'Kill us? They've never needed to kill us,' said Lamb. 'I mean, look at us. What would be the point?'A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service's First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive - but she's had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she's fought for.Meanwhile, still reeling from recent losses, the slow horses are worried they've been pushed further into the cold. Slough House has been wiped from Service records, and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew are feeling paranoid. But have they actually been targeted?With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets, and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's an uncomfortable place for those deemed surplus to requirements. The wise move would be to find a safe place and wait for the troubles to pass.But the slow horses aren't famed for making wise decisions.
Slow Horses
Dead Lions
Real Tigers
Spook Street
London Rules
Joe Country
Down Cemetery Road
The Last Voice You Hear
Why We Die
Smoke And Whispers
Reconstruction
Nobody Walks
The List
This Is What Happened
The Drop
The Catch
SLOUGH HOUSE
Mick Herron
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Murray (Publishers)
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Mick Herron 2021
The right of Mick Herron to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 9781529378672
John Murray (Publishers)
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
HER MORNING TURNED OUT shorter than she’d planned. Wearing her fur-lined coat against a biting wind, she’d been heading for a team meeting at the new facility, a granite complex on the city’s edge. If it looked like the local headquarters of an insurance company, that was fine. Some things hid best in the open.
The sky was grey but unthreatening. The streets, their usual city selves.
Driving in wasn’t encouraged. There was a regular shuttle, though, twice an hour, looping through the inner suburbs, and she’d pass a pharmacy on the way to her stop. She needed bath salts. Three times a week, days were full-on physical: 15K in the morning, then gym-work, then four times across the lake – twice in a boat, twice in the water – then another 15K. You needed long baths afterwards … Yesterday she’d dozed off in the tub, its lapping a sense-reminder of the movement of the lake, into which, rumour had it, leeches had once been poured, to keep swimmers on their mettle. But she’d never encountered one. This was a relief. Even the thought of leeches gave her the creeps; the way they were jelly, and mostly mouth. The way, if you stepped on one, it would burst like a blood-filled balloon.
Seriously, she thought: sooner this hunter on my tail than one of those nightmares fastened to my skin.
Because she’d spotted him now. Should have done sooner, but she was no more than fifteen seconds off the beat; an allowable laxity, even by the standards of her department. Already she was remapping her route, and the first detour was here: through the indoor market, a vast amphitheatre where chickens hung from hooks and sacks of vegetables formed battlements along the aisles. These were too narrow for a follower to remain hidden, though he did his best: when she paused to examine a tray of ducks’ eggs, the passage behind her remained empty save for an elderly woman on sticks. But he was somewhere back there, in a black leather jacket; a little noticeable for pavement-work, which was a neat double bluff.
And the nature of her task was clear – another test. She had to ditch her tracker before reaching the shuttle bus stop. Because you could swim a hundred laps of the lake, run more K than there were minutes in the hour, and none of it would count if you couldn’t shake a shadow on a city street. And if you led the shadow home, well … She’d heard of a department made up of failures: losers assigned to a dead-end desk, spending the rest of forever in a mist of thwarted ambition. You only got to mess up once. This was harsh but – until it happened to you – it was fair.
But it wasn’t going to happen to her.
