“Why do you care?”
That one, Catherine finds easier. “What’s the alternative?” she asks, and now it’s Shirley’s turn to be puzzled, while out in the corridor Lech Wicinski is leaving another voicemail.
It’s John Bachelor whom Lech is trying to contact. Lech has only the haziest notion of what’s been going on these past twenty-four hours, but he’s aware that the safe house is no longer occupied: he called in on his way to work that morning—a lengthy detour, justified on the ground that he had his fingertips, at least, on a live operation—but it was deserted. Recalling the crusty array of takeaway cartons, sticky glasses, and the furry atmosphere that smoking leaves, he at least has the satisfaction of knowing who has been in occupation, but since he is also aware that Lamb’s practice is to keep his horses in the dark unless he has absolute reason not to, this knowledge is accompanied by the depressing awareness that whatever happened, he is unlikely to be made privy to the details. Unless Bachelor can share these with him, but so far, all Bachelor has shared is frequent half-minutes or so of voicemail emptiness, into which Lech has poured requests for contact.
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.