Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(6)

Meanwhile, it was about keeping her head down and waiting for everyone to realise that all she needed was for people to stop getting on her case. A few days, tops. And she could manage that, but she’d be happier if she’d had time to pack properly—all the sermonising about self-control and clean living would be easier to take with a bump of coke to help it down, not to mention it would increase their chances of getting her to open up. She’d be first to admit she was more voluble after a line or two. This whole place, now she thought about it, would benefit from a more lax attitude, and a bar wouldn’t hurt either. She wondered if there was a suggestion box, and whether it would infringe her code of dignified silence to make a contribution.

Somewhere in the corridor she could hear footsteps, and a soft knocking on a door as some poor bastard was roused to face the day. Her turn next. Delaying the moment, she rolled and buried her face in the pillow. When you’re up in the air your shadow can’t lay a finger on you, but no one stays high forever. And once you hit the ground, your shadow’s waiting.

I haven’t hit the ground yet, she said out loud, but her voice was unconvincing in the bare little room, and then her door was softly knocked, and the day was starting too early.

Sheesh.

Or, to put it another way: . . .

Nah. He couldn’t think of another way. Sheesh would have to do.

But seriously, the number of times Roderick Ho had to clean up other people’s messes, you might as well go the distance: give him a uniform, cut his pay in half, and call him a key worker.

Also, this had been a perfectly good keyboard before Shirley Dander had decided to see how many pieces she could smash it into. Answer being: about as many as she’d smashed the other one into first. Stood to reason she was currently in a padded cell, though if anyone had a right to be mad it was the RodMeister. Whose car, let’s not forget—Ford Kia: modern classic, you don’t see them often—once again needed kinks ironed out, thanks to Dander. Wicinski too, come to that. And meanwhile, the office floor was covered in plastic, and when he’d asked Catherine Standish when she planned to get around to sweeping up—he was a patient man but it had been a couple of days, and that stuff got stuck in your trainers—anyway, yeah, when he’d asked her that, she about blew the bloody doors off. Very touchy. As for Wicinski himself, he was refusing to set foot in the room, preferring to squat in Dander’s vacant office on account of—Roddy had heard him telling Louisa—if he had to spend time in Roddy’s company, he was liable to stuff him inside the wastepaper basket and drop-kick him through the window.

Yeah, right. Come and try it, hopscotch-face.

Caught, for the moment, in a vision of Lech Wicinski doing just that, Roddy did what Roddy did best, which right now was a bit of improvised martial artsing using the broom he was sweeping the floor with. Watch carefully. You might learn something. Subtle as a cobra, Roddy held his broom at eye-level, two-handed. See not the stick. See the space between where the stick is, and where it will be. Fill that space using no sudden movements; capture, rather, the flow of the stick’s desire to be elsewhere. Now blink.

He blinked.

He was still holding the broom, but it was pointing the other way.

No significant amount of time had passed.

Like to see Mr. Lightning try that.

And would like to see Wicinski try to stuff him into the wastepaper basket too. The RodBod would have him impaled on a broom handle and rotating like a chicken on a spit before you could say, well, Sheesh. Or kebab.

Whistling a tune of his own composition, itself a remix of one of his own previous compositions, Roddy more or less finished sweeping up bits of plastic and tipped them into the bin—which was way too small to hold him—then looked round to see what else needed doing. He had a phone call to make, but wasn’t quite ready yet. This, despite having been up half the night thinking about it. Not that he had to do anything more than be his own cool self, but still: sometimes, being Roddy Ho took practice. Even when you were already Roddy Ho to begin with.

But if the movies had taught him anything, it was that inner steel and outer cool saw you through. And if they’d taught him anything else, it was this: listen to the whackjobs, because something they say will turn out important.

Like: Any woman desperate enough to dress up as a cartoon character is looking to get laid.

Remembering Shirley’s words, Roddy twirled the broom in his hands again in another demonstration of self-taught mastery. Move not the stick. Let the stick move through you. Roddy and stick were one, and when the force flowed through Roddy it flowed through the stick too, resulting in an almost mystical marriage of whirling wood and implacable will. The broom a blur in his magical hands: see him parry, see him block, see him jab.

He jabbed.

The broom sailed from Roddy’s grip and flew through the closed window, bouncing off Aldersgate Street below in a shower of shattered glass.

This was greeted by the squonk of an outraged car horn and a shriek from a passing pedestrian.

Roddy blinked six times in quick succession.

This time, even he could tell, sheesh wasn’t going to be enough.

Windows, as it happened, were already on Catherine Standish’s mind. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, she was thinking, what does that make windows? Not that she was given to whimsical speculation—it was frowned upon in recovery circles; she’d heard the phrase “slippery slope”—but this one was hard to avoid as she wiped away condensation to reveal a little of her office to the world, and vice versa. Of all Slough House’s windows only hers were ever cleaned, and then only on the inside. If you only clean one side of the glass, you might as well clean neither. To the casual glance her windows were blotched and stained, and if that said anything about the state of her soul, Catherine didn’t want to know.