, while next to Ho’s desk wobbles a cardboard tower fashioned from the geek’s traditional building block: the empty pizza box. A lot of stuff.

But when our cat pokes its head round the door, it’ll find only Ho. The office is his alone, and Ho prefers this, for he mostly dislikes other people, though the fact that other people dislike him back has never occurred to him. And while Louisa Guy has been known to speculate that Ho occupies a place somewhere on the right of the autism spectrum, Min Harper has habitually responded that he’s also way out there on the git index. It’s no surprise, then, that had Ho noticed our cat’s presence, his response would have been to toss a Coke can at it, and he’d have been disappointed to have missed. But another thing Roderick Ho hasn’t grasped about himself is that he’s a better shot when aiming at stationary targets. He rarely fails to drop a can into a wastebasket half the office away, but has been known to miss the point when it’s closer than that.

Unscathed, then, our cat withdraws, to check out the adjoining office. And here are two unfamiliar faces, recently dispatched to Slough House: one white, one black; one female, one male; so new they don’t have names yet, and both thrown by their visitor. Is the cat a regular—is the cat a fellow slow horse? Or is this a test? Troubled, they share a glance, and while they’re bonding in momentary confusion our cat slips out and nips up the stairs to the next landing, and two more offices.

The first of which is occupied by Min Harper and Louisa Guy, and if Min Harper and Louisa Guy had been paying attention and noticed the cat, they’d have embarrassed seven bells out of it. Louisa would have gone onto her knees, gathered the cat in her arms and held it to her quite impressive breasts—and here we’re wandering into Min’s area of opinion: breasts that couldn’t be called too small or too large, but breasts that are just right; while Min himself, if he could get his mind off Louisa’s tits long enough, would have taken a rough manly grasp of the cat’s scruff; would have tilted its head so they could share a glance, and each understand the other’s feline qualities—not the furry, soft ones, but the night time grace and the walking-in-darkness; the predatory undercurrent that hums beneath a cat’s daytime activities.

Both Min and Louisa would have talked about finding milk, but neither would actually have done so, the point being to indicate that kindness and milk-delivery were within both their scopes. And our cat, quite rightly, would have relieved itself on the mat before leaving their office.

To enter River Cartwright’s room. And while our cat would have crossed this threshold as unobtrusively as it had all the others, that wouldn’t have been unobtrusive enough. River Cartwright, who is young, fair-haired, pale-skinned, with a small mole on his upper lip, would immediately have ceased what he was doing—paperwork or screenwork; something involving thought rather than action, which perhaps accounts for the air of frustration that taints the air in here—and held our cat’s gaze until it broke contact, made uncomfortable by such frank assessment. Cartwright wouldn’t have thought about providing milk; he’d be too busy mapping the cat’s actions, working out how many doors it must have slipped through to make it this far; wondering what drew it into Slough House in the first place; what motives hid behind its eyes. Though even while he was thinking this our cat would have withdrawn and made its way up the last set of stairs, in search of a less stringent reckoning.

And with this in mind, it would have found the first of the final pair of offices: a more welcoming area into which to strut, for this is where Catherine Standish works, and Catherine Standish knows what to do with a cat. Catherine Standish ignores cats. Cats are either adjuncts or substitutes, and Catherine Standish has no truck with either. Having a cat is one small step from having two cats, and to be a single woman within a syllable of fifty in possession of two cats is tantamount to declaring life over. Catherine Standish has had her share of scary moments but has survived each of them, and is not about to surrender now. So our cat can make itself as comfortable as it likes in here, but no matter how much affection it pretends to, how coyly it wraps its sleek length round Catherine’s calves, there will be no treats forthcoming; no strips of sardine patted dry on a Kleenex and laid at its feet; no pot of cream decanted into a saucer. And since no cat worth the name can tolerate lack of worship, ours takes its leave and saunters next door …

… to Jackson Lamb’s lair at last, where the ceiling slopes and a blind dims the window, and what light there is comes from a lamp placed on a pile of telephone directories. The air is heavy with a dog’s olfactory daydream: takeaway food, illicit cigarettes, day-old farts and stale beer, but there will be no time to catalogue this because Jackson Lamb can move surprisingly swiftly for a man of his bulk, or he can when he feels like it, and trust this: when a fucking cat enters his room, he feels like it. Within a blink he’d have seized our cat by the throat; pulled up the blind, opened the window, and dropped it to the road below, where it would doubtless land on its feet, as both science and rumour confirm, but equally doubtless in front of a moving vehicle, this, as noted, being the new dispensation on Aldersgate Street. A muffled bump and a liquid screech of brakes might have carried upwards, but Lamb would have closed the window by then and be back in his chair, eyes closed; his sausagy fingers interlinked on his paunch.

It’s a lucky escape for our cat, then—that it doesn’t exist, for that would have been a brutal ending. And a lucky escape twice over, as it happens, for on this particular morning the nigh-on unthinkable has happened, and Jackson Lamb is not dozing at his desk, or prowling the kitchen area outside his office, scavenging his underlings’ food; nor is he wafting up and down the staircase with that creepily silent tread he adopts at will. He’s not banging on his floor, which is River Cartwright’s ceiling, for the pleasure of timing how long it takes Cartwright to arrive, and he’s not ignoring Catherine Standish while she delivers another pointless report he’s forgotten commissioning. Simply put, he’s not here.

And no one in Slough House has the faintest idea where he is.

Where Jackson Lamb was was Oxford, and he had a brand new theory, one to float in front of the suits at Regent’s Park. Lamb’s new theory was this: that instead of sending tadpole spooks on expensive torture-resistance courses at hideaways on the Welsh borders, they should pack them off to Oxford railway station to observe the staff in action. Because whatever training these guys underwent, it left every last one of them highly skilled in the art of not releasing information.

“You work here, right?”

“Sir?”

“Were you on shift last Tuesday evening?”

“The helpline number’s on all the posters, sir. If you have a complaint—”

“I don’t have a complaint,” Lamb said. “I just want to know if you were on duty last Tuesday evening.”

“And why would you want to know that, sir?”

Lamb had been stonewalled three times so far. This fourth was a small man with sleeked-back hair and a grey moustache that twitched occasionally of its own accord. He looked like a weasel in a uniform. Lamb would have caught him by the back legs and cracked him like a whip, but there was a policeman within earshot.

“Let’s assume it’s important.”

He had ID, of course, under a workname, but didn’t have to be a fisherman to know that you don’t go lobbing rocks in the pool before you cast your line. If anyone rang the number on his card, bells and whistles would sound at Regent’s Park. And Lamb didn’t want the suits asking what he thought he was doing, because he wasn’t sure what he thought he was doing, and there was no chance in hell he was going to share that information.

“Very important,” he added. He tapped his lapel. A wallet poked visibly from his inside pocket, and a twenty pound note peeped visibly from inside that.

“Ah.”

“I take it that’s a yes.”

“You understand we have to be careful, sir. With people asking questions at major transport hubs.”

Good to know, thought Jackson Lamb, that if terrorists descended on this particular transport hub, they’d meet an impregnable line of defence. Unless they waved banknotes. “Last Tuesday,” he said. “There was some kind of meltdown.”

But his man was already shaking his head: “Not our problem, sir. Everything was fine here.”

“Everything was fine except the trains weren’t running.”

“The trains were running here, sir. There were problems elsewhere.”

“Right.” It had been a while since Lamb had endured a conversation this long without resorting to profanity. The slow horses would have been amazed, except the newbies, who’d have suspected a test. “But wherever the problem, there were people being bused here from Reading. Because the trains weren’t running.”

The weasel was knitting his eyebrows together, but had seen his way to the end of this line of questioning, and was picking up speed on the final stretch. “That’s right, sir. A replacement bus service.”

“Which came from where?”

“On that particular occasion, sir, I rather think they’d have come from Reading.”

Of course they bloody would. Jackson Lamb sighed, and reached for his cigarettes.

“You can’t smoke in here, sir.”

Lamb tucked one behind his ear. “When’s the next Reading train?”

“Five minutes, sir.”

Grunting his thanks, Lamb turned for the barriers.

“Sir?”

He looked back.

Gaze fixed on Lamb’s lapel, the weasel made a rustly sign with finger and thumb.

“What?”

“I thought you were going to …”

“Give you a tip?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Here’s a good one.” Lamb tapped his nose with a finger. “If you’ve got a complaint, there’s a helpline number on the posters.”

Then he wandered onto the platform, and waited for his train.

Back on Aldersgate Street, the two new horses in the first-floor office were sizing each other up. They’d arrived a month back, within the same fortnight; both exiled from Regent’s Park, the Service’s heart and moral high-ground. Slough House, which was not its real name—it didn’t have a real name—was openly acknowledged to be a dumping ground: assignment here was generally temporary, because those assigned here usually quit before long. That was the point of sending them: to light a sign above their heads, reading EXIT. Slow horses, they were called. Slough House/slow horse. A wordplay based on a joke whose origins were almost forgotten.

These two—who have names now; their names are Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander—had known each other by sight in their previous incarnations, but department culture kept a firm grip on Regent’s Park, and Ops and Comms were different fish, and swam in different circles. So now, in the way of newbies everywhere, they were as suspicious of each other as of the more established residents. Still: the Service world was relatively small, and stories often circled it twice before smoke from the wreckage subsided. So Marcus Longridge (mid-forties, black, south-London born of Caribbean parents) knew what had propelled Shirley Dander from Regent’s Park’s Communications sector, and Dander, who was in her twenties and vaguely Mediterranean-looking (Scottish great-grandmother, nearby POW camp, Italian internee on day release) had heard rumours about Longridge’s meltdown-related counselling sessions, but neither had spoken to the other of this, or indeed of much else yet. Their days had been filled with the minutiae of office co-living, and a slow-burn loss of hope.

It was Marcus who made the first move, and this was a single word: “So.”

It was late morning. London weather was undergoing a schizoid attack: sudden shafts of sunlight, highlighting the grimy windowglass; sudden flurries of rain, failing to do much to clean it.

“So what?”

“So here we are.”

Shirley Dander was waiting for her computer to reboot. Again. It was running face-recognition software, comparing glimpses snatched from CCTV coverage at troop-withdrawal rallies with photofit images of suspected jihadists; that is, jihadists suspected of existing; jihadists who had code names and everything, but might have been rumoured into being by inept Intelligence work. While the program was two years out-of-date it wasn’t as out of date as her PC, which resented the demands placed upon it, and had made this known three times so far this morning.

Without looking up, she said, “Is this a chat-up?”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“Because that would not be wise.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Well then.”

For almost a minute that was that. Shirley could feel her watch ticking; could feel through the desk’s surface the computer struggling to return to life. Two pairs of feet tracked downstairs. Harper and Guy. She wondered where they were off to.

“So given that it’s not a chat-up, is it okay if we talk?”

“About what?”

“Anything.”

Now she gave him a hard stare.

Marcus Longridge shrugged. “Like it or not, we’re sharing. It wouldn’t hurt if we said more than shut the door.”

“I’ve never told you to shut the door.”

“Or whatever.”

“Actually I prefer it open. Feels less like a prison cell.”

“That’s good,” said Marcus. “See, we’ve got a discussion going. Spent much time in prison?”

“I’m not in the mood, okay?”

He shrugged. “Okay. But there’s six and something hours of the working day left. And twenty years of the working life. We could spend it in silence if you’d rather, but one of us’ll go mad and the other’ll go crazy.” He bent back to his computer.

Downstairs, the back door slammed. Shirley’s screen swam bluely into life, thought about it, and crashed again. Now conversation had been attempted, its absence screamed like a fire alarm. Her wristwatch pulsed. There was nothing she could do about it; the words had to be said.

“Speak for yourself.”

He said, “About?”

“Twenty years of working life.”

“Right.”

“More like forty in my case.”

Marcus nodded. It didn’t show on his face, but he felt triumph.

He knew a beginning when he heard one.

In Reading, Jackson Lamb had tracked down the station manager, for whose benefit he adopted a fussy, donnish air. It wasn’t hard to believe Lamb an academic: shoulders dusted with dandruff; green V-neck stained by misjudged mouthfuls of takeaway; frayed shirtcuffs poking from overcoat sleeves. He was overweight, from sitting around in libraries probably, and his thinning dirty-blond hair was brushed back over his head. The stubble on his cheeks sang of laziness, not cool. He’d been said to resemble Timothy Spall, with worse teeth.

The station manager directed him to the company which supplied replacement buses, and ten minutes later Lamb was doing fussy academic again; this time with a bottom note of grief. “My brother,” he said.

“Oh. Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

Lamb waved a forgiving hand.

“No, that’s awful. I’m really sorry.”

“We hadn’t spoken in years.”

“Well, that makes it worse, doesn’t it?”

Lamb, who had no opinion, gave assent. “It does. It does.” His eyes clouded as he recalled an imaginary infant episode in which two brothers enjoyed a moment of absolute fraternal loyalty, little knowing that the years to come would drive a wedge between them; that they would not speak during middle age; which would come to a halt for one of them on a bus in dark Oxfordshire, where he would succumb to …

“Heart attack, was it?”

Unable to speak, Lamb nodded.

The depot manager shook his head sadly. It was a bad business. And not much of an advert, a customer dying on a unit; though then again, it wasn’t as if liability lay with the company. Apart from anything else, the corpse hadn’t been in possession of a valid ticket.

“I wondered …”

“Yes?”

“Which bus was it? Is it here now?”

There were four coaches in the yard; another two in the sheds, and as it happened, the depot manager knew precisely which one had unintentionally doubled as a hearse, and it was parked not ten yards away.

“Only I’d like to sit in it a moment,” Lamb said. “Where he sat. You know?”

“I’m not sure what …”

“It’s not that I believe in a life force, precisely,” Lamb explained, a tremor in his voice. “But I’m not positive I don’t believe in it, do you see what I mean?”

“Of course. Of course.”

“And if I could just sit where he was sitting when he … passed, well …”

Unable to continue, he turned to gaze over the brick wall enclosing the yard, and beyond the office block opposite. A pair of Canada geese were making their way riverwards; their plaintive honking underlining Lamb’s sadness.

Or that’s how it seemed to the depot manager.

“There,” he said. “It’s that one over there.”

Abandoning his scanning of the skies, Lamb fixed him with wide and innocent gratitude.

Shirley Dander tapped a pencil uselessly against her reluctant monitor, then put it down. As it hit the desk, she made a plosive noise with her lips.

“… What?”

“What’s ‘wouldn’t dare’ supposed to mean?” she said.

“I don’t follow.”

“When I asked if you were chatting me up. You said you wouldn’t dare.”

Marcus Longridge said, “I heard the story.”

That figured, she thought. Everyone had heard the story.

Shirley Dander was five two; brown eyes, olive skin, and a full mouth she didn’t smile with much. Broad in the shoulder and wide in the hip, she favoured black: black jeans, black tops, black trainers. Once, in her hearing, it had been suggested she had the sex appeal of a traffic bollard, a comment delivered by a notorious sexual incompetent. On the day she was assigned to Slough House she’d had a buzz cut she’d refreshed every week since.

That she had inspired obsession was beyond doubt: specifically, a fourth-desk Comms operative at Regent’s Park, who had pursued her with a diligence which took no heed of the fact that she was in a relationship. He’d taken to leaving notes on her desk; to calling her lover’s flat at all hours. Given his job, he had no trouble making these calls untraceable. Given hers, she had no trouble tracing them.

There were protocols in place, of course; a grievance procedure which involved detailing “inappropriate behaviours” and evidencing “disrespectful attitudes;” guidelines which carried little weight with staff who’d spent a minimum of eight weeks on assault training as part of their probation. After a night in which he’d called six times, he’d approached her in the canteen to ask how she’d slept, and Shirley had decked him with one clean punch.

She might have got away with this if she hadn’t hauled him to his feet and decked him again with a second.

Issues, was the verdict from HR. It was clear that Shirley Dander had issues.

Marcus was talking through her thoughts: “Everybody heard the story, man. Someone told me his feet left the floor.”

“Only the first time.”

“You were lucky not to get shitcanned.”

“You reckon?”

“Point taken. But mixing it on the hub? Guys have been sacked for less.”

“Guys maybe,” she said. “Sacking a girl for flattening a creep who’s harassing her, that’s embarrassing. Especially if the ‘girl’ in question wants to get legal about it.” The inverted commas round girl couldn’t have been more audible if she’d said quote/unquote. “Besides, I had an edge.”

“What sort of edge?”

She kicked back from her desk with both feet, and her chair-legs squealed on the floor. “What are you after?”

“Nothing.”

“Because you sound pretty curious for someone just making conversation.”

“Well,” he told her, “without curiosity, what kind of conversation have you got?”

She studied him. He wasn’t bad looking, for his age; had what appeared to be a lazy left eyelid, but this gave him a watchful air, as if he were constantly sizing the world up. His hair was longer than hers, but not by much; he wore a neatly trimmed beard and moustache, and was careful how he dressed. Today this meant well-pressed jeans and a white collarless shirt under a grey jacket; his black and purple Nicole Farhi scarf hung on the coatstand. She’d noticed all this not because she cared but because everything was information. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that meant nothing. Besides, everyone was divorced or unhappy.

“Okay,” she said. “But if you’re playing me, you’re likely to find out first-hand just how hard I hit.”

He raised his hands in not entirely mock-surrender. “Hey, I’m just trying to establish a working relationship. You know. Us being the newbies.”

“It’s not like the others put up a united front. ’Cept maybe Harper and Guy.”

“They don’t have to,” Marcus said. “They’ve got resident status.” His fingers played a quick trill across his keyboard, then he pushed it away and shunted his chair sideways. “What do you make of them?”

“As a group?”

“Or one by one. It doesn’t have to be a seminar.”

“Where do we start?”

Marcus Longridge said, “We start with Lamb.”

Perched on the back seat of a bus where a man had died, Jackson Lamb was looking out at a cracked concrete forecourt and a pair of wooden gates, beyond which lay Reading town centre. As a long-time Londoner, Lamb couldn’t contemplate this without a shudder.

For the moment, though, he concentrated on doing what he was pretending to do, which was sit in quiet recall of the man he’d said was his brother, but who in reality had been Dickie Bow: too daft to be a workname, but too cute to be real. Dickie and Lamb had been in Berlin at the same time, but from this distance, Lamb had trouble recalling the other man’s face. The image he kept coming up with was sleek and pointy, like a rat, but then that’s what Dickie Bow had been, a street rat; adept at crawling through holes too small for him. That had been his key survival skill. It didn’t appear to have helped him lately.

(A heart attack, the postmortem had said. Not especially surprising in a man who drank as much, and smoked as much, and ate as much fried food as Dickie Bow. Uncomfortable reading for Lamb, whose habits it might have been describing.)

Reaching out, he traced a finger over the back of the seat in front. Its surface was mostly smooth; the one burn mark obviously ancient; the faint tracery in a corner suggesting random scratching rather than an attempt to etch a dying message … It was years since Bow had been in the Service, and even then, he’d been one of that great army who’d never quite been inside the tent. You could always trust a street rat, the wisdom ran, because every time one of them took money from the other side, he’d be on your doorstep next morning, expecting you to match the offer.

There was no brotherhood code. If Dickie Bow had succumbed to a mattress fire, Lamb would have got through the five stages without batting an eye: denial, anger, bargaining, indifference, breakfast. But Bow had died on the back seat of a moving coach, without a ticket in his pocket. Booze, fags and fry-ups aside, the PM couldn’t explain Bow’s being in the sticks when he should have been working his shift at a Soho pornshop.

Standing, Lamb ran a hand along the overhead rack, and found nothing. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have been anything left by Dickie Bow, not after six days. Then he sat again, and studied the rubber lining along the base of the window, looking for scratch marks—ridiculous perhaps, but Moscow Rules meant assuming your mail was read. When you needed to leave a message, you left it by other means. Though in this instance, a thumbnail on a rubber lining wasn’t one of them.

A hesitant, polite cough from the front of the coach.

“I, ah—”

Lamb looked up mournfully.

“I don’t mean to rush you. But are you going to be much longer?”

“One minute,” Lamb said.

Actually, he needed less than that. Even while he was speaking he was sliding his hand down the back of the seat, forcing it between the two cushions, encountering a gobbet of ancient chewing gum hardened to a tumour on the fabric; a welter of biscuit crumbs; a paperclip; a coin too small to be worth pocketing; and the edge of something hard which squirted out of his reach, forcing him to delve deeper, the cuff of his overcoat riding up his arm as he pushed. And there it was again, a smooth plastic shell snuggling into his grip. Lamb scratched his wrist deep enough to draw blood as he pulled his treasure free, but didn’t notice. All his attention was focused on his prize: an old, fat, bottom-of-the-line mobile phone.

“Lamb, well. Lamb’s everything he’s made out to be.”

“Which is?”

“Some kind of fat bastard.”

“Who goes way back.”

“A long-lived fat bastard. The worst kind. He sits upstairs and craps on the rest of us. It’s like he gets pleasure out of running a department full of …”

“Losers.”

“You calling me a loser?”

“We’re both here, aren’t we?”

Work was forgotten. Marcus Longridge, having just called Shirley Dander a loser, gave her a bright smile. She paused, wondering what she was getting into. Trust nobody, she’d decided when she’d first set foot in this place. The buzz-cut was part of that. Trust nobody. And here she was on the verge of opening up to Marcus simply because he was the one she was sharing an office with: And what was he smiling at? Did he think he was being friendly? Take a deep breath, she told herself; but a mental one. Don’t let him see.

This was the crux of Communications: find out all you can, but give nothing away.

She said, “The jury’s still out on that. What do you make of him, anyway?”

“Well, he’s running his own department.”

“Some department. More like a charity shop.” She slapped a hand on her PC. “This should be in a museum for a start. We’re supposed to catch bad guys with this shit? We’d have a better chance standing on Oxford Street with a clipboard. Excuse me, sir, are you a terrorist?”

“Sir or Miss,” Marcus corrected her. Then said, “We’re not expected to catch anyone, we’re supposed to get bored and go join a security firm. But the point is, whatever we’re here for, Lamb’s not being punished. Or if he is, he’s enjoying it.”

“So what’s your point?”

He said, “That he knows where some bodies are buried. Probably buried a few himself.”

“Is that a metaphor?”

“I failed English. Metaphor’s a closed book to me.”

“So you think he’s handy?”

“Well, he’s overweight and drinks and smokes and I doubt he takes much exercise that doesn’t involve picking up a phone and calling out for a curry. But yeah, now you mention it, I think he’s handy.”

“He might’ve been once,” Shirley said. “But there’s not much point in being handy if you’re too slow to be any good at it.”

But Marcus disagreed. Being handy was a state of mind. Lamb could wear you down just standing in front of you, and you wouldn’t know he was a threat until he was walking away, and you were wondering who’d turned the lights out. Just Marcus’s opinion, of course. He’d been wrong before.

“I suppose,” he said, “if we stick around long enough, we might find out.”

Coming back down the coach Lamb rubbed a finger in his eye, which made him look grieving, or at any rate like he had a sore eye. The depot manager seemed uncomfortable, ill at ease with a stranger’s sorrow, or else he’d noticed Lamb with his arm down the back seat, and was wondering whether to address the topic.

To short-circuit any such attempt, Lamb said, “The driver around?”

“What, who was driving when …?”

When my brother kicked off, yes. But he just nodded, and wiped his eye again.

The driver didn’t much want to talk to Lamb about his uncooperative passenger; the only good ones are the ones that walk away being the standard bus-driver take on the general public. But once the depot manager had made a final apology and shuffled back to his office, and Lamb had indicated for the second time that morning that he had a twenty pound note in his possession, the driver opened up.

“What can I say? I’m sorry for your loss.”

Though seemed happy enough about his own possible gain.

Lamb said, “Was he talking to anyone, did you notice?”

“We’re supposed to keep our eyes on the road, mostly.”

“Before you started.”

The driver said, “What can I say?” again. “It was a bleedin’ circus, mate. Couple of thousand stranded, we was just getting them shifted. So no, I didn’t notice, sorry. He was just another punter until …” Realising he was heading up a conversational cul-de-sac, he tailed off with “you know.”

“Until you got to Oxford with a stiff on your back seat,” Lamb supplied helpfully.

“He must have gone peaceful,” the driver said. “I pretty much kept to the limit.”

Lamb looked back at the coach. The company livery was red and blue, its lower half flecked with mud. Just an ordinary vehicle, that Dickie Bow had stepped on and never stepped off again.

“Was there anything unusual about that trip?” he asked.

The driver stared.

“Corpse aside.”

“Sorry, mate. It was just, you know. Pick ’em up at the station, drop ’em off at Oxford. Not like it was the first time.”

“And what happened when you got there? Oxford?”

“Most of them was off like the clappers. There was a train waiting to take ’em the rest of the way. They must’ve been an hour behind by then. And it was pissing down. So they wasn’t hanging around.”

“But someone found the body.” The driver gave him an odd look, and Lamb surmised the reason. “Richard,” he said. They’d been brothers, hadn’t they? “Dickie. Someone realised he was dead.”

“There was a huddle at the back of the bus, but he was already gone. One of them, a doctor, he stayed behind, but the rest left to catch their train.” He paused. “He looked quite calm, like. Your brother.”

“It’s how he would have wanted to go,” Lamb assured him. “He liked buses. So you what, called an ambulance?”

“He was past help, but yeah. I was stuck there rest of the evening. No offence. Had to give a statement, but you’d know that, right? Being his brother.”

“That’s right,” Lamb said. “Being his brother. Anything else happen?”

“Business as normal, mate. Once he’d been, you know, taken away, and I’d tidied the bus and everything, I came back here.”

“Tidied the bus?”

“Not cleaning it or anything. Just check the seats for anything left behind, you know? Wallets and that.”

“And did you find anything?”

“Not that evening, mate. Well, just a hat.”

“A hat?”

“On the overhead rack. Near where your brother was.”

“What sort of hat?”

“Black one.”

“Black one what? Bowler? Fedora? What?”

He shrugged. “Just a hat. With a brim, you know?”

“Where’s it now?”

“Lost property, ’less it’s been picked up. It was just a hat. People leave hats on buses all the time.”

Not when it’s pissing down they don’t, thought Lamb.

A moment’s reflection told him this wasn’t true. When it was raining, more people wore hats, so more people left them on buses. It stood to reason. A matter of statistics.

But the thing about statistics, Lamb reasoned, was statistics could take a flying hump at the moon.

“So where’s your lost property?” He waved in the vague direction of the depot office. “Over there?”

“Nah, mate. Back in Oxford, innit?”

Of bloody course it is, thought Lamb.

“So what about Ho?”

“Ho’s a dweeb.”

“Newsflash. All webheads are dweebs.”

“Ho’s dweebness goes deeper. You want to know the first thing he said to me?”

“What?”

“The very first thing, right? I mean, I haven’t even got my coat off,” Marcus said. “First morning here, thinking I’ve just been shipped to the spooks’ equivalent of Devil’s Island, and I’m wondering what happens next, and Ho picks up his coffee mug and shows it to me—it’s got a picture of Clint Eastwood on it—and he says, ‘This is my mug, okay? And I don’t like other people using my mug’.”

Shirley said, “Okay. That’s bad.”

“It’s way past anal. I bet his socks are tagged left and right.”

“What about Guy?”

“She’s doing Harper.”

“Harper?”

“He’s doing Guy.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that hardly amounts to a character portrait.”

He shrugged. “They’ve not been doing each other long, so right now, that’s the only significant thing about them.”

Shirley said, “That must have been them going out earlier. I wonder where they went?”

“We’re still persona non grata at the Park then.”

Which was an odd thing for Min Harper to say, given that they were in a park, but Louisa Guy knew what he meant.

“Do you know,” she said, “I’m not entirely sure that’s the reason.”

The park they were in was St James’s, and the park they weren’t in was Regent’s. They were heading for the palace end and a woman in a pink velvety tracksuit was approaching them along the footpath at about two miles an hour. At her ankles waddled a small hairy dog with a matching pink ribbon round its neck. They waited until she’d passed before continuing.

“Explain?”

So Louisa did. It was to do with Leonard Bradley. Until recently Bradley had been Chair of the Limitations Committee, which effectively controlled the Service purse strings. Every op planned by Ingrid Tearney, First Desk at Regent’s Park, had to be cleared by Limitations if she didn’t want budgeting issues, which was what running out of money was now called. Except Bradley—Sir Leonard, if the title hadn’t been repossessed yet—had lately been caught with his fingers in the till: a Shropshire “safe house,” fully staffed for the recuperation of officers suffering Service-related stress, had turned out to be a beachfront property on the Maldives, though to be fair, it was fully staffed. And the result of Bradley’s peccadilloes—

“How do you know all this?” Harper interrupted. “I thought he’d just retired.”

“Ah, that’s sweet. But you’ve got to keep an ear to the ground in this business.”

“Don’t tell me. Catherine.”

She nodded.

“Girls’ talk? Quick confab in the ladies’?”

He kept it light, but there was an edge. Something he was excluded from.

She said, “Catherine’s hardly likely to call a press conference. When I told her we’d been summoned, she told me this was going on. She called it an audit.”

“How does she know about it?”

Louisa said, “She’s got a connection. One of the Queens.”

The Queens of the Database were who you went to when you needed information, which made them useful friends, and even more useful connections.

“So what’s this audit?”

—and the result of Bradley’s peccadilloes was what was being termed an audit, but might more accurately be called an Inquisition. Limitations’s new Chair, Roger Barrowby, was taking the opportunity to clean the stables: this involved in-depth interviews with all staff, covering their financial, operational, emotional, psychological, sexual and medical histories; just to make sure everything was squeaky clean. Nobody wanted further embarrassments.

“Bit of a cheek,” Min said. “I mean, Bradley was the one stealing cookies. Any embarrassment should be the Committee’s, not the Park’s.”

“Welcome to the world, baby boy,” Louisa explained.

There was a bright side, though. “I bet Taverner’s going spare,” he mused.

But there wasn’t time to explore what Taverner might be going, because here came James Webb, who’d summoned them to this al fresco meeting.

Webb was a suit. He wasn’t actually wearing a suit today—he wore fawn chinos and a dark blue roll-neck under a black raincoat—but he wasn’t fooling anyone: he was a suit, and if you cut him open he’d bleed in pinstripes. Today’s outfit he probably thought was tradecraft: what you wore for a leafy stroll. But the impression he gave was that he’d popped along to his man in Jermyn Street, explained he was going for a walk in the park, and wanted to dress accordingly. He was as much a man in casuals as the pink lady was a jogger.

Still, he was Regent’s Park to their Slough House. Getting the call at all was a jawdropper. When he nodded they nodded back, and fell into step either side of him. “Any trouble getting away?”

He might have been asking how traffic had been.

Louisa said, “The back door jams. You have to kick it and lean on the handle at the same time. Once we were through that, it was a breeze.”

Webb said, “I meant with Lamb.”

“Lamb wasn’t around,” Min told him. “Is he not supposed to know about this?”

“Oh, he’ll find out eventually. It’s no big deal anyway. I’m seconding you, that’s all. Not for long. Three weeks or so.”

I’m seconding you. Like he was a big wheel. Over at the Park, when Ingrid Tearney was in DC, which was about half the time, Lady Di Taverner took the hot seat: she was one of several Second Desks, but top of most people’s list whenever there were rumours of a palace coup. As for Spider Webb, his desk didn’t have a number. He was basically HR, Min and Louisa had heard, and had this connection with River Cartwright neither of them knew the details of, beyond that they’d been through training together, and that Webb had screwed River over, which was how come River was a slow horse.

Maybe some of this leaked out from Min and Louisa’s silence, because Webb said: “So you’ll be reporting to me.”

“On what sort of job?”

“Babysitting. Maybe a bit of vetting.”

“Vetting?” Vetting was mostly clerical, which was the slow horses’ lot, but demanded resources Slough House didn’t run to. And anyway, usually fell to Background, Regent’s Park’s skeleton-rattling department, with the Dogs—the internal security mob—providing back-up as and when.

But Webb affected to believe Min was unfamiliar with the term. “Yes. Personal checks, identity confirmation, location cleansing. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, vetting,” said Min. “Thought you said petting. I wondered if things were getting heavy.”

“It’s not complicated,” Webb said, “because if it was, I wouldn’t be asking a smartarse to do it. But if you’re not up to it, just say the word.” He came to a halt, and Min and Louisa each took an extra step before realising. They turned to face him. He said, “And then you can piss off back to Slough House. And whatever important tasks you’re busy with this week.”

Min’s mouth began responding before his brain was in gear, but Louisa got in first. “We’ve nothing much on,” she said. “We’d be up for it.”

She shot Min a glance.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sounds like a blast.”

“A blast?”

“Within our sphere of competence, he means,” Louisa said. “We’re just a little … nonplussed by your choice of venue.”

Webb looked around, as if only just noticing they were outside: water, trees, birds. Traffic, aware of the Palace, hummed politely beyond the railings. “Yes,” he said. “Well. Always nice to get out.”

“Especially when things are dodgy at home,” Min couldn’t stop himself saying.

Louisa shook her head: I have to work with this?

But Webb pursed his lips. “It’s true the Park’s a bit manic right now.”

Yeah. You’re touching toes for the bean-counters, thought Min. That must make for fun moments round the watercooler.

Webb said, “Every organisation needs the odd shake-up. We’ll see how things stand once the dust settles.”

And in the same instant, both Min and Louisa realised Webb was intending to emerge from this shake-up behind a desk with a number on it.

“But meanwhile, it’s mend and make-do. Background’s busy, as you might imagine, running checks on the Park’s own staff. Which is why we find ourselves forced to, ah …”

“Outsource?”

“If you like.”

“Tell us about this babysitting,” Louisa suggested.

“We’re expecting visitors,” Webb said.

“What kind?”

“The Russian kind.”

“That’s nice. Aren’t they our friends now?”

Webb chuckled politely.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Talks about talks.”

“Guns, oil or money?” Min asked.

“Cynicism’s an overrated quality, don’t you think?” Webb marched onwards, and they fell into step, flanking him. “HMG rather feels the wind of change from the East. Nothing imminent, but you have to prepare for the future. Always an idea to extend a friendly hand to those who might one day be, ah, influential.”

“Oil, then,” Min said.

“So who’s the visitor?” Louisa asked.

“Name of Pashkin.”

“Like the poet?”

“Very nearly like the poet, yes. Arkady Pashkin. A century ago, he’d have been a warlord. Twenty years ago, Mafia.” Webb paused. “Well, twenty years ago he was Mafia, probably. But these days, he’s mostly a billionaire.”

“And you want us to vet him?”

“Christ, no. The man owns an oil company. He could have whole bloody boneyards in his closet, HMG wouldn’t care. But he’ll be bringing staff, and there’ll be high-level talks, and all of this needs to run smoothly. If it doesn’t, well, the Park’ll obviously need someone to blame.”

“And that would be us.”

“That would be you.” He gave a brief smile which might have indicated humour, but neither Min nor Louisa were convinced. “Any problems with that?”

“Sounds like nothing we can’t handle,” Min said.

“I’d hope not.” Webb came to a halt again. Min was starting to have flashbacks to walking his two boys when they were younger. Getting anywhere was a struggle: anything in their path that snagged their interest—a twig, a rubber band, a till receipt—resulted in a five-minute delay. “So,” Webb went on, too casually. “How’s things over your manor, then?”

Our manor, Min wanted to parrot. Innit.

Louisa said, “Same old same old.”

“And Cartwright?”

“No different.”

“I’m surprised he sticks it out. No offence. But he was always full of himself. He must hate it over there. Away from the action.”

There was barely disguised satisfaction in the pronouncement.

Min had decided he wasn’t a fan of Spider Webb. He wasn’t a particular fan of River Cartwright come to that, but there was a base line these days that hadn’t always been there, and it was simply stated: Cartwright was a slow horse, same as himself, same as Louisa. Once, that hadn’t meant more than being tarred with the same brush. But now, if they didn’t stick together exactly, they didn’t piss on each other in front of others. Or not in front of Regent’s Park suits, anyway.

He said, “I’ll pass on your regards. I know he has fond memories of your last meeting.”

At which River had clubbed Webb unconscious.

Louisa said, “Does Lamb know you’re, ah, seconding us?”

“He will soon. Is he likely to kick up a fuss?”

“Well,” Louisa said. “If it annoys him, I’m sure he’ll keep it to himself.”

“Yeah,” said Min. “You know Lamb. Natural born diplomat.”

“Oh Christ,” said Lamb. “Not you again.”

Back at Oxford station, after another half-hour wait for a train, Lamb was looking for someone to tell him where the lost property office was, and the first face he saw was the weasel’s: still twitchy, still officious, and definitely not happy to cast eyes on Jackson Lamb.

He made to walk straight past, but Lamb’s cover as just another member of the public was wearing thin. He caught hold of a uniformed elbow. “A word?”

The weasel looked down at Lamb’s hand, up at Lamb’s face, and then, slowly, deliberately, at the transport policeman a few yards away, showing a pretty blonde woman how to read a map.

Lamb released his grip. “If it’s of any interest,” he said, “I still have that twenty pound note.” In the teeth of the expectations of a Reading bus driver, he might have added. “So there’s no reason we can’t proceed in a friendly fashion.”

He smiled to illustrate ‘friendly fashion,’ though the yellow-stained result might have passed for ‘evil intent.’

It was more probably the mention of money than the amiable overture that worked. “What is it this time?” the weasel asked.

“Lost property. Where is it?”

“That would be in the lost property office.”

“This is going splendidly,” Lamb said. “And where’s that?”

The weasel pursed his lips and looked pointedly at the spot where Lamb’s wallet nestled in his inside pocket. It was clear that mere promises were no longer cutting ice.

Finishing his geography lesson, the policeman glanced across. Lamb nodded at him, and received a similar nod back. Then he asked the weasel: “Worked here long?”

“Nineteen years,” the weasel said. His tone suggested this was something to be proud of.

“Well if you want to make it to nineteen years and a day, start playing nice. Because I’ve spent nineteen years and then some finding things out people don’t want me to know, so a bit of publicly available information from a turd in a uniform really shouldn’t be this hard to acquire. Don’t you think?”

The weasel looked round for the policeman, who was now ambling towards a coffee booth.

“Oh, seriously,” Lamb said. “Can he get here before I break your nose?”

Nothing in his physical appearance suggested Lamb could move quickly, but something about his presence suggested you’d be unwise to dismiss the possibility. He watched this calculation crawl across the weasel’s face, and, while it was struggling to its conclusion, yawned ferociously. When lions yawn, it doesn’t mean they’re tired. It means they’re waking up.

The weasel said, “Platform two.”

“Lead the way,” Lamb said. “I’m looking for a hat.”

In St. James’s Park, Webb had handed over a pink cardboard folder, its flap sealed with a sticky label, and taken his leave. Louisa and Min were now heading for the City, but were walking round the lake first, in case this turned out to be a short cut.

“If he’d said HMG once more, I’d have had to LOL,” Louisa said.

“Mmm. What? Oh, right. Good one.”

He sounded miles away.

“The wheel is turning,” she noted. “But the hamster’s dead.”

Min proved her point by grunting in reply.

She took his arm because they could always pretend this was cover. On a rock in the middle of the lake, a pelican stretched its wings. It was like watching a golf umbrella do aerobics.

She said, “You’ve been eating your wheaties, haven’t you?”

“Meaning what?”

“I thought you were gunna challenge him to a wrestling match.”

This earned a sheepish grin. “Yeah. Well. He got on my tits.”

Louisa smiled, but kept it on the inside. Min had changed these past few months, and she was aware that she was the cause of it. On the other hand, she was equally aware that any woman would have done: Min was having sex again, and that would put a spring in anyone’s step. Like her own, his life had gone down the pan a few years back: in Min’s case, the pivotal moment had been leaving a classified disk on a tube train. His marriage had been collateral damage. As for Louisa, she’d screwed up a tail-job, an error which had put guns on the street. But a few months ago they’d stirred themselves out of their individual torpors enough to start an affair, at the same time Slough House had gone briefly live. Things had settled since, but optimism hadn’t entirely died. They suspected Jackson Lamb now had serious dope on Diana Taverner; enough that, if she wasn’t his sock puppet, she was at least in his debt.

And debt meant power.

Louisa said, “Webb’s the one River put on the floor, isn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m surprised he got up again.”

Min said, “You think River’s that tough?”

“Don’t you?”

“Not especially.”

She barked a little laugh.

“What?”

“You. That shoulder roll you gave when you said that.” She gave an exaggerated imitation. “Like, not as tough as me.”

“I did not.”

“Yes you did.” She gave the roll again. “Like that. Like you were on World’s Strongest Man or something.”

“I did not. And all I meant was, sure, River can probably handle himself. But he’s hardly likely to dismantle Lady Di’s lapdog, is he?”

“Depends what the lapdog did to him.”

They rounded the lake. Padding about on the grass, on feet too big for their legs, were two annoying birds neither could identify, while a short distance away a black swan glided. It looked cross.

“You okay with this?”

She shrugged. “Babysitting. Hardly high excitement.”

“Gets us out of the office.”

“When it’s not keeping us there. There’ll be paperwork. Wonder what Lamb’ll say.”

Min stopped so Louisa, her arm still through his, came to a halt too. Together they watched the swan patrol the choppy fringe of the lake, and jab without warning at something below the surface; its neck momentarily becoming a bar of black light beneath the water.

She said, “Black swans. I was reading about them the other day.”

“What, they’re on a takeaway menu? That’s kind of sick.”

“Behave. It was in one of the Sundays. It’s a phrase, black swan,” she said. “Means a totally unexpected event with a big impact. But one that seems predictable afterwards, with the benefit of hindsight.”

“Mmm.”

They walked on. After a while, Louisa said, “So what were you thinking back then? When you were so far away?”

He said, “I was thinking last time we got dragged into a Regent’s Park op, someone was looking to screw us over.”

The black swan dipped its neck once more, and buried its head in the water.

Shirley Dander lifted her take-out coffee cup, found it cold, and drank from it anyway. Then said, “Standish?”

“The Lady Catherine …” Marcus made a swigging gesture with his right hand. “She likes the bottle.”

That didn’t sound right. Catherine Standish was wound pretty tight, and with her curiously old-fashioned way of dressing resembled Alice in Wonderland grown middle-aged and disappointed. But Marcus seemed sure:

“She’s dry now. Years, probably. But if I know drunks, and I’ve known a few, she could have put me under the table in her day. You too. Sequentially.”

“You make her sound like a boxer.”

“Your really serious drunk approaches booze like it was a barfight. You know, only one of you’s going to be left standing. And the drunk always thinks that’ll be him. Her, in this case.”

“But now she’s hung up her drinking shoes.”

“They all think they’ve done that too.”

“Cartwright? He crashed King’s Cross.”

“I know. I saw the movie.”

Video footage of River Cartwright’s disastrous assessment exercise, which had caused a rush-hour panic in one of London’s major railway stations, was occasionally used for training purposes, to Cartwright’s less-than-delight.

“His grandfather’s some kind of legend. David Cartwright?”

“Before my time.”

“He’s Cartwright’s grandfather,” Marcus said. “He’s before all our times. But he was a spook back in the dark ages. Still alive, mind.”

“Just as well,” Shirley said. “He’d be turning in his grave otherwise. Cartwright being a slow horse and all.”

Marcus Longridge pushed further back from his desk and stretched his arms wide. He could block doorways, Shirley thought. Probably had, back in Ops: he’d been on raids; had closed down an active terrorist cell a year or so back. That was the story, anyway, but there must have been another story too, or he wouldn’t be here now.

He was staring at her. His eyes were blacker than his skin: a thought that reached her unprompted. “What?”

“What was your edge?”

“My edge, huh?”

“That meant they couldn’t sack you.”

“I know what you meant.” Somewhere overhead, a chair scraped on a floor; footsteps crossed to a window. “I told them I was gay,” she said at last.

“Uh-huh?”

“And no way were they gunna fire a dyke for punching out some arsehole who felt her up in the canteen.”

“Is that why you cut your hair?”

“No,” she said. “I cut my hair because I felt like it.”

“Are we on the same side?”

“I’m on nobody’s side but my own.”

He nodded. “Suit yourself.”

“I intend to.”

She turned back to her monitor, which had fallen asleep. When she shifted her mouse it grumpily revealed a screen frozen on a split-image of two faces so obviously not a match that the program must have been taking the piss.

“So are you actually gay? Or did you just tell them that?”

Shirley didn’t reply.

On a bench at Oxford station sat Jackson Lamb; overcoat swamping him either side, undone shirt button allowing a hairy glimpse of stomach. He scratched this absently, then fumbled with the button before giving up and covering the mound instead with a black fedora, on which he then concentrated his gaze, as if it held the secret of the grail.

A black hat. Left on a bus. The bus Dickie Bow had died on.

Which didn’t in itself mean much, but Jackson Lamb wondered.

It had been raining heavily when that bus reached Oxford, and first thing you’d do on stepping off a bus into the rain was put your hat on, if you had one. And if you didn’t have one, first thing you’d do was go back for it. Unless you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself; wanted to remain part of the crowd heading onto the platform, boarding a train, being carried away from the scene as quickly as possible …

He was being stared at, pointedly, by a woman who was far too attractive to be doing so out of amateur interest. Except, Lamb realised, it wasn’t him she was staring at but the cigarette he now noticed he held between two fingers of his left hand, the one he was tapping the fedora with. His right was already rummaging for a lighter, a motion not dissimilar from scratching his balls. He gave her his best crooked smile, which involved flaring one nostril, and she responded by flaring both her own, and looking away. But he tucked the fag behind his ear anyway.

The rummaging hand gave up the search for a lighter, and found instead the mobile phone he’d collected from the bus.

It was an ancient thing, a Nokia, black-and-grey, with about as many functions as a bottle opener. You could no more take a photo with it than send an e-mail with a stapler. But when he pressed the button, the screen squeaked into life, and let him scroll down a contact list. Five numbers: Shop, Digs, and Star, which sounded like Bow’s local, and two actual names; a Dave and a Lisa, both of which Lamb rang. Dave’s mobile went straight to voicemail. Lisa’s landline went nowhere; was a gateway to a humming void in which no telephone would ever be answered. He clicked onto Messages, and found only a note from Bow’s service provider informing him he had 82p in his pay-as-you-go account. Lamb wondered what fraction of Bow’s worldly goods 82p represented. Maybe he could send Lisa a cheque. He scrolled onto Sent Items. That was empty too.

But Dickie Bow had fished his mobile out shortly before dying, and had jammed it between the cushions of his seat, as if to make sure it would only be found by someone looking for it. By someone for whom he had a message.

An unsent message, as it turned out.

A train arrived, but Lamb remained on his bench. Not many people got off; not many got on. As it pulled away Lamb saw the attractive young woman glowering at him through a window and he farted quietly in response: a private victory, but satisfying. Then he examined the phone again. Drafts. There was a Drafts folder for text messages. He opened this, and the single-word entry of a single saved message stared back from the tiny screen.

Near his feet a pigeon scratched the ground in imitation of a bird that might make an effort. Lamb didn’t notice. He was absorbed in that single word, keyed into the phone but never transmitted; locked forever in its black-and-grey box, alongside 82 pence-worth of unused communication. As if a dying word could be breathed into a bottle, and corked up, and released once the grim business of tidying away the corpse had been seen to: here on an Oxfordshire railway platform, with a late March sun struggling to make itself felt, and a fat pigeon tramping underfoot. One word.

“Cicadas,” Jackson Lamb said out loud. Then said it again. “Cicadas.”

And then he said, “Fuck me.”

Shirley Dander and Marcus Longridge had settled back into their tasks; the atmosphere only slightly altered by their conversation. In Slough House, sound seeped easily. If he were interested Roderick Ho might have rested his head against the wall separating his office from theirs, the better to hear them, but all he registered was the familiar buzz of other people establishing relationships—he was, anyway, busy updating his online status: adding a paragraph to Facebook describing his weekend at Chamonix; tweeting a link to his latest dancemix … Ho’s name for these purposes was Roddy Hunt; his tunes were looted from obscure sites he subsequently torched; his photos were tweaked stills of a young Montgomery Clift. It still amazed Ho you could build a man from links and screenshots, launch him into the world like a paper boat, and he’d just keep sailing. All of the details that built up a person could be real. The only thing fake was the person … Constructing a mythical work-pattern for his user ID had been the most brilliant thing Ho had accomplished this year. Anyone monitoring his computertime would confirm his constant presence on the Service network, building an operations archive.

So Ho was uninterested in Shirley and Marcus’s chattering, and the office above theirs was empty, because Harper and Guy weren’t yet back. If they had been, it’s likely that one would have knelt with an ear to the floor, and relayed each word to the other. And if River Cartwright had been in there, instead of in the room above Ho’s, he might have done the same: it would have relieved the boredom. Which he should have been used to but it kept recurring, like a week-old insect bite that wouldn’t quit. Though if that analogy were to ring true, River now thought, he’d have to be wearing boxing gloves too: unable to scratch; just rubbing away without effect.

Until a few months ago he had shared this room. Now it was his alone, though a second desk remained, equipped with a PC that was newer, faster and less battered than River’s. He could have commandeered it, but Service PCs were user-specific, and he’d have had to log a request for IT to reassign it; a thirty-minute job that could take eight months. And while he could have short-circuited the process by asking Ho to do it, this would have involved asking Ho to do it, and he wasn’t that desperate.

He drummed an off-beat rhythm with his fingers, and studied the ceiling. Exactly the kind of pointless noise that could draw a returning thump from Jackson Lamb, meaning both shut up and come here. The fact that there wasn’t much to do didn’t stop Lamb dreaming up tasks. Last week he’d sent River out collecting takeaway cartons: River had plucked them from bins, gutters, car roofs; had found a trove in a Barbican flowerbed, chewed by rats or foxes. Then Lamb had made him compare them with his own collection, the fruit of six months’ afternoon snacking: he’d become convinced that Sam Yu, frontman of the New Empire next door, was giving him smaller cartons than everyone else, and was “working up the evidence.” Borderline Lamb: he might have meant it, might have been taking the piss. Either way, River was the one up to his elbows in bins.

For a while, a few months back, it had looked like things were changing. After years of squatting upstairs, happily dumping on the poor saps below, Lamb had appeared to be taking an interest; at the very least, had enjoyed putting the screws on Lady Di Taverner at Regent’s Park. But the mould was showing through again: Lamb had grown bored with excitement, preferring the comfortably unchanging days, so River was still here, and Slough House was still Slough House. And the work was the same grunt-work it had always been.

Today was a case in point. Today, he was a typist. Yesterday he’d been a scanner-operator; today the scanner wouldn’t work, so today he was a typist, entering pre-digital death records onto a database. The deceased had all been six months old or younger, and had died while rationing was still enforced: prime targets for identity theft. Back then, you worked this by taking names from gravestones; a less innocent form of brass-rubbing. Birth certificates were then claimed lost and copies sought; after that, you simply traced the life the infant might have led, with all its attendant paperwork: national insurance number, bank account, driving licence … All of the details that built up a person could be faked. The only thing real was the person. But anyone who’d actually done this would be collecting a pension by now. Any sleepers using the names River had found could have called themselves Rip van Winkle instead. So it was just makework for the slow horses, plugging gaps in a history book, nothing more. And where was Jackson Lamb?

Sitting here wouldn’t answer that. Having risen without consciously deciding to, River went with the flow: out of his office, up the stairs. The top floor was always dark. Even when Lamb’s door was open, his blinds were drawn, and Catherine’s office, at the back of the building, sat in the shadow of a nearby office block. Catherine preferred lamps to overhead lighting—the only trait she shared with Lamb—and these didn’t so much dispel the gloom as accentuate it, casting twin pools of yellow light between which murkiness swarmed. Her monitor gave a grey glow, and in its wash, as River entered her room, she seemed a figment from a fairy tale: a pale lady, hoarding wisdom.

River plonked himself on a chair next to a pile of vari-coloured folders. While the rest of the world pursued a digital agenda, Lamb insisted on hard copy. He’d once toyed with instigating an employee-of-the-month award, based solely on weight of output. If he’d had a pair of scales, and an attention span, River didn’t doubt he’d have done so.

“Let me guess,” Catherine said. “You’ve finished what you were doing, and want some more work.”

“Ho ho. What’s he up to, Catherine?”

“He doesn’t tell me.” She seemed amused that River thought he might. “He does what he does. He doesn’t ask my permission.”

“But you’re closest to him.”

Her expression wavered not one inch.

“Geographically, I mean. You take his calls. You manage his diary.”

“His diary’s empty, River. Mostly he stares at the ceiling and farts.”

“It’s a captivating picture.”

“He smokes in there too. And it’s a government office.”

“We could make a citizen’s arrest.”

“We might want to practise on someone smaller.”

“I don’t know how you stand it.”

“Oh, I offer it up.” Fear flashed in River’s eyes. “Joke? He’d drive a saint to suicide, anyway. Frankly, whatever he’s up to, I’m just relieved he’s somewhere else.”

“He’s not at the Park,” River said. When Lamb was at the Park, he made sure everyone knew it. Probably hoping someone would break, and ask if they could come too. “But something’s up. He’s been weird. Even for Lamb.”

Lamb’s weirdness would pass for normality in other people. His phone had rung, and he’d answered it. He’d had Ho unfreeze his browser, which meant he’d been online. In fact, he’d given the impression of having a job to do.

“And he hasn’t said a word,” River said.

“Not one.”

“So you’ve no idea what’s lured him onto the streets.”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Catherine said.

River studied her, an old-fashioned creature whose pale colouring spoke of an indoor life. Her clothes covered her wrist to ankle. She wore hats, for god’s sake. He guessed she was fiftyish, and until the business last year he hadn’t paid her much attention; there was little in a wall-hugging woman her age to interest an uptight man of his. But when things had turned nasty she hadn’t panicked. She’d even pointed a gun at Spider Webb—as had River. This shared experience made them fellow-members of a select club.

She was waiting for him to respond. He said, “Tell?”

“Who’s Lamb send for when he needs something?”

“Ho,” River said.

“Exactly. And you know how sound travels here.”

“You heard them talking?”

“No,” Catherine said. “That’s what was interesting.”

Interesting because Lamb was not in the habit of modulating his tones. “So whatever it is, it’s not for the likes of us.”

“But Roddy knows.”

It was also interesting that Catherine called Ho Roddy. Nobody else called Ho anything. He wasn’t someone you engaged in casual chat, because if you didn’t come with broadband, you weren’t worth his attention.

On the other hand, he currently possessed information River would like to share.

“Well then,” he said. “Let’s go talk to Roddy, shall we?”

“Nice,” said Min.

“Best you can do?”

“Spectacular, then. Better?”

“Much.”

They were on the seventy-seventh floor of one of the City’s newest buildings; a great glass needle that soared eighty storeys into London’s skies. And it was some room they were in, a huge one, yay metres long and woah metres wide, with floor-to-ceiling views to north and west of the capital, and then the wide space beyond, where the capital gave up and the sky took over. She could spend days in here, Louisa thought; not eating, not drinking; just taking in as much of the view as she could, in every weather, and all types of light. “Spectacular” didn’t come close.

Even the lift had been a thrill: quieter, smoother and faster than any she’d known.

Min said, “Cool, wasn’t it?”

“The lift?”

“At Reception. The plastic cops.”

The security guys, who’d checked their Service ID with what Min had interpreted as awe and envy. Louisa thought it more the look state kids aimed at their public school counterparts: the age-old enmity of yobs v toffs. A long-time yob herself, she savored the irony.

She laid her palm against the glass. Then rested her forehead there. This brought a delicious feeling of safe vertigo; set a butterfly fluttering in her stomach, even while her brain enjoyed the view. Min stood by, hands in pockets.

“This the highest you’ve been?” she asked.

He gave her a slow look. “Duh, aeroplane?”

“Yeah, no. Highest building.”

“Empire State.”

“Been there, done that.”

“Twin Towers?”

She shook her head. “They were already gone when I was there.”

“Me too,” he said.

They were quiet for a while, watching London operate way below, thinking similar thoughts: of a morning when people in a different city had stood at greater heights, enjoying similar views from different windows, not knowing they’d never put their feet on the ground again; that the threads of their future had been severed with box cutters.

Now Min pointed, and following his finger she saw a speck in the distance. An aeroplane: not one of the liners leaving Heathrow, but a small, buzzy machine, ploughing its own furrow.

Min said, “I wonder how close they get?”

“You think it’s that important?” Louisa said. “This mini-summit? Big enough for a … replay?”

She didn’t have to specify what it would be a replay of.

After a while, Min said, “No, I guess not.”

Or it wouldn’t have been entrusted to them, Regent’s Park audit or not.

“Got to do it properly, though.”

“Look at all the angles,” she agreed.

“Else we end up looking bad even when nothing bad happens.”

“You think this is a test of some kind?”

“Of what?”

“Us,” she said. “Finding out if we’re up to the job.”

“And if we pass it, we get back to Regent’s Park?”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

This many people had made the return journey from Slough House to the Park: none. They both knew that. But like every slow horse before them, Min and Louisa hid secret hopes their story would be different.

At length she turned and surveyed the room. Still yay metres long and woah metres wide, it took up about half of the floor; the separate suite, also currently vacant, enjoying the views south and east. There was a shared lobby area where the smart lifts arrived; a third, the service lift, lay behind the stairwell, which was a vision of eternal descent. It passed floors and floors of high-end corporate offices, only some of which were yet occupied: the list in the folder Webb had provided included banks, investment companies, yacht salesmen, diamond merchants, a defence contractor. The tower’s lower third was a hotel, its grand opening scheduled for the following month. She’d read it was fully booked through the next five years.

Spider Webb must have called in favours, or opened some classified folders, to secure the suite for his meeting, a few weeks hence. Any part of town, a space like this commanded respect. This high up, it demanded awe. Kitchen and bathrooms aside, it was a single room, designed for business; its centrepiece a beautiful mahogany oval table big enough for sixteen chairs, which, if it hadn’t been larger than Louisa’s entire flat, she’d have coveted. But like the view, the table belonged to the moneyed. This wasn’t supposed to factor into her motivation, but still. Here they were, the pair of them, and they’d be ensuring the safety of some hotshot whose pocket change equalled twice their joint salaries.

Forget it, she thought. Not relevant. But couldn’t help saying: “Kind of flash for a discreet meeting.”

“Yeah, well,” Min said. “Don’t suppose they’ll have anyone peeping through the windows.”

“How do they clean them, do you think?”

“Some kind of hoist? We’d better find out.”

That was just for starters. They’d need an itinerary; where the Russian was staying, and the route from there to here. Who was catering. Drivers. They’d need to study Webb’s notes and do extra digging, because Webb was trustworthy as a snake. And they’d need sweepers to check for bugs, and maybe a techie to provide interference, though she doubted parabolic eavesdropping was possible. The nearest high building was a dwarf by comparison.

Min touched her shoulder. “We’ll be fine. Jumped-up Russkie oligarch is all. Coming over here. Buying our football teams. It’s babysitting, like Webb said.”

She knew. But Russkie oligarchs weren’t the most popular breed on the planet, and there was always the possibility something would go wrong. And underneath that, a very faint glimmer of possibility that everything would go right.

It swam into her mind again that this could be a test. And alongside it swam a creepier notion: What if a successful outcome resulted in a single ticket home; a desk at Regent’s Park for one of them but not the other? If it were hers, would she take it? If it were Min’s, would he? He might. She couldn’t blame him. She might too.

All the same, she shrugged his hand off her shoulder.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. We’re at work, that’s all.”

Min said, “Sure. Sorry,” but there was nothing snarky in his tone.

He wandered towards the doors, through which lay the lifts, the other suite, the stairwell. Louisa, in his wake, veered off into the kitchen. It was spotless, unused, gleaming, and fully equipped with a fridge that was restaurant-sized, but empty. Fixed to the wall was a friendly red fire extinguisher; next to it, behind a glass cover, a fire blanket and a small axe. She opened bare cupboards, closed them again. Returned to the big room and its windows, through which she could now see an air-ambulance, seemingly stationary over Central London, though possibly swinging like a randy divorcee from the point of view of those it carried. And she thought again of the black swans, and the huge and improbable events they’d lent their name to. It was only afterwards you knew you’d encountered one. The helicopter was still hovering there when she went to find Min.

Ho didn’t like having his space invaded. Especially not by River Cartwright, who was one of those who ignored the likes of Roderick Ho except when he needed something only the likes of Roderick Ho could provide. Technological competence, for instance. Competence was generally beyond Cartwright. For a while, Ho had used a CCTV still of the King’s Cross chaos as a screensaver, until Louisa Guy suggested River might break his elbows if he found out.

But Catherine Standish was with him, and while Ho didn’t precisely like Standish, he couldn’t put his finger on a reason for disliking her. Since this put her in a select category, he decided to see what they wanted before telling them he was busy.

River made a space on the spare desk, and perched on its corner. Catherine pulled out a chair and sat. “How are you today, Roddy?”

His eyes narrowed with suspicion. She’d called him that before. He said to River, “Don’t move my stuff.”

“I haven’t moved anything.”

“My stuff on the desk there, you just rearranged it. I’ve got everything sorted. You put it out of order, I won’t be able to find it.”

River opened his mouth to make a number of points, but Catherine caught his eye. He changed direction. “Sorry.”

Catherine said, “Roddy, we were wondering if you could do us a favour.”

“What sort of favour?”

“It involves your area of expertise.”

“If you want broadband,” Ho said, “maybe you should just think about paying for it.”

“That would be like asking a plastic surgeon to do ingrown toenails,” Catherine said.

“Yeah,” said River. “Or getting an architect to wash your windows.”

Ho regarded him suspiciously.

“Or a lion tamer to feed your cat,” River added.

The look Catherine flashed him indicated that he wasn’t helping.

“The other day, in Lamb’s office,” she began, but Ho wasn’t having it.

“No way.”

“I hadn’t finished.”

“You don’t need to. You want to know what Lamb wanted, right?”

“Just a clue.”

“He’d kill me. And he could do it, too. He’s killed people before.”

“That’s what he wants you to think,” River said.

“You’re saying he hasn’t?”

“I’m saying he’s not allowed to kill staff. Health and safety.”

“Yeah, right. But I’m not talking killing killing.” Ho turned back to Catherine. “He’d kill me on a daily basis. You know what he’s like.”

“He doesn’t need to find out,” she said.

“He always finds out.”

River said, “Roddy?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Whatever. A few months ago, we did a good thing. Yes?”

“Maybe,” Ho said, suspiciously. “So what?”

“That was teamwork.”

“It was kind of teamwork,” Ho admitted.

“So—”

“The kind where I had all the ideas. You did a lot of running around, I remember.”

River bit back his first response. “We all play to our strengths,” he said. “My point is, for a while there, Slough House worked. Know what I mean? We played as a team, and it worked.”

“So now we do it again,” Ho said.

“That would be good, yes.”

“Only this time, instead of running around, you just sit there. While I do all the work again.” He turned to Catherine. “And then Lamb finds out and kills me.”

River said, “Okay, how about this. You don’t tell us anything, but we find out anyway, and tell him you told us. Then he kills you.”

Catherine said, “River—”

“No, seriously. Lamb never locks his computer, and we all know what his password is.”

Lamb’s password was “Password.”

Ho said, “If you were gunna do that, you’d have done it. You wouldn’t be bothering me.”

“No, well, it hadn’t occurred to me till now.” He looked at Catherine. “What’s the opposite of teamwork?”

She said, “It’s not going to happen, Roddy. He’s kidding.”

“It doesn’t sound like he’s kidding.”

“Well he is.” She looked at River. “Isn’t that right?”

He surrendered. “Whatever.”

She said to Ho, “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to.”

As an interrogation technique, thought River, this lacked bite.

Ho chewed his lip and looked at his monitor. This was angled so River couldn’t see it, but reflected in Ho’s glasses he could make out a thin tracery of lines cobwebbing the screen, and green lights blinking on a black background. Ho could be navigating his way through an MoD firewall, or playing Battleship with himself, but either way, he seemed to be contemplating something else altogether at the moment.

“All right,” he said at last.

“There,” River said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“I wasn’t talking to you. I’ll tell her.”

“For fuck’s sake, Ho, she’ll tell me herself soon as—”

“And who’s ‘she’?” Catherine asked. “The cat’s mother?”

The two men shared an unlikely moment of mystified brotherhood.

“Never mind,” she said. She pointed at River. “Out. No arguments.”

There were arguments, and he made a few of them, but only in his head.

Back upstairs, he looked in on Harper and Guy’s office, but they weren’t back. “Meeting,” Harper had said when River asked, which might have meant a meeting, or might have meant they were taking advantage of Lamb’s absence to do whatever they did these days: a walk in the park, a movie, sex in Louisa’s car. Park, though … They couldn’t have gone to Regent’s Park, could they? The thought stilled him, but only for a moment. It didn’t sound likely.

In his own room, he spent five minutes reacquainting himself with the database of the dead and another ten staring out from behind the window’s worn gilt lettering: WW Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. There were three people at the bus stop opposite, and as River watched a bus arrived and took them all away. Immediately someone else arrived, and began waiting for the next bus. River wondered how she’d react if she knew she was being watched by a member of the Intelligence Service. Wondered, too, what she’d make of the notion that she almost certainly had a more exciting job than his.

He wandered back to his computer, where he entered a fictitious name and dates on the database, thought for a bit, then deleted them.

Catherine knocked and entered. “You busy?” she said. “This can wait.”

“Ha bloody ha.”

She sat. “Lamb wanted a Service personnel file.”

“Ho doesn’t have access to those.”

“Very funny. File was on an occasional from the eighties. A man called Dickie Bow.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Real name Bough, but his parents were stupid enough to call him Richard. I take it you’ve never heard of him.”

River said, “Give me a moment.”

He leaned back, mentally refocusing on an image of the O.B.—Old Bastard, an epithet bestowed by River’s mother. He’d been largely raised by the O.B., whose long life had been dedicated to the Intelligence Service, and much of whose long retirement was spent doling out its highlights to his only grandson. River Cartwright was a spook because that’s what his grandfather was. Not had been: was. Some professions you never gave up, long after they were over. David Cartwright was a Service legend, but the way he told it, the same held true for the lowliest bagman: you could change sides, sell your secrets, offer your memoirs to the highest bidder, but once a spook you were always a spook, and everything else was just cover. So the friendly old man trowelling his flowerbeds with a silly hat on remained the strategist who’d helped plot the Service’s course through the Cold War, and River had grown up learning the details.

Which mattered. This, the O.B. had drummed into him before he was ten. Details mattered. River blinked once, then again, but came back with nothing: Dickie Bow? A ridiculous name, but not one River had heard before.

“Sorry,” he said. “It means nothing.”

“He was found dead last week,” she said.

“In suspicious circumstances?”

“On a bus.”

He clasped his hands behind his head. “The floor’s yours.”

“Bow was on a train to Worcester, but it was cancelled at Reading because of signalling problems. The bus was taking passengers from there to Oxford, where the trains were okay. At Oxford everyone got off, except Bow. This was because he’d died en route.”

“Natural causes?”

“So the report says. And Bow’s not been on the books for a while. So not what you’d call an obvious candidate for assassination, even if he’d ever done anything important.”

“Which you’re sure he hadn’t.”

“You know what personnel records are like. Secure stuff’s redacted, and anything more sensitive than a routine drop-and-poke is secure. But Bow’s file’s an open book barring some drink-related incident near the end. He did a lot of toad work. Cash for info, mostly gossip. He worked in a nightclub, so he picked up a lot.”

“Which would have been used for blackmail purposes.”

“Of course.”

“So revenge isn’t out of the question.”

“But it was all a long time ago. And like I say, natural causes.”

“So why’s Lamb interested?” River mused.

“No idea. Maybe they worked together.” She paused. “A note says he was a talented streetwalker. That doesn’t mean what it sounds like, does it?”

“Happily, no. It means he was good at shadowing people. Following them.”

“Well, then. Maybe Lamb just heard he’d died, and got sentimental.”

“Yes, but seriously.”

Catherine said, “Bow didn’t have a ticket for his journey. And he was supposed to be at work. I wonder where was he going?”

“I’d never heard of him until two minutes ago. I doubt my speculations are worth much.”

“Mine either. But it’s got Lamb off his arse, so there must be something to it.” She fell silent. To River, her gaze seemed to turn inward, as if she were looking for something she’d left at the back of her mind. And he noticed for the first time that her hair wasn’t entirely grey; that in the right light, might even look blonde. But her nose was long and pinched, and she wore hats, and it all added up to a kind of greyness, so that was how you saw her when she wasn’t there, and after a while became the way you saw her even when she was. A sort of witchiness that might even be sexy in the right circumstances.

To break the spell, he spoke. “Wonder what kind of something.”

“Assume the worst,” Catherine said.

“Maybe we should ask him.”

Catherine said, “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

It wasn’t such a good idea.

A few hours later, River heard Lamb whomping up the stairs like an out-of-breath bear. He waited a while, staring at his monitor without seeing it. “Maybe we should ask him.” Simple enough while Lamb was elsewhere; a different proposition with him on the premises. But the alternative was to sit looking at reams of indigestible information, and besides, if River backed down, Catherine would think him chicken.

She was waiting on the landing, eyebrow raised. Sure about this?

Well, no.

Lamb’s door was open. Catherine tapped, and they went in. Lamb was trying to turn his computer on: he still wore his coat and an unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth. He eyed them as if they were Mormons. “What’s this, an intervention?”

River said, “We were wondering what’s going on.”

Puzzled, Lamb stared at River, then plucked the cigarette from his lips and stared at that instead. Then returned it to his mouth and stared at River again. “Eh?”

“We were—”

“Yeah, I got that. I was having a what-the-fuck moment.” He looked at Catherine. “You’re a drunk, so wondering what’s happening’s a daily experience. What’s his excuse?”

“Dickie Bow,” Catherine said. Lamb’s crack didn’t visibly affect her, but she’d been in the business a while. She’d been Charles Partner’s PA while Partner had run the Service; had filled that role until finding him dead in his bathtub, though her career had been interrupted by, yes, being a drunk. Along the way, she’d picked up clues about hiding emotions. “He was in Berlin same time as you. And died last week on a bus outside Oxford. That’s where you’ve been, isn’t it? Tracing his journey.”

Lamb shook his head in disbelief. “What happened? Someone come round and sew your balls back on? I told you not to answer the door to strangers.”

“We don’t like being out of the loop.”

“You’re always out of the loop. The loop’s miles away. Nearest you’ll get to being in the loop is when they make a documentary about it and show it on the History Channel. I thought you were aware of that. Oh god, here’s another one.”

Marcus Longridge had appeared behind them, carrying a manila folder. “I’m supposed to give this to—”

Lamb said, “I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Longridge,” said Marcus.

“I don’t want to know. I was making a point.” Lamb plucked a stained mug from the litter on his desk, and threw it at Catherine. River caught it before it reached her head. Lamb said, “Well, I’m glad we’ve had this chat. Now fuck off. Cartwright, give that to Standish. Standish, fill it with tea. And you, I’ve forgotten your name again, go next door and get my lunch. Tell Sam I want my usual Tuesday.”

“It’s Monday.”

“I know it’s Monday. If I wanted my usual Monday, I wouldn’t have to specify, would I?” He blinked. “Still here?”

Catherine held his stare a little longer. It had become a matter between the two of them, River realised. He might as well not be here. And for a moment he thought Lamb might look away first, but it didn’t happen; Catherine gave a shrug instead, one in which something seemed to leave her body, then turned away. She took the folder Longridge was holding, and went into her office. The other pair trooped downstairs.

So, that went well, he thought.

But before River had been at his desk twenty minutes came a godawful noise from upstairs; the kind you’d get if you tipped a monitor off a high-enough desk that the screen shattered when it hit the deck. It was followed by the scattering rattle of plastic-and-glass shards spreading across the available space. River wasn’t the only one who jumped. And everyone in the building heard the oath that followed:

“Fucking hell!”

After that, Slough House went quiet for a while.

The film was grainy, jerky, black-and-white, and showed a train at a platform late in the evening. It was raining: the platform was roofed, but water trickled down from misaligned guttering. Seconds passed while nothing happened. Then came a sudden onrush, as if a gate had been opened offscreen releasing a swarm of anxious passengers. Their jerky motion was due to the film skipping frames. Movements gave it away: the sudden appearance of hands from pockets; umbrellas folding without warning. Mostly, the expressions on offer betrayed irritation, anxiety, the desire to be elsewhere. River, who was good at faces, recognised no one.

They were in Ho’s office, because Ho had the best equipment. After Lamb had tipped his computer over while trying to insert a CD—a piece of slapstick River would have given a month’s salary to have witnessed—he’d boiled in his room half an hour, then stalked downstairs as if this had been the plan all along. Catherine Standish followed a moment later. It might have been residual embarrassment which prevented Lamb from protesting when the other slow horses assembled in his wake, though River doubted it. Jackson Lamb couldn’t have defined embarrassment without breaking into a sweat. And once he’d given Ho the CD, and it was up and running, it was clear he expected them all to watch. Questions would follow.

There was no sound; nothing to indicate where this was happening. When the platform cleared the train began to move, and there were no clues there, either: it simply jerked into motion and pulled out of view. What was left was an empty platform and a railway track, onto which heavy rain fell. After four or five seconds of this, which might have been fifteen or twenty in real time, the screen went black. The entire sequence had lasted no more than three minutes.

“And again,” Lamb said.

Ho tapped keys, and they watched it again.

This time, when it stopped, Lamb said, “Well?”

Min Harper said, “CCTV footage.”

“Brilliant. Anyone got anything intelligent to add?”

Marcus Longridge said, “That’s a west-bound train. They run out of Paddington into Wales and Somerset. The Cotswolds. Where was that, Oxford?”

“Yes. But I still can’t remember your name.”

River said, “I’ll make him a badge. Meanwhile, what about the bald guy?”

“Which bald guy?”

“About a minute and a half in. Most of the others pile onto the train, but he walks up the platform, past the camera. Presumably he gets on board further up.”

“Why him?” Lamb asked.

“Because it’s pouring. If everyone else is getting on the train within view of the camera, that suggests the rest of the platform’s not covered. They’re all trying to stay out of the rain. But he’s not. And it’s not like he’s carrying an umbrella.”

“Or wearing a hat,” Lamb said.

“Like the one you brought in.”

Lamb paused a beat, then said, “Like that, yes.”

“If that’s Oxford,” Catherine said, “then that’s the crowd just got off the bus Dickie Bow died on. Right?”

Looking at Ho, Lamb said, “You have been a busy bee. Anything else you’ve made public I should know about? My dental records? Bank account?”

Ho was still smarting from being reduced to entertainments officer. “That’d be like asking a plastic surgeon to do your ingrown toenails.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m insulting you,” Lamb said kindly.

“I …”

“Because when that happens you’ll know all about it, you slanty-eyed twat.” He turned to the others. “Okay,” he said. “Cartwright wasn’t wrong. And it’s not often I get to say that. Our bald friend, let’s call him Mr. B, got on a train at Oxford last Tuesday evening. The train was headed for Worcester, but stopped several times along the way. Where’d Mr. B get off?”

“Are we supposed to guess?” Min asked.

“Yes. Because I’m really interested in pointless speculation.”

River said, “You got this footage from Oxford?”

“Well done.”

“Presumably other stations will have coverage too.”

“And aren’t there cameras on trains these days?” Louisa put in.

Lamb clapped. “This is fantastic,” he said. “It’s like having little elves to do my thinking for me. So, now you’ve established those facts, which would have taken an idiot half the time, let’s move on to the more important business of me telling one of you to go check out such coverage and bring me an answer.”

“I can do that,” River said.

Lamb ignored him. “Harper,” he said. “This could be up your street. It doesn’t involve carrying anything, so you don’t need worry about losing it.”

Min glanced at Louisa.

“Whoah,” said Lamb. He looked at Ho. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“Harper just shared a little glance with his girlfriend. I wonder what that means.” He leaned back in Ho’s chair and steepled his fingers under his chin. “You’re going to tell me you can’t.”

“We’ve been given an assignment,” Harper said.

“ ‘We’?”

“Louisa and—”

“Call her Guy. It’s not a disco.”

The thing to do here, they all decided independently, was not waste a whole lot of time asking why that might make it a disco.

“And also,” Lamb went on, “ ‘Assignment’?”

Min said, “We’ve been seconded. Webb said you’d know about it by now.”

“Webb? That would be the famous Spider? Isn’t he in charge of counting paperclips?”

“He does other stuff too,” Louisa said.

“Like, ah, second my staff? For an ‘assignment’? Which is what, precisely? And please say you’re not allowed to give me details.”

“Babysitting a visiting Russian.”

“I thought they had professionals for that sort of thing,” Lamb said. “You know, people who know what they’re doing. Except, don’t tell me, this is Sir Len’s legacy, right? What a circus. If we’re that worried about him fiddling the books, why didn’t we stop him years ago?”

“Because we didn’t know?” Catherine suggested.

“We’re supposed to be the fucking Intelligence Service,” Lamb pointed out. “Okay, you’re seconded. I don’t get a say in the matter, do I?” The wolfish grin which accompanied this carried a promise of happier days, when he would have a say in the matter, and would say it loud and clear. “Which leaves me with this crew.”

“I’ll do it,” River said again.

“For Christ’s sake, this is MI5, not a kiddies’ playground. Operational decisions don’t turn on who says bagsies. I decide who goes.” Lamb counted them off from the right. “Eenie meenie minie mo.” At mo, his finger rested on River. He moved it back to Shirley. “Meenie. You’re it.”

River said, “I was mo!”

“And I don’t base operational decisions on children’s games. Remember?” He pressed eject, and the CD drawer slid open. He tossed the disc in Shirley’s direction, and it sailed through the open door. “Butterfingers. Pick that up and watch it again. Then go find Mr. B.”

“Now?”

“No, on your own time. Of course now.” He looked round. “I could have sworn the rest of you had jobs to do.”

Catherine arched her eyebrows at River, and left. The others followed, with visible relief, leaving only Ho and River.

Lamb said to Ho, “I might have guessed Cartwright would want to continue the discussion. But it beats me why you’re still here.”

“It’s my office,” Ho explained.

Lamb waited.

Ho sighed, and left.

River said, “You were always going to do that, weren’t you?”

“Do what?”

“All that crap about putting the kettle on, fetching your lunch. It was a wind-up. You need us. Somebody has to do your leg-work.”

“Speaking of legs,” said Jackson Lamb, and raised his so they stuck out horizontally, then farted. “I was always going to do that, too,” he pointed out. He put his feet back on the ground. “Doesn’t make it any less effective.”

Whatever you thought of Lamb’s act, nobody ever accused his farts of lacking authenticity.

“Anyway,” he went on, unperturbed by his toxic gift. “If it hadn’t been for Standish, we wouldn’t have gone all round the houses. Don’t like being out of the loop, for Christ’s sake. Can’t blame it on the rag at her age. Unless pickling herself in booze all those years had a preservative effect. What do you think?”

“I think it’s pretty strange you’re so sure Bow was murdered when the post-mortem said his heart gave out.”

“That doesn’t answer my question, but I’ll let it pass. Here’s another one.” Lamb folded his right leg over his left. “If you wanted to poison someone without anyone finding out, what would you use?”

“I’m not really up on poisons.”

“Hallelujah. Something you’re not an expert in.” Lamb had this magic trick: he could produce a cigarette out of almost nowhere; out of the briefest dip into the nearest pocket. In its opposite number he found a disposable lighter. River would have protested, but smoke could only improve the atmosphere. It was improbable Lamb was unaware of this. “Longridge hasn’t brought my lunch yet. I hope the sorry bastard’s not forgotten.”

“So you do know his name.”

He regretted that as soon as he’d said it.

Lamb said, “Jesus, Cartwright. Which of us does that embarrass more?” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, and the coal glowed orange, half an inch long. “I’ll be in late tomorrow,” he said. “Stuff to do. You know how it is.” A thin cloud of tobacco smoke turned his eyes to slits. “Don’t break your neck down the stairs.”

“Up the stairs,” River said. “Ho’s office, remember?”

“Cartwright?”

River halted in the doorway.

“You don’t want to know how Dickie Bow died?”

“You’re seriously gunna tell me?”

“It’s obvious, when you think about it,” Lamb said. “Whoever killed him used an untraceable poison.”

Untraceable poison, thought River Cartwright.

Jesus wept!

On the tube, an attractive brunette sat next to him, her skirt riding up as she did so. Almost immediately they fell into conversation, and, getting off at the same stop, hesitated by the escalator to exchange numbers. The rest followed like tumbling dice: wine, pizza, bed, a holiday; first flat, first anniversary, first child. Fifty years later, they looked back on a blessed existence. Then they died. River rubbed an eye with a knuckle. The seat opposite became free, and the woman moved into it, and took the hand of the man next to her.

From London Bridge River went on to Tonbridge, which his grandfather inhabited as if it were a territory annexed after a lifetime’s battle. The O.B. could wander to the shops; pick up paper, milk and groceries; twinkle at butcher, baker, and post office lady, and none of them would come within a mile of guessing that hundreds of lives had passed through his hands; that he’d made decisions and given orders that sometimes had altered the course of events, and at other times—more crucially, he’d have said—ensured that everything remained the same. He was generally thought to have been something in the Ministry of Transport. Good naturedly, he took the blame for deficiencies in the local bus service.

What enormous things must have happened, River sometimes thought, to make sure that nothing ever changed.

After eating they sat in the study, with whisky. A fire blazed in the grate. Over the years, the old man’s chair had moulded itself to hold him like a hammock; the second chair was getting the hang of River. As far as he knew, nobody else ever used it.

“You’ve something on your mind,” he was told.

“That’s not the only reason I come to see you.”

This was dismissed for the irrelevance it was.

“It’s Lamb.”

“Jackson Lamb. What about him?”

“I think he’s lost his mind.”

The O.B. liked that, River could tell. Liked anything that offered the opportunity for psychological spelunking. And especially liked it when River bowled him a full toss: “An insight based on your rigorous medical training.”

“He’s turning paranoid.”

“If he’s only just done that, he’d not have survived this long. But you’re saying he’s surpassed himself. How’s this particular paranoia manifesting?”

“He seems to think there’s a KGB wet squad at large.”

The O.B. said, “Well, on the one hand, the KGB doesn’t exist any more. And the Cold War’s over. We won, if you’re keeping score.”

“I know. I Googled it.”

“But on the other, Russia’s President used to run the KGB, who are now the FSB by the way, and they may have changed the letterheads but they wear the same old boots. As for untraceable poisons, that’s what the KGB’s ‘Special Office’ was all about. The poison factory. Back in the ’30s a goon called Mairovsky, Mairanovsky, something like that, spent his whole career dreaming up untraceable poisons. Got so good at it they had to kill him.”

River looked down at his glass. He only ever drank whisky with his grandfather. Maybe that made it a ritual. “You’re saying it’s possible.”

“I’m saying that any time Jackson Lamb’s worried about an old-time-Moscow-style op being run in our back yard, I’d pay attention. The name Litvinenko not ring bells?”

“Not for being untraceably poisoned.”

“Quite. Because that was a black flag operation. You think they couldn’t have made it look an accident if they’d wanted?” This was a favourite O.B. trick; turning your argument against you. Another was not giving you a chance to regroup. “Who’s the victim?”

“Name of Bough. Richard Bough.”

“Good Lord. Dickie Bow was still alive?”

“You knew him.”

“Of him. Berlin hand.” Putting his drink down, the O.B. adopted his sage pose: elbows on the armrests, fingertips pressed together as if holding an invisible ball. “How’d he die?” And when River had given him the details said, “He was never what you’d call fast track,” as if the late Dickie Bow’s sluggishness preordained him for death on a bus. “Never first division.”

“Premier league,” River suggested.

His grandfather waved away such modern abominations. “One of life’s streetwalkers. And I think he had an interest in a nightclub. Or worked in one. Anyway, he used to come up with titbits. Which minor official was stepping out on his wife or his boyfriend. You know the kind of thing.”

“And all of it was fed into the files.”

The O.B. said: “That old saw about laws and sausages, about how you never want to see either being made? The same applies to intelligence work.” Dropping his invisible ball, he picked up his glass instead and swirled it thoughtfully, so the amber liquid washed round the tumbler’s edge. “And then he went AWOL. That was Dickie Bow’s claim to fame. Went for a walk on the wild side, and had switchboards lit up from Berlin to bloody … Battersea. Sorry. Alliteration. Bad habit. Berlin to Whitehall, because he might have been small fry but the last thing anyone wanted right then was a British agent turning up on Red TV, claiming god knew what.”

“This was when?” River asked.

“September eighty-nine.”

“Ah.”

“Too bloody right, ah. Everyone in the game, all the Berlin hands anyway, knew damn well something was about to happen, and while nobody said it aloud for fear of jinx, everyone looked at the Wall while they thought it. And nobody, nobody, wanted anything that might throw history off course.” His swirling became agitated, and whisky sprayed from his glass. Setting it on the table next to him, the old man raised his hand to his mouth and licked the drops away.

“When you say nobody …”

“Well, I don’t mean nobody, obviously. I mean nobody on our side.” He examined his hand, as if he’d forgotten what it was for, then let it drop to his lap. “And it wouldn’t have taken much. Dickie Bow might have been just the grit of sand on the tracks to throw the locomotive. So we were keen on recovering him, as you might imagine.”

“And evidently you did.”

“Oh, we found him all right. Or he turned up, rather. Waltzed back into town just as we were ready to slap black ribbons on every operation he’d ever had a sniff at. Well, I say waltzed. He could barely walk was the truth.”

“He’d been tortured?”

The O.B. snorted. “He was blind drunk. Though the way he told it, not of his own volition. Held him down and poured the stuff down his throat, he said. Thought they meant to drown him, he said. Of course, why wouldn’t they? Drown a man like Dickie Bow in booze, you’re merely speeding things up.”

“And who were ‘they,’ in this scenario? The East Germans?”

“Oh, nothing so parochial. No, Dickie Bow’s story was, he’d been snatched by actual hoods. The Moscow variety. And not your everyday foot soldier, either.”

He paused, milking the moment. River sometimes wondered how the old man stood it, doing his daily rounds—butcher, baker, post office lady—without succumbing to the temptation to perform for the whole sorry bunch of them. Because if there was one thing the O.B. liked these days, it was an audience.

“No,” said the old man. “Dickie Bow claimed to have been kidnapped by Alexander Popov himself.”

A revelation which might have carried more impact if the name had meant anything to River.

Drive a saint to suicide, thought Catherine Standish.

Lord above!

I’m channelling my mother.

They were words she’d used earlier, about Jackson Lamb: that he’d drive a saint to suicide. Not a phrase she’d ever expected to hear herself say, but this was what happened: you turned into your mother, unless you turned into your father. That, anyway, was what happened if you let life smooth you down, plane away the edges that made you different.

Catherine had had edges once, but for years had lived a life whose borders were marked by furriness, and mornings when she wasn’t sure what had happened the night before. Traces of sex and vomit were clues; bruises on arms and thighs. The sense of having been spat out. Her relationship with alcohol had been the most enduring of her life, but like any abusive partner it had shown its true colours in the end. So now Catherine’s edges had been planed away, and alone in the kitchen of her North London flat she made a cup of peppermint tea, and thought about bald men.

There were no bald men in her life. There were no men in her life, or none that counted: there were male presences at work, and she’d grown fond of River Cartwright, but there were no actual men in her life, and that went double for Jackson Lamb. Nevertheless, she was thinking about bald men; about one in particular, giving a swift glance up at the camera before pacing into the driving rain of a railway platform, instead of boarding under shelter. And about the hat he wasn’t wearing because he’d left it on a bus two minutes earlier.

And she was also thinking, because she often did, how easy it would be to slip out for a bottle of wine, and have one small drink to prove she didn’t need one. One glass, and the rest down the sink. A Chablis. Nicely chilled. Or room temperature, if the off-licence didn’t keep it fridged; and if they didn’t have Chablis a Sauvignon Blanc would do, or a Chardonnay, or triple strength lager, or a two-litre bottle of cider.

Deep breath. My name is Catherine, and I’m an alcoholic. A copy of the Blue Book stood between a dictionary and a collected Sylvia Plath in the sitting room, and there was nothing to stop her settling down with it, peppermint tea at her elbow, until the wobble passed. The wobble: that was another one of her mother’s. Code for a hot flush. A lot of code words, her mother had used. Which was almost funny, given what Catherine did for a living.

So what would her mother make of her now, if she were alive? If she could see Slough House, its flaky paintwork, its flakier denizens … Catherine didn’t need to ask, because the answer was blindingly clear: her mother would take one look at the worn-out furniture, the peeling walls, the dusty bulbs, the cobwebs that hung from the corners, and recognise it as somewhere her daughter belonged, somewhere safe from aspiration. It was better to build your life’s ceiling low. Better not to put on airs.

Better, in the long run, not to think about what lay behind you.

So picking up her peppermint tea Catherine carried it into her sitting room, and for the many hundredth time didn’t go out for a bottle. Nor did she browse the Blue Book—let alone Sylvia bloody Plath—but instead sat and thought about bald men, and their actions on rainy railway platforms. And she tried not to think about her mother, or about life’s edges being planed away until you could see clear past them into whatever came next.

Because whatever came next, it was best to assume the worst.

From the seventy-seventh floor to this, thought Louisa Guy.

Holy crap!

A broadsheet’s Beautiful Homes column had lately informed her that a little imagination and a small amount of cash could transform even the tiniest apartment into a compact, space-efficient dream-dwelling. Unfortunately, that “small amount” was large enough that if she’d laid her hands on it, she’d have moved somewhere bigger instead.

As ever, damp washing was tonight’s motif. A clothes horse, designed to be folded out of sight when not in use, was always in use, and anyway, there was nowhere to put it when it wasn’t. So it leaned against a bookshelf, draped with underwear, her collection of which had undergone significant upgrading since Min Harper had entered her life. Elsewhere, blouses hung on wire hangers from anywhere they could be hooked, and a still-damp sweater reshaped itself on the table, its arms dangling heavily over the sides. And Louisa perched on a kitchen chair, laptop on her knees.

It was a fairly basic research technique, but Googling the day of Spider Webb’s mini-summit was the first port of call. This revealed an International Symposium on Advanced Metallurgical Processes at the LSE, and a conference on Asiatic Studies at SOAS. Tickets went on sale for an ABBA reunion gig, and were expected to sell out inside two minutes, while Central London would be more of a lunatics’ day out than usual, because there was a Stop the City rally marching down Oxford Street: a quarter million demonstrators were expected. Traffic, tube and normal life would doubtless come to a halt.

None of which had any obvious connection with the Russian visit. It was background, but background was important, and after the last time the slow horses had become embroiled in Regent’s Park business, she wasn’t relying on info supplied by Webb. But it was hard to concentrate. Louisa kept remembering that huge floorspace in the Needle. She’d rarely been anywhere so roomy without being outside, a thought that inevitably dragged her home, a rented studio flat on the wrong side of the river.

And now two, sometimes three nights a week, Min was here too, and while this was still a good thing, it wasn’t without its downside. Min wasn’t messy, but he took up room. He liked to be clean and fresh when he came to her bed, which meant yielding precious inches of her bathroom shelf; he needed a clean shirt in the morning, so required wardrobe space too. DVDs had appeared, and books and CDs, which meant more physical objects in a space that was getting no larger. And then there was Min himself, of course. Who didn’t lumber about, but didn’t have to: the mere fact of his presence brought the walls nearer. It was nice to be close to him, but it would have been nicer to be close somewhere spacious enough to be further apart.

Elsewhere in the building a door slammed shut. The resulting draught whistled along the hallways and whispered under doors until, with a noise like snow sliding off a roof, a blouse fell from its hanger to the floor. Louisa studied it a moment or two, as if the situation might rectify itself without her intervention, and when this didn’t happen she closed her eyes and willed herself elsewhere, and when she opened them again that hadn’t happened either.

A draughty rented studio flat. With one extra terrible characteristic: that for all its faults, it was several steps up from Min’s bedsit.

If they wanted to find somewhere nice together, they were going to need money.

Eleven thirty. Six and a half hours to go.

Frigging hell!

If he’d been asked to draw a picture of what he’d expected from private security work, Cal Fenton would have drawn it big. There’d have been manual combat training; utility belts, Kevlar vests, Tasers. And driving, too: rubber-shredding take-offs and sharp cornering. He’d have had one of those earpieces with a hands-free mic attached, a necessity in the adrenalin-rich world of the security consultant, where you never knew what the next second might bring. That was what Cal Fenton had had in mind. Danger. Excitement. A grim reliance on his own physical competence.

Instead, he had a uniform that was too small, because the last guy in the job had been a midget, plus a rubber torch with a fading battery. And instead of riding shotgun in an armoured limo, he had a nightly trudge up and down half a dozen corridors, calling in every hour on the hour; less to reassure management that the facility was still standing than to prove he was awake and earning his pay. Which was so slightly above minimum wage that if you split the difference, you’d have change from a quid. A job was a job, his mum never left off saying, but flush with the wisdom of nineteen years on the planet, Cal Fenton had found the flaw in this argument: sometimes a job was a pain in the arse. Especially when it was eleven thirty-one, and there were six hours twenty-nine minutes to go before you were out the door.

Speaking of which …

Cal was on ground-level, pacing the facility’s east-side corridor, and the door at its far end was open. Not hanging wide, but not firmly closed … Either someone had opened it since Cal’s last circuit, or Cal hadn’t closed it after his cigarette.

Cal and only Cal, because night shift was a one-man job.

Reaching the door, he pushed it gently. It opened with a creak. Outside was an empty car park bordered by a mesh fence, beyond which a pot-holed road disappeared into the shadow of the West-way. The building opposite used to be a pub, and maybe hoped to be a pub again one day, but for the time being was making do with being an eyesore. Posters for local DJs peeled from its boarded-up windows. After watching for a moment, Cal pulled the door shut. He stood in silence, aware of his heartbeat. But there’d been nobody outside, and there was nobody inside either, himself excepted. Eleven thirty-four. He stepped away from the door and checked the office.

Office. Facility. You could get away with words like that, if you weren’t exposed to the reality.

Because the office was a glorified broom cupboard, and “facility” an up-itself name for a warehouse: windowless brick on ground level, then wood for the second storey, like they’d run out of bricks halfway. It was newer than whatever had stood in the same place previously, but after that, you ran out of compliments. Like the once and future pub across the road, the whole place was basically counting out time until the area hit an upward swing, but that figured. DataLok was a cut-price operation, and what you got was less than what you saw. Especially if what you’d been looking at was the company catalogue.

Cal swung the torch in big, forgiving loops. There was nobody in the office. Least of all a guard dog, which a sign on the main gate warned patrolled the premises 24/7, but the sign came in at $4.99, which was a lot less than a 24-hour guard-dog presence cost.

And then he heard something along the north corridor. A scuffing noise, as if a heel had kicked against the tiles.

Cal’s heart phoned in loud and clear. Lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub. Exactly as normal, only twice as loud and four times as fast.

Twenty-four minutes until his check-in call. Which he could make early, of course, on account of being totally spooked.

And here’s how that conversation would go:

“I think I heard a noise.”

“You think you heard a noise.”

“Yeah, along the corridor. Like there might be someone there. But I haven’t looked to see. Oh, and the door was open, but I might have left it open earlier when I nipped out for a smoke. Do you wanna send reinforcements?”

(With combat training, utility belts and Kevlar vests.)

But even a pain-in-the-arse job was better than none, and Cal really didn’t want to lose out on paid employment because a squirrel had wandered in. He weighed his torch in the palm of his hand. It felt solid enough, baton-like, and suitably reassured, he stepped out of the office and into the north corridor, at the end of which was the staircase.

The corridors were on the building’s outer edges. The downstairs office was where the security shifts—himself and an edging-seventy ex-copper called Brian—kept their stuff; upstairs there was a techs’ room, where incoming was processed. And the rest of the facility was a labyrinth of storage rooms: apart from the number pasted above each doorway, the bastards all looked the same. Sounded the same, too: a constant humming. This was the noise information made when it was waiting to be used.

That was what he’d heard one of the techies say once.

He was halfway along the corridor when the lights went out.

“Never heard of him.”

“Oh, poppycock!”

Which was unlike the old man. Put it down, River thought, to being on his third glass. He said, “No, all these years you’ve been telling me spook stories, Alexander Popov’s never rated a mention.”

That earned him a sharp look. “I haven’t been telling stories, River. I’ve been educating you. At least, that’s always been my intention.”

Because if the O.B. ever learned he’d turned into an old gossip, it would destroy something deep inside him.

River said, “That’s what I meant. But Popov’s never formed part of my education. I’m guessing he was Moscow Centre, yes? One of their secret wizards, pulling levers?”

“Pay no attention to the man behind the Curtain,” the O.B. quoted. “That’s quite good, actually. But no. What he was was a bogeyman. Smoke and a whisper, nothing more. If information was hard currency, the best we had on Popov was an IOU. Nobody ever laid a finger on him, and that was because he didn’t exist.”

“So how come,” River began, and stopped himself. Asking questions is good. An early lesson. If you don’t know something, ask. But before you ask, try to work it out for yourself. He said, “So the smoke and the whispers were deliberate. He was invented to have us chasing someone who wasn’t there.”

The O.B. nodded approval. “He was a fictional spymaster, running his own fictional network. It was meant to have us tying ourselves in knots. We did something similar in the war. Operation Mincemeat. And one of the lessons we learned from that was you can discover an awful lot from the details you’re asked to believe. You know how the Service works, River. The boys and girls in Background prefer legends to the real thing. Truth walks a straight line. They like to peep round corners.”

River was used to ironing out the kinks in his grandfather’s conversation. “If the details you were being fed were fake, that didn’t mean they couldn’t tell you anything.”

“If Moscow Centre said ‘Look at this’, the sensible thing was to look in the opposite direction,” the O.B. agreed. And then said, “It was all a game, wasn’t it?” in a tone suggesting he’d fallen upon a long-hidden secret. “And they were still playing it when everything else they owned was up for grabs.”

The fire crackled, and the old man turned his attention to it. Watching him fondly, River thought what he often thought when they dwelt on such subjects: that he wished he’d been alive then. Had had a part to play. It was a wish that kept him at Slough House, jumping through hoops for Jackson Lamb. He said, “There was a file, then. On Alexander Popov. Even if it was full of fairy tales. What was in it?”

The O.B. said, “God, River, I haven’t given it a thought in decades. Let me see.” He peered into the fire again, as if expecting images to emerge from the flames. “It was patchwork. An old woman’s quilt. But we had his birthplace. Or what we were led to believe was his birthplace … But let’s not go round that bush again. The story was he came from one of the closed towns. You know about them?”

Vaguely.

“They were military research stations, served by civilian populations. His was in Georgia. Didn’t have a name, just a number. ZT/53235, or something like that. Population of maybe thirty, thirty-three thousand. The crème were scientific staff, with a service industry propping them up, and military to keep them under control. Like most of these places it was founded in the post-war years, when the Soviet nuclear programme was in overdrive. That’s what the town was about, you see. It was … not organic. It was purpose-built. A plutonium production plant.”

“ZT/53235?” said River, who liked to keep his memory sharp.

His grandfather looked at him. “Or something like that.” He turned back into the fire. “They all had names something like that.” Then he sat straighter, and got to his feet.

“Grandad?”

“It’s just a—it’s okay. Nothing.” Reaching into the log basket to the side of the fireplace, the old man pulled a long dry twig from the sheaf of kindling. “Come on, now,” he muttered. “Let’s be getting you out of there.” He held the twig into the flames.

He’d seen a beetle, River realised. A wood louse, scuttling blindly on the topmost log of the burning pyramid. Despite the heat, his grandfather’s hand remained steady as he leaned forward, the end of the twig positioned so that the beetle’s next circuit would bring it immediately into its path, whereupon the dying creature would presumably launch itself gratefully upwards, as if upon a rope dangled from a helicopter. What was beetle for deus ex machina? But the beetle had no words, Latin or otherwise, and avoided the offered escape route, making instead for the uppermost point of the log, where it balanced for a moment then burst into flames. River’s grandfather made no comment. He simply dropped the twig into the fire, and settled back in his armchair.

River was going to say something, but turned the words into a throat-clearing noise instead.

The old man said, “This was back in Charles’s day, and he got quite exercised about it in the end. Talked about wasting time on fun and games when there was still a war on, if nobody had noticed.” The O.B.’s voice changed with these words, as he indulged in that harmless habit of imitating someone your listener had never met.

Charles Partner had been the Service’s First Desk, once upon a time.

“And this was the man Dickie Bow claimed kidnapped him.”

“Yes. Though to be fair to Dickie, when he came up with his story, it hadn’t been firmly established Popov didn’t exist. He must have seemed like a good-enough alibi at the time for whatever Dickie was up to. Drinking and whoring, probably. When he realised his absence had sent balloons up, that was the story he invented. Kidnapped.”

“And did he say what Popov wanted? I mean, kidnapping a streetwalker …”

“He told everyone who’d listen, and quite a few who wouldn’t, that he’d been tortured. Though as this took the form of being made forcibly drunk, he had difficulty summoning up sympathy. Speaking of which …”

But River shook his head. Any more, and he’d know about it in the morning. And he ought to be getting home soon.

To his surprise, his grandfather refilled his own glass. Then he said, “That closed town. The one he was supposed to come from.”

River waited.

“It disappeared from the map in ’55. Or would have done, if it had been on a map.” He looked at his grandson. “Closed towns didn’t officially exist, so there wasn’t a lot of admin involved. No photographs to airbrush, or encyclopedia pages to replace.”

“What happened?”

“Some kind of accident at the plutonium plant. There were a few survivors, we think. No official figures, of course, because officially it never happened.”

River said, “Thirty thousand people?”

“Like I said. There were some survivors.”

“And they wanted you to believe Popov was one of them,” River said. His mind was conjuring a story from a comic book: an avenger arising from the flames. Except what was there to avenge, after an industrial accident?

“Perhaps they did,” his grandfather said. “But they ran out of time. Our net filled up once the Wall came down. If he’d been flesh and blood, one of the bigger fish would have offered him up. We’d have had the whole biography, chapter and verse. But he remained scraps, like an unfinished scarecrow. Some reptile dropped his name in a debriefing session, but that was an admission of ignorance by then, because nobody believed in him any more.”

The O.B. turned from the fire as he finished. Light from the flames emphasised the creases in his face, turning him into an old tribal chief, and a pang ran through River as he realised there wouldn’t be many more evenings like this one; that there ought to be something he could do to eke them out. But there was nothing, and never would be. Learning that was one thing. Living with it, another entirely.

Careful not to let those thoughts show, he said, “Dropped his name how?”

“There was a code word involved. I can’t remember what it was.” The old man looked into his glass again. “I sometimes wonder how much I’ve forgotten. But I don’t suppose it matters now.”

Admissions of weakness were not on their usual agenda.

River put his glass down. “It’s getting late.”

“I hope you’re not going to start humouring me.”

“Not without a bulletproof vest.”

“Be careful, River.”

That gave him pause. “What makes you say that?”

His grandfather said, “The streetlight at the end of the lane’s gone. There’s a dark stretch between there and the station.”

Which was true enough, it turned out. Though River didn’t believe that was what had been uppermost in his grandfather’s mind.

Cal Fenton was glad no one was around to hear him yelp like a girl in the dark:

“Jesus Christ!”

Though mostly he was worried there might in fact be someone around.

It wasn’t a generator blow-out. The towers were humming; all that information safe and snug in electronic cocoons. The lights were on a different circuit, and it might just be a power cut, but even as Cal’s mind reached for that possibility, his bowels were acknowledging that if there ever was a power cut, it wasn’t going to happen two minutes after he’d noticed the door was open, or heard a scuffing noise.

Ahead of him, the corridor was empty of everything but shadows, which were larger and more fluid than usual. The stairs ascended into bigger blackness. Gazing into it Cal’s breathing came faster, and his grip on the torch tightened. He couldn’t guess how long he stood there: fifteen seconds, two minutes. However long it was, it came to an end when he hiccuped; an unexpected, belly-deep hiccup which surfaced as a squeak—the last thing Cal wanted was to face an intruder who’d just heard that. He turned. The corridor behind him was empty too. Heading along it, he broke into a jog as unintentional as his recent paralysis; this, then, was how Cal reacted in an emergency—he did whatever his body told him to do. Stand still. Wave a torch. Run.

Danger. Excitement. A grim reliance on his own physical competence …

Back in the office, he flipped the lightswitch, but nothing happened. The telephone hung on the wall opposite. Swapping the torch from his right hand to his left he reached for it, and the receiver moulded to his grip with the exact smooth plastic shape of a baby’s bottle. But the comfort only lasted a moment. In his ear, there was nothing; not even the distant-sea sound of a broken connection. He stood, torch pointing nowhere. The door, the possible noise, the lights; now the phone. Taken together, there was no chance he was still alone in the facility.

He replaced the receiver carefully. His coat hung on the back of the door, and his mobile was in its pocket. Except it wasn’t.

First thing Cal did was check his pockets once more, a little more quickly, and the second was to do it again, more slowly. All the while, his mind was racing on different levels. In one gear, he was re-picturing his movements on getting to work; checking his mental negatives, in case they revealed where he’d left his phone. And in another, he was unfolding what he knew about the facility. Info-dump, the techies called it. Dumping, he’d learned, was what you did with a near-infinity of digital knowledge which nobody was going to want to consult again, barring remote circumstances involving lawyers. If not for that, the digital archives stored here would have long been erased—though erased wasn’t the word he’d heard used; that had been released, and when he’d heard it, the image was of information being uncooped like a flock of pigeons, bursting into the air to the sound of applause …

The phone was nowhere. Someone had broken into the facility on Cal’s watch; had fixed the lights, killed the phone, stolen his mobile. It was unlikely that having done this, they’d quietly left.

His torchbeam wavered, as if this would be the next thing to go. Cal’s throat was dry, and his heart pounding. He needed to step out of the office and patrol the corridors; head upstairs and check out that unlit labyrinth with all its stored knowledge, and he had to do this with a horrible chorus beating away in his brain:

That sometimes, information is worth killing for.

From the corridor where the shadows had gone to hide came the soft squeak of a rubber-soled shoe on lino.

And if information was worth killing for, thought Cal Fenton, someone generally had to die.

A quiet night in, thought Min Harper.

Bloody hell!

He poured a drink, and surveyed his estate.

That didn’t take long.

Then he sat on his sofa, which was also his bed, though if dull technicality were to intrude neither were his; they came with the room. Which was L-shaped, the foot of the L being the kitchen area (a sink; a microwave atop a fridge; a kettle on a shelf), and the longest wall boasting two windows, the view from both being of the houses opposite. Since moving into a bedsit, Min had taken up smoking again; he didn’t do it in public, but in the evening he’d hang out of a window and puff away. In one of those houses opposite a boy was often doing the same thing, and they’d give each other a wave. He looked about thirteen, the same as Min’s eldest, and the thought of Lucas smoking gave Min a pang in his left lung, but he didn’t feel anything about this kid doing it. He supposed if he’d still been living at home a sense of responsibility would have kicked in and he’d have had a word with the kid’s parents. But then, if he’d been living at home he wouldn’t have been hanging out of the window smoking, so the situation wouldn’t have arisen. In the time it took him to think this he finished his drink, so he poured another then hung out of the window and smoked a cigarette. The night was cold, with a hint of rain later. The kid wasn’t there.

When he was done, he returned to the sofa. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable sofa, but the bed it unfolded into wasn’t comfortable either, so at least it was consistent. And its lumpy narrowness was only one reason Min wasn’t in the habit of bringing Louisa back here; others being the way cooking smells hung around all night, and the peeling floor in the bathroom down the hall, and the borderline psycho in the room below … Min should move; get his life back on a proper footing. It had been a couple of years since everything went down the pan, a process that had begun when he’d left a classified disk on the tube, and woken next morning to find its contents being discussed on Radio 4. He’d been at Slough House within the month. His domestic life collapsed shortly afterwards. If his marriage had been strong to begin with, he sometimes lectured himself, it would have survived his professional humiliation, but the truth, he’d come to understand, held a tighter focus. If he himself had been strong, he would have ensured that his marriage survived. As it was, his marriage was definitely a thing of the past, what with Louisa being on the scene. He was pretty sure Clare wouldn’t tolerate that particular development, and while he hadn’t told her about it, he wasn’t convinced she didn’t know. Women were born spooks, and could smell betrayal before it happened.

His glass was empty again. Reaching to refill it he had a sudden glimpse of a future in which this never changed; one in which he was always in this soul-destroying room, and never released from the career-ending Slough House. And he knew he couldn’t let that happen. The failures of his past had been atoned for: everyone was allowed one mistake, surely? This olive branch from Regent’s Park, in the shape of Spider Webb’s summit; all he had to do was grab hold of it, and be pulled ashore. If this was a test, he intended to pass it. Nothing at face value, that had to be his mantra. He’d assume everything held a hidden meaning, and keep digging until he found what it was.

And trust nobody. That was the most important thing. Trust nobody.

Except Louisa, of course. He trusted Louisa completely.

Which didn’t necessarily mean keeping her in the loop.

Once River had left, the house grew quiet enough for David Cartwright to replay their conversation.

Fiery damn!

ZT/53235, he’d said, and River had been sharp enough to repeat it back to him. And it wasn’t a name he’d forget, because River had always been able to recite phone numbers, car registrations, Test match scores, months after reading them. It was a gift, Cartwright liked to think, the boy had inherited from him; certainly one he’d encouraged River to cultivate. So sooner or later he’d wonder how come his grandfather had got this particular name digit-perfect, when he’d been making a bit of a performance of losing details here and there.

But you didn’t grow old without becoming accustomed to there being things beyond your capacity to change. So David Cartwright filed that one in a memory drawer and resolved not to let it vex him.

The fire was dying. That woodlouse: it had scuttered about in evident fear, and at the last second had thrown itself into the flames below, as if death were preferable to the moments spent waiting for it. And this was a woodlouse. That human beings in similar straits had reached the same conclusion was a matter of televised fact, and not one David Cartwright cared to dwell upon. His memory was full of drawers he kept shut.

Take Alexander Popov. If he’d never mentioned that name to his grandson, it was for the reason he’d given: that he hadn’t spared the creature a thought in over a decade. And this, too, was for the stated reason: Popov was a legend, and did not exist. As for Dickie Bow, he’d clearly been a drunkard who’d seen his usefulness to the Service drawing to a close. His claim of a kidnapping had been a last-gasp attempt to score a pension. That he’d died on a bus without a valid ticket didn’t strike Cartwright as an out-of-the-way ending. On the contrary, it had been on the cards from the opening credits.

But Jackson Lamb appeared to think otherwise, and the trouble with that old joe wasn’t that he spent his life thinking up ways of tormenting his slow horses. It was that, like most old joes, once he got it in mind to start pulling on a thread, he wouldn’t stop till the whole damn tapestry unravelled. And David Cartwright had seen so many tapestries, it was hard to know where one started and the next one stopped.

He picked up his glass again, but set it down on finding it empty. Another drink now and he’d sleep like the dead for an hour, then lie wide-eyed until morning. If there was anything he missed about being young, it was that careless ability to fall into oblivion like a bucket dropped down a well, then pulled up slowly, replenished. One of those gifts you didn’t know you possessed until it was taken away.

But in addition to growing accustomed to there being things beyond your capacity to change, the old also learned that some things changed without your knowing.

Alexander Popov had been a legend, Cartwright thought. Alexander Popov hadn’t existed.

He wondered if that were still the case.

He continued to stare into the dying fire for some while. But in the way of things that were dying, it didn’t reveal anything he didn’t already know.

The Wentworth Academy of the English Language maintained two premises. The primary site, as featured in its glossy brochure, was a handsome country house, subliminally familiar to anyone who’d watched the BBC on a Sunday evening: a four-storey, crenellated wonder boasting thirty-six rooms, sweeping lawns, a carp pond, tennis courts, a croquet lawn, and a deer park. The second, whose only advantage over the first was that it was the actual academy, was a pair of third-floor offices above a stationer’s off High Holborn, and any accompanying paperwork would have had to own up to a damp-stained ceiling, cracked windows, an electric bar-heater whose highest setting scorched the surrounding plaster, and a sleeping Russian.

The fire was off when Lamb appeared in the doorway. Silently, he took the scene in: bookshelves filled with dozens of copies of that same brochure; three framed diplomas on the wall above the mantelpiece; a view of a brick wall through the cracked windows; and two telephones on the desk at which the sleeping Russian slumped, both rotary, one black, the other cream. They were only just visible under piles of what might politely be called paperwork, but more reasonably described as litter. Bills and flyers for local pizza parlours, and minicab firms, and one for someone who appeared to be new in town, and in need of a firm hand. Pushed under the desk, but not entirely hidden from view, lurked a folded camp-bed and a grubby pillow.

Once he was sure the man wasn’t faking, Lamb swept a pile of brochures onto the floor.

“Fcrah!”

He came out of the chair like a man who’s known bad dreams. Nikolai Katinsky, his name was. Jumping, he grasped something from the desktop, but it was only a glasses case; a minor prop to anchor him to waking reality. Halfway to his feet he stopped, and slumped back. The chair creaked dangerously. He put the glasses case down and coughed for a while. Then said, “And you are?”

“I’ve come about the money,” Lamb said.

It was a reasonably safe bet that Katinsky owed money, and that someone would be round to collect it soon.

Katinsky nodded thoughtfully. He was bald, or mostly bald—a crop of white stubble gilded his ears—and gave off an air of pent-up energy, of emotions kept in check; the same sense Lamb had had watching the video of him, shot eighteen years ago, through a two-way mirror in one of Regent’s Park’s luxury suites. Joke. These were underground, and were where the Service’s more serious debriefings took place; those which it might later prove politic to deny had happened. But that man had diminished in the years since, as if he’d recently undergone a crash diet without updating his wardrobe. Flesh had tightened across his jawline, and gave the impression of sagging elsewhere. When he’d finished nodding, he said: “Jamal’s money? Or Demetrio’s money?”

Tossing a mental coin, Lamb said, “Demetrio’s.”

“Figures. Tell the dirty Greek bastard to go fuck himself for his money. The first of the month, that was the arrangement.”

Lamb found his cigarettes. “I might not mention the bit about fucking himself,” he said. Moving into the room, he hooked an ankle round a chair and tipped its burden of hat, gloves and Guardians onto the floor. Lowering himself into it, he undid his overcoat buttons, and foraged for his lighter. “This school set-up fool anyone?”

“So now we’re having a conversation?”

“I need to stay long enough that Demetrio’s convinced we talked the ins and outs of fiscal propriety.”

“He’s outside?”

“In the car. Between you and me, he might go for the first of the month.” He found his lighter, and applied it. “You weren’t on today’s list. We just happened to be passing.”

He was surprising himself, how easily it came back: firing up a legend on the spot. Ten minutes from now, Katinsky’s current life would be spread out between them like a takeaway. And once Lamb had picked the bones out of that, he could get to the meat of the matter.

Katinsky’s debriefing hadn’t actually been serious. Katinsky had been among the sweepings; the exodus of minor hoods triggered by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, all desperate to convert scraps of intelligence into a harder form of currency. They were hardly Grade-A candidates. But all had to be processed, and kicked out the other side, and some even sent back, to prove there was no such thing as a free ride.

Those allowed to stay were given a small lump sum and a three-year passport they sweated over each time the renewal date came round. It was always handy, as Lamb’s mentor Charles Partner once remarked, to have a supply of expendable Russians on the books. Apart from anything else, you never knew when the wheel would spin again, bringing the world back where it started. “Where it started” was a phrase neither questioned. The Cold War was the natural state of affairs.

Katinsky, anyway, had been among the lucky. And look at him now: the once-minor hood, running his own “school” … Late sixties, Lamb supposed. His arms twitched under various sleeves: charity shop tweed jacket, holey grey V-neck, scruffy white collarless shirt. And there was something off about him, even leaving aside the secondhand clothing, the stained walls, the desperate address. Something off; like that gap between the use-by date, and the moment the milk turns.

“We’re busier than we look,” he said, answering Lamb’s question about the school. “We get a lot of enquiries. Web traffic. Foreign students. You’d be surprised.”

“You’d be surprised how little surprises me. Who’s we?”

“It’s a useful plural.” Katinsky smiled thinly, showing grey teeth. “The school has a full complement of pupils at present, but happily we are able to offer places on our subsidiary teaching scheme. A distance-learning arrangement.”

Lamb ran a thumb down a ream of stiff paper stacked on the nearest shelf, then slid the topmost sheet off the pile. A diploma: Advanced Studies, it read, specialising in, with three rows of dotted lines underneath. Board-certified, a little rosette-shaped logo promised, without going into detail about which board, or how certified.

Katinsky said, “We get the odd dissatisfied pupil, sure. But you consider the source, yes? The other day there’s a letter, the stupid bastard can’t spell bastard, that’s how stupid the bastard is. I’m supposed to care what he thinks?”

“I’d have thought teaching the bastards to spell would come within your remit,” Lamb said.

“So long as they sign the cheques,” Katinsky said. “Won’t Demetrio be wondering where you are?”

“He’ll be reading the paper. Picking his nose. You know Demetrio.”

“But not as well as you.”

“Probably not.”

“Which is strange, as I’m the one who made him up. Have you finished playing games yet, Jackson Lamb? And if you have, would you mind telling me what you want?

Much earlier the pale-blue sky had been cross-hatched by contrails, and Shirley Dander was deep in unreclaimed countryside; sheep, fields, and an unignorable smell of shit. There were occasional rows of roadside cottages; one with a peacock strutting outside, for Christ’s sake. Shirley stared as it swept across the road and round a hedge. Chickens, maybe, but a peacock? It was like a Richard Curtis movie.

None of which got her there faster, but at least she knew where she was going. Mr. B—Jackson Lamb’s bald man—had stepped off the delayed Worcester train at Moreton-in-Marsh, which turned out larger than its name suggested. It had a reasonably substantial shopping drag, at any rate, including some outlets Shirley wouldn’t have minded browsing. They weren’t open, though. It wasn’t long past seven. Shirley had been up all night.

The station boasted a car park and a space for taxis, currently vacant. Shirley sat under an awning while morning activity unfolded: citygoers were dropped off by tracksuited spouses, looking ever-so-harassed behind the wheels of their 4x4s; bolder types arrived on bikes which they locked to the nearby rack, or folded into complicated quadrilaterals. Some saddoes even turned up on foot. A taxi arrived, and disgorged a significant blonde. Shirley watched as she smiled and paid and tipped and smiled and left, then slipped into the back seat before the driver knew she was there.

“Miss your train?”

“Not even a bit,” she told him. “Do you just do mornings, or do you take the evening shift too?”

And because a suffering look was now unfolding across his wide country features, she snapped her fingers, propelling a ten pound note from its hiding place in her watch’s wristband; a trick she pulled on waiters, when they were worth the bother.

“Last week, for instance. Were you picking up in the evenings last week?”

“Boyfriend trouble, is it?” he asked.

“Do I look like boyfriends give me trouble?”

He reached a hand out and she dropped the note into it. Then he drove them away from the neat little station just as another taxi arrived to take his place, and gave Shirley Dander a quick tour of the village while she pumped him for info on local taxi services.

A large, very large, woman lumbered past: she didn’t look more than early twenties, but had amassed at least a stone for each year. She snagged Louisa’s attention. Gravitational pull, probably. “What must that be like?”

They were sitting on a stone plinth wrapped round a column, takeaway coffees in hand. Around them was a constant stream of people: heading into or out of Liverpool Street Station; disappearing round corners, or into shops and office blocks.

“Not just the effort of moving,” she went on. “The whole shebang. How’d you get a man when you’re shaped like that?”

“You know what they say,” Min said. “Anyone with one of those can always lay their hands on one of these.”

His head movement indicated the corresponding parts of their bodies he meant.

“I wouldn’t be too sure. I know some pretty lonely women.”

“Oh, well, if you’re gunna have standards …”

Of the people heading by, none showed interest in them. Somebody would, sooner or later: Spider Webb had set a meeting up.

“There’s two of them,” he’d said. “Kyril and Piotr, they’re called.”

“Are they Russian?” Min had asked.

“How will we know them?” Louisa said hurriedly.

“Oh, you’ll know them,” Webb said. “Pashkin doesn’t get here for another couple of weeks. You can talk through the itinerary with this pair. They’ve been told you’re from the Department of Energy, for what that’s worth. Let them know to keep their feet off the furniture, but don’t go putting collars on them. Never wise to stir up the gorillas.”

“Gorillas?” Min had asked.

“They’re on the big side,” Webb admitted. “They’re goons, what did you think? He’d have a pair of mini-mes?”

“How come they’re here already?” Louisa had wanted to know.

But Webb had no information. “He’s rich. Not Rolls Royce rich—moonshot rich. If he wants his cushions plumped up weeks in advance, that’s his privilege.”

Gorillas, then, was already in Min’s mind, but it would have popped up anyway, because they approached now like a pair of silverbacks. Both were broad-shouldered, and walked in a way that suggested their suits were chafing. One, who would turn out to be Piotr, had a tennis-ball fuzz of grey across his scalp. Kyril was darker and shaggier.

“This will be them,” Louisa said.

Really? You think? Not stupid enough to say that out loud, Min stood, sucked his gut in and waited.

The pair reached them and the one who was Piotr said, “You’re with Mr. Webb, right?” His voice was low and unmistakably eastern European, but he spoke fluently. Introductions made, the pair sat. Louisa waved for more coffee from the nearby booth. It might have been pleasant; four people sitting down to business in a capital city, mid-morning; coffee on the way, and the possibility of sandwiches later. You couldn’t throw a stone from here without hitting someone on their way to such a meeting; but it would have been trickier, Min hoped, to target one where half those convened were carrying guns.

“Mr. Pashkin gets here week after next?” Louisa asked.

“He’s flying in,” Piotr agreed. “He’s in Moscow right now.”

Kyril, it seemed, didn’t talk much.

“Well, maybe we should run through some ground rules before he gets here. Just so we all know where we stand.”

Piotr gave her a serious look. “We’re professionals,” he said. “Your turf, sure. There’s no problem. You tell us the rules. We keep to them as best we can.”

After a brief moment in which he wondered whether he’d ever speak another language well enough to say fuck you quite so politely in it, Min said, “Yeah, well, any rules you’re not sure about, let us know. I’ll have someone translate.”

Louisa flashed him the eyebrow equivalent of a kick in the shins, and said, “It’s pretty basic stuff. Like you say, our turf. And we really can’t have you walking round with guns. I’m sure you understand that.”

Piotr was politeness itself. “Guns?”

“Like those you’re carrying now.”

Piotr said something to Kyril in, Min assumed, Russian. Kyril said something back. Then Piotr said, “No, really. Why would we be carrying guns?”

“It’s you I’m worried about. London’s more savvy than it used to be. You’re one phone call away from an armed response.”

“Ah, an armed response. Yes. London has a reputation for that.”

Oh, here we go, thought Min. You shoot one plumber.

“But I assure you,” Piotr continued, “nobody’s going to mistake us for terrorists.”

“Well, if they do,” Louisa said, “it’s Mr. Harper and I who’ll have to clear up the mess. It’s all right for you. You’ll be dead. But we’ll really be in the shit.”

The look Piotr gave her was intense and blue-eyed and utterly humourless. And then the clouds cleared, and he showed big white teeth more American than Russian. “We wouldn’t want that, would we?” he boomed. He turned to Kyril and rabbited on for a bit. Min counted three thick sentences. Kyril laughed too, making a noise like a bag of marbles. When he’d finished, he produced an unbranded packet of cigarettes: stubby, filterless, lethal. A health warning would have been like subtitles on a porn film. Utterly beside the point.

Min shook his head and swallowed his last mouthful of coffee. It wasn’t a warm day but was bright and clear, and had felt fresh enough when he’d cycled into work. Cycling was a new thing for Min; something to cancel out the smoking. Accepting one of Kyril’s cigarettes in front of Louisa would have been tantamount to confessing he had no plans for a long-term future.

Louisa said, “So we’re agreed.”

Piotr gave an expansive shrug, taking in not only Louisa’s question but the general surroundings, the sky above, the whole of goddamn London. “No guns,” he said.

“We can get down to business, then?”

He gave a gracious nod.

Nobody took notes. They talked dates and places: when Pashkin was due, what transport he’d be using (“Car,” said Kyril at this point. That was the one word of English he came up with. “Car.”). And they talked about the Needle, where the meeting would be taking place.

“You’ve seen it, obviously,” Louisa said.

“Of course.”

It was over her shoulder, in fact. Its tip could be seen from where they sat.

“It’s … cool.”

“It is.”

His eyes crinkled as he smiled.

Jesus, thought Min. He’s coming on to her.

“Where are you staying?” Min asked.

Piotr turned to him politely. “I beg your pardon?”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Ambassador. On Hyde Park.”

“Already?”

Piotr looked puzzled.

“I mean,” Min said, “I can see your boss might want to stay there. But I’m surprised he’s checked you two in a fortnight before he arrives.”

Kyril was watching him with a mildly interested expression. He understands every word I’m saying, thought Min.

Louisa said, “Good boss to have. Can’t see ours doing that.”

“He’s okay,” Piotr said. “But no, we’re not actually there yet.”

He nodded at Min. “I misunderstood. I thought you meant where we’ll be later. Once Mr. Pashkin arrives.”

Course you did, thought Min. “So you’re … where?”

“Near Piccadilly. Off Shaftesbury Avenue. What’s its name again?”

He rattled off some more chunky vocabulary at Kyril, who grunted back. “The Excelsior,” he said. “Excalibur? Something like that. Forgive me, I’m stupid with names.” His contrition was aimed exclusively at Louisa. “Maybe I should call you later. Confirm the name.”

“Good idea,” she said. “We’d hate you to get lost.” Fishing a card from her bag, she handed it to him.

And it seemed they were done, because the Russians were standing, offering their hands. Piotr held onto Louisa’s while saying, “This could be a good thing. An oil deal between our nations. Good for us, good for you.”

“And wonderful for the environment,” Min added.

Piotr laughed, without letting go of Louisa’s hand. “You,” he said. “I like you. You’re funny.”

Louisa freed herself. “You’ll let us know your hotel.”

“Of course. We can get a taxi from here?”

“That way.”

Kyril nodded at Min very seriously, and the pair rolled off. People heading their way, Min noted, swerved round them. Louisa said something, but he didn’t catch what. “Take this.” Slipping his jacket off, he hurled it at her.

“Min?”

“Later,” he called, but it wasn’t likely she heard him; he was already twenty yards away.

It cost her a second tenner, but by 7:15 that morning Shirley Dander had had numbers for all the station’s pick-up drivers, by 7:30 had deeply annoyed three of them, and by 7:40 was talking to a fourth, who’d been working the previous Tuesday evening, the night the westbound trains were late. And yes, he’d picked up a bald guy, and no he wasn’t a regular. And what was this, some kind of wind-up?

It’s an opportunity, Shirley told him. She’d buy him breakfast.

She was still jazzed from last night’s raid on DataLok, where the train company’s onboard-CCTV footage was stored. Subduing the infant on security hadn’t proved taxing, and chances were the morning shift would have unwrapped him by now: the kid had thought she was going to kill him. Finding the right files had taken longer, but the system wasn’t a closed book, not after four years at Regent’s Park Comms, and she’d uploaded everything and more to a website she’d created yesterday and had since taken down. Then she’d gone home, woken her lover, and committed a borderline act of rape. Lover had justifiably collapsed afterwards, but Shirley had taken a twist of coke then gone piledriving through the data, decoding the filing system in minutes: date, time, train number, destination, carriage. Recording was on, she estimated, a seven-second stutter, though that might have been the coke talking. The thought inspired a second hit: if this was going to take all night, she’d need all the help she could get.

It had taken a shade over two hours.

Two hours’ clock-time, anyway. Shirley was flying to her own schedule by this point. Coke, yes, but also an adrenalin high from the raid. Each seven-second onscreen jump echoed the beat of her heart. She registered plenty of bald men, baldness being as much fashion statement as male tragedy these days, but she had no doubt when she found the one and only Mr. B—there he sat, oblivious of the camera at the end of the carriage, and yet so square on to its field of coverage he might as well be mouthing cheese … He sat alone, staring ahead unsmilingly. Not even blinking. Except he probably was, amended coked-up Shirley Dander, was probably blinking in the six seconds spare he had out of every seven. But it was odd, nevertheless, that all around him was a funhouse of jerky movement, as his fellow-travellers conjured instant shapes from newspapers, or produced handkerchiefs out of nowhere, as if this were a magicians’ convention—and Mr. B alone remained stock still: a cardboard cut-out who didn’t even roll with the train’s movement. Or that’s how he’d stayed until reaching Moreton-in-Marsh, in the Cotswolds. Which boasted, among other attractions, a nice little café, open early.

Kenny Muldoon turned out quite the breakfast fiend: sausages, bacon, egg, beans, tomatoes; buckets of tea. Enough toast to carpet a barn. Shirley, no appetite, still had raw energy pulsing through her veins. But her last twist of coke was hours ago, and she had an unbreakable rule about never leaving home while carrying, so knew she was going to crash soon, with a long drive ahead of her … She nibbled a piece of toast, but swallowed a whole cup of tea without pausing, then poured another. Then said:

“So you collected a bald gentleman from the station last Tuesday, yes?”

“Don’t know about gentleman. Seemed a bit of a bruiser.”

“We won’t argue details. Where did you take him?”

“This some sort of romantic contretemps?” Kenny Muldoon rolled contretemps around his mouth like it was his last piece of sausage. “Sugar Daddy done a moonlit flit?”

Plucking the fork from Kenny’s unsuspecting grip, Shirley Dander impaled his hand with it then leaned on it heavily. Felt its tines scrape and pop through gristle; watched blood squirt like ketchup over the ruins of his full English.

“Heh, heh,” Kenny added.

Shirley blinked, and the fork remained in Kenny’s hand. She said, “Something like that. Do you remember where he went?”

Kenny Muldoon’s drooping eyelid was as much response as he was prepared to give at this juncture. Taxi drivers, thought Shirley. You could squash them into the same box holding all the bankers in London, and nobody would mind if you dropped it off a cliff. Her watchstrap had long been relieved of its bounty. She produced another tenner from her pocket instead. “I didn’t realise country life was so expensive.”

“You city folk don’t know you’re born,” he assured her. He put his knife down, took the money, slipped it into a pocket. Picked up his knife again. “Course I remember,” he said, as if everything that had happened between her question and this reply had been invisible business. “Couldn’t hardly not, he made such a fuss about it.”

“What sort of fuss?”

“Didn’t know where he was going, did he? Starts off saying he wants to go to Bourton-on-the-Water. Got halfway there, and he shouts out like he’s being kidnapped. Nearly took the car into a ditch, didn’t I? That’s not what you want in hard rain.”

His tone of voice made it clear that the incident still rankled.

“What was his problem?”

“Turns out he doesn’t mean Bourton-on-the-Water at all, does he? Turns out he means Upshott. And tries to make out that’s what he said in the first place, and I’m an idiot for not hearing properly. How long do you think I’ve been doing this job?”

Like she cared. “Fifteen years?”

“Try twenty-four. And I don’t mishear place names, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

In which case, wasn’t she due some change? “So what did you do?”

“What could I do? Turned round and took him to Upshott. He made me restart the clock too, on account of how he wasn’t paying a fare somewhere he didn’t want to be in the first place.” Kenny Muldoon shook his head at the sheer bloody injustice of a world where such outrages occur. “You can probably guess the size of the tip, too.”

Shirley made an O-shape out of finger and thumb, and he nodded gloomily.

“So what’s Upshott?”

“Upshott? It’s hardly anything. It’s a hundred houses and a pub.”

“Not got a railway station, then.”

Muldoon looked at her as if she’d dropped in from another planet. Fair play to him though, she was beginning to feel that way herself.

He said, “It’s not got hardly anything, but that’s where I left him. Zero gratuity on a twelve-quid fare. Sometimes I wonder why I do this job.”

Spearing the last morsel of sausage, he used it to mop up the last of the yolk, then transferred it to his mouth. From the look on his face, it was evident he found some small consolations in the role life had concocted for him.

“And that was the last you saw of him?”

“I drove away,” said Kenny Muldoon, “and I didn’t look back.”

In London, the Highway Code applies on a curve: for motorists, it’s a rulebook; for taxis, a guideline; for cyclists, a minor inconvenience. Min swerved into City Road without pausing, and a southbound lorry missed him by at least a yard, but blared its horn anyway. Ignoring it, he threaded through the gaggle of tourists on the crossing, scattering them for the safety of the pavement, little red rucksacks and all …

His bicycle had been chained to the rack on Broadgate Square, and now, helmet on and jacket off, Min was as close to being disguised as he’d ever been. Even if the Russians were looking out their taxi’s back window, they wouldn’t cop to him. He was just another maniac on two wheels.

Why are you doing this?

I don’t trust them.

You’re not supposed to trust them. That’s part of the game.

It was weird the way the voice of common sense sounded like Louisa.

The taxi was heading for the Old Street roundabout. This offered a variety of directions, in any one of which it might vanish, but for now it was pausing at pedestrian lights a hundred yards ahead and in the process of changing. Min, pedalling as fast as he’d pedalled in his life, pedalled faster; pulled out to overtake a slowing bus, and banged his left elbow against it as the back-draught caught him. Briefly he was suspended in a perfect, gravity-free moment … The bus honked madly, and here were the traffic lights, and there they were behind him, and a taxi was kerbing twenty yards ahead, and that damned bus was gaining, and Min had no choice but to brake hard, or be smeared against the front of one or the back of the other. He left rubber on the road’s surface. His teeth clenched so hard, he didn’t recognise their shape.

This is because of the way he was looking at me, isn’t it?

Don’t be stupid. It’s because he didn’t want us to know where they’re staying.

So you plan to chase them home on a bicycle?

The bus passed. Min hauled his bike round the parked taxi the way he might an unruly horse, and shouted something filthy through the driver’s window before starting to pedal again. His legs were cooked spaghetti, and the bike a torture device, until, with an inaudible click, they became one again, man and bike, Min and bike, and he was flowing into the Old Street roundabout, which boasted yet more traffic lights at its first spoke. Beyond them, four cars ahead, was a black cab, and Min was almost positive that the two heads conferring in its back seat were Piotr and Kyril—his legs were moving faster, the ground whipping away beneath his wheels, and there was a whole long stretch of Old Street, four hundred yards of it, before the pedestrian crossing—he’d never noticed before how many obstacles to free-flowing traffic littered the city, and would have been glad of it now, had the taxi not blown through the lights on amber, and sailed away towards Clerkenwell.

Of course, if there’s one thing worse than acting like a jerk, it’s acting like a jerk and still coming up empty-handed …

Min didn’t even decelerate. He clipped someone’s bag as he scythed through pedestrians, and shopping scattered in his wake, a welter of apples and jars and packets of pasta. Someone screamed. The cab was way ahead of him now, might not even be the right cab, and Louisa-in-his-head was gearing up for another verbal onslaught—Getting killed will prove what, exactly?—when Min’s heart stopped as a big white van emerged from his left, directly in his path.

The Russian opened a drawer and found cigarette papers and a packet of tobacco, embossed with rich brown curly writing. Rolling a prisoner’s pinch into a thin smoke, he asked Lamb, “You here to kill me?”

“I hadn’t given it any thought,” Lamb said. “You deserve killing?”

Katinsky considered. “Lately, not so much,” he said at last. Then, “There’s a shop on Brewer Street. You can get Russian tobacco there. Polish chewing gum. Lithuanian snuff.” He scratched a match, and held the flame to his tightly-rolled cylinder, starting a small fire he swiftly sucked out of existence. “At any given moment, half its customers used to be spooks. You’ve been described to me on many occasions.” Match extinguished, he replaced it in the box. “So, what do you want with me, Jackson Lamb?”

“Little chat about old times, Nicky.”

“There are no old times. Don’t you keep up? Memory Lane’s been paved over. They built a shopping mall on it.”

“You can take the man out of Russia,” Lamb observed, “but he’ll still reckon he’s some kind of tragic fucking poet.”

“You think it’s amusing,” Katinsky said, “but not so long ago a mall was what the queen rode down on her horse, and there was only one of them. Now everywhere you look there’s a mall, and they’ve all got cookie stores and burger joints. So I’ll tell you what’s really funny, what’s really funny is, you still think it was Red Russia the Americans beat.” He spat into the wastepaper basket. Whether that was additional comment or a smoking-related necessity wasn’t clear. “So you want to take me down Memory Lane,” he continued, “it’ll be a forced march, you understand?”

Lamb said, “I get the feeling making you shut up is gunna be the hard part.”

He waited while Katinsky locked up, then followed him down the stairs and onto the street. Katinsky led Lamb past six pubs before reaching one he approved of. Inside, he stopped to take bearings before heading for a corner, which either meant he was new here, or hoped Lamb would think he was. He wanted red wine. Lamb might have been surprised about this, if he was capable of surprise at another man’s drinking habits.

At the bar he ordered a large scotch for himself, because he wanted to give the impression of being kind of a lush, and also because he wanted a large scotch. Memory Lane stretched in both directions. He deserved a drink. Because his scotch came first he drained it in two swallows while the wine was poured, then ordered another, and carried them back to the table.

“Cicadas,” he said, sliding Katinsky’s wine in front of him.

Katinsky’s reaction was behind the beat. He lifted his glass, swirled it as if it were something to savour and not just crappy house red, and took a sip. Then said, “What?”

“Cicadas. A word you used in your debriefing. At Regent’s Park.”

“Did I?”

“You did. I watched the video.”

Katinsky shrugged. “And? You think I remember everything I said in a debriefing nearly twenty years ago? I’ve spent most of my life trying to forget stuff, Jackson Lamb. And this, this is ancient history. The bear is sleeping. Why poke it with a stick?”

“Good point. So, when’s your passport up for renewal?”

Katinsky gave him a weary look. “Ach. It’s not enough to suck a man dry. You have to come back and grind up the bones.” In an attempt to rehydrate himself, he gulped more wine. It was a big gulp, a drinker’s gulp, requiring him to wipe his chin after. “Ever been debriefed, Jackson Lamb?”

That was such a stupid question, Lamb didn’t even bother.

“As a hostile? That’s how I was treated. They want to know everything I ever heard or saw or did, and after a while I don’t know if they’re looking for reasons to throw me back or reasons to keep me. Like I say. They suck a man dry.”

“Are you trying to tell me you were making stuff up?”

“No, I’m trying to tell you that every scrap of information I ever had, everything I thought was useful, everything I knew wasn’t, everything I didn’t know what it was, I spilled it all. Every last drop. If you’ve watched the video, you know as much as I ever did. Maybe more, because believe me, I have forgotten more than I ever knew.”

“Including cicadas.”

Katinsky said, “Maybe not so much cicadas, no.”

There was no way to measure the distance between Min and the end of his life in that moment. The van slammed its brakes to avoid slamming into Min instead, and the displaced air kissed Min all over, and then he was gone, leaving chaos behind him. In his wake a horn sounded, but what the hell. Near-death experiences were two-a-penny on the city roads, and it would all be forgotten in minutes.

As for now, speed had become its own point and purpose. Min’s legs were pumping easily, his fists were moulded to the handlebars, and with the road disappearing beneath his wheels, the gift of being alive flowed through him like a shot of tequila. The noise he suddenly barked was halfway between a laugh and a shout, and barely human. Pedestrians stared. Few had been lucky enough to see a cyclist going this fast.

And up ahead lay the junction with Clerkenwell Road, and yet more lights, and the backed-up traffic included at least three black cabs. Min, now immortal, stopped pedalling, and freewheeled towards the waiting cars.

So you’ve caught up with them. Possibly. Now what?

Kyril understood every word we were saying.

Of course he did. So?

Cruising the cycle lane he pulled level with the first cab, and risked a sideways glance. Its lone passenger was on her mobile phone. The second was its mirror image; a male, holding a phone to the opposite ear. Maybe they were talking to each other. Almost at the front of the queue now, Min stopped alongside a bus, perhaps the same one he’d had the altercation with earlier; there were now just two cars between him and the remaining black cab, which was hovering impatiently under the lights. For a moment, the world shimmied. Then his vision cleared, and he was looking at the backs of their heads: Piotr and Kyril, both facing front, lacking all interest in bedraggled cyclists.

So he had caught up with them. Now what?

He had his answer almost immediately: now the lights changed, and the taxi pulled away. Min barely had time to register the first half of its plate, SLR6, before it was through the junction, and heading down Clerkenwell Road. And with it went that feeling he’d had that he could cycle forever; it drifted from him like one of those Chinese lanterns you lit and let go and watched burn into nothingness. Each breath rasped through him like a match on a sanded surface—he could taste blood, never a good sign. By the time he was through the crossroads, the black cab was gone, might be miles away … When he registered that he was being overtaken by a pedestrian, Min pulled over, gave the finger to the car behind him out of cyclist habit, and pulled his mobile from his trouser pocket. His hands shook as he used it. His bicycle fell to the pavement.

“Yes?”

“Do you have pull at the Troc?”

“I’m fine, Min, thanks for asking. How’s your morning?”

“Jesus, Catherine—”

“I don’t know about pull, but I did a comms course with one of the admin staff back in the Dark Ages. What do you want?”

“I’ve got a taxi heading west along Clerkenwell Road. Partial plate reads—”

“A taxi?”

“Just see if they’ll run it, Cath, yeah?” He half-spat the halfplate he had: SLR6.

“I’ll do my best.”

Min slid the phone back into his pocket, then leaned to one side and very neatly threw up into the gutter.

This time, Katinsky drained his glass. Glancing at his own, Lamb found that it, too, was empty. With a grunt he headed back to the bar, where a pair of old women, dressed in what looked like their entire wardrobes, huddled in furtive conversation, while a pony-tailed man in a streetsweeper’s jacket confided in a pint of lager. The drinks arrived. He’d barely delivered Katinsky’s wine before the Russian was off again.

“At the Park, I was given to understand I was old news. As if there’d been a fire-sale, and you’d already bought everything you’d ever need. Tell us something new, I was told. Tell us something new. Or we throw you back. And I don’t want to be thrown back, Jackson Lamb.” He clicked his fingers, in response to some mental trigger. “KGB agents weren’t so popular at that point in history. Actually, I’ll tell you a secret. We were never popular. It’s just that we were no longer in a position where that didn’t matter to us.”

“Guess what?” Lamb said. “Nobody likes you yet.”

Katinsky rolled over this. “But low grade information was all I had. Office gossip, interesting because the office was Moscow Centre, but nothing that hadn’t been giftwrapped a hundred times over by men who’d forgotten more than I’d ever known.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “I was a cipher clerk. But you already know that.”

“I’ve read your CV. You never set the world alight.”

The Russian shrugged. “I comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ve outlived more successful colleagues.”

“Did you bore them to death?” Lamb leaned forward. “I don’t want your life story, Nikky. All I’m interested in is anything you know about cicadas that you didn’t spill then. And in case you’ve got thoughts of stretching this out all night, that’s the last drink I’m buying. We on the same page?”

A puzzled expression crossed Nikolai Katinsky’s face, and he began to cough. Not the healthy, clearing out your lungs type cough, with which Lamb was familiar, but as if there were something inside him trying to force its way out. A lesser man might have offered to do something, like fetch water or call an ambulance, but Lamb contented himself with his drink until Katinsky got his shuddering under control.

When he thought he might receive a reply, Lamb said, “Do you get that often?”

“It’s worse in the damp,” Katinsky wheezed. “Sometimes I—”

“No, I meant, if it’s gunna happen again, I’ll pop out for a smoke.” He waggled his lighter in illustration. “And if I decide that display was to avoid answering questions, I’ll drag you out with me and put this to use.”

Katinsky stared at him without speaking for twelve long seconds, then shifted his gaze to the tabletop. When he started speaking again his voice was steady. “Cicadas is a word I overheard, Jackson Lamb. Alongside a name I think you’re familiar with. Alexander Popov. It meant nothing to me then, but it was spoken in a tone approaching … what would I say? I think I would say awe, Jackson Lamb. In a tone approaching awe.”

“Where was this?”

“It was in a lavatory. A shithouse, if you prefer. That was the use I was putting it to, certainly. It was an ordinary work day, except that it was not long before the Wall came down, so no days were ordinary. I’ve heard it said many times that the fall came suddenly, that nobody was prepared, but you and I know it wasn’t like that. They say animals sense an earthquake before it happens, and the same holds true of spooks, yes? I don’t know what life was like in Regent’s Park, but in Moscow Centre it was like waiting for the results of a medical exam.”

“Jesus wept,” said Jackson Lamb. “You were in a shithouse.”

“I had stomach cramps, so I retreated to the lavatory where I succumbed to an attack of diarrhea. And that is where I was, in a stall, when two men came in and used the urinals. And while they did so, they exchanged words. One said, You think it still matters? And his companion said, Alexander Popov thinks it does. And the first said, well, of course he does. The cicadas are his baby.” Katinsky paused. Then said, “He did not actually say ‘his baby’. But that’s the closest I can come.”

“And that was that?” Lamb said.

“They finished their piss and left. I remained there some while, more concerned with my stomach than the meaning of their words.”

“Who were the men?” Lamb asked.

Katinsky shrugged. “If I knew, I’d have said.”

“And they had this conversation without checking they weren’t being overheard?”

“They must have done. Because I was there, and they had the conversation all the same.”

“Convenient.”

“If you say so. But it meant nothing to me. I gave it no thought until I was dredging things up from the back of my mind in a room under Regent’s Park.” His brow furrowed. “I didn’t even know what cicadas were. I thought they were fish.”

“Instead of some kind of funny insect.”

“Funny insect, yes. With one particularly funny trait.”

Lamb said, “For Christ’s sake,” and sounded genuinely pained. “You think I don’t know?”

“They bury themselves underground for long periods,” Katinsky went on. “Seventeen years in some cases, I believe. And then they burst out and they sing.”

“If it was a genuine code word,” Lamb said, “it would only mean one thing.”

“But it wasn’t genuine, was it?”

“No. You were a dupe. Just another straw man feeding us a line about Alexander Popov, who didn’t exist. So we’d end up chasing our tails, trying to find a sleeper network which didn’t exist either.”

“So why keep me, Jackson Lamb? Why not throw me back?”

Lamb shrugged. “They probably thought you were cheap enough to be worth a punt. Just in case.”

“In case it turned out that what I overheard was real.” Katinsky was recovering from his coughing fit. The gaps between his sentences were diminishing, and he began rolling another of his old lag’s cigarettes. Placing it on the table as carefully as if it were a holy relic, he addressed his next words to it. “Which would mean what? That your bogeyman’s real too, and not only real but with an actual network. All these years after the fall. Here in dear old Blighty.”

Lamb said, “Thanks. Now I’ve heard it out loud, it’s clearly bollocks.”

“Of course.” Katinsky bowed his head. “Clearly. There is no precedent for such a thing.”

“Funny.”

“Except the whole world knows there is. Is that why you turned up at my door, Jackson Lamb? You’ve been reading last year’s papers, and got to worrying it could happen again?” He was enjoying himself now. “It’s going to look careless, isn’t it? Allowing not one but two nests of communist spies to bed down in western comfort all these years.”

“I’m not sure anyone would care about their politics,” Lamb said. “That dog died a while ago.”

“It certainly did. The workers’ paradise is today run by gangsters and capitalists. Much like the west.”

“Missing the good old days, Nicky? We could always ship you back.”

“Not me, Jackson Lamb. I look around your green and pleasant land and I just love what you’ve done with the place. But you’re here because you’ve started to think what if, haven’t you? What if the cicadas are real after all? Who would they answer to? Not the national Soviet interest that put them here, because that no longer exists.” Raising his empty glass to the light, he tilted it so its faint red tidemark showed up like a scar. “Imagine that. Buried underground for years and years. Waiting for the word to start their song. But whose word?”

Lamb said, “Alexander Popov was a scarecrow. A hat and a coat and two old sticks, no more.”

“They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to make people stop believing in him,” Katinsky said. “But all joes believe in the devil, don’t they? Deep down, during their darkest nights, all joes believe in the devil.”

He laughed at this, which turned into another cough. Lamb watched him heave for a minute, then shook his head and dropped a fiver on the table. “Wish I could say you’d been a help, Nicky,” he said. “But on the whole, I think we should’ve thrown you back.”

When he looked back from the door, Katinsky was still heaving on the rack of his own body. But the five pound note had disappeared.

Earlier, from his car, Kenny Muldoon had watched Shirley Dander get behind the wheel of her own, slip a pair of shades on, and go roaring out of Moreton-in-Marsh station car park. She wants to be careful, he thought. The locals didn’t care for reckless drivers, and there’s no one more local than a local policeman. But that wasn’t his problem. He patted his breast pocket, where he’d tucked the money she’d handed him, then patted his stomach, into which he’d shovelled the breakfast she’d bought. Not a bad morning’s work. And it wasn’t over yet.

From his glove compartment he took a scrap of paper on which was scrawled a mobile number. Mumbling it aloud, he punched it into his phone.

A train was pulling out; one of the commuter wagons, stuffed to the gills.

The phone rang.

A woman stood on the bridge, holding a baby. She was making the child wave its hand at the departing train; holding it at the elbow, moving it left then right.

The phone rang.

A young couple in bright jackets and rucksacks examined a timetable by the platform gate. They appeared to be arguing. One gestured after the vanishing train, as if making a point.

The phone was answered.

Muldoon said, “It’s Muldoon. From the taxi. I was given this number.”

And he said, “Yes. It was a woman, though.”

And he said, “Yes, that’s what I told her.”

And he said, “So when do I get my money?”

Ending the call, he tossed the phone onto the passenger seat, then crumpled the scrap of paper and dropped it at his feet. And then he too left the car park.

After a while, the young couple in their bright jackets wandered onto the platform, to await the next train.

Roderick Ho was pissed off.

Roddy Ho felt betrayed.

Roderick Ho was wondering what it all added up to, if you couldn’t trust your fellow man, your fellow woman. If your fellow woman lied to you, misrepresented herself, was not who she claimed to be …

A lesser man might weep.

Because you put your whole damn self into a relationship, and what did you find? You found yourself reaching out to this hot blonde chick who was into hip-hop, action movies and snowboarding, who’d reached level five of Armageddon Posse and was taking evening classes in 20th century history, and then—and he’d only discovered this because she mentioned her make of car and that she had SkyPlus, two hard facts which allowed him to trace her corporeal identity as opposed to her online character—and then it turned out that if she was into snowboarding she’d better be doing it carefully, because not many insurance companies were going to cover a fifty-four-year-old woman on a snowboarding holiday, because fifty-four was the kind of age when your bones turned brittle and you had to worry about catching a chill in case it developed into something nasty. Christ. She didn’t need evening classes in twentieth century history. She just had to cast her mind back. Roddy Ho wasn’t sure his own mother was fifty-four yet. The bitch.

But anyway. Water under the bridge. The adjustments he’d made to his e-mail set-up ensured that any further communications from Ms. Geriatric Ward would be blocked. If she wondered what she’d done to upset Roderick Ho—or Roddy Hunt, rather; the DJ superstar with the Montgomery Clift profile she’d thought she was hooking up with—she needed to take a long hard look in the mirror, that was all. Truth in advertising was what she needed evening classes in. Ho wasn’t easily offended—he was an easygoing guy—so it was with both sorrow and disgust that he wiped out Ms. Coffin Dodger’s credit rating. He only hoped she’d learn her lesson, and stick to her own side of the generation gap in future.

And as if the afternoon wasn’t stressful enough, here came Catherine Standish, bearing gifts.

“Roddy,” she said, and placed a can of Red Bull on his desk.

Nodding suspiciously, Ho moved it a few inches to the left. Everything’s got its place.

Catherine settled herself behind the other desk. She’d brought a cup of coffee too, and cradled it in her hands. “Everything okay?” she asked.

He said, “You only come in here when you want something.”

An expression he didn’t recognise flickered across her face. “That’s not entirely true.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m busy, anyway. And besides …”

“Besides?”

“Lamb says I’m not to help you any more.”

(What Lamb had actually said: “I catch you freelancing again, I’ll pimp you out to IT support. Photocopier division.”)

“Lamb doesn’t have to know everything,” Catherine said.

“Have you told him that?” She didn’t reply. Taking this as proof of his unassailable rightness, Ho popped the tab on his Red Bull, and took a long swallow.

Watching him, Catherine sipped her coffee.

Ho thought: here we go again. Another older woman with designs. To be fair, she was after Ho’s skills rather than his bod, but it all came down to exploitation in the end. Good thing he was more than a match for her. He looked at his screen. Then back at Catherine. She was still watching him. He turned back to his screen. Studied it for half a minute, which is a lot longer than it sounds. When he risked another glance, she was still watching him.

“… What?”

She said, “How’s the archive going?”

The archive was an online Service resource; a “tool for correlating current events with historical precedents,” and thus of enormous strategical use, or so an interim Minister had decided a few years back. As was frequently the way with the Civil Service, a notion once decreed was difficult to countermand, and the Minister’s mid-morning brainwave had outlived his career by several administrations. And since Regent’s Park rarely encountered a makework task that couldn’t more usefully be done by a slow horse, archive maintenance and augmentation had long since ended up on Roderick Ho’s desk.

“… All right.”

Balancing her cup in one hand, Catherine dabbed her lips with a tissue held in the other. This was all wrong. This was his office, his space; its contents arranged according to the rightness of the places they occupied, even if, to the uninitiated, this might resemble chaos. There were spare cables and mouses, and the wispy envelopes CDs come in, and thick manuals on long superseded operating systems. And there was collateral damage in the shape of pizza boxes and energy drink cans, and that electric buzz that haunts the air around computers. It was his space. And it was wrong that Catherine Standish could just wander in and make like it was hers too.

Didn’t look like she was removing herself soon, either.

“Takes up a lot of your time, I’ll bet,” she said.

Working on the archive, she meant.

“Almost all of it,” said Ho. “It’s my top priority.”

“Must be handy, then, that fake tasklist you’ve rigged up,” Catherine went on. “You know, the one that shows anyone monitoring your logged-on activity how hard you’re working.”

Ho choked on his Red Bull.

Louisa said, “You could have been killed.”

“I was riding a bike, that’s all. Thousands of people do it every day. Most of them don’t get killed.”

“Most of them aren’t chasing cars.”

“I think they probably are,” Min said.

“And where did it get you?”

A mile and a half, he thought, which was pretty good going in London traffic. But what he said was, “I got the guys at the Troc to pick it up on Clerkenwell Road. They tracked—”

“You got the guys—”

“Yeah yeah. Catherine got the guys at the Troc to pick them up.” The Troc was the Trocadero, which was what the hub of the capital’s CCTV network was called. “They tracked the cab west, and the goons didn’t get out at any hotel Excelsior, or Excalibur, or Expialidocious or anywhere else, but went straight on through to the Edgware Road. That’s where they’re staying. West End hotel? Dosshouse, more like.”

Louisa said, “You’d think Webb would have that stuff covered. Where the goons are staying, I mean. They’ve been in country how long? And they’re wandering round off the leash?”

Min thought he might have been given a bit more credit for slipping the leash back on them. Or at least working out where their kennel was. He said, “Like he told us. Over at the Park, they’re busy turning out their pockets for the bean counters. Haven’t got time for the, ah, hands-on stuff.”

“This isn’t trivial. It’s security. These guys have got guns … I mean, Jesus, we just let them wander round the capital tooled up? How’d they get them through Customs in the first place?”

“They probably didn’t,” Min said. “I can’t be certain about this, but I believe it’s possible to lay your hands on illegal weaponry in some parts of London.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Not the good parts. But a lot of places out east. And north.

And some parts west.”

“Are you finished?”

“And anywhere south of the river, obviously. More to the point, they were playing us, Louisa. All that time we were sitting working out the details, them saying yes ma’am, no ma’am to all your suggestions, they were basically just thinking fuck you. We can’t trust them an inch. They’ll say whatever we want to hear and do whatever they want to do. And Webb made it clear that if anything goes wrong, it’s our fault.”

“Yes, I noticed that.”

“So—”

“So we make sure nothing goes wrong.”

They were sitting on the stone balustrade of one of the flower beds on the Barbican terrace overlooking Aldersgate Street. Traffic hummed below, and from somewhere behind them music played; something classical. Over the road, through one of Slough House’s windows, Catherine was visible behind the spare desk in Roderick Ho’s office. The back of Ho’s head was a motionless black blob. They made an unlikely pair of conspirators.

Louisa put her hand on Min’s, which was resting lightly on her knee. “Okay, so they lied to us about staying in a nice hotel because they don’t want us to think they’re just rent-a-heavies, even though they are, and even though that’s what we’re gunna think anyway. Or maybe Pashkin has paid for a fancy hotel, and they’re pocketing the difference. Either way, I don’t think we should be too bothered. What worries me is the lack of back-up info. Audit or no audit, the Park should have known where they were.”

“But at least we know now.”

“At least we know now.”

“Thanks to me.”

“Yeah yeah. Thanks to you.”

“I’ll take that as a pat on the head then.”

“Pat pat,” Louisa said.

“You think they’ll ditch the guns?”

“I think they probably carried the guns because if they hadn’t, we’d be wondering where their guns were. So yes, they’ll ditch them for the time being. But they’ll carry them when their boss is here. That’s what goons do.”

“You’re good at this.”

“I’ve been using my brains. While you were nearly getting yours splattered across Old Street, playing Lance Armstrong.”

“This is about the bike, isn’t it?” Min said, but she didn’t get it.

Over in Slough House, Catherine was still talking to Ho. In the next room, Marcus Longridge was at his computer. Min couldn’t make out the expression on his face. Marcus was a cipher. Nobody was entirely sure why he’d been exiled, and nobody knew him well enough to ask. On the other hand, nobody cared, so it wasn’t a big worry.

Louisa said, “The one who was doing the talking. Piotr. You think he was coming on to me?”

“You wish. He had his arm round Kyril in the taxi. They were kissing.”

“Right.”

“Seriously. Tongues and everything.”

“Right.”

“You need your gaydar seen to.”

“You know what?” she said. “It’s not my gaydar needs seeing to.”

She gave him a sideways look he was getting to know very well indeed.

“Oh,” he said. “Right. Got you.”

“My place tonight?”

Min stood. The music had stopped, or else got quieter. He reached out a hand, and Louisa took it.

“Bring it on,” Min said.

Catherine put her cup down, but kept talking. “Don’t get me wrong, Roddy, it’s a neat trick, but don’t you think you should have programmed it to show a few off-reservation sites? Nobody sits at their computer all day and does nothing but work.”

Ho became aware that his mouth was open, so he closed it. Then opened it again, but only to fill it with Red Bull.

“But perhaps,” said Catherine, “you’re wondering how I know about this.”

He wasn’t, actually. He’d already decided it must be witchcraft.

Because Catherine Standish knew which way up a keyboard went, and probably had a certificate somewhere verifying her typing speed, but anything beyond surfing tourist sites was as far from her reach as dating … well, dating. Even if she’d crept in at night and logged on in his user-name, she couldn’t have found the program he’d written. If Roddy hadn’t been the one who’d hidden it, he’d not have been able to find it himself.

He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Catherine glanced at her wristwatch. “That’s about thirty seconds too late to be convincing. Which, in a way, proves my point.”

This time Ho really didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Roddy,” she said, “you don’t get people, do you?”

“Get them?”

“Understand what makes them tick.”

He snorted. Understanding what made people tick was what he did. He tossed a mental coin, and it came up Min Harper. Take Min Harper, then. What made Min Harper tick? Hang onto your hat, lady, because Roddy Ho could tell you Harper’s service record, his salary, the mortgage on his family house, the rent on his bedsit, his credit card debts, his standing order payments, the family-and-friends earmarked on his mobile network, how many points he’s racked up on his supermarket loyalty card and what websites he’s bookmarked. He can tell you Harper looks at Amazon a lot without buying much, and e-mails the Guardian’s over-by-over cricket blog on a regular basis. And he was about to start telling her precisely all that, but she got in first.

“Roddy.” She pointed to the computer in front of him. “We all appreciate that you can make one of those things sit up and beg. And that the last thing you want to be doing is the kind of data-processing a trainee could do after twenty minutes’ instruction. And we definitely all know there’s a whole suite of rooms at GCHQ keeping an eye on Five’s online wanderings, in case anyone’s anywhere naughty. With me so far?”

Unable to prevent himself, he nodded.

“So bearing all that in mind, I asked myself what I’d do if I had your skills and was, let’s say, prone to wandering around the dark side of the web. And I decided that what I’d do is, I’d write a program that would convince anyone watching that I was doing precisely what I was supposed to be doing, which would leave me free to do whatever I wanted all day long.”

Ho felt liquid drizzling over his fingers, and looked down to find that he’d crushed the not-quite empty can of Red Bull in his fist.

“And at the same time, I imagined I was the kind of, ah, compulsive personality type who it wouldn’t occur to to build a little slack into the system. Something that would look convincingly like a human being was sitting at the keyboard, and not—forgive me, Roddy—a robot. Which is what I meant by not getting what makes people tick.” And now Catherine leaned back, and clasped her hands on her lap. “So. Was I wrong about any of that?”

“Yes,” he said.

“No, I mean actually wrong. Not just that you wish I wasn’t right.”

After a while, Ho said, “You dropped a fibre optic through the ceiling, didn’t you?”

“Roddy, I wouldn’t know one end of a fibre optic from the other.”

In the face of such colossal ignorance, Roderick Ho had nothing to say.

Standing, Catherine collected her coffee cup. “Well,” she concluded. “I’m glad we’ve had this little chat.”

“Are you going to tell Lamb?”

Or the Dogs, he thought. Who would definitely have something to say about a shop-floor spook playing games on the Service network.

“Of course not,” she said. “Lamb doesn’t have to know everything, remember?”

He nodded, dumbly.

“Though I will expect you to be a little more flexible in helping out with research in future. Not just mine, either.”

“But Lamb—”

“Mmm?”

“… Nothing.”

“That’s what I thought.” Catherine paused at the door. “Oh, and one more thing? You even think about using your online tricks to make my life difficult, and I’ll feed your beating heart to a hungry dog. Understood?”

“… Okay.”

“Have a good afternoon, Roddy.”

And she went.

Leaving Roderick Ho feeling pissed off, betrayed—and kind of awed.

One dark night the previous winter, Jackson Lamb had arranged a meeting with Diana Taverner by the canal up near the Angel; a meeting she’d agreed to because Lamb had her balls in his pocket. Lady Di aspired to the Park’s First Desk, currently occupied by Ingrid Tearney, and the methods she’d resorted to to promote her interests had produced a situation that had threatened to become untidy. Lamb’s involvement hadn’t made things any tidier; but in the world of spooks—as in those of politics, commerce and sport—the fact that everything had been bollocksed up beyond belief hadn’t resulted in anything changing: the desks at Regent’s Park remained arranged the way they had been, and Lady Di’s resentment at being barred from the top job hadn’t noticeably diminished. And Lamb still had dirt on her which could get her crucified twice over: once by the media, with ink and pixels, and a second time by Ingrid Tearney, with wood and nails.

This being so, Lady Di hadn’t offered much resistance when Lamb suggested a quiet natter, “at the usual place.” She was late, but this assertion of her dominance didn’t bother Lamb in the slightest, because he was even later. Approaching from the Angel end, he could see her on the bench, looking down the canal. A couple of houseboats were moored on the other side; one with a bicycle rack on its roof; the other shuttered, its door chained up. She was probably wondering if he’d rigged video surveillance from one or the other, because that’s what he’d have been thinking if he were her. But he was pretty certain she hadn’t rigged up anything herself, partly because he doubted she’d want their conversation on the record, but mostly because the window of time she’d had to arrange it, Lamb had been sitting on that same bench, and he’d have noticed.

Like any Joe, he had his favourite spots. Like any Joe, he mostly avoided them; made his visits irregular, aborting them if there were too many people around, or too few. But like any Joe he needed a space in which he could think, which meant somewhere no one expected him to be. This stretch of canal fit the bill. It was overlooked by the backs of tall houses, and there were usually cyclists around, or joggers; at lunchtimes, shop and office workers wandered down and ate sandwiches. Sometimes narrowboats toiled past, heading into the long tunnel under Islington, where no towpath followed. It was so obviously a place where a spook might sit and think spook thoughts that nobody who knew the first thing about spooks would imagine any spook stupid enough to use it.

So Lamb had called Lady Di from there, and issued his invitation and then he’d sat as the afternoon faded, looking like an office worker who’d just been made redundant, possibly for hygiene reasons. He’d chain-smoked seven cigarettes thinking through Shirley Dander’s report of her trip into the Cotswolds, and as he’d lit the eighth a shudder wracked him top to toe, and he coughed like the Russian had coughed. He had to throw the still king-size fag into the canal while he concentrated on holding his body together, and by the time the fit left him, he felt he’d run a mile. Clammy sweat wrapped him, and his eyes were blurry. Somebody really ought to do something about this, he thought, before leaving the bench, so Lady Di could arrive there first.

And now she ignored his approach, barely acknowledging him as he sat. Her hair was longer than last time he’d seen her, and curled more, though that might have been art. She wore a dark raincoat which matched her tights, and when she spoke at last she said: “If this bench marks my coat, I’m sending you the cleaning bill.”

“You can get coats cleaned?”

“Coats cleaned, teeth fixed, hair washed. I appreciate this is news to you.”

“I’ve been busy lately. It’s possible I’ve let myself go.”

“A bit.” She turned to face him. “What did you want with Nikolai Katinsky?”

“I’m not the only one’s been busy, then.”

“When you go harassing former customers, they have a habit of pulling the communication cord. And I can do without the complication right now.”

“On account of your domestic difficulties.”

“On account of mind your own fucking business. What did you want with him?”

“What did he tell you?”

Diana Taverner said, “Some story about his debriefing. That you wanted him to go over what he’d told the Dentists.”

Lamb grunted.

“What were you really after?”

Lamb said, “I wanted him to go over what he’d told the Dentists.”

“You couldn’t just watch the video?”

“Never the same, is it?” His coughing fit had entered that comfortable mental zone where it might have happened to somebody else, so he lit another cigarette. As an afterthought, he waved the packet vaguely in Taverner’s direction, but she shook her head. “And there was always the chance he’d remember it differently.”

“What are you up to, Jackson?”

He was all innocence and airy gesture: Him? He didn’t even have to speak. Just wave his cigarette about a bit.

“Katinsky’s strictly from the shallow end,” Taverner said. “A cipher clerk, with no information we didn’t already have from other, better informed sources. We only hung onto him in case we needed swaps. Are you seriously telling me you’re developing an interest?”

“You’ve looked him up, then.”

“I get word you’ve been rousting nobodies from the Dark Ages, of course I looked him up. This is because he mentioned Alexander Popov, isn’t it? Jesus, Jackson, are you so bored you’re digging up myths? Whatever operation Moscow was thinking of running way back when, it’s as relevant now as a cassette tape. We won that war, and we’re too busy losing the next one to have a rematch. Go back to Slough House, and give thanks you’re not in the firing line any more.”

“Like you, you mean?”

“You think it’s easy, Second Desk? Okay, it might not be life behind the Wall. But try doing my job with both hands tied, and you’ll find out what stress feels like, I guarantee it.”

She stared at him, underlining how serious she was, but he held it easily enough, and wasn’t bothered about letting her see the smile itching onto his lips. Lamb had done both field and desk, and he knew which had you gasping awake at the slightest noise in the dark. But he’d yet to meet a suit who didn’t think themselves a samurai.

Taverner looked away. A pair of joggers panting down the opposite towpath broke apart for a woman pushing a pram. Only once the pair had jogged on, and the pram was approaching the incline up to the bridge, did she continue. “Tearney’s on the warpath,” she said.

Lamb said, “Being on the warpath’s Tearney’s job description. If she wasn’t rattling a sabre, them down the corridor would think she wasn’t up to it.”

“Maybe she isn’t.”

Lamb ran five fat fingers through hair that needed a rinse. “I hope you’re not about to wax political. Because, and I can’t stress this enough, I don’t give a flying fuck who’s stabbing who in the back at the Park.”

But Taverner was venting, and not about to interrupt herself. “Leonard Bradley wasn’t just her rabbi, he was also her Westminster mole. Now she doesn’t have any allies down the corridor, as you put it, and you know how jumpy she gets. So she doesn’t want any boats rocked or any strings plucked. In fact, she doesn’t want anything happening at all, good or bad. Bring her the next Bin Laden’s head on a plate, she’d be worried where the plate came from, in case someone claimed it on expenses.”

“She’s gunna love this, then.”

“Love what?”

“I’m planning an op.”

Taverner waited for the punchline.

“Is that you being quietly impressed?”

“No, this is me not believing my ears. Were you listening to a word I said?”

“Not really. I was just waiting for you to finish.” He flicked his cigarette end into the water, and a duck changed course to investigate it. “Popov was a myth, Katinsky’s a nobody, and Dickie Bow was a part-time spook long ago. But now he’s a full-time corpse, and on the phone he was carrying when he died, there’s an unsent text message. One word. Cicadas. The same word Katinsky heard in relation to a plot dreamt up by the non-existent Alexander Popov. Tell me that’s not worth checking out.”

“A dying message? Are you serious?”

“Oh yes.”

Taverner shook her head. “You know, out of your whole crew, I really didn’t think you’d crack up first.”

“Keeps you on your toes, doesn’t it?”

“Lamb, there’s no way Tearney’s going to stand for Slough House going live. Not with the Park in economic lockdown. And not any other time either.”

“Good job I’ve got you then, isn’t it?” Lamb said. “What with your inability to refuse me anything.”

Slough House on an April afternoon: the promise of spring on the streets occasionally broken by the farting of traffic, but still, it was there. Min could glimpse it in the sunlight glinting off the Barbican Towers’ windows, and hear it in the occasional burst of song, for the students from the nearby drama school were invulnerable to embarrassment, and would happily perform while walking to the tube.

All aches and pains from the cycle-dash, he felt good anyway. A couple of years stuck behind a do-nothing desk, but he could turn it on when he needed to. He’d proved that this morning.

For the moment, though, he was back at that do-nothing desk, completing a do-nothing task: cataloguing parking tickets issued near likely terrorist targets, in case a suicide bomber’s research included checking out the facilities first, by car, without bothering to top up the meter. Min was nearly through February without a single plate coming up twice, while Louisa, immersed in an equally tedious task, hadn’t spoken for a while.

Thumb-twiddling time.

There was a theory, of course, that they were given these jobs for a reason, and the reason was that they’d grow so mind-achingly bored they’d quit, saving the Service the hassle of bringing their employment to an end, with its attendant risk of being taken to tribunal. It was a good job, thought Min, that he had a morning’s real work behind him, and the prospect of more to come. A dosshouse off the Edgware Road. Piotr and Kyril holed up there, waiting for their boss to show: it wouldn’t hurt to know more about that pair. Their habits, their hangouts. Something to give Min an edge, if it turned out he needed an edge. You could never have too much information, unless it was about parking tickets.

It was quiet upstairs. Lamb had disappeared after listening to Shirley Dander’s report on how she’d tracked down Mr. B; or that’s what Min assumed she’d been reporting.

He said, “I wonder what Shirley turned up.”

“Hmm?”

“Shirley. I wonder if she found the bald guy.”

“Oh.”

Not a lot of interest there, then.

A bus trundled past the window, its top deck empty.

“Lamb seemed keen on it, that’s all,” he said. “Like it was personal.”

“Just a whim, knowing him.”

“And I doubt River was happy Shirley got to go out and play.”

He couldn’t help the smile that went with that. He was remembering the speed with which he’d whipped down Old Street. And of River sitting at his desk while this was happening.

Louisa was watching him.

“What?”

She shook her head and returned to her work.

Another bus went past, this one full. How did that happen, exactly?

Min tapped a pencil against his thumbnail. “Maybe she screwed up, do you think? I mean, she didn’t have a lot to go on.”

“Whatever.”

“And she was Comms, wasn’t she? Shirley. You think she has much field-time?”

And now Louisa was looking at him again. Quite hard, in fact. “What’s with the mention-itis?”

“What?”

“You want to know how Shirley got on, go chat her up. Best of luck.”

“I don’t want to chat her up.”

“Not what it sounds like.”

“I’m wondering if she did okay, that’s all. We’re supposed to be on the same team, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, right. Maybe you should give her some pointers. After your morning’s adventure.”

“Maybe I should. It’s not like I did so badly.”

“You could show her the ropes.”

“Yes.”

“Steer her right.”

“Yes.”

“Spank her when she’s naughty.” Louisa said.

“Yes. No!”

“Min? Shut up now, okay?”

He shut up.

There was still the same promise of spring outside, but the atmosphere inside the office had unaccountably reverted to winter.

“It’s a good job I’ve got you then, isn’t it?” Lamb said. “What with your inability to refuse me anything.”

A crooked yellow smile accompanied this, in case Taverner had forgotten what good friends they were.

“Jackson—”

“I need a workable cover, Diana. I could put one together myself, but it’d take a week or two, and I need it now.”

“So you want to run an op and you want to do it in a hurry? Does any part of that sound like a good idea?”

“I also need an operating fund. Couple of K at least. And I might need to borrow a pair of shoulders. I’m under strength at the House, what with your boy Spider’s recruitment drive.”

“Webb?”

“I prefer Spider. Every time I see him, I want to swat him with a newspaper.” He gave her a sly glance. “You know about his poaching, right?”

“Webb doesn’t rearrange his desk without my permission. Of course I know.” There was a sudden clatter as the duck launched itself out of the canal and headed downwater. “And there’s no way you’re using anyone from the Park. We’ve got Roger Barrowby counting teaspoons. Trust me, he’ll notice if a warm body goes missing.”

Lamb said nothing. The wheel had turned. Any moment now, Taverner would notice she’d gone from saying the door was shut to negotiating about how far it would open.

“Oh Christ,” she muttered.

There you go.

Silently, he offered his cigarettes again, and this time she took one. When she leant in to be lit he caught a wave of her perfume. Then his lighter flared and it was gone.

Taverner leaned back, past caring about any marks the bench might leave. She closed her eyes to inhale. “Tearney doesn’t like undercover,” she said. He had the feeling she was continuing a conversation she’d had in her head many times. “Given the chance, she’d scrap Ops and double the size of GCHQ. Distance intel-gathering. Just the way Health and Safety likes it.”

“There’d be fewer joes in body bags,” Lamb said.

“There’d be fewer joes full stop. And don’t pretend to defend her. She’d parade your generation before a truth and reconciliation committee. Apologising for every black-ribbon adventure you ever set up, then hugging your oppo for the cameras.”

“Cameras,” Lamb repeated. Then said, “God, you’re not even joking, are you?”

“Know what her latest memo said? That those in line for Third Desk grade should sign up for an in-house PR course. Make sure they’re fully prepared for a ‘customer-facing’ role.”

“ ‘Customer-facing’?”

“ ‘Customer-facing’.”

Lamb shook his head. “I know some people. We could have her whacked.”

She touched his knee briefly. “You’re kind. Let’s make that Plan B.”

After that they sat in silence while she finished her cigarette. Then she ground it beneath her heel and said, “Okay. Enough fun and games. Unless you’re ready to tell me you’re kidding about this?” But a quick glance told her she wasn’t getting off that easy. She checked her watch. “Lay it out.”

Lamb told her what he had in mind.

When he’d finished, she said, “The Cotswolds?”

“I said an op. I didn’t say al Qa’eda.”

“You’re going to do this anyway. Why bother even telling me about it?”

Lamb looked at her solemnly. “I know you think I’m a loose cannon. But even I’m not stupid enough to run an op on home ground without clearing it with the Park.”

“I meant really.”

“Because you’ll find out about it anyway.”

“Damn right I will. You worked out which one of your newbies is reporting back to me yet?”

His expression betrayed nothing.

She said, “This better not turn into a circus.”

“A circus? This guy planted one of ours. If we let that happen without, what would you call it, due diligence? We let that happen without checking out who, what and why, then we’re not only not doing our job, we’re letting down our people.”

“Bow wasn’t our people any more.”

“It doesn’t work that way, and you know it.”

She sighed. “Yes, I know it. Didn’t know you did speeches, though.” She thought a moment. “Okay. We can probably rustle up a pre-used ID without ringing bells. It won’t be watertight, but it’s not as if you’re sending anyone into Indian country. And if you fill out a 22-F, I’ll pass it through Resources. We’ll lay it off as some kind of archive expense. I mean, face it, you’re exploring ancient history. If that’s not an archive matter, I don’t know what is.”

Lamb said, “You can nick it from petty cash for all I care. No skin off my arse.”

To verify this assertion, he gave the area in question a scratch.

“Jesus wept,” said Diana Taverner. Then said, “I do this, we’re free and clear, right?”

“Sure.”

“You’d better not be pissing about on company time, Jackson.”

In a rare moment of tact, Lamb recognised when someone needed the last word, and said nothing. Instead, he watched her out of sight, then rewarded himself with a slow grin. He had Service cover. He even had an operating fund.

Neither of which he’d have got, if he’d told her the truth.

Retrieving his phone from his pocket, he called Slough House.

“You still there?”

“Yes, that’s why I’m answering the—”

“Get your arse to Whitecross. And bring your wallet.”

Snapping the phone shut, he watched as the wayward duck returned, coming to a skidding halt on the canal’s glassy surface, shattering the reflected sky, but only for a moment. Then it all shivered back into shape: sky, rooftops and overhead cables, all in their proper place.

Ho would have been happy about that.

“You took your time,” Lamb said.

River, who’d arrived first, knew a Lamb tactic when he heard one. “What did I need my wallet for?”

“You can buy me a late lunch.”

Because it had been a while since his early lunch, River surmised.

The market was packing up, but there were still stalls where you could buy enough curry and rice to feed an army, then stuff it so full of cake it couldn’t march. River paid for a Thai chicken with naan, and the pair walked to St Luke’s and found a bench. Pigeons clustered hopefully, but soon gave up. Possibly they recognised Lamb.

“How well did you know Dickie Bow?” River asked.

Through a mouthful of chicken, Lamb said, “Not well.”

“But enough to light a candle.”

Lamb looked at him, chewing. He kept chewing so long it became sarcastic. When he’d at last swallowed, he said, “You’re a fuck up, Cartwright. We both know that. You wouldn’t be a slow horse otherwise. But—”

“I was screwed over. There’s a difference.”

“Only fuck ups get screwed over,” Lamb explained. “May I finish?”

“Please.”

“You’re a fuck up, but you’re still in the game. So if you turn up dead one day, and I’m not busy, I’ll probably ask around. Check for suspicious circumstances.”

“I can hardly contain my emotion.”

“Yeah, I said probably.” He belched. “But Dickie was a Berlin hand. When you’ve fought a war with someone, you make sure they’re buried in the right grave. One that doesn’t read Clapped Out when it should say Enemy Action. Grandad never teach you that?”

River remembered a moment last year when he’d had a glimpse of the Lamb who’d fought that war. So despite Lamb now being a fat lazy bastard, he was inclined to believe him.

On the other hand, he didn’t like Lamb slighting his grandfather, so said, “He might have mentioned it. When he wasn’t telling me Bow was a pisshead who claimed to have been kidnapped by a non-existent spook.”

“The O.B. told you that?” Lamb cocked his head. “That’s what you call him, right? The old bastard?”

It was, but how Jackson Lamb knew passed all understanding.

Aware that River was thinking this, Lamb gave his stalker’s grin. “Alexander Popov was a scarecrow, sure,” he said. “What else did grandpa tell you?”

“That the Park put a file together,” River said, “to see what it revealed about Moscow Centre’s thinking. It was mostly fragments. Place of birth, stuff like that.”

“Which was?”

“ZT/53235.”

“Why doesn’t it surprise me you remember that?”

“There was some kind of accident there,” River said, “and the town was destroyed. That’s a detail that sticks in your mind.”

“Well, it would,” Lamb said. “If it had been an accident.” Scraping the last of his curry from its foil container, he shovelled it into his mouth, oblivious to the look River was giving him. “That wasn’t bad,” he said. With a practised flick of the wrist, he sent his spork spinning into a nearby bin, then sponged the remaining sauce up with his last hunk of naan. “I’d give it a seven.”

“It was deliberate?”

Lamb arched his eyebrows. “He didn’t mention that bit?”

“We didn’t go into great detail.”

“He probably had his reasons.” He chewed the naan thoughtfully. “I’m pretty sure your gramps never did anything without a reason. No, it was no accident.” He swallowed. “You’re still too young to smoke, right?”

“I’m still not stupid enough.”

“Get back to me when you’ve had a life.” Lamb lit up, drew in, exhaled. Nothing about his expression suggested he’d ever considered this might be harmful. “Z whatever you called it was a research facility. Part of the nuclear race. This is before my time, you understand.”

“Didn’t realise they had nuclear capability before your time.”

“Thanks. Anyway, to our best understanding, Moscow Centre decided it harboured a spy. That someone on the inside was feeding information about the Soviet nuclear programme to the enemy. Who would be us. Or friends of ours.” Lamb became still. For a few moments, the only thing moving was the thin blue trail of smoke aching wistfully upwards from his cigarette.

River said, “And they destroyed it?”

Lamb said, “Did gramps never mention, all these secret history lessons he’s been giving you, how fucking serious it got? Yes, they destroyed it. They burnt the place to cinders to make sure whatever was happening there stayed hidden.”

“A town of thirty thousand people?”

“There were some survivors.”

“They destroyed it with the people still—”

“More efficient. They could be reasonably sure their spy ceased his activities forthwith. The joke being, of course, that there was no spy.”

“Some joke,” River said.

Some punchline, he thought.

“That was one of Crane’s favourite stories,” Lamb said.

Amos Crane, long before River’s time, had been a service legend, for all the wrong reasons. Not so much poacher turned gamekeeper as fox turned henhouse warden.

“Crane liked to say you had the whole hall of mirrors wrapped up in that episode. They build a fort, then worry we’ll burn it down. So they burn it down first, to make sure we can’t.”

“And Popov’s supposed to be one of those survivors, yes?” River said. In his mind, he was seeing a perfect circle. “They destroy their own town, and years later make a bogeyman from the ashes to wreak vengeance on us.”

“Yeah, well,” Lamb said. “Like I say, it tickled Crane.”

“What happened to Crane anyway?”

“Some chick whacked him.”

Lesser talents would need a whole novel to tell you that much, River thought.

Lamb stood, gazed at the nearest tree as if in sudden awe of nature, lifted a heel from the ground and farted. “Sign of a good curry,” he said. “Sometimes they just bubble about inside you for ages.”

“I keep meaning to ask why you’ve never married,” River said.

They crossed the road. Lamb said, “Anyway. Scarecrow he might be. Bogeyman he was. But Dickie Bow’s still dead, and he’s the only one who ever claimed to set eyes on him.”

“You think Mr. B’s connected to the Popov legend?”

“Bow left a message on his mobile, more or less saying as much.”

River said, “Untraceable poison. Dying message.”

“Something you want to get off your chest?”

“Seems a bit … unlikely.”

“Tony Blair’s a peace envoy,” Lamb pointed out. “Compared to that, everything’s just business as usual.”

Speaking of which, it was time for River to get his wallet out again. They stopped at a stall serving coffee. “Flat white,” said River.

“Coffee,” said Lamb.

“Flat white?” said the stallholder.

“Pink and chubby. Since you ask.”

“He’ll have what I’m having,” said River.

Cups in hand, they walked on.

“I’m still not sure why we’re having this conversation.”

“I know you think I pull a lot of shit,” Lamb said. “But I never send a joe into the field without giving him all the info to hand.”

This took five seconds to sink in.

“The field?”

“Can we skip the bit where you repeat what I’ve just said?”

River said, “Okay. It’s skipped. The field. Where?”

“Hope you’ve had your jabs,” said Lamb. “You’re going to Gloucestershire.”

It was late when Min left the office. Free overtime; a not unusual reward for passive-aggressive behaviour. At five he’d turned his mobile off, so when Louisa rang she’d have to leave a message, and at seven he turned it on again: nothing. He shook his head. He deserved this. Things had been going too well. He’d screwed up without noticing. But then, that’s what he was famous for. He was the one who’d managed to flush his career then go home for a good night’s sleep; find out about it the following morning. The one the others laughed about, secure in the knowledge that they might all have screwed up, but at least they’d known it at the time. Hadn’t needed the nation’s flagship news programme to point it out.

And it wasn’t talking about Shirley that had done the damage. That’s just what had broken the surface, like a shark’s fin. No: it was about the way they were living, dividing their relationship between two lousy addresses. It was about what they could expect from the future, sharing an office and the same lack of prospects. And always, of course, it was about his other life: the children, wife and house he’d left behind when his career went up the spout. He might have separated from them, but they were still there, placing demands on his time and emotions and income that Louisa would inevitably come to resent, if she didn’t already. You could see why she’d been upset. And why it was his fault, even though it wasn’t.

All of which one half of Min’s brain was explaining to him while the other half was guiding him over the road to a dreadful pub, where he spent ninety minutes drinking beer and morosely shredding a beermat. Another familiar feeling; a reminder of long solitary evenings endured in the aftermath of his life hitting the wall. At least he wouldn’t be hearing about this one on Radio 4 in the morning. “In a totally unsurprising development, Min Harper has screwed up his love life and can expect to be alone for the foreseeable. And now sport. Gary?”

It was here that Min decided he’d wallowed in enough self-pity.

Because Louisa was in a snit but she’d get over it, and Slough House might be a cul-de-sac, but Spider Webb had dropped a rope ladder, and Min was grabbing it with both hands. The question was, would it hold the pair of them? Min considered the pyramid of shredded cardboard he’d constructed. It was best to regard everything as a test. He’d learned that during training, and had yet to be told to stop. So: Spider Webb. On scant acquaintance Min neither liked nor trusted Webb, and could easily believe he was playing a double game. But if that game involved a prize, it would be foolish not to attempt to win it, and equally foolish not to imagine this hadn’t occurred to Louisa too. Hell, it wasn’t out of the question that her snit was because Min had shown he could play the big game this morning, while she was mostly showing her prowess at admin, at paper shuffling. The kind of activity Slough House was built on.

He checked his phone again. Still no message. But let’s be clear about this, he told himself; he wasn’t trying to pull a fast one over Louisa. In fact he’d call and apologise and head over there later. All of that. He’d do all of that, but first he called up Google Earth on his iPhone and examined the stretch of the Edgware Road where Piotr and Kyril’s taxi had stopped. Then he left the pub and collected his bike from round back of Slough House. It was nearly nine, and growing dark.

Diana Taverner’s office had a glass wall so she could keep an eye on the kids on the hub. There was nothing overbearing about this; it was a protective instinct, a form of nurturing. The old guys would tell you ops were where it counted, but Taverner knew the stresses that mounted up backstage, as sleeplessly as rust. Across all those desks on the hub beamed intel, 24/7: most of it useless, some of it deadly; all of it to be weighed in a balance that needed recalibrating daily, according to how the wind blew. There were watch-lists to monitor, snatched footage to interpret, stolen conversations to translate, and underneath all the data-processing lay the knowledge that a momentary lapse of concentration, and you’d see bodies pulled from the wreckage on the evening news. It could splinter you, such pressure; it could rob you of sleep, cheat you of dreams, and surprise you into tears at your desk. So no, keeping an eye on the kids was because she had their welfare at heart, though it also allowed her to check that none of the bastards were playing funny games. Not all of Taverner’s foes lay abroad.

And to make sure the surveillance was one-way, there were ceiling-to-floor blinds she could pull when needed. They were down now, and the overhead lights were dimmed, mimicking the fading daylight outside. And standing in front of her, because she hadn’t invited him to sit, was James Webb, who didn’t live on the hub but had an office in the bowels of the building—‘office’ sounded good, but what it meant was, he was outside the circle of power.

And thus out of her line of sight.

Time to discover what he’d been up to.

“I’ve been hearing stories,” she said. “Seems you’ve seconded a pair of slow horses.”

“Slow …?”

“Don’t even think about it.”

Webb said, “It’s nothing important. I didn’t think you’d want to be bothered by it.”

“When there’s something I don’t want to be bothered by, I like to know what it is first. So I can be sure it’s not something I’d rather be bothered by.”

There was a moment’s silence while they both picked a path through that one. Then Webb said, “Arkady Pashkin.”

“Pashkin …”

“Sole owner of Arkos.”

“Arkos.”

“Russia’s fourth largest oil company.”

“Oh. That Arkady Pashkin.”

“I’ve been … having talks with him.”

Lady Di leaned back, and her chair adjusted its position with a whisper of springs. She stared at Webb, who’d been useful once. The office in the bowels had been a reward for services, and should have been enough to keep him quiet. But that was the thing about the Spider Webbs of the world: shut them out of anywhere for long, and they fog its windowpanes with their breath.

“You’re having … talks with a Russian industrialist?”

“I think he prefers ‘oligarch’.”

“I don’t care if he prefers ‘Czar’. What the hell gave you the idea you could open up diplomatic channels with a foreign national?”

Webb said, “It occurred to me we could do with some good news round here.”

After a pause, Taverner said, “Well if that’s your notion of ‘diplomatic’, we can no doubt expect war with Russia any day. What kind of good news did you have in mind? And do make this … convincing.”

“He’s a potential asset,” said Webb.

And now Lady Di leaned forward. “He’s a potential asset,” she repeated slowly.

“He’s unhappy with the way things are over there. He finds the swing towards old-era antagonism regressive, and regrets the Mafia State image. He has political ambitions, and if we could help him in any way … Well, that would make him quite amenable, wouldn’t it?”

“Is this a joke?”

Webb said, “I know it sounds like shooting for the moon. But think about it. The man’s a player. It’s not out of question he could take the reins.” He was growing visibly more excited. Taverner carefully avoided looking at his trousers. “And if we’re with him, if we smooth his path—I mean, really. It’s the Holy Grail.”

The sensible thing would be to torch him here and now, she thought. Thirty seconds of verbal creosote, and he’d leave sooty footprints all the way back to his office, and never have an idea again. That was the sensible thing, and she was mentally turning her flame up high when she heard herself say, “Who else knows about this?”

“Nobody.”

“What about the Slough House pair?”

“They think they’re running security on oil talks.”

“How did it start?”

“He made contact. Personally.”

“With you? How come?”

“There was that thing last year …”

That thing. Right. ‘That thing last year’ had been one of Ingrid Tearney’s brainwaves; a charm offensive to counter the recent tsunami of PR disasters: illegal wars, accidental slayings, torturing suspects; stuff like that. Tearney had made a string of public appearances, explaining how counter-terrorist measures were safeguarding the country, even if it appeared to the uninformed that they were merely creating huge delays at airports. Webb—a spiffy dresser—had carried her bags, and provided an ear into which she could whisper when she wanted to look like she was conferring. He’d been mentioned by name in the press coverage, which he’d doubtless have been insufferable about if the term ‘arm-candy’ hadn’t been used.

She could still torch him. Bring this to a halt before its inevitable flaws came screaming into view. Instead, she said, “And this you call unimportant? Something I wouldn’t want to be bothered with?”

“Plausible deniability,” Webb said. “If it all goes pear-shaped … Well, it’s one of your underlings on a frolic of his own, isn’t it?” He gave a short sharp chuckle. “That happens, I’ll probably end up with the slow horses myself.”

And if you give that particular answer a shake, the picture changes completely. If it all goes according to plan, Webb finds himself dropping a big juicy bone at Ingrid Tearney’s feet. The first Taverner would know about it, she’d be standing outside a closed door, wondering what the briefing was about.

But bigger men than Spider Webb had made the mistake of underestimating Diana Taverner.

She said, “And how the hell are you slipping all this past the Barrowboy?”

Meaning Roger Barrowby, who was currently running a slide-rule over every decision taken in the Park, down to and including whether you wanted fries with that.

Spider Webb blinked twice. “By going via Slough House,” he said.

Taverner shook her head. Christ, she was losing it. That was why he was using the slow horses: they didn’t fall under Barrowby’s remit. Their outgoings were practically zero, if you didn’t count Lamb’s expenses. “Okay,” she said. He relaxed. “That doesn’t mean you can go.” She spared her desk drawer a brief glance: her cigarettes were in there. But last time anyone had smoked in the Park, it triggered a toxin alert. “The whole story,” she said. “And I mean all of it. Now.”

When Kyril had heard “hookahs,” what he’d thought he’d heard was “hookers,” and nothing about the subsequent thirty seconds had shaken that conviction: there’d been a change in the law, a Pole in a pub had told him, and now all the hookers on the Edgware Road were out on the pavements, instead of behind the windows of the Turkish restaurants. “Hubbly-jubbly!” the Pole had concluded. Kyril had nodded in agreement. For the purposes of his mission here he wasn’t supposed to understand English, but he spoke it well enough, and had a firm grasp of what “hubbly-jubbly” signified.

The joke was, there were dozens of hookers on the Edgware Road, and plenty more on the sidestreets, but the hookahs the Pole had meant were the Arabian Nights pipes that drew tobacco up through a hose. Kyril had never tried one before, and it turned out he liked it. So he’d gone back the following evening and tried it again; sitting out on the pavement under a plastic canopy; the streets dark, and traffic hissing past. He was making friends—that was okay: what The Man didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him—and chatting to these friends was what he was doing when the guy from this morning, Harper, cycled past.

Kyril made no sudden movements. Just kept on smoking the hookah, laughing out loud at a brand-new joke. Watching without watching, he saw Harper haul the bike off-road and disappear round the corner. That was all right. Didn’t matter if a man disappeared, so long as you knew where he was going to be, which in this case was as close by Kyril as he dared get. So Kyril dallied another ten full minutes before rising and making his excuses, and walking on to the little supermarket to load up on supplies, mostly bottles and cigarettes.

When Webb finished Taverner chewed her lower lip for a moment, before realising she was doing so. “Why the Needle?” she asked. “This is the secret service, or didn’t you get that memo? You couldn’t get more high profile if you arranged a meet in the Mall.”

“He’s not some lowlife I’m trying to turn. If Pashkin’s spotted in a lapdancing club, it’ll raise eyebrows. If he’s seen going into London’s newest piece of skyline flash, nobody’ll think twice. It’s his natural territory.”

She couldn’t argue with the logic. “And nobody else knows about this. The real story.”

“Just you and me.”

“And you’ve only told me because you’re on my carpet.”

He nodded along with her. “Because of the whole—”

“Deniability thing. So you said.” Taverner directed another penetrating gaze at her subordinate. “I sometimes worry you’re going over to the enemy,” she said.

He looked shocked. “MI6?”

“I meant Tearney.”

“Diana,” he lied. “That would never happen.”

“And you’ve told me everything.”

“Yes,” he lied.

“I want regular updates. Every tiny detail. Good or bad.”

“Of course,” he lied.

Once he’d gone, Taverner wrote an e-mail to Background, requesting a CV on Arkady Pashkin, then deleted it without sending. Last thing she wanted was any flags raised, and with Roger bloody Barrowby’s audit in full swing, she’d have to explain in triplicate why she was interested. So, falling back on the first-dater’s method, she Googled him instead, and came up with well under a thousand hits: he flew low for a player. First up was a year-old article from the Telegraph, citing his achievements. It carried a photo too, revealing Pashkin to resemble a less benign Tom Conti, a conjunction which pressed a number of Taverner’s buttons. With the blinds still down, she allowed herself a moment of reverie: shag, marry or push off a cliff?

Hell, the man was a billionaire. All three. In that order.

It was late. She logged off, and sat pondering. It was always possible Webb would come back with the goods, and while the chances of Pashkin ending up both in Five’s debt and in the Big Seat in the Kremlin were vanishingly small, that was how the job was played. You had to back outsiders, because insiders were spoken for. Though it wasn’t always clear by whom.

Damn it, she thought. Let him go ahead. If it fell apart she’d nail him to the debris, then float him out to sea for gulls to feed on. Delusions of grandeur, she’d say. That’s what came of press attention.

And don’t think Ingrid Tearney wouldn’t grasp the import of that.

Before leaving she pulled the blinds up, so those on the hub could admire her empty office. Nothing to hide, she thought. Nothing to hide.

Nothing at all to hide.

Some days, it just comes together.

Min Harper hadn’t broken records cycling west; it was a recce, that was all, just to get a taste for the area. The road was busy off Marble Arch, and he’d slowed, looking for somewhere to chain the bike, and that’s when he saw him, Kyril, the one who’d pretended not to speak English. Sitting outside a restaurant under one of those plastic tent arrangements, pulling on a hookah and laughing with the locals as if he did this every night of his life. Just like that, it all came together.

He hopped off the bike, wheeled it round a corner where he locked it to a lamppost, then squashed his high-vis vest into the pannier. Back on the main road, shielded from Kyril by a wall of traffic, he went into a 7-Eleven whose magazine rack barricaded the front window. He browsed this intently until Kyril rose, cracked a last joke with his buddies, then ambled along to the mini-mart on the next corner. As soon as he was inside Min crossed the road and sheltered in a shop doorway, studied the cards pinned there: Cleaning Work Offered, Man with a Van, English Lessons. He pretended to jot down numbers. When Kyril reappeared with a carrier bag in each hand, Min waited until he was a good hundred yards away before following, cutting his way through the crowds thronging the pavement, the Russian’s bulk an easy target. Min could taste beer on his breath. Could feel pressure building on his bladder, come to that. But what he mostly felt was the thrill of the chase—it would be so easy to stop one of these people, this approaching blonde for instance, and say I work for the security services. See that guy? I’m following him. But the blonde walked past without a glance, and Kyril disappeared.

Min blinked, and forced himself not to break into a run. Calm regular pace, same as before. Kyril must have stepped into another shop, or a bar; maybe there was a concealed alley ahead. The danger was, Min would end up in front of him. No, the danger was, he’d lost him—

But there was no danger. That was what he had to remember. There was no danger because nobody knew where he was or what he was doing. Only Min would know, as he got back on his bike and slunk across the city to Louisa’s, only Min would know he’d messed up a tail job, the kind a rookie could pull off without breaking a sweat.

Some days it all fell apart.

Except, except, not today, because there he was again, that beautiful bulky Russian, stepping from an alcove where he’d stopped to examine a menu … Min only realised his heart had been racing because it now climbed down to normal.

Keeping the same careful hundred yards behind, he followed the Russian along the Edgware Road.

Jackson Lamb was in his office, where the only light source was at knee-level, a lamp that sat on a pile of telephone directories. Enough of it crept upwards to cast troll-like shadows across his face, and bigger ones across the ceiling. On the desk, next to his feet, was a bottle of Talisker, and in his hand was a glass. His chin was on his chest, but he was awake. He seemed to be studying his cork noticeboard, to which was pinned a montage of out-of-date money-off coupons, but he might have been staring straight through it: down a long tunnel of remembered secrets, though he’d claim if questioned that he’d been wondering whose turn it was to fetch him cigarettes. A claim he’d validated in advance by recently stubbing out the last of his current pack.

He seemed oblivious to everything, but didn’t so much as flicker when Catherine Standish spoke from the doorway where she’d been standing for almost a minute. “You drink too much.”

In answer, he raised his glass and studied its contents. Then drained it in a single swallow, and said, “You’d know.”

“Yes. That’s my point.” She came into the room. “Having blackouts yet?”

“Not that I remember.”

“If you can joke about it, you’ve probably not started wetting yourself. There’s a treat in store.”

“You know what’s good about reformed drunks?” Lamb said.

“Please tell.”

“No, I’m asking. Is there anything good about reformed drunks? Because from where I’m sitting, they’re just a pain in the arse.”

Catherine said, “You know, that would still work if you took the word ‘reformed’ out.”

Lamb gave her a penetrating stare, then nodded thoughtfully, ruefully, as if arriving at a gentle appreciation of her wisdom. Then he farted. “Better out than in,” he said. “You know, that would still work if it was about you.”

Proving once and for all that she couldn’t take a hint, Catherine went nowhere. Instead she said, “I’ve been doing a little digging.”

“Oh god.”

“And you know what?” Moving two box files onto the floor, she claimed the chair they’d been occupying. “The night Dickie Bow died, that mess with the trains?”

“Amaze me.”

“Someone sabotaged a fusebox outside Swindon. The network meltdown was a fix. You don’t think that’s suspicious?”

“I think it shows a lack of faith in First Great Western,” Lamb said. “The idea that you need to resort to sabotage to create chaos, that’s preposterous.”

“Very funny. What are you up to, Lamb?”

“It’s above your pay grade. Let’s just say I found a loose thread, and pulled it.” He looked at his watch. “Are you still here?”

She said, “Yes. And guess what? I’m not going anywhere. Because it took me a while to work it out, but I got there. I don’t know why you wanted me in Slough House, but you did. And you’re not going to get rid of me, are you? I don’t know why, but I know it’s so. You feel guilty. I don’t like you and doubt I ever will, but beneath all your stupid drunken offensiveness, you’re paying off some debt, and that gives me an advantage. It means you can’t shut me up.”

Lamb said, “That was cute. If this was a film you’d let your hair down now and I’d say, but Miss Standish, you’re beautiful.”

“No, if this was a film I’d stake you through the heart, and you’d disappear in a cloud of dust. Dickie Bow, Lamb. He was a has-been.”

“Yep. He’d have fitted in round here like a dream.”

“He was also a drunk.”

“Further comment would be tactless.”

She ignored that. “I pulled his records. He—”

“You what?”

“I asked Ho to pull his records.”

“I hope you’re not corrupting that kid. We’ve already got a ringer on the premises.”

“A what?”

He said, “Lady Di tells me one of our newbies is her snitch. Find out which, would you?”

“It’s on my to-do list. Meanwhile, Bow. You know he spent the past three years on the nightshift in a Brewer Street bookshop.”

“I doubt the booktrade’s what pays their rent.”

“No, he was downstairs with the dirty mags and the sex toys.”

Lamb spread his hands in a forgiving gesture. “Really, who hasn’t found themselves, one time or another, leafing through a porn mag with a dildo in their hand?”

“A fascinating glimpse into your home life. But let’s not change the subject. Last time Bow was in play Roger Moore was James Bond. You really think he found a Moscow hood and tracked him halfway across the country?”

Lamb said, “He died.”

“I know he did.”

“That’s what makes me think he found a Moscow hood and tracked him halfway across the country.”

“No. Dying doesn’t prove he found a Moscow hood. All it proves is he’s dead. And if a Moscow hood killed him, that doesn’t mean you found a thread and pulled. It means a thread was dangled, and you snapped it up.”

Lamb said nothing.

“Exactly as you were meant to.”

Lamb said nothing.

“You’ve gone quiet. Run out of funny comments?”

Lamb pursed his lips. He looked like he was about to blow a raspberry, which wouldn’t have been the first time. But instead he unpursed them, sucked his teeth, then leaned back and combed his hair with his fingers. To the ceiling he said, “Untraceable poison. Dying message. Give me a fucking break.”

Now it was Catherine’s turn to be fazed. “What?”

When Lamb looked at her, his eyes were clearer than they ought to have been, given the level of the bottle.

“You really think I’m stupid?” he asked.

Up ahead was the flat. It was the top floor of a dump held up by mould and damp, whose painted-over windows had trapped the air inside for decades, making it an olfactory museum of poverty and desperation, smells Kyril was familiar with. Most rooms were hot-beds: men coming home from work as others left for the nightshift. Communication was nod-of-the-head. Nobody cared about anyone else’s business.

Which was how The Man liked it, but Kyril was a people person. One of his strengths. So much so it could be taken for a weakness, which was why Piotr had decided Kyril couldn’t speak English this morning.

“What’s the harm? They’re civil servants.”

“They’re spooks,” Piotr had said. “Civil servants? They’re spooks. You believe that Department of Energy crap?”

Kyril had shrugged. Yes, he’d believed that Department of Energy crap. Probably not a great thing to admit.

“So I do the talking,” Piotr said.

And Piotr had been right, because if the guy was from the Department of Energy, how come he was tailing Kyril now?

Though if he was a spook, how come he was so bad at it?

There was always the chance there were others Kyril hadn’t spotted, but he figured Harper was alone, which suited him fine. Harper wouldn’t present problems. Kyril could snap him in half with one hand, and throw him in opposite directions.

That made him smile. He didn’t enjoy violence, and hoped the need wouldn’t arise.

But if it did, he could handle it.

Shirley Dander opened her eyes. The crack running outwards from a corner of her ceiling was the shape of a continent, an unfamiliar animal, a dimly remembered birthday. For long seconds she hovered inside its reach, and then she was awake, and it was just a crack.

Her skull pulsed to someone else’s beat. Whoever was playing that drum had stolen the daylight.

Risking movement, she turned her head to the window. It wasn’t dark, but only because there was a city outside, pouring its electric wash over everything. So the light bleeding through her thin faded curtain was yellow and automatic, and came from a nearby lamppost.

The bedside clock blinked at her. Nine forty-two. Nine forty-two? Jesus.

At Slough House, after giving Jackson Lamb her report, Shirley had suffered a cocaine crash. These were not unfamiliar, but generally planned for, and came with a duvet, a tray of brownies and a DVD of Friends. When you were heading for a hard landing, an office with an inquisitive colleague was not the place to be.

“Good morning, was it?”

Marcus Longridge would not have believed the effort her grunt of reply required.

But the man would not give up. “Enjoy your trip?”

This time she managed to shrug. “Country. I can take it or leave it.”

“More a beach girl?”

“Less of the ‘girl’.”

In front of her, the virtual coalface once more. One brief taste of the outside world and she was matching faces again, like trying to play snap without a twinned pair in the deck. She’d told Lamb she’d been up all night, that tracking down Mr. B had been what she’d done instead of sleeping, but all that earned her was a toothy snarl. “You’ll be looking forward to home-time then, won’t you?” he’d said.

Marcus was still watching. “I need food,” he said. “You want anything?”

A dark room, a quiet bed, the temporary absence of life.

“Shirley?”

“Maybe a Twix.”

“Be right back.”

When he’d gone, Shirley crossed to the window. After a moment, Marcus had appeared on the street below. Instinctively she’d drawn back, but he hadn’t looked upwards; just crossed the road, heading for the row of shops. As he walked, he held his mobile to his ear.

Paranoia came with the territory. Every hangover she’d ever known—beer, tequila, cocaine, sex—had left her furtive and hunted. But even allowing for that, she’d been certain she was the subject of that phonecall.

Back in the here and now, she groaned softly. This did nothing to change the quality of the light, the pulsing of her skull, or the black pit that opened every time she closed her eyes.

Nine forty-five, winked her clock. She could stay where she was for another ten hours, and maybe that would make her all right again.

Maybe …

She gave it five minutes; then got up, dressed, and headed out into the evening.

Kyril had vanished once more. When Min turned the corner to discover this he swore under his breath, tasting beer again: but still. It wasn’t the end of the world. It suggested that the target had reached his destination.

Doss-house had been his first thought when he’d heard that the taxi had dropped them on the Edgware Road. He wasn’t wrong. These buildings were tall and imposing-looking, but their glory days were long gone, and regeneration hadn’t taken off yet: banks of doorbells showed they were multi-occupancy, and the blankets and newspapers taped across windows betrayed the low-paid status of their inhabitants.

You and me both, mate, thought Min. Then a hand like a rock gripped his shoulder, and something cold and blunt and steel pressed into his neck.

“You’re following me, I think, yes?”

Min said, “I—what? What you talking about—”

“Mr. Harper. I think you’re following me. Yes?” The steel thing pressed harder.

“I just—”

“You just what?”

Just need a moment to think up a story, thought Min.

The steel thing pressed harder.

“So now you know what?” Kyril said. “Now you find out what happens to Department of Energy guys who get too nosy, know what I mean?”

Lamb opened a drawer and produced a second glass, chipped and dusty, into which he poured a careful measure of Talisker he then placed within Catherine’s reach. Then he refilled his own glass, with a measure a little less careful.

“Chin chin,” he said.

Catherine didn’t respond. Nor did she glance at her glass.

“The Swindon fusebox was sabotaged, yes. You really think I’d go plodding about the shires without making sure it was necessary? The trains were scuppered about the same time our friend Mr. B was laying a trail for Dickie Bow.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t lay a trail down a well-kept pavement. You make the hunter work.”

“He wanted Bow to follow him.”

Lamb put his glass down to give her a slow handclap.

“And wanted you to do the same,” she said. “You found something on his body, didn’t you?”

“On the bus. His phone. With an unsent text.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Keyed in his dying moments?”

“Keyed by Mr. B, more like. There was a scrum when people realised he was dead. Mr. B would have been part of it, keying the message, shoving the phone between the cushions.”

“What was the message?”

“One word,” said Lamb. “ ‘Cicadas’.”

“Which evidently means something.”

“To me, yes. Shouldn’t have meant anything to Bow, though. Another reason I know it’s a fake.”

“And the untraceable poison?”

“Ten a penny. Most untraceable poisons aren’t actually untraceable, but you have to find them before they fade away. A clapped-out wino has a heart attack, most post mortems’ll just read heart attack.” He made a magician’s gesture with his hands. “Pouf. End of. But there’ll have been a puncture wound somewhere. Easy enough to prick someone in a crowd.”

Catherine said, “Hardly foolproof, is it? What are the chances you’d have checked between the cushions for Bow’s phone?”

“Someone would’ve. You don’t off a spook, even a clapped-out nobody like Bow, without making waves. Didn’t used to, anyway. Seems Regent’s Park’s got better things to do these days.” He reached for his glass. “Someone ought to let them know. You never leave your corpses by the pool.”

“I’ll circulate a memo.”

“Besides, if I hadn’t found that clue, there’d have been another. All the way up to Mr. B giving a taxi driver a bollocking for taking him to the wrong place. That’d not be forgotten in a hurry, would it?” Lamb curled a lip. “The cabbie’s a trip wire. He’d have been on the phone the moment Shirley left him.”

“Meaning he knows we’re following his lead.”

“Like good little bloodhounds.”

“Is that wise?”

“What’s wise got to do with it? We either follow his trail or forget about it. And that’s not an option, because whoever’s behind this is old school. Takes an old school spook to know a street rat like Bow would take his bait in the first place. Whoever’s pulling the strings is playing Moscow Rules. Regent’s Park might be too busy to think that’s worth following up, but I don’t.”

“Are you going to say his name or am I?”

“Say what?”

“Alexander Popov,” said Catherine Standish.

The room was small, and the window open. It was cold, but still: a bead of sweat dislodged itself from Min’s hair and trickled down his neck. The eyes of the other two men never left his. There was always the possibility he was faster than both, but deep in his gut he knew that that was slim beyond reckoning: either one, on their own, and he might have been in with a chance, but the pair together made for formidable opposition. Once, his reflexes might have been up to this. But he was growing older every moment, and had been drinking earlier, and—

A fist slammed on the table.

Three shots …

Min was fast, but fast didn’t cut it. Maybe anywhere else in London, he’d have been fine, but here and now in this room he was toast.

The third shot, he spilt most of. Piotr and Kyril were already leaning back, empty glasses lined up, roaring.

When he could speak, Kyril said, “You lose.”

“I lose,” Min admitted. The three vodkas joined the two from the previous round, and the one from the round before that. Plus the penalty shots for having lost both. Plus the beers he’d drunk in that pub near where he worked, though finer details, such as what the pub was called, and where he worked, had grown hazy. These guys, though—these guys. These guys were kind of crazy, but it was surprising how quickly barriers broke down when you got past the job descriptions. Like his own, which was to keep an eye on these guys without them knowing he was doing so.

It was possible he’d compromised that particular part of his mission.

“So tell me,” Kyril said, “When I did that thing with the key. When I—”

“Stuck it in the back of my neck, you bastard!”

Kyril laughed. “You thought it was a gun, yes?”

“Of course I thought it was a gun! You bastard!”

All three were laughing now. It was a picture, for sure: Min, convinced his last moments had come. That a Russian spy had a pistol screwed into his neck, and was about to pull the trigger.

Kyril stopped laughing long enough to say, “I couldn’t resist.”

“How long did you know I was there?”

“Always. I saw you on your bicycle.”

“Jesus,” Min shook his head. But he didn’t feel too low. Okay, so he’d messed up, but it hadn’t had serious consequences. Though he was pretty sure it would be best if nobody else got to hear about it. Specifically Lamb, he thought. And Louisa. And everybody else. But specifically them.

Piotr said, “Don’t feel too bad. We do security. We’re trained to spot faces in crowds.”

“Just like you are trained to do whatever it is you do in the … Department of Energy,” Kyril added. His broad smile supplied invisible quotation marks.

“Look,” Min began, but Piotr was waving a hand, as if seeing him off on a journey.

“Hey. Hey. Arkady Pashkin is an important man. You think we don’t know there will be … interest in him? Government interest? We’d be worried if there wasn’t. It would mean he was no longer important. And people who aren’t important don’t need people like us.”

“If my bosses found out I was here—”

“You mean,” Kyril said slyly, “if they found out you’d botched a shadowing job.”

Min said, “Well, I tracked you to your lair all right.”

“And now you’re finding out what happens to Department of Energy guys who get too nosy.”

They all roared again. Piotr refilled the glasses.

“To successful outcomes.”

Min was happy to drink to that. “Pravda,” he said, because it was the only Russian word he knew.

And everyone roared with laughter again, and another round had to be poured.

They were on the topmost floor, which was a self-contained flat. This was the kitchen, and there were at least two other rooms. The kitchen was clean, though the window was smeared with the usual city grime. The fridge was full, and not just with vodka. It held cartons of juice and bundles of vegetables, plus little wrapped packets from delis. This pair were used to being away from home, Min suspected, and knew how to take care of themselves in a foreign city without resorting to takeaways. He also suspected that if he drank much more he’d forget where he lived, let alone the ability to cycle there. Last thing he wanted was to finish up under a bus.

There was a noise from elsewhere, the front door opening and closing, and someone new wandered into the room. Min turned, but whoever it had been was already vanishing back into the hallway.

Piotr said, “One moment,” and left the kitchen.

Kyril poured more vodka.

“Who was that?” Min asked.

“Nobody. A friend.”

“Why doesn’t he join us?”

“He’s not that sort of friend.”

“Not a drinking man,” Min surmised. His glass flaunted itself in front of him. What had he just decided about alcohol? But it would be rude to leave a full glass, so he echoed whatever toast Kyril had proclaimed, and threw the vodka down his throat.

Piotr returned, and said something to Kyril that sounded to Min like a pile-up of consonants.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Kyril. “Nothing at all.”

Paranoia was back, if it had ever been away. Shirley Dander, all in black, fitted like a bathplug on the streets of Hoxton, but still felt out of place, as if her every step left a neon footprint.

Hardly night-time, really. Half past ten.

There was a pub she favoured, mostly because she had a contact there. She didn’t like to say ‘dealer’: dealer implied habit; habit implied problem; and Shirley didn’t have a problem, she had a lifestyle. One she had no intention of allowing to die the way her career had. That Slough House was a graveyard, she’d never been in doubt; that the earth was piled on quite so high, she’d just discovered. She’d done what Jackson Lamb had asked—done it well, without missing a beat—and all she’d earned was a back-to-your-desk. And from stories she’d heard, it was a miracle she’d been sent out at all. Slow horses came and slow horses went, and the passage between was spent tethered in their stalls. It was as if her mission had been one of calculated cruelty: give her a glimpse of the sunshine, then close the stable door.

Screw Lamb anyway, though. He wanted to make her life difficult, he’d find that was a two-way street.

The pub was crowded three deep at the bar. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t planning on staying. A familiar face raised a hand in greeting, but Shirley feigned abstraction and worried her way through to the toilets, which were round the far side: a sleazy corridor with a smeared mirror, and handbills pasted to the walls for open-mic poetry nights, local bands, the Stop the City rally, transgender cabarets. She didn’t have to wait long. Her contact sidled through from the bar, and precisely seventeen words later Shirley was leaving, three banknotes lighter, a comfortable weight nestling in her pocket.

Black jacket. Black jeans. She should have been invisible, but felt marked out. Memories of the previous night flashed from car windscreens: that kid she’d scared half to death, raiding DataLok. That was how easy it was to terrorise. You simply had to believe your cause was just; or failing that, simply not care about the people you were doing it to … When she turned, Shirley was convinced there’d be someone in her wake; a face from the pub; one of the wallhuggers whose eyes were always busy, but who never dared approach. Well, stuff them. Shirley was spoken for; and besides, she didn’t dance where she shopped. That’s what she was thinking when she looked back, but the street was empty, or seemed to be empty. Paranoia, that’s all. The comfortable weight in her pocket would take care of it.

All in black, she carried on her way.

“Alexander Popov,” said Catherine Standish.

Lamb regarded her thoughtfully. “Now, where’d you come across that name?” he asked.

She let him wonder.

“I sometimes worry you’re going over to the enemy.”

She looked askance. “Regent’s Park?”

“I meant GCHQ. You got me bugged, Standish?”

She said, “You’re sending River undercover—”

“Oh god, I might have guessed,” Lamb sighed.

“—into something you already know is a trap?”

“I only told him a couple of hours ago. Did he change his Facebook status already?”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Did gramps not teach that kid anything except how to tell stories?” Raising his glass to his mouth again, his eyes remained fixed on the one he’d poured for Catherine. It sat like a challenge, or a carefully worded insult. “Besides, trap or not, he wouldn’t care. An op’s an op. He probably thinks all his Christmases just came at once.”

“I’m sure he does. But you know what Christmas is like. It always ends in tears.”

“He’s going to the Cotswolds, Standish. Not Helmand Province.”

“There’s something Charles Partner used to say about ops. The friendlier the territory, the scarier the natives.”

“Was that before or after he blew his brains out?”

Catherine didn’t answer.

Lamb said, “What everyone seems to forget is that even if Alexander Popov never existed, whoever invented him did. And if the same smartarse is making a mousetrap in our back yard, we need to find out why.” He belched. “If that means making Cartwright our designated cheese-eater, so be it. He’s a trained professional, remember. Being a fuck-up is only his hobby.”

“He’s your white whale isn’t he? Popov?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Something else Charles once said. That it’s dangerous personalising an enemy. Because when that happens, you’re chasing a white whale.” Catherine paused. “It’s a Moby-Dick reference. It probably works better if you don’t need that explained. River doesn’t know he’s taking bait, does he?”

“No,” said Lamb. “And he’s not going to find out. Or your confidence about your unassailable role here might turn out to be misplaced.”

She said, “I’ll not tell him.”

“Good. You planning on drinking that?”

Catherine poured her glass’s contents into Lamb’s. “Unless I decide he’s in danger,” she went on. “It’s your whale, after all. No reason anyone else should die trying to stick a harpoon in it.”

“Nobody’s going to die,” said Lamb. Inaccurately, as it turned out.

The phone rang.

Because the body carried a Service card, red flags went up. This meant attending police officers were demoted to traffic duty, while Nick Duffy—the Park’s Head Dog—became scene boss, and his underdogs measured angles and took witness statements.

Most of the witnesses had arrived after the event, though not the car’s driver, obviously. The car’s driver had turned up at precisely the moment the event took place.

“Came out of nowhere,” she repeated.

She was blonde and appeared sober; an impression borne out by a breathalyser borrowed from a disgruntled cop.

“I didn’t stand a chance.”

A voice tremor, but that was understandable: mash into someone with your car, blameless or not, and you were bound to feel shaky.

It wasn’t the busiest junction, this time of night, but you wouldn’t want to cross it blind. Though of course, if you were drugged up or drunk, the Green Cross Code might not be top of your agenda.

“I mean, I hit the brake but—”

The shakes took her again.

Nick Duffy heard himself saying, “Look, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.” Christ, he sounded like a Special Constable.

But she was blonde and reasonably fit, and the corpse had a Service card but was from Slough House, which was every bit as special as a Constable; the same way some kids were special, and had special needs. When a spook died under a car, you had to poke around carefully, in case the car—metaphorically speaking—had dodgy plates, but when you found out the spook was a slow horse, you refigured the odds. Maybe they’d just been looking the wrong way. Left/right. It could be a confusing issue.

And she was blonde and reasonably fit …

“But I need to take a look at your licence.”

Which told him she was one Rebecca Mitchell, 38, British citizen; nothing on the face of any of that suggesting she’d just carried out a hit. Though of course, the best hits were carried out by the least likely hitters.

Nick Duffy scanned the junction again. His Dogs were checking kerbs and shop doorways: last time a car took out a spook a gun had gone missing, and Bad Sam Chapman, his immediate predecessor, had wound up on the short end of an internal inquiry. Last heard of, he was working for some private outfit. Not a fate Duffy was ready for, thanks. As he handed the licence back, a taxi arrived, and out climbed Jackson Lamb. A woman was with him, and it only took Duffy a moment to collect the name: Catherine Standish, who’d been a fixture at the Park back when Duffy was a pup, but went into exile after Charles Partner’s suicide. The pair ignored him. They went straight for the body.

He said to Rebecca Mitchell, “You’ll need to make a statement. There’ll be someone along shortly.”

She nodded mutely.

Leaving her, Duffy approached the new arrivals, about to tell them to back away from the body, but before he could speak Lamb turned, and the expression on his face persuaded Duffy to keep his mouth shut. Then Lamb looked down at the body again, and then up the street. Duffy couldn’t tell what he was focusing on: the cross traffic at distant junctions; the lights jewelling the highway. Always, in the city, there were strings of pearls at night; sometimes fairy lights strung for a wedding; sometimes glassand-paste baubles, hung for a funeral.

Standish spoke to Jackson Lamb.

“Who’s going to tell Louisa?” she said.