“Louisa? Are you hurt?”
She didn’t reply.
The steady
whump-whump
of the helicopter blades grew
louder. If the pilot saw an armed man, he wouldn’t land; he’d go
whumping
away … She had to show him Pashkin had a gun. If Min were here, he’d tell her what a stupid plan that was, but Min wasn’t here because he was dead, and if she didn’t do something now, the man who’d killed him would be whisked off. The axe might come in useful. She reached for it again, and a heavy boot crunched onto her hand.
She looked up into Pashkin’s eyes. He glared back, genuinely irritated that she was putting him to this trouble. In one hand he held a cloth bag, swollen to the size of a football. Lot of diamonds.
In the other he held the gun, aimed straight at her head.
“I’m sorry, Louisa,” he said. “Really I am.”
Then Marcus shot him, and Pashkin, gun and bag of diamonds dropped, though only the diamonds went scattering this way and that, like small bright marbles in a children’s game; some of them tumbling to the edge of the roof, and over.
Louisa could only imagine what that must have been like—tiny glass raindrops falling onto distant streets, while the
whump-whump
of the helicopter blades beat the air into slender nothings.
In the
moment after Katinsky dialled the number to detonate the bombs, silence hung around the churchyard, around the whole village, like a plastic dome around a cake. Sunshine stopped, the wind paused, a blackbird choked off mid-note, and even River’s aches and pains were suspended as he waited for the series of cracks that would split the sky like lightning, and bring Upshott tumbling down. The weeks he’d spent here kaleidoscoped through his mind, and he thought of the pub and the village shop, of the graceful curve of eighteenth-century townhouses lining the green, of the one-time manor house, all turned into a series of craters to satisfy some dying spook’s vision of vengeance. It would be a rustic Ground Zero, memorial to a long-forgotten town that died
in a long-forgotten fire; ZT/53235, an ancient casualty in the mirror-game played by spies.
It would be futile and useless, but would scorch the earth behind it.
And then the sun shone on, and the breeze stirred again, and the blackbird caught its breath and resumed its song.
Nikolai Katinsky was just an old man, staring at the phone in his hand as if its technology were beyond him.
River said, “See?” and his voice was close to normal.
Katinsky’s lips moved, but River couldn’t make out what he said.
He struggled to get up, and this time made it. Then he leant against the bench, his limbs still wobbly. “They’ve been here years,” he said. “They’re not yours any more. They don’t care what brought them here. This is their life. It’s where they live.”
There were cars arriving. He recognised the sound of jeeps’ engines, and felt a brief surge of hysteria as he wondered how this would play out; a village community revealed as a sleeper cell, one sleeping so hard, it had no desire to wake.
“Still,” he said. “Nice try,” and released his grip on the bench. There you go, River thought, you can stand; and thinking so, he set off along the path to the lychgate, through which military types would soon be swarming.
“Walker?”
He looked back. Katinsky was draped in sunlight, which this past minute had crested the bell tower.
“Not all of the bombs were theirs. One was mine.”
He hit another number on his phone.
The blast, which took out the west wall of St Johnno’s, killed Katinsky instantly, standing as he was right in its path. In later nightmares, River saw a chunk of ancient stonework cleave the old spook in two, but in reality he was bowled over by the shock wave, and by the time rocks were raining to earth was curled inside
the lychgate itself, head between his knees. So he heard and felt, rather than saw, the slower death that followed Katinsky’s, as the belltower swayed and hovered and lost its grip on the vertical. When it dropped, it fell away from River’s shelter, or he’d have joined the old man in whatever afterlife was waiting. As it was, the tower’s descent onto the graveyard and the footpath beyond seemed to last for whole minutes, for acres of time, as befitted its brute removal from a skyline it had kissed for hundreds of years; and for hours afterwards it seemed to continue happening, as the shock reverberated through the suddenly emptier landscape, making new shapes out of silence and dust.
Marcus made
sure Pashkin was dead, then helped Louisa to her feet.
He said, “I met Shirley on the stairs. He hadn’t passed her. So I figured maybe he’d come to the roof.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“Like I told you. They made me a slow horse ’cause I gamble. Not ’cause I’m a fuck up.”
The helicopter landed, and he went to meet it.
T
hroughout the day of
the aborted rally, parts of London burned. Cars were torched, a bus was set alight, and a Jankel—one of the police armoured units—was baptised by a petrol bomb on Newgate Street. A photo of St Paul’s obscured by oily smoke duly graced front pages next morning. But before nightfall, the rally that had become a riot became a rout: mindful of criticisms of too softly-softly an approach to recent disturbances, the police went in hard, and broke heads, and made arrests. Free-ranging mobs were dispersed, ringleaders bundled into vans, and those who’d spent the day kettled up in backstreets were allowed to make their way home. It had been, the day’s Gold Commander announced at the inevitable press conference, an effective demonstration of firm, no-nonsense policing. Which did not alter the fact that the City had been well and truly stopped.
Rumour had fanned the flames. It turned out that through the course of that morning, a whisper on Twitter—that a bombladen aeroplane had been shot down by the RAF—had cajoled its way into fact; the less incendiary truth, that a Cessna Skyhawk had been intercepted and escorted to an RAF base, where it was found to be bearing a load of amateurish leaflets, did not become general knowledge until the following day. At about the same time, responsibility for the headlong evacuation of the
Square Mile was being laid firmly at the door of the Security Services, or more precisely, at the shoes of Five’s Chair of Limitations, who had effectively been First Desk at the time, and upon whose advice the Home Secretary had sounded the City’s alarm. Roger Barrowby impressed many with his ready acceptance of blame; he had the air, it was remarked, of a man who knew when he’d been castled. His resignation was discreetly handled, and he was reported to have been touched by his leaving gift, an imitation Mies van der Rohe chair.
In the immediate aftermath, many shops and businesses in Central London remained shut, and roads witnessed less traffic than usual. There was a communal holding of breath, and the general intention of having an early night. Even on some of the busiest streets, barely a mouse stirred.
But if a mouse wanted to, it could enter Slough House with ease. No mouse worth its whiskers would have problems threading under that long-shut door, nor up the uncarpeted staircase, whereupon—pausing on an office threshold—it might weigh up the attractions of a wobbling tower of pizza boxes and an array of still-sticky cans, and set them against the deterrent of a snoozing Roderick Ho, who, worn out by unaccustomed exertion, lies with his cheek on his desk, his glasses askew. It’s even possible that the dribble puddling from his open mouth might present a third lunch option for our mouse, but a sudden blart, halfway between a snore and a raspberry, decides the matter. And a tail is turned …
… and into the adjoining office our wee friend scurries, where its incursion is regarded not, as would once have been the case, as a possible test, but simply as enemy action, for an air of paranoia now taints this room, and it seeps off the walls and soaks into the carpet. Both Shirley Dander and Marcus Longridge know that one of them is thought to be Diana Taverner’s stooge, and as each knows it isn’t them, both believe it to be the other. The only words
they have exchanged today have been “Shut the door,” and their post-Needle debriefings remain undiscussed. Had they pooled what each had gleaned, they might have reached certain conclusions regarding the likely official verdict: that inasmuch as James Webb had laid a trap for the gangster masquerading as one Arkady Pashkin, the operation had been worthwhile, but—its outcome having been badly compromised by the involvement of the slow horses—few citations for valour and even fewer recalls to Regent’s Park would be offered. This wouldn’t have lightened the atmosphere much, though, were he minded to do so Jackson Lamb could have improved matters, being aware that, in telling him one of the newbies was reporting to her, Diana Taverner was merely trying to mess with his head. Taverner is something of an expert in this field, as Roger Barrowby might attest, but any time she thinks she’s put one over on Jackson Lamb, thinks Jackson Lamb, she ought to count her pocket change. If she had an ear in Slough House, she’d have known of Webb’s having seconded two slow horses before Lamb told her. And besides, Lady Di already has a black mark against her name in Lamb’s book, since it was on her instructions that Nick Duffy did such a half-arsed job of investigating Min Harper’s death. For this there will be retribution. Meanwhile, in this office, a sense of betrayal hangs heavy, something no good-natured mouse can support for long, so off it goes again, up the stairs, seeking out new horizons.
Which it finds in the shape of River Cartwright. River is also quiet, having just ended a call to St Mary’s Hospital, which is where Spider Webb was taken, a little longer after being shot than Accident and Emergency Rooms recommend. The news of his former friend’s current status might be what he contemplates now, and our mouse cannot tell whether it brings pain or pleasure; though River might equally be occupied by other emotions; by the suspicion, for example, that the reason the name ZT/53235 came tripping so lightly from his grandfather’s memory was that
it had long resided there, the O.B. himself having been responsible for convincing the Soviet authorities that the closed town nurtured a traitor. It was in 1951 that ZT/53235 burned, with the loss of thousands of lives, and David Cartwright would then have been much the age his grandson is now, prompting River to wonder whether he has it in him to play the mirror game as if the stakes were spent matches instead of human lives. And to wonder, too, if such thoughts will intrude the next time he visits the old man, or whether he will bury them like any spy’s secrets, and greet his grandfather as fondly as ever.
As this is not a problem our mouse can help with, it retreats, to find in Louisa Guy’s room a different kind of silence, the kind used to smother a soft noise. This finds no echo, as there is nobody to offer one, the spare desk here being just that: spare, untenanted, redundant. Given time, a fresh body will turn up to commandeer it—as Lamb has pointed out, Slough House is staffed by screw-ups, of which there’s never any shortage—and perhaps it’s that future occupation that causes Louisa to gently sob now, or perhaps it’s the current emptiness awaiting her at her flat, which once seemed too small for two, and is now too large for one; a situation unassuaged by her recent acquisition, currently nestled among her newer, less practical, now uncalled-for underwear, of a fingernail-sized diamond; its weight less than that of a doughnut, and its value a mystery to her. Ascertaining this would be another step over a line she never intended to cross in the first place, so for now it remains wrapped and hidden; its only promise that of an escape from one empty place into another, which is all the future seems to offer to Louisa; one empty space after another, like an infinity of mirrors reaching all the way to nowhere.
Small wonder she sobs; even less that our mouse tiptoes discreetly away from a grief it can’t comfort. Further up, on the final floor, it pays a brief visit to Catherine Standish, for whom a mouse holds no horrors, provided it’s real. Catherine has seen
her share of phantom mice, small shapes that scurried from sight when she turned to look, but those days are long past, and the only day that matters is the one that lies ahead. Which she will deal with in the same calm manner she has come to deal with most things; a talent honed by daily exposure to the irritating Jackson Lamb, who is currently in his own room, door firmly closed, which presents as much an obstacle to our murine explorer as the inelegantly heaped pile of telephone directories, atop which it pauses at last, whiskers quivering, snout a-tremble. Jackson Lamb has his feet on his desk, and his eyes closed. On his lap is a newspaper, folded at a bizarre little story about a localised earth tremor in the Cotswolds, for heaven’s sake; a seismic shrug which caused a much-loved church to collapse, thankfully with only a single fatality. And so, thinks Lamb, the ghost of one Alexander Popov, as embodied by one Nikolai Katinsky, fades into nothingness in the heart of a village which in no way resembled the town he’d emerged from, except in the manner of the destruction he’d hoped to wreak upon it. As for the cicadas—that collection of long-buried sleepers, who’d slept so deeply their false existences had displaced the real—for them there’d be no awakening, cruel or otherwise, the school of thought from Them Down the Corridor being to let sleeping spooks lie. Lying, after all, is what spooks do best.
Thinking such thoughts Jackson Lamb reaches blindly out for something, probably his cigarettes, and when his questing hands come up empty, resorts to opening his eyes. And there in front of him—snout quivering, whiskers a-tremble—sits a mouse. For a moment Lamb has the uncomfortable sensation that this mouse is staring into a past he has tried to bury, or peering into a future he’d sooner forget. And then he blinks, and the mouse is nowhere, if it was ever there at all.
“What this place needs is a cat,” grumbles Lamb, but there’s no one there to hear him.