Slow Horses полностью

Such a fancy won’t survive the time it takes the bus to pass beneath the nearby pedestrian bridge, of course. But one inkling might last a while longer: that the yellows and greys that dominate the colour scheme aren’t what they first appear—that the yellow isn’t yellow at all, but white exhausted by stale breath and tobacco, by pot-noodle fumes and overcoats left to dry on radiators; and that the grey isn’t grey but black with the stuffing knocked out of it. But this thought too will quickly fade, because few things associated with Slough House stick in the mind; its name alone having proved durable, born years ago, in a casual exchange between spooks:

Lamb’s been banished.

Where’ve they sent him? Somewhere awful?

Bad as it gets.

God, not Slough?

Might as well be.

Which, in a world of secrets and legends, was all it took to give a name to Jackson Lamb’s new kingdom: a place of yellows and greys, where once all was black and white.

Just after 7 a.m. a light went on at the second-storey window, and a figure appeared behind W W Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. On the street below, a milk float rattled past. The figure hovered a moment, as if expecting the float to turn dangerous, but withdrew once it passed from sight. Inside, he resumed the business at hand, up-ending a soaking black rubbish sack on to a newspaper spread across the worn and faded carpet.

The air was immediately polluted.

Rubber-gloved, wrinkle-nosed, he got to his knees and began picking through the mess.

Eggshells, vegetable ends, coffee grounds in melting paper filters, parchment-coloured teabags, a sliver of soap, labels from jars, a plastic squeezy bottle, florets of stained kitchen towels, torn brown envelopes, corks, bottle tops, the coiled spring and cardboard back of a spiral-notepad, some bits of broken crockery which didn’t fit together, tin trays from takeaway meals, scrunched-up Post-its, a pizza box, a wrung-out tube of toothpaste, two juice cartons, an empty tin of shoe polish, a plastic scoop, and seven carefully bundled parcels made from pages of Searchlight.

And much else that wasn’t immediately identifiable. All of it sopping wet and glistening, sluglike, in the light of the overhead bulb.

He sat back on his haunches. Picked up the first of the Searchlight parcels, and unwrapped it as carefully as he could.

The contents of an ashtray fell on to the carpet.

He shook his head, and dropped the rotting newspaper back on the pile.

A sound made its way up the back stairs, and he paused, but it didn’t repeat. All entrances and exits from Slough House came via a back yard with mildewed, slimy walls, and everyone who came in made a large, unfriendly noise doing so, because the door stuck and—like most of the people using it—needed a good kicking. But this sound had been nothing like that, so he shook his head and decided it had been the building waking up; flexing its lintels or whatever old buildings did in the morning, after a night of rain. Rain he’d been out in, collecting the journalist’s rubbish.

Eggshells, vegetable ends, coffee grounds in melting paper filters …

He picked another of the paper parcels, its scrunched-up headline a denunciation of a recent BNP demo, and sniffed it tentatively. Didn’t smell like an ashtray.

‘A sense of humour can be a real bastard,’ Jackson Lamb said.

River dropped the parcel.

Lamb was leaning in the doorway, his cheeks glistening slightly as they tended to after exertion. Climbing stairs counted, though he’d not made a squeak on them. River could barely manage such stealth himself, and he wasn’t carrying Lamb’s weight: most of it gathered round his middle, like a pregnancy. A shabby grey raincoat shrouded it now, while the umbrella hooked over his arm dripped on to the floor.

River, trying to hide the fact that his heart had just punched him in the ribs, said, ‘You think he’s calling us Nazis?’

‘Well, yes. Obviously he’s calling us Nazis. But I meant you doing this on Sid’s half of the room.’

River picked up the fallen bundle but it gave way as he did so, the paper too wet to contain its contents, spilling a stew of small bones and scraped-away skin—for a nasty moment, evidence of a brutal, baby-sized murder. And then the shape of a chicken asserted itself from the collection; a misshapen chicken—all legs and wings—but recognizably a former bird. Lamb snorted. River rubbed his gloved hands together, smearing sodden lumps of newspaper into balls, then shaking them into the pile. The black and red inks wouldn’t lose their grip so easily. The once-yellow gloves turned the colour of miners’ fingers.

Lamb said, ‘That wasn’t too clever.’

Thank you for that, River thought. Thanks for pointing that out.