Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(2)
Speaking of malleable idiots . . .
On closer inspection, he noticed that his victim wasn’t one of Benito’s crew at all, but on Sparrow’s own side. Still, there he was, prone and useless, and Sparrow holding a club.
His caller was still talking, so he tapped a finger against his phone three times, a signal both knew meant the conversation had passed all useful purpose. Then waited a moment.
“Not at all. What I’m here for.”
He waited some more. And then: “Yes, prime minister. See you in the morning.”
And, call over, Sparrow raised his club and brought it down as hard as he could, and then again, and again, until this anonymous creature was where all his opponents ended, dumb and dusted at his feet.
Act II
Chimp Politics
The wind, with its hands in its pockets, whistles a tune as it wanders down the road—a jaunty melody, at odds with the surroundings—and the theme is picked up by everything it passes, until all of Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, has joined in. The result tends towards the percussive. A bottle in the gutter rocks back and forth, cha-chink cha-chunk, while a pair of polystyrene cartons, one nestled in the other’s embrace, whisper like a brush on a snare drum way up on the pedestrian bridge. A more strident beat is provided by the tin sign fixed to the nearest lamppost, which warns dogs not to foul the pavement, a message it reinforces with a rhythmic rattle, while in the Barbican flowerbeds—which are largely bricked-in collections of dried-up earth—pebbles rock and stones roll. By the entrance to the tube there’s a parcel of newspapers bound by plastic strips, whose pages gasp and sigh in choral contentment. Dustbins and drainpipes, litter and leaves: the wind’s conviction that everything is its instrument is justified tonight.
And yet halfway down the road it pauses for breath, and the music stops. The wind has reached a black door, wedged between a dirty-windowed newsagent’s, visibly suffering from lack of public interest, and a Chinese restaurant offering the impression that it’s still in lockdown, and plans to remain so. This door, irredeemably grimy from the exhalations of passing traffic, is a sturdy enough construction, the only gap in its armour a long-healed wound of a letterbox, impervious to junk mail and red-lettered bills, but a door is only a door for all that, and the wind has blown down bigger. Perhaps it considers rendering this supposed obstruction into dust and matchsticks, but if so, the moment passes; the wind moves on, and its orchestra goes with it. The shake and rattle and roll starts to fade, the theme toyed with one last time, then dropped. The wind is going places, and this grubby stage isn’t big enough to hold it. It’s heading for the brighter lights; for the stardom that waits, somewhere over the rainbow.
So the black door is left unshaken and unstirred. But just as it never opens, never closes during daylight hours, nor is it about to yield now, and anyone intent on entry must take the stagedoor johnny route, down the adjacent alley, past the overflowing wheelie-bins and the near-solid stench from the drains, through the door that sticks in all seasons, and then, once inside, climb stairs whose carpet has worn thin as an actor’s ego, and whose walls boast mildew stains, and lightbulbs that are naked and/or spent. It’s dark in here, a bumpy kind of dark, with sound effects provided by rising damp and falling plaster, and the offstage antics of vermin. The stairs grow narrower the higher they go, and the paired offices that lurk on each landing are furnished with shabby props, scratched on every surface and torn in all the ways they can tear—nothing capable of being damaged twice has been damaged only once, because history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce, and here in Slough House the daily grind is of such unending repetition that the performers can barely tell one from the other. More to the point they’re not sure it matters, for the role of a slow horse, as this troupe are known, is to embrace unfulfilment and boredom; to look back in disappointment, stare round in dismay, and understand that life is not an audition, except for the parts that are, and those are the parts they’ve failed. Because Slough House is the end of the pier, the fleapit to which Regent’s Park consigns failures, and these would-be stars of the British security service are living out the aftermath of their professional errors. Where once they’d dreamed of headline roles in their nation’s secret defences, they’ve instead found themselves in non-speaking parts, carrying spears for Jackson Lamb. And given his oft-stated advice as to where they might put these spears, none of them should anticipate a return to the bright lights any time soon.
Which doesn’t stop them hoping, of course.
The wind’s tune has faded, and Slough House is as quiet as a mouse—it twitches and rustles, scratches and squeaks. Come morning its scattered cast will reassemble, and as in any office, familiar scenarios will play themselves out once more: the passive-aggressive feuding, the mind-crushing boredom, the ill-disguised hostility, the arguments over the fridge. None of this will ever change much. But as in any office most of those involved expect it to, as if some larger drama is about to begin, one that will erase their previous errors—missed cues, mangled lines, early exits—allowing the spotlight to fall on them at last. It’s a reason for turning up, anyway; the possibility that their attendance today will mean they won’t have to be here tomorrow, and that their future, instead of this endless tedium played out against broken furniture, will be one of shining triumph, in which everything comes out right. Even those who no longer believe this act as if they do, because otherwise, what would be the point? It’s a small enough world without accepting that it’ll never get larger. Better to go along with the fantasy that any moment now the curtain will rise and the lights dim.