Slow Horses полностью

And Ho knew the shape and colour of each and every smudge: the crimes of drugs, drunkenness, lechery, politics and betrayal—Slough House was full of secrets, and Ho knew the size and depth of each and every one of them, excepting two.

Which brought him to Sid. It could be Sid up there.

And here was the thing about Sid Baker: Ho didn’t know what crime Sid was being punished for. It was one of two secrets that eluded him.

That was probably the reason he didn’t like Sid.

As the kettle boiled, Ho picked over some of Slough House’s secrets; thought about the nervous idiot Min Harper, who’d left a classified disk on a train. He might have got away with this if the disk’s pouch hadn’t been bright red, and stamped Top Secret. And also if the woman who’d found it hadn’t handed it in to the BBC. Some things were too good to be true, unless you were the one they were happening to: for Min Harper, the episode had been too awful to believe, but had happened anyway. Which was why Min had spent the last two years of a once-promising career in charge of the first-floor shredder.

Steam billowed from the kettle’s lip. The kitchen was poorly ventilated, and plaster frequently flaked from the ceiling. Give it a while, the whole lot would come down. Ho poured water into a teabagged mug. The days were diced and sliced into segments like this; divided into moments spent pouring cups of tea or fetching sandwiches, and further mentally subdivided by rehearsing Slough House’s secrets, all but two …The rest of the time Ho would be at his monitor; ostensibly inputting data from long-closed incidents, but most of the time searching for the second secret, the one that ate away at him, and never slept.

With a spoon he fished the teabag out, and dropped it into the sink; a thought striking him as he did so: I know who’s upstairs. It’s River Cartwright. Has to be.

There wasn’t a single reason he could think of why Cartwright might be here this time of the morning, but still: place your bets. Ho bet Cartwright. That’s who was upstairs right now.

That figured. Ho really didn’t like River Cartwright.

He carried his mug back to his desk, where his monitor had swum into life.

Hobden put the Telegraph aside, its front-page photo a gurning Peter Judd. He’d made a few notes on the upcoming by-election—the Shadow Culture Minister had handed his cards in, last January’s strokes wrapping up his career—but nothing more. When politicians voluntarily shrugged off the mantle it was worth a closer look, but Robert Hobden was a veteran at parsing a story. He still read copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when D-notices were an issue; when the Regent’s Park mob had left their fingerprints on the facts. This was most likely what it seemed to be: a politician heading back to the sticks after a health scare. And Robert Hobden trusted his instincts. You didn’t stop being a journalist just because you were no longer in print. Especially when you knew you had a story, and were waiting for its fin to show above the waves of the everyday news. It would break surface sooner or later. And when it did, he would recognize it for what it was.

Meanwhile, he’d continue his daily trawl through this sea of print. It wasn’t as if much else troubled his time. Hobden wasn’t as connected as he used to be.

Face it, Hobden was a pariah.

And this, too, was down to Regent’s Park: at one time or another, he’d written for all these newspapers, but the spooks had put paid to that. So now he spent his mornings in Max’s, hunting down his scoop … This was what happened when you were close to a story: you worried everyone else was on it too. That your scoop was under threat. Which went double when spooks were involved. Hobden wasn’t an idiot. His notebook contained nothing that wasn’t public domain; when he typed his notes up, with added speculations, he saved them to his memory stick to keep his hard drive clean. And he kept a dummy, in case anyone tried to get clever. He wasn’t paranoid, but he wasn’t an idiot. Last night, prowling his flat, unsettled by the sense of something left undone, he’d run through unexpected encounters he’d had recently, strangers who had started conversations, but couldn’t come up with any. Then he’d run through other recent encounters, with his ex-wife, with his children, with former colleagues and friends, and couldn’t come up with any of them either. Outside of Max’s, no one wished him good morning … The thing left undone had been putting the rubbish out, but he’d remembered eventually.

‘Excuse me?’

It was the pretty redhead at the next table.

‘I said, excuse me?’

It turned out she was talking to him.

Fish bits. The last of the Searchlight parcels contained fish bits: not the bones and heads that would indicate that the journo fancied himself in the kitchen, but the hardened edges of batter and skin, and lumps of charcoaled chip that suggested his local takeaway wasn’t the best.