Clown Town полностью

He had more to say first, though. “We have a suspicious, a violent death, we have woundings, we have the presence of a formerly significant political figure, and the involvement of secret service personnel, including several who were once part of a notorious undercover operation. The sole reason this isn’t headline news is the classified nature of such activities, and I am painfully aware, Diana, that despite your elevated position and long experience, your own activities seem to be as far from safeguarding the national well-being as it is possible to get without actually holding a pillow over the nation’s face.” It wasn’t hard to remember that he’d been a lawyer in his pre-political life, used to summing up a case for the jury. Everything colour-coded and delivered in paragraphs. “Now, I need two things from you. The first is a full written report of precisely what occurred last night. The second is your resignation. You can frame it as you like—time for a change, ready for a rest—but it will be on my desk this evening. I cannot afford to have my government, or its officers, embroiled in any situation which reeks of cover-up and corruption.”

“Going well so far,” she said.

“. . . I beg your pardon?”

She gazed round at the over-furnished room, noting an unfaded border of wallpaper around an undistinguished portrait, an indication that a larger picture had been there recently. “Could you have someone fetch a microcassette player? There’ll be one in a cupboard.” She rolled her eyes, almost imperceptibly. “It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to rely on last century’s technology to get this year’s work done. The past has a way of hanging around. Unless it’s the kind you can just shift elsewhere and drape a cloth over it.”

His lips were a thin straight line. “What are you talking about, Diana?”

She opened a fist, showing the tiny cassette on her palm.

“You need to listen to this.”

Slough House, like a broken mouth, was full of gaps. Lech felt it, in Louisa’s room, where he was methodically tearing in half, then tearing in half again, the printouts of his current research job, littering the floor with scrambled addresses. Shirley felt it, lying under her desk in the room below, for reasons that weren’t clear. Roderick Ho felt it, perched amidst his busy screens, self-medicating with energy drinks and pizza; his current assignments included wiping out an invading force of Nazi zombies. The headphones sealing him off from reality pumped angry music into his system, and it fizzed through him, hair to toes. And Catherine, newly back from St. Leonard’s, felt it in her eyrie, where she sat at a desk that was for once free of paperwork; a blank space she could control, provided it remained blank, and no extraneous matters materialised.

Left as it was, it should be easy to walk away from. And it wasn’t as if she had nowhere to walk to—she had her flat; as quiet as this, but half a world away. It smelt of basil and cut flowers, of polish and scented candles, and even intrusive noises—the beep-beeping of a delivery lorry in reverse; the overhead throbbing of aeroplanes circling before descent—felt less an interruption and more a notification that life continued on its even path. Whereas here in Slough House, the constant barrage of sound suggested that the front line, never far away, was getting nearer, and as for the smells . . . Catherine had long come to the conclusion that removing the aroma of stale tobacco would be a three-step process. First you’d have to steam-clean the soft furnishings, then paint the walls, and then knock the building down and scatter the rubble.

There was a crashing sound from downstairs, which could have been anything. She should investigate, but the effort felt beyond her.

The next noise was Lamb, calling her landline.

“I thought you were coming back here,” she said.

“Things to do, people to see. It’s not easy being me.”

“I can imagine.” It wasn’t that easy being around him. “If you’re calling for an update on your staff—”

“Nah. But get hold of Cartwright.”

“What do you need River for?”

“Need him? Christ, don’t give him that impression. Tell him I want his keys back. I’ll meet him at . . . the hanging gardens. In an hour. The rest of you be there too.” There was a pause while he cleared his lungs out. Either that or a nearby cat was throwing up a frog. “Not a good idea to be around Slough House right now.”

“Where exactly are the—”

But he was gone.