Slow Horses

Chapter 1

Let us be clear about this much at least: Slough House is not in Slough, nor is it a house. Its front door lurks in a dusty recess between commercial premises in the Borough of Finsbury, a stone’s throw from Barbican Station. To its left is a former newsagent’s, now a newsagent’s/grocer’s/off-licence, with DVD rental a blooming sideline; to its right, the New Empire Chinese restaurant, whose windows are constantly obscured by a thick red curtain. A typewritten menu propped against the glass has yellowed with age but is never replaced; is merely amended with marker pen. If diversification has been the key to the newsagent’s survival, retrenchment has been the long-term strategy of the New Empire, with dishes regularly struck from its menu like numbers off a bingo card. It is one of Jackson Lamb’s core beliefs that eventually all the New Empire will offer will be egg-fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork. All served behind thick red curtains, as if paucity of choice were a national secret.

The front door, as stated, lurks in a recess. Its ancient black paintwork is spattered with roadsplash, and the shallow pane of glass above its jamb betrays no light within. An empty milk bottle has stood in its shadow so long, city lichen has bonded it to the pavement. There is no doorbell, and the letterbox has healed like a childhood wound: any mail—and there’s never any mail—would push at its flap without achieving entry. It’s as if the door were a dummy, its only reason for existing being to provide a buffer zone between shop and restaurant. Indeed, you could sit at the bus stop opposite for days on end, and never see anyone use it. Except that, if you sat at the bus stop opposite for long, you’d find interest being taken in your presence. A thickset man, probably chewing gum, might sit next to you. His presence discourages. He wears an air of repressed violence, of a grudge carried long enough that it’s ceased to matter to him where he lays it down, and he’ll watch you until you’re out of sight.

Meanwhile, the stream in and out of the newsagent’s is more or less constant. And there’s always pavement business occurring; always people heading one way or the other. A kerbside sweeper trundles past, its revolving brushes shuffling cigarette ends and splinters of glass and bottle tops into its maw. Two men, heading in opposite directions, perform that little avoidance dance, each one’s manoeuvre mirrored by the other’s, but manage to pass without colliding. A woman, talking on a mobile phone, checks her reflection in the window as she walks. Way overhead a helicopter buzzes, reporting on roadworks for a radio station.

And throughout all this, which happens every day, the door remains closed. Above the New Empire and the newsagent’s, Slough House’s windows rise four storeys into Finsbury’s unwelcoming October skies, and are flaked and grimy, but not opaque. To the upstairs rider on a passing bus, delayed for any length of time—which can easily happen; a combination of traffic lights, near-constant roadworks, and the celebrated inertia of London buses—they offer views of first-floor rooms that are mostly yellow and grey. Old yellow, and old grey. The yellows are the walls, or what can be seen of the walls behind grey filing cabinets and grey, institutional bookcases, on which are ranged out-of-date reference volumes; some lying on their backs; others leaning against their companions for support; a few still upright, the lettering on their spines rendered ghostly by a daily wash of electric light. Elsewhere, lever arch files have been higgledy-piggled into spaces too small; piles of them jammed vertically between shelves, leaving the uppermost squeezed outwards, threatening to fall. The ceilings are yellowed too, an unhealthy shade smeared here and there with cobweb. And the desks and chairs in these first-storey rooms are of the same functional metal as the bookshelves, and possibly commandeered from the same institutional source: a decommissioned barracks, or a prison administration block. These are not chairs to sit back in, gazing thoughtfully into space. Nor are they desks to treat as an extension of one’s personality, and decorate with photographs and mascots. Which facts in themselves convey a certain information: that those who labour here are not so well regarded that their comfort is deemed as being of account. They’re meant to sit and perform their tasks with the minimum of distraction. And then to leave by a back door, unobserved by kerbside sweepers, or women with mobile phones.

The bus’s upper deck offers less of a view of the next storey, though glimpses of the same nicotine-stained ceilings are available. But even a three-decker bus wouldn’t cast much light: the offices on the second floor are distressingly similar to those below. And besides, the information picked out in gold lettering on their windows says enough to dull interest. W W Henderson, it reads. Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. Occasionally, from behind the serifed flamboyance of this long-redundant logo, a figure will appear, and regard the street below as if he’s looking at something else altogether. But whatever that is, it won’t hold his attention long. In a moment or two, he’ll be gone.

No such entertainment is promised by the uppermost storey, whose windows have blinds drawn over them. Whoever inhabits this level is evidently disinclined to be reminded of a world outside, or to have accidental rays of sunshine pierce his gloom. But this too is a clue, since it indicates that whoever haunts this floor has the freedom to choose darkness, and freedom of choice is generally limited to those in charge. Slough House, then—a name which appears on no official documentation, nameplate or headed notepaper; no utility bill or deed of leasehold; no business card or phone book or estate agent’s listing; which is not this building’s name at all, in any but the most colloquial of senses—is evidently run from the top down, though judging by the uniformly miserable decor, the hierarchy is of a restricted character. You’re either at the top or you’re not. And only Jackson Lamb is at the top.

At length, the traffic lights change. The bus coughs into movement, and trundles on its way to St Paul’s. And in her last few seconds of viewing, our upstairs passenger might wonder what it’s like, working in these offices; might even conjure a brief fantasy in which the building, instead of a faltering legal practice, becomes an overhead dungeon to which the failures of some larger service are consigned as punishment: for crimes of drugs and drunkenness and lechery; of politics and betrayal; of unhappiness and doubt; and of the unforgivable carelessness of allowing a man on a tube platform to detonate himself, killing or maiming an estimated 120 people and causing £30m worth of actual damage, along with a projected £2.5 billion in lost tourist revenue—becomes, in effect, an administrative oubliette where, alongside a pre-digital overflow of paperwork, a post-useful crew of misfits can be stored and left to gather dust.

Such a fancy won’t survive the time it takes the bus to pass beneath the nearby pedestrian bridge, of course. But one inkling might last a while longer: that the yellows and greys that dominate the colour scheme aren’t what they first appear—that the yellow isn’t yellow at all, but white exhausted by stale breath and tobacco, by pot-noodle fumes and overcoats left to dry on radiators; and that the grey isn’t grey but black with the stuffing knocked out of it. But this thought too will quickly fade, because few things associated with Slough House stick in the mind; its name alone having proved durable, born years ago, in a casual exchange between spooks:

Lamb’s been banished.

Where’ve they sent him? Somewhere awful?

Bad as it gets.

God, not Slough?

Might as well be.

Which, in a world of secrets and legends, was all it took to give a name to Jackson Lamb’s new kingdom: a place of yellows and greys, where once all was black and white.

Just after 7 a.m. a light went on at the second-storey window, and a figure appeared behind W W Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. On the street below, a milk float rattled past. The figure hovered a moment, as if expecting the float to turn dangerous, but withdrew once it passed from sight. Inside, he resumed the business at hand, up-ending a soaking black rubbish sack on to a newspaper spread across the worn and faded carpet.

The air was immediately polluted.

Rubber-gloved, wrinkle-nosed, he got to his knees and began picking through the mess.

Eggshells, vegetable ends, coffee grounds in melting paper filters, parchment-coloured teabags, a sliver of soap, labels from jars, a plastic squeezy bottle, florets of stained kitchen towels, torn brown envelopes, corks, bottle tops, the coiled spring and cardboard back of a spiral-notepad, some bits of broken crockery which didn’t fit together, tin trays from takeaway meals, scrunched-up Post-its, a pizza box, a wrung-out tube of toothpaste, two juice cartons, an empty tin of shoe polish, a plastic scoop, and seven carefully bundled parcels made from pages of Searchlight.

And much else that wasn’t immediately identifiable. All of it sopping wet and glistening, sluglike, in the light of the overhead bulb.

He sat back on his haunches. Picked up the first of the Searchlight parcels, and unwrapped it as carefully as he could.

The contents of an ashtray fell on to the carpet.

He shook his head, and dropped the rotting newspaper back on the pile.

A sound made its way up the back stairs, and he paused, but it didn’t repeat. All entrances and exits from Slough House came via a back yard with mildewed, slimy walls, and everyone who came in made a large, unfriendly noise doing so, because the door stuck and—like most of the people using it—needed a good kicking. But this sound had been nothing like that, so he shook his head and decided it had been the building waking up; flexing its lintels or whatever old buildings did in the morning, after a night of rain. Rain he’d been out in, collecting the journalist’s rubbish.

Eggshells, vegetable ends, coffee grounds in melting paper filters …

He picked another of the paper parcels, its scrunched-up headline a denunciation of a recent BNP demo, and sniffed it tentatively. Didn’t smell like an ashtray.

‘A sense of humour can be a real bastard,’ Jackson Lamb said.

River dropped the parcel.

Lamb was leaning in the doorway, his cheeks glistening slightly as they tended to after exertion. Climbing stairs counted, though he’d not made a squeak on them. River could barely manage such stealth himself, and he wasn’t carrying Lamb’s weight: most of it gathered round his middle, like a pregnancy. A shabby grey raincoat shrouded it now, while the umbrella hooked over his arm dripped on to the floor.

River, trying to hide the fact that his heart had just punched him in the ribs, said, ‘You think he’s calling us Nazis?’

‘Well, yes. Obviously he’s calling us Nazis. But I meant you doing this on Sid’s half of the room.’

River picked up the fallen bundle but it gave way as he did so, the paper too wet to contain its contents, spilling a stew of small bones and scraped-away skin—for a nasty moment, evidence of a brutal, baby-sized murder. And then the shape of a chicken asserted itself from the collection; a misshapen chicken—all legs and wings—but recognizably a former bird. Lamb snorted. River rubbed his gloved hands together, smearing sodden lumps of newspaper into balls, then shaking them into the pile. The black and red inks wouldn’t lose their grip so easily. The once-yellow gloves turned the colour of miners’ fingers.

Lamb said, ‘That wasn’t too clever.’

Thank you for that, River thought. Thanks for pointing that out.

The previous night he’d lurked outside the journo’s past midnight, wresting what shelter he could from the slight overhang of the building opposite while rain belted down like Noah’s nightmare. Most of the neighbours had done their civic duty, black sacks lined up like sitting pigs, or council-supplied wheelie bins standing sentry by doors. But nothing outside the journo’s. Cold rain tracked down River’s neck, mapping a course to the crack of his arse, and he knew it didn’t matter how long he stood there, he was going to have no joy.

‘Don’t get caught,’ Lamb had said.

Of course I won’t get bloody caught, he’d thought. ‘I’ll try not to.’

And: ‘Residents’ parking,’ Lamb had added, as if sharing some arcane password.

Residents’ parking. So what?

So he couldn’t sit in his car, he’d belatedly realized. Couldn’t cosy down, rain bouncing off a waterproof roof, and wait for the bags to appear. The chances of a parking revenue attendant—or whatever they were called today—doing the rounds after midnight were slim, but not non-existent.

It was all he’d need—a parking ticket. On-the-spot fine. His name in a book.

Don’t get caught.

So it was the slight overhang in the pouring rain. Worse than that, it was the flickering light behind the thin curtains of the journo’s street-level apartment; it was the way a shadow kept appearing behind them. As if the hack inside, dry as toast, was busting a gut at the thought of River in the rain, waiting for him to put his rubbish bag out so he could whip it away for covert study. As if the journo knew all this.

Not long after midnight, the thought occurred to River: maybe he did.

That was how it had been for the past eight months. Every so often, he’d take the bigger picture and give it a shake, like it was a loose jigsaw. Sometimes the pieces came together differently; sometimes they didn’t fit at all. Why did Jackson Lamb want this journo’s rubbish, enough to give River his first out-of-the-office job since he’d been assigned to Slough House? Maybe the point wasn’t getting the rubbish. Maybe the point was River standing in the rain for hours on end, while the hack laughed with Lamb about it over the phone.

This rain had been forecast. Hell, it had been raining when Lamb had given him the op.

Residents’ parking, he’d said.

Don’t get caught.

Ten more minutes, and River decided enough was enough. There was going to be no bag of rubbish, or if there was, it wasn’t going to mean anything, other than that he’d been sent on an idiot’s errand … He’d walked back the way he’d come, collecting a random rubbish sack on the way; had flung it into the boot of the car he’d parked by the nearest meter. Had driven home. Had gone to bed.

Where he’d lain for two hours, watching the jigsaw reassemble itself. Jackson Lamb’s Don’t get caught might have meant just that: that River had been given an important task, and mustn’t get caught. Not crucially important—if so, Lamb would have sent Sid, or possibly Moody—but important enough that it had to be done.

Or else it was a test. A test to discover whether River was capable of going out in the rain and bringing back a bag of rubbish.

He went out again not long after, abandoning the random sack of rubbish in the first litter bin he passed. Cruising slowly past the journo’s, he could hardly believe it was there, slumped against the wall below the window: a knotted black bag …

The same bag’s contents were now strewn across the floor in front of him.

Lamb said, ‘I’ll leave you to clear that, right?’

River said, ‘What am I looking for precisely?’

But Lamb was already gone; audible on the stairs, this time—every creak and complaint echoing—and River was alone in Sid’s half of the office; still surrounded by unsweet-smelling crap, and still weighed down by the faint but unmistakable sensation of being Jackson Lamb’s punchbag.

The tables were always packed too close in Max’s, in optimistic preparation for a rush of custom that wasn’t going to happen. Max’s wasn’t popular because it wasn’t very good; they re-used the coffee beans, and the croissants were stale. Repeat trade was the exception, not the rule. But there was one regular, and the moment he stepped through the door each morning, newspapers under his arm, the body on the counter would start pouring his cup. It didn’t matter how often the staff turned over: his details were passed down along with instructions about the cappuccino machine. Beige raincoat. Thinning, brownish hair. Permanently irritated. And, of course, those newspapers.

This morning, the windows were a fogged-over drizzle. His raincoat dripped on to the chessboard lino. If his newspapers hadn’t been in a plastic bag, they’d have been a papier-mâché sculpture waiting to happen.

‘Good morning.’

‘It’s a lousy morning.’

‘But it’s always good to see you, sir.’

This was the morning’s Max, a name they all shared as far as Robert Hobden was concerned. If they wanted him to tell them apart, they shouldn’t all work the same counter.

He settled in his usual corner. A redhead, one of only three other customers, was at the next table, facing the window: a black raincoat hung from the back of her chair. She wore a collarless white shirt and black leggings cut off at the ankle. He noticed this because her feet were hooked round her chair legs, the way a child might sit. A baby-sized laptop sat in front of her. She didn’t look up.

Max delivered his latte. Grunting acknowledgement, Hobden placed keys, mobile and wallet on the table in front of him, like always. He hated sitting with lumps in his pockets. His pen and notebook joined them. The pen was a thin-nibbed black felt-tip; the keyring a memory stick. And the newspapers were the quality dailies, plus the Mail. Piled up, they made a four-inch stack, of which he would read about an inch and a half; significantly less on Mondays, when there was more sports coverage. Today was Tuesday, shortly after seven. It was raining again. Had rained all night.

… Telegraph, Times, Mail, Independent, Guardian.

At one time or another, he’d written for all of these. That wasn’t so much a thought that occurred to him as an awareness that nudged him most mornings, round about now: cub reporter—ridiculous term—in Peterborough, then the inevitable shift to London, and the varied tempos of the major beats, crime and politics, before he ascended, aged forty-eight, to his due: the weekly column. Two, in fact. Sundays and Wednesdays. Regular appearances on Question Time. From firebrand to the acceptable face of dissent; an admittedly long trajectory in his case, but that made arrival all the sweeter. If he could have freeze-framed life back then, he’d have had little to complain about.

These days, he no longer wrote for newspapers. And when cab drivers recognized him, it was for the wrong reasons.

Beige raincoat discarded for the moment; the thinning, brownish hair a permanent accessory—as was the irritated look—Robert Hobden uncapped his pen, took a sip of his latte, and settled to work.

There’d been lights in the windows. Ho knew before opening the door that Slough House was occupied. But he’d have been able to tell anyway—damp footprints in the stairwell; the taste of rain in the air. Once in a harvest moon, Jackson Lamb would arrive before Ho; random predawn appearances that were purely territorial. You can haunt this place all you like, Lamb was telling him. But when they pull down the walls and count the bones, it’ll be mine they find on top. There were many good reasons for not liking Jackson Lamb, and that was one of Ho’s favourites.

But this wasn’t Lamb, or not Lamb alone. There was someone else up there.

Could be Jed Moody, but only if you were dreaming. Nine thirty was a good start for Moody, and it was generally eleven before he was ready for anything more complicated than a hot drink. Roderick Ho didn’t like Jed Moody, but that wasn’t a problem: Moody didn’t expect to be liked. Even before he’d been assigned to Slough House, he’d probably had fewer friends than fists. So Ho and Moody got on okay, sharing an office: neither liking the other, and neither caring the other knew. But there was no way Moody was here before him. It was barely seven.

Catherine Standish was more likely. Ho couldn’t remember Catherine Standish ever arriving first, which meant it had never happened, but she was usually next in. He’d hear the door’s agonized opening, and then her soft creak on the stairs, and then nothing. She was two floors above—in the small room next to Lamb’s—and out of sight, she was easy to forget. Actually, standing in front of you, she was easy to forget. The chances of sensing her presence weren’t good. So it wasn’t her.

That suited Ho. Ho didn’t like Standish.

He made his way up to the first floor. In his office he hung his raincoat on a hook, turned his computer on, then went into the kitchen. An odd smell was drifting down the stairs. Something rotten had replaced the taste of rain.

So here were the suspects: Min Harper, who was a nervous idiot, constantly patting his pockets to check he’d not lost anything; Louisa Guy, who Ho couldn’t look at without thinking of a pressure cooker, steam coming out of her ears; Struan Loy, the office joker—Ho didn’t like any of them, but he especially didn’t like Loy: office jokers were a crime in progress—and Kay White, who used to be on the top floor, sharing with Catherine, but had been banished downstairs for being ‘too damn noisy’: thanks, Lamb. Thanks for letting the rest of us suffer. If you can’t stand her chatter, why not pack her back to Regent’s Park? Except none of them were going back to Regent’s Park, because all of them had left a little bit of history over there; an ungainly smudge on the annals of the Service.

And Ho knew the shape and colour of each and every smudge: the crimes of drugs, drunkenness, lechery, politics and betrayal—Slough House was full of secrets, and Ho knew the size and depth of each and every one of them, excepting two.

Which brought him to Sid. It could be Sid up there.

And here was the thing about Sid Baker: Ho didn’t know what crime Sid was being punished for. It was one of two secrets that eluded him.

That was probably the reason he didn’t like Sid.

As the kettle boiled, Ho picked over some of Slough House’s secrets; thought about the nervous idiot Min Harper, who’d left a classified disk on a train. He might have got away with this if the disk’s pouch hadn’t been bright red, and stamped Top Secret. And also if the woman who’d found it hadn’t handed it in to the BBC. Some things were too good to be true, unless you were the one they were happening to: for Min Harper, the episode had been too awful to believe, but had happened anyway. Which was why Min had spent the last two years of a once-promising career in charge of the first-floor shredder.

Steam billowed from the kettle’s lip. The kitchen was poorly ventilated, and plaster frequently flaked from the ceiling. Give it a while, the whole lot would come down. Ho poured water into a teabagged mug. The days were diced and sliced into segments like this; divided into moments spent pouring cups of tea or fetching sandwiches, and further mentally subdivided by rehearsing Slough House’s secrets, all but two …The rest of the time Ho would be at his monitor; ostensibly inputting data from long-closed incidents, but most of the time searching for the second secret, the one that ate away at him, and never slept.

With a spoon he fished the teabag out, and dropped it into the sink; a thought striking him as he did so: I know who’s upstairs. It’s River Cartwright. Has to be.

There wasn’t a single reason he could think of why Cartwright might be here this time of the morning, but still: place your bets. Ho bet Cartwright. That’s who was upstairs right now.

That figured. Ho really didn’t like River Cartwright.

He carried his mug back to his desk, where his monitor had swum into life.

Hobden put the Telegraph aside, its front-page photo a gurning Peter Judd. He’d made a few notes on the upcoming by-election—the Shadow Culture Minister had handed his cards in, last January’s strokes wrapping up his career—but nothing more. When politicians voluntarily shrugged off the mantle it was worth a closer look, but Robert Hobden was a veteran at parsing a story. He still read copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when D-notices were an issue; when the Regent’s Park mob had left their fingerprints on the facts. This was most likely what it seemed to be: a politician heading back to the sticks after a health scare. And Robert Hobden trusted his instincts. You didn’t stop being a journalist just because you were no longer in print. Especially when you knew you had a story, and were waiting for its fin to show above the waves of the everyday news. It would break surface sooner or later. And when it did, he would recognize it for what it was.

Meanwhile, he’d continue his daily trawl through this sea of print. It wasn’t as if much else troubled his time. Hobden wasn’t as connected as he used to be.

Face it, Hobden was a pariah.

And this, too, was down to Regent’s Park: at one time or another, he’d written for all these newspapers, but the spooks had put paid to that. So now he spent his mornings in Max’s, hunting down his scoop … This was what happened when you were close to a story: you worried everyone else was on it too. That your scoop was under threat. Which went double when spooks were involved. Hobden wasn’t an idiot. His notebook contained nothing that wasn’t public domain; when he typed his notes up, with added speculations, he saved them to his memory stick to keep his hard drive clean. And he kept a dummy, in case anyone tried to get clever. He wasn’t paranoid, but he wasn’t an idiot. Last night, prowling his flat, unsettled by the sense of something left undone, he’d run through unexpected encounters he’d had recently, strangers who had started conversations, but couldn’t come up with any. Then he’d run through other recent encounters, with his ex-wife, with his children, with former colleagues and friends, and couldn’t come up with any of them either. Outside of Max’s, no one wished him good morning … The thing left undone had been putting the rubbish out, but he’d remembered eventually.

‘Excuse me?’

It was the pretty redhead at the next table.

‘I said, excuse me?’

It turned out she was talking to him.

Fish bits. The last of the Searchlight parcels contained fish bits: not the bones and heads that would indicate that the journo fancied himself in the kitchen, but the hardened edges of batter and skin, and lumps of charcoaled chip that suggested his local takeaway wasn’t the best.

River had graded most of the crap, and none of it amounted to a clue. Even the Post-its, carefully uncrumpled, yielded nothing more than shopping lists: eggs, teabags, juice, toothpaste—the original ideas on which this mess was based. And the cardboard backing of the spiral-notepad was just that; no pages survived. He’d brushed a fingertip across the board, in case any scrawling was embedded there, but found nothing.

From the ceiling above came a thump. Lamb’s favourite summons.

They were no longer the only ones here. It was coming on for eight; the door had opened twice, and the stairs creaked their usual greeting. The noises that had ended on the floor below belonged to Roderick Ho. Ho was usually first in, often last out, and how he spent the hours between was a mystery to River. Though the cola cans and pizza boxes surrounding his desk suggested he was building a fort.

The other footsteps had passed River’s floor, so must have belonged to Catherine. He had to delve for her surname: Catherine Standish. Havisham would have suited her better. River didn’t know about wedding gowns, but she might as well have walked round draped in cobweb.

Another thump from the ceiling. If he’d had a broom handy, he’d have thumped back.

The mess had migrated. It had started off contained within the newspaper island he’d laid out; now it had spread, covering much of Sid’s half of the floor. The smell, more democratic, occupied the whole room.

A twist of orange peel, unreadable as a doctor’s signature, lay curled under the desk.

Another thump.

Without removing his rubber gloves, River stood and headed for the door.

He was fifty-six years old. Pretty young redheads didn’t speak to him. But when Robert Hobden sent an enquiring glance her way she was smiling, nodding; signalling all the openness one animal offers another when something is wanted or needed.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m supposed to be working? On this assignment?’

He hated that upward inflection. How did the young let each other know when an answer was required? But she had a light dusting of freckles, and her shirt was unbuttoned enough that he could see they reached as far as her breasts. A locket on a thin silver chain hung there. Her ring finger was bare. He continued to notice such details long after they’d ceased to have relevance.

‘Yes?’

‘Only I couldn’t help noticing the headline? On your paper? One of your papers …’

She reached across to tap his copy of the Guardian, offering a better view of those freckles, that locket. It wasn’t a headline she meant, though. It was a teaser above the masthead: an interview with Russell T. Davies in the supplement.

‘My dissertation is on media heroes?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Be my guest.’

He slid G2 from its mother-paper, and handed it to her.

She smiled prettily and thanked him, and he noticed her pretty blue-green eyes, and a slight swelling on her pretty lower lip.

But sitting back, she must have misjudged her pretty limbs, because next moment there was cappuccino everywhere, and her language had become unladylike—

‘Oh shit I’m so sorry—’

‘Max!’

‘I must have—’

‘Can we have a cloth over here?’

For Catherine Standish, Slough House was Pincher Martin’s rock: damp, unlovely, achingly familiar, and something to cling to when the waves began to crash. But opening the door was a struggle. This should have been an easy fix, but Slough House being what it was, you couldn’t have a carpenter drop round: you had to fill out a property maintenance form; make a revenue disbursement request; arrange a clearance pass for an approved handyman—outsourcing was ‘fiscally appropriate’, standing instructions explained, but the sums spent on background vetting put the lie to that. And once you’d filled out the forms, you had to dispatch them to Regent’s Park, where they’d be read, initialled, rubber-stamped and ignored. So every morning she had to go through this, pushing against the door, umbrella in one hand, key in the other, shoulder hunched to keep her bag from slipping to the ground. All the while hoping she’d maintain balance when the door deigned to open. Pincher Martin had it easy. No doors on his Atlantic rock. Though it rained there too.

The door gave at last with its usual groan. She paused to shake excess water from her umbrella. Glanced up at the sky. Still grey, still heavy. One last shake, then she tucked the umbrella under her arm. There was a rack in the hall, but that was a good way of never seeing an umbrella again. On the first landing, through a half-open door, she glimpsed Ho at his desk. He didn’t look up, though she knew he’d seen her. She in her turn pretended she hadn’t seen him, or that’s what it must have looked like. Actually, she was pretending he was a piece of furniture, which required less effort.

Next landing up, both office doors were closed, but there was a light under River and Sid’s. A rank smell tainted the air: old fish and rotting vegetation.

In her own office, on the top floor, she hung her raincoat on a hanger, opened her umbrella so it would dry properly, and asked Jackson Lamb’s shut door if it wanted tea. There was no answer. She rinsed the kettle, filled it with fresh water, and left it to boil. Back in her office she booted up, then fixed her lipstick and brushed her hair.

The Catherine in her compact was always ten years older than the one she was expecting. But that was her fault and nobody else’s.

Her hair was still blonde, but only when you got close, and nobody got close. From a distance it was grey, though still full, still wavy; her eyes were the same colour, giving the impression that she was fading to monochrome. She moved quietly, and dressed like an illustration in a pre-war children’s novel; usually a hat; never jeans or trousers—nor even skirts, but always dresses, their sleeves lacy at the cuff. When she held the compact closer to her face, she could trace damage under the skin; see the lines through which her youth had leaked. A process accelerated by unwise choices, though it was striking how often, in retrospect, choices seemed not to have been choices at all, but simply a matter of taking one step after the other. She’d be fifty next year. That was quite a lot of steps, one after the other.

The kettle boiled. She poured a cup of tea. Back at her desk—in a space she shared with no one, thank God; not since Kay White had been banished downstairs on Lamb’s orders—she picked up where she’d left off yesterday, a report on real estate purchases for the past three years in the Leeds/Bradford area, cross-referenced against immigration records for the same period. Names appearing under both headings were checked against Regent’s Park’s watch-list. Catherine had yet to find a name to set alarms ringing, but ran searches on each anyway, then listed the results by country of origin, Pakistan at the top. Depending on how you viewed the results, they were either evidence of random population movement and property investment, or a graph from which a pattern would eventually arise, readable only by those higher up the intelligence-gathering chain than Catherine. Last month, she’d produced a similar report for Greater Manchester. Next would be Birmingham, or Nottingham. Her reports would be couriered over to Regent’s Park, where she hoped the Queens of the Database would pay it more attention than they paid her maintenance requests.

After half an hour she paused, and brushed her hair again.

Five minutes later River Cartwright came upstairs, and entered Lamb’s room without knocking.

The girl was on her feet, using the newspaper as a sort of funnel to direct cappuccino away from her laptop, and for a second Hobden felt a twinge of proprietorial annoyance—that was his paper she was rendering unreadable—but it didn’t last, and anyway, they needed a cloth.

‘Max!’

Hobden hated scenes. Why were people so clumsy?

He stood and headed for the counter, only to be met by Max, cloth in hand, saving his smile for the redhead, who was still ineffectually applying the Guardian. ‘It’s no problem, no problem,’ he told her.

Well, it was a bit of a problem actually, Robert Hobden thought. It was a bit of a problem that there was all this fuss going on, and coffee everywhere, when all he wanted was to be left in peace to trawl through the morning’s press.

‘I’m so sorry about this,’ the girl said.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he lied.

Max said, ‘There. All done.’

‘Thank you,’ the girl said.

‘I’ll bring you a refill.’

‘No, I can pay—’

But this too was no problem. The redhead settled back at the table, gesturing apologetically at the coffee-sodden newspaper. ‘Shall I fetch you another—’

‘No.’

‘But I—’

‘No. It’s of no importance.’

Hobden knew he didn’t handle such moments with grace or ease. Maybe he should take lessons from Max, who was back again, bearing fresh cups for both of them.

He grunted a thanks. The redhead trilled sweetness, but that was an act. She was deadly embarrassed; would rather have packed up her laptop and hit the road.

He finished his first cup; put it to one side. Took a sip from the second.

Bent to The Times.

River said, ‘You thumped?’

Looking at Lamb, sprawled at his desk, it was hard to imagine him getting work done; hard to imagine him standing up even, or opening a window.

‘Nice Marigolds,’ Lamb replied.

The ceiling sloped with the camber of the roof. A dormer window was cut into this, over which a blind was permanently drawn. And Lamb didn’t like overhead lighting, so it was dim; a lamp on a pile of telephone directories was the main light-source. It looked less like an office than a lair. A heavy clock ticked smugly on a corner of the desk. A corkboard on the wall was smothered with what appeared to be money-off coupons; some so yellow and curling, they couldn’t possibly be valid.

He thought about peeling the rubber gloves off, but that would be a sticky business, involving pinching each finger end then tugging, so decided not. ‘Dirty work,’ he said instead.

Unexpectedly, Lamb blew a raspberry.

The desk hid Lamb’s paunch, though hiding it wasn’t enough. Lamb could be behind a closed door, and his paunch would remain evident. Because it was there in his voice, let alone his face or his eyes. It was there in the way he blew a raspberry. He resembled, someone had once remarked, Timothy Spall gone to seed, which left open the question of what Timothy Spall not gone to seed might look like, but painted an accurate picture nevertheless. Spall aside, that stomach, the unshaved jowls, the hair—a dirty blond slick combed back from a high forehead, which broke into a curl as it touched his collar—made him a ringer, River thought, for Jack Falstaff. A role Timothy Spall should consider.

‘Good point,’ he said. ‘Well made.’

‘Thought there might be a veiled criticism in there,’ Jackson Lamb said.

‘Wouldn’t have occurred to me.’

‘No. Well. Occurred to you to do this dirty work over Sid’s side of the office.’

River said, ‘It’s difficult to keep a bagful of rubbish all in one place. Experts call it garbage-creep.’

‘You’re not a big fan of Sid’s, are you?’

He didn’t reply.

‘Well, Sid’s not your biggest admirer either,’ said Lamb. ‘But then, competition for that role’s not fierce. Found anything interesting?’

‘Define interesting.’

‘Let’s pretend for the moment I’m your boss.’

‘It’s about as interesting as a bagful of household rubbish gets. Sir.’

‘Elaborate, why don’t you?’

‘He empties his ashtray into a sheet of newspaper. Wraps it up like a present.’

‘Sounds like a loony.’

‘Stops his bin from smelling.’

‘Bins are supposed to smell. That’s how you know they’re bins.’

‘What was the point of this?’

‘Thought you wanted to get out the office. Didn’t I hear you say you wanted to get out the office? Like, three times a day every day for months?’

‘Sure. On Her Majesty’s, etc etc. So now I’m going through bins like a dumpster diver. What am I even looking for?’

‘Who says you’re looking for anything?’

River thought about it. ‘You mean, we just want him to know he’s being looked at?’

‘What do you mean we, paleface? You don’t want anything. You only want what I tell you to want. No old notebooks? Torn-up letters?’

‘Part of a notebook. Spiral-bound. But no pages. Just the cardboard backing.’

‘Evidence of drug use?’

‘Empty box of paracetamol.’

‘Condoms?’

‘I imagine he flushes them,’ River said. ‘Should the occasion arise.’

‘They come in little foil packets.’

‘So I recall. No. None of those.’

‘Empty booze bottles?’

‘In his recycling bin, I expect.’

‘Beer cans?’

‘Ditto.’

‘God,’ said Jackson Lamb. ‘Is it me, or did all the fun go out of everything round about 1979?’

River wasn’t going to pretend he cared about that. ‘I thought our job involved preserving democracy,’ he said. ‘How does harassing a journalist help?’

‘Are you serious? It ought to be one of our key performance indicators.’

Lamb pronounced this phrase as if it had been on a form he’d lately binned.

‘This particular example, then.’

‘Try not to think of him as a journalist. And more as a potential danger to the integrity of the body politic.’

‘Is that what he is?’

‘I don’t know. Anything in his rubbish suggest he might be?’

‘Well, he smokes. But that’s not actually been upgraded to security threat.’

‘Yet,’ said Lamb, who’d been known to light up in his office. He thought for a moment. Then said, ‘Okay. Write it up.’

‘Write it up,’ River repeated. Not quite making it a question.

‘You have a problem, Cartwright?’

‘I feel like I’m working for a tabloid.’

‘You should be so lucky. Know what those bastards earn?’

‘Do you want me to put him under surveillance?’

Lamb laughed.

River waited. It took a while. Lamb’s laugh wasn’t a genuine surrender to amusement; more of a temporary derangement. Not a laugh you’d want to hear from anyone holding a stick.

When he stopped, it was as abrupt as if he’d never started. ‘If that’s what I wanted, you think I’d pick you?’

‘I could do it.’

‘Really?’

‘I could do it,’ he repeated.

‘Let me rephrase,’ said Jackson Lamb. ‘Supposing I wanted it done without dozens of innocent bystanders getting killed. Think you could manage that?’

River didn’t reply.

‘Cartwright?’

Screw you, he wanted to say. He settled for ‘I could do it,’ again; though repetition made it sound an admission of defeat. He could do it. Could he really? ‘No one would get hurt,’ he said.

‘Nice to have your input,’ Lamb told him. ‘But that’s not what happened last time.’

Min Harper was next to arrive, with Louisa Guy on his heels. They chatted in the kitchen, both trying too hard. They’d shared a moment a week ago, in the pub across the road, which was a hellhole: an unwindowed nightmare, strictly for the lager and tequila crowd. But they’d gone anyway, both suffering the need for a drink within sixty seconds of leaving Slough House, a margin too thin to allow for reaching anywhere nicer.

Their conversation had been focused at first (Jackson Lamb is a bastard), then becoming speculative (what makes Jackson Lamb such a bastard?) before drifting into the sentimental (wouldn’t it be sweet if Jackson Lamb fell under a threshing machine?). Crossing back to the tube afterwards, there’d been an awkward parting—what had that been about? Just a drink after work, except no one in Slough House went for a drink after work—but they’d muddled through by pretending they’d not actually been together, and found their separate platforms without words. But since then they’d not positively avoided each other, which was unusual. In Slough House, there was almost never more than one person in the kitchen at a time.

Mugs were rinsed. The kettle switched on.

‘Is it me, or is there a strange smell somewhere?’

Upstairs, a door slammed. Downstairs, one opened.

‘If I said it was you, how upset would you be?’

And they exchanged glances and smiles both turned off at exactly the same moment.

It took no effort for River to remember the most significant conversation he’d had with Jackson Lamb. It had happened eight months ago, and had started with River asking when he was going to get something proper to do.

‘When the dust settles.’

‘Which will be when?’

Lamb had sighed, grieving his role as answerer of stupid questions. ‘The only reason there’s dust is your connections, Cartwright. If not for grandad, we wouldn’t be discussing dust. We’d be talking glaciers. We’d be talking about when glaciers melt. Except we wouldn’t be talking at all, because you’d be a distant memory. Someone to reminisce about occasionally, to take Moody’s mind off his fuck-ups, or Standish’s off the bottle.’

River had measured the distance between Lamb’s chair and the window. That blind wasn’t going to offer resistance. If River got the leverage right, Lamb would be a pizza-shaped stain on the pavement instead of drawing another breath; saying:

‘But no, you’ve got a grandfather. Congratufucking-lations. You’ve still got a job. But the downside is, it’s not one you’re going to enjoy. Now or ever.’ He beat out a tattoo on his desk with two fingers. ‘Orders from above, Cartwright. Sorry, they’re not my rules.’

The yellow-toothed smile accompanying this held nothing of sorrow at all.

River said, ‘This is bullshit.’

‘No, I’ll tell you what’s bullshit. One hundred and twenty people dead or maimed. Thirty million pounds’ worth of actual damage. Two point five billion quid in tourist revenue down the drain. And all of it your fault. Now that—that’s bullshit.’

River Cartwright said, ‘It didn’t happen.’

‘You think? There’s CC footage of the kid pulling the cord. They’re still playing it over at Regent’s Park. You know, to remind themselves how messy things get if they don’t do their jobs properly.’

‘It was a training exercise.’

‘Which you turned into a circus. You crashed King’s Cross.’

‘Twenty minutes. It was up and running again in twenty minutes.’

‘You crashed King’s Cross, Cartwright. In rush hour. You turned your upgrade assessment into a circus.’

River had the distinct impression Lamb found this amusing.

‘No one was killed,’ he said.

‘One stroke. One broken leg. Three—’

‘He’d have stroked anyway. He was an old man.’

‘He was sixty-two.’

‘I’m glad we agree.’

‘The mayor wanted your head on a plate.’

‘The mayor was delighted. He gets to talk about oversight committees and the need for airtight security processes. Makes him look like a serious politician.’

‘And that’s a good idea?’

‘Can’t hurt. Given he’s an idiot.’

Lamb said, ‘Let’s try for a little focus. You think it’s a good idea you turned the Service into a political football by being, what would you call it? Colour-deaf?’

Blue shirt, white tee.

White shirt, blue tee …

River said, ‘I heard what I heard.’

‘I don’t give a ferret’s arse what you heard. You screwed up. So now you’re here instead of Regent’s Park, and what might have been a glittering career is—guess what? A miserable clerk’s job, specifically tailored to make you save everyone a lot of grief and jack it in. And you only got that much courtesy of grandpa.’ Another flash of yellow teeth. ‘You know why they call this Slough House?’ Lamb went on.

‘Yes.’

‘Because it might as well be in—’

‘In Slough. Yes. And I know what they call us, too.’

‘They call us slow horses,’ Lamb said, exactly as if River had kept his mouth shut. ‘Slough House. Slow horse. Clever?’

‘I suppose it depends on your definition of—’

‘You asked when you were going to get something proper to do.’

River shut up.

‘Well, that would be when everyone’s forgotten you crashed King’s Cross.’

River didn’t reply.

‘It would be when everyone’s forgotten you’ve joined the slow horses.’

River didn’t reply.

‘Which is going to be a very fucking long time from now,’ Lamb said, as if this might somehow have gone misunderstood.

River turned to leave. But there was something he had to know first. ‘Three what?’ he asked.

‘Three what what?’

‘There were three somethings, you said. At King’s Cross. You didn’t say what they were.’

‘Panic attacks,’ said Lamb. ‘There were three panic attacks.’

River nodded.

‘Not including yours,’ Lamb said.

And that had been the most significant conversation River had had with Jackson Lamb.

Until today.

Jed Moody would turn up eventually. A couple of hours after everyone else, but nobody made an issue out of this because nobody cared, and anyway, nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of Moody, and most sides of Moody were the wrong one. A good day for Moody was when some character took up residence at the bus stop over the road, or sat too long in one of the garden patches in the Barbican complex opposite. When this happened, out Moody would go, even though it was never serious—was always kids from the stage school down the road, or someone homeless, looking for a sit-down. But whoever it was, out Moody would slope, chewing gum, and sit next to them: never engaging in conversation—he just sat chewing gum. Which was all it took. And when he came back in he was a little lighter of step for five minutes: not enough to make him good company, but enough that you could pass him on the stairs without worrying he’d hook a foot round your ankle.

He made no secret: he hated being among the slow horses. Once he’d been one of the Dogs, but everyone knew Jed Moody’s screw-up: he’d let a desk-jockey clean his clock before making tracks with about a squillion quid. Not a great career move for a Dog—the Service’s internal security division—even without the subsequent messy ending. So now Moody turned up late and dared anyone to give him bullshit. Which nobody did. Because nobody cared.

But meanwhile Moody wasn’t here yet, and River Cartwright was still upstairs with Jackson Lamb.

Who leant back in his chair, folding his arms. There’d been nothing audible, but it became apparent he’d farted. He shook his head sadly, as if attributing this to River, and said, ‘You don’t even know who he is, do you?’

River, half his mind still at King’s Cross, said, ‘Hobden?’

‘You were probably still at school when he was successful.’

‘I dimly remember him. Didn’t he use to be a Communist?’

‘That generation were all Communists. Learn some history.’

‘You’re about the same age, aren’t you?’

Lamb ignored that. ‘The Cold War had its upside, you know. There’s something to be said for getting teenage disaffection out your system by carrying a card instead of a knife. Attending interminable meetings in the back rooms of pubs. Marching for causes nobody else would get out of bed for.’

‘Sorry I missed that. Is it available on DVD?’

Instead of replying, Lamb looked away, beyond River, indicating they weren’t alone. River turned. A woman stood in the doorway. She had red hair, and a light dusting of freckles across her face, and her black raincoat—still glistening from the morning rain—hung open, showing the collarless white shirt beneath. A locket on a silver chain hung at her breast. A faint smile hovered on her lips.

Under one arm she held a laptop, the size of an exercise book.

Lamb said, ‘Success?’

She nodded.

‘Nice one, Sid,’ he told her.

Chapter 2

Sidonie Baker put the laptop on Lamb’s desk. Without looking at River she said, ‘There’s been some kind of accident. Downstairs.’

‘Does it involve rubbish?’ Lamb asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then relax. It wasn’t an accident.’

River said, ‘Whose is that?’

‘Whose is what?’ Sid asked.

‘The laptop.’

Sid Baker might have walked out of a commercial. It didn’t matter for what product. She was all clean lines and fresh air; even her freckles seemed carefully graded. Underneath her scent, River detected the whiff of fresh laundry.

Lamb said, ‘It’s okay. You can rub it in.’

It was all the clue River needed. ‘That’s Hobden’s?’

She nodded.

‘You stole his laptop?’

She shook her head. ‘I stole his files.’

River turned to Lamb. ‘Would they be more or less important than his rubbish?’

Lamb ignored him. ‘Did he notice?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Sidonie said.

‘Sure?’

‘Pretty sure.’

Lamb raised his voice. ‘Catherine.’

She appeared in the doorway like a creepy butler.

‘Flash-box.’

She disappeared.

River said, ‘Let me guess. Feminine wiles?’

‘Are you calling me a honey trap?’

‘If the cliché fits.’

Catherine Standish returned with a flash-box she placed on Lamb’s desk next to his clock. She waited, but Lamb said nothing. ‘You’re welcome,’ she told him, and left.

Once she’d gone, Lamb said: ‘Tell him.’

‘His key-fob’s a memory stick,’ Sid said.

‘A flash drive,’ River said.

‘That’s right.’

‘And he keeps his back-up files on it?’

‘Seems a reasonable conclusion. Given that he carries it everywhere.’

‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you? If it’s attached to your keys.’

‘There’s certainly something on it. A couple of mega-bytes’ worth.’

‘Maybe he’s writing a novel,’ River said.

‘Maybe he is. You didn’t find a draft in his rubbish, did you?’

He was going to lose this conversation if he wasn’t careful. ‘So you picked his pocket?’

‘He’s a man of habit. Same café, every morning. Same latte. And he piles his pocket contents on the table before he sits.’ Sidonie produced a barrette from her pocket. River thought that was what it was called. A barrette. ‘I swapped his stick for a dummy while his attention was elsewhere.’

Which meant she’d had a dummy with her, which meant she’d had Hobden under surveillance. How else would she have had an identical memory stick?

‘And then I copied its contents on to the laptop.’

She slotted the barrette behind her left ear, making a science-fiction shape of her hair. There was no way she could know what it looked like, River thought. Which made it all the stranger that the shape appeared intentional.

‘And then I swapped it back.’

‘While his attention was elsewhere.’

‘That’s right,’ Sid said, smiling brightly.

Lamb was bored now. He picked up the flash-box. The size of an A4 box-file, it was self-locking, and any attempt to open it without its series key would produce a smallish bonfire. He reached for the laptop. ‘Was he still there when you left?’

‘No. I waited him out.’

‘Good.’ Lamb fitted the computer into the box. ‘Stick?’

‘There’s nothing on it.’

‘Did I ask?’

Sidonie produced the stick, a twin to the one on Hobden’s key-ring. Lamb dropped it into the flash-box, then snapped the lid shut.

‘Abracadabra,’ he said.

Neither quite knew what to say to that.

‘And now I have a call to make,’ he said. ‘If the pair of you wouldn’t mind, you know.’ He waggled a hand in the direction of the door. ‘Fucking off.’

From the landing, River could see Catherine at her desk in the adjoining office; absorbed in paperwork with the absolute concentration of someone who knows they’re being observed.

Sid said something over her shoulder, but he didn’t catch what.

In his office, Lamb made his phone call. ‘You owe me. Yes, it’s done. All his files, or everything on his stick, anyway. No, the rubbish was clean. As it were. Yeah, okay. This morning. I’ll send Baker.’ He yawned, scratched at the back of his neck, then examined his fingernails. ‘Oh, and another thing? Next time you want errands running, use your own boys. Not like Regent’s Park is running out of bodies.’

After he hung up, he leant back and closed his eyes. It looked for all the world like he was taking a nap.

Downstairs, River and Sid surveyed the scattered rubbish. River had the uncomfortable feeling that this joke wasn’t funny any more, and even if it had been, he was as much its butt as Sid. It wasn’t like the smell had kept to her side of the room. But any possible apology died in the face of what had just happened. For a couple of minutes last night, standing under an overhang in the pouring rain, he’d convinced himself he was doing something important; that he was on the first rung of a ladder back into the light. Even if that feeling had survived the downpour, and the rummaging through the rubbish this morning, it wouldn’t have survived this. He didn’t want to look at Sid. Didn’t want to know the shape of the smile on her lips when she spoke. But did want to know what she’d been up to.

‘How long have you been playing Hobden?’ he said.

‘I haven’t been playing him.’

‘You’ve been doing breakfast.’

‘Just often enough to clock his habits.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Are you going to clear this mess up?’

River said, ‘When’d you ever hear of a joe being sent out solo? Domestic, I mean. Middle of London.’

This amused her. ‘So now I’m a joe?’

‘And how come Lamb’s running an op off his own bat?’

‘You’d have to ask him. I’m going for coffee.’

‘You’ve already had coffee.’

‘Okay then. I’m going somewhere else until you’ve got rid of all this crap.’

‘I haven’t written it up yet.’

‘Then I’ll be gone a while. The gloves suit you, by the way.’

‘Are you taking the piss?’

‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

Unhooking her bag from her chair, she left.

River kicked a tin can which might have been put there for that purpose. It bounced off the wall, leaving a bright red contact wound, and dropped to the floor.

Peeling off his rubber gloves, he added them to the sack. When he opened the window a cold blast of London air filtered through, adding traffic fumes to the mix. Then a familiar thumping on the ceiling set the lampshade wobbling.

He picked up the phone, tapped out Lamb’s extension. A moment later, he heard it ring upstairs. It felt like he had an offstage role in someone else’s drama.

‘Where’s Sid?’ Lamb asked.

‘Gone for coffee.’

‘When will she be back?’

There was an office code, of course. You didn’t dob a colleague in.

He said, ‘Quite a while were her exact words. I think.’

Lamb paused. Then said, ‘Get up here.’

River was listening to the dial tone before he could ask why. He took a breath, counted to five, then headed back upstairs.

Lamb said, ‘All cleaned up?’

‘More or less.’

‘Good. Here.’ He tapped the flash-box in front of him with a fat finger. ‘Deliver this.’

‘Deliver it?’

‘Is there an echo in here?’

‘Deliver it where?’

‘Is there an echo in here?’ Lamb repeated, then laughed: he’d made a joke. ‘Where do you think? Regent’s Park.’

Regent’s Park was the light at the top of the ladder. It was where River would be now, if he hadn’t crashed King’s Cross.

He said, ‘So this Hobden thing, it’s Regent’s Park?’

‘Of course it bloody is. We don’t run ops from Slough House. Thought you’d worked out that much.’

‘So how come Sid got the real job? And I’m left collecting the rubbish?’

‘Tell you what,’ said Lamb. ‘You have a good long think about that, and see if you can come up with the answer all by yourself.’

‘And why would the Park want us anyway? They’ve no shortage of talent, surely.’

‘I hope that’s not a sexist remark, Cartwright.’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’

Lamb looked at him blankly, and River had the sense he was thinking deep thoughts, or else wanted River to think he was thinking deep thoughts. But when he answered, it was only to shrug.

‘And why do they want me to deliver it?’

‘They don’t,’ Lamb said. ‘They want Sid. But Sid’s not here. So I’m sending you.’

River picked up the flash-box, and its contents slid from one end to the other. ‘Who do I deliver it to?’

Lamb said, ‘Name’s Webb. Isn’t he an old mate of yours?’

And River’s stomach slid sideways too.

Flash-box under one arm, he cut through the estate to the row of shops beyond: supermarket, newsagent’s, stationer’s, barber’s, Italian restaurant. Fifteen minutes later, he was at Moorgate. From there he caught a tube part way, then walked across the park. The rain had stopped at last, but large puddles swamped the footpaths. The sky was still grey, and the air smelled of grass. Joggers loped past, trackies plastered to their legs.

He didn’t like it that Lamb had sent him on this errand. Liked even less knowing that Lamb knew that, and knew he knew it too.

In the weeks after King’s Cross, River grew accustomed to a scraped-out feeling, as if that desperate dash along the platform—his last-second, doomed attempt to put things right—had left permanent scars. Somewhere in his stomach it was always four in the morning, he’d drunk too much, and his lover had left. There’d been an inquiry—you didn’t crash King’s Cross without people noticing—the upshot of which was, River had made sixteen basic errors inside eight minutes. It was bullshit. It was Health and Safety. It was like when a fire breaks out in the office, and afterwards everyone’s ordered to unplug the kettle when it’s not in use, even though it wasn’t the kettle started the fire in the first place. You couldn’t count a plugged-in kettle as an error. Everyone did it. Almost no one ever died.

We’ve run the numbers, he’d been told.

Running the numbers happened a lot at Regent’s Park. Pixellating, too; River had heard that lately—we’ve pixellated this, meaning we’ve run it through some software. We’ve got screenshots. It sounded too techie to catch on as a Service word. He couldn’t see the O.B. being impressed.

All of this was background static; his mind throwing up a curtain, because he didn’t want to hear the numbers.

But the numbers, it turned out, were inescapable. He heard them whispered in corridors his last morning. One hundred and twenty people killed or maimed; £30m worth of damage. A further £2.5 billion in lost tourist revenue.

It didn’t matter that none of these numbers were real, that they had simply been conjured up by those who took special pleasure in concocting worst-case scenarios. What mattered was that they’d been committed to paper and passed round committees. That they’d ended up on Taverner’s desk. Which was not a desk you wanted your mistakes to end up on if you had hopes of them being forgotten.

But no, you’ve got a grandfather, Lamb had told him. Congratufuckinglations. You’ve still got a job.

Much as River hated to admit it, that had been true. If not for the O.B., even Slough House would have been out of reach.

But the downside is, it’s not one you’re going to enjoy. Now or ever.

A career of shuffling paper. Of transcribing snatched mobile phone conversations. Of combing through page after page on long-ago operations, looking for parallels with the here and now …

Half of the future is buried in the past. That was the prevailing Service culture. Hence the obsessive sifting of twice-ploughed ground, attempting to understand history before it came round again. The modern realities of men, women, children, wandering into city centres with explosives strapped to their chests had shattered lives but not moulds. Or that was the operating wisdom, to the dismay of many.

Taverner, for instance. He’d heard Taverner was desperate to alter the rules of the game; not so much change the pieces on the board as throw the board away and design a new one. But Taverner was Second Desk, not First, and even if she’d been in charge, there were Boards to answer to these days. No Service Head had been given free rein since Charles Partner: the first to die in office and the last to run the show. But then, Partner had been a Cold War warrior from his fur-lined collar to his fingerless gloves, and the Cold War had been simpler. Back then, it had been easier to pretend it was a matter of us and them.

All before River’s time, of course. Such fragments, he’d gleaned from the O.B. His grandfather was the soul of discretion, or so he liked to think; imagining that a lifetime’s sealed lips had left him close with a secret. This belief persevered despite the evident truth that he liked nothing better than Service gossip. Maybe this was what age did, thought River. Confirmed you in your image of yourself even while it unpicked the reality, leaving you the tattered remnant of the person you’d once been.

His hand hurt. He hoped it didn’t look too obvious. But there was nothing he could do about it now. He was minutes from Regent’s Park, and it wouldn’t look good if he was late.

In the lobby, a middle-aged woman with the face of a traffic warden made him wait ten minutes before issuing his visitor’s pass. The laptop, snug in its padded envelope, was passed through an X-ray machine, which left River wondering if its contents had been wiped. If he’d been Sid, would he have been kept waiting? Or had James Webb left instructions that River be kept hanging about until the obvious was hammered home: that a visitor’s pass was the best he’d ever get?

Where Spider was concerned, River easily got paranoid.

That ordeal over, he was allowed through the large wooden doors, where there was another desk, this one manned by a balding red-cheeked type who’d pass for an Oxford porter but was doubtless an ex-cop. He motioned River to a bench. Sore hand in pocket, River sat. He put the envelope next to him. There was a clock on the facing wall. It was depressing to watch the second-hand crawl round, but difficult not to.

Behind the desk, a staircase curved upwards. It wasn’t quite large enough to choreograph a dance sequence on, but it wasn’t far off. For one inexplicable moment, River had a vision of Sid coming down those stairs, heels clacking off the marble so loudly, everyone in earshot would stop and look.

When he blinked, the image vanished. The footsteps echoed for a moment, but they were made by other people.

He’d thought, first time he’d come into this building, that it resembled a gentlemen’s club. Now it occurred to him that the truth might be the other way round: that gentlemen’s clubs were like the Service, the way the Service used to be. Back when what it did was known as the Great Game.

At length another ex-cop showed up.

‘That’s for Webb?’

One proprietorial hand on the envelope, River nodded.

‘I’ll make sure he gets it.’

‘I’m supposed to give it to him myself.’

There was never going to be any doubt about this. He had a visitor’s pass and everything.

To give him credit, his new friend didn’t fight it. ‘This way, then.’

River said, ‘That’s okay. I know my way round,’ but only to get a rise.

He didn’t get one.

River was led, not up the stairs, but through a set of doors to the left of the desk, and into a corridor he’d not been in before. The padded envelope felt like a present he was bringing Spider, though that was an unlikely scenario.

White tee under a blue shirt. That’s what you said.

No, I said blue tee under—

Fuck you, Spider.

‘What was that?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ River assured him.

At the end of the corridor, a set of fire doors opened on to a stairwell. Through a window, River saw a car turning down the ramp into the underground car park. He followed his guide up a flight of stairs, then another. On each landing a camera blinked, but he resisted the temptation to wave.

They went through another set of fire doors.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’

His guide offered him a sardonic look. Halfway along the corridor, he stopped and rapped twice on a door.

And River, all of a sudden, wished he’d left the parcel at reception. He’d not seen James Webb in eight months. For the year preceding that, they’d been all but inseparable. What made it a good idea to see him now?

White tee under a blue shirt. That’s what you said.

Apart from anything else, the urge to deck the bastard might prove overwhelming.

From inside the room a voice called a welcome.

‘In you go, sir.’

In he went.

It wasn’t as large as the office River shared with Sid, but it was a whole lot nicer. The wall to the right was book-shelved floor to ceiling, lined with colour-coded folders, while in front of him was a big wooden desk, which might have been carved from the hull of a ship. A pair of friendly-looking visitors’ chairs were placed in front of this, while behind it loomed a tall window that gave a view of the park, which was mostly muted browns right now, but would be glorious in spring and summer. Also behind it, in front of the view, sat James Webb; inevitably Spider.

… First time in eight months, though for the year preceding that they’d been all but inseparable. Friends wasn’t the word—it was both too big and too small. A friend was someone you’d go for a drink with; hang out with; share laughs. He’d done those things with Spider, but not because Spider was his first choice for doing them with; more because he’d spent days with Spider doing assault courses on Dartmoor, which had felt like it was going to be the most difficult part of training, until the days spent learning torture resistance techniques somewhere on the Welsh borders. Resistance techniques were taught slowly. Things had to be broken down before being built up again. Breaking down happened best in darkness. When you’d been through that, you wanted to be near others who’d been through it too. Not because you needed to talk about it, but because you needed your need not to talk about it to be shared by those you were with.

Friendship, anyway, was best conducted on level ground. Without the competitive undercurrent generated by the knowledge that they were in line for the same promotion.

White tee under a blue shirt. That’s what you said.

Fuck you, Spider.

So here he was, eight months later: no bigger, no wider, no different.

‘River!’ he said, getting to his feet, thrusting out a hand.

They were of an age, River Cartwright and James Webb, and similar sizes: both slim, with good bones. But Webb was dark to River’s sandy lightness, and Webb favoured smart suits and polished shoes, and looked like he’d stepped off a billboard. River suspected that for Spider, the worst parts of those assault courses had been staying muddy for days on end. Today he wore a charcoal two-piece with a faint chalk stripe and a grey shirt with a button-down collar, the obligatory splash of colour hanging round his neck. There was an expensive haircut not long in his past, and River wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’d stopped for a shave on his way in—paid someone else to do it, with a warm towel and flattering banter.

Someone who’d pretend to be a friend for as long as the moment lasted.

River ignored the outstretched hand. ‘Someone threw up on your tie,’ he said.

‘It’s a Karl Unger. Peasant.’

‘How have things been, Spider?’

‘Not bad. Not bad.’

River waited.

‘Takes getting used to, but—’

‘I was only being polite.’

Spider eased back into his chair. ‘Are you going to make this difficult?’

‘It’s already difficult. Nothing I do’ll make a difference.’ He surveyed the room, his gaze lingering on the bookshelf. ‘You keep a lot of hard copy. Why’s that?’

‘Don’t play games.’

‘No, seriously. What comes in hard copy?’ River looked from the shelves to the sleek, paperback-thin computer on the desk, then back. Then said: ‘Oh, no. Jesus. Don’t tell me.’

‘It’s above your pay grade, River.’

‘Are they job applications? They are, aren’t they? You’re doing applications.’

‘I’m not just doing applications. Have you any idea how much paperwork an organization the size of—’

‘Jesus, Spider. You’re HR. Congratulations.’

Spider Webb licked his lips. ‘I’ve had two meetings with the Minister this month already. How’s your career looking?’

‘Well, I don’t have an arse two inches in front of my nose, so my view beats yours.’

‘The laptop, River.’

River sat in one of the visitors’ chairs, and passed Webb the padded envelope. Webb produced a rubber stamp, and carefully affixed its mark.

‘Do you do it every morning?’

‘What?’

‘Change the date on your stamp.’

Webb said, ‘When I remember.’

‘The responsibilities of rank, eh?’

‘How’s the delightful Sidonie?’

River recognized an attempt to regain the high ground. ‘Not sure. She went swanning off this morning almost before she’d arrived. Didn’t show much dedication.’

‘She’s a bright officer.’

‘I can’t believe you just said that.’

‘She is.’

‘Maybe so. But Christ, Spider—bright officer? You’re not back at Eton, you know.’

Webb opened his mouth—to point out, River knew, that he hadn’t been at Eton—but came to his senses in time. ‘Did you have breakfast? We have a canteen.’

‘I remember the canteen, Spider. I even remember where it is.’

‘I don’t get called that any more.’

‘Not in your hearing, possibly. But face it—everybody calls you that.’

‘This is schoolboy stuff, River.’

‘Nyah nah-nah nyaah nyaah.’

Webb opened his mouth and closed it again. The padded envelope lay in front of him. He drummed his fingers upon it briefly.

River said, ‘My office is bigger than yours.’

‘Real estate’s cheaper that end of town.’

‘I thought the action took place upstairs. On the hub.’

‘I’m there a lot. Lady Di—’

‘She lets you call her that?’

‘You’re a laugh a minute, River. Lady Di—Taverner, she keeps me busy.’

River waggled an eyebrow.

‘I don’t know why I’m even bothering.’

River said, ‘You ever going to admit you made a mistake?’

Webb laughed. ‘You still on that?’

‘He was wearing a white tee under a blue shirt. That’s what you told me. Except he wasn’t, was he? He was wearing a blue tee under a—’

‘The guy was wearing what I said he was wearing, River. I mean, what, I get the colours the wrong way round and there just happens to be someone there, that exact moment, wearing what I said? Same general profile as the target? What are the odds?’

‘And the tape not working. Don’t forget the tape not working. What are the odds on that?’

‘EFU, River. Happens all the time.’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘Equipment fuck-up. You think they dish out state-of-the-art gear for assessment ops? We’re up against budgetary constraints, River. You don’t want to get Taverner started on that—oh, but hang on, you won’t, will you? On account of you’re in Slough House, and the closest you’ll get to the inner circle is reading someone’s memoirs.’

‘There isn’t an acronym for that? RSM?’

‘You know something, River? You need to grow up.’

‘And you need to admit that the mistake was yours.’

‘Mistake?’ Webb showed his teeth. ‘I prefer to call it a fiasco.’

‘If I was you, and smirked like that, I’d have someone watching my back.’

‘Oh, I play London rules. I don’t need anyone watching my back but me.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

‘Time to go.’

‘Should I shout for a guide? Or have you pressed a secret button?’

But Webb was shaking his head: not in response, but in reaction to River’s presence, which had tired him, because he had important things to get on with.

And nothing River said would get Webb to admit it was him who’d screwed up, not River. Besides, what difference would it make? It had been River on that platform, a star on CCTV. When you got to boardroom level, playing fair wasn’t even a bullet point. Who’d screwed up didn’t matter; who’d been visible during the screw-up did. Webb could put his hands up right now, and Diana Taverner wouldn’t care.

The only reason you’re still here is your connections, Cartwright. If not for grandad, you’d be a distant memory.

River stood, hoping an exit line would occur before he got to the door. Something to make him feel less like he’d been dismissed: by Spider bloody Webb.

Who said, ‘Didn’t Lamb have a flash-box?’

‘A what?’

‘A flash-box, River.’ He tapped the padded envelope. ‘The kind you can’t open without a key. Unless you want a magnesium flash.’

‘I’ve heard of those. But at Slough House, frankly, I’m amazed we’ve got jiffy bags.’

River’s need for an exit line evaporated. Scorched hand wrapped tightly round the memory stick in his pocket, he left.

Chapter 3

When lovely woman stoops to folly, all bets are off. Was that how it went? Didn’t matter. When lovely woman stoops to folly, something’s got to give.

Such thoughts were pitilessly regular; as familiar as the sound of her footsteps clickety-clacking up the stairs of her apartment block. Lovely woman stoops to folly. This evening’s earworm, picked up from an ad on the tube.

When lovely woman stoops to folly, the shit has hit the fan.

Catherine Standish, forty-eight a memory, knew all bets were off. Last thing she needed was her subconscious reminding her.

And she had been lovely once. Many had said so. One man in particular: You’re lovely, he’d told her. But you look like you’ve had some scary moments. Even now she thought he’d meant it as a compliment.

But there was nobody to tell her she was lovely any more, and it was doubtful they’d say so if there were. The scary moments had won. Which sounded like a definition of ageing, to Catherine. The scary moments had won.

At the door to her flat she put her shopping on the floor and hunted out her key. Found it. Entered. The hall light was on, because it was on a timer. Catherine didn’t like stepping into the dark, not even for the second it would take to flip a switch. In the kitchen, she unpacked the shopping; coffee in a cupboard, salad in the fridge. Then she took the toothpaste into the bathroom, where the light was on the same timer. There was a reason for that too.

Her worst scary moment had been the morning she’d turned up at her boss’s flat to find him dead in his bathroom. He’d used a gun. Sat in the tub to do it, as if he didn’t want to make a mess.

You had a key to his house? she’d been asked. You had a key? Since when?

That had been the Dogs, of course. Or one Dog in particular: Sam Chapman, who they called Bad Sam. He was a dark difficult man, and knew damn well she’d had a key to Charles Partner’s house, because everyone knew she’d had a key to Charles Partner’s house. And knew it hadn’t been because of an affair, but simply because Charles Partner had been hopeless about taking care of himself—ostensibly simple things like remembering to buy food, remembering to cook it, then remembering to throw it away when he’d forgotten to eat it. Charles had been twenty years older than Catherine, but it hadn’t been a father/daughter thing either. That was a convenient label, but the reality had been this: she had worked for Charles Partner, cared for him, shopped for him. and had found him dead in his bathroom once he’d shot himself. Bad Sam could growl all he liked, but he’d only been going through the motions, because Catherine had been the one to find the body.

Funny how swiftly that happened; how swiftly you went from being Charles Partner—not a man whose name was known to the public at large, true, but a man whose decisions dictated whether significant numbers of them would live or die, which had to count for something—to being ‘the body’. All it had taken was one calculated moment in a bathtub. He didn’t want to make a mess, but what mess he’d made was for others to clean up. Funny.

Less funny was how quickly the scary moments accumulated.

Because she was in the bathroom, and because the light was already on, it was hard for Catherine not to catch herself in the mirror. It held no surprises. Yes, the scary moments accumulated, but that was the least of it. Some damage was gifted by your genes. Some you discovered for yourself. Her nose grew red-tipped in the cold, as did her cheekbones. This made her look witchy and raw. Nothing she could do about that. But the rest of it—the spidery tracing of broken veins; the gaunt stretching of the skin across the skull—they told a different story, one she’d written herself.

My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.

By the time she’d got around to formulating that sentence, alcohol was a problem. Prior to that, it had seemed like a solution. No, that was too glib: rather, it hadn’t seemed like anything at all; it had simply been what one did. Perhaps a tad self-dramatic (a bottle for solace was such a time-worn trope, it felt like you weren’t doing heart-break properly without a glass in your hand) but more often, just the normal backdrop. It was the obvious adjunct to an evening alone with the box, and absolutely de rigueur for an evening out with girlfriends. And then there were dates, which Catherine often had in those days, and you couldn’t have a date without a drink. A meal meant a drink; the cinema meant a drink afterwards. And if you were plucking up courage to ask him back for coffee, a drink was necessary; and ultimately … Ultimately, if you needed somebody there, because you didn’t want to wake in the middle of the night knowing you were alone, you were going to have to fuck somebody, and sooner or later you were going to have to fuck anybody, and that demanded a drink if anything did.

There was a phrase: the slippery slope. Slippery implied speed and blurriness, and the ever-present threat of losing your feet. You’d end up flat on your back, breathing splinters. But Catherine’s journey had been more moving staircase than slippery slope; a slow downwards progression; a bore rather than a shock. Looking across at the people heading upwards, and wondering if that was a better idea. But somehow knowing she’d have to reach the bottom before she could change direction.

It had been Charles Partner who’d been there when that happened. Not literally, thank God; not actually present when she’d woken in a stranger’s flat with a broken cheekbone, finger-shaped bruises on her thighs. But there to make sure the pieces were gathered together. Catherine had spent time in a facility that was beyond anything she’d have been able to afford had she been paying. Her treatment had been thorough. It had involved counselling. All this, she was told, was in line with Service protocol (Do you think you’re the first? she’d been asked. Do you think you’re the only one it gets to in the end?) but there’d been more to it than that, she was sure. Because after the retreat, after the drying-out, after the first six everlasting months of sober living, she’d turned up at Regent’s Park expecting to be assigned to the outer limits, but no: it was back to regular duties as Charles’s doorkeeper.

Most things, at that time in her life, had made her want to weep, but this seemed more warranted than most. It wasn’t as if they’d been close. Sometimes he’d called her Moneypenny, but that was it. And even afterwards they were hardly friends, though it did not escape her that he never called her Moneypenny again. Nor did they discuss what had happened, beyond his asking, that first morning, if she was ‘back to her old self’. She’d given him the answer he’d wanted, but knew that her old self was long gone. And from there, they’d continued as before.

But he had cared for her when it mattered, and so she cared for him in return. They were together another three years, and before the first was out she was playing a role in his non-working life. He was unmarried. She’d long registered his threadbare aura. It wasn’t that he was seedy, but seediness was a possibility, and poor diet an ongoing fact. He needed looking after. And she needed something. She didn’t need to wake up next to more strangers, but she needed something. Partner turned out to be it.

So she kept his freezer full, and arranged for a weekly cleaner; took his diary in hand and made sure he had the odd day off. She became a barrier against the worst of his underlings—the atrocious Diana Taverner, for a start. And did all this while remaining part of the wallpaper: there was never physical contact, and nor did he acknowledge that she was anything other than secretary. But she cared for him.

Though not enough to recognize that he needed more help than she could give him.

She tilted her head to one side now, allowing her hair to fall across her face. She wondered if she should tint it, bring the blonde out, but who for? And would anyone notice? Apart from the odious Jackson Lamb, who’d ridicule her.

She could accept, Charles Partner being dead, that there was no place for her at Regent’s Park. But Slough House felt like a deferred punishment for a crime she’d already atoned for. Sometimes she wondered if there were more to that crime than her own wine-dark past; if she were held responsible in some way for Charles’s suicide. For not knowing it was going to happen. But how could she have known that? Charles Partner had spent a lifetime dealing in other people’s secrets, and if there was one thing he’d learned, it was how to keep his own. You had a key to his house? she’d been asked. And: You were expecting this to happen? Of course she hadn’t. But she wondered now if anyone had ever believed her.

Ancient history. Charles Partner was bones, but she still thought about him most days.

Back to the mirror. Back to her own life. Lovely woman had stooped to folly, and this was where it had left her.

My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.

She hadn’t had a drink in ten years. But still.

My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.

She turned off the bathroom light, and went to make supper.

Min Harper spent a chunk of the evening on the phone to his boys: nine and eleven. A year ago, this would have left him knowing more than he needed to about computer games and TV shows, but it seemed both had crossed a line at the same time, and now it was like trying to have a conversation with a pair of refrigerators. How had that happened? Change should come with a warning, and besides, shouldn’t there have been a breathing space where his nine-year-old was concerned? More childhood to negotiate before adolescence crept in? But prising information from him was like scratching at a rock. By the time his ex-wife was on the line Min was ready to take it out on her, though she was having none of it:

‘It’s a phase. They’re the same with me. Except all the time they’re grunting and saying nothing, I’m cooking their meals and washing up. So don’t tell me you’re having problems with it, right?’

‘At least you get to see them.’

‘You know where we are. Would it kill you to get round more than once a week?’

He could have fought a rearguard action—the hours he worked; the distance involved—but marriage had taught him that once the battle lines were drawn, defeat was only a matter of time.

Afterwards, he couldn’t settle. It was hard, after such calls, not to end up thinking about the trajectory his life had taken; a free fall he could pin down to one specific moment. Prior to that brainless second, he’d had a marriage, a family and a career, along with all the accompanying paraphernalia—dentist’s appointments and mortgage worries and direct debit arrangements. Some of which still happened, of course, but its relevance, the evidence it supplied that he was building a life that worked, had been washed away by the Stupid Moment; the one in which he’d left a computer disk on a tube train. And hadn’t known he’d done so until the following morning.

He supposed few people had had their careers dismantled via Radio 4. The memory hurt. Not the abject belly-panic as it sank in that the object under discussion was supposed to be in his keeping, but the moments before that, when he’d been enjoying a peaceful shave, thinking: I’m glad I’m not the pitiful bastard responsible for that. That was what hurt; the notion that all over the country other people were having exactly the same thought, and he was the only one who didn’t deserve to.

Other, more drawn-out painful moments had followed. Interviews with the Dogs. Comedy riffs on TV shows about secret service idiots. People on the street didn’t know Min was the butt of these sketches, but they were laughing at him all the same.

Worst of all was the assumption that incompetence had caused the screw-up. Nobody had suggested treachery; that leaving a report outlining gaps in Terminal 5’s security procedures on the Piccadilly Line had been a bungled dead-letter drop. That would have been to accord Min Harper a measure of respect. He could have been in the grip of misguided idealism, or lured by wealth, or at the very least making a conscious decision, but no: even the Dogs had written him off as an idiot. Any other year, he’d have been out of the door, but a combination of hiring freeze and budget tightening meant that if Min had gone, his job would have left with him, and it proved politic to keep him on the books until his departure would allow for a replacement.

Regent’s Park, though, was in his past.

Min checked his pockets, reminded himself not to, then poured a drink and tuned the radio to the sports channel. As ball-by-ball commentary on an overseas Test Match filled the room, a rewritten history swarmed through his head; a more amenable version of his life, in which he was halfway on to the platform at Gloucester Road when he turned and saw the disk on the seat and went back and collected it, feeling the hot chill of near-disaster tickle his nape—a sensation he’d feel again later that evening, as he helped put the boys to bed, and then forget about entirely as his career and life continued on their even tenor: marriage, family, career; dentist’s appointments, mortgage; direct debit arrangements.

As so frequently when he was trying not to have such thoughts Min startled himself by groaning aloud, but nobody heard. He was alone. There was only the radio. And as for the phone: once he’d spoken to his uncommunicative children and rowed with his ex, well: he didn’t have anyone else to talk to. So he turned it off.

Louisa Guy went home to her rented studio flat: examined its four walls—what she could see of them behind stuff in the way: piles of CDs, books, damp laundry on collapsible racks—and almost went straight out again, but couldn’t face the choices that would entail. She microwaved a lasagne and watched a property programme instead. House prices were in freefall, if you owned one. They remained laughably lunar to the rent-bound.

Her phone stayed silent. That wasn’t unusual, but still: you’d think somebody would have found time to dial a number. Ask how Louisa was. If she’d done anything interesting lately.

She left her plate to soak. Changed channel. Encountered someone telling her that pink placebos were more effective than blue ones. Could that be right? Was the brain that easily bamboozled?

Her own felt bamboozled constantly; not so much tricked as stifled into submission. When she closed her eyes at night, illegible data scrolled down her eyelids. Sleep was repeatedly yanked from her by a sensed error, the feeling that something was out of sequence for a reason she’d nearly grasped, and grasping would have rehabilitated her career. But it was always gone and she’d be stone awake once more, her unsleeping head on a pillow too thin and too warm, no matter how cold the rest of her bed was.

Jesus, she’d think, each time. Could she get a break? Could she get a decent night’s sleep? Please?

And in the morning, she’d do it all over again.

It was screen-watching. Which wasn’t what she’d joined the Service for, but what she’d ended up doing. And it felt like ending up, too; felt like she had no future other than the one that waited every morning behind the flaking back door of Slough House, and stretched out minute by endless minute until the door shut behind her when she left. And the time in between was spent fuming at the injustice of it all.

She should quit. That’s what she should do. She should just quit.

But if she quit, that would make her a quitter. She hadn’t joined the Service to be a quitter, either.

The screen-watching was virtual surveillance, trolling among the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere. Some of the websites she covered were Trojan horses, Service-designed to attract the disaffected; others might have belonged to other branches of the State—she sometimes wondered if she were lurking in chatrooms peopled entirely by spooks; the undercover equivalent of teen-sites populated entirely by middle-aged men. Genuine or not, the sites covered a range of mood, from the in-your-face (how to make your own bomb) to the apparently educational (‘the true meaning of Islam’) to the free-for-all forums where argument spat like a boiling chip pan, and rage brooked no grammar.

To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.

It felt pointless. Worse, it felt undoable … How could you know when something worse than words was meant, when all you had to go on were the words? And when the words were always the same: angry, vicious, murderous? Several times she’d decided that a particular voice rang darker than the rest, and had passed the information upstream. Where, presumably, it was acted upon: ISP addresses hunted down; angry young men tracked to their suburban bedrooms. But perhaps she was kidding herself. Maybe all the potential terrorists she ever identified were as ghostly as herself; other spooks in other offices, who were sending her own webname upstream even as she was sending theirs. It wouldn’t be the only aspect of the War on Terror that turned out to be a circle jerk. She should be out on the street, doing actual work. But she’d tried that already, and had screwed it up.

Every time she thought about this—which was a lot—her teeth clamped together. Sometimes she found herself thinking about it without realizing that’s what she was doing, and the clue was the grinding of teeth, and an ache in her jaw.

Her first field op, a tracking job: the first time she’d done it for real. Following a boy. Not the first time she’d done that for real, but the first time she’d done it like this: at a distance, keeping him in sight at all times, but not so close he’d sense her presence.

Tracking jobs were done in threes, minimum. That day there’d been five: two ahead, three behind. The three behind kept changing places, as if engaged in a country dance. But it all took place on city streets.

The boy they were following—a black youth as far from the tabloid image as you could get: he wore a pinstripe and plastic-rimmed corrective glasses—was point man in a gun drop. A cache of decommissioned handguns had been hijacked the previous week, en route to a furnace. ‘Decommissioned’ was like ‘single’ or ‘married’: a status liable to abrupt change. The handguns hadn’t been hijacked because they’d make nice paperweights. They’d been hijacked to be retooled, and released into the community.

‘Three? Take point.’

An instruction through an earpiece, propelling her to the front of the queue.

The agent who’d had the target’s heels peeled away: he’d hover by a newspaper stand for a while, then rejoin the procession. Meanwhile, she had the wheel. The target was maintaining an unbroken pace. This either meant he had no idea he was under surveillance, or was so used to it that it didn’t faze him.

But she remembered thinking: He has no idea.

He has no idea. He has no idea. Repeated enough, any phrase ceases to have meaning. He has no idea.

Less than a minute later, the target stepped into a clothes shop.

This wasn’t necessarily significant. He liked his threads: you could tell. But shops made good meeting places. There were queues, occasional crowds. There were changing rooms. There were opportunities. He stepped into the shop, and she followed.

And lost him immediately.

In the follow-up, which began later that day and went on for weeks, the unspoken accusation was of racism. That she could not tell one black youth from another. This was not true. She had had a firm mental picture of the target, and retained it even now: the slight dint in his jaw; his razor-sharp hairline. It was just that there were at least six other young men in the shop—same size, same colour, same suit, same hair—and they’d all been put in play.

Afterwards, it became clear he’d spent less than three minutes in the shop. Into a changing room, out of his suit. When he walked back on to the street, he was dressed like he belonged there: shades, a floppy grey top, baggy jeans. He’d walked straight past Two, who was heading inside to back Louisa up, and passed One, Four and Five unnoticed. Louisa—Three—was just starting to feel the panic. Not a good day at the office.

It got worse when the guns started turning up: in bank raids, in hold-ups, in street corner shootings …

Among the casualties was Louisa Guy’s career.

She thought about pouring another drink, then decided to turn the TV off and get to bed instead. It would bring the morning sooner, but at least there’d be oblivion between now and then.

It was a while coming, though. For at least an hour she lay in the dark, stray thoughts nipping and nagging at her.

She wondered what Min Harper was doing.

Jed Moody edged his way past the crowd by the door and bagged a pavement table where he smoked three cigarettes with his first pint. The shops opposite were a High Street palindrome—Korean grocery, courier service, letting agents, courier service, Korean grocery—and buses passed with noisy frequency. When he’d finished his pint he went back in for a second, but this time carried it upstairs, where tables lined along an internal balcony allowed a view of the stewing masses below. He was halfway through it when Nick Duffy joined him. ‘Jed.’

‘Nick.’

Duffy sat.

Nick Duffy, late forties, had been an exact contemporary of Moody’s: they’d finished training at the same time, both winding up in the Service’s internal security system—the Dogs—a dozen years later. The Dogs were kennelled at Regent’s Park, but had licence to roam. The furthest Moody had ranged was Marseilles—a junior operative had been knifed to death by a transsexual prostitute in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity—but Duffy had made it as far as DC. He had close-cropped grey hair these days and, like Moody, wore a jacket but no tie. They must have resembled a pair of off-duty whatever, Moody thought. Accountants, estate agents, bookies; perhaps, to the more astute observer, cops. Maybe one in a million would have guessed Five. And Moody would want a background check on that particular bastard.

‘Keeping busy?’ he asked.

‘You know.’

Meaning he didn’t. And wasn’t allowed to.

‘I’m not after classified, Nick. I’m asking how things are.’

Duffy tilted his head to the bar below. ‘Far end. Check it out.’

He’d been followed, was Moody’s first thought. His second was: Oh. Okay. At the far end of the bar sat two women whose skirts, combined, would have made a decent lens cloth.

One was wearing red underwear.

Duffy was waiting.

He said, ‘Jesus, you’re kidding, aren’t you?’

‘Feeling old?’

‘I didn’t ask you out on the pull.’

‘Why is that not a surprise?’

‘And if I had, I wouldn’t trawl this place. Not without penicillin.’

‘You’re a laugh a minute, Jed.’ As if testing this assertion, Duffy checked his watch, then took a long steady pull on his pint.

So Moody cut to the chase. ‘You have much to do with Taverner?’

Duffy realigned his beer mat, and set his glass upon it.

‘Is she approachable?’

Duffy said, ‘You want to talk approachable? That blonde’s sending out smoke signals.’

‘Nick.’

‘You really want to do this?’

And that was it, before they’d even started. Six words, and Duffy had told him he might as well shut up now.

‘I just need a chance, Nick. One small chance. I won’t screw up again.’

‘I hardly ever see her, Jed.’

‘You get ten times as close as I do.’

‘Whatever you want from her—’

‘I don’t want from her—’

‘—it’s not going to happen.’

Moody stopped flat.

Duffy went on: ‘After that mess last year, they needed someone to throw to the wolves. Sam Chapman handed his hat in, and that was a start, but they wanted an unwilling victim. That would be you.’

‘But they didn’t kick me out.’

‘You reckon you’re in?’

Moody didn’t reply.

Duffy, because it was his job, put the boot in. ‘Slough House is not in, Jed. Regent’s Park, that’s the centre of the world. The Dogs—well, you know. We roam the passageways. Sniff whoever we like. We make sure everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and nobody’s doing what they’re not. And if they’re not, we bite them. That’s why they call us the Dogs.’

Throughout this, he kept his voice light and breezy. Anyone watching would think he was telling a joke.

‘Whereas over at Slough House, you get to—what is it you get to do again, Jed? You get to frighten people if they lurk at the bus stop too long. You make sure nobody steals any paper clips. You hang around the coffee machine listening to the other screw-ups. And that. Is. It.’

Moody said nothing.

Duffy said, ‘Nobody followed me. I know that, because I’m the one says who follows who. And nobody followed you, because nobody cares. Trust me. Nobody’s keeping an eye on you, Jed. The boss made a mark on a piece of paper, and forgot you ever lived. End of story.’

Moody said nothing.

‘And if that’s still bothering you, try another line of work. When cops get the boot, they pick up security jobs. Given that any thought, Jed? You’d get a uniform and everything. Nice view of a car park. Move on with your life.’

‘I wasn’t given the boot.’

‘No, but they figured you’d quit. Have you not worked that out yet?’

Moody scowled and reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, before contemporary reality kicked in. When was the last time he’d enjoyed a smoke in a pub? Then again, when was the last time he’d had a drink with a colleague, and joked about the job? Or the last time he’d felt okay about being Jed Moody? Inside his pocket, his hand curled into a fist. He loosened it, stretched his fingers, laid both hands on the table in front of him.

‘He’s up to something,’ he said.

‘Who is?’

‘Jackson Lamb.’

Duffy said, ‘Last time Jackson Lamb stirred himself to do anything more strenuous than break wind, Geoffrey Boycott was opening for England.’

‘He sent Sid Baker on an op.’

‘Right.’

‘A real one.’

‘Jed, we know, okay? We know. You think Lamb farts without permission?’ He raised his glass to his lips again, but it was empty. He put it down. ‘I’ve got to go. Early meeting in the morning. You know how it is.’

‘Something to do with a journo.’ Moody tried to keep desperation out of his voice. To keep it on a level Duffy would understand: that if an op was being run from Slough House, Moody should be part of it. Christ knows, he had more experience than the rest of them put together. Sid Baker was barely out of a training bra, Cartwright had melted King’s Cross, Ho was a webhead, and the others were fucking fridge magnets. Moody alone had kicked down doors in earnest. And don’t tell him it wasn’t about kicking down doors. He knew it wasn’t about kicking down doors. But when you were running an op you wanted someone who could kick down doors, because sooner or later that’s what it would be about after all.

Duffy said, ‘Jed, a word of advice. Jackson Lamb’s got the authority of a lollipop lady. You’re three rungs below that. We know what Baker was doing, and only a rank amateur would call it an op. It was an errand. Get the difference? An errand. You think we’d trust him with anything bigger?’

Before he’d finished speaking he was getting to his feet.

‘I’ll put one behind the bar. No hard feelings, okay? If anything comes up, I’ll let you know. But nothing’s going to come up.’

Moody watched as Duffy vanished down the stairs then reappeared in the bar below, gave money to the barman, pointed a thumb in Moody’s direction. The barman glanced up, nodded, and fed the till.

On his way out Duffy paused by the short-skirted blonde. Whatever he said caused her to open her eyes wide and give a little scream of laughter. Before Duffy left she was huddling up, passing his words on to her friend. A little ripple of friendly filth; just another hit-and-run on a weekday evening.

Jed Moody drained his pint and leant back in his seat. Okay, you son of a bitch, he thought. You know everything, I know nothing. And I’m stuck in the wilderness while you’re having early meetings and deciding who follows who. I got the shitty stick. You got the whole of the moon.

But if you’re so clever, how come you think Sid Baker’s a man?

He didn’t bother collecting the pint Duffy had paid for. It was a small victory, but they added up.

Years ago—and he wouldn’t thank you for reminding him—Roderick Ho had worked out what his Service nickname would be. More than that, he’d settled on his possible responses first time it was used. Yeah, make my day, he’d say. Or Feeling lucky, punk? That’s what you said when people called you Clint.

Roderick Ho = Westward Ho = Eastward Ho = Clint.

But nobody had ever called him Clint. Perhaps political correctness wouldn’t allow them to make the oriental elision from Westward to Eastwood.

Or perhaps he was giving them too much credit. Perhaps they’d never heard of Westward Ho!

Actually, bunch of morons. He worked with a bunch of morons. Couldn’t make a pun with a dictionary and a Scrabble board.

Like Louisa Guy, like Min Harper, Ho was at home this evening, though his home was his own, and a house not a flat. It was an odd house, though that was none of his doing: it had been odd when he’d bought it. Its oddness lay in its upstairs conservatory; a glass-roofed, tiled-floor mezzanine. The estate agent had made much of this feature, pointing out the array of plants that created a micro-climate there; natural and green and eco-whatever peppering her spiel. Ho had nodded like he cared, calculating how many electronics he could fit into here once this eco-shit was off the premises. Quite a lot had been his estimate. This turned out to be the precise exact amount.

So now he sat surrounded by quite a lot of electronics, some quietly awaiting his touch; others humming pleasantly in response to pre-set commands; and one blasting out death metal at a volume that threatened to make the genre literal.

He was too old for this music, and he knew it. He was too old for this volume, and knew that too. But it was his music, his house, and the neighbours were students. If he didn’t make his own noise, he’d have to listen to theirs.

Currently, he was virtually crawling through Home Office personnel files. Not looking for anything in particular. Just looking because he could.

Ho’s parents had left Hong Kong ten years before handover, and Ho—who obsessed about what-ifs; who’d devoured you-make-the-decisions books as a teenager, when not playing Dungeons and Dragons relentlessly, unsleepingly—often wondered how he’d have turned out if they’d stayed. Odds on he’d have been a webhead in a more commercial area, software design or SFX, or lackeying for some vast faceless corporation whose tendrils touched every corner of the known world. Odds on he’d be pulling down more money than he was now. But he wouldn’t have these opportunities.

The previous evening he’d been on a date with a woman he’d met on the tube that morning. They hadn’t spoken. First dates were like that.

She’d been mousy blonde, and wore a regulation City outfit—charcoal jacket and skirt, white blouse—but what attracted Ho was her building pass, which dangled on a chain round her neck. Strap-hanging eight inches away, he had no trouble reading her name; ten minutes after reaching Slough House, he’d established her address and marital status (single); her credit history (pretty good); her medical records (usual female stuff); and was wandering through her e-mails. Work. Spam. A bit of flirting with a colleague, which was going nowhere. Plus, she was looking to buy a second-hand car, and had responded to an ad in her local free press. The owner hadn’t replied.

So Ho gave him a call, and established that he’d already sold the car but hadn’t bothered informing the unlucky enquirers. That was fine Ho assured him before calling the woman himself, to see if she was still interested in a six-year-old Saab. She was, so they arranged to meet that evening in a wine bar. Ho, established in a corner before she turned up, had watched her grow visibly more frustrated over the following hour; had even thought of approaching her; sitting her down and explaining that you couldn’t be too careful—that you could not. Be. Too. Careful. A security pass on a chain round her neck? Why not sport a badge reading Rape My Life? Financial details, favourite websites, numbers dialled, calls received. All it took was a name, and one other bite: place of work did fine. Tax codes, criminal records, loyalty cards, travel passes. It wasn’t simply that these things could be found, along with everything else. It was that they could be changed. So you leave home one morning, security pass like a cowbell round your neck, and by the time you reach work your life’s not your own any more.

Roderick Ho was here to tell this woman that.

But hadn’t, of course. He’d watched until she’d given up and left in a storm of silent fury, and then finished his alcohol-free lager, and walked home satisfied that he’d had her in the palm of his hand.

His secret.

One among many.

So now he sat in front of his screen, not hearing the music blasting through his room; not even blinking. A Home Office flunkey might as well be standing by his monitor, ushering him in; leading him to the filing cabinets. Offering him a key. Would sir like an alcohol-free lager while he prowled? Why, yes. Sir would.

Ho plucked the can from the holder screwed to his desk.

Thank you, flunkey.

He contemplated swapping the birth dates of some of the higher-ranking apparatchiks, which would mess up a pension plan or two, but was distracted by a link to an external site, which led him to another, and then another. It was surprising how quickly time passed: next time he looked up it was midnight, and he was miles from the Home Office; was navigating his way round a small-time plastics factory with deep-cover links to the MoD. More secrets. This was the playground he’d been born to run around in: didn’t matter where his parents ended up. This was his element, and he’d dig in it until time healed over; like a miser sifting heaps of dust, in search of the nugget of gold.

And all of it was practice, nothing more. None of his trawling had brought him anywhere near uncovering the mystery that really tormented him.

Roderick Ho knew exactly what sins had brought his colleagues to Slough House; the precise nature of the gaffes and blunders that had condemned them to the twilight of the second-rate. He had calibrated their wrongdoings to the minutest detail, knew the dates and places where they’d fallen, and understood the consequences of their screw-ups better than they did themselves, because he’d read the arse-covering e-mails their superiors had subsequently penned. He knew exactly whose hand had given the thumbs-down in every instance. He could quote chapter and verse, chapter and verse.

For every sin but two.

One was Sid Baker’s, and he was starting to have his suspicions about that.

As for the other, it remained as elusive as that hidden nugget.

Ho raised the can once more, but it was empty. Without looking behind, he tossed it over his shoulder; had forgotten about it by the time it hit the wall.

Kept his eyes glued to his screen.

Every sin but two.

The days when he’d been a creature of instinct were in Jackson Lamb’s past. They belonged to a slimmer, smoother version of himself. But previous lives never really disappear. The skins we slough, we hang in ward-robes: emergency wear, just in case.

Approaching his house, he became aware of a figure lurking in the shadow of the adjoining lane.

A shortlist of suspects wouldn’t have been hard to draw up. Lamb had made enemies over the years. Lamb, to be frank, had made enemies over the days—it never took him long. So he rolled his Standard into a baton as he neared the junction; rotated it hand to hand, as if conducting music in his head. He must have looked oblivious to the world. He must have looked an easy target.

He must have looked a lot less friendly two seconds later.

His arms knew the movement. Like falling off a bike.

‘Jesus mister—’

And then the voice was cut off by the Standard: a brief taste of the thrills you could expect if you poked a sleeping beast with too short a stick.

A light went on nearby. It wasn’t a neighbourhood where anyone was likely to step outside to question events, but it wasn’t unusual for residents to want a closer look.

In the brief yellow glow before a curtain was drawn, Lamb saw he’d netted a kid; just another teenage hustler. His face so dappled with acne, someone might have carved him with a knife.

Slowly, he removed the newspaper from the boy’s mouth. The boy promptly threw up.

Lamb could walk away. It wasn’t like the boy would follow, seeking vengeance. But on the other hand, he didn’t have far to walk. The kid would see which house he went into. Lamb’s life was built up of moments in which he decided who should know what. In this particular instance, he decided he didn’t want this kid learning anything new. So he waited, right hand clutching the kid’s collar. The left had discarded the Standard, which had reached its use-by date even more swiftly than usual.

At length, the kid said: ‘Jesus Christ—’ Lamb let him go.

‘I was mindin me own business.’

Lamb was interested to find that he was only mildly out of breath.

‘You some kind of fuckin lunatic?’

Except that, now he thought about it, his heart was racing, and he could feel a strangely unpleasant heat pulsing at his forehead, and through his cheeks.

The kid was still speaking. ‘Not doin any harm.’

There was a self-pitying twang to this assertion, as if it were a temporary victory.

Lamb rode over his body’s complaints. He said, ‘So what are you doing?’

‘Hangin.’

‘Why here?’

A sniff. ‘Everybody’s gotta be somewhere.’

‘Not you,’ Lamb said. ‘You go be nowhere, somewhere else.’ He found a coin in his pocket: two quid, two pee; he didn’t know and didn’t care. He tossed it over the kid’s shoulder. ‘Okay?’

When the kid had disappeared from view, he waited a few minutes more.

His heart slowed to its normal rate. The sweat on his forehead cooled.

Then Jackson Lamb went home.

Not everyone was so lucky that night.

He was nineteen years old. He was very frightened. His name didn’t matter.

You think we give a toss who you are?

He’d parked the car two streets away, because that was as close as you could get. This area of Leeds was slowly overcrowding—too many immigrants, his father had laughed; too many Poles and East Europeans, coming over here, ‘taking our jobs’: ha ha, dad—and as he’d walked back he’d been working on a riff about how it was a funny thing with cars: there wasn’t anything else you owned which you’d leave overnight two streets away and expect to find in the morning. There was something there, he knew. Throw in a two-beat pause …

‘Mind you, round our way, that’s gunna happen.’

The thing about punchlines, they had to slide into the socket. No room for ambiguity. And never use two words when one will do, but that one word had to do its job. That’s gunna happen. By which he meant: of course, round our way, if you leave your car out overnight, it’ll get stolen. Would an audience pick that up straight off? It was all in the delivery.

‘Mind you, round our way, that’s gunna happen.’

Pause.

‘Round our way, you leave your house on the street overnight—’

And then the first shape appeared, and he’d known he was in trouble.

He was in the back lane. He shouldn’t have taken the shortcut, but that was what happened when he was riffing: his feet took over while his brain went AWOL. Creativity was like being drunk, when you got down to it. He should make a note of that, but there was no time now because the first shape had stepped out of a garage doorway where he could have been taking a leak, or lighting up, or doing anything essentially innocent except for this one detail: he wore a stocking over his head.

Fight or flight? Never in question.

‘If you ever find yourself in trouble … street hassle?’ Something his father had once said to him.

‘Dad, don’t even try.’

‘Aggro?’

‘Dad—’

‘A rumble?’

‘I know what you’re trying to say, dad. Use your own words to say it, okay?’

‘Run like hell,’ his father had said simply.

Words to live by.

But there was nowhere to run, because the first shape was just that: the first. When he turned there was a second. Also a third. They too wore stocking masks. The rest of their wardrobes faded into insignificance.

Run like hell.

Trust this: he tried.

He got three yards before they put him on the ground.

Next time he opened his eyes, he was in the back of a van. A foul taste in his mouth, and the memory of cotton wool. They’d drugged him? The van’s bouncing went on forever. His limbs were heavy. His head hurt. He slept again.

Next time he opened his eyes, there was a bag on his head and his hands were tied. He was naked, except for his boxers. The air was damp and chill. A cellar. He didn’t have to see it to know. Or hear the voice to know he wasn’t alone.

‘You’re gunna be good, now.’

It wasn’t a question.

‘You’re not gunna make any problems, and you’re not gunna try to escape.’ A pause. ‘No fuckin chance of that anyway.’

He tried to speak, but all that came out was a whimper.

‘You need to piss, there’s a bucket.’

And this time he managed to find a voice. ‘Wh—where?’

His reply was a tinny kick over to his left. ‘Hear that?’

He nodded.

‘That’s where you piss. Shit. Whatever.’

Then something was dragged across the floor; something he couldn’t see but which sounded monstrous and punitive; a device they’d strap him to before applying sharp tools to his softer parts …

‘And here’s a chair.’

A chair?

‘And that’s your lot.’

And then he was alone again. Footsteps receding. A door shutting. A lock being thrown: that was the verb, thrown, as if any chance of opening that door had been heaved out of reach.

His hands, tightly bound, were at least in front of him. He raised them to his head and pulled the sack off, nearly throttling himself in the process, but managing it. That was one small victory at least. He threw it to the floor, as if it were responsible for all that had happened these last—what? Hours?

How long since they took him in the lane?

Where was he now?

And why? What was this about? Who were they, and why was he here?

He kicked at the rag on the floor. Tears were running down his cheeks: how long had he been crying? Had he started before the voice left the room? Had the voice heard him crying?

He was nineteen years old, and very frightened, and more than an audience—more than a roomful of people laughing at his routines—what he wanted was his mother.

There was a chair in front of him, an ordinary dining-room chair, and with one swift kick he laid it flat on the floor.

And there was a bucket in the corner, exactly as promised. He might have kicked that too, if the phrase didn’t have disturbing connotations.

Wh—where?

He hated himself that he’d said that. ‘Where’s the bucket?’ As if he’d been asking about the amenities in a guest-house. As if he’d been grateful.

Who were these people? And what did they want? And why him?

That’s where you piss. Shit. Whatever.

They were going to keep him here long enough he’d need to take a crap?

The thought buckled him at the knees. Crying took it out of you. He sank to the cold stone floor.

If he hadn’t kicked the chair over, he’d have sat on it. But the task of putting it back on its legs was beyond him.

What do they want from me?

He’d not spoken aloud. But the words crawled back to him anyway, from the edges of the room.

What do they want?

There were no answers handy.

A single lightbulb lit the cellar. It dangled, shadeless, three feet or so above him, and he became aware of it now mostly because it went out. For a few seconds, its glow hung in the air, and then it too went wherever ghosts go in the dark.

He thought he’d felt panic before, but that was nothing to what he felt now.

For the next moments he was entirely inside his own head, and it was the scariest place he’d been. Unspeakable horrors hid there, feeding on childhood nightmares. A clock struck, but not a real one. It was a clock he’d woken to once aged three or four, that had kept him awake the rest of the night, terrified that its tick-tick-ticking was the approach of a spindly-legged beast. That if he slept, it would have him.

But he’d never be three or four again. Calling for his parents would have no effect. It was dark, but he’d been in the dark before. He was frightened but—

He was frightened but alive, and angry, and this might be a trick; a rag-week stunt pulled by the cooler kids on campus.

Angry. That was the thing to hold on to. He was angry.

‘Okay, guys,’ he said out loud. ‘You’ve had your fun. But I’m tired of pretending to be scared.’

There was a tremor in his voice, but not much of one. Considering.

‘Guys? I said I’m tired of pretending.’

It was a prank. A Big Brother-influenced routine he’d been made the butt of.

‘Guys? You’re pretty cool, okay. You think. But you know what?’

He couldn’t see his own tied hands as he raised them to the level of his face, and extended both middle fingers.

‘Sit and spin, guys. Sit. And. Spin.’

And then he set the chair on its feet once more, and sat, hoping that his shoulders didn’t betray how ragged his breathing was.

It was important that he get himself under control.

The thing to do was not lose his head.

Chapter 4

Earlier that evening, River had joined the commuter shuffle from London Bridge; by eight, he’d been on the outskirts of Tonbridge. A phone call on the move had been the only notice he gave, but there was no sense he’d caught the O.B. on the hop: supper was a pasta bake, and a big salad that hadn’t come from a bag.

‘You were wondering if you’d find me with a tin of beans in front of the telly.’

‘Never.’

‘I’m all right, you know, River. At my age, you’re either alone or dead. Either way, you get used to it.’

River’s grandmother had died four years ago. Now the Old Bastard, as River’s mother called him, rattled around the four-bedroomed house on his own.

‘He should sell the place, darling,’ she’d said to River on one of her vanishingly rare visitations. ‘Get himself a nice little bungalow. Or move into one of those residential complexes.’

‘I can see him going for that.’

‘It’s not all daytime TV and abuse these day. They have,’ and she’d waved her hand airily; her standard semaphore for trivial detail, ‘regulations.’

‘They could have Commandments,’ River told her. ‘It wouldn’t tear him from his garden. Is it his money you’re after?’

‘No, darling. I just want him to be unhappy.’

That might have been a joke.

After they’d eaten, River and his grandfather retreated to the study, the room where spirits were drunk. Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the O.B. clung to the pattern his wife had designed for their lives.

Glenmorangie in hand, firelight dancing in the corners, River had asked, ‘Do you know Robert Hobden?’

‘That toad? What’s your interest?’

He’d tried to sound bored, but a glint in his eye betrayed him.

River said, ‘Casual. My interest in him’s casual.’

‘He’s a spent force.’

‘We specialize in them. At Slough House.’

His grandfather studied him over the top of his spectacles. The ability to do this was a fine argument for wearing glasses. ‘They won’t keep you there forever, you know.’

‘I was given the impression they might,’ River said.

‘That’s the point. If you knew it was only for six months, it wouldn’t hurt.’

It had already been more than six months, but they both knew that, so River said nothing.

‘You do your time. Whatever grunt work Jackson Lamb throws your way. Then you head back to Regent’s Park, sins forgiven. Fresh start.’

‘What was Lamb’s sin?’

The O.B. pretended not to hear. ‘Hobden was a star in his day. His time on the Telegraph especially. He was their crime reporter, and did a series on the drug trade in Manchester which opened a lot of eyes. Up until then drugs were an American problem, most people thought. He was the real deal all right.’

‘I didn’t know he’d been a reporter. I thought he was a columnist.’

‘Eventually. Back then, most of them had been reporters. These days, all you need is a media studies degree and an uncle on staff. But don’t get me started on how degraded that profession’s become.’

‘Good idea,’ River said. ‘I’m only here for the evening.’

‘You’re welcome to stay.’

‘Better not. Wasn’t he a member of the Communist Party?’

‘Probably.’

‘That didn’t raise eyebrows?’

‘Things aren’t always black and white, River. A wise man once said he wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t been a radical in his youth, and Communism was the radicalism of choice back then. What’s wrong with your hand?’

‘Kitchen mishap.’

‘Playing with fire.’ His expression changed. ‘A hand up?’

River helped him to his feet. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Damn waterworks,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever get old, River.’

He shuffled out. A moment later, the door to the downstairs bathroom closed.

River sat, his chair’s leather soft as a diary’s binding. The study ticked pleasantly as he swirled the liquid in his glass.

The O.B. had spent his working life in the service of his country, at a time when the battle lines were drawn less crookedly than now, but the first time River had seen him he’d been on his knees at a flowerbed, and couldn’t have looked less like a fighter in secret wars. He wore an umpire’s hat not broad enough to keep the sweat from trickling down his brow, and his face shone like a cheese. At River’s approach, he rocked back on his haunches, trowel in hand, speechless. River, seven years old, had arrived a quarter of an hour earlier, deposited by his mother and the man currently keeping his mother company. They’d left him on the doorstep with careless kisses and a curt nod respectively. Until that morning, he hadn’t known he’d had grandparents.

‘They’ll be delighted to have you,’ his mother had told him, throwing random articles of his clothing into a suitcase.

‘Why? They don’t even know who I am!’

‘Don’t be silly. I’ve sent them photographs.’

‘When? When did you ever—?’

‘River. I’ve told you. Mummy has to go away. It’s important. You want Mummy to be happy, don’t you?’

He didn’t answer. He didn’t want Mummy to be happy. He wanted Mummy to be there. That was important.

‘Well then. It won’t be for long. And when I come back—well.’ She dropped a badly folded shirt into the case and turned to him. ‘Maybe I’ll have a surprise for you.’

‘I don’t want a surprise!’

‘Not even a new daddy?’

‘I hate him,’ River said, ‘and I hate you too.’

They were the last words he’d say to her for two years.

His grandmother had been first shocked, then kind, and fussed over him in the kitchen. As soon as her back was turned, he’d slipped out the back door to flee, but here was this man on his knees by a flowerbed; who for the longest time said nothing, but whose silence held River rooted. And in his memory, they at length had the following conversation, though in truth it might have happened at a different time, or possibly never, and was simply one of those episodes the mind constructs to retrospectively explain events that would otherwise remain haphazard.

His grandfather said, ‘You must be River.’

River didn’t reply.

‘Damned silly name. Still. Could have been worse.’

River’s experiences at a number of schools suggested that the old man was wrong about this.

‘You mustn’t think badly of her.’

Not knowing whether yes or no was required, River didn’t answer that either.

‘Blame myself. Don’t blame her. Least of all blame her mother. That would be your grandmother. The lady in the kitchen. She’s never spoken about us, has she?’

That definitely didn’t need a reply.

After a while his grandfather pursed his lips, and examined the patch of earth he was tending. River didn’t know what he was doing: planting flowers or digging up weeds—River had spent his life in flats. Flowers arrived in colourful wrapping, or sprouted in parks. If he could magic himself back to one of those flats now he’d do so, but magic was unavailable. The grandparents he’d encountered in stories were sometimes, not always, benign. There remained the possibility of murderous intent.

‘It’s easier with dogs,’ his grandfather continued.

River didn’t like dogs, but decided to keep this information to himself, until he knew which way the wind was blowing.

‘You look at their paws. Did you know that?’

This time, it seemed an answer was required.

‘No,’ River had said, after a gap of maybe three minutes.

‘No what?’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Didn’t know what?’

‘What you said. About dogs.’

‘You look at their paws. If you want to know how big they’re going to get.’ He began trowelling again, satisfied with River’s contribution. ‘Dogs grow into their feet. Children don’t. Their feet grow with them.’

River watched soil dribble down the trowel’s edge. Something red and grey and squirming happened, briefly. A flick of the tool, and it was gone.

‘I don’t mean your mother grew bigger than we’d expected.’

It had been a worm. It had been a worm, and now—if what River had heard was true—it was two worms, in two separate places. He wondered if the worm remembered being just one worm, and if that had been twice as good, or only half. There was no way you could answer such questions. You could learn biology, but that was all.

‘I meant we couldn’t know she was a bolter.’

More trowelling.

‘Made a lot of bad decisions, your mother. Your name was the least of them. And you know what the worst thing is?’

This too required a response, but the best River could manage was a shake of the head.

‘She hasn’t noticed yet.’ He was trowelling harder, as if there were something in the soil to be brought into the light. ‘We all make mistakes, River. Made a couple myself, and some have hurt other people. They’re the ones you shouldn’t get over. The ones you’re meant to learn from. But that’s not your mother’s way. She seems intent on making the same mistake over and over again, and that doesn’t help anyone. Least of all you.’ He gazed up at River. ‘But you mustn’t think badly of her. What I’m saying is, it’s in her nature.’

It was in her nature, River thought now, as he waited for his grandfather to return from the bathroom. That was undeniable, at this point in time. She’d been making the same mistakes ever since, and showed little sign of slowing down.

As for the old man: when River thought back on scenes like that—on the umpire’s hat and the jumper holed at the elbow; at the trowel and the rivulets of sweat creasing his round country face—it was hard not to see it as an act. The props were certainly to hand: big house with wrap-around garden; horses within spitting distance. English country gentleman down to the vocabulary: ‘bolter ’ was a word from early twentieth-century novels; from a world where Waughs and Mitfords played card games on tables designed for the purpose.

Except that acts could shade into reality. When River remembered his childhood in this house, it was always bright summer, and never a cloud in the sky. So perhaps it had worked, the game the O.B. played; and all the clichés he espoused, or pretended to espouse, had left their mark on River. Sunshine in England, and fields stretching into the distance. When he’d become old enough to learn what his grandfather had really done with his life, and determined to do the same himself, those were the scenes he was thinking about, real or not. And the O.B. would have had an answer for that, too: Doesn’t matter if it’s not real. It’s the idea you have to defend.

‘Am I going to live here now?’ he had asked that morning.

‘Yes. Can’t think what else to do with you.’

And now he came back into the room, more sprightly than the way he’d left it. It was on the tip of River’s tongue to ask if he was all right, but he put that tongue to better use, and sipped whisky instead.

His grandfather settled back in his armchair. ‘If Hobden’s on your radar, it’s political.’

‘I heard his name. Can’t remember the context. It rang a bell, that’s all.’

‘In your line of work, lying can be a matter of life and death. You’re going to have to practise, River. Speaking of which, what did you really do to your hand?’

‘Opened a flash-box without the code.’

‘Idiot activity. What was that about?’

‘I wanted to see if I could do it without getting burnt.’

‘Got your answer, didn’t you? Had it seen to?’

It was River’s left hand. If he’d used his right he’d have been quicker and perhaps not burnt himself at all, but he’d taken the pragmatic approach: if the box went off like a grenade, he’d rather lose the hand he didn’t favour. As it was, he’d doused the brief flame with bottled water. The box’s contents got wet, but were undamaged. He’d copied the computer’s files on to a new memory stick, then slid the laptop into the jiffy bag which, like the stick, he’d bought at the stationer’s near Slough House. All this on a bench by a children’s playground.

The hand wasn’t too bad; a bit red, a bit raw. If you wanted to carry a moral from the exercise, it would be that flash-boxes weren’t much cop. Though Spider had been only too happy to believe that Slough House lacked even that degree of technology.

If you wanted another moral, it would be to work out what you’re doing before you do it. The whole episode had been generated by his own slow-burning resentment: at having been sent on an idiot’s errand while Sid went out on an actual op; most of all, at being made Spider Webb’s errand boy … He hadn’t examined the stick’s contents yet. Just having the damn thing was an imprisonable offence.

‘It’s okay,’ he said to his grandfather. ‘A bit scorched. Nothing to worry about.’

‘There’s something on your mind, though.’

‘You know what I’ve been doing for the past month?’

‘Whatever it is, I doubt you’re supposed to tell me about it.’

‘I think you can be trusted. I’ve been reading mobile phone conversations.’

‘And this is beneath your talents.’

‘It’s a waste of time. They’re hoovered up from high-interest areas, mostly from near the more radical mosques, and the transcripts are generated by voice-recognition software. I’ve only been given those in English, but still, there are thousands of them. The software renders a lot of them gibberish but they’ve all got to be read, and graded as to levels of suspicion. One to ten. Ten being very suspicious. As of this afternoon, I’ve read eight hundred and forty-two of them. You know how many I’ve graded above one?’

His grandfather reached for the bottle.

River made a zero sign with finger and thumb.

His grandfather said, ‘I hope you’re not planning anything foolish, River.’

‘It’s beneath my abilities.’

‘It’s a hoop they’re making you jump through.’

‘I’ve jumped. I’ve jumped over and over again.’

‘They won’t keep you there forever.’

‘You think? What about, I don’t know, Catherine Standish? You think she’s a temporary assignment? Or Min Harper? He left a disk on a train. They’ve a whole club at the MoD of Hooray Henries who’ve left classified disks in taxis without having their lunch privileges revoked. But Harper’s never going back to Regent’s Park, is he? And neither am I.’

‘I don’t know these people, River.’

‘No. No.’ He brushed his brow with his hand, and the smell of ointment stung his nostrils. ‘Sorry. Frustrated, that’s all.’

The O.B. refilled his glass. More whisky was the last thing River needed, but he didn’t demur. He was aware that none of this was easy for his grandfather; suspected that what Jackson Lamb had told him months ago was true: that River would have been out on his ear if not for the O.B. Without this connection, River wouldn’t have been a slow horse, he’d have been melted down for glue. And maybe Lamb was right, too, that this dull, grinding scut-work was intended to make him give up and walk away—and would that be such a bad thing? He wasn’t yet thirty. Time enough to pick up the pieces and have a career that might even, who knows, earn some money.

Except even while that thought was forming, it was packing its bags and heading west. If River had inherited anything from the man sitting with him, it was this obstinate sense that you should see the course you’d chosen to its end.

His grandfather now said, ‘Hobden. You’re not running a game on him, are you?’

‘No,’ River said. ‘His name came up, that’s all.’

‘He used to have pull. He was never an asset, nothing like that—too damn fond of blowing his trumpet—but he had the ear of some important people.’

River said something forgettable about the mighty having fallen.

‘There’s a reason that got to be a cliché. When a Robert Hobden pisses on his chips in public, it doesn’t get forgotten.’ The O.B. didn’t often descend to crudity. He meant River to pay attention. ‘The kind of club he belonged to can’t be seen to change its mind about kicking you out. But remember this, River. Hobden wasn’t excommunicated because of his beliefs. It was because there are certain beliefs you’re supposed to keep under wraps if you want to dine at High Table.’

‘Meaning what he believed in came as no surprise to those around him.’

‘Of course it didn’t.’ River’s grandfather leant back in his chair for the first time since his bathroom excursion. A distant look filmed his eyes, and River had the impression he was looking into the past, when he’d fished in similar waters. ‘So you be careful if you’re thinking about going off reservation. The company Hobden kept before his fall from grace is a lot less savoury than the type he’s mixed with since.’

‘I’m not running a game. I’m not going off reservation.’ Did every occupation come with its own language? ‘And Hobden’s of no interest. Don’t worry, old man. I’m not heading for trouble.’

‘Call me that again and you will be.’ Sensing a natural end to the conversation, River started making the movements you make when you’re ready to leave, but his grandfather hadn’t finished. ‘And I don’t worry. Well, I do, but there’s precious little point in it. You’ll do what you’re going to do, and nothing I say’ll steer you on to any other course.’

River felt a pang. ‘You know I always listen—’

‘It’s not a complaint, River. You’re your mother’s son, that’s all.’ He gave a low chuckle at whatever expression washed across River’s face. ‘You think you get it from me, don’t you? I wish I could claim the credit.’

‘You raised me,’ River said. ‘You and Rose.’

‘But she had you till you were seven. She could have taught the Jesuits a thing or two. Heard from her lately?’

This last thrown in casually, as if they were discussing a former colleague.

River said, ‘Couple of months ago. She called from Barcelona to remind me I’d missed her birthday.’

The O.B. threw his head back, and laughed with genuine amusement. ‘There you go, boy. That’s how you do it. Set your own agenda.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ River told him.

The old man caught his elbow as River bent to kiss his cheek goodbye. ‘Be more than careful, lad. You don’t deserve Slough House. But make a mess trying to break out, and nothing anyone says will save your career.’

Which was as close as his grandfather had ever come to admitting he’d put a word in after the King’s Cross fiasco.

‘I’ll be careful,’ he repeated, and left to catch his train.

He was still thinking about that the following morning. I’ll be careful. How many times did you hear that, immediately before somebody had an accident? I’ll be careful. But there was nothing careful about the memory stick in his pocket; nothing accidental about its being in his possession. The only careful thing he’d done so far was not look at it.

Doing that would make him privy to information closed to Sid Baker; probably even to Spider Webb. It would give him an edge, make him feel a full-fledged spook again. But it could also get him banged up. What was the word the O.B. had used? Excommunicated … There are certain beliefs you should keep under wraps if you want to dine at High Table. River was a long way from High Table, but there was further to fall. And if he got caught with the stick in his possession, he’d fall all right.

Though if that happened, everyone would assume he’d read what was on the stick anyway …

His thoughts chased backwards and forwards. A guilty conscience was the worst thing to be wearing. Climbing the stairs at Slough House, he had to fix his expression into whatever it usually was, this time of the morning: When you need to act natural, don’t think about what you’re doing. An old lesson. Think about anything else. Think about the last book you read. He couldn’t remember the last book he’d read. But whether the effort of trying to do so made him look less or more natural he never found out, because no one was interested in River’s state of mind that morning.

Roderick Ho’s office door was open, so River saw from the landing that everyone was gathered there: an unprecedented event. But at least they weren’t talking to each other. Instead, all were staring at Ho’s monitor, the largest in the building. ‘What is it?’ River asked, but hardly needed to. Stepping inside he could make out, over Ho’s shoulder, a badly lit cellar, an orange-clad figure on a chair with a hood over its head. Gloved hands held up an English newspaper, which was shaking. This made sense. Nobody ever sat in a badly lit cellar holding the day’s newspaper for a camera without feeling fear.

‘Hostage,’ said Sid Baker, without looking away from the screen.

River stopped himself from saying I can see that. ‘Who is it? Who are they?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘What do we know?’

Sid said, ‘They’re going to cut his head off.’

Chapter 5

Not everyone had been in Ho’s office when River got there. How had he failed to register Jackson Lamb’s absence? Before long this was rectified: a heavy thump on the stair; a loud growling noise which could only have emanated from a stomach. Lamb could move quietly when he wanted, but when he didn’t, you knew he was coming. And now he didn’t so much enter Ho’s office as take possession of it; breathing heavily, saying nothing. On the monitor, the same absence of event: a gloved, hooded boy in an orange jumpsuit, holding the English newspaper with its back page showing. It took a moment for River to register that he’d reached that conclusion—that the figure was a boy.

A thought interrupted by Lamb. ‘It’s not nine o’clock and you’re watching torture porn?’

Struan Loy said, ‘When would be a good time to watch—’

‘Shut up,’ Sid Baker told him.

Lamb nodded. ‘That’s a plan. Shut up, Loy. This live?’

‘Coming over as a live feed,’ Ho said.

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Do you really want to hear about it?’

‘Good point. But that’s today’s paper.’ Lamb nodded again, approving his own deductive brilliance. ‘So if it’s not live, it’s not far off. How’d you pick it up?’

‘From the blogs,’ Sid said. ‘It appeared about four.’

‘Any prologue?’

‘They say they’re going to cut his head off.’

‘They?’

She shrugged. ‘Don’t know yet. Grabs the attention, though.’

‘Have they said what they want?’

Sid said, ‘They want to cut his head off.’

‘When?’

‘Forty-eight hours.’

‘Why forty-eight?’ asked Lamb. ‘Why not seventy-two? Three days, is that so much to ask?’

Nobody dared ask what his problem was. He told them anyway.

‘It’s always one day or three. You get twenty-four hours, or seventy-two. Not forty-eight. You know what I already hate about these tossers?’

‘They can’t count?’ River suggested.

‘They’ve no sense of tradition,’ Lamb said. ‘I don’t suppose they’ve said who the little blind mouse is, either?’

Roderick Ho said, ‘The beheading threat came over the blogs, along with the link. And the deadline. No other info. And there’s no volume on the feed.’

Through all of this, none of them had taken their eyes off the screen.

‘Why so shy?’ Lamb wondered. ‘If you’re cutting somebody’s head off, you’re making a point. But if you don’t tell anybody why you’re doing it, it’s not going to help your cause, is it?’

‘Cutting heads off doesn’t help anyone’s cause,’ Sid objected.

‘It does if your cause involves chopping people’s heads off. Then you’re preaching right at your niche market.’

Ho said, ‘What difference does it make who they are? They’re Al Qaeda, whatever they call themselves. Sons of the Desert. Sword of Allah. Wrath of the Book. They’re all Al Qaeda.’

There was another late entry: Jed Moody, his coat still on. ‘You’ve heard?’

‘We’re watching it now.’

Kay White started to say something, but changed her mind. In a more cruel mood, everyone present would have marked this down as a first.

River said, ‘So what do we do?’

Lamb said, ‘Do?’

‘Yes. What do we do?’

‘We get on with our jobs. What did you think we did?’

‘For Christ’s sake, we can’t just act like this isn’t happening—’

‘No?’

The short, sharp word punctured River’s balloon.

Lamb’s voice became flat and unimaginative. The boy on the monitor, the hood on his head, the newspaper he held—it might have been a screensaver.

He said, ‘Did you think the Batphone was about to go off, Lady Di shouting all hands on deck? No, we’ll watch it on telly like everyone else. But we won’t do anything. That’s for the big boys, and you lot don’t play with the big boys. Or had you forgotten?’

Nobody said anything.

‘Now, you’ve got papers to shuffle. Why are we all in this room?’

So one by one everybody left, except Ho and Moody, whose room it was. Moody hung his raincoat on the back of the door. He didn’t speak, and Ho wouldn’t have answered if he had.

Lamb stood a moment longer. His upper lip was flecked with an almond croissant’s sugary dust, and as he watched the computer monitor, on which nothing happened that hadn’t been happening for the past several minutes, his tongue discovered this seam of sweetness and gathered it in. But his eyes remained oblivious of what his tongue was doing, and if Ho or Moody had turned his way, what they saw might have startled them.

For a short while, the overweight, greasy has-been burned with cold hard anger.

Then he turned, and plodded upstairs to his office.

In his own room River booted up, then sat silently cursing the time his computer took to flicker into life. He was barely aware of Sid Baker arriving, and jumped when she spoke:

‘Do you think—’

‘Jesus!’

Sid recovered first. ‘Well, sorry! Christ! It’s my office too, you know.’

‘I know, I know. I was … concentrating.’

‘Of course. Turning your PC on, that’s a tricky business. I can see it would take all your attention.’

‘Sid, I didn’t realize you’d come in. That’s all. What do you want?’

‘Forget it.’

She sat at her desk. River’s monitor, meanwhile, enjoyed its usual fake awakening; swimming into blue then reverting to black. Waiting, he glanced at Sid. She wore her hair tied back and seemed paler than usual, which might have been her black cashmere V-neck, or might have been the ten minutes she’d just spent watching a young man with a hood on his head, who’d apparently been condemned to death.

And she wasn’t wearing her silver locket. If he’d been asked if this was unusual he’d have said he had no idea, but the fact was Sid wore the locket about half the time, from which he drew the inference that it held no special emotional significance for her. But nobody was likely to ask him.

His computer emitted that high-pitched beep that always sounded impatient, as if he’d been keeping it waiting rather than the other way round.

He said, only half aware he was about to do so, ‘About yesterday. I’m sorry. It was stupid.’

‘It was.’

‘It felt like it might be funny at the time.’

‘Stupid things often do,’ Sid said.

‘Clearing it up was no fun, if it makes you feel any better.’

‘It would make me feel better if you’d done a proper job of it. There were still eggshells under my desk this morning.’

But she was half-smiling, so that probably drew a line under the episode.

Though the question of why Sid had been sent on an op in the first place continued to rankle.

His computer was awake now but in a familiarly human sort of way, which meant it would be another few minutes before it was up to speed. He clicked on the browser.

Sid spoke again: ‘You think Ho’s right? They’re Al Qaeda?’

About to make a smart remark, River bit it back. What was the point? He said, ‘What else? It’s not like we’ve not seen this before.’

Both fell silent, remembering similar broadcasts a few years earlier; of a hostage beheaded for the crime of being Western.

‘They’ll be on the radar,’ Sid said.

River nodded.

‘All this stuff we do, here and Regent’s Park, GCHQ—the lid’s on pretty tight. Once they establish who the kid is, and where it’s happening, they’ll run up a shortlist of suspects. Won’t they?’

He was online at last. ‘What was that link?’

‘Sec.’

A moment later an e-mail winked on to his screen. He clicked on the link it held, and the browser changed from a bland civil service logo to the now-familiar boy, hood, cellar.

Nothing had changed in the minutes since they’d left Ho’s room.

Again they sat in silence, but a different silence to the one that usually prevailed in their office. It was shared, rather than dictated by awkwardness.

But if either were hoping it would be broken by a voice from that cellar, they were disappointed.

At last, River said, ‘There’s a lot of time, effort and money been spent on covering extremist groups.’

Sid had forgotten she’d asked the question.

‘But there’s not a whole lot of live intel out there.’

‘Assets,’ she said.

Any other day, River might have scoffed. ‘Assets,’ he agreed. ‘Infiltrating extremist groups used to be an easier business.’

‘You sound like you know about this.’

‘I grew up with the stories.’

‘Your grandfather,’ she said. ‘He was David Cartwright, wasn’t he?’

‘He still is.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘He’s still alive. Very much so.’ He glanced round. She had pushed her chair from her desk, and was watching him rather than the screen. ‘And it’s not like he told me State secrets as bedtime stories.’

‘I wasn’t going to suggest that.’

‘But the first bedtime story he ever did read me was Kim.’ River could tell she recognized the title, so didn’t elaborate. ‘After that, well, Conrad, Greene. Somerset Maugham.’

‘Ashenden.’

‘You get the picture. For my twelfth birthday, he bought me le Carré’s collected works. I can still remember what he said about them.’

They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.

River returned to the screen. The newspaper the boy held trembled. Why was he holding it with the back page showing, though? England triumph—last night’s World Cup qualifier.

‘The BBC,’ he said out loud, thinking of the link Sid had sent him.

‘A blog on their news pages. The link was posted there, along with the beheading threat. Then it mushroomed. It’ll be everywhere now.’

River had a sudden image of darkened rooms all over the country, all over the world; heads bent over monitors, studying iPhones, watching nothing happening, slowly. In some of the hearts of those watching would be the same sick dread he felt now; and in others, there’d be unholy joy.

‘Can we trace the link?’ Sid asked. ‘The IPS, I mean? Where it’s being broadcast from?’

He said, ‘Depends. If they’re clever, no. If they’re stupid …’

But both knew that this wasn’t going to end as swiftly and satisfactorily as that.

Sid said, ‘He pissed you off, didn’t he? More than usual, I mean?’

River didn’t need to ask. She meant Jackson Lamb.

He said, ‘How long have you been here now?’

‘Just a few months.’

‘I meant exactly.’

‘I don’t know exactly. Since August sometime.’

About two months.

He said, ‘I’ve been here eight months, two weeks and four days.’

Sid Baker was quiet a few moments, then said, ‘Okay. But hardly worth a long-service medal.’

‘You don’t get it, do you? Being here means I have to sit watching this like everybody else. That’s not what I joined the Service for.’

‘Maybe we’ll be needed.’

‘No. That’s what being in Slough House means. It means not being needed.’

‘If you hate it so much, why don’t you quit?’

‘And do what?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Whatever you like.’

‘Banking?’ he said. ‘Insurance?’

She fell silent.

‘The law? Property sales?’

‘Now you’re taking the piss.’

‘This is what I’m for,’ he said. He pointed at the screen, on which a hooded boy sat on a chair in a cellar. ‘To make things like this not happen. Or when they happen, make them stop. That’s what it is, Sidonie. I don’t want to do anything else.’

He couldn’t remember he’d ever called her that before.

She said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

She turned away. Then shook her head. ‘Sorry you feel that way. But one mistake doesn’t mean your career’s over. You’ll get another chance.’

‘What did you do?’ he asked.

‘Do?’

‘To deserve Slough House.’

Sid said, ‘What we’re doing is useful. It has to be done.’

‘And could be done by a bunch of trained monkeys.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Yesterday morning? Taking Hobden’s files?’

‘Yeah, okay, you got to—’

‘I’m not rubbing it in. I’m simply pointing out, maybe things are changing. Maybe Slough House isn’t such a dead end. I did something real. You went out too—’

‘To bring the rubbish in.’

‘Okay. A monkey could have done that.’

River laughed. Then shook his head. On his monitor, nothing had changed. The laugh turned sour in the air.

‘This poor sod needs more than monkeys on his side,’ he said.

Sid nodded.

River’s hand dropped to his thigh, and he felt the hard nub of the memory stick in his trouser pocket.

She meant well, he supposed, but her predecessor here had quit the Service, ground into submission by routine tasks. As had his own; a man called Black, who had lasted only six months, and left before River arrived. That was the true purpose of Slough House. It was a way of losing people without having to get rid of them, sidestepping legal hassle and tribunal threats. And it occurred to him that maybe that was the point of Sid’s presence: that her youth and freshness were meant as a counterpoint to the slow horses’ failure, rendering it more pungent. He could smell it now. Looking at this hooded boy on his screen, River could smell failure on his own skin. He couldn’t help this kid. Whatever the Service did, it would do without River’s assistance.

‘What is it?’

He turned back to Sid. ‘What’s what?’

‘You look like something occurred to you.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Nothing.’

On his desk was a fresh pile of transcripts. Catherine Standish must have delivered them before the news broke. He picked up the topmost, then dropped it. That small slapping noise was as much impact as it would ever have; he could spend the next hour writing a report on another chunk of chattering from another supposed hot spot, and all it would earn would be a cursory once-over from Regent’s Park. Sid said something else, River didn’t catch what. Instead, he locked his eyes on the computer screen; on the boy in the hood who was going to be executed for some reason, or no reason at all, in less than forty-eight hours, and if the newspaper he held was to be believed, this was happening here in the UK.

Bombs on trains were bad enough. Something like this, the press would go intercontinental.

Whatever it was Sidonie Baker had said, she now said again. Something about gloves. ‘Why do you think he’s wearing gloves?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was a good question. But River had no answer.

What he mostly knew was that he needed to do something real, something useful. Something more than paper-shuffling.

He felt the hard nub of the memory stick once more.

Whatever it held, it was in River’s pocket. Was the fruit of a real-live op.

If viewing its contents was crossing a line, River was ready to cross it.

At Max’s, the coffee was bad and the papers dull. Robert Hobden leafed through The Times without troubling his notebook, and was contemplating today’s front-page blonde on the Telegraph when he became aware of background mutter. He looked up. Max was at the counter with a customer, both staring at the TV on its corner plinth. Usually, Hobden insisted they lower the volume. Today he turned the world upside down, and insisted they raise it.

‘… has yet claimed responsibility, and nor has anyone appeared onscreen other than the young man pictured, but according to an anonymous post that appeared on the BBC’s current affairs blog at four o’clock this morning, the young man you’re watching is to be executed within forty-eight hours …’

Max said, ‘Do you believe this shit?’

The customer said, ‘They’re monsters. Plain monsters. They want shooting, the lot of them.’

But Hobden was barely hearing it.

Sometimes you knew you had a story, and were just waiting for its fin to show above the waves of the everyday news.

And here it was. Breaking surface.

Max said again, ‘Do you believe this?’

But Hobden was back at his table, gathering up keys, mobile, wallet, pen and notebook; tucking everything into his bag, except the newspapers.

Those, he left where they lay.

It wasn’t long after nine. A watery sunshine spilt over London; a hint of good weather to come, if you were in an optimistic mood.

On a large white building near Regent’s Park, it fell like a promise that this was as good as things might get.

Diana Taverner had a top-floor office. Once she’d enjoyed an expensive view, but post-7/7, senior staff had been moved away from external walls, and her only window now was the large pane of glass through which she could keep an eye on her team, and through which they in their turn could cast glances her way, keeping an eye on her keeping an eye on them. There were no windows on the hub either, but the light that rained on it was gentle and blue and, according to some report or other—it would be on file; labelled and archived and retrievable on request—was the closest electricity could come to natural sunlight.

Taverner approved. She didn’t begrudge a younger generation the prizes her own had won for them. There was no sense fighting the same battles twice.

Her apprenticeship had been served in the fag-end of the Cold War, and it sometimes felt like that was the easy part. The Service had a long and honourable tradition of women dying behind enemy lines, but was less enthusiastic about placing them behind important desks. Taverner—Lady Di everywhere but to her face—had done her best to shake that particular tree, and if she’d been told ten years ago that a woman would be running the Service within the decade, she’d have assumed she’d be the woman in question.

History, though, had a way of throwing spanners in every direction. With Charles Partner’s death had come a feeling that new winds were blowing down the Service’s corridors; that a fresh outlook was required. ‘Troubled times’ was the recurring phrase. A safe pair of hands was needed, which turned out to belong to Ingrid Tearney. The fact that Tearney was a woman would have been a soothing balm to Taverner, if it hadn’t been a severe irritant instead.

Still, it was progress. It would have felt more like progress if it hadn’t involved someone else, but it was progress. And she, Taverner, was Second Desk, even if the new dispensation involved there being several Second Desks; and her team had spring-sunshine lighting and ergonomic chairs, and that was fine too. Because they also had young men with rucksack-bombs on tube trains. Anything that helped them do their jobs was fine by Taverner.

This morning, they also had an execution in progress.

The link had appeared on a BBC blog around 4 a.m., its accompanying message brief but effective: we cut his head off forty-eight hours. Unpunctuated. Short. Radical groups, especially your religious types, tended to sermonize: spawn of Satan, eternal fire, et cetera. That this wasn’t the case made it more disturbing. A hoax would have had claptrap attached.

And now, like all successful media events, it was playing on every screen in sight. Would be playing on every screen in the country, in fact: in homes and offices; above treadmills in gyms; on palm-pilots and iPhones; on the back seats of black cabs. And all round the globe, people would be catching up with it at the different times of their day, and their first reaction would be the same as that of the team on the hub: that this couldn’t be happening in Britain. Other parts of the world boasted outlaw lands aplenty. Tell your average Western citizen that they played polo with human heads in Kazakhstan, and you’d get a nod. Yeah, I heard about that. But even on the wildest of Britain’s inner city estates, they weren’t chopping heads off. Or not on the BBC, anyway.

And it wasn’t going to happen, Taverner told herself. This was not going to happen. Stopping it was going to be the highlight of her career, and would call time on a lousy era for the Service, years of dodgy dossiers, suspicious deaths. It was going to get them out of the doghouse: herself, her superiors, and all the boys and girls on the hub; the hardworking, underpaid guardians of the State who were first in line when duty called, and last to be celebrated when things went right … It wasn’t twelve months since her team had rolled up a terrorist cell that had mapped out a full-scale assault on the capital, and the arrests, the captured weaponry, had made for a two-day wonder. But at the trial, the main question was: how come the cell had thrived for so long? How come it had so nearly achieved its objective?

The anniversaries of failure were marked on the streets, with crowds emerging from offices to observe a silence for the innocent dead. Successes were lost in the wash; swept from the front pages by celebrity scandal and economic gloom.

Taverner checked her watch. There was a lot of paper heading her way: the first sit-rep was due on her desk any minute; there’d be a Crash Room meeting thirty seconds later; a briefing for the Minister before the hour was out; then Limitations. The press would want a statement of intent. Ingrid Tearney being in DC, Diana Taverner would deliver that too. Tearney would be relieved, actually. She’d want Taverner’s fingerprints on this in case it went tits up, and a citizen had his head cut off on live TV.

And before any of that happened there was someone at the door: Nick Duffy, Head Dog.

It didn’t matter which rung of the ladder you were on: when the Dogs appeared uninvited, your first reaction was guilt.

‘What is it?’

‘Something I thought you should know.’

‘I’m busy.’

‘Don’t doubt it for a minute, boss.’

‘Spit it out.’

‘I had a drink with an ex last night. Moody. Jed Moody.’

She said, ‘He got the boot after the Miro Weiss business. Isn’t he at Slough House?’

‘Yes. And not liking it.’

The door opened. A kid called Tom put a manila folder on Taverner’s desk. The first sit-rep. It looked implausibly thin.

Taverner nodded, and Tom left without speaking.

She said to Duffy, ‘I’m somewhere else in thirty seconds.’

‘Moody was talking about an op.’

‘He’s covered by the Act.’ She scooped up the folder. ‘If he’s running off about his glory days, bring him in and slap him round. Or get a tame policeman to do it. Am I really telling you how to do your job?’

‘He wasn’t talking about the past. He says Jackson Lamb’s running an op.’

She paused. Then said, ‘They don’t run ops from Slough House.’

‘Which is why I thought you should know.’

She stared past him for a second, through the glass at the crew on the hub. Then her focus shifted, and she was looking at her own image. She was forty-nine years old. Stress, hard work and Father bloody Time had done their worst, but still: she was heir to good bones, and blessed with a figure. She knew how to make the most of both, and today wore a dark suit over a pale pink blouse, the former picking up the colour of her shoulder-length hair. She was fine. A bit of maintenance between meetings, and she might make it to nightfall without looking like something dragged round a barnyard by pigs.

Provided she didn’t get many unexpected moments.

She said, ‘What shape did this op take?’

‘Someone I thought at the time was a bloke, but—’

‘Sidonie Baker,’ Taverner said. Her voice could have cut glass. ‘Jackson Lamb sicced her on a journalist. Robert Hobden.’

Nick Duffy nodded, but she’d put a hole in his morning. It was one thing to bring a bone to the boss. Another to find she’d buried it in the first place. He said, ‘Right. Sure. It was just—’

She gave him a steely look, but give him credit: he didn’t back down.

‘Well, you said yourself. They don’t run ops from Slough House.’

‘It wasn’t an op. It was an errand.’

Which was so nearly what Duffy had told Jed Moody that it startled him for a moment.

Taverner said: ‘Our slow horses, they push pens, when they’re not folding paper. But they can be trusted with petty theft. We’re stretched, Duffy. These are difficult times.’

‘All hands on deck,’ he found himself saying.

‘That would cover it, yes. Anything else?’

He shook his head. ‘Sorry to bother you.’

‘Not a bother. Everyone has to be on the ball.’

Duffy turned to go. He was at the door when she spoke again.

‘Oh, and Nick?’

He turned.

‘There are those who’d take it badly if they knew I’d been sub-contracting. They might think it shows lack of faith.’

‘Sure, boss.’

‘Whereas it’s simply a sensible use of resources.’

‘My ears only, boss,’ he said. And left.

Diana Taverner wasn’t one to make marks on paper when she could avoid it. Jed Moody: that wasn’t much to remember.

On the wall-mounted TV, coverage continued: the orange-clad, hooded boy. For tens of thousands around the globe, he’d be the object of pity and prayer by now, and of massive speculation. For Diana Taverner, he was a figure on a board. Had to be. She couldn’t do what she needed to do, the end result of which would be his safe return home, if she allowed herself to be distracted by emotional considerations. She would do her job. Her team would do theirs. The kid would live. End of story.

She rose, gathered her paperwork, and got halfway to the door before returning to her desk, opening a drawer, and locking inside it the memory stick James Webb had given her the previous afternoon. A copy of Hobden’s own memory stick, he’d told her, made by Sid Baker. Safely delivered. Unlooked at. The interim laptop wiped. She’d believed him. If she’d thought he’d look at it, she’d have had a higher opinion of him, but wouldn’t have set him this task.

On the TV, the hooded boy sat in silence, newspaper fluttering. He’d live, she told herself.

Though even Diana Taverner had to admit, he must be scared.

Fear lives in the guts. That’s where it makes its home. It moves in, shifts stuff around; empties a space for itself—it likes the echoes its wingbeats make. It likes the smell of its own farts.

His bravado had lasted about ten minutes by his reckoning, and less than three in reality. Once that was done, his fear rearranged the furniture. He’d voided his bowels into the bucket in the corner; had clenched and unclenched until his guts ached, and long before he’d finished he’d known this wasn’t rag week. Didn’t matter how edgy these bastards thought they were, this was way past playtime. This was where policemen became involved. We were only kidding didn’t play in court.

He didn’t know whether it was day or night. How long had he been in the van? The filming might have been yesterday, or might have been two hours ago. Hell, it might have been tomorrow, and that newspaper a fake, crammed with news that hadn’t happened yet …

Concentrate. Keep a grip. Don’t let Larry, Moe and Curly smash his mind to pieces.

Which was what he was calling them: Larry, Moe and Curly. Because there were three of them, and that’s what his dad called customers who came in threes. When they came in pairs, they were Laurel and Hardy.

That had once been so lame: the names, and the fact that his dad used them two or three times a week. Larry, Moe and Curly this; Laurel and Hardy that. Get a fresh script, dad. But now his father’s words were a comfort. He could even hear the voice. Right bunch of comedians you’ve got yourself mixed up with. Not my fault, dad. Not my fault. He’d simply been walking down a lane at the wrong time.

But walking and daydreaming, he reminded himself. His mind playing its usual games, working up a piece of shtick; a comedy riff which distracted him long enough for these goons to get the drop on him … Except that was a laugh too, wasn’t it? A trio of twelve-year-olds could have ‘got the drop on him’. He wasn’t Action Man.

But they’d taken him, and doped him, and stripped him to his shorts and dumped him in this cellar; had left him for an hour or two, or three, or a fortnight, until he’d grown so used to the dark that the sudden light was like the sky ripping open.

Larry, Moe and Curly. Rough hands, big loud voices.

God, you dirty bastard—

The stink in here—

And then they were thrusting his new uniform at him, an orange jumpsuit and a hood for his head. Gloves for his hands.

‘Why are you—?’

‘Shut up.’

‘I’m nobody. I’m just—’

‘You think we give a toss who you are?’

They’d slapped him down on the chair. Thrust a newspaper into his hands. From noises they made, words they said, he suspected they were setting up a camera. He was crying, he realized. He hadn’t known this could happen to adults: that they could cry without knowing they’d started.

‘Stop moving.’

Impossible advice. Like stop itching.

‘Keep still.’

Keep still …

He kept still, tears rolling under his hood. Nobody spoke, but there was a hum that might have been their camera; a scratching it took a while to identify: it was the newspaper’s pages, rustling as he shook. And he thought: that’s not enough noise. He should scream. He should swear his head off, let these bastards know he wasn’t scared, not of lowlife chickenshits like them; he should shout, scream and swear, but didn’t. Because there was part of him saying If you swear they might not like you. They’ll think you’re a bad person. And if they think that, who knows what they’ll do? Advice this little voice kept squeaking while newspaper rustled and camera hummed, until at last one of the comedians said, ‘Okay,’ and the humming stopped. The newspaper was snatched from his hands. He was pushed from the chair.

On landing he bit through his lip, and that might have been the moment he let fly. But before he could make a sound there was a heavy head next to his, breathing a filthy message into his ear that arrived with the hot stink of onions, blasting its meaning deep inside his brain, and then the men were gone and he was swallowed by the dark. And the little voice in his head breathed its last, for it had arrived at a true understanding of what was happening, and that it didn’t matter what kind of person they thought he was, or whether he swore or meekly followed orders, because everything that he could be to them had slotted into place long ago. The colour of his skin was enough. That he didn’t share their religion. That they resented his presence, his very existence; that he was an affront to them—he could swear, or get down on his knees and give each of them a blow job: it didn’t matter. His crime was who he was. His punishment was what they’d already decided it would be.

We’re going to cut your head off.

That’s what the voice had said.

We’re going to show it on the web.

That’s what it said.

You fucking Paki.

Hassan wept.

Chapter 6

The dreadful pub across the road served food of sorts, and its sprawl promised undisturbed nooks. River’s lunch break was early enough to qualify as a late breakfast, but Slough House was absorbed by the morning’s news, and he didn’t suppose anyone would notice. He needed to do something which didn’t involve paperwork; he wanted a taste of what Spider Webb might be doing. He booted up his laptop and plugged in the memory stick. This was technically a criminal act, but River was pissed off. There are always moments in a young man’s life when that seems reason enough.

Ten minutes later, it seemed a lot less than that.

The bacon baguette he’d ordered sat ignored; the coffee was undrinkable filth. Cup to one side, plate to the other, laptop in the middle, he was working through the files Sid had stolen from Hobden. Except she couldn’t have, River decided. She couldn’t have, unless—

‘What you doing?’

River couldn’t have looked more guilty if he’d been caught with kiddie porn.

‘Working,’ he said.

Sid Baker sat down opposite. ‘We have an office for that.’

‘I was hungry.’

‘So I see.’ She eyed his untouched baguette.

‘What do you want, Sid?’

‘I thought you might be getting drunk.’

‘And?’

‘And I didn’t think that was a clever move.’

Closing the laptop, he said, ‘What’s happening?’

‘Ho says it’s a loop.’

‘I didn’t spot that.’

‘You’re not Ho. He says it’s running at thirty-something minutes, seven or eight.’

‘Not live, then.’

‘But this morning. Because of—’

‘Because of the newspaper, yeah, I got that. What about a location?’

‘Ho says not. They’ve bounced the transmission off PCs stretching halfway round the globe. By the time you’ve traced the next in the chain, it’s thirty machines ahead of you. This is Ho, mind. GCHQ might have a better shot.’

‘Too complicated to be a hoax?’

Sid said, ‘Until we know who the kid is, and who’s got him, nobody’s ruling anything out. But with the whole world watching, we’ve got to treat it as real.’

He leant back. ‘That was rousing. We?’

She flushed. ‘You know what I mean. And none of that answers my question, anyway. What are you doing here?’

‘Missing a pep-talk, apparently.’

‘Do you ever give a straight answer?’

‘Do you?’

‘Try me.’

‘How much research did you do on Hobden?’

Her eyes changed. ‘Not much.’

‘But enough to find out where he has breakfast.’

‘That’s not tricky, River.’

‘You don’t usually call me River.’

‘I don’t usually call anyone River. It’s not an everyday name.’

‘Blame my mother. She had a hippy phase. Did Lamb tell you to keep the job quiet?’

‘No, he told me to blog it. It’s on bloody stupid questions, dot gov, dot UK. My go. How much do you know about Hobden?’

‘Hotshot reporter back in the day. Firebrand leftie, moved right as he got older. Ended up doing why-oh-why columns for the little-England press, explaining why the country’s problems are all down to immigration, the welfare state and some bloke called Roy Jenkins.’

‘Labour Home Secretary in the sixties,’ Sid said sweetly.

‘History GCSE?’

‘Google.’

‘Fair enough. Anyway, it’s all standard retired-colonel stuff, except he had a few national newspapers to sound off in. The occasional pitch on Question Time.’

‘Beats holding forth at the vicar’s garden party,’ she said. ‘So that’s Robert Hobden, then. Angry young man to irritated old fogey in twenty years.’

‘A common trajectory.’

‘Except his was more severe than most. And when it turned out he was a fully paid-up member of the British Patriotic Party, that was his career shot to pieces.’

‘The nation’s last defence, as their website has it.’

‘Made up of those who thought the BNP had gone soft.’

River found he was enjoying this. ‘And who weren’t going to let a newfangled thing like political correctness get in the way of the old-time virtues.’

‘The direct approach, I think they called it,’ Sid said.

‘Paki-bashing is what they called it,’ River said.

‘You’d have thought he’d try to keep that quiet.’

‘Hard to do when the membership list turns up on the internet.’

And now they shared a smile.

River said, ‘And that was the end of an almost-glorious career.’ He remembered his grandfather’s words. ‘Not because of his beliefs. But because there are some beliefs you’re supposed to keep under wraps if you don’t want to be excommunicated.’

All of this from an hour’s web-research, on getting home last night.

‘Did the Service really leak the list?’

River shrugged. ‘Probably. Didn’t Lamb give any hint?’

‘I’m not supposed to discuss it.’

‘You’re not supposed to be in the pub.’

‘He gave no hint. No.’

‘You’d say that anyway.’

‘I’m sure that must be frustrating for you. You know, this is the longest conversation we’ve ever had?’

A record they’d broken twice today.

‘Did you really read Ashenden?’ he asked.

‘As in, the whole thing?’

‘That answers that.’

‘I do pub quizzes. I know the titles of a lot of books I’ve never read.’ Her focus shifted to his laptop. ‘What are you doing, anyway? Still on those transcripts?’

Before he could answer she’d reached out and turned the computer, opening its screen. The page of numbers he’d been staring at stared right back at her.

‘Pie,’ she said.

‘You’ll have to ask at the bar.’

‘Funny ha ha. Pi.’

‘I know.’

She scrolled down. ‘To what looks like a million places.’

‘I know.’

He turned the laptop back round, and closed the file. There were fifteen on the memory stick, and he’d only opened seven, but all contained nothing but pi. To what looked like a million places.

He’d bet his uneaten bacon sandwich that the remaining eight were the same.

Sid was waiting. She raised an eyebrow.

‘What?’

‘So what are you doing? Memorizing it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’

He folded the laptop shut.

‘Do you usually spend your lunchtimes in the pub?’ she asked.

‘Only when I want privacy.’

She shook her head. ‘Pub stands for public. Clue’s in the name.’ She checked her watch. ‘Well, you’re still among the living. I’d better get back.’

‘Did you really copy Hobden’s files?’

It was something the O.B. had told him. A lot of questions go unanswered because nobody thinks to ask.

‘We’ve been through that.’

‘Tell me again.’

She sighed. ‘He’s a man of habit. He has coffee at the same café every morning. First thing he does is empty the contents of his pocket on to the table. Which includes his memory stick.’ She waited, but he said nothing. ‘I caused a fuss by spilling some coffee. When he went off to fetch a cloth, I swapped his stick for a dummy and loaded it on to my own laptop. Later, I swapped it back.’ She paused. ‘The laptop’s the one you delivered to Regent’s Park.’

‘Did you look at the files?’

‘Of course not.’

There were ways of telling when someone was lying. The direction their eyes were pointing, for instance: left for memory, right for creation. But Sid’s eyes were directed straight at River’s. Which meant she wasn’t lying, or else was very good at it. They’d done the same courses, after all.

‘Okay, so—’

But she’d gone.

He shook his head, then returned to his laptop. It only took five minutes to confirm that all the files were the same; eternal strings of figures mapping one endless circle. Unless Hobden had taken pi places it had never been before, it seemed unlikely that this was what Regent’s Park had been after. So either Hobden was the kind of total paranoid who flaunted dummy back-ups of his real secrets, or Sid herself had pulled a fast one.

Or something else was going on, and River was in the dark.

That sounded plausible. That sounded entirely likely … Abandoning his sandwich, he headed back to Slough House.

Where there was communal activity again. When he reached the landing, Louisa Guy and Min Harper called him into Ho’s office, as if waiting for someone else to share the news with. ‘They’re showing a new film.’

‘A new one?’

‘A new one.’ This was Ho, in front of his monitor. The others were gathered around him, Sid among them. ‘The first was a loop,’ Ho said. There was no definite inflection to these words, but everyone caught the hidden meaning: the first had been a loop, which he had noticed and nobody else had. ‘Now there’s a new one. Also a loop.’

Stepping to one side, looking round the bodies clustered in his way, River got his first look at the screen.

‘And,’ Struan Loy said, ‘you’re not gunna believe this.’

But River was already believing it, because there it was on Ho’s monitor: same set-up as before, except this time the kid wasn’t wearing a hood. His face was plain to see, and it wasn’t a face they’d been expecting.

Somebody said, ‘It doesn’t mean it’s not Islamists. Who’ve got him, I mean.’

‘Depends on who the kid is.’

‘He’ll turn out to be a squaddie—a Muslim squaddie. Exactly the kind of victim they’re looking for.’

Sid Baker said, ‘He doesn’t look like a squaddie.’

He didn’t, it was true. He looked soft and dreamy. And scared stiff, and even a squaddie can be scared stiff, but it went deeper than that: his features had that untested gloss which is one of the first things squaddies get kicked out of them.

‘That’s why they had him wearing gloves,’ Sid said. ‘They were hiding his colour.’

‘How long’s the loop?’ River asked.

‘Twelve minutes. Twelve and a bit,’ Ho said.

‘Why are they doing that?’

‘A continuous feed would be easier to trace. Less impossible, anyway.’ Ho sighed. He liked people knowing he knew this stuff, but hated having to explain it. ‘You’d get little breaks in transmission every time they switched computer. If their network’s limited to a set number of proxies, that might give us an edge in tracking them.’

‘What’s that in the background?’ Catherine Standish said. River hadn’t noticed she was there.

‘What’s what?’

‘Over his left shoulder.’

Something leant against the wall a couple of yards behind the boy.

‘A piece of wood.’

‘A handle of some sort.’

‘I think it’s an axe,’ Catherine said.

‘Jesus …’

Loy was still worrying away at the kid’s identity. ‘If he’s not a squaddie, maybe he’s a name. Wonder who his parents are?’

‘Anyone missing on the diplomats’ list?’

‘Well, there might be. But it’s not like we’ll be told. Besides, if the kid was a name, the kidnappers would have said. Ups the box-office value.’

Sid said, ‘Okay, say he’s not a squaddie or an embassy snatch. Who is he?’

‘One of their own who they think’s been turned.’

‘Or they caught him with a tart.’

‘Or a half of bitter and a jazz mag,’ Loy put in.

River said, ‘Unless he’s not.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Unless he’s some random kid who happened to be the right colour.’

Ho said, ‘He look the right colour to you?’

Sid said, ‘Depends on who’s got him. That’s your point, right?’

River nodded.

Ho said, ‘Didn’t we cover this? Swords of the Desert, Wrath of Allah. Doesn’t matter what they call themselves. They’re Al Qaeda.’

‘Unless they’re not,’ River said.

Without fanfare, Jackson Lamb appeared among them.

He stared at the screen a full fifteen seconds, then said, ‘He’s Pakistani.’

Sid said, ‘Or Indian or Sri Lankan or—’

Lamb said, flatly, ‘He’s Pakistani.’

‘Do we have a name?’ River asked.

‘Fuck should I know? But it’s not Al Qaeda’s got him, is it?’

That he’d been about to say something similar didn’t stop River from countering this. ‘Doesn’t rule it out.’

‘Besides,’ Ho said. ‘Who else? Chopping a kid’s head off on prime-time? Nobody does that except—’

‘Idiots,’ said Lamb. ‘You’re all idiots.’

His slow gaze took them all in: River, Sid and Ho; Min Harper and Louisa Guy; Struan Loy and Kay White; Catherine Standish, on whom he seemed to focus with particular disdain. ‘It’s on the table now. Don’t you get it? They cut heads off, so can we. That’s the masterplan behind this piece of theatre. Somebody somewhere will be using the words fight fire with fire. Some other dickhead’ll be saying that what works in Karachi works just as well in Birmingham.’ He caught Loy’s mouth about to open. ‘Or wherever.’ Loy closed it. ‘Trust me, he’s Pakistani, because that’s the average numpty’s shorthand for Muslim. And whoever’s strapped him to that chair’s not Al Qaeda. They’ve strapped him to that chair because he’s Al Qaeda, or’ll do nicely until the real thing comes along. These aren’t Islamic fuckwits waging war on Satan’s poodle. They’re home-grown fuckwits who think they’re taking it back to the enemy.’

Nobody spoke.

‘I’m disappointed. Nobody think I’m off the wall?’

River would have pulled his own tongue out sooner than tell him he’d had the same thoughts. ‘If you’re right, why haven’t they said so? Why mask him until now?’

‘That’s the way I’d do it,’ Lamb said. ‘If I wanted maximum attention. I’d start off letting everybody think they knew what was happening. So by the time I got around to explaining the real deal, everyone would already have an opinion.’

And he was right, thought River. The fat bastard was probably right. Everywhere, everybody would be doing what Lamb had said: reconfiguring their earlier position that this was Islamist extremism. And he wondered how many of them would experience a brief hiccup before civilized outrage reasserted itself; a moment in which the thought would intrude that this foul threat, if neither fair nor just, was at least some kind of balancing.

Catherine said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and left.

Lamb said, ‘Speaking of which, I assume this little gathering means you’ve all finished your current assignments? Because I want hard-copy updates by three. Along with a ten-bullet explanation of precisely why it’s crucial we get a six-month extension on each of them.’ He looked round.

Nobody blinked. ‘Good. Because we don’t want to end up credit-crunched for looking like a bunch of useless tossers, do we?’

On Ho’s monitor, the slightest of flickers indicated that the loop had come to an end and the reel was beginning again. The boy’s face was still soft and glossy, but his eyes were shafts into the dark.

‘Where’s Moody, anyway?’ Lamb asked.

But nobody knew, or nobody said.

Chapter 7

A shag was making its way up and down the Thames, carving out a stretch of river between Hungerford Bridge and Canary Wharf. She didn’t know much about the behaviour of birds—wasn’t one hundred per cent this was a shag—but she suspected that if another turned up there’d be trouble; feathers would fly, and the loser would end up downriver, looking for a quiet life. That was what happened when territory was at stake.

Take this space here: a bench where you could sit with your back to the Globe. Streams of tourists passed every hour, and in either direction fire-jugglers, buskers and itinerant poets jealously guarded their patches; fistfights, even stabbings, resulting from encroachment on another’s turf. Income was at stake. For the shag, food was the prize; for the hustler, tourist silver. But none of them knew the real value of the estate, which was that it was a blank spot. The bench on which Diana Taverner sat was in a twelve-yard corridor of CCTV limbo. It was a small safe cupboard in the open air, and had been reserved for her alone by a foul-looking splash of birdshit running most of its length; a revolting mess ensuring that even the weariest tourist would look elsewhere to rest his bones, though it was, in fact, a plastic transfer.

Unregarded, then, and off the leash, she lit a cigarette, and dragged a lungful of sweet poison into her system. Like most pleasures, this one diminished the more you indulged it. In normal circumstances Lady Di could let a pack last a month, but today, she suspected, she might be setting records.

A weak light fell upon the river. On both banks, the usual noises obtained: the rattle and honk of city traffic; the constant buzz of a million conversations. Way overhead, airliners were stacking up for Heathrow, while nearer to ground level a helicopter discovered a new shortcut between one side of London and the other.

Taverner breathed out smoke which hung in the air two seconds, then broke apart like a daydream. A passing jogger altered course to avoid the drift. Smoking was almost as good a guarantor of privacy as fake birdshit. Though give it another year or two, and it would probably be an arrestable offence.

Her current need for nicotine lay in the fact that she wasn’t long out of the day’s third meeting: this one with Limitations, formerly Steering & Oversight. It wasn’t clear whether a sense of humour lay beneath the rebranding. Limitations was a cross between an Oxbridge MCR and a railway platform: a collection of chinless wonders, with a sprinkling of field-hardened veterans. You had more chance of reaching a consensus with a vox pop on Marmite. The suits hated operations because operations cost money; the field guys loved them, because the best produced pure gold. To outward appearances Taverner was a suit, but her heart belonged with the field guys, the handlers. Besides, if you removed operations from the curriculum, security didn’t amount to more than putting on a peaked cap and a shiny badge. As far as the war on terror went, you might as well start digging trenches, and handing out tin hats.

The folders she’d brought to this particular meeting were all the same buff-colour; had all been time-stamped fifteen minutes previously; were all logo-ed Mozart, this year’s Grade-A classification. They’d made their way round the table even faster than the pastries.

For a few moments there was near-silence.

At length, a suit piped up. ‘You’re quite sure about this?’

‘Of course.’

‘Humint?’

A snort. The vets loved it when the footlights crowd slipped in a tradecraft term.

‘Human intelligence,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘And this Albion crew—’

Somebody else said, ‘Could we do this by the numbers, please?’

General clearing of throats, shuffling of papers.

Tradition decreed that Limitations gatherings were minuted, regardless of whether the session was designated open, and thus recorded, or closed, and thus officially not recorded. So by the numbers it was: date, time, those attending. In the chair, Leonard Bradley of Westminster Parish. In the hot seat, Lady Di. Not that anyone called her that.

‘For those who don’t know, Ms Tearney, Ingrid, is in Washington this week, or would of course be here. We’re grateful to Diana for stepping into her shoes, but then we all know how capable a Second she is. Diana.’

‘Thank you, Leonard. Good morning, everyone.’ Replies were murmured. She tapped her folder. ‘The first anyone knew of this, it popped up on a BBC blog at 4.22 a.m.’

‘I hate to interrupt,’ a suit said.

The almost audible rolling of multiple pairs of eyes suggested that this wasn’t entirely true.

‘Can’t such entries be traced via, ah, I believe they’re called—’

Diana Taverner said: ‘If we had a trace, we wouldn’t need this meeting. We’d have wrapped the whole thing up before Today aired.’

Bradley made a hand gesture that would have looked more complete if he’d been brandishing a pipe. ‘Perhaps we could let Diana finish. Or even start.’

She said: ‘Hassan Ahmed. Born Birmingham, 1990. His grandparents arrived from Islamabad in the early seventies. His grandfather ran a soft furnishings business which his father took over when the old man retired. Hassan is the youngest of four, in his second year at Leeds University. Business Studies. Shares a flat with three other students, but by all accounts, he’s a shy kid. No girlfriend known, or boyfriend either. His tutor couldn’t pick him out from a crowd. He belongs to a student society calls itself the Last Laugh, for budding stand-up comedians, but nobody there has much to say about him. He’s clearly not lighting fires.’

She paused to take a sip of water.

‘He’s Muslim, but only nominally. Before university, he was a regular attender at his local mosque, which is not—and never has been—on a watch list. But his homelife is secular, and his father in particular seems to regard the mosque as a networking opportunity. They don’t use Urdu at home, and it’s not clear Hassan speaks it. There’s no record of his having contact with extreme influences, nor has he been clocked on demos or marches. His name popped up on a petition objecting to the 21/7 convictions, but it’s possible it was hijacked. And even if it wasn’t, it might just mean he happened to be there when the petition went round.’

When she replaced the glass on its coaster, she took care to position it dead centre.

‘It’s a brief profile, and we all know that moderate backgrounds can produce blazing extremists, but there’s absolutely nothing on Hassan to suggest that he’s anything other than what he seems to be. A British Asian studying for a degree. Either way, we do know he was taken late last night on his way home from the comedy club. He was snatched in a back lane not far from his flat, taking a shortcut from where he’d parked his car. The snatchers—’

‘He drives a car?’ somebody asked.

‘It was a present from his father,’ Taverner said.

She waited, but that seemed to satisfy him.

‘The snatchers call themselves the Voice of Albion.’

Now Leonard Bradley leant forward, his face creasing into that mask of perplexity he liked to wear when about to pick holes in somebody’s case. ‘You’ll forgive me—’

She waved him ahead, like a driver might a friendly bus.

‘I thought there’d been no actual contact with these snatchers. But you’ve identified them already? That’s smart work. Very smart.’

One or two murmurs of assent met this.

Diana Taverner said, ‘There’s been no contact, no. That’s to say, they’ve not made any demands or identified themselves in relation to this particular, ah, episode.’

‘But you’ve been keeping tabs on them.’

‘That’s well within our remit, I think you’d agree.’

‘Absolutely. Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.’

Down the table, Roger Barrowby made a clucking noise with his tongue.

Barrowby was usually called the Barrowboy, a nickname he detested and pretended to revel in. He had thinning sandy hair, a prominent chin, and a habit of pressing the tip of a finger to its central dimple, as if trying to encourage it back into his jaw. But he appeared to have done something about his dandruff.

‘Roger!’ Leonard Bradley’s tone couldn’t have sounded heartier at a barbecue. ‘You have an interjection? An objection?’ You could have cut the bonhomie with a knife. Taverner wondered why they hated each other.

‘An observation, Len. Merely an observation.’

‘Care to share?’

Barrowby said, ‘Bloody lucky, that’s all. We have a watching brief on a bunch of original thinkers, just as they’re attempting a coup? I mean, how often does that happen?’

Despite herself, Taverner smiled at ‘original thinkers’.

Bradley said, ‘We could argue about gift horses and dental plans. But perhaps Diana has a view?’

‘Watching brief is pitching it high,’ Diana said. ‘They’re one of seventeen groups on the radar right now, which is also a bit high, but there’ve been murmurs something like this was on the horizon. And—’

‘Excuse me?’

Barrowby again.

‘Murmurs?’

She’d have answered, but knew there was no way this was getting past the assembled ex-handlers, who provided a chorus:

‘Not our remit, Roger.’

‘Not even close.’

‘Intelligence gathering’s outside the sphere of this committee.’

‘Of course,’ Barrowby agreed. ‘But if we’re paying for supper, we get to glance at the menu, surely?’

‘We’ll check the books when the financial year closes,’ somebody else said. ‘But how Operations shells out the booty is their game.’

Bradley was nodding. ‘We get to taste the sausages, Roger,’ he said, ‘if you’ll allow me to pursue your metaphor. But we don’t get to watch them being made.’

Barrowby raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘Diana. Forgive me. You heard murmurs. You allocated resources. Fair enough. It looks like you, or perhaps Ms Tearney, made a wise, operational, decision.’

Leaving unaddressed the degree to which Ingrid Tearney had been involved, Diana went on: ‘Like I say, not a watching brief. That is, we weren’t actually keeping them under surveillance, otherwise this caper wouldn’t have got off the ground. And that, I’d agree, would have been bloody lucky. As it is, I’m confident we can roll this up in short order.’

‘Before they chop young Hassan’s head off,’ Leonard Bradley said.

‘Precisely.’

‘Well, there’s no need to spell out the public relations aspect, is there? The half of the country that’s not watching this yet will be glued to it by suppertime.’ He glanced at the papers in front of him. ‘Voice of Albion, eh? I’d be more impressed if there was any chance these halfwits had actually read Blake.’

Silence greeted this.

He said, ‘Our friends in blue?’

‘We haven’t released the details, the Voice of Albion connection,’ Taverner said. ‘We will if necessary, but I’m confident that by this time tomorrow, we’ll be able to present them with the whole package.’

‘The boy was snatched in Leeds city centre?’ someone piped up.

‘Not quite the centre. Headingley.’

‘Don’t they have CCTV? I was rather under the impression one couldn’t cross the road without being a reality TV star.’

‘It appears that the traffic monitoring system was off air for six hours last night, from a little before midnight until a short while ago. Routine maintenance, we’re told.’

‘Bit of a coincidence.’

‘We’re looking into it. Or the police are. But I don’t think Albion have that sort of reach. You’ll find a printout of their homepage in the folder, if you want an idea of the clout they wield.’

There was a general rustling of pages.

Bradley glanced up. ‘“Natoinal purity”,’ he noted with distaste. It wasn’t clear whether it was the concept or the spelling which pained him.

‘We’re not dealing with the sharpest pencils in the box,’ Taverner agreed.

‘Can’t you trace them through the site?’ Barrowby asked.

She said, ‘Now, there they have shown nous. The proxy’s in Sweden, where they treat client privilege very seriously. Getting their details will take a while. More than the deadline allows. But let me repeat, I have every confidence that this crew will be under wraps before the deadline becomes an issue.’

Then Bradley did that thing with his hand again, and said, ‘Let me say on all our behalf—behalves?—that we’re grateful to Diana for a remarkably full picture drawn in a remarkably short time. And that we’ll be equally grateful for hourly updates, leading to a swift and happy conclusion.’

There was a knock on the door, and Tom entered, a folded sheet of paper in his hand. Without a word, he handed it to Diana Taverner, and left.

Taverner unfolded it, and read it in silence. Her expression betrayed not the slightest clue as to whether the information it contained was new to her, confirmation of something already suspected, or an out-of date report on weather happening elsewhere. But when she looked up, the atmosphere shifted.

‘This is fresh. There’ll be copies in a moment.’

Bradley said, ‘Perhaps you might …’

She might. She did.

‘People, it would appear this isn’t the random snatch we’d thought.’

New information demanded at least as much action as discussion. It was Diana Taverner’s role to leave to see about the action, and everybody else’s to get the discussion under way. Or almost everybody’s. She was halfway to the lift when the Barrowboy caught her—almost literally: she turned to find him reaching for her arm. The look she bestowed upon him would have stuck six inches out the back of a more sensitive man.

‘Not a good time, Roger.’

‘When is it ever? Diana, this new information.’

‘You know as much as I do.’

‘I doubt that. But either way, it doesn’t change anything, does it?’

‘You think? Not even a little?’

‘What I meant was, you seemed confident enough before this apparent bombshell went off. Who he is doesn’t make your job harder.’

‘“Apparent”?’

Each vowel was its own icicle.

‘Poor choice of word. All I meant was, you’ve an asset in place, yes? You don’t get Mozart-grade info from random phone-grabs or lists of dodgy loan applications.’

‘It’s nice to hear from an expert, Roger. Remind me, where was your finest hour? Beirut? Baghdad? Or the bar at the Frontline Club?’

But it washed off him. ‘I only meant, that’s the stuff they do over at Slough House.’ He barked a self-appreciative laugh. ‘Hoping to bore the deadweights into jumping ship. This is higher grade. So. You have an asset.’

She jabbed the lift button with an index finger. ‘Yes, Roger. We have an asset. That’s how intelligence gathering works.’

‘But he didn’t know this latest twist?’

‘If he knew everything he wouldn’t just be an asset, Roger. He’d be Wikipedia.’

‘So how close to the action is he?’

‘Pretty close.’

‘Handy.’

‘Some might say so. Others call it foresight.’

‘Well, there’s foresight and foresight, isn’t there? Not much credit in reading the runes if you laid them out in the first place.’

‘That’s right up there with apparent, Roger. Are you trying to tell me something?’

The lift arrived. Before its doors were fully open she was inside; pressing the button for floor level. Pressing it three times, in fact. Someday they’d invent a button which made things happen faster the more you pressed it.

‘Nothing really, Diana. Just that it might be an idea to be careful.’

The doors didn’t quite cut off his coda:

‘Swimming with sharks, that kind of thing.’

Swimming with sharks, she thought now, crushing her cigarette underheel. She checked her watch. It was fifteen seconds short of one o’clock.

He approached from the east, and even if she hadn’t pulled up his records earlier, before making the call, she’d have recognized him. At Regent’s Park they called them slow horses, and half the fun had been letting the slow horses know it. So it became self-fulfilling: when Slough House met Regent’s Park, it was always clear who was wearing the boots. And here he came, approaching her with a slow horse’s determination, as if reaching the finishing line meant the battle was won. When, as anyone with breeding knows, coming first is the only result that matters.

At the bench, he treated her to a look half aggressive, half defensive, like a wronged lover, and then curled his lip at the bench itself.

She said, ‘It’s not real and it’s quite dry.’

He seemed dubious.

‘For God’s sake. This is a useful bench. You think we’d let a gull crap on it?’

Jed Moody sat.

Out on the water the shag was halfway through another circuit, while near Bankside Pier a street-preacher had staked out an imaginary pulpit, and was haranguing passers-by. Everything normal, in other words.

Taverner said, ‘I’m told you reached out last night.’

‘Nick’s an old friend,’ Moody said.

‘Shut up. You told him Jackson Lamb was running an op, that he’d sent one of your junior colleagues on a data-snatch. That this wasn’t anything Slough House does, and that if it was, it should be you doing it.’

‘It’s true. I spent six years—’

‘Shut up. What I want to know is, how did you find out about it?’

‘About what, ma’am?’

She’d been focused on the buildings on the far bank, but now turned to face him. ‘Don’t for a moment imagine we’re having a conversation. When I ask for information, you give it. You don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, and you don’t dream about telling anything but the truth. Or you’ll find there are colder, deeper things than this river, and I’ll take pleasure in burying you in one of them. Clear?’

‘So far.’

‘Good. Now, I gave Lamb a specific instruction about a specific job. I don’t remember telling him to let you know about it. So, how did you find out?’

He said, ‘There’s a bug.’

‘There’s. A. Bug.’

It wasn’t exactly a question. So Moody didn’t exactly answer. He just swallowed, hard.

‘Are you seriously telling me you planted a bug in Jackson Lamb’s office?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sweet Jesus.’ She threw back her head and laughed. Then stopped. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ she said again.

‘It wasn’t …’

‘Wasn’t what? Wasn’t something that could get you, what, thirty years? Given the climate?’

‘Have you any idea what it’s like?’

But she was shaking her head: not interested in his prepared outburst. He might be frustrated, thwarted, feel he’d been made to carry the can for a Service balls-up. But the fact was, he’d never have made it out of his current pay grade. If you needed a walking definition of foot soldier, a glance at Jed Moody’s file would do it.

‘I don’t care. All I want to know is, how come the sweeps didn’t pick it up? Oh, no. Don’t tell me.’

So he didn’t.

‘You do the sweeping.’

He nodded.

‘Set a thief to catch a … Christ. What else do you lot get up to over there? No, don’t even start. I don’t want to know.’

True to her earlier forebodings, Diana Taverner fished her cigarettes out again. She offered the pack to Moody. He’d already produced a lighter, and with one big hand shielding the flame, lit them both. For a brief moment, membership of the twenty-first century pariahs’ club united them.

He said, ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping. Well, I was. But not for anybody else. I used to be one of the Dogs. Lamb’s got me running background checks when they get a new waiter next door. Not because he thinks anyone’s about to post an asset there. He’s just taking the piss, and doesn’t care if I know it.’

‘So why not quit?’

‘Because it’s what I do.’

‘But you’re not happy.’

‘Nobody’s happy at Slough House.’

Taverner concentrated on her cigarette, or pretended to, but had good peripheral vision, and was studying Jed Moody. He’d probably been handy once, but the drink and the smoking had put paid to that, and it was a safe bet that exile had sealed the downward spiral. These days, he probably guilt-splurged at the gym; seven-hour workouts making up for lost weekends. He’d keep kidding himself this was working. Whenever the truth looked like breaking in, he’d have another drink, and light another smoke.

‘Not even Lamb?’ she asked.

Rather to her surprise, he gave her a straight answer: ‘He’s a burn-out. A fat, lazy bastard.’

‘You ever wonder why he’s at Slough House?’

‘What good would he be anywhere else?’

That wasn’t quite so straight. The one self-evident fact about Lamb being allowed to run his own little kingdom—even from a crackpot palace like Slough House—was that he must know where bodies were buried. Moody didn’t want to raise that with Diana Taverner. Which meant, she surmised, that Moody was treading round her with caution. Which was exactly how she preferred it.

Moody’s cigarette had burned to the filter. He let it fall from his fingers, and it rolled into the crack between two paving stones.

When he looked up, she fixed him with a stare that left no doubt who was in charge. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘You’re going to do one or two favours for me. Off the books.’

‘Illegal.’

‘Yes. Which means that if for any reason things go even slightly wrong, and you end up in a small room being questioned by angry men, there’s no possibility I’ll pretend to have heard of you. Are we clear on that?’

Moody said, ‘Yes.’

‘And are we happy about it?’

Moody said, ‘Yes’ again, and she could tell this was the truth. Like other slow horses before him, he wanted to be back in the game.

From her bag, she produced a mobile phone, and handed it to him. ‘Incoming only,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘And dump the bug. Slough House may be a dead end, but it’s a branch of the Service. It gets out it’s been compromised, and your former mates from Internal Investigations’ll take you apart, bone by bone.’

She stood, but instead of moving straight off, she hovered a moment.

‘Oh, and Moody? Word of warning. Lamb’s a burn-out for a reason.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning when he was in the field, he had more to worry about than his expenses. Things like being caught, tortured and shot. He survived. You might want to bear that in mind.’

She left him sitting there, an asset bought and paid for. Some were cheaper than others. And she already knew to what use she could put him.

From the window River gazed down on the traffic backed up along Aldersgate, victims of the roadworks that had plagued the street forever. Sid was at her desk, her monitor still unreeling the twelve-minute loop of the boy in the cellar; the actual twelve minutes long swallowed by the passing day, but each loop nevertheless chopping away at the time left to him.

‘A far-right group,’ River said, and though it was a while since either had spoken, Sid Baker picked up the tune without missing a beat:

‘There’s more than one of them.’

He turned. ‘I’m aware of that. You want me to run through some of the more obscure—’

‘River—’

‘—nutjob circuses, in case any have slipped your mind?’

‘Don’t assume it’s Hobden’s crew. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘Because it’s more likely to be coincidence that he pops on to Five’s radar the day before this happens?’

‘He popped on to yours the day before this happened. I expect he’s been on Five’s a lot longer.’

River’s grandfather would have recognized the stubborn look on his face. Sid Baker pressed on regardless.

‘The British Patriotic Party are the usual bunch of shallow-enders, blaming their lack of prospects on the nearest victim group. Get them lagered up, and they’ll break windows and beat up a shopkeeper, sure. But this is out of their league.’

‘You don’t think Hobden’s got the nous to put this together?’

‘Nous, yes. But why would he want to? Besides, if Five thought he was behind this, you think they’d be stealing his files? They’d have him answering questions in a basement.’

River said, ‘Maybe. Or maybe he’s got enough friends in high places that he can’t be tossed into a van without people getting upset.’

‘You think? He’s spent the last couple of years being strung up in print by the rags he used to write for.’

‘Because they can’t afford to look like they support him.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. They’ve strung him up because he deserves it. There’s no sympathy for views like his in the mainstream. Twenty years ago, perhaps. But times have changed.’

‘And keep changing. There’s a recession on, did you notice? Attitudes have hardened. But we’re off the point, anyway. What this is, we’ve a far-right group performing a terrorist act the same day we pull a data-theft on the highest-profile right-wing nutcase in the country. No way is that just one of those things.’

Sid turned back to her monitor. ‘You’re always saying we do nothing important here at Slough House. How does that fit in with us suddenly being on point for the whole damn Service? If Hobden’s behind this, and Five were checking him out, we wouldn’t know about it, would we?’

He had no answer for that.

‘He’ll be found. It’s not going to happen, River. This boy is not going to get his head chopped off on camera. Not tomorrow, not any other day.’

‘I hope you’re right. But—’

He bit the rest of his sentence off.

‘But what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You were about to say something. Don’t pretend you weren’t.’

But I saw what you took from Hobden’s laptop, and it was gibberish. Whatever you were trying to steal, you didn’t get. Which means if he is involved in this, he’s at least one step ahead of Five, which means it’s not looking good for that kid right now …

‘Is this about what you were looking at in the pub?’

‘No.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Okay, I’m lying. Thanks.’

‘Give me a break. I’d lie too if I’d come into possession of knowledge I shouldn’t have. I mean, given we’re spies and all.’

She was trying to get him to laugh, he realized. That was an odd feeling. He couldn’t recall the last time a woman had tried to get him to even smile.

Wasn’t going to work though. ‘It was nothing,’ he repeated. ‘Just some corrupted files.’

‘Weird form of corruption, translating everything into pi.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘Sounds more like some kind of security scrambling.’

‘Look, Sid, it was nothing important. And even if it was, it’s none of your business.’

Judging by the look on her face, it would be a while before she attempted to put a smile on his again.

‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘Fine. Excuse me for breathing.’ She stood abruptly, and her chair toppled backwards. ‘And speaking of breathing, this room still stinks. Open a bloody window, can’t you?’

She left.

Instead of opening the window, River looked out of it again. The traffic hadn’t noticeably shifted. He could stand here the rest of the day, and that sentence wouldn’t need changing.

It’s not going to happen, River. That boy is not going to get his head chopped off on camera. Not tomorrow, not any other day.

He hoped she was right. But he wasn’t banking on it.

But the police found Hassan safe and sound.

It turned out there’d been a partial witness to the abduction; from her bedroom window, a woman had seen some lads ‘rough-housing’—her word—at the end of the lane opposite, then they’d all bundled into the back of a white van, a Ford, and headed east. She’d thought nothing of it at the time, but the news reports stirred her memory, so she took her snippet of information to the local cops. There were traffic lights in the direction the van had gone; over-hanging cameras monitored the junction. A partial number plate had been captured. This fragment was swiftly disseminated the length and breadth of the country; every force in the land matched it against recorded sightings of white Ford vans on motorways, in city centres, on garage forecourts. After that, it was only a matter of time. But it was a peculiar stroke of luck that broke the case wide open and brought armed-response cops bursting into Hassan’s cellar; it seemed that a local homeless man had.

Hassan opened his eyes. Darkness stared back. He closed them again. Armed-response cops burst in. He opened them. No they didn’t.

He hadn’t known time could crawl so slowly.

And hadn’t known this, either: that fear could take you away from yourself. Not simply out of time, but out of your body. Sitting in a hood and jumpsuit, like a patient in a surrealist’s waiting room, his grasp on the here-and-now slipped away, and that shrill voice at the back of his mind popped up, the one that delivered all his best riffs. Shaky, but recognizably his own, and trying to pretend none of this was happening; or that it had happened, but was now safely over; was now, moreover, material for the most scrotum-tightening stand-up routine ever. All those other hostages—the ones who’d spent years chained to radiators—they wrote their books, they made their documentaries, they hosted radio shows. But how many of them took it open-mic?

‘Let me tell you about my hood.’

Pause.

‘No, really. My hood.’

And then they’d get it, his audience; they’d get that he meant hood, the thing they’d put on his head. Not his ‘hood, where you couldn’t leave your car out overnight.

But that was as far as the shrill voice got. Because it wasn’t over. The stink was too foul for it to be over: the vomit, the shit, the piss; everything that fear had shifted out of its way when making space inside him. He was here. He didn’t have an audience. He’d never had an audience; every open-mic night at the Student U he’d been there, head full of material, stomach full of knots, but he’d never dared take the stage.

Funny thing was, he’d thought that had been fear. His dread of making a tit of himself in front of beered-up fellow students—he’d thought that had been fear. Like stubbing your toe on a railway sleeper, and hopping on the spot with the pain. Not seeing the train bearing down on you.

One minute, walking home. Next, bunged into a cellar, holding a newspaper for the camera.

Now that was fear.

And this, too was fear: We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web.

He liked the internet. He liked the way it brought people closer. His generation had thrown its arms around the globe, tweeting and blogging to its heart’s content, and when you were chatting online with a user called PartyDog, you didn’t know if they were a boy or a girl let alone black or white, Muslim or atheist, young or old, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it? …

Except that Hassan had once read about some toerag who’d seen a woman collapse in the street, and instead of trying to help, like a normal person—or hurrying past, like a normal person—he’d pissed on her, actually pissed on her, and filmed himself on his phone doing it, then posted it on the web for other toerags to laugh at. It was as if the internet validated certain actions … For a tiny moment it felt good to have something to blame for all this, even if what he was blaming was the internet, which could never be made to care.

And then that tiny moment too became another chip knocked off a block that was rapidly growing smaller; and the awareness that the moment had passed occupied the moment that followed it, and also the moment after that, and in neither of those moments, nor in any of those that came after it, did armed-response cops burst into the cellar, and find Hassan safe and sound.

The kitchen wasn’t anywhere you’d want to cook a meal. On the other hand, it wasn’t anywhere a meal had been cooked; its surfaces piled with takeaway containers and plastic cutlery, with greasy brown paper bags and pizza boxes, with empty soft drink bottles and discarded cigarette packets. Ashtrays had been made of anything that didn’t move. The lino curled at the corners, and a blackened patch by the back door suggested a small fire in the past.

In the centre of the room sat a formica-topped kitchen table, its red surface scarred with circular burns and razor-straight slashes. A laptop computer occupied the centre of this table, its lid currently closed. An assortment of cables snaked on top of it like electrical spaghetti, and next to these lay a folded tripod and a digicam about the size of a wallet. Once upon a time, you’d needed a building’s worth of hardware to reach the world, but ‘once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days. Arranged around the table were four mismatched chairs, three of them occupied. The fourth was tilting at a crazy angle, held upright only by the pair of booted feet that were alternately pushing it away then hauling it back. Every other second it seemed the chair would topple, but it never did.

The feet’s owner was saying, ‘We should webcam it.’

‘… Why?’

‘Stick it on the intranet.’Stead of those clips. Let the whole world watch him crap himself start to finish.’

The other two shared a glance.

They were bulldog males, the three of them; different shapes and sizes, but with this much in common: they were bulldog males. You wouldn’t put your hand out to any of them and feel sure you’d get it back. Below them, in the cellar, Hassan Ahmed was calling them Larry, Curly and Moe, and if they’d formed a line-up for him, this was how it would have shaken down:

Larry was tallest, and had the most hair, though this wasn’t a fierce contest: where the other two were shaved to the bone, a mild fuzz covered Larry’s skull, somehow conferring on him an air of authority, as if he were wearing a hat in a room full of bareheaded men. He was thin-faced with restless eyes, which kept checking door and window, as if either might burst open at any moment. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up; he wore black jeans and brand-new trainers. Moe, meanwhile, was the middle-man in every sense: shorter than one, taller than the other, and with a belly a black tee-shirt did nothing to minimize. Unwisely he sported a goatee he stroked constantly, as if checking it remained attached.

As for Curly—the owner of the feet—he seemed to be the stupid one.

Larry told him, ‘We don’t want a webcam.’

‘Why not?’

‘We just don’t.’

‘He’s stinking that room out like a rat inna trap. We should let the world see what they’re like. When they’re not clambering on to buses with rucksacks loaded with Semtex.’

Moe, his tone of voice suggesting this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, said, ‘We set up a webcam, we double the chances of getting caught.’

‘We’re already putting the video clips out there.’

You could spend all day trying to drum simple stuff into Curly’s head, Larry thought, but sooner or later you were going to have to give up. If you wanted him to understand anything more complicated than a two-horse race, you’d either have to draw him a picture or just give him a cigarette and hope he’d forget about it.

But Moe persevered. ‘This stuff on the web, people are going to be trying to find where it’s coming from. There’s ways of hiding our tracks, and we’ve done all that. But we go live—we put a webcam down there, and it’ll be easier for them to trace us.’

‘And it’s the internet,’ Larry said. ‘By the way.’

‘What?’

‘Internet. Intranet’s something’s else.’

‘Same difference.’

Larry looked at Moe again, and an unspoken thought passed between them.

‘Anyway,’ Curly said. ‘Think he’s scared now? He’ll be a steaming pile of chickenshit this time tomorrow.’

This with an air of finality, as if it were the final step in a careful argument.

‘I’m going for a crap,’ he added.

Both chairs hit the floor when he stood.

When he’d gone, Larry lit a cigarette, then tossed the pack to Moe. ‘Do you think he’s up to this?’

‘He’s not as stupid as he pretends to be.’

‘No, well. Cunt can walk and breathe at the same time, he’s obviously not as stupid as he looks.’

‘I said pretends.’

‘I heard.’

On the other side of the kitchen door Curly listened without moving a muscle, until satisfied they’d finished. And then he moved like smoke down the hallway and up the stairs, where he locked himself in the bathroom, and made a quiet call with a phone he shouldn’t have had.

Lamb was at his desk with a folder in front of him—an analysis of congestion charge anomalies, or Twitter feeds, or cash-in-hand real estate purchases in Beeston—but his attention seemed focused on the corkboard on his wall, on which an array of money-off tokens were pinned: the local takeaway pizza place; Costcutter’s price promise on Ginster’s sausage rolls. Catherine watched from the doorway. She’d intended to walk in, add her own report to his pile and leave, but something had snagged her. Lamb didn’t look like the Lamb they all knew and hated. There was something there that hadn’t been there before.

The funny thing was, Catherine Standish had once been keen on meeting Jackson Lamb. It had been Charles Partner’s fault. Lamb had been one of Partner’s joes, back in the Middle Ages. He’d turned up one day in the modern world; was Partner’s 10 a.m. He’s one of a kind, Jackson Lamb, Partner had said. You’ll like him. And given the source, she’d thought she would.

At the time, Lamb had been in transition; making the jump from foreign holidays—as the joes all called them—to tending the home fires. This was in that blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the cold war and about ten minutes later. And she’d known he’d spent time behind the Curtain. You couldn’t know a detail like that without it colouring your expectations. You didn’t expect glamour, but you understood the bravery involved.

So he was unexpected, this overweight, dishevelled man who’d stumbled into her office an hour and twenty minutes late, hungover, or still drunk. Partner was in another meeting by then, and if he’d been surprised by Lamb’s no-show he hid it well. When he turns up, give him coffee. So she’d given Lamb coffee and put him in the visitor’s chair, which he’d occupied the way a sloth occupies a branch. He’d fallen asleep, or pretended to. Every time she looked his eyes were closed and a bubble was forming at his lips, but still: she felt watched all the time he was there.

A couple of years later, the world was upside down. Partner was dead; Slough House was up and running; and Jackson Lamb was king.

And for some reason, Catherine Standish was beside him. Lamb had asked for her specifically, she discovered, but he never gave her one hint why. And she’d never asked him. If he’d had designs on her, he was years too late; there’d been a time when she’d have slept with him without giving it much thought, or remembering it afterwards, but since drying out she’d been more particular, and had slept with precisely no one. And if that ever changed, it wasn’t going to be for Jackson Lamb.

But now here he was, and there was something about him that hadn’t been there before. Anger, perhaps, but anger with the brakes on; held in check by the same impotence that curbed everyone else in Slough House. Lamb had spent the best part of his working life behind enemy lines, and now here the enemy was, and there was bugger all Lamb could do but sit and watch. Weirdly, this had the effect of making Catherine want to say something comforting. Something like: ‘We’ll get them.’

We’ll get them. People were saying this in offices up and down the country; in pubs, in classrooms, on street corners. Can’t happen here. We’ll get them; and by we they all meant the same thing: those in jobs like her own and Jackson Lamb’s; those who worked, one way or the other, for the security services. Those who didn’t allow things like this to happen, even if they generally didn’t succeed in stopping it until the fifty-eighth minute. And it occurred to Catherine that if anyone thinking these thoughts ever got a look around Slough House, they might re-evaluate their position sharpish. That kid in the cellar? Doesn’t have a prayer.

So she backed away from the door and returned to her room, her report still tucked under her arm.

Chapter 8

There wasn’t much of a moon, but that hardly mattered. River was opposite Robert Hobden’s flat again. Less than forty-eight hours ago rain had been falling in torrents, and River had been on the pavement, stealing shelter from an overhanging window. Tonight it wasn’t raining, and he was in the car—if a warden came, he’d move. From behind Hobden’s curtain, a thin light shone. Every so often, a shadow fell across it. Hobden was a prowler, unable to sit still for long. Much as River hated to admit anything in common with him, they shared that much. Neither could rest quietly in their own skin for long.

And now River almost jumped out of his: what the—

Just a tap on the glass, but he hadn’t seen anyone approaching.

Whoever it was bent, and peered into the car.

‘River?’ she mouthed.

Jesus, he thought. Sid Baker.

He opened the door. She slid inside, pulled it shut, then shook her head free of her hood. She was carrying a pair of take-out coffees.

‘Sid? What the hell are you doing?’

‘I could ask you the same thing.’

‘Have you been following me?’

‘You’d better hope not, hadn’t you?’ She handed him one of the coffees, and he was helpless to do anything but accept it. Peeling the polystyrene lid from her own released a gust of steam. ‘Because that would mean I’d tracked you halfway across London without you noticing.’ She blew softly on the liquid’s surface, and the steam flurried. ‘On foot. Which would make me pretty special.’

Opening his own cup involved splashing hot coffee on to his thighs. She handed him a napkin. He fumbled with it, trying to mop himself dry without spilling more. ‘So what, you guessed I’d be here?’

‘It wasn’t that difficult.’

Great, he thought. Nothing like being transparent. ‘And you thought I might want company?’

‘I can honestly say I’ve never thought that, no.’ She looked past him. ‘Which one’s Hobden?’

River pointed.

‘And he’s alone?’

‘Far as I know. So why are you here?’

She said, ‘Look. You’re probably wrong. If Hobden’s got anything to do with Hassan—’

‘They’ve released his name?’

‘Not officially. But Five have got it, and Ho picked it up a couple of hours ago. That boy’s slick. It’s a good job he’s working for us.’

‘So who is he?’

‘Hassan Ahmed. Ho’s probably got his shoe size by now, but that’s all he had when I left. Anyway, if Hobden’s involved, he’d hardly still be loose. Five would have brought him in.’

River said, ‘That had occurred to me.’

‘And?’

He shrugged. ‘I know he’s up to something.’

‘That stuff you were looking at in the pub. Ready to tell me what that was about?’

He might as well. It wasn’t like he could convince her he wasn’t up to anything. ‘They were Hobden’s,’ he said. ‘The files you stole the other day.’

‘They were what?’

He told her what he’d done, as briefly as he could. When he’d finished, Sid was silent for a full minute. He was glad about that. She could easily have launched into a catalogue of exactly what an idiot he was; explained that theft of government property was one thing, and theft of classified information another. Even if that information turned out to be useless. He didn’t need to know any of that. And nor did she mention that merely hearing what he’d told her put her in the same situation as him. If River wound up in the dock, she’d be by his side. Unless she left the car now. And called the Dogs.

Instead, when the minute was up, she said, ‘So what’s with pi? Code?’

‘I don’t think so. I think his back-up’s a dummy. I think he’s the kind of paranoid who expects someone to lift his files, and wants to be sure they don’t get anything. No, more than that. Wants them to know he was expecting it. He wants to have the last laugh.’

River remembered something else: that Hobden used copies of Searchlight, the anti-fascist newspaper, to wrap his kitchen leavings in; an up-yours to anyone who rifled his dustbins. You think he’s calling us Nazis? he’d asked Lamb. Well, yes, Lamb had said. Obviously. Obviously he’s calling us Nazis.

‘Well, you can’t say he’s wrong,’ said Sid. ‘I mean, I lifted his files. You went through his rubbish.’

‘And that list didn’t get on the web by accident,’ River said. ‘Let’s face it, the Service screwed him good and proper.’

‘And his revenge involves setting up some kid for execution? You know what kind of backlash there’ll be if it actually happens?’

‘I can imagine.’ His coffee was still too hot. He placed the cup on the dashboard. ‘Islamic communities taking to the streets. Oh, there’ll be plenty of sympathy from the liberal left, why wouldn’t there be? An innocent kid killed on camera. But it won’t just be demonstrators waving placards and demanding respect. It’ll be about revenge. There’ll be stabbings and God knows what. You name it.’

‘That’s what I meant. He might be a raving idiot, but he’s a patriot, for what that’s worth. You really think he wants chaos in the streets?’

‘Yep. Because after the chaos comes the clampdown, and that’s what he’s after. Not the backlash but what follows, when everything gets harsh. Because nobody wants kids executed on TV, but they want riots on their doorstep even less.’

Sid said, ‘I hate conspiracy theories.’

‘It’s not a theory once it’s proved. After that, it’s just a conspiracy.’

‘And sitting outside Hobden’s flat helps how?’

‘Let me get back to you in the morning.’

‘You’re seriously planning on sitting here all night?’

‘I hadn’t got as far as making it a plan.’

She shook her head, then sipped from her cup. ‘If nothing happens, you’re buying breakfast.’

He didn’t know what to say to that, but before it became obvious, another thought occurred to her.

‘River?’

‘What?’

‘You know you’re an idiot, don’t you?’

He smiled but turned away first, so she wouldn’t notice.

That was at ten. For the next hour, it seemed breakfast was on River; there was almost no movement on the street, and none involving Hobden. The light at his window remained steady. An occasional shadow on the curtain proved he was still in there, or that someone was—perhaps River should knock on his door. That might provoke a reaction.

But provocation was a no-no. It distorts the data. Spider Webb, speaking up during a seminar: It distorts the data to provoke the target into a course of action he might not otherwise adopt. No doubt Spider had been parroting somebody who knew what he was talking about. On the other hand, if Spider was against it, River was for it.

An argument he’d had with himself five times now, and wasn’t close to resolving.

He stretched his legs as best he could, trying not to make it obvious. He was wearing everyday gear: blue jeans, a white collarless top under a grey V-neck. Sid wore black jeans and hooded sweater. Tradecraft, but she looked good in it. She’d pushed the car seat back and was mostly in shadow, but every so often her eyes picked up light from a nearby streetlamp and threw it in his direction. She was thinking about him. When a woman was thinking about you, it was always either a good thing or a bad thing. River had no idea which in this case.

To put an end to it, he said, ‘So what made you sign up?’

Now she held his gaze. ‘What else? The glamour.’

‘You’ve seen the show. Now live the life.’

‘I’m not stupid, you know.’

‘Didn’t think you were.’

‘I took a first in Oriental Languages.’

‘That’s got to be a comfort.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘It’d be a greater one if you’d shut up.’

So he shut up.

On the street the pavements stayed empty, and there was little traffic.

Prowling his apartment … Hobden could be issuing orders on his mobile, or e-mailing confederates. But River didn’t think so. He didn’t think Hobden would be doing anything that rendered him vulnerable to electronic eaves-dropping. He was just prowling like a cat in a cage; waiting for something to happen.

River could relate to that.

Sid said, ‘You’re Service family.’

He nodded.

Once, it hadn’t been uncommon; the same way some families go in for police or plumbing. Even now, you’d encounter third- or even fourth-generation spooks; roles in life handed down like family silver. With a grandfather a Service legend, River had never stood a chance. But this was Sid’s story, so he said nothing.

‘I don’t have your pedigree. Never gave the Civil Service a thought, let alone this branch. I was heading for banking. Mum’s a barrister. I was going to be an even higher-paid banker. That’s how you measure success, isn’t it? Earning more than your parents.’

He nodded again, though the thought of his mother earning money was quite funny.

‘But I was still at uni when the bombs went off.’

And this was no surprise either. No one had joined the Service since the bombs without the bombs being part of the reason.

He listened without looking at her. People talked about that day in different ways. Either it was a story about them in which bombs happened, or it was a story about the bombs, and they’d just happened to be there. Whichever this turned out to be, it would be easier for her if he wasn’t watching.

‘I was temping at a bank in the City. It was a holiday job, and I was pretty new, and I didn’t know you should wear trainers for the commute. And keep a pair of shoes in the office, you know? So anyway, I was coming out of Aldgate, and I heard it happen. It wasn’t just a noise, it was a … a sort of swelling. Like when you open a vacuum-packed jar, that release of air you get? Only bigger. And I knew what had happened—everyone knew what had happened. As if we’d all spent three and a half years waiting for it. And hadn’t realized it until that moment.’

A car appeared at the far end of the road, its headlights pinning them into their seats.

‘The funny thing was, there was little panic. On the street, I mean. It was as if everyone knew this was a time for good behaviour. For not indulging in fake heroics … Letting the professionals do their job. And all the while, stories were spreading about other bombs, and buses blowing up, and something about a helicopter crashing into Buckingham Palace—I don’t know where that one came from.’

There’d been other rumours too, spun at the speed of the web. For all the sangfroid on show, it had been a day on which you could peer through the fabric of the city itself, and see how fragile its underpinnings were.

‘Anyway, my office was being evacuated by the time I got there. We’d rehearsed for this. We used to gather outside, and everybody would look grim and check their watches while fire marshals counted heads. But I never even got inside the building that morning. You could see their point. That would have been a hell of a good time to rob a bank.’

Her voice had settled into that pattern people fall into when they know they’ll not be interrupted; when a tale they’ve rehearsed in their head is finding an audience. If they were anywhere but in a car, River thought, he could sneak quietly away, and Sid would keep talking.

She said, ‘Anyway. I keep saying that, don’t I? Anyway. Anyway, I walked home. A lot of Londoners did that on the seventh of July. It was walk home from work day. And by the time I got home, my feet were in ribbons … I’d been wearing heels for work. Because I was new, and because I wanted to look smart and feel sexy, because this was the City, after all … And because nobody told me that my second week on the job, a bunch of murderers were going to take their lunatic grievances into the underground, kill fifty-six people and close London for half a day.’ She blinked. ‘I got home and put my shoes in a cupboard and that’s where they’ve been ever since. Everybody’s got their own memorial, haven’t they? Mine’s a pair of ruined shoes in a cupboard. Every time I look at them, I think about that day.’ Now she looked at River. ‘I’m not being very clear, am I?’

‘You were there.’ It came out a croak. He cleared his throat. ‘It’s your memory. It doesn’t have to be clear.’

‘What about you?’

Where’d he been when the bombs went off, she meant.

As it happened he’d been on leave; a make-or-break Italian jaunt with his last serious girlfriend, a civilian. So he’d watched the day unfurl on CNN, when not frantically altering his flight home. ‘His’ flight, because she’d stayed. He wasn’t certain she’d ever returned.

Sometimes, River Cartwright felt like a career soldier who’d never seen action.

Instead of answering, he said, ‘So that’s why you joined. To stop anything like that happening again.’

‘Makes me sound naive, doesn’t it?’

‘No. It’s part of the job.’

Sidonie said, ‘What I thought was, even if I’m only filing cards. Trawling through websites. Even if I’m just making cups of tea for the people who are stopping it happen again, that’ll be enough. Just to be part of it.’

‘You are part of it.’

‘So are you.’

But making cups of tea is not enough, he didn’t say.

Down the road, another car turned off the main drag and almost immediately pulled into a space. For a moment it sat, lights on, and River could make out the purr of its engine. Then it died.

‘River …’

‘What is it?’

‘You wanted to know why I was assigned to Slough House.’

River said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I have been.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t need the details.’ Because when you got down to it, it didn’t take a genius. Sid must have embarrassed the wrong person, either by not sleeping with him—or her—or by sleeping with him or her, and still being there in the morning. She didn’t belong in Slough House. But that wasn’t a reason to make her tell him about it. He said, ‘I’ve messed up plenty myself.’

Bombs on underground trains had propelled Sid into the Service. A non-existent bomb on an underground platform had all but propelled River out of it. One day he might be able to say something like that out loud, and hear her laugh; hear himself laugh, even. But not yet.

‘I didn’t mess up, River.’

River’s view of the newly parked car was mostly blocked by the car in front, but he could tell nobody had got out of it.

‘I mean, there’s a reason I’m there.’

Could be making a phone call. Or waiting for someone. Maybe here was a rare example of someone who’d pull up near a friend’s house after dark, and refrain from blowing their horn to announce their presence.

‘River?’

He didn’t want to hear it. Might as well come clean; he didn’t want to hear about Sid’s sexual history. Months of pretending she barely existed; it had been a way of guarding against rejection, because Christ knew, he was already a reject. The whole world knew about him crashing King’s Cross. The footage was used for training purposes.

‘Christ …’

There might have been movement down the road. Did one shadow leave the parked car, and join the larger shadows on the pavement? He couldn’t tell. But if it had, it had been too clean to be an accident.

‘Will you pay afuckingttention?’

‘I’m listening,’ he said. ‘So what’s the reason? For you being at Slough House?’

‘You are.’

And now he did pay afuckingttention. Sid, half her face in shadow, the other half white as a plate, said, ‘I was put there to keep an eye on you, River.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

She shook her head.

‘You’re kidding.’

The one eye he could see gazed steadily back. He’d known good liars, and maybe Sid was one. But she wasn’t lying now.

‘Why?’

‘You’re not supposed to know about this.’

‘But you’re telling me. Right? You’re telling me.’

This choking feeling was nothing new. He felt it every morning, familiar as an alarm clock. It was what dragged him out of sleep. White shirt. Blue tee. Blue shirt. White tee … Some days he couldn’t remember which way round Spider had said it, and which way round the guy was dressed; all he knew for certain was that Spider had set him up, but underlying that was a layer of puzzlement. Spider had screwed him to clear his own career path? It wasn’t that he didn’t think Spider that kind of bastard. Spider was exactly that kind of bastard. But Spider wasn’t a clever enough bastard. If he had been, he wouldn’t have had to do it. He’d have had the edge over River to start with.

And now here was Sid telling him someone else had been responsible—that someone had been pulling River’s strings. Sid had been put in Slough House to keep an eye on him. And who could have done that, except whoever had put River there to start with?

‘Sid—’

And now her eyes were widening and she was pointing over his shoulder. ‘River? What’s that?’

He turned in time to glimpse a black shape disappearing over the five-foot wall to the right of Hobden’s window.

‘Sid?’

‘Looked like—’ Her eyes widened. ‘One of the achievers?’

Black-clad. Heavy weaponry. So called because they got the job done.

River was out of the car before she’d finished. ‘Watch the door. I’ll take the wall.’

But pretty much hit the wall, in fact, misjudging his vault. He had to back up and try again. An undignified scramble dropped him into a garden: mostly lawn, trimmed by a narrow flowerbed. Plastic furniture here and there; a table with a forlorn, dripping umbrella. And nobody in sight.

How long since that shape had appeared? Fifteen seconds? Twenty?

The building had a shared lobby round the back. This had a double-fronted, glass-panelled door, which hung open. Down the corridor to River’s left another door closed as he stepped into the lobby, cutting in two a noise that had barely begun. Half a syllable. A note of shock.

River’s boots click-clacked on the lobby’s tiles.

There were two doors to choose from, but if his mental map was accurate, Hobden’s was on the left. He guessed the man in black had gone straight in—skeleton key or pick. But was this really an achiever? And if it was, what did River think he was doing … But it was too late, time was happening too fast; he was here and now, bracing himself against the corridor wall. The same boot that had click-clacked across the lobby hit the door with a splintering thud, and the door broke open, and River was inside the flat.

A short corridor, more doors to either side, both ajar, bathroom and bedroom. The corridor ended in a sitting room, on the far side of which was the front door he’d been watching from across the road; the rest of the room was books, papers, portable TV, shabby sofa, table strewn with leftover takeaway, curtained window through which he’d watched Hobden’s shadow prowling, prowling; a restless movement suggesting he’d been expecting something. And here he was, the shadow’s owner.

River hadn’t laid eyes on Hobden before, but this had to be him: average height, thinning brownish hair, look of terror as he turned to face this new intrusion even while crushed in an arm-lock by the previous invader, the achiever—except this wasn’t an achiever: he was blackclad, wore a balaclava, had a utility belt round his waist, but the ensemble lacked the hi-tech tailoring of the genuine article. Besides, what he held to Hobden’s head was a .22: small, and non-Service issue.

And now the gun swung towards River, and its size became insignificant. He held out an arm, as if trying to placate an upset dog. ‘Shall we put that down?’ Astonishing himself with his banality of expression and evenness of tone. Hobden erupted, an unpunctuated gabble—‘What’s going on who are you why’—and the black-clad man silenced him with a tap on the head, then made an on-the-floor gesture at River. Disconnected thoughts held a confab in River’s head. This isn’t an op. Take him down. What makes you sure he’s alone? Their meeting done, his thoughts scattered. River knelt, measuring the distance between his hand and the heavy-looking ashtray on the nearby table. Still the man didn’t speak. Arm round Hobden’s throat, he swung him towards the front door, gun still levelled at River. Briefly, he released the journalist while opening the door. Cold air rushed in. Grabbing Hobden again he backed out, attention trained on River. Whatever his plan was, it didn’t take Sid into account, who was waiting outside. She grabbed Hobden’s arm, and River seized the ashtray and leaped forward, intending to club the gunman. Hobden fell to the pavement. River reached the other pair in moments; the third part of a triangle which proved anything but eternal. The gun made a quiet cough. The trio dispersed.

Of them, one fell to the ground, landing perfectly in a puddle which hadn’t been there a moment ago. It swarmed, spread, and formed an inky stream to the gutter, hardly disturbed at all by the sounds of flight and fear and grief now gathering round it.