He thought for a moment then stepped back, drawing Daisy with him. It was a narrow hallway, barely worth the name. Turn right, you were in the front room. Daisy released herself from Stamoran’s grasp and slid away to give Sid space, and as Sid entered she became aware—nothing extra-sensory; it was too small a house to keep secrets—that they weren’t the only ones within, and this required a quick rethink. Stamoran wasn’t alone. Was Taverner aware of this? The window’s view of the front road was shrouded by a net curtain; there was a two-seater sofa, and a hint of last night’s alcohol in the air. Maybe Stamoran was guilty of other crimes, like running a Service safe house as an Airbnb, but that was another rabbit hole she’d best not tumble down. She turned to ask a question, and it was on her tongue, all but spoken, when her legs were whipped away from her and for one turbulent moment she was unconnected to the floor. And then she was on it and Daisy was on top of her and there was a blade at her throat, and that was it; that was all there was.
Roddy would have been the first to admit he had an excellent singing voice, though a long-established difficulty in finding the second meant he generally refrained from breaking into harmony when the slackers were about. Their loss. His gift for leaving even the roughest melody glazed in honey deserved its own label: a pity R&B was taken—Rodz Beatz—but there was still room for Roddy-pop.
“Losers and boozers,” he was crooning. “Something something fingernails.”
“Working on your theme song?”
Ho’s attempt to look like he was simultaneously upright, working and not singing resulted in his headphones and his mobile hitting the floor at not quite the same time, as if an experiment in gravity had just failed.
“Yeah, and you’ve found your . . . cheese grater.”
“Nice one.”
“Because that’s what you shave with.”
Lech rubbed his cheek: Funny, he could go for hours not being reminded about the mess his face had become—Londoners were unfazeable, by and large, when they weren’t online—but seconds into Ho’s company and he was contemplating bandaging himself up like the invisible man. “Did you ever think about a vow of silence? Or maybe having your vocal cords pruned?”
“Jealous. I went pro I’d have groupies. You’ve just got rubberneckers.”
“Ho, your voice sounds like you’re feeding an arthritic seal, very slowly, into a cider press. The only way you’ll draw groupies is if you sign up for assisted dying.”
“You need your ears plunged. My voice puts the Ho in ‘hot.’”
Lech, who would have quite liked to put the Ho in hospital, said, “You should leave your brain to science. They could do with one that’s not been used.”
“Yeah, and you should leave yours to . . . the Tiny Brain Museum.”
“Good comeback.”
“They could do with one that’s really small,” Ho called after him as he left the office and trudged up to Louisa’s, where he begged her to reconsider the No Squatters policy. Otherwise he might kill Ho.
“Sounds a plan. No, I meant killing Ho.” Too late: Lech was already booting up the PC on the spare desk, which Louisa hated anyone calling “the spare desk.” “It makes it sound like people can plonk themselves there whenever they feel like it,” she’d said more than once, usually to Lech, which proved her point. And just to underline how his presence was disturbing her, his phone rang.
“Yeah, what?”
“You working on the safe house register?”
“Is that what we’re calling it? A register?”
River, who’d spent the past two hours watching the house where Stamoran lived, said, “Shit, I don’t know, call it what you like. But are you at your desk? Can you look at the list?”
“Yes. Or no. But okay. Hang on a minute.” He pulled the spare chair from under the spare desk with his foot and crashed onto it while waiting for the spare screen to stop grinding grey and ask for his password. Meanwhile, Louisa had guessed it was River he was talking to: This probably had as much to do with the rarity of Lech’s receiving a call as it did with River being on her mind. “Ask him where he is,” she said.
“Where are you?” Lech asked. Then said, “Oxford.”
“What’s he doing in Oxford?”
“What are you doing in—you know what, hold tight.” He tossed the phone to Louisa, and used his newly free hand to slap the PC, a verified method of making it feel like you were speeding things up.
“What you doing in Oxford?” Louisa said.
“Not much. What you doing in Slough House?”
“Same. Why d’you need to know where the local safe house is?”
“Seen all the tourist stuff. Did you know they have an underground train here, taking books from one library to another?”
“Sounds like a lot of effort to avoid a bit of work. Who’s in the safe house?”
