Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

“I didn’t breach the Act.”

“Attempted breach. You know the penalty? They’re not going to have you picking up litter, Cartwright. This isn’t some ASBO offence. You’re a member of the Service, a fuck-up member right enough but you carry a card and you’re on the books. Which makes what you did not some petty offence; it puts it into the realm of treason. What were you planning on doing with the file? That’s what I need to know. Who were you planning on selling it to?”

Lamb hadtaken his shoes off and his office smelled of socks, which was the fourth worst thing Louisa remembered it smelling of. She took a breath, stepped across the threshold and told him what Ho had just told her.

“He’s back at the Park?” Lamb considered this for a moment. “That’d make his grandad proud, if he was still alive.”

“He is still alive, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but finding out Junior’s been arrested’ll probably kill him,” Lamb said reasonably.

“What makes you think he’s been arrested?”

“If his phone’s blocked, it means he’s downstairs. And if he’s downstairs, it’s not because they’ve opened the dungeons to the public.”

Louisa, remembering tales she’d heard of below-stairs interrogations at the Park, wondered what the hell had River done to wind up there. And how he had managed it so quickly. It was only a couple of hours since they’d both been in the kitchen, making coffee. He’d asked her where Catherine was. And Catherine was still nowhere.

She said, “It’s not a coincidence.”

“What, him and Standish both going AWOL? I doubt it.”

“So what do we do?”

“I do what I always do. And you do whatever you were doing yesterday.” With dexterity surprising in one so large, Lamb raised his right foot and rested it on his left knee. He began massaging it roughly. “Census project, right?”

“So we all just carry on as normal.”

“As if you were normal, yes. Nothing like ambition.” He grabbed a pencil from his desk, and began using it as a scratcher, working it between his toes. “Are you still here?”

“What’ll happen to River?”

“When they’ve finished stripping the flesh from his bones, I expect they’ll send him back. He’ll only make the place untidy otherwise.”

“Seriously.”

“That wasn’t serious? Which part of it did you find funny?”

“You’ve got two joes missing, and you’re just going to sit there making holes in your socks?”

“None of you are joes, Guy. You’re just a bunch of fuck-ups who got lucky.”

“This is lucky?”

Lamb’s lip curled. “I didn’t say what kind of luck.”

He tossed the pencil back onto the desk, where it kept on rolling until it dropped off the other side.

Louisa said, “We’re not joes, no. But we’re your joes. You know that.”

“Don’t get carried away. This is Slough House. It isn’t Spooks .”

“You’re telling me. It’s barely Jackanory .” She took a step into the room. “But you think something’s happened to Catherine, or you wouldn’t have sent me round to her flat. And whatever River was up to has to have something to do with that. So no, I’m not going back to the census project. Not until you tell me what you’re going to do about it.”

It was dark in Lamb’s room, as usual; he’d closed the blinds and turned his low-wattage desk lamp on. This sat on a pile of telephone directories, long since rendered obsolete, and the shadows it cast mostly confined themselves to floor level, where they crawled about like spiders. The ceiling sloped and the floorboards creaked, and such things as he’d hung on the walls—a cork notice board on which clipped coupons faded to brittle yellow dustiness, like the corpses of pinned moths, and a smeary-glassed print of a bridge over a foreign-looking river, which had almost certainly come from a charity shop—served to underline the general creepiness. It wasn’t a cosy atmosphere he aimed for, and the look he directed at Louisa now underlined that fact.

“I think you’re forgetting who’s top banana round here.”

“No. I’m just reminding you that you are.”

She was expecting one of his leers, or perhaps a raspberry, or even a fart—there’d been indications in the past that he could deliver these at will, unless he was just unusually lucky with his timing. But instead Lamb put his foot heavily on the floor, and leaned back in his chair so far it audibly strained. In place of his usual repertoire of grimaces, his face seemed blank, lineless almost; a passive mask behind which she could sense his thoughts rolling around themselves.

At last he said, “I’ll make a call,” with all the enthusiasm of one preparing to tote a barge, or lift a bale.

Louisa nodded, remaining where she was.

“It’s a phone call, not a shag. I don’t need someone watching to make sure I’m doing it right.”

That wasn’t an image Louisa wanted in her head. She left him to it, but didn’t close the door on her way out.

“What wereyou planning on doing with the file?” Duffy said. “And who were you planning on selling it to?”

“I wasn’t going to sell it.”

“Course not. Going to keep it for a little bedtime reading, right?” Duffy stood and pushed the chair, which fell flat on the floor. “Rub one out while rummaging through the PM’s little secrets.”

“Does he really have secrets worth rubbing one out to?”

Duffy paused in front of the mirror, pretending it was a mirror. He ran a hand through his cropped hair, maybe checking for bald patches. Or perhaps making secret hand signals to whoever was on the other side.

He said, “What’s really funny is you finding this funny.”

“I’m not.”

“Because this is one joke’s going to have to last you an awful long time. Couple of years down the road, you might have trouble squeezing any more chuckles from it.” He took a step towards River, who was leaning against the wall, and stood directly in front of him. River could smell the fabric conditioner he’d used on his tracksuit. Duffy had put it on fresh from the wash.

He said, “They have Catherine Standish.”

“Standish.”

“There was a photograph. Came to my phone from hers. It was taken this morning, last night. They wanted the file.”

“Standish,” Duffy said again. “She’s another of your special needs crew, right?”

“Can I be there when you say that to Lamb?”

“You don’t get to be anywhere without somebody’s say-so, Cartwright. Your whole future’s one long yes-sir, no-sir.”

That sounded horribly plausible. And River was scared, because Duffy was good at this, but he was scareder, somehow, of letting it show.

Not letting it show was all he had left right now.

“They’ve got Catherine Standish, and somebody needs to go find her. The picture’s on my phone. Whoever’s behind that mirror needs to take a look at it now .”

“This isn’t about your amateur porn collection, Cartwright. It’s about your attempt to steal the PM’s vetting file. Did you really think you’d get away with that?”

“The guy I spoke to was early fifties, five nine. Grey suit, yellow tie, black shoes. Dark hair going silver at the temples. English, white, upper-class accent—”

Duffy slammed his left hand against the wall, an inch from River’s ear. “And he’s your buyer, right? He’s the man instructed you to break into the Park.”

“I didn’t break in.”

“Well you weren’t fucking invited. Where’d this happen?”

“Over by Barbican.”

“And this toff what, dropped in on Slough House?”

“I told you, he sent—”