Real Tigers (3 page)

He was part of her past, but other than knowing that much, she had little to go on. Of their actual lovemaking, if it could be so described, she had no memory. In those days, two drinks in, her immediate future became a blank slate, with everything scrawled thereon erased within moments of its appearance. He could have written her sonnets, or transcribed arias, and it would all be the same to her. But she knew that was never the case; that it had been fuck-buddy sex like always, because in those days anyone would have done, just so long as she had someone to cling to as she slid into the dark. Poems and operas were not required. A bottle would do the trick.

But while it was true that there were many she'd forgotten, of whom she'd barely been aware even while they were inside her, Sean Donovan had at least been there in the morning once or twice. Fond of the drink himself, he'd done her the false kindness of pretending they were bad as each other.
Man, my head this morning. We pushed the boat out all right.
But what for her had been blackout territory, for him had been a night on the tiles. She'd been a willing enough partner in this, because she was always willing back then. And if she'd been otherwise, Catherine wondered now, if she'd been sober, would they have stood a chance together? But there was no answering that.

She wasn't far from a tube station. From there she would make her way home, but first she took out her mobile and made a call. At the other end a phone went straight to voicemail. She didn't leave a message.

Phone back in her bag, she continued up the road.

A hundred yards behind her, a black van idled.

Shirley watched
Roderick Ho scrambling for his glasses, and wondered whether she should have slapped him like that. A backhander gave you the drop, sure, generally surprising the backhanded, but if she'd made an effort and formed a fist she could have broken the little bastard's nose. After informing him of her intention in writing, if she'd felt like it. Forewarned wouldn't have meant forearmed in Ho's case. Forewarned would have meant being punched in the nose anyway, after worrying about it first.

What was mildly disquieting about the incident, though, was that it didn't seem to have calmed her down.

In the general order of things, getting physical was releasing a valve, releasing endorphins, so afterwards you felt that sweet high, halfway between an ache and a caress—by rights, she should be watching Ho's cack-handed fumbling with a great big grin on her face, at peace enough to lend him a hand even, though the ungrateful little sod wouldn't thank her. Instead, she still felt wound to full pitch, enough to want to give him another slap. Which wasn't out of the question, obviously, but might put a strain on the remainder of the evening.

Marcus wasn't at the bar; he must have gone to the gents, unless he'd snuck off through the side door. Which must have been a temptation for him, but the way things stood, he wouldn't dare.

That morning, he'd said to her, “You know what that little shit's doing?”

There were any number of little shits this might have been, but top of the list was always going to be Roderick Ho.

“Cyberstalking you?”

“Well, duh. Apart from that.”

“He's dobbed you in?”

“Not yet. But he says he will.”

“Bastard.”

“You've not heard the half of it. Guess what his price for keeping shtum is.”

Shirley reflected now that it might have been a better idea not to laugh when he told her.

“A night in the pub? That's it?”

“I'd sooner give him cash.”

“Oh, that is fabulous. Take notes. I'm gonna want to hear all about this.”

“That's not a problem. You're coming too.”

“Dream on.”

“'Cause if it's just me and Ho, who knows where the conversation might lead? Once we've run through sport and politics, we might end up discussing our colleagues. Like, you know, who sneaks off early when they think no one's looking, and who leaves their dirty mugs in the sink.”

“Enthralling.”

“And who snorts coke.”

Shirley dropped her pen. “You wouldn't.”

“Won't get the opportunity. Not if you're there too.”

“That's blackmail.”

“What can I say? Learned from a master.”

So here she was, here they both were, suffering the company of Roderick Webhead Ho. No wonder she was feeling . . .

But she didn't want to use “uptight.”

Shirley had been at the dentist's the previous week, and flipping through a lifestyle magazine in the waiting room had encountered one of those diagnostic quizzes,
How uptight are you?
, and had started mentally checking off answers.
Do you get annoyed at queue-jumpers, even when you're not in a hurry?
Well, obviously, because it's a matter of principle isn't it? But other questions seemed designed to rile her.
You discover your partner met his/her ex for a drink, “for old times' sake.”
She didn't need to read the rest. This was supposed to show how “uptight” you were? Far as Shirley was concerned it was grading you on common sense . . . She'd hurled the magazine at the door, giving the dental nurse, who was just popping her head round, something of a fright. And who got her own back five minutes later, being over-zealous with the waterpick.

And yeah, besides that, so she liked the odd toot, but who didn't? Tell her Marcus never snorted a line of the old marching powder—Marcus had been Tactical, the squad that kicked down doors, and once you'd tasted that adrenalin high, you'd want another boost, right? He said he never, but he would say that. Besides, it wasn't like Shirley was an habitual user. It was a weekend thing with her, strictly Thursday to Tuesday.

There was a thump as Roderick Ho sat down. His right cheek was flaming red, and his glasses hung lopsided.

“What you do that for?”

She sighed heavily.

“It needed doing,” she said, half to herself, and wished she were anywhere else.

Though maybe,
all things considered, not where River Cartwright was.

River was in a hospital room, standing by a window there was no point attempting to open. It had been painted shut years ago, back when the NHS still ran to the occasional lick of paint, and even if it had opened, the air that would have crawled in would have been thick as soup, with a saltiness that caught the back of the throat, and left you gasping for a glass of water. He tapped the pane, looking down on a covered walkway. The noise was in brief counterpoint to the blipping of one or other of the machines ranged by the bed, on which a gradually diminishing figure lay, making no greater impact on its surroundings than it had done for the past however many months it was.

“You're probably wondering what I've been up to,” said River. “You know, while you've been taking it easy.”

There was a fan on the bedside shelf, but the barely wavering slip of ribbon tied to its frame revealed how feeble it was. Several times River had attempted to fix it, this taking the form of flicking its switch on and off. DIY skills exhausted, he settled for nudging the visitor's chair nearer the draught-zone, and slumping onto it.

“Well, it's fascinating stuff.”

The shape on the bed didn't answer, but that was no surprise. On three previous occasions River had sat here, sometimes silent, sometimes making one-sided conversation, and there was no indication that the bed's occupant was aware of his presence. Indeed, the patient's own presence was an open question: River wondered, while the body was lying there, where the mind was; whether it was wandering the corridors of its interrupted life, or cast into some nightmare of its own devising; a Dali-world of two-faced jackals and multi-headed snakes.

“It's before your time, and mine too, but there was a Civil Service strike in '81. Went on months. Can you imagine the paperwork that piled up? Everything needing doing in triplicate, and none of it happening for twenty-odd weeks . . . When the firefighters go on strike, they bring in the army. Who do you get to come in when the pen-pushers down tools?”

River was a pen-pusher too. Who would do his job if he wasn't there to do it? He had a sudden, unwanted vision of his own ghost floating round Slough House, sifting through unachieved tasks.

“Anyway. See where this is going? You'll get there, given a minute, and a nodding acquaintance with how Jackson Lamb's mind works. Because what he likes to do is dream up tasks that aren't only boring, and aren't only pointless, and don't only involve months of crawling over lists of names and dates, looking for anomalies that you can't know are there, because you don't know what they consist of . . . Not only all of that, designed not just to bore you rigid but to kill your soul one screaming pixel at a time . . . But you know the worst thing about it? The really worst?”

He wasn't expecting an answer. Didn't get one.

“The really worst thing is the infinitesimally small, but nevertheless conceivably possible chance that he might just have something. That if you do it right, and turn over all the rocks, you might just find something that didn't want to be found. Which is exactly what we're supposed to be looking for, right? Us in the . . . intelligence services.”

The intelligence services, which River had joined at a young age, following in his grandfather's footsteps. David Cartwright had been a Service legend. River was a Service joke, having crashed King's Cross at rush hour during a training exercise, and been exiled to Slough House in consequence. The fact that he'd been set up was the joke's real punchline, but not one many people had heard, and not one River laughed at.

“It's the passport office,” he said at last. “All that huge backlog of passport applications, hundreds of them ushered through on the nod once the suits went back to work. So maybe someone out there saw that coming, right? Maybe it was a fire sale on the old false identity front. And what better false identity than a genuine British passport? Renewed so many times since, it's beyond reproach.”

The machines chittered and whirred, blinked and bleeped, but the shape on the bed didn't move, and said nothing.

“Sometimes I think I'd sooner be where you are,” River said.

But he almost certainly didn't mean it.

Catherine didn't
see the van. What she saw was the soldier near the entrance to the tube.

He wasn't uniformed, or she wouldn't have spared him a second glance—there were always squaddies in London. But he had the watchfulness that goes with having occupied hostile territory, a wary stillness, and that made two she'd seen tonight, and any lingering doubt about chance encounters evaporated. He held a rolled-up newspaper to keep his hands busy, and wasn't so much standing vigil as soaking everything in; cataloguing movement, alert for anomaly. Or not anomaly, she corrected. He was alert for her.

In which case he had already seen her; and if he hadn't yet he had now, because she made an abrupt 180-degree turn. Bad tradecraft, but she wasn't a street agent—never a joe—the nearest she'd come to an op was having her tonsils out, and was this paranoia? When the bad old days revisited, when she felt she'd slipped into a dry drunk, anything could happen . . .

She didn't look back; focused instead on the pavement in front of her. A black van rolled past, and she had to step aside for a group of teenagers, but she kept moving. There was a bus stop not far ahead, and if she was lucky her arrival there would coincide with a bus. On the bus, if one came, she'd call Lamb again. If one came.

The streets were far from deserted. People in office clothes, others in T-shirts and shorts; shops were still open, though banks and bookies and so on had darkened their doors. Pubs and bars had theirs propped open, letting heat escape on a tangle of music and voices. The canal wasn't far, and it was the kind of summer's evening when young people drifted that way, and shared picnics and wine on the benches, or unfolded blankets on grassy patches, where they could lie and text each other in drowsy comfort. And all Catherine had to do was raise her voice, shout for help . . .

And what would that get her? An exclusion zone. A woman having a meltdown in a heatwave: someone to avoid.

She risked a look behind. No bus. And nobody following. The soldier, if he'd been one, wasn't in sight, and Sean Donovan was nowhere.

At the bus stop she paused. The next bus would take her back the way she'd come; it would drop her opposite Slough House, rewinding the evening to when she'd emerged from the back lane. None of this would have happened, and in the morning she'd look back on it as a minor blip; the kind of bump in the road recovering drunks learn to negotiate. Up at the junction the lights changed, and fresh traffic began flowing her way; she was hoping for a bus, but the largest vehicle among them was a black van, the same one that had just gone past in the opposite direction. Catherine left the bus stop, her heart beating faster. One soldier, two soldiers; a recurring black van. Some things were echoes from a drunken past. Others weren't.

Why on earth would anyone be targeting her?

A question for another time. For the moment, she had to go to ground.

Before the approaching traffic reached her, she darted across the road.

On his
way to the bar Marcus had called into the gents, for the relief of a few solo minutes, and finding the cubicle free had occupied it to contemplate what had happened to his life. This past while—since his exile to Slough House, certainly, but more specifically the past two months—it had been heading down the toilet. No wonder he felt calmer in here than out there.

Back when everything was as it should have been, one of Marcus's combat instructors had laid down a law: control is key. Control the environment, control your opponent. Most of all, control yourself. Marcus got that, or thought he got it, first time of hearing, but had soon discovered it was the large-print version: control didn't just mean keeping a lid on, it meant nailing that lid down tight. Meant making yourself into one of those soldier's tools, the kind that fold away until they're all handle, no blade, and only snap open when needed.