Joe Country

Cities sleep with their lights on, as if they’re afraid of the dark. Up and down their roads, clustering at junctions, streetlights make daisy chains out of the night, illuminating pavements and hiding the stars. And if, from above—from the perspective of an astronaut, say, or a reader—these chains resemble neural pathways, forging connections between a city’s hemispheres, that seems an accurate picture. For a city is made of memories, stored recollections packed into boxes of stone and metal, brick and glass, and the brighter its pathways pulse with light, the stronger those memories are. On its wider, busier thoroughfares the traces of grand events linger—royal progressions, wartime rallies, victory celebrations—while the circuses where its big roads meet nurture shades of less seemly occasions: riots and lynchings and public executions. Along its riverbanks, quiet moments promenade—a hundred thousand engagements and cuckoldings—and in the explosive glow of its transport terminals, a billion arrivals and a billion departures are recalled one by one. Some of these have left scars on its memory, others a faint graze, but all contribute to the whole, for this is what makes a city: the slow accumulation of history, of a near-infinite number of happenings in a network of streets that light up at night.

But if the grandest of these memories warrant plaques and statuary, the more private are kept out of view; or at least, stored in such plain sight that they’re unseen. Take Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, upon which the gross bulk of the Barbican squats like a toad. Even on the main drag, the dull weight of mediocrity hangs heavy: of all London’s memories, this undistinguished array of shops and offices is least likely to ring bells; those bright connections, firing through the night, are at their weakest here. But briefly lit by their flare, not far from the entrance to the Underground, is a block four storeys tall, though it appears shorter. Its pavement-level frontage comprises a black door dusty with neglect, sandwiched between a newsagent’s and a Chinese restaurant; its façade is distempered, its guttering a mess, and the local pigeons have shown their contempt for it in the traditional manner. The one stab at respectability—the legend WW Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths tattooed in gilt on a second-storey window—has long since started to peel, and the unlettered windows above and below it are smeary and grey. The building is a bad tooth set in a failing mouth. Here is where nothing happens: nothing to see here. Move along.

Which is how it’s supposed to be, for this is Slough House, and Slough House deserves no attention. Should a historian attempt to penetrate its mysteries, she’d first have to negotiate a back door which sticks in all weathers, then a staircase whose creaking suggests imminent collapse, but having done so, she’d find little to exercise her notebook: just a succession of offices equipped to face the 1990s, crumbling plasterwork, and rotting splinters in the window frames. The metallic odour of an overused kettle will taint the air, and in the corners of the flaking ceilings, mould spores congregate. She’ll creep from room to room on carpets thin as motel bedsheets, place a hopeful hand on radiators that are lumps of unresponsive steel, and find no history but the desultory kind, which carries on happening out of habit alone. So she’ll pack her pen away and head back down the rackety staircase, through the mildewed yard where the dustbins live, and out into the alley, then the street, then London beyond. There’s plenty of history elsewhere. There are memories minted every minute in the wider world. There’s no reason to waste her time on this.

And once she’s gone a sigh will pass through the building, a barely noticeable exhalation that rustles papers and wobbles doors, and Slough House will know its secrets remain intact. For it has secrets: like every building in every city, Slough House is a neuron in an urban hippocampus, and retains the echo of all it’s seen and heard. Memories have stained its walls and seeped into its stairwell; they reek of failure, and have been scrubbed from the public record, but they persist, and they’re not for intruders’ eyes. Deep within the building’s bones is the knowledge that some of its rooms that held two characters now hold only one; that formerly familiar impressions—the weight of a shadow on a wall; the pressure of a foot on a staircase—occur no more. This is what memory is: an abiding awareness that some things have vanished. And this is what consciousness is: the knowledge that more absences will come.

Time passes, and the city’s lights wink out as it heaves itself awake. Memories, stirred by sleep, subside with the dawn. Snow will arrive before the week’s end, but today there is only cold grey normality. Soon the slow horses will troop in, and settle to the mind-numbing grind; mental forced marches through a landscape undistinguished by points of interest. With such tasks in front of them, the real challenge is remembering why they bother.

And while they do, Slough House goes about the daily chore of trying to forget.

The thing to remember about Roddy Ho—Roddy Ho remembered—was that Roddy was a spook, a spy, an agent. Roddy was a player.

This was why he was rustling through someone else’s wastepaper bin.

True, he’d had a bad year. Kim, his girlfriend, had turned out not to be his girlfriend, and while that particular rock had been a long time falling down the well, the splash it eventually made wasn’t one he’d forget in a hurry. He’d felt betrayed. Hurt. Had felt, moreover, unnerved when it had been pointed out how very nearly treasonous his actions had been—good job Lamb wasn’t going to see his trusted lieutenant flushed down the pipe without a fight. But now the waters were calmer two things were certain: Kim—his girlfriend—was history, and he, the Rodster, was still the brain pumping Clever through Slough House.

while the charges pertaining to your behaviour are fully investigated you will remain assigned to

But for a while, man, he’d gone to pieces. He’d let his beard go to hell, from soul patch to hipster mess. He’d crashed out of TerraWar VII on level two, so knew how Andy Murray had felt catching the early bus home from Wimbledon. And he’d barely bothered to bring the outrage when it was announced that the new Doctor would be a woman: let others fight the good fight. The RodMan had hung up his cape.

shall not, until investigations have been completed to the satisfaction of this department, have contact with colleagues

And if he’d been waiting for someone—probably Louisa; he’d have settled for Catherine—to take him aside and say concerned and soothing things, that hadn’t happened either. Then again, this made sense. You had a wounded lion in your pack—the king of the pride; your alpha beast—you didn’t fuss about it while it healed. You waited until it was strong again was what you did. And then heaved a sigh of relief that order had been restored. So that was what had been happening lately: a quiet period of recovery, respected by all around him—

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—which was now over: he was back in the game. Women could hurt you, but they couldn’t break you. Ask Batman. Walking alone was the warrior’s way. And besides, in the days of Mama Internet, anyone can get laid—or at the very least, anyone had access to many vivid pictures of what getting laid looked like. So it could have been worse.

And what he was doing now, part of his recovery if you like, was regaining control of his environment. Because although a warrior walked alone, Ho had been assigned a stablemate. Alec Wicinski, the new guy’s name was, or Leck—Lek?—which sounded like Star Wars. Two days he’d been here, and already he’d insisted Roddy move his stuff to “his own side of the room,” muttering about how this was his desk, “for the time being.” Yeah, right. Evidently he needed a lesson about respecting his betters, which meant Roddy had to do what Roddy did best, which was saddle up, ride the Wild Web, and find out who this Wicinski guy was, and what he’d done to warrant gate-crashing Roddy’s manor.

So he’d done the obvious and dived into Service records, looking for the back story on this new comedian; info not open to casual viewers, but there was no firewall the RodMan couldn’t walk through . . . Except the info didn’t exist. Not just the redacted chatter about whatever mess he’d left on Regent’s Park’s carpet, but anything at all—no date of hire, no job description, no photo; nothing. It was like Alec (Lech?) Wicinski didn’t exist, or at least, hadn’t existed before setting foot in Slough House.

Which was interesting. And Roderick Ho didn’t like interesting.

What Roddy Ho liked was things done properly.

But Wicinski had been getting letters, so at least somebody thought he existed. He’d sat at Roddy’s other desk and read them sourly, as if they weren’t just bad news but confirmation of something worse, then torn them up and tossed the bits in his wastepaper basket.

You didn’t, Roderick Ho sneered, have to be Sherlock Holmes.

So he’d waited until Wicinski cleared off for the day, collected the scraps and pieced them together. Only took him forty minutes. And what he’d got was evidence, no doubt about it: a letter from HR. Stuff about not setting foot in Regent’s Park, not contacting colleagues; about “ongoing investigation.” “Charges.” That shit sounded serious. But no clues had been offered as to the nature of his sins.

Still interesting, then. Not orderly yet.

Roddy had put the pieces back in the bin, or most of them. He was on the case now. And there’d be no stopping the Rodster, now he was back in the game.

Anyway, that had been yesterday. This morning, Wicinski had sat drinking black tea, scowling and reading another letter, pages long. You could almost feel sorry for him, if that was your bag—up to the moment, anyway, that he scrumpled the pages, tossed them into the wastebasket, and stormed out the room like a monkey with a rage on.

Ho waited, but he didn’t storm back.

The pages had all landed cleanly in the basket, so props for that, but seriously, Roddy thought: the dude had looked undignified, stamping out. Gotta have respect for yourself, he thought, getting down on his knees by the bin. Gotta keep your standards up, as he started rifling through it.

He pulled out the first page, uncrumpled it.

Blank.

Odd.

He pulled out another, did the same thing.

Blank.

. . . What was Wicinski, some kind of fucked-up origami artist? Was that why he’d been sent to Slough House, for wasting paper? It took all kinds, Roddy would be first to admit, but seriously: this was weird shit and he didn’t like it.

Another one.

Blank.

And then another. It wasn’t until he got to the seventh sheet that Roddy found one with actual words on, and this rocked him back on his haunches a second, while he took them in.

Fuck you, you little snoop.

Now what the hell was that about?

But before he could decipher it there were other pages to uncrumple, so he plunged his hand back into the bin, touched something solid and snap—Roderick Ho screamed as pain ate him from the fingers up, Jesus, what just happened? He pulled his hand clear, throbbing in agony, and when he saw through a curtain of tears what was dangling from it, another puzzle joined the cryptic message he’d just uncovered.

Why the hell had the stupid bastard thrown away a perfectly good mousetrap?

It was funny, Louisa Guy later thought, how unused she’d become to the sound of a phone. Not a mobile, obviously, but a landline, which, with its limited repertoire, was like something from a black-and-white movie, in which phones were sturdy works of art, all rotary dials and clumsy black receivers. The two in her office weren’t like that, were grey push-buttons, but still: it was months since her own had uttered a peep, let alone the one on the unused companion desk. She hadn’t been expecting it. Apart from anything else, that desk belonged to a dead man.

The dead man was Min Harper.

The day, not halfway done, had already offered surprises, but even when new things happened in Slough House, they felt like old things. There’d been a text from River, bad news, but news that had been coming for a while, and no reply she could make could prevent its arrival. And then the new guy, Lech—Alec?—had been in the kitchen earlier. He’d looked the way any slow horse did the first few days; like someone had slapped him with a shovel. Last week, he’d been at Regent’s Park, and now he was here, and the distance between the two was the kind that, if you stared into it, it stared back. Nothing she could do about that even if she’d wanted to—and there was reason to feel wary around new intake—but her inability to do anything for River Cartwright maybe softened her a bit, enough to offer advice. Not because the new guy was about to step into deep shit, but because even shallow shit got everywhere if you didn’t watch what you were doing.

So she said, “Not that one.”

“. . . Huh?”

“Not that mug.”

He’d been reaching for Clint Eastwood, which wasn’t going to make anyone’s day if Roderick Ho found out.

“Your office-mate gets touchy if other people use his stuff.”

“. . . Seriously?”

“Famous for it.”

“Talk about anal.”

“. . . Yeah, a word to the wise? Don’t say that in front of Lamb. He’ll take it as an invitation.”

Which was enough to be getting on with. Any more would count as spoilers. So she just added, “Good luck,” and carried her coffee to her office. On the way she heard a shriek from Ho’s room and wondered what that was about, but not enough to go and find out.

And twenty minutes after that, the phone had rung.

For a while—five rings—she stared at the offending instrument, its drring-drrings churning the office air. Wrong number? She hoped so. In the animal centre of herself, was certain that no good would come of picking up. Until, from somewhere overhead, a familiar note of irritation, Will somebody answer that fucking phone?, so she stood at last, crossed to the other desk, and lifted the receiver.

“. . . Henderson’s.”

“Is that . . . Is this Min Harper’s office?”

Something inside Louisa uncurled and shivered.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Harper doesn’t work here anymore,” she said. The words, her tone of voice, came laced with black crêpe.

“I know, I know . . . I just . . .”

Louisa waited. It was a woman’s voice, about her own age, far as she could tell. Unsure of herself. Min had been dead a while. Louisa was over it, in the way you got over a childhood illness; some part of you would always be weaker, but you’d never get ill in the same way again. That was the theory, anyway. And whether it was true or not, Min wasn’t coming back.

“Could you tell me why you’re calling?” Louisa found herself reaching for a pen, like anybody else, in any office anywhere. A pen, a pad, the usual tools. “Let’s start with who you are.”

“My name’s Clare Addison. That’s my name now, I mean. But I’m Clare Harper as was.”

Louisa’s pen made no mark on the paper.

“Min was my husband,” the woman said.

With power comes responsibility, along with the opportunity to stick it to those who’ve annoyed you on your way up. Diana Taverner wasn’t gauche enough to have compiled an actual list, but like any competent First Desk, her mental envelope had several names scrawled on the back of it.

First Desk . . . Even thinking it made her smile.

When Claude Whelan had opted for retirement rather than one of the alternatives on offer—among them, the chance to be taken outside and shot—there’d been no obvious candidate for the role; or none that had survived Diana Taverner’s vetting, which in at least one instance had come close to being the surgical procedure its name suggested, rather than the background check that protocol required. A potentially messy business, but as the individual in question had attended the same prep school as Oliver Nash, and had, on two occasions, attempted to flush Oliver Nash down a toilet on the grounds that Oliver Nash was a sneak and a drongo and a tool, and as Oliver Nash was now Chair of the Limitations Committee, which was responsible for putting a list of potential appointees for the role of head of the Service in front of the Prime Minister, the whole thing was a rare example of the Old Boy Network paying off in a woman’s favour, and could be cited as progress if it weren’t, obviously, never to be spoken of again. But as it was, everything had worked out to the satisfaction of all important parties, these being Taverner herself and Oliver Nash. Taverner had been put forward as the only available candidate in the circumstances, and the newly appointed Prime Minister—herself a needs-must choice, though she appeared to be the only person in the country unaware of the fact—had bestowed her blessing, and Taverner now held the office from which lesser talents had conspired to keep her for too long. And yes, of course she had a mental list of those awaiting retribution, and if some were currently off-limits, that situation would resolve itself in time. For now, she’d make do with those within reach. Hence this morning’s treat: an audience with Emma Flyte, Head Dog.

“This won’t come as a surprise.”

Flyte gave not a flicker in response.

This was happening in Regent’s Park, which was not, as the crow flies, a huge distance from Slough House, but by any other metaphor was a lifetime away. The Park was the Service’s headquarters; it was where baby spooks learned their ABCs, and where flyaway spooks returned, once their missions were complete. It was where you didn’t get to visit if you’d been exiled to Slough House. Once that had happened, it might as well be Oz: ruby slippers not included.

“This, ah, reappraisal of your performance.”

“My last appraisal scored me as way above satisfactory.”

“Yes, well. My predecessor was a great admirer of yours.” Lady Di let that hang for a moment. Claude Whelan had been a great admirer of a number of people, but if you were offering marks, only Emma Flyte would have scored a perfect ten. There was a girl on the Hub he’d kept an eye on too—Josie, her name was—but where she scored highest was in proximity. That and the T-shirts. He’d been a good man, Claude Whelan, but thank god he’d had his flaws, else he’d still have his hand on the tiller. “So much so, he may have allowed himself a little . . . bias.”

“And you plan to redress the balance.”

“Fair and transparent,” said Taverner. “That’s how our processes should be. Apart from all the classified stuff, obviously.”

“I was brought in because the Dogs were being used for First Desk’s private purposes,” Flyte said. “Under my watch, that’s been stopped. Are you sure it’s fairness and transparency you’re keen on?”

Her refusal to allow the Dogs to become Taverner’s poodles was the basis of the women’s antagonism. That and her being younger than Taverner. Sisterhood might be powerful, but Anno Domini was a bitch.

“Let’s not get bogged down in detail,” said Taverner. “Every First Desk is a new broom, that should be obvious. And the qualities I’m looking for in the head of the internal security section aren’t necessarily going to match those that so, ah, charmed dear Claude. That’s all.”

“So you want rid of me. On what grounds?”

Beauty alone ought to do it, thought Taverner. The fact that there was no actual regulation outlawing Flyte’s kind of looks didn’t mean there shouldn’t be: at best it was a distraction; at worst, there’d be duels fought and blood shed. Not that Flyte had ever capitalised on her appearance, but then, an elephant didn’t capitalise on its size. Which didn’t mean it didn’t knock trees down.

“Nobody’s said anything about getting rid.”

“And yet you want my performance reappraised.”

“To take recent developments into account.”

“These being . . . ?”

That I’m fucking First Desk now. Did Flyte really need that said out loud?

Taverner glanced around. She hadn’t changed rooms since her elevation; was still on the Hub. Her predecessors had mostly occupied an upstairs office, with views of the park: sunlight and gardens, and a neverending procession of au pairs trying not to lose the kids; down here, through her glass wall, Lady Di could watch the boys and girls as they monitored the hot spots and kept the world on track. This was where the job got done. And part of the job, now, was consolidating her own position; not for the purposes of petty revenge, but to ensure that when tough decisions were needed, she could take them without a chorus of dissent in the background. That, and also for the purposes of petty revenge. Because it would be foolish to deny the satisfaction involved.

It turned out, anyway, that actual words weren’t required. The look on her face was all the response Emma Flyte needed.

“Perhaps it would be simpler if I just cleared out my locker.”

“Good heavens, no,” said Taverner. “Nobody’s talking about dismissal. No, what I had in mind was a role more in keeping with our revised sense of your abilities. And not a demotion. More of a . . . sideways move.”

The glimmer of understanding in Flyte’s eyes was worth more to Taverner than a new pair of shoes.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Oh, I don’t think I am,” said Taverner. “No, I think Slough House is the perfect place for you, in the circumstances.”

And was pleased to imagine that no hint of her triumph showed itself on her face.

Her coat had faded to the colour of dust, and wrapped within it, she might disappear on the staircase of Slough House; grow invisible against a tired carpet and age-stained walls. Did this happen to everyone? Or only to women?

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She wore a hat too. Not many people did these days. Hers was a dull purple—dulled by time, because it had seemed deeper, more vibrant, when she’d bought it. But maybe it was the eyes that faded, diluting all they viewed to feeble ghosts. Maybe she was wrong about her hat and coat; maybe she dazzled without knowing it. That thought almost produced laughter, an impulse easily stifled, here on the staircase. These walls had heard a lot of things, but laughter didn’t figure high on the list.

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(These weren’t colours, of course. Except that they were; they were reds, the colour of blood.)

Her gloves were black, mind, and her shoes. Not everything faded. But her hair had been blonde once, and while—strand by strand—it perhaps still was, when she looked in the mirror it was grey. This seemed proof enough. It had been a long time since anyone came closer to her than her own reflection.

All my colours, thought Catherine Standish. All those primary splashes life was once drenched in; it was down to shoes and gloves now. Everything else lay in shadow.

She reached her office. The room was cold, though the arthritic wheezing of the pipes meant the heating was technically on. Her radiator needed bleeding—and there it was again, blood, though this would be a watery substitute; a rusty trickle. Coat off, hat off, computer on. There were reports from Louisa Guy and River Cartwright to evaluate: Louisa’s would be sketchy—she was compiling names of those who’d borrowed “suspect texts” from public libraries—but otherwise reliable; River, on the other hand, seemed to have embarked on a work of fiction, even if that fiction was just a list of addresses. Identifying properties that were potentially hostile safe houses was his current task. The methodology involved cross-checking Council Tax payments against census forms, though the practice seemed to be that once a week River would download a bunch of random addresses and shuffle them for authenticity. Sooner or later Lamb was going to notice.

And then there was the new boy: Lech Wicinski. Also went by Alec. She wondered what mind-numbing task Lamb would find for him to do.

And wondered why she bothered wondering.

Every night for weeks she had broken her journey home to St. John’s Wood; had lit from the tube one stop early, despite the chill. Snow was forecast, and the pavements were hard as iron. You felt it in each step, the bone-cold stones hammering through your frame, because this was what London did, when the weather reminded the city it was temporary: it hunched down tight. Sensible folk didn’t linger when this happened. But every night Catherine braved the cold one stop early, because this way she could call in to the Wine Citadel, and buy a bottle.

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It wasn’t really, when you got down to it, about the colour.

And it had been years since she’d enjoyed this freedom allowed most everyone else. The apparently casual nature of the transaction thrilled her. You chose your bottle and swiped your card. People did it every day, a lot of them more than once. She’d done it herself times out of mind, in the olden golden days. She’d been at Regent’s Park then, a functioning alcoholic, following which, for a rather shorter period, she’d been a dysfunctional alcoholic, and then—after drying out in a Service sanatorium, courtesy of her boss, Charles Partner—a recovering alcoholic. And then that same boss, First Desk at Regent’s Park, had blown his brains out in his bathtub, or that had been the story at the time.

But like a wine stain the story wouldn’t go away, and every time she scrubbed it it re-emerged, its pattern different. Partner, it turned out, had been a traitor. The man who’d led the Service, and pulled Catherine back from her downward spiral, had spent a decade committing treason. This, it felt to her now, had been both a shock and a confirmation of something she’d always known: that all joes go to the well in the end. Charles’s well, it seemed, had been full of money . . . What had been slower to come to light was this: that Partner had kept her on because of what, not who, she was. She’d thought herself his dedicated helper; the ever-efficient PA whose own life might have been a mess, but who ensured that his ran along straight lines. But it turned out that her chief qualification, in his eyes, was that she was a drunk, and could be trusted not to see what was happening in front of her. Every secret he ever sold had passed across her desk, her fingerprints smeared on all his crimes. Had he faced trial, she’d have been standing next to him. Her fledgling sobriety would have taken wing at that.

But he had killed himself, and here she was in Slough House, and while the other inhabitants saw it as torture, for Catherine it was a penance. Being an alcoholic was part of her make-up, its seed inside her since her teens, but she hated having been a fool. Even mindless drudgery was better than running that risk again. Even Jackson Lamb was better—his endless crudity, his animal habits.

And then the stain changed shape once more.

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It had been Diana Taverner who had told her: There’s something you really ought to know. You had to hand it to Lady Di; when it came to breaking news, she could leave the jagged part sticking in your back. Did you really think he’d killed himself? Surely you’ve worked it out by now. . .

And of course she had; she’d known for years. Known, but never allowed the knowledge to harden and take root.

Jackson Lamb had killed Charles Partner. He’d been Partner’s joe, back in the day; Partner his handler, his mentor, the maypole around which he’d danced. But he’d killed him; had shot him in his bathtub, where Catherine had found him. So there was no trial, no trauma in the tabloids; just another Service suicide, a few mumbled words, and a trip to The Spooks’ Graveyard. As payment or punishment, she didn’t know which, Lamb had been given Slough House, and had been squatting here since, a grim overlord to the Service’s washouts; those whose careers might not have peaked with a bullet in a bathtub, but had reached a full stop nevertheless. And here she was too, every day; delivering reports to Lamb’s desk, making him cups of tea; sitting with him in the dark hours sometimes, for reasons she’d never understood. She did not like him, but was bonded to him: her bogeyman and occasional saviour; and now, it turned out, the man who’d murdered her former boss. How was she supposed to feel about that?

She was supposed to keep on keeping on. She was supposed to do that one day at a time.

Catherine began going through the reports, River’s and Louisa’s. She’d tidy them up, print them out, staple them neatly, slide them into a folder. Sooner or later they’d wind up in Regent’s Park, where for all she knew, they’d be shredded unread. Just one of the many things outside her control.

But later, on her way home, she’d buy a bottle.

If you like school you’ll love work, the old line went. And it was true, thought Shirley Dander, that the one was good training for the other. If you could handle the tantrums, the malice and the potty rage in the office, education would be a breeze.

Case in point. J.K. Coe.

Coe was three-quarters psycho, if you wanted Shirley’s opinion. And documented fact bore her out: he’d deliberately killed at least two people, not counting whatever he did in his free time; one of them (unarmed, manacled) here in the building; the other an admittedly harder target: a bad actor, spraying bullets from an automatic weapon. Coe had walked up and put a bullet in his head at point blank range. Even with a handgun, there’d have been a mess. With a police-issue rifle, it was modern art. Take those things, then factor in the time he’d held a blade to Shirley’s own throat, and she wasn’t sure why she was downgrading him to three-quarter status, unless it was professional courtesy. Most offices, a record like that, you’d be out on your arse by lunchtime. Most schools too, she hoped.

But this was Slough House, where Jackson Lamb made the rules, and provided you didn’t hide his lunch or steal his whisky, you could get away with murder. There’d been at least four corpses within these walls she knew of, and she didn’t work weekends. And this was the Service’s backwater, where they sent you when they wanted to bore you to death. God knew what went on in Regent’s Park.

So anyway, J.K. Coe and Shirley had history, which should have made it easier to have a conversation with him. As it was, it made it simple enough to find him—he was in his office—but after that it was uphill all the way.

“Quiet round here.”

If nothing else, his lack of response proved her point.

“Where’s River?”

He shrugged.

When he’d first turned up, Coe had had the irritating habit of playing an invisible keyboard. He’d be at his desk, or any flat surface, and his fingers would be tapping away, spelling out whatever he was hearing in his head, which was usually piped there by iPod, but she suspected might echo round his brain regardless. He didn’t do that so much anymore. But he was still pretty vacant; a charisma vacuum. Didn’t mean he didn’t pick up information, though.

“Spoken to the new guy?”

Coe shook his head.

“You heard what he’s in for?”

They always made it sound like a conviction, because that’s what it was. Something that got you hard time.

But Coe shook his head again.

Shirley shook hers too: waste of fucking breath. Coe made a shoehorn look chatty. It wasn’t like she wanted to be best buddies or anything. But they’d taken down bad guys together, and that should at least be worth idle conversation.

Pickings elsewhere were slim. River wasn’t around, they’d established that; Louisa had made it clear she didn’t want to talk; Ho was Ho; and Catherine had been strange lately, not given to chat. Sometimes, new people had that effect. They had you remembering a time when you still had hope. When you thought some mistake had been made, which might yet be rectified; that, given time, you could haul yourself out of the pit, to general applause.

After a while, you realised that all that would happen was you’d be thrown back in again.

Shirley said, “Good talk. Let’s do this again,” and left Coe to it.

Back in her own room, she had another look at her latest assignment. Lamb had had an idea not long ago; this particular gem being that your average bomb-chucking numpty (his words) was unlikely to observe the social niceties.

“This might just be me being harsh, but if your mission in life is to indiscriminately massacre your neighbours, you’re probably not that bothered about paying your TV licence. Right?”

Shirley had said, “Yeah, but don’t they get taught to blend in? At terrorist school?”

“Oh, good. A volunteer.”

“No, I was just—”

“See, what I’m suggesting, by which I mean what you will henceforth dedicate your life to until I say stop, is what I’m going to call . . . Operation Scofflaw.”

Meaning Shirley’s daylight hours were now taken up by cross-referencing a register of TV licence defaulters against lists of those who’d failed to pay parking fines, child support and a million other minor offences . . .

(“Wouldn’t it be quicker to just take the population of Liverpool and start from there?”

“And they say I teach you nothing.”)

. . . the whole shebang then, for want of a less inflammatory description, ethnically profiled. It was, essentially, classic Lamb: pointless, time-wasting and tit-blisteringly boring, with a dash of offensiveness chucked in. If it was happening to anyone else, it would be funny.

She wondered what task Lamb would find for the new guy.

And she wondered what the new guy had done to wind up in Slough House.

And then she wondered how come River was nowhere to be seen, the jammy skiver.

Good job some of us have a work ethic, she decided, making sure her office door was shut before she closed her eyes.

His grandfather was fading with the day.

River had been at his bedside since the early hours, summoned by a kind voice on his mobile: It would be wise to get here soon. For minutes afterwards he’d lain unhearing the words, running back the clock. He was twelve, and helping in the garden; watching worms at their incomprehensible work. On his head, the O.B.’s hat. Don’t want you catching sunstroke. Your grandmother’d have my guts. Or twice that age and sitting in the study, rain lashing the windows, the O.B. talking him through the dark days of the Cold War. Over the years, the old man’s chair had moulded itself to hold him like a hammock. River’s chair was a work in progress . . . On their own darkest day, none colder, they’d buried his grandmother, Rose, and it had been the first and only time he’d seen the O.B. cry.

You built a life the way you’d build a wall, one brick on top of the other, but sooner or later, those first bricks were taken away.

He had thought about calling his mother, but for no longer than it took to shake his head. Then he’d willed himself up and into yesterday’s clothes, arriving at Skylarks, the nursing home, before the sun. His grandfather had been moved into a room that was purpose-built to die in, though nobody actually said so. The lighting was gentle, and the view through the window of winter hills, their treeline a skeleton chorus. The bed the O.B. would never leave was a clinical, robust device, with upright panels to prevent him from rolling off, and various machines monitoring his progress. On one, his pulse echoed, a signal tapped out from a wavering source. A last border crossing, thought River. His grandfather was entering joe country.

Twice he took his phone out, to ring his mother. Twice he didn’t. He texted Louisa, though; let her know where he was. She texted back: So sorry. He’d have called Catherine, but Catherine had changed lately, reverting to how she’d been in his early days at Slough House: a pale ghost, who moved through the rooms leaving no trace behind her. The previous day, alone with her in the kitchen, he’d stood close by her, reaching for milk from the fridge, and breathed in deeply: could he smell alcohol? But he caught only the herbal mix of the soap she favoured, the scent she wore.

Besides, if she’d fallen off the wagon, they’d all know about it, surely? A crash like that. Unless Catherine had done what Catherine would do, which was fall so slowly, fall so deep, that no one would notice and no one would hear.

From the bed, calm breathing.

He stood and paced the room, to keep his blood flowing. That’s the kind of thought you have in a hospital room. The O.B.’s gentle exhalations, his secret murmuring, didn’t waver, and seemed no different from anyone else asleep. But those familiar with death had picked up on signs River couldn’t decrypt. When life was entering the final straight there were signals to read, codes to break. It was a language he didn’t know yet. All the deaths he’d witnessed had happened suddenly, to healthy people.

Every fifteen minutes a nurse came in and assessed the situation. She brought River a cup of tea and a sandwich, patted his shoulder. Are you the only family? How long have you got? There was a mother, Isobel Dunstable, née Cartwright, who had given the Old Bastard his name, and meant it; and a father, the renegade American spook Frank Harkness, who had seduced Isobel not for love, nor even for pleasure, but to bend the O.B. to his will, perhaps the only time in his life the O.B. had been outfoxed. And never spoken a word of it, either. By the time River came to learn the truth, the old man had been lost in the twilight, unable to tell the difference between trees and shadows.

Meanwhile, Frank was in the wind, and his mother hadn’t spoken to her father in years.

I just want him to be unhappy, she’d told River once. Behind the brittle levity, he’d sensed a wound still pulsing.

He dozed, so that when at last it happened, it happened without his knowing. His eyes had closed, and the images that scampered through his mind were a confused welter of loss and unhappiness. It was a noise from the corridor that brought him back, a jostled trolley, and he started at the sound, his heart hammering. It was another moment or two before he realised that the machines had changed their tune, and instead of charting progress, were transmitting the news from the other side. His grandfather had crossed the border.

River rose and kissed the old man’s forehead moments before the nurse arrived.

Emma said, “You’re kidding, right?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

“No offence, but it’s hard to tell.”

This was true. It wasn’t that Lady Di was a stoneface, and if she ever took to pulling the legs of her subordinates it would likely be in controlled conditions, with the subject fixed to a rack, but in the time Emma Flyte had been running the Dogs, she’d heard a lot of instructions that might easily have been a piss-take. It turned out that in the governance of a nation’s security, many absurd situations had to be worked around: a toxic clown in the Foreign Office, a state visit by a narcissistic bed-wetter, the tendency of the electorate to jump off the occasional cliff. So sometimes a First Desk would outline an agenda and your first thought would be Yeah, as if.

But not this time.

“I’d have thought Slough House was on your list,” she said.

“I have a list?”

“Oh, I think we both know you have a list. And Slough House has been a thorn in your side for years, right? So here you are at last, top of the monkey puzzle tree, I’d have thought your first move would be to raze that place to the ground.”

And sow salt where it had stood. You couldn’t be too careful, where Jackson Lamb was concerned.

“And instead, you’re embracing its potential—oh, don’t tell me. You made a deal with Lamb.”

“I’m First Desk, Ms. Flyte. I don’t have to make deals with anyone.”

“And I used to be a copper, Ms. Taverner, and I recognise bullshit when I hear it. That’s how you got rid of Whelan, isn’t it? You had Lamb’s help, and in return Slough House is off the hook.”

She only had to say the words aloud to recognise their truth. Backroom politics was Diana Taverner’s natural habitat, and as for Lamb, he’d deal with the devil if circumstances required. Whether the devil would shake hands with Lamb was a different question. Even Satan has standards.

Lady Di had leaned back. Not a great sign. Taverner was a prowler. When someone else was in charge, she’d move around rather than sit in one place; ever-conscious, Emma supposed, of how warm flesh could be a target.

She was speaking now. “Let’s just say,” she said, “that the higher up you move, the more your perspective changes. Slough House has been a nuisance in the past, yes. And may be again in the future, in which case I won’t hesitate to trim its sails. But for the time being—let’s call this a transitional phase—there are certain uses to which it can be put. Not least of which is, solving the problem of your career trajectory.” For a moment, her gaze shifted; she was looking beyond Emma, through the glass wall, at the boys and girls on the Hub. A target-rich environment, Emma assumed. There were so many ways you could disappoint Diana Taverner, some of which you wouldn’t know about until your head was rolling on the sand. “So yes, as you put it, I’m embracing its potential. That’s what leaders do.”

Emma shook her head.

“Something to add?”

“The Met was bad enough,” said Emma. “But this, Jesus. You’d burn a city down to save face.”

“It would depend on the city.”

“I wish I thought you were joking.”

“This meeting seems to have become all about my sense of humour. If it’ll save you time, here’s my tell. When I think something’s funny, I laugh. With me?”

“You remind me of someone from my old job.”

“The Commissioner, I hope.”

“No, this was a serial offender. Must have arrested him a dozen times, mostly for punching out strangers. But he never copped on that he was the one with the problem.”

“I’m going to miss our little chats,” said Diana Taverner. “I don’t often get across that end of town. It’s not that the journey’s tricky, it’s just that it’s awfully shitty over there. Unless you’ve a thing for street food?”

Emma Flyte smiled. “I’ve eaten enough of it in my time to learn one thing. That I’ll decide where I buy it.”

“That sounds like you’re rejecting my proposal. But would you like to make it clearer?”

“Of course,” said Emma. “With the greatest lack of respect, ma’am, fuck you. And fuck your job.”

And as there didn’t seem much point prolonging the interview, she left.

So the day passes, as most days do, and the city sinks nightwards once more. On the guttering of Slough House, on its window panes, on the frame of the black front door which never opens, never closes, thin ice forms, and the building’s only contribution to the lights that guide the city through the small hours is a laterally sliced yellow square on its upmost storey, tilted to the sky. But even as this catches the attention it winks off, and some minutes later—just enough time to allow a whisky-impaired navigation of six half-staircases, with an interval to make use of what appears from a damaged perspective to be a mobile lavatory—a heavy-coated shape emerges from the adjacent alleyway, crosses the road and disappears into the Barbican shadows, which was not the route it took the night before, and will not be its route tomorrow.

And now the building subsides, the effect of shadows cast by a passing bus. Memories stir, the residue of long brooding—the stains people leave on the spaces they’ve occupied—but these will be gone by morning, leaving in their place the usual vacancies, into which new sorrows and frustrations will be poured. Soon winter will shake its big stick again, not only at London but at everything in its path, and great swathes of the country will be swallowed by snow. By the time it melts, Slough House will have new ghosts.

Until then, it will do its best to forget those it already has.

On Saturday morning Lech Wicinski left the basement flat in Crouch End that he shared with his fiancée, intending to buy a pint of milk. There was a corner shop not two hundred yards away, but for some reason he fished his car keys from their hook in passing, and about the time he should have been sitting down to scrambled eggs he was leaving the city, heading westward, though it was some while before his destination revealed itself. For that first half hour he was driving blind, trying to reverse the clock, as if in an as-yet unknown direction he’d find the misstep he’d made and untake it; return home to find everything as it ought to be, his career on track, a fresh pint of milk in the fridge. He was way too much the rationalist to think that might happen. But a human being, so, you know: Christ.

Traffic was sluggish: the usual weekend exodus. London’s pull was a weekday force. It evened out after an hour, though, and he found himself at a stable seventy-five. It was cold and dry, the motorway verges, the fields beyond, brittle and uncared for. The cows in the fields were motionless; placeholders for actual cattle.

The previous evening he’d called Josie, one of the Hub crew, and asked if she fancied a quick drink. There’d been forced cheer in his voice, a Lech Wicinski neither recognised. But it didn’t matter, because all she’d said was, “Sorry, Lech. I can’t.”

shall not, until investigations have been completed to the satisfaction of this department, have contact with colleagues

He felt his teeth grinding. Forced himself to stop.

Lech had torn that letter up, dumped it in his office bin, where the prick whose office he now shared had found it. A swift lesson: life in Slough House. In the mean little shopping arcade opposite was a hardware store that sold mousetraps. Fuck you, you little snoop. That should lighten the atmosphere.

And just to keep things rolling along, he’d snapped the handle off Ho’s Clint Eastwood mug and dumped the parts on the kitchen counter.

After skirting Oxford he left the motorway. The road narrowed, and would be leafy in summertime, but at the moment the overhead branches resembled old scars. It was potholed too, and speedbumped where it wound through villages. The cottages here enjoyed valley views and well-kept gardens, as if those who chose to live in the countryside liked to tame those parts they could. But then, who wouldn’t? It was when things slipped out of control that everything went crazy.

They had found pornography on his Service laptop—child pornography.

“It wasn’t me.”

Richard Pynne, his line manager—Dick the Prick, obviously, but he’d earned it—had bowed a sceptical head. “Yes well but, Alec. There it is. For all to see.” That required a codicil: “Or not.”

“How did you even—?”

“There are sweeps, we do sweeps. Remote sweeps. You must know about that. We issue enough warnings.”

We don’t care how you get your rocks off, his words implied. Just don’t be doing it with Service kit.

That had been the first he’d known of it: the Dogs arriving at his workstation, in full view of the Hub, disconnecting his hardware, going through his desk. Packing everything onto those plastic trays they use at airports. What did they think he’d done? Leaked a secret, blown a whistle . . . It had taken Dick the Prick to teach him, in one of the smaller, windowless interview rooms; the kind to which you were summoned when coffee wasn’t on the agenda.

Pynne was large, and going to be larger still if he didn’t start doing something about it; had long declared victory over male-pattern baldness by shaving his head, and wore thick-framed spectacles, which was all Lech was willing to admit they shared in common, though Lech himself only wore his for close-up work. Pynne was a year or two younger but on a faster track, which might have been the Cambridge degree, and might just have been that he wanted it more. Don’t be fooled by the speech patterns, Lech reminded himself. That hesitancy, the repetition. He was sharp enough, Pynne the prick. One of Di Taverner’s protégés.

But that was all white noise. What mattered was the impossibility of it: child porn, on Lech’s laptop. Which only he used. Which he was responsible for: security, contents, the lot.

“So I’m going to have to ask you, and this is formal, it’s being recorded, I’m going to have to ask you the obvious. Did you do this, Alec? Did you download this?”

“I—no! No, of course I bloody didn’t.”

“And has the laptop been in your possession for the past week?”

“It’s been in my possession for the past year. But I haven’t been downloading bloody—Jesus, Dick, child porn? I’m engaged to be married, for God’s sake!”

It sounded like a hastily concocted alibi. Men with wives, fiancées, partners—men with lives didn’t do that sort of thing. Didn’t use illegal pornography. Except for the ones who did, of course, but Lech wasn’t one of them.

Dick said, “If it’s an error, an integrity issue—I mean integrity of the system, obviously—if that’s the case, then it will all get sorted out. But in the meantime, there’ll need to be an investigation, and while that’s underway, you can’t be on the premises, I’m afraid.”

Escorted out of the building, as if he’d been caught stealing paperclips.

He turned off the road at the sign for Northwick Park.

The same morning, back in London.

Louisa, who lived out on the fringes, never came into the city at the weekend, except on those few occasions which demanded it—a date, shopping, being bored; call it every other Saturday max, or three a month at most—and yet here she was, Soho, like a mindless tourist; one among a million, even in this cheerless weather. She was wearing her new white ski-jacket, and if it didn’t do much for her figure she’d been glad of it walking from the Tube, with London’s air a refrigerated warning. There’d been talk on the radio of a Siberian front on the way. They’d made it sound like a wartime manoeuvre.

The café windows were grey with condensation, and ghosts streamed past in an unbroken flow. Louisa wrapped both hands round her Americano, and the door opened and closed, opened and closed, and by her watch the woman should have been here ten minutes ago. If she finished her coffee, she thought. If the woman hadn’t turned up by then, game over.

It wasn’t like Louisa wanted to be here in the first place.

Is that . . . Is this Min Harper’s office?

Something like vertigo had swamped her.

Mr. Harper doesn’t work here anymore.

She’d been leaning against what had been Min’s desk, something she had watched him do time without number. He liked to stand when on the phone; he’d had restless bones. Sitting at a desk wasn’t what he’d joined the Service for. Her neither. But their careers had been derailed; Louisa’s because she’d screwed up a surveillance operation that put dozens of handguns on the streets; Min because, in what had since become an accepted classic, he’d left a disk stamped Top Secret on the Underground. If there’d been other people to blame, their lives might have felt easier. As it was, both were crippled by shame and self-loathing, which was probably the igniting factor in their love affair. Which had been their business alone, she reminded herself now. Min’s marriage had already been over.

My name’s Clare Addison. That’s my name now, I mean. But I’m Clare Harper as was . . . Min was my husband.

What Louisa figured was, it was some kind of twelve-step thing. Clare Harper was looking for licence to move on. And part of that process was facing Louisa Guy, with whom her late husband had spent the last year of his life.

She finished her Americano and thought: there’s not enough tequila in the world. Forget about coffee: not enough tequila. She didn’t want to do this. Didn’t want to be here. But she didn’t leave, despite the deal she’d made with herself.

How old would the children be now? She’d never even met them . . . Fifteen, she decided. Sixteen? That would be Lucas. She couldn’t remember the younger one’s name. George? No, she was associating.

“Hello?”

Hadn’t even noticed the door opening again.

“Oh. Yes.”

“You’re . . . ?”

“I’m Louisa, yes.” She stood. “And you must be Clare.”

“I’m sorry I’m late.”

“No, that’s okay.” There was a moment where nothing was happening; just two women, paralysed by meeting. Louisa forced her way past it: “Can I get you a coffee?”

“Oh . . . A latte. Thank you.”

First contact survived, Louisa rejoined the queue, and like a spy studied Clare Harper in the mirrored wall. Except not Harper: Addison. Either way, she was about Louisa’s age, a little older; so call her thirty-nine, or thirty-eight and three quarters for solidarity’s sake. She was a brunette, her hair tapered close to the neck but longer in the front, a style Louisa had tried herself a couple of years back, but didn’t entirely get on with. Wearing jeans and a loose green sweater, which in other circumstances Louisa might have asked where it came from. She didn’t think, though, that they were about to become best buddies. She thought they were here so Clare Addison could stomp on her a bit before moving on. But Louisa wasn’t here to be anyone’s bunny, or even to talk about Min: she was here to say Yes, that was me. Give Clare Addison a face to go with the name, just like Louisa herself had one now. Closure worked both ways.

When she returned to the table, Clare was sitting, hands clasped in front of her. Louisa said some words: she wasn’t sure what—have you come far?; something like that. Clare was nodding, or shaking her head, and Louisa noticed tight lines around her mouth, the way her eyes flickered left to right, as if she were expecting somebody else. The tension seemed unnecessary. Whatever was going to happen, the worst was in the past. Wounds healed.

She made to say more words, useful ones this time, but Clare was already speaking.

“You worked with Min, right? At this place—Slough House?”

“That’s what they call it.”

“It’s where they assigned him after he messed up that time.”

“Yes,” said Louisa. She didn’t understand why the woman was going the long way round. What did she want, a day-by-day account of their affair? Because screw that. She was prepared to offer sympathy, but wasn’t about to bare her soul. “Clare, I don’t know how much Min told you about me, or about Slough House, but you have to understand there are some things I can’t talk about.”

“He didn’t tell me much. Just that it was a punishment posting, which I’d already worked out. And he didn’t talk about his colleagues at all. That’s why I rang his old number. I didn’t know who to ask for, otherwise.”

“You didn’t . . .”

“He talked about your boss, a dreadful man. Is he still there?”

“Oh yeah.”

“But I couldn’t remember his name.” Clare’s eyes became still at last, and she focused on Louisa. “And you were in the same office? On the next desk?”

“It’s an old-fashioned set-up,” she heard herself saying. “Not open-plan or anything.” Her voice faded away at the impossibility of putting Slough House into a modern office context. “He didn’t talk about any of us? His colleagues?”

“We weren’t together long, after he was posted there. He was in such a state. He couldn’t believe he’d messed up so bad.”

“No . . .”

“He heard about it on the radio, you know. On Today. An item about a classified disk being found on the Tube. They were onto the weather before he realised it was him they were talking about.”

One of those moments when the floor drops away. Louisa had once seen a photograph of a construction site in China; a huge development that razed a neighbourhood, though one homeowner had refused to sell up. So his house remained intact while all around was dug away, leaving it perched on a pillar of earth a hundred metres high. She remembered looking at the picture and recognizing it: no ground beneath your feet, save the space you occupied. Min had felt the same. It wasn’t so different now, she supposed, except that she’d got used to it.

She didn’t want more coffee; would be buzzing the rest of the morning. Gave her something to do with her hands, though.

“Clare—”

“I need your help.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“It’s Lucas. Our son. Min’s and mine.”

“Lucas? What’s he done?”

“He’s disappeared,” said Clare. “I’ve no idea where he is.”

A rusting green skip sat parallel to a length of wooden fencing, which looked twenty minutes’ effort away from being in the skip itself. This side of the fence was a row of garages, some with their doors rolled up, revealing workshop interiors, and overalled men tinkering with engines. From behind the thinly wooded area to Lech’s left came the sound of traffic, but here, in this low-key industrial estate, the cars were mostly sick or injured. This was where you’d come if you were rebuilding an American classic, or had recently flogged a car to death and were disposing of the body. A metal sign read powder coating fabrication shot blasting and it briefly amused him that, while he understood what each word meant, he had no clue what they signified.

Life was coding; was hidden messages. You knew what was going on or you didn’t.

Lech had parked on a grassy verge, and was walking through the estate called Northwick Park. A memory of mist hung in the air, and the ground was slick with leaves and the occasional fat black slug. Thrusting his hands into his pockets, he skidded briefly, then righted himself. A plane passed overhead, flying low; a two-seater, by the look. He didn’t know aeroplanes. His grandfathers, who’d both lived here, wouldn’t have recognised it either. But they’d have known what kept it in the air, and have held their breath at the memory of flight.

There were brick huts with corrugated roofs; some ivy-trailed, some barred up. Originally a hospital for American troops, the estate became a refuge for displaced Polish people in the war’s aftermath, and looking at it now in the bleak winter light, he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom.

But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind. Both his grandfathers had left Poland before the occupation; had served in the RAF, one a pilot, the other ground staff. They’d fought the war under foreign skies, but in time those skies had come to be their own. Maybe the skies hadn’t felt the same way. The war over, the men had chosen to stay and raise their families among fellow Poles, other ex-servicemen, until Northwick Park shut down in 1970. Both sets of grandparents, by this time in-laws, went to live on the south coast then, and family holidays for young Lech in the eighties had been seaside jaunts: ice cream and sandcastles. Poland was a name on the news, it was footage of unrest and cold-looking buildings, and he’d bridled against his ethnic heritage, hating the way it marked him as different, and had insisted on Alec, wouldn’t answer to Lech. His parents hadn’t fought him on the issue. Families from that end of Europe had learned to play the waiting game centuries ago. Give it time, give it time.

He had dark curly hair, and by five of an evening, looked like he’d gone two days without a shave. His genetic inheritance, he supposed. That, and a bone-bred pessimism: if you expected things to get worse, history would prove you right. And then, of course, there was the expectation of betrayal. Which was working out fine too.

A few short weeks back Lech had been an analyst on the Hub, Regent’s Park’s centre of activity, where the brightest and best were called to arms. He’d had all the usual training, but had never been out in the field. The nearest he’d come to an op was sitting in the back of the van while someone else kicked a door down. Afterwards, he’d be brought out to look at what had been found behind the door, or to offer a plausible reason as to why there was nothing behind the door after all, or occasionally to point at a different door and explain that that was the one he’d meant. This happened often enough that it had its own column in the budget. Analysis suited Lech; it gave him an excuse to brood. Not that he was sullen; he just liked to work things out, discover what was ticking. Plagued by insomnia, he’d pound the city streets, something he likened to taking London’s back off and exploring the workings. His fiancée, Sara, was used to waking in the dark to his absence, and would tell him, not entirely joking, that this would obviously cease once they were married. That was what life was: you worked, sometimes you couldn’t sleep, and your future was already being shaped. Until something crashed into it, and knocked everything out of true. A phrase that brought to mind Jackson Lamb.

Lamb was the head of Slough House, though you’d be forgiven for thinking him the belly. And yet, when Lech replayed their first encounter, he wondered how much to trust that initial judgement. Lamb was gross, sure—corpulent—though somehow not as obese as he appeared, as if the impression he gave of spilling out of his chair even while motionless was engineered. But when Lech had blinked and looked again, he hadn’t been able to tell where that thought had come from. Lamb was fat, that was all, and had a cruel look pasted across his damp-looking features. His hair, what was left of it, might have a blond tint if it were clean; his toenails might not be poking through his socks if he cut them. This last observation was impossible to avoid, Lamb’s shoeless feet being on his desk. He still wore his coat, however. The thought processes of a man who’d relax with his shoes off, his coat on, were foreign territory to Lech. Then again, the thought processes of Jackson Lamb, as revealed by their subsequent conversation, were probably terra incognita to the psychiatric profession as a whole.

“Oh, goodie fucking gumdrops,” he said, when Lech stepped into his room. “Fresh meat.”

“I was assigned here temporarily,” Lech said. “While some HR issues are sorted out.”

“HR issues,” Lamb repeated slowly. “Not heard it called that before.” He removed his feet from the desk with surprising agility, produced a cigarette out of nowhere, lit it, farted, reached into his desk drawer, removed a bottle of whisky he slammed onto his desk top, farted again, and said, “I don’t have any bad habits myself, so maybe I’m over-censorious. But seriously, kiddy porn?” He unscrewed the cap on the bottle. “You’re the six-foot Pole I wouldn’t touch that with.”

Lech Wicinski, who was five-eleven, felt his teeth clench. “I was told all details were sealed. You’re not supposed to know that.”

“Yeah, a list of things I’m not supposed to know but do would be nearly as long as the list of things I know but couldn’t give a toss about. Currently, you’re at the top of both. And a thing you should know about me is, I hate lists.” He blew out smoke Lech hadn’t noticed him inhaling. “The ones I don’t screw up and throw away, I feed into the shredder.”

Lech glanced around. The further reaches of the office were cloaked in shadow, but he couldn’t make out anything that might be a shredder.

“Yeah, okay, smartarse. I improvise.” There was a dirty glass among the rubbish on his desk, and Lamb poured whisky into it; what might have been a triple, if your idea of a single was a double. “Says on the paperwork you go by Alec. But your signature reads Lech. I’m guessing you reckoned a little ethnicity wouldn’t do any harm at this stage of your career, eh? This stage being the bit right before it runs off a cliff.”

“I answer to both.”

“How very broad-minded of you. But then, we’ve already established your lack of boundaries.”

“My lawyer—”

“Your lawyer is a figment of your fucking imagination. No way are the Park gunna allow you a brief, not until they’ve decided what the outcome’s gunna be. And as long as I’m popping your balloons, nobody gets assigned here temporarily. What you see is all you get. So let’s make everything simple, yeah? You spend the rest of your career pushing whatever paper I see fit to send your way, or you trot off now and jump in front of a bus. I’d use the pedestrian bridge, I was you. But wait until after six, there’s a sport, because it does fuck up the traffic.”

“The issue’s being investigated. I’ll be cleared. Because I didn’t do anything.”

Jackson Lamb farted again. “Me neither. And yet here we both are.”

“Are you always this unpleasant?”

Lamb shrugged. “It’s not an exact science.” He dropped his cigarette into a half-empty teacup. “And you can drop the wide-eyed innocence. Here in Slough House, you’re always guilty of something. Of being in Slough House, if nothing else.”

Lech stared.

“And one more thing. I don’t want to have to tell you to fuck off every time I want you to fuck off. So learn to read the signals and just fuck off at the appropriate moment, right? Of which this is one. So fuck off.”

If you expected things to get worse, history would prove you right, Lech remembered. You didn’t always have to wait for history, either. Sometimes the present stepped up and got on with the job.

When he’d left Lamb’s room, the woman in the office opposite glanced up from her desk. There might have been sympathy on her face, but if so it was only there for a moment.

I didn’t do it, he wanted to scream.

But isn’t that what the guilty always said?

That advice about stepping in front of a bus, he’d thought. Let’s not rule that out altogether.

For the moment, though, he trudged on through the fallen leaves of Northwick Park.

In the café the usual noises continued, but were blotted out by Clare’s words. Louisa put her mug down. Min’s son, Lucas, whose name she’d heard many times, but whom she’d never met. Missing. And here was his frightened mother.

She said, “Have you been to the police?”

“Well of course I’ve been to the police! You think you were my first option?”

“Sorry. Sorry. What did they say?”

Clare Addison calmed as suddenly as she’d erupted. “No, I’m . . . They took details. They’ve put him on a register or whatever . . . A missing persons list.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventeen.”

Seventeen: Jesus. Where did the time go? But his mother didn’t need to be asked that.

Louisa said, “He’s a minor. Aren’t they treating it with urgency?”

Clare looked away, towards the door. Someone was coming in, or going out. It didn’t matter which. She said, “He’s had some . . . issues. In the past.”

“He’s run away before?”

“He had difficulties. When Min left. And when he died.”

“Of course . . .”

“There was trouble at school, and he took off for a few days. But that’s all it was, a few days.”

“And the police looked for him then?”

“There was a bit of a palaver. And there was some, well. Drugs. Cannabis, that’s all.”

“Did they prosecute?”

“No, thank goodness. It was just a small amount. And that was two years ago.”

“When he was fifteen.”

God, shut up. This isn’t a maths lesson.

“Yes,” Clare said. “And after that, he . . . Things got better. I came down on him hard of course, but that’s what he needed, what he wanted, really. And he settled down. Sixth form college now. He’s been doing really well.”

“But now he’s disappeared?”

“And the police think he’s done another bunk, that he’s off getting high in some squat or other, but he isn’t, I know he isn’t.” Clare broke off and stared into her lap. It was a second or two before Louisa realised she was crying.

She reached awkwardly across, and laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

Clare said, “He’s been gone three days.”

“What happened? Did he . . .” Did he what, she wondered. What did teenagers do? If her own experience was anything to go by, nothing they wanted their mothers to know about, but they were past that stage. Here his mother was, in tears, looking to a stranger for help. And it only then struck her what was going on: Clare wasn’t here because Louisa and Min had been lovers. She was here because Louisa was a spook, and might have access to uncommon search engines, to special forces. Clare was a frightened mother, with no space to be anything else. And desperate too, turning to Min’s old colleagues for help.

“He’s like his dad,” Clare said at last.

“Headstrong?” said Louisa, unable to help it. “Prone to . . . charging off?”

“You knew him, didn’t you?” Clare reached into a pocket and produced a tissue; blew her nose noisily. “Sorry.” She lifted her cup, set it down. Brushed at her hair with a hand. “Yes. He gets it into his head to do something, it’s hard to dislodge.”

“What did he get it into his head to do?”

Clare didn’t know.

But what had happened was, a few days previously, Lucas hadn’t come home from college. A telephone call had established that he hadn’t made it as far as college that morning, either. Clare had called the police, whose response was initially alert, but became significantly more lax once details were gathered.

“He’d taken some money from his savings account.”

“How much?”

“A few hundred pounds.”

Louisa nodded, trying to keep all expression from her face. The kid had been minted; he had a history of skipping out and getting wasted. There was only one box left unchecked:

“Does he have a girlfriend?”

“He’s not just sloped off to shack up with a girl. He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t do that without letting me know.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just asking the obvious questions, that’s all . . . Did he take anything other than money?”

Again the door opened, closed; again Clare looked up. It was as if she expected him to walk in and plonk himself down next to her. As if this nightmare she was living through could be wiped away as easily as that; the way real ones were, when you opened your eyes.

“A rucksack,” she said. “Just a small one.”

Louisa mentally filled it with the things a teenage boy might think essential—a mobile phone, charger, condoms. Dick Whittington for the twenty-first century. She took a deep breath, and said what needed saying. “I’m sorry, but it’s pointless kidding around here. He left of his own accord. You must see that.”

“But why?”

“That’s not for me . . . Clare, I’m sorry.” She’d apologised more this past ten minutes than in the past two years combined. And all for stuff that was less her fault than it was her business. “But it’s a good thing. If he left of his own free will, under his own steam, then he’ll come back when he’s ready. I’m sure he will.”

Yeah, right, because she was an expert.

She said, “You should go home. Wait there. He’ll turn up soon.”

Clare threw her a look. “You think I’m making a fuss about nothing.”

“I read some stats not long ago,” Louisa said. Her job was all stats; she couldn’t avoid them. “Ninety percent of missing teens come home inside of three days.”

She was pretty sure that’s what she’d read.

“His three days are up.”

“Which is why you should be at home.”

“He said he wasn’t worried about a student loan anymore.”

“. . . Okay . . .”

Clare shot her a look. “You don’t think that’s significant?”

“I don’t think anything. I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s something we’ve talked about, the cost of a degree. I’ve told him I’ll help as much as I can, but he knows he’s going to have to take out a loan. And he’s been, well, not obsessing about it exactly. But it keeps coming up. He wants to travel, wants to go to the States, but he’s also aware that everything costs so much. But suddenly he’s saying it’s not a problem.”

Louisa didn’t know how to respond. She said, “What about his brother? You have two boys, right?”

“Andrew. He’s two years younger.”

“And he doesn’t have any idea where Lucas might have gone?”

“He says not. They fight like cats and dogs half the time. They’ll grow out of it, but . . . No. He has no idea.”

“And where did Lucas’s savings come from? Does he have a job?”

“Not during term time. But he was working over Christmas. We were in Pembrokeshire. In Wales?”

Yeah, thanks, thought Louisa.

“We go there often, family holidays. We started when Lucas was two. So we’ve made friends down there, and . . .”

The way she tailed off made Louisa wonder whether any particular friend came to mind. But not her business.

“And he was working there?”

“I know someone runs a catering business, he takes on part-time help. And it pays well. So Lucas usually does a few jobs when we’re down there. It’s cash in hand, so . . .”

She looked up once more as the door jangled again. Despite everything, it was getting on Louisa’s nerves. She said, “Clare? He’s not about to walk in. If you’re expecting him, it’s your home he’ll turn up at.”

“It’s not that, I just . . . Oh, I’m just feeling paranoid. These past few days. As if I’m being watched.”

“. . . Really?”

“I’m all over the place. It’s nothing.”

Louisa finished her coffee. She played it out for a few seconds, hunting for an escape clause. She’d come expecting a showdown, or perhaps a tearful encounter and a few shared memories. But Clare had no idea she’d been more to Min than a colleague, and her missing son was a teenager with a couple of ton in his backpack and a history of going walkabout while stoned. It didn’t feel like anything she should be getting involved with.

Her stonewalling technique might need working on. Clare said, “I shouldn’t have bothered you. Not on your weekend.”

“It’s no bother.”

“You’re right. He’ll turn up. Or he won’t. But that’s no concern of yours, is it?”

She gathered herself together and stood.

“He’ll be fine,” Louisa said. “I’m sure he will.”

“You’re sure,” said Clare. “That’s okay, then.”

“What is it you expected me to do?”

“You work for the security services,” Clare said, a bit louder than Louisa would have preferred in a crowded café. “I thought you might think of something. Not as a favour to me, or even to Lucas. But you were fucking Min, weren’t you? I’d have hoped that counted for something.”

This time, the door slammed instead of just clicking shut. But then, Clare put some shoulder into it.

Excellent Saturday morning so far, thought Louisa. But as she was in town anyway, she might as well get some shopping done.

Lech remembered the memorial as soon as he laid eyes on it. It was a shrine, almost; a drystone alcove, under a tree. There was a statue of the Virgin, of course, and vases of flowers, and saucers holding unlit candles. He wondered about lighting one, but didn’t have a match, and anyway, it wouldn’t flicker for a moment before the wind put it out of its misery. Besides, who was he kidding? He read the inscription, or started reading it, then hurried to the end, cherry-picking words: To commemorate the Polish ex-servicemen who lived here with their families from 1948–1970. Ordeal, deportation, Allied victory. And everything that followed, including, eventually, him.

He could hear shouting from the garages, horseplay, and he closed his eyes, pretending that this was a normal day, and the impulse that brought him here a Saturday whimsy. Sara would be wondering where he was. If he turned his phone on it would confirm this, with a series of irritated chirrups. But Sara, at least, believed in him—or would do, if she knew what was going on, which she didn’t. He’d explained that it was stuff, that’s all; a protocol issue; that he’d been seconded to an office near the Barbican for the time being. Even he hadn’t known what “protocol issue” meant.

The thing is, they found child porn on my laptop. So everyone’s a little tetchy. You want to catch a movie, or shall we have an early one?

Someone had stubbed out a nearly complete cigarette on the stonework, and left it nestled in a rift. He looked at it for a moment or two, then walked on.

When he ran his mind over the weeks prior to the cataclysm, one thing stuck out. He’d done a favour for an acquaintance, a Service drone called John Bachelor, who worked the milk round, nannying superannuated spooks. Just because you’d put your life on the line back in the dark ages didn’t mean you could get to Sainsbury’s on your own here and now. Spooks got old too. So other spooks who were never much cop were assigned to hold their hands, or do their shopping for them. That had been Bachelor’s role: a straight-to-DVD career. Lech had met him just once before, at the funeral of one of his grandfather’s comrades. It seemed, in retrospect, an appropriately Polish encounter; they’d spent an afternoon drinking, talking about someone neither had known especially well, who was dead. And months later there’d been a bill to pay, because Bachelor had asked a favour; that he run a name through the Service search engines; a name, it turned out, that was flagged—a person of interest. Which meant Lech was trespassing. So he’d shut the search down and waited for shit to fall from on high, which he’d expected to take the form of a finger-wagging email, or a visit from a Dog. But nothing happened. Bachelor had rung a day or so later, calling it off; whatever had sparked his need had died down. And that was it: maybe nothing of consequence, except it was the only thing out of the ordinary in the period before the shitstorm.

No way of chasing it up now, either. He was tainted twice over, a pervert and a slow horse, and doors were closing, every way he looked. Any further research, he’d have to use chicken entrails and a dowsing rod.

There was a glitter of wings as a pigeon took to the air.

Lech turned his phone on and checked his screen. Four unread texts and seven missed calls. All from Sara, who was unaware he was a hundred miles away.

As he walked back to his car, passing the shuttered huts, their barred windows, he tried to think about his grandparents again; about the lives they’d made after all they’d come through. Object lesson in overcoming adversity.

But mostly he was thinking about Slough House.

Mondays are bastards, through and through; Thursdays are waiting days, neither one thing nor the other. Fridays: everyone knows what they’re like. But this Wednesday, the day of the funeral, had stepped outside the calendar, and had no borders River could see. Dressing had been like putting on a costume for a role he hadn’t rehearsed. And the feeling in his stomach, a Sunday-night anxiety, had been with him on waking and continued to grow. It made little sense—the bad thing had already happened. Still, he felt as if he’d been diagnosed with a condition that was serious and complicated, but about which he remembered nothing. He’d just have to wait and see.

The O.B. had spent his retirement years in Kent, but would be buried in London, as Rose had been. The memory of that day was one River kept sealed, and he and the old man had rarely talked of it. But it had been there in their silences; in the gaps between the stories his grandfather told. When River arrived at the house unexpectedly, he had sometimes felt he was interrupting a conversation; that even now, with Rose in her grave, the pair shared secrets. Not all spies’ partners knew the truth, that their other half lived on Spook Street. But Rose had always been in the know. She’d held the door open between her husband’s different addresses, allowing him to step into the light when the day’s dark deeds were done.

But all that was long ago. For the last year of his life, his grandfather’s conversations had had no anchor, and whether he’d been talking to Rose, who was absent, or River, who was not, made no difference; he would drift with the prevailing current, his conversation spinning into eddies or battering invisible rocks. All his life, River had heard tales from the old man’s past, the failures, the victories, the stalemates, and he had learned to read between the lines enough to tell which was which. But no longer. The scraps he heard now were remnants from a shot memory; tattered flags blown by conflicting winds. You’d need a map to know which side the old man had been on. Which might have been the last secret he needed to impart to his grandson; that in the end, all lines blurred. That no day had firm borders.

But but but. This day had come.

So had his mother.

He hadn’t been sure she’d turn up. Their phone conversation, the day the O.B. died, had been one of tortured small talk, “So apart from that, how are you?” being his mother’s most memorable contribution. She was currently ‘wintering’ in Brighton, a term he’d only heard her use in Mediterranean contexts before, and he wondered if she were lowering her ceilings; whether the comfort the late Mr. Dunstable left her in had begun to leak at the seams. He hoped not. River hadn’t lived with his mother since he was seven, when she’d left him at her parents’ door, and his fading memories of the life they’d shared were scrappy and unfulfilled. Until lately, when he’d thought about those years, the context had been one of bad parenting, but now he thought about how unhappy she must have been, how desperate. He didn’t think she’d survive another taste of that. He was pretty certain he wouldn’t survive hearing about it.

So it was a relief when she arrived at St. Leonard’s in a taxi she’d evidently hired on the south coast: evidence of economy measures—travelling by train, or, God forbid, coach—would have indicated not merely penury but a character transplant. He’d seen enough of that with the O.B.

He’d been waiting at the roadside end of the gravel drive, next to the eight-foot hedge that shielded the chapel from view. Once she’d waved her car off she hugged him, and he felt for a moment that life could have been different. But only for a moment, and only until she spoke.

“How did you get to be so big?” she complained. “Having a son your size. It’s very ageing.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”

“I don’t suppose it’s entirely your fault.”

There were times he could admire his mother’s self-absorption: it was a rare example of her showing total commitment. “You decided to come, then.”

She looked around. She was holding a single lily wrapped in cellophane, and now the hugging was done she resumed a two-handed grip on it, as if it were an assault weapon. “Where is everyone?”

“The service doesn’t start for forty-five minutes.”

“You said eleven sharp!”

“And it’s quarter past now,” he explained. “Which is why I lied.”

Cruel as it was to deprive Isobel of her big entrance, he felt he had enough to cope with already.

“I suppose you think that was clever.”

He kind of did, but could see it wasn’t an argument he’d win in a hurry. “I wasn’t sure how long you’d be able to stay. And I thought you might want a chance to talk.”

“I think we both know where you get your deviousness from.” She stroked his cheek. “It’s a good job you inherited some of my charm along with it.”

That was another debate he wasn’t about to get involved in.

She tucked her arm through his. “Come on, then. Let’s look at the final resting place. Plot, I should say. Yes, in his case, definitely a plot.”

He’d give her that one, though he was pretty sure she’d worked it out on the journey. But he was glad, even so, that she was here, and they walked round the side of the chapel together.

“Wonder if he’ll jump in the grave.”

“This isn’t Hamlet.”

“Does that happen in Hamlet?” said Lamb. “I was thinking of Carry On Screaming.”

They were in the back of a taxi, Lamb taking up seventy percent of the available space, and Catherine wishing the day over. She didn’t like funerals—who did?—and hadn’t known David Cartwright in any meaningful sense. Once or twice long ago she’d encountered him, or taken minutes at a meeting he’d attended; and much later, she’d had the brief keeping of him while River feared his life was at risk. He’d been lost to dementia by then, and if it were true that such conditions reveal the secret self, David Cartwright had been mostly cunning and fear, the two sides of his nature entwined and snapping at each other like fox cubs. She shook the memory away; pictured, instead, the bottle she’d buy on her way home, then squashed that thought too. Sitting next to Lamb, your secrets weren’t safe. He had a way of seeing inside your head, and holding what he found up to the light, for his amusement.

She just hoped he wasn’t going to talk about death the whole journey.

“So when you cop it,” he said, “how’d you want to go? Buried, cremated or eaten by cats?”

“I don’t keep cats,” she said.

“You don’t have to. Crafty bastards, cats. They’ll find a way in.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

Lamb cast her a malevolent look. “Why not? Heard any good jokes lately?”

“If life’s taught me anything, it’s that we won’t find the same things funny.”

It had also taught her that when she least wanted Lamb’s company, she’d end up in the back of a cab with him. Like those cats he thought crafty bastards, he responded to being shunned by singling you out for attention. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Here’s a good one. Guess how our new recruit pissed on his chips?”

Lech Wicinski. Catherine had assigned him to Roderick Ho’s office; both Louisa and Shirley had space, but Shirley could be volatile on days ending with -y, and Louisa had made it clear she didn’t want to share. It was like wrangling teenagers. But as to how Wicinski had blotted his copybook, Catherine didn’t know and didn’t want to. Apart from anything else, mere blots didn’t warrant Slough House. Most recruits had set fire to their copybook, shoved it through First Desk’s letterbox, then tried to douse the flames by urinating through the slot.

She said, “Disciplinary files are supposed to be sealed. You’ll have HR on your case if you start talking about your team’s misdemeanours.”

“Really? I never knew that.” He considered for a moment. “Good job I’m the soul of discretion, or things could have got embarrassing.”

“Imagine.”

“But anyway, they caught him with child porn on his laptop.”

Catherine Standish closed her eyes.

“I know, right? Time was you could pass it off as an allergy to pubic hair. But these days, you want to see pubic hair, you’ve really got to go looking. If the Daily Mail’s to be believed.” He adopted a pious expression. “Personally, I wouldn’t know. But anyway, yeah, Lech Wicinski. He’s Polish, by the way.”

“I did not know that,” she said, in a flat tone.

“Well, smarten up. The name should’ve been a clue. I’m not saying all Poles are kiddy-fiddlers. Wouldn’t hire one as a babysitter, though.”

The idea of Lamb being in need of a babysitter, for any reason whatsoever but especially one involving an actual baby, was too upsetting to contemplate. Which was why Catherine responded, rather than allowing the moment to drift away at its own speed. “He doesn’t look the type.”

“And what does the type look like?”

He had a point. They didn’t all sport tracksuits and medallions.

She said, “That’s a criminal offence. How come he’s been assigned to us?”

“Maybe they think I’m collecting the set.” He counted off on his fingers. “Fuck-ups, basket cases, druggies and drunks. Now a kiddy porn-peeper. When I’ve got a dog-botherer, I win a case of cutlery.”

“And what would you do with cutlery? You mostly eat with your fingers.”

“You’re very confrontational lately. I have to walk on eggshells, God knows why. You’re too old to be on the rag.” He sniffed suspiciously. “Don’t tell me you’re hitting the bottle.”

“You’re asking me? You wouldn’t be able to work it out for yourself?”

“You alkies can be devious. It’s the reason no one trusts you.”

She said, “As long as we’re on the subject, I hope you don’t plan to drink during the actual ceremony. Those who are genuinely grieving might take it the wrong way.”

“There’s no point having a hip flask if you don’t use it.”

“That’s not a hip flask. It’s a small bottle.”

“Jesus. Who put you in pedants’ corner?” Lamb produced the offending bottle, unscrewed the top and took a swallow. “And a less tolerant man would take issue with that. Genuinely grieving, I mean.”

“You’re not seriously going to pretend you’re mourning his passing. So why are you even here?”

“You’re expecting me to say, to make sure the old bastard’s dead, aren’t you?”

She didn’t reply.

“And well, yeah, that’s part of it. Okay, so he was off his head the last year, but if I’d done half what he got up to I’d pretend to go doolally too, in case the busies turned up with a charge sheet and a bucket full of questions. So maybe he was on his game the whole time, and he’s faked his death. He’d not be the first.”

She stared at him, mouth not entirely closed.

“We’re spies, Standish. All kinds of outlandish shit goes on. You want some of this?”

She shook her head.

“Like I said, devious. A blind man could tell you do.” He put the bottle away, but its odour lingered in the air, and caught the back of her throat.

“You hated him.”

“I hate a lot of people. Doesn’t mean I won’t get lonely when they’re all dead.”

You’re lonely now, she thought but didn’t say. You’re lonely now.

“And what about Wicinski? Lech.” She had to force herself to use his name. Some allegations tainted every syllable, even when they were just that: allegations.

“There’s an ongoing investigation, unquote,” Lamb said. “While facts are assessed and outcomes determined. Unquote.”

“So he wasn’t actually caught red-handed?”

“One-handed, you mean. But no. His laptop’s guilty as charged, but his dick’s still in the dock.”

“Which means, for the moment at least, we regard him as innocent. Unless I’m misremembering the basic principles of British justice.”

“Your faith in human nature really pisses me off, you know that?”

“As good a reason as any for clinging onto it.”

The taxi gave a lurch as it pulled away from a set of lights, and the motion made everything drunken for a second: Catherine was in a strange loose place, and rattled around, unanchored. And then the moment passed, though the taste at the back of her throat remained, as it likely always would. The taste she’d never forget, and would always be straining to remember.

She blinked, and her vision blurred. She blinked again, and it returned.

On her way home, she’d buy another bottle. Meanwhile, there was a funeral to get through. She hoped that would happen without Jackson Lamb causing any gross moments.

And she hoped River didn’t jump into any graves.

Which didn’t seem likely, but Lamb had a point.

All kinds of outlandish shit went on.

The funeral was in Hampstead. St. Leonard’s was a discreet brick building in a quiet close: services on alternate Sundays, though the alert might notice that these seldom came to pass. Perhaps this was a sign of dwindling congregations; perhaps an indication that the powers-that-be considered this particular enclave well served already, and that other, less moneyed areas might benefit more from the Church’s resources. But it was true that, if regular services were not on the menu, St. Len’s put on a lovely funeral. The graveyard at its rear was a calm oasis; each corner with its own tree, its own bench. Sitting there, you could forget there was a city mere streets away. You could bask in the quiet company of the dead.

And if it seemed strange that most of the buried had no obvious local connection, there were few to keep track of such oddities. Funerals are private affairs, and never more so than at The Spooks’ Chapel, where many cover stories had been laid to rest, and last words said over careers that had blossomed in dark corners, some so successfully that even close friends and family remained unaware of their true nature. But, as Jackson Lamb had been known to remark, suits’ bodies were easier to find than those of joes, and messy ends didn’t lead to tidy burials. So inside the chapel, on the west wall, were plaques to the memory of those who hadn’t made their way home, a display some called The Last Dead Letter Drop. The names on the plaques weren’t always those their owners had been born with, but there was a case for saying that the name you died with carried more weight. The identity you never let go of; that, in the end, let go of you instead.

Though of course, thought River, the O.B.’s identity had slipped away from him before he gave up breathing.

His mother at his side, he walked among the gravestones towards a freshly dug hole. It was cold, because how could it be anything else? And the ground was hard, which meant someone had had a job of it; clearing a space for David Cartwright. Did you tip gravediggers? River couldn’t recall the subject coming up.

Isobel’s grip on his arm tightened. “I know you think I hated him.”

“Well, yes. But only because you told me you hated him.”

“It was complicated.”

River knew how complicated it was. His mother, though, didn’t know he knew that, or he didn’t think she did. That was how complicated it was: people not knowing how much other people knew they knew. It was possible that other families were like this; ones without spies in them.

He said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

“He’d lost his mind, hadn’t he?”

“There were . . . glimpses of him. Right to the end.” This was a lie. The last sight he’d had of his grandfather—the man, not the shell—had been months ago.

And he wasn’t sure why he didn’t say as much. His mother didn’t need her feelings tiptoed round. She hadn’t spoken to her father in years. When she’d called him the Old Bastard, she’d meant precisely that. It was River who’d diluted the words; doused their spite with affection.

On the other hand, since learning what had driven father and daughter apart, he was less inclined to blame his mother. Things had happened to Isobel that had been part of a game she hadn’t known she’d been drafted into. She had lost her heart, and borne a son, to Frank Harkness, an American spook, though “lost her heart” was a kind way of phrasing it. In reality Harkness had stolen it, then traded it back to David Cartwright for various favours. Had he not done so, River’s life would have taken a very different course—he’d have been a soldier in another man’s army—so he supposed he couldn’t complain that things had worked out as they had, but he was aware that the bargain had been a foul one, and Isobel’s heart had not been returned intact. Certainly it never opened in her father’s direction again. It probably explained why River himself had always felt his mother’s absence, even on those occasions when she was present. Like now, approaching the O.B.’s grave.

It was next to Rose’s, of course, on whom the earth had settled. They stopped beside it, and Isobel placed the lily on the headstone.

“A lily for Rose,” she said, and again River had the feeling he was an audience for a rehearsed moment.

While she stood contemplating her mother’s resting place, or planning her next gesture, River looked into the hole that would soon accommodate his grandfather. The O.B. had filled the space a father might have done in River’s life, while his actual father pursued a mad crusade. That venture had come to an end now, or River assumed it had. But with Frank, who knew? He was out in the world somewhere, and pretty certainly hadn’t hung up his sword and shield. Though whatever use he was putting them to was probably confined to the shadows.

He looked at his mother, who was dabbing her eyes with a tissue, and tossed a mental coin: benefit of the doubt.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh . . . I’ll be fine.”

“He loved you, you know. They both did.”

“I never had cause to doubt my mother’s love.”

Which sounded like it had been put through translation software. But again: benefit of the doubt.

His mother had taken hold of his arm again, and he led her away, along the path to its far corner, where it curved and headed back towards the front. But she paused there and reached into her bag, from which she produced cigarettes and a lighter.

“You’re still doing that?”

“You’re my son, not my GP.”

“And what does your GP have to say about it?”

Isobel lit a cigarette, and watched smoke float into the branches overhead. “I’m sure I can’t imagine.”

From where they were standing they could see past the body of the chapel to the drive, where a limo was pulling up. River supposed he should be there to greet arrivals, but wasn’t sure of the protocol. When you buried a grandfather, people queued to shake your hand. Did the same hold true when you buried a spy? Or was that an occasion for furtive glances, mumbled code? Whatever the case, River abandoned all thought of it when he saw who was emerging from the limo: Lady Di Taverner, newly appointed First Desk, and the woman responsible for his exile to Slough House.

Down the road, a man sat in a car. His hazard lights were flashing, as if to indicate a temporary, unwilled stop, and he was talking on his phone, or seemed to be. His lips were moving; the phone was near his mouth. Even so, his presence earned a tap on the window.

He flipped a switch, and the glass rolled down.

“Can I ask if you’re going to be long, sir?”

This from a handy-looking gent in an overcoat. The man said, “’Scuse one sec,” into his phone, securing it between chin and shoulder while he produced an ID card which he flashed at the intruder with something between a squint and a smile: You’re just doing your job, mate, we both know that. The newcomer took the card, studied it a moment, and handed it back with a nod. As he walked back the way he’d come, the car window hummed upwards again.

Out loud, the man in the car said, “And don’t you just feel like you’ve had a narrow escape, buddy? One of you Dogs gets a long hard look at a CIA pass, the next words you hear are usually ‘black, two sugars.’”

This might have earned a chuckle if there’d been anyone on the other end of the phone.

He carried on chatting to nobody while a limo pulled onto the chapel’s drive: long, black, funeral issue, fuck knows why. You might as well turn up in a clown car, have everyone tumble out in a heap. Make no difference to the dead. But instead, from the back of this limo emerged a woman; from the far side, a man.

That the American could identify both should have been a problem, but the people it should have been a problem for were happy with a squint and a smile and a fake ID. The pair from the limo disappeared from view. Another car was arriving; there’d be a fleet of the damn things soon. He wondered how many of their occupants felt genuine stirrings of sorrow. Let’s face it, an ancient spook like David Cartwright, if people had the nerve to offer the tribute he deserved, as many would be taking a leak on his coffin as removing their hats. You didn’t end a life on Spook Street without more enemies than friends; not if you’d done things properly. On the other hand, Cartwright was a legend, and it’s always sad when legends die. It underlines the fact that shit like death can happen to anyone.

Place was a security nightmare, though—they called it The Spooks’ Chapel, which summed it up: why didn’t they pitch a neon sign out front? He’d just watched the Park’s First Desk arrive, followed by Oliver Nash, Head of the Limitations Committee, who, okay, wasn’t going to sell tickets on his own, but if you were in the know—if you knew who pulled the levers on this secret train they rode—you’d definitely want to target, if you were a bad actor. One well-timed intervention and you could take out the whole of the Service’s top tier, and much of its dead wood, without pausing between breaths. But then, that was the trouble with England—with Britain—it was so in love with its myths and legends, it couldn’t see what a ball and chain they were. No, if you wanted to stay ahead of the bad guys, you had to cut history loose. That was his considered opinion. He had memories—who didn’t?—but his baggage was all carry-on; he could walk away from any identity he’d ever had without a backward glance. He certainly wouldn’t hang around to bury his dead. And if he did, he wouldn’t bury them in a tourist attraction. “The Spooks’ Chapel.” You might as well print pamphlets.

Some of this he said out loud, into the dead phone, and if anyone was watching they’d note his animation and assume he was talking to someone he could pull rank on: an underling or a girlfriend, not a boss or a wife. And maybe, thinking he was CIA, they’d assume he was here to pay his respects to a one-time hero of a rival Service, because they were all in this together, even if only one of them was going into a hole today. So yeah, that’s what they’d think; that he was representing the Company, and he’d hang up his call and dip his head when they carried the coffin inside.

But he wasn’t here to pay respects.

He was here collecting faces.

And this, anyway, solved River’s protocol problem: if they stood right where they were they could watch arrivals without having to worry about whom to acknowledge, whom to discreetly ignore. Lady Di, for instance, and the tubby man she’d come with: what Lamb would call a suit, by which Lamb meant it was only the pinstripes holding him upright. Whoever he was, Lady Di was a difficulty. Responsible for River’s exile, because though—on paper—he’d crashed King’s Cross, a messed-up training exercise of a kind no junior spook could walk away from, the mess-up hadn’t been of his making but hers. History now, but it still churned River to see her.

His mother was regarding him, an odd expression on her face. “Are you all right, dear?”

“It’s my grandfather’s funeral.”

But she’d followed the direction of his scrutiny. “Oh, I say.” She watched Taverner walk the gravelled path to the chapel door. “A little . . . mature for you, dear.”

“She’s . . .” He hesitated, but what the hell. His mother was a Service child. “First Desk. That’s why she’s here.”

“Well, she’s nicely turned out, I’ll give her that. But you ought to set your sights on someone your own age.”

“I’m not—”

“Or your own wage bracket. That’s Chanel she’s wearing.” She eyed her son critically. “Whereas, well, not to criticise. But where did that suit actually come from? A garage forecourt?”

“They had a surprisingly wide selection.”

“You’re going to need that sense of humour if you don’t start earning money soon. And who’s this?”

This was Louisa Guy, who saw them and sketched a wave, but went straight inside. River was glad to see her. She hadn’t known his grandfather, and hadn’t come because he was a Service legend: she’d come because River was a friend, and if River drew up a list of his current friendships, he’d be chewing his pencil once he’d written her name. But he was also happy she’d headed in. Friend didn’t necessarily mean he wanted her to meet his mother. There were some conversations you didn’t want to have.

And some you couldn’t avoid.

“A little more your league, dear.”

“She’s a colleague.”

“Like I say.”

“It’s a funeral, mother. Not a speed-dating group.”

“Just as well. You’re not exactly in a hurry, are you?” She wrapped both hands round his elbow. “But I don’t mean to pressure you. If there’s anything you want to tell me, just come out and say it. Your grandfather was an old reactionary, but I’ve always had very liberal views.”

“I’m not gay.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

“And if I was, why imagine I’m fixated on Di Taverner?”

“It’s a not uncommon pattern. But don’t forget, dear. Liberal views.”

His sexual identity, income bracket and dress sense having been taken care of, River wondered whether they could now focus on the morning’s actual business. He looked away. Frost had rimed the headstones’ edges, and crystallised the bouquets that graced some graves; it had captured, too, a hundred spiderwebs, transforming them to works of antique beauty: jewellery fit to adorn the Egyptian dead. Not that the O.B. would have considered himself a Pharaoh. But he’d have enjoyed advising one; whispering strategies into the ear of power. That would have been his role whatever his era.

The lily his mother had placed on Rose’s stone had been glazed already by the light, and might have been sculpted there. River wished—he didn’t know what he wished. He felt an unanchored yearning; a desire that things weren’t like this. But he couldn’t wish his grandparents alive. He couldn’t face watching them die again.

He felt a tug on his sleeve: his mother. A taxi had arrived.

“And that’s him, is it?”

It did not surprise him that Isobel should so easily recognise a man she’d never met.

“That’s Jackson, yes.”

“I thought he was supposed to be some kind of master spy.”

“I’m not sure anyone’s ever decided what kind of spy he is.”

“A badly dressed one, that’s clear. Does he realise it’s a funeral?”

“I’m pretty certain it was mentioned on the invite.”

Catherine was with Lamb. She seemed grey, a creature of the weather. Funerals had that effect, unless there was something else going on.

“We should make our way inside,” he said. Just saying the words shifted something inside him: this was really happening, a memory he’d never lose. Today he was burying his grandfather.

They walked back the long way round, and passed the waiting grave once more. River had the feeling it should have had more to say for itself; should have been an empty, yawning terror. But it was only a hole in the ground, and that somehow made it worse.

Louisa had passed a man in a car up the road, perfectly placed to clock attendees, but if he was anyone to worry about the Dogs would have sorted him out. Though they were Dogs without a walker at the moment—she’d heard from Emma Flyte at the weekend. Louisa had been in the shower, and the call had gone to voicemail. Emma sounded pissed but against a quiet background.

I just got screwed. Does that make me a member of your club?

A pause, a swallow.

Yeah, well, anyway. I told Taverner to fuck off, so I’m now what they call looking for a new position. Should be fun.

Another pause.

So give me a call sometime. We can swap notes on what it’s like being booted out of Regent’s Park. It’s Emma, by the way.

Louisa had already gathered that much.

She wished she’d been there, to see Emma give Taverner the finger. Who was here, of course, duty-mourning. There were others she half-recognised too, faces glimpsed back in the day, riding the lifts to the Park’s top floors. If things had been different, River Cartwright would have been down the front; chief mourner and heir apparent. As it was he was loitering under a tree, with a woman Louisa supposed was his mother. He’d slip in soon, and make his way to the front, but it wasn’t like the great and good would be lining up to offer their sorrows. The way things might have been. A funeral a pretty obvious occasion to flip through that book of swatches.

But enough of other people’s problems. What should she do about Lucas Harper?

You were fucking Min. I’d have hoped that counted for something.

She hadn’t been, of course. Well, she had been, but that wasn’t what it had been about; she had loved him, he had loved her, they’d have shared their lives, or made the attempt, if he hadn’t died. So where did that leave her? Not in Clare Harper’s debt, that was certain. Addison. Whatever. So why was it niggling at her, this feeling that she’d turned her back when she should have offered a hand? Min’s boys had been a fuzzy image on the periphery of their relationship, part of his life she had no access to. She hadn’t hassled him to make introductions; had assumed that that would happen sooner or later, mentally filing it as an ordeal her future self would handle. And here she was: her future self. Niggled at by responsibilities a younger Louisa had avoided.

But Min’s son had left home, that was all, taking his savings with him. A bad idea, but at seventeen a lot of bad ideas had a certain attraction. Louisa could think of a few she’d had herself; Clare too, probably. But there was no doubt Clare was suffering. Louisa thought of the way she’d startled every time the coffee shop door opened. It was natural, to become paranoid at such times. She’d spend her nights awake, blurry with fear. It would be like grief.

Whose soundtrack started even as she had the thought; something grey and sonorous from the organ above. It seemed designed to mark time; not so much its current passage as those stretches forever gone. It made her think of Min, of course. She hadn’t attended his funeral. Too angry. If she had, she’d have met—or seen—Lucas; would have a mental picture of him based in reality, instead of imagining a younger Min; the same half-smile; the same look of concentration when sending a text or checking a score. She had a whole catalogue of images to flick through, from a relatively short time together. What would a lifetime’s memories look like? It was already too late to tell.

If Min hadn’t died, they’d have lasted—sitting here at someone else’s postscript, this felt like a truth. They could have shared a life together, once they’d swallowed the bitter pill about their careers, and jumped ship—happy-ever-afters weren’t much of a thing around Slough House: you couldn’t have the one within the other. Too late now. And Louisa could feel herself getting into the funeral vibe; tears ready to flow, though misattributed tears; nothing to do with the deceased . . .

River walked past, arm in arm with his mother, and the music grew louder, and the service was ready to begin.

He’d seen the face he had come to collect, he was ninety percent sure of that. Had taken a photo. So what he should do now was leave, but something was holding him in place; the sense of unfinished business. That was always the way with funerals, except in those rare cases where you were burying someone you’d killed yourself. That was less of a joke than it might have been if someone else had made it but he thrust the thought aside as he turned his hazard lights off, put his phone away, climbed out of the car.

The Dog who’d checked him out earlier watched as he approached but didn’t challenge him; nodded, rather, from his sentry position by the hedge. Jesus, mate. Do your job. An organ was droning. They’d be lined up in pews now; heads bowed, attention elsewhere. Instead of joining them, he skirted the building and found the graveyard, in the far corner of which a hole was waiting. He lit a cigarette, thinking about those he’d seen heading into St. Len’s earlier. River, of course, and his mother. Isobel had aged gracefully, presumably at the same speed as himself, though she’d taken care to slow down on the curves, or had some first-class mechanics hammering the dings out every other lap. As for River, he was still young enough to take the knocks and stay standing, or get back on his feet afterwards. A nice trick, soon lost. River would learn.

He inhaled, breathed out; the smoke torn apart on the wind. He should leave, he reminded himself, but approached the graveside anyway.

Some of the others, he could put a name to. The fat, badly dressed man: that would be Jackson Lamb. Fat didn’t mean soft, if the stories were true. He’d worn a sly smile, as if finding grim humour in the surroundings, and not only because it was a boneyard. No, Lamb looked the type who’d find grim humour in a kindergarten; who’d find most things blackly funny because of who he was, and what he’d been through; because otherwise he’d sit up at night wondering whether to put a bullet through his brain. He’d had a woman with him, one of his crew. They called them the slow horses. Slough House/slow horse; it was clever, in that very English way; the kind that expressed itself in word play and crossword clues, and was fuck-all use. Look at the Dog out front. Though to be fair, David Cartwright would have had that slacker on a charge.

David Cartwright, though, was beyond any such measures, as the waiting grave underlined. There was no stone yet, of course. Names, dates, came later. The first order of business was planting the dead. Any moment now the chapel’s back door would open, and the bearers would carry him out, and that would be the last touch of daylight he’d know. Comes to us all in the end.

But at least I outlived you, you old bastard, thought Frank Harkness, as he tossed his still burning cigarette into the grave.

The funeral was the usual mess: litany and music interrupting a stream of disconnected memories. River felt actively present one minute out of two. The music had been chosen by Rose Cartwright, long ago. Her husband might have the nation’s security in his keeping, she’d once confided in River, but anything more important fell into her domain. River had retrieved the instructions from the drawer where she’d filed them and emailed them to the funeral director, but had no memory of the titles; no idea what he’d been listening to. Throughout, he’d kept glancing at his mother. Widowhood had bestowed respectability, but the role of grieving daughter seemed beyond her, at least where her father was concerned. At Rose’s interment there had been feeling. But here and now, she seemed wooden; almost bored. As if this final duty were a chore.

And now they were outside, and the coffin being lowered into the ground. There was a good crowd, thirty or more; many of them unknown to him. He expected their names would strike bells though; among them some who had figured in the O.B.’s tales; stories of labyrinthine deviousness; of actions carried out to convince others that certain knowledge was in our possession, or not in our possession; that certain facts held sway, or never had. A wilderness of mirrors, the land of spooks. Nothing you saw meant what it seemed, apart from those times when it did. Telling the two apart was the tricky bit. Knowing which was real, which the reflection.

Ashes to ashes.

Diana Taverner had nodded at him; had switched her phone to silent as a mark of respect, and hadn’t sent more than three emails since the service began. Jackson, too, was uncharacteristically restrained, meaning he hadn’t started a brawl yet. He’d subjected Isobel to one of his visual audits, though: a frank appraisal which in some men might have indicated sexual interest, but with Lamb, thank God, was transgressive in a different way: he was measuring her like a joe does a contact, wondering if she could be trusted. River could have saved him the effort. The coffin touched earth, and the world blurred. That was it, then. He raised his eyes skyward to a mass of cloud, then turned to his mother again, who didn’t look back; he blinked twice, then saw in the far corner of the graveyard a leafless tree sheltering a bench, and a figure upon it, watching him.

He blinked a third time, but the figure didn’t disappear.

It was Frank Harkness.

“Okay, so he didn’t jump in the grave,” Lamb said later. “But, you know. Next best thing.”

Which was that River had leaped over it, scattering those on the other side, who included Lady Di, Oliver Nash, the vicar, and an elderly woman who, it turned out, had been one of the O.B.’s neighbours, and under the impression that David Cartwright had been a big wheel in the Department of Transport. Given that, she handled it rather well; better, anyway, than Nash, who windmilled backwards before falling over a headstone. River was history by then; had vanished round the far side of St. Len’s, giving chase.

“Dear God,” Catherine said.

Louisa appeared at her side. “Was that who I think it was?”

“I didn’t get a good look. You’re not going to follow?”

“In these heels?”

Lamb said, “Well, supercalifragilisticfuckmealadocious. And people say funerals are glum affairs.” He slotted a cigarette into his mouth.

Alone among the company, Isobel Cartwright seemed unaffected. She remained standing by the grave with her head bowed, her eyes closed. Those around her shifted away a little. This specific situation might not be covered in etiquette manuals, but common sense suggested breathing space.

With Diana Taverner conducting operations, and a fresh-faced Dog taking an arm apiece, Oliver Nash rose from the grave. Not his own, but even a resurrection by proxy must feel like a second chance. “I thought mourners were supposed to rend their own garments,” he snapped. He freed his arms from his helpers’ grip and bent to check a split seam. “Not bystanders.’”

Taverner came to join Lamb. When she spoke, her lips hardly moved. “Why do I sense your hand in this?”

Lamb saw no reason to adjust his volume. “Because you have a nasty fucking mind?”

“One of your crew just made a circus out of a Service funeral. Why would he do that?”

“I wouldn’t rule out instructions in the will.” Lamb lit his cigarette: decorum had clearly sailed. “The old bastard had a sense of humour, after all.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Hell, he rescued Cartwright’s career. He was either having a laugh or losing his marbles long before anyone noticed.”

Taverner said, “Who was under that tree?”

“Grim reaper?”

The funeral was breaking up, the way a wedding might if someone dropped the just-cause-and-impediment bomb. The more obvious Service retirees slipped away, to avoid a debriefing, or just on general principles. Not being near an ongoing scene was second nature to joes and handlers alike. Those who’d known the O.B. as a retired civil servant, on the other hand, were clearly awaiting an explanation, ideally one involving twisted family secrets. Taverner, well practised at screwing lids down tight, passed among them: grandson, always unstable; unhinged by grief, poor thing. If River’s mother caught this, she didn’t allow it to ruffle her. She might have been a solitary mourner at an ancient grave.

From somewhere distant, as if playing on a different channel, came a chorus of vehicular complaint: a screaming of brakes, a wailing of horns.

“Does it count if it’s interrupted?” Lamb asked Catherine. “I mean, is he properly buried yet or do we have to start again?”

“That was River’s father, wasn’t it?” Catherine was better than Taverner at speaking without seeming to, no one but Lamb could have caught her words. You’d have thought she’d had less practice, but a closeted alcoholic picks up tricks.

“Yep.”

“Was he there the whole time?”

“He was behind the tree to start with. I assumed he was having a piss. Not everyone treats sanctified ground with respect.” He belched smoke. “That was before I clocked who it was.”

The tree was fifty yards away, and the figure had been wearing a cap pulled low. It was easy to forget that Lamb hadn’t always occupied an office, with the blind down.

“Someone should go after River.”

“And spoil his fun?”

Catherine thought: the last time they met, River’s father had dropped him in the Thames. Any reunion they were having wouldn’t involve hugs and tears.

Oliver Nash was smoothing things over with the vicar; something about the stresses and pressures of spook life. Nash would know about such things. He had the figure of a man who watched a lot of TV.

Louisa said, “Why do you think he came? He must have known he’d not be welcome.”

“If Frank Harkness only went places he was welcome,” said Lamb, “he’d have the social life of Julian Assange.”

“He had history with David Cartwright,” said Catherine. “Is it so strange he’d want to see him buried?”

“Yes.”

“Not to mention Isobel. Maybe he wanted to see her again. I’m talking about human responses here. I appreciate that it must sound like Mandarin to you.”

Lamb replied with a mellifluous jangle of syllables, then tossed his cigarette away. It bounced off a nearby headstone, and dropped into a tin pot. “That’s the only Mandarin I know,” he said. “And if the answer’s more than twenty quid, you’ve priced yourself out of the market.”

Calling Lamb’s bluff would be a full-time occupation, and unlikely to pay off in the long run.

Catherine said, “And then there’s River.”

“Who wants to kill him,” Louisa said.

“And who has a tendency to walk into a trap when one’s offered.”

“Except when he runs,” said Louisa.

Lamb said, “If Harkness wanted to set a trap for River, he’d not have picked a public occasion. He might be a show-off, but he’s a professional and values his skin. No, he was here for something else, and given his track record, we should probably be bothered by that.”

“Maybe River will catch him and make him tell,” said Louisa.

“Yeah,” said Lamb. “And we can all live happily ever after.”

Louisa looked to the corner around which River had vanished. “I wish I’d worn different shoes,” she said.

“Imagine how I feel,” said Lamb, rummaging for another cigarette.

Harkness was still rounding the chapel when the Dog who’d approached him earlier stepped into his path. The movement the American made might have been interpreted as reaching for his credentials, though in fact he was positioning his elbow to jam into the Dog’s throat. He didn’t make clean contact, but the beauty of brute force is, you don’t have to. The Dog dropped like an autumn apple, and Harkness was round front of St. Len’s, skirting its high hedge, then on the street again, heading for his car.

It had been bad tradecraft, but hell: watching his son help shoulder his grandfather’s coffin was circle of life stuff. Last time he’d seen River the boy had been a mess, but not giving an inch—there was a steel core there. If he’d been in Frank’s keeping he’d have been something to see by now, and who knew what the future held? But there’d need to be drastic changes first. Step one was River leaving Slough House, and putting that loser crap behind him. Then Frank would be waiting, ready to show him step two. He was nearly at his car now, had unlocked it on the move, so was perfectly placed to half-turn and crouch just as his son reached him, full tilt; nearly soundlessly but nearly was the key; nearly would get you killed. As it was, it got River a brief moment of unassisted flight as Frank’s shoulder came up and Frank’s left arm gripped his right elbow, twisted and threw. The kid landed okay—needed work, but he wasn’t a civilian—but even so Frank was in the car before he was back on his feet. Tough love. He pulled away while fastening his belt, already thinking about the journey ahead, already consigning River to the back pocket of his mind, when the car rocked like someone had dropped a dog on it, and Frank blinked, and River was sprawled on his bonnet, teeth bared.

For a second they were staring into each other’s eyes, father and son. He’d been right about the steel core. Either that, or River was a fucking nutcase. Then he slammed on the brakes, just before the junction, and a passing car screamed its head off as River tumbled onto the road.

Frank thought for half a moment about opening the door, letting River climb in. It could be that easy. They could drive off and sort everything out somewhere down the line, this father/son thing they had going on. The main problem was he’d have to batter River into submission first, which would be time-consuming, and besides, there was movement back at the chapel: more Dogs, unless they’d learned their lesson on that score, and sent out the vicar instead. Time to move. All around them cars had stopped, sensing an incident in progress, and a chorus was warming up: the beeping and blaring of confused traffic. River was upright but swaying, and reaching a hand out to bang on the glass, unless he was hoping for support. But more tough love, son: Frank pulled away before River made contact, swerved round the stationary vehicle ahead, and turned right, away from the centre. He’d collected the face he’d needed to see, and if he saw it again, he’d take action.

Meanwhile he’d concentrate on doing what he did best, and disappear.

That afternoon, at Slough House, Lamb held what he insisted on calling a postmortem.

“Get it?” he’d asked Catherine.

Who didn’t bother hiding her sigh. “Can you try using a little tact in front of River?”

“I’m not the one played leapfrog with his dead grandpa.”

The slow horses were trooping up the stairs; those who’d not been at the funeral picking up on the vibe that it hadn’t gone by the book, and even Wicinski, the novice, aware something odd had happened. Less than a week in residence, and that bar was higher by the day.

There wasn’t much room in Lamb’s office, but, as Lamb was fond of pointing out, you didn’t hear him complaining. So they arranged themselves as best they could, while Lamb sprawled in his chair with his feet on his desk. He’d had something involving prawns and rice for lunch, judging by the Rorschach-stains on his shirt, and excavated fugitive scraps from folds and crevices as he spoke. River was his first target. “Great show. Couldn’t have been more fun if you’d booked a stripper. Come to think of it—”

“That was my mother.”

“Pity.” Lamb moulded his findings into something the size of a grape, and levered it into his mouth. “Don’t suppose daddy stopped for a chat on his way out?”

“He was in a bit of a rush.”

Everything had been a rush, in fact, once River had returned from the wars. Those who’d remained at the graveside, nailed in place by embarrassment, waited while the obsequies were completed, and then their exodus was swift and uncomplicated. The look Diana Taverner shot him was almost visibly directed through a sniper’s scope; the now-torn suit she left with, River had identified as Oliver Nash, Chair of Limitations, and thus string-puller-in-chief to the Service as a whole. Well, on paper. But any reality which involved pulling strings and expecting Di Taverner to dance was going to find itself Fake News in a hurry. The chances of Nash winning that contest was on a par with Lamb deciding the morning’s events were best forgotten about.

Speaking of whom, he’d adopted a mournful expression, and looked like a solemn hippo regretting a heavy night. “I mean, I’m not a stickler for manners, fuck knows, but even I wouldn’t turn a sorrowful occasion into a hit-and-run opportunity. Not without serious provocation.”

“Harkness being there was serious provocation,” River said.

“I can see ‘daddy’ might be a stretch,” Lamb said. “But ‘Harkness’?”

“Mr. Harkness.”

Next to River, Lech Wicinski shifted, a man ill at ease. In the cluster by the door, he was the one around whom space had appeared: his history had gone round Slough House swiftly as a diuretic, and no one wanted to get close.

He said, “Do I need to be here for this? I’ve no idea who any of these people are.”

“Somewhere you’d rather be?” Lamb asked. “Knock yourself up.”

“. . . I think you mean out.”

There was an embarrassed pause, broken by River. “He’s suggesting you screw yourself.”

“I’m glad someone’s paying attention,” said Lamb. He shifted to brace an unshod foot against his desk. Experience had determined that this posture increased the volume of his eructations, and the gathered crew hunched, trying to dull their hearing without resorting to fingers in ears, a defensive strategy known to upset Lamb. “What did you have in mind, one of those classes where they address deviant behaviour? Because if you want to go celebrity spotting, do it in your own time. But while you’re in Slough House, you stay where you’re fucking put. Clear?”

He lowered his leg. The fart never came.

As if none of that had happened, Shirley said, “Harkness was there? The one sent the psycho to kill us?”

Still looking at Wicinski, Lamb said, “New viewers start here.”

Shirley said, “He didn’t try to kill anyone this morning, did he?”

She sounded like she’d sulk if he had: another treat missed.

Lamb said, “Well, he bounced Cartwright off his car, but let’s face it, that doesn’t necessarily speak to evil motives. But he was hanging around while what passes for the great and the good were all in a bunch, so who’s to say he didn’t have designs on mass slaughter?” He fumbled at his crotch to general alarm, but he’d merely found a sliver of red pepper. “Nah, just kidding. Cartwright took after him with all the grace of a septic iguana. If he’d been there to toss a bomb, he had time to toss it. Trust me on that. I know a tosser when I see one.”

River all but lip-synched that last line, thinking: I’ve been here too long.

Earlier, Louisa had grabbed five minutes with him: still in his funeral blacks, trousers gaping at the knee. “You okay?” she’d asked. And then amended herself: “I mean, given you’re not okay, are you okay?”

“Had better days.”

“Why’d you think he was there?”

“God knows.” Though River had a shortlist of reasons: so Frank could lay eyes on his son, and his son’s mother; so Frank could see the old man put in the ground—that one rang true. Sentiment wasn’t Frank’s style, but keeping score was in character. So yeah, that, or else this: Frank had some other reason all of his own. In which case, they’d have to just wait and see.

“What about your mother?”

“. . . What about her?”

Louisa said, “You know, did she have much to say on the subject?”

Like: goodness gracious me, there’s the man who pretended he loved me, and got me pregnant, and all so my father would bankroll his mad-spook scheme, hatched in a French chateau.

No, none of that came up.

Instead, River and his mother had stood by the grave, River’s knees pulsing where they’d scraped along the road, his heartbeat back to normal, but heavy with grief and a confusion of other emotions. He should have been boiling with rage, but wasn’t quite. Rather, he felt as if a fuse had been lit, and that his father’s reappearance heralded some major shift, the way the grey vault of sky promised snow. When it came, it would cover everything. Nothing would be missed.

He said, “She’s spent so long pretending he doesn’t exist that she didn’t even see him. That’s how she acted, anyway.” Acted with her silent posture; with her frozen refusal to notice his escapade. Right up until she was getting into her taxi, when she’d hugged him tighter than normal. This was his fault, she’d said, and he’d known she’d meant the O.B.; her father, not his. It was possible she was right, but difficult to discern what difference it made. He shook his head for Louisa’s benefit. “Don’t know whether to go into therapy or write a sitcom.”

“Your grandfather was proud of you.”

River looked up, down, all around. Slough House. Words weren’t necessary.

“Yeah, okay. But you haven’t given up, have you?”

“I’ve given it some thought.”

He was giving it more now, by the look of him. Louisa would be worried, if she didn’t have troubles of her own. And didn’t have to pay attention to what Lamb was saying, because he tended to notice when you wandered, and that was never fun.

“Apparently he had CIA ID,” he was saying now. “Which must be harder to say than to fake, because our Frank soiled his pants with the so-called Cousins about the same time he soiled Cartwright’s mother’s sheets. No way is he holding legitimate paper.” He tossed the fragment of red pepper into the air, and snapped like a pike taking a fly. “Now, maybe he turned up at the funeral for old times’ sake, but my feeling is, he doesn’t scratch his arse without a hidden agenda. And given that his last appearance involved redecorating our walls, I’m not inclined to shrug him off. Which is why I’m looking at you, Scissorhands.”

Roddy Ho said, “What?”

Ho had his fingers bandaged, Louisa noticed, though she didn’t care why. True, he’d been less of a dick this last little while, but that might have been because being more of one was a stretch even for him.

“You’re awake. Good. Because what we’ve got ourselves here is a mystery, and as with any mystery, you have to address the four Fs.”

No one dared ask.

“Who the fuck, what the fuck, where the fuck and why the fuck,” Lamb continued. “Fake paper or not, Harkness must be leaving a trail. What’s he calling himself, what’s he up to, where’s he gone, and why now? I’m reliably told you can’t use a public pissoir these days without showing up on You-Bend or whatever it’s called, and if I want someone to follow digital breadcrumbs, who better to ask than our own little digital detective? Whose digits, I notice, are looking mangled. Stick them somewhere you shouldn’t?”

“Accident,” said Ho.

“Sorry to hear it,” said Lamb. “So. River’s daddy. Where do you start looking?”

“Car,” said Louisa, River and Shirley as one.

“He drove away in a car, and while Cartwright here was too busy playing Starsky and Hutch to get his number plate, there’ll be CCTV footage, even if the Dogs didn’t think to make a note of it. But I suppose, having lost their head, they’ll have trouble licking their balls, let alone doing their job.”

“Emma’s gone?” asked River.

“That got your attention, didn’t it? Yeah, Flyte’s history, and she was oh-so-nearly one of the gang. Pity. She’d have brightened this place up no end. Not that I’m objectifying her, you understand, but she’s a right cracker. And some of us have a sense of aesthetics.” He slipped a hand down his trousers and scratched vigorously. “You still here?” he asked Ho. “Find the car. It’ll be hired, under an alias, but that’ll be a start.”

“Why not stolen?” Shirley asked.

“To avoid unnecessary attention. Any more questions?”

“Yeah, what’s Starsky and Hutch?”

Ho left, having to sidle round Wicinski, who refused to move. Something going on there; Louisa hoped she wasn’t going to be forced to pick sides. Roddy Ho versus a kiddy-porn user: it’d be like choosing between Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan in a bare-knuckle death match. There ought to be a way both could lose.

“Meanwhile,” said Lamb. He eyed River, Louisa, Shirley and Coe, his gaze somehow drifting over Catherine and Lech. “You lot can walk back the cat. We can assume Harkness’s base of operations is Europe, because he’s about as welcome in the States as a turd in a martini. Which means European arrivals, planes, trains and ferries. Do we still have that face-recognition malarkey?”

Louisa said, “Yes, but it’s so old it mostly recognises eighties pop stars. It’d be quicker walking the streets with an e-fit, asking passersby.”

“Ho’s kit’s faster,” River put in. “Why can’t he do that?”

“Because Ho’s looking for the car,” Lamb said.

“He could multi-task.”

“Multi-task? He couldn’t charge his phone while having a dump.”

Coe said, “Last time we saw Harkness, he was running his own private French Foreign Legion. It’s more likely he was dropped off on a beach than he walked through border control.”

“You know, mostly I forget you’re here, and when you do speak I wish you weren’t. Maybe he crawled under the wire, yes, but since we lack the ability to run a trace on uncaught illegal immigrants, let’s just do what we can, yes? Unless you have a better idea?”

Coe shrugged.

River said, “The Park keep tabs on entry points, and their recognition software’s up to date. If he came in through channels, they’ll already know.”

“But they’re not likely to share that with us, are they? On account of, you know, you lot being not only surplus to requirements, but an actual hindrance and embarrassment.”

“Last time he showed, we were his target,” River insisted. It was no warmer in Lamb’s office than anywhere else in Slough House, but Louisa could see his temperature rising; a pink flush creeping upwards from his collar. “If they know what he’s up to now, they should keep us in the loop.”

“We’ve talked about your proximity to loops before,” said Lamb. “And you’re no nearer one now than you were then. So let’s do things my way, shall we?” He adopted a martyred expression. “I mean, just for a fucking change? Planes, trains and ferries, then. On your bikes. In fact, there’s an idea. Add bikes to that list. Just in case.”

“What about me?” Wicinski asked.

“What about you?”

“What do I do?”

“You sit in your office and try not to think about children. And if you do, you try not to fiddle with yourself while doing so. Or is that too big an ask?”

“I am not a paedophile!”

“The thing is, there’s no way to make that statement sound convincing. Funny, that.”

Louisa didn’t want to look Wicinski’s way, but couldn’t help it. The man’s face had turned grey, which wasn’t the colour she’d have expected. Neither anger nor embarrassment; rather, the expression you might see on someone looking into a pit, the bottom of which was out of sight, and whose edges were starting to crumble.

Lamb broke wind loudly.

Nobody moved.

“Did I misfart? That’s your signal to leave.”

They left; mostly back to their offices, though Louisa followed Catherine into her room. It seemed as if Catherine hadn’t noticed; her back to Louisa, she began straightening files that didn’t need straightening. A lock of her hair had come loose from its ribbon, and Louisa had to quash an urge to reach out, undo the bow, and see Catherine come undone. Except, it occurred to her, that’s what she was already seeing. Catherine with a hair out of place was as familiar a sight as Jackson Lamb handing cake round at Christmas. But before she could utter this, or something like it, Catherine turned, her hands full of folders; using them, Louisa thought, as a shield, a barrier. She regarded Louisa calmly, then said, “Are you sure you want to hang around up here? When he’s on a crusade, it’s best to make yourself scarce.”

Louisa reached into her back pocket, and pulled out the sheet she’d printed off earlier. “Funny you should bring that up. I need to take some leave.”

“There’s a form on the intranet.”

“Yes.” Louisa waved the paper in her hand. “I’ve filled it in.”

“Well, then.”

“. . . Are you okay, Catherine?”

“Me? Yes, I’m fine. Thank you for asking. You want me to get Lamb to sign off on that, I expect.”

“He doesn’t like it when we take time off. You know that.”

“And I don’t like being the buffer between him and the rest of you. But I don’t suppose you know that because it’s never occurred to you to think about it.”

“. . . Jesus, where did that come from?”

Catherine shook her head. “Nowhere. Never mind. Here, give it to me.”

She almost didn’t want to now, but not quite as much as she didn’t want to head back into Lamb’s office and put it on his desk herself. She held it out, and Catherine whipped it from her hand with the air of one removing a sharp object from an infant’s grasp.

Job done, but she couldn’t leave it at that. She watched Catherine place her form on top of a pile of other papers, marvelling a little at how perfectly aligned this new addition was, with no apparent effort on Catherine’s part. And then watched Catherine notice her stray strand of hair, and tuck it behind her ear pending major reconstruction.

She said, “Maybe you should think about taking some leave yourself.”

“And do what?”

“Just get away. Go somewhere warm.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

Louisa glanced towards the window. Soon there’d be snow, if the radio’s dire warnings came true; the sort that lingered for days, making castles out of parked cars and hillsides out of hedgerows. All very well if you had somewhere to be, and could afford to put the heating on. For those on the wrong side of closed doors, possibly lethal.

Maybe Min’s son was having the time of his life; bedding down in a warm room with a girlfriend or two and a pizza menu. But if not, if he was out there on the streets, she owed it to Min to find him. Or maybe not Min; maybe she owed it to herself, to keep being the person Min would have wanted her to be. She didn’t exactly know, but it was what she seemed to be doing regardless.

“No,” she said. “I just need some time to myself, that’s all.”

Catherine stared, as if she’d announced a desire for some agonising luxury or other. Then said, “I’ll have him sign it. When do you want to start?”

“Right away,” said Louisa.

“You’re supposed to give at least as much notice as the length of leave requested, you do realise that?”

Why’d you think I want you to hand him the form, Louisa thought, but didn’t say. “Thanks, Catherine. I owe you one.”

“You owe me more than one,” said Catherine softly as Louisa disappeared downstairs. She added another form to the stack requiring Lamb’s signature, a request for a replacement boiler, whose last service had provoked a teeth-sucking groan of disbelief from a plumber who was about nineteen. This, Catherine knew, would never make it beyond the post-room at Regent’s Park, there being a standing instruction that all mail from Slough House addressed to Finance be binned unopened. Besides, if you started replacing worn-out parts round here, where would it stop? Any overhaul would include herself, and she wasn’t sure she’d survive an upgrade.

She went back into Lamb’s office, the pile of forms in her arms. All over the world banks were becoming coinless, cars driverless, offices paper-free. Here in Slough House they were taking up the slack, as if in Newtonian response to refinements made elsewhere: an equal and opposite surfeit of unnecessary busywork.

Lamb was where they’d left him: arse in chair, feet on desk. Through holes in his socks, his toes tasted freedom. He was smoking, and though Catherine suspected him capable of doing this in his sleep, she’d yet to prove it. She slapped the papers onto his desk, or at least, onto the clutter that littered his desk. A self-defeating gesture, because once they slipped onto the floor they’d be archived as far as Lamb was concerned. He had a three-second rule about paperwork: that long on the carpet, it was good as filed.

Without opening his eyes, he said, “I sense your disapproval.”

“If you ever sense my anything else,” she said, “one of us has been replaced.”

“They spend their whole lives hoping for something to do,” he said. “And you want to spoil their fun?”

“We should leave Harkness to the Park.”

“Yeah, that happened last time. And they let him walk.”

“And what’s your plan, exactly? Always supposing you track him down, with all this genius expertise at your disposal?”

This time he opened his eyes. “I thought it was my job to remind you they’re a bunch of useless twats,” he said. “Not the other way round.”

“They’re not entirely useless,” she said, but even to her own ears, her protest sounded insincere.

Lamb took the cigarette from his mouth and examined it as if it were an alien artefact. Then he flicked it at his wastepaper basket, scoring a direct hit. “Last time Frank Harkness showed his face, he sent one of his sock puppets round with a gun.”

“I hadn’t forgotten.”

“He’s got the blood of my joes on his hands.”

“Funny how they’re joes once they’re dead.”

A thin spiral of smoke rose from the wastepaper basket.

Lamb said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s just got the blood of more useless twats on his hands. But they were my useless twats. And I hadn’t necessarily finished with them.”

“You’ll get River killed.”

“Standish, I could chain him to his desk and lock the door. You really think that’ll prevent him going after Harkness?”

She wasn’t in the mood to admit he might be right about anything. Nor inclined to warn him that he’d set his bin on fire: if nothing else, burning Slough House to the ground would see the paperwork off.

Speaking of which, the papers she’d set down for him began their inevitable slide floorwards. Catherine caught them before they became airborne; automatically tapped them into alignment before tucking them under her arm. It was as if the role she’d been cast into was an iron maiden, retaining its shape even as she was screaming for release. And her mind flipped forward a few hours: the journey home, the bottle of wine. Its glass body smooth to the touch. All those memories, waiting to be released.

He was watching her, his lip curled in its automatic sneer. What was it like being him? Pointless even to speculate. “You’ve been seething for a while,” he said. “You ever going to actually combust, or just keep us all in suspense?”

She didn’t know what he was talking about, or at least, that was the impression she tried to convey. “You need to sign these,” she said. “Now would be good. And with your actual name this time. Nobody was amused by the last lot.”

“I’m surprised they even read them.” Lamb reached out a fat palm, and she handed him the forms. While he signed them with a blue Biro—its plastic casing bitten through: he destroyed a dozen a week, not using more than one for actual writing—he continued scrutinising her. “Cartwright hasn’t done any work for longer than I can remember,” he said, “and the fact that you keep typing up whatever garbage he hands you doesn’t make them official reports. You know and I know and Cartwright knows that ninety-nine percent of what we do here is to provide practice for Regent’s Park’s document shredders, but that won’t help him if I call him upstairs now and can him on the spot.”

“Do you plan to do that?”

“Not today. Today he’ll actually be putting some effort in, which will make such an almighty change I’m half expecting spring to break out, with fucking butterflies and stuff. He’s probably tap dancing with cartoon rabbits as I speak.”

“You seriously think River’ll be able to trace him?”

“I seriously think if we dangle River from a piece of string, Harkness will show his face sooner or later, which is the only reason for keeping Cartwright in place I can think of offhand. That doesn’t involve using him as a toilet brush. What’s Guy want leave for?”

So much, thought Catherine, for his disregard for what he was signing.

She said, “I can only imagine she needs respite from the unrelenting comedy.”

“Yeah, I thought it was probably that. Does she know I can dock her a week’s pay for taking leave without proper notice?”

“You really can’t.”

“Yeah, but does she know that?”

Catherine shrugged. She’d fought enough of Louisa’s battles for one day. She held her hand out and Lamb surrendered the forms. All she needed do now was despatch them, wait a day, then begin the process again, with nothing achieved in the meantime. Well, Louisa would get her leave, she supposed. On her way to the door a thought struck her. “Wicinski. Lech. Should he even have access to the internet?”

“He’s already Kevin Spaceyed his career,” Lamb said. “If he wants to go for the full Rolf Harris, he’s a braver man than me.”

He magicked a cigarette from somewhere, plugged it between his lips, then bent and retrieved a smouldering twist of paper from the bin. He blew on it until it caught flame, and used it to light the cigarette. Then he wafted it to ash, dumped it back in the bin, and poured the dregs of a cup of tea on the budding bonfire. A thick plume of smoke filled the room.

“They’re not all joes,” he said.

“. . . Who aren’t?”

But Lamb had closed his eyes, and didn’t answer.

Before returning to her room Catherine went downstairs and wordlessly dropped the holiday request on Louisa’s desk. On her way back she passed Ho leaving the kitchen: a slice of pizza hung from his mouth, and he was carrying a plastic bottle in his left hand, his right still bandaged up. He said nothing. He was probably working out how best to trace Harkness’s car, she surmised, though he was in fact thinking about mousetraps, how there was a thing about if you invented a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to your door. Frankly, though, Roddy couldn’t see how mousetraps could be bettered, the one he’d found in Wicinski’s bin being an unimprovably effective way of silencing the bastards. Not to mention damaging fingers. How was he supposed to navigate the keyboard jungle with his hand taped up? It was like attaching bells to a ninja. You were robbing him of his greatest strength.

When he got back to his office Wicinski was there, but not working; staring, rather, at Roddy. So that was the way it was. Okay, thought Ho. You and me. Right here, right now. One hand tied behind his back, kind of, but that wouldn’t slow him down: a back-flip, a left-handed throat jab . . . His arm was suddenly wet because he’d crushed his plastic bottle, flushing its contents over his wrist, in reaction to which he’d bitten through his pizza, half of which dropped to the floor. Shit. He put the bottle on his desk, retrieved his lunch, Wicinski’s eyes never wavering. You wanna piece of me? thought Roddy. Wanna try your luck? Bigger men than Wicinski had been mentally ground to paste by the Rodster. He removed a small brown pellet of dirt from his pizza—he was always finding pellet-shaped bits of dirt here just like the ones he found at home: strange—and flicked it away. Not about to let the staring weirdo spoil his lunch.

He logged on and picked up where he’d left off. One-handed he might be, but snatching data from Hampstead’s Mickey Mouse street-warden company was easy as kicking a puppy: the algorithm he’d triggered before going to warm his pizza had finished its job already, decoding the password. He copied it, flipped to the command screen and pasted it where the prompt demanded: bingo. Free and total access to all stored data, so now he could spend as long as he liked watching raw footage of cars parked on various roads in Hampstead, across a four-month timespan. He’d like to see Wicinski pull that off. The Rodster, on the other hand; give the Rodster anything with a monitor and a keyboard, he’d be watching rough cuts of the next Star Wars movie before you’d opened the popcorn.

Still sticky-fingered, he fed today’s date into the search box, and his left-hand screen fragmented into thirty-two boxes, each providing a live feed from one of Hampstead’s traffic-control cameras. And this was Roddy working single-handed, he reminded himself; his primo digits out of action, though flexible enough to shovel what remained of his pizza slice into his mouth. Back to the command screen: let’s skip back a couple of hours, see what was happening then. He could feel the new boy’s eyes on him. Maybe Lamb hadn’t given him anything to do; maybe Lamb had just told him to observe and learn, which was fair enough, but let’s face it: the only lesson he’d be taking home today was how far short of Roddy Ho’s skill sets he fell. Watch and weep, new boy, watch and weep. Roddy was viewing footage from this morning now, thirty-two boxes’ worth, each flipping into a new channel every few seconds because there was a lot of CCTV in Hampstead: a lot. Like everywhere else in London, when you walked the streets you were auditioning for the non-speaking role of passerby.

Or perhaps trying out as a stuntman.

Because there: blink and you’d miss it. Sixth screen along, third row down. He paused everything, moved the clock back thirty seconds, maximised the box that had caught his eye and ran it again. River Cartwright, jumping onto a moving car and clinging on for maybe seven seconds? Six? Roddy was going to time it, bet on that, but meanwhile he was enjoying the spectacle: the world’s worst suicide attempt. The car couldn’t have been going more than twenty. It was kind of a pity Cartwright had fallen off soon as he did, because if he’d managed another second or two, he’d have been dumped slap in the middle of the junction. And as far as Roddy was concerned, there was nothing wrong with River Cartwright that being involved in a major traffic pile-up wouldn’t put right.

A small detail entertainment-wise, but a crucial one so far as his task went, was that the number plate of the car Cartwright was attempting to sledge showed up bright and clear in the frame.

He finished his energy drink, and tossed the empty into the bin. Tracing a plate, assigning an identity to the vague shape behind the wheel, was something he could do in his sleep; such a lowly task he didn’t feel down to doing it himself, so he emailed a screenshot to Shirley Dander: let someone else do some work for a change. Wicinski was still staring, so he leaned back in his chair and swivelled the monitor to show off his success.

“Congratulations,” Wicinski said after a while. “Data theft. Quite the hot-button crime.”

“For national security,” Roddy reminded him.

“Which might have mattered once. But this is a post-Brexit, post-truth, fake news world, and something I’ve noticed is, people are pissed off.” Wicinski smiled, but not in a good way. “Hate figures are the new black. People find a spook like you watching their every move, you’ll be the poster-boy for every anti-government pressure group going.”

And this was exactly the kind of shit the HotRod was used to: the frank admiration disguised as contempt; the derision that masked drooling envy. Life in Slough House, he was surrounded by no-hopers, trying not to let him see they were grabbing for his coattails. Whatever coattails were.

Ho said, “Who’s gunna find out?” Wicinski was starting to irritate him. Also, a bit of meatball or something was lodged between two molars, and with his right hand currently inflexible, he was going to have Voldemort’s own job freeing the damn thing.

“Yeah,” said Wicinski. “That’s what everyone says. Right up until somebody blows the whistle.”

“Last time someone tried something like that, Lamb found out about it first.”

“Yeah? And then what?”

Roddy couldn’t remember. Hadn’t been good, though. And besides, he himself, the Dyno-Rod, was pretty pitiless in vengeance mode too. Not so long back, he’d heaved a would-be killer through a window. Well: details were hazy. But he’d been there, and the would-be killer had wound up dead on the pavement. Do the math.

He returned to his screens. Wicinski’s gaze, he knew, remained fixed upon him: a dark-eyed stare intended to unnerve. Which, okay, was starting to do that, but not because the RodMan scared easy—hell: he’d been sharing a building with J.K. Coe for a year, and he was a genuine psycho—it was more about Wicinski’s past having been wiped from Service records. That was spooky. What they knew he’d done was enough to put you off the guy. So whatever he’d done that someone wanted covered up, well, that must be seriously dark.

The chunk of meatball came loose of its own accord, and Roddy’s mouth filled with what tasted like beef.

Blowing the whistle, he thought. Was that an actual threat? Could be. That was the trouble with the slow horses; they were constantly rattling their cages, checking the bars still held. If it weren’t for Roddy himself, his calming influence, the idiots would have burned the building to the ground long ago.

The stuff he and Lamb had to put up with. Good job he had Wicinski’s number . . . First suspicious move from you and the Rodster’ll tie you in knots, thought Roddy. Lead you down the garden path, drown you in the pond. He could picture himself going over this with Lamb; the older man’s shoulders heaving. What I could have done with ten men like you in the old days, Lamb was saying. Ten joes like you, I’d have run rings round the Kremlin. Eyes narrowing with suppressed pleasure, Roddy registered the ping of an arriving email but didn’t open it, so remained unaware that Shirley Dander had tracked Harkness’s car to a national hire chain; an office in Southampton. The vehicle was an Audi; the customer one Jay Featherstone, who’d used a Canadian passport. Until someone got a look at its photo, and confirmed it was the man himself and not a proxy, she couldn’t be sure she’d tagged Harkness; that it was a hire car, even, didn’t mean it hadn’t subsequently been snatched. But if the customer were legit and the car stolen from him he’d have reported it by now, unless he had good reason not to, like being dead or something—too many variables, Shirley decided. Time being, they might as well assume Frank Harkness was disguised as a Canadian, which could mean wearing a plaid shirt and carrying a hockey stick, but more likely meant he’d be using his normal voice, wearing normal clothes, and banking on no one knowing the difference. In Southampton, or anywhere else that wasn’t Toronto, that seemed a safe bet.

Anyway: her part was done. Cartwright could haul up the paperwork and say whether it was daddy. And then—if she’d read the signs aright—Lamb might just let them off the leash, which would make for a late Christmas present. Harkness had killed Marcus, or primed the hand that did so. Thinking that thought had Shirley clenching her own hand: making a fist, letting it go. Making a fist. She’d shared this office with Marcus once. They’d had their moments, but never come to blows. And in the end, they’d been partners.

She had to avert her eyes from the wall, remembering this. The wall against which Marcus’s life had ended; his final thoughts sprayed upon it like illegible graffiti.

Making a fist, letting it go. Making a fist again. Letting it go.

Shirley had attended court-mandated anger management sessions not long back, and the sessions had been successful in the sense that she didn’t have to go to them anymore, but unsuccessful in the sense that she’d punched someone in a nightclub earlier in the week, and while this had, as it happened, been the manager, that probably didn’t count. The whole thing had been a misunderstanding—he had thought she was accusing his staff of selling drugs; in fact she’d been complaining that they weren’t—but she had to be honest with herself: not resorting to violence during misunderstandings had been a key feature of the anger management course. And if, in her defence, it had been a hell of a punch—straight uppercut, no tell—that wasn’t really, when you got down to it, an actual defence. Punching someone who didn’t see it coming lost you points for self-control. Whether or not they were a dick didn’t enter into it, apparently.

Then again, the course hadn’t been an entire waste of time. At least she knew what bullshit she was expected to spout next time someone got to ask her: And how did that make you feel?

Buoyed by this positive thinking, she checked her email: yep, Cartwright had requested a copy of the relevant paperwork from the car hire firm, a ‘request’ phrased as delicately as a grip on the company’s lapels. There weren’t many advantages to Slough House, but the fact that nobody knew its status as Service pariah was one, making it possible to play the national security card with civilians. Just don’t get tweeted about while doing it. Cartwright had been promised a response within thirty minutes, which in most offices translated as an hour and a half; time to grab some food, Shirley thought, a Pavlovian reaction to a glimpse of J.K. Coe passing her door, carrying something wrapped in greaseproof paper. He took it up to the office he shared with River Cartwright, who as usual offered no greeting. They’d reached this kind of détente, Coe supposed you could call it; a working arrangement whereby either might as well have been alone for all the rapport in evidence. Which suited Coe.

He sat, took a bite from his sandwich, and set the face recognition program running again. He’d have left it on while fetching lunch—that was what computers were for; to do stuff for you while you did other stuff—but experience had taught him that the program froze every twenty minutes, unless you paused it. The footage it was currently trawling through was of yesterday’s ferry arrivals at Southampton: the foot passengers. Until confirmation came that the man who’d hired the car there was the same man driving it in Hampstead—Frank Harkness—this could be a waste of time, but if you were after a working definition of life as a slow horse, that would do. Which, again, suited Coe. His was a precarious balance. His own trauma lay far in the past, or so the calendar said; it didn’t feel like ancient history though, not when memory woke him in the small hours. And the glimpses he’d had since of what he was capable of himself didn’t make for comfortable contemplation either: he was, it seemed, the sort of person who would shoot an unarmed, manacled man, an action you only had to perform once for it to become a defining characteristic. Not the person he’d assumed he was. Another, more recent outing had suggested him capable of heroism too, at least in the eyes of others, though Coe knew that when he’d shot an armed terrorist dead in Derbyshire, he’d been in the grip of something—call it a manic curiosity—over which he’d had little control; the overwhelming urge to see what a dead terrorist looked like, close up. Given all that, wasting time was as good a way of getting through it as any.

The picture on his screen juddered, halted, and the dialogue box conjured a message: Refer to Annex C. This referred to a database of known mercenaries—legit, grey area and downright nasty—and the highlighted face belonged to a man with the pitted skin of an acne survivor, and eyes that revealed nothing. They didn’t usually, in Coe’s experience. Those with something to hide knew not to put it in their windows. The man’s hair was short enough to qualify as military; his gear—a black polo-neck under a thigh-length winter coat, combat trousers, boots; a dufflebag over one shoulder—ticked the same boxes. Way too young to be Harkness so not on Coe’s agenda, and besides, he couldn’t find the match on Annex C while running face recog; not on hardware that was creaky when scooters were hip. Coe put his sandwich down, scribbled a reminder on its wrapper, then hit return, allowing the program to re-start. The way it trip-hopped face to face, superimposing geometric shapes upon each, was as mesmerising as a screensaver, and about as productive. What would the program make of him, he wondered? He barely recognised himself anymore, that was for sure. And then the program stalled again, and he thought he’d over-pushed it, but no; after a quivery moment, another dialogue box appeared. Refer to Annex A.

Thinning fair hair, noticeable cheekbones. A middle-aged face on a capable-looking body.

“Cartwright?” he said.

Cartwright grunted.

“This him?”

Cartwright looked up, came over, squatted by Coe’s desk. After a while he said, “Where’s this?”

“Southampton. Ferry arrivals. Yesterday.”

“It’s him.” He tapped the screen. “Annex A?”

Coe said, “Big and bad.”

“Well don’t access it. No need to let the Park know we’re looking.”

Three bags full, thought Coe.

“Almost certainly Jay Featherstone, then,” said River Cartwright, even as his own computer pinged incoming paperwork from the car hire firm.

From upstairs came a familiar explosion: a Jackson Lamb coughing fit, though by the noise, you’d be forgiven for assuming he was giving birth. The two men shared an uneasy moment, one broken by a voice from the doorway: Louisa Guy, delivering a farewell.

“You’re away?”

“Leave.”

“With this going on?” said River.

But Louisa was already halfway down the stairs.

Coe glanced to the window. It was dark outside, the pavements bracing themselves for overnight frost. Soon there’d be snow, and the country in the grip of its annual pantomime: cancelled trains, motionless airports, unnavigable roads. He hit return on his keyboard and the program chuntered back to life, sorting through the rest of Southampton’s arrivals: the weary, the footsore. It had already found what Coe was looking for, had pinned Frank Harkness to its memory-board, but why stop there? He was dimly aware that the coughing upstairs had subsided; that Cartwright had returned to his desk. Other aural irritations continued: the burping of radiators, the passive-aggressive grumbling of the fridge. A slamming door would be Shirley Dander; the scraping of a chair, Roddy Ho. He had grown used to this, both the discordant soundtrack and the occasional harmonies it hid; had learned to find comfort in continuity, though knew full well that the only reliable constant was fracture, that eventually everything broke. Which might happen as easily in the snow as at any other time.

And his computer blipped once more, as another Annex C match was made.

“Why didn’t I know that Frank Harkness was in-country?”

A wobble drifted across Richard Pynne’s features, as if a TV screen had briefly lost its hold. Pynne—inevitably Dick the Prick, but less and less often in his hearing—was the nearest Di Taverner had had to a favourite since the days of the late James Webb, whose legacy was a snatch of Service wisdom: Don’t nail your colours to two different masts. Or, as the corridor version had it, Don’t get fucking shot. The latter outcome wasn’t a direct result of the former infraction in Spider’s case, but might as well have been, and Pynne was assiduous in maintaining an undivided loyalty where Lady Di was concerned. A large young man with shaven head and thick-framed spectacles, he would have looked at home in Shoreditch, making energetic visits to pop-up coffee boutiques and craft beer spaces, but instead was shift manager on the Hub, maintaining daily workflow and ensuring the efficient manning, resource-utilisation rather, of the floor’s workstations. He had his eyes on a Third Desk role of course, overseeing field ops, but so did everyone else. Then again, not everyone else had regular sit-downs with Di Taverner; nor had anyone—far as he knew—been assigned a low-risk, home-soil, agent-running gig. So: officially admin for the moment but groomed for stardom, that was Richard Pynne. Which was a fair bit of background to cover before responding to one short question, but Pynne was ever-conscious of his status, and hated it to be thought, for even a minute, that he wasn’t on top of his brief.

Frank Harkness.

“I’ll check on it,” he said.

“You know who he is?”

The question direct, and here was another Service gem: You never lied to Diana Taverner until you were sure you could get away with it.

“. . . He’s not on my radar.”

“Then you need a bigger dish.” Taverner pursed her lips, as if trying to banish a bitter taste. “He’s former CIA. One-time liaison with the Park. And then spent a couple of decades running a deep-cover mercenary outfit from a French chateau.”

“And he’s in-country now,” said Pynne. “Should we worry?”

“Well, he made a farce out of what should have been a solemn moment, but it’s possible he was just passing and saw no reason not to. Check with the DGSI, though. He was playing flics and robbers in their backyard long enough, they ought to have stuck a flag in him. Maybe we can get some actual collaboration, instead of indulging in pissing contests.” She paused. “And collaboration, well. They’re French, they won’t need reminding how that works.”

“I’ll choose my words carefully, shall I?”

Di Taverner allowed herself a brief smile. “Soon as you can. But first, an update on Snow White.”

Which was the code name for the operation Pynne had been given: home-soil, low-risk.

There was little to report. Hannah Weiss, Pynne’s joe, was a minor double: believed by the BND—the German intelligence service—to have infiltrated the British Civil Service on its behalf, she had in fact infiltrated the BND for the British intelligence service. That was what Regent’s Park thought, anyway. Pynne was her handler, but truth was she needed little handling; beyond her recent shift to the office of the minister in charge of Brexit negotiations—“in charge” being used in its loosest possible sense, there—she’d made no demands on him. They met once every three weeks, meetings that were easily the high point of Dick Pynne’s calendar: an attractive young woman, an expense-account coffee, the sense that his career was in the ascendancy. He kind of wished those sessions had an audience, though had to admit that that might have compromised the whole Secret Service aspect of proceedings.

Taverner asked him, “Anything new on BND protocols?”

There wasn’t. Hannah’s German handler similarly made contact every three weeks, though he splashed for lunch, being on a better expenses deal than Dick, and also, as mentioned, German. That aside, the running of a joe in the field seemed to differ little on the two sides of this currently friendly divide; had probably differed little since joes and fields were first discovered. Hannah brought back to Dick the details of these debriefings, at which—to maintain the appearance that she was working for German intelligence—she fed Peter Kahlmann, Dick’s opposite number, various Brexit-related titbits to accompany his schnitzel—

(“I hope you’re not descending to racial stereotypes,” Lady Di put in.

“They eat at Fischer’s. He likes the schnitzel.”)

—all of which had been carefully vetted to ensure minimum damage to British interests, however glittery they might seem. The idea was to boost German confidence while negotiations were ongoing; encourage them to overplay their hand, or at least to underestimate British resolve. There were limits, though. Dick’s suggestion that they sow a rumour that the Brexit minister was approaching mental breakdown, and likely to cave early on crucial points, had been vetoed on grounds that were, he was informed, “outwith his need to know.”

“And what about Hannah herself? How’s she bearing up?”

“I think she rather enjoys it.”

He knew he did.

“Okay, thanks, Richard. Good meeting.”

Not ten minutes later, back at his desk, Richard Pynne watched Oliver Nash, Chair of the Limitations Committee, working his way across the floor, heading for Lady Di’s office.

She called Clare Harper while driving home, that final comment in the coffee shop—You were fucking Min, weren’t you? I’d have hoped that counted for something—carefully unmentioned, as if it were an elderly relative’s flatulence.

“Okay,” Louisa said. “Tell me about Lucas’s recent movements.”

Like she was a private detective, or a GP.

“Just the normal. School, friends, his bedroom . . . Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“And he doesn’t have a girlfriend?”

“You know what they’re like these days. He has friends who are girls. But no one special, no.”

These days weren’t so distant from her own, Louisa thought; not in real terms. But hell. The difference.

“What’s his number?” she asked. “I might be able to get it traced. That’s what you were hoping for, isn’t it?”

“He didn’t take his phone with him.”

She might as well have said he’d left his kidneys behind. Louisa didn’t know many teenagers, but she couldn’t swear she’d ever seen one without a phone in its hand.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s right here. I’m holding it.”

So okay: short of leaving a banner reading don’t come looking, Lucas couldn’t have made his intentions clearer. But still. Abandoning home and mother was one thing, but his phone? If this was adolescent dramatics, it was an extreme case.

She said, “Can you check on his recent activity? Or—”

“I don’t have his—”

“—Password, right.” There were people Louisa could ask, who could crack a phone’s password faster than a teenager could crack its screen, but the most obvious was Roddy Ho, and she didn’t want to go that route. Asking Ho for a favour was like chewing someone else’s gum.

“What about his computer? Or is that passworded too?”

“No. House rules. But they don’t use email much. It’s all texts and Snapchat. And his browser history’s the usual stuff, social media and music sites. He clears it pretty regularly.”

Even Louisa did that, and she didn’t have a mother on the premises.

She said, “Send me the list of sites he’d been looking at?”

“I’ve told you, there’s nothing unusual there.”

“And yet I’m the one you asked for help.”

She heard a noise in the background, a boy’s voice. That would be . . . Andrew.

Clare said, “I’m sorry.”

“I understand.”

“You can’t. You don’t have children.”

No, but she’d noticed most mothers were fond of them. Why was that so difficult for Clare to get her head round? But Louisa simply recited her email address so Clare could send her Lucas’s browsing history, then fretted at a traffic light, hating the stop-start of her commute. But at least that was over for the next week. Because she was going to do this, it seemed. Whether for Min, for herself, for Clare, even for Lucas: that was background fade now. She was going to do this.

Clare was saying, “Thank you.”

“I’m not promising anything.”

“No, but . . . Thank you.”

Louisa ended the call, promising to get back to Clare later.

When she reached home the first thing she did was fire up her laptop and examine Lucas Harper’s online history. Clare had sent his browsing tree as a screenshot, and a quick glance revealed nothing to excite maternal discomfort—Lucas was a cricket fan, like his father; had obsessively checked stats, as if hunting for a glimmer of hope in the recent Ashes debacle; and he spent time on YouTube and Facebook, like everyone else. Also Amazon, and other online retailers: clothes and sporting goods, mostly. Wikipedia. Google.

A couple of sites fit no obvious parameters, though. One was for a catering company, Paul’s Pantry. “For all your party needs.” It was based in Pegsea, Pembrokeshire. That’s in Wales, she remembered Clare saying. The other was for a property in the same county; a place called Caerwyss Hall, which offered all the facilities your company required for a weekend getaway, including conference rooms, swimming pool, assault course, stables, quad bikes, spa and gym. The thought of her company—specifically, of Jackson Lamb—making use of all or any of these momentarily swamped any other consideration, but once she’d banished such images, she commenced wondering why Lucas had been interested. Paul’s Pantry, she guessed, had been where he’d worked over Christmas. Maybe this had been one of their catering events.

She rang Clare again to check. “Does the name Caerwyss Hall ring bells?”

“It’s near Pegsea. One of those big manor house places that’s gone corporate? Weekend retreats and team-building. Where everyone has to pretend they get on, and nobody hates anyone else.”

“Hell on earth,” Louisa agreed. While they talked, she was looking up the Wiki pages Lucas had visited. “Lucas worked for Paul’s Pantry, right? Did he help cater an event there?”

“Yes. The day after Boxing Day. It was good money.”

But he’d looked at the site since then, so he hadn’t been checking up ahead of the job, to know what to expect.

The Wiki harvest was a curious collection. Some well-known names. Some obscure companies. What on earth was Bullingdon Fopp? Was this what teenagers did to pass the time: surf below-the-skyline entities from the financial news pages? It didn’t seem likely. She said, “What about his interests? I can see he likes sport. What about politics?”

“Not really. He was interested in causes, all young people are, or should be. He got uptight about the whole Me Too thing. But Labour-Tory politics, no, it turned him off. Each as bad as the other, he reckoned.”

Louisa was scrolling through Caerwyss Hall’s website, scanning their About Us page. The usual puffery, and pull-quotes from users. Our team has gone from strength to strength. We were delighted with the care and support on offer. And there, halfway down the page, Bullingdon Fopp again. A PR company. No quote offered, but the company was listed as a customer.

“And sport, yeah. He’s a fitness fanatic.”

She nodded, pointlessly. Was feeling unfit herself today, well short of her 10,000 steps. She scrolled back to the top of the page, wondering why Lucas had been so interested in Caerwyss Hall, and what had led him to research the name of one of its corporate clients.

As if she’d been reading her mind, Clare went on, “He logs his daily exercise, and if he’s fallen short during the week, he makes up at weekends. Goes on runs to get his mileage up. That sort of thing.”

Louisa paused. “Does he have a Fitbit?”

“God, yes. He’s obsessed with it.”

“And did he take it with him?”

“I imagine so. I haven’t seen it lying around.”

“Okay,” said Louisa. “I don’t suppose you can lay your hands on the paperwork, by any chance?”

In Slough House, the afternoon was doing what the afternoon did: outstaying its welcome. River had printed the photocopied passport from Southampton, the supposed Canadian called Jay Featherstone, and pinned it to his office wall. This was his father. He had no fond childhood memories to draw on, because he hadn’t met the man until last year, but he hadn’t forgotten how Harkness had dumped him in the Thames on that occasion. More delaying tactic than murder attempt, to be fair, but Frank’s absence during River’s childhood had presumably left certain gaps in his knowledge, such as whether his son could swim, so you couldn’t write it off as horseplay. Then again, River couldn’t swear his mother knew that much. Talk about a fucked-up family. They had enough raw material to float a psychotherapy practice.

He was rolling a pea-sized ball of Blu Tak between finger and thumb, and he flicked it now at Frank’s photo. It hit the paper, hung for a second, then dropped to the floor.

The name Jay Featherstone was all they had. Lamb had vetoed contacting border control: there was no need to alert anyone—he meant the Park—that they were looking. Not that they’d need alerting. Di Taverner had been at the funeral, and would no more expect Lamb to shrug Harkness’s presence off than she’d expect him to fly, or brush his teeth. But that was par for the course; much of life at Slough House was determined by the push-me/pull-you relationship between those two. River would suggest they get a room, provided the room was soundproofed, locked, and had an alligator in it.

“So what do we do?” he’d asked earlier, when they’d gathered in Lamb’s room once more, pooling what they knew. It had already been pooled by email, of course, but Lamb shunned emails; would have communicated entirely by dead-letter drop if he could. The stack of phone books holding up his desk lamp testified to his analogue preferences. “You can break a man’s ribs with a telephone directory,” he’d once observed. “Try doing that with a rolled-up copy of the internet.”

“I assume we have some idea where our mock Canadian has got to?” Lamb had said. “Not that I approve of mocking Canadians. That’d be like shooting kittens in a barrel.”

River said, “We have a credit card from the car hire firm.”

“He used it to book a room at a Travelodge,” said Ho.

“Classy bastard,” said Lamb. “Where?”

Shirley said, “Stevenage.”

“It’s as if you’re working in harmony,” Lamb said. “Like a fucking Coke commercial.” He belched, possibly a Pavlovian thing. “You’ll be wanting a group huddle next.”

“He’s the reason Marcus was killed,” Catherine said quietly.

“Who was Marcus?” Lech asked.

They all stared at him.

“Jesus,” he said. “Pardon me for breathing.”

“They’re not being unfriendly because you’re new,” Lamb explained kindly. “They’re being unfriendly because you get your kicks watching kiddy porn.”

“We should go there,” River had said. “Stevenage.”

“Yeah, we should, if there was the remotest possibility he’d still be there,” said Lamb. “But it’s probably best we don’t bother, on account of not being complete morons. Present company excepted.” He was holding a cigarette. He hadn’t been, a second before, but this was something the slow horses were used to: between endless examples of fat bastardy, there was the odd moment of slick trickery too. “So. Any ideas as to what he’s up to?”

“Stevenage,” said Shirley. “I’m ruling tourism out.”

“Yeah, Stevenage was regrouping,” said Lamb. “His business lies elsewhere. Where’s your mother?”

This to River, who started. He said, “Brighton. You don’t think—”

“Maybe.” Lamb plugged the unlit cigarette into his mouth, and for a moment looked lost in thought.

“Because if she’s in danger—”

“But maybe not. No, if it was her he was after, he’d not have needed to scope out grandpa’s funeral to find her. He’s a lifetime spook. I imagine he knows about directory enquiries.” He looked up, and River saw something in his eyes that wasn’t usually there. “I’d thought he might have wanted to see you, but that’s not likely either, is it? No, there’s something else.”

They waited, but whatever it was, he hadn’t grasped it yet.

Shirley said, “That new guy was there. Nash? The Limitations Committee’s new boss.”

She mimed someone looking down a sniper scope. It wasn’t a very good mime, but the context was obvious enough that it didn’t have to be.

River said, “Frank Harkness has a screw loose, sure. But he has no reason to want to whack the head of the Service’s steering committee.”

A match flared, and the smell of burning tobacco filled the room. “We all know Cartwright here’s biased, on account of, you know, DNA and stuff, but he has a point.” Lamb shifted in his chair, and swung his unshod feet onto his desk. “Last time Frank was here he was mopping up his own mess, but it was a mess he made trying to protect this country’s interests, not destroy them.”

“Big difference,” Shirley pointed out.

Lamb grunted, then frowned. “I’d be the first to admit I have trouble telling you apart,” he said. “But is there someone missing?”

“Louisa’s on leave,” Catherine reminded him.

“All right for some, eh? I suppose we should be grateful there’s not an emergency on. Like, you know, a homicidal spook on the loose.”

“She probably decided it was Park business. And that Slough House had no reason getting involved.”

“Nice going. Here’s me bending over backwards to boost the morale of this shiftless bunch of spastics, and you have to undermine them. I don’t know why I bother, I really don’t.”

He took a drag on his cigarette, then scowled at the glowing end, as if concerned it would give his position away.

Coe spoke. “He wasn’t alone,” he said.

Lamb put a spare finger into his ear, wriggled it about, and removed something he peered at then wiped on his sock. “That’s better, touch of tinnitus. Unless . . .” He looked enquiringly around. “He didn’t speak, did he?”

“There were three men with him.”

“Let’s pretend we’d like a little detail.”

Coe said, “I ran face recognition on the Southampton arrivals. There were three other hits on the same ferry. All on the Park’s Annex C.”

Lamb’s look of perplexity was a pantomime dame’s, appealing to an audience for help with a lunatic.

Surprisingly, it was Lech Wicinski who came to his aid. “Minor players,” he said. “Mercenaries, informants, known associates. That kind of thing.”

“What you might call the grey area,” River said.

“So the kind of pool Harkness might go paddling in,” Lamb said. He pointed his cigarette at Coe. “Any visible contact?”

“No.”

“But a big coincidence if they weren’t a team. Unless Brittany Ferries were running a special. Three lowlifes for the price of two. You check this Annex Whatever?”

“All have records as private contractors. Military.”

“So Harkness has a team in country. Gadfuckingzooks.” Lamb shook his head, but River saw a gleam in his eye. That pretence about not knowing what Annex C was; the general air of marvelling at the world’s dirty linen. Fat slob he might be, but joe blood ran in Lamb’s veins. Had stained his hands.

Now he said to Coe, “Nice to see you using your brain, instead of spreading someone else’s over the landscape. You have names for this crew?”

“Anton Moser. Lars Becker. Cyril Dupont.”

“That was all just noise to me, but I assume the rest of you have taken note.” Lamb sat upright suddenly, swinging his feet floorwards. “Anything else?”

“Harkness is Annex A,” said Coe.

“Meaning, I presume, that he’s regarded as toxic?”

Coe nodded.

“And yet he walks among us. Seems like the deal he swung last time still holds good.”

“Which means,” Catherine pointed out, “that he’s untouchable.”

“You again? I’m starting to wonder whose side you’re on.” He flipped his cigarette stub into the air—a new trick, this—and it dropped neatly into the half-full mug of tea on his desktop. “Harkness might have a hands-off agreement with the Park. But he doesn’t have one with me.”

Me either, River thought. Me either.

“So,” said Lamb. He surveyed the gathering. “To answer Cartwright’s impertinent little whine five minutes back, what we do now is find out if Dozy, Beaky and Titch were at that same Travelodge with Harkness. And if not, where are they now? That sound like it falls within your skill set, grasshopper?”

He was looking at Roddy Ho, who gave a twitchy smirk in response. “Yeah, sure.”

“How splendid. Wrap it up by teatime and I’ll see about getting you a gerbil, to replace that girlfriend of yours.”

Shirley scowled. “How come he gets special treatment?”

“Fact of life, Dander. Us minorities pull together.”

“. . . You’re a minority?”

Lamb looked pained. “I’m half lesbian on my mother’s side. Or does that count for nothing?”

That was then. Now, River stood and approached the photocopy on the wall. Jay Featherstone—Frank Harkness. He’d inherited some of his father’s looks; the mole on his upper lip was his own, but the colouring was hand-me-down, and the general facial structure, his shape, his essence, was there in his father’s features. Along with what else? All his life, he’d thought he’d inherited his ambition from his grandfather, and the stories the O.B. had plied him with throughout his youth. He hadn’t known that being a spook was a dynastic thing. That his father lived in those same shadows.

Half without meaning to, he slammed his fist side-on against Frank’s face. A little payment on account, though Frank’s expression didn’t change, and all River gained from the moment was a throbbing in his hand.

He knew Coe was watching as he returned to his desk, just as he knew that if he glanced Coe’s way, Coe would be focused on something else.

River sat down again, and got on with brooding.

If you want your enemy to fail, give him something important to do. This stratagem—known for obscure historical reasons as ‘The Boris’—was one Di Taverner set store by, and if Oliver Nash wasn’t exactly an enemy, he was the kind of ally you wanted ground into submission whenever possible. Technically, the Chair of the Limitations Committee argued First Desk’s case before Treasury and the Cabinet in general; in practice, as one of Diana’s predecessors had pointed out, Chairs can wobble. Sometimes you had to saw a length off a leg. And Di Taverner had no qualms about cutting Nash off at the knees, but there were ways and means. It made sense to balance the cruel with the kind.

Nash made his entrance with his usual lack of aplomb; dexterity he might have in spades when it came to diplomatic wrangling, but in actual physical terms, he had the grace of a boat going sideways. Lady Di had visions of him crashing through her glass wall, gifting the boys and girls on the Hub a legend they’d never forget, but apart from a brief tussle with the visitor’s chair, and a nudge to her desk which rattled its drawers, he made harbour without incident. Despite the weather, he looked warm. It occurred to her that he always did, but then, he carried enough padding to make an Arctic outing plausible.

Seated, comfortable, he spoke. “This morning.”

“I thought the vicar spoke well,” she said. “Nice balance between service for his country and tactful lack of detail. You know Cartwright’s neighbours thought he was in Transport?”

“Wonder what they made of the acrobatics. A disgruntled commuter paying his disrespects?”

“Families,” said Diana. “I put it about that the grandson’s a little . . . emotional.”

“A little emotional? What would having a breakdown look like? Digging the corpse up and doing a waltz?”

She allowed him a small nod.

“So who was he, Diana? And what was he doing at Cartwright’s funeral?”

“His name’s Frank Harkness, and I have no idea.”

“One of us?”

“An American.”

“Oh, Christ. CIA?”

“Former.”

“Former? They use formers for wet work. Jesus, they didn’t have Cartwright killed, did they?”

“Unlikely. The head of CIA’s a voice of sanity in the US at the moment. Then again, it’s all relative. Would you like coffee, by the way? I should have asked.”

“Thank you. And maybe a biscuit? I skipped lunch.”

Nash’s battle with his waistline was approaching mythical status at Regent’s Park, though ‘battle’ might be overstating it, given Nash’s half-hearted approach to hostilities. His strategy mostly consisted of carrying on as normal and hoping the situation would improve. Besides, his definition of ‘skipping’ didn’t differ wildly from ‘postponing’; lunch might have been omitted from his diary, but an afternoon biscuit frenzy would soon have things back on track.

While waiting for the promised refreshments to arrive, he said, “Several people warned me about taking on this role, you know. They seemed to think there were easier ways of securing a seat in the Lords.”

“Oh, we’re on the side of the angels, Oliver. You just have to remember that angels do God’s dirty work.”

Nash nodded. “So if I wanted to know what was going on without knowing anything I’d have cause to wish I didn’t, how much would you tell me?”

Not much more than a paragraph, was Taverner’s considered opinion. The details of Harkness’s last UK appearance, shortly after the Westacres bombing, were still under wraps—not so much buried in the files for thirty years as left blowing in the wind, to be scattered for all time—and while Nash was entitled to be fully briefed, he was wise not to press the point. Deniability was next to Godliness in Westminster’s corridors, and Godliness itself second only to Unassailable Majority. And the last time anyone had seen one of those, the resulting messiah complex was still being grumbled about in The Hague.

But Nash was an ally, so here was something he could do: sit on a piece of information and make sure it never hatched.

“He worked liaison, between Langley and the Park. Only a little, and a long time ago. But afterwards, once he went freelance, he made use of certain . . . assets.”

A tray was brought in, and Nash’s mood improved.

“It turned out he’d helped himself from our dressing-up box before putting certain events in train,” Taverner continued when they had the room again. “Which made bringing charges a tricky business. It could so easily have looked like we’d been incompetent.”

Than which, as both knew, there were few looks more damning. It was a rare historical car crash that forensic reconstruction couldn’t make seem a successful emergency stop. And as in any line of business, a succeeding CEO who couldn’t make a bygone cock-up look like an opportunity missed wasn’t fit for management, and should take her retirement package, her annual bonus, her golden handshake and her non-disclosure kickback and tiptoe from the boardroom in disgrace. So no, Taverner wasn’t worried that she might seem incompetent; Claude Whelan had been in charge during the Westacres atrocity, and the associated buck had been branded with his initials long before it came to a halt. What Taverner would prefer not to become public was the nature of the deals she’d made to ensure that that particular deceleration didn’t inflict whiplash on her too.

Nash reached for a second Hobnob, making quite a good fist of looking like he was doing this unconsciously, his mind on other things. “And is that coming back to bite us? Because I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and find nasty headlines on my iPad. I didn’t much like it when they came neatly folded on good old-fashioned broadsheets.”

“No editor’s going to print that St. Len’s is the Spooks’ Chapel,” she said. “Not unless they want to find out what it’s like having their own mobiles monitored. So no, a minor brouhaha at a family event is all that happened. It’ll stay that way.”

“And Harkness?”

“Wheels are in motion.”

“Just so long as they don’t come off.” Nash leaned back in his chair. Were it not for the smudge of chocolate on his upper lip, he’d have looked the model of an executive decision-maker. “Because the Service isn’t in good odour at present. Too many missteps, too few triumphs. While acknowledging that your own tenure’s still in its infancy, the PM isn’t convinced that a corner’s yet been turned.”

“She’s rejected my working paper,” Taverner said flatly.

“It’s not a good time, Diana. The cupboard is bare. Now is not the moment for a root-and-branch overhaul of operational practices, however crucial you feel that might be.” He glanced at the plate of biscuits, but successfully glanced away again. “Between ourselves, playing wait-and-see might be no bad thing. The PM’s stamp of approval hardly comes with a lifetime guarantee. It’s no secret she wasn’t so much made leader as handed a janitor’s uniform. Once Brexit’s been finalised, and her job looks less like an excrement baguette, someone more competent will step into her breeches. Then, perhaps, the ball will be back in your court.”

“Our court, don’t you mean?”

“I’m on your side, Diana. You know that.”

“Good to hear. But we don’t just need new balls, we need our racquet restrung. I’m trying to safeguard the nation, Oliver. That’s not a good area to penny-pinch on. And it’s not as if we’re currently standing shoulder to shoulder with our sister services.”

“Our European allies aren’t going to throw us to the wolves just because we’re looking for trading partners elsewhere.”

“Maybe not. But nor are they going to let us sit at their tables if they think we’re best buddies with China, or Kazakhstan, or whoever we end up swapping glass beads with. The borders have shifted. We need good, old-fashioned, on-the-ground intelligence, backed up with the appropriate hardware. We can’t be keeping our fingers crossed that the neighbours’ll lend us theirs when the chips are down.”

“The people have spoken, Diana.”

“Did they speak? Or just scream in frustration?”

“Save it for a dinner party. The government of the day, elected by the people, indicates the path we have to tread. Currently, that’s the path of make and do.”

“And the government of the day doesn’t always choose the wisest route.”

“Which are words best kept between these walls. You’re First Desk now, Diana. That carries responsibilities above and beyond the operational. Caretaker or not, the PM has a right to expect your loyalty.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not planning a coup.”

“Good to know.”

“I’ll let her own party do that.”

“You’re not filling me with confidence.”

She said, “Blowing off steam. That’s all.” She dipped her head ever so slightly. “Thanks for arguing the case, anyway.”

“Yes, well. Let me handle the politics.” He looked at his watch, noticed the dusting of crumbs on his sleeve, and brushed himself in irritation. “Time I was away. Be brave and true, and all that sort of thing.”

“Oliver.”

She smiled him out of the room, thinking: The Boris. Give your enemy something important to do.

It did no harm to have Oliver Nash think he was in charge.

“No way,” said Emma Flyte.

“You owe me one,” said Louisa.

“No I don’t. Where on earth did you get that idea?”

Louisa said, “I just thought it might sway you if I said that.”

“Huh.”

Emma was at home. Even a week into unemployment it felt strange, not going to work. First day, she’d pounded her phone: contacts contacts contacts. Putting the word out that she was on the market. She imagined networks lighting up, like an old-fashioned switchboard; messages relayed from one source to another; information absorbed, mulled over, passed on. There’d be speculation—how come the Service let her go?—but one of the benefits of the covert world was, there was no shortage of alibis. The details can’t be made public. I’m sure you understand. Wouldn’t stop the gossip, because nothing ever did, but gossip at least guaranteed she’d be on everyone’s agenda for a while. Lots of places—big interests—expensive concerns—would be happy with an ex-Met, ex-Regent’s Park cop on their books. So far, though, her calls remained unreturned.

Didn’t matter. Give it a week, give it two, the serious players would come to her. For the moment she just had to play the waiting game.

The trouble was, it was a game she was really bad at. The week had been purgatory: household chores, bloody books, staring at the TV until its programmes became nervous. Having nothing to do was driving her crazy. A call from Louisa was a relief.

They weren’t friends, exactly. They were friendly, though. And now she was no longer Park, perhaps they could take things onto the next level; like, do stuff together without getting into a fight. Time would tell.

But whatever happened next, this phantom favour wasn’t going to be it.

“It would be a quick in, quick out.”

“It’s Regent’s Park, not Tesco’s.”

“That’s what I meant. Those self-service checkouts take forever. Anyway, if you’re too chicken—”

“Fuck off, Louisa.”

“—too scaredy pants to venture into the lions’ den, you could always get Devon to do it. I’m sure he’d be only too happy to do you a favour. And twice as happy if he knew he was doing me one at the same time.”

“You realise he’s gay?”

There was a slight pause. Then Louisa said, “Yeah, I knew that.”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“Course I did. Doesn’t mean he won’t want to do us both a favour.”

“Except it wouldn’t be doing me a favour, because I have no interest in persuading someone on the Hub to break the law. Can I run that past you again? What you’re asking is against the law.”

“Used to happen all the time when I was at the Park.”

“And remind me where you are now?”

“. . . Point taken.”

“It’s not only a sackable offence. I genuinely think Lady Di would have someone shot.”

Louisa said, “I knew that really. Just thought it was worth taking a punt.”

Emma said, “Are you drinking?”

“Glass of wine.”

“Gimme a sec.” She didn’t know why she said that: she took the phone with her as she went into her kitchen, found a glass, and poured herself a healthy slug of Malbec. Benefits of unemployment: you didn’t have to worry about next morning’s head. The disadvantage was, of course, that if it went on too long, she’d be swapping the Malbec for Thunderbird. And that wasn’t a good look at all.

Glass full, she said, “How’s things?”

“Same as.”

“That bad, huh?”

“You heard David Cartwright died?”

“Yes. How’s whatsisname taking it?”

“River. Much as you’d expect. I’ll pass on your regards, shall I?”

“Just make sure he knows I forgot his name.” Emma sipped her wine. Mid-week drinking had a certain vibe, she decided. Maybe those folk sleeping in doorways had a point. “What about the fat bastard?”

“You seriously want to know?”

“I’m hoping you’ll say he’s at death’s door.”

Louisa said, “I doubt death would answer. It’d hide behind the sofa, pretending to be out.”

“Good point. Who you looking for?”

“Missing kid.”

“How old?”

“Seventeen.”

“Girl?”

“No.”

“How come you’re looking?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You’re shagging the dad?”

There was a pause. Then Louisa said, “Long time ago.”

More to it than that, Emma could tell. She took another sip of wine, let it roll around her mouth, then said, “And you think you can trace this kid by his Fitbit?”

“Not personally. But the thing is, he’s still wearing it. And given they’re internet-enabled, and I’ve got its registration number—”

“Then someone with the right kit should be able to pinpoint—”

“His exact location, yeah.”

“Well, you’re probably right. But I’m not going to bluff my way onto the Hub and ask one of the worker bees to break fifteen different laws for me. They didn’t like me when I worked there. They’re not going to do me any favours now.”

“Sure they liked you.”

“They were scared of me.”

“There’s a difference?”

Emma conceded the point by finishing her wine.

She said, “Why don’t you ask your tame keyboard muppet? I seem to remember there’s nothing he can’t do with a computer. Or that was the impression he liked to give.”

“Yeah, no, the thing is, if I ask Roddy to do it, it would be like I owed him a favour.”

“It would be precisely you owing him a favour,” Emma pointed out.

“Which is worse,” Louisa agreed. “On account of I work in the same building as him. Though that does, in fact, give me an idea . . .”

Emma waited, but nothing more was forthcoming.

“You still there?”

“I was hoping,” Louisa told her, “that you’d work the next bit out for yourself. Hence my dramatic pause.”

“. . . God, no.”

“Pretty sure he’d jump at the chance to get in your pants. Good books is what I just said. Ignore whatever you thought you heard.”

“I am not going to go begging favours from Roddy Ho.”

“Awww, you remember his name. That is so cute.”

“Louisa—”

“Plus you’re bored out of your skull. You know you are.”

“This was your plan all along, wasn’t it? You knew there was no chance in hell I’d go into the Park for you. And you’re hoping because I’d say no to that, I’d be more likely to say yes to this.”

“I have no idea what you mean. Plan? We’re having a girly chat.”

“One in which you play me like a . . . xylophone.”

“Yeah, I can’t play the xylophone. Listen, Emma, seriously? I really need to find this kid. And I don’t think Ho will do it for me. He’s been kind of pissed off since, you know. That whole fake girlfriend thing.”

Emma looked at her empty glass. She was being played, no question.

It was true, though, that she was bored out of her skull.

She said, “I do this for you, you’ll explain what ‘complicated’ means?”

Louisa said, “To the last syllable.”

Emma picked the glass up, walked back to her kitchen. “Okay,” she said. “You want to read out that registration number?”

That evening—while River was turning off his computer at Slough House, then rebooting immediately, thinking ten more minutes; just ten more minutes running Jay Featherstone’s hire car through ANPR, in case it had registered while he was powering down—Richard Pynne stopped for a drink on his way home. He needed it. Instead of researching Frank Harkness, his afternoon had been one of crisis-management: a Park operative had dropped off the map. A contractor, her role was to supervise the incineration of shredded documents, the crushing of superannuated hard drives, and to some she was little more than a glorified janitor, but not to Pynne. The way he saw it, she regularly laid hands on broken secrets. Who was to say they couldn’t be reassembled? So when it had been brought to his attention that she wasn’t at work, and when the resulting knock on her door revealed a vacant flat, it was clear she’d taken her jigsaws to auction. Thus her photo was red-flagged, and took the UK airports’ hit parade by storm; meanwhile, Dick put a team onto assembling a menu of recently sledgehammered work product, a task which involved most of the Hub. And it went well, or as well as these things ever do: by seven, he’d been ready to deliver to Lady Di a list of operations to be regarded as tainted when someone handed him a Post-it the contractor had stuck to her manager’s desk that morning: she had the flu and was going home. Further investigation revealed she’d changed address without updating her personal details. All of which went to show, as Richard emphasised in his end-of-day report, that procedures should be rigidly adhered to. There was a reason red tape existed; it was so things didn’t fall apart. And now he needed a drink.

It was a corner pub off Great Portland Street, with a battle-scarred mirror behind the bar in which he could keep an eye out for undue interest. The afternoon’s false alarm didn’t mean real alarms couldn’t happen, and since leaving the Park he’d had that uneasy sense of hearing footsteps in synch with his own. There were tricks you could pull—double back to check a shop window, pause to fix a shoelace, halt at a bus stop—and he’d tried each in turn. But if he had a tail, it failed to wag. Now inside, he ordered a gin and tonic; made it a double. However exemplary his actions of the afternoon, he didn’t want to dwell on them. Nor was he keen to know what the boys and girls of the Hub would be chatting about over their own after-work cordials.

He wished he were meeting Hannah. Amazing how a hint, a swift deflection, could turn disaster into weather-beaten triumph. Bit of a flap this afternoon. Nothing I can talk about . . . When he looked up, Lech Wicinski was on the stool next to him. “Hey, Dick.”

“What the fuck?”

“I was passing. Saw you through the window.”

Pynne turned automatically to the window, then back to Wicinski. “You shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be talking to me.”

“What are you, royalty?”

Good as, Pynne thought. Given their respective status. He shook his head. “Lech. Remember your letter? From HR? No contact, not with anyone from the Park, while—”

“Yes, I remember. It’s a fucking earworm. But you know what?” Wicinski waved a finger and the barman approached; he ordered a pint, then picked up where he’d left off. “I don’t much care.”

Red tape held things together. Once people like Wicinski started cutting through it, it would be a full-time job maintaining integrity. That wasn’t the reason he’d been let go, obviously, but he wasn’t doing himself any favours.

Now he said, “It turns out I don’t have many friends at the Park.”

“Many? Try none. That was some pretty sick shit you were looking at.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“There’ll be a hearing. You know how this works.”

“I don’t, actually. I’ve never been in this situation before.” His pint arrived, and he forked over a tenner. “You know what they say about you on the Hub, Dick? That you’re one pocket-protector away from being a geography teacher.”

“Very amusing.”

The barman laid Wicinski’s change on the counter.

Pynne watched the mirror while this was happening. The two of them, side by side; you might mistake them for friends. That was how appearances worked: they pulled you one way, reality went another. He slid a hand into his overcoat pocket and said, “Why were you following me?”

“Because, like I say, you have a rep. Geography teacher.”

“And what, you were lost?”

“Meaning you like things done the way they should be done. And I realised something earlier today. I don’t need a friend. I need someone who wants things done properly.”

Pynne drained his G&T, in perfect unison with his reflection. He was okay with the way he looked. Calm. In control. ’Fronted by a pissed-off junior, but not letting it get to him. Hear what the man had to say, then blow his candle out. Gently.

“They will be,” he said. “The hearing happens later this week. Lady Di, Oliver Nash. There’ll be evidence.”

“But I won’t be there to state my case.”

“It’s not a court of law. It’s Regent’s Park.” His hand still in his pocket, he fondled his Service rape alarm, as they were called. Anyone tried to slip a hand between your thighs, you pressed the button. “That being so, let’s both save our breath and you get back on home to, remind me. Sara?”

“Keep her out of this.”

“Sure thing. We done yet?”

“No. I want you to do something. Not for me, not just for me, but because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Hurry it up.”

“A couple of weeks ago, I ran a search and hit a flagged name. A person of interest. I think I triggered something. I think I was being shut down.”

“This is paranoia, Lech.”

“Well in the circumstances I’m entitled, don’t you think?”

“I—”

“Dick, listen. Could you follow up on that name? Please? It’s Peter Kahlmann, that’s K-A-H-L-M-A-N-N. Peter. But don’t run the usual checks, or it’ll be noticed. I was thinking maybe put in a request through GCHQ, with the wanted ads?”

Wicinski meant the list of trigger words the monitoring agency updated daily, as it reaped the national chatter. Emails and phone calls, online conversations: plucking syllables out of static. And since communications between the Service and GCHQ didn’t always flow smoothly, chances were, the same flags wouldn’t be in place on their respective targets. Especially if the flag in question was internal to the Park. Pynne knew all this. He didn’t need it spelled out.

“Before the hearing. This is evidence, Dick. It might be evidence.”

The man should listen to himself. There was desperation in his voice; a whiny, needling pitch to make any listener flinch.

Pynne signalled for a refill, and while it was coming pulled the alarm from his pocket. He set it on the bar. “You should know, I just pressed this.”

“Jesus, man—”

“So it’d be best all round if you left now.”

For a moment, it was a toss-up: Wicinski was going to throw a punch; Wicinski was going to make one last plea. In the end, the coin dropped nowhere. The man just shook his head, said “Fuck you,” and got up to go.

“Lech?”

Wicinski paused.

“I’m not saying I believe you. But I’ll do the right thing.”

Wicinski remained motionless for another half-second, then nodded, and went out the door.

Pynne put his unpressed alarm back in his pocket as his G&T arrived.

I’ll do the right thing, he thought, but that didn’t involve running stray names through spook channels. Not after having disappointed Di Taverner once today already. The last thing she’d said to him after this afternoon’s fiasco still rankled: “Seriously, Richard, just go home now.” He had some distance to make up there; to shred that memory, or take a hammer to its hard drive.

And now he had Lech Wicinski to deal with too. But that was okay. That was one problem he could fix.

He was halfway down his glass already. Definitely needed that. Seeing it off with one grand swallow, he nodded a farewell to the barman, and followed Taverner’s final instruction at last.

Catherine Standish, too, was homeward bound. She had stayed late at Slough House, unsure, as so often, whether the work she was engaged in demanded prolonged attention, or whether her delayed departure had been a form of self-punishment. Being the last one out, locking up behind her, provoked a raw awareness, one she usually held at bay. But walking through the rank little yard into the alley, she couldn’t help but think: This. This was more than her workspace, it had become her life, a life now dwindled to a series of dull tasks which, because of her meticulous wiring, she performed to a standard beyond anyone’s expectation, after which the usual weary journey home to the usual empty flat. A decade ago, fifteen years, this was a better future than she might have had call to expect. But twenty years ago, thirty, and it was a ruin of a life, stripped of ambition and hope. A vision of it granted to her then would have rocked her firmament. Might have driven her to drink.

She left the Tube a stop early, called at the Wine Citadel, and bought a Barolo. An understated label, of which she approved. A good wine spoke for itself. It went into a plastic bag, and should have been an anonymous weight in her hand, but somehow wasn’t. There was something about a full bottle, the way it responded to gravity, that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. It was like carrying a big brass key, which would open the biggest door ever heard of.

It was cold on the street—not long now, and this weather would have its way with her bones. She’d creak on waking, slow to a crawl on frosty pavements. There were so many things age could do to you; so few you could do in return. In the end, she supposed, you just stayed on your feet as long as you were able, then took the rest lying down.

Her apartment block was set back from the road, shielded by a hedge; its lobby, when she reached it, was empty and chill. Her heels clacked on its tiles. If she dropped her plastic bag its contents would shatter, and the floor become swampy with cinematic blood . . . The image made her tighten her grip. Some losses were more unthinkable than others.

And then the lift, and its slow rise; and then her own floor, with streetlight streaming through the window at the far end. Her key already in her hand. Her next automatic gesture already in motion.

As soon as she opened the door, she knew the flat was not empty.

She stepped into her sitting room with her coat on, her bag hanging from her hand. The corner lamp was on a timer, and performing its usual magic; throwing its glow at the rows of bottles, allowing them to beam back fractured light, so the room became the inside of a genie’s lantern. This light spoke of blood, and stained the air with a ruby mist. Walking into it, she felt as if she were stepping underwater, and the two possible outcomes of such an action—that she would drown; that she would float—remained in perpetual tussle. This was where she lived, the edge on which she balanced. And its one enduring comfort was, she balanced there alone.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I believe the kids call it chillaxing,” said Lamb. The heating had come on, but he wore his coat; his shoes were puddled on the carpet in front of him. He wasn’t drinking, oddly enough. He was cradling a bottle, though; looked as if he were nursing it, one meaty hand wrapped around its label. She recognised it regardless—a Montepulciano; a low-end choice, but a parent doesn’t judge.

“Leave now,” she said. “This moment.”

“You’re miffed because I didn’t bring a bottle.”

“This is trespass. This is the worst—”

She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t find the words; they were all trapped behind glass, which was only to be broken in the event of emergency. And while this felt like one of those, she was unable to reach out and perform the required damage.

Something changed; a shift in the light. It was Lamb’s phone, she realised. Lamb’s phone was resting on the arm of his chair—her chair—and it had just winked out, fading into sleep. Which meant he’d been using it within the last few minutes.

Lamb, using his phone. That might be the strangest thing of all in this strange moment.

He said, “No, really, take your coat off. Make yourself at home.”

“You have no right to be here. None at all.”

“Well Christ, I know that. I used a stolen key, for fuck’s sake. That was a clue.”

“I could call the police.”

“Yeah, they’ll think they’ve caught a smuggler.” He waved an arm: it didn’t matter which direction. There were bottles, full bottles, stacked against each wall. They were lined along the bookshelves; parading on the mantlepiece. They were in battle formation on the coffee table, prepared to fend off boarders. “Or are you opening an off-licence?”

“I haven’t drunk.”

“I know.”

“You think I wouldn’t be able to hide it?”

“Maybe for the first half hour. But second bottle in you’d be under a trucker, we both know that.”

“And you’re here to save me?”

“Fuck, no. I’m here to push you over the edge.” He lobbed the bottle he’d been cradling at her and instinctively she dropped the bag and let the airborne missile fall into her arms. The bag hit the carpet with a thud. No damage done.

Lamb plucked another from the stack next to his chair. “Bouchard père et fils,” he read. “Yeah, that’ll rinse the taste of derelict from your gums.”

“And that’s your party trick, is it?” she said. “You’re going to throw bottles at me until I crack and open one.”

“Hey, they’re your bottles. I’m just the middleman.” He glanced around. “Hope you got a discount for bulk. You could buy a house for what this cost. I mean, in Sunderland. But still.”

She walked into her kitchen, trembling. She took her coat off and hung it on a chair: it slid to the floor, and she let it. She grabbed a glass and filled it from the tap. Drank. Refilled it. Drank again.

What had she been planning? She didn’t know. It was madness, to surround herself with this temptation; madness, but a kind of security too. The possibility of a single glass would always hover over her; might be enough to lead her to the cliff. But this—the Aladdin’s cave she’d wrought—was something else, beyond mere temptation. It was the promise of absolute carnage. Lamb was right: two bottles in, there’d be no bottom to the depths she might fall. The life that had dwindled to a series of dull tasks would look like paradise over her shoulder. So why was she flirting with destruction? She heard a bass rumble, and returned to her living room. Lamb had succumbed to one of the coughing fits that had plagued him lately. Red-faced, sweating, he was bent double, one meaty hand covering his mouth, the other curled into a fist and thumping the arm of the chair. He might have been wrestling with demons.

Catherine watched. This would wear itself out. It always did. She supposed she could use his temporary uselessness to go through his pockets and take back the key to her flat he’d acquired. Or steal his shoes, walk around in them for a while. And she shook her head at the thought: God, no. Anything but that.

Maybe just beat him to death with a bottle.

He was returning to normal, the coughing subsiding. The fist became an open palm. Through it all, he’d not relinquished the bottle: it was clamped between his thighs, upright. Another image she didn’t want taking root.

When he’d finished, she handed him the glass she was still holding. He drained it, wiped a hand across his damp forehead, and glared at her.

“That’s not going anywhere, is it?” she said.

“Chest infection.”

“You’re sure? It sounds like your whole body’s in revolt.”

“Antibiotics’ll clear it up.”

“They tend not to work with drink taken.”

“They’re drugs, they’re not fucking Irishmen.” He studied his hand for a moment, then wiped it on his coat, “And let’s not forget, I’m not the one with the death wish.”

“Which you’re here to help trigger.”

“I hate indecisive types, don’t you? Shit or get off the pot.”

“It’s time for you to go.”

“And this wino’s trolley dash of yours, you’re doing it for one reason only.”

“Jackson Lamb, amateur psychologist. I almost want to record this. But mostly I just want you to shut up and go away.”

She might as well not have spoken. “It’s because Taverner told you I killed Charles Partner. Your sainted boss, who was a fucking traitor, by the way. She told you that, and it’s been eating you up ever since.”

Lamb rotated the bottle in his hands as he spoke, and she stared as its label became visible, was obscured, became visible again. One bottle among many, but for some reason it had secured her full attention.

“Because every day you come into work, open my mail, bring me my tea, and these are all things you used to do for him, back in the good old days.”

The good old days, when she’d have opened that bottle without a second thought; when its contents would have measured out the first half of an evening, the half spent wondering whether she’d have a quiet night, or maybe get a little drunk. Just to take the edge off.

“And I’m the one blew his brains out.”

And that’s what she had to live with. She’d grown used to Lamb over the years; used to the idea that this half of her life, the dry half, was to be spent in the employment of a gross, unpredictable bastard who had, like it or not, saved her. Without him she’d have been discarded after Partner’s death, and who knew if her fledgling sobriety would have survived that? So buried somewhere deep in what she felt for Lamb was gratitude, because he was the reason her raft remained afloat. And then she learned that he’d killed Partner. The darkest stain of all, and the one that had taken longest to come to light.

“That’s what Taverner told you.”

“And you’re here to tell me that’s not true,” she said.

“No,” said Lamb. “I’m here to tell you how it happened.”

Good job he had Wicinski’s number . . . First suspicious move and the Rodster’ll tie you in knots.

So yeah: good times. The RodMan had Wicinski’s number, and was currently watching a visual simulacrum of it—its avatar a steaming turd—hanging steady just off Great Portland Street, an address GoogleMaps indicated was a pub. Stopping for a drink, huh? Hanging with your mates? But why there, Wicinski? Why a pub nowhere near your place of work, your home address? Oh yeah, Roddy-O’s got your number.

He had Lamb’s number too, and had just used it.

Good times.

Roddy was at home, in front of a bank of monitors, four of them: thirty-two inch plasma screens, their combined weight not much more than a couple of the pizza boxes stacked on the floor. It was new kit, bought with the dosh his insurance company had coughed up after the robbery; a robbery carried out by the Service’s security team, though this was a detail Roddy hadn’t felt it necessary to include on the claim forms. It had been a major aggravation. But live and learn: one of his screens was now rigged to a CCTV camera above his front door. Even the Rodster could be caught unawares, but not twice.

The room was middle storey and had a mostly glass wall: previous occupants had used it as a kind of urban conservatory, which went to show that no matter what your postcode, you couldn’t rule out hippy neighbours. As a result of the same incident which had seen his computer kit go walkies, Roddy had had to have one of the big windows replaced. He’d managed to undercut the original quote by some distance, a triumph slightly mitigated by the way it now rattled a lot when the wind blew, and a fair bit when it didn’t. But then, he was generally plugged into his sound system while he worked, and no rattle could interrupt that mess. He’d been listening to the classics lately—Guns N’ Roses; Deep Purple—an indication of growing maturity. There was a specially wistful drum solo on Live in Japan. That shit had escaped him when he was younger.

The turd avatar just sat there, steaming. Drinking solo, or a meat-space chat? Roddy couldn’t tell.

He took a long pull on an energy drink, which was electric blue and promised enhanced mental receptivity. Even the RamRod took what help he could get: no shame when you were a 24/7 guy, which Roddy was, except for when he was asleep. The turd, meanwhile, just sat there. One day, Roddy thought, a little investment, a little more hardware, he’d be able to activate screen-vision when tagging a mobile, and see who his target was mixing with, and what was going down. Give him extra edge, if that was possible. More edge than a cliff, babes, he imagined himself saying. (He really needed someone to say this stuff to.) More edge than a polyhedron. But better look that one up first.

And it wasn’t like he didn’t have a lot of stuff going on. This Wicinski business had interrupted his current project, one that had occupied him for weeks. Essentially, Roddy was on a mission to protect the vulnerable—because what would be the point of his skills if he didn’t use them to good effect? It would be like Thor using his hammer to put up shelves—and his chosen group (“Ho’s Hos”) was made up of a random selection of models from clothing and perfume ads in lifestyle magazines: a diverse range of 17–23-year-old women. They were his #MeToo group, because that was a big thing now, and each of them, every time he looked at their picture, he thought: Yep, me too. I definitely would. That was basically how selection was made. And what the protection was, he showed these women how trackable they were—how they laid themselves open to the attention of predators, who could easily find their personal details, their home addresses, their real-life situations.

True, when the Rodmeister said ‘trackable’ he meant provided you had access to sophisticated technology, but that was the thing about saddos: there was always going to be one who was both savvy and kitted-out.

He shook his head, and fished a handful of M&Ms from the packet in front of him. Ho’s Hos. And how he looked after them was, he began with a basic assumption, that each would have a presence on social media, the chances of which he put at a conservative 100 percent. After that, it was straightforward image-recognition, which was where the technology came in. Matching a Facebook profile, a Twitter glimpse, to a photo-shoot: basically, once you’d scanned and uploaded the image and made a cup of tea, your job was done. And sometimes, too, other photos came to light; other photo-shoots these perfume and clothery girls had signed up for, which might or might not involve perfume but had little to do with clothing. These too he downloaded and saved and printed out: all part of the dossier-building. And once a dossier was thick enough, Roddy dispatched it directly to the girl in question—first class delivery; no penny-pinching—so she’d know she had a well-wisher; someone intent on alerting her to the dangers a saddo predator could represent. He did this anonymously. Heroes work in the dark. But he liked to think of these girls—women—receiving his packages, and realising how much care and attention had gone into them; how focused some unknown but totally woke stranger was on their well-being, to compile these warnings about their vulnerability. He imagined their grateful tears as they reconsidered their online options. Fewer selfies emailed to boyfriends. A little less online sharing. A bit more wary in general, really, and as he thought about that something shifted on one of his monitors. Not the Wicinski turd; that remained static. The CCTV feed. There was someone at his door.

A blonde woman in a long dark coat.

Roddy blinked.

Nah, couldn’t be.

Couldn’t be.

But it was.

He headed downstairs, pausing at the hallway mirror. Looking good, man. Looking fine. He practised a quick boyish grin: not the full wattage, because he didn’t want to cause damage. “Phasers to stun,” he murmured, then opened the door.

On Emma Flyte, former Head Dog.

“Mr. Ho.”

“Hey.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Are you all right? You seem to be in pain.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Okay.”

“. . . I was grinning, that’s all.”

“Oh . . . Mind if I come in?”

He switched the boyish grin off. Stick to business, to start with. But really, like, yeah, right: business. She was no longer Head Dog; no longer Park. No kind of business could bring her to Roddy’s door.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but your mouth is open.”

Closing it, he led the way inside.

Downstairs was a kitchen and a living room he barely used—storage, mostly; lifestyle like Roddy’s, you wound up with a lot of cardboard boxes—so he went straight up the stairs, and she followed. Stood in the doorway of his workspace a moment, taking it in. A faint burble leaked from his abandoned headphones, and a louder hum from the monitors. The feed from the street showed his empty doorstep, a quiet pavement.

Flyte said, “You remember me, I take it?”

Roddy gave a curt but meaningful nod, and wiped dribble off his chin. Sure, babes. I remember you. Until recently she’d been in charge of the Service’s internal security: chicks did all sorts of important stuff these days, which was great. And he’d encountered her before, of course. There’d been an interrogation situation, long story, but clearly he’d piqued her interest. Kind of inevitable. Of course, the downside of being in that role, head of security, was she couldn’t get involved with active personnel. Had to keep herself aloof. Anyway, here she was, no longer in the job. And here she was, in Roddy’s house.

“I do indeed.” Smooth. “Can I offer you a drink?” He consulted a mental list of his fridge’s contents. “I have Malibu.” Women dig Malibu, so Roddy always kept a bottle handy. Better check the best-by date, though.

“No thanks.” She looked at the monitor displaying the central London streetmap. “You’re running a surveillance.”

He nodded. Man of few words.

“From your own house.”

He nodded again.

“That’s not strictly allowed, is it?”

He shrugged. Then decided a fuller answer was called for. “I don’t always play by the book,” he said.

Flyte nodded, as if she’d heard that about him.

“It’s kind of interesting, actually,” he said. “That little, uh . . . that avatar—”

“The pile of shit.”

“Um, yeah. He’s somewhere he shouldn’t be.”

shall not, until investigations have been completed to the satisfaction of this department, have contact with colleagues

Flyte said, “That’s not far from the Park.”

“Yeah.”

“One of your crew?”

“That’s right.”

She shook her head, momentarily lost in admiration.

And she was awesome, thought Roddy. The blonde hair, the dark blue eyes, the creamy skin: she could have played a robot on Westworld. Not to mention walk straight into Ho’s Hos, no audition required. Bump an existing member, even. As it happened, he knew for a fact there were no dodgy photos of her on the internet. A very careful lady.

He wondered whether it was too soon to call her babes. Kim—his ex-girlfriend—had liked it when he called her that. An empowerment thing.

She said, “You’ll have heard I’m no longer in the Service.”

Roddy gave his curt but meaningful nod again.

“No. What I meant was, you’ll have heard I’m no longer in the Service.”

Oh—kayyy . . .

She said, “Sometimes it’s best to have certain stories get around. If it’s generally thought I’m no longer on the job, then I have greater . . . flexibility.”

Roddy nodded again. Emma Flyte’s flexibility was something he’d given thought to in the past; the fact that she was here, now, talking about it, made the day special.

“But it also means I have to work behind the lines. Using resources I don’t have to account for. Doing things I might have to deny later. Are we on the same page here, Roddy?”

“Sure thing.”

[Babes.]

“And seeing how you’re one of those guys who doesn’t play by the rule book, well. Maybe you could help me out with something.”

And this was his moment. This was where he’d shine. So he forgot about his Rules of Cool, laid aside his trademark Treat-’em-Mean protocol, and instead flashed on the maximum wattage Roddy Ho bedroom smile, way before she’d done much to deserve it.

Because sometimes, just turning up was enough.
“Babes,” he said. “I can help you out with anything.”

And the look on her face told him that, as usual, he’d said exactly the right thing.

Lamb said, “Once upon a time, I was Charles Partner’s joe.”

Catherine closed her eyes, and felt the dark sparkling: all her glass. All her bottles. And now Lamb among them, like a dragon nestling in someone else’s gold, ensuring that it would never be pure again. She’d have to get rid of them, every last one. And she wasn’t sure she was ready to do that.

He was right, the bastard. The bastard was right. This fortress, the one that might so easily topple and crush her, she’d built it because of what Diana Taverner had said.

Tell me, Catherine. Something I’ve always wondered. Did Lamb ever tell you how Charles Partner really died?

She forced herself to speak. “This isn’t something I want to talk about.”

“Who cares? You were off your face at the time. Anything that didn’t escape your attention came in a glass or had its hand up your skirt.”

“I was sober when he died. When you killed him.”

“I’m talking about the year before.”

And now she opened her eyes.

She was on her sofa, facing a bookshelf obscured by bottles; a view so distantly familiar it was a postcard from her past, when she had no control over the direction her evenings would take. When she might find herself trapped by a drunken bore; so boring, she’d find him a fascination; so drunk herself, she’d sleep with him.

“I was running joes of my own by then. The Wall was down and all kinds of nasties came crawling out. It was a full-time job keeping up with the acronyms. And there were the retirees, the assets, those we’d recruited from the other side, so they could risk their lives and betray their country. Starting to see a theme here?”

She didn’t want to be involved. Didn’t want to hear this; wasn’t going to participate.

“There was one we called Bogart. Middle-ranking Stasi officer who’d come to us long before cracks started appearing. This wasn’t someone looking to save their skin. Or get rich. Remember that. It’s important later.” He picked up his phone, which was still resting on the arm of the chair, and stuffed it into his coat pocket. When his hand came free again it was holding a cigarette.

She said nothing.

“You’re not gunna tell me I can’t?”

“You foul my living space just by being here. Cigarette smoke’s not going to make a difference.”

He thought about that for a moment, then shrugged and tucked the cigarette behind his ear.

She wondered if he’d just wanted to make her speak.

“When the Wall fell, Bogart was offered the passport package. New life, new house, new car, the usual shit. Turned it down. Said the time for betrayal was over. From now on it was about rebuilding the country, and that meant cutting the cord. No more dead-letter drops, no more cut-outs, no further contact. And we all lived happily everfuckingafter. Gives you a nice warm feeling inside, doesn’t it?”

River had told her about the evenings he’d spent with his grandfather, David Cartwright—the O.B.—back when the old man was still in the light, and she had a vivid picture of the pair, sharing a history only one of them had lived through. This was a grotesque parody of that. And the strangest detail, the ungraspable fact, was that Lamb wasn’t drinking. Wasn’t smoking.

“Except the Cold War didn’t really end. It just hid behind closed doors, like Trump in a tantrum. So when Partner decided his own passport package wasn’t good enough, and a Civil Service pension wouldn’t keep him in the luxury he had in mind, well, it wasn’t hard to find buyers for old news. Such as who’d been chipping away at the brickwork when they should have been shoring it up.”

He fell silent. Maybe he was imagining a fire he could stare into. The best on offer was the winelight glimmer of the bottles.

“So Partner betrayed Bogart,” she said, when the silence became too much.

She might not have spoken. “There were quarterly sit-downs back then,” he said. “I’d come back to the Park and spend days with Cartwright, going through the diary, what happened when, who did what. Before he went picking daisies, that man had a mania for detail. Study the small cogs, and you’ll see which way the big wheels turn. Shame he couldn’t see what was happening under his fucking nose.”

“Nor did you.”

Lamb put his unlit cigarette in his mouth.

He spoke around it. “Dates and places, but never names. Wall or no wall, Berlin was a zoo, so we still played Berlin Rules. Even First Desk didn’t get to know a source’s identity, because that was the law. So in retirement Bogart remained Bogart, and only I knew who Bogart was, and Cartwright was fine with that, as he should have been.”

There came a noise from the corridor; someone leaving the lift. Footsteps down the hallway, a door opening, closing. It was unremarkable enough that it might have gone unheard, but Berlin Rules were now in play. Off-stage noise was enemy action. Any footfall might be the last thing you heard.

When all was quiet, he continued.

“Ever go drinking with your old boss? Might have been a contest. He could put it away. Thirst like a fucking camel. Unless he was pouring it under the table.”

She’d thought many things about Jackson Lamb, most of them bad. But it had never occurred to her he’d been a teenage girl. “So that’s it?” she said. “Charles Partner got you drunk, and you told him who Bogart was?”

The look he gave would have turned a younger woman to stone.

“Or enough,” she said, “that he could work it out and sell the name?”

“He didn’t have to.” Lamb’s words were hard as bullets. “He only had to sell a single syllable.”

That made no sense, until it did. What single syllable could make a difference? Only one Catherine could think of.

She.

Lamb wasn’t looking at her now, or at anything else. He might have been the genie hiding in the lamp, contemplating all the wishes he’d heard down the years.

“I didn’t think he’d noticed. End of the week, I went back to Berlin. Nothing happened until the following month.”

He inhaled dirty air through an unlit tube. His lungs must be dishrags, thought Catherine. Like something you’d pull from a blocked kitchen sink.

“There were only three female Stasi officers of that rank in that department at the time Bogart was operating,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been difficult to identify her. Bit of due diligence. A few weeks at most.”

He looked at the cigarette in his hand, rolled it between his fingers.

“But they weren’t fucking perfectionists, were they? So they did all three. No possibility of error, no overtime involved. Hard not to admire the practical approach.”

And then the cigarette disappeared. Up his sleeve, she wondered? Or had he just made it vanish; cast it back into the past he was staring into?

“Ever seen someone hanged with piano wire? For extra points, you tie something heavy to the victim’s feet. An iron is good. Leave the body long enough, the head comes clean off.”

“You saw them?”

“No. But I got to hear about it.”

“What did you do?”

“I heaved my fucking guts out.”

“Afterwards.”

“What do you think? I reported back to Cartwright. Because he was the brains of the Service.”

“You told him you’d leaked Bogart’s gender, and now Bogart was dead. You joined the dots. You pointed him at Partner.”

And then you shot Partner in his bathtub, she thought. Where I found him.

The memory of it tasted fresh, and probably always would.

Lamb lifted the bottle from between his thighs, and re-examined its label. For a moment she thought he was about to draw its cork with his teeth, but instead he leaned over and replaced it next to its neighbours. And Catherine had to fight a sudden urge to grab it and crack its seal herself. Isn’t that what she’d been working up to? She’d been teetering on the edge so long that not to fall would disappoint. Not to drink, not to succumb: that would be an act of betrayal.

But she wasn’t going to do so with Lamb as a witness.

And then something he’d said struck her.

“This happened the previous year, you said. The year before you killed him.”

He looked at her, his skin mottled in the hazy light.

“So why did you wait so long? Friend or not, mentor or not, he was a traitor. He had your asset murdered. For money. So why’d you wait, Jackson? Were you hoping you were wrong?”

The cigarette was back, dancing between the fingers of his hand like a miniature baton he’d failed to pass on. Always, he’d be left holding it.

He said, “I knew I wasn’t. Cartwright responded like it was news he’d been waiting to hear, straightforward confirmation. And where the rest of us saw blood and teeth, he saw opportunity. If Partner was dirty, that could be put to use. And that’s what happened for the next year. He made Partner work for us again, without Partner knowing it.”

“He fed him misinformation,” said Catherine.

“Oh yes. But nothing you could put a pin in and stick to a board. Whispers, just. That a goldmine had opened up in joe country. That we had a new asset in the enemy camp. He couldn’t tell Partner who it was, and Partner couldn’t ask, but let’s just say that when the next round of promotions hit the Kremlin, we’d have a top-shelf source of a quality we’d never had before.”

“Cartwright was targeting someone. Destroying them with a rumour.”

“Someone bound for greatness.” The cigarette was tap-dancing across his digits, but that aside, she’d never seen Jackson Lamb stiller. Even his breathing seemed silent. “You wouldn’t remember the name. A one-time bright spark who Cartwright thought too bright, too sparky. You don’t want the opposition fielding their best players. And any leg you break in the dressing room, that’s time saved on the pitch.”

The last time she’d seen David Cartwright he’d been a scared old man, nervy of shadows. Perhaps it was true what they said about age: that in its darker corners lurk the monsters of our own making.

“The following year I was called back to London. And that’s when it happened.”

When you shot Charles Partner in his bathtub, she thought again. Where I found him.

“Cartwright’s timing was immaculate, I’ll give him that. Moscow wouldn’t believe for an instant that Partner killed himself. The way they saw it, it was proof positive he was onto something, and we whacked him before he could sell it.”

“Did it work?”

Lamb looked away, at the makeshift glass wall. He must have been able to see his reflection shining back at him; a fly’s-eye view of his own gross shape.

“Well, the bright spark was fucked right enough. Molly Doran could probably tell you where he is now, and it’s probably the Russian equivalent of Slough House, but he hasn’t bothered the world since. He must still be wondering what hit him.”

“Quite the little triumph for the Park, then.” Catherine closed her eyes and saw it again: Partner’s body in the bathtub; the contents of his head a red mess on the porcelain. A pulpy mixture, like trodden grapes. Some memories seared themselves on your mind, like a shadow on a wall after a nuclear flash.

“Yeah, that depends, doesn’t it? Because the role he’d been lined up for, that was a biggie. Director of the FSB, which is what they called the KGB after the makeover. Only with boyo shafted, Yeltsin had to turn to his second choice. Care to hazard a guess who that was?”

Her vision shimmered, unless it was the light faltering. “. . . No. No, that can’t be true.”

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” He sneered. “Maybe David Cartwright wasn’t the mastermind he pretended to be. Unless he had his own reasons for giving Vladimir Putin a leg-up. On Spook Street, it’s hard to know what to believe.”

Catherine stared at him in horror.

“But me, I think it’s the law of unintended consequences. For other examples, see the history of the fucking world.”

Lamb put the unlit cigarette in his mouth again.

“They gave me Slough House once the shitstorm died down, and you know what they say. My gaff, my rules. And you know what rule one is. Nobody messes with my stuff. I don’t know what Frank Harkness is up to, and I don’t care. He left bodies in my yard, and he’ll pay for that. And if the Park’s pulling his strings, they’d better have another puppet ready. Whatever game they’re playing, he’s off the board.”

He stood so suddenly she thought the world had shifted; that the building was tumbling, and he’d been thrown loose. With the wave of an arm, he took in her treasures. “So all of this, Standish, all this dancing about with your personal demons, nobody cares. Least of all me. Drink or don’t, but make your fucking mind up and do it quick. Because I have better things to worry about than how far you’re gunna fall, and what kind of splash you’ll make when you hit the bottom.”

She found a voice somewhere, and used it. “Always a comfort to have you around.”

“Just doing my job.”

She sat while he forced his feet back into his shoes and clumped from her flat. All around her the bottles whispered, their rose-blood colouring staining the air. When all was quiet again she stood and walked to the window. Lamb was down there, on the street, but he disappeared into shadow as she watched. Where he belonged, she thought.

It occurred to her that he’d neither opened a bottle, nor taken one with him. But there were other things to think about, and she didn’t dwell on it long.

Louisa was on her third glass of wine, taking it slowly. On the TV, a rather camp chef was constructing a masterpiece involving squid ink and shredded kale. In Louisa’s sink was the pan she’d boiled pasta in, and an empty tub of pesto.

She muted the sound when her phone rang.

“You work with that guy?” Emma Flyte asked. “I mean, spend time with him on a daily basis?”

“He’s not that bad when you get to know him.”

“Seriously?”

“No, of course not seriously. He’s a dick. You just notice less after a while, that’s all.”

Emma said, “That’s not an experiment I plan to undergo.”

“Still time to change your mind. Always an opening at Slough House.”

She could hear Emma shudder and it almost made her smile. Almost.

“But you got what you were after, right?”

“What you were after,” Emma corrected her. “And it’s going to cost you. I haven’t decided yet, but it might involve a spa day. I need some kind of corrosive cleaning process after that.”

“But he traced the Fitbit.”

“He traced the Fitbit.”

This time Louisa did smile. Day one—not even day one: she’d been at work today. Tomorrow was day one. And already she’d found Lucas. How cool was she?

“So where is it?” she asked.

Emma said, “I’ll text you the actual coordinates. But big picture, it’s in a town called Pegsea, in Pembrokeshire.”

“Okay,” said Louisa.

“That’s in Wales,” Emma added.

“I know. Somebody told me.”

Afterwards, she zapped the TV off and considered her options, but not for long. Bottom line was, she was due a stupid idea. Her lifestyle choices of the past six months had been reassuringly sober, and mostly couched as a series of negatives: I will not go to bars by myself; I will not hook up with strangers. I will not spend four hundred quid on a pair of boots. Okay, that last one she’d reneged on, but if you were going to backslide, you might as well do it in killer footwear. And she hadn’t hooked up with any strangers lately.

Looked like she was going to Wales, then.

She checked her weather app, and confirmed what she suspected: that it had been snowing in Pembrokeshire, with more on the way.

Good job she had a new winter jacket.

Finishing her wine, she went to pack.

Something in his bones had always sung of doom. But nothing in the lyrics had ever suggested this: that he’d be sleeping in his clothes in his office, while his life fell apart around him.

Child porn? You were looking at child porn?

He hadn’t been. He had tried to tell her that. Whatever was happening, it was something he’d been thrown into, not something he’d dug for himself.

So why didn’t you say? Why hide it from me, we’re going to be married, Lech, why did you hide this from me if you’re innocent, if it’s not true?

For obvious reasons. For obvious fucking reasons, Sara. Because it’s child porn, Jesus Christ—even the words rip a hole in your guts.

And besides, he thought. And besides. You know me. You love me. How can you possibly believe that I’d—

Richard Pynne, he thought. As soon as he’d left the pub, Pynne must have been on the phone. Let’s both save our breath and you get back on home to, remind me. Sara?

Which was what he’d done, got back on home, after a long walk through the late-night, ghost-blown streets. A day in Slough House, with its damp dissatisfactions, needed flushing out of the system.

And then he was back at the flat, to find Sara in furious tears.

Most of their conversation was thankfully a blur, a mishmash of italicised outrage and grief. He hadn’t packed a bag; hadn’t been offered the chance. But he’d walked out at last, through a door that had been standing open half an hour, its cold warning blowing right through him. And then the streets again, and the weight of his angry thoughts, and nowhere to go except here. Slough House.

This time of night, it ached like a rheumatic joint. Lech could hear its floorboards wheeze, its pipework bang. It was a warehouse of memories, all of them bad, and now it was having dreams. And he was caught up in them; every time sleep came near, one limb or other thrashed out in alarm. It was as if he were standing on a flight of stairs, his balance fragile as an egg. He mustn’t fall. But staying where he was filled him with terror.

Weak light, lamppost light, swam through the window. On the street something clattered to the ground. On the staircase, a shadow broke loose and entered the room.

Lamb.

He moved without a sound, though that was hard to fathom given his bulk, and for a while hovered in front of the desk, his gaze unblinking, unreadable, until at last he shook his head and reached for the landline. He lifted the receiver, punched some numbers, waited a while, then spoke. “Yeah, customer for you.” He held the receiver out to Lech. “Samaritans,” he said. “Quid a minute in the kitty when you’re done.”

Lech stared.

Lamb shrugged. “Or just leave it in your will. Up to you.”

He dropped the receiver, left the room and headed upstairs.

Lech looked at the phone, still live, still softly crooning.

Then he ripped it from its socket and hurled it at the wall.

It was snowing by the time Louisa crossed into Wales.

She had set out early; had virtuously breakfasted on muesli and apricots, and packed a bag with nut-based energy bars, carrots, and a pack of what claimed to be yoghurt-covered raisins, though could easily be mouse-shit past its best. All of which was more than enough to counterbalance the pair of breakfast McMuffins she picked up later. Roddy Ho had traced Lucas Harper’s Fitbit to Pegsea; the map coordinates Emma had pinged her would match, she guessed, Bryn-y-Wharg, or that was how she’d heard it over the phone—the cottage Clare and her boys used twice a year. That being established, she might have easily spent the rest of her sudden holiday hunkered in her flat, working her way through The Good Wife. But a fuse had been lit. On the motorway, racing into a cold front, she’d been keenly aware of not being at her desk, compiling a list of suspect library users; of not attending one of Lamb’s morale-shafting meetings. Slough House cast a long shadow, but not that long. Here, the sky was a blank page. Traffic was steady, the radio crackly with weather warnings.

If Lucas wasn’t at the cottage, she’d get an update on the Fitbit’s whereabouts via Emma—might cost her another spa day, but now that Emma had established comms with Roddy Ho, she might as well keep ploughing that furrow. Last thing Louisa wanted was to owe Roddy a favour herself, especially one involving the name Harper. All pennies dropped eventually, even down wells like Roddy Ho, and she didn’t want Min’s ghost raised among the slow horses. Questions asked. Memories stirred.

Not that there was a shortage of ghosts round Slough House.

A little while back, River had thought he’d received a call from Sidonie Baker. This was fine, as far as it went; Sid had been a slow horse, and what was wrong with a former colleague getting in touch? Except that Sid Baker was dead: shot in the head, carted away in an ambulance, and that was the last anyone saw of her. She’d been a slow horse, yes—except, somehow, not quite; there was a rumour she’d been planted in Slough House; a rumour which, if true, made her Park, and if she were Park, she might not be dead after all. Because Park couldn’t bring you back to life, but it could cover up the fact that you’d never actually died, and what it really really liked to bury was the notion that a mistake had been made, ever. Having an agent go down on a London street with a bullet in her head definitely fell under “mistake.” So when no record of Sid Baker ever having been admitted to that hospital, in that ambulance, came to light: well, that could mean she’d been whisked away, couldn’t it, River wanted to know. Could mean she was still among the living.

Or it could just mean that the Park had found something better to do with the body: for instance, not have it appear in a headline, anywhere, ever.

And what Louisa thought about it was, she didn’t know. Probably Sid was dead, and it was best to work on that assumption, because otherwise you’d jump every time the phone rang, or spend your life looking through windows. She hadn’t said as much to River, though perhaps should have done. Get your mourning over. Couldn’t say it now. River had been in a turmoil even before his grandfather died, and he was unlikely to have calmed down now Frank had shown his face again.

But that was in a different country. Because here she was, in Wales.

The snow worsened, and the last twenty minutes of her journey took almost an hour. SatNav was a stranger here, and led her up a few false roads, but in the end there it was, Bryn-y-Wharg, a whitewashed cottage at the top end of a steep lane perpendicular to the main road through the village. Similar properties lined the lane, down one side of which a row of cars was parked, iced with snow an inch thick. It was early afternoon but streetlamps were already lit, flakes swirling round them like a plague of moths. The cottage itself was dark, its windows blank. Louisa parked opposite, where the lane widened before angling around a church wall, and sat reconsidering the day’s decisions. She’d kitted up well: she had walking boots, and the ski jacket she’d bought before Christmas, when a previous snowfall had blanketed the capital. Even so, she was in new territory, looking for someone she wouldn’t recognise, and had nowhere to stay. But this was the choice she’d made. Getting out from under Jackson Lamb’s meaty presence; breathing clean cold air, and enjoying being a stranger. Being somewhere new gave you licence. You could reinvent yourself, adjust to a different reality.

And it wasn’t like she’d made a life-or-death choice or anything.

Snow drifted across her windscreen. The temperature in the car was rapidly falling.

Louisa grabbed her jacket from the passenger seat, struggled into it, and stepped out into the world.

Secrecy was the Service’s watchword, but leaking like a sieve was what it did best. When the leaked material was classified the leaker was tracked down and strung up, or so the Handbook required, but gossip was and always had been fair game—who’d lunched who, and where, and how often—and Di Taverner knew better than to attempt to fix that. So when she had a meeting off the books she tagged it Personal Time in her calendar, happy for her staff to weave erotic legends around her absence, just so long as that kept them from any darker truth.

This lunchtime she was in a club off Wigmore Street, whose members-only dining room was a throwback to what passed for pastoral in the public school imagination: actual wooden benches ran alongside two long tables, gazed down upon by portraits of stern, academically garbed homunculi. This arrangement might have led to communal feasting and lively interaction, but in fact fostered cliquery, which was its main purpose. Diners paired off, or clustered in small groups, with intervening spaces across which to pass the salt, or shuttle a basket of rolls. The occasional woman, suffered as a legislative necessity, was treated with that degree of reverence which borders on contempt, and never realises how transparent it is. The dress code tended towards the baggy.

Most voices bounced off the ceiling; the louder they were, the shallower their content. But underneath that was the bass murmur of business being done.

Di Taverner enjoyed her rare visits, partly because it was always salutary to observe the Establishment with its braces loosened, and partly because it amused her to be one of the few who knew the club to be the brainchild of one Margaret Lessiter, a college contemporary of hers, who had been trading off the blinkered self-regard of men since Freshers’ Week.

There were few diners, the cold weather keeping them away. For the young, winter brings a glow to the cheek; for those of Lady Di’s vintage, a certain amount of upkeep is required outside the normal temperature range. She disappeared briefly on arrival; on her reappearance her face was fresh, her features unravaged, and she sat at the far end of one of the benches barely acknowledging the scant others present, whose conversation was muted, but organic—there was a rule about mobile phones, and the rule was: No mobile phones. These remained out of sight; dismantled too, in Di Taverner’s case, both battery and SIM card removed. Though she was always struck, on performing such measures, that the increased security they offered was partly offset by a heightened awareness of the vulnerability that demanded such measures in the first place.

For some reason this observation reminded her of her erstwhile boss, Claude Whelan. He’d have enjoyed it. Absent friends, she thought; though, as with the majority of her relationships, it was only absence that made friendship feasible.

The menu did not require study—experience had taught her that the risotto came in smaller quantities than the shepherd’s pie, and was therefore preferable—so she sat unoccupied for five minutes. Her lunch-date’s lateness did not surprise her. Maintaining his own clock was in keeping with a larger, all-encompassing solipsism; part of a package that had been returned to sender so often that a less arrogant soul might have wondered whether it were correctly addressed. When he at last showed up, it was with no obvious sense of hurry, and he paused to speak to others before joining her. One of those who rose to greet him looked vaguely familiar to Taverner, but in a generic way, as if he’d once belonged to a boy band who’d troubled the charts for a while, but whose disparate units made no impact whatsoever. He offered his card to Taverner’s lunch companion, who took it with every sign of enthusiasm, and who was still clutching it as he arrived at her side, where he tore it in two and dropped it on the table.

“One-time policy adviser to David Cameron,” he said in explanation. “The poor bastard. Who wants that on their CV?”

“Looking for a new role, is he?”

“For a whole new identity, if he has any sense.” He studied her. “Ravishing as always, Diana. Can’t think why you insist on meeting in public.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can.”

Peter Judd smiled in his usual wolfish way.

Still a wolf then; still a beast. True, now that he was less in the public eye he had pulled back on his more obviously camera-friendly habits, like riding a bicycle and spouting Latin. The line he’d once walked had been redrawn, and was no longer a highwire, strung between the City and Westminster Palace; more an invisible thread, connecting interests that were likely subterranean. Former Home Secretary and one-time scourge of the liberal left, with a personal life not so much lock-up-your-daughters as scorch your earth and erect watchtowers, he was now a private citizen, which, given what he managed to get up to when a public servant, didn’t inspire confidence. This being so, Taverner had found it wise to keep a quiet eye on him since he’d left office. Officially at least he was keeping his nose clean, running a PR business, which took a little image-adjustment: Peter Judd had always spent more time jamming bushels over other people’s lamps than dimming his own, and an image of him scrubbing his clients’ paths to the limelight didn’t come easily. People could change, though. It was all she could do not to bark with laughter as that little gem came to mind.

“You’re looking very . . . prosperous, Peter.”

“Everyone looks prosperous this time of year. It’s why gym membership goes up.” He patted his stomach as he sat, having walked round the bench to be facing her. “Beach-ready by Easter, don’t worry. You appear pretty trim, though. Power agrees with you.”

“I don’t think of it as power. I think of it as service.”

He nodded. “That’s damn good. Did you write it yourself?”

“I do hope we’re not going to spend all lunchtime sparring. I’m passing up a perfectly good maintenance and upkeep review meeting for this.”

“I’m flattered. Have you ordered?”

She hadn’t; they dealt with that. And once the waitress—waitperson, she wondered? Waitstaff?—had retreated, she said, “So. ‘Bullingdon Fopp’? Really?”

“Don’t pretend you’re not amused.”

“Oh, I am. I just wonder you have any clients.”

“Lorry loads. Private jet loads, I should say. Everyone wants to be in on the joke. Because it’s no joke. You know how this works, Diana. No network like a college network. Surely First Desk of the intelligence services doesn’t need reminding of that. Especially not one with a Cambridge degree.”

“Funny. But only because it was long before my time.”

“Old treacheries cast long shadows. Here’s our wine.”

It was poured, and the bottle left in an ice bucket within easy reach.

“And the private sector’s a happy hunting ground?” she asked. “It still feels strange, not seeing your name on the front pages.”

“Consider it a . . . sabbatical.”

Her glass failed to reach her lips. “A comeback? Seriously? With your history?”

“You want to know the thing about history?” he said. “History is over. That’s its purpose. A few years in the wilderness, breaking bread with the lepers, and you can return rinsed and pure, your sins not so much forgiven as wiped from the public memory. Oh, the occasional high-minded journalist might dig up some long-forgotten peccadillo, but it’s one of the blessings of an electorate with a low attention span that once you’re out of jail and passed Go, you’re golden.” He sipped wine. “Short of kiddy-fiddling or animal cruelty, obviously.”

“‘Long-forgotten peccadillo’? Orchestrating a coup, near as damn it? Not to mention the attempted hit on a member of the security services.”

“I do miss Seb,” Judd admitted. “He had a skill set you don’t often find in your run-of-the-mill valet.”

“Yes, I’m sure Jackson Lamb would sympathise with your loss,” said Lady Di. “Though I doubt he’d tell you what he did with the body.”

“That’s the way Seb would have wanted it,” said Judd philosophically. “A nice professional job. No prolonged farewells.”

“Whatever you think of the electorate’s short-term memory,” she said, “I think you can confidently expect Lamb to harbour a grudge. And I’m not sure he’ll be happy to see you back in the high life.”

“Lamb can be dealt with, if perhaps less . . . extremely than was attempted last time. I’m sure he has skeletons in his closet.”

“You have more faith in his discretion than I do. I expect Lamb has skeletons at his breakfast table. But that doesn’t mean he rattles easily.”

Judd waved an airy hand. “He’s a detail. One of many. Meanwhile, I’m eating a lot of rubber chicken. The political returnee’s equivalent of humble pie. And calling in favours, of course. As I said before, no network like a college network. And our new Prime Minister is—well. Let’s just say we go way back.”

Something about the wide-eyed innocence of this statement triggered Taverner’s shag-dar.

“. . . You’re kidding.”

“It never ceases to please me how women who like to appear so in charge in public like nothing better than to be supplicant behind closed doors.”

“Oh god.”

“Mind you,” he added thoughtfully, “we don’t hear the phrase strong and stable leadership anything like as often as we used to. Most of her public appearances, she looks like a woman who’s forgotten her safe word.”

The food was arriving. She held her tongue while the plates were set in front of them, and suffered Judd’s polite harassment of the waitress—definitely waitress in this context—before speaking again.

“And that’s why you invited me to lunch? To let me know you’re on the comeback trail? Frankly, Peter, however that goes, I can’t see our professional futures being entwined any time soon. And as for private encounters, well. I’m as sentimental as the next girl, but there are some primrose paths best trodden only once, don’t you think?”

“And yet I’m sure I’ll be scaling those blue remembered hills, in memory at least, for years to come.” He picked up his fork. “But no. No, my dear. I alert you to my career intentions only because you’ll find out about them anyway, and long before the press gets its boots on, I’ve no doubt. No, I had other things in mind. Something you need to hear.”

“Our opinions as to what I do and don’t need are likely to differ,” Diana said. “But speak your mind. And then I’ll decide whether I’m going to have a second glass of this rather ordinary white before I return to work.”

“Forthright as ever.” He kept his eyes on her as he dug his fork into the mashed potato topping of his pie. “In the first instance, I’m here to demonstrate my bona fides,” he said, unable to resist stressing the word: boner. Old habits die hard. “There’s been some . . . activity you should know about.”

“What kind of activity?”

“The kind that falls within your remit, I’m afraid. Yes, national security would be involved. Ideally in a blanket-dropping sort of way.”

“You’re going to have to use plain English.”

“In plain English,” said Peter Judd, “it seems that some rather bad people are about to commit naughty deeds on your patch. Perhaps you’d like me to continue?”

She nodded, and he did.

The barn was old, and gaps between its slats ensured a steady draught. It contained a stew of ancient smells too—rotted animal waste and mulched down hay—and through a hole in its roof a twirling pillar of snow descended, as if a snowman were attempting to rise from the hard-earth floor. But Anton Moser had slept in worse, and there was no reason to suppose he wouldn’t sleep in worse again.

They’d arrived—himself, Lars Becker, Cyril Dupont—the day before, having spent the previous night in Stevenage, awaiting instructions. Secret agent bullshit, but Anton had worked for an actual secret service in the past, and knew better than to complain. Besides, he’d take a Travelodge over a barn any night, especially in the snow. All around the landscape was altering, hills smoothing out to a series of uninterrupted mounds, above and behind which the sky loomed huge. On the map the barn was a tiny square by a scrabbly patch of woodland; in reality it had fallen into disuse years ago. The oil patches by the door had dried up, and the few bits of equipment still in evidence, a pitchfork and a pair of shovels, were rusty souvenirs. The ladder to the loft was missing rungs. This hadn’t stopped Anton bedding down there, where the animal smells were less pronounced. Probably fewer rats too, unless rats could climb faulty ladders. Anton didn’t know. Animals were a closed book.

They were a mile out of town, and a little more than a mile from the coast. It was mostly cliff edge, but he wasn’t expecting a sea exfiltration. It would be one of those jobs where you leave a body in a ditch and drive back to the city. By the time the locals found it Anton would be back in Cologne, doing what he did best, which was resting between jobs.

“Yo, Anton? You jerking off up there or what?”

“Yeah. I was thinking about those sheep we saw.”

“Ones with the little horns?”

“No, the other kind. The little sexy ones.”

“You’re a fuckin’ pervert,” said Lars. “They were underage.”

Anton sat up, stretched. Checked his watch. Two, a little after. It was already dark: nothing but the cloud-covered sky offering light. The sun would probably show up in three or four months. Until then, the locals lit torches, or stayed indoors. Anton didn’t understand that shit. He’d grown up bleak, and how he’d fixed that situation was, he’d started walking soon as he was able, and never glanced back.

And look at him now, he thought. Just look at him now.

The job was straightforward. Two colleagues, both of whom he’d worked with before, and a boss—Frank Harkness—who was something of a legend: ex-CIA, and then a long career nobody knew much about, which was exactly the sort of reference employers approved of. The man himself had showed up an hour before and done a walk-around, checking the barn, checking the terrain: that was who he was. Always assuming, even in Wales, miles from anywhere, that this was joe country. What Anton thought was, this was sheep country, but being careful was the difference between a long career and a bootless corpse.

Recce done, Frank gave them a heads-up.

“There’s been a complication, but nothing you can’t handle. The target now has professional help.”

“Yowser,” said Cyril.

“So you might actually have to earn your wages. I hope that’s not too alarming a prospect.”

Anton scratched his ankle. He was starting to think all this hay, or its ancient remnants, was having an allergic effect. He was itching like a bastard. “This help. They in the game?”

“It’s nobody you’ll have bunked down with, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”

It wasn’t, but it was good to set the picture straight. This job, sometimes you ended up going toe to toe with a former colleague, which caused problems for your sentimental types. The way Anton approached this, he didn’t make friends much. This saved heartache down the road.

Frank said, “It seems the kid’s father was a spook, and his mother reached out to a colleague. The colleague’s a lady spook, and doesn’t represent a huge threat. There’s a department where Five keep their screw-ups, and that’s where she’s from. Slough House. The operatives get called slow horses, and there’s a reason for that. But still. She’s Five, however low on the food chain, and that means she’s in the game. So if she turns up, take her out. We’ll worry about the right and wrong ways to treat a lady afterwards.”

“I know how to treat a lady,” Cyril said. “We should invite her back here, get her to pull a train. Would warm this shithole up.”

Frank ignored that. “I’ve got art,” he said. “Gate-crashed a gathering.” He produced his phone, called up a photo, passed it around, Cyril first.

Cyril made an unk-unk noise and wrapped a hand round his crotch.

And Cyril, thought Anton, really should get in touch with himself. Always first to brag about getting some action; always last out of the showers when bunking with a crew. It was the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake. Nobody gave a damn which way he swung, so long as he could lay down supporting fire in a landing zone. Anton, personally, would carry a rifle for gay rights, so long as he got paid. Didn’t matter to him. Generally turned out, of course, that those writing the cheques were sticklers for traditional values. But what could you do?

Meanwhile, unk-unk.

The phone reached him, and the woman was a looker, sure, especially after a couple of days in a barn. Brunette but with blonde highlights; nice figure in a formal looking outfit. Dark eyes. But there were several things you couldn’t tell about a woman just by looking, and one was how she’d handle herself in a firefight. This chick was spook-trained. Damaged goods, but you always had to factor in dumb luck. So if she showed up in any of the wrong places, Anton wouldn’t hesitate to mess up her highlights.

Frank said, “Three hours till boots up. I want you in place ninety minutes before the kid shows, and I don’t want any complaints about the weather. Make it clean, make it tidy, and leave the body in a nice deep drift. Any luck, it’ll be June before anyone finds him. Questions?”

“This lady spook,” Cyril said. “She be armed?”

“Doubtful.”

“Because—”

“No guns. It’s got to look accidental. I’ll say it again. Questions?”

Nobody had questions.

“I’m heading into town, where I plan to enjoy a nice hot meal. We’ll regroup here at twenty-two hundred, where you will tell me there were no problems. Becker, you’ve got the command. Gentlemen.”

Frank Harkness left the barn, and a moment later they heard his car start, then rumble off through steadily falling snow.

“Becker, you’ve got the command,” Anton said.

Lars’s salute turned into a finger, stoutly raised.

“Three hours from now, we’ll be lucky to get anywhere without a plough,” Cyril grumbled. “It’s fucking Narnia out there.”

“We’re getting paid, aren’t we?” Lars said.

Anton scratched his damn ankles again, and decided to heat up some soup.

Heading out into weather like this, they’d need something hot inside them.

The other diners had left, after a protracted session of backslapping. More than once, the shop-soiled boy wonder who’d pressed his card on Peter Judd glanced their way, hoping for a farewell wave, or a job offer, but to Judd, as to the public at large, he’d ceased to exist.

Diana’s risotto was a congealing mess, though she’d nibbled an asparagus tip or two. Judd’s shepherd’s pie, on the other hand, was now mostly a gravy-traced outline.

This hadn’t stopped his flow of words.

“One of my clients runs a factory in the northwest. It specialises in, let’s say, machine parts.”

“Let’s.”

“Very technical, sophisticated—”

“I know which factory you’re referring to, Peter. I know precisely what you mean by machine parts. And I even know the name of the man who, behind a positive thesaurus of false-flag identities, actually owns said factory. So you might as well cut to the chase.”

“You’re well informed.”

“I’m head of the Secret Service. I thought we’d established that.”

He bowed, ever so slightly. “Said man, then, in the cause of public relations, occasionally arranges discreet get-togethers, in remote-ish locations. Those involved shun the limelight. But at the same time they expect a certain amount of . . . razzmatazz. An indication that their custom is not unappreciated. That, whatever the public perception of such arrangements, their business is not only legal but a necessary fillip to the economy of our own and other nations.”

“Spare me the editorial. They’re arms dealers, not gentlemen warriors.”

Judd gave the slightest of smiles, refilled their glasses, then inserted the empty bottle upside down in its bucket. “And to make sure such gatherings go smoothly, our friend likes to make sure they’re also attended by personages of quality. The kind whose presence impresses both domestic and foreign parties, and ensures that negotiations are conducted in an atmosphere free from unseemly rancour.”

“Which is where you come in.”

“I’ve sat at table with government leaders the world over, you know that. My address book positively oozes quality. The proper one, I mean. Not the little red one.”

Which positively oozed available company, no doubt.

“Go on.”

“There was a particular occasion,” he said, “just before the new year. Which, as you might imagine, required a certain celebratory atmosphere.”

“Are we talking hookers and cocaine, by any chance?”

“It’s not impossible.”

“Funny, isn’t it,” she said. “No matter how sophisticated and technical the machine parts on offer, it’s always girls and drugs that oil the wheels. So what went wrong?”

“Nothing drastic.”

“Then why are we discussing this? I’m already aware that nasty deals are the market’s lifeblood, and I don’t need you to tell me how, once we’re sundered from Europe, we’re going to be bedding down with some unpleasant customers. Be that as it may, I don’t pick fights outside these borders. If the deal you’re talking about broke no laws, and no one ended up dead in a bathroom, then I don’t need to hear the details.”

“And yet here we are. May I continue?”

She didn’t bother hiding her sigh. “If you must.”

“On the occasion we’re discussing, which took place in Pembrokeshire, at a place called Caerwyss Hall, the personage of note in attendance was, let’s say, exceptionally high born.”

“Does he have a name?”

“On such occasions, he prefers to go by a number. Number Seven, in fact.”

“How tiresomely like a Bond villain.”

“Well, in his case, the number has significance. It being how close in line to the seat of power he was at the time.”

He waited while tumblers rolled in her eyes.

“. . . Oh, Christ.”

“Yes.”

“Are you telling me that the Duke of bloody—”

“Hush.” He put a hand on her wrist; squeezed it. “No names. Here or anywhere else.”

She said, “Remove that. Now.”

Judd did so.

“Number Seven has been an invaluable asset for decades, an ambassador for growth and wealth generation. But it’s in nobody’s interests that his work on behalf of certain sectors of British industry becomes a topic of public chatter. Regardless of the huge amount of wealth generated, and the resulting benefit to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.”

“Or, in his case, Mummy’s Revenue and—”

“Yes, yes, very funny.”

Diana realised her glass was empty. She hadn’t noticed draining it. “You just told me nothing went wrong. Please underline that for me.”

“Nothing went wrong,” he said. “As such.”

“Oh, god in heaven.”

“But there was a boy.”

“A boy? I know he likes them young, but I thought—”

“No. One of the staff catering the event. Apparently he was the curious type, and saw something he shouldn’t have. And while I wasn’t actually present the entire time the, ah, conference was taking place—”

“Conference.”

“—Yes, conference, I was nominally its convenor, since my firm made all the arrangements. So this boy decided I was his first phone call.”

“What did he want?”

“Fifty thousand.”

“And what did he see?”

Judd said, “Well, we could probably call it fifty thousands’ worth, in the circumstances. I mean, the bar bill came to more than that.”

“I assume he had some kind of recording.”

“He made no such claim. He simply asserted knowledge of Number Seven’s presence at what he called an orgy, and suggested I might like to buy his silence. Before, as he put it, things went viral.”

“And have you paid?”

“Not yet.”

“But you plan to?”

Judd picked up his empty glass and revolved it slowly in his hand. Unusually, he seemed unwilling to look at her while doing so. For Peter Judd, any physical action undertaken in the presence of a woman was foreplay; doubly so if the action involved food or drink. Or plucking his nasal hairs, in all likelihood. But now, his gaze directed elsewhere, he said, “I may have made a . . . tactical error.”

“A tactical error,” she said flatly.

“It happens.”

“I know it happens, Peter. I know it even happens to you. But hearing you admit it, well. That’s on the level of a Tour de France winner testing clean.”

“I decided the best thing to do was throw a scare into the boy.”

“Of course you did.”

“And that it might be best if I weren’t immediately involved. Given my current intentions.”

“You mean, given your plans to re-enter politics, you’d rather not be dragging a traumatised teenager in your wake? I see your old nous hasn’t deserted you.”

“So I, ah, referred the matter upwards.”

“You resorted to prayer.”

“Not exactly.”

“No, I didn’t think so. Who? One of the parties at this conference, right?”

He nodded.

“And they are?”

“Let’s say they’re a nation state currently looking to consolidate their power base.”

“By eradicating opposition within their borders, no doubt.”

“I’m a democrat, Diana. And I believe in the sovereignty of nations.”

“How wonderful for all concerned. What did they do?”

“They may have brought in hired help,” he said. “Professionals.”

“Mercenaries.”

Judd nodded, once.

“So,” Taverner said. “We have a teenage boy who witnessed God only knows what depravities involving sex, drugs and a senior royal, as a sideshow to an arms deal. And one of the parties to the deal plans to kill him before he can make this public.”

“You can’t be sure they intend to kill—”

“And Peter Judd is having a crisis of conscience. I think that’s the detail that really frightens me.” She picked up her glass, put it down again. Nothing in it. “Okay, you’ve got my attention. What arrangements were made? For paying off the boy, I mean.”

“A handover near where it happened, in Pembrokeshire. As the boy suggested.” The hint of a sneer crossed his face. “I rather suspect he wanted me to think he’s local.”

“So you managed to identify him.”

“Well it wasn’t complicated, Diana. And even in Seb’s absence, I do have staff.” He paused. “There is a slight further, what shall I call it? Further wrinkle you should know about.”

She sighed. “Enlighten me.”

“His father was one of yours.”

“One of my what?”

“A spook, Diana. He was in Five. Deceased now, but in his time, yes. Name of Harper.”

Di Taverner said, “It never stops, does it?” She thought a moment. “The only Harper I recall was one of Lamb’s. A slow horse.”

Judd said nothing.

“Which means Lamb will almost certainly find a way of complicating matters.”

“There’s no reason he should find out about this.”

“Not having a reason is one of the things Lamb does best.” She looked him in the eye. “I’m still unconvinced by the crisis of conscience.”

“Maybe I just wanted to do you a favour.”

“With an eye on my owing you one.”

“And Number Seven remaining firmly in the shadows. Whatever the outcome.”

Di Taverner said, “Oh, absolutely. We must safeguard our national treasures.”

She rose to go.

Judd said, “We have more to discuss.”

“I don’t have time.”

“I don’t mean now. Once this matter has been . . . disposed of.”

“I’m not in the mood for cloak and dagger, Peter.”

“Aren’t you? I rather thought that was your thing.” He stood too. “We’ll talk more. To your advantage. Trust me.”

She laughed. “Trust you? Oh, Peter. You say the funniest things.”

He leaned across as if to embrace her, but she was already on the move.

Snow had blurred the boundaries between road and verge, casting all it covered in a strange new light. Louisa parked at the top of a lane running down to a crossroads, fields in all directions, and before her headlights died noted that the fenceposts they illuminated were the aftermath of battle: a row of spears, protruding from graves. And then just fenceposts again. With the car quiet the world became huge, and mostly dark, though a dark blanketed by soft white numbness. There’d been no traffic on the road. Locals knew better than to venture out in this.

Earlier, she’d called Emma from a pub on Pegsea’s High Street. Emma, it would be fair to say, hadn’t been delighted with her updated request.

“You want me to talk to him again?”

“You can do it on the phone this time.”

“That’s still talking. You get that, right? That talking to someone on the phone is still talking?”

“But it beats being up close and personal.”

“You’re actually in Wales now?”

“Yep.”

“You’re insane. I heard on the radio they were expecting another six inches.”

“Probably a man said that. In which case it’ll be more like two.”

“What’s it doing now?”

She’d looked out of the window. “You ever see The Day After Tomorrow?”

“God.”

“Look, I know Roddy. If he tracked this thing for you last night, he’ll still be tracking it now. It’ll take him like five seconds to update the coordinates. Five seconds. Max. And I need this, Emma. The kid’s not at the cottage. Doesn’t look like he’s been there.”

“God,” said Emma again. Then: “Two spa days. And you come with me.”

“Deal.”

“I’ll need both,” Emma grumbled. “Just to get the feel of his eyes off my skin.”

She called back within the hour. Roddy Ho, Louisa surmised, was keen to impress Emma Flyte.

“Okay,” Emma had said. “Did we say four spa days?”

“Cumulatively,” Louisa agreed. “He manage it?”

“You got a pencil?”

The coordinates Emma gave her were for Lucas Harper’s Fitbit, in real time.

“And he’s pretty static.”

“Hope he’s not dead in a ditch.”

There was a pause.

Emma said, “Is that a likely scenario?”

“Just a turn of phrase.”

“What are you getting into here?”

“Nothing. He’s a missing kid, that’s all. I’ve never even met him.”

“And yet there you are, in Wales.”

“Like I said. I knew his father.”

The numbers squiggled on the scrap of paper in front of her meant nothing by themselves. Were meaningless, without a map to make them solid.

“Call me later,” Emma said. “When you find him.”

“Okay.”

“Or if you don’t. Call me anyway. Nine o’clock.”

“Nine o’clock,” Louisa agreed.

And now she was here, an hour short of that deadline; her map app—map app, she liked that; it looped in her mind: map app, map app—having pinpointed the Fitbit as being within a couple of hundred yards. She’d been expecting a building, a pub most likely, but there was nothing; just a junction at the foot of a slope, around which some trees had gathered. More woodland lay across the snow-covered fields. And somewhere beyond them was the sea.

A crossroads in the dark. An insignificant junction: what on earth was Lucas Harper doing there? And where was he, anyway? Emma’s words came back to her, What are you getting into? That Lucas didn’t want to be found was a given, else why would he leave his phone behind? But even so, this was a strange hiding place. It looked like somewhere you’d arrange a handover, or an ambush. Maybe better to approach on foot, as quietly as she could manage. And maybe better not to be totally unprepared.

From the boot she took her tiny backpack and her all-purpose tool: a monkey wrench, once used in battle by Shirley Dander. And as long as she was being careful, best not to stride down the middle of the road. She’d walk by the fenceposts, where the snow was deeper, but a scraggly runt of a hedge offered cover. But as she made her way down the slope, something snagged at her: fuck!—her new ski jacket. A triangular tear on the right breast now, a flap of fabric hanging loose. This was what you got, doing favours for strangers. Damn it to hell, she thought. Damn it to hell.

Wrench in hand, and thoroughly pissed off, Louisa Guy made her way down the slope to the tree-marked junction below.