Slow Horses (2 page)
Static burst in his ear.
The tannoy said: ‘Please make your way calmly to the nearest exit. This station is now closed.’
‘River?’
He shouted into his button. ‘Spider? You idiot, you called the wrong colours!’
‘What the hell’s happening? There are crowds coming out of every—’
‘White tee under a blue shirt. That’s what you said.’
‘No, I said blue tee under—’
‘Fuck you, Spider.’ River yanked his earpiece out.
He’d reached the stairs, where the crowd sucks into the underground. Now, it was streaming out. Irritation was its main emotion, but it carried other whispers: fear, suppressed panic. Most of us hold that some things only happen to other people. Many of us hold that one such thing is death. The tannoy’s words chipped away at this belief.
‘The station is now closed. Please make your way to the nearest exit.’
The tube was the city’s heartbeat, thought River. Not an east-bound platform. The tube.
He pushed into the evacuating crowd, ignoring its hostility.
Let me through.
This had minimal impact.
Security. Let me through.
That was better. No path opened, but people stopped pushing him back.
Two minutes before the Dogs. Less.
The corridor widened at the foot of the stairs. River raced round the corner, where a broader space waited—ticket machines against walls; ticket windows with blinds drawn down; their recent queues absorbed into the mass of people heading elsewhere. Already, the crowd had thinned. Escalators had been halted; tape strung across to keep fools off. The platforms below were emptying of passengers.
River was stopped by a transport cop.
‘Station’s being cleared. Can’t you hear the bloody tannoy?’
‘I’m with intelligence. Are the platforms clear?’
‘Intelli—?’
‘Are the platforms clear?’
‘They’re being evacuated.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘It’s what I’ve been—’
‘You have CC?’
‘Well of course we—’
‘Show me.’
The surrounding noises grew rounder; echoes of departing travellers swam across the ceilings. But other sounds were approaching: quick footsteps, heavy on the tiled floor. The Dogs. River had little time to put this right.
‘Now.’
The cop blinked, but caught River’s urgency—could hardly miss it—and pointed over his own shoulder at a door marked
No Access
. River was through it before the footsteps’ owner appeared.
The small windowless room smelled of bacon, and looked like a voyeur’s den. A swivel chair faced a bank of TV monitors. Each blinked regularly, shifting focus on the same repeated scene: a deserted underground platform. It was like a dull science fiction film.
A draught told him the cop had come in.
‘Which platforms are which?’
The cop pointed: groups of four. ‘Northern. Piccadilly. Victoria.’
River scanned them. Every two seconds, another blink.
From underfoot came a distant rumble.
‘What’s that?’
The cop stared.
‘
What?
’
‘That would be a tube train.’
‘They’re running?’
‘Station’s closed,’ the cop said, as if to an idiot. ‘But the lines are open.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes. But the trains won’t stop.’
They wouldn’t need to.
‘What’s next?’
‘What’s—?’
‘Next train, damn it. Which platform?’
‘Victoria. Northbound.’
River was out of the door.
At the top of the shallow flight of stairs, barring the way back to the mainline station, a short dark man stood, talking into a headset. His tone changed abruptly when he saw River.
‘He’s here.’
But River wasn’t. He’d leaped the barrier and was at the top of the nearest escalator; snapping back the security tape; heading down the motionless staircase, two deep steps at a time.
At the bottom, it was eerily empty. That sci-fi vibe again.
Tube trains pass closed stations at a crawl. River reached the deserted platform as the train pulled into it like a big slow animal, with eyes for him alone. And it had plenty of eyes. River felt all of them, all those pairs of eyes trapped in the belly of the beast; intent on him as he stared down the platform, at someone who’d just appeared from an exit at the far end.
White shirt. Blue tee.
River ran.
Behind him someone else ran too, calling his name, but that didn’t matter. River was racing a train. Racing it and winning—drawing level with it, outpacing it; he could hear its slow motion noise; a grinding mechanical feedback underpinned by the terror growing within. He could hear thumping on windows. Was aware that the driver was looking at him in horror, thinking he was about to hurl himself on to the tracks. But River couldn’t help what anyone thought—River could only do what he was doing, which was run down the platform at exactly this speed.
Up ahead—blue tee, white shirt—someone else was also doing the only thing he could do.
River didn’t have breath to shout. He barely had breath to push himself onwards, but he managed …
Almost managed. Almost managed to be fast enough.
Behind him, his name was shouted again. Behind him, the tube train was picking up pace.
He was aware of the driver’s cabin overhauling him, five yards from the target.
Because this was the target. This had always been the target. And the swiftly narrowing distance between them showed him for the youngster he was: eighteen? Nineteen? Black hair. Brown skin. And a blue tee under a white shirt—
fuck you, Spider
—that he was unbuttoning to reveal a belt packed tight with …
The train pulled level with the target.
River stretched out an arm, as if he could bring the finishing line closer.
The footsteps behind him slowed and stopped. Someone swore.
River was almost on the target—was half a second away.
But close wasn’t nearly enough.
The target pulled a cord on his belt.
And that was that.
Let us be clear about this much at least: Slough House is not in Slough, nor is it a house. Its front door lurks in a dusty recess between commercial premises in the Borough of Finsbury, a stone’s throw from Barbican Station. To its left is a former newsagent’s, now a newsagent’s/grocer’s/off-licence, with DVD rental a blooming sideline; to its right, the New Empire Chinese restaurant, whose windows are constantly obscured by a thick red curtain. A typewritten menu propped against the glass has yellowed with age but is never replaced; is merely amended with marker pen. If diversification has been the key to the newsagent’s survival, retrenchment has been the long-term strategy of the New Empire, with dishes regularly struck from its menu like numbers off a bingo card. It is one of Jackson Lamb’s core beliefs that eventually all the New Empire will offer will be egg-fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork. All served behind thick red curtains, as if paucity of choice were a national secret.
The front door, as stated, lurks in a recess. Its ancient black paintwork is spattered with roadsplash, and the shallow pane of glass above its jamb betrays no light within. An empty milk bottle has stood in its shadow so long, city lichen has bonded it to the pavement. There is no doorbell, and the letterbox has healed like a childhood wound: any mail—and there’s never any mail—would push at its flap without achieving entry. It’s as if the door were a dummy, its only reason for existing being to provide a buffer zone between shop and restaurant. Indeed, you could sit at the bus stop opposite for days on end, and never see anyone use it. Except that, if you sat at the bus stop opposite for long, you’d find interest being taken in your presence. A thickset man, probably chewing gum, might sit next to you. His presence discourages. He wears an air of repressed violence, of a grudge carried long enough that it’s ceased to matter to him where he lays it down, and he’ll watch you until you’re out of sight.
Meanwhile, the stream in and out of the newsagent’s is more or less constant. And there’s always pavement business occurring; always people heading one way or the other. A kerbside sweeper trundles past, its revolving brushes shuffling cigarette ends and splinters of glass and bottle tops into its maw. Two men, heading in opposite directions, perform that little avoidance dance, each one’s manoeuvre mirrored by the other’s, but manage to pass without colliding. A woman, talking on a mobile phone, checks her reflection in the window as she walks. Way overhead a helicopter buzzes, reporting on roadworks for a radio station.
And throughout all this, which happens every day, the door remains closed. Above the New Empire and the newsagent’s, Slough House’s windows rise four storeys into Finsbury’s unwelcoming October skies, and are flaked and grimy, but not opaque. To the upstairs rider on a passing bus, delayed for any length of time—which can easily happen; a combination of traffic lights, near-constant roadworks, and the celebrated inertia of London buses—they offer views of first-floor rooms that are mostly yellow and grey. Old yellow, and old grey. The yellows are the walls, or what can be seen of the walls behind grey filing cabinets and grey, institutional bookcases, on which are ranged out-of-date reference volumes; some lying on their backs; others leaning against their companions for support; a few still upright, the lettering on their spines rendered ghostly by a daily wash of electric light. Elsewhere, lever arch files have been higgledy-piggled into spaces too small; piles of them jammed vertically between shelves, leaving the uppermost squeezed outwards, threatening to fall. The ceilings are yellowed too, an unhealthy shade smeared here and there with cobweb. And the desks and chairs in these first-storey rooms are of the same functional metal as the bookshelves, and possibly commandeered from the same institutional source: a decommissioned barracks, or a prison administration block. These are not chairs to sit back in, gazing thoughtfully into space. Nor are they desks to treat as an extension of one’s personality, and decorate with photographs and mascots. Which facts in themselves convey a certain information: that those who labour here are not so well regarded that their comfort is deemed as being of account. They’re meant to sit and perform their tasks with the minimum of distraction. And then to leave by a back door, unobserved by kerbside sweepers, or women with mobile phones.
The bus’s upper deck offers less of a view of the next storey, though glimpses of the same nicotine-stained ceilings are available. But even a three-decker bus wouldn’t cast much light: the offices on the second floor are distressingly similar to those below. And besides, the information picked out in gold lettering on their windows says enough to dull interest.
W W Henderson
, it reads.
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths
. Occasionally, from behind the serifed flamboyance of this long-redundant logo, a figure will appear, and regard the street below as if he’s looking at something else altogether. But whatever that is, it won’t hold his attention long. In a moment or two, he’ll be gone.
No such entertainment is promised by the uppermost storey, whose windows have blinds drawn over them. Whoever inhabits this level is evidently disinclined to be reminded of a world outside, or to have accidental rays of sunshine pierce his gloom. But this too is a clue, since it indicates that whoever haunts this floor has the freedom to choose darkness, and freedom of choice is generally limited to those in charge. Slough House, then—a name which appears on no official documentation, nameplate or headed notepaper; no utility bill or deed of leasehold; no business card or phone book or estate agent’s listing; which is not this building’s name at all, in any but the most colloquial of senses—is evidently run from the top down, though judging by the uniformly miserable decor, the hierarchy is of a restricted character. You’re either at the top or you’re not. And only Jackson Lamb is at the top.
At length, the traffic lights change. The bus coughs into movement, and trundles on its way to St Paul’s. And in her last few seconds of viewing, our upstairs passenger might wonder what it’s like, working in these offices; might even conjure a brief fantasy in which the building, instead of a faltering legal practice, becomes an overhead dungeon to which the failures of some larger service are consigned as punishment: for crimes of drugs and drunkenness and lechery; of politics and betrayal; of unhappiness and doubt; and of the unforgivable carelessness of allowing a man on a tube platform to detonate himself, killing or maiming an estimated 120 people and causing £30m worth of actual damage, along with a projected £2.5 billion in lost tourist revenue—becomes, in effect, an administrative oubliette where, alongside a pre-digital overflow of paperwork, a post-useful crew of misfits can be stored and left to gather dust.
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.