Out on the main thoroughfare loud cries would create confusion, and confusion was the enemy’s friend. Here, away from the rapid pulse of traffic, she could knock on a stranger’s door and plead sanctuary . . . She risked a look behind. There was no sign of the black van, which would have to travel some way down the road before effecting a turn, because of the median strip. But there was someone, a hundred yards back, or had been—in the moment of her turning he melted in the evening’s heat; was an imp of her unconscious, playing with her mind.
Or he was a man, and had dropped behind a parked car.
It might all be a heat dream. Paranoia, the sober drunk’s companion, blooming in the swelter of the evening. But it felt real. First Sean, then the other soldier; the van that had looped round, as if coming to collect her. Panic was welling inside Catherine, though it would have taken a pro to notice. She looked distracted, nothing more. At Slough House, this might have been cause to pull up the barricades; here on the streets, it didn’t register.
She believed she was being followed, and that he had dropped behind a car.
And she believed that any moment the black van would reappear, and that for some unknown reason it was coming for her—that Sean Donovan had tagged her for a cohort of watchers, who were gathering, and would soon pounce.
On the move, walking faster, she found her phone, re-called Lamb, and went straight to voicemail again. Disconnecting, she once more considered knocking on a stranger’s door: but then what? She was not unaware that Shirley Dander referred to her as the Mad Governess. Dangerous territory, snarking on others’ appearance when you were five-two high and favoured a buzz cut, but there it was—the mode of dress in which Catherine felt comfortable labelled her eccentric. Would you let this woman into your home? Besides, knocking on a door would mean coming to a halt, and movement felt safest. Lamb, she thought, would keep moving. Not the Lamb he was today, but the Lamb he’d been back whenever, living the life that had turned him into the Lamb he was today.
She hurried through the square and into a connecting terrace. Streetlights were coming on and the quality of the heat was changing, radiating up from the pavements instead of pulsing down from the sky. Night would bring no relief. Still, when it fell she hoped to be home, behind a locked door, wondering what momentary madness she’d fallen prey to, out on the sun-struck streets.
This terrace was thirty houses long, and ended in another square. At the next junction, she’d head back to the main road: hop on a bus, rejoin the transport network that held London together, when it wasn’t holding it up. Another look behind. Nobody. The shape that had dropped behind a car had been a falling shadow, nothing more. Two black vans was well within an ordinary margin. A car rolled by, looking for a parking space, and rounded the corner ahead. As it passed from sight the black van turned into the road. Catherine swung on her heels, and Sean Donovan scooped her into his arms like a fairytale hero; cradling her and stopping her mouth in a single embrace. The black van slowed, its back doors opened, and Donovan stepped inside carrying Catherine. The doors closed, and the van swept off.
Seven seconds, if that.
The streets quietly smouldered, as the violet hour grew purple.
It was still hot as hell when Jackson Lamb emerged from Slough House into the backyard and, fiddling in his pocket for his lighter, found his mobile phone instead, and noticed he had two missed calls—Standish. Missed calls. A stationery delivery gone astray, or a complaint about a printer not working. Standish persisted in laying such issues at his door, no matter how many times he outlined department policy, which was that he didn’t give a toss. Cigarette smouldering in hand he shambled into the lane, a coronet of smoke lingering in the air behind him, like an image of a wandering spirit . . .
Which lasted but briefly, though in the moments before its passing swelled outward, as though pregnant with impressions of the building’s inhabitants, weighed down as they were with grief and gambling debts, with drug habits and self-involvement; unburdening themselves to the comatose, squabbling in pubs, hunting oblivion in strangers’ beds, or else grown lazy, fat and complacent—sifting through all these as if somewhere among them lay the answer to a question posed recently, quite some distance away:
And then the air shifted, and the smoke was gone.
