Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(104)

He will keep trying Bachelor, on and off, for the next few days, with the same result, but will finally receive a late-night return call, which will pull him from a rare pleasant dream. But Bachelor, aside from making no apology, will make no sense, and simply ramble about loss and beauty and similar abstracts until Lech, not without regret, will disconnect. He already knows about loss and beauty, and what little Bachelor might teach him is not worth broken sleep. But sleep won’t come again, and a little later Lech will be walking London’s pavements until dawn, maskless but scarred as a phantom, attempting to outwalk his thoughts. All that lies in the near future; in the immediate present Lech dawdles back to his desk, whose nearby window, awaiting a glazier, is still shrouded with cardboard, and as he sits hears a murmur of conversation from upstairs, where Louisa has joined Ashley, to clarify a detail or two: “So Lamb sliced an atomic chili into your nuts and berries.”

“Yep.”

“And you didn’t notice.”

“Nope.”

“Just as well Roddy ate some first, then.”

“It was,” says Ash. “Imagine. It could have been me whose mouth was vulcanised.”

But she appears reasonably sanguine, as if this had never been a likely prospect.

“Yes,” says Louisa, “imagine. But instead it was Roddy. Meaning he was thrashing about on the floor like a dying trout while you were on the phone to Lamb, pretending it was you who’d figured out Rasnokov’s firetrap.”

“Well,” says Ash. “I’d have called Taverner, but it wasn’t clear she was still in the picture.”

“Lamb won’t give you credit for delivering information.”

“No. But he might give me credit for stealing Ho’s work.”

Louisa nods thoughtfully, remembering what she’d thought about Ash: that her anger was going to have to find an outlet, or the woman would explode. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “Roddy’s a knob.”

“But he’s your knob?”

“Roddy is not my knob, no. In fact, let’s pretend you never said that. Roddy’s a knob, but you need to be careful about fucking him over. Lech’s still getting calls from his service providers, asking why he’s cancelled his payments.”

“Yeah, but Lech didn’t fix Roddy up with a date.”

Because Ash has spoken to Leia Six this morning; less out of a need to placate Roddy than to test her own powers of persuasion.

“A date? He can barely talk.”

“This is Roddy. Preventing him from talking is like giving him a makeover.”

Still, both will be somewhat surprised when Roddy, as yet unable to speak, has a reasonably successful first date with Leia Six; and more so when, still unable to speak, he has a reasonably successful second. But by the third date his mouth will be more or less recovered, and he will turn up at Slough House the following morning with a black eye.

“So who knows?” Ash continues. “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“You think so?”

“Nope.”

“Welcome to Slough House,” says Louisa, getting to her feet. “Oh, one other thing? You want to shift your stuff back where it was. River’ll be needing his desk.”

“He’s coming back?”

“Better believe it,” Louisa says.

She leaves, not pausing to look up the remaining flight towards Lamb’s room, from which no noise issues. But he is there, one of his hands holding a cigarette, the other nursing a shot glass. The blind on his window is down, and the lamp by his desk, balanced on a pile of yellowing phone directories, casts the room’s only light, his cigarette tip apart. And in this self-imposed gloom, he is thinking, if he is thinking at all, of Vassily Rasnokov, who is either floating on a cold sea or preparing to slip into a life he’s been building for years; a life warmed up for him by a now-defunct scarecrow, whose body lies unclaimed in a vault somewhere in Greater London. Eyes closed, cigarette shedding its chrysalis of ash even as a smoky butterfly rises to the ceiling, Lamb barely breathes as he contemplates the future that awaits one who’s walked away from the spy trade: a carrel in a European library, say, or a stool on a beach bar under a Bahamian sun. Or a life of unrelieved ordinariness, in which the papertrails established by a now-dead understudy—the water bills and council tax debits, the credit cards and gym memberships, the electronic footprints, the economic handholds; each of them locking a life into place the way pegs hold down a tent—lead remorselessly to their only possible destination: in the end, whatever role you choose, you reach the end of the drama; the paperwork is shuffled into binbags, and the tent blows away. But the triumph lies in making the choice, rather than accepting the part you’re given. Lamb’s cigarette glows like a candle, briefly, and if his eyelids flicker, and his gaze appears fixed on the drab painting of a bridge which is his office’s sole decoration, that’s likely no more than chance; just as, if his lips move beneath their filtered burden, and their mumble sounds like Rosebud, he’s assuredly thinking of that team on the Holloway Road. But perhaps, in fact, he mumbles nothing at all, and his exit line remains unspoken. It’s possible the trembling of his lips is a quiet belch. Well, nobody’s perfect.

From the street below, a snatch of what might be music drifts upwards, though is more likely the accidental percussion of daily life: heel on pavement, tyre on a loose drain lid. Whatever it is, this theme penetrates Slough House for a moment, probably through that cardboard-patched window, and dances round in the dust-deckled air, attempting to get a party going. But this enterprise is doomed from the start, and lasts no longer than it takes a sudden draught to slam a door, after which the building—its creaky stairs and broken skirting boards—its rackety furniture and stained ceilings—its peeling paper and plasterwork—its bewildered wiring, its confused pipes—its ups and downs and highs and lows and all its debts and credits—slumps into its usual stupor, as the morning’s wax surrenders to the afternoon’s wane. And if, outside, the day carries on with its usual background business, inside it pauses for a drawn-out beat, and then drops like a curtain.