Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

“Watch yourselves,” he said to River and Louisa as he left.

He might have been talking to Ho too, of course.

Shirley said, “Yeah, fuck,” and disappeared in his wake.

River felt something uncomfortable wriggle down his spine: that sneaky feeling he’d just dodged a bullet.

An office door slammed downstairs, and a piece of furniture crashed to the floor.

Lamb produced a cigarette out of thin air, and waved it in their direction. “Leaving you two. And believe me, that says more about the alternative than it does about you.”

“There are three of us,” mumbled Ho.

“You still here?”

Louisa said, “Was that necessary? Donovan’s a pro, and we already know he’s not averse to violence. We—”

Lamb gave her the same basilisk stare he’d granted Shirley, and she faltered.

“We could have used Marcus,” River said. “That’s all we’re saying.”

A match flared, and Lamb’s features shimmered in its heat.

They heard footsteps leaving Slough House, and the scratch and thump of the back door being prised open. They didn’t hear it close. After a while, a warm draught climbed as high as the top floor, and curled around their ankles like a cat. Lamb smoked, and his office took on the blue-grey hue of late-night jazz piano. The light coming slantwards through the blind picked up motes and dust-spirals gyrating in the air. When you could see what it was you were breathing, River thought, it really was time to be somewhere else.

At length, he said, “Okay, it’s just us. So what do we do now? Wait for Donovan to make contact?”

“I doubt we’ll be waiting long,” said Lamb.

And because, as River later speculated, Lamb had long ago sold his soul in exchange for the occasional display of omniscience, River’s phone chose that precise moment to chirrup.

Catherine, his caller display read.

But it was Donovan.

I t was the violethour once more, and still the heat had not lifted. As River eased out of the car he felt his stomach muscles complaining, and before he was fully upright had reached into his jeans for the painkillers Louisa had given him. Four left. He popped them from their plastic sheath and dry swallowed. The last one stuck in his throat, which would keep him entertained for the next minute or so.

Louisa shut the door on the driver’s side. “I think we were followed.”

“Yeah?”

“It was keeping back, three cars behind. And disappeared for a stretch. But it was there.”

River nodded, though he wasn’t convinced. That kind of tail sounded professional, and if it was professional, he didn’t think Louisa would have spotted it. But voicing that opinion might be dangerous, and his testicles hadn’t fully recovered yet. “You should have said.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t entirely sure.” She threw him a look which was a barely disguised challenge. “But I am now.”

“Okay,” said River. But if they’d been followed, whoever it was had now dropped off the radar.

They were within what Lamb would have called pissing distance of London’s westbound railway lines, which ran alongside a corridor of airport parking, gas-holders, cement works and heavy plant depots, and had parked on a patch of wasteland surrounded on three sides by long low office blocks: low by the capital’s standards, six storeys tall, and originally white. These were set at a higgledy-piggled angle, with gaps between wide enough to drive a car. Two, joined at third-storey level by a walkway, were derelict, glassless, tagged high and low with faded swirls of paint; the stuttering, repetitive squawks of urban discontent— Tox , Mutant , Flume . At ground level each was unwalled, with thick round pillars every few yards; these were scorched black where homeless wayfarers or partying teenagers had made camp, and the floors were strewn with bottleglass and random litter. Toilet smells drifted out to where they stood, on a pitted and rubbly patch of concrete, with thuggish plant-life sprouting from its cracks. River could feel its heat seeping up through the soles of his shoes, and the ground trembled as a high-speed train thundered past.

The third block looked to be in the process of being reclaimed, though how far advanced this was was open to question. Its paintwork, if not fresh, hadn’t yet succumbed to distemper, and glass shimmered in its windows, but a distressed air hung over it, as if it had fallen into bad company, and knew things wouldn’t end well. The fourth side of the more-or-less square was a disused factory—paint or vinyl, River thought—which had a squat, rectangular tower at one end, next to which a tall whitewashed chimney reached up to about the height of the nearby blocks. An extension had been added, long ago; a slant-roofed corrugated-iron and sheet-plastic construction, from whose guttering barbed wire dangled like an ill-fitting crown of thorns. Pictures of Alsatians were studded at intervals, indicating that trespassers would be eaten, or worse. A jagged hole in its wall at ground level suggested that this threat hadn’t been taken entirely seriously.

Three fridges and a mattress formed a nearby cairn, next to which ten-foot lengths of metal fencing were stacked in a pile, chained to each other by their end-poles, and secured to the earth by an iron hoop. An orange skip lay on its side, like a Tonka toy cast off by a giant.

Louisa’s car ticked, as if counting down to something ominous.

“I think I saw this place in a film once,” River said. “It involved zombies.”

“West of Ealing,” Louisa said. “It might have been a documentary.”

River’s phone rang. It was Lamb.

“Why’s your phone on?”

“It’s on vibrate,” River lied. “We’ve just arrived. Place seems quiet.”

“Well, it was until your phone rang.”

River waited, Lamb’s breathing rusty in his ear.

At length Lamb said, “These soldiers, Donovan and . . . ”

“Traynor.”

“Traynor. Once they’ve got what they want, back off. Don’t try to follow them. Let them leave.”

“What about Catherine?”

“Just focus on your end,” said Lamb. “Remember, Ingrid Tearney’s pulling the strings here. And when it suits her, she’ll cut them.”

“We’ll beware of falling puppets,” said River.

“Don’t get cocky. You’re desk drones, not the Dynamic Duo.”

“And we should know that by now,” River finished for him.

Lamb hung up.

Louisa said, “What’s he want?”

“For us to be careful, believe it or not.” River tucked his phone away. “But he’s run out of Enid Blyton analogies.”

Another train rumbled past, picking up speed out of Paddington, and sounded its whistle; an old-fashioned, reliably forlorn noise. A crow, picking at something near one of the abandoned fridges, looked up, emitted a sullen cough, and went back to its meal.

“There was definitely a car,” she said. “But I didn’t get the make or colour.”

“Okay,” River said again.

He was saved saying anything more by the sight of two shadows emerging from behind a pillar in the nearest of the wrecked buildings.

Roderick Howas finding it quiet in Slough House, now the others had gone. This didn’t usually bother him. Most days, he saw as little of anyone as he could manage, except for the moments he engineered in the kitchen with Louisa, who had given him a look before she left—an amused glance, telling him she’d rather stay behind than set off on a ludicrous exercise: babysitting a pair of ex-soldiers while they stole the X-Files. He’d mirrored this with a look of his own, a slight raising of an eyebrow meaning You and me both, babes , but she was out of the door before he’d delivered it. He needed to practise that look. If he’d been quicker off the mark she’d have caught it, no problem.