But long time ago. Water under a bridge. River was a name for water that passed under a bridge. Lying in another hospital, River wondered who he’d have been if born to a different mother; one who hadn’t rebelled so thoroughly, if ineffectively, against her middle-class upbringing. He wouldn’t have been brought up by his grandparents. Wouldn’t have fallen out of a tree, or not that tree. And wouldn’t have fallen under the spell of an idea of service; of a life lived outside the humdrum … But his mother had drifted in and out of his life like a song. During her longer absences, he forgot the words; when she was around, there was always a new one to add to the list. She was beautiful, vague, solipsistic, childish. Lately, he’d recognized how brittle she’d become. She often imagined she’d raised him herself, and would bristle convincingly when reminded otherwise. Her hell-raising years were not only behind her, they belonged to someone else. Isobel Dunstable—her late marriage had been a satisfactory one, bestowing respectability, wealth and widowhood in quick succession—might never have looked at a hash pipe in anything other than puzzlement. It wasn’t only her father who was adept at destroying true identities.
Thinking these familiar thoughts was better than the alternative, which was thinking about other things altogether.
There came a scraping from beyond the locked door; as if somebody was balancing on a chair, steadying themselves with their feet against the opposite wall.
As a boy with a broken arm, River had recognized his surroundings for what they were: hospitals were where light gathered in corners, and curtains performed the functions of walls. Where privacy was rarely granted, and unwanted visitors far more common than the other kind.
He heard footsteps heading down the corridor, towards him.
Slough House too was in darkness. At Regent’s Park, even when nothing was happening, there’d be enough people about for a midnight football match: eleven a side, plus linesmen. Here there was only emptiness, and the reek of disappointment. Min Harper, climbing the forlorn staircase, decided that the place resembled nothing more than a front for a mail-order porn empire, and with the thought came the dispiriting sense of being part of an enterprise nobody cared about, where tasks that didn’t matter were performed by people who didn’t care. For the last two months, Min had been examining congestion charge anomalies: cars clocked entering the zone whose owners had never paid; whose owners, in fact, denied being in the zone on the day in question. And time after time, it broke down to the same boring facts: that those who’d been caught were guilty of everyday life. They were playing away from home, or shifting bootlegged DVDs, or delivering their daughters to abortion clinics well out of their husbands’ sight … There were prison camps whose inmates spent their days carrying rocks from one end of the yard to the other, and then back. That might be a more fulfilling occupation.
Something shifted further up the stairwell.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. A noise.’
They halted on the landing. Whatever had made the sound didn’t make it again.
Louisa leant closer to Min, and he became aware of the smell of her hair.
‘A mouse?’
‘Do we have mice?’
‘We’ve probably got rats.’
Alcohol thickened the syllables, and slurred the sibilants.
Whatever they’d thought they’d heard didn’t happen again. The smell of Louisa’s hair, though, continued. Min cleared his throat.
‘Shall we?’
‘Um …?’
‘Go up, I mean?’
‘Sure. Going down’s not an option. I mean—’
Good job it was dark.
But as they set off up the next flight of stairs their hands brushed in the darkness, and their drunk fingers entangled themselves, and then they were kissing, and more than kissing; were clutching at each other in the darkness; each pushing at the other as if anxious to occupy the same space, which turned out to be against the wall in Loy’s room, the first they’d come to.
Three minutes passed.
Coming up for breath, their first words were:
‘Jesus, I never—’
‘Shut up.’
They shut up.
Two floors above them, a black-clad figure paused inside Lamb’s office.
Outside the door, one of Nick Duffy’s crew occupied a plastic chair, tilting it so its back was resting against the wall. Dan Hobbs had been two minutes short of going off-roster when he was dispatched here instead. When an agent got shot, there was no such thing as downtime. Even when it was a slow horse. Even when it was their own stupid fault.
Though short on detail, Hobbs was prepared to accept that it had been their own stupid fault.
