She stood, left her office, walked the Hub. This was her routine: to make sure the boys and girls—they were always girls, always boys; it was the local language—knew that whatever happened, she was available. There was chatter coming in from Russian sources; a whisper of a potential hack on a High Street bank. Which might mean it was going to happen, or might mean somebody somewhere was bored, or might mean something entirely different was in the wind, and she was being encouraged to look the wrong way. . .
Josie stopped her. “You wanted to know if anything untoward came in from Pembrokeshire way?”
She made it sound like the Wild West.
“Tell me.”
“We got a coded message Thursday night, from a civilian mobile. But the recording stayed stored. Didn’t hit the screen until this morning.”
She handed Taverner a printout: a go-dark notice. One that decoded to
“Why the delay?”
“Because the ID doesn’t match any existing protocol. Whoever it’s from, it’s not one of ours.”
“Have you checked the number?”
“I was just about to.”
“Don’t bother,” said Taverner, folding the printout. “Someone’s playing cowboys and indians without permission, that’s all. You can file it under forget. Thanks, Josie.”
There was always the possibility, she supposed, resuming her circuit, that Lamb’s crew might pack the mess away without drawing attention to themselves, or to whatever shenanigans had prompted the blackmail effort. On the other hand, if they were sending up distress signals, it didn’t seem things were going their way. And you could usually rely on the slow horses to make a bad situation worse. . .
What she needed, as she’d told Nash more than once, was a root-and-branch overhaul of operational practices.
She was prepared for a certain amount of collateral damage in order for that to happen.
Slough House was absorbing another memory.
The man looked
And not in a good way.
Handy job the Rodster had been there to hoik him from that wheelie-bin, because no way would he have made it out on his own. So Standish had held the lid while Roddy stood on an upturned bucket and reached down to grab Wicinski’s arms. You could tell he wasn’t dead—the groaning was a clue—but he wasn’t cooperating, and frankly the RodMan would as soon have left him where he was, but he kept on reaching, and Wicinski kept not cooperating, and the upturned bucket wasn’t all that stable, and probably, if you weren’t an expert, it might have looked like Roddy fell into the bin himself. Fact was, though, he’d worked out that this was the most efficient way of getting the job done. It was all about leverage, in the end.
That was when Lamb turned up.
“Trump on a treadmill.”
His head appeared over the lip of the bin like the sun over the horizon.
“There are better places to learn how to swim.”
Roddy would have capped that, but he had something in his mouth he was eager to dispose of.
And then Lamb had reached in, exactly the way Roddy had done, except he grabbed Wicinski by the arms and hauled him up and out before throwing him over one shoulder.
Unseen, Catherine Standish had said, “Careful.”
“I am being careful. This is me being fucking careful.”
Roddy had risen to unsteady feet on a floor of unsteady rubbish in time to see Jackson Lamb disappearing inside Slough House, carrying Lech Wicinski like a rolled-up carpet.
The door didn’t even stick. Maybe, just this once, it didn’t dare.
Roddy had followed five minutes later, once he’d got out of the bin. In his office he found Wicinski laid on the floor, because sitting in a chair was outside his range, like expecting a bowl of jelly to change a lightbulb. He looked shocking. Not just the filth he was caked in but the blood filming his face, which Standish was dabbing at with a damp cloth. It wasn’t a laughing matter—apart from anything else, it was making a mess of the carpet—but still, it was a bit funny, because whatever had happened to Wicinski had happened a
Lamb was in Roddy’s chair, using Roddy’s keyboard as an ashtray. The sleeves of his overcoat were wet, and across one shoulder was a smear of something someone hadn’t thought worth eating.
He said, “I left you in the bin. Can’t you take a hint?”
Bantz, thought Roddy.
Then Catherine said, “Oh, lord above . . .”
“What?”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Lamb was answering a prayer or asking a question.
But Catherine said it again, “Oh, god, no,” still on her knees by Wicinski, dabbing at his face, then squeezing the cloth into a bowl. The run-off was foul; Wicinski’s face a little whiter, though there were marks that weren’t coming off; that looked like they’d been scored into his cheeks . . .
Lamb squashed his cigarette into Roddy’s desk, and rose.
Catherine looked directly up at him. “They’ve written on him.”
