London Rules полностью

‘It’s political correctness gone mad,’ agreed Lamb sadly. ‘I’m rabidly anti-censorship, as you know. But some books just need burning.’

So did some bosses. She’d been working on this list, which involved cross-checking Public Lending Right statistics against individual county library databases, for three months. It now stretched not quite halfway down a single sheet of A4, and she’d reached Buckinghamshire in her alphabetical list of counties. Thank Christ she didn’t have to cover the whole of the UK, because that would have taken even an actual librarian years.

Not the whole of it, no. Just England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

‘Fuck Scotland,’ Lamb had explained. ‘They want to go it alone, they can go it alone.’

Her only ally in her never-ending task was the government, which was doing its bit by closing down as many libraries as possible.

In the War Against Terror, you take all the help you can get.

Louisa giggled to herself, because sometimes you had to, or else you’d go mad. Unless the giggling was proof you’d already gone mad. J. K. Coe might know, not so much because of his so-called expertise in Psychological Evaluation, but because he was a borderline nutter himself. All fun and games in Slough House.

She pushed away from her desk and stood to stretch. Lately she’d been spending more time at the gym, and the result was increasing restlessness when tethered to her computer. Through the window, Aldersgate Street was its usual unpromising medley of pissed-off traffic and people in a hurry. Nobody ever wandered through this bit of London; it was simply a staging post on the way somewhere else. Unless you were a stalled spook, of course, in which case it was journey’s end.

God, she was bored.

And then, as if to console her, the world threw a minor distraction her way: from not far off came a screech and a bump; the sound of a car making contact.

She wondered what that was about.

Hi Tina

Just a quick note to let you know how things are going here in Devon – not great, to be honest. I’ve been told I’m being laid off at the end of the month because the boss’s sister’s son needs a job, so someone has to make way for the little bastard. Thanks a bunch, right?

But it’s not all bad because the gaffer knows he owes me one, and has set me up with one of his contacts for a six-month gig in – get this – Albania! But it’s a cushy number, doing the wiring on three new hotel builds, and it’ll be cheap living so I’ll

Coe stopped mid-sentence and stared through the window at the Barbican opposite. It was an Orwellian nightmare of a complex, a concrete monstrosity, but credit where it was due: like Ronnie and Reggie Kray before it, the Barbican had overcome the drawback of being a brutal piece of shit to achieve iconic status. But that was London Rules for you: force others to take you on your own terms. And if they didn’t like it, stay in their face until they did.

Jackson Lamb, for instance. Except, on second thoughts, no: Lamb didn’t give a toss whose terms you took him on. He carried on regardless. He just was.