Clown Town полностью

All of which left her here, in her office, having just been read, yeah, chapter again: chapter and verse by St. Catherine of Standish, patron saint of addicts. Who had herself graduated from the San with full honours, and obviously regarded Shirley’s truncated experience of its rehabilitative wonders as some kind of moral failure, so fuck that. What she really needed, leaving aside all the bollocks inherent in what others thought she needed, was to be left alone for a while; a little solitude (the odd pickup apart) and some clean living, with maybe the odd toot for variety’s sake—it was relaxation, not canonisation, she wanted. A few weeks of that and she’d be ready for anything Slough House could throw at her, even including her current task, which involved an online trawl for youths exhibiting antisocial tendencies in specific postcodes, these centring on mosques identified by Regent’s Park as being “of special interest” . . . Well, she could imagine Lamb saying. You have to start somewhere. He had the notion, or pretended to, that it ought to be possible to identify those undergoing radicalisation not so much by their youthful careers of hooliganism as by those same careers being abruptly curtailed. Redemption, in Lamb’s world, was less likely than the chances of being recruited by the forces of evil, forces which would prefer you kept your nose clean for the moment.

None of which had any relevance to her own situation, obviously.

She leaned forward and tapped at her keyboard to dispel the screensaver but her computer had switched itself off, its usual response to being ignored for more than five minutes. She could boot up again, but on the other hand it was less than two hours to lunchtime, so she might as well just sit it out. Coming up next on Shirley Dander: fuck all. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and wondered if she were the only one in the building who had no real plans at all. Maybe. Maybe not. Time would tell. It usually did.

Book restaurant.

The memo was fixed to her monitor’s upper corner, but she’d avoided acting on it yet.

Things Louisa had accomplished so far this morning included, pretty much exclusively, opening her window, through which now drifted the sounds of ordinary things, all of which had happened a million times before. Buses wheezed, traffic snorted, an airliner bulldozed its way through a temporarily cloudless sky. White noise, leaving no trace behind. On her windowsill lay two dead bluebottles, half a moth, and the scattered debris of city dirt, the kind that accumulates unseen, until it’s suddenly a landfill site. Underfoot was threadbare carpeting; on the walls a dull shade of paint that had long given up its proprietorial singularity—November Frost? Autumn Lawn?—in favour of a universal beige. The space between felt like it was held prisoner by the 1970s. The shelving on the walls remained there largely through inertia, and the mismatched desks—her own kept level thanks to a folded piece of cardboard; the other with a surface scarred by the penknife lacerations of a previous bored resident, and both with drawers that didn’t open easily, or wouldn’t shut—might have started life in a more salubrious corner of the civil service, but were now a decade or more past their useful working life. Not unlike—but she held off completing the thought.

That other desk, the scarred and battle-worn one, had been commandeered by Lech Wicinski lately, but had belonged to Min Harper once, what felt like fifteen years ago, and she still imagined him there occasionally, balanced on its edge or standing by the window, like an overgrown schoolboy gazing at the playing fields. Min Min Min. Oddly, he spoke to her now.

You going to make that reservation?

She hadn’t decided yet.

What’s to decide? An old friend seeking your company? Not even a date, as such. Just . . . friendship.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Min wasn’t there, of course, and even if he had been was unlikely to offer useful commentary on her options. He’d not been the most reliable source of advice while alive. It was unlikely he’d improved in that area since his death.

Still, he wasn’t shutting up.

And it’s not as if you’re doing anything else this evening.

Yeah, thanks for that.

She made a pistol of her fingers, shot Min’s ghost dead, and felt bad.