Slow Horses (8 page)

There was a phrase: the slippery slope. Slippery implied speed and blurriness, and the ever-present threat of losing your feet. You’d end up flat on your back, breathing splinters. But Catherine’s journey had been more moving staircase than slippery slope; a slow downwards progression; a bore rather than a shock. Looking across at the people heading upwards, and wondering if that was a better idea. But somehow knowing she’d have to reach the bottom before she could change direction.

It had been Charles Partner who’d been there when that happened. Not literally, thank God; not actually present when she’d woken in a stranger’s flat with a broken cheekbone, finger-shaped bruises on her thighs. But there to make sure the pieces were gathered together. Catherine had spent time in a facility that was beyond anything she’d have been able to afford had she been paying. Her treatment had been thorough. It had involved counselling. All this, she was told, was in line with Service protocol (
Do you think you’re the first?
she’d been asked.
Do you think you’re the only one it gets to in the end?
) but there’d been more to it than that, she was sure. Because after the retreat, after the drying-out, after the first six everlasting months of sober living, she’d turned up at Regent’s Park expecting to be assigned to the outer limits, but no: it was back to regular duties as Charles’s doorkeeper.

Most things, at that time in her life, had made her want to weep, but this seemed more warranted than most. It wasn’t as if they’d been close. Sometimes he’d called her Moneypenny, but that was it. And even afterwards they were hardly friends, though it did not escape her that he never called her Moneypenny again. Nor did they discuss what had happened, beyond his asking, that first morning, if she was ‘back to her old self’. She’d given him the answer he’d wanted, but knew that her old self was long gone. And from there, they’d continued as before.

But he had cared for her when it mattered, and so she cared for him in return. They were together another three years, and before the first was out she was playing a role in his non-working life. He was unmarried. She’d long registered his threadbare aura. It wasn’t that he was seedy, but seediness was a possibility, and poor diet an ongoing fact. He needed looking after. And she needed something. She didn’t need to wake up next to more strangers, but she needed something. Partner turned out to be it.

So she kept his freezer full, and arranged for a weekly cleaner; took his diary in hand and made sure he had the odd day off. She became a barrier against the worst of his underlings—the atrocious Diana Taverner, for a start. And did all this while remaining part of the wallpaper: there was never physical contact, and nor did he acknowledge that she was anything other than secretary. But she cared for him.

Though not enough to recognize that he needed more help than she could give him.

She tilted her head to one side now, allowing her hair to fall across her face. She wondered if she should tint it, bring the blonde out, but who for? And would anyone notice? Apart from the odious Jackson Lamb, who’d ridicule her.

She could accept, Charles Partner being dead, that there was no place for her at Regent’s Park. But Slough House felt like a deferred punishment for a crime she’d already atoned for. Sometimes she wondered if there were more to that crime than her own wine-dark past; if she were held responsible in some way for Charles’s suicide. For not knowing it was going to happen. But how could she have known that? Charles Partner had spent a lifetime dealing in other people’s secrets, and if there was one thing he’d learned, it was how to keep his own.
You had a key to his house?
she’d been asked. And:
You were expecting this to happen?
Of course she hadn’t. But she wondered now if anyone had ever believed her.

Ancient history. Charles Partner was bones, but she still thought about him most days.

Back to the mirror. Back to her own life. Lovely woman had stooped to folly, and this was where it had left her.

My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.

She hadn’t had a drink in ten years. But still.

My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.

She turned off the bathroom light, and went to make supper.

Min Harper spent a chunk of the evening on the phone to his boys: nine and eleven. A year ago, this would have left him knowing more than he needed to about computer games and TV shows, but it seemed both had crossed a line at the same time, and now it was like trying to have a conversation with a pair of refrigerators. How had that happened? Change should come with a warning, and besides, shouldn’t there have been a breathing space where his nine-year-old was concerned? More childhood to negotiate before adolescence crept in? But prising information from him was like scratching at a rock. By the time his ex-wife was on the line Min was ready to take it out on her, though she was having none of it:

‘It’s a phase. They’re the same with me. Except all the time they’re grunting and saying nothing, I’m cooking their meals and washing up. So don’t tell me you’re having problems with it, right?’

‘At least you get to see them.’

‘You know where we are. Would it kill you to get round more than once a week?’

He could have fought a rearguard action—the hours he worked; the distance involved—but marriage had taught him that once the battle lines were drawn, defeat was only a matter of time.

Afterwards, he couldn’t settle. It was hard, after such calls, not to end up thinking about the trajectory his life had taken; a free fall he could pin down to one specific moment. Prior to that brainless second, he’d had a marriage, a family and a career, along with all the accompanying paraphernalia—dentist’s appointments and mortgage worries and direct debit arrangements. Some of which still happened, of course, but its relevance, the evidence it supplied that he was building a life that worked, had been washed away by the Stupid Moment; the one in which he’d left a computer disk on a tube train. And hadn’t known he’d done so until the following morning.

He supposed few people had had their careers dismantled via Radio 4. The memory hurt. Not the abject belly-panic as it sank in that the object under discussion was supposed to be in his keeping, but the moments before that, when he’d been enjoying a peaceful shave, thinking:
I’m glad I’m not the pitiful bastard responsible for that
. That was what hurt; the notion that all over the country other people were having exactly the same thought, and he was the only one who didn’t deserve to.

Other, more drawn-out painful moments had followed. Interviews with the Dogs. Comedy riffs on TV shows about secret service idiots. People on the street didn’t know Min was the butt of these sketches, but they were laughing at him all the same.

Worst of all was the assumption that incompetence had caused the screw-up. Nobody had suggested treachery; that leaving a report outlining gaps in Terminal 5’s security procedures on the Piccadilly Line had been a bungled dead-letter drop. That would have been to accord Min Harper a measure of respect. He could have been in the grip of misguided idealism, or lured by wealth, or at the very least making a conscious decision, but no: even the Dogs had written him off as an idiot. Any other year, he’d have been out of the door, but a combination of hiring freeze and budget tightening meant that if Min had gone, his job would have left with him, and it proved politic to keep him on the books until his departure would allow for a replacement.

Regent’s Park, though, was in his past.

Min checked his pockets, reminded himself not to, then poured a drink and tuned the radio to the sports channel. As ball-by-ball commentary on an overseas Test Match filled the room, a rewritten history swarmed through his head; a more amenable version of his life, in which he was halfway on to the platform at Gloucester Road when he turned and saw the disk on the seat and went back and collected it, feeling the hot chill of near-disaster tickle his nape—a sensation he’d feel again later that evening, as he helped put the boys to bed, and then forget about entirely as his career and life continued on their even tenor: marriage, family, career; dentist’s appointments, mortgage; direct debit arrangements.

As so frequently when he was trying not to have such thoughts Min startled himself by groaning aloud, but nobody heard. He was alone. There was only the radio. And as for the phone: once he’d spoken to his uncommunicative children and rowed with his ex, well: he didn’t have anyone else to talk to. So he turned it off.

Louisa Guy went home to her rented studio flat: examined its four walls—what she could see of them behind stuff in the way: piles of CDs, books, damp laundry on collapsible racks—and almost went straight out again, but couldn’t face the choices that would entail. She microwaved a lasagne and watched a property programme instead. House prices were in freefall, if you owned one. They remained laughably lunar to the rent-bound.

Her phone stayed silent. That wasn’t unusual, but still: you’d think somebody would have found time to dial a number. Ask how Louisa was. If she’d done anything interesting lately.

She left her plate to soak. Changed channel. Encountered someone telling her that pink placebos were more effective than blue ones. Could that be right? Was the brain that easily bamboozled?

Her own felt bamboozled constantly; not so much tricked as stifled into submission. When she closed her eyes at night, illegible data scrolled down her eyelids. Sleep was repeatedly yanked from her by a sensed error, the feeling that something was out of sequence for a reason she’d nearly grasped, and grasping would have rehabilitated her career. But it was always gone and she’d be stone awake once more, her unsleeping head on a pillow too thin and too warm, no matter how cold the rest of her bed was.

Jesus, she’d think, each time. Could she get a break? Could she get a decent night’s sleep? Please?

And in the morning, she’d do it all over again.

It was screen-watching. Which wasn’t what she’d joined the Service for, but what she’d ended up doing. And it felt like ending up, too; felt like she had no future other than the one that waited every morning behind the flaking back door of Slough House, and stretched out minute by endless minute until the door shut behind her when she left. And the time in between was spent fuming at the injustice of it all.

She should quit. That’s what she should do. She should just quit.

But if she quit, that would make her a quitter. She hadn’t joined the Service to be a quitter, either.

The screen-watching was virtual surveillance, trolling among the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere. Some of the websites she covered were Trojan horses, Service-designed to attract the disaffected; others might have belonged to other branches of the State—she sometimes wondered if she were lurking in chatrooms peopled entirely by spooks; the undercover equivalent of teen-sites populated entirely by middle-aged men. Genuine or not, the sites covered a range of mood, from the in-your-face (how to make your own bomb) to the apparently educational (‘the true meaning of Islam’) to the free-for-all forums where argument spat like a boiling chip pan, and rage brooked no grammar.

To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.

It felt pointless. Worse, it felt undoable … How could you know when something worse than words was meant, when all you had to go on were the words? And when the words were always the same: angry, vicious, murderous? Several times she’d decided that a particular voice rang darker than the rest, and had passed the information upstream. Where, presumably, it was acted upon: ISP addresses hunted down; angry young men tracked to their suburban bedrooms. But perhaps she was kidding herself. Maybe all the potential terrorists she ever identified were as ghostly as herself; other spooks in other offices, who were sending her own webname upstream even as she was sending theirs. It wouldn’t be the only aspect of the War on Terror that turned out to be a circle jerk. She should be out on the street, doing actual work. But she’d tried that already, and had screwed it up.

Every time she thought about this—which was a lot—her teeth clamped together. Sometimes she found herself thinking about it without realizing that’s what she was doing, and the clue was the grinding of teeth, and an ache in her jaw.

Her first field op, a tracking job: the first time she’d done it for real. Following a boy. Not the first time she’d done that for real, but the first time she’d done it like this: at a distance, keeping him in sight at all times, but not so close he’d sense her presence.

Tracking jobs were done in threes, minimum. That day there’d been five: two ahead, three behind. The three behind kept changing places, as if engaged in a country dance. But it all took place on city streets.

The boy they were following—a black youth as far from the tabloid image as you could get: he wore a pinstripe and plastic-rimmed corrective glasses—was point man in a gun drop. A cache of decommissioned handguns had been hijacked the previous week, en route to a furnace. ‘Decommissioned’ was like ‘single’ or ‘married’: a status liable to abrupt change. The handguns hadn’t been hijacked because they’d make nice paperweights. They’d been hijacked to be retooled, and released into the community.

‘Three? Take point.’

An instruction through an earpiece, propelling her to the front of the queue.

The agent who’d had the target’s heels peeled away: he’d hover by a newspaper stand for a while, then rejoin the procession. Meanwhile, she had the wheel. The target was maintaining an unbroken pace. This either meant he had no idea he was under surveillance, or was so used to it that it didn’t faze him.

But she remembered thinking:
He has no idea
.

He has no idea. He has no idea. Repeated enough, any phrase ceases to have meaning.
He has no idea
.

Less than a minute later, the target stepped into a clothes shop.

This wasn’t necessarily significant. He liked his threads: you could tell. But shops made good meeting places. There were queues, occasional crowds. There were changing rooms. There were opportunities. He stepped into the shop, and she followed.