He looked down at his own costume. Spider-Man was hardly age-appropriate, but it wasn’t like anyone would be offering style points: making the evening news was the aim, and superhero suits ticked the right media boxes. It had worked before and would work again. So he was the Amazing Spider-Man, and the comrade he was meeting for the first time now, with whom all arrangements had been made anonymously through a message board, was Batman, and the pair would be a dynamic duo for one morning only, and blaze through newscasts for the rest of the week. One hand on the roll of canvas he’d unpacked, Lowell levered himself to his feet and extended the other, because this too was part of an ancient narrative: men meeting and greeting, and bonding in a common cause.
Ignoring Spider-Man’s outstretched hand, Batman punched him in the face.
Lowell fell backwards as the world span out of control: lit-up office windows spiralled like stars, and all the air left his body as it hit damp brickwork. But already his mind had slipped into work-gear, and he rolled sideways, away from the edge, as Batman’s foot stamped down hard, just missing his elbow. He needed to be upright, because nobody ever won a fight from a prone position, and he concentrated on this for the next two seconds instead of wondering why Batman was kicking the shit out of him, and his focus almost paid off because he’d made it to his knees before he was punched in the head again. Blood soaked through Lowell’s Spider-Man mask. He tried to speak. A formless gargle was all he could manage.
And then he was being dragged towards the edge of the platform.
He shrieked, because it was clear what would happen next. Batman was hauling him by the shoulders, and he couldn’t break free—the man’s hands felt moulded from steel. He kicked out and hit the canvas lump, which rolled towards the edge, unravelling as it went. He swung an arm for Batman’s crotch, but hit muscle-hard thigh instead. And then he was hanging in space, the only thing keeping him aloft the caped crusader’s grip.
For a moment they were locked in near-embrace, Batman rigidly upright, Spider-Man dangling, as if posing for a cover illustration.
“For pity’s sake,” Spider-Man whispered.
Batman dropped him.
The canvas roll had hit the road before Paul Lowell did but wasn’t a roll by then, having unwound itself along the tarmac to become a strip of carpet instead of the banner he’d intended it to be. In foot-high letters, its hand-painted battle cry, a fair deal for fathers, blurred as the wet ground soaked into the fabric, along with a certain quantity of Lowell’s blood, but remained a gratifyingly newsworthy image, and would feature in many a broadcast before the day was out.
Paul Lowell didn’t see any of them, though.
As for Batman, he was long gone.
On a night hot as hell in the borough of Finsbury a door opens and a woman steps into a yard. Not the front street—this is Slough House, and the front door of Slough House famously never opens, never closes—but a yard that sees little natural light, and whose walls are consequently fuzzy with mildew. The odour is of neglect, whose constituent humours, with a little effort, can be made out to be food and fats from the takeaway, and stale cigarettes, and long-dried puddles, and something rising from the drain that gurgles in a corner and is best not investigated closely. It is not yet dark—it’s the violet hour—but already the yard is shadowy with night. The woman doesn’t pause there. There’s nothing to see.
But supposing she were herself observed—supposing the slight draught that brushes past as she closes the door were not a longed-for breeze of the type that August seems to have abjured, but a wandering spirit in search of a resting place—then the moment before the door is firmly closed might be one in which an opportunity is briefly open. Quick as a sunbeam in it slips, and because spirits, especially wandering spirits, are no slouches, what follows would happen in the time it takes a bat to blink; a lightning survey of this half-forgotten and wholly ignored annex; this “administrative oubliette,” as it was once dubbed, of the intelligence service.
Our spirit flies up the stairs, no other option presenting itself, and as it ascends notes the contours marked on the staircase walls; a ragged brown scurf-mark, like the outline of an unfinished continent, indicating the height to which damp has risen; a wavy scribble that might almost be taken, in the gloom, for the licking of flames. A fanciful notion, but one reinforced by the heat and the general air of oppression that smothers the house, as if someone—something—were exerting a malign influence over those in his, its, thrall.
