She reached her office. The room was cold, though the arthritic wheezing of the pipes meant the heating was technically on. Her radiator needed bleeding—and there it was again, blood, though this would be a watery substitute; a rusty trickle. Coat off, hat off, computer on. There were reports from Louisa Guy and River Cartwright to evaluate: Louisa’s would be sketchy—she was compiling names of those who’d borrowed “suspect texts” from public libraries—but otherwise reliable; River, on the other hand, seemed to have embarked on a work of fiction, even if that fiction was just a list of addresses. Identifying properties that were potentially hostile safe houses was his current task. The methodology involved cross-checking Council Tax payments against census forms, though the practice seemed to be that once a week River would download a bunch of random addresses and shuffle them for authenticity. Sooner or later Lamb was going to notice.
And then there was the new boy: Lech Wicinski. Also went by Alec. She wondered what mind-numbing task Lamb would find for him to do.
And wondered why she bothered wondering.
Every night for weeks she had broken her journey home to St. John’s Wood; had lit from the tube one stop early, despite the chill. Snow was forecast, and the pavements were hard as iron. You felt it in each step, the bone-cold stones hammering through your frame, because this was what London did, when the weather reminded the city it was temporary: it hunched down tight. Sensible folk didn’t linger when this happened. But every night Catherine braved the cold one stop early, because this way she could call in to the Wine Citadel, and buy a bottle.
It wasn’t really, when you got down to it, about the colour.
And it had been years since she’d enjoyed this freedom allowed most everyone else. The apparently casual nature of the transaction thrilled her. You chose your bottle and swiped your card. People did it every day, a lot of them more than once. She’d done it herself times out of mind, in the olden golden days. She’d been at Regent’s Park then, a functioning alcoholic, following which, for a rather shorter period, she’d been a dysfunctional alcoholic, and then—after drying out in a Service sanatorium, courtesy of her boss, Charles Partner—a recovering alcoholic. And then that same boss, First Desk at Regent’s Park, had blown his brains out in his bathtub, or that had been the story at the time.
But like a wine stain the story wouldn’t go away, and every time she scrubbed it it re-emerged, its pattern different. Partner, it turned out, had been a traitor. The man who’d led the Service, and pulled Catherine back from her downward spiral, had spent a decade committing treason. This, it felt to her now, had been both a shock and a confirmation of something she’d always known: that all joes go to the well in the end. Charles’s well, it seemed, had been full of money . . . What had been slower to come to light was this: that Partner had kept her on because of what, not who, she was. She’d thought herself his dedicated helper; the ever-efficient PA whose own life might have been a mess, but who ensured that his ran along straight lines. But it turned out that her chief qualification, in his eyes, was that she was a drunk, and could be trusted not to see what was happening in front of her. Every secret he ever sold had passed across her desk, her fingerprints smeared on all his crimes. Had he faced trial, she’d have been standing next to him. Her fledgling sobriety would have taken wing at that.
But he had killed himself, and here she was in Slough House, and while the other inhabitants saw it as torture, for Catherine it was a penance. Being an alcoholic was part of her make-up, its seed inside her since her teens, but she hated having been a fool. Even mindless drudgery was better than running that risk again. Even Jackson Lamb was better—his endless crudity, his animal habits.
And then the stain changed shape once more.
It had been Diana Taverner who had told her:
And of course she had; she’d known for years. Known, but never allowed the knowledge to harden and take root.
