Light showed from an upper storey. Ho seemed to have an upstairs conservatory. They climbed the fence, a flimsy wooden construction, and as Min dropped into the paved-over garden, a plank snapped cleanly behind him with a noise like a bullet. He froze, expecting alarms or sirens, but the noise simply disappeared into the dark. No curtains twitched; no voices were raised. Louisa Guy dropped next to him.
For another moment they waited. Min’s hand dropped to his pocket again, and his thumb stroked the paperweight’s smooth surface. Then the pair advanced on the back door.
As they got closer, Min thought he could hear music.
Audible music strained from an upstairs room, and light bled skywards from a skylight. It was what—after four? And Dan Hobbs could hear the music out here in the street.
He thought: I was a neighbour, I’d break the runt’s neck. Toss a wheelie bin through his window to grab his attention, and then take him by the neck and squeeze until his eyes pop like grapes.
Dan Hobbs wasn’t having the best night of his life.
He leant on the bell.
After his encounter with Jackson Lamb at the hospital, he’d come to on the floor; no obvious bruising, but he felt like he’d been trampled underfoot. The storeroom door hung open. River Cartwright was gone. Hobbs had got to his feet and made his way upstairs, where the first person he’d encountered was the newly arrived Nick Duffy.
And Hobbs learned the hard way that shit travels downwards.
‘He was just this fat guy. How was I to know—’
‘Remember Sam Chapman? Bad Sam?’
Hobbs did.
‘Bad Sam once said he wasn’t frightened of anyone except overweight guys with bad breath and ill-fitting shirts. You know why?’
Hobbs didn’t.
‘Because once in a nun’s nightmare, one of them would turn out to be Jackson Lamb. And by the time you’d realized that, you’d lost your lunch, your boots and most of your teeth. Now fuck off back to the Park.’
A couple of hours’ fuming, and he had new instructions; another slow horse to collect.
‘Name’s Roderick Ho.’ Duffy read out the address. ‘Slough House geek. Think you can handle him on your own?’
Hobbs took a breath. The Service was hierarchical, to put it mildly, but you didn’t get to be one of the Dogs by meekly observing the protocols. ‘In my fucking sleep,’ he told his boss. ‘You said yourself, even Sam Chapman couldn’t take Lamb, and I didn’t know it was him. So give me a break, all right?’
A twelve-second silence followed. Then Duffy said, ‘You’re as much use as an elastic anchor, you know that? But my four-year-old niece could take down Ho, so I’m going to trust you.’
Carefully keeping relief from his voice, Hobbs asked, ‘How hard do I bring him in?’
‘C&C.’
Dogs’ slang for collect-and-comfort. Which meant without worrying onlookers.
‘And Dan? Screw this up, and I’ll sack your whole family.’
He wouldn’t. This wouldn’t wipe the slate, but would show he was still in the game. And intended to remain there.
And the next time he encountered Jackson Lamb—But he shook that thought free too. Nothing screwed you up faster than keeping score.
And now he was at Ho’s place. He’d have gone in through the back, but the music changed the rules. Ho was awake. Possibly had company. Geeks had social lives. Who knew?
Company or not, nobody was opening the door. He leant on the bell again, and stayed there.
Having been caught once this evening, he’d done his research, or had the Queens of the Database do it for him. Roderick Ho’s records had been on his BlackBerry long before he’d got here, and it was clear from the physicals that if Ho hadn’t been geek-supreme, he’d have been invalided out to spare everyone’s embarrassment. He looked the type to wear a smog-mask on the tube. And if it turned out the records lied, and Ho was Bruce Lee’s forgotten cousin, that was fine too. Hobbs knew some moves himself.
Did the music stutter? Something had happened. Without taking his hand from the bell, Hobbs peered through the marbled window. A fuzzy shape was coming to the door.
Roderick Ho hadn’t been to bed. Roderick Ho didn’t sleep much anyway, but tonight he had business. Tonight, he was paying off a debt.
On his way home he’d picked up two economy-sized bags of tortilla chips, and had dropped both when a twat in a Lexus honked him on a zebra … His glasses had slipped off when he’d bent to retrieve them, and the twat in the Lexus honked again, and it was obvious he’d been enjoying this, was simply livening up those dead moments when he’d been forced to wait at a crossing for a
That had been then. This was now:
