Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

“Shirley,” Marcus warned.

“—wafting round like a ghost on downers. All of a sudden you want to start giving orders?”

“Shirley,” Marcus repeated.

“Because I’m not taking them from you. And don’t you start, either.” This last to Marcus. “Partner.”

She left the room and stomped up the stairs. A moment later, they heard the lavatory door slam shut.

After a while, Louisa said, “Another happy day in the office.”

“You really think Judd’s involved in whatever’s going on?”

“No, I just wanted to wind Shirley up.”

“Not exactly a challenge.” Marcus fished a handful of CDs from the bin. Casually as he could, he said, “You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You seem a bit—”

“I’m fine.”

“Lighten up, girl. I saved your life, remember?”

“Didn’t I thank you? At the time?”

“. . . I guess.”

“Well then.”

“Okay.” Marcus’s focus shifted. “Fact is, I’d have shot him anyway.”

“I know.”

“He got on my tits.”

“I can imagine how you felt.”

“Shirley’s a little uptight right now.”

“Shirley’s a loose fucking cannon.”

“She’s just split with her girlfriend. Boyfriend. Whichever.”

“I want an update on her status, I’ll check Facebook. But if she keeps annoying me, I’ll clean her clock. And Marcus? Call me ‘girl’ again, it’s your own life’ll need saving.”

“What was that about?” Shirley asked, coming back into the room as Louisa left.

“Office banter.”

“You could repurpose that woman. Use her as a fire blanket. She can kill an atmosphere stone dead.”

“Were you in the loo just now?”

“Yeah. I’d give it five minutes.”

“You weren’t . . . ”

“Weren’t what?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh Christ, not you too.” She stomped back to her chair. “I’m not a junkie, all right? I like the odd recreational high, that’s all.”

“That shit fucks with your reactions.”

“Yeah, that’s a real danger in this job.” Shirley manhandled her keyboard, coaxing a satisfactory yelp out of it. “I get a rogue paper clip, I’m toast.”

“You need to take things more seriously.”

“And you need to lighten up.”

“Yeah, well. You owe me a quid,” he said, but she pretended not to hear him.

Outside, sunlightwas a shock. Lamb found a patch of shadow overlooking a channel of water that was still and green and pasted with a layer of thick round leaves the size of dinner plates. The occasional bloom was a defiant gesture, a doily the pink and white of a conjunctivitis-riddled eye. In a nearby flowerbed a scatter of feathers betrayed where a fox had caught a pigeon, unless the pigeon had simply exploded. He lit his cigarette at last. His phone had fallen silent before he’d left the church, but it would ring again soon. When it did, he raised it to his ear without looking at the screen and said, “Diana.”

“What are you up to, Lamb?”

“Church visit,” he said. “Have you let Jesus into your life? He does house calls, but it’s nice to pop round his place.”

“Tearney’s just signed a release on your boy Cartwright.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’ve just had Nick Duffy on the line. He walked Cartwright out of the building himself. Not happily, I might add.”

“I doubt Tearney signed anything.”

Pause.

“Yeah, okay, she didn’t do that.”

Lamb watched as the smoke from his cigarette struggled upwards into the heavy, heat-struck air. “What’s on your mind, Diana?”

“Judd’s planning on overhauling the command structure,” Diana Taverner said. “Apparently he thinks Second-Desk level would be better served by ministerial appointees.”

“You can see his point,” Lamb said. “I mean, if the current system works, how come you’re senior to me?”

“If it goes ahead, you’ll be answering to some party hack whose sole aim in life is inching up the greasy pole. Well, I say answering. But the first thing any politico would do on taking the Slough House brief would be to shut it down.”

“And you’re telling me all this because . . . ?”

“I have your best interests at heart. You know that.”

“It’s never occurred to you I might welcome retirement?”

He spent the silence that followed this question easing his underwear from the crack of his arse.

At length Taverner said, “If you’re not going to take this seriously, there’s no point my trying to warn you.”

“Just lightening the moment.”

“Because the image of you in retirement, leafing through the Angling Times or whatever—”

“I appreciate your input. But if I’m going to get a cake baked before young River gets home, I’d best be on my way.”

“Jackson . . . ”

“Diana.”

“You know what I’ve spent the past few months overseeing? Reshelving paperwork. I’m serious. Off-site storage for the whackjob files, for black-ribboned folders, for anything deemed no longer necessary for, and I quote, quotidian objectives. That’s daily business, in case you were wondering.”

“I can’t stress how much I wasn’t.”

“Carry on finding it funny. But I’m Second Desk Ops, Jackson, and I’m doing an intern’s job. They won’t just close down Slough House. They’ll turn the Service into a work experience factory for Foreign Office wannabes.” She paused for effect. “If you’re asked to choose sides, I hope you pick the right one.”

“For your sake or mine?” Lamb asked, and rang off.

Ho said,“His name’s Sylvester Monteith. He ran a security outfit, Black Arrow?”

“Never heard of it,” Louisa said.

Marcus said, “They’re not top level, but they’ve picked up a couple of government contracts . . . ”

He tailed off, trying to dredge up a detail.

“And now he’s a stiff,” said Shirley. “Who whacked him?”

Ho said, “You know what? His CV doesn’t say.”

It was ten minutes since the blow-up in Marcus and Shirley’s office, and now, without arrangement, they’d gathered in Ho’s room to find out what he’d discovered. Sometimes, it happened like this. It didn’t always augur well.

“Whoever it was,” Louisa said, “they weren’t trying to keep it a secret. Dumping a body from the back of a van, the middle of London. That’s gang behaviour.”

“The van didn’t get far,” Ho said. “It was abandoned three streets away.”

“Any CCTV?”

“Middle of London? Let me think.”

“Thank you, smartarse. Have you got the feed?”

“Not yet,” Ho admitted.

“Peter Judd,” Marcus said.

“What about him?”

“Monteith’s firm picked up government contracts because he had a handy mate somewhere. That’s how the story went.”

“And the mate was Peter Judd?”

“Be interesting if it was, wouldn’t it? Given he was a bystander.”

Ho’s upper lip had curled. It was the face he usually wore when he was wading into the web, and accounted for a large proportion, though not the whole, of his unpopularity.

Not many keystrokes later he said, “They were at school together.”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t the local comp,” Shirley said.

“God bless the Establishment,” said Marcus. “But what’s any of this got to do with Catherine’s disappearance?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Louisa, tension in her voice. Marcus made a mental note to stand well back. The recoil from a woman’s stress could have a finger off, you weren’t careful. “Let’s find out more about Black Arrow.”

“You mean, you want me to,” said Ho.

“There’s no I in ‘team,’” Louisa reminded him.