Louisa had peered round the door three minutes back to give them a heads-up on a possible Lamb appearance: as a result, the pair were staring at their screens; a reasonable facsimile of work, except that Shirley was still wet. Marcus’s monitor throbbed in front of him. Even after all this time in Slough House he found it hard to adjust to its routines; switch mind and body off, become an automaton, processing random information sets. Burnt-out vehicles, that was his spreadsheet: burnt-out cars and vans—hardly an unusual sight in British cities. He’d seen one himself last week, in a supermarket car-park; a black husk squatting in a pool of sooty residue. It would have been joy-ridden there then set alight, as the simplest way of eradicating evidence—the kids who’d taken it convinced that the forces of law and order were itching to go CSI on their gangsta asses; ready to swab DNA from seats, prints from the steering wheel. Safer just to torch that baby, and watch it crack and buckle in the heat.
But what if it wasn’t as simple as that, Lamb wanted to know? (Important corollary: Lamb didn’t want to know—Lamb couldn’t care less. Lamb had just hit on another way of wasting a slow horse’s time.) What if these torch-happy kids weren’t just lighting up their stolen rides; what if they were experimenting with ways of blowing cars up—calculating blast radiuses; measuring the potential damage varying payloads could deliver? So here was Marcus, whose role in life had been kicking down doors, retooling himself as an analyst; staring at a screen which broke down five years’ worth of vehicular arson by make, location, accelerant used, and a dozen other variables . . . There was always the possibility Lamb had a point—anyone who found the notion too high-concept just had to turn the TV on, and watch footage of the onesie-clad forensics crew picking through Westacres’ ashes. But either way, this wasn’t the part of the process Marcus should have been involved in. He should be the one they called when they had a suspect holed up in a towerblock with hostages. The one they decked out in Kevlar and dropped down a chimney:
Control, alt, delete.
The radiator gurgled noisily, interrupting his chain of thought, but at least it meant heat was moving around the building, which meant someone was paying bills. Marcus wasn’t. Marcus was accumulating a drawerful of red letters: final demands for electricity and gas. Cassie was talking about taking the kids, going to her mother’s “for a bit,” and that was even without knowing about the unpaid bills—her repossessed car had been the final straw.
“You said you’d got it under control.”
His gambling, she meant.
“You said you’d drawn a line, walked away. No more money down the drain. You
And he’d meant it, too, but how did you stop money disappearing once it had decided to go? It was even less responsive to persuasion than Cassie.
He thought: I’ve turned into one of those men worth more dead than alive. More of us than you’d think. It’s not just the Jihadi Johns out there in the scrublands, living off camel meat and sleeping in holes but with a million-dollar price tag on their heads: it’s the rest of us too. Us poor working saps in debt to our eyeballs, a never-ending mortgage, and bills papering the walls; barely enough spare cash for a cup of coffee, but shouldering game-changing amounts of life insurance. I could keel over right here right now, and the death-in-service payout would solve all my problems. The house would be free and clear; money left over to see the kids through university. Best thing all round, except for being dead. But that’s going to happen sooner or later, so why not here at my desk? . . . He should raise that as a joke with Cassie, except she might not laugh. And no amount of Kevlar offered protection from a woman’s disappointment.
The slamming of a keyboard roused him from his reverie. Shirley was having hardware issues, and resolving them in her traditional manner.
“. . . You got an AFM later?” he asked.
“Who needs to know?” she snarled.
“Nobody at all,” said Marcus, and tapped at his own keyboard randomly for a moment, as if by altering the rows of figures on his screen, he might also change the facts he was confronted with: not simply the half-a-decade’s worth of destroyed cars, but his own dwindling net worth; the sums snapping at his heels growing ever larger, ever more vicious, and his ability to outpace them weakening by the day.
If he was going to walk to the village he’d need his wellingtons. Yesterday, he’d had to return home before he’d got fifty yards—a soft-shoe shuffle back down the drive; slippers jettisoned into the bin, soaked and useless. Well, a moment of absent-mindedness, and there’d been no witnesses. This was one of the advantages of living in semi-isolation, though you could never be certain there were no stoats watching.
“Know what I mean by stoats?”
