Louisa reached into her back pocket, and pulled out the sheet she’d printed off earlier. “Funny you should bring that up. I need to take some leave.”
“There’s a form on the intranet.”
“Yes.” Louisa waved the paper in her hand. “I’ve filled it in.”
“Well, then.”
“. . . Are you okay, Catherine?”
“Me? Yes, I’m fine. Thank you for asking. You want me to get Lamb to sign off on that, I expect.”
“He doesn’t like it when we take time off. You know that.”
“And I don’t like being the buffer between him and the rest of you. But I don’t suppose you know that because it’s never occurred to you to think about it.”
“. . . Jesus, where did that come from?”
Catherine shook her head. “Nowhere. Never mind. Here, give it to me.”
She almost didn’t want to now, but not quite as much as she didn’t want to head back into Lamb’s office and put it on his desk herself. She held it out, and Catherine whipped it from her hand with the air of one removing a sharp object from an infant’s grasp.
Job done, but she couldn’t leave it at that. She watched Catherine place her form on top of a pile of other papers, marvelling a little at how perfectly aligned this new addition was, with no apparent effort on Catherine’s part. And then watched Catherine notice her stray strand of hair, and tuck it behind her ear pending major reconstruction.
She said, “Maybe you should think about taking some leave yourself.”
“And do what?”
“Just get away. Go somewhere warm.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
Louisa glanced towards the window. Soon there’d be snow, if the radio’s dire warnings came true; the sort that lingered for days, making castles out of parked cars and hillsides out of hedgerows. All very well if you had somewhere to be, and could afford to put the heating on. For those on the wrong side of closed doors, possibly lethal.
Maybe Min’s son was having the time of his life; bedding down in a warm room with a girlfriend or two and a pizza menu. But if not, if he was out there on the streets, she owed it to Min to find him. Or maybe not Min; maybe she owed it to herself, to keep being the person Min would have wanted her to be. She didn’t exactly know, but it was what she seemed to be doing regardless.
“No,” she said. “I just need some time to myself, that’s all.”
Catherine stared, as if she’d announced a desire for some agonising luxury or other. Then said, “I’ll have him sign it. When do you want to start?”
“Right away,” said Louisa.
“You’re supposed to give at least as much notice as the length of leave requested, you do realise that?”
Why’d you think I want you to hand him the form, Louisa thought, but didn’t say. “Thanks, Catherine. I owe you one.”
“You owe me more than one,” said Catherine softly as Louisa disappeared downstairs. She added another form to the stack requiring Lamb’s signature, a request for a replacement boiler, whose last service had provoked a teeth-sucking groan of disbelief from a plumber who was about nineteen. This, Catherine knew, would never make it beyond the post-room at Regent’s Park, there being a standing instruction that all mail from Slough House addressed to Finance be binned unopened. Besides, if you started replacing worn-out parts round here, where would it stop? Any overhaul would include herself, and she wasn’t sure she’d survive an upgrade.
She went back into Lamb’s office, the pile of forms in her arms. All over the world banks were becoming coinless, cars driverless, offices paper-free. Here in Slough House they were taking up the slack, as if in Newtonian response to refinements made elsewhere: an equal and opposite surfeit of unnecessary busywork.
Lamb was where they’d left him: arse in chair, feet on desk. Through holes in his socks, his toes tasted freedom. He was smoking, and though Catherine suspected him capable of doing this in his sleep, she’d yet to prove it. She slapped the papers onto his desk, or at least, onto the clutter that littered his desk. A self-defeating gesture, because once they slipped onto the floor they’d be archived as far as Lamb was concerned. He had a three-second rule about paperwork: that long on the carpet, it was good as filed.
Without opening his eyes, he said, “I sense your disapproval.”
“If you ever sense my anything else,” she said, “one of us has been replaced.”
“They spend their whole lives hoping for something to do,” he said. “And you want to spoil their fun?”
“We should leave Harkness to the Park.”
“Yeah, that happened last time. And they let him walk.”
“And what’s your plan, exactly? Always supposing you track him down, with all this genius expertise at your disposal?”
This time he opened his eyes. “I thought it was my job to remind you they’re a bunch of useless twats,” he said. “Not the other way round.”
“They’re not entirely useless,” she said, but even to her own ears, her protest sounded insincere.
