Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(8)
It’s a familiar scenario, this: a tabloid newspaper waiting to add fuel to whatever comes its way. Already a splash of oil has escaped the pan and landed on the ring with a big-snake hiss; not loud enough to penetrate a whisky fog, but a sign of more to come. The minutes will pass, shuffling their way towards the quarter hour, and before that milestone is reached the oil will have bubbled its way to freedom, at which point the minutes will give up, and the seconds come into their element. Things that were happening separately will start happening at once, and when the boiling oil spits onto the waiting paper, the paper will respond as it would to any good story and spread the news far and wide; across the threadbare carpet, over the shabby furnishings, and onto the figure on the bed itself, which might twitch of its own accord in its first few flaming moments, but will soon lose any such self-motivation and become the fire’s puppet, twisting and baking into a flaky black museum piece, while the annexe burns to a shell around it. All of this will happen soon, and some of it’s happening already. The oil burps in the pan, hungry. The cigarette stub smoulders its last, and a faint grey coil of smoke drifts towards the ceiling.
A few streets off, on the Westway, traffic roars into and out of London, embarking on an ordinary day.
But here in this cramped, shabby room, that day will never happen.
Meanwhile, back on Aldersgate Street, the shards of glass have been swept from the pavement, which is to say that Catherine Standish has marched Roderick Ho out and watched him sweep said shards into a pile—after watching him rescue the broom from the road—and then brush them into a cardboard box. There’s an audience of sorts for this sideshow, but it’s a desultory morning crowd made up of London’s early pedestrians, and no one lingers long. These groundlings have other dramas to pursue, and this particular moment is merely a respite from their various starring roles, in which they answer phones and do battle with spreadsheets, serve customers and mend computers, police the streets and mark exams, sell cigarettes and ask for spare change, heal the sick and empty the bins, launder clothes and broker deals, write songs and typeset books, love and lose and sing badly in the shower, commit fraud and assault, drink themselves stupid, and are kind to strangers. With all this ahead of them, there’s little time to linger. They move out of shot, and Roddy hoists the cardboard box, which rattles like a kaleidoscope, and carries it round the alleyway to the back of Slough House, where he dumps it in a wheelie-bin. Then he sulks his way upstairs, to spend the rest of the morning covering the broken window with a cardboard shield fashioned from taped-together pizza boxes, whose company logos smile onto the road below like unexpected adverts.
On Aldersgate Street a council lorry wheezes past tugging a series of trailers, each freighted with pipes and sinks and indeterminable items of metalware; travelling junkyards that look as if all the shiny bits have been extracted from some huge and cumbersome invention. And in the offices of Slough House the slow horses have settled themselves at their desks for another day, one which already seems askew from reality, as if things that happened in one order are about to be told in another.
But as long as they start happening soon, this doesn’t really matter.
Oliver Nash had chosen a patisserie in which to meet Claude Whelan, because it was handy for both of them, and because you had to support small businesses, and because it was a patisserie. Nash’s battle with his weight was an unfair contest. He had good intentions on his side, and a whole stack of diet books, not to mention words of advice bordering on warning from his GP, but his weight had a secret weapon: his appetite. In the face of which indomitable force, the massed artillery of inner determination, bookshelves and medical wisdom didn’t have a prayer.
None of which went through Whelan’s mind as they shook hands. They hadn’t seen each other in years, but neither had changed much, and if Whelan wouldn’t have gone so far as to say Nash was the shape he’d chosen for himself he was certainly the shape he was, and that was as much thought as Whelan had ever given the matter.
“How are you, Claude?”
He was fine.
“And can I tempt you to an almond croissant?”
No. He was a fallible man, and wouldn’t claim otherwise, but he’d never had a sweet tooth.
Nash didn’t pretend to regret having already ordered two. Coffee, likewise, was on its way: “Americano without, yes?” He had a memory for such things, heaven knew how. To the best of Whelan’s recall—they had been colleagues, of a sort, once—Nash spent half his life taking meetings, drinking coffee with others. He surely couldn’t recall everyone’s taste in beverage.
They chatted until their drinks came. Though not one of life’s small talkers, Whelan found this undemanding: Nash could provide both halves of a conversation if it proved necessary, and sometimes when it didn’t. The patisserie wasn’t crowded, and anyway held only half the tables it once had. On the nearest one, an abandoned newspaper revealed that the PM had just shared his vision of post-Brexit Britain as a scientific powerhouse, its trillion-pound tech industry the envy of the world. They chuckled over this, and drank coffee, and Nash put away a croissant without apparently noticing doing so, and at last said, “You’re a busy man,” which was the correct formula: nobody likes to be told they have nothing much to do. “But I have a favour to ask.”
Whelan nodded, hoping this wouldn’t be misinterpreted as a willingness to carry out the favour, but knowing it probably would. Hard to deny it: he was a soft touch. Not a busy man, either. He had things to do, but not enough to keep him occupied.