Real Tigers полностью

If a ghost it is, it’s a peculiarly inquisitive one, and pauses at the first landing to test the air. Here, as always, the doors hang open, and while the rooms are empty, even a spectre would have no trouble spotting which was Roderick Ho’s room; which Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander’s. The latter is tainted with conflicting emotions tonight, as if the recent male occupant has been reflecting that for all his combat experience, he basically had his nuts pulled from the fire twice yesterday, both times by people he regards as lightweight. So much for taking control . . . And as for the female, there’s a suggestion that her recent physical exertions, satisfying as they were, are perhaps no long-term substitute for intimacy—and as a short-term measure, postpone, rather than obliterate, the need for any other kind of high. But there is a tangible sense of relief here too, that yesterday’s sackings appear to have been reversed; or, at any rate, were not referred to during the lengthy post-mortem of last night’s events. A strange quirk, perhaps, to be relieved by the prospect of remaining among the slow horses, but as every ghost knows, there are few more complicated creatures than the living.

In the former office, meanwhile, a particularly perceptive shade might catch a trace of a fragment of conversation; the words A bus? Okay, that’s old school—words spoken by Marcus and lapped up by Roderick Ho; words Ho repeated silently to himself over and over, until they gave way to another mantra, equally silent: So, babes, fancy a drink?, this too practised over and over, mimed to a window in lieu of a mirror, and mimed long after their intended recipient had appeared on the street below, leaving Slough House, and Roddy Ho, equally unthought-of behind her.

More stairs now. Onward and upward. On the next landing two more vacant rooms, again heavy with the late presence of their incumbents, one of these being the just-now alluded to Louisa Guy, who is currently sitting on a barstool, and, as usual, is being approached by the usual man with the usual line, though tonight finds herself saying, Sorry, not interested, recalling as she does so a snapshot memory from yesterday evening: not the men she shot, not poor dead Douglas, nor even brave, doomed Donovan, but River Cartwright pulling her to her feet when she fell, a brief moment of contact that somehow overrules the possibility of going home with anyone tonight, a feeling which might outlast her third vodka, but then again might not. As for River himself, that lunchtime, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, he made the hop across town to Spider Webb’s bedside once more, only to find the room vacant, its bed remade, its eternally beeping machines removed; a discovery that prompted the queasy suspicion that yesterday’s trip to Regent’s Park, and his alibi-forming lie to Diana Taverner, if he ever wound up plugged into a wall-socket, if that was all that was keeping him alive, he’d want to be switched off, has produced an unintended consequence, a thought so bowel-shrinking he prefers not to entertain it, so has instead opted to visit his grandfather, the O.B., and hear familiar tales of Service myth and Spook Street legend, and lock all self-examination away.

Again, the thunder sounds, so near it might be crashing off the roof, and this time is accompanied by, yes, a flash of lightning; a sudden electric burst that fills the uncurtained rooms, and if there were anyone here they would surely be seen now, captured in that flash as by a photograph . . . But there is nothing. Nothing, unless that shadow in the corner is darker, thicker, more substantial, than it should be . . . Unless it moves like a ghost, soundlessly flitting up one last staircase to the uppermost floor, where the rooms are smaller, and closer to heaven . . .