Dead Lions (6 page)

But Dickie Bow had fished his mobile out shortly before dying, and had jammed it between the cushions of his seat, as if
to make sure it would only be found by someone looking for it. By someone for whom he had a message.

An unsent message, as it turned out.

A train arrived, but Lamb remained on his bench. Not many people got off; not many got on. As it pulled away Lamb saw the attractive young woman glowering at him through a window and he farted quietly in response: a private victory, but satisfying. Then he examined the phone again. Drafts. There was a Drafts folder for text messages. He opened this, and the single-word entry of a single saved message stared back from the tiny screen.

Near his feet a pigeon scratched the ground in imitation of a bird that might make an effort. Lamb didn’t notice. He was absorbed in that single word, keyed into the phone but never transmitted; locked forever in its black-and-grey box, alongside 82 pence-worth of unused communication. As if a dying word could be breathed into a bottle, and corked up, and released once the grim business of tidying away the corpse had been seen to: here on an Oxfordshire railway platform, with a late March sun struggling to make itself felt, and a fat pigeon tramping underfoot. One word.

“Cicadas,” Jackson Lamb said out loud. Then said it again. “Cicadas.”

And then he said, “Fuck me.”

S
hirley Dander and Marcus
Longridge had settled back into their tasks; the atmosphere only slightly altered by their conversation. In Slough House, sound seeped easily. If he were interested Roderick Ho might have rested his head against the wall separating his office from theirs, the better to hear them, but all he registered was the familiar buzz of other people establishing relationships—he was, anyway, busy updating his online status: adding a paragraph to Facebook describing his weekend at Chamonix; tweeting a link to his latest dancemix … Ho’s name for these purposes was Roddy Hunt; his tunes were looted from obscure sites he subsequently torched; his photos were tweaked stills of a young Montgomery Clift. It still amazed Ho you could build a man from links and screenshots, launch him into the world like a paper boat, and he’d just keep sailing. All of the details that built up a person could be real. The only thing fake was the person … Constructing a mythical work-pattern for his user ID had been the most brilliant thing Ho had accomplished this year. Anyone monitoring his computertime would confirm his constant presence on the Service network, building an operations archive.

So Ho was uninterested in Shirley and Marcus’s chattering, and the office above theirs was empty, because Harper and Guy
weren’t yet back. If they had been, it’s likely that one would have knelt with an ear to the floor, and relayed each word to the other. And if River Cartwright had been in there, instead of in the room above Ho’s, he might have done the same: it would have relieved the boredom. Which he should have been used to but it kept recurring, like a week-old insect bite that wouldn’t quit. Though if that analogy were to ring true, River now thought, he’d have to be wearing boxing gloves too: unable to scratch; just rubbing away without effect.

Until a few months ago he had shared this room. Now it was his alone, though a second desk remained, equipped with a PC that was newer, faster and less battered than River’s. He could have commandeered it, but Service PCs were user-specific, and he’d have had to log a request for IT to reassign it; a thirty-minute job that could take eight months. And while he could have short-circuited the process by asking Ho to do it, this would have involved asking Ho to do it, and he wasn’t that desperate.

He drummed an off-beat rhythm with his fingers, and studied the ceiling. Exactly the kind of pointless noise that could draw a returning thump from Jackson Lamb, meaning both
shut up
and
come here
. The fact that there wasn’t much to do didn’t stop Lamb dreaming up tasks. Last week he’d sent River out collecting takeaway cartons: River had plucked them from bins, gutters, car roofs; had found a trove in a Barbican flowerbed, chewed by rats or foxes. Then Lamb had made him compare them with his own collection, the fruit of six months’ afternoon snacking: he’d become convinced that Sam Yu, frontman of the New Empire next door, was giving him smaller cartons than everyone else, and was “working up the evidence.” Borderline Lamb: he might have meant it, might have been taking the piss. Either way, River was the one up to his elbows in bins.

For a while, a few months back, it had looked like things were
changing. After years of squatting upstairs, happily dumping on the poor saps below, Lamb had appeared to be taking an interest; at the very least, had enjoyed putting the screws on Lady Di Taverner at Regent’s Park. But the mould was showing through again: Lamb had grown bored with excitement, preferring the comfortably unchanging days, so River was still here, and Slough House was still Slough House. And the work was the same grunt-work it had always been.

Today was a case in point. Today, he was a typist. Yesterday he’d been a scanner-operator; today the scanner wouldn’t work, so today he was a typist, entering pre-digital death records onto a database. The deceased had all been six months old or younger, and had died while rationing was still enforced: prime targets for identity theft. Back then, you worked this by taking names from gravestones; a less innocent form of brass-rubbing. Birth certificates were then claimed lost and copies sought; after that, you simply traced the life the infant might have led, with all its attendant paperwork: national insurance number, bank account, driving licence … All of the details that built up a person could be faked. The only thing real was the person. But anyone who’d actually done this would be collecting a pension by now. Any sleepers using the names River had found could have called themselves Rip van Winkle instead. So it was just makework for the slow horses, plugging gaps in a history book, nothing more. And where was Jackson Lamb?

Sitting here wouldn’t answer that. Having risen without consciously deciding to, River went with the flow: out of his office, up the stairs. The top floor was always dark. Even when Lamb’s door was open, his blinds were drawn, and Catherine’s office, at the back of the building, sat in the shadow of a nearby office block. Catherine preferred lamps to overhead lighting—the only trait she shared with Lamb—and these didn’t so much dispel the gloom as accentuate it, casting twin pools of yellow light between
which murkiness swarmed. Her monitor gave a grey glow, and in its wash, as River entered her room, she seemed a figment from a fairy tale: a pale lady, hoarding wisdom.

River plonked himself on a chair next to a pile of vari-coloured folders. While the rest of the world pursued a digital agenda, Lamb insisted on hard copy. He’d once toyed with instigating an employee-of-the-month award, based solely on weight of output. If he’d had a pair of scales, and an attention span, River didn’t doubt he’d have done so.

“Let me guess,” Catherine said. “You’ve finished what you were doing, and want some more work.”

“Ho ho. What’s he up to, Catherine?”

“He doesn’t tell me.” She seemed amused that River thought he might. “He does what he does. He doesn’t ask my permission.”

“But you’re closest to him.”

Her expression wavered not one inch.

“Geographically, I mean. You take his calls. You manage his diary.”

“His diary’s empty, River. Mostly he stares at the ceiling and farts.”

“It’s a captivating picture.”

“He smokes in there too. And it’s a government office.”

“We could make a citizen’s arrest.”

“We might want to practise on someone smaller.”

“I don’t know how you stand it.”

“Oh, I offer it up.” Fear flashed in River’s eyes. “Joke? He’d drive a saint to suicide, anyway. Frankly, whatever he’s up to, I’m just relieved he’s somewhere else.”

“He’s not at the Park,” River said. When Lamb was at the Park, he made sure everyone knew it. Probably hoping someone would break, and ask if they could come too. “But something’s up. He’s been weird. Even for Lamb.”

Lamb’s weirdness would pass for normality in other people.
His phone had rung, and he’d answered it. He’d had Ho unfreeze his browser, which meant he’d been online. In fact, he’d given the impression of having a job to do.

“And he hasn’t said a word,” River said.

“Not one.”

“So you’ve no idea what’s lured him onto the streets.”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Catherine said.

River studied her, an old-fashioned creature whose pale colouring spoke of an indoor life. Her clothes covered her wrist to ankle. She wore hats, for god’s sake. He guessed she was fiftyish, and until the business last year he hadn’t paid her much attention; there was little in a wall-hugging woman her age to interest an uptight man of his. But when things had turned nasty she hadn’t panicked. She’d even pointed a gun at Spider Webb—as had River. This shared experience made them fellow-members of a select club.

She was waiting for him to respond. He said, “Tell?”

“Who’s Lamb send for when he needs something?”

“Ho,” River said.

“Exactly. And you know how sound travels here.”

“You heard them talking?”

“No,” Catherine said. “That’s what was interesting.”

Interesting because Lamb was not in the habit of modulating his tones. “So whatever it is, it’s not for the likes of us.”

“But Roddy knows.”

It was also interesting that Catherine called Ho Roddy. Nobody else called Ho anything. He wasn’t someone you engaged in casual chat, because if you didn’t come with broadband, you weren’t worth his attention.

On the other hand, he currently possessed information River would like to share.

“Well then,” he said. “Let’s go talk to Roddy, shall we?”

“Nice,” said
Min.

“Best you can do?”

“Spectacular, then. Better?”

“Much.”

They were on the seventy-seventh floor of one of the City’s newest buildings; a great glass needle that soared eighty storeys into London’s skies. And it was some room they were in, a huge one,
yay
metres long and
woah
metres wide, with floor-to-ceiling views to north and west of the capital, and then the wide space beyond, where the capital gave up and the sky took over. She could spend days in here, Louisa thought; not eating, not drinking; just taking in as much of the view as she could, in every weather, and all types of light. “Spectacular” didn’t come close.

Even the lift had been a thrill: quieter, smoother and faster than any she’d known.

Min said, “Cool, wasn’t it?”

“The lift?”

“At Reception. The plastic cops.”

The security guys, who’d checked their Service ID with what Min had interpreted as awe and envy. Louisa thought it more the look state kids aimed at their public school counterparts: the age-old enmity of yobs v toffs. A long-time yob herself, she savored the irony.

She laid her palm against the glass. Then rested her forehead there. This brought a delicious feeling of safe vertigo; set a butterfly fluttering in her stomach, even while her brain enjoyed the view. Min stood by, hands in pockets.

“This the highest you’ve been?” she asked.

He gave her a slow look. “Duh, aeroplane?”

“Yeah, no. Highest building.”

“Empire State.”

“Been there, done that.”

“Twin Towers?”

She shook her head. “They were already gone when I was there.”

“Me too,” he said.

They were quiet for a while, watching London operate way below, thinking similar thoughts: of a morning when people in a different city had stood at greater heights, enjoying similar views from different windows, not knowing they’d never put their feet on the ground again; that the threads of their future had been severed with box cutters.

Now Min pointed, and following his finger she saw a speck in the distance. An aeroplane: not one of the liners leaving Heathrow, but a small, buzzy machine, ploughing its own furrow.

Min said, “I wonder how close they get?”

“You think it’s that important?” Louisa said. “This mini-summit? Big enough for a … replay?”

She didn’t have to specify what it would be a replay of.

After a while, Min said, “No, I guess not.”

Or it wouldn’t have been entrusted to them, Regent’s Park audit or not.

“Got to do it properly, though.”

“Look at all the angles,” she agreed.

“Else we end up looking bad even when nothing bad happens.”

“You think this is a test of some kind?”

“Of what?”

“Us,” she said. “Finding out if we’re up to the job.”

“And if we pass it, we get back to Regent’s Park?”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

This many people had made the return journey from Slough House to the Park: none. They both knew that. But like every slow horse before them, Min and Louisa hid secret hopes their story would be different.

At length she turned and surveyed the room. Still
yay
metres
long and
woah
metres wide, it took up about half of the floor; the separate suite, also currently vacant, enjoying the views south and east. There was a shared lobby area where the smart lifts arrived; a third, the service lift, lay behind the stairwell, which was a vision of eternal descent. It passed floors and floors of high-end corporate offices, only some of which were yet occupied: the list in the folder Webb had provided included banks, investment companies, yacht salesmen, diamond merchants, a defence contractor. The tower’s lower third was a hotel, its grand opening scheduled for the following month. She’d read it was fully booked through the next five years.