Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

Shirley had been at the dentist’s the previous week, and flipping through a lifestyle magazine in the waiting room had encountered one of those diagnostic quizzes, How uptight are you? , and had started mentally checking off answers. Do you get annoyed at queue-jumpers, even when you’re not in a hurry? Well, obviously, because it’s a matter of principle isn’t it? But other questions seemed designed to rile her. You discover your partner met his/her ex for a drink, “for old times’ sake.” She didn’t need to read the rest. This was supposed to show how “uptight” you were? Far as Shirley was concerned it was grading you on common sense . . . She’d hurled the magazine at the door, giving the dental nurse, who was just popping her head round, something of a fright. And who got her own back five minutes later, being over-zealous with the waterpick.

And yeah, besides that, so she liked the odd toot, but who didn’t? Tell her Marcus never snorted a line of the old marching powder—Marcus had been Tactical, the squad that kicked down doors, and once you’d tasted that adrenalin high, you’d want another boost, right? He said he never, but he would say that. Besides, it wasn’t like Shirley was an habitual user. It was a weekend thing with her, strictly Thursday to Tuesday.

There was a thump as Roderick Ho sat down. His right cheek was flaming red, and his glasses hung lopsided.

“What you do that for?”

She sighed heavily.

“It needed doing,” she said, half to herself, and wished she were anywhere else.

Though maybe,all things considered, not where River Cartwright was.

River was in a hospital room, standing by a window there was no point attempting to open. It had been painted shut years ago, back when the NHS still ran to the occasional lick of paint, and even if it had opened, the air that would have crawled in would have been thick as soup, with a saltiness that caught the back of the throat, and left you gasping for a glass of water. He tapped the pane, looking down on a covered walkway. The noise was in brief counterpoint to the blipping of one or other of the machines ranged by the bed, on which a gradually diminishing figure lay, making no greater impact on its surroundings than it had done for the past however many months it was.

“You’re probably wondering what I’ve been up to,” said River. “You know, while you’ve been taking it easy.”

There was a fan on the bedside shelf, but the barely wavering slip of ribbon tied to its frame revealed how feeble it was. Several times River had attempted to fix it, this taking the form of flicking its switch on and off. DIY skills exhausted, he settled for nudging the visitor’s chair nearer the draught-zone, and slumping onto it.

“Well, it’s fascinating stuff.”

The shape on the bed didn’t answer, but that was no surprise. On three previous occasions River had sat here, sometimes silent, sometimes making one-sided conversation, and there was no indication that the bed’s occupant was aware of his presence. Indeed, the patient’s own presence was an open question: River wondered, while the body was lying there, where the mind was; whether it was wandering the corridors of its interrupted life, or cast into some nightmare of its own devising; a Dali-world of two-faced jackals and multi-headed snakes.

“It’s before your time, and mine too, but there was a Civil Service strike in ’81. Went on months. Can you imagine the paperwork that piled up? Everything needing doing in triplicate, and none of it happening for twenty-odd weeks . . . When the firefighters go on strike, they bring in the army. Who do you get to come in when the pen-pushers down tools?”

River was a pen-pusher too. Who would do his job if he wasn’t there to do it? He had a sudden, unwanted vision of his own ghost floating round Slough House, sifting through unachieved tasks.

“Anyway. See where this is going? You’ll get there, given a minute, and a nodding acquaintance with how Jackson Lamb’s mind works. Because what he likes to do is dream up tasks that aren’t only boring, and aren’t only pointless, and don’t only involve months of crawling over lists of names and dates, looking for anomalies that you can’t know are there, because you don’t know what they consist of . . . Not only all of that, designed not just to bore you rigid but to kill your soul one screaming pixel at a time . . . But you know the worst thing about it? The really worst?”

He wasn’t expecting an answer. Didn’t get one.

“The really worst thing is the infinitesimally small, but nevertheless conceivably possible chance that he might just have something. That if you do it right, and turn over all the rocks, you might just find something that didn’t want to be found. Which is exactly what we’re supposed to be looking for, right? Us in the . . . intelligence services.”

The intelligence services, which River had joined at a young age, following in his grandfather’s footsteps. David Cartwright had been a Service legend. River was a Service joke, having crashed King’s Cross at rush hour during a training exercise, and been exiled to Slough House in consequence. The fact that he’d been set up was the joke’s real punchline, but not one many people had heard, and not one River laughed at.

“It’s the passport office,” he said at last. “All that huge backlog of passport applications, hundreds of them ushered through on the nod once the suits went back to work. So maybe someone out there saw that coming, right? Maybe it was a fire sale on the old false identity front. And what better false identity than a genuine British passport? Renewed so many times since, it’s beyond reproach.”

The machines chittered and whirred, blinked and bleeped, but the shape on the bed didn’t move, and said nothing.

“Sometimes I think I’d sooner be where you are,” River said.

But he almost certainly didn’t mean it.

Catherine didn’tsee the van. What she saw was the soldier near the entrance to the tube.

He wasn’t uniformed, or she wouldn’t have spared him a second glance—there were always squaddies in London. But he had the watchfulness that goes with having occupied hostile territory, a wary stillness, and that made two she’d seen tonight, and any lingering doubt about chance encounters evaporated. He held a rolled-up newspaper to keep his hands busy, and wasn’t so much standing vigil as soaking everything in; cataloguing movement, alert for anomaly. Or not anomaly, she corrected. He was alert for her.

In which case he had already seen her; and if he hadn’t yet he had now, because she made an abrupt 180-degree turn. Bad tradecraft, but she wasn’t a street agent—never a joe—the nearest she’d come to an op was having her tonsils out, and was this paranoia? When the bad old days revisited, when she felt she’d slipped into a dry drunk, anything could happen . . .

She didn’t look back; focused instead on the pavement in front of her. A black van rolled past, and she had to step aside for a group of teenagers, but she kept moving. There was a bus stop not far ahead, and if she was lucky her arrival there would coincide with a bus. On the bus, if one came, she’d call Lamb again. If one came.

The streets were far from deserted. People in office clothes, others in T-shirts and shorts; shops were still open, though banks and bookies and so on had darkened their doors. Pubs and bars had theirs propped open, letting heat escape on a tangle of music and voices. The canal wasn’t far, and it was the kind of summer’s evening when young people drifted that way, and shared picnics and wine on the benches, or unfolded blankets on grassy patches, where they could lie and text each other in drowsy comfort. And all Catherine had to do was raise her voice, shout for help . . .