Slow Horses (41 page)

It’s a lucky escape for our cat, then—that it doesn’t exist, for that would have been a brutal ending. And a lucky escape twice over, as it happens, for on this particular morning the nigh-on unthinkable has happened, and Jackson Lamb is not dozing at his desk, or prowling the kitchen area outside his office, scavenging his underlings’ food; nor is he wafting up and down the staircase with that creepily silent tread he adopts at will. He’s not banging on his floor, which is River Cartwright’s ceiling, for the pleasure of timing how long it takes Cartwright to arrive, and he’s not ignoring Catherine Standish while she delivers another pointless report he’s forgotten commissioning. Simply put, he’s not here.

And no one in Slough House has the faintest idea where he is.

Where Jackson
Lamb was was Oxford, and he had a brand new theory, one to float in front of the suits at Regent’s Park. Lamb’s new theory was this: that instead of sending tadpole spooks on expensive torture-resistance courses at hideaways on the Welsh borders, they should pack them off to Oxford railway station to observe the staff in action. Because whatever training these guys underwent, it left every last one of them highly skilled in the art of not releasing information.

“You work here, right?”

“Sir?”

“Were you on shift last Tuesday evening?”

“The helpline number’s on all the posters, sir. If you have a complaint—”

“I don’t have a complaint,” Lamb said. “I just want to know if you were on duty last Tuesday evening.”

“And why would you want to know that, sir?”

Lamb had been stonewalled three times so far. This fourth was a small man with sleeked-back hair and a grey moustache that twitched occasionally of its own accord. He looked like a weasel in a uniform. Lamb would have caught him by the back legs and cracked him like a whip, but there was a policeman within earshot.

“Let’s assume it’s important.”

He had ID, of course, under a workname, but didn’t have to be a fisherman to know that you don’t go lobbing rocks in the pool before you cast your line. If anyone rang the number on his card, bells and whistles would sound at Regent’s Park. And Lamb didn’t want the suits asking what he thought he was doing, because he wasn’t sure what he thought he was doing, and there was no chance in hell he was going to share that information.

“Very important,” he added. He tapped his lapel. A wallet poked visibly from his inside pocket, and a twenty pound note peeped visibly from inside that.

“Ah.”

“I take it that’s a yes.”

“You understand we have to be careful, sir. With people asking questions at major transport hubs.”

Good to know, thought Jackson Lamb, that if terrorists descended on this particular transport hub, they’d meet an impregnable line of defence. Unless they waved banknotes. “Last Tuesday,” he said. “There was some kind of meltdown.”

But his man was already shaking his head: “Not our problem, sir. Everything was fine here.”

“Everything was fine except the trains weren’t running.”

“The trains were running here, sir. There were problems elsewhere.”

“Right.” It had been a while since Lamb had endured a conversation this long without resorting to profanity. The slow horses would have been amazed, except the newbies, who’d have suspected a test. “But wherever the problem, there were people being bused here from Reading. Because the trains weren’t running.”

The weasel was knitting his eyebrows together, but had seen his way to the end of this line of questioning, and was picking up speed on the final stretch. “That’s right, sir. A replacement bus service.”

“Which came from where?”

“On that particular occasion, sir, I rather think they’d have come from Reading.”

Of course they bloody would. Jackson Lamb sighed, and reached for his cigarettes.

“You can’t smoke in here, sir.”

Lamb tucked one behind his ear. “When’s the next Reading train?”

“Five minutes, sir.”

Grunting his thanks, Lamb turned for the barriers.

“Sir?”

He looked back.

Gaze fixed on Lamb’s lapel, the weasel made a rustly sign with finger and thumb.

“What?”

“I thought you were going to …”

“Give you a tip?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Here’s a good one.” Lamb tapped his nose with a finger. “If you’ve got a complaint, there’s a helpline number on the posters.”

Then he wandered onto the platform, and waited for his train.

Quentin Bates

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Frozen Assets

Cold Comfort

Chilled to the Bone

Cheryl Benard

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Moghul Buffet

James R. Benn

(World War II Europe)

Billy Boyle

The First Wave

Blood Alone

Evil for Evil

Rag & Bone

A Mortal Terror

Death’s Door

A Blind Goddess

Cara Black

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Murder in the Marais

Murder in Belleville

Murder in the Sentier

Murder in the Bastille

Murder in Clichy

Murder in Montmartre

Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

Murder in the Rue de Paradis

Murder in the Latin Quarter

Murder in the Palais Royal

Murder in Passy

Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Murder Below Montparnasse

Murder in Pigalle

Grace Brophy

(Italy)

The Last Enemy

A Deadly Paradise

Henry Chang

(Chinatown)

Chinatown Beat

Year of the Dog

Red Jade

Death Money

Gary Corby

(Ancient Greece)

The Pericles Commission

The Ionia Sanction

Sacred Games

The Marathon Conspiracy

Colin Cotterill (Laos)

The Coroner’s Lunch

Thirty-Three Teeth

Disco for the Departed

Anarchy and Old Dogs

Curse of the Pogo Stick

The Merry Misogynist

Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

Slash and Burn

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die

Garry Disher

(Australia)

The Dragon Man

Kittyhawk Down

Snapshot

Chain of Evidence

Blood Moon

Wyatt

Whispering Death

Port Vila Blues

Fallout

David Downing

(World War II Germany)

Zoo Station

Silesian Station

Stettin Station

Potsdam Station

Lehrter Station

Masaryk Station

(World War I)

Jack of Spies

Leighton Gage

(Brazil)

Blood of the Wicked

Buried Strangers

Dying Gasp

Every Bitter Thing

A Vine in the Blood

Perfect Hatred

The Ways of Evil Men

Michael Genelin

(Slovakia)

Siren of the Waters

Dark Dreams

The Magician’s Accomplice

Requiem for a Gypsy

Timothy Hallinan

(Thailand)

The Fear Artist

For the Dead

(Los Angeles)

Crashed

Little Elvises

The Fame Thief

Mick Herron

(England)

Dead Lions

Adrian Hyland

(Australia)

Moonlight Downs

Gunshot Road

Stan Jones

(Alaska)

White Sky, Black Ice

Shaman Pass

Village of the Ghost Bears

Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis

(Denmark)

The Boy in the Suitcase

Invisible Murder

Death of a Nightingale

Graeme Kent

(Solomon Islands)

Devil-Devil

One Blood

James Lilliefors

(Global Thrillers)

Viral

The Leviathan Effect

Martin Limón

(South Korea)

Jade Lady Burning

Slicky Boys

Buddha’s Money

The Door to Bitterness

The Wandering Ghost

G.I. Bones

Mr. Kill

The Joy Brigade

Nightmare Range

The Man with the Iron Sickle

Peter Lovesey

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The Last Detective

The Vault

On the Edge

The Reaper

Rough Cider

The False Inspector Dew

Diamond Dust

Diamond Solitaire

The House Sitter

The Summons

Bloodhounds

Upon a Dark Night

The Circle

The Secret Hangman

The Headhunters

Skeleton Hill

Stagestruck

Cop to Corpse

The Tooth Tattoo

The Stone Wife

Jassy Mackenzie

(South Africa)

Random Violence

Stolen Lives

The Fallen

Pale Horses

SeichōMatsumoto

(Japan)

Inspector Imanishi Investigates

James McClure

(South Africa)

The Steam Pig

The Caterpillar Cop

The Gooseberry Fool

Snake

The Sunday Hangman

The Blood of an Englishman

The Artful Egg

The Song Dog

Jan Merete Weiss

(Italy)

These Dark Things

A Few Drops of Blood

Magdalen Nabb

(Italy)

Death of an Englishman

Death of a Dutchman

Death in Springtime

Death in Autumn

The Marshal and the Madwoman

The Marshal and the Murderer

The Marshal’s Own Case

The Marshal Makes His Report

The Marshal at the Villa Torrini

Property of Blood

Some Bitter Taste

The Innocent

Vita Nuova

The Monster of Florence

Fuminori Nakamura

(Japan)

The Theif

Evil and the Mask

Stuart Neville

(Northern Ireland)

The Ghosts of Belfast

Collusion

Stolen Souls

Ratlines

Eliot Pattison

(Tibet)

Prayer of the Dragon

The Lord of Death

Rebecca Pawel

(1930s Spain)

Death of a Nationalist

Law of Return

The Watcher in the Pine

The Summer Snow

Qiu Xiaolong

(China)

Death of a Red Heroine

A Loyal Character Dancer

When Red is Black

Matt Beynon Rees

(Palestine)

The Collaborator of Bethlehem

A Grave in Gaza

The Samaritan’s Secret

The Fourth Assassin

John Straley

(Alaska)

The Woman Who Married a Bear

The Curious Eat Themselves

The Big Both Ways

Cold Storage, Alaska

Akimitsu Takagi

(Japan)

The Tattoo Murder Case

Honeymoon to Nowhere

The Informer

Helene Tursten

(Sweden)

Detective Inspector Huss

The Torso

The Glass Devil

Night Rounds

The Golden Calf

The Fire Dance

Janwillem van de Wetering

(Holland)

Outsider in Amsterdam

Tumbleweed

The Corpse on the Dike

Death of a Hawker

The Japanese Corpse

The Blond Baboon

The Maine Massacre

The Mind-Murders

The Streetbird

The Rattle-Rat

Hard Rain

Just a Corpse at Twilight

Hollow-Eyed Angel

The Perfidious Parrot

Amsterdam Cops: Collected Stories

Timothy Williams

(Guadeloup)

Another Sun

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