When he ran his mind over the weeks prior to the cataclysm, one thing stuck out. He’d done a favour for an acquaintance, a Service drone called John Bachelor, who worked the milk round, nannying superannuated spooks. Just because you’d put your life on the line back in the dark ages didn’t mean you could get to Sainsbury’s on your own here and now. Spooks got old too. So other spooks who were never much cop were assigned to hold their hands, or do their shopping for them. That had been Bachelor’s role: a straight-to-DVD career. Lech had met him just once before, at the funeral of one of his grandfather’s comrades. It seemed, in retrospect, an appropriately Polish encounter; they’d spent an afternoon drinking, talking about someone neither had known especially well, who was dead. And months later there’d been a bill to pay, because Bachelor had asked a favour; that he run a name through the Service search engines; a name, it turned out, that was flagged—a person of interest. Which meant Lech was trespassing. So he’d shut the search down and waited for shit to fall from on high, which he’d expected to take the form of a finger-wagging email, or a visit from a Dog. But nothing happened. Bachelor had rung a day or so later, calling it off; whatever had sparked his need had died down. And that was it: maybe nothing of consequence, except it was the only thing out of the ordinary in the period before the shitstorm.
No way of chasing it up now, either. He was tainted twice over, a pervert and a slow horse, and doors were closing, every way he looked. Any further research, he’d have to use chicken entrails and a dowsing rod.
There was a glitter of wings as a pigeon took to the air.
Lech turned his phone on and checked his screen. Four unread texts and seven missed calls. All from Sara, who was unaware he was a hundred miles away.
As he walked back to his car, passing the shuttered huts, their barred windows, he tried to think about his grandparents again; about the lives they’d made after all they’d come through. Object lesson in overcoming adversity.
But mostly he was thinking about Slough House.
Mondays are bastards, through and through; Thursdays are waiting days, neither one thing nor the other. Fridays: everyone knows what they’re like. But this Wednesday, the day of the funeral, had stepped outside the calendar, and had no borders River could see. Dressing had been like putting on a costume for a role he hadn’t rehearsed. And the feeling in his stomach, a Sunday-night anxiety, had been with him on waking and continued to grow. It made little sense—the bad thing had already happened. Still, he felt as if he’d been diagnosed with a condition that was serious and complicated, but about which he remembered nothing. He’d just have to wait and see.
The O.B. had spent his retirement years in Kent, but would be buried in London, as Rose had been. The memory of that day was one River kept sealed, and he and the old man had rarely talked of it. But it had been there in their silences; in the gaps between the stories his grandfather told. When River arrived at the house unexpectedly, he had sometimes felt he was interrupting a conversation; that even now, with Rose in her grave, the pair shared secrets. Not all spies’ partners knew the truth, that their other half lived on Spook Street. But Rose had always been in the know. She’d held the door open between her husband’s different addresses, allowing him to step into the light when the day’s dark deeds were done.
But all that was long ago. For the last year of his life, his grandfather’s conversations had had no anchor, and whether he’d been talking to Rose, who was absent, or River, who was not, made no difference; he would drift with the prevailing current, his conversation spinning into eddies or battering invisible rocks. All his life, River had heard tales from the old man’s past, the failures, the victories, the stalemates, and he had learned to read between the lines enough to tell which was which. But no longer. The scraps he heard now were remnants from a shot memory; tattered flags blown by conflicting winds. You’d need a map to know which side the old man had been on. Which might have been the last secret he needed to impart to his grandson; that in the end, all lines blurred. That no day had firm borders.
But but but. This day had come.
So had his mother.
