Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

It was perhaps indicative of their respective conditions that each left it to the other to affirm their essential roadworthiness.

“Goodbye, then.”

The lights were in her favour, so she was able to cross immediately. On the other side she didn’t look back, but knew that if she did she’d see him watching her, the colour of his eyes unknowable at this distance, but still that shade of stormy blue they became in his darker moments.

“You looklike you could use company.”

Louisa didn’t reply.

Undeterred, the man slid onto the stool next to her. A glance in the mirror told her he was passable—maybe mid-thirties and wearing it well; wearing, too, a made-to-measure charcoal suit, with an intricately patterned tie, blues and golds, loosened enough to indicate the free spirit blooming within. His spectacles had a thin black frame, and Louisa would have bet her next vodka and lime their lenses would be plain glass. Nerd-chic. But she didn’t bother turning to check this out.

“Only you’ve been here thirty-seven minutes now, and you haven’t once checked the door.”

He paused, the better for her to appreciate the cuteness of that specific amount of time, the sharpness of his observation. Sitting here thirty-seven minutes, and not expecting anyone. He’d doubtless counted her drinks, and knew she was on her third.

And now a chuckle.

“So you’re the quiet type. Don’t get many of them round here.”

Round here being south of the river, though not far enough south to be free of made-to-measure suits and classy ties. It was a bus-ride from her studio flat, which, since the weather had turned and the streets become heavy with smells of tar and fried dust, felt smaller than ever, as if shrinking in the heat. Everything in it seemed to pulse. Arriving there was a constant reminder she’d rather be anywhere else.

“But you know what? Beautiful woman, all mysterious and quiet, that’s an invitation to a guy like me. Gives me a chance to shine. So tell you what, any time you want to chip in, feel free. Or smile and nod, whatever. I’m happy just admiring the view.”

So she’d showered and changed, and now wore a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and skinny black jeans over gold sandals. The blonde streaks in her hair were recent, as was the blood-red toenail polish. He wasn’t entirely wrong. She was sure she wasn’t a beautiful woman. But she was certain she looked like one.

Besides, a hot August evening, and chilled drinks on the bar. Anyone could look beautiful when the context allowed.

She raised her glass and its ice whispered musical promises.

“So I work in solutions? Clients mostly import-export, and a real bastard landed on my desk this morning, two-and-a-half mill of high-spec tablets chugging out of Manila and the paperwork’s only been bollocksed . . . ”

He chuntered on. He hadn’t offered her a drink—he’d time it so he’d finish his own a beat ahead of her then raise a finger for the girl behind the bar, vodka lime, plenty of ice , then carry on with his story so as not to draw attention to the minor miracle he’d performed.

This, or something like it, was how it always went.

Louisa placed a finger on the rim of her glass and traced round it before tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. The man was still talking, and she knew, without looking round, that his companions were at a table by the door, alert for signs of success or failure, and prepared to have a laugh either way. Probably they worked in ‘solutions’ too. It seemed a job title that could stretch pretty far in any direction, provided you weren’t fussy about the range of problems it encompassed.

Her own problems—the day she’d had, like every other working day of the past two months—involved comparing two sets of census figures, 2001 and 2011. Her target city was Leeds, her age-group 18–24, and what she was looking for were people who had dropped out of sight or appeared from nowhere.

“Any particular language group?” she remembered asking.

“Ethnic profiling is morally obscene,” Lamb had admonished. “I thought everyone knew that. But yeah, it’s the sand-jockeys you want to focus on.”

People who’d vanished and others who’d materialised. There were hundreds of them, of course, and rock-solid reasons for most, and potentially rock-solid reasons for most of the rest, though tracking those reasons down was a pain in the neck. She couldn’t approach the targets themselves, so had to come in at a tangent: social security, vehicle licensing, utilities, NHS records, internet use: anything that left a paper trail, or indicated a footprint. And blah blah blah—it wasn’t so much looking for a needle in a haystack as rearranging the haystack, stalk by stalk; grading each by length and width, and making them point the same way . . . She wished she worked in solutions. The current project seemed mostly a matter of contriving unnecessary problems.

Which was the point. Nobody left Slough House at the end of a working day feeling like they’d contributed to the security of the nation. They left it feeling like their brains had been fed through a juicer. Louisa had dreams of being trapped in a telephone directory. The fuck-up that had put her with the slow horses had been bad—a messed-up surveillance job resulting in a large quantity of guns being dumped on the street—but she’d surely been punished enough. Except the point was, no amount of punishment was enough. She could set her own terms, serve her own sentence, and walk away whenever she felt like it. That was what she was supposed to do: give it up and walk away. So, like all the rest of them, it was the last thing she’d ever do. Something Min had said—no, don’t think about Min. Anyway, without discussing it, she knew they all felt the same way. Except for Roderick Ho, who was too much of an arsehole to realise he was being punished, which, given he was being punished for being an arsehole, seemed apt.

And meanwhile, her brain felt like it had been fed through a juicer.

The man was still talking, might even be reaching the climax of his anecdote, and Louisa was more certain than she was of anything else that whatever this turned out to be, she didn’t want to hear it. Without turning to face him, she placed a hand on his wrist. It was like using a remote: his story ended, mid-air.

“I’m going to have two more of these,” she said. “If you’re still here when I’m done, I’ll go home with you. But in the meantime, shut the fuck up, okay? Not a word. That’s a deal-breaker.”

He was smarter than he’d so far suggested. Without a sound, he waved for the bartender, pointed at Louisa’s glass, and raised two fingers.

Louisa faded him out, and got to work on her drink.

Shoot menow, thought Marcus again, this time not out loud.

Shirley was having fun with the idea Ho fancied his chances with Louisa. “That is brilliant. Have we got a noticeboard? We are so going to need one.” She made a crosshatch sign with her fingers. “Hashtag deludedmale.”

The bar was the far side of the Barbican Centre, and Ho thought he’d suggested it because it was a favourite dive of his, somewhere he hung with his friends, but the truth was Marcus had never set foot in it before, and had picked it for precisely that reason. It was exactly the kind of place he’d wager money no actual friend of his would ever set foot, so the chances of running into any of them while in company with Roderick Ho were minimal.

On the other hand, wagering money was what had got him here in the first place, so placing further bets wasn’t his wisest course.

A giant TV screen fixed to a wall was tuned to rolling news. The breaking-headline ribbon was unspooling too quickly to follow, but the picture would have been difficult not to identify: blue suit, yellow tie, artfully tousled haystack of hair and a plummy grin you’d have to be a moron or a voter not to notice concealed a degree of self-interest that would alienate a shark. The brand-new Home Secretary, meaning Marcus’s new boss, and Shirley’s, and Ho’s, not that the relationship would bother Peter Judd—to attract his attention, you had to have royal connections, a TV show or enhanced breasts (“allegedly”). Straddling the gap between media-whore and political beast, he’d long since made the leap from star-fucker to star-fucked, stealing the public affection with shows of buffoonery, and gaining political ascendancy by way of the Hollywood-sanctioned dictum that you keep your enemies close. It was one way of dealing with him, but old Westminster hands agreed that he couldn’t have been more of a threat to the PM if he’d been on the opposition benches. Which, if the opposition had looked likely to win an election soon, he doubtless would have been.