Real Tigers (11 page)

Lamb had
taken his shoes off and his office smelled of socks, which was the fourth worst thing Louisa remembered it smelling of. She took a breath, stepped across the threshold and told him what Ho had just told her.

“He's back at the Park?” Lamb considered this for a moment. “That'd make his grandad proud, if he was still alive.”

“He is still alive, isn't he?”

“Yeah, but finding out Junior's been arrested'll probably kill him,” Lamb said reasonably.

“What makes you think he's been arrested?”

“If his phone's blocked, it means he's downstairs. And if he's downstairs, it's not because they've opened the dungeons to the public.”

Louisa, remembering tales she'd heard of below-stairs interrogations at the Park, wondered what the hell had River done to wind up there. And how he had managed it so quickly. It was only a couple of hours since they'd both been in the kitchen, making coffee. He'd asked her where Catherine was. And Catherine was still nowhere.

She said, “It's not a coincidence.”

“What, him and Standish both going AWOL? I doubt it.”

“So what do we do?”

“I do what I always do. And you do whatever you were doing yesterday.” With dexterity surprising in one so large, Lamb raised his right foot and rested it on his left knee. He began massaging it roughly. “Census project, right?”

“So we all just carry on as normal.”

“As if you were normal, yes. Nothing like ambition.” He grabbed a pencil from his desk, and began using it as a scratcher, working it between his toes. “Are you still here?”

“What'll happen to River?”

“When they've finished stripping the flesh from his bones, I expect they'll send him back. He'll only make the place untidy otherwise.”

“Seriously.”

“That wasn't serious? Which part of it did you find funny?”

“You've got two joes missing, and you're just going to sit there making holes in your socks?”

“None of you are joes, Guy. You're just a bunch of fuck-ups who got lucky.”

“This is lucky?”

Lamb's lip curled. “I didn't say what kind of luck.”

He tossed the pencil back onto the desk, where it kept on rolling until it dropped off the other side.

Louisa said, “We're not joes, no. But we're your joes. You know that.”

“Don't get carried away. This is Slough House. It isn't
Spooks
.”

“You're telling me. It's barely
Jackanory
.” She took a step into the room. “But you think something's happened to Catherine, or you wouldn't have sent me round to her flat. And whatever River was up to has to have something to do with that. So no, I'm not going back to the census project. Not until you tell me what you're going to do about it.”

It was dark in Lamb's room, as usual; he'd closed the blinds and turned his low-wattage desk lamp on. This sat on a pile of telephone directories, long since rendered obsolete, and the shadows it cast mostly confined themselves to floor level, where they crawled about like spiders. The ceiling sloped and the floorboards creaked, and such things as he'd hung on the walls—a cork notice board on which clipped coupons faded to brittle yellow dustiness, like the corpses of pinned moths, and a smeary-glassed print of a bridge over a foreign-looking river, which had almost certainly come from a charity shop—served to underline the general creepiness. It wasn't a cosy atmosphere he aimed for, and the look he directed at Louisa now underlined that fact.

“I think you're forgetting who's top banana round here.”

“No. I'm just reminding you that you are.”

She was expecting one of his leers, or perhaps a raspberry, or even a fart—there'd been indications in the past that he could deliver these at will, unless he was just unusually lucky with his timing. But instead Lamb put his foot heavily on the floor, and leaned back in his chair so far it audibly strained. In place of his usual repertoire of grimaces, his face seemed blank, lineless almost; a passive mask behind which she could sense his thoughts rolling around themselves.

At last he said, “I'll make a call,” with all the enthusiasm of one preparing to tote a barge, or lift a bale.

Louisa nodded, remaining where she was.

“It's a phone call, not a shag. I don't need someone watching to make sure I'm doing it right.”

That wasn't an image Louisa wanted in her head. She left him to it, but didn't close the door on her way out.

“What were
you planning on doing with the file?” Duffy said. “And who were you planning on selling it to?”

“I wasn't going to sell it.”

“Course not. Going to keep it for a little bedtime reading, right?” Duffy stood and pushed the chair, which fell flat on the floor. “Rub one out while rummaging through the PM's little secrets.”

“Does he really have secrets worth rubbing one out to?”

Duffy paused in front of the mirror, pretending it was a mirror. He ran a hand through his cropped hair, maybe checking for bald patches. Or perhaps making secret hand signals to whoever was on the other side.

He said, “What's really funny is you finding this funny.”

“I'm not.”

“Because this is one joke's going to have to last you an awful long time. Couple of years down the road, you might have trouble squeezing any more chuckles from it.” He took a step towards River, who was leaning against the wall, and stood directly in front of him. River could smell the fabric conditioner he'd used on his tracksuit. Duffy had put it on fresh from the wash.

He said, “They have Catherine Standish.”

“Standish.”

“There was a photograph. Came to my phone from hers. It was taken this morning, last night. They wanted the file.”

“Standish,” Duffy said again. “She's another of your special needs crew, right?”

“Can I be there when you say that to Lamb?”

“You don't get to be anywhere without somebody's say-so, Cartwright. Your whole future's one long yes-sir, no-sir.”

That sounded horribly plausible. And River was scared, because Duffy was good at this, but he was scareder, somehow, of letting it show.

Not letting it show was all he had left right now.

“They've got Catherine Standish, and somebody needs to go find her. The picture's on my phone. Whoever's behind that mirror needs to take a look at it
now
.”

“This isn't about your amateur porn collection, Cartwright. It's about your attempt to steal the PM's vetting file. Did you really think you'd get away with that?”

“The guy I spoke to was early fifties, five nine. Grey suit, yellow tie, black shoes. Dark hair going silver at the temples. English, white, upper-class accent—”

Duffy slammed his left hand against the wall, an inch from River's ear. “And he's your buyer, right? He's the man instructed you to break into the Park.”

“I didn't break in.”

“Well you weren't fucking invited. Where'd this happen?”

“Over by Barbican.”

“And this toff what, dropped in on Slough House?”

“I told you, he sent—”

Duffy slammed his other hand against the wall, and leaned forward so his forehead was almost touching River's. “You want to know why I'm having trouble believing this fairy story, Cartwright?”

“Look at my phone.”

“It's because if any of it even remotely happened, you know where you'd be now? Back at your desk, doing your job. Having reported all these . . .
unusual
events to your boss, who'd have passed them up the line exactly the way it says in the protocols. Because if you'd done anything different, Cartwright, you'd have knowingly endangered the life of your fellow . . . What is it they call you over there?”

River could smell Duffy's breath. Could feel the heat of the sweat forming on his brow.

“Can't hear you.”

“You know what they call us.”

And then he was doubling over in pain, that familiar terrible pain men learn early and never forget. In a minute or two, it would get worse. But for the moment the impact of Duffy's knee into his testicles wiped out all thought of his future.

Duffy stepped away, and River fell to the floor.

Diana Taverner
answered on the third ring and said, “What do you want?”

“No, really,” said Lamb. “The pleasure's all mine.”

He'd called her mobile, though he knew she'd be at her desk—she had that level of devotion to duty at least partly fired by fear that someone would move into her office if she left it for long.

“Been meaning to call you, actually,” she said. “Finance are querying your latest expense sheet. How come you clock up so much in travel costs when you barely leave your room?”

“How come Finance are passing their queries on to you?”

“Because her high-and-mighty Dameness has decreed that all and any manner of crap be redirected my way.” A pause followed, just long enough for her to be lighting a cigarette if that weren't a shootable offence at the Park. “She wants to underline how indispensable I am, which means she thinks she's found a way of dispensing with me.”

Because he wasn't at the Park, and because nobody got shot at Slough House without his permission, Lamb lit a cigarette. “You sound quite relaxed about it.”

“She'll have to get up earlier than she thinks she has,” Taverner said, which would have sounded cryptic from anyone else, but was reasonably lucid for her. “So. These expense sheets.”

“Don't push me, Diana. I have hostages, remember?”

“They're not your hostages, Jackson. They're your staff.”

“You say potato,” said Lamb. “Anyway, I don't have as many as I used to. A birdy tells me you've got one of mine in your lock-up.”

“That would be River Cartwright.”

“Yes, but don't blame me. I think his mother was a hippy.”

“Smoke a lot of dope while he was in the womb, did she? That might explain today's dipshit behaviour. And I thought he was one of your cleverer boys.”

“Mind like a razor,” Lamb agreed. “Disposable. Anyway, when you've finished ticking him off, pack him back this way, would you? I've thought of three different ways of making his life hell, and I'm itching to put them into practice.”

That he was itching was beyond doubt. His pencil being out of reach he'd grabbed a plastic ruler, and was sawing away at the gaps between the toes on his right foot, a task made easier now the fabric of his sock had given way.

“Yeah, right.” Taverner gave her throaty chuckle, famous for making the old boys on the Oversight Committee stand to attention. “You might need to practise your latest . . .
wheezes
on someone else.”

“‘Wheezes'?”

“This isn't one of your daily misdemeanours, Lamb. Cartwright attempted to steal, or photograph, a Scott-level document, leaking which would have caused serious embarrassment to both the Service and the government. We're not going to send him back to you with a slapped wrist. Anyway, it's out of my hands. He's with the Dogs. And when they're finished with him, they'll hand him over to the Met.”

Lamb took a long drag on his cigarette, noisily enough that Taverner knew what he was doing. He said, “Scott-level? You're still playing Thunderbirds over there?”

“Yes, but don't blame me. Unquote. Tearney thinks they're astronauts.” Her chuckle floated into Lamb's room once more, mixing with the cloud he'd just breathed out. “And if you think I don't know when you're processing, you're sadly wrong. You've no idea what your boy was up to, have you?”

“Well, I've got a birthday this year. Perhaps he was looking for that special gift.”

“I'll get those expense details emailed over. You might want to give them some more thought.”

“Diana?”

This time, it was more than a chuckle. This time it was an outright laugh. “Oh dear. Sounds like you're about to make a plea.”

Lamb said, “Cartwright's not my only joe gone walkabout. If there's anything happening I need to know about, you'd best email those details too. Save me having to come over there and ask you myself.”

He hung up, and gave his foot one last vicious tweak with the ruler, which split in half with a noise like a gunshot.

This being Slough House, and Lamb being Lamb, nobody came to find out if that's what it had been.

When he
could see again, all he could see was the floor. He spat, and then he could see the floor and some spit, and then his vision went wavy again, and then it came back.

So now you know, a small voice in the back of his head told him, what it's like to be kneed in the balls by an expert.

It's surprising how even the most basic of skills can become, in the hands of an artist, a minor masterpiece.

“I'm waiting,” another voice said. This one wasn't in his head; it existed in the rest of the world too.

River hauled himself into a squatting position where the pain didn't exactly subside, but allowed him to think that it might one day do so, and took a deep breath, half-scared that doing so would rupture something important. He looked for his voice, and found it a little farther away than usual. “Slow. Horses. They call us. The slow. Horses.” Even to himself, he sounded like a nonagenarian refugee. “And you know. What they call. You?”

“Everyone knows what they call us,” Duffy said. “They call us the Dogs.”

“No. They call the Dogs. The Dogs. They call you. A useless prick.”

“And yet you're the one lying on the floor.”

“You ever. Try that. Outside your own backyard,” River said. “We'll see who ends up. On the floor.”

It was getting easier again, this old talent of his: making words come out of his mouth. He looked up, and found Duffy looking straight back down at him.