Slough House полностью

Only it wasn’t a tapping now; more a squeaking, like someone rubbing a finger against glass. The back door had a glass pane, she remembered. A glass pane in a wooden frame. And she had locked the door after River’s departure last night because that was what you did when you were hiding; you locked doors. Even doors with glass inserts, which you didn’t have to be an expert to find your way through; merely someone with a disregard for damage.

The squeaking stopped, and was replaced by a circular, scratching sound.

The glass globe might be a weapon. Or the lump of reshaped metal. Once a Luger, River had explained. Wartime details were involved in what followed. Now it was redesigned by Dalí, and all she had to load it with was the memory of a bullet. Tt Tt Tt. From the back of the house came a brief splintering, as glass dropped to the tiled floor. The ex-gun felt complicated in her hand; she could make out what might once have been the barrel, now curled in upon itself like a sleeping lizard, but its trigger had been swallowed up inside the metal mass. There was a clicking noise which she interpreted as the unfixing of the back door’s latch, a hand reaching through a broken pane to release the sneck. ‘Sneck’: a word she’d acquired up north. A faint brushing sound as the door opened, sweeping shards of glass aside. If she could solve the gun, remind it what it used to be, she would not be defenceless. The air in the house shifted, a rearrangement she could feel even in the study. She listened for footsteps, two pairs. But they’d creep, she thought. She wouldn’t hear them now they were in the house. Missionaries creep.

If she could remind herself what she used to be, she would not be defenceless.

The silence grew closer, as if the effort someone was making to be quiet were inching through the house.

It stopped outside the study door.

As long as he was there, Lech shut himself in a cubicle and had a piss.

This is my working life, he thought. Used to be an intelligence analyst – one of the hub’s best and brightest – and now I’m in a stinking public lavatory, hoping one of my own side makes a pass. Such was the view from Slough House.

He finished, flushed, but instead of stepping out to wash his hands leaned against the door and pressed his ear to it. The noises from the subway were muffled, abstract, aquarium-like. How many men had stood where he was now, hoping for strange encounters? He closed his eyes and thought about focaccia. Imagined thumping dough: punching it over and over, only to watch it rise.

Someone entered the toilet.

‘We want their ID,’ Shirley had said, back in the pub. ‘Their Service card, their wallet, their phone. Hell, their pocket change and their door keys too. Fuck ’em.’

‘These are agents in training,’ Lech had said. ‘They’ll be sharp. In good nick.’

‘I’m in good nick.’

You’re fucking high, he’d nearly said. The way she was jiggling in her seat, he’d have to scrape her off the ceiling soon. Two pints of lager had done nothing to bring her down.

The state she’d been in, he was better off on his own.

Whoever had come into the toilet was using the urinal. Lech rested his forehead against the back of his hand. The man finished, crossed the floor, ran a tap. Lech heard a paper towel pulled from the dispenser; the rustling of hands being dried. Then nothing. No footsteps; no breathing. Just a man in a public toilet, possibly holding a damp paper towel. A man in a black mac, he thought. Reversible to grey.

He opened the door, suddenly and loud, and stepped out of the cubicle.

The man was right up in front of the mirror, pulling at the corner of an eye, as if he had something in it. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t – it was a pretty obvious dawdling tactic – but what was certain was, he wasn’t the man in the mac, unless he’d changed his coat in the last five minutes, and also his head. When Lech appeared he left his eye alone, and watched as Lech, after a brief hesitation, came forward and rinsed his hands.

‘It’s polite to flush,’ he said.

‘Already did.’

‘… Right.’ The man rubbed his eye again. He was staring into his own reflection when he said, ‘Looking for company?’

‘Go away.’

‘Because this isn’t the place.’

‘I said go away.’

‘There are websites, you know. Apps.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Lech.

The man dropped his paper towel in the bin. ‘I’m only saying. Get with the century, right? Unless you’re into this scene.’

Footsteps were approaching.

‘Gotta go.’

He left as the man with the black mac stepped through the door into the gents.

She was called Jane. He was called Jim.

Surnames were not offered.

‘But you’re Sidonie Baker, yes? Sid to her friends.’

‘Which we hope to be.’

‘Oh, very much so.’

It had had an air of inevitability about it, the way the study door had opened and the couple had come in. They might have been prospective buyers, and the house a property on their list: good, airy rooms; a little question mark over the water table. So what did that make Sid, whose name they so handily knew? Their estate agent?