“Dunno. Maybe.”
She goes to the cupboard and takes out another glass before she sits down. I blink at her, red-eyed and confused.
“Talk.” She pours a shot into her own glass. “In your own time.”
I glance at the kitchen clock. “It’s one a.m.”
“And it’ll be one a.m. again, at least once a day for the rest of your life. So talk, if you want. Or drink up and come to bed.”
I sip my whisky. “I screwed up.”
“How badly?”
“I killed a bystander.”
“A by-” She freezes with her glass halfway to her lips. “Jesus, Bob.” Pause. “How did you do that?”
She looks appalled, but probably much less appalled than your spouse would look if you confessed to killing someone over the kitchen table. (Mo is made of stern stuff.)
“Angleton sent me to do a routine job. Only I missed something and fucked up my prep.”
“But you’re still-” She bites her lip, and now she looks shaken; my ears sketch in the missing word: alive.
“Oh, I almost got it right,” I explain, waving my glass. “Warrant Officer Hastings wasn’t hurt. And I’m here.” But then I remember the purple flash again, and the door opening, and the sight of Helen’s face aging a hundred years in a second right before my eyes. “Only the tea lady opened the door at the worst possible moment…”
Mo is silent for a while, so I take another sip.
“Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake,” I try to explain. “It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.”
“So what did you do afterwards?” she asks quietly.
“Afterwards? It was too late to do anything.” I shrug. “I told ’em not to disturb the scene and called the Plumbers. Then I had to wait until they arrived and hang around while they logged the scene and filed a preliminary report and bagged the body, which took all evening. They had to use a Dyson-there wasn’t enough left of her to fill a teacup, never mind a reanimator’s workbench. It’s on the books as a level four excursion, incidental unintended fatality. The desk officer was very understanding but I’ve got a ten o’clock appointment with someone in Operational Oversight to file an R60.” An official incident report. “Then I suppose there’ll be an enquiry.”
And the juggernaut of an internal investigation will start to roll, bearing down on my ass like hell’s own lawn mower in search of an un-trimmed blade of grass, but it’s not as if I don’t deserve it. I take another sip of the whisky, wishing I could drown myself in it. This isn’t the first time I’ve killed someone, but it’s the first time I’ve killed a civilian bystander, and I lack the words to express how I feel.
“I was going to dump on you,” Mo tells me, “but… forget it.” She empties her glass and I realize that while I was seeing that purple light the whisky has evaporated from my tumbler. “Come to bed now.”
I push myself to my feet, neck drooping. “It won’t make things better.”
“No.”
“I feel like shit.”
“No, Bob, you need to get some sleep.”
“I am a shit.”
“You need to get some sleep. Come to bed.”
“If you say so.”
I follow her upstairs. Today’s been shit, and tomorrow is quite possibly going to be worse-but it can wait for a while.
2. POINTING THE FINGER
I GO TO WORK IN A NONDESCRIPT OFFICE IN CENTRAL LONDON, south of the river and east of the sun-I can’t say precisely where-located above a row of shops. It’s a temporary home for the department, and it’s officially called the New Annexe, probably because it was thrown up in 1964. It consists of three floors of characterless sixties concrete piled up above a C &A and a couple of other boring high street stores like a bad perm on a grocer’s granny; it used to belong to the Post Office, back in the day. And nothing you can see through the windows from outside is really there.
The weather is just as unpleasant as yesterday, if not worse-muggy and humid, warm enough to be annoying but not hot enough to provoke businesses into paying for air conditioning-and there’s a stale tang of vehicle exhausts and fermenting dog shit underlying every noisome breath I take. Wasps buzz around the overflowing litter bins on the street outside the office as I nip into the staff entrance to the store, then push through a plywood door labeled BUILDING MAINTENANCE ONLY and up a whitewashed stairwell with peeling linoleum treads. (A lot of people go through that door every day, and they don’t look much like store employees, but for some reason nobody seems to notice. Or more accurately, they can’t notice.)
At the top of the stairs there’s another door. This one’s a bit more substantial. The wards make my skin crawl and send pins and needles singing up my arm as I push it open, but they recognize me as someone who belongs here, for which I am profoundly grateful. (A couple of years back a gang of thugs decided to ram-raid us and steal the office computers. Boy did they get an unpleasant surprise…)
I slouch over to reception. “Are there any messages for me today?” I ask Rita.
Rita, who is about a year younger than my mother and about as maternal as an iron maiden, stares at me in brassy-eyed surprise. “Iris said she wants to see you, if you showed up today!” she declares. “Are you signed off sick or something?”
“No, but I might be contagious.”
“Be off with you.” She turns back to her web browser, dismissing me, and I take a deep breath and head for Iris’s office.
Iris is my (How to describe our relationship accurately? Person from Porlock? Morlock?) latest line manager. I seem to get through about one a year. It wasn’t always so: but Andy got moved sideways into Research and Development, and before him, Harriet and Bridget are, ahem, long-term indisposed. They took on Angleton and lost, epic level. I actually work directly for Angleton these days, but Angleton isn’t a manager according to our org chart; he’s a DSS, and DSSs are too important to burden with boring administrative duties like overseeing staff performance appraisals. So although I work for him, I have to have an actual manager to report to, at least in theory, and that’s where Iris comes into the frame. She handles my interface with Human Resources, Payroll, and general admin stuff. She doesn’t know everything I do, but she knows I work for Angleton and it’s her job to be my manager-on-paper. And she’s good at it.
Her office door is ajar as I turn the corner between the reception area and the coffee station: she’s the kind of manager who’s happy to sacrifice an outside office with a window in return for an interior one that lets her keep an eye on everyone entering and leaving her little fiefdom, which should tell you something. Her attitude is one of those irregular verbs peculiar to bureaucracies: if you like her she’s attentive, and if you don’t, she’s paranoid.
“You wanted to see me, boss.”
Iris waves me at the seat opposite her desk. She’s leaning back with feet up and phone clamped between ear and shoulder, nodding along unconsciously to the beat of her unseen caller’s narrative.
“Yes, I understand. You can use his office, I think. When?… Half an hour? Excellent, thanks. Yes, and you too. Bye.” She puts the receiver down, then hits the divert to voice mail button on her handset. “How are you feeling, Bob?” She looks concerned.
“Like shit.” I don’t see any need-or room-to dissemble. “I came in because I’ve got a report to file.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?” She raises a penciled-in eyebrow. “I’ve given you my presenteeism lecture, haven’t I?”
Bless her, she has: she’s the first manager I’ve ever had who explained to me in words of one syllable that she’d be really pissed off if she caught me skulking around the office while I’m feeling ill. (This is the Laundry; they don’t fire you for calling in sick, in fact, they can’t fire you: all they can do is give you scut work. Back in my first year I took two weeks off, once, just to try it on-I ended up going back to work when I got bored with counting the cracked tiles on the bathroom wall. We still maintain this endless pretense that we’re the same as any other government department, clock-punching time misers all, but it’s not true: we do things differently in the Laundry. And so does Iris, and for a blessing, she admits it.)