Slough House полностью

And still that woman was watching, and still pretending not to. You had to admire a trier, thought Shirley. You had to admire an admirer, and perhaps she should take pity on her, drag her from the crowd and jump-start her on the dance floor, but that might lead to awkwardness later, because a thing about Shirley’s partners – and she meant her professional partners, but there was such a thing as mission-creep – a thing about Shirley Dander’s partners was that they tended to die; their brains misted against an office wall, or their insides spilt on snowy Welsh hillsides … Shirley had never thought of herself as a jinx, but that hardly mattered, did it? What mattered was what everyone else thought, and – two partners down – it would be an uphill task dismantling gossip. Team up with Shirley and start counting the days. Not the kind of come-on you wanted to broadcast to those watching you from the sidelines, and pretending not to.

And the lights spun, and the dance floor pounded, and the weight of electric bass thrummed in her frame. All eyes were on Shirley Dander, and that was fine by her.

Just so long as nobody started dying again.

There was money now, a little, from his grandfather’s will – his grandfather’s care had gone through his savings like a landlord, but enough remained for River to have bought a car, his first for years. He’d done his due diligence, checked the wear-and-tear stats on second-hand vehicles, listened to Louisa’s tip that yellow cars lost only twenty-two per cent of their value in the first three years as opposed to thirty, like every other colour, then bought something he saw stickered for sale in the street. Well, it was a bargain. And so far so good, he thought, as mid-evening London fragmented into carpet showrooms and bed shops, into garages and self-storage warehouses; he’d broken away from a pedestrian existence. It might even be symbolic of a new beginning. He had a hand on the doorknob, ready to step into whatever came next. But first he had to deal with what was happening in Kent.

His childhood home was outside Tonbridge. Jennifer Knox was a neighbour, but that was by rural standards. Central London, you’d fit fifteen dwellings into the space between her house and the O.B.’s, and never meet half the occupants. But strangers were more visible outside the city, and lights in houses that should be dark were noticed. So he had no reason to doubt her word: there was – had been – someone in his grandfather’s house.

Which might be a simple case of opportunist intrusion. There’d been a death notice in the paper, and burglars were capable of research. But there were other possibilities. The O.B. had been a spook, a Service legend. His obituary had been tactful – his cover had placed him in the Ministry of Transport – but he’d lived a secret life, and the possibility that some of his secrets lived on could not be ruled out. His house was mostly empty now; the furniture mostly cleared. River’s mother had taken care of that: Let me take some of the burden off your hands. He’d thought at first – Christ, what did this say about him? – that she was hoping to skim the cash, and had put his foot down where the study was concerned. ‘The books,’ he’d said. ‘I’m keeping the books.’

His mother had adopted her default mode of assuming he’d gone mad. ‘You don’t read, River.’

‘I read.’

‘You don’t read that much.’

Who did? The old man’s study was a booklined cave, as if he’d grown part-hobbit in age. But his last year he’d not read at all, the words having slipped from the pages in front of him. One of the last coherent conversations he’d had with his grandson: I’m losing anchor. The look in his eyes bottomless.

So the study remained like a showroom in a vacant property – books, chairs, curtains; the shelf with its odd collection of trophies: a glass globe, a hunk of concrete, a lump of metal that had been a Luger; the desk with its sheet of blotting paper, like something out of Dickens, and the letter opener which was an actual stiletto, and had once belonged to Beria – and if David Cartwright had left secrets in his wake they’d be somewhere in that room, on those shelves, hidden among a billion other words. River didn’t know if he really believed that, but knew for sure that he didn’t know he didn’t, and if River thought that way others might too, and act upon the possibility. Spook secrets were dangerous to friends and foes alike, and the old man had made many of both down the years. He could see one of either breed breaking a lock, finessing a window; could see them working round the study, looking for clues. If that was happening, River needed to stop it. Any trail his dead grandfather had left, no one was going to follow but him.