He was about to reply, but a sudden metallic crunch made both look up: Lamb’s office wasn’t directly overhead, but if he were hurling thunderbolts, that was roughly the direction to worry about. Only it hadn’t come from above but below, a realisation they reached at precisely the same moment. “Shirley,” they said in unison, though Shirley would have denied she’d been the one that made the noise—what had made the noise had been the iron. She hadn’t even been holding it at the time, had she? Otherwise it wouldn’t have been hitting the floor.
Cocaine logic.
She’d brought the iron into work because she was cruising Shoreditch later, and didn’t want to start the evening creased. Standards. And since it was now four, which put her on her own time if you didn’t count the next hour and a half, she’d decided to speed the evening up by both doing her ironing and taking a small bump to get her in the mood. It took a small bump to get her in the mood for most things these days, except those things that took a big bump, but it wasn’t like she was made of money, and people didn’t give the stuff away, or not round Shoreditch. Everyone had a living to make; everyone had a plan. Here was hers: hit a club or two, make enough of a score to see her through to the weekend, work off some energy on the dance floor, and—who knew?—she might decide to get lucky. Say what you like about Shirley’s looks, Shirley’s figure—and people had in the past—but she knew this much: deciding upfront whether you intended to get lucky pretty much put the outcome beyond doubt. She picked up the iron—which had gouged an inverted pyramid out of the threadbare carpet—and got on with the task in hand, enjoying the feeling of being productive and efficient, and trying to squash the niggling knowledge that she was being left out; that Lech and Louisa were plotting something—a KGB colonel, for fuck’s sake; okay, ancient history, but still. They had some action going on, even if they were digging up old bones to find it. And weren’t planning on letting Shirley join in, because if you partnered up with Shirley Dander, chances were you’d end up a blood-red mist on an office wall, or a smudge on a snowy hillside—
“What on earth are you doing?”
She nearly dropped the iron again.
“. . . What’s it look like?”
What it looked like was some kind of art installation, thought Catherine Standish, though she supposed, if you clung to the details, it also looked like Shirley was trying to iron a T-shirt. It was that she was using her desk as an ironing board that was the problem, and that she hadn’t cleared the desk first, making it more assault course than smooth surface. And also, the iron was either leaking or had a full-on steam setting: Shirley seemed to be having a sauna at the same time as getting her household chores done, which was in turn the point at issue. Household chores? She was in her office.
“Shirley—”
“What?”
Not a polite
Not a moment to be treading softly, then. Sometimes you had to stamp.
“What are you on?”
“On? What sort of question’s that?”
“A straightforward one. You’re high, you think I can’t tell? What have you taken?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Shirley, you’re at work. You work for the Service, for God’s sake. You’ve got a boss upstairs who’ll throw you out of your job without a thought if you give him an excuse.”
Job? He’d throw her out of a window.
“He won’t notice. He’s probably drunk. Besides, I took some cough mixture, that’s all. I’ve a bad throat. You can’t be too careful.”
Shirley was saying all this holding the iron at chest height, which in her case wasn’t that high, but still. With steam pouring from it, she looked like she was standing behind a special effect.
But her eyes were pinholes. If that was cough mixture, there’d be big demand for it.
Catherine said, “And why ironing, anyway? Why aren’t you doing that at home?”
“Saves time.”
“You’re not supposed to be saving time, you’re—oh, I can’t stand this. Put that away. Drink some water or whatever it is you do to bring yourself down. And do not take any more . . . cough medicine.”
“You should loosen up,” Shirley told her. “You’re too uptight. You’ll give yourself a seizure.”
“It’s not so long ago you assaulted a fundraiser in the street. And then there’s the man in the toilet at the tube station—”
“That was Lech.”
“Lech was there. There’s a difference.”
“I get blamed for everything!”
“Not without reason. And do you really think ironing on a desk is going to work?”
“I was doing fine till you butted in.”
