Lamb was the head of Slough House, though you’d be forgiven for thinking him the belly. And yet, when Lech replayed their first encounter, he wondered how much to trust that initial judgement. Lamb was gross, sure—corpulent—though somehow not as obese as he appeared, as if the impression he gave of spilling out of his chair even while motionless was engineered. But when Lech had blinked and looked again, he hadn’t been able to tell where that thought had come from. Lamb was fat, that was all, and had a cruel look pasted across his damp-looking features. His hair, what was left of it, might have a blond tint if it were clean; his toenails might not be poking through his socks if he cut them. This last observation was impossible to avoid, Lamb’s shoeless feet being on his desk. He still wore his coat, however. The thought processes of a man who’d relax with his shoes off, his coat on, were foreign territory to Lech. Then again, the thought processes of Jackson Lamb, as revealed by their subsequent conversation, were probably terra incognita to the psychiatric profession as a whole.
“Oh, goodie fucking gumdrops,” he said, when Lech stepped into his room. “Fresh meat.”
“I was assigned here temporarily,” Lech said. “While some HR issues are sorted out.”
“HR issues,” Lamb repeated slowly. “Not heard it called that before.” He removed his feet from the desk with surprising agility, produced a cigarette out of nowhere, lit it, farted, reached into his desk drawer, removed a bottle of whisky he slammed onto his desk top, farted again, and said, “I don’t have any bad habits myself, so maybe I’m over-censorious. But seriously, kiddy porn?” He unscrewed the cap on the bottle. “You’re the six-foot Pole I wouldn’t touch that with.”
Lech Wicinski, who was five-eleven, felt his teeth clench. “I was told all details were sealed. You’re not supposed to know that.”
“Yeah, a list of things I’m not supposed to know but do would be nearly as long as the list of things I know but couldn’t give a toss about. Currently, you’re at the top of both. And a thing you should know about me is, I hate lists.” He blew out smoke Lech hadn’t noticed him inhaling. “The ones I don’t screw up and throw away, I feed into the shredder.”
Lech glanced around. The further reaches of the office were cloaked in shadow, but he couldn’t make out anything that might be a shredder.
“Yeah, okay, smartarse. I improvise.” There was a dirty glass among the rubbish on his desk, and Lamb poured whisky into it; what might have been a triple, if your idea of a single was a double. “Says on the paperwork you go by Alec. But your signature reads Lech. I’m guessing you reckoned a little ethnicity wouldn’t do any harm at this stage of your career, eh? This stage being the bit right before it runs off a cliff.”
“I answer to both.”
“How very broad-minded of you. But then, we’ve already established your lack of boundaries.”
“My lawyer—”
“Your lawyer is a figment of your fucking imagination. No way are the Park gunna allow you a brief, not until they’ve decided what the outcome’s gunna be. And as long as I’m popping your balloons, nobody gets assigned here temporarily. What you see is all you get. So let’s make everything simple, yeah? You spend the rest of your career pushing whatever paper I see fit to send your way, or you trot off now and jump in front of a bus. I’d use the pedestrian bridge, I was you. But wait until after six, there’s a sport, because it does fuck up the traffic.”
“The issue’s being investigated. I’ll be cleared. Because I didn’t do anything.”
Jackson Lamb farted again. “Me neither. And yet here we both are.”
“Are you always this unpleasant?”
Lamb shrugged. “It’s not an exact science.” He dropped his cigarette into a half-empty teacup. “And you can drop the wide-eyed innocence. Here in Slough House, you’re always guilty of something. Of being in Slough House, if nothing else.”
Lech stared.
“And one more thing. I don’t want to have to tell you to fuck off every time I want you to fuck off. So learn to read the signals and just fuck off at the appropriate moment, right? Of which this is one. So fuck off.”
If you expected things to get worse, history would prove you right, Lech remembered. You didn’t always have to wait for history, either. Sometimes the present stepped up and got on with the job.
When he’d left Lamb’s room, the woman in the office opposite glanced up from her desk. There might have been sympathy on her face, but if so it was only there for a moment.
But isn’t that what the guilty always said?
That advice about stepping in front of a bus, he’d thought. Let’s not rule that out altogether.
For the moment, though, he trudged on through the fallen leaves of Northwick Park.
In the café the usual noises continued, but were blotted out by Clare’s words. Louisa put her mug down. Min’s son, Lucas, whose name she’d heard many times, but whom she’d never met. Missing. And here was his frightened mother.
