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Were you to point a gun at Jackson Lamb and Catherine Standish’s respective heads, and demand they speak the name of the person they hold most dear in this world, two things would occur (though not concurrently): firstly, they would lie, and secondly, you would find your time on this earth remarkably – if not fatally - shortened. While the latter requires no explanation (the slowest of the slow horses are still loping around for a reason), the former is worth remarking upon, especially if you happen to be the unfortunate murderer/thief/terrorist/former KGB agent/idiot who has been fool enough to think such an endeavour in any way prudent.
Lying, at a surface level, would surely be logical; any name yoked out would inevitably become a target, prompting both of the former/ex/still-barely-holding-on spooks to lay the bait elsewhere – a friendly fellow attendee from AA, perhaps, Mr Chen the proprietor (and frequent employer of less-than-legal migrants) of the Chinese restaurant downstairs, or any number of people whose loss would be survivable, if not entirely forgivable.
But beneath that easy psychology is another reason why the pair would lie under such circumstances, it being the case that each would be forced to name the other, and it being the case that both are extremely embarrassed about it – embarrassed enough that a murderer/thief/terrorist/former KGB agent/idiot would not be threat enough to warrant the release of such information. Indeed, Jackson Lamb is pretty sure it couldn’t be waterboarded out of him; Catherine Standish would rather join Struan Loy’s hapless pub quiz team.
Both are aware of the existence of such a feeling within the other, though it has remained unspoken these last twenty years, and will remain so until they are in their very separate graves. For Lamb, the attachment is one sprung from guilt, then from necessity, and finally from unacknowledged affection (unacknowledged, or perhaps unrecognised, for a fair few decades have passed since his heart last did anything save pump blood). He doesn’t know the exact shape that she occupies in his mind, only that she is present enough to cloud his judgement – present enough that he would do the bidding of Diana Taverner, for example, to spare her from the unflinching injustice of the Security Services.
For Standish, the issue is rather more opaque, in that she neither likes nor respects the man, and yet understands the meaning of every flicker of his eyes, every movement of his brows, every indiscriminate hand gesture (though the one that accompanies his instruction to “sit and swivel” doesn’t take a lifelong connection to work out). It’s funny, that she does feel a lifelong connection with him, despite their having only met many years into their respective Park services. But eternities have been known to pass in a single day at Slough House, and she has a tendency to count every second, if only to be a little further away from that last drink with every tick of the clock.
The other slow horses, the Dogs, even Lady Di herself, are only half aware of the depth of their shared affinity. Observation alone could not account for the millions of wordless arguments they have fought, for the feeling that passes through every dismissive bark and every refused tumbler; their relationship cannot be studied because there is not, and will never be, enough data to be coded or categorised or held under a spotlight and scrutinised.
Even if you were to point a gun to their heads.
This level of context is helpful enough in assisting a murderer/thief/terrorist/former KGB agent/idiot escape certain death, but it also serves another purpose, in explaining just why Jackson Lamb is banging on Catherine Standish’s front door at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning, four months after abandoning her at a petrol station precisely twenty-eight miles from said front door.
He is there because, squashed and beaten and crippled though it may be, they share something. He is there because he is trying to be kind.
He is banging because it has never occurred to him to be kind kindly.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Open the door, Standish!”
Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Put the bottle down and let me in!”
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Come on Standish, I’ve not got all day, and this is supposed to be a fucking raid-”
The door is tugged open, but the chain is still latched, and it recoils so sharply that it nearly slams shut all over again. The flat’s long-term inhabitant sighs, but makes no move to remedy the situation.
“If it was a raid, they would’ve sent the Dogs,” Catherine says plainly, though the only part of her that is visible are her fingernails – not manicured, but tidy – on the frame of the door, “Not you.”
He hasn’t had much to smile about the past few months, but the primness of her voice, the offence wafting off of every word, makes his lip curl up at the corner so suddenly it cracks the skin.
“And if the Dogs were here, they’d have kicked the fucking door down by now, so be grateful they’re not,” he argues back, “Now open the bloody thing, or I will.”
Her fingers tighten on the doorframe, and a chip of paint tucks itself under one of her nails as she squeezes.
“For you to get your leg up that high would require an act of God,” Catherine replies, her voice a gentle snarl, “Given that you’re probably last on the list of people he’d be willing to appear before, I think I’ll take my chances. Goodbye Jackson.”
But her fingers are still on the doorframe, and he can see the outline of her slipper, fastened to the carpet, not moving an inch.
He grins sharply again; his lip splits, he tastes blood.
“A rhino couldn’t kick that high either. Wouldn’t bet against it smashing through this piece of shit though.”
He raps on the wood.
“Well, if you want to make that comparison-”
“Listen Standish, I can stand here all fucking day while you fat-shame me-”
“Don’t call me that,” Catherine says sharply, and he hears the blissful sound of the chain being unfastened, immediately dampened by the deep furrow of her brows, the glint in her eyes that tells him his jokes are about as welcome as he is.
“Don’t call you what?” he says, rather more softly than he had intended, and now it’s his turn to grip onto the doorframe, swaying in his soft leather shoes that had seen better days fifteen years ago, and now face the daily nightmare of being invaded by Jackson Lamb’s unwashed, blistered feet.
Catherine purses her lips together, resists putting her hands on her hips like a school ma’am.
“Standish,” she says, “I’m not one of your lackeys anymore. One of your horses.”
She stares him down. He wishes he found it less amusing.
“Catherine, then,” he tests, a glint of humour in his tone, a slyness, a man who knows he is pushing his luck.
She harrumphs. “Don’t call me that either.”
He barks a laugh, his belly shaking with the whiplash force of it.
“Well what the fuck am I supposed to call you then?” he laughs, “Mabel? Grace? Your Fucking Majesty?”
Your Fucking Majesty – as she will remain for just a few moments longer – colours a deep red and stares at the carpet while she evaluates her options.
“Oh for goodness-” she starts, before stepping aside to let him in, “Well, come in then. You had better tell me what it is that you want. And if it’s for me to come back, then you’ve had a wasted trip.”
Jackson pads in and kicks off his shoes, who thank him for the brief relief, while Standish wrinkles her nose and closes the door behind him, curiously sliding the latch across again as if she doesn’t trust him to protect her were someone with a less generous motive to have the same thought of popping in at 7 o'clock on an erstwhile Saturday morning.
She makes no move to invite him in further than the entry way to her flat, which leads immediately into a small living room-cum-kitchen. He’s been here before, the last time during the balls-up with the Asian kid, and it strikes him as he looks her up and down that she’s switched out the nightgown for blue polyester pyjamas. Dark blue.
He can’t remember having ever seen her in trousers before.
She catches him staring at the same time he does, and he diverts, strolls around the span of her living room, glances at her bookshelves, at the volumes of Virginia Woolf mixed with Mills & Boons, to shake off her eye.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” he asks lightly, tapping his finger against the spine of a volume aptly titled Spies, Lies & Naked Thighs, “Time was, you’d have half of London tramping in and out of this place.”
No response. He always had to push a little harder with Catherine. It was one of the things he liked most about her.
“No need to have a latch, you’d be better off replacing the whole thing with a revolving door. A lot quicker, eh?”
“Jackson, what do you want?”
Her arms are crossed, her look expectant, and he realises it’s time to put on the show he had planned on the way over here.
No point traipsing across London and not making a scene.
“Told you at the door, didn’t I?” he says, clapping his hands together with an echoing smack and heading into the kitchen, “Fucking raid, innit Standish.”
He doesn’t need to be looking at her to see the flurry of fury, confusion, and surprise that crosses her face as he starts flinging cupboard doors open, yanking so hard that the joints squeal loudly enough to conceal her initial question of “What on earth are you-?”
He rummages carelessly, tips over a salt shaker, a bottle of olive oil, takes out tins of baked beans and peaches in syrup; he tosses baking paper over his shoulder and tsks at the white pasta – “Thought you’d be a wholemeal girl, Standish, much better for the gut” – and flicks through packs of microwave pasta, toppling a neatly-stacked row of basmati like a house of cards; and when he’s done there, he moves to the fridge, and the low buzz drowns out Catherine’s protests too, and he unscrews the lid from a jar of pickles and doesn’t replace it, shakes a pot of Greek yoghurt, avoids the half-cucumber in the bottom drawer because he knows what she used to be like and he also knows she doesn’t have sex anymore, so Christ knows where that thing’s fucking been-
It’s a cacophony of noise, and it’s meant to be. He’s trying to scare the shit out of her – or the shits into her, dependent on what she’s been up to.
There have been damning reports, after all.
She pulls on his wrist – fingernails again, only this time digging into his skin – and demands, “Will you stop that! What are you doing, Jackson? For God’s sake-”
“You were seen!” he announces, turning around, and pulling open the cupboard under the sink, “Seen going into the Hare and Hounds last Friday night. Didn’t come out for two hours.”
Catherine startles, stands up straight, and she aims a light kick at his lower back which causes him to hesitate for a second, before tossing a reel of bin liners out and carrying on.
If he had reacted, if he had turned around, Jackson Lamb might have seen something that looked almost like gratitude on Catherine Standish’s face. Because she had thought he was here to mess around with her; God knows she’s let him treat her like a ragdoll, a maid, a common-law wife – sans the affection, financial security, and the shagging – for en embarrassingly long time. She’s his favourite toy in that sense. Oh, he gets a good amount of his jollies from terrorising the other slow horses – the slow horses, she corrects in her mind, there’s no ‘Other’ if you’re not one of them – but she’s always been the hardest one to rattle, so he shake, shake, shakes her, whenever he can, wherever he can, because Jackson Lamb loves a reaction, loves the fight, loves the boiled blood and bruised knuckles and the adrenaline that comes with the near-miss of a fist, the sting of a bullet that just breaches the skin.
But that’s not what this is. Not today, anyway.
He’s here because he’s worried.
The gratitude disappears pretty quickly though. He’s already made a mess of her life. She’s not about to let him make a mess of her flat.
“Will you get out from under there?” she says, trying to temper her volume, because restraint is what she is best at, and she will not let him that take from her too.
“Answer the charge and I might,” he grumbles, knocking over half-empty bottles of bleach and washing-up liquid.
“The charge-” Catherine mutters under her breath, resisting the urge to slam the cupboard door shut on his neck, “The charge. I was at the Hare and Hounds with a friend. I had a lemonade.”
“And your little trip to the off-licence the week before?”
She stands on her left foot with her right to stop herself from kicking him again.
“I needed stamps. The post office was shut.”
“You’ve been going to AA more than usual.”
“I have.”
“Four times a week.”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“So, I’ve felt the need to find a bit of community,” Catherine snaps, before reeling herself back in. Breathe. The worst he can do to you, he’s done. Calm down now. “People I can trust.”
“And you thought a bunch of alcoholics was your best option?” he retorts, though she can hear him swallowing down a wheeze, even this modicum of exercise a little too much, “Jesus Christ Standish, you’d give your life savings away to a fucking Nigerian prince just to feel less lonely.”
“I’m not lonely,” she lies, and when he doesn’t immediately scoff, she thinks he might have calmed down a bit himself from the frenzy of the last few minutes, but luck has never been on her side where Jackson Lamb has been involved. In fact, she thinks he’s probably cursed her.
She doesn’t have time to ruminate on when such a curse may have been cast – not that she needs to think too hard; brain matter on white tiling is hard to forget – because the next sound Jackson emits is a triumphant hurrah, and out he comes from under the sink, a glass bottle in hand, three-quarters full and deliberately unlabelled.
“I knew it!” he calls, uncapping the bottle and taking a swig, and Catherine has to enjoy the moment, because (and she hates to admit it, but it is true) Jackson Lamb is so infrequently wrong that the times he screws up really are worth celebrating.
He spits a shower of white spirit across her kitchen floor, droplets of it staining the cuffs of her pyjama shirt, and she grimaces as he splutters for air, dropping the open bottle to the floor where it slowly seeps into a puddle around him, soaking through his holey socks and climbing up to his ankles. He chokes on an immense cough, and Catherine rolls her eyes as his own fill with water, and collects the glass bottle and sets it on the draining board.
“You were saying?” she asks when he regains the ability to speak, and he wipes spittle from his mouth and bites back, “Well, you did used to like the hard stuff.”
“For the love of- It’s white spirit, Jackson. It’s for cleaning, not drinking,” she says contemptuously.
“What the fuck are you cleaning with that? That’s what they use to burn warts off of mules, you hardly need it to do the sink,” he replies sourly, before sticking his head under the tap like a dog and washing out his mouth.
“You’re disgusting,” she can’t help but say, “And you’ve got it all over the floor-”
Shooing him away from the sink, she pulls out a sheaf of kitchen roll and starts mopping up the spirit, and immediately hates the position she finds herself in; on her hands and knees, while he stands over her, looking down, the way he has done for all the time they’ve known one another.
Catherine knows they have never been equals. She had been a secretary; he had been a joe. One of them had been more vital to the service than the other, even if she had never wanted to admit it, and when she had been packed off to Slough House with him, it was made clear from the very first day that he was the boss. That was fine. For the first few years, she was so focused on not slipping in her recovery that she barely noticed the imbalance. And he hadn’t been all that cruel in the beginning. But his taunts had grown in tandem with her sobriety – taunts, tests, however he liked to call them – and his bellowing and generally dogsbodying would have felled a lesser woman than her, who wore his demands and bad tempers like calluses on her hands.
Never equals. And yet, a partnership. And eventually, pseudo-parents corralling their wayward children.
But he has been lying to her all this time. Every hour of every day for twenty long years, lying about Charles and letting her blame herself, and letting her look so stupid and so naïve in front of the rest of them. God, the things people must have said behind her back: poor Catherine, couldn’t even see the devil in the office next door; poor Catherine, deluded herself that a man like that would care an iota about an alcoholic; poor Catherine, always the last to know.
She could forgive him the callousness with which he had finally told her the truth. But she isn’t sure if she can forgive him the decades of her life she has spent martyring a man who would’ve thrown her to the wolves for sixpence and a whisper.
The humiliation of it doesn’t so much rankle, as it does bite.
“Standish?”
She has fallen silent for too long, she realises, and Jackson is pulling her to her feet via a clumsy hand on her elbow, and she lets him manoeuvre her, before coming to and slapping his hand away.
“Paintbrushes,” she says softly, and Jackson frowns.
“Paintbrushes?”
“I’ve been painting,” Catherine admits, and she leads Jackson and his wet feet back through to the living room, and points at some of the little canvases in the corner behind the bookshelves.
“You’ve been painting?” he asks, incredulity in his voice, as if the blobs of acrylic are not evident enough. He picks up the nearest – a mass of green and yellow – and turns it three-hundred-and-sixty degrees before chucking it back down.
“Bloody hell Standish, you should’ve said,” he says lightly, “If I’d’ve known we were harbouring the next Monet at Slough House, I would’ve kicked you out years ago.”
“You didn’t kick me out, I quit,” Catherine replies, though the fight had seeped out of her at the same time as the white spirit, and now all she wants to do is go back to bed and forget about Jackson Lamb and Charles Partner and the whole damned Secret Service to boot.
Her father had told her to train as an accountant. And if he hadn’t broken both of her arms during the course of her childhood, she might have been inclined to listen to him.
Jackson has fallen silent – the kind of silent she does not trust – and she sighs and claps a hand to her forehead, exhausted in a way that normally follows the working day, not the time before the sun has even fully risen.
“I haven’t checked your bathroom. Or your bedroom,” he finally says, and he looks at her, his own energy clearly waning too.
“Be my guest,” she capitulates, carelessly waving a hand towards the bathroom, and she lets him finish his search, hears him chucking pill bottles (aspirin, paracetamol, codeine for days like these) and tubes of moisturiser aside in his now more moderately-paced raid for her non-existent stash of alcohol. Catherine herself goes back to her bedroom and makes the bed – more for her own peace of mind than for his comfort – and then perches on the side of it, and waits for him to come in.
He had been right earlier – the taunt about half of London. But no man – save him, that one time with the kidnapped boy – has ever crossed the border into the bedroom in this apartment. That life had been left behind, many years and quite a few postcodes away. This space has a sanctity to it, a sacredness that she does not want to defile no matter how much she sometimes misses the feeling of a solid weight atop of her, the scrape of stubble between her thighs, the sting of teeth burrowing into her neck.
It is not a reminiscence, not as such, but she is still lingering in thought when Jackson trudges into her bedroom, his wet socks squelching, the carpet absorbing the dual stench of Lamb himself and the white spirit he stepped in. He settles down on the bed next to her, dropping down with such force that he is surprised when she doesn’t spring up and through the ceiling.
Standish has always been haunted, he thinks, watching her eyelashes flicker as she imagines herself some place between here and somewhere very far away. Even before Partner, even before the alcoholism set in. It was like she had been born to be a slow horse, born to never reach her potential; waif-like, wraith-like, always on the periphery. The kind of person you could forget existed when they weren’t in your direct line of sight.
And yet he has never managed to forget her. He has not forgotten the devastation on her face when he found her with Charles’ body; he has not forgotten the glint of tears in her eyes in that nameless petrol station on the outskirts of London; he has not forgotten the softness of her mouth, or the pressure of her tongue, or the surprising strength of her thighs, from one night round the back of a pub half a lifetime ago.
In fact, he’s pretty sure she’s the one who’s forgotten that last bit.
“Not going to ransack this room as well?” Catherine asks, defeated, and he wriggles to get comfortable, before farting soundly. Good mattress, he thinks, as it swallows the sound, but he finds himself troubled by Standish’s lack of reaction.
“Nah, I trust you. Plus, I’m fucking knackered,” he says lackadaisically, and then rummages around in his pocket for his flask, before unscrewing the lid, wafting it in her direction, and asking, “Want a swig?”
It’s not as though life at Catherine Standish’s place is a party, but the atmosphere dies a death so sudden that Jackson briefly suspects the involvement of Novichok, before realising he is the one who has committed the murder.
He does not lower his hand, and the scent of whatever cheap whiskey is inside perforates the room, filling every little gap, tucking itself around every hidden corner.
From the look on her face, he half expects a punch on the jaw.
“What would you do if I said yes?” Catherine asks, her eyes trained on him, interrogative.
He shrugs, shakes the flask, hears the whiskey slosh about within its tight confines.
“Up to you, isn’t it?” he says quietly, “No skin off my back.”
“Really?”
Disbelief colours her voice, but before he can make a snide comment in return, she snatches the flask from his hand and raises it to her lips, and he doesn’t think at all, just slaps the metal from her hands and watches as another puddle coagulates on Catherine Standish’s floor.
He doesn’t dare speak, even tries to fart to diffuse the tension, but for perhaps the first time in his life finds himself unable to summon the necessary elements. Catherine’s expression is inscrutable, but her left hand is shaking next to him, and, overtaken by something close to kindness, he settles his own hand atop of hers, and gently squeezes her fingers in an attempt to disclose that which he could never come close to with words.
“I’m not drinking, Jackson,” she says plainly, “I wouldn’t let you push me that far.”
“Well,” he sighs, “I’m glad to hear it.”
Her laugh is empty, but it’s a better noise than the silence.
“You know,” he starts, unsure of where his mouth is taking him, “That night at the petrol station. You shouldn’t have wandered off.”
“No?”
“No. All sorts of weirdos out there. Would’ve been a real shit-show if we’d gone to all that effort to rescue you, and then you’d been stuffed in the back of a car and turned into a coat by some Buffalo-Bill wannabe.”
“Hm.”
“Hm?” Jackson mocks, “What, you trying to do an impression of the mains grid?”
The strange, empty laughter doesn’t return, but he swears he sees a flicker of a smile on her face.
“You could just apologise,” Catherine eventually says, her hand still tucked neatly beneath his, “It would have been much simpler than this… farce.”
“Hm.”
“Hm?”
“Nah, come to think of it, it sounds more like a lightbulb on the fritz, doesn’t it?”
He reaches for a cigarette and tucks it behind his ear, figures it’s best not to push his luck and light it, and lets go of Standish’s hand with a reluctance that would surprise him if there was anything left in the world that could.
“How is everyone?” Catherine asks, though her gaze remains trained on the hand he has just abandoned, “At Slough House?”
Jackson chuckles drily, the cigarette behind his ear shaking as his body vibrates from the sound.
“Cartwright is still a pain in my arse. Guy is still somewhat competent, but Christ, if she doesn’t stop moping, I’m going to kick her down the fucking stairs. And Dander and Longridge are meeting new, terrifying levels of codependency,” he replies, glad for the easy conversation, glad to just complain. He’s been bearing all of his ill-will towards the horses without Standish as a sounding board for close to four months. Frankly, he deserves the fucking Victoria’s Cross.
“What about Roddy?” Standish asks.
“Roddy?”
Catherine rolls her eyes.
“Ho.”
“You almost make this too easy,” Jackson replies, biting down on a childish response, “But Ho. Christ. I genuinely forgot he existed for a minute there. Best minute of my life, actually. Why did you have to go and ruin that?”
“Be nice, Jackson,” Catherine chides, and he grins at the return of her matronly voice.
“He’s alive, anyway,” he continues, “Thinks he’s got himself a girlfriend.”
“Good for him.”
“She’s a North Korean spy.”
“Don’t be unkind, Jackson.”
“I’m not kidding! Besides, how else would he have managed it?”
She lets out a contemplative sound, and it makes him want to applaud, because another of his favourite things about Catherine Standish is that everyone thinks she’s a saint, but the reality is that she can be just as awful – if not more – as the rest of them. In the early days of Slough House, she had been spacey as hell, too off her head with grief to snark with him; nowadays – or, up until a fateful night in June – there had been a small comradery to be found in their shared contempt of certain individuals (some, if not all, slow horses included).
The heart of the matter is that they’ve been together too long to be parted like this. And while he genuinely had come here to check she wasn’t drinking – he had made Dander and Longridge tail her for the last few weeks, just in case, so they were due for a ball-busting on Monday for their shit intel – with every passing moment spent here, he’s biting deeper and deeper into his tongue to stop himself from begging her to return.
She’ll come back on her own, he tells himself.
Both of them know that neither one will survive a permanent separation.
As though she can read the lines of his thoughts through the lines around his mouth, Standish clears her throat, flexes her fingers.
“I’m still furious,” she murmurs, though she inches closer to him as she speaks – he, the black hole at the side of her bed, his weight drawing her slippery faux-satin pyjamas ever closer into his orbit, “With you.”
“I know,” he replies, aiming for casual, unruffled, and landing a few hundred yards short at somewhere close to placid, though still some leagues from guilty. Because spooks don’t say sorry; admitting culpability only speeds up the process of getting a foreign government-sanctioned bullet to the brain, and while Catherine Standish’s poky little flat on the wrong side of Hammersmith with its small, stubborn windows, and freshly-laundered smell doesn’t exactly spell out enemy territory, this is a place where professing to his sins could land him in an even worse position than dead in an alley with a bullet lodged upside his head.
If he starts saying sorry, Christ knows where he’ll stop.
There are worse things for her to know about Charles Partner, after all.
“You humiliated me,” Catherine continues, and his stomach clenches at just how worse this could be, if she knew the whole story and not just the slither he had so viciously divulged, “Not just that night, but for years before, too.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
It’s the crux of the matter, he supposes. In retrospect, there were a million reasons for it: that he couldn’t bear to be called vulnerable by her, nor to be lauded as good by the standards of a man who had fallen short of every one of them; that he, in turn, had made her vulnerable by lying to her – vulnerable not to threats, to violence, but to mockery and japes at the behest of the people around her; that he had made her ignorant in a world that reserved such privilege only for civilians and the insane. Maybe he had just been pissed off at how scared he had been – if only for moments, for seconds – that something would happen to her, the cogs that kept his wheels turning, the perpetual, unrelenting, incomparable thorn in his side.
But if she was a thorn in his side, he was pretty sure he was a knife in hers.
“I thought I was doing you a favour,” he lies, “I know you loved him.”
You loved him. And I decorated his bathroom wall with the insides of his skull.
Catherine scoffs, phlegmatic and wet, and contests, “I wasn’t in love with him.”
“Didn’t say you were,” Jackson says placatingly, “But you cared about him. You didn’t drink because of him. I didn’t want to tear that away from you.”
“But you did,” Catherine says hotly, agitated, and he removes the cigarette from behind his ear and rolls it between his fingers, and has to confess: “I was angry too.”
Catherine rubs her forehead with both hands, shielding herself, and then snatches the cigarette – still in motion – from his hands, and fishes out a lighter from his external side pocket, where she knows it lives. She lights up, inhales deeply, lets the ash tip onto the carpet where it’s extinguished by the remnants of white spirit still clinging to Jackson Lamb’s now slightly cleaner socks.
She doesn’t smoke, has never really smoked, had only ever smoked when prompted to by the bodies she’d taken home with her; the acrid smell, the bitter taste, reminds her of dingy nights in dirty pubs and dirty fucks with dingy men, and it doesn’t make her want to drink, but it does remind her of what it felt like to be touched, and so she passes the cigarette along to Jackson, who lets it hang out of the corner of his mouth, and acknowledges it for the kiss that it is, even if they are both angry people who are not entirely sure what they want.
“Why him?” she asks, unsure of the true scope of her question: why did Partner have to betray me? Why did he have to die? Why did I spend so many years blaming myself?
Jackson takes a long drag, coughs inside himself, and smiles so briefly it could be mistaken for him passing gas, “We’ve all loved people who didn’t deserve it. Fact of life, that one.”
Catherine’s brows furrow, and she wordlessly asks for the rest of the cigarette, which he dutifully returns. When the last few centimetres are sizzling at her fingertips, she hesitates, and Jackson takes it, makes a joke about her expecting him to eat it, and stubs it out on her white bedframe before pocketing the remains for disposal later on.
“Have you?” she asks, “Ever loved someone, I mean.”
The idea of Jackson Lamb in love is a pixelated image, a portrait in abstract; she can see the edges of it, but can’t fill in the rest of picture. He has torn through her home this morning like a tornado, but he has also spoken more softly to her than on any other occasion that she can recall – he has prodded, but not pounded the way he usually does.
She wonders, briefly, if that is why he makes himself so outwardly revolting. Because, in some lights – in some sleep-deprived, still-heartbroken, early-morning lights – you could wind up feeling something less than hatred for him.
She doesn’t think he would know what to do with something like love.
He considers her question for a while, and seemingly settles on a sufficiently cryptic answer: “What do you take me for Standish? I’m not a monk.”
Somehow, without her notice, his hand has ended up on top of hers once again, and she thinks that if they were other people, if they weren’t alcoholics of various pedigrees, if they weren’t old-fashioned spooks still clinging to an analogue existence, shored up against the tides of modernity and Bluetooth and digital surveillance, she might just turn her hand palm-up, and let their fingers fall together.
Oh well. Fate and other plans.
“Right, well, I’ve got a busy day. Some of us are still working, not just farting about reading filth and making shit paintings,” Jackson announces, slapping his hands to his knees and rising to his feet with a stream of expletives that would make Billy Connolly look like a children’s entertainer. He does look back at her though, before making his way out of her bedroom, and there’s a mischief to his face that strips decades from him when he asks, “Fancy a quick roll around? For old times’ sake?”
Catherine prides herself on not reacting in the horrified way that she’s sure he expects her to. It’s easy, actually, because the booze might have cast a shadow over her memories, but Lamb is a difficult character to erase in his entirety.
“For old time’s sake, surely.”
The difference is grammatical as opposed to audible, and he grins like he’s never been prouder of her.
She follows him out of the bedroom, and towards the front door, where he slips his leather shoes back on and adds, “Fair enough. Though,” – a hoarse laugh – “I was so drunk, I remember there being two of you.”
He turns sharply by the front door, and if there’s an affectionate, somewhat alien, gleam to the look he gives her, she shakes it off, and counters, “I was so drunk, I hardly remember it at all.”
“Touché,” he says, pushing his glasses closer to his face and reaching around for the latch, “Shame though.”
“Hm,” she replies neutrally, and she sees his shoulders shake with the laughter that he supresses.
“I’ll be seeing you then, Standish,” Jackson says, stepping out into the hallway.
“Jackson-” she protests, the comfortable back-and-forth grinding to a halt with the presumption entwined in his farewell. He visibly reacts to the discomfort in her voice, and suddenly she can’t picture what he looks like when he laughs, can’t picture him ever having laughed at all.
“Or not. Up to you, I suppose. Makes a nice change, not having to listen to your fucking whining,” he says gruffly, reaching for another cigarette, “And just think: I’ve been sticking wet spoons in the sugar all this time.”
“You haven’t been making your own coffee, Jackson,” Catherine hits back, crossing her arms across her chest, “You don’t know how.”
“You know, you’re really fucking mouthy for half-seven in the morning,” he complains, though he does not leave, and his fists are clenched as if to stop himself from reaching out.
She doesn’t think they’ve ever hugged. They’ve brushed shoulders, hands have lingered. He has hovered over her, and she has felt embraced by his shadow. And of course they fucked, hard and heated, that one time, eight Prime Ministers and dozens of wars ago. But the softer intimacies, the reassurances, the kind of affection that should exist between two people with their shared past is absent, and will continue to be, for a little while longer at least.
“Can I have that, by the way?” Jackson blurts out just as she begins to close the door, and he points back towards the green-yellow blob canvas he had dumped next to her sofa earlier.
“What? Why?” Catherine asks, bemused, and Jackson lights up as she retrieves it, and delivers it into his waiting hands.
“I want to hang it in my bog,” he explains, tucking the photo-size board inside his trench coat with no great finesse. He exhales a cloud of smoke into the corridor as he turns on his heel and strides away, “So I’ll think of you every time I have a shit.”
God, she wishes she hated him.
“Goodbye, Jackson.”
“Smell you later, Standish.”
It is grief that draws Catherine Standish back to Slough House, though it is largely Jackson Lamb’s.
When Jackson had ‘raided’ her flat a few weeks ago, it had taken an hour or so to restore order; this time, it takes days. She buys more white spirit – buys it in the gallons – and scrubs the carpet in Shirley’s office, in Jackson’s, until she has to step away for fear of undoing her twenty years of sobriety through inhalation alone. But none of the promised Park resources seem at all forthcoming, and they can’t just… exist in this gory stasis until such a time when Diana Taverner deems their distress sufficiently urgent. So she does her job, and patches things up where she can.
Only the top floor of the building is occupied today; River is with his grandfather, Roddy is skiving, Louisa is somewhere still seething, and Shirley is in the wind, probably six lines in with so much deeper left to dig. She feels desperately sorry for all of them (JK Coe excluded), although her heart strains most for River, who has won a terrible prize in finding his father, but losing the man who raised him.
Her own father’s death had been a relief, in both its suddenness and its very happening. She had had a few drinks to celebrate, she remembers, in the days before ‘a few drinks’ became code for a blackout.
Jackson is doing his best to reach such a height right now, she thinks. That would usually be par for the course, no cause for concern. Except he hasn’t offered her a measure. Hasn’t even looked her way while she’s been scouring dried blood off of his radiator.
She’s choosing not to dwell on how the blood got there. Her ears are still ringing.
(And she’s trying not to think about a conversation she overheard between Jackson and Coe, where the latter had been subjected to a tirade of cursing from the former, whose meaning could only be ascertained from his final exclamation of Why the fuck didn’t you let her leave before you did it?)
There’s an irony to all of it, she supposes. He had let her go strolling into the night after breaking her heart, and with the situation now reversed, here she is, six feet away, keeping an eye on him as he mourns, not trusting him to do it safely without a supervisor. Apples and oranges: her grief would burn only her; she thinks Jackson’s might torch all of London.
She kneels down to scrape at the flecks embedded in the valve, and a spike of pain rushes through her knee. Glass is the most likely culprit, and it’s a hollow victory when she pulls a shard from under the skin, blood beading down her calf in slow-motion.
It’s a sorry excuse for an injury compared to the sorts they have sustained over the last few days, but she doesn’t want to stain the floor any further, so she braves Jackson’s bathroom, waving off his absent concern when she passes his desk.
She pins the hem of her dress back to her waist, places her foot on top of the toilet, and runs a wad of toilet paper under the sink before pressing it against the cut. She hisses under her breath, but it’s minor, so minor that she’s angry for having to waste time on it when there is still so much work to be done in this place.
“You all right in there, Standish?” Jackson calls, and he thumps once on the door before coming in anyway, her return to Slough House seemingly a declaration of her willingness to sacrifice her privacy once more (though even ‘quitting’ hadn’t awarded her such a privilege).
He stands in the doorway, and she gives him a warning look that he ignores before wolf-whistling perfectly on key.
“Nice legs, Mrs Robinson,” he leers, although they both know his heart’s not in it, “What’s going on, you got a moon cup stuck up there or something?”
“How do you know what a moon cup is?” she asks, one eyebrow raised.
“My neighbour doesn’t bother picking up her mail. She’s got some good subscriptions,” Jackson parses back, refusing to avert his gaze. He chuckles, and in as innocent a voice as she has heard from him, asks, “Do you need a hand?”
She raises her other eyebrow and sighs, before untucking her dress, and letting it fall back around her feet. She disposes of the wet loo roll in the bin, and eventually manages a weak retort: “In your dreams.”
He chuckles, a bit more feeling in it this time, and staggers back to his desk, somehow doubling the distance with the force of his swaying, and Catherine is about to follow him out when her eyes settle on a familiar vomit-coloured canvas propped up above the sink.
It was meant to be a tree, once upon a time. But still, it’s only fitting that as decoration for Jackson Lamb’s bathroom, it looks more like a lazy splash of bodily fluid.
She smiles, small and gentle, and walks back into Jackson’s office, to the offer of a few fingers (of whiskey Standish, get your mind out of the gutter), and plenty more wounds to be healed – even a fair few she doesn’t yet know about.
But that’s life at Slough House. Life entwined with Jackson Lamb.
Gun to her head, she wouldn't be anywhere else.