“That what she told you?” Shirley shook her head sadly. “I knew she was skimming, but I didn’t think she’d be so blatant. You might be right, though. About Louisa being recruited by someone she knows.”
“And what I was thinking is, if they’ll take her, they’ll take us. Why not? I mean, I’m younger, and I didn’t fuck up the way she did. And you’re . . .”
Shirley waited.
“You’ve got bags of personality. Is she really stealing from us?”
“Catherine? Yeah, but we’re not supposed to talk about it. Lamb covers for her. He’ll pay you back. Just speak to him when no one’s around.”
“Yeah, okay. So, shall we ask Louisa, then?”
“. . . Sorry, what?”
“About who’s approached her.”
“. . . You mean . . . What, just
“There’s a better way?”
“Well, we could follow her. Or get Ho to bug her phone or sack her emails. Or . . . yeah, no, you might be right. We could ask her.”
Weird, though.
“Shall we go together?” Ash asked, and Shirley had the sensation, strange to her, of being the adult in the room.
“Well, first I’m going to drink this,” she said. “Then I’ll probably have a wee. But yeah, okay, let’s do that.”
Though the odds of Louisa telling them anything were on a par with Lamb refunding Ash’s kitty money. Besides, Louisa had left; was on her way to Oxford to find out what River had got himself into, and was currently barrelling down the M40, enjoying not being at work, the day’s tasks postponed. And also finding space to think about her words to Lamb earlier:
Mostly, though, what loomed large was not what was waiting but what would be left behind. At first, Slough House had felt like a temporary punishment, a proving ground where she’d redeem the desperate error that had seen her exiled from the Park. And then there’d been Min, of course, and a period during which the future had been something waiting with open arms rather than with its hands behind its back, concealing weapons. After Min died—after that, life had been a blank page on which she’d written nothing, but which she hadn’t been able to turn. Paralysed—affectless—she might as well have been at Slough House as anywhere else, and the future became something to be postponed, which she did by existing only in the present. Things were different now. Things always became different if you left them long enough. That sounded too basic a lesson to have taken her so long to learn, but you live your life in the order it happens, and here she was now; heading to Oxford, her last outing as a slow horse. Who would she miss? River, maybe Lech. She’d think about Catherine, but doubted she’d see her again. As for Lamb—well, she’d think about him, too. But in time, all of this would be fragments; the years patchworked by memory until she could no longer fit actions to places, faces to words. When she looked back on this, it would be like reassembling broken crockery. Even if the bits fitted, the cracks would remain.
