Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

There’d been two others. One driving, obviously. Sean himself, who had lifted her from the street like a sack left for recycling; and a third, the soldier she’d seen loitering by the tube. Being spotted, it occurred to her, had not been his error: she’d been meant to notice him, and turn away. What use would their van have been on the underground?

Here and now, like any prisoner, she checked the window first. Set in an alcove formed by the slant of the roof and mullioned into a diamond pattern, it was closed by a simple latch, and easily large enough to fit through, but there were iron bars set into the external sill which a brief tug told her weren’t going anywhere. Not that she was built for scrambling down the side of a house. It wasn’t the securest of prisons, but didn’t have to be—she was a middle-aged woman who’d never been a joe; a recovering drunk who was PA to a drunk still working on it. Why did they want her in the first place? And who, Sean Donovan included, were they?

Unsuited for squeezing through them, Catherine settled for leaving the windows open instead, causing a slight adjustment in the air. Nothing you could call a breeze. There was a hum of distant traffic, but she couldn’t see the road from here. It had felt like a motorway, though that didn’t narrow things down much. An hour or so from Central London, somewhere off a motorway . . . A house set on its own in what must be countryside, because it was too dark to be anything else.

In the van, she’d been blindfolded and gagged, her hands bound, but none of it roughly—it might have been a sex game, a party promise. And that had been it for the rest of the journey. She’d contemplated thrashing about, but to what end? Best to preserve her strength for whatever came next.

When they’d left the motorway, the terrain had swiftly deteriorated: slip road, B-road—she’d heard bushes swishing the van’s panels. Then the crunching of gravel, and the sudden dips and bounces of rough ground. The van had lurched to a stop; no negotiating its way into a space. They’d untied her but left the blindfold on as they helped her out, one strong arm—not Donovan’s—at her waist until she’d found her feet. Then out of the country air, which was softer, greener, richer than the city’s, and into a house whose floors were wooden, on which her buckled feet sang, and produced a faint echo.

“There’s stairs.”

Again, not Donovan.

There were stairs, yes, and then more stairs; three floors’ worth. And then she was in here, this one-time nursery, and the blindfold was removed.

“Your quarters.”

It was the second soldier, the one from the tube: chipped from the same block as Donovan. Before she had time for a more detailed analysis, he was gone. She heard him fitting the padlock in place, then heading downstairs.

Here she was, then. They’d taken her bag: her money, tissues, lipstick, Kindle, travel pass, other stuff; her phone too, of course. Her watch. They hadn’t searched her, though, which could easily have proved their undoing, if she’d been in the habit of carrying a concealed weapon or the means of improvising one. And still she had no clue what they wanted . . . The slightest of draughts now, through the opened window. There were hills in the distance, a starless expanse blocking the heavens. A few faraway lights, which must be other dwellings; a more focused blaze of electricity which was probably a garage, servicing the nearby motorway. All plainly visible. Almost an amateur operation, except for Sean Donovan’s involvement. No one would call him amateur.

Looking down on the immediate surroundings, she could make out other structures, half-revealed by the pools of light splashing through downstairs windows. They looked like outhouses—barns?—further suggesting that this was a farmhouse. Something else, too, in the darkness; a vehicle the size and shape of a London bus; one of the old Routemasters that were either out of service or about to be reintroduced, depending what the transport policy was on any given morning. Just another touch of the bizarre to throw into the mix. What was going on?

She doubted it was personal. Donovan would hardly put a crew together to kidnap a former girlfriend. Or not even girlfriend; one of his former lays. Some other reason, then . . . He knew she was no longer at the Park, because he’d said as much, on Aldersgate Street. What did he know about Slough House? Did he think it was important? He had a serious disappointment coming if so.

There was a second door on the far side of the room and Catherine tried it now, expecting to find it locked, but it opened without complaint. An en-suite bathroom: loo, sink, bath. There was no cabinet on the wall, though screw marks, and a less-discoloured rectangle of magnolia paint, indicated that there had been once: yes, well, she thought. Give a girl a mirror, she can make herself a knife. Presumably similar thoughts about the weaponising potential of shampoo, tubes of toothpaste, cans of hairspray, etc. had also occurred to her captors, because the only toiletry, a single loo roll aside, was a complimentary-sized bar of soap, still in its wrapper. Stick a hairpin in it, you’ve got a one-use-only shiv, she thought, but she didn’t have a hairpin, and didn’t imagine it would take anyone bigger than a boy scout to take it away from her if she did.

There was another window in here, a skylight, but it too was barred over, and anyway out of reach.

She returned to the bedroom. It occurred to her that maybe she should try to get some sleep, there being few other activities available which didn’t involve pacing and growing scared, but decided against it. To sleep was to become vulnerable. For the time being, she was in charge of herself, if nothing else. She’d sit and wait. Sooner or later, information would start to flow. Meanwhile, she’d carry on being herself: not drunk, unbowed, and as organised as the situation allowed her to be.

•••

It wasperhaps half an hour before anyone came. Catherine had turned the light off, the better to familiarise herself with the view through the window, but no great insights arrived in the dark. Sean Donovan, she remembered, had been in a liaison role when she first met him; had attended a meeting with Charles Partner, her former boss and then head of the Security Service, and various other bigwigs, some from Down the Corridor, as Westminster was locally known; others from Over the River, where Intelligence was supposedly housed. Alone of those gathered, he had looked her in the eye as she handed out the morning’s dossiers. One thing had led to another. In those days, it usually did.

And now, hearing someone rattling the padlock, she assumed it would be him, but the man who entered was a stranger; neither Donovan, nor the other soldier, but a third man: younger, stocky. He wore a once-white short-sleeved shirt, and up his arms crawled inky designs, which also peeped out from the collar, and crept onto the back of his hairless head. He held something in his hand: two somethings. One was the pair of handcuffs she’d been made to wear in the van. The other was a mobile—it looked like Catherine’s own.

“Put these on.” He dangled the cuffs.

“Why am I here?”

“Lady, just put the cuffs on. And this.”

He produced the gag from his back pocket.

“Is that my phone?”

“Yes.”

His vowels were flat, she noted: northern. She was no expert on regional accents, but thought North-West rather than East. She noted, too, that her own pronunciation had sharpened in response, becoming more BBC. Maybe Lamb was rubbing off on her. That was the kind of trick he’d play.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Seriously?”

“It was worth a try.”

He said, “Let’s just get the cuffs on, okay?”