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Bad news didn’t just come in the dead of night. Sometimes it came at lunch, midweek, halfway through a limp salad and a lukewarm cup of lemon verbena. It’s your husband, the call had said. St. Bart’s. Come right away.
That was all well and good, except Catherine Standish didn’t have a husband. She had a clean bill of health, as far as ex-alcoholics went, but a sense of dread loomed over her head regardless. It was in buildings like these where they told you were dying. Or dead. Then, rattling down the list of descending cataclysms: Blown. Hung out to dry. Put out to pasture among the other slow horses.
“Standish,” she reported, not actually wringing her hands, but looking like the motion was part of her repertoire. If this was cover, she could do worse.
They delivered her to an antiseptically lit corridor, where the doors were all the same and the lino was scraped by the passage of gurneys and wheelchairs and metal trollies into runnels that lined the way back to the lift, which she considered re-entering, but Catherine Standish was not a coward. She knocked. A barked, wheezing cough told her she was in the right place. Just like stepping into Lamb’s office, really, except here she was armed with nothing—not even a cup of tea. A doctor and two nurses looked up from their huddle in the corner, relief washing over their faces.
Jackson Lamb, sat on the bed, too preoccupied with the buttons of his shirt to bother looking up. A heaping of belly and curling greyish hair poked out beneath his shirt and unbuckled belt, the loose end of which jutted out in an indecent direction. The rest of him thankfully attached to trousers.
“Took your sweet time,” Lamb grunted, scowling up at her with all the charm of a flaccid grizzly bear. “What, you had to drop in to the off-license, get a nip of fortification first? Sometimes I find it hard to believe we’re actually married.”
“We’re not—”
“Alcoholic,” he confided, turning to the nurses. “Blackouts.”
“That’s not—”
“Bit late for denial, isn’t it? Be a dear and chuck us my tie.”
Catherine gave in from habit. Lamb only talked when he got what he wanted, and even then he was more likely to turn to stone than let her into his confidence. She mutely watched him knot the tie into a noose, careless as ever as he looped it over his collar, and tried to figure out the game they were playing. If it was a game. If she was even a player. But he was the one who’d called her, hadn’t he?
“What happened? Are you—?”
“Healthy as a horse.”
“One that’s just wiped out at the steeplechase,” interjected the doctor, over the ensuing pathos, Lamb’s quiet heave of despair. “Your husband’s had a heart attack. He was brought in late last night—”
“Why didn’t anyone let us know?”
“He wasn’t carrying any ID, and to be frank, his manner was fairly…belligerent. And there was the matter of surgery, we had to perform a coronary angioplasty. That’s when—”
“I know what it is.”
“They shafted me pretty good,” Lamb chimed in, prodding his groin and wincing. “Not the spot I’d usually go for a bit of in-and-out, but well, they say life’s all about new experiences.”
She ignored him. “And why is he being discharged?”
“We’re not a prison. He’s made it clear he has no intention of staying. He only let us ring you when I told him the whole process goes a lot smoother with family at hand—personally, I don’t like it—”
“And I doubt you’d like to see me test-drive this new hole you’ve given me, but we can’t always get what we want. Here, give us a hand.”
“Mr. Standish—”
“I meant getting my shoes. Christ alive, the filth you people come up with.” He shook his head piously.
A feeling of unreality washed over Catherine, in queasy definition. The doctor threw her a dirty look, as if to say: Really? Him?
Lamb stood with some effort, faint lines of sweat softening his face into a pale cheese. His eyes blazed. Looking in his eyes Catherine was struck by the fact that this was a man she had never met, not in the peeling offices of Slough House and not in the Georgian splendour of Charles’ apartment, nor the unforgiving back-corridors of the Park.
“Where are his glasses, please?” she asked, then, insistent. “His glasses.”
There was a small scuffle of opened furniture, conferring, then finally a nurse returned bearing them aloft. Lamb slid them on. A familiar opaque barrier between his dispassion and the objects of his disgust.
“Only way you’re wheeling me out of here is in a body-bag,” he coughed. “Now. Off we fuck.”
Lamb lurched forward and Catherine took his elbow; if there was any doubt that the pair were husband and wife, it died as they headed toward the lift and their conversation settled into that well-worn pattern of the concerned and the heedlessly irritated, doubtless acted out with cutting precision a thousand times over the years.
The nurse bit back a grin. Sweet, really. Love just might be real after all.
♞ ♞ ♞
Traffic. Never anything but traffic, even after rush hour on a week night. Catherine frowned at her reflection in the cab’s window, looking into the blank faces of pedestrians for an answer that would never come.
“Why did you call me?” she finally asked.
“Looked like Cuckoo’s Nest there was about to blow a gasket,” Lamb shrugged. “I’m all about conflict avoidance. Thought you’d be throwing a parade, me looking after my health and all.”
“I’m not sure you know what that means.”
“Well. You can drop me at the station.”
“You’re not serious.”
“As a heart attack.”
“I’m not letting you die on the Tube. Someone might put it online.”
“I could gargle a gallon of petrol and burn myself up like a monk on manoeuvres and no one would blink twice. Here’s fine.”
“Keep driving.”
“Just because we’re husband and wife, don’t go thinking you get to see where I live. Cohabitation’s a nasty sin.”
“St. John’s Wood, please,” she told the driver.
“I know how this works, you get me back to your place, you ply me with that vile tea of yours, and before you know it I’m at your tender mercies, with you having chopped my legs off like that film with that geezer from The Whatsit. Godfather. Molly’d have a field day. All nice and domestic, til a cat smothers me in my fucking sleep.”
“I don’t have cats.”
“Well you’re not smothering me with anything else. I don’t put out on the first date, you know.”
The cab lapsed into a threatening silence. Catherine, knowing Lamb’s ways, launched an offensive before he could muster up wind.
“It’s either this, or letting me know where you live. Someone with your sense of privacy,”—or slovenliness, she might has said, conjuring up a viscerally unappealing picture of a Lamb-inhabited dwelling and shuddering at the thought—“I’d have thought you’d prefer the first option.”
“You know where I live. Or don’t tell me you haven’t gotten hands on the paperwork, after all this time? No cards at Christmas?”
A rhetorical question. They both knew his address was as real a concept as pigs flying to the moon.
“Even if you did know where I lived,” Lamb mused, “I wouldn’t give you a key. Considering your track record.”
A sick dog could still bite. She knew this, and yet the words still lanced through her stiff composure; she’d thought, stupidly, that he was too ill to bother baring his teeth.
You had a key? Bad Sam Chapman glowering at her across the table after they’d bundled her off to some underground room, blank walls, blood spattered up the tile, except that was a different room in a different house, and she was still clutching the key in her hand so hard that it cut a jagged line in her palm.
Every house she entered might have a room where Charles Partner lay dead. Bathrooms held horror even now. Lamb knew this, and enjoyed letting her know he knew this as often as he could.
“So that’s settled then,” said Catherine, reigning in her anger. Her grief. She could switch it off from one moment to the next, these unexpected flashes of an old life, turn cold and calm and clinical as a surgeon when required. Which dealing with Jackson Lamb often did. “Mine it is.”
“Glory be.” Lamb belched, mopped a ream of sweat from his chin. “All this chat has me dying for a fry and a fag.”
He bared his uneven teeth in a grin. It wasn’t too late to push him from the cab, claim an accident. Two bosses in twenty years wouldn’t look good, but this was Lamb at full steam, hoping to provoke a reaction.
Better bosses had been killed for less. She might even get a medal.
Catherine sighed and dug out the key to her flat.
♞ ♞ ♞
The first time Lamb had been in her home, he’d planted a gun in her bag. This time he made a show of casually rifling through her life, eyeing up books and crockery as if they might testify against her in court.
“Hm,” he grunted. He was still sour she’d made the taxi driver drop them at the door, and sourer over her emphatic ban on climbing the stairs. “Might as well send monogrammed notes to the neighbours,” he’d spat, glowering at the lift as it clattered open. “Lady Standish has a gentleman caller. Enquiries within.”
Certain habits died hard. See: her previous life. The bottles down the sink.
Catherine busied herself arranging blankets on the sofa, and did her best to pretend he wasn’t there. It was like having a gorilla on the loose. She kept wondering if the noises meant he was readying himself for escape or attack or if he was simply marking his territory in less desirable ways.
When she finished he was still rooting through the tiny kitchen, picking up offending knick-knacks with nicotine-stained fingers; she wondered why that yellow tinge had gone out of fashion, somehow, with the younger generation. A change in the filters, maybe. Or an advantage of those e-cigarettes. She tried to imagine Lamb puffing away on one of those cloyingly-scented gadgets and felt the corner of her mouth twitch.
“So,” she said. “You had a heart attack. Yesterday. Care to explain?””
“Not really.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“Things were feeling a little hairy, so I stepped out for a smoke. Kept walking. Didn’t want to give Cartwright the pleasure of pissing on my corpse.”
The kettle boiled. Tea, in two cups. The one with the cracked handle she kept for herself.
“So that’s it? Slink off to some gutter, and let us read all about it in next year’s circular? That’s cruel, even for you.”
“Would’ve thought it’d beat the alternative,” he said, mildly, placing a porcelain eggcup back down on the shelf and slurping a mouthful of tea.
Bath tub. Water dripping onto tile. Flecks of red on the grouting. One body just like another, when it came down to it.
Catherine gripped her mug tightly. “No,” she frowned. “You don’t get to make it sound like you care. If that was the case, you might have put in a little less effort in digging yourself an early grave. Like now.” She was really getting going now, little sparks of anger lighting up her voice. “If you wanted to be dead, you wouldn’t have rung me. You’re scared.”
“Oh, here we go. Let’s hear it, Sickmind Fraud.”
“You don’t have anyone who cares how you go, is that it? Well, honestly, neither do I. It’s not my job to keep you alive. It’d be well within my rights to call Personnel and let them handle the rest of it.”
Lamb barked out a mangled laugh.
“Forced retirement, is it? A march to the seaside for my health? Never hand the opposition a knife and show where it hurts, first rule of fight club. Just thinking about putting me down for good would give Lady Di an earth-shattering climax of such devastation you’d need a bomb squad to pick through the pieces. I’d resent giving her the satisfaction.”
“You can’t expect to keep something like this hidden—”
“Only way they’ll find out is if you tell them. And Standish, I can promise you this, if you do tell them, when I die I’ll make sure it’s on your fucking doorstep.”
A burst of coughing gave the threat a sense of immediacy. She wouldn’t put it past him.
♞ ♞ ♞
Night passed and turned grey with promised light. Catherine woke at five and padded out of bed, finding the sofa rumpled and empty.
So. He had a death wish. That wasn’t her problem. Someone would find him halfway across London in the morning, just another vagrant in a grimy coat. It was his heart that got him. The only time anyone would ever say that of Jackson Lamb, generally regarded by anyone who had the misfortune to meet him to be decidedly heartless and a bastard. Not that she'd argue otherwise.
She was just about to head back to another hour of unrestful sleep when a noise came from the kitchen. She found Lamb sitting at the tiny table, meaty hands clasped at the back of his neck, elbows on knees.
“Don’t mean to cause alarm,” Lamb spoke, muffled by his mass. “But I think I’ve had a heart attack.”
“I know you think you’re being funny, but if you mean you’ve had another one you’ve got about ten seconds before I ring for an ambulance—”
“Jesus. Can’t make a joke around here. ” His face was splotchy and marbled with interrupted sleep, thick around the eyes. He didn’t look well. Not that anything Catherine said was going to change that. “It’s too quiet. Don’t see how you can stand it.”
Train line. Student digs. Above a pub. All-night supermarket. Taxi rank. Motorway. Catherine mentally reeled off likely culprits within five hundred yards of Lamb’s housing arrangement and stopped; knowing him, he probably lived in a gated community miles from the nearest town, in blissful monkish silence.
“If the couch isn’t comfortable, that’s too bad. This isn’t an Airbnb. Tough it out.”
“They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom,” Lamb muttered, distractedly. “Berlin, been there, done that, but I’d rather shove my desiccated corpse through a tea strainer before ending up the other side of the pond. That was Partner’s purview, wasn’t it? Glad-handing with the fucking Yanks. If it was me, I’d blow my brains out.”
“Why do you do that?” asked Catherine, leaning against the counter. She pulled her dressing gown around herself and watched as the question failed to reach him. “You call him Partner, now he’s gone. Back then you were friends. He called you—”
Lamb dragged a hand across his hair.
“He was the only one to do that. Jack. Jacky-boy. Boiled my piss and he knew it.”
She felt for the first time that there really was something wrong with him. He wouldn’t have mentioned Charles otherwise.
♞ ♞ ♞
It wasn’t unlike Lamb, not deigning to show up at work. A few mutters reached Catherine’s office, amplified by the house’s esoteric plumbing, but no one mentioned Lamb’s absence to her face. Eliding the need to lie. For a shoddy excuse for a spook and a one-time alcoholic, she really ought to be better at it.
The thought of Lamb with free reign in her flat sent an unsettled wave of apprehension clattering through her stomach. How much chaos could he cause in one day? Quite a fair amount, as it happened.
At eleven River Cartwright appeared in her doorway like a dour salesman, a look of deep grievance pasted across his sharp features.
“He’s got Louisa off on some wild goose chase,” he announced.
“Who’s he? The Pope?”
“Lamb. He’s been calling all morning.”
“When have you ever known Lamb to touch a phone willingly? I’m not sure he’s the checking-in type.”
“Not like that,” said River darkly, then dashed from the room as an electronic bleating pierced the air below.
Catherine heard him clatter down the stairs like a herd of rampaging goats, followed by the phone’s shrill tone cutting off mid-ring. Slowly, she followed. River had the earpiece jammed into his shoulder, and made a face at her as she entered and picked up the extension.
“Short of breath, aren’t we?” rattled Lamb’s voice through the speaker. “If I’ve interrupted you having a wank, Cartwright, by all means keep at it. I charge by the minute.”
“I wasn’t at my desk.”
“Christ, and they call you a professional. Oh, wait. Nobody does.”
“Yeah, well, it’s nice to chat but if there’s a point you’d like to get to…”
“Black cab on the approach,” Lamb barked. “I want you to follow it.”
“Where are you—?”
“National Institute of the Blind. Trying to see if I can get a bunch of their lot to replace the cack-handed amateurs in my unit.”
“Yeah, well. As it happens, I’m busy.”
“Once you’re done pulling my leg, why don’t you try giving my cock a go, see what happens?”
“You know, I’ve always wondered what the H.R. department stands for? It’s one of those new-fangled politically correct trends, like washing socks and eating your five a day.”
“Won’t catch on. Besides, if there’s a H.R. in our department, it’s you, Cartwright.”
“Let me guess.” River made a face as Lamb sniffed, hacked up something thick and wet from the back of his throat. “How about humungous re—”
“Don’t make me report you for hate speech. I’ll sic Dander on you. Now, what are you doing, nattering on the phone when there’s work to be done? Can’t get the staff these days.”
“Yeah, well. Don’t feel like you’ve got to rush back, or anything. The grief’s character building.”
“Building a case for my foot up your arse, that’s what.” Then Lamb said plummily, “Keep up the vital work, sonny boy,” and killed the phone, leaving River fumbling like a plastered fielder for the last word.
“See?” River spat. He crossed to the window and squinted at the street. “There’s about three cabs out there right now. He’s having a laugh.”
“What if it’s important?” asked Catherine, doubting it severely. The fact Lamb was racking up calls on her phone bill was more concerning, if anyone asked. Which they wouldn’t.
River slumped into his chair.
“Come off it,” he groaned. Then got up, grabbed his jacket, and tripped into the corridor and down the stairs. The back door slammed.
When Catherine’s phone lit up she let it ring for a full thirty seconds. “What, Jackson?”
“Blimey, you psychic? Could’ve been one of those telemarketers trying to hawk a hoover.”
“If you want me doing pointless footwork, you should know better.”
“Can’t have all that rigorous office discipline falling on its backside, without me there to light the way. Keeps them on their toes.”
“You’re meant to be resting. That includes harassing your staff.”
“Yeah, well, as Udo Lindenberg would say, Ich bin off my fucking Rocker. Usually my days off involve a lot more drinking. Days on, too.”
“If you bring alcohol into my house—”
“You have a very low image of me,” Lamb said, mournfully. “Must say, I was expecting a lot more bodice-rippers on your bookshelf, and the disappointment’s killer. You know, last day I took a holiday Major was still in Downing Street. I’m a cunthair away from going spare.”
“I’m sure you’ll find some way to occupy yourself.”
“Do I detect a note of innuendo?”
“Absolutely not. Goodbye, Lamb.”
♞ ♞ ♞
Catherine returned home to find the apartment intact, which was a start. No upturned shelves. No books strewn across the floor. No Lamb, either.
She stood in the middle of her sitting room for a moment, prescription bags clenched in her fists. Observe. No point going doomsday about it. The bathroom was empty. She didn’t even have a bathtub; the first thing she’d checked when she bought the place.
His coat gone from the rack. His shoes flung haphazard beneath the sofa. The door had been locked, not that it made much difference. No keys needed in his world.
Catherine left her flat and headed upwards, on a hunch. The steel door that led onto the roof—rusted shut as long as she had been in residence—sat slightly ajar, its lock scuffed with fresh scratches. After years of practice at Slough House and its screeching demon of a door all it took was the knack—and a well-placed kick.
The roof was a stretch of pebbled tarmac and an abstract line of metal vents and boxes. Lamb leaned at the edge of the parapet, a blanket draped over his shoulders. The lank hair at his collar whipped in the wind. With his crumpled blanket and overcoat he looked like a huddled monk on a cliffside retreat, or an empty crisp packet.
“Those are my slippers,” Catherine commented.
“Creature of comfort, me.”
He didn’t turn around. She could smell the smoke from here.
As Catherine approached she saw that he had a cat dandled in the crook of his elbow. This gave her an absurd thrill: no one would ever believe her. All that special immunity he’d built for years leading to a squash-faced tabby scowling up at her as if she was the one trespassing.
“I don’t like cats,” she said, frowning. “Don’t tell me you stole it.”
“Going against type. Someone should throw you a parade,” growled Lamb around the cigarette jammed between his teeth. “Nosy little bastard giving me guff, trying to trip me down the stairs. Fucking hazard.”
“It’s my neighbour’s. She’ll be wondering where it’s gotten to.”
Lamb peered over the edge. “If it’s not true about them landing on their feet then I guess I’d just be the asshole that chucked some poor dear’s darling mog off the roof. Fancy it, Shitface?”
The cat scrabbled to Lamb’s shoulder, arched itself, and flopped to the ground.
Lamb watched it roll onto its belly.
“You really are a useless crock of piss,” he informed the cat. A few fingers of sun were clawing their way through the clouds, turning the distant council flats holy and pictorial. Catherine shivered. Paid no heed to the animal as it rubbed itself against her ankles, and turned to Lamb instead.
“Where did you get that?”
He mouthed at the offending cigarette stub in a way that suggested he might try to swallow it. It was a pointless question. Lamb had a knack for conjuring cigarettes from pockets and sleeves and behind ears—and, once, improbably, from the turn-up of his trousers where she gathered he had dropped it—but she doubted even he could summon them out of thin air.
Lamb exhaled a long billow of smoke from both nostrils like a coach-horse from hell, and looked out across the flats and tree-lined streets, the low-slung sun making his eyes seem distant and calculating behind the filthy glare of his glasses.
“Sun goes down behind the wall,” he ruminated, then, like he was rattling off a list of contacts, “In Pankow and Prenzlauer Berg and last but not least in Kreuzberg and Zehlendorf. Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh and whatever the frolicking fuck else.”
“What’s that?”
“The sun,” Lamb said kindly, pointing. “It goes down every night.”
Catherine let out a measured breath. “Yes. I’m aware, thank you.” She plucked the cigarette from between his fingers and, instead of grinding it out on the bricks, took a long slow drag. It was horrible. Even worse than she remembered.
Lamb turned to watch. His face was unreadable, but she thought he might actually be impressed.
“Those things’ll kill you,” he wheezed, delicately. He liberated the stub from her grip and took a final drag before flicking it over the edge, where the embers arced and scattered in the wind.
“How are you—”
“Feeling? Oh, absolutely fan-fucking-tastic, thanks for asking.”
“No bullshit. Remember? That’s the price of rent—not that I’m getting any, by the way.”
Lamb patted his pockets, vaguely. “Fuck me. Some bellend’s nicked my wallet. Shame.”
“Very funny.”
“You don’t even have a T.V. There’s prisons more kitted out than this. Not really worth the price of admission.”
The cat vanished down the stairwell. Neither of them watched it go. It seemed to Catherine that they were back in Slough House, above the rest of the rumble and clatter of the street and the innate sense of frustration permeating the structure. The only thing missing was the waft of tomato and garlic from the Italian below.
“Almost dying isn’t worth a lot of things,” she said, at last.
“Ah, but consider the company.” Lamb considered. “Fuck. Nah. Never mind.”
Catherine turned toward the stairs, and he watched her go, removing his smeared glasses and polishing them on his shirt. Without them his eyes looked as pale as chipped-off fragments of sky and just as distant.
For a moment she thought he might say something, and then she was inside the stairwell, looking down at her cold hands. The small body of a mouse curled in a darkened corner at her feet. Part of her still thought this might be some perverse test, seeing how far her loyalty ran, how much she was willing to take.
He must be slipping. He hadn’t even complained when she’d stolen his pack of cigarettes.