So he’d done the obvious and dived into Service records, looking for the back story on this new comedian; info not open to casual viewers, but there was no firewall the RodMan couldn’t walk through . . . Except the info didn’t exist. Not just the redacted chatter about whatever mess he’d left on Regent’s Park’s carpet, but anything at all—no date of hire, no job description, no photo; nothing. It was like Alec (Lech?) Wicinski didn’t exist, or at least, hadn’t existed before setting foot in Slough House.
Which was interesting. And Roderick Ho didn’t like interesting.
What Roddy Ho liked was things done properly.
But Wicinski had been getting letters, so at least somebody thought he existed. He’d sat at Roddy’s other desk and read them sourly, as if they weren’t just bad news but confirmation of something worse, then torn them up and tossed the bits in his wastepaper basket.
You didn’t, Roderick Ho sneered, have to be Sherlock Holmes.
So he’d waited until Wicinski cleared off for the day, collected the scraps and pieced them together. Only took him forty minutes. And what he’d got was evidence, no doubt about it: a letter from HR. Stuff about not setting foot in Regent’s Park, not contacting colleagues; about “ongoing investigation.” “Charges.” That shit sounded serious. But no clues had been offered as to the nature of his sins.
Still interesting, then. Not orderly yet.
Roddy had put the pieces back in the bin, or most of them. He was on the case now. And there’d be no stopping the Rodster, now he was back in the game.
Anyway, that had been yesterday. This morning, Wicinski had sat drinking black tea, scowling and reading another letter, pages long. You could almost feel sorry for him, if that was your bag—up to the moment, anyway, that he scrumpled the pages, tossed them into the wastebasket, and stormed out the room like a monkey with a rage on.
Ho waited, but he didn’t storm back.
The pages had all landed cleanly in the basket, so props for that, but seriously, Roddy thought: the dude had looked undignified, stamping out. Gotta have respect for yourself, he thought, getting down on his knees by the bin. Gotta keep your standards up, as he started rifling through it.
He pulled out the first page, uncrumpled it.
Blank.
Odd.
He pulled out another, did the same thing.
Blank.
. . . What was Wicinski, some kind of fucked-up origami artist? Was that why he’d been sent to Slough House, for wasting paper? It took all kinds, Roddy would be first to admit, but seriously: this was weird shit and he didn’t like it.
Another one.
Blank.
And then another. It wasn’t until he got to the seventh sheet that Roddy found one with actual words on, and this rocked him back on his haunches a second, while he took them in.
Now what the hell was that about?
But before he could decipher it there were other pages to uncrumple, so he plunged his hand back into the bin, touched something solid and
Why the hell had the stupid bastard thrown away a perfectly good mousetrap?
It was funny, Louisa Guy later thought, how unused she’d become to the sound of a phone. Not a mobile, obviously, but a landline, which, with its limited repertoire, was like something from a black-and-white movie, in which phones were sturdy works of art, all rotary dials and clumsy black receivers. The two in her office weren’t like that, were grey push-buttons, but still: it was months since her own had uttered a peep, let alone the one on the unused companion desk. She hadn’t been expecting it. Apart from anything else, that desk belonged to a dead man.
The dead man was Min Harper.
The day, not halfway done, had already offered surprises, but even when new things happened in Slough House, they felt like old things. There’d been a text from River, bad news, but news that had been coming for a while, and no reply she could make could prevent its arrival. And then the new guy, Lech—Alec?—had been in the kitchen earlier. He’d looked the way any slow horse did the first few days; like someone had slapped him with a shovel. Last week, he’d been at Regent’s Park, and now he was here, and the distance between the two was the kind that, if you stared into it, it stared back. Nothing she could do about that even if she’d wanted to—and there was reason to feel wary around new intake—but her inability to do anything for River Cartwright maybe softened her a bit, enough to offer advice. Not because the new guy was about to step into deep shit, but because even shallow shit got everywhere if you didn’t watch what you were doing.
So she said, “Not that one.”
“. . . Huh?”
“Not that mug.”
