A fresh batch of cod had just been put into the deep fryer, so Shirley ordered a hot dog while waiting, and ate it watching fat spit and sizzle. She remembered once sitting in an all-night laundrette, studying the tumblers as their loads rose and fell, rose and fell, like dolphins. It might have been hours she sat there, lost in fascination. That was the sort of thing that happened then, but didn’t now. Now life was set to normal, was a long string of grey moments, as if the mood in Slough House were leaking through its walls, and infecting everything, everywhere.
It got to them all in the end, the curse of the slow horses. It sapped them of energy, and left them to wilt.
Her order arrived. Armed with a plastic fork, still chewing the last of her hot dog, she left the shop thinking about Marcus, and what he’d have made of her self-imposed clean stretch. He’d have said little. He’d have nodded, though, or something; made one of those macho gestures of his, to remind her that he might be behind a desk same as she was but he’d kicked down doors in his time, and she’d have felt good, seeing that nod; felt she was on the right track. But on the other hand: fuck off, Marcus; what’s it to do with you? Not as if he’d waltzed through life unaccompanied by demons. Towards the end there, the back half of last year, he’d been pouring money into slot machines like he’d found the secret to eternal life.
The chips were good, though.
When she reached the car she was relieved, despite herself, to find that Louisa hadn’t reappeared, and decided to eat standing up, using the car roof as a table. Stink the inside out, she’d never hear the end of it. She attacked the cod with the two-inch fork – a weapon unsuited to the task – and managed to convey a reasonable chunk into her mouth before remembering she was supposed to be ‘securing the perimeter’: yeah, right. Still chewing, she stepped round the car and into the quiet road, giving the parked vehicles a quick once-over. Everything as it had been.
Except, she thought, before stepping back to her al fresco dinner – except: that van, a hundred yards away. Had that been there five minutes ago?
It hadn’t.
When Coe saw Cartwright heading for the hall, he stepped inside a shop doorway and hid. He didn’t feel needed.
But as far as the bigger picture went, he knew he was right.
He slipped his radio’s earbuds in and listened to the headlines: an update on the surviving penguins; a woman found dead in her London home. Not long ago, he wouldn’t have been able to do this: the most he’d been able to bear was long stretches of unscored piano music; improvised melody that had him drifting like a leaf in a rowing boat’s wake. But that was fading; had begun to do so once he’d fired three bullets into a killer’s chest. Strange, the things that eased tension. This one wasn’t likely to crop up in self-help books, but you couldn’t argue with results.
And whatever else was going on, whatever static buzzed in his background, his brain worked fine, so yes, he knew he was right. He’d always had an ability to retrieve written information: to recall the shape of words on a page, the arrangement of paragraphs, at what depth of a book a sentence lay. ‘The watering hole’ was a Kiplingesque phrase that lingered. Whoever had tossed the bomb into the penguin enclosure at Dobsey Park had been following instructions that Coe had seen written down, and beneath that plan a bigger one was shifting. The point of all this was to whip the curtain away, and show the machinery behind. Expose the plan as one the nation had written itself, or its secret sharers had. And a nation’s secret sharers were the keepers of its soul.
He left the doorway and headed down the street, then into an alley between the worked-on building and the next. At the end of the alley wheelie bins jostled, but there was no way through, and he was about to head back when he noticed a ladder fixed to the scaffolding. Okay, he thought. From up high, he could watch the street. Cartwright was bound to call and ask what he was doing; ‘maintaining surveillance’ might shut him up. And he’d be out of harm’s reach. He scaled the ladder, and then another, which took him up to a walkway thirty feet above the street. The wooden boards had give in them, but not enough to feel unsafe. Just a slight swaying motion. Panic attacks, Lamb had accused him of having. Okay, but it was people who triggered them. He was fine with heights. Was fine with most things, provided they didn’t come with people attached.
By the top of this second ladder was a sealed paint tin, which probably shouldn’t have been left there. Coe stepped round it, leaned on a horizontal metal pole, and looked down on the street below.
