Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

Catherine said, “Well, since it’s traditional.”

She offered her wrists, then he leaned across her to tie the gag round her mouth. She could smell him when he did this—sweat, inadequately masked by his deodorant, which was marginally less pleasant. When he’d finished, he stepped back and aimed her iPhone at her. She remained still while he took her picture, and stayed that way while he examined the result, nodding to himself. Good lord, who did he think he was?

Perhaps he caught something of this in the blank gaze she levelled at him, because while he ungagged her, he said, “Just checking.”

“Thank you, David Bailey.”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter.” But he was Bailey now, which pleased her. Information, even the kind you make up yourself, gives you a handle on what’s going on.

He uncuffed her and left, padlocking the door behind him. She wondered what time it was, decided after midnight, and wondered if they planned on feeding her. She wasn’t hungry, but to feed her someone would have to come back and maybe talk some more . . . Thinking about not being hungry made her thirsty instead, so she returned to the bathroom, where she cupped her hands and drank from the tap. Where would she normally be now? At home; most likely asleep. She didn’t always sleep well. Some nights she played music quite late, but softly. Alcohol used to blur the edges of even the roughest days. Now she had to rely on other comforts, and the days never quite became smooth.

She must have dozed, or hovered on the border, because the noise of the door opening startled her; brought her back with a wildly beating heart. She sat up so quickly her head buzzed.

This time, it was Donovan.

He didn’t speak at first but surveyed the room, as if she’d paid a security deposit, and he was looking for reasons not to return it. While he did that, she studied him for signs of guilt. It was there, she thought. Whatever was going on, he felt bad about this part, at least.

When he at last looked at her, his eyes were still the bad-times stormy blue.

She said, “Bailey didn’t give much away.”

“Bailey?”

“Private joke.”

“Glad to see you’re making friends. I thought you’d given that up.”

“Is that what this is about? Have you been nursing a passion for me all these years, Sean?”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know what to think yet. What happened to you?”

He laughed, or nearly did. It was a noise, anyway, and had an edge of amusement to it. “We’ve both come down in the world, haven’t we?”

“Oh, I get by. You, though. You look pretty rough.”

He glanced down at himself.

“Not your clothes. It’s you, Sean. You’re not the man I knew. It’s like you’ve taken a slow-acting poison.”

“A slow-acting poison.”

She gave her signature shrug, which is to say she held her palms upright, to show she had nothing to hide.

“Quite the lady, aren’t you? Now you’ve given up the booze.”

There was a looser aspect to his movements than earlier, as if his joints had been oiled. This would have been enough to tell her he’d taken drink, even if she hadn’t been able to smell it on him. She pictured him downstairs, the downstairs she hadn’t seen. A comfortably shabby room, looking out on that courtyard with its outhouses and its double-decker bus, if that’s what it was. There’d be a sideboard, a drinks cabinet: straight out of fifties’ rep. He’d have poured from a cut-glass decanter, downed it in one, then poured another for a more contemplative sip-and-savour. Nothing to dull his edge, he’d have thought, because everyone thought that. Like smokers unable to smell their habit on their clothes, drinkers always thought themselves unaffected.

Her hands had curled into fists. Thinking drinker’s thoughts could do that.

Uncurling them, she brushed at her skirt, as if it harboured crumbs. There was something very precise about her movements, and this seemed to annoy him.

“All buttoned-up. Who’d think to look at you the times we once had?”

“I’m an alcoholic, Sean,” she said calmly. “I had lots of times, did lots of things. I wouldn’t do them now.”

“Too good now.”

“It’s not about goodness.”

“You were, though. On your back or on your knees, you were always good.”

He waited for her to respond, but she said nothing. Just regarded him unflinching, simply being who she was now instead of who she’d been then, and letting him know she felt no shame or self-disgust. Simply the determination never to be that person again.

Only when he looked away did she speak.

“What do you want, Sean? If you’re expecting a ransom, you’re going to be seriously disappointed, but either way, what brings you upstairs? A chat about the weather?”

That seemed to amuse him, for some reason. But the answer he gave was, “To find out who you trust.”

“I’m not in the mood for that conversation.”

“It’s not a conversation. Just a question. Which of your colleagues would you trust with your life?”

“With my life,” she said flatly.

He didn’t answer.

She said, “I used to trust you. Does that count?”

“Someone from Slough House,” he said. “I need a name. Longridge? Cartwright? Guy?”

So this wasn’t about her. It was about Slough House.

Probably, when you got down to it, it was about Jackson Lamb.

“Catherine?”

She gave him a name

He left, locking the door behind him. For a long while afterwards she sat in the same position: upright, with her hands clasped on her knees. A Mad Governess again, and not just mad, but locked in an attic. That would give Shirley Dander a laugh, supposing she caught the reference.

After a while Catherine lay on the bed instead, and after a further while, slept.

However manymiles away, in whichever direction it was, Slough House boiled in the morning’s heat. Everyone was there by nine save Catherine and Lamb, and the former’s unfamiliar absence struck a jarring note. It did with River, anyway, and as he stood by the kettle, pouring a cup of instant coffee, he asked Louisa, who was brewing a pot of the real stuff, if she knew where the other woman was.

She didn’t reply.

“Louisa?”

“What?”

“Seen Catherine?”

She shook her head.

Why bother? Since Min’s death she was a walking time bomb: not much given to conversation, but if you listened carefully, you could hear her tick.

River took his cup to his office, and contemplated another day of studying ancient passport applications, scanned and pasted into a database so creaky, if it was a boat you’d be watching rats abandon it. Picking up a biro, he tapped it against his front teeth. Eight and a half hours of this, minus whatever he could get away with for lunch. Five times that to make up the week, and forty-eight weeks in the working year . . . He might see this task off before his fortieth, if he really hammered it. Yeah: get a wiggle on, and he could celebrate putting this to bed alongside the big four-oh.

Or he could just beat himself to death with a hole punch.

Gathering one up, pumping it like a stress reliever, he crossed to the window whose gold-tooled lettering spelled ww henderson, solicitor and commissioner for oaths for the benefit of those on the street who wondered what poor fools toiled away in here. An oath or two had been uttered in these parts, that was true. The hole punch clacked in his hand. He heard the downstairs door open then close, and thought, Catherine , then: no. She comes up the stairs like a ghost. Lamb could too when he felt like it, but this morning he was his usual bothersome presence: navigating the staircase with the grace of a hippopotamus steering a wheelbarrow. He thumped past River’s office, then into his own room overhead; the precursor, usually, to a one-man-band performance: the farting, cursing, furniture-rattling overture to the day. River returned to his desk, where his pile of passport applications had grown while his back was turned. It wasn’t going anywhere, and until it did, neither was he. But he hadn’t done more than pluck the topmost sheet off the pile before it occurred to him that the expected overhead symphony hadn’t occurred; that what he was listening to now was that kind of silence that descends before a tree comes crashing down . . . He stood. When the thumping started, he was already halfway out of the door.