Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

And what would that get her? An exclusion zone. A woman having a meltdown in a heatwave: someone to avoid.

She risked a look behind. No bus. And nobody following. The soldier, if he’d been one, wasn’t in sight, and Sean Donovan was nowhere.

At the bus stop she paused. The next bus would take her back the way she’d come; it would drop her opposite Slough House, rewinding the evening to when she’d emerged from the back lane. None of this would have happened, and in the morning she’d look back on it as a minor blip; the kind of bump in the road recovering drunks learn to negotiate. Up at the junction the lights changed, and fresh traffic began flowing her way; she was hoping for a bus, but the largest vehicle among them was a black van, the same one that had just gone past in the opposite direction. Catherine left the bus stop, her heart beating faster. One soldier, two soldiers; a recurring black van. Some things were echoes from a drunken past. Others weren’t.

Why on earth would anyone be targeting her?

A question for another time. For the moment, she had to go to ground.

Before the approaching traffic reached her, she darted across the road.

On hisway to the bar Marcus had called into the gents, for the relief of a few solo minutes, and finding the cubicle free had occupied it to contemplate what had happened to his life. This past while—since his exile to Slough House, certainly, but more specifically the past two months—it had been heading down the toilet. No wonder he felt calmer in here than out there.

Back when everything was as it should have been, one of Marcus’s combat instructors had laid down a law: control is key. Control the environment, control your opponent. Most of all, control yourself. Marcus got that, or thought he got it, first time of hearing, but had soon discovered it was the large-print version: control didn’t just mean keeping a lid on, it meant nailing that lid down tight. Meant making yourself into one of those soldier’s tools, the kind that fold away until they’re all handle, no blade, and only snap open when needed.

But the thing about training—and Marcus wasn’t the first to notice this—was it filled you with skills that remained unflexed. Lots of stuff he’d had crammed into him, like how to bury himself in woodland for forty-eight hours straight, hadn’t been called on since. He’d kicked some doors down, and not so long ago had placed a nicely tight circle of bullets inside a human being, but by and large his career hadn’t made demands. And now Slough House, the slow annihilation of every ambition he’d ever had . . . The control factor was the only thing keeping him sane. Every day he nailed himself down, did what he was told, as if this might prove worthy of reward in the long run. And this despite what he’d been told by Catherine Standish, right at the start; that every slow horse knows there’s no going back, apart from that small part of every slow horse that thinks: except, maybe, for me . . .

And control, of course, was where the gambling came in—ceding control was what gave him the kick. No matter how much he kidded himself it was a balancing act, that he only surrendered the environment but at all times maintained control of himself—set boundaries, established limits—the truth was, he was stepping into the unknown every time he entered a casino. Which hadn’t mattered until lately, because until lately, he’d not been in the habit of losing.

It was the machines that had got him, those damn roulette machines, that had appeared in bookies it seemed like overnight. One-armed bandits, he’d never had trouble with: the clue was in the name. Those things were always going to rob you blind. But for some unaccountable reason the roulette machine was more alluring, more seductive . . . You started with a few coins, and it was astonishing how close you came to winning without actually winning, so you put a few more in, and then you won. Winning cleared the decks. Once you’d won you were back where you started, though with slightly less money . . . He’d played poker with Vegas pros and left the table walking; had scooped outsider bets on horses that were walking dog-food, and here he was, taken to the cleaners by a fucking machine, feeding it twenties like it was his firstborn. He’d once boasted he was the house’s worst nightmare: a gambler who played by the clock. As in, I’m leaving here at ten, ahead or behind . These days every time he looked at his watch it had skipped ahead thirty minutes, and every time it did, his next payday got further away.

He’d been digging into savings. Had found himself studying the loan ads on the tube, the ones with rates that annualised at 4,000 percent plus. Cassie was going to kill him, if he didn’t shoot himself first.

Worst of all, playing catch-up in office hours—logging onto casino sites in a bid to recoup lunchtime losses—he’d been snared by Roderick bloody Ho, Slough House’s answer to the tachograph. Which was why, tonight, he was Ho’s drinking buddy, with only cokehead Shirley Dander as backup. Yep, the toilet was the right place for him, but he couldn’t stay here forever. Heaving himself upright, he headed back into the bar.

When he rejoined his colleagues Shirley was asking Ho if his mouth was connected to his brain. “‘Bitch’? You’re lucky I just slapped you.”

Ho turned to Marcus with relief. “You believe that, dog?”

“Did you just call me ‘dog’?”

Shirley raised a hand, for the pleasure of seeing Ho flinch. “Mind your fucking language,” she warned.

“Did he just call me ‘dog’?”

“I think he did.”

Marcus plucked Ho’s glasses from his nose and tossed them onto the floor. “I’m a dog? You’re a dog. Fetch.”

While Ho went scrabbling again, Marcus said to Shirley, “I didn’t know you and Louisa were tight.”

“We’re not. But I wouldn’t fix Ho up with a nanny goat.”

“Sisterhood is powerful.”

“Got that right.”

They chinked glasses.

When Ho sat back down, he was holding his spectacles in place with two fingers. “. . . What you do that for?”

Marcus shook his head. “I can’t believe you called me ‘dog.’”

Ho shot Shirley a glance before saying, “Did you forget the terms of our, uh, arrangement?”

Marcus breathed out through his nose. Almost a snort. “Okay,” he said. “This is what’s what. We’re renegotiating terms, right? Here’s the deal. You breathe one word about those casino sites, to anyone, and I’ll break every bone in your chickenshit body.”

“I’m not chickenshit.”

“Focus on the broken bones. Are we clear?”

“I’m not chickenshit.”

“But you will have broken bones.”

“I will have broken bones. But I’m not chickenshit.”

“You pick weird places to set your boundaries. And you know what your problem is?” Marcus was warming up now, developing his theme. “You never do anything. You just sit in your office and surf your machines like, like, like a fucking elf. Day in, day out, churning through reams of pointless information, just to keep Jackson bloody Lamb happy.”

“So do you.”

“Yeah, but I hate it.”

“But you still do it.”

Shirley shook her head.

Marcus explained, “You’re a dweeb, Ho. All you are, all you’ll ever be. A woman like Louisa’s never gonna give you a second glance, and nor is any other woman without seeing your credit card up front. Me, I don’t have that problem. You know why? Because before I was stuck doing this shit, I was doing other shit. Proper shit. You, all you’ve ever done is this shit, and this is the shit you like doing.”

Ho said, “So what are you saying?”

“Give me strength . . . Do something, that’s what I’m saying. You want to make a mark, you want to impress people, do something. Doesn’t matter what, just so long as it’s not sitting at a screen crunching . . . data .”