It’s a momentary sensation, quickly shrugged off. Pedestrians shake their heads as if reminded of a minor chore they’ve been avoiding—unwashed laundry, an unread novel—and shuffle by, unaware that the anonymous structures in their wake are identified on maps, if at all, as “government buildings,” or that they house the secret servants of the state; that behind their walls the sharpest minds available are gathering intel, fabricating data, forecasting outcomes and analysing threats, when they’re not playing Candy Crush and watching the clock like the rest of us. There are armed guards behind unmarked doors; there are cameras scrutinising pavements, sentries studying screens. It’s thrillingly like a thriller. Sometimes—rarely—it might only have happened once—there’ll be action: A car will scream to a halt, a door will burst open. Figures in black with holstered weaponry will pour from the building and be whipped away. Later that same day you’ll see nothing about this on the news, and will struggle to remember precisely where it happened; being certain only that, wherever it was, it wasn’t Aldersgate Street, where little disrupts the daily round of not much going on. The Chinese restaurant remains closed for long stretches; the newsagent’s enjoys limited custom. Meanwhile, the black front door between them remains shut, and anyone foolish enough to seek entry must do so via a back alley, where a yard in which wheelie bins lurk like corpulent hoodlums also reveals, like an admission of guilt, a door which sticks in all weathers, and once forced open betrays nothing more high-tech than a staircase, lined with wallpaper peeling in some places and already peeled in others. A single dim lightbulb casts half-hearted shadows, and should you ascend the stairs you would find on each landing a pair of offices, neither inviting. The carpeting is scuffed; the skirting boards warp from the walls. There is evidence of murine activity, but even this seems ancient, as if the mice responsible packed their bags for pastures new years ago. If there were a lift, it would have long stopped working. If there were hope, it would have left. For if the murkiest of London’s depths are where its spooks congregate, Slough House—this being the name of the Aldersgate Street residence—is the lowest of the low; an administrative oubliette where the benighted moulder in misery. Their careers are behind them, though not all have admitted it; their triumphs are black laughter in the dark. Their duties involve the kind of paperwork designed to drive those undertaking it mad; paperwork with no clear objective and no end in sight, designed by someone who abandoned a course in labyrinth design in favour of something more uplifting, like illustrating suicide notes. The light in the building leaks away through cracks and fissures, and the air is heavy with regret. To arrive here for work every morning is its own punishment, one made harsher by the awareness that it’s self-inflicted—because all the inmates need do to win freedom is claim it. No one will stop them walking away. Indeed, there’s every reason to suppose that such a move would meet with admiration, or at any rate, a sigh of relief. Some employees are more trouble than they’re worth, and after various adventures involving poor choices, idiot politics, appalling weather and violent death, it’s fair to say that the slow horses fall into this category. It’s not that they wouldn’t be missed, more that they’d happily be forgotten. Whatever space they occupy on the map might more usefully be rendered a blank white nothing.
Though of course, blank spaces on maps are an invitation to the curious, just as empty white pages are a temptation to those with nothing better to do. In the drabbest of buildings, home to the dullest of spooks, stories wait to be told. And in Slough House—on Aldersgate Street—in the London borough of Finsbury—this happens the way it has always happened. One syllable at a time.
“A
“Or an email.”
“That’s twice as fucking bad. You want me to write an
“Don’t think of it as a punishment, Shirley. Think of it as smoothing things over.”
“Yeah, right. Have you met me?”
Catherine blinked, pursed her lips, and decided to leave it there.
“Just think about it. Please. That’s all I’m asking.”
She turned and went up two flights of stairs, a manila folder clutched to her chest: protective colouring. Not that she required this—in some moods, on some days, she could walk past anyone in Slough House bar Jackson Lamb, and they wouldn’t know she was there—but it was an ingrained habit, having a visible alibi in case of interrogation:
