He reached a stile and clambered over it. Behind them lay a few complicated days, and a black curl of smoke etching an ideogram in the sky; ahead, a whitening landscape, and beyond that the sea. As he set off to meet it, he thought: that owl had been right on the money, even if late with its prediction. Death had visited the area, making a collection. It had had a tougher job than it might have expected, given that the opposition had been from some rejects’ department: Slade House? No, Slough House . . . Slough House, because the boss had called them “slow horses.” A harder job than expected, but it made no lasting difference.
The man was dead. The woman was dead.
Slough House was going to need some new slow horses.
Cities sleep with their lights on, as if they’re afraid of the dark. Up and down their roads, clustering at junctions, streetlights make daisy chains out of the night, illuminating pavements and hiding the stars. And if, from above—from the perspective of an astronaut, say, or a reader—these chains resemble neural pathways, forging connections between a city’s hemispheres, that seems an accurate picture. For a city is made of memories, stored recollections packed into boxes of stone and metal, brick and glass, and the brighter its pathways pulse with light, the stronger those memories are. On its wider, busier thoroughfares the traces of grand events linger—royal progressions, wartime rallies, victory celebrations—while the circuses where its big roads meet nurture shades of less seemly occasions: riots and lynchings and public executions. Along its riverbanks, quiet moments promenade—a hundred thousand engagements and cuckoldings—and in the explosive glow of its transport terminals, a billion arrivals and a billion departures are recalled one by one. Some of these have left scars on its memory, others a faint graze, but all contribute to the whole, for this is what makes a city: the slow accumulation of history, of a near-infinite number of happenings in a network of streets that light up at night.
But if the grandest of these memories warrant plaques and statuary, the more private are kept out of view; or at least, stored in such plain sight that they’re unseen. Take Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, upon which the gross bulk of the Barbican squats like a toad. Even on the main drag, the dull weight of mediocrity hangs heavy: of all London’s memories, this undistinguished array of shops and offices is least likely to ring bells; those bright connections, firing through the night, are at their weakest here. But briefly lit by their flare, not far from the entrance to the Underground, is a block four storeys tall, though it appears shorter. Its pavement-level frontage comprises a black door dusty with neglect, sandwiched between a newsagent’s and a Chinese restaurant; its façade is distempered, its guttering a mess, and the local pigeons have shown their contempt for it in the traditional manner. The one stab at respectability—the legend WW Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths tattooed in gilt on a second-storey window—has long since started to peel, and the unlettered windows above and below it are smeary and grey. The building is a bad tooth set in a failing mouth. Here is where nothing happens: nothing to see here. Move along.
Which is how it’s supposed to be, for this is Slough House, and Slough House deserves no attention. Should a historian attempt to penetrate its mysteries, she’d first have to negotiate a back door which sticks in all weathers, then a staircase whose creaking suggests imminent collapse, but having done so, she’d find little to exercise her notebook: just a succession of offices equipped to face the 1990s, crumbling plasterwork, and rotting splinters in the window frames. The metallic odour of an overused kettle will taint the air, and in the corners of the flaking ceilings, mould spores congregate. She’ll creep from room to room on carpets thin as motel bedsheets, place a hopeful hand on radiators that are lumps of unresponsive steel, and find no history but the desultory kind, which carries on happening out of habit alone. So she’ll pack her pen away and head back down the rackety staircase, through the mildewed yard where the dustbins live, and out into the alley, then the street, then London beyond. There’s plenty of history elsewhere. There are memories minted every minute in the wider world. There’s no reason to waste her time on this.
