Slough House

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HER MORNING TURNED OUT shorter than she’d planned. Wearing her fur-lined coat against a biting wind, she’d been heading for a team meeting at the new facility, a granite complex on the city’s edge. If it looked like the local headquarters of an insurance company, that was fine. Some things hid best in the open.

The sky was grey but unthreatening. The streets, their usual city selves.

Driving in wasn’t encouraged. There was a regular shuttle, though, twice an hour, looping through the inner suburbs, and she’d pass a pharmacy on the way to her stop. She needed bath salts. Three times a week, days were full-on physical: 15K in the morning, then gym-work, then four times across the lake – twice in a boat, twice in the water – then another 15K. You needed long baths afterwards … Yesterday she’d dozed off in the tub, its lapping a sense-reminder of the movement of the lake, into which, rumour had it, leeches had once been poured, to keep swimmers on their mettle. But she’d never encountered one. This was a relief. Even the thought of leeches gave her the creeps; the way they were jelly, and mostly mouth. The way, if you stepped on one, it would burst like a blood-filled balloon.

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