Dead Lions (3 page)

Without looking up, she said, “Is this a chat-up?”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“Because that would not be wise.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Well then.”

For almost a minute that was that. Shirley could feel her watch ticking; could feel through the desk’s surface the computer struggling to return to life. Two pairs of feet tracked downstairs. Harper and Guy. She wondered where they were off to.

“So given that it’s not a chat-up, is it okay if we talk?”

“About what?”

“Anything.”

Now she gave him a hard stare.

Marcus Longridge shrugged. “Like it or not, we’re sharing. It wouldn’t hurt if we said more than shut the door.”

“I’ve never told you to shut the door.”

“Or whatever.”

“Actually I prefer it open. Feels less like a prison cell.”

“That’s good,” said Marcus. “See, we’ve got a discussion going. Spent much time in prison?”

“I’m not in the mood, okay?”

He shrugged. “Okay. But there’s six and something hours of the working day left. And twenty years of the working life. We could spend it in silence if you’d rather, but one of us’ll go mad and the other’ll go crazy.” He bent back to his computer.

Downstairs, the back door slammed. Shirley’s screen swam bluely into life, thought about it, and crashed again. Now conversation had been attempted, its absence screamed like a fire alarm. Her wristwatch pulsed. There was nothing she could do about it; the words had to be said.

“Speak for yourself.”

He said, “About?”

“Twenty years of working life.”

“Right.”

“More like forty in my case.”

Marcus nodded. It didn’t show on his face, but he felt triumph.

He knew a beginning when he heard one.

In Reading
, Jackson Lamb had tracked down the station manager, for whose benefit he adopted a fussy, donnish air. It wasn’t hard to believe Lamb an academic: shoulders dusted with dandruff; green V-neck stained by misjudged mouthfuls of takeaway; frayed shirtcuffs poking from overcoat sleeves. He was overweight, from sitting around in libraries probably, and his thinning dirty-blond
hair was brushed back over his head. The stubble on his cheeks sang of laziness, not cool. He’d been said to resemble Timothy Spall, with worse teeth.

The station manager directed him to the company which supplied replacement buses, and ten minutes later Lamb was doing fussy academic again; this time with a bottom note of grief. “My brother,” he said.

“Oh. Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

Lamb waved a forgiving hand.

“No, that’s awful. I’m really sorry.”

“We hadn’t spoken in years.”

“Well, that makes it worse, doesn’t it?”

Lamb, who had no opinion, gave assent. “It does. It does.” His eyes clouded as he recalled an imaginary infant episode in which two brothers enjoyed a moment of absolute fraternal loyalty, little knowing that the years to come would drive a wedge between them; that they would not speak during middle age; which would come to a halt for one of them on a bus in dark Oxfordshire, where he would succumb to …

“Heart attack, was it?”

Unable to speak, Lamb nodded.

The depot manager shook his head sadly. It was a bad business. And not much of an advert, a customer dying on a unit; though then again, it wasn’t as if liability lay with the company. Apart from anything else, the corpse hadn’t been in possession of a valid ticket.

“I wondered …”

“Yes?”

“Which bus was it? Is it here now?”

There were four coaches in the yard; another two in the sheds, and as it happened, the depot manager knew precisely which one had unintentionally doubled as a hearse, and it was parked not ten yards away.

“Only I’d like to sit in it a moment,” Lamb said. “Where he sat. You know?”

“I’m not sure what …”

“It’s not that I believe in a life force, precisely,” Lamb explained, a tremor in his voice. “But I’m not positive I don’t believe in it, do you see what I mean?”

“Of course. Of course.”

“And if I could just sit where he was sitting when he … passed, well …”

Unable to continue, he turned to gaze over the brick wall enclosing the yard, and beyond the office block opposite. A pair of Canada geese were making their way riverwards; their plaintive honking underlining Lamb’s sadness.

Or that’s how it seemed to the depot manager.

“There,” he said. “It’s that one over there.”

Abandoning his scanning of the skies, Lamb fixed him with wide and innocent gratitude.

Shirley Dander
tapped a pencil uselessly against her reluctant monitor, then put it down. As it hit the desk, she made a plosive noise with her lips.

“… What?”

“What’s ‘wouldn’t dare’ supposed to mean?” she said.

“I don’t follow.”

“When I asked if you were chatting me up. You said you wouldn’t dare.”

Marcus Longridge said, “I heard the story.”

That figured, she thought. Everyone had heard the story.

Shirley Dander was five two; brown eyes, olive skin, and a full mouth she didn’t smile with much. Broad in the shoulder and wide in the hip, she favoured black: black jeans, black tops, black trainers. Once, in her hearing, it had been suggested she had the sex appeal of a traffic bollard, a comment delivered by a notorious
sexual incompetent. On the day she was assigned to Slough House she’d had a buzz cut she’d refreshed every week since.

That she had inspired obsession was beyond doubt: specifically, a fourth-desk Comms operative at Regent’s Park, who had pursued her with a diligence which took no heed of the fact that she was in a relationship. He’d taken to leaving notes on her desk; to calling her lover’s flat at all hours. Given his job, he had no trouble making these calls untraceable. Given hers, she had no trouble tracing them.

There were protocols in place, of course; a grievance procedure which involved detailing “inappropriate behaviours” and evidencing “disrespectful attitudes;” guidelines which carried little weight with staff who’d spent a minimum of eight weeks on assault training as part of their probation. After a night in which he’d called six times, he’d approached her in the canteen to ask how she’d slept, and Shirley had decked him with one clean punch.

She might have got away with this if she hadn’t hauled him to his feet and decked him again with a second.

Issues, was the verdict from HR. It was clear that Shirley Dander had issues.

Marcus was talking through her thoughts: “Everybody heard the story, man. Someone told me his feet left the floor.”

“Only the first time.”

“You were lucky not to get shitcanned.”

“You reckon?”

“Point taken. But mixing it on the hub? Guys have been sacked for less.”

“Guys maybe,” she said. “Sacking a girl for flattening a creep who’s harassing her, that’s embarrassing. Especially if the ‘girl’ in question wants to get legal about it.” The inverted commas round girl couldn’t have been more audible if she’d said quote/unquote. “Besides, I had an edge.”

“What sort of edge?”

She kicked back from her desk with both feet, and her chair-legs squealed on the floor. “What are you after?”

“Nothing.”

“Because you sound pretty curious for someone just making conversation.”

“Well,” he told her, “without curiosity, what kind of conversation have you got?”

She studied him. He wasn’t bad looking, for his age; had what appeared to be a lazy left eyelid, but this gave him a watchful air, as if he were constantly sizing the world up. His hair was longer than hers, but not by much; he wore a neatly trimmed beard and moustache, and was careful how he dressed. Today this meant well-pressed jeans and a white collarless shirt under a grey jacket; his black and purple Nicole Farhi scarf hung on the coatstand. She’d noticed all this not because she cared but because everything was information. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that meant nothing. Besides, everyone was divorced or unhappy.

“Okay,” she said. “But if you’re playing me, you’re likely to find out first-hand just how hard I hit.”

He raised his hands in not entirely mock-surrender. “Hey, I’m just trying to establish a working relationship. You know. Us being the newbies.”

“It’s not like the others put up a united front. ’Cept maybe Harper and Guy.”

“They don’t have to,” Marcus said. “They’ve got resident status.” His fingers played a quick trill across his keyboard, then he pushed it away and shunted his chair sideways. “What do you make of them?”

“As a group?”

“Or one by one. It doesn’t have to be a seminar.”

“Where do we start?”

Marcus Longridge said, “We start with Lamb.”

Perched on
the back seat of a bus where a man had died, Jackson Lamb was looking out at a cracked concrete forecourt and a pair of wooden gates, beyond which lay Reading town centre. As a long-time Londoner, Lamb couldn’t contemplate this without a shudder.

For the moment, though, he concentrated on doing what he was pretending to do, which was sit in quiet recall of the man he’d said was his brother, but who in reality had been Dickie Bow: too daft to be a workname, but too cute to be real. Dickie and Lamb had been in Berlin at the same time, but from this distance, Lamb had trouble recalling the other man’s face. The image he kept coming up with was sleek and pointy, like a rat, but then that’s what Dickie Bow had been, a street rat; adept at crawling through holes too small for him. That had been his key survival skill. It didn’t appear to have helped him lately.

(A heart attack, the postmortem had said. Not especially surprising in a man who drank as much, and smoked as much, and ate as much fried food as Dickie Bow. Uncomfortable reading for Lamb, whose habits it might have been describing.)

Reaching out, he traced a finger over the back of the seat in front. Its surface was mostly smooth; the one burn mark obviously ancient; the faint tracery in a corner suggesting random scratching rather than an attempt to etch a dying message … It was years since Bow had been in the Service, and even then, he’d been one of that great army who’d never quite been inside the tent. You could always trust a street rat, the wisdom ran, because every time one of them took money from the other side, he’d be on your doorstep next morning, expecting you to match the offer.

There was no brotherhood code. If Dickie Bow had succumbed to a mattress fire, Lamb would have got through the five stages without batting an eye: denial, anger, bargaining, indifference, breakfast. But Bow had died on the back seat of a moving coach, without a ticket in his pocket. Booze, fags and fry-ups
aside, the PM couldn’t explain Bow’s being in the sticks when he should have been working his shift at a Soho pornshop.

Standing, Lamb ran a hand along the overhead rack, and found nothing. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have been anything left by Dickie Bow, not after six days. Then he sat again, and studied the rubber lining along the base of the window, looking for scratch marks—ridiculous perhaps, but Moscow Rules meant assuming your mail was read. When you needed to leave a message, you left it by other means. Though in this instance, a thumbnail on a rubber lining wasn’t one of them.

A hesitant, polite cough from the front of the coach.

“I, ah—”

Lamb looked up mournfully.

“I don’t mean to rush you. But are you going to be much longer?”

“One minute,” Lamb said.

Actually, he needed less than that. Even while he was speaking he was sliding his hand down the back of the seat, forcing it between the two cushions, encountering a gobbet of ancient chewing gum hardened to a tumour on the fabric; a welter of biscuit crumbs; a paperclip; a coin too small to be worth pocketing; and the edge of something hard which squirted out of his reach, forcing him to delve deeper, the cuff of his overcoat riding up his arm as he pushed. And there it was again, a smooth plastic shell snuggling into his grip. Lamb scratched his wrist deep enough to draw blood as he pulled his treasure free, but didn’t notice. All his attention was focused on his prize: an old, fat, bottom-of-the-line mobile phone.

“Lamb, well
. Lamb’s everything he’s made out to be.”

“Which is?”

“Some kind of fat bastard.”

“Who goes way back.”

“A long-lived fat bastard. The worst kind. He sits upstairs and craps on the rest of us. It’s like he gets pleasure out of running a department full of …”

“Losers.”

“You calling me a loser?”

“We’re both here, aren’t we?”

Work was forgotten. Marcus Longridge, having just called Shirley Dander a loser, gave her a bright smile. She paused, wondering what she was getting into. Trust nobody, she’d decided when she’d first set foot in this place. The buzz-cut was part of that. Trust nobody. And here she was on the verge of opening up to Marcus simply because he was the one she was sharing an office with: And what was he smiling at? Did he think he was being friendly? Take a deep breath, she told herself; but a mental one. Don’t let him see.

This was the crux of Communications: find out all you can, but give nothing away.

She said, “The jury’s still out on that. What do you make of him, anyway?”

“Well, he’s running his own department.”

“Some department. More like a charity shop.” She slapped a hand on her PC. “This should be in a museum for a start. We’re supposed to catch bad guys with this shit? We’d have a better chance standing on Oxford Street with a clipboard. Excuse me, sir, are you a terrorist?”

“Sir or Miss,” Marcus corrected her. Then said, “We’re not expected to catch anyone, we’re supposed to get bored and go join a security firm. But the point is, whatever we’re here for, Lamb’s not being punished. Or if he is, he’s enjoying it.”

“So what’s your point?”

He said, “That he knows where some bodies are buried. Probably buried a few himself.”

“Is that a metaphor?”

“I failed English. Metaphor’s a closed book to me.”

“So you think he’s handy?”

“Well, he’s overweight and drinks and smokes and I doubt he takes much exercise that doesn’t involve picking up a phone and calling out for a curry. But yeah, now you mention it, I think he’s handy.”