Slough House

2

LET’S BE HONEST. FRONTAL aspect, first reaction: it’s not the best-looking property on the market.

But consider the potential.

Conveniently located above a Chinese restaurant and a newsagent, which enterprises occupy the ground-floorage, these upper three storeys present a rare opportunity to acquire a toehold in this up-and-coming area. (Nice little mention in the Mail not long ago. Not the property pages, but still.) East-facing, but sheltered from morning dazzle by an imposing view of the iconic Barbican Centre, and offered further protection by being on Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, renowned for its temperate climate. Traffic calmed by nearby lights; buses a regular fixture. And the Tube on the doorstep, with the popular Hammersmith & City, Circle and Metropolitan lines literally a minute away.

The front door’s not in use, but never mind. We’ll go round the back.

To this nicely low-maintenance yard, with ample room for wheelie bins and broken furniture. Ignore the smell, that’s a temporary blockage. Through this back door, sticking a bit today – doesn’t usually do that – but a bit of shoulder work and Bob’s your uncle. Then up the stairs, but best not put weight on that banister. It’s more ornamental than load-bearing. Original feature, mind.

And so we come to the first floor, a matching pair of offices, with a view of the aforementioned heritage brickwork opposite. All unspoilt, very much on-plan. Notice the fixtures and fittings. Authentic period detail there, and the seventies is a decade that’s coming back, isn’t it, what with the riots, the recession, the racism – ha! Our little joke. But no, really. Nice lick of paint, put your own stamp on it. Splash of yellow, splash of grey. Nothing like a touch of colour to bring out the natural warmth of a room.

But time’s wingèd chariot, eh? Onwards and upwards, onwards and upwards.

Which means another flight of stairs, a little cardio-workout. That’s not damp on the plasterwork, just the discolouration you get with age. Two more offices on this level, plus a compact kitchen: bit of surface area for your kettle and your microwave, storage space for your crockery and whatnot. Washer needs a tighten, but that’s easily sorted. Your facilities through here, and – oh. Eco-conscious, the previous user. Just give it a flush.

And up we go to the final two offices. Crying out to be bedroomed, our opinion. You’ve got your sloping roof, adds character, but leaves ample space to maximise your lifestyle requirements, once you look past the telephone directories and the overflowing ashtrays and the mess on the carpet there. Nothing a deep-clean won’t set to rights. Ideally the premises would be decluttered before a viewing, but access was an issue, apologies.

Window appears to be jammed shut too. But a quick minute with a screwdriver’ll see to that.

Anyway, there you have it. It’s quirky – little bit different – and benefits from a colourful history. A department of the Secret Service, though not an especially active one. Paperwork, we gather. Current occupants have been in possession for an eternity, though it probably feels longer. You’d think spies would have better things to do, but then again, maybe they were never the best sort of spy. Maybe that’s why they’re here in the first place.

But we can see you’re not convinced – it was the toilet, wasn’t it? – so maybe we should head west, where more traditional premises are available, over towards Regent’s Park. No, don’t worry about the door. Security’s never been a major concern here, which is a bit peculiar now we come to think of it.

Not that that’s our business – all that matters is getting this place off the books. But sooner or later, we’ll find a taker. That’s the thing about this line of work; the same in yours, we’ll be bound. The same the world over. When something’s for sale, eventually someone’ll buy it.

Just a matter of time, really.

Just a matter of time.

Looking for donor sperm? read the ad above her head.

Definitely not, though on the Central Line at rush hour, you couldn’t rule it out.

But for the moment, Louisa Guy hoped herself impregnable. She was jammed into a corner, true, but had her back to the enveloping mass, and her attention fixed on the door she was pressed against. In its reflection all became disjointed, like a 3D movie without the specs, but she could make out human features: blurred mouths lip-syncing to iPods, faces shuttered against contact. While the chances of a stranger-on-stranger encounter turning nasty were rare – a million passenger journeys for every incident, said the stats – you’d hate to be the one to buck the trend. Take deep breaths. Don’t think about bad outcomes. And then they were at Oxford Circus, where the crowd split apart like murmurating starlings, her half spilling onto the platform, heading for exits.

She didn’t normally come into town after work. Her barhopping days were largely over, largely unregretted; shopping expeditions were for weekends; and cultural outings – theatre, museums, concerts – let’s face it, didn’t happen: she was a Londoner, not a bloody tourist. But she needed new trainers after a ten-mile outing in the rain last week; a stupid idea but she’d been having a bad day, thoughts of Emma Flyte refusing to leave her alone. You couldn’t run away from your memories, but you could tire yourself to the point where the details blurred. So anyway, the trainers had either shrunk or changed shape so fundamentally they belonged on different feet, which meant here she was, heading into town after work; the evenings lighter now the clocks had gone forward, but the air still bearing shades of winter. On the escalator, video ads encouraged her to rethink fundamental choices: change bank, change phone, change job. In a perfect world she’d have managed all three by the time she reached street level.

Where the pavements were damp from rain. Louisa circumnavigated clumps of pedestrians, crossed Regent’s Street at a trot while the LED warned 3-2-1, and dipped into a sporting goods store, its neon logo a pale imitation of itself in the watery light, its tiled floor slick with grime. A yellow bollard exhorted her to take care. If she’d taken care, Emma Flyte would still be alive. But it was pointless to think such things; the clocks had gone forward since then, and only ever went so far back. Trainers were in the basement. She took an elevator again; she was always going up or down, it seemed. Always up or down.

On the back wall, running shoes were displayed like ranks of heads in Game of Thrones. As always there was a sale on, high-street retail being mostly zombie since You-Know-What, but even at reduced prices, trainers were mad. The ones that looked good were, anyway. And while the main thing about trainers was they had to feel right, not look good, still: they had to look good. So she picked the pair that most impressed on the wall, which proved nothing but was a sensible starting point, and sat and tried them on.

They felt okay. She walked up and down and they pinched a bit, more than when sitting, but it was hard to tell whether that was a new-shoe thing or a fitting issue. These places should have a treadmill. She flexed her leg to see if that helped, and noticed a guy noticing this – he was down the far end, examining a Nike – so did it again, and he kept on noticing, though studiously pretended not to. She crouched, and pressed the toe end of each trainer, checking for fit. He replaced the Nike on the wall and took a step back, his face a studied neutrality. Yeah, right, thought Louisa, awarding herself a mental high five.

Still got it.

She sat again, removed the trainers. They cost more than she wanted to spend, and while that had rarely stopped her in the past, it would be an idea to try on a few more pairs first. As if agreeing with this notion, her mobile trembled in her pocket, and at precisely the same moment she heard a nearby ping – someone else’s phone registering an incoming text. It was the guy who’d been watching her, or pretending not to, and he stepped out of sight behind a rack of socks and wristbands, reaching into his jacket as he did so. Could’ve been a meet-cute, she thought, self-mockingly. Hey, simultaneous texts – what are the odds? And she reached for her own mobile while having the thought, and checked her message.

… Fuck!

Louisa leaped up, shoeless, and raced to the far wall, slipping a little, steadying herself by grabbing the rack, but he was gone already – was that him on the escalator? Taking the stairs two at a time, as if alerted to a sudden emergency – yeah, she thought. You and me both. There was no point following, not with nothing on her feet. He was out of sight now anyway; would be on the street, picking the busiest direction to disappear in.

Bastard, she thought. You sly cunning bastard.

And then thought: So what the hell’s going on here then?, as she padded back to her shoes, the wet floor working through her socks with every step.

If you didn’t count the text that had pinged in five minutes ago, this was the first action River Cartwright’s phone had seen in days. He seriously needed to do something about his social life.

‘… Mr Cartwright?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’s Jennifer Knox?’

River kept a mental list of the women he’d had contact with over the past few years, and it didn’t take long to scroll through. B to K was a blank.

‘From next door to your grandfather’s?’

And that explained the senior wobble in her voice, which was a relief. Not that desperate, whatever anyone thought.

So ‘Of course’ was what he now said. Jennifer Knox. A caller-in on the O.B.: supplier of casseroles and local gossip, though the visits had tailed off as the Old Bastard’s grasp on gossip and solids, and such fripperies as who this woman he’d known for years might be, had slackened to nothing. She had River’s number because River was who you called when the O.B. had an emergency, though the old man was beyond such contingencies now. Which Jennifer Knox knew very well, having been at the funeral.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Mrs Knox. How can I help you?’

‘There’s someone in the house.’

His grandfather’s house, she meant, which had been unoccupied for a while. It belonged to River now, technically, as his mother kept stressing – ‘technically’ apparently meaning in every possible sense, including the legal, barring his mother’s own feeling that the natural order had been disturbed – and was, equally technically, on the market, though at a price the agent had declared ‘way too optimistic. Way’, in these post-You-Know-What times. Its refusal to budge suited River, for the moment. He’d grown up in his grandparents’ house, having been abandoned there by a mother whose horizons hadn’t, at the time, included future property rights. He’d been seven. That was a lot of history to sell.

Jennifer Knox was still talking. ‘I thought about calling the police, but then I thought, well, what if they’re friends of yours? Or, you know, potential buyers?’

‘Thanks, Mrs Knox. I should have let you know. Yes, they’re old friends passing through, in need of somewhere to spend the night. And I know the furniture’s gone, but—’

‘It’s still a roof and four walls, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly, and cheaper than a hotel. They’re travelling at the moment, and—’

‘We all do what we can, don’t we? To keep the costs down.’

‘They’ll be gone in the morning. Thanks, Mrs Knox. I’m grateful you took the trouble.’

His flat was a rented one-bedder, ‘nicely off the tourist track’ as some smug git had once put it. He might have inherited a country pile, but his actual living conditions remained urban haemorrhoid. The flat was cold most times of year, and even in daylight felt dark. The nightclub over the way hosted live bands twice a week, and a nearby manhole cover had loosened; every time a car ran over it, the resulting ka-chunk ka-chunk made River’s jaw spasm. It happened now, as he tucked his phone in his pocket. Not so much a soundtrack; more an audible toothache.

River raised a middle finger in the world’s general direction. Then went to see who’d broken into his dead grandfather’s home.

Meanwhile, Roddy Ho was doing what Roddy Ho did best.

What Roddy Ho did best was everything.

Which did tend to make such moments busy, but hey: if being Roddy Ho was easy, everyone would do it – there’d be fat-thumbed Roddy Hos, bad-haired Roddy Hos; even chick-retardant Roddy Hos. Which you had to love the comic possibilities, but Roddy Ho didn’t have time to dwell on them because Roddy Ho had his skinny-thumbed, good-haired, chick-delighting hands full.

And the everything he was currently deployed on involved saving Slough House from whatever deep-impact shit was headed its way.

As usual.

That shit was incoming was a given: this was Slough House. But also and anyway, it had been the Rodster himself who’d alerted Jackson Lamb to the Weird Wiping, as he’d dubbed it. The Weird Wiping meant incoming shit, no question, and that the shit would be deep impact, well: it didn’t take a genius. This was the spook trade, and when things went awry on Spook Street, they generally went the full Chris Grayling. So Roddy was checking the shit for depth and durability; trying to ascertain exactly which direction the shit was travelling in, and if, by now, he’d gone past the stage where the whole shit metaphor was proving useful, he’d at least made his point. Shit was coming, and everyone was looking to Roddy Ho to provide the double-ply bog roll.

Though actually, when you thought about it, that would involve Roddy doing the wiping.

Momentarily derailed, he reached for a slice of pizza. Roddy was in his office; it was way past sayonara time, but when the HotRod was on a mission, he didn’t watch the clock. Besides, some things you don’t want showing on your domestic hard drive, and tinkering around in Service records was one of them. Because the first problem he’d identified, the direction of travel of the incoming effluent, was a no-brainer: any time Slough House was under the hammer, you could bet your chocolate buttons it was Regent’s Park at the anvil. And in this particular instance, the Weird Wiping, what had been wiped was Slough House itself.

By ‘wiped’, Roddy meant erased from the Service database. Not just Slough House but the horses themselves, from the new guy Wicinski to Jackson Lamb; each and every one of them taken off the board. Oh, they were still around on the deep-level data sets; the ones involving salaries and bank accounts, all of which – after a nasty hack some years ago – were ascribed to employee numbers rather than names, so they were still getting paid, and still had jobs to do, but their personal files, their personnel jackets: they were gone, baby, gone. Anyone checking out Roddy Ho on the Service database would find zero, nada, zilch. Like the RodBod had ceased to exist.

Everything came to an end, he knew that. Take those huge statues of Jedi Knights the Taliban bombed to dust. But he’d figured his own legend would remain intact for a while yet.

So he’d thought about putting himself back up there – easy enough when you had the Rodinator’s talent set: he could hoist a dick-pic as the Service’s screensaver if he had a mind to – but best not. Over at the Park, they had to know who they were messing with, and it stood to reason they’d have extra security in place for when Roddy-O came putting their wrongs to rights. Which meant ninja skills were called for, stealth and cunning, and that was basically Roddy’s user profile. He was near-invisible was the plain fact. Half the time, people didn’t notice he was in the room. So for now he trod pantherlike among the pixels, melding with the matrix. Gathering information was one thing; gathering the absence of information called for a whole different kind of cool. And Roddy Ho was cooler than a bowl of Frosties.

Pausing for a moment to wipe pizza topping from his keyboard, he summed up his progress so far.

What he’d mostly discovered was that whoever’d done the wiping had made an impressively thorough job of it.

In fact, it occurred to him, any newbies out there – any junior spooks just starting at the Park – would have no idea Slough House existed at all.

And the image came to his mind of an empty space on the street, an unfilled gap ignored by passers-by; and Roderick Ho found himself wondering, just for half a moment, what difference that would make to anyone.

Dance like no one’s watching, thought Shirley Dander.

What cockwomble came up with that?

Because the point of dancing is everyone’s watching, or they are if you’re doing it right. The wallflowers chugging flavoured gin and wishing they had the moves. The wannabe rocking the bow-tie-and-specs on the balcony. That cute pair of kids in the corner, sizing each other up: seriously, she thought. Get a wiggle on. Before I toss a coin to choose which of you to take home.

Which could happen, she promised herself. Could so easily happen, she ought to have a sign around her neck: Danger, Woman at Work. Let these sad sacks know what they were dealing with.

But meanwhile, check these moves. There was no high like a natural high, and she was pretty sure the coke had worn off. What was flowing through her veins was pure Shirley-power.

That afternoon, she’d been in Slough House. Every afternoon, face it, she was in Slough House, and even the afternoons when she wasn’t felt like she was. Slough House cast a portable shadow: you could hike halfway to Watford and still feel it on your back. Because Slough House sucked the juice from your veins, or tried to. The trick was showing you were juicier than it knew. So anyway: blah. That afternoon, she’d been in Slough House, working on one of Jackson Lamb’s pet projects: the hooligan hinterland, he called it. His notion being, you didn’t strap on a suicide vest and wander down your local high street without your antisocial tendencies having manifested in some way beforehand, like unpaid parking tickets, or using a mobile in the quiet carriage. Shirley wasn’t so sure, but that wasn’t the point: the point was, when you were in Slough House, you did what Jackson Lamb told you. The alternative was accepting that your career in the Secret Service was over, and like every slow horse before her, and every slow horse to come, Shirley Dander thought she’d be the exception to the rule that Regent’s Park didn’t take you back. She thought they were secretly waiting for her. She thought that somewhere in a stationery cupboard, they already had the banner they’d prepared for her homecoming.

On that day too, she’d dance.

Here and now, but doubtless also in that glorious future, a woman kept catching her eye and pretending it was accidental. Who knew, she might get lucky, but right at the moment she could simply gawp like everyone else, because this was Strictly Come Dander, and every other fucker better get their ass off the dance floor. At rest she might resemble, in the words of a former colleague, a concrete bollard with an attitude, but that was only half the story: Shirley was on the underwhelming side where height was concerned, and more cylindrical than traditionally associated with beauty, but the simple physics of it was, every body exerts gravitational pull, and when she was dancing Shirley’s pulling power was up there with Newton’s other laws. As for the former colleague, if he’d been asked to repeat his description a moment later, he’d have been too busy wondering what just happened to his lungs. Shirley could handle criticism as well as the next guy, but the next guy was a touchy bastard.

And still that woman was watching, and still pretending not to. You had to admire a trier, thought Shirley. You had to admire an admirer, and perhaps she should take pity on her, drag her from the crowd and jump-start her on the dance floor, but that might lead to awkwardness later, because a thing about Shirley’s partners – and she meant her professional partners, but there was such a thing as mission-creep – a thing about Shirley Dander’s partners was that they tended to die; their brains misted against an office wall, or their insides spilt on snowy Welsh hillsides … Shirley had never thought of herself as a jinx, but that hardly mattered, did it? What mattered was what everyone else thought, and – two partners down – it would be an uphill task dismantling gossip. Team up with Shirley and start counting the days. Not the kind of come-on you wanted to broadcast to those watching you from the sidelines, and pretending not to.

And the lights spun, and the dance floor pounded, and the weight of electric bass thrummed in her frame. All eyes were on Shirley Dander, and that was fine by her.

Just so long as nobody started dying again.

There was money now, a little, from his grandfather’s will – his grandfather’s care had gone through his savings like a landlord, but enough remained for River to have bought a car, his first for years. He’d done his due diligence, checked the wear-and-tear stats on second-hand vehicles, listened to Louisa’s tip that yellow cars lost only twenty-two per cent of their value in the first three years as opposed to thirty, like every other colour, then bought something he saw stickered for sale in the street. Well, it was a bargain. And so far so good, he thought, as mid-evening London fragmented into carpet showrooms and bed shops, into garages and self-storage warehouses; he’d broken away from a pedestrian existence. It might even be symbolic of a new beginning. He had a hand on the doorknob, ready to step into whatever came next. But first he had to deal with what was happening in Kent.

His childhood home was outside Tonbridge. Jennifer Knox was a neighbour, but that was by rural standards. Central London, you’d fit fifteen dwellings into the space between her house and the O.B.’s, and never meet half the occupants. But strangers were more visible outside the city, and lights in houses that should be dark were noticed. So he had no reason to doubt her word: there was – had been – someone in his grandfather’s house.

Which might be a simple case of opportunist intrusion. There’d been a death notice in the paper, and burglars were capable of research. But there were other possibilities. The O.B. had been a spook, a Service legend. His obituary had been tactful – his cover had placed him in the Ministry of Transport – but he’d lived a secret life, and the possibility that some of his secrets lived on could not be ruled out. His house was mostly empty now; the furniture mostly cleared. River’s mother had taken care of that: Let me take some of the burden off your hands. He’d thought at first – Christ, what did this say about him? – that she was hoping to skim the cash, and had put his foot down where the study was concerned. ‘The books,’ he’d said. ‘I’m keeping the books.’

His mother had adopted her default mode of assuming he’d gone mad. ‘You don’t read, River.’

‘I read.’

‘You don’t read that much.’

Who did? The old man’s study was a booklined cave, as if he’d grown part-hobbit in age. But his last year he’d not read at all, the words having slipped from the pages in front of him. One of the last coherent conversations he’d had with his grandson: I’m losing anchor. The look in his eyes bottomless.

So the study remained like a showroom in a vacant property – books, chairs, curtains; the shelf with its odd collection of trophies: a glass globe, a hunk of concrete, a lump of metal that had been a Luger; the desk with its sheet of blotting paper, like something out of Dickens, and the letter opener which was an actual stiletto, and had once belonged to Beria – and if David Cartwright had left secrets in his wake they’d be somewhere in that room, on those shelves, hidden among a billion other words. River didn’t know if he really believed that, but knew for sure that he didn’t know he didn’t, and if River thought that way others might too, and act upon the possibility. Spook secrets were dangerous to friends and foes alike, and the old man had made many of both down the years. He could see one of either breed breaking a lock, finessing a window; could see them working round the study, looking for clues. If that was happening, River needed to stop it. Any trail his dead grandfather had left, no one was going to follow but him.

Traffic grew lighter as the skies grew dark, and he made good time, parking up the lane from the O.B.’s house and approaching on foot. The house seemed empty from outside, its windows lightless. There was always the chance that the old lady had made a mistake. But there was equally a chance that she hadn’t, and River skirted the front of the building, keeping in tree-shadow, and let himself in through the back door as quietly as he could.

Lech Wicinski was making dough, the instructions a list in his head.

First weigh out the flour, or make a reasonable guess.

Now add yeast and a pinch of salt. Stir it in.

Now add your warm water, your tablespoons of olive oil.

Now punch the bastard to within an inch of its life.

He faded out for a moment while this part was going on.

The day had been a bad one, which was to say, no different from most others. Jackson Lamb had taken to asking him when he planned to clean the office windows, as if this were a genetic trait, and while the other slow horses had, if not exactly warmed to him, at least defrosted slightly, the air around Slough House remained that of a half-hearted funeral. The task he’d been given, after months of staring at the walls, was slightly less energising than staring at the walls: Lamb had seen on TV, or read in a newspaper, or invented out of his own head, something about radicalised teenagers withdrawing from social media, and decided Lech might usefully pursue this topic.

‘… You want a list of kids who’ve withdrawn from social media?’

‘From Facepalm and Twatter and the rest, yeah.’

‘Any clues as to how I might go about doing that?’

Lamb had pretended to ponder. ‘I could do your job myself, if that’s what you mean,’ he’d said at last. ‘But then there’d be even less fucking point to you than there is now.’

Which was about average for an encounter with Lamb.

So anyway, that was the shape of Lech’s days: lost in a blizzard of hashtags, much like the face that looked back from every reflecting surface. Because this was a frightening mess. From a distance, he might have barely survived an acne attack; close up, you could see the razor marks obliterating what had lain beneath. As if he’d run a cheese grater over his cheeks. Bad enough, but it could have been worse: the word scored out was PAEDO, carved into Lech’s face by the man who’d infected his laptop with illegal pornography.

Thinking this, he punched the bastard dough some more.

That man was out of reach now – thanks to Lamb, as it happened – but so was Lech’s career, so was his earlier life. No way would Regent’s Park admit he’d been framed. His exoneration would mean their mistake, and the Park didn’t do mistakes. So there was no way back to the bright lights, and no obvious future if he stepped away from Spook Street: leave now, he’d be doing so without a clean reference, looking like an extra from a horror flick. Employers wouldn’t fall over themselves. While they couldn’t get you for being old, gay, ethnic, disabled, male, female or stupid, when you looked like you’d crawled from wreckage of your own devising, they could throw you a pitying look: Thank you, next. So Slough House it was, for the foreseeable future.

It was enough to induce paranoia. That evening, on the bus heading home, he’d had the feeling of being watched; a feeling so unnervingly real he’d stepped off the bus early, and waited until it was down the road before walking the rest of the way. Unlikely, he knew; if there was any advantage to being a slow horse, it was that no one was interested. But you couldn’t switch off your instincts.

He draped a cloth over the bowl. Once the dough rose he’d bash it down again, flatten it onto a tray, pour olive oil over it, along with a paste of garlic and shredded basil leaves, and leave it an hour before putting it in the oven. Then, lo, focaccia.

And tell me this, he thought. Tell me this: how could any life be broken if it included baking fucking focaccia?

It took all the willpower he possessed not to throw the bowl at the wall, but Lech managed it.

Look at me now.

Not long back, Catherine Standish had taken to buying bottles again; a self-conscious recreation of her drinking days, with this important distinction: she did not drink. It had been a deliberate flirtation with danger, acting out the alcoholic desire of oblivion, but in the end she had done what she had to do, and emptied her bottles down the sink, dismantling the Aladdin’s cave she had wrought. It had felt, afterwards, the way she remembered the post-Christmas lulls of her childhood, when decorations were packed away and ordinary dullness re-established. But at the same time she knew a danger had been avoided, and that her regret at not having confronted it head-on was her addiction speaking. Addiction loves challenge because challenge provides an excuse to fail. Though in Slough House, opportunities to fail were never far from hand.

And if you were ever in danger of forgetting this, Jackson Lamb was usually there to see you right.

But Lamb had left the office on some mission of his own before Catherine, and she herself had left early. The evening was chill, the start of British Summer Time having been marked by hailstorms and grey skies, and she wore her winter coat as she waited at a bus stop: not her own, nor anywhere near her route. Several buses passed, and she hailed none, but when a wheelchair rounded the nearest corner and trundled past the stop, she fell into step behind it. The wheelchair’s occupant gave no indication of having noticed, but continued as far as the next junction, where the chair’s electric humming ceased for a moment at the pedestrian crossing. Catherine remained out of its occupant’s range of vision, but the woman in the chair spoke anyway.

‘Do I know you?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Give me a minute.’

This was as long as the traffic lights required. But once they’d done their job, the wheelchair was on the move again. As they crossed the road, to the impotent fury of London’s traffic, its occupant spoke again.

‘Catherine Standish,’ she said. ‘One-time PA to Charles Partner, late and unlamented. And now – what shall we call it? Amanuensis? Chatelaine? Dogsbody? – to the not-yet-late but lamentable Jackson Lamb.’

‘Who sends his regards.’

‘Does he?’

‘Not really.’

‘No, that didn’t sound like him. You’re not going to pretend this is a chance encounter, then?’

‘I’d been waiting ten minutes.’

‘Surprised you weren’t scooped up. Sensitive to hangers-around, this neighbourhood.’

This being Regent’s Park, the immediate catchment area of the Secret Service.

‘One of the advantages of being a middle-aged woman,’ Catherine said, ‘is the cloak of invisibility that comes with it.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

Which was a fair rejoinder. Molly Doran had many attributes, but invisibility wasn’t among them.

‘I normally take a cab,’ she continued. ‘You’re lucky you caught me.’ She halted abruptly. ‘I was sorry to hear about your colleague.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Jackson hates losing joes.’

‘I don’t suppose the joes are that thrilled either.’

‘Ah. She bites.’ The wheelchair resumed its progress. ‘The reason I’m not in a taxi heading home, Ms Standish, is that I have things to do in town. So you have two minutes to explain whatever it is you’re after, and then we can both get about our business.’

Catherine said, ‘We have concerns.’

‘How borderline tragic for you.’

‘And we were wondering if you could help.’

‘And how are we defining “we” in this context?’

‘Just me, really.’

‘I see.’ Molly wore mockery-defying make-up, her face lifelessly white, her cheeks absurdly red. She might have been auditioning for a role in a different manner of circus, as a clown or perhaps an acrobat, though she was more than usually challenged if the latter. Her legs, for instance, ended at the knee.

She said, ‘So Lamb has no idea you’re talking to me?’

Catherine was aware that it could be an error to categorically state what Lamb was and was not aware of at any given time, including when he was asleep. But it was simplest to stick to supposition. ‘No.’

‘That’s a pity. When Lamb wants a favour, I charge him through the nose.’

‘… Really?’

‘Information. Not money.’ She smiled, not in a pleasant way. ‘Spook currency. I’m something of a hoarder.’

‘Which is the reason I wanted to see you.’

‘It’s the only reason anyone wants to see me. That’s my USP. My raison d’être.’ Molly Doran came to a halt again, and Catherine sensed a speech coming. ‘I’m an archivist, Ms Standish. I deal in the paper world. My little kingdom’s full of folders stuffed with the secrets people kept back when they sat at typewriters to make their reports. I used to be told, ooh, fifteen years ago, that digitisation would put an end to my kind of gatekeeping. That was before everyone got the heebie-jeebies about how vulnerable the online world is.’ She mimed the flicking of a switch. ‘One smart cookie in Beijing, and everything’s on the Web for all to see. So I’m still around, and my records are very much hard copies. The future may not be in my keeping, but trust me, the past is my domain.’ She paused. ‘“Cookie” was wordplay, incidentally. It’s a thing they have on computers.’

‘Yes, I’d heard.’

‘So tell me about these concerns of yours. Has someone been shaking your foundations? Slough House tumbling around your ears?’

Before Catherine could reply there was a howling in the near distance, from the direction of the zoo.

‘Did you hear that?’ she said.

‘Ah,’ said Molly. ‘The big bad wolf. Coming to blow your house down, is he?’

‘I think someone already has,’ said Catherine.

The back door opened into a porch where coats were hung and wellington boots abandoned, or that’s what used to happen. Now it was just a cold empty area between the outside world and the kitchen. River passed through it silently. That was the thing about familiar houses: you knew its squeaks and unoiled hinges; you knew where to put your weight. Here on the doorjamb was a single pencil mark, midriff height. Rose had marked it off for him. There. That’s how tall you are. And then David had explained the rules of life: you didn’t leave your details in the open for everyone to see; you didn’t mark your height and age for the weasels to find. It had been River’s first glimpse into his grandfather’s secret world, and he’d never again asked Rose to measure him.

There was no noise. The study was ground floor, at the back: exit the kitchen, turn left. He could have done it with his eyes closed. Its door was open a fraction. Was that how he’d left it? He waited while his eyes adjusted to the gloom, acutely conscious of the emptiness around him. Even the grandfather clock, a fixture in the hallway since long before his birth, was gone. Its absence of ticking felt like a tap on his shoulder.

But in the study the shelves would be stocked with books; the rugs in place; the desk, the armchairs. There’d be a basket of logs by the fire and a transistor radio on the coffee table. It would barely be a surprise to find the O.B. there, brandy glass in hand. But his grandfather had passed into joe country, and besides: in the air was a smell of fried dust.

He put a hand flat on the study door, and pushed. It swung open.

The soft glow came from the ancient one-bar electric fire, usually kept tucked behind the O.B.’s armchair. In its halo, the room assumed the air of a Dutch painting: pin-sharp details in the centre, fading to shadow around the edges. And there, more or less where it shone brightest, his grandfather’s chair, its familiar heft as much a presence in River’s life as the man who’d once occupied it. The figure that sat there now watched as River entered, and didn’t seem to move; didn’t appear to be breathing. Might have been a ghost.

‘Jesus,’ he said softly.

He took two steps into the room.

‘… Sid?’

‘Hello, River,’ she said.

At that precise moment, miles away, an ambulance in a hurry rounds Beech Street, its blue light strobing first Barbican Tube Station and then the buildings on the next block: the Chinese restaurant, the newsagent’s; the door between the two which never opens, never closes. And for the time this takes to happen, Slough House is illuminated, its windows throwing back light as if fully engaged in London life; as if the building breathes the same air as everybody else, and harbours the same hopes and aspirations. It doesn’t last. A moment later the ambulance is bombing down Aldersgate Street, its siren squealing round the rooftops, and in its wake Slough House’s windows become the same black pools they were before, so that if you approached and peered in, always supposing you could hover that high above the pavement, nothing would look back at you – not the everyday nothing of casual absence, but the long-drop nothing that comes once everything’s over.

But nobody ever approaches, and nobody ever looks in. Slough House might as well not be there, for all the attention paid to it, and while this is unsurprising – the spook trade not being renowned for kerb flash – it carries too a suggestion of redundancy. Because in London, a building best hurried past is a building without reason to be, and such a building might find its days numbered; might find itself viewed not as bricks and mortar but as an opportunity; as an empty pillar of air, waiting for steel and glass to give it shape. The history embedded in its bones counts for nothing. To those who buy and sell and own and build, the past is simply a shortcut to what’s yet to come, and what’s yet to come offers magpie riches to those prepared to embrace the changes demanded. Or so the promises run.

For a city is an impermanent thing, its surface ever shifting, like the sea.

And like the sea, a city has its sharks.

3

THERE’S A SHOP ON Brewer Street. You can get Russian tobacco there. Polish chewing gum. Lithuanian snuff …

If the man who’d spoken those words weren’t long dead, he’d have had no trouble finding the shop in question: it hadn’t moved, hadn’t redecorated, had barely changed at all. It was still the same stamp-sized floorspace, with a counter on which sat a till, still fondly referred to as ‘electric’; it was still shelved floor to ceiling on all sides, and each shelf still bore the same bewildering array of vendibles: the same cigars with green and yellow bands; the same chocolate frogs in the same foil wrapping. The same calendar, still celebrating 1993, still hung above the door to the stairs, and the same biscuit-tin lid, its bright motif still a twinkly-eyed Stalin, was still propped on a head-height shelf, and still saw service as a percussive device when Conference was in swing, ‘Conference’ being the designation Old Miles bestowed on any upstairs gathering numbering more than three – any fewer, he was wont to grumble, and there was no call to count cadence, a rhythm he still observed by beating Joe Stalin in the face with a tiny hammer.

Old Miles wasn’t his actual name, but it was generally held that old miles were what he walked, and nothing about the way he clung to established habits gave the lie to this.

But one reason for adhering to tradition is an awareness of impending change, and the little shop’s apparent obduracy concealed a minor shift that required major rearrangement, in that what once had been a going concern was now simply a concern. Business rates were ever on the rise, and the customer base ever dwindling, reduced by mortality and age and decreasing mobility. The shop had once been part of a local network of grocers and tradesmen of every description, where the competent shopper could provision a family for a siege. But those days were gone, and Old Miles’s tobacconist-cum-smuggler’s cave was now marooned in a hipsters’ playground. Which was the least of its worries. London altered by the day, and if the city had never been as kind nor as welcoming to strangers as it liked to pretend, it had at least thrived on the variety that strangers introduced. The political fog of the times had changed that, and political fog, as history has illustrated, is best dispelled by the waving of flags and banners, which usually foreshadows the use of truncheons and sticks. Variety was no longer a draw, and the gatherings of so-called Yellow Vests on the streets of central London were a testament to the shrinking of mental horizons that accompanies the raising of a drawbridge. Milosz Jerzinsky – Old Miles – hadn’t spent his early years fighting communists from a distance only to be sandbagged by fascists on his doorstep in old age. Besides, the leasehold on his shop had precisely as many years to run as those by which he had surpassed retirement age, and the neat mirror image these spans presented was as good as a sign from the heavens. So he had taken, he admitted to his remaining customers, the land-grabber’s shilling; he was folding his tent; he was making his departure. His shop would remain unchanged until its final day, but that arrived on the stroke of midnight, to mark time until which one last Conference was being held in the upstairs room; a gathering of stalwarts and irregulars alike, who would count the hours down glass by glass, and simply by their presence prove the remainder of that long-dead customer’s encomium on Old Miles’s place: At any given moment, half its customers used to be spooks.

But the given moments, thought the man himself, were fast wearing out their welcome.

He had just sold the last three packs of his Russian cigarettes – a life-destroying brand that only a suicide could embrace – to a fat man in a dirty overcoat who looked like he worked in a betting shop, either behind the cashier’s grille or on a stool beneath the TV, watching his pay packet break a leg in the 3:15 at Doncaster. Still, there was a grim focus in his eyes as he waited for his change, as if he were committing the little shop’s interior to memory. Maybe he’d lost more than the odd pay packet in his time. Maybe there was a whole archive of failure shelved in that ugly head, which was perhaps the reason Old Miles spoke to him as he counted coins into his waiting hand. ‘We’re closing,’ he said.

‘So I heard.’

‘There’s no future in it.’

The man grunted. ‘It looks like there’s barely a present.’

‘You’ve not been here before?’

The man didn’t answer. He was staring at the coins, as if Old Miles had shortchanged him, or slipped an unacceptable currency into his palm. But at length he shovelled them into his trouser pocket and looked Old Miles in the eye. ‘Heard about it. Never set foot inside.’

‘You can’t have bought that brand anywhere else in these parts.’

‘Maybe there’s the reason you’re having to close,’ the man said. ‘Maybe you’re too nosey to survive.’

‘There might be truth in that,’ Old Miles conceded. ‘Though up till now, I’ve considered survival one of my talents.’ He nodded in the direction of the door to his left. ‘Would you like to go upstairs?’

‘You’re not my type.’

‘There’s drink. A gathering of like-minded friends.’ He leaned closer. ‘You’ve been in the game, haven’t you? I can usually tell.’ He pulled back. ‘Call it a wake.’

‘I’m not the sentimental kind.’

‘But you look like a drinker.’

The fat man produced a cigarette from nowhere. It looked like one of those that Old Miles had just sold him – the tobacco nearly black; the tube loose in its filter – but he couldn’t have freed it with his hand in his pocket, surely. He slotted it into his mouth. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll pop my head in. See if I recognise any old faces.’

‘And if any of them recognise yours,’ said Old Miles, ‘what name would they attach to it?’

‘Christ knows,’ said Jackson Lamb, and disappeared through the door the shopkeeper had indicated.

The speciality of the house was red meat.

If you didn’t believe the menu, just look at the diners.

Diana Taverner ran the obvious numbers: if you subtracted the serving staff she’d be the only woman here, which was fine by her. Equality meant nothing if it didn’t involve earning your place at the table; a table, in this instance, occupying the private upstairs room of a pub, but one of those pubs reviewed in the Sunday supplements, with a named chef. He’d moved among them earlier, introducing himself, explaining the cuts he was intending to serve, and had come this close to asking if they wanted to meet the damn cow. Diana enjoyed her food, but the rituals involved could be tiresome.

A fork met a glass, repeatedly. The company fell silent.

‘Thank you all.’

It was Peter Judd who’d rung for quiet, and Judd who spoke now. He’d put on weight: for a man who’d never minded being photographed jogging, he reliably resembled the ‘before’ slot in a set of before-and-after photos. But those paparazzi days were behind him, she supposed, even allowing for the fact that they might turn out to be ahead of him also: writing off the career of a politician whose greed for power was so naked it required a parental advisory sticker frequently turned out to be a little previous, as the barrow-boy slang had it. And barrow-boy slang was just one of the vernaculars Judd was fluent in. Another was corporate bonhomie, which, for this evening, he’d turned up to eleven.

‘I’d just like to say how delightful it is to see you all here on what I’m sure will be the first of many – many – such occasions, being a celebration of this bold new enterprise of ours. You all know Diana Taverner, of course, and I’m sure that, like me, you’re all enjoying the the the apt nomenclature she rejoices in, for she is indeed our quick huntress, whose latest foray into the forests of international intrigue we’re making a festive ah ah ah bunfight of tonight.’

There were those who’d said of Peter Judd, during his years as a contender for the highest office in the land, that his clowning masked a laser-like focus on his own best interests, but it was a mistake to assume that the theatrical flourishes were nothing more than showmanship. The truth was, he enjoyed the ringmaster role too much to abjure it, while another, truer truth was, it had the added benefit of inducing even close associates to underestimate him. This, Diana knew, was a key component of his interpersonal skill set. Judd had long made a study of loyalty – the ties that bind, and how we answer to their bondage – without ever suffering its strictures himself.

‘Some while ago, as none of you will have forgotten, a disgraceful episode interrupted the tranquillity of our fair and sovereign nation, when, for reasons yet to be fully established, a foreign intelligence service dispatched what can only be described as “hitmen”, a pair of hitmen, their actual gender notwithstanding, to commit murder on our shores. These assassins arrived in the guise of tourists, come to pay obeisance to one of the jewels in our national crown, but rather than guidebook and selfie stick they arrived armed with a toxic substance and evil intent. So far, so very like some popcorn spectacle of the kind we’re accustomed to seeing on the widescreens of our nation’s multiplexes, or should that be multiplices? And yet, and yet, if I were to invoke a cinematic precedent, it would be more Inspector Clouseau than ah ah James Bond. More Laurel and Hardy than Fast and Furious. For in their blundering idiocy, these fools not only proved themselves unable to carry out their original mission, but left in their wake a woman dead and a man seriously impaired. Innocent bystanders, unfortunate citizens, casual victims of international skulduggery. And there are those among you, I know, who felt – like me – the the the shame of seeing this disgraceful episode go unpunished, to see the perpetrators paraded on their homeland television like returning heroes, and their president describe them as uninvolved passers-by, innocent of wrongdoing, and thus subject their victims, and by association every other citizen of this land, to a degree of contempt that in earlier times would have seen boots polished, kitbags packed and gunboats launched.’

He paused and his mouth assumed its usual pout, his eyes their usual cunning light. Give him a toga, Diana thought, and he’d be Nero absent his lyre.

His voice dropped.

‘I should say, of course, that as deplorable and sordid as these events were, they could have been worse. Much much worse. Slathering a nerve agent on their ex-compatriot’s doorknob, in a doomed attempt to murder him, was an evil, evil act, but discarding the unused portion of their toxic weapon – in a perfume bottle – in a local park – to be chanced upon by a couple on a community clean-up outing – that was heinous beyond the reach of vocabulary. That the woman died, the unfortunate woman, was quite tragic enough, but it takes no great leap of imagination to envision other outcomes. The murderous miscreants, in abandoning their poisonous armoury, gave no thought to the potential consequences such action might entail. Any number of victims might have suffered contamination. Children might have been involved. Small, British children.’

His audience was caught up in his rhetoric, their knives and forks at high noon across the bloody swirls on their plates. Damien Cantor was nodding to P. J.’s beat as if he’d first danced to it at his school disco. She’d been taken aback to see him among the company. But he, and the rest of them, had paid for this; had made it happen. So she supposed they were entitled to enjoy the moment, even if that meant – in a typically male way – that they would feel themselves its engineers.

‘And in the aftermath, as I say, shame. The shame of seeing our government do nothing, of seeing sabres apparently unsheathed, but hearing only the plastic rattle of inadequacy. We pulled our aprons over our heads and hid our faces from the world. There we were, taunted and mocked by the global bully, and the best response we could muster was a cowardly wail. Is it any wonder that the common people felt affronted? Is it really a source of surprise that they began to question their leaders? Who among us wouldn’t, when our leaders proved themselves so unequal to the tasks facing them? Tasks, you would have thought, that those occupying the great offices of state would be more than prepared to gird themselves for. Indeed, it’s not too presumptuous to suggest that they should have arrived at said offices with loins already clenched.’

He paused, his gaze sweeping the table.

‘So it is with awe and admiration that I offer our communal thanks to the fair Diana, for the efficiency and aplomb with which she turned her sights on the prize. That prize being, I don’t need to tell you, an evening of the score. Two hitmen, I said, two hitmen were dispatched to our sovereign shores, though of course, as we all know, one of those hitmen was, in actual fact, in actual fact, a hitwoman. And she, the female of the species – which we don’t need our national poet to remind us is far deadlier than the male – has now been returned to the soil from which she sprang, or dung heap, rather, the dung heap which spewed her forth, one of our own unsung heroes – or possibly, who knows, heroines? – performing the ah, the ah, termination. On the instructions of our gallant huntress Diana, she who sought to take life has now herself been taken, and I can only imagine, as I’m sure we all can, the terror that must now be afflicting her erstwhile comrade-in-villainy. Vengeance, gentlemen – gentlemen and lady – vengeance is an oft-maligned impulse. We are told to turn the other cheek, to forgive the wrongs done to us. And this is well and good, well and good. But there is a time, too, for anger and chastisement, a time to take up the sword and lay waste those who have done us wrong. That this has now been done is a matter for celebration, and while I pay tribute, as we all do, to the fair Lady Diana, I also want to thank all of you for making her acts possible. You provided the steel and the lead, you provided the weapon. Diana took aim and her aim, as we all know, proved true. Once more we can hold our heads high in the world, even if our pride, for the time being, has to remain a matter of quiet satisfaction rather than triumphant bellowing. But the time for bellowing will come, rest assured of that. The time for bellowing will come. And when we bellow, the world will hear. Thank you.’

The boisterous reaction took some minutes to quieten down.

Taverner had to hand it to him. Judd knew which buttons to press.

It was more tree house than clubhouse, the room above Old Miles’s shop; wooden floorboards, and no furniture to speak of. Packing cases along one wall provided a surface on which bottles had been set – red wine, vodka and whisky – their haphazard groupings punctuated by overflowing ashtrays. The remainder of the floor was occupied by similarly haphazard groupings of old men, or men nearly old; some in suits that had seen better days; others in peacock apparel. The common factor was that each held at least one glass. Through the small sash window, propped open the height of a tobacco tin, came a distant muddle of chanting.

Inside the room conversation was multilingual and overlapping. A blue cloud hung overhead, and the gently swaying lightbulb was the moon on an overcast night.

Lamb had found a bottle of malt and was in a corner smoking, looking like a bin someone had set fire to. Next to him, at shoulder height, hung a dartboard to which a picture of Vladimir Putin, topless on horseback, had been taped. One small postcard aside, of a wooden church in a snow-clad landscape, it was the room’s only decoration.

‘Are you smoking that or is it smoking you?’

The speaker was a shade younger than most others present, and wore a charcoal suit with a faint pinstripe. His thinning hair was sandy and his spectacle frames blue.

‘It smells Soviet-era. Where do they make them, Chernobyl?’

Lamb gazed around the room. Though everyone had looked at him when he’d entered, most had made the effort not to appear to be doing so. ‘There’s a few here might have been assets at one time,’ he said, ‘and more than a couple probably sold secrets when the weather was fair. But even Russian tobacco can’t cover up the odour I’m getting from you. You’re a suit.’

‘Suit? I was nearly a desk at one time.’

‘What happened? Someone lose your Allen key?’

The man laughed. ‘Someone was better at their job than me. It happens. Smith, by the way. Corny, I know. Chester Smith.’

‘And what desk did you nearly fill, Chester Smith?’

‘US Liaison. Went to a woman who’d done her masters at Barnard. Turns out that was a good place to make future contacts. Form your networks early. There any spare in that bottle?’

Lamb held it up; it was three-quarters full. ‘No.’

A small figure appeared in the doorway, and was immediately obscured by others.

Smith said, ‘It’s like the United Nations in here.’

‘What, a dosshouse for the weird and lonely?’

‘Exactly. Old Miles has never been on the books, did you know that? Been running this place as an out-of-hours spooks’ club since the seventies, but it’s always been under the bridge. More than a few ops planned here, you can bet your braces.’

‘You still with the Park, Chester Smith?’

‘No, I took the option when the desk job fell through. Handy little benefits package.’ He sipped from his glass. ‘I dabble in real estate now.’

‘You don’t say.’ Lamb drained his own glass, then refilled it.

‘Office space, mostly. A few luxury apartments. But I have this thing, call it a principle. I don’t deal with Russian money.’

‘That must make you very proud.’

The small figure appeared again briefly, in the space between taller bodies. The room had filled since Lamb arrived, and Old Miles himself squeezed in now, to general hubbub. The shop had closed its door for the last time. It was a sad moment, but sad moments were to be celebrated as much as happy ones, or half the liquor in the world would go undrunk. And there were no better friends than old comrades to share such moments with. This, or something like it, formed the basis of a short speech. Cheers were attempted, and glasses raised. Through the window came another burst of chanting, as if distant strangers were old comrades too.

‘You were a joe, weren’t you?’ Smith said, once the clamour had subsided. ‘That why you’re here? You miss the old days?’

‘What I like about the old days is, they’re over,’ said Lamb.

‘And you know what? I think I’ve just worked out who you are. You’re Lamb, aren’t you? You’re Jackson Lamb.’

Lamb’s face was expressionless. But after a moment, he nodded.

‘… Ha! Jackson Lamb! If I’d known I’d be meeting a legend I’d have brought my autograph book.’

‘If I’d known this was a date I’d have freshened up.’ Lamb farted, possibly in compensation, and took a last drag of his cigarette before the tube fell from the filter, scattering a Catherine wheel of sparks across the floor. Lamb ignored every part of this process apart from the inhalation: when he breathed out again, it was as if he were conjuring a storm cloud.

Smith stepped on the small fire, extinguishing it. ‘Jackson Lamb. Didn’t you once—’

‘Whatever I did or didn’t once, I don’t now.’ He produced another cigarette. ‘Or did the whole “secret” part of Secret Service pass you by?’

Chester Smith pressed a finger to his lips. ‘Mea culpa. But imagine the awe a desk-man feels for the field agent.’

‘I’m a desk-man myself these days. And you’re, what do you call it, an investment opportunist? Property consultant? Or does wanker cover it all?’

‘Now that’s classic. “Does wanker cover it all?” Priceless. Here, let me get that.’ Producing a lighter, Smith snapped a flame into life. ‘And I’m not exactly a civilian. I lunch with Oliver Nash once a month. A club off Wigmore Street. He keeps me in the loop.’

Nash was chair of the Limitations Committee, which oversaw the Service’s spend, so technically kept Diana Taverner on a leash. It was no surprise he dined off the stories that came his way. He was every joe’s nightmare: a career bureaucrat with an operational veto.

Lamb said, ‘How very considerate of him. Does he print a newsletter, or just use a megaphone?’

The lighter went back in Smith’s pocket. He said, ‘You know your Service carried out an assassination last month?’

‘Megaphone it is, then.’

‘One of the GRU creeps involved in that Novichok business. Whacked her on home turf, somewhere in the Volga. That’s what I call taking it to the enemy.’ He swirled his empty glass. ‘Word is, Putin’s spitting teeth.’

‘He’s always spitting teeth. If not his own, someone else’s.’

‘You sure you couldn’t squeeze a small one out of that?’

‘I hate freeloaders.’ But Lamb poured a tiny amount into the proffered glass, once he’d made sure his own was full.

‘Thank you.’ Smith toasted the picture on the dartboard, and broke softly into song. ‘“Rah-rah-rah Putin, homicidal Russian queen.” Gay porn lost a superstar when he went into despotism, right? Could have been the new Joe Dallesandro.’

Lamb grunted.

‘That man he tried to have poisoned. Here in England.’

‘What about him?’

‘He was a swapped spy. Out of the game. He—’

‘I know how it works,’ said Lamb. ‘I’m not the fucking janitor.’

‘But welcome to the brave new order, eh? No holds barred. Don’t get me wrong, three cheers for Lady Di. I mean, I’m all for peace and love and all that, but only once the body count’s even. Otherwise we run the risk of being Russia’s bunny.’ He swallowed his drink in a single draught. It’s possible that sarcasm was intended. ‘I’m sure he’ll have rolled a head or two back home, won’t he? The Kremlin’s Gay Hussar. Assigned some locals to Siberia. What you might call the Naughty Steppes.’ He glanced slyly at Lamb saying this. ‘But that won’t be enough, will it? The Park carried the fight to him, he’ll bring it on back. Couldn’t look his photographer in the face otherwise.’

‘Well, you carry right on not selling him flats. That’ll take the wind out his sails.’

‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he weren’t behind that lot, come to think of it. Les gilets jaunes.’ Smith nodded towards the open window, through which distant grumbling could still be heard. ‘The real world equivalent to a bunch of internet trolls.’

‘If you say so,’ said Lamb. ‘But I’d take them more seriously if they spent less time accessorising.’ He slipped the bottle into his coat pocket, and thrust his free hand out. Chester Smith made to clasp it in his own. ‘No, I need your lighter. Mine’s empty.’

Smith handed it over, then watched as Lamb crossed the room, the press of bodies parting for him without fuss. At the door he halted without looking back, though Smith had the sense he was checking the room out anyway. But whatever it was he’d been looking for he didn’t appear to have found, because a moment later he was gone, and the room seemed half as crowded for his absence.

‘Jackson Lamb,’ Smith murmured aloud, for no obvious reason. Then went to find someone new to talk to.

Judd sat next to Diana, satisfaction oozing from every pore, and she put a hand on his elbow. ‘I’m not too proud to admit it,’ she said. ‘I nearly got an erection there.’

‘Me too.’

‘And thank you for those kind words.’

‘Every syllable deserved.’

She was unused to praise from Peter Judd. Achievement, in other people, was not something he admired: it was like watching somebody walk around in shoes he’d planned to buy. On the other hand, he’d been running a PR company since leaving the political limelight. Perhaps he’d learned something, if only which lies to tell.

‘And it achieved the required response,’ he went on. ‘Rage and fury from the Kremlin, I gather. He’ll do such things, he knows not what they are, or something like that. King Lear, yes?’

‘Quite possibly.’

‘Did it for A level. You think he’ll start a war?’

‘If I’d thought that,’ Diana said, ‘I’d not have green-lit the operation.’

‘Oh, come on. What’s life without a little risk?’

‘Longer?’

‘You never disappoint me, Diana.’

She said, ‘He won’t start a war. Because he broke the rules. Sanctioning a hit on a swapped spy, that’s not done. He should have known that.’

‘And now you’ve carried out a hit on the hitter we’re all square, or should be. But as you’ve already pointed out, he’s not playing by the rules.’

‘You’re aware that it wasn’t actually an agent who consigned the target to, as you put it, the dunghill?’

‘Heap,’ said Judd. Then: ‘No, I’d rather assumed you acquired the services of a soldier of fortune of some sort.’

She nodded.

‘But we’re here to inspire national pride, and if that means blurring the odd detail, so be it.’ He reached for his glass. ‘Besides, the underlying point remains. The good chaps here, they provided the wherewithal. Whether to a salaried operative or a freelance journeyman hardly matters. Our political overlords, so-called, fell at every available hurdle, but these good men and true stepped up. National pride was at stake. They heard the call, and opened their chequebooks.’

‘Now that’s a stirring image.’

‘Behave. You took their money. Don’t look down your nose.’

In other company she might have tried to look contrite, but Judd had as little time for social pieties as she did.

‘And you have to admit, it’s working nicely so far.’

It was. Or seemed to be.

It had been the tail end of winter when Judd had approached her with, as he’d termed it, an opportunity. These had felt few and far between at the time. An agent had died, in the snow, in Wales; one of Jackson Lamb’s crew – a slow horse – but it all went down on the books. A recently departed Park operative had been killed in the same debacle. The way it spun, no blame was laid at Diana’s door, but an odour had lingered; worse, this had happened shortly after her application for a root-and-branch overhaul of operational practices – effectively a plea for a major increase in spend – had been rejected. And that had been before the budgetary fallout from You-Know-What kicked in. The last full-scale retreat from Europe, by way of amateur armada, had seen defeat dressed up as victory; this latest version, a supposed triumph, might as well have been made on the Titanic. No wonder Peter Judd’s siren song had fallen sweetly on her ears.

Suppose the Service were able to achieve, let’s call it a self-sufficient status … What if she had the resources to operate as required, in situations of critical need, without requiring government approval?

We’re not talking about privatisation. Simply an injection of necessary funds from sources with a vested interest in national security …

Funds well spent, though for now the dossier on the Kazan operation remained a miracle of invisible expenses. This was an easier ask than the more familiar inverse. Those holding the purse strings were happy not to wonder, for example, at how cheaply extra-territorial surveillance had been undertaken. And it turned out that the actual cost of having someone whacked remained one of those subjects too embarrassing to discuss in public, so that wasn’t subjected to intense scrutiny either.

Judd became embroiled in something humorous to his right. Meanwhile, the man to Diana’s left required her attention.

‘What you said afterwards,’ he said. ‘Smiert spionam. It made me laugh.’

‘How did you come to hear about that?’

‘Oh, come on. You said it to spark a legend. You knew it would get around.’

She had a long-standing aversion to being told what she knew, though it had been a long while since anyone had dared. And this particular man – Damien Cantor – had probably still been in school then. He was mid-thirties now, treading that line between being a noise in the business world and still hip to the streets: three-day stubble and trainers. When they went on about sixty being the new forty, they forgot to add that that made thirty-something the new twelve.

‘So anyway,’ he went on. ‘You must be pleased with the way things are going.’

‘Must I?’

‘All those years of being tethered to the rule book.’ He was dismantling a bread roll as he spoke, though the meal was effectively over. ‘And now you’re a free agent. More or less.’

‘I have no plans to tear up any rule books, Mr Cantor.’

‘Please – Damien.’ He reached for a napkin. ‘I’m happy to have been of assistance. And we’re all looking forward to the next adventure.’

‘And I’m grateful for the backing. But the next adventure, as you put it, will more than likely consist of improved administrative processes. It’s astonishing how expensive a firewall upgrade can be.’

‘I’m sure. But I think we’d all prefer something a little more technicolour. I mean, after a start like this, it would be a shame to go lo-fi, wouldn’t it?’

Diana stared, causing him no great discomfiture. He was easily the youngest of the assembled company; one of the new-breed media magicians, who’d started as a YouTube impresario and now owned a rolling news channel, mostly fed by citizen input. ‘Make it, don’t fake it’ was Channel Go’s mission statement, unless it was its mantra, or its logo. But its general thrust was to encourage choleric rage in its viewers, so, if nothing else, Cantor had tapped into the spirit of the times.

Judd had returned his attention her way.

‘Mr Cantor was just providing me with consumer feedback,’ she told him. ‘Apparently I’m to work my way up to a series finale.’

‘Damien has a well-polished sense of humour. Nobody here is steering your aim, Diana. We’re all very much behind the scenes.’

‘Of course,’ Cantor agreed. ‘Pay no attention to me.’

Plates were being cleared, and people starting to mill about. A group broke away, heading for the smoking area outside: ‘Won’t have to put up with this nonsense much longer,’ one could be heard saying.

‘In fact,’ Cantor continued, ‘I was hoping for very much the opposite. That we all pay more attention to you.’

‘Now now,’ Judd said.

‘Oh come on, Peter. It’s the obvious next move.’ He met Diana’s gaze. ‘Channel Go have a seven o’clock bulletin. It would be a tremendous coup for us if you were to appear. A quick rundown of, ah, recent developments. No need to go into operational details. Keep it as cloak-and-dagger as you like. But a general statement to the effect that our national pride has been reasserted, that the lion has roared – well. You hardly need me to write your script.’

‘I’m starting to get the impression that that’s exactly what you think I need,’ Diana said.

‘If you prefer, we could shoot you behind a screen.’

‘I could probably arrange something similar for you.’

‘Perhaps we should discuss this another time,’ Judd cut in smoothly. ‘If I might drag you away, Diana?’

As he rose, he let his hand fall on Diana’s shoulder, and she saw Damien Cantor register this; the information slotting into place. Inaccurate information, as it happened – there was nothing between her and Judd; hadn’t been for years – but that hardly devalued it. Fake news was as useful as the other kind.

She made sure to be smiling as she got to her feet.

There’d been a gathering most weeks lately, usually on a midweek evening; not precisely a march, more what was described as a display of solidarity, even though what it mostly illustrated was deep division. The Yellow Vests were a loose coalition of the disaffected – its French origins an unwitting tribute to the free movement of ideas – and their anger, initially aimed at those who failed to listen to them, or at those who’d listened but had failed to act upon their demands, or at those who had acted upon their demands but in a way deemed unsatisfactory in some manner, had long been swallowed by a free-range hatred for anyone who swam into their crosshairs: Jewish MPs, gay journalists, student activists, traffic wardens; all routinely described as Nazis, which, if nothing else, suggested that the master race’s membership criteria had grown less rigorous since its pomp. Tonight they had gathered along Wardour Street, where Reece Nesmith III passed them in a hurry, ignoring the jeers this provoked. Words he’d heard before, and besides, he was on a mission.

Though the man he was tailing had, for all his size, vanished inside the evening’s folds.

This must have happened within minutes of his leaving Old Miles’s. The streets, gilets jaunes aside, weren’t fuller than usual; the street lights were working, there was no mist. What there was, unless it was Reece’s imagination, was a whiff of foreign tobacco, as if the man had coloured the air he walked through. But of the man himself, no sign. Reece doubled back, running the gauntlet of jeers again, but he was wasting his time. The man was gone.

I know how it works, he’d said. I’m not the fucking janitor. The other one, the man in the suit, was a hanger-on, a spy buff. But this one, for all he was gross and dressed like he’d crawled from a charity bin, something about him suggested he was the real thing. Andy would have picked him out of a line-up: Spook Street. No question. But it wasn’t like Andy was here to say so. That was the whole point.

In the end he gave it up as a bad job and headed for home; along Oxford Street, up Edgware Road, under the flyover. The flat was above a dummy shop, its window display a mosaic of cards showing lettable properties but its door permanently locked. His own door was next along, in a recess, and as he opened it and stepped across the threshold, everything turned upside down. A glimpse of a yellow vest was his last conscious observation. Then he blacked out.

‘I was not expecting to find fucking broadcasters among your guests.’

‘Welcome to century twenty-one,’ Judd said, ironising the words. ‘You can’t attract wealthy sponsors without involving media interests, you know that. But the Murdoch principle still applies. Why break a prime minister when you could have a whole string of them to play with instead?’

‘That’s not particularly comforting.’

‘I’m simply pointing out that Cantor’s on our side. And would much rather have a friendly, ongoing relationship with a power player than a brief headline everyone will call fake news. As for his interview, it’s not going to happen.’

‘Damn right it’s not going to happen.’

‘Though it wouldn’t hurt to—’

‘I’d think very carefully about the next words that emerge from your mouth.’

He paused. ‘It’s always a pleasure, I hope you’re aware of that, Diana.’

She said nothing.

‘But a little gratitude wouldn’t hurt. Nobody’s expecting you to appear on TV, that was out of order. But a fair bit of funding has been ushered your way, and those whose pockets it’s come from are entitled to appreciation. Not to mention those of us who’ve done the ushering.’

‘Does this place do rooms?’ she asked. ‘Because I could rent one. You could have them form a disorderly queue.’

‘All I meant was, it never hurts to acknowledge largesse.’

‘They’re supposed to be angels, Peter. That was the word you used. Silent backers. Nothing more.’

‘Even angels get their wings stroked, now and again.’

‘Except the ones who plotted against God,’ said Diana. ‘They were eternally damned, I seem to recall.’

The unlikely angels, unless they were the legion of the damned, were scattered around the room, engaged in small conspiracies. It was not a mixed crowd: exclusively white, and middle-aged or upwards, Cantor being the exception. Their backgrounds, those she was aware of, could be summed up as urban money, but it troubled her that there were three or four among them who, like Cantor, she hadn’t known would be here. This despite Judd’s briefing.

She said, ‘I’m grateful to have received support. But I’m starting to wonder if the arrangement’s going to work.’ His face didn’t change while receiving this news: that wasn’t a good sign. ‘I didn’t authorise the Kazan operation so your backers could dine out on it.’

‘My backers?’

‘You brought them to the table.’

‘And I plan to join them under it before the evening gets much older. So I hope you’re not going to spoil everyone’s enjoyment.’ He studied her for a moment. ‘Kazan has brought a smile to the trousers of every red-blooded Englishman—’

‘Who gets to hear about it,’ she put in.

‘And that’s more than you might think. There are whispers on the internet. And when the history books are written, you’ll be there. The woman who avenged her nation’s honour. And did so without expectation of glory, which should make wearing the laurels so much sweeter. More?’

She nodded.

He refreshed their glasses from the decanter at his side, and as he poured said, ‘I gather you’ve been gifted a nice little mews property.’

‘Not me personally.’

‘Of course not. Heaven forfend. No, the Service, I should say, now has a little hideaway entirely off the books, which I’m sure will come in useful.’ He set the decanter down. ‘How did you explain that to the Limitations Committee, if you don’t mind my asking?’

She said, ‘Oliver Nash can be very understanding.’

‘Can he indeed? Can he indeed? But I imagine even he finds it difficult to get a grasp on something when it’s not actually put in front of him.’

She said, ‘All right.’

He feigned innocence. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘It didn’t go before Limitations. As you apparently know.’

And she’d have given a lot to discover how he’d come to do that.

He said, ‘And nor was it intended to. It was an outright gift, the point of which was to allow you a little leeway. There’s a reason they’re called safe houses. And what’s the point of having new … sponsors, if they’re not able to show their support? Were Limitations to become involved, or any one of the other ludicrously overpopulated oversight committees you’re subjected to, you’d be back where you started, unable to muster the resources you need, unable to mount operations like the one we’re all so happy to celebrate this evening.’

‘… Thank you. You’ve made your point.’

‘Have I? Because it seems to me you may not have fully grasped the import of what’s happening. These good people you see around you, they’re here for a reason, they’re patriots. They want to help. And what do they want in return? Nothing outrageous, Diana. Nothing that might cause you to regret having accepted their largesse. But the fact is that, alongside the very warm feelings they get when they see their nation’s security service prospering, they might also desire a little reflected glory themselves. A little oomph.’ He swirled the glass in his hand. ‘It’s not like we’re asking your joes to wear team shirts. We appreciate that that might be counterproductive.’

‘You think?’

‘But it would be a little … disheartening if the Limitations Committee, or, as I say, one of the other myriad parasites you’re victim to, were to be presented with the full details of our little venture and find them not to their taste. What do you imagine the outcome would be? A slap on the wrists? Naughty Diana, don’t do it again?’

‘I hope that’s not intended as a threat, Peter.’

‘I’m simply indicating that this is not a good stage at which to start questioning our arrangement’s efficacy. Lot of miles to travel yet. And who wants to turn the clock back on what’s already been achieved?’

She thought about that, and about the humiliations of the previous year; the murderous assault that had taken place on her watch; the ‘Who, me?’ poses thrown in Moscow. Authorising reprisal on the slimmest of nods – look into the possibilities, Diana, run the numbers, let’s examine the viability – had been risky, but not enough to deter her in the end. Because it mattered too much. It was the difference between apologising to the bully for being in his way and smacking him in the nose. That the bully was bigger was a given. But you shouldn’t, couldn’t, back down. Not unless you wanted it all to happen again.

And if taking Judd’s privately organised shilling had been the only way to facilitate it, well: so be it. He was right about not turning the clock back. The time had been too well spent. She took a sip of brandy to fortify herself for the coming ordeal, that of admitting she more or less agreed with him, but he was gazing at nowhere in particular, a smile crawling across his pouty lips.

He came back to earth. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Wool gathering.’ He raised his glass in her direction. ‘Something about that phrase “naughty Diana” sent me off into dreamworld.’

‘You never change, do you?’ she said. ‘Dog whistle politics and wolf whistle mindset.’

‘You’ve been reading my reviews,’ he said.

That smell was back: Russian tobacco. Reece Nesmith III opened his eyes, closed them, opened them again. He was on the floor of the sitting room of his upstairs flat, and there was a fat man occupying the armchair, a yellow vest puddled at his feet. The cigarette producing the Russian smell hung from his lower lip. His expression could have graced a totem pole: it was every bit as serious, and just as mobile.

‘You hit me,’ Reece said.

His voice came out at a higher pitch than usual.

The man didn’t reply. Without taking his eyes off Reece, he gave the impression of having the whole room under surveillance, much the way he had at Miles’s. Fewer bodies to keep track of, of course, and not much furniture. The armchair. A small table on which the TV sat. And bookshelves, and many more books than they could hold: tottering ziggurats of them, mostly with multiple bits of paper protruding from their pages, as if they were spawning miniature texts of their own. Tadpole writing on these slips: Andy’s notes, and he always swore he could reconstruct his entire library from his high-speed jottings. Possibly an empty boast. Reece had never put him to the test.

He tried to get up, but the dizzy room prevented him. So he cleared his throat and spoke again instead. ‘You hit me.’ Same words, different key.

The man’s cigarette glowed brightly. ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

‘Fuck off!’

‘Russian, huh? Well, Comrade Fuckoff, you learn your English from watching the Superbowl? Because I’m hearing a distinctly Yankee twang.’

‘You just assaulted me on my doorstep!’

‘Kicked you a bit on the stairs, too. If you’re keeping score.’ He removed the cigarette from his mouth and examined the burning end, as if some technical error were occurring. Then put it back. ‘You followed me from that spooks’ parlour. Or tried to.’

‘You followed me!’

‘Like I say. Or tried to.’ The cigarette evidently wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, because he dropped it. ‘You weren’t much cop. Ready to tell me your name yet? I’m happy to kick you some more, if it’ll help.’

Nothing about his expression suggested he was kidding.

Reece looked at the yellow jacket onto which the burning cigarette had fallen. It was work clothing, something you’d wear on a construction site, and probably wouldn’t burn easily. It might be best, though, not to find out the hard way.

He said, ‘Reece. Reece Nesmith.’

The man grunted.

‘The third.’

‘There’s two more of you? That’s nearly half the set. When’s Snow White get here?’

‘Very funny.’

‘Glad you think so. Sometimes I have to explain my jokes. What is it, a condition? Or are you just, you know, a freak?’

Reece said, ‘I’m not a freak.’

‘Yeah, no offence. You should see the clowns I have to work with. Actual physical deformity would be an improvement.’ From his overcoat pocket he produced a half-full bottle of whisky and unscrewed the cap. ‘But let’s get back to why you were following me. And what you were doing in the first place, hanging out with a bunch of Euro-spooks. Long-retired Euro-spooks.’ He took a swallow. ‘Long-retired Euro-spooks who were third division messenger boys at best.’

‘You’re a spy.’

‘If you’re one of those 007 nerds, hoping the glamour rubs off, you’re in for a disappointment.’ He farted, and produced another cigarette. ‘Class takes practice.’

‘Please don’t light that.’

‘Your growth’s already been stunted. Where’s the harm?’

‘It’s my home.’

‘And burning it down would increase its value.’ But he didn’t light up, or not yet. ‘Why were you following me?’

‘I heard you talking with that guy. The other Brit. The one who acts like he’s been in the game, but hasn’t.’

The man nodded.

‘You were talking about Putin. About the Novichok business. When toxic paste was smeared on a doorknob and the bottle left in a park.’

‘Where someone found it,’ the man said. ‘And died. What are you, a reporter for Metro? That’s ancient history.’

‘There’s a rumour there’s been a vengeance killing. That you Brits took out one of the team responsible. You were talking about it.’

‘If you’re wanting to bid on the film rights, you’re going the long way round. Nobody at Old Miles’s would have the first clue what actually happened.’ He raised the bottle to his mouth again, took another swallow. ‘Least of all Chester Smith.’

‘That’s why it wasn’t him I followed.’

The high-vis vest was smouldering now. Reece picked himself up, walked over and stamped on it, sending a whisper of black smoke spiralling upwards, like an evil ghost. There was only one chair in the room, but there was an upturned tea chest against one wall, and he crossed over, moved the incumbent table lamp to the floor, and sat. ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

‘I’ll ask the questions, Dobby. So you followed me because I look like I know what I’m talking about. And that’s why you were there in the first place, right? Looking for someone like me.’ The unlit cigarette between his fingers seemed a deadly weapon. Reece wondered if he’d made a mistake, but it was done now. Besides, the fat bastard walked the walk. He’d tailed Reece half a mile across London, unseen. He doubted Chester Smith could have done that.

‘Andy used to go there,’ he said. ‘Old Miles has gatherings, or did have. “Conferences,” he called them. Once a month or so. Andy used to go. Some of the old guys there, he used them as sources.’

‘For what?’

‘He was writing a book.’

‘About what?’

‘Putin. He was a journalist, Andy was. He had a lot of material, he’d done a lot of research, especially about Putin’s early days. He knew exactly the kind of man Putin is, what he’s capable of. And Chester Smith was right, he’ll be after payback if one of those assassins he sent here was killed. But Smith was wrong that it’s something he’s planning. It’s already happening. It’s already started.’

‘What are you talking about, little man?’

‘Putin had Andy murdered,’ said Reece Nesmith III. ‘He had him killed.’ And then – he couldn’t help it – he started to cry.

The taxi taking her home, which she was sharing with Peter Judd – though not as far as he probably hoped – became snarled in a Yellow Vest gathering. Men holding banners had overflowed the pavement, whether by accident or design was hard to say, though if the former, it added a layer of irony to the slogans about taking back control. When the driver sounded his horn, the backlash was immediate: fists were raised and obscenities unleashed. Someone thumped the bonnet, and the driver revved the engine, and the way was cleared, though the muttering from the front seat continued for some while. It might have become more than muttering if Judd hadn’t barked ‘Ladies present!’

‘Preserving me from a fit of the vapours?’ she asked. ‘What a gent.’

‘One of the many tragedies of feminism is that women can no longer suffer gallantry.’

‘I’d be grateful if you’d spare me the others. I’m due in the office at seven.’

Judd nodded in appreciation, then gestured towards the back windscreen. ‘Do you have people among them?’

‘People?’

‘People. Among our assembled brethren back there.’

‘I’m not sure they’re brethren of mine,’ Diana said. ‘Or of each other, come to that. A coalition of the furious is how I’d describe it.’

‘Which sidesteps my question, which is an answer in itself, isn’t it?’ His brow furrowed, a familiar harbinger of weighty opinion. ‘Are we sure that falls under your remit?’

‘You’re asking whether riotous assemblies are a threat to national security? Let me think about that. Yes.’

‘Because you’re falling into the common misapprehension that these folk are enemies of democracy. Whereas in fact they’re champions of the new democracy, that’s all. One that will ultimately see power being handed over to a wider spectrum of stakeholders.’

‘You’ve changed your tune,’ she said. ‘A few years ago, you’d have described them as a rabble. But of course, that was when your own ambition ran along more traditional lines.’

‘Things change,’ he said smoothly. ‘Conditions change. The old way of doing things no longer applies. There are new realities of power evolving in front of our eyes, and they’re part of it. Yellow, you might say, is the new black.’

‘A delicious irony if you happen to be black, I’m sure,’ said Diana. ‘Come to think of it, maybe irony is the new black. There’s no shortage.’ She glanced his way. ‘It used to be you had the hard right on one side, the hard left on the other. Nowadays, they meet round the back. I suppose racists and anti-Semites are always going to find common ground, but I wish they wouldn’t march up and down on it chanting.’

‘They’re disgruntled citizens.’

‘Who vent their disgruntlement in the traditional way, by finding weaker citizens to bully. Please don’t tell me you’re planning on figureheading their movement, Peter. That would leave us seriously at odds.’

‘Which would never do, would it?’ The absence of light in his eyes belied the tone of voice he’d adopted. ‘So let’s not fight. Though there is another possibly contentious topic I’m going to have to raise now.’

‘Damien Cantor.’

‘You never cease to amaze me. Yes, Damien Cantor.’

‘Who didn’t exactly endear himself to me. Or did you not notice that?’

‘I think even he noticed that, and he’s not overburdened with self-awareness. No, opinion is divided as to young Damien. Some think he’s a prick. Others that he’s a cunt. But all agree he’s a figure to be reckoned with. Because he has the ears of the public. Their eyes, too. And doubtless other parts of their anatomy, but for the time being it’s his media clout we should consider. I know you don’t want to look too closely at the books, and why should you – that’s my job – but you should know that he’s a major contributor to the cause, Diana. Major. And as such, it might be an idea to allow him a little access. A backstage pass, as it were.’

‘Is this meant to be funny?’

‘We both knew there’d be a certain amount of flexibility required alongside these new arrangements. This is part of that. You don’t have to like him, you just have to accept that he’s part of the grander scheme of things. And I’m certainly not suggesting you appear on his news show. We can all agree that’s not in our best interests.’

‘I’m so glad to hear you’re looking out for my best interests. Are you hearing yourself speak? I’m First Desk at Regent’s Park, you seriously think I’m going to be best pals with an internet chancer just because he was front of the queue when you were passing the hat? This falls on your side of the line, Peter. I agreed to turn up tonight and shake a few hands and smile a few smiles, but I am not taking part in the swimsuit round. If you want him entertained, waggle your own tail feathers. Are we clear on this?’

Apparently not.

He said, ‘All I’m saying is, show him he’s on the inside looking out. He’s not an actual journalist, he doesn’t care about breaking stories or finding scoops. He cares about being close to the levers of power. Let him think that, and he’ll be first in the queue next time I’m, how did you put it, passing the hat.’

Diana stared, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze; he was looking ahead, over the driver’s shoulder, at the streets unfurling in front of the car, at the gauzy reflections in puddles and windows that turned after-hours London into a kaleidoscope, made fast-food outlets and minicab offices brief flashes of wonder. Innocence became him like a wimple does a stripper.

She said, ‘What have you done?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You could use that phrase as your ringtone, but it doesn’t fool me. You’re telling me to loosen up for Damien Cantor because you’re covering your tracks. You’ve already let something out of your bag, haven’t you? What is it?’

‘Diana—’

‘I won’t ask twice.’

He said, ‘In order to establish the right sort of backing for our venture, by which I mean people who believe in what we’re trying to do, people of appropriate character, I have had to … allow a little light to shine here and there. Not on anything that might cause us embarrassment. You have nothing to worry about.’

‘Was there ever a more confidence-sapping expression?’

‘I’ve divulged nothing that could do us harm, Diana. You know me better than that. Just a little … shop gossip.’

‘You’re not in the shop, Peter. You’re not even a customer. You’re just hanging around in aisle three, hoping to nick a chocolate bar.’

‘No metaphor left unpunished, that’s one of the things I adore about you.’ He turned to face her. ‘As I say, Damien may not be anyone’s pick for a dining companion, but he is a force to reckon with. An influencer. So yes, I may have allowed him a peep behind the curtain. An oeil amusé, if you like. Just to keep him onside, which is where we want him to be.’

‘A glimpse of what?’

‘I shared a detail or two about your special needs group, that’s all. The slow horses. And the use you’re putting them to.’ His pout twitched. ‘He thought it was funny. As do you. Which is why you told me in the first place, yes?’

‘Not expecting you to pass it around the playground.’

‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,’ he soothed. The taxi was slowing, approaching Diana’s house. ‘Remind me. Am I dropping you here? Or are we both, ah, getting off?’

‘You’re going home to your wife.’

‘So I am.’

‘And I’m giving serious thought as to whether I drop the curtain on our little arrangement,’ she said, laying heavy stress on the final three words as the car drew to a halt and she opened the door, and climbed gracefully out.

Peter Judd waved through the window. ‘It’s interesting that you think you’re still holding the rope,’ he said, but the car was moving by then, and there was no chance she’d have heard.

After a while he’d got himself under control, though to be fair, he hadn’t lost it all that much. A few tears: a grown man could be forgiven a few tears. Andy had been twenty-eight, same as himself. Losing someone at that age, being lost at that age: a few tears were the least you could expect.

The fat man hadn’t moved from the armchair, but every time a car went past its headlights threw his shadow on the walls then sucked it out of existence, a passenger on a demonic carousel. It made Reece want to draw the curtains, but he was mesmerised by the moment. And if he moved the man might pounce. He looked capable of it, for all his size, the way a monitor lizard might seize a passing goat.

‘Who’s Andy?’ the man asked at last.

‘My partner.’

‘And he’s dead.’

‘He was killed.’

‘How?’

‘They said it was a heart attack. But—’

‘They?’

‘He was in Moscow. But there was nothing wrong with his heart.’

‘Your friend died of a heart attack in Moscow, and you think Vladimir Putin did it.’

‘Because of the book Andy was writing.’

‘Was he one of you?’

‘In what way?’

‘Jesus, so much for tact. What’s the PC term for diddyman?’

‘I have achondroplasia. A genetic disorder.’ Reece felt a familiar flash of anger. ‘Do you want me to spell it for you?’

‘Fuck no, we’ll be here all night.’ There was a glint as the man’s bottle appeared again. He took a swallow, then said, ‘So you were a matching pair.’

‘His condition was rarer than mine. But the outcome was the same. He was a person of restricted growth, yes.’

‘You’d think he’d have been better at keeping his head down.’

‘Is this all a joke to you?’

‘So far. What was he doing in Moscow? Research?’

‘Yes. And … Well, he used to live there. His parents still do.’

‘So he was Russian.’

‘Yes. Andrey.’

‘A Russian citizen who died in Russia. Were you there?’

‘… No.’

‘Did you see his death certificate?’

‘No, but—’

‘Any police investigation?’

‘No.’

‘His parents kick up a fuss?’

‘No, they think he—’

‘Where’s his body now?’

‘He was cremated.’

‘Were you there?’

‘… No.’

‘So, to sum up. Something happened a long way away which you didn’t see and nobody else is suspicious about. What do you think we should do? Organise a telethon?’

‘Putin had him murdered.’

‘So what? We all know the man has blood on his hands. Let’s face it, he has blood on his elbows. But he couldn’t give a flying fuck for world opinion, and anything he gets up to inside his own borders is the state equivalent of behind closed doors. Besides.’ He took another slug from his bottle. ‘I realise the loss of your friend must have left a tiny little hole in your life. But dying in Russia doesn’t automatically mean he was murdered by its president. And if you were an expert cardiac diagnostician, I doubt you’d be living in this shithole. Aren’t you lot supposed to be house-proud?’

‘You think all gay men are neat-freaks?’

‘I meant dwarfs, to be honest. Or is it gnomes are the tidy ones? I get you mixed up.’

‘Now you’re just trying to be offensive.’

‘There’s effort involved, yes. And it wouldn’t kill you to show some appreciation. I’ve had a long day.’ He looked at the bottle in his hand. ‘Fancy a drink?’

‘… Thanks.’

‘Well fetch me one while you’re at it. This is good stuff. I’ll save the rest for later.’ He tucked it away in his pocket.

Reece mentally played back what he’d just heard, then did so again to be sure … He could itemise the contents of his fridge from here, and already knew all he had was beer: bottled Beck’s. He got down off the tea chest, went into the kitchen, and came back carrying a pair.

‘This the best on offer? Bloody hell.’ But he unscrewed the cap anyway, and tossed it into a corner.

Reece said, ‘Andy had done a lot of research. And he had a contact. In the GRU. That’s—’

‘Yeah, let’s pretend I know what the GRU is.’

‘This man, he told Andy about the special squad they have there. An assassination department.’

He sat back on the tea chest, and opened his own bottle.

The man said, ‘If that was Andy’s breaking news, what was his idea of a scoop? The charge of the Light Brigade?’

‘They use two-person teams, posing as married couples. And one of them was killed not long ago, on Russian soil. In the city of Kazan. As revenge for the Novichok attacks.’

‘That’s the rumour, yes. And it’s even reached Brewer Street.’ He hoisted the bottle to his lips, and swallowed half its contents in a single gulp. ‘So it’s unlikely that it’s worth murdering for.’

But Reece wasn’t finished. ‘He told Andrey, the contact did, that Rasnokov’s declared war on the British Secret Service. On Putin’s orders. That they’d identified a similar department here in the UK, some kind of assassination squad, and they plan to wipe them out one by one. On British soil. That’s what Andy was writing about.’

‘In his book,’ the man said flatly.

‘He was planning on selling this bit to a newspaper.’

‘But he died of a heart attack first.’

‘He didn’t have a heart condition.’

‘Nobody does. Until they do.’ Impressively, if that’s the word, the man’s beer was already gone. He lobbed the empty after its cap and belched hugely. ‘And he told you this how long before he died?’

‘The day before. Ten days ago. We spoke on the phone.’

The man said, ‘Lots of people write books. Sell stories to newspapers. They don’t all get murdered. Not half enough of them, frankly.’

‘Andy stepped into something big, and then he died. You think that’s a coincidence?’

‘It’s a matter of perspective. If Andy was your size, anything he stepped in must have looked big. Any more beer?’

‘No.’

‘Good. That one was a fucking insult.’ He stood so suddenly Reece thought he was on the attack. His cigarette hung from his mouth. ‘Look. People die. You should get used to that. And if you want to get all paranoid about it, that’s your choice. Word of advice, though. Be careful dropping names like Rasnokov’s, and keep your fantasies to yourself or you’ll only be a nuisance. And you’re small enough to squash. Something else you should be used to by now.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Reece.

‘Now that’s disappointing. I was hoping for “Follow the yellow brick road”.’

And then he was gone.

Reece crossed to the window, and watched him heading down the street, trailing smoke. His high-vis vest lay on the floor, a camouflage accessory no longer required. Reece wondered where he’d stolen it from, in that brief interval after leaving Old Miles’s; wondered if he’d left a genuine yellow vest wearer in a similar heap somewhere, then decided he didn’t care. Andrey would have thought it a detail worth worrying over, but Andy had been a writer. And look where that had got him.

Though maybe the fat bastard had been right. Maybe being dead was just the next thing that had happened to Andy in his short, all senses, life.

In a sudden spurt of anger, he kicked out at the nearest pile of books. Homespun bookmarks flew, snippets of Andrey’s tadpole writing on them: useless clues – Reece couldn’t decipher half, and the rest were in Russian. But it didn’t matter. Nothing he did could bring Andy back, and his best attempt so far, snagging a real-life spook from Andy’s favourite hang-out, had only resulted in a string of insults and a sitting room stinking of smoke. Everybody was a bastard. That included Andy and, probably, himself.

After a while he collected the books and set them in a pile again. The bookmarks would never find their way back to their rightful pages, so he just gathered them together and tucked them inside the top volume. Maybe, tonight, he’d set something in motion he’d never get to hear about. It was more likely, though, that all he’d done was afford half an hour’s amusement to a fat spy.

He put the empty bottles in the recycling box and the scarred yellow vest in the bin.

Then he went to bed.

4

THE KITCHEN AT SLOUGH House had been fitted in the late seventies, and had undergone renovation since, inasmuch as a calendar had been hung there in 2010. That had been taken down, but the nail used to fix it in place remained, now graced by a tea towel, which had previously dangled from the one drawer knob that didn’t come away in the hand. This new assignment sometimes allowed the towel to nearly dry out, not that it was used much, but it did tend to absorb available moisture. The room’s other main advantage was that it was of a size that could almost accommodate two people without argument erupting, provided neither one was Roddy Ho.

Who, sniffing suspiciously, said, ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

‘Focaccia.’

‘It’s got bits on it.’

‘It’s supposed to. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one before. You eat enough pizza.’

‘Pizza’s round.’

‘You’re aware that being round is not a food group?’ The bread Lech Wicinski had made the previous evening nestled in silver foil on the battle-scarred kitchen counter. ‘Try some. It won’t kill you.’

‘I don’t want to get crumbs on my shirt.’

Lech eyed the garment in question: a green, paisley-swirled specimen Ho had buttoned to the throat. ‘Crumbs might improve it.’

Louisa joined them, bearing an empty mug. She looked at Ho, then at Lech, then at the bread, then at Lech again. ‘You made that?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, with like flour and stuff?’

‘Flour, yes. And also stuff.’

She nodded, though not in a way that indicated she was up to speed yet. ‘And then what? Did you drop it?’

‘Christ, what is this? I made some bread, I didn’t finish it all. So I brought the rest in. Where’s the problem?’

‘It’s just, that doesn’t happen much round here.’

‘Which? The baking or the bringing it in?’

‘All of it,’ said Louisa. ‘Including the part about not finishing it yourself.’ She emptied the kettle into the sink and refilled it, a process Ho watched without comprehension. ‘Fresh water?’ she said. ‘For coffee?’ Then back to Lech: ‘If you’re planning on starting a bake-off, I’ll tell you now, it’ll end badly.’

‘If I start a bake-off,’ said Lech, ‘it’ll be to decide which of you lot to chuck in an oven.’

‘Why bake stuff anyway?’ asked Ho. ‘It’s available in shops. Duh.’

‘I hate to say this,’ said Louisa, ‘but the shirt has a point.’

‘So you’re not a cook either.’

‘Me? I can barely defrost.’

‘What’s wrong with my shirt?’ asked Ho.

‘It looks like a frog threw up on you.’

‘It’s Italian designed.’

‘So’s the bread,’ said Lech. ‘But it was made by a Pole in the East End.’

Catherine had appeared in the doorway. ‘What are you all doing?’

‘Are you our prefect now?’ Louisa asked. ‘Is this one of those age-flip things, and I’ve woken up back in school?’

‘We should all be so lucky.’

‘Anyway, the boiling kettle should be a clue,’ Louisa added.

‘I didn’t so much mean what are you doing as why aren’t you doing it upstairs? Team meeting, remember? Nine sharp.’

‘I didn’t think he was here yet.’

‘He’s not,’ said Catherine. ‘But when did that stop him expecting everyone else to be on time? Focaccia looks good, by the way.’

‘Thanks,’ said Lech.

‘But you do realise you’ll never hear the end of it.’

Louisa poured her coffee while Ho tried to read the label on his own collar without undoing buttons. Lech rewrapped the bread and looked like he was regretting various decisions, going at least as far back as bringing the bread in, and possibly extending to choice of career and not staying in Australia, where he’d holidayed in ninety-six.

‘I didn’t mean anything, by the way,’ Louisa said. ‘That crack about being back in school.’

He rolled his eyes, but she was out of the door, and didn’t notice.

Upstairs, Shirley was already in place. There were no visitor’s chairs in Lamb’s office, or none he liked anyone to sit on – the one technically so designated currently nursed a pyramid of sauce-stained Wagamama hotboxes – but one particular standing space was deemed more desirable than others, it being thought to fall within Lamb’s blind spot. The warier among them didn’t believe Lamb had a blind spot, and suspected some slow-burning mind-fuck, but Shirley was playing the odds, and had positioned herself to the left of the door, nearest the corkboard on which brittle scraps of paper had long ago been pinned, presumably by Lamb, presumably for a reason. She didn’t speak when Louisa, Lech and Roddy trooped in, and was possibly asleep, though upright. River arrived last. He didn’t speak either, but in contrast to Shirley looked like sleep was a stranger, or an enemy.

Louisa tried to catch his eye, but he wasn’t having it. This wasn’t especially unusual, but there was an energy to him, a voltage, which was. Slough House didn’t recharge batteries, it sapped power. It’s as if there were negative ley lines, special coordinates where forceless fields met, sucking all spirit from whoever stood there, and Slough House was slap bang on that junction. Whatever had River twitching, it wasn’t the prospect of a day at work.

A door banged; not the one from the yard, but the toilet on the floor below. So Lamb had floated in and up several flights of stairs without fluttering a cobweb on the way. It was unnerving to picture him doing this, like imagining a tapir playing hopscotch. The smell of stale cigarettes entered the room a moment before him, and the slow horses made way for it, then Lamb, by shuffling to either side. He arrived among them shaking his head in wonderment. ‘What a dump.’

Louisa looked round: the moist walls, the grim threadbare carpet, the print of a foreign bridge which made you want to hurl yourself off it. ‘You’ve only just noticed?’

‘I meant back there,’ said Lamb. ‘That’s going nowhere first flush.’ He threw himself into his chair, which, one happy day, was going to respond by disintegrating into a hundred pieces. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting. I was up late comforting a gay American dwarf.’

They stared.

‘What? I can’t have a social life?’

‘It’s more that you don’t usually apologise,’ Catherine said.

‘Well, how often do I fall into error?’ He tossed something at Shirley, which she unwisely caught. It was a paper tissue, unnaturally heavy, starting to split. ‘Get rid of that, will you?’

‘… You’re nearest the bin.’

‘I didn’t want it in my nose, you don’t think I want it in my bin, do you?’ He looked round at the assembled team. ‘Remind me, what the fuck are you doing here?’

Shirley slipped out, suppressing a gag reflex, while all present mentally erased the blind-spot theory.

‘Updates,’ said Catherine.

‘Ah yes. Team updates. So glad we can share these moments. Means I don’t have to rely on the obituary columns for giggles. So.’ He placed his palms on his paunch and smiled benignly. ‘Time to share. And this is a safe space, mind. No one’s going to point out what a dickhead you are. Who’s first?’

Louisa said, ‘I was followed yesterday evening.’

‘Congratulations. Did you shag him in his car or take him home?’

‘He tagged me on the Central Line and stayed with me to Oxford Street. I busted him in a sports shop. And he legged it.’

Lamb surveyed the assembled company. ‘You see, this is what happens when you leave your contact details on toilet walls.’

‘He was Park.’

‘Ah, keeping it in the family. And we know this because …?’

‘Because he got the same text we all got at 6.59 p.m. yesterday. One of those HR messages, checking their alert system’s working.’

You are receiving this text to ensure your contact details are up to date. Reply ICON to acknowledge receipt.

Lamb’s eyes narrowed. ‘I thought we were wiped from Service records. This kind of spoils the magic.’

‘Contact details are on the deep-level data sets,’ Ho said.

‘Yeah, I heard some jabbering there, but I won’t pretend I followed it.’

‘We’ve been over this,’ Lech said. ‘It’s our personal records that have been wiped. Names, photos, active history, operational involvement, all that. The deep-level stuff, which is anonymised – like our employee numbers and bank details – that data’s still on file. Else we wouldn’t get our salaries, for a start.’

Lamb looked pained. ‘You get salaries? I thought the whole point was to demoralise you.’

‘We don’t get much.’

‘Just as well. If they paid you what you were worth, you’d owe them money.’ He returned to Ho. ‘That new, is it? The palsy-pattern shirt?

‘Paisley,’ said Roddy.

‘If you say so. Makes you look a spastic either way.’ He leaned back and put his feet on his desk. Somehow he’d managed to shed his shoes. ‘So. Everyone got the same text message, right?’

‘Including you,’ said Catherine.

‘Seriously?’ He scrambled about in his pockets, theatrically going through most of them before finding his mobile back in the first one he’d checked. Then they waited while he turned it on. ‘Well, heartbreak make me a dancer. Seems I’m no better than the rest of you.’ He dropped the phone, and went on, ‘Okay then. One little slow horse went to market, and it turned out she had a trainee spook on her heels.’

‘What makes him a trainee?’

‘You spotted him, didn’t you? What about the rest of you?’ He pointed at Shirley, who’d slunk back in and was visibly trying to disassociate herself from her own hands. ‘What were you up to last night? No, let me guess. You were jiving the small hours away. Anyone watching you?’

‘I’m always watched in night clubs.’

‘Yeah, they’re worried you’ll steal people’s drinks.’ He paused. ‘No, hang on, you’re the lush,’ he said to Catherine. ‘I get you confused. Have you thought about wearing badges?’

‘To make your life easier? That’s not going to happen,’ said Catherine. ‘And no, I wasn’t followed last night.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘I just said so.’

‘Ah, the wonders of sobriety. What it must be to have total recall of every passing second.’ He looked at Louisa. ‘And she could have given you lessons back in the day. Had a thing about sailors, if I remember rightly. A big thing. She’d have gone down on the Titanic given half a chance.’

He produced a cigarette out of nowhere, a lighter from the same place, and lit the one from the other. Then he stared at the lighter for a moment before tossing it over his shoulder and pointing at Lech Wicinski. ‘You planning on letting those facial pubes cover the art on your cheeks? Or is your electric razor on the fritz? No offence.’

‘I’m Polish,’ Lech said. ‘Not German.’

‘Well, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Did you make the bread, by the way?’

‘… Yes.’

‘Needs more garlic.’ Lamb belched. ‘So, any nasty eyes tracking your private pleasures last night? Or were you too busy playing the old ham banjo to notice?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Lech. ‘There might have been someone.’

‘Well, that opens a world of possibilities. Care to elaborate?’

‘Heading home, on the bus.’ He shrugged. ‘It might have been nothing. But I got off a stop early just in case.’

‘That’d put the fear of God into them. Anyone surrender?’

‘Nobody followed me home from there.’

‘Probably too scared. You’re very quiet.’

This to River Cartwright.

River said, ‘Nothing to report.’

‘No pitter-patter of spooky footsteps trailing your moves last night?’

‘They’d have had to be fast. I was driving.’

‘Oh, of course, you have a car now. Spending the inheritance. What did you go with? Let me guess. An Aston Martini.’

‘Something like that,’ said River.

‘And where were we tooling about?’

‘Nowhere special. Just putting it through its paces.’

Lamb stared, but said no more.

The smoke from his cigarette was thicker than usual, unless there was a local mattress fire. Eyes were starting to water; throats beginning to itch.

‘You haven’t asked me yet,’ Roddy said.

Lamb sighed. ‘Okay, Donkey Kong. Anyone pinned a tail on you lately?’

‘No.’

‘Well, that was a fruitful exchange.’ His cigarette between his lips, Lamb slid both hands down his trousers to rearrange his underwear. That accomplished, he removed the cigarette and tapped the ash into the nearest mug. The entire tube fell off the filter. He looked bitterly at what was left for a moment, then dropped that into the mug too. ‘So. Either the rest of you are too dozy to notice that the Park’s keeping tabs, or it’s only happening to the scarlet woman. Or she was making it up on account of being terrified she’ll end up a spinster bag lady, with no man paying attention. That about sum it up?’

‘Or, strange as it may seem, it was a coincidence,’ said Catherine.

‘Ah, thank you. We can always rely on you to play devil’s asparagus.’

‘Avocado,’ she said automatically. Then: ‘Advocate. Damn it, you’ve got me doing it.’

‘He ran when he realised I’d clocked him,’ said Louisa. ‘It was no coincidence.’

Lamb shifted his feet to the floor, carefully enough that only a few things were knocked from his desk. ‘No. Because if it was it would be two coincidences, on account of it happening at the same time as we’ve been rubbed out of the Service database.’ He looked at Lech. ‘Rubbed out in the technical sense, that is. Not your area of expertise.’

Lech’s look, his posture, his reddening neck; everything bar his actual voice invited Lamb to go fuck himself.

‘Have you raised this with the Park yet?’ Catherine said. ‘Dare I ask?’

‘Our refugee status? No, I haven’t. On account of I prefer to know what Taverner’s up to before I ask her about it, and I haven’t worked out what that is yet. Too busy. Some of us have lives outside the workplace, you know.’

‘Comforting gay American dwarfs,’ said Shirley.

‘Glad someone’s paying attention.’

‘Or is it dwarves?’

‘There was only one of them,’ said Lamb. ‘His friend’s dead.’ He farted in a brisk, businesslike fashion. ‘Anything else? God, look at you all, lined up like a choir at a hobo funeral. About as confidence-inspiring as a Spanish motorway.’

‘Nothing like rallying the troops,’ said Catherine.

‘I have something,’ said Ho.

Lamb glared. ‘Pubic lice? That would explain the fidgeting.’

‘I know when our records were removed.’

‘Well, fuck me merrily on high. Actual information.’ He leaned back. ‘Come on then. Amaze us.’

‘First week of January. The fifth.’

‘How do you know?’ said River. ‘If the records aren’t there, they can’t tell you when they were deleted.’

Ho adopted the superior look cats give mortals. ‘I checked for when the personnel database was updated, outside the regular back-ups. Then looked to find each time an update happened with no new material added.’

‘How can you—’

‘It gets smaller.’

‘Which meant something was deleted,’ Louisa said.

‘Yeah, duh.’ Ho interlaced his fingers importantly. ‘Administrator activity’s logged. But you have to know where to look.’

‘And that’s why we keep you,’ said Lamb. ‘I’d known there was a reason, beyond my famously charitable nature.’ He beamed round at the rest of them. ‘See? Being a dickless no-mates pays off in the long run. Okay, Austin Powers, as a reward, you can keep your shirt on. I’d been going to make you eat it.’

‘And what use is that?’ said Shirley. ‘Knowing the date it happened?’

‘Difficult as this will be for you to understand,’ said Lamb, ‘knowing things is better than not knowing things. Think of it as the difference between having a cocaine baggie in your pocket and not. I hope this helps.’

Shirley managed not to check her pockets, but it was a close-run thing.

‘All righty,’ said Lamb. ‘I’ve had as much as I can stand for one lifetime. Piss off and do some work. And remember, all of us are lying in the gutter. But some of you are circling the drain.’

‘Thanks.’

‘But it could be worse. You could be a hotshot squad of international assassins. Then you’d really be in trouble.’

Nobody dared ask, and they all trooped out.

On the way downstairs, Shirley said, ‘Have you gone off reservation lately?’

‘Me?’ said Louisa. ‘No.’

‘Then why would the Park be tailing you?’

‘They don’t need a reason,’ said Louisa. ‘We’re Slough House. They can do what they want with us.’

She left it until after lunch before heading into River’s room. He didn’t seem surprised to see her. His computer was on, its screen reflected in the windowpane behind him: rows of columns, probably an electoral register. So much of what they did involved scrolling through the surface details of civic existence, looking for bumps that weren’t there. But River’s hands weren’t on his keyboard or his mouse. They were holding something he dropped in a drawer as she entered.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘You okay?’

‘Just peachy.’

She perched on the corner of his desk and raised an eyebrow. ‘An Aston Martini?’

‘It’s actually a Renault Crisis.’

‘Yeah, that sounds more you.’ She leaned forward, and he pushed the drawer shut. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

‘It’s nothing. Tell me about this guy who was following you.’

‘He was a guy,’ said Louisa, ‘and he was following me. That’s a barrette, isn’t it?’

‘A barrette’s a kind of gun, right? I haven’t got a gun, no.’

‘That’s a Beretta.’

‘Or a bishop’s hat? Haven’t got one of those, either.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about now,’ said Louisa, ‘but we both know what you’re not talking about.’

River said, ‘I was clearing my drawers out, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, ’cause you’re big on spring-cleaning. I’ve noticed that in the past. That was Sid’s barrette, wasn’t it? Okay, hair grip.’

‘Why would I have—’

‘Because you found it on her desk after – afterwards. Come on, River, this is me. What’s the matter? Why’s she on your mind?’

His face was set in a familiar obstinate scowl.

‘Because that call you got, the one you thought was her. It could have been anyone. A wrong number, a glitch on the line. Whoever it was didn’t say anything, did they? You can’t recognise a silence.’

Though she was recognising this one. River had pushed his chair back onto its rear two legs; was leaning against the wall, eyes half-closed.

Louisa glanced towards the room’s other desk, currently vacant; its most recent former occupant a smudge on a distant hillside. And she thought about Emma Flyte, who hadn’t been a slow horse; who had, let’s face it, been better than any of them. Both more recent casualties than Sidonie Baker, but fresh wounds make old scars itch. It didn’t take a genius to work out why River Cartwright was turning Sid’s barrette over in his hands; the hair slide that was all the Park’s removal men had left of her presence.

She said, ‘I’m not a therapist, God knows, but—’

‘She’s alive.’

‘I know you want to think that. I do too. But until she actually turns up—’

‘No, seriously.’ He let the chair fall back onto all four legs, and laid his hands flat on the desk. ‘She has done. Turned up. Sid’s alive.’

Louisa stared, but it didn’t take her long. He meant every word, she could see that.

‘You— Really? Jesus, River! Really?’

He glanced ceilingwards, and shook his head. ‘Not here.’ And then he was on his feet, heading for the door. His coat hung on a hook, and he scooped it free in passing.

She followed him a moment later, barely caring that Lamb might hear them, or that leaving Slough House without his permission was a hanging offence.

They were out in the yard a minute later; in the pub over the road shortly after that.

Her hair was different. Maybe that’s what death does to you. It was still mostly red but now punkishly short, with a white stripe across her left temple where the bullet had passed, leaving in its wake a shallow channel, which gave her the appearance of having been imperfectly sculpted. Her dusting of freckles had faded and her skin seemed whiter, though that might have been the effect of dim lighting. She was skinnier too, her upper body swamped by a hoodie whose American university brand name disappeared inside its own folds. Once she’d been all clean lines and fresh air; now that same thought conjured up an image of her hung out with the washing. But she was still Sid. She had Sid’s eyes and Sid’s mouth, so she was still Sid; back from joe country, and in his grandfather’s house. How had that happened?

And what did he say?

He said, ‘Jesus. Sid.’

Two resurrections.

She watched as he entered, shutting the door. It seemed necessary to keep this encounter within a closed space; to seal off the emptiness outside. It was just the pair of them in a familiar room, in which nothing had changed, bar everything.

‘Hello, River.’

Her voice was the same too, if a notch quieter. And there was something considered about the delivery; as if Sid were playing off-book for the first time, not entirely comfortable with her lines yet. ‘I heard you coming in. I knew it was you.’

The chair she sat in was the O.B.’s. If River squinted, he could make out the smooth patches on its arms, the indentations of its upholstery, all of it adding up to the faded shape of his grandfather. His own chair, the one he’d spent so many evenings in, listening to the old man conjure stories out of memory, hadn’t yet shaped itself to him. Favourite chairs were like your future; the form they would eventually take depended on your input, your commitment. River hadn’t sat in his for a while. There’d been no need to, since his grandfather passed.

He crossed the room, crouched next to her. ‘Sid? It’s really you, right?’

‘It’s really me.’

He wanted to touch her, to make sure. Weird kind of hallucination this would be, one he’d driven miles to encounter at a neighbour’s invitation, but still: he wanted to know her flesh was still flesh. So he reached a hand out and she took it. Her hand felt curiously warm.

‘You’re alive.’

‘Of course I am.’

As if the alternative were out of the question, though the last time he’d seen her she’d been prone on a pavement, a pool of blood blotting out her horizons. His memory of what followed was mostly of a loud journey through zombie-strewn streets, sirens jangling. Head wounds bleed. Head wounds bleed bad. He’d clung to that fact: that head wounds bleed bad. That Sid Baker was bleeding from the head didn’t necessarily mean anything critical had happened. Could be a graze. So why had she looked so dead?

‘And you’re here … Why didn’t you let me know?’

‘I was going to. I knew you’d come, though. Sooner or later. I mean …’ She glanced around the room. ‘This.’

The room, she meant; its intact status in an empty house. You didn’t clear a building, leaving just one small corner of it furnished.

‘What is it, a shrine? Your grandfather died, didn’t he. And this is preserving his memory?’

‘Not exactly. I mean, yes, in a way, but … It doesn’t matter. What are you doing here? All this time. Why didn’t you let me know?’

‘I called you.’

He remembered. The phone had rung in his office, and nobody spoke when he picked up: he’d been sure it was Sid, though he didn’t believe in any of that woo-woo nonsense. There must have been something in the quality of her breath. The short time they’d known each other, they’d spent most of it in that office, not talking. He’d grown used to her silent presence. Had known what it was like to hear her not speak.

‘But I didn’t know what to say.’

‘… That you were alive?’

‘But you must have known that. Didn’t you know that?’

He said, ‘They told us you were dead.’

‘Oh …’

She’d disappeared from the hospital; vanished as if she’d never been there. That, in fact, was the official truth: she had never been there. And when River had tried to find out what had happened, he’d been closed down. Sidonie Baker was dead: that was all he needed to know. Sid Baker was dead, and River Cartwright was Slough House, which meant he should fuck off back to his desk and stop asking questions.

The surface she’d slid under had been a murky one, and Diana Taverner had been responsible for much of the dirt. So naturally, it wasn’t a pool she wanted anyone stirring a stick in.

The news that she’d been dead didn’t appear to startle Sid. But then, her face was less lively now. In her long absence, she’d acquired a degree of stillness. There must have been a lot of waiting involved, and she’d clearly grown used to it.

‘You could have …’

But it wasn’t a thought worth finishing. She could have let him know, could have been in touch. But what did River know about being vanished? At least in Slough House he could open a window if he felt like it, and scream his frustration to the street below. Nobody would pay attention, but he could do that. Presumably Sid’s situation had been different.

‘I wasn’t well for a long time.’ She raised a hand to the white flash in her hair. ‘I lost a couple of years.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

It had been, or that was the way River remembered it. A confused moment on a rainy street, and a single gunshot. A number of people had been involved, and the rest of them were all dead too.

‘How did you find me? The house, I mean? How did you know to come here?’

‘It was in your file. I read your file.’

Of course she had.

Because while Sid had been a slow horse, she’d also been something else; had been put in Slough House to keep an eye on him, River Cartwright. This would have been Taverner’s work, but he never did hear the exact details, because Sid had been shot minutes after she’d confessed this to him.

She said, ‘I lost a lot of things.’

Well, moving hospital to hospital, he could see that some of her stuff might have gone astray.

‘But I remembered you.’

He wasn’t sure he made any response to that. Or that any was required.

She said, ‘Once I was better, they put me in Cumbria. Have you been there?’

He either had or hadn’t, he was sure one of the two was true, and after a moment, he recalled which. ‘Once. Long time ago.’

On a short holiday with Rose. He didn’t know where the O.B. had been. Supposedly retired, there were still gaps in his family life. River recollected that much.

‘It’s beautiful. Hills and lakes and meadows. There’s a farmhouse there, it’s run like a holiday home …’

But would be a Service resource, thought River. There were still one or two. You could cut back here and cut back there, bow to the demands of an age of austerity, but you had to look after your joes when they’d been shot in the head. If only to ensure that future recruitment didn’t get difficult.

‘And you’re better now? You’re fully recovered?’

‘I get headaches. But I’m mostly okay.’

But something had been subtracted, he was sure of that. There was a vitality missing. But how could it be otherwise? She’d been dead. Even with the demonstrable evidence in front of him that this wasn’t so, it was a difficult piece of knowledge to cast away. It was as if his past had just been rewritten. This might be what religion felt like; a thunderball, a stroke.

‘So you knew where I lived,’ he said. ‘Where I used to live. But what made you come here? Why now?’

‘I needed somewhere to hide.’

That was easy to believe. She looked like she might bolt somewhere at any moment, and cover herself with leaves.

He was still holding her hand. They’d never had this much contact back when they’d shared an office.

‘Here’s good then,’ he said. ‘You’re safe here.’ Which wasn’t necessarily true, but felt like the right thing to say regardless.

‘Maybe for the moment.’

‘What are you hiding from?’

She said, ‘Someone’s trying to kill me.’

This seemed a suitably dramatic moment at which to pause the narrative.

The pub across the road from Slough House felt like a continuation of their work lives: more a chore than a break. The coffee was poured from a jug, but tasted like instant. River could have done with an actual drink, but that would have been a mistake: he’d be back on the road as soon as he could, behind the wheel, back to Tonbridge. Wouldn’t have left her last night, except she insisted. Keep everything normal. Don’t draw attention.

‘And you haven’t told Lamb?’ Louisa said.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think he’s going to find out anyway.’

‘Sid’s frightened. She asked me not to tell anyone, so that’s what I’m doing.’

‘Except for me.’

‘Well, yes. Except you.’

‘Thanks. I think. Who’s trying to kill her?’

‘She doesn’t know. She just knew she was being watched.’

Louisa said, ‘Lot of that about.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What do you mean, how do I mean? I was tailed last night? Remember?’

‘Yeah, sorry, right. No, I mean yeah, but what’s the connection?’

‘I didn’t mean there was a connection, I just … oh, never mind. So she felt she was being watched. Doesn’t she have a handler or something? They didn’t just put her out to pasture, did they? Recovering from head trauma?’

After the farmhouse, after the residential care, Sid had been moved to a cottage on a newbuild estate not far from Kendal. She’d been there more than a year, relearning the steps required to live a life. The phrase had remained with River: he pictured her with L-plates on, buying groceries, feeding plastic into an ATM. Opening brown envelopes which explained her civic duties: council tax, voter registration, jury service.

‘She had a handler, or a milkman anyway,’ he said. ‘Twice a week, she’d turn up and check everything was okay. That Sid was managing.’

Milkmen were what retired spooks got; and also those gunned down in the field, it seemed.

‘And this milkman, who’s a she you say, making her a milkwoman, thanks – what did she make of it?’

‘Don’t know,’ said River. He tried some coffee: dreadful. ‘I haven’t actually put thumbscrews to her yet. Sid. Haven’t choked every last detail out of her.’

Louisa said, ‘I hate to ask this. But is she, you know – okay?’

‘In what sense?’

‘Well, most of them.’ River was looking obstinate again, but she ploughed on regardless. ‘Look, she was shot in the head. I get it she’s still alive, and you told me about the hair thing, the white stripe. But how’s she looking otherwise? Still a Burne-Jones, or is she more Picasso now?’

‘She hasn’t lost her looks,’ said River. ‘She’s more fragile looking.’

‘And how about mentally?’

‘Pretty spacey. Drifts off while she’s talking. But look, I hadn’t seen her in however long it’s been. Years. Hard to tell what’s awkwardness and what’s … permanent.’

‘No it isn’t,’ said Louisa. ‘Sid was bright, Sid was witty, she was never at a loss for words that I remember. Which means the Sid you’ve been talking to’s not fully come back from her wound.’ She picked up her coffee cup, came to her senses and put it down again. ‘There’s a lot of space between thinking someone’s watching you and thinking they want you dead. The mysterious watchers might be a symptom, for all we know. Paranoia.’

‘Says the woman who was tailed into a sportswear shop last night.’

‘Oh, that happened. His phone pinged, remember?’

‘I believe her.’

‘Okay.’

‘Something happened to send her on the run.’

‘Sure. But let’s not forget she’s not the only one who got hurt when she was shot. You’ve been feeling guilty ever since.’

Tell him about it. The memory was seared on his mind: the rain, and the blood gathering on the pavement. And then the night-ride to the hospital, and the slamming doors, and the body on the trolley being wheeled away. He’d ended up locked in a cupboard, guarded by one of the Dogs, until Lamb had come to rescue him.

‘And that makes you more inclined to believe her.’

‘I believe her because she’s Sid.’

‘Same difference. Look, you want my advice? Because I’m giving it anyway. Tell Lamb. Hate to say it, but. Either Sid’s in danger, in which case she’s better off him knowing, or she’s not, in which case people need to know anyway. So they can set about making her better.’

‘What if he knows already?’

‘… That she’s at your grandfather’s house?’

‘That she’s still alive.’

‘It’s possible,’ said Louisa. ‘He knows all sorts of things he shouldn’t. But either way, he’s Lamb. And she’s his joe, when you get down to it.’

‘That doesn’t always help, does it?’ River said, and they both thought briefly of the empty desk in his office.

‘We should get back,’ said Louisa, rising to her feet. Then, buttoning her coat, said, ‘Slough House, by the way.’

‘… What?’

‘That’s the connection between Sid and me. Slough House.’

River just grunted.

At lunchtime, on her way out, Catherine Standish heard Jackson Lamb torturing a warthog in his room. Best thing would be to keep walking: down the stairs, through the door which jammed rain or shine, then through the alley and onto Aldersgate Street, whose traffic-choked mundanity felt a spring meadow after a morning in Slough House. But something made her peer into Lamb’s office, to check no actual animals were being harmed, and she interrupted him mid-snore. His office, as always, seemed subtly different when he was its only occupant, as if enfolding him in a mouldy embrace, though the familiar medley of odours – stale alcohol, cigarettes, sweat – remained present and true. Lamb’s eyes opened before she’d finished these thoughts. ‘What?’

‘I thought you were having one of your fits.’

‘Fits? I don’t have fits.’

‘Pardon me. One of those coughing extravaganzas where it seems likely you’ll heave your lungs up.’

‘I’m allergic to interfering spinsters,’ said Lamb. ‘That’s probably what it is.’ He scratched the back of his head, and when his hand appeared again, it was holding a cigarette.

Catherine had long given up being amazed by such tricks. She was perturbed, though, by the industrial appearance of the cigarette in question. ‘Wouldn’t it be quicker to burn a tyre and breathe it in?’

‘Possibly,’ said Lamb. ‘But you know what Health and Safety’s like.’ He slotted the cigarette into his mouth, but made no move to light it. This was just as well, as he had it in backwards. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

She paused. ‘Now, that’s a list I try to keep as long as possible.’ But it was a forlorn defence: Lamb was growing rosily benign, the way witches in fairy tales do. She stepped further into the room and said, ‘I spoke to Molly Doran last night.’

Lamb’s expression didn’t alter.

‘Ambushed her on her way home.’

‘There are those who might think that’s taking unfair advantage of a cripple,’ said Lamb.

‘I only—’

‘But that’s Molly for you. And as she obviously didn’t flay and hang you from the nearest branch, she must have been in a happy mood.’

‘Her records are pre-digitised,’ said Catherine. Sometimes, if you kept on track, you could drag Lamb’s attention after you. ‘I wanted to know if the paper versions of our records had been purged as well.’

Lamb looked at his watch.

‘… What?’

‘It’s five past April,’ he said. ‘Congratulations. That little brainwave only took you, what? Three months?’

She suppressed a sigh. ‘You’d already done that.’

‘But Molly didn’t let on. Like I said. Happy mood.’ He removed the cigarette, then reinserted it the right way round. ‘Nobody’s looked at our folder in years. Gives you a nice tingly feeling, doesn’t it? Being forgotten. Or is that just me?’

‘But the paperwork’s still in place,’ said Catherine. ‘So even when they’re forgetting us, they’re forgetting to forget us properly.’

‘If you’re getting philosophical, I need a drink.’ He opened a drawer and thrust his hand into it like a bear exploring a hollow trunk. ‘Anyway, it’s all a tub of shit. Not what you just said, though that too. But our status as untouchables. We’ve not been forgotten. We’ve been repurposed.’

An audible sneer accompanied the word, like a sommelier offering an alcopop.

She stepped to one side and tipped the visitor’s chair so its cargo of takeaway receptacles slid to the floor. Then she produced a tissue from the sleeve of her dress and wiped the seat down. Once more or less satisfied, she sat. ‘You said you didn’t know what Taverner was up to.’

He said, ‘That’s what I said, yes. But a funny thing about me, and this is what sets me apart from the rest of you clowns, my brain stays switched on. So while I didn’t know before, I do now. Do you need me to say that again?’

‘I just about followed. What’s happening?’

‘It’s like I said to Guy. She spotted him, so he must have been a beginner.’ Lamb had found a bottle in his drawer: Talisker. ‘Light dawning yet?’

‘It’s a training exercise,’ she said.

‘Give that woman a goldfish.’

‘That’s why we’ve been wiped.’

‘Yeah, so Lady Di can paint targets on our backs and let her junior agents off the leash,’ Lamb said. He leaned back, and his chair complained angrily. ‘I suppose she might have hoped that, somewhere in the dim recesses of whatever passes for you lot’s mental processes, you might still remember some tradecraft. Like making sure you’re not being tailed when you go about your daily business. Or even just paying some fucking attention, the way normal people do. Which might have made it a slightly more taxing exercise for the early learners.’ He unscrewed the cap off the bottle. ‘Fancy a drink?’

She said, ‘So the Park have been using us for practice. And they wiped us first so the newbies won’t know we’re spooks too.’

‘To be fair,’ said Lamb, ‘thinking of you lot as spooks requires a mental leap. Like calling Farage a statesman.’

‘And now Kay White is dead.’

Lamb was watching the liquid rope he’d made by pouring whisky very slowly from the bottle into the glass. So she couldn’t see his expression as he said, ‘Did Molly tell you that?’

‘She didn’t have to.’

When he looked up, there was nothing to suggest the news had come as a surprise.

Kay White had been a slow horse, some years back. Lamb had fired her when she’d betrayed them all – his view – to the Park, presumably on the understanding that she’d be reinstated over there. That didn’t happen. It never did.

Catherine said, ‘She kept in touch with a few former colleagues. And they keep in touch with me.’

‘A fishwives’ network,’ said Lamb. ‘How jolly.’

‘She fell off a stepladder while clearing out her attic.’

‘They say most accidents happen in people’s homes,’ said Lamb. ‘That’s why I never visit anyone.’

‘No, it’s why you’re never invited anywhere.’

He tipped his glass in her direction, then drank from it.

‘That’s not like you.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘To have one of your crew die without batting an eyelid.’

Lamb put the glass down. His unlit cigarette was between his fingers now. ‘One of mine? She’s a distant memory. Wasn’t even that until you brought her name up.’

‘All right, so she wasn’t current. But she used to be one of us. That ought to matter.’

‘Might of, if I hadn’t fired her for dumping us all in the shit. I mean, it was a long time ago, and it’s not like I carry grudges.’ He put the cigarette back in his mouth. ‘But she deserved to die. Even Gandhi would admit that.’

‘Did it never occur to you that for a supposed backwater of the Security Service, we suffer a lot of fatalities?’

‘I’ve always assumed that was down to public demand.’

‘So it doesn’t worry you, this … accidental death? Now, of all times?’

‘Seriously? You’re seriously asking me that?’ He threw his head back and barked at the ceiling. Some might call it laughter. ‘Look, I trust Taverner about as far as I can fly. But she’s not gunna take out a contract on Slough House just to give her learner spooks something to do. Don’t get me wrong, she’d do it if she had a reason. But this isn’t that.’

Catherine pursed her lips, and didn’t answer.

‘Christ, Standish, they’ve never needed to kill us. I mean, fucking look at us. What would be the point?’

‘The timing worries me.’

‘It’s spring. When else do you clear out your attic?’

She stood. ‘What did that crack mean, earlier? About international assassins?’

‘Nothing to get your ovaries in a twist. Assuming yours aren’t already knotted.’

She waited, but he wouldn’t elucidate further.

‘So now you’ve worked out what’s going on,’ she said, ‘are you planning on taking it up with Taverner?’

‘Is Notre Dame flammable? Speaking of which.’

He sparked a flame from a lighter he was suddenly holding, and applied it to his cigarette.

Catherine shuddered. ‘You really need to get a grip on some health issues.’

‘What I don’t know about healthy living,’ said Lamb, ‘you could write on the back of a fag packet.’ He breathed out smoke. ‘And tell Cartwright and Guy that the next time they sneak out without permission, I’ll hang her by his testicles. Or vice versa.’

He reached for his glass again, and Catherine left him to it.

5

PREPARING TO LEAVE, OLIVER Nash said, ‘I saw something rather extraordinary on the way in.’

Nash being Nash, this would probably be one of those pop-up tourist experiences London pulls from its sleeve occasionally: a wondrous mechanical elephant, or a herd of fibreglass cows.

It had been a successful meeting, from both points of view; Diana’s because she had got what she wanted, and Nash’s because he hadn’t noticed. The venue was Diana’s office, down on the hub. Previous First Desks had chosen to occupy one of the upper-storey rooms, whose expensive windows afforded leafy views, but Diana preferred to be where the action was. Most of her career had been spent here, almost all of it as Second Desk (Ops), her initial meteoric rise having been followed by a hard stop. Since then, it sometimes felt she’d done little but bide her time, paying obeisance to one First Desk after another; watching mistakes made and successes forged, and knowing that if she’d been in charge, there’d have been fewer of the former, more of the latter. And now she was where she’d long wanted to be, and much of it involved taking meetings with Oliver Nash and similar examples of Whitehall mandarin: decent human beings in themselves, but lacking the sense of urgency that the times required.

Take the business of cybersecurity.

There was little official appetite for deep-cover ops, she’d reminded him; software was replacing human agency as the cornerstone of intelligence work. Hundreds of hours of recorded conversation; miles of emails – that was how they were measured, in actual miles – and gallons, bathtubs, reservoirs of pixellated flow: all of these, gathered at a distance, were the fruits of Spook Street. And even once they were harvested, human agency remained at a remove, the intelligence pored over instead by algorithms whose acronyms were increasingly twee, but which were at least as open to subversion as the most disenchanted joe. You didn’t have to buy an algorithm a drink, or set it up with an easy lay. You just had to work out what made it dance, and once that was done – once you had its number – it was your creature, and would do whatever you wanted. And that was how vulnerable everything was these days: you were only one hack away from open government.

‘We need bigger firewalls, Oliver. Bigger ones, better ones. The kind you can see from space.’

‘Ha, like the Great Wall of—’

‘Precisely.’

‘Not unironic, in the circs.’

She let him chuckle over that, accurately gauging the moment at which mirth would deflate into a sigh.

‘Diana, I am on your side in this.’

‘Why does that phrase drain me of confidence?’

‘But you can’t be unaware of the bigger picture.’

‘There is no bigger picture. We’re talking about national security, about protecting our virtual borders. For God’s sake, look at the self-harm we’ve inflicted in the name of national sovereignty. You’d have thought there’d be few lengths we’d not be willing to go in pursuit of that particular grail.’

‘Leaving aside your jaundiced view of recent history, you’re overstating the case. Besides, and don’t imagine I’m unaware of this, the last such restructuring was completed not twenty-four months back. After a significant, not to say unprecedented, budgetary dispensation.’

‘Two years is a long time in cyberspace.’

‘Be that as it may, this is not a case you’re going to find it easy to pursue in front of Limitations. Claude Whelan had friends Down the Corridor, remember. Forgive me if I’m treading on your amour propre, but you’re not quite as popular, perhaps because you’re not as ready to, as our American cousins would say, make nice.’

‘I’m not in this business to make nice, and I don’t like having to make do, either. Nor am I looking to Whitehall for friends or playmates. I just expect support from that direction when I’m looking to repel our common enemies.’

‘As witness the Kazan episode.’

‘Which received an ovation from the committee. In case you’d forgotten.’

‘It tickled the right erogenous zones, yes, but in the cold light of day, wiser opinion holds that now is not the time to pour oil on troubled wildfires. And some who’ve gone to the bother of examining the minutes have pointed out that at no time were you given carte blanche to perform the, ah, procedure in question. You were simply asked to examine the viability of such an operation.’

‘Well, I think I did that with exceptional clarity.’

‘And besides, there are other needs than yours, many of them equally pressing. I’m not saying there isn’t a case to be made for the upscaling you have in mind, but that’s what you have to do – make a case. Not simply assert your demands.’

‘And what if I told you that I won’t be making demands? That all I’m looking for is approval to refocus existing resources?’ She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. ‘All I require can be met through internal rebudgeting.’

This gave him pause.

‘I’m serious, Oliver. I’ve identified a saving.’

‘I thought you were cut to the bone.’

‘We are. But I can prioritise.’

‘Enlighten me further,’ said Nash. ‘Please.’

‘There’s a project called Chimera.’

‘Oh, very on-message. How come I’ve not heard of it?’

‘Because I run a tight ship. Chimera’s not appeared on any agenda within the last few years because it’s been doing precisely what it ought to do, when it ought to do it, within budget.’

‘Good lord. Are you sure you want to close it down? We could have it mounted and put on a plinth.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘All right, all right. A little levity never did any harm. Remind me, what’s the precise nature of this, ah, Chimera?’

‘Probably best if we don’t emphasise what we’re losing, and focus on the gains to be made.’

‘Of course. And I’m sure you’re right, and there’s no need to blind the committee with technical detail, but for my own peace of mind, I really do need a glimpse of precisely what we’re deciding we can live without.’

‘Very well,’ said Diana. ‘Chimera was set up in the mid nineties and involved long-term, real-time analysis of the psychological effects of operating under deep cover in domestic pressure groups.’

‘Ah. Animal Liberation Front kind of thing?’

‘I can neither confirm nor deny.’

‘All very … surreptitious. Subterfuguous?’

‘I don’t want to hammer home the obvious, but we are the Secret Service.’

‘Is there an adjective from subterfuge?’

‘I’ll make a note, Oliver. Have someone look into it.’

He said, ‘And this was costing enough that you can make substantial savings by closing it down?’

‘We’re a bureaucracy. Everything we do costs money, because it all has to be discussed by committee, every member of which is claiming expenses. So do we really need to debate first principles, or can I rely on your support when it comes to the next Limitations meeting? Redirecting funds, that’s all. With the committee’s approval it can be done in house, and the next you’ll hear about it, it’ll be in place. No fuss, no fireworks.’

‘I’ll give it some thought. But in principle, I see no objection.’

‘I’m grateful. Now, I’ve a call to make. Was there any other business?’

‘There was something.’ Nash checked his phone, which was where he kept his notes. ‘Ah yes. The minister’s been getting calls. An American, resident here, claiming that his partner, in the life partner sense I think, that his partner was murdered in Moscow. On Putin’s orders.’

‘And was he one of ours?’

‘A Brit, you mean? No, I gather he was a Russian citizen.’

‘So even if he was murdered, it wouldn’t be our business. Why are you bringing it to me?’

‘The minister had no particular instructions,’ Nash said. ‘He just wants to stop receiving these phone calls.’

‘That’s a police matter. Really, you can’t keep urging me to keep costs down on the one hand, and—’

‘Mea culpa.’

‘—offering my services to any of your Westminster cronies who have a passing problem.’

‘I’m sorry, Diana, you’re right. As always. Thanks for your time.’ He rose to go, putting his phone away, and said, ‘I saw something rather extraordinary on the way in.’

A wondrous mechanical elephant, she thought. A parade of fibreglass cows.

‘Please tell.’

‘There was a tour arriving as I came through the lobby,’ he said. ‘One of those Civil Service groups?’

These were regular outings: covens of civil servants given whistlestop tours round Regent’s Park, or at least, round those non-classified areas that were close enough to thrill by association. This is where Bond hangs his raincoat. Some floors below us lies the hub.

‘It’s not that extraordinary. They’ve been a feature for years.’

‘Ah, yes, no, I meant who was in the group. Damien Cantor? The boss of Channel Go, you know who I mean? Richest man in the country under thirty-five, I’m led to believe.’

Diana discovered something on her desk that required attention, and it was a moment before she replied. ‘And he was being shown around the building?’

‘Maybe he plans to make an offer for it,’ said Nash. ‘Diana? That was a joke.’

‘Good meeting, Oliver. Thank you.’

There was something forlorn about a house stripped of its furniture, or there was if you were its departing spirit. A stranger might find potential in this wide hallway, but for River – reaching it via the kitchen; he’d used the back door again, as had been his childhood habit – it was like entering a ransacked priory: the wooden chest which had sat under that row of coat hooks was gone, as was the engraving, a Howard Phipps, which had hung on the opposite wall. But these were secondary emotions: he was here for Sid, who was in the study, and to all appearances had not moved since the early hours. Sid was bright, Sid was sharp. Sid now seemed mostly weary, and greeted him the way a long-term patient might a regular visitor, reaching a hand out but remaining seated, her legs tucked under her. The white stripe in her hair looked an affectation: she was a punkish waif in a modernised Dickens.

‘Thank you for coming.’

He wasn’t sure how the alternative would have worked. He could have gone home, he supposed, and spent the evening thinking how strange it was, that Sid was in his grandfather’s study in Kent.

They ate in picnic fashion: provisions he’d bought on the way.

‘You weren’t followed, were you?’

River shook his head. He’d looped a roundabout twice, and doubled back on himself a couple of miles to make sure.

‘Tell me again,’ he said. ‘About the people who came looking.’

‘You’re wondering if my story’s going to change.’

‘I’m wondering what we can do to find them.’

‘I don’t want to find them,’ she said. ‘I want them not to find me.’

‘I’ll keep you safe. Describe them.’

‘They were a couple. A man and a woman. Dressed like missionaries.’

Black-suited, River learned. White-shirted. The man was dark, clean-shaven; the woman blonde, had her hair tied back, and wore round, plastic-framed spectacles. They’d been going door-to-door round the estate where Sid had been housed.

‘And you’re sure they weren’t … well. Missionaries?’

She gave him a look he remembered well: this was Sid, he’d once shared an office with.

When they’d reached her door, she had watched from a bedroom window. They had hung on the doorstep longer than natural, and she’d had to step back sharply when the woman looked up.

‘What time of day?’

‘Morning.’

‘Where did they go once they’d left?’

‘Next door.’

And had carried on up the winding street, then down the other side. Like missionaries would have done.

Sid said, ‘Maybe it wasn’t just to look less suspicious. Maybe they didn’t know exactly which house I was in.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I called it in.’

Which was standard. If you had a handler, if you had a milkman, you always called it in.

River said, ‘It was supposed to be a safe house. How could they know where to find you?’

‘They could have known about the farm. Where I spent time in recovery.’ A hunk of bread balanced uneaten on her chair’s armrest. ‘It’s been used for years.’

And a link between the farm and the estate, a few miles down the road, wouldn’t have been hard to establish. They might not have followed Sid’s milkman to Sid’s exact address – the estate was a warren of culs-de-sac and one-way streets; a tail would have burned bright as a beacon – but they could have established her general whereabouts, and then gone door to door.

‘And what makes you sure they wanted to kill you?’

She picked up the bread and stared at it, puzzled. Then put it carefully down. ‘What else would they have planned?’

It pulled at his heart to have her sitting here, both because it was her and because it was here. Sid, whom he’d thought dead. And here, of all places, where that same heart had put down its first roots. He’d been carted place to place by his mother, like a suitcase. Only once she’d abandoned him to his grandparents’ care had he learned what home meant. And thinking that thought, he realised he had no idea what family Sidonie Baker had; what friends she might have left behind. Besides himself, he thought, then caught that: had he been her friend? They’d fought through most of their short relationship. Which was a familiar story when it came to River and women, though in his defence, by no means all of them ended up shot in the head.

And it was impossible not to think about head wounds, their long-term implications. Being shot in the head might leave you fearing being shot in the head again. Most professions this didn’t happen once, let alone twice, but River could see how it might be: once shot, twice shy. Sid was a softer presence now; her colours muted. Maybe her reception in general was fuzzier, and prone to static. Strangers weren’t always dangerous, but those that were were best avoided. Why wouldn’t she imagine them bringing harm to her door?

Some of this might have been written on his face, because she said, ‘You think I’m paranoid.’

‘No.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Sid, you had a bad time of it, and I’m sorry. It was my fault.’

Truth was, he could barely remember if that were so. He had been the reason Sid was there that night, on that London street in the rain, but he hadn’t asked her to come.

‘You didn’t pull the trigger,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Well then.’

‘Why did you come here?’

‘I couldn’t think of anywhere else. And you’re safe.’ She raised a hand to the white stripe in her hair. ‘You’re a slow horse. Whatever’s going on, whatever’s happening, you’re not involved. Slow horses never are.’

Which was partly true, he thought. Slow horses spent a lot of time not being involved. And by the time things turned out otherwise, it was frequently too late.

‘Why do you think they’re after you?’

‘Maybe I know something.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know … Maybe I used to know something, and I’ve forgotten what it was. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still know it. Back there.’

She made a vague gesture: the back of her mind, she meant. A part blocked off since the shooting. He imagined the bullet throwing up furrows as it creased her head: creating little earthworks in the brain, behind which memories piled, irretrievable clumps of information.

And that would be just like a slow horse too, he thought. To be in possession of crucial information, and still be the last to know.

‘What do you think I should do?’

‘You can stay here for a while.’

‘That’s not a solution. Just a hiding place.’

‘Best I can do right now.’ He wanted to move closer to her, offer reassurance, but wasn’t sure that was the way to do so. Instead, he rose and turned on the lamp in the corner, dispelling the gathering gloom. ‘I can try to find out more about those missionaries.’

‘They weren’t missionaries.’

‘Whoever they were. I can get Ho to check them out, probably.’

Provided he didn’t mind eating some serious shit.

‘Roderick Ho … Is he still with you?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘How is he?’

‘Much the same,’ said River. ‘Unfortunately.’

Again, that evening, he didn’t want to leave but couldn’t comfortably stay. He fetched from the boot some odds and ends he’d thought to pack – his kettle, a duvet, a towel – and asked how she was doing for clothes. It was like vaulting over several levels of relationship. When he left he was clutching the list she’d scribbled – underwear, a sweatshirt, shampoo – and trying to remember if her handwriting had been so disorganised when he’d first known her. Meanwhile Sid had bedded down in a nest of cushions, and that was how he thought of her all through the night: like someone who’d lost their way in a wood, and covered themselves with leaves, hoping this would keep them safe.

Before the light had left the day, Diana was occupying a bench with her back to the Globe, looking out on the Thames. The bench was an old favourite, smack in the middle of a twelve-yard stretch unmonitored by CCTV, and she’d recently had its USP refreshed, this being a foul splash of birdshit covering most of its length; a plastic transfer, but realistic enough to ensure no one ever sat here. It was also somewhere she would smoke, a habit she rarely indulged in with others present. It was hard to say which of the two, fag or faeces, passing tourists found more offensive.

Sometimes, at moments like this – feeling the day’s first charge of nicotine; watching the endless river heading home – she could allow her mind to empty, and simply feel alive. Today, though, that wasn’t going to happen. She’d been fizzing for hours.

‘Ah. A beautiful woman indulging in vice. Is there any more arousing sight?’

If Peter Judd appreciated the specifics of a clandestine meeting, he went out of his way to challenge them.

Diana peeled the transfer away, allowing him space to sit, and as he lowered his carefully tailored bulk onto the bench, he said, ‘A summons. An urgent summons, no less. Who’s been putting sand in your Vaseline, Diana?’

‘Why did Damien Cantor join a visitor group at the Park this morning?’

‘Flattering as it is to have you think I’m pulling strings all day, I’m usually as much in the dark as you.’

‘I’m not generally in the dark.’

‘No. I seem to recall you prefer it with the lights on. May I have one of those?’

She took packet and lighter from her bag and handed them to him. He shuddered at his first inhalation, a parody of pleasure. ‘Thank you. Look, Cantor’s an investor. He wants to kick the skirting boards, check for damp. And he probably thinks he was being subtle, or even funny, joining a tour group, but you can put that down to his age. And being mega-rich. The mega-rich always think they’re the dog’s bollocks.’

‘My understanding of dogs’ bollocks,’ said Diana, ‘is that you can lop them off and chuck them away, and the dog will still operate.’

She finished her cigarette and ground it underfoot. A nearby gull watched with hungry interest.

‘It’s a little soon,’ said Judd, ‘to contemplate altering the composition of, what shall we call it, our caucus? Besides which, as I think I mentioned, Cantor is a major contributor. Sidelining him now would be like dropping Beckham before the semi-final.’

‘I see you’re letting your sporting references lapse. Now you no longer depend on the goodwill of the electorate.’

‘Fuck the electorate.’

‘Cantor might be a big noise in his world, but this is mine,’ she said. ‘And his role in my world is to offer his backing and accept my gratitude, or remove himself entirely.’

‘I do love it when you draw lines,’ Judd said smoothly. ‘It brings out the feminist in me. I’ll have a word with our Damien, all right? And all shall be well, and all manner of thing and so on. Now. Crisis over, moving on. Your meeting with Nash went well, I trust?’

‘… Passably.’

‘Don’t tell me. You invented a project that’s no longer fit for purpose, and claimed you could make a saving by closing it down and redirecting the funds to your preferred use. And all you need the committee to do is rubber-stamp the process.’

‘It’s in hand.’

‘And you’re confident Nash won’t, ah, put two and two together?’

‘Two and two? He’d have trouble adding one and one.’

Which was unfair, and both knew it, but politics was the art of cutting absent parties down to size.

‘Excellent. I’m glad your qualms of yesterday have settled. This work we’re doing, this path we’re on – it’s of enormous benefit to the nation. I feel stirrings of heroism.’ He glanced at his crotch. ‘There is one other small thing. I’ve been talking with our, ah, angels, and there’s general agreement that we’d like you to ease off on your infiltration of the Yellow Vest movement.’

The river still flowed, the breeze still blew. The evening light was still leaking away from the sky.

She eased another cigarette from the packet. The lighter wouldn’t spark first time.

‘I probably didn’t hear you correctly. For a moment, I thought you were daring to dictate Service policy.’

‘Hardly policy. I don’t wish to engage in semantic quibbles, but we’re talking about one minor line of surveillance. Nothing more.’

She didn’t need to look his way to know the pout was in place, the rhetoric forthcoming.

‘Look, I understand your concern about the unwashed getting jiggy on the streets, but it’s a minor blip. The disturbances will die down – they always do – and on the smoke-blown landscape left behind, we’ll see one or two figures emerge who it’s wise to pay attention to. Look at You-Know-What. A minor figure, a local joke, never even managed to get elected, somehow positions himself as head of a party everyone wrote off as a bunch of small-minded xenophobes, and ten years later he’s changed history. This, these Yellow Jackets, who knows? Maybe they’re the start of something similar. Just another stage in our political evolution. Democracy is all very well, Diana, but nobody’s ever suggested it’s the be-all and end-all. Especially not the end-all. Harks back to ancient Greece, thank you, but where’s Greece now? Knocking on the back door, asking for scraps. That’s where its big idea got it.’

‘Thanks for the history lesson,’ Diana said. ‘But the big picture isn’t the only thing worrying me. No, what I find concerning is you telling me that this decision has apparently been made, and I’m here to take instruction. And that’s not how this works.’

‘You’ve been over-bureaucratised for too long. All those subcommittees and oversight boards, all that middle-fucking-management whose only purpose is to assert its own importance, because if anyone took a good hard look they’d see it doesn’t have any. Like it or not, that’s the world you’re coming from. Where the only decisions you’re allowed to make are either so piddlesome nobody else can be bothered with the paperwork, or so incendiary nobody wants to be caught near the fire. Sound familiar?’

‘Peter—’

‘No one’s trying to strong-arm you, Diana. It’s simply a matter of encouraging you to see things from a wider perspective, now you’re heading up a team with more diversified interests.’ He shook his head solemnly. ‘If I thought anyone was trying to hold you over a barrel, I’d be the first to stand in their way.’

This was a familiar trope. Theoretically, Judd was always ready to lie down in front of bulldozers for a principle, even if, in practice, he tended to be out of the room when the short straw was pulled.

‘Well you can let our angels know that their desires will not be considered. Not when I’m making operational decisions, or any other kind. And if any of them want to withdraw their support in light of that, they’re free to do so. Are we clear?’

‘As crystal. But bear in mind that if they do decide to withdraw their support, you’ll be back where you started from, rattling your cup in front of a panel of thwarted pygmies.’ He touched the knot of his tie with an index finger. ‘Always supposing you weather any bad publicity arising.’

‘Say that again?’

‘I’m simply pointing out that when you disappoint rich and powerful men, they let their displeasure be known. But I’m sure it won’t come to that. One small favour, Diana. Allow the Yellow Vest campaign to reach its natural end without attempting to discredit those spearheading it. Where could be the harm?’

‘Have a good evening, Peter.’

She was halfway across the Millennium Bridge before she remembered she’d failed to reaffix the bird-shit transfer. But then, that was the thing about shit, real or fake: once you’d begun spreading it about, it never ended up precisely where you wanted it.

Most great ideas, or a lot of them anyway, were thought at the time to be rubbish, and you were reckoned an idiot for having them.

This was true of stupid ideas too.

Telling them apart was the tricky bit.

So a couple of years ago, when Struan Loy had his brainwave, there’d been no shortage of naysayers telling him he was dipshit crazy. But he’d had the strength of character to rise above that, to recognise the brilliance of his own invention, and to refuse to kowtow to the carping of mediocrities, so here he was, living in a shipping container, cooking past-their-sell-by sausages on a camping stove, and wondering whether that scrabbling he could hear was another rat or a Madagascan spider. These containers had been all over the world, so exotic spiders couldn’t be ruled out.

At the time, though, it had been a great idea.

Back then, things had been looking handy. Momentarily between employments, he’d been a sleeping partner at a fitness centre. Well, sleeping partner – he’d been sleeping with one of the partners. This was a divorcée named Shelley, who, to piss off her ex – the other half of the operation – had given Struan a deal on hiring the hall for evening classes: self-defence. Struan, as he sometimes let drop, had been in the security services in an earlier life; not to go into detail but there’d been training, there’d been combat. Put it like this: do not sneak up behind him. Which added frisson to his ‘Do it to Them First’ session, a fairly lively class that, with hindsight, wasn’t ideal for the over fifties. Anyway, once the paramedics were off the premises, Shelley had said something about this being the last straw, which came as a surprise to Struan, who hadn’t been counting straws. But it seemed they built up without you knowing.

Give Shelley her due, she’d been generous while it lasted, and the winter before they’d gone on a South African jaunt, safari included. All top job, but it was during a two-day stopover in Johannesburg that he’d had his eureka moment, and that moment was this: shipping containers. There were whole apartment blocks made out of them in Jo’burg: brightly coloured huge great building blocks stacked on top of each other like kids’ toys, only with people living in them. It was like, on one hand you had a housing crisis, which everyone knew about, and on the other was this solution, which some smart guys in Johannesburg had stumbled upon, but it was up to Struan Loy to carry the message home. Shipping containers. A lot cheaper than actual buildings. This, definitely, was worth putting every penny he had into, along with a lot of pennies he didn’t have but was able to borrow at rates which would seem cheap in the long run, so, post Shelley, he bought a dozen containers from a shipping company gone liquid, these particular assets being stacked behind an industrial park on the outskirts of Leicester. Struan Loy, entrepreneur. All he needed now was to recruit some of the architectural nous, design nous, which the bright lads back in S.A. had on tap, and his future was up and running.

Long story short: two years later he had no job, no money, and was shaving expenses where he could, which had meant moving into one of the containers, even though they hadn’t exactly been customised yet. It was almost like being homeless, which was in fact exactly what it was.

It made the days when he’d been a slow horse seem a career high.

Slow horses was what they’d been called, those edged out of their roles at Regent’s Park because of the envy, spite and small-minded malice of others, but also, in his case, because of an unwise group email suggesting that the then First Desk was an al-Qaeda plant. It was a lesson in how bureaucracies worked: i.e. no sense of humour. Then there’d been a thing that happened with a kid being kidnapped, and Struan’s crew – the slow horses – had ended up in the middle of it, and he’d made the perfectly rational decision to save his own skin by shopping them all to Diana Taverner at the Park, in the hope that this would salvage his career. Memo to self: didn’t happen. It could get you down, the obstacles a good man found in his way, but seriously, what was that scrabbling in the corner?

Except not in the corner, he realised. It was coming from outside: footsteps on the cracked concrete surface of the wasteground.

He moved to the door as silently as he could; peeped out into the near-dark, and the air that held a hint of coming rain. A few yards away, outside the next container along, stood a man and a woman, both of whom turned his way, despite his attempt at quiet. They were, he couldn’t help noticing, carrying a bottle of vodka apiece.

They approached, the woman unleashing a smile. ‘Struan Loy, yes? Mr Struan Loy?’

The honorific stressed, as if in despite of circumstance.

Loy said, ‘Who are you?’

‘We heard about your business scheme.’

‘The shipping containers?’ This was the man, and his accompanying glance took in Loy’s home and its immediate neighbours. ‘The residential shipping containers?’

Raincoats, black suits, white shirts. The woman attractive, but with her hair tied back severely enough that she might want you not to notice, or not yet; the man clean-shaven, and with a quiet, polite look to him.

‘I’m him, yes. Or he’s me.’ Loy was conscious of how he was dressed, suddenly: an old pair of jeans and a sweater too long in the sleeves. Not exactly primed for business discussion. But his visitors didn’t seem to care: they stood on what he supposed you could call his threshold, but might be more accurate not to, holding their bottles expectantly, as if awaiting an invitation.

If it weren’t for the vodka, thought Struan Loy, he might have taken them for missionaries.

Diana Taverner had eaten an Italian meal, had drunk two glasses of Chilean wine, but was feeling irredeemably British as she arrived at her Notting Hill home: tired, irritable, full of dread. ‘Home’, anyway – when asked she’d say ‘home’ was the Cotswolds, careful never to name the actual village; London was her workplace, her business address. But on the few occasions when she suffered through a weekend in Temple Guiting, she found herself glued to her phone, counting the hours. The cottage had woodburning stoves and exposed beams, stone-flagged floors and a curious window-seat halfway up its narrow staircase, all of which, back in the city, she’d recount as rustic charm, and most of which was a fucking nuisance. She could see stars there, true, but indoors she had to keep her head low. Exposed beams were dangerous. Home, in fact, was Regent’s Park. But the Notting Hill house was elegant and subtle and carpeted to a hush; it had spot lighting and spotless walls. It had a fridge full of wine. She shucked her shoes off, gathered the mail, padded into the kitchen and poured herself another glass. Through the sliding door, she could see the intruder light was on, which meant a fox had been doing the rounds. It would go off in a minute. She put the mail on the table, and carried the wine upstairs.

Removed her make-up. Took deep breaths. She hadn’t waded out so far she couldn’t make it back safely. She was First Fucking Desk. She’d taken apart bigger threats than Damien Cantor, than Peter Bloody Judd. And troublesome angels weren’t an unprecedented hazard. Some had tried it on with God, and look where that got them.

Her wine finished, she left the mirror to its own reflections, and took her glass downstairs to refill it.

The intruder light was still on.

The garden was a thin strip of land, most of it paved; large plants in huge pots were kept alive by a weekly gardener. There was furniture too, in case Diana ever made any friends, and ever invited them round, and they ever decided to enjoy each other’s company in the garden. It was wooden, sturdy, and when the intruder light was on looked like props on a stage. She unlocked the door, opened it and stepped down onto the path. The smoke from Jackson Lamb’s cigarette reached her even before she registered his bulk, squatting in one of the chairs.

He said, ‘What are you doing in my garden?’

She shook her head.

‘Now you say, “No, it’s my garden,” and we’ll improvise from there.’

‘Fuck off. You know how long it’ll take the Dogs to get here? And it will not be a comfortable collection, I can promise you.’

‘Might as well sit while we’re waiting, then.’

Diana stared at him, then shook her head again and went back into her kitchen and filled her wineglass. Really filled it. Had to be careful carrying it outside again, in case it slopped over the rim.

She set it on the table, pulled another of the heavy wooden chairs out, and sat.

Looking at the glass, Lamb said, ‘No, don’t worry. I’m fine.’

‘I know. There’s a bottle poking out of your pocket.’

‘Oh. That.’ He brought it out, removed its cap. ‘Cheers.’

She raised her glass in what she hoped was an aggressively sardonic manner.

‘So,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I invited you out here for a chat.’

‘Cut the comedy and get to the point.’

‘You’ve been using my crew for training purposes. Like they were dummies in a shooting gallery.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. Is there a reason I shouldn’t be doing that?’

‘Only the obvious. That they’re my fucking dummies.’

‘And they do you so much credit.’ She glanced at his feet, where a pile of cigarette stubs had mushroomed. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Longer than I expected. Since when have you had a social life?’

‘Sorry to inconvenience you.’

‘Yeah, I may have had to piss in one of your plant pots.’

Diana doubted he was kidding. She motioned towards his cigarette. ‘Can I have one of those?’

He sighed. ‘Some people just make themselves free and easy with other people’s property.’ But he handed her one.

‘Did you make this yourself?’

‘Just hold it at an angle.’

He shoved a plastic lighter across. The first inhalation reminded her of her first one ever. ‘God in heaven. Where did this come from?’

‘Old Miles’s.’

‘Ah, Christ. It’s closed down, right?’ She shook her head. ‘The old guard used to gather there. Back in Partner’s day.’

‘Just the suits,’ he said. ‘And the hangers-on.’

‘Suits and hangers,’ she said. Then: ‘It’s all changing though, isn’t it? I thought everything had changed enough already. But it keeps on happening.’

‘If I wanted to listen to a stroppy woman getting maudlin, I’d have picked a City bar.’ He took a swallow from his bottle, which had a label Diana didn’t recognise, then said, ‘So that’s why you had us all wiped. So your newbies wouldn’t know they were tailing professionals.’

She breathed out smoke that looked blacker than natural. ‘It took you long enough.’

‘Once I’d established I was still getting paid, it didn’t seem that urgent. Besides. You didn’t put anyone on me.’

‘No,’ said Diana. ‘I didn’t want any of them broken.’

Lamb nodded, as if that went without saying. Then said, ‘I heard about Kazan. I’m guessing the Whitehall crowd creamed themselves then backed away.’

‘Nothing I’m not used to.’

‘What about Number Ten?’

‘Doesn’t officially know. That way, his spad doesn’t have to decide what the PM thinks.’

They were silent. Way overhead, in the dark starless sky, nothing happened.

Then Lamb said, ‘I’ve stood on bridges in my time. You watch one of your own come back to your side, watch one of theirs walk the opposite way. And that’s the end of the story. They’re off the board. Untouchable. This shit doesn’t get written down, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a rule. Otherwise it’s just joe country. Welcome to the badlands.’ He tipped his bottle in her direction. ‘Putin pissed all over that rule. You did the right thing.’

‘Thanks.’

‘He’s probably declared war, though. You realise that.’

‘No, I think he’ll get the message.’

‘Because I heard a rumour.’

‘And you pay attention to that sort of thing?’

‘Of course I fucking do. I’m a spy.’ He added his cigarette end to the pile by his feet. ‘Apparently we have a crack assassination squad.’

‘That was the rumour?’

‘No, the rumour is they’ve been targeted. Tit for tat. You took out one of their featured artists, now they’re coming for yours. Should make for an interesting summer.’

Diana said, ‘We used freelance talent for Kazan.’

‘I figured.’

‘Because it’s not as straightforward as it used to be. Not with half the agencies in Europe thinking it’s funny to put our people on their watch lists. No more courtesy access, no more blind eyes turned to low-key incursions. No more shortcuts through friendly states. Cooperation strictly according to the book, which suddenly has a lot more small print than we’d thought.’ She contemplated her wineglass, manoeuvring which was less complicated now it held half as much. ‘The many blessings of You-Know-What.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ said Lamb. ‘I voted Lib Dem.’

‘Very funny. But my point was, we have tactical teams, sure, and we have operatives who could take even you down bare-handed, though I’m sure they’d prefer rubber gloves. But we don’t, as such, have an actual department. Where’d this rumour come from?’

‘A little man at Old Miles’s.’

‘And he, what, saw it on Twitter?’

‘His partner was a journo, writing a book on Putin.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And died.’

‘Killed?’

Lamb shrugged.

‘Where?’

‘Moscow.’

‘This little man,’ Diana said. ‘American?’

‘Full-blooded Munchkin.’

‘And his partner was a Russian citizen.’ She made to inhale again, and thought better of it. ‘He’s been writing to the minister. Local reports called it natural causes.’

‘And annoying Putin doesn’t count?’

Diana said, ‘Well, he wouldn’t be the first Russian journalist to walk into a bear trap.’ She drank some wine. ‘If bodies start turning up, I’ll know we’ve got a problem. To add to my ever-growing list. In the meantime, I’m tired. Would you mind pissing off back wherever you call home?’

Lamb heaved himself up. When he stretched, she thought about bear traps again. He found another cigarette somewhere, and said, ‘Pretty impressive, though. Bankrolling a hit on a Moscow heavy without sanction from upstairs.’

‘Maybe I’ve got a fairy godfather.’

‘Let’s hope he doesn’t make an offer you can’t refuse.’

Foreboding washed over her, and the words were out before she could stop them. ‘I may have made a mistake, Jackson.’

He waited.

But she shook her head. ‘Ah, screw it. It is what it is. Isn’t that the current wisdom?’

‘London rules, Taverner. If you’re big enough to admit you’ve made an error, you’re stupid enough to make another one.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And don’t fuck with my joes.’

‘They’re not joes.’

‘That wasn’t the important bit. The important bit was, do not fuck.’ He nodded towards the door. ‘Can I come through the house?’

‘No. You can leave the way you came.’

‘I came through the house.’

‘No you didn’t.’

She locked the sliding door behind her, and went up to the toilet. When she came back down the intruder light was off, and the garden empty.

‘May we come in and look around?’

If it had been just her, no question.

The man said, ‘Jim and Jane. By the way.’

‘He’s Jim,’ the woman added. ‘I’m Jane.’

‘We’re what you might call interested parties.’

‘Interested in the concept, that is.’

‘Shipping containers,’ said Jim. ‘Residential. Brilliant.’

‘Just brilliant.’

‘And we’re very keen on exploring the potential further.’

‘Possibly as a franchised opportunity,’ said Jane.

‘By which we mean, we would shoulder the design burden. And production costs, of course.’

‘While you would retain the vision and the trademark rights.’

‘We’d not ask you to sell your dream.’

‘Who in their right mind would offer their dream for sale?’

‘But we hope you’ll be interested in leasing it,’ said Jim.

It was like being washed by gentle hands, thought Struan Loy. Like being oiled and towelled and given a happy ending. ‘Jim and Jane,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Okay, Jim and Jane. Come in. Bring your bottles.’

He couldn’t help slipping into salesman mode as he stepped aside to let them enter. ‘Nice and spacious, as you can see. Plenty of … potential.’

There was only the one light, a battery-powered lantern, but it illuminated the amenities: the armchair, and the wooden crate seeing use as both table and kitchen. The camping stove sat on top of it, along with the pan in which he’d fried his sausages; probably still hot, but here was the beauty of his current lifestyle: who cared about scorch marks?

‘Bit of a campsite, to be honest. Not actually ready for moving in, but I wanted to … test the ambience.’

Jim was looking round with interest.

Jane said, ‘What design did you have in mind? For the finished model, I mean?’

‘Well,’ said Loy. ‘Three rooms, really. A living–sleeping space, that would be most of it. And a shower, obviously, with the necessaries. And a separate kitchen.’

‘With a good big window across the living space wall,’ Jane said. ‘I like it. What are you using at the moment? For the – ah – necessaries?’

‘Just going round back,’ said Loy.

Jim was making admiring-type noises and, more importantly, unscrewing the top of the vodka bottle. It made that appealing snap as the seal broke. ‘You have glasses? Or plastics, even. We’re all friends here.’

Loy had two polystyrene beakers and a chipped mug.

‘Perfect.’

Jim poured each of them a generous measure of vodka, and they toasted Struan Loy’s enterprise.

Jane kept up the chatter while Jim refreshed their drinks. They’d heard about the scheme while exploring investment opportunities, and their ears had pricked up. Well, housing. It was important to put something back, didn’t Struan think? Struan thought. Anyway, she could see why he’d had trouble with uptake, because people were so unimaginative these days, but anyone with an ounce of vigour – hell, she wasn’t afraid of the word: anyone with spunk – could see that what Struan had come up with, his genius brainwave, was exactly what society had been waiting for. Man with a welding torch and the right attitude could have this space sorted in no time. And Struan was so right not to overcomplicate. Three rooms: bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Or even – and she didn’t want to tread on toes here – but even, you could make it just the two. Plenty of properties, studio flats, incorporated kitchen into living space, yes? Cut down on conversion expenses. But anyway, here was the other thing, they were stackable, shipping containers. Famous for it. What you had here, basically, was a whole apartment block waiting to be assembled. Little bit of clever with the outside staircases, and you were away. Had he thought about furnished or unfurnished? She bet the former. She could see he had an eye. Have some more vodka.

He had some more vodka.

It felt good going down. And Jane’s pep talk hit the spot too, reminding Struan what it was he’d seen in Johannesburg. Not just an opportunity, but a journey; somewhere he could point himself, and keep moving. Away from the bad luck that had dogged him so long. The only trouble, far as he could see – the only wasp in the sun cream – was that things like this didn’t happen. Not to Struan Loy.

Because when things were turning to shit, they kept turning to shit faster. Second law of motion. Emphasis on motion. His recent trajectory had taken a shitward direction, and no way was that going to terminate in a couple of strangers turning up with a wellyful of dosh. No, something was going on. And if they thought Struan hadn’t copped on to that yet, they should have stuck to being the missionaries they resembled.

‘So who was it pointed you in my direction?’

He slurred on direction, he thought, but then decided he hadn’t, or at least, that you were supposed to slur on it, it had an ecksh sound. But probably the whole mental debate was itself an indication that he’d been drinking neat vodka.

Jane and Jim exchanged a look. ‘His name was Peter?’

‘… Pete Fairfax?’ said Loy.

‘Fairfax, yeah. I think that was it.’

It was good to have these questions answered, especially when the answer was: these people are full of crap. Loy didn’t know a Peter Fairfax.

Might be good to have them not in his living space any more.

‘So yeah, well, anyway,’ he said. ‘Good. Good. Definitely a lot to think about.’

‘Definitely,’ Jim agreed.

‘So much,’ Jane offered.

‘But right now, and thanks for the drink and everything, but right now I’d really better get some shut-eye.’ He mimed sleeping, very briefly, unsure why he was doing so. Everyone knew what sleeping looked like. ‘Gotta be fresh in the morning.’

‘Really? Why so?’

This was Jane again.

‘Oh, you know.’ A vague gesture. ‘Things to do.’

Jim was unscrewing the top on the second vodka bottle. There didn’t seem to be a snap this time, as if the seal had already been broken.

‘No, really. I think I’ve had enough,’ Loy said.

‘Yeah, probably,’ Jim agreed. He looked at Jane. ‘We about done?’

‘To a crisp,’ she agreed. And then, to Loy, she said some words he didn’t follow: a pattering of tongue on palate in a language from far away.

‘… What?’

‘Oh, just an observation.’

Jim was holding the bottle upside down now, pouring its contents onto Struan’s sleeping bag.

‘Hey! What the hell you doing?’

‘What? Oh, this.’ He stopped pouring. ‘Well. You can’t drink it. That’s for sure.’

‘That’s for damn sure,’ added Jane, and they both laughed.

Jim started prowling the living space, shaking the bottle on the move: liquid spattered everywhere, onto Loy’s possessions, onto the metal walls.

‘Will you stop that?’ He moved forward, intent on delivering a physical rebuke, but he was on the floor suddenly, his legs a tangle beneath him. Jane stepped away, a small smile on her face. And then Jim was shaking the bottle in his direction, so it was spattering down the front of his sweater, his holey old sweater too long in the sleeves.

‘Right. That’s it. Fuck off out of here, both of you!’

‘I think he’s right,’ said Jane.

‘Bottle’s empty anyway,’ said Jim.

‘Shall we tuck him in?’

‘Not sure he’s in the mood.’

‘Fuck off,’ Loy said. He was sober again, he was sure of it. ‘Right off. Now.’

Who they were, what they wanted, other questions: they’d still be there in the morning. But one thing he knew: these people, this Jim and this Jane, were remnants of his old life, when he’d been in the Service. This was a call to action. Tomorrow he’d be back at the Park, banging on the door. Home was where, when you went there, they had to let you in. This, they’d want to know about. And he felt a spark light up inside, familiar from years ago: the feeling of belonging, and of being useful, and having something to bring to the fight. He didn’t yet know what the fight was, but had a shrewd idea of who the enemy were. And there was a strange smell, too, which wasn’t vodka but was more energetic, not to mention acrid, not to mention dangerous.

Not to mention this:

That Jim and Jane were leaving, the lighter Jim had just tossed towards the sleeping bag still tumbling over itself in mid-air, more slowly than gravity usually allowed, its flame somehow holding on despite the gyrations it was going through. Already Struan was getting to his feet, and had managed as far as his hands and knees before the lighter hit the bag the way shit hits the fan: with a whump, and an air of there being no going back. Jim and Jane were at the door, and then the door was swinging shut, and there was a ratcheting noise, something indescribable, but perfectly captured by the vision of a length of wood being inserted through a pair of metal handles. There was no way of confirming this from Struan’s side of the door, but its refusal to open told a story. He hammered on the frame, sounding like a German rock group. ‘Please!’ There were flames behind him, the sleeping bag going up, and fire spreading everywhere, greedily swallowing the liquid Jim had sprayed around, and then scarfing up everything else in its path: clothes, some books, the fat in that dirty pan, the sweater he was wearing. ‘Open the door! Please!’ You spent half your life pleading let me in, but when it came down to it, what you really wanted was to be set free.

But no matter how hard he banged, how loud he screamed, nothing happened next except the rest of everything, or Struan Loy’s everything, which involved heat and flame and flesh and smoke and far too much noise, and then silence.

6

DAMIEN CANTOR WAS WATCHING a video submission, citizen footage of police officers hassling Yellow Vests, when his office door opened and two men entered, black-jeaned, polo-necked and plugged into their mothership, judging by their earpieces. Without word they proceeded to give his office a once-over as he muted his laptop, stared in amazement, and finally said, ‘Excuse me? Excuse me? What the hell?’

Neither paid attention.

He picked up his phone then replaced the receiver: if Sally wasn’t in the room apologising already, she was either being forcibly restrained or had committed seppuku in reception. So he slipped into a smile, leaned back and said, ‘Okay, guys. Knock yourselves out.’

They did and they didn’t. There was no self-harm involved, but they quietly, methodically, finished their tasks: the point wasn’t securing the room, but letting Cantor know he was their bitch. Which made this office politics, and you didn’t get to his position – the fifty-second floor of the Needle, snugly inside the Square Mile’s nest of bankers, lawyers and other corporate scam artists – without knowing how to take a dagger in the back. So when they reached his desk he simply raised his arms so they could lift his laptop and check its underside. ‘Want to pat me down?’ he said. ‘Shall I assume the position?’ Not a flicker of response. ‘Give me a call now,’ he said as they exited. ‘Don’t be shy.’ They left the door open, but it was closed by invisible hands once Diana Taverner was in the room.

‘That was exciting,’ he told her. ‘I felt like a movie extra.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you felt more important than that.’ She sat on the opposite side of his desk, and despite the view on offer looked nowhere but at him. He supposed, once you’d had professionals do the business for you, you didn’t need to pay extra attention.

‘Coffee? Tea? I used to have a PA somewhere.’

‘I won’t be long. You were at the Park yesterday.’

‘I was.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘There’s a visitors’ tour. Fascinating stuff. Fascinating.’

‘And you thought it would be cute to tag along, oohing and aahing with the common herd.’

Cantor was wearing a blue suit today, with matching tie and three-day stubble. For his common-herd outing, he’d worn windcheater and nerd-specs: plastic frames with vanilla lenses. He wasn’t surprised he’d been recognised.

Taverner said, ‘Do I have to explain to you why it’s not a good idea that our connection be flagged?’

‘And yet here you are. Openly and in broad daylight.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t mean to teach you your trade. But doesn’t the full court press compromise the, ah, clandestine nature of our relationship?’

‘Well, now. Imagine how complicated it would be to explain away a furtive encounter.’

He was nodding already; his expression that of the bright child who understands first time of hearing. ‘So your coming here in the open renders our meeting official but banal. Remind me why it’s happening?’

‘I’m curious about footage you’ve been airing. Wanted to quiz you on its provenance.’

‘Which is something First Desk would do.’

‘It’s something this First Desk does. As the fact of my doing so might indicate. Mr Cantor—’

‘Damien.’

‘Damien, I’m going to outline how our relationship works. And then, if you see any difficulties arising, we’ll know we need to rethink its viability.’

‘Oh, I’m liking this. Loving it.’

‘This is not a partnership, Damien. This is a strictly one-way arrangement. You, along with a number of others, dispense funding. In doing so, you’re providing a service to the nation, in return for which the nation is in a better position to be able to protect those things you value and hold dear. With me so far?’

‘I am.’

‘What you don’t get is any say in the uses to which I put that funding. That can not and will not happen. Ever. I would have hoped Peter Judd had made that perfectly clear.’

‘Oh, he did. He did.’

‘Further to which, I’m not saying there might not be advantages to your role. Potential priority when stories are breaking, for instance. But you can forget about my appearing anywhere near a newsroom camera.’

He showed his palms. Total surrender.

‘Well then. Now I’ve underlined the message, we have no more to discuss.’

‘Of course not. But just so I’m not getting any wires crossed,’ he said. ‘It’s like I make a donation to the Red Cross. That doesn’t give me the right to tell them how to apply bandages. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Or say I give a dosser in the street ten quid. If he wants to piss it up against a wall, that’s his choice.’

‘Or perhaps he’ll just piss all over you, Damien. That would be his choice also.’ She stood.

‘Sure you won’t stay for coffee?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Or a tour of the company? I mean, you’ve shown me yours. By the way, I keep meaning to ask, do you ever get called “M”?’

‘Enjoy your day.’

He said, ‘One other thing. How’s Doyle working out?’

‘… What’s that?’

‘My man Tommo Doyle. Joined your internal police a few months back, what do you call them? The Dogs?’

Taverner said, ‘In what way is he “your man”?’

‘He worked security for me a couple of years, but he was wasted, frankly. I’m not exactly a high-risk subject. And Tommo was SAS, back in the day. Definitely a good fit for you guys.’

‘I’m not personally acquainted with Mr Doyle,’ she said.

‘Really? I make it my business to be on first-name terms with all my staff,’ said Cantor. ‘Not that I’m trying to teach you how to run your Service.’

‘A wise decision.’

After she’d left, he reran the footage and approved it for that lunchtime’s bulletin. Ultimately this would be the editor’s decision, but ultimately he paid the editor’s salary. Then he stood near the window, looking down on London: its starts and stoppages, its daily chaos. He shouldn’t have mentioned Doyle really, but the worst that would happen was Doyle would lose his job and there was always room for him back here. Tommo was full of good stuff once you got him loosened up. A couple of drinks and he’d tell you stories would make your hair curl.

Treat those you despise with humanity, especially if the reason you despise them is that they have none. One of those lessons you pick up along the way, a little shard of wisdom – aspirational goodness – that becomes a moral anchor, if only by virtue of the fact that the words are there, in your head. So Lech Wicinski supposed that’s how he ought to regard his fellow beings – with humanity – seeing as how he seemed to be suffering the contempt of all around, but mostly what he felt was, fuck them. Especially Jackson Lamb.

‘You want the good news first or the bad news? And I should warn you up front, the bad news is, there’s no good news.’

Which was how Lamb had greeted them once they’d answered the summons to his room, delivered via Slough House’s version of jungle drums: Lamb’s foot, stamping repeatedly on Lamb’s office floor.

Catherine said, ‘Why don’t we cut the pantomime for once, and you could just let everyone know what’s up?’

Lamb, who was drinking what was probably tea from a mug the size of a bucket, raised his eyebrows. ‘Dissent in the ranks? Okay, I’m a reasonable man. Let’s put it to the vote. Hands up those who prefer Standish’s approach. Right. Now, hands up all those in charge. Oh, just me?’ He lowered his hand. ‘The mes have it.’

River Cartwright said, ‘Glad we’ve established that. What’s the bad news?’

‘You know how your self-esteem couldn’t get lower? Well, congratulations. We have a new depth. Tell ’em, Standish.’

‘Louisa was right,’ Catherine said. ‘She was being followed, by a Park junior. As are the rest of you, on and off.’

A certain amount of clamour followed this. Lamb, meanwhile, sipped tea daintily from his bucket, like a well-behaved silverback.

‘As a training exercise,’ Catherine said, once the noise had died down. ‘That’s why Slough House was wiped. To turn you all – us all – into anonymous targets.’

‘So we’re what now,’ asked Louisa. ‘Tin ducks at a fairground stall?’

‘Kind of,’ said Lamb. ‘Only without the individual personalities.’

‘And this is Taverner’s doing,’ said River.

‘You have to admit, it has a sly charm all her own.’

Shirley Dander said, ‘It’s a fucking liberty is what it is.’

Ho was looking from one slow horse to another, as if trying to work out when it would be his turn to speak.

Louisa said, ‘Have you suggested to Taverner that she curtail this?’

‘Hell no. Why would I do that?’

‘To stop your team being treated with disrespect? … Sorry. Forget I spoke.’

‘Already done.’ Lamb set his mug down carefully, then belched with all the restraint of a defrocked nun. ‘Anyway, I can’t see the harm, to be honest. Not like you present a challenge. And if you’re now serving two purposes instead of one, it’s like I’ve just halved all your salaries.’ He beamed. ‘Win win.’

‘What level surveillance are we under?’ asked Lech.

‘What level whattery are we what?’

‘Surveillance. Are they simply using us for pavement practice, or should we assume our airwaves have been tagged?’

‘Ah, yes, I can see why that’s an issue for you. What with all the porn out there, just waiting to be googled.’ He adopted a pious expression. ‘If that’s what one does with porn. You’re asking the wrong person, really. But as far as the surveillance question’s concerned, the answer is, I have no fucking clue. But thank you, Forrest Gimp. Good input.’

Catherine said, ‘So the plan is, we just put up with whatever nonsense the Park wishes upon us?’

Lamb rolled his eyes. ‘God, you’re a drag to have around. Moan moan moan. It’s like being shackled to the ghost of Bob Marley.’

‘I think you mean Jacob.’

‘Depends,’ said Lamb. ‘Which was the one surrounded by wailers?’

After that, the morning crawled past. Lech was deep into his register of social media absconders; #gonequiet, as he’d mentally dubbed it. There seemed no useful algorithm he could apply, so mostly he was making a random trawl of hot-button issues, particularly the aftermaths of terrorist events. In the midst of grief and anger, you could always discern hate. It occurred to him that, for all his pre-digital outlook, Lamb was a walking correlative of Twitter, inasmuch as his daily outpourings of bile didn’t look like drying up anytime soon. An insight he’d once have enjoyed relaying to Sara, his fiancée, when he got home, except they were no longer engaged and no longer lived together. There probably weren’t many relationships could survive accusations of paedophile leanings, he thought. He couldn’t blame Sara for pulling the plug, though he did.

Someone called @thetruthbomb had enjoyed the New Zealand murders. giving it some of there own innit, he’d opined. Almost certainly ‘he’. drink your medicin boys. He hadn’t tweeted since, unless he’d been banned, or changed his name.

Shirley Dander was standing in the doorway.

Lech assumed she’d come to see Roderick Ho, who was headphoned and might as well have been blinkered too, which was as much to say, he was being Roderick Ho. But Dander walked straight to Lech’s desk and stood waiting for a reaction, like a mute charity mugger.

‘… What?’

‘You doing anything?’

Lech looked at his computer, looked at Shirley, looked at the ceiling, looked back at Shirley. ‘Now?’

‘For lunch.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I was thinking, maybe fish?’

Lech said, ‘And why do you want me along?’

‘Bait,’ said Shirley.

The keeper of overlooked history, thought Diana. The curator of the dusty box file.

Or just an old bag in a wheelchair.

Two views of Molly Doran.

Elsewhere in Regent’s Park, the Queens of the Database managed information: stored it, catalogued it, rendered it readily obtainable for the boys and girls on the hub. They were the digital do-it-alls, and prided themselves on the meticulous nature of their record-keeping. They also fielded a formidable pub quiz team. Molly Doran, meanwhile, stalked the perimeter of her analogue estate like an old-world gamekeeper, if admittedly one on wheels; her archive, modelled on the stacks found in its real-world counterparts, was some floors below the surface, at the end of a blue-lit corridor. It occupied a long room lined with upright cabinets, set on tracks allowing them to be pushed together accordion-style when not in use, and in these cabinets languished acres of dusty information, the Park’s past lives and glories, and also its failures and dismal misadventures. All of which could be housed on a thumb drive, if the money was there for digitisation; a process which would be carried out over Molly Doran’s lifeless corpse, as the woman herself had asserted, in the apparent belief that this was a disincentive. When the Beast – Molly’s collective name for the array of databases and info-caches the Queens oversaw – when it broke down or, as daily seemed more likely, turned out to be also available in Mandarin, her shelves would be all that remained secret and untarnished. She’d have shielded the past from the present, which, as far as Diana Taverner was concerned, was the almost exact inverse of the task in hand.

But useful or not, one thing Molly Doran most certainly was was out of the way. Her archive was her island, and she never came to shore. Though check-in data showed she spent more time in the building than anyone bar Diana herself, she might as well have been a ghost on wheels, unnoticed by any but the most sensitive, and dismissed as a story by everyone else. And yet eight weeks ago she’d registered a complaint; reported one of the in-house police team – the Dogs – for ‘unwarranted intrusion, unacceptable language and all-round arseholery’, the last of which wasn’t a recognised infringement of a house rule, but could probably be taken as character appraisal. The complaint had been investigated; an HR lackey sent to mollify Molly, which probably ranked as the most thankless task available to that department; and a mild wigging delivered to the miscreant, in the form of an email suggesting he read up on the disability protocols outlined in the staff handbook. Thereafter, the wheels of the Park had ground on, as had, presumably, the wheels of Molly’s chair.

The Dog in question: Tommo Doyle, Damien Cantor’s ‘man’.

This information had come her way when Diana had looked up Doyle’s employment record on her return to the Park. Cantor’s impertinent valediction, How’s Doyle working out?, had been intended as a one-fingered salute, that was clear; Cantor was a show-off, a man-child, like most men, and clearly convinced of his own cunning. She’d checked the CCTV capture of his tourist outing, and he’d been wearing glasses and a windcheater. A disguise. No wonder Oliver noticed him. And all it was, she thought, was manspreading; he was pissing on a lamppost, marking territory. There was no shortage of such behaviour in this business, or any other; there were always men in the background, imagining they were centre stage. The newer variety, who were careful to keep their inner Weinstein on a leash; older ones like Peter Judd, who wore their chauvinism like battlefield decorations; and uncategorisable miscreants like Jackson Lamb, who probably thought the glass ceiling was a feature in a Berlin brothel. She remembered, not long back, an uncharacteristically informal conversation with Josie, who worked on the hub. It’s funny, Josie had remarked, how we always end up working round male insecurities. The Bechdel test gets flunked here on a daily basis. ‘Our job is tackling crises and clearing up messes,’ Diana had reminded her. ‘That’s pretty clearly going to involve discussing men.’

It was not beyond the bounds of probability, she now thought, that whatever Tommo Doyle had been up to that pissed off Molly Doran would lead back, like an unravelled clew, to Damien smugging Cantor.

There was an alcove just inside the archive room, a wheelchair-sized cubbyhole where she expected to find Molly, but it was currently vacant, and the room silent. You could not, she thought – Molly could not – navigate her way round here without a certain amount of mayhem; the aisles were surely too narrow for a wheelchair to manoeuvre freely. There would be caution, hesitation and stop/start calculation. Except there wasn’t. What there was instead was a smooth cornering on near-silent wheels, and the sudden appearance of Molly Doran barrelling towards her, like Mr Toad in a fury.

She came to a halt with her front wheels a precise inch in front of Diana’s toes.

‘Very impressive,’ Diana said drily.

‘I practise a lot,’ said Molly.

Diana stepped aside, and Molly executed a neat little three-point turn which left her precisely in her alcove.

‘You registered a complaint,’ Diana said, once Molly was stationary.

‘I most certainly bloody did.’

‘About Doyle.’

‘I don’t care what his name is. One of your security gorillas. I’ve told them before, and I’ll tell them again, I won’t have Dogs on my floor. Not even guide ones.’

Diana suppressed irritation. ‘Might I ask why?’

‘You might. I don’t have any tea leaves to hand, so I’ve no idea what’ll happen next.’

‘If I don’t get your cooperation pretty soon, I can sketch a fair idea of what your future will entail. If that helps.’

Molly thrust her jaw out. This was not an especially attractive look for her, though compiling a list of such looks would be a challenge: some time ago – Diana was guessing it was subsequent to the event that saw Molly consigned to a wheelchair – she had taken to making her face up in a manner only a little way short of being eligible for a clown’s patent, if such things existed, and weren’t an internet myth. Red cheeks, pale face, almost as thick as Kevlar. Her hair in tufts. A challenge to the world in general, though Diana was the wrong person to lay a challenge down in front of, unless you were prepared to see it bent in half and thrust into the nearest bin.

‘They tend to be uncivil,’ said Molly.

‘And what form of incivility did this particular example display?’

‘Trespass.’

‘Any detail you want to add?’

‘I found him poking around when I arrived one morning. Which meant he’d opened up and entered without my permission. Which would not, in any case, have been forthcoming.’

‘The Dogs have access rights on all floors,’ said Diana. ‘Regardless of your personal antipathy. What was he doing?’

‘Just checking things out,’ Molly said. ‘That was his story.’

‘You didn’t believe him?’

She said, ‘He called me a crip.’

‘He called you what?’

‘I asked him to leave. He said he didn’t take instructions from a crip.’

‘And so you reported him.’

Molly nodded.

Diana looked around. They were the only people there, which would probably have been true at most times. The secrets Molly kept didn’t burn with urgency; they lay like mantraps in overgrown patches of woodland. Long forgotten, most of them, but not yet rusted shut. When she looked back at Molly, the other woman’s expression was a familiar one; it spoke of an extra layer of knowledge you hadn’t drilled down to yet. Slappable, really, though that wouldn’t be politic. Better to probe a little deeper. There weren’t many options.

She said, ‘You think he was blowing smoke.’

‘Not at the time,’ said Molly. ‘At the time, I saw red. Big man, seen some action by the look of him. Could have thrown me, chair and all, from one side of the room to the other.’

‘And strong men aren’t bullies. Weak ones are.’

They both knew an exception to that rule, of course, but he was a study all to himself.

‘But later, when I thought about it,’ Molly said, ‘after that moron from HR came to pacify me, it occurred to me, that’s why he’d rolled the insults out. To stop me wondering what he’d really been doing.’

‘You’ve checked for missing files?’

Molly didn’t bother to laugh. ‘I’ll do that, when I have a decade to spare.’

‘And all he’d need was a phone,’ Diana finished. Ten minutes on his own in here, he could walk away with a hundred years of history in his pocket.

It was her own fault, or could be made to look like it was, which came to the same thing. Until a few months back, Head Dog had been one Emma Flyte, whose departure Diana had much enjoyed arranging once she’d come into her kingdom. Following this, there’d been a minor exodus from the ranks, three or four of Flyte’s colleagues feeling the need to move on too. It wasn’t a huge issue. Replacements were found. And as the Dogs were frequently recruited from ex-forces personnel, a former SAS officer with private security experience would have been seen as a good fit.

She left Molly and took the lift back to the hub, her mind simmering. Josie was at her office door, the overnights in her hand: reports of incidents that had come in during the dark hours. ‘Bullet points?’

‘Nothing too troublesome. Surveillance updates on the Manchester lot, mostly.’

‘I don’t need to see them. I do need some coffee.’

‘Ma’am.’ Josie was about to head off, but remembered something. ‘Oh, and a suspicious death. Horrible really. A fire in a shipping container.’

‘Christ. Immigrants?’

‘No. Just the one victim.’

‘We’re not the police force.’

‘He used to be Park,’ said Josie.

Catherine Standish refilled Lamb’s bucket several times that morning: he didn’t always drink tea, but when he did, it was an Olympic performance. Her first few visits he was occupied, which is to say, in one of his waking trances: unshod feet on his desk, hands clasped across his belly, open eyes directed at the ceiling. She knew better than to attempt communication. The fourth occasion, he glared at her as if reading her mind. This being so, she spoke it.

‘You might have backed them up a bit.’

‘Oh, shut up. I told Taverner not to fuck with my joes. She probably won’t. But having them tailed by her L-plate muppets isn’t full-on fuckery. More like heavy petting.’ He hefted his mug. ‘Besides, I told them about it, didn’t I? And I don’t imagine Dander will shrug it off.’

Catherine let that sink in. Then said, ‘Somebody might get hurt.’

‘I’m pleased you’ve grasped the essentials.’ He took a magnificent slurp of tea. ‘Besides, Taverner’s heart’s not in it. She’s up to something, and it’s not going well.’

‘And this is a cause for rejoicing? We’re all on the same side, remember?’

‘Jesus, have you learned nothing? When they tell you to take it one day at a time, that doesn’t mean do a memory wipe each morning.’ He set the mug down. It couldn’t possibly be empty yet. ‘If we were all on the same side, we wouldn’t have to watch our own backs.’

‘We can’t watch our own backs. We have to watch each other’s.’

‘That, sir, is arrant pedantry,’ Lamb said, in a fair approximation of Winston Churchill. ‘Up with which you can fuck right off.’

He was impossible in this mood, which was something it had in common with all his other moods.

Catherine said, ‘What do you mean, Taverner’s not going well?’

‘I mean she might have made a mistake.’

‘In picking on your crew?’

‘Christ, no. That’s a no-brainer. No, it’s what she said last night, then pretended she hadn’t. She’s worried about something, and as she has no personal life, it’s something to do with the Park.’ He squinted at the ceiling. ‘And off-book, or she’d not be worried. Anything in-house, she can blame on someone else.’

‘You think she’s running a black op?’

‘Last time she tried that, heads rolled. Well, not rolled exactly. But definitely sat on a tabletop looking alarmed.’

‘Thanks for the memory. What do you plan to do?’

‘I plan to have a big lunch and a long nap,’ said Lamb. ‘But send Ho up first. Don’t see why I should be the only one making an effort.’

The hotel was just off Kingsway, and was a discreet and mildly shabby concern, the kind of place where you might bring a hooker, but only if you were classy enough to pay for the whole night. Peter Judd collected his key at reception and asked if there was a kettle in the room. He gestured to the plastic bag he held, which was all the luggage he carried. ‘I’ve brought my own biscuits,’ he said, in a tone of self-congratulation that implied that walking into a supermarket, grasping the general concept, and successfully walking out with a purchase was an achievement on a par with Prince Charles posting a letter by himself.

‘All our rooms are provided with full amenities,’ he was assured.

‘I’m very glad to hear that,’ he said. ‘Whatever it means. Could you ring when my guest arrives?’

Which happened within the hour.

His guest was a man in early middle age, running to fat, and with sweaty jowls which weren’t shaved too closely; less a style statement than lack of care. His hair hadn’t been washed of late, and his shirt was too snug a fit for bystanders’ comfort, so God knew what wearing it felt like. He looked round the room suspiciously before venturing inside; stood with the door hanging open behind him, like an exit strategy for dummies. Judd, who had arranged the two available armchairs in the centre of the room, was pouring boiling water into a teapot. ‘Put wood in hole,’ he said, in a comedy accent. ‘That’s what you northerners say, isn’t it?’

‘I’m from Hertfordshire.’

‘Yes.’ He carried the teapot to a small table on which he’d already placed two teacups and the now opened packet of biscuits. ‘I didn’t put them on a plate,’ he said. ‘I assumed you don’t go for airs and graces.’

The man had closed the door at last, and at Judd’s invitation took one of the two chairs.

‘So,’ said Judd, taking the other. ‘Desmond Flint. Flinty. I presume your nickname comes from adding a Y, rather than from your unyielding nature?’

Flint just stared.

‘Well, it cuts down on imaginative effort, I suppose,’ said Judd. ‘Forgive me if I appear ill at ease.’ He was as ill at ease as a cat in a basket. ‘At Oxford I quite often encountered those who, ah, identified as working class. But what they meant was, they went to only a minor public school. Do you take milk? There are little tubs.’

‘Why am I here?’

‘To tell me what you’re doing. What you think you’re doing. With the, ah, you know. The Yellow Vests.’

‘And why the hell should I do that?’

‘Because there’ll be something in it for you.’

Flint kept staring a moment longer, then shook off whatever grim spell he’d fallen under. His words, when they came, were greased by familiarity.

‘It’s the will of the people being frustrated over and over. These past few years, we’ve seen it happen time and again, election promises broken, Parliament dragging its feet before acting on what the people want. What they demand. These politicians, they’re the servants of the people, right? So how come they get to decide what orders they do and don’t carry out? All that has to come to an end. And that’s what we’re doing. Bringing it to an end.’

Judd waited until Flint was done, then clapped politely. ‘You know what I like most about that? It’s that you said sweet fuck all.’

‘I was explaining—’

‘No, you were saying words. But don’t get me wrong.’ He lifted the teapot and began pouring. ‘That’s all you need do right now. Say the words and make the noises. Nobody’s really listening, they’re just tapping along to the beat.’

‘I’m listened to.’

‘No. You’re noticed, that’s all. But that’s nothing to worry about at this stage. There’s a fine line between political notoriety and political respectability, and that’s where you’re balanced. A good starting point for a career.’

‘If I was interested in political respectability, I’d have stood for election. And a fat lot of good that would have done.’ Flint picked his teacup up, but put it down without drinking from it. ‘We all know the system’s rigged to favour Establishment voices. Of which you’re one, by the way. So why should I be interested in anything you have to say?’

‘Because I’ve been there and walked away from it,’ said Judd smoothly. ‘I know what it’s like to occupy one of the great offices of state, and what it’s like to feel dissatisfaction – disillusionment – with the process.’ He oozed sincerity. ‘I spent most of my life believing I could do good within the walls as they currently stand. But I came to recognise that there will always be those who will do everything in their power to maintain the status quo, even when that so obviously favours such a small section of society.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Yes, that’s a good point. Do help yourself to a biscuit.’ He did so himself, and went on, ‘You know, I don’t get told to fuck off half often enough, given the bullshit I spout. On the other hand, I’m in PR now. If I weren’t spouting bullshit, I’d not be doing my job.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To see how far I can push you.’

‘In what way, push?’

‘Up the greasy pole. To the summit. Any metaphor you care to employ. A metaphor is when you describe something as if it were something else.’

‘Fuck off again.’

‘See? We’re getting along famously.’

Flint took a biscuit. ‘There were rumours you had no choice but to go. All sorts of mischief going on behind the scenes.’

‘That’s primarily what scenes are for, old man. To cover up what’s going on behind them. And the fact that you don’t know that underlines how much you need me on your team. As for my departure from front-line politics, the truth? Yes, I was aiming for the top, and was prevented from reaching it. But that was then and this is now. And things are changing. In your own small way you’re helping bring that about, though it would be happening anyway. It might be wise not to forget that.’

‘There’s change coming, you got that part right. Massive change. And long overdue.’

‘Well now. Let’s not overestimate its impact. When the Establishment crumbles, you know what’ll replace it? The Establishment. There’ll be new letterheads printed, that’s all. And what I’m offering you is the opportunity to climb on board. You might as well. If not you, it’ll be someone else.’

‘Do you think you’re being funny, mate? Because I don’t have to just walk out, you know? I could knock your block off first.’

‘I’m sure you could. You do look, if I have the terminology right, “well hard”. But do either of those things, and at the very least you’ll miss learning something you ought to know.’

Judd sipped tea again, and waited.

Flint had his hands on the arms of his chair, ready to get up. But he didn’t.

Judd sipped more tea. Waited.

At last Flint said, ‘Well?’

‘The Secret Service have people in your organisation.’

‘… We’re not an organisation, as such.’

‘Aren’t you really? As such? But you have people doing things, don’t you? You’re having leaflets printed. Who’s writing the copy? Who’s arranging the printing? Who’s sorting them into bundles—’

‘Okay.’

‘—and arranging their distribution? Who decides when and where you next do whatever it is you’re going to do? And who decides what that is?’

‘I said okay.’

Judd smiled benevolently. ‘Even if you don’t have a steering committee, you have decisions to make, and people helping make them. It’s possible that among that number are some who are there specifically for the purpose of reporting your intentions to what I suppose we’ll have to call the authorities. Or maybe they’re just hangers-on, joining your gatherings. If so, you’ll soon work out who they are. They’ll be the ones encouraging the others to pick up a brick and throw it through a window. Or suggesting that instead of moving on nicely when Mr Policeman instructs, you have a go at him instead. Agents provocateurs, they’re called. Like the posh knickers, and with the same outcome in mind.’ He smiled. ‘Someone’s going to get fucked.’

‘And you’re saying that’s me.’

‘And by association, everyone who supports your movement.’ Judd put his cup down. ‘More? Sure? You don’t mind if I do?’ He poured. ‘I may already have managed to curtail these covert activities. If not, I shall do so in short order. Meanwhile, let me return to my opening argument. Political respectability. It’s not about being elected, it’s about having a voice.’

‘Oh, I have a voice. And it’s being heard loud and clear.’

‘Is it? Because as far as mainstream media goes, you’re a joke. The rabble at the gates. All that muckraking going on, digging up your CV. Non-payment of child support, some minor cases of affray. Mortgage fraud too, wasn’t it?’

‘That was a clerical error!’

‘Oh, I’m sure. But the point is, that’s what the headlines are saying every time your picture appears. But they’re not painting you a yob just because you’re a yob. They’re doing it because they’re frightened. What you need to do is make capital out of that fear.’

Flint was rubbing his stomach abstractedly. It looked very much like that was the sort of thing he did when concentrating, so was presumably already on Judd’s mental list of stuff that would need sorting out. He said, ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘That I help,’ Judd told him. ‘I can put you next to the right people, who’ll give you a fair hearing, and the opportunity to have your voice heard unaccompanied by editorial condemnation.’

‘And?’

‘And I’ll make sure you’re seen in the right places, and with the right company. At the moment you’re on the news pages, and a punchline on panel shows. But once you start appearing in the diary columns, well. Then you’re being taken seriously.’ He put his cup down. ‘Channel Go will do for starters. It has aspirations, and it’s looking for someone to pin its colours to. If it decides to back you, that means you’ll have got clout tomorrow you didn’t have today. And if that happens often enough, you become an unstoppable force.’

‘You make it sound easy,’ said Flint. ‘But what’s in it for you?’

‘Power.’

‘That’s very … frank.’

‘I often am. Oh, I lie my teeth off like everyone else when it’s in my best interests. But here and now, there’s no point lying. Your movement may be going places, and I’ve never wanted to be on the wrong side of history. That being the losing side, of course.’

‘And what if I decide I don’t want your help?’

‘Then I’ll put the same effort into destroying you. But don’t let that upset you. It’s nothing personal.’

Flint was nodding, agreeing with some conclusion he’d just reached. ‘I always thought you were just another posh dick. Like him in Number Ten. But you’re a hard bastard, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Judd. ‘Also, my life’s not a super-injunction. And the number of children I have is a matter of public record.’

‘Out of interest—’

‘I said public record. I didn’t say I’d committed it to memory. I’ll call this evening. Have an answer ready.’

And just like that he switched his attention off, as if Desmond Flint had already left the room.

‘I should warn you,’ said Shirley Dander. ‘Last couple of times I teamed up with someone, they’re both dead.’

‘… Did you kill them?’

‘Uh-uh.’ She shook her head virtuously. ‘I mean, I might kill Ho given the chance. But it hasn’t come up.’

They’d bought enchiladas at Whitecross market and carried them up to the Barbican terraces; were eating perched on the concrete border of a dystopian-looking flowerbed. It struck Lech that this was the first time he’d shared a meal in months. Even half an hour ago, the notion would have sounded absurd. Shirley wasn’t a friend. She was just a nearby occurrence, like a disturbing weather pattern.

He took a mouthful and scanned both directions. There was nobody watching that he could see. That, though, would be the point of the exercise.

Shirley said, ‘Don’t do that.’

‘… What?’

‘Let anyone know we know.’

He ran that through translation software. ‘You spotted someone?’

Shirley shrugged. ‘There was a guy at the market might have been following. But once you know someone’s doing it, you see the bastards everywhere. Like mice.’

Lech thought of the mousetrap he’d once put in his bin, a little surprise for Roddy Ho, who’d been going through his rubbish. Good times.

He said, ‘They must be tripping over each other, if we’ve all got a shadow. And won’t they be wondering how come we all work in the same building?’

‘So we’re a building full of patsies. Besides, maybe they’re doing us one at a time. Who knows? The fact they’re doing it at all is what pisses me off.’

‘Enough to “team up” with the in-house pariah?’

Shirley scrunched her face into make-believe misery. ‘Boohoo. I got caught watching kiddy porn. Poor me.’

‘Fuck you, Dander. I didn’t do that, never have, never would.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Never.’

‘Yeah. That’s what Catherine said.’

He almost choked. ‘… She said what?’

‘That what happened with the kiddy porn was a plant. That you’d been framed. She didn’t say why. Classified.’ She made quote marks with her fingers to illustrate the word, and sprayed sauce onto Lech’s trouser leg. ‘Oh, sorry.’

He looked at the red splashes on his chinos, then at Shirley, cramming what was left of her lunch into her mouth. She rolled her eyes at him. I said sorry.

‘You all know I was framed. Lamb too. And you all still treat me like shit.’

Shirley spoke through food. ‘So you got a tough break. Doesn’t mean we have to like you. You’re kind of a prick most of the time.’

‘For fuck’s sake! I’ve had my whole life destroyed!’

‘None of us are in our happy place.’ She swallowed, then offered him her napkin. ‘You could pour some water on that. Then dab at it.’

‘It’ll make it worse.’

‘But at least you’ll be doing something.’ He made no move to take the napkin, so she wiped her mouth with it instead. ‘Look. Shit happened. Join the club. Meanwhile, more shit is being dropped from a height by Regent’s Park’s pigeon squadron. You gunna lie back with your mouth open, or grab a bow and arrow?’

Lech resisted the temptation to rub at the stain on his trousers and rubbed his cheek instead. The scarring felt strange terrain still; as if he were wearing a mask, and kept forgetting about it. Or had woken to find himself taking part in a masquerade, or an armed robbery. ‘You’re kind of a prick yourself,’ he told her.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Shirley. ‘You get used to it. Do you do coke ever?’

‘… No. Well, sometimes. But no.’

‘I wasn’t offering. Just, there’s a guy on one of the stalls down there, one of the Thai places? He’s your man, you get the urge.’

He had the weird feeling this was Shirley’s idea of a friendship offering. The pipe of peace. Three guesses what would end up in any pipe Shirley got hold of.

‘Okay,’ he said at last. The terrace was empty now, apart from themselves. Shreds of blue sky were showing through rips in the cloud canopy. ‘What are you planning?’

Shirley said, ‘Let’s take one of the bastards down.’

River was in his office, having spent the day staring at his screen, or else through the window, which had planted a square of sunlight onto the vacant desk he shared the room with. It had once been where Sid Baker sat, and that remained its chief significance even during J. K. Coe’s tenure, which hadn’t been fair on Coe, but Slough House wasn’t big on fairness. And now Sid was back. All this time, she’d been in the world, hidden away; partly erased but still breathing, waiting for the moment to appear to him, in his grandfather’s study.

For months he’d been wondering what secrets might be preserved in that room, encrypted among a wealth of facts and fictions. Bringing them into the light would be a task for an archivist – a Molly Doran. He remembered sitting in the kitchen once, watching his grandmother prepare a Christmas goose: this had involved removing its organs, which Rose had set about with the same unhurried calm she had approached most things, explaining as she did so the word ‘haruspicate’. To divine the future from the entrails of birds or beasts. He’d planned the opposite: to unshelve those books, crack their spines, break their wings, and examine their innards for clues to the past. His grandfather’s past, he’d assumed. Instead, what he’d found in that room was something broken off from his own life. Now read on.

Roderick Ho had been summoned to Lamb’s presence after the meeting this morning, but was back in his own office now. You didn’t have to be a spy in Slough House: the creaky staircases and unoiled doors offered clues as to who was where. When River went downstairs, he found that Ho had set his monitors up so they were angled towards him like a tanning device. PC pallor. From behind them, he squinted suspiciously at River.

‘What’s happening?’ River asked.

‘… Why?’

‘Just curious.’

Ho shook his head. ‘Uh-uh.’

‘Lamb got you on some special mission?’

Ho’s eyes narrowed, which River took as a yes. But then, Ho always thought whatever he was doing was a special mission, even downloading menus from local takeaways.

‘Well, I’ve got one. When you’re free.’

‘I don’t work for you.’

‘None of us work for each other. We work with each other. As in, cooperate.’ Ho looked like he was struggling with the concept, so River offered a clue. ‘Like the Avengers?’

Ho rolled his eyes.

‘No, really. I can just see you as Mrs Peel.’

‘You called?’

This was Louisa, who’d followed River downstairs.

Ho said, ‘I’m busy. Leave me alone.’

Louisa came and stood behind him, studied his screens. Ho made a half-hearted attempt to shield them with his arms, like a schoolboy in an exam, but not being an octopus, he was a few limbs short of a barricade.

She said, ‘Uber records? Whose log are you hacking?’

‘I’m not hacking it. I’m just looking.’

‘Suppose I gave you a street name and a date,’ River said. ‘Told you that some people had been going door to door, saying they were missionaries.’

‘What you on about?’

‘I bet you couldn’t tell me if they really were or not.’

Louisa said, ‘Don’t try to play him. He’s too smart.’ She pointed to one of the screens. ‘D Taverner? You’re running a number on Lady Di?’

Anything to do with Lady Di grabbed River’s attention. ‘This is for Lamb, right? What’s he up to?’

‘That’s strictly need to know.’

‘I bet you’ve always wanted to say that.’

Louisa was still reading the screen, though had to lean in close: a list of dates, a list of drivers, a list of journeys. ‘The beginning of January.’

‘That’s the week we were wiped,’ said River.

Ho did something, and the screens went blank.

‘Ah, come on! I was reading that!’

‘Get out of my room,’ said Ho.

‘What’s all the noise about?’

And now Catherine had joined them.

‘Miss! Miss!’ said Louisa. ‘Ho’s using his computer to spy on people, miss!’

‘I’m sure that’s very funny,’ said Catherine. ‘But it’s also noisier than Lamb likes it when he’s awake. Which he will be if this goes on much longer.’

Ho said, ‘Cartwright wants me to check up on some missionaries.’

Catherine raised an eyebrow in River’s direction.

‘Brief moment of spiritual crisis,’ said River. ‘I thought Roddy might be able to help. I’d forgotten he was a dick.’

‘Delete your account,’ Ho told him.

‘You know Lamb’s expecting the next batch of safe-house possibles by five?’ Catherine said.

The list River was compiling, of properties which might potentially be utilised as hideaways by non-friendlies. It was intended to cover the entire country, a codicil River always spelled out word by word when reminding himself what his job consisted of.

The. Entire. Country.

‘And he’ll have it,’ he said. ‘Just taking a little downtime with my colleagues. Always a morale booster.’

‘Careful,’ said Catherine. ‘If Lamb takes it into his head to appoint a morale officer, it’ll make all our lives miserable.’

She left.

Louisa studied Ho’s blank screens. ‘Probably just as well,’ she said. ‘Not sure how you’d go about finding a pair of anonymous doorknockers.’

Ho rolled his eyes.

‘I thought you said not to play him,’ said River.

‘You were playing him,’ said Louisa. ‘I’m just signalling his limitations.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Ho. His fingers danced, and the screens came back to life. ‘Street name?’

River recited the postcode and date Sid had given him.

‘Watch the magic happen.’

River and Louisa shared a glance.

‘I’d as soon go boil the kettle,’ Louisa said.

In the kitchen, River moodily opened cupboard doors and closed them again. An ancient bag of sugar, turned to stone; damp coffee filters. He collected the broken-off handle of a ceramic mug from an otherwise empty shelf and twirled it in his fingers. ‘Do you ever wonder what you’d have ended up doing?’ he said. ‘I mean, if you’d just said fuck it when they offered you Slough House?’

‘Oh, please.’ Louisa was rinsing her cafetière. ‘You do realise it’s not about you?’ she said. ‘Sid being alive, I mean?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means she’s not just a chapter in your life story. It would be an idea not to forget that.’

‘You’re supposed to be an intelligence officer. Not an agony column.’

‘No one said I can’t be both.’ An idea struck her. River saw this happen: she paused, the wet cafetière in her hands. ‘Sid thinks she’s being targeted.’

‘I know. I told you that.’

‘Yeah, but so are we. Right? And she was a slow horse, or used to be. Did you know that Kay died?’

‘Kay? Kay White?’

‘Remember her?’

‘She’s the one never shut up,’ said River. ‘How did she die? She can’t have been that old.’

‘Fell off a ladder, Catherine said. Something like that, anyway. Some kind of accident. Easy to fake.’

River looked at the broken handle in his palm, then tossed it into the sink. It made a scattering noise. ‘So what, you think they’re not just stalking us, these Park trainees? You think they’re knocking us off? That doesn’t sound likely. And besides, Kay’s not been one of us for years …’

His voice trailed away.

‘Nor has Sid,’ Louisa supplied.

They shared a look.

‘What do you think?’

River said, ‘It’s out there. Way out there.’

‘Yeah, but. A lot of the things that happen round here are.’

‘The Park, though. Taverner? She’d not authorise anything like that.’

One of Lamb’s saws came to mind, though. All kinds of outlandish shit goes on.

‘We should take this upstairs.’

‘No,’ said River. ‘I promised her I wouldn’t.’

‘Promised who?’ Roderick Ho had appeared in the doorway.

‘Nobody,’ said River. ‘What’d you find?’

Ho ignored him, and spoke to Louisa. ‘Told you I could do it.’

‘Actually,’ said Louisa, ‘you didn’t. Not in words.’

‘Same difference.’ He slid past River and opened the fridge, where half a pizza sat, still in its box. He wormed it out, but left the box where it was. ‘Seven tweeters in that postcode,’ he said, closing the fridge door. ‘Two mentioned people knocking on the door the morning you said.’

‘It was me said it,’ River put in helpfully. ‘If that matters.’

It didn’t seem to. ‘One said they were from the Latter Day Church of Heaven, and the other from the Latter Day Church of Christ the Redeemer. There’s no such places. So the dudes weren’t righteous, doesn’t look like.’

‘Is English your second language or your third?’

Ho scowled.

From upstairs came a familiar thump: Jackson Lamb wanting attention.

River said, ‘He wants your download on Lady Di. What’s that about?’

‘It’s below your pay grade,’ said Ho, cramming his pizza into his mouth before heading up the stairs.

‘Oh, happy day,’ said Louisa. ‘I want him to keep saying that forever.’

River said, ‘So they weren’t missionaries.’

‘Wouldn’t appear so.’

‘Which means Sid was right. They were looking for her.’

‘Possibly.’ The kitchen had filled with the smell of fresh coffee, and for a moment Slough House was transformed. ‘So it’s like I said before. You need to take this upstairs.’

‘The same upstairs using us as practice dummies?’

‘I meant Lamb.’

River said, ‘If we’ve been wiped, how come these guys know who to come looking for? If that’s what’s happening?’

She stared. ‘You’re not seriously suggesting Lamb has anything to do with it?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Except Sid’s in danger.’

‘And you plan to get all Jason Statham on it.’

‘Tell Catherine I’ve been taken sick, would you? Must have been something I saw Ho eat.’

Before he could leave, she said, ‘River?’

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to lose anyone else.’

‘When did the Stath ever get lost?’

‘Well, he’s made some pretty iffy career choices,’ Louisa said, but River was gone.

Afternoons dragged, but this one was reaching its apex now; tipping into evening. This happened differently than up north, where Sid had spent the last few years; differently, too, from the way it happened in cities, where you could measure sunlight’s decline against the buildings. Here there were trees that ought to perform the same function, but they were too variable to rely on, too prone to arbitrary movement, and seemed as if they might be capable of pushing the day on as their moods took them, ushering in the dusk with their gently waving limbs.

They were best watched from upstairs. Sid had told River she stayed in the study, but that wasn’t true. Obviously, she had to use the bathroom, and while these were brief furtive visits, tarried over no longer than necessary to get the job done, there were also times, like now, when she’d climb the stairs to the master bedroom, which had a view of the lane that wound through the trees. This was surprisingly well maintained, given its negligible importance. Eventually it joined forces with a larger road, which in turn fed into a motorway, which in turn became London. All these miles distant, that was a barely imaginable turbulence. Here, in rural stillness, there was a house next door, separated by a generous strip of garden and a bossy hedge; that aside, the next dwelling was a hundred yards down the lane. Before reaching it, you could cut off along a footpath, which took you to the village. She knew all this from a map she’d found in the study. There were other footpaths, dotted lines; you could tear along them, and rip the countryside to shreds. Scatter the pieces like leaves in a wind.

Tonight, anxiety had drawn her upstairs. Being alone all day skewed her emotional thermostat. The continual silence oppressed her, yet any unexpected noise – a passing lorry, passing voices – would have her crouching against a wall, waiting for it to subside. And then she’d find herself stroking the rift in her skull, wondering how much of her identity, of Sidonie Baker, had been carved away by that bullet’s passage. She had never been one to cower against walls. That was something the bullet had left her with; a whole new character trait, conjured out of pain and confusion.

There wasn’t much pain, to be fair. There were occasional blinding headaches that came from nowhere and vanished just as suddenly, but they were happening less often. But her dreams had altered character, and made sleep bizarre and unrewarding. The bullet itself would appear to her, taking on the shape of a white-suited Belgian with an asymmetrical moustache. It had taken an unfeasibly long while for Sid to deduce that this was Hercule Poirot. Your little grey cells, non? he would twinkle. So many of them, how you say, smeared on the pavement. Tt Tt Tt. This vowelless admonition would recur during her waking hours. It was her fault, was what he meant. You got in my way. Tt Tt Tt.

The bullet had been removed from her head in the hours that followed the shooting. But it remained there nevertheless; her deadly passenger, with her for the long haul.

The sky grew darker and the world through the window dimmed. Before coming upstairs she had cut a slice from the loaf River had brought, and wrapped it round a hunk of cheddar. Bread, cheese. She supposed River had other things to do than plan menus, but still. That could be something to tease him about when he turned up, teasing being something requiring forethought now. If she were to re-enter her old life she’d need more than a map of the neighbourhood, which was illuminated suddenly, the neighbourhood not the map, by a pair of headlights slicing crescent shapes out of the dusk, briefly rendering bright the room: its bare painted walls, its curtainless window frame. She stopped chewing. The car wasn’t River’s, but it slowed anyway, and came to a halt on the verge. The engine died. Something inside Sid woke and fluttered. The car would move on soon. It would start up, drive away, and before long River would arrive, and she’d tease him about the bread and cheese.

Tt Tt Tt, said Hercule Poirot in her head. Tt Tt Tt.

But the car didn’t move. Instead its doors opened and two people got out, a man and a woman she recognised. They had knocked on her door in Cumbria, dressed as missionaries, and here they were, come to kill her again.

All down the lane the trees shifted as a gust of wind rifled through them. If she were out there she’d hear them sigh as they moved, but from inside the house, it was a silent blessing they bestowed. Their jobs were done, and night had fallen, and it seemed to Sid they were waving goodbye.