Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

“No. He was spotted on the perimeter, checking us out.”

Perimeter, thought Duffy. These toy soldiers loved their vocabulary.

“He’s a big guy, black. Thing is, there was someone with him.”

Duffy mentally ran through Slough House personnel. A big black guy would be Marcus Longridge; someone else was either Shirley Dander or Roderick Ho. His money was on Dander. Ho was a desk-jockey.

“And they got away.”

“Fuck. Anyone go after her?”

“She’s in block one, far as we know.”

The Black Arrow gestured behind him, in case Duffy had forgotten which block was which.

“Thing is . . . ”

Another thing? Duffy said, “What?”

“They’ve put him in the van. Where we put the first prisoner?”

“Good.”

“Only . . . the first prisoner?”

“What about him?”

“He’s dead.”

“And?”

“Jesus, I mean . . . ” From toy soldier to boy soldier: Duffy could tell that any moment now, his lower lip would wobble. “Nobody said there was going to be killing.”

Duffy nodded. The Black Arrow couldn’t see his face, which was probably as well, because his expression wouldn’t soothe worries away. He leaned in closer, and just to erase any ambiguity from the situation wrapped one gloved hand round the man’s throat as he did so. “Well what the fuck did you think we were going to do? Tag them and release them into the community?” His voice had dropped an octave, a grace note he’d always found effective when explaining grim realities.

“But it’s just—”

“It’s just nothing. For the past six months your crappy little operation has been headed up by someone who today turns out to be an enemy of the state. Now there’s two ways we can deal with this. We can have a nice tidy discussion followed by a full-scale investigation, after which none of you will have a job ever again. Not to mention having MI5 so far up your arses you’ll spend the rest of your lives whistling when the wind blows. Or we can do it my way, which is quick, quiet and leaves no mess. If you’re not man enough for that, say so. But get your head round this first. If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem. Understand?”

The Arrow nodded.

“Didn’t catch that, son.”

“. . . Yes.”

“Welcome aboard. This new prisoner, is he cuffed?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll deal with him. You get to your position. Anyone comes out that factory, the lights go on, and you bring them down. Understand?”

This time he didn’t wait for an answer. Leaving the Arrow in the stench of the dying building, he headed for the van.

In RoddyHo’s opinion, he wasn’t being given enough credit for taking charge. Think of something , Lamb had told him. Do something , Marcus had said. Any way you looked at it, driving a bus through a front door was “something.” The fact that it turned out unnecessary was one of those wise-after-the-event outcomes it was hardly fair to pin on him.

In his mind’s eye, it had played out differently. He’d rolled straight out of the driver’s cabin, disarming the thug holding Lamb at gunpoint; bit of the old natural grace coming into play as he’d brought said thug to his knees with a quick one-two . . .

Later, with Louisa: “Really, Lamb said that? All I was doing was reacting, babes.”

“Jesus, Roddy, when someone calls you a hero, just accept it, yeah? Is that his gun in your pocket, by the way?”

“Hell’s teeth. Did the impact fuck your hearing up or what?”

And this was Lamb, bringing Roddy Ho back to reality.

“Dunn. Alison Dunn. That was the name of the woman Donovan killed.”

Ho said, “Yes. No. I can’t remember . . . ”

“Give me strength. If it was your brains I needed, we’d all be in trouble. All I want is your typing skills. Look her up. Is this guy related?”

For a moment, Ho couldn’t lay hands on his smartphone, and his life flashed before his eyes. Most of it involved Grand Theft Auto . Then he located it—new holster attachment, duh—and keyed in his password for the Service intranet. Typing skills, typing skills. What Lamb didn’t realise was how much more was involved than simple typing skills.

Alison Dunn, deceased. Military. Scroll down to find her surviving family.

“You know,” Lamb said, looking round at the mess the bus had made of the hallway, “when I first met you, I had you pegged as a waste of space.”

Busy as he was, Ho couldn’t prevent a smirk. He recognised a third-act moment when he heard one. “And when did you change your mind?”

“When did I what?”

Catherine emerged from the room where they’d put Dunn. “As long as you’ve got your phone out, call an ambulance.”

“Like hell,” Lamb said. “We’ll cuff him to a radiator and let the Dogs pick him up. Things are messy enough without a trip to A&E.”

“He’s a civilian,” Catherine said. “Not our jurisdiction.”

Ho looked up from his phone. Standish was glaring at Lamb in a way that made him glad it wasn’t happening to him. Babes , he told Louisa, that lady can be mighty fierce, you hear what I’m saying? Surviving family was her mother and a brother, Craig. There was a fiancé too, one Benjamin Traynor.

Traynor . . .

“Something else you should know,” he told Lamb.

Shirley founda staircase, its fire door hanging by one hinge, and bounded up to the next level. Smells of piss and weed: you didn’t have to abandon a building long before nature stepped in to reclaim it. Even here: not quite the heart of the city, but its appendix or something. Its bladder. She almost tripped at the top, but didn’t; stepped out onto the first level, and ran lightly down a corridor with a view of the wasteground through its glassless windows. Bitching dark now, one big shadow, but Shirley could make out shapes. There was the Black Arrow van, where they’d have taken Marcus. She hoped it was where they’d taken Marcus. The alternative—that they weren’t taking prisoners—didn’t bear thinking about.

Because apart from anything else, there was at least one of them on her tail right now.

At the end of the corridor she swung a hard right: more windows, now with a view of the railway lines, behind a breeze block wall topped with lengths of wire, the topmost one barbed. A digger was parked against the wall, its tool semi-upright, angled like a stepladder. Those things were always yellow or red. This one was yellow.

An open doorway. She spun into it, dropped to a crouch. Waited. Private security operations aimed to hire the brightest and the best: they wanted fitness, smarts and enough nous not to go belting into the dark after an unknown subject without checking out the terrain. What they mostly got, though, were lumbering wannabes who thought duffing up a Goth in a pub car park made them Jason Statham. The one on Shirley’s tail trundled past her wheezing like Thomas the Tank Engine, the gear on his utility belt slapping his thighs in cumbersome counterpoint, before erupting into a brief solo when she thudded into him waist height, sending him flying through the unglassed window. He didn’t fall far—it was only the first floor—but he hit the ground like a sack of spanners. Shirley tried to remember how many Arrows Marcus claimed to have seen, but couldn’t. One down, anyway.

Hearing more feet on the stairwell, she slipped back out of sight, noticing as she did so a strange sensation in her face; an unaccustomed tautening of muscles. She used her hand to check—yep. She appeared to be grinning.

Nothing like a drug-free high, she thought, and waited in the shadows for the next Black Arrow to make his move.