Joe Country полностью

And once she’s gone a sigh will pass through the building, a barely noticeable exhalation that rustles papers and wobbles doors, and Slough House will know its secrets remain intact. For it has secrets: like every building in every city, Slough House is a neuron in an urban hippocampus, and retains the echo of all it’s seen and heard. Memories have stained its walls and seeped into its stairwell; they reek of failure, and have been scrubbed from the public record, but they persist, and they’re not for intruders’ eyes. Deep within the building’s bones is the knowledge that some of its rooms that held two characters now hold only one; that formerly familiar impressions—the weight of a shadow on a wall; the pressure of a foot on a staircase—occur no more. This is what memory is: an abiding awareness that some things have vanished. And this is what consciousness is: the knowledge that more absences will come.

Time passes, and the city’s lights wink out as it heaves itself awake. Memories, stirred by sleep, subside with the dawn. Snow will arrive before the week’s end, but today there is only cold grey normality. Soon the slow horses will troop in, and settle to the mind-numbing grind; mental forced marches through a landscape undistinguished by points of interest. With such tasks in front of them, the real challenge is remembering why they bother.

And while they do, Slough House goes about the daily chore of trying to forget.

The thing to remember about Roddy Ho—Roddy Ho remembered—was that Roddy was a spook, a spy, an agent. Roddy was a player.

This was why he was rustling through someone else’s wastepaper bin.

True, he’d had a bad year. Kim, his girlfriend, had turned out not to be his girlfriend, and while that particular rock had been a long time falling down the well, the splash it eventually made wasn’t one he’d forget in a hurry. He’d felt betrayed. Hurt. Had felt, moreover, unnerved when it had been pointed out how very nearly treasonous his actions had been—good job Lamb wasn’t going to see his trusted lieutenant flushed down the pipe without a fight. But now the waters were calmer two things were certain: Kim—his girlfriend—was history, and he, the Rodster, was still the brain pumping Clever through Slough House.

while the charges pertaining to your behaviour are fully investigated you will remain assigned to

But for a while, man, he’d gone to pieces. He’d let his beard go to hell, from soul patch to hipster mess. He’d crashed out of TerraWar VII on level two, so knew how Andy Murray had felt catching the early bus home from Wimbledon. And he’d barely bothered to bring the outrage when it was announced that the new Doctor would be a woman: let others fight the good fight. The RodMan had hung up his cape.

shall not, until investigations have been completed to the satisfaction of this department, have contact with colleagues

And if he’d been waiting for someone—probably Louisa; he’d have settled for Catherine—to take him aside and say concerned and soothing things, that hadn’t happened either. Then again, this made sense. You had a wounded lion in your pack—the king of the pride; your alpha beast—you didn’t fuss about it while it healed. You waited until it was strong again was what you did. And then heaved a sigh of relief that order had been restored. So that was what had been happening lately: a quiet period of recovery, respected by all around him—

your salary and benefits to be frozen at their current

—which was now over: he was back in the game. Women could hurt you, but they couldn’t break you. Ask Batman. Walking alone was the warrior’s way. And besides, in the days of Mama Internet, anyone can get laid—or at the very least, anyone had access to many vivid pictures of what getting laid looked like. So it could have been worse.

And what he was doing now, part of his recovery if you like, was regaining control of his environment. Because although a warrior walked alone, Ho had been assigned a stablemate. Alec Wicinski, the new guy’s name was, or Leck—Lek?—which sounded like Star Wars. Two days he’d been here, and already he’d insisted Roddy move his stuff to “his own side of the room,” muttering about how this was his desk, “for the time being.” Yeah, right. Evidently he needed a lesson about respecting his betters, which meant Roddy had to do what Roddy did best, which was saddle up, ride the Wild Web, and find out who this Wicinski guy was, and what he’d done to warrant gate-crashing Roddy’s manor.