Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(7)
And with the other offices’ windowpanes unbothered by cloth or cleaning fluid, to inhabitants of the Barbican opposite, the building must seem like it housed vampires, a suspicion perhaps not dispelled by the faded gilt-lettering across the windows of the floor below, spelling out ww henderson, solicitor and commissioner for oaths in such ornate, seriffed flamboyance that it couldn’t help but seem a fiction; an over-elaborate cover for dark deeds. Oaths and blood went together. But whatever business had once been carried on in the office she still thought of as River Cartwright’s, it had ceased long before the building passed into the hands of Jackson Lamb, who would allow the building to fall around his ears sooner than suffer the intrusions required to keep it clean. His own window, anyway, was rarely open to view. His blind was mostly down. He preferred lamps with switches, light he could kill. The new recruit, Ashley Khan, had asked Catherine if Lamb were paranoid, a question to which the obvious answer—of course he is—didn’t do justice. Lamb’s history demanded paranoia: it was the role he’d been assigned. In a tragedy he’d be the last man standing, drenched in blood. In a comedy, about the same.
She sighed, finished wiping, and assessed her work: the slightly less filthy windows. A certain amount of effort, and almost no result. She might have been miming daily life in Slough House.
Floors were another story. Even failed spies should know one end of a broom from the other, and Catherine tried to make sure the offices were swept once a quarter by their own occupants, which in effect meant almost never. But the previous week, taking advantage of Lamb’s absence on some mission doubtless involving food or cigarettes, she’d swept his room, releasing almost visible odours, and when she’d finished, there in the dustpan—among the rat’s-nest tangles of hair and dust, and desiccated lumps of food, and thirteen disposable cigarette lighters—there’d lain a tooth, a molar, unmistakably human, its root darkened with blood. Nothing suggested it hadn’t lain there for years. She remembered, ages back, finding a handkerchief on Lamb’s desk clotted with blood, and thinking it a sign of life’s impending retribution: you could not live the way Lamb did without inviting comeback. His lungs, his liver, his lights: some part of him waiting to be switched off. It had seemed freighted with foreboding, that handkerchief, the way handkerchiefs in plays can be, and she had tried to put it out of her mind since, only to find herself wondering now if it had been another of Lamb’s cruel jokes, allowing his poor dental health to masquerade as something potentially fatal, for her benefit. This, after all, was what their relationship was like; lies were told with no words exchanged, and knowledge falsified in the absence of information. If she taxed him with that, he’d ask her what she expected? They were spooks. This was how they lived.
But she wouldn’t ask him, because there were some things she didn’t want to know, answers she’d rather remained in the dark and dust.
It was time to stop woolgathering and face the day ahead: weekly reports to assemble for Lamb, who never read them, and job-output stats to compile for Regent’s Park, which didn’t care. All that mattered to both was that the work of Slough House continue uninterrupted, whether by something major like whatever had happened in Wimbledon the other evening, or by something comparatively trivial, involving, say, the sound of a window breaking two floors below, which Catherine would now have to investigate.
The condition of her soul notwithstanding, she allowed herself a brief, uncharacteristic curse word before heading downstairs, wishing she’d chosen a different day for an early start.
But some never had that choice to make.
Some will never wake again.
A few streets off the Westway, where the city makes its bid for freedom with one last flourish of bookmakers and bed shops, bridal boutiques and barbers, in a single-roomed annexe occupying what was once the back garden of what was once a family home and now houses thirteen individuals leading thirteen separate lives, a figure lies on a bed, fully clothed, eyes shut, still breathing. How much of his current state can be put down to natural sleep, how much to alcohol-induced coma can be gauged by the empty bottle by his side: the label reads The Balvenie, a brand way too classy for this venue. The figure’s breathing is regular but laboured, as if heavy work were being done in that unconscious state, and the air it’s processing is thick with cigarette smoke—there’s an ashtray on the floor which needed emptying last Tuesday. One stub still smoulders, suggesting a recent companion, as it seems unlikely that the prone figure has been active these past few minutes. An unkinder view would be that it’s unlikely he’s been active this past month, but a bottle of scotch can have that effect, as indeed can two—a second bottle, equally drained, has rolled to rest under the room’s only table: a battered, tin-topped thing with foldable leaves.
Nothing else in sight gives cheer. Against the wall is a sink unit, on one side of which unwashed crockery mounts up on a stainless steel draining board, while on the other, a two-ring electric stove plugged into an already overworked socket offers just enough of a nod in the direction of domesticity to allow a landlord to describe the room as self-catering. One of the two rings is dormant, and on top of it has been placed a plastic bag of frozen chips, torn open at the wrong end. A little diagram explains how to prepare them: they can be cooked in an oven or on top of a stove, supposing a chip pan is available. A chip pan, as it happens, is available, and in fact is close at hand: it sits atop the second of the two rings, which is glowing orange in the dusky light, and the viscous liquid with which it is filled is beginning to bubble and pop, causing the pan’s wire basket to rattle against its sides. Spread out on the floor below is a newspaper, one of the capital’s giveaways, its pages unfurled and unfolded as if someone has been trying to read all of it in one go.