She remembered Loy. Something of a joker, and so an irritation in any office space. The space he’d come to occupy outside Leicester, though, had been a shipping container, inside which he’d burned to death. Investigation remained ongoing, but it was clearly a murder. He’d been a slow horse, yes, but this was a coincidence. People got murdered. Slow horses were people. There was a Venn diagram waiting to happen, and somewhere near Leicester, it just had.
It was unlikely that Jackson Lamb would see it that way – he had a tendency to become aroused at any sign of threat – but Diana had other things to worry about. Besides, Lamb wasn’t privy to the daily updates, and the story hadn’t made headlines here in the capital. Chances were, it wouldn’t come to his attention.
‘Fuck me sideways,’ said Jackson Lamb.
Then put his head back and stared at the ceiling.
Catherine said, ‘The local paper said suspicious circumstances.’
‘Burning to death in a shipping container? Yeah, it doesn’t take Shylock Holmes.’
She decided to let that one go.
To the amateur observer, Lamb might be preparing for a nap. His feet were on his desk, his toes mostly visible through the tatters of his socks, and one arm lay across his paunch like a jovial illustration from Dickens. But Catherine, a seasoned watcher, recognised the tension enfolding him, and knew, too, that Lamb thought the way a bear hibernates. Best not interrupt him, unless you wanted a limb torn off.
She settled herself on the visitor’s chair, to one side of which lay the pile of takeaway hotboxes, and waited.
Empty noises drifted up from the lower storeys. Slough House was a medley of knocks and rattles after hours, its ghosts scratching windows and walls once its occupants had left. Or perhaps, she thought, this was normal, and it was simply a building relaxing into the dark.
She thought about Kay White, tumbling off a stepladder in the comfort of her own home.
About Struan Loy, screaming his lungs out in a tin trap.
More ghosts.
When Lamb at last raised the arm that had been dangling over the side of his chair, it held a cigarette. He slotted it into his mouth and, from somewhere on his person, produced a plastic lighter, which refused to work. After staring at it in wounded disappointment, he tossed it over his shoulder, and looked balefully at Catherine.
‘Can’t help you,’ she said.
‘Christ. Remind me of your purpose?’
‘You smoke too much. Like you imagine it’s a virtue.’
‘I can see how an idiot might think so.’
While he began the laborious process of opening drawers and rummaging through them without actually looking, she said, ‘We’re being watched by the Park, on and off. And hunted by someone else. At the same time?’
Lamb’s only reply was the clicking of another lighter, drawn from the depths of a drawer, and equally useless. It joined its companion somewhere in the shadows behind.
She persevered. ‘They must be connected.’
‘How?’
‘Well, I don’t know!’
‘So think about it. How many points of connection could there be? Jesus, a man could die trying to get a smoke round here.’ But his roving hand found a box of matches even while he spoke, and he brandished it in triumph, offering her a view of stained armpit. With a dexterity that would have impressed her in a squirrel, let alone an overweight drunk, he removed a match from the box and struck it one-handed, though lost points by dropping the open box while completing the action. Matches went everywhere, but the lit one reached his cigarette, which was all that mattered. Its job done, he tossed it away. Said, ‘Loy wasn’t a slow horse any more. Nor was White. Why would anyone think they were?’
Catherine said, ‘Because they’re operating from out-of-date information.’
‘And where might that come from?’
‘Oh Lord …’
‘And that would be the sound of a penny dropping, would it? If it took me that long to join a pair of dots, I’d still be wondering why my Y-fronts shrink when I look at porn.’ He paused to draw in smoke, scrunched his face in presumable pleasure, and yawned his exhalation. She’d not have been surprised to glimpse a crocodile bird, pecking shreds of meat from his teeth. ‘Takes it out of you, being a genius.’
‘It must be a constant strain.’
‘That and coping with the ill-tempered sarcasm of subordinates.’ He heaved himself more or less upright. More matches dropped to the floor. ‘I met this dwarf a couple of nights ago. I might have mentioned it.’
‘It cropped up.’
‘He told me his journo friend heard a whisper that Rasnokov had declared war on the Park’s assassination squad.’ Vassily Rasnokov was the GRU’s First Desk. ‘All jolly hockey sticks, I’m sure, except that the Park doesn’t have an assassination squad. It gives orders as and when, or hires local talent, like it did in Kazan. So the GRU has the same problem George W had back in the day. How do you declare war on something that doesn’t physically exist?’ He paused to smoke. ‘Answer, you go ahead and do it anyway, and hope to fuck no one notices.’
