Slow Horses полностью

This was the morning’s Max, a name they all shared as far as Robert Hobden was concerned. If they wanted him to tell them apart, they shouldn’t all work the same counter.

He settled in his usual corner. A redhead, one of only three other customers, was at the next table, facing the window: a black raincoat hung from the back of her chair. She wore a collarless white shirt and black leggings cut off at the ankle. He noticed this because her feet were hooked round her chair legs, the way a child might sit. A baby-sized laptop sat in front of her. She didn’t look up.

Max delivered his latte. Grunting acknowledgement, Hobden placed keys, mobile and wallet on the table in front of him, like always. He hated sitting with lumps in his pockets. His pen and notebook joined them. The pen was a thin-nibbed black felt-tip; the keyring a memory stick. And the newspapers were the quality dailies, plus the Mail. Piled up, they made a four-inch stack, of which he would read about an inch and a half; significantly less on Mondays, when there was more sports coverage. Today was Tuesday, shortly after seven. It was raining again. Had rained all night.

… Telegraph, Times, Mail, Independent, Guardian.

At one time or another, he’d written for all of these. That wasn’t so much a thought that occurred to him as an awareness that nudged him most mornings, round about now: cub reporter—ridiculous term—in Peterborough, then the inevitable shift to London, and the varied tempos of the major beats, crime and politics, before he ascended, aged forty-eight, to his due: the weekly column. Two, in fact. Sundays and Wednesdays. Regular appearances on Question Time. From firebrand to the acceptable face of dissent; an admittedly long trajectory in his case, but that made arrival all the sweeter. If he could have freeze-framed life back then, he’d have had little to complain about.

These days, he no longer wrote for newspapers. And when cab drivers recognized him, it was for the wrong reasons.

Beige raincoat discarded for the moment; the thinning, brownish hair a permanent accessory—as was the irritated look—Robert Hobden uncapped his pen, took a sip of his latte, and settled to work.

There’d been lights in the windows. Ho knew before opening the door that Slough House was occupied. But he’d have been able to tell anyway—damp footprints in the stairwell; the taste of rain in the air. Once in a harvest moon, Jackson Lamb would arrive before Ho; random predawn appearances that were purely territorial. You can haunt this place all you like, Lamb was telling him. But when they pull down the walls and count the bones, it’ll be mine they find on top. There were many good reasons for not liking Jackson Lamb, and that was one of Ho’s favourites.

But this wasn’t Lamb, or not Lamb alone. There was someone else up there.

Could be Jed Moody, but only if you were dreaming. Nine thirty was a good start for Moody, and it was generally eleven before he was ready for anything more complicated than a hot drink. Roderick Ho didn’t like Jed Moody, but that wasn’t a problem: Moody didn’t expect to be liked. Even before he’d been assigned to Slough House, he’d probably had fewer friends than fists. So Ho and Moody got on okay, sharing an office: neither liking the other, and neither caring the other knew. But there was no way Moody was here before him. It was barely seven.

Catherine Standish was more likely. Ho couldn’t remember Catherine Standish ever arriving first, which meant it had never happened, but she was usually next in. He’d hear the door’s agonized opening, and then her soft creak on the stairs, and then nothing. She was two floors above—in the small room next to Lamb’s—and out of sight, she was easy to forget. Actually, standing in front of you, she was easy to forget. The chances of sensing her presence weren’t good. So it wasn’t her.

That suited Ho. Ho didn’t like Standish.

He made his way up to the first floor. In his office he hung his raincoat on a hook, turned his computer on, then went into the kitchen. An odd smell was drifting down the stairs. Something rotten had replaced the taste of rain.

So here were the suspects: Min Harper, who was a nervous idiot, constantly patting his pockets to check he’d not lost anything; Louisa Guy, who Ho couldn’t look at without thinking of a pressure cooker, steam coming out of her ears; Struan Loy, the office joker—Ho didn’t like any of them, but he especially didn’t like Loy: office jokers were a crime in progress—and Kay White, who used to be on the top floor, sharing with Catherine, but had been banished downstairs for being ‘too damn noisy’: thanks, Lamb. Thanks for letting the rest of us suffer. If you can’t stand her chatter, why not pack her back to Regent’s Park? Except none of them were going back to Regent’s Park, because all of them had left a little bit of history over there; an ungainly smudge on the annals of the Service.