Dead Lions полностью

Deep breath. My name is Catherine, and I’m an alcoholic. A copy of the Blue Book stood between a dictionary and a collected Sylvia Plath in the sitting room, and there was nothing to stop her settling down with it, peppermint tea at her elbow, until the wobble passed. The wobble: that was another one of her mother’s. Code for a hot flush. A lot of code words, her mother had used. Which was almost funny, given what Catherine did for a living.

So what would her mother make of her now, if she were alive? If she could see Slough House, its flaky paintwork, its flakier denizens … Catherine didn’t need to ask, because the answer was blindingly clear: her mother would take one look at the worn-out furniture, the peeling walls, the dusty bulbs, the cobwebs that hung from the corners, and recognise it as somewhere her daughter belonged, somewhere safe from aspiration. It was better to build your life’s ceiling low. Better not to put on airs.

Better, in the long run, not to think about what lay behind you.

So picking up her peppermint tea Catherine carried it into her sitting room, and for the many hundredth time didn’t go out for a bottle. Nor did she browse the Blue Book—let alone Sylvia bloody Plath—but instead sat and thought about bald men, and their actions on rainy railway platforms. And she tried not to think about her mother, or about life’s edges being planed away until you could see clear past them into whatever came next.

Because whatever came next, it was best to assume the worst.

From the seventy-seventh floor to this, thought Louisa Guy.

Holy crap!

A broadsheet’s Beautiful Homes column had lately informed her that a little imagination and a small amount of cash could transform even the tiniest apartment into a compact, space-efficient dream-dwelling. Unfortunately, that “small amount” was large enough that if she’d laid her hands on it, she’d have moved somewhere bigger instead.

As ever, damp washing was tonight’s motif. A clothes horse, designed to be folded out of sight when not in use, was always in use, and anyway, there was nowhere to put it when it wasn’t. So it leaned against a bookshelf, draped with underwear, her collection of which had undergone significant upgrading since Min Harper had entered her life. Elsewhere, blouses hung on wire hangers from anywhere they could be hooked, and a still-damp sweater reshaped itself on the table, its arms dangling heavily over the sides. And Louisa perched on a kitchen chair, laptop on her knees.

It was a fairly basic research technique, but Googling the day of Spider Webb’s mini-summit was the first port of call. This revealed an International Symposium on Advanced Metallurgical Processes at the LSE, and a conference on Asiatic Studies at SOAS. Tickets went on sale for an ABBA reunion gig, and were expected to sell out inside two minutes, while Central London would be more of a lunatics’ day out than usual, because there was a Stop the City rally marching down Oxford Street: a quarter million demonstrators were expected. Traffic, tube and normal life would doubtless come to a halt.

None of which had any obvious connection with the Russian visit. It was background, but background was important, and after the last time the slow horses had become embroiled in Regent’s Park business, she wasn’t relying on info supplied by Webb. But it was hard to concentrate. Louisa kept remembering that huge floorspace in the Needle. She’d rarely been anywhere so roomy without being outside, a thought that inevitably dragged her home, a rented studio flat on the wrong side of the river.

And now two, sometimes three nights a week, Min was here too, and while this was still a good thing, it wasn’t without its downside. Min wasn’t messy, but he took up room. He liked to be clean and fresh when he came to her bed, which meant yielding precious inches of her bathroom shelf; he needed a clean shirt in the morning, so required wardrobe space too. DVDs had appeared, and books and CDs, which meant more physical objects in a space that was getting no larger. And then there was Min himself, of course. Who didn’t lumber about, but didn’t have to: the mere fact of his presence brought the walls nearer. It was nice to be close to him, but it would have been nicer to be close somewhere spacious enough to be further apart.

Elsewhere in the building a door slammed shut. The resulting draught whistled along the hallways and whispered under doors until, with a noise like snow sliding off a roof, a blouse fell from its hanger to the floor. Louisa studied it a moment or two, as if the situation might rectify itself without her intervention, and when this didn’t happen she closed her eyes and willed herself elsewhere, and when she opened them again that hadn’t happened either.

A draughty rented studio flat. With one extra terrible characteristic: that for all its faults, it was several steps up from Min’s bedsit.