Worst of all, playing catch-up in office hours—logging onto casino sites in a bid to recoup lunchtime losses—he’d been snared by Roderick bloody Ho, Slough House’s answer to the tachograph. Which was why, tonight, he was Ho’s drinking buddy, with only cokehead Shirley Dander as backup. Yep, the toilet was the right place for him, but he couldn’t stay here forever. Heaving himself upright, he headed back into the bar.
When he rejoined his colleagues Shirley was asking Ho if his mouth was connected to his brain. “‘Bitch’? You’re lucky I just slapped you.”
Ho turned to Marcus with relief. “You believe that, dog?”
“Did you just call me ‘dog’?”
Shirley raised a hand, for the pleasure of seeing Ho flinch. “Mind your fucking language,” she warned.
“Did he just call me ‘dog’?”
“I think he did.”
Marcus plucked Ho’s glasses from his nose and tossed them onto the floor. “I’m a dog? You’re a dog. Fetch.”
While Ho went scrabbling again, Marcus said to Shirley, “I didn’t know you and Louisa were tight.”
“We’re not. But I wouldn’t fix Ho up with a nanny goat.”
“Sisterhood is powerful.”
“Got that right.”
They chinked glasses.
When Ho sat back down, he was holding his spectacles in place with two fingers. “. . . What you do
Marcus shook his head. “I can’t believe you called me ‘dog.’”
Ho shot Shirley a glance before saying, “Did you forget the terms of our, uh, arrangement?”
Marcus breathed out through his nose. Almost a snort. “Okay,” he said. “This is what’s what. We’re renegotiating terms, right? Here’s the deal. You breathe one word about those casino sites, to anyone, and I’ll break every bone in your chickenshit body.”
“I’m not chickenshit.”
“Focus on the broken bones. Are we clear?”
“I’m not chickenshit.”
“But you will have broken bones.”
“I will have broken bones. But I’m not chickenshit.”
“You pick weird places to set your boundaries. And you know what your problem is?” Marcus was warming up now, developing his theme. “You never do anything. You just sit in your office and surf your machines like, like, like a fucking elf. Day in, day out, churning through reams of pointless information, just to keep Jackson bloody Lamb happy.”
“So do you.”
“Yeah, but I hate it.”
“But you still do it.”
Shirley shook her head.
Marcus explained, “You’re a dweeb, Ho. All you are, all you’ll ever be. A woman like Louisa’s never gonna give you a second glance, and nor is any other woman without seeing your credit card up front. Me, I don’t have that problem. You know why? Because before I was stuck doing this shit, I was doing other shit. Proper shit. You, all you’ve ever done is this shit, and this is the shit you like doing.”
Ho said, “So what are you saying?”
“Give me strength . . .
If that last noun had involved bodily fluids rather than information, Marcus couldn’t have put a more disgusted spin on it.
Now he stood. “I’m going. Broken bones, remember? If you take nothing else away, take that. Broken bones.”
“Aren’t we having another round?”
Shirley did the thing with her fingers again. “Hashtag missingthepoint.”
“Stop doing that,” Marcus said. He looked down at his unfinished beer, shrugged, and headed for the door.
Shirley reached across, carefully removed Ho’s specs, folded them, and dropped them into Marcus’s Guinness. “There,” she said.
Ho opened his mouth to say something, but wisely changed his mind.
There was construction work on the other side of the road, as there seemed to be everywhere else: an office block had been taken down, a new one would one day go up, and meanwhile the empty space had been boarded off in case anyone noticed that not everywhere had to have a building on it. Catherine hurried past, buckled shoes tip-tapping on the pavement. An approaching man shot her a troubled look, but whether at her speed or her choice of clothing couldn’t be determined.
This area was only vaguely on her map, but she knew if she swung right she’d soon join the main road leading to King’s Cross; the other way, and she’d be into one of those enclaves London specialised in, whose small pockets of history had been left largely unmolested. This one was Georgian squares, many of them intact; one or two with a side removed due to war or development damage. Parked cars lined the kerbs. It struck her, and felt like an observation somebody else was making, how tranquil London could look, from the right angle, in the right light.
