“You don’t have to remind me. I’d planned a cake, a bottle of bubbly.” Lamb shook his head sadly. “I was gunna set fire to your personnel file, and maybe have a quiet moment, you get my drift.” In case River didn’t, he mimed having a quiet moment with his right hand. “Trust me, I’d have marked the occasion in an appropriate manner.”
“The appropriate manner being your fallback position,” Lech muttered.
They had waited for Lamb for over an hour, and hadn’t been making a lot of conversation. Shirley and Lech were still wary of each other following that morning’s hostilities, a skirmish occasioned by the former’s insistence on keeping all the blinds in the building down “as a mark of respect,” which Lech interpreted as “so no one looking in will see Shirley doing blow.” Actually, Shirley wasn’t doing blow (supply chain malfunction), and nor did Lech think she was (hangover malice), but they hadn’t been fighting over blinds either. Grief smothered Slough House like a nurse with a pillow. Even Roddy felt it, cranking his headbanging mix tape to nosebleed levels while flaying swastika-embossed excrescences with what looked like, and possibly was, a glass dildo. Computer games come with age certification; none of them actually say “mental age of seven,” but most should. But a couple of hours ago Roddy had had a phone call, after which the music had abruptly ceased, and he’d begun livestreaming Notting Hill traffic pressure points like a man planning to firebomb a carnival. Lech had noted this, but asking questions would have been tantamount to a gesture of friendship. Besides, he had a wobbly tooth after his difference of opinion with Shirley, and was too busy probing it with his tongue to articulate much.
River had come from the hospital. Sid had been there too, but at CC’s bedside. Your grandfather would understand, she’d told him, and River had pretended he agreed. But his grandmother would. Rose, who had spent almost her entire life on the outside of the Service looking in; she’d have understood. And would probably have done the same thing.
When Lamb arrived he’d been clutching a greaseproof package containing either a particularly artisanal kebab or a prop from a horror film. The latter would presumably have been non-edible, but the slow horses were accustomed to Lamb’s robust approach to culinary shibboleths. He claimed the bench they’d been congregating on by his usual method—i.e., declining to accept the fact that others were already sitting there—forcing them to scatter. Only Roddy remained in place, headphones loose round his neck, laptop on his lap. As far as anyone could tell, he was still engaged in mapping W3 via its traffic control systems. Say what you like about Roddy, thought River—which, to be fair, was his usual approach—but when he committed to something, he went all in. If he’d made wiser choices as to what those commitments were, he might have averaged out at a speakable human being.
So that left River on his feet, along with Lech, Shirley and Catherine; Shirley leaning against a pillar and Lech staring at the walkway opposite, along which a man was shuffling as slowly as possible without going backwards. He appeared to be wearing hospital garb, though his lower half was shielded from view by the wall, so it might have been a baggy shirt.
River said, “And what precisely made you shelve your wankfest? Did my medical clearance come through?”
“Shit, no. You’re fuck out of luck there, sonny. They’re terrified you’ll be a death-in-service payout waiting to happen. And given recent events—”
“Shut up, Jackson.”
“—well, one payment down, another looking likely, the kitty’s bare. So no.”
“I said shut up.”
“Yeah, but I’m not your boss any more, remember? So you can’t make me.”
River buried his head in his hands. “For fuck’s sake.”
Cramming the remainder of his supper into his mouth, Lamb crumpled the greaseproof paper into a mess the size of a cricket ball. There being no wastebasket handy, he lobbed it in the direction of Catherine, who, to the surprise of the assembled company, caught it neatly, following which, to the surprise of nobody, she tucked it into her handbag for later disposal. Lamb, meanwhile, lit a cigarette with less stage business than usual.
Shirley said, “So now we all don’t know why River’s here. What about the rest of us? Or are we not gunna find that out either?”
