Slough House Read online

  “Of course,” he said. “Mrs. Knox. How can I help you?”

  “There’s someone in the house.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  What Roddy Ho did best was everything.

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

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

  As usual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  What cockwomble came up with that?

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

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

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

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

  On that day too, she’d dance.

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

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

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

  Just so long as nobody started dying again.

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

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

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

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

  “I read.”

  “You don’t read that much.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “. . . You want a list of kids who’ve withdrawn from social media?”

  “From Facepalm and Twatter and the rest, yeah.”

  “Any clues as to how I might go about doing that?”

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

  Which was about average for an encounter with Lamb.

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

  Thinking this, he punched the bastard dough some more.

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

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

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

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

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