Slough House полностью

His grandfather’s house, she meant, which had been unoccupied for a while. It belonged to River now, technically, as his mother kept stressing – ‘technically’ apparently meaning in every possible sense, including the legal, barring his mother’s own feeling that the natural order had been disturbed – and was, equally technically, on the market, though at a price the agent had declared ‘way too optimistic. Way’, in these post-You-Know-What times. Its refusal to budge suited River, for the moment. He’d grown up in his grandparents’ house, having been abandoned there by a mother whose horizons hadn’t, at the time, included future property rights. He’d been seven. That was a lot of history to sell.

Jennifer Knox was still talking. ‘I thought about calling the police, but then I thought, well, what if they’re friends of yours? Or, you know, potential buyers?’

‘Thanks, Mrs Knox. I should have let you know. Yes, they’re old friends passing through, in need of somewhere to spend the night. And I know the furniture’s gone, but—’

‘It’s still a roof and four walls, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly, and cheaper than a hotel. They’re travelling at the moment, and—’

‘We all do what we can, don’t we? To keep the costs down.’

‘They’ll be gone in the morning. Thanks, Mrs Knox. I’m grateful you took the trouble.’

His flat was a rented one-bedder, ‘nicely off the tourist track’ as some smug git had once put it. He might have inherited a country pile, but his actual living conditions remained urban haemorrhoid. The flat was cold most times of year, and even in daylight felt dark. The nightclub over the way hosted live bands twice a week, and a nearby manhole cover had loosened; every time a car ran over it, the resulting ka-chunk ka-chunk made River’s jaw spasm. It happened now, as he tucked his phone in his pocket. Not so much a soundtrack; more an audible toothache.

River raised a middle finger in the world’s general direction. Then went to see who’d broken into his dead grandfather’s home.

Meanwhile, Roddy Ho was doing what Roddy Ho did best.

What Roddy Ho did best was everything.

Which did tend to make such moments busy, but hey: if being Roddy Ho was easy, everyone would do it – there’d be fat-thumbed Roddy Hos, bad-haired Roddy Hos; even chick-retardant Roddy Hos. Which you had to love the comic possibilities, but Roddy Ho didn’t have time to dwell on them because Roddy Ho had his skinny-thumbed, good-haired, chick-delighting hands full.

And the everything he was currently deployed on involved saving Slough House from whatever deep-impact shit was headed its way.

As usual.

That shit was incoming was a given: this was Slough House. But also and anyway, it had been the Rodster himself who’d alerted Jackson Lamb to the Weird Wiping, as he’d dubbed it. The Weird Wiping meant incoming shit, no question, and that the shit would be deep impact, well: it didn’t take a genius. This was the spook trade, and when things went awry on Spook Street, they generally went the full Chris Grayling. So Roddy was checking the shit for depth and durability; trying to ascertain exactly which direction the shit was travelling in, and if, by now, he’d gone past the stage where the whole shit metaphor was proving useful, he’d at least made his point. Shit was coming, and everyone was looking to Roddy Ho to provide the double-ply bog roll.

Though actually, when you thought about it, that would involve Roddy doing the wiping.

Momentarily derailed, he reached for a slice of pizza. Roddy was in his office; it was way past sayonara time, but when the HotRod was on a mission, he didn’t watch the clock. Besides, some things you don’t want showing on your domestic hard drive, and tinkering around in Service records was one of them. Because the first problem he’d identified, the direction of travel of the incoming effluent, was a no-brainer: any time Slough House was under the hammer, you could bet your chocolate buttons it was Regent’s Park at the anvil. And in this particular instance, the Weird Wiping, what had been wiped was Slough House itself.

By ‘wiped’, Roddy meant erased from the Service database. Not just Slough House but the horses themselves, from the new guy Wicinski to Jackson Lamb; each and every one of them taken off the board. Oh, they were still around on the deep-level data sets; the ones involving salaries and bank accounts, all of which – after a nasty hack some years ago – were ascribed to employee numbers rather than names, so they were still getting paid, and still had jobs to do, but their personal files, their personnel jackets: they were gone, baby, gone. Anyone checking out Roddy Ho on the Service database would find zero, nada, zilch. Like the RodBod had ceased to exist.

Everything came to an end, he knew that. Take those huge statues of Jedi Knights the Taliban bombed to dust. But he’d figured his own legend would remain intact for a while yet.