‘Are you our prefect now?’ Louisa asked. ‘Is this one of those age-flip things, and I’ve woken up back in school?’
‘We should all be so lucky.’
‘Anyway, the boiling kettle should be a clue,’ Louisa added.
‘I didn’t so much mean what are you doing as why aren’t you doing it upstairs? Team meeting, remember? Nine sharp.’
‘I didn’t think he was here yet.’
‘He’s not,’ said Catherine. ‘But when did that stop him expecting everyone else to be on time? Focaccia looks good, by the way.’
‘Thanks,’ said Lech.
‘But you do realise you’ll never hear the end of it.’
Louisa poured her coffee while Ho tried to read the label on his own collar without undoing buttons. Lech rewrapped the bread and looked like he was regretting various decisions, going at least as far back as bringing the bread in, and possibly extending to choice of career and not staying in Australia, where he’d holidayed in ninety-six.
‘I didn’t mean anything, by the way,’ Louisa said. ‘That crack about being back in school.’
He rolled his eyes, but she was out of the door, and didn’t notice.
Upstairs, Shirley was already in place. There were no visitor’s chairs in Lamb’s office, or none he liked anyone to sit on – the one technically so designated currently nursed a pyramid of sauce-stained Wagamama hotboxes – but one particular standing space was deemed more desirable than others, it being thought to fall within Lamb’s blind spot. The warier among them didn’t believe Lamb had a blind spot, and suspected some slow-burning mind-fuck, but Shirley was playing the odds, and had positioned herself to the left of the door, nearest the corkboard on which brittle scraps of paper had long ago been pinned, presumably by Lamb, presumably for a reason. She didn’t speak when Louisa, Lech and Roddy trooped in, and was possibly asleep, though upright. River arrived last. He didn’t speak either, but in contrast to Shirley looked like sleep was a stranger, or an enemy.
Louisa tried to catch his eye, but he wasn’t having it. This wasn’t especially unusual, but there was an energy to him, a voltage, which was. Slough House didn’t recharge batteries, it sapped power. It’s as if there were negative ley lines, special coordinates where forceless fields met, sucking all spirit from whoever stood there, and Slough House was slap bang on that junction. Whatever had River twitching, it wasn’t the prospect of a day at work.
A door banged; not the one from the yard, but the toilet on the floor below. So Lamb had floated in and up several flights of stairs without fluttering a cobweb on the way. It was unnerving to picture him doing this, like imagining a tapir playing hopscotch. The smell of stale cigarettes entered the room a moment before him, and the slow horses made way for it, then Lamb, by shuffling to either side. He arrived among them shaking his head in wonderment. ‘What a dump.’
Louisa looked round: the moist walls, the grim threadbare carpet, the print of a foreign bridge which made you want to hurl yourself off it. ‘You’ve only just noticed?’
‘I meant back there,’ said Lamb. ‘That’s going nowhere first flush.’ He threw himself into his chair, which, one happy day, was going to respond by disintegrating into a hundred pieces. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting. I was up late comforting a gay American dwarf.’
They stared.
‘What? I can’t have a social life?’
‘It’s more that you don’t usually apologise,’ Catherine said.
‘Well, how often do I fall into error?’ He tossed something at Shirley, which she unwisely caught. It was a paper tissue, unnaturally heavy, starting to split. ‘Get rid of that, will you?’
‘… You’re nearest the bin.’
‘I didn’t want it in my nose, you don’t think I want it in my bin, do you?’ He looked round at the assembled team. ‘Remind me, what the fuck are you doing here?’
Shirley slipped out, suppressing a gag reflex, while all present mentally erased the blind-spot theory.
‘Updates,’ said Catherine.
‘Ah yes. Team updates. So glad we can share these moments. Means I don’t have to rely on the obituary columns for giggles. So.’ He placed his palms on his paunch and smiled benignly. ‘Time to share. And this is a safe space, mind. No one’s going to point out what a dickhead you are. Who’s first?’
Louisa said, ‘I was followed yesterday evening.’
‘Congratulations. Did you shag him in his car or take him home?’
‘He tagged me on the Central Line and stayed with me to Oxford Street. I busted him in a sports shop. And he legged it.’
Lamb surveyed the assembled company. ‘You see, this is what happens when you leave your contact details on toilet walls.’
‘He was Park.’
‘Ah, keeping it in the family. And we know this because …?’
‘Because he got the same text we all got at 6.59 p.m. yesterday. One of those HR messages, checking their alert system’s working.’
