Real Tigers полностью

Probably, when you got down to it, it was about Jackson Lamb.

“Catherine?”

She gave him a name

He left, locking the door behind him. For a long while afterwards she sat in the same position: upright, with her hands clasped on her knees. A Mad Governess again, and not just mad, but locked in an attic. That would give Shirley Dander a laugh, supposing she caught the reference.

After a while Catherine lay on the bed instead, and after a further while, slept.

However many miles away, in whichever direction it was, Slough House boiled in the morning’s heat. Everyone was there by nine save Catherine and Lamb, and the former’s unfamiliar absence struck a jarring note. It did with River, anyway, and as he stood by the kettle, pouring a cup of instant coffee, he asked Louisa, who was brewing a pot of the real stuff, if she knew where the other woman was.

She didn’t reply.

“Louisa?”

“What?”

“Seen Catherine?”

She shook her head.

Why bother? Since Min’s death she was a walking time bomb: not much given to conversation, but if you listened carefully, you could hear her tick.

River took his cup to his office, and contemplated another day of studying ancient passport applications, scanned and pasted into a database so creaky, if it was a boat you’d be watching rats abandon it. Picking up a biro, he tapped it against his front teeth. Eight and a half hours of this, minus whatever he could get away with for lunch. Five times that to make up the week, and forty-eight weeks in the working year . . . He might see this task off before his fortieth, if he really hammered it. Yeah: get a wiggle on, and he could celebrate putting this to bed alongside the big four-oh.

Or he could just beat himself to death with a hole punch.

Gathering one up, pumping it like a stress reliever, he crossed to the window whose gold-tooled lettering spelled ww henderson, solicitor and commissioner for oaths for the benefit of those on the street who wondered what poor fools toiled away in here. An oath or two had been uttered in these parts, that was true. The hole punch clacked in his hand. He heard the downstairs door open then close, and thought, Catherine, then: no. She comes up the stairs like a ghost. Lamb could too when he felt like it, but this morning he was his usual bothersome presence: navigating the staircase with the grace of a hippopotamus steering a wheelbarrow. He thumped past River’s office, then into his own room overhead; the precursor, usually, to a one-man-band performance: the farting, cursing, furniture-rattling overture to the day. River returned to his desk, where his pile of passport applications had grown while his back was turned. It wasn’t going anywhere, and until it did, neither was he. But he hadn’t done more than pluck the topmost sheet off the pile before it occurred to him that the expected overhead symphony hadn’t occurred; that what he was listening to now was that kind of silence that descends before a tree comes crashing down . . . He stood. When the thumping started, he was already halfway out of the door.

Lamb eyed his crew—some say “team”; he preferred “minions”—with a malevolent eye, the other being scrunched shut against the smoke from his cigarette. The blinds were drawn as usual, but sunlight had found a little leverage, and was currently painting stripes on the wall, and across the heads and shoulders of said minions, who were bunched like suspects in an old-fashioned film.

In the same hand that held his cigarette Lamb was wielding a Danish pastry, and he waved it now in their general direction. “You know, seeing you all together, it reminds me why I come into work every morning.”

Golden crumbs and blue-grey smoke flew in opposite directions.

“It’s ’cause I’ve a cockroach infestation at home.”

“Can’t think why,” murmured River.

“It’s rude to mutter. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s bad manners.” Lamb bit off some pastry and continued, mouth full, “Christ, it’s like being in a zombie movie. You lot need to perk yourselves up. Where’s Standish?”

“Haven’t seen her,” Ho offered.

“I didn’t ask if you’d seen her. I asked where she is. She’s usually here before me.”

“But not always.”

“Thanks. Next time I forget what ‘usually’ means, I’ll know who to ask.”

“Bathroom?” Shirley suggested.

“Must be the world’s longest dump she’s taking,” Lamb grumbled. “And I speak as an expert.”

“None of us doubt that.”

“Maybe she has a domestic emergency,” Marcus said.

“Like what? Her bookshelves got out of alphabetical order?”

River said, “It’s always possible she has a life you don’t know about.”

“Like you, you mean? How is your old pal Spider?”