He didn’t appear any more grateful for that than he had for Shirley saving his neck in the toilet. But she was used to going unappreciated, and stayed for another drink anyway.
AT THE MEETINGS SHE attended less often than she should –
Kay White was on her mind.
It was a peculiarity of Slough House that its occupants tended to know where everyone was. If some organisations had Chinese walls, to prevent confidential information spreading, Slough House’s walls were Swiss, inasmuch as they were full of holes; both literally – occupants had been known to punch the plaster – and in the sense that there was always leakage. The anguish of the floorboards and the creaking of the stairs told you who was where: it was an aural panopticon, wired for sound. And yet, it was easy to forget about each other. The separate miseries that slow horses came wrapped in, and the ongoing drudgery that was their daily grind, meant that much of the time they were on their own. Some more so than others. Kay White, for example. Nobody had liked her. She never shut up, for a start. So it felt no huge surprise when she’d betrayed them, and no huge loss when she’d been sacked. And what it felt like now she was dead, thought Catherine, was just more of the same: the woman had left no mark here, nothing to grieve over, and where there was no grief there was often guilt.
To assuage which, Catherine Standish was making mental amends. The working day was done but she remained at her desk, hands clasped on her lap, eyes closed. It might have looked like prayer, but was simply the summoning of memory: she was trying to find a moment she’d shared with Kay White, something that stood out against the background noise. But there was nothing of substance. Most moments spent with Kay had been an attempt to block her out. When she’d departed, along with – the name escaped her – it had been a relief. And that wasn’t a matter of blame, Catherine told herself. It was just life, which was full of passing strangers, even if some of them hung around for years.
… Struan Loy. That was the name. Loy had been here at the same time as Kay, and Lamb had kicked the pair of them out together.
And Struan Loy too had joined that chorus invisible; those who’d drifted from the margins of memory. In Catherine’s life, most such had been fellow drunks, who’d done their best to blur her recollection by being little more than blurs themselves, smeary with alcohol. But there were slow horses among them, which was why that prick of guilt was needling her. That prick of shame. She should go home, really. But before that – before running the gauntlet of London’s bars and pubs, its off-licences and supermarkets, its corner shops with their furtive shelves of booze, all calling her name as she passed – before any of that, she’d have a quick trawl through the usual search engines, and see if she could find out what Struan Loy was up to these days.
Maybe that would soothe her conscience, for a while.
Peter Judd said, ‘We live in new times, with new conditions, and new alignments are coming into being. This is a natural, and indeed ah ah ah a necessary, progression. For progression it is. And those who fail to appreciate that will suffer the usual fate of those unable to adapt to new circumstances.’
‘You mean political defeat.’
‘I mean political extinction.’
‘Give me a break,’ said Diana.
It would have been a nice moment if Channel Go had indeed gone to a break then, but it chundered on regardless.
‘And you believe,’ the interviewer went on, ‘that Desmond Flint is one of those ushering in these new conditions we’re disc—’
Diana killed transmission.
