London's Slough House is where the washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. The "slow horses," as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated here. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the ...
They have tied me down to keep me from shredding myself, he managed, in a moment of clarity. To prevent me ripping the skin from my bones, and not stopping until I’m dead. This was a good thought: it pretended they had his welfare in mind. But the pain remained, like being chewed by fire-ants, an...
It was after midnight. Some of the houses were dressed in darkness; from others, light peeped behind thick curtains; and Hobden could imagine the chink of cutlery, and of glasses meeting together in toasts. Halfway down the street, he found the house he was after. There were lights on. Again, he ...
Monday morning was blue skies, but Zoë traced a stiff wind in the limbs of next door’s trees, and knew clouds might turn up out of nowhere. Spring days could turn to autumn. The lift your heart got might be the kind that dropped you at the next exit. Sunday, she’d written ...
Dieter Hess died in his armchair, surrounded by his books; a half-full glass of 2008 Burgundy at his elbow, a half-smoked Montecristo in the ashtray on the floor. In his lap, Yeats’s Collected—the yellow-jacketed Macmillan edition—and in the CD tray Pärt’s Für Alina, long hushed by the time Bache...
She was at the focal point of the universe; where the crosshairs met. ‘Inside. How are you grouped?’ ‘He’s watching. I have to go back. He says he’ll use the gun.’ He was handing her something through the railings: a very normal-looking Nokia. ‘My number’s the only one on this. How are you groupe...
From the shelter of a shop awning Helen Coe waited until it eased, thinking of this as London weather as opposed to any other kind, which made her wonder if she’d been here too long. It was still steadily raining, though less torrentially, when she moved on. Her flat was t...
She wanted, she said, to do some shopping, and they saw nothing odd in this. Identify your friend’s body; then a little retail therapy. But maybe – in a job entailing regular trips to a morgue – you developed a certain insight into the reactions of the bereaved, and learned there was no template ...
. . Being in Regent’s Park always gave River a hollow feeling; the same you might get on stepping inside the marital home once the divorce had come through. Well, he said “always.” There’d been a time when that might have been the right word, early in his career, when it w...
In his hand a carrier bag, and in the bag a shoebox. It weighed more than his son. This thought wouldn’t leave. It echoed to the patter of the raindrops. There were bars along this stretch of road, and taxis cruising past. Not by any means a deserted part of the capital. Dancer had given Mose whi...