The back door opened into a porch where coats were hung and wellington boots abandoned, or that’s what used to happen. Now it was just a cold empty area between the outside world and the kitchen. River passed through it silently. That was the thing about familiar houses: you knew its squeaks and unoiled hinges; you knew where to put your weight. Here on the doorjamb was a single pencil mark, midriff height. Rose had marked it off for him.
There was no noise. The study was ground floor, at the back: exit the kitchen, turn left. He could have done it with his eyes closed. Its door was open a fraction. Was that how he’d left it? He waited while his eyes adjusted to the gloom, acutely conscious of the emptiness around him. Even the grandfather clock, a fixture in the hallway since long before his birth, was gone. Its absence of ticking felt like a tap on his shoulder.
But in the study the shelves would be stocked with books; the rugs in place; the desk, the armchairs. There’d be a basket of logs by the fire and a transistor radio on the coffee table. It would barely be a surprise to find the O.B. there, brandy glass in hand. But his grandfather had passed into joe country, and besides: in the air was a smell of fried dust.
He put a hand flat on the study door, and pushed. It swung open.
The soft glow came from the ancient one-bar electric fire, usually kept tucked behind the O.B.’s armchair. In its halo, the room assumed the air of a Dutch painting: pin-sharp details in the centre, fading to shadow around the edges. And there, more or less where it shone brightest, his grandfather’s chair, its familiar heft as much a presence in River’s life as the man who’d once occupied it. The figure that sat there now watched as River entered, and didn’t seem to move; didn’t appear to be breathing. Might have been a ghost.
‘Jesus,’ he said softly.
He took two steps into the room.
‘… Sid?’
‘Hello, River,’ she said.
At that precise moment, miles away, an ambulance in a hurry rounds Beech Street, its blue light strobing first Barbican Tube Station and then the buildings on the next block: the Chinese restaurant, the newsagent’s; the door between the two which never opens, never closes. And for the time this takes to happen, Slough House is illuminated, its windows throwing back light as if fully engaged in London life; as if the building breathes the same air as everybody else, and harbours the same hopes and aspirations. It doesn’t last. A moment later the ambulance is bombing down Aldersgate Street, its siren squealing round the rooftops, and in its wake Slough House’s windows become the same black pools they were before, so that if you approached and peered in, always supposing you could hover that high above the pavement, nothing would look back at you – not the everyday nothing of casual absence, but the long-drop nothing that comes once everything’s over.
But nobody ever approaches, and nobody ever looks in. Slough House might as well not be there, for all the attention paid to it, and while this is unsurprising – the spook trade not being renowned for kerb flash – it carries too a suggestion of redundancy. Because in London, a building best hurried past is a building without reason to be, and such a building might find its days numbered; might find itself viewed not as bricks and mortar but as an opportunity; as an empty pillar of air, waiting for steel and glass to give it shape. The history embedded in its bones counts for nothing. To those who buy and sell and own and build, the past is simply a shortcut to what’s yet to come, and what’s yet to come offers magpie riches to those prepared to embrace the changes demanded. Or so the promises run.
For a city is an impermanent thing, its surface ever shifting, like the sea.
And like the sea, a city has its sharks.
