Slough House полностью

That there was nobody around wasn’t in itself a surprise: the cemetery locked its gates after hours. That Louisa had arrived first was stranger: she had furthest to come. On the other hand, she’d ignored protocol and driven, so maybe that shortened the odds. It was one thing going dark; quite another spending the evening farting about on public transport. She lived way out of the centre because it was more affordable. Not because she enjoyed the commute.

Catherine was asking, ‘Were you followed?’

‘I’m pretty sure not.’

‘Pretty sure?’

Louisa said, ‘I spotted the guy the other day, and I’ve been careful since. Or maybe paranoid’s the word. I don’t think I was followed. Why, what’s going on?’

‘Let’s wait till the others arrive.’

‘Why’s Lamb not here?’

‘He will be.’

Louisa eyed Catherine’s dress. It was ankle length, as usual, with sleeves that blossomed at the cuff. On any given day, she looked like she was dressed as a Victorian puppet. Not many people could have carried it off, but Louisa had to admit Catherine was one of them. On the other hand, it was hard to picture her scaling cemetery railings.

‘Lamb has a key,’ Catherine told her.

‘I know.’

‘He opened the gate.’

‘How did you even know I was wondering that? And if Lamb was here then, where is he now?’

‘Here’s someone.’

Which was Lech. ‘You do know there are two Blake’s graves,’ he said.

This was true. There was a small headstone, suggesting the poet-painter William Blake’s remains lay near by, and a larger memorial, flat upon the ground, which seemed more confident of those remains’ location.

‘They’re, like, twenty yards apart?’ said Louisa.

‘I know.’

‘So we’d probably have seen each other, whichever one we were waiting at?’

‘I know. I was just saying.’

Darkness was traditionally forgiving of facial blunders: ill-advised piercings, drunken-error tattoos and New Romantic make-up stylings were diminished in shadow, and seemed less stupid. Lech’s scars, though, it made worse. The first thing you thought when you saw him was that you wanted to turn a light on. Probably not entirely fair to lump him with those who’d made their faces a sideshow: it hadn’t been his decision to have PAEDO carved into his cheeks. But it had been his choice to obliterate the word with haphazard scars, so he couldn’t claim not to have had a hand in it. And right now he looked nervy, Louisa thought, as if his evening had already gone wrong in some unspecified way, and he was waiting for it to go more wrong differently. Not necessarily an unwise state of mind when Lamb had sounded a siren, but still. There was such a thing as a positive attitude.

She wondered where River was. A summons like this, she’d have expected him to be first on the scene.

And now came Shirley, weaving into the graveyard’s central reservation like someone who’d been drinking with barely a pause since leaving the office. Not that Louisa was one to judge, but there was a margin there in which she could feel smug.

Catherine took one look and said, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. Here.’ She produced a bottle of water from somewhere.

‘Oh, cheers,’ Shirley said. She took a hefty slug. ‘Thirsty work.’

‘What is?’

‘This. Whatever this is.’

The cemetery was wedged between Bunhill Row and City Road, from which the noise of traffic was still constant. That was the direction Shirley had arrived from, and Louisa couldn’t help wondering not whether she’d been seen climbing in, but by how many people, and what they’d done about it. Probably nothing. It wasn’t that London lacked the civic-minded; more that even the civic-minded didn’t much care when short drunk strangers hauled themselves over pointy railings.

Anyway, it wasn’t like they were tramping on actual graves. A few luminaries apart, the dead were fenced off from the flagstoned pathways.

Shirley was peering round, checking off a mental register. ‘Where’s Cartwright? And douchebag? And Lamb?’

‘Not here, obviously,’ said Catherine. ‘And a little respect for your colleagues, would you mind?’

‘Sorry. Mr Lamb.’

And if River wasn’t here yet, it probably meant he’d headed off to the O.B.’s, to be with Sid. Louisa wondered how she felt about that, not that she had a right to feel anything. Sid was one of them, she thought, one of the originals, though there’d been slow horses before them, and would be slow horses afterwards. Unless Slough House itself was headed for extinction. Being wiped from Service records wasn’t an encouraging sign.

She heard a strangled cry from Bunhill Row, followed by a tearing sound and a muffled thump. The kind of noise you’d get, she thought, if you dropped a computer nerd a short distance onto a hard surface.

Roddy Ho was on his feet when she got there, one pocket of his hoodie hanging loose but a scowl fixed firmly in place.

‘Hurt yourself?’

‘No. Just practising my land and roll.’

‘Yeah,’ said Louisa. ‘In case you find yourself doing a teeny-tiny parachute jump.’