“Maybe that’s why you don’t speak fucking English. Because I told you to piss off out of it, but you’re still here. So what you plan to do about that?”
“I plan to piss off now,” said Lars.
“Glad to hear it.”
“And I’m sorry about your nose.”
“What you mean, you’re sorry about my—”
Lars broke the man’s nose with as little movement as possible, though the man more than made up for Lars’s economy by going into a jig, accompanying himself with a high-pitched squeal. Throughout all this, the woman, to her credit, gave only a single yelp, which Lars decided to interpret as appreciative. He beckoned her closer. “Make sure he keeps his head up,” he said. “Here.” He guided the woman’s hand so it was tilting the man’s chin. “Like this, okay?”
She nodded, mutely.
“And tell him not to be such a dick, yes?”
Though it was possible the man had figured this out for himself in the last ten seconds.
He walked on down the path and then stopped and turned. The woman had let go of her boyfriend’s head and was holding her mobile in trembling hands. He sighed, went back, took it from her and hurled it into the woods. Then he set off back down the track at a steady jog, alert for the two women, the boy, and anywhere they might be hiding.
Someone had hung an air-freshener above the frosted window, which had been painted shut years ago. Catherine Standish, he expected. Hard to know whether to admire her persistence, or scorn the futility of her gestures. Presumably she was responsible, too, for the bottle of bleach next to the toilet, and the clean handtowel on a rail by the sink. But there’d been nothing she could do about the lime-scale scarring on the sink itself, and the mirror screwed into the wall was a battle-flecked mess. He was coming to recognise the process: you could resist all you liked its mildewed embrace, but Slough House would eat your best efforts in the end, its inch-by-inch victory as metronomic as the dripping of that tap.
Lech looked in the mirror. He’d barely use this to shave in, its surface was so pitted and green. But even here, his new wounds lit the room; the letters rearranging themselves in the absurd logic of reflection, but still legible, unmistakable; trumpeting their meaning the way sense jumps out of those wordsearch puzzles. PAEDO. He might as well be hoisting a flag.
He thought: How could he walk into a casualty ward, a doctor’s surgery, and ask for help with this?
And it hurt. It hurt like hell.
From his pocket, he retrieved the razor Lamb had given him. Silver handle, with a
The letters glowed scarlet in the mirror. They were radioactive. Toxic spill.
He opened the razor, and stared at the blade.
Maybe if he just never shaved again. His beard was thick and, left untamed, would cover his face like knotweed. It would drive people crazy, trying to read the letters through the undergrowth . . . But if he chose that path, he might as well pick out a bus shelter to bed down in. Stuff his possessions into carrier bags.
Already his throat was crawling with stubble. But it was such a puny defence, wasn’t it? A blade like this, you could slice your way through it, stubble and throat, adam’s apple, in seconds.
Give Lamb this: the fat bastard knew what he was talking about.
He could not live with this word carved into his cheeks.
Lech lifted the razor and did what he had to do.
The thing about someone else’s car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.
That went double when it was Ho’s.
