Slough House Read online

  Look at me now.

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

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

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

  “Do I know you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Give me a minute.”

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

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

  “Who sends his regards.”

  “Does he?”

  “Not really.”

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

  “I’d been waiting ten minutes.”

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

  This being Regent’s Park, the immediate catchment area of the secret service.

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

  “Speak for yourself.”

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

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

  “Thank you.”

  “Jackson hates losing joes.”

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

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

  Catherine said, “We have concerns.”

  “How borderline tragic for you.”

  “And we were wondering if you could help.”

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

  “Just me, really.”

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

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

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

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

  “. . . Really?”

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

  “Which is the reason I wanted to see you.”

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

  “Yes, I’d heard.”

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

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

  “Did you hear that?” she said.

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

  “I think someone already has,” said Catherine.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Jesus,” he said softly.

  He took two steps into the room.

  “. . . Sid?”

  “Hello, River,” she said.

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

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

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

  And like the sea, a city has its sharks.

  There’s a shop on Brewer Street. You can get Russian tobacco there. Polish chewing gum. Lithuanian snuff . . .

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

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

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

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

  He had just sold the last three packs of his Russian cigarettes—a life-destroying brand that only a suicide could embrace—to a fat man in a dirty overcoat who looked like he worked in a betting shop, either behind the cashier’s grille or on a stool beneath the TV, watching his pay packet break a leg in the 3.15 at Doncaster. Still, there was a grim focus in his eyes as he waited for his change, as if he were committing the little shop’s interior to memory. Maybe he’d lost more than the odd pay packet in his time. Maybe there was a whole archive of failure shelved in that ugly head, which was perhaps the reason Old Miles spoke to him as he counted coins into his waiting hand. “We’re closing,” he said.

  “So I heard.”

  “There’s no future in it.”

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

  “You’ve not been here before?”

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

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

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

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

  “You’re not my type.”

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

  “I’m not the sentimental kind.”

  “But you look like a drinker.”

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

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

  “Christ knows,” said Jackson Lamb, and disappeared through the door the shopkeeper had indicated.

  The speciality of the house was red meat.

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

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

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

  “Thank you all.”

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

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

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