Slough House

Spook Street / C13

Chapter 13

Book 4 Part Two 5474 words POV: Shirley Dander, Roderick Ho, Patrice, Narrator, Moira Tregorian, Marcus Longridge, Sam Chapman, Catherine Standish

Summary

Patrice reaches Aldersgate Street and works round to Slough House’s back door, having decided that both targets are probably inside. Inside, the slow horses are winding down: Shirley replays the videos, Marcus sits with a gun he means to sell, Ho runs an illegal money transfer for Kim on a Service machine, and Lamb leaves for drink after telling Catherine that Cartwright’s hands are dirty. Patrice comes up the stairs and the building turns into a shooting gallery. Chapman drops a kettle on him, Catherine breaks into Lamb’s desk for his revolver, and the staff fall back room by room; Chapman empties a chair at Patrice and is then killed. Shirley, Catherine and Coe barricade themselves in an office with an unloaded gun, a knife and a keyboard, and Patrice kicks the door down and starts shooting. Lamb returns and throws a whisky bottle into his temple, spoiling his aim. Upstairs the O.B. recites knights to Moira through the gunfire. Shirley goes to find Marcus and finds him shot through the head, with one bullet in his desk, and Ho comes out of hiding alive.

Beats

  • C13S01 · Shirley — Shirley, back at Slough House, relives her near-death cheerfully and is now certain from a second uploaded video that the man on Pentonville Road was River. Marcus corrects her account of Coe’s weapon: it was a knife, not a trick. She offers tea, gets only a grunt from Marcus, and reflects that a war footing would at least give her something to hit and something to talk about at Anger Management.
  • C13S02 · Roddy Ho — Ho stays late at a Service machine for a task Kim has set him: ghosting into a company’s systems to move money to a friend of hers who says she was cheated out of her commission. He believes the job will prove what he can do and bring ‘soon’ closer. Because he works better in the cold he opens a window, satisfied that nobody in the building would understand what he was doing even if they watched.
  • C13S03 · Patrice — Sheltering under the Barbican, Patrice remembers the cellar at Les Arbres, where each boy was locked in on his twelfth birthday until he asked to be freed: Bertrand lasted seventeen days, Patrice a month, Yves two. He punishes himself for thinking Frank should have known what Yves would become, then reasons that the failures to kill the two targets may have been luck or the weather. He concludes that both men are probably at Slough House, and that this time there must be no mistakes.
  • C13S04 · Narrator — Lamb smokes in the yard and dismisses Catherine’s sympathy for the O.B., arguing that Cartwright bought Frank off to save his own career and his chance of the top job. Catherine answers that the money also kept Frank from getting his hands on the unborn River. Lamb says some of his own actions were done on Cartwright’s orders, then leaves through the alley towards Aldersgate Street, having checked something sock-shaped in his raincoat pocket.
  • C13S05 · Moira Tregorian — Moira Tregorian takes the O.B. his tea, resenting Catherine’s tone and the backlog of files, and notes that Catherine’s discharge papers are sitting in plain sight. She softens when he fails to complain, and joins his game when he answers ‘King Arthur’ with a knight of her own. When she says ‘Galahad’ it rings a bell, but she cannot place it.
  • C13S06 · Patrice — Patrice finds Slough House’s front door painted shut with disuse, works round past a Chinese restaurant into an alley and through a mildewed yard. He observes how little security a Security Service outbuilding has, and what that says about the value of its occupants. He takes out Emma Flyte’s gun, eases the jammed door open without noise, and starts up the stairs.
  • C13S07 · Marcus — Alone at his desk, Marcus says out loud that he has a gambling problem, then looks again at the gun in his drawer, worth ‘a couple of ton’ at least. He plans to take it that evening to Dancer, who buys guns from a back office near St Paul’s, and to buy it back once he has won. He talks himself out of going upstairs to ask Catherine for help, and then hears someone on the staircase.
  • C13S08 · Sam Chapman — Bad Sam leaves Lamb’s office with his knee still painful and finds Catherine and Shirley in the kitchen. He apologises to Catherine for the interrogation after Partner’s death, and she nods; he feels released from something he had not thought about in years. Two gunshots, so close together they might be halves of one sound, cut him off.
  • C13S09 · Narrator — Catherine runs for Lamb’s desk, Shirley arms herself with a corkscrew from a drawer, and Coe appears in his doorway with his blade. The light on the lower landing goes out. Chapman orders the others behind a door, then leans over the banister and drops the boiling kettle onto the head of the figure coming up.
  • C13S10 · Catherine — Catherine forces Lamb’s locked bottom drawer with a metal ruler and finds a taped shoe box holding a small, heavy revolver and no loose ammunition. She orders Moira back into her office and heads for the stairs. On the stairs she hears the third shot and feels the displaced air of the bullet pass her cheek.
  • C13S11 · Patrice — The kettle misses Patrice’s head, strikes his shoulder and scalds his face, and he fires blind up the stairwell, the bullet burying itself in the roof. He bangs his head against the wall twice to clear his vision. He then takes the stairs two at a time and swings round on the half-flight to aim at a figure on the landing above.
  • C13S12 · Narrator — Coe hauls Shirley into his room, trips her, and throws his knife aside to drag her back from the landing by her collar and jeans. Catherine comes down from above with Lamb’s gun, hair loose; Chapman, out of Louisa’s office, brandishes a chair and screams at them to move. Coe pulls Catherine inside and slams the door as Chapman throws the chair at Patrice, who fires again.
  • C13S13 · Patrice — Patrice recognises Chapman on the landing, the man he failed to kill the day before and again that day, and fires as the chair comes at him. A slat splinters from the bullet and the chair still catches him in the chest without stopping him. He notes that they are fighting with kettles and furniture, and follows them up to the kitchen landing.
  • C13S14 · Narrator — Coe bolts the flimsy door and pushes River’s desk against it, but Shirley draws the bolt back to go after Marcus. Catherine threatens to shoot her if she opens it, and Shirley offers to take the gun and shoot Patrice instead. A splintering crash comes from the landing.
  • C13S15 · Sam Chapman — Chapman, barricaded alone in one of the offices, realises that his last shot cost him: the bullet has gone into his side. He wishes he had found Chelsea Barker and hopes somebody else will look for her. The door bursts off its hinges, and upstairs the O.B. goes on naming knights while Moira covers her eyes and more gunfire sounds below.
  • C13S16 · Patrice — Patrice kicks the rotten door apart, steps over it and shoots Chapman in the head, then finds the room otherwise empty. The kitchen is empty too, no bigger than a barge’s galley, with one office door closed. He kicks that door, which holds against the first assault but will not hold against a second.
  • C13S17 · Catherine — Behind the door, Catherine, Shirley and Coe know the next kick will bring Patrice in, and Catherine admits she has no bullets. Coe tells them to spread out so that Patrice might not get all of them. Catherine pulls River’s keyboard free of its cable as a weapon and thinks longingly of a drink as the door splinters.
  • C13S18 · Narrator — The O.B. continues his litany — Tristan, Bors, Gareth — and tells Moira that they all started with promise and all went the same way. Moira screams at him to be quiet, and crashes and gunfire from below silence him. A short while later they hear someone climbing the last flight of stairs.
  • C13S19 · Patrice — Patrice takes the doorway and prices three targets in an instant: the shorter woman with the gun first, the man with the knife second, the older woman with the keyboard last. He judges from her fear that Catherine’s gun is empty, and fires at Shirley. Jackson Lamb throws a whisky bottle from the stairwell into his temple, throwing his aim so that three shots hit air, glass and plaster, and Patrice lands on the broken door.
  • C13S20 · Shirley — Shirley reaches her own office and finds Marcus thrown back against the wall in his chair, shot through the forehead, with a gun on the floor and one bullet in his desk. She waits for the scene to change and it does not. Ho emerges from hiding, saying he hung out of a window and nearly fell, and she tells him Marcus did not make it before turning and going back upstairs.

People

  • Shirley Dander — replays the videos, arms herself with a corkscrew, is dragged to safety by Coe, and finds Marcus dead
  • Patrice — enters Slough House and shoots his way up through the building
  • Frank Harkness — quoted giving Patrice the Aldersgate Street address and the order to kill everyone
  • David Cartwright — the O.B., upstairs with Moira, reciting knights and telling her they all died
  • Moira Tregorian — gives the O.B. tea, joins his game, and screams at him to be quiet
  • Jackson Lamb — goes out ostensibly for drink and returns to knock Patrice down with a bottle
  • Sam Chapman — apologises to Catherine, throws the kettle and a chair, and is shot dead
  • JK Coe — pulls Shirley out of the line of fire and barricades the office
  • Bertrand — remembered as the boy who lasted seventeen days in the cellar
  • Yves — remembered as the boy who lasted two months in the cellar and outlasted them all

Places

  • Slough House — the building Patrice enters and fights his way up
  • Les Arbres — the commune whose cellar regime is remembered

Lines worth keeping

“I have a gambling problem” — Marcus Longridge, said quietly to himself at his desk, before taking out the gun

“Spread out. He might not get all of us.” — JK Coe, in the barricaded office as Patrice prepares to kick the door in

“They started with such promise, but they all went the same way in the end.” — David Cartwright, telling Moira what became of the knights

“Marcus didn’t make it” — Shirley Dander, her reply to Ho, who has just asked about Marcus

Threads

  • Plants: Ho is moving money illegally on a Service computer, a standing exposure that outlives the attack.; Marcus’s gun and his arrangement with Dancer are set up in detail and never carried out.; Lamb’s sock-shaped object in his raincoat pocket is produced and put back unexplained.; Moira’s half-recognition of ‘Galahad’ is left unresolved.; The O.B.’s knight litany runs across three sections and ends only when the gunfire stops.; Patrice’s assumption that Les Arbres can be rebuilt, and that the others will return, goes uncorrected.
  • Payoffs: Frank’s instruction to kill everyone at Aldersgate Street is carried out the same evening.; Emma Flyte’s stolen gun is the weapon used inside Slough House, as Patrice himself notes.; Lamb’s departure to fetch drink is what lets him come back with the bottle that spoils Patrice’s aim.; The gun Marcus brought in that morning is the one on the floor beside him; he got a single shot off and hit his desk.; Marcus’s money trouble, established in C11, drives him to plan the sale rather than raise the alarm.; Ho’s late-night session explains why he is still in the building and how he survives.
  • Continuity: The assault happens on the same evening as the Pentonville Road shooting, minutes after Patrice leaves the Embankment.; Cellar terms: Bertrand seventeen days, Patrice one month, Yves two months, each beginning on a boy’s twelfth birthday.; Marcus expects ‘a couple of hundred’ for the gun; Dancer’s shop is a stationer’s near St Paul’s.; Lamb’s revolver is kept in a taped shoe box in a locked bottom drawer, with no loose rounds.; Catherine’s discharge papers are sitting on the desk in Moira’s office, consistent with her plan to leave.; Chapman is hit in the side first (c13s15) and then shot in the head (c13s16).; The text does not show Marcus being shot; he is simply found dead, with his own one shot in the desk.; The O.B. and Moira remain upstairs throughout and are not reached by Patrice before Lamb stops him.; Patrice fires three shots after the bottle hits him and hits nobody.

Characters

Places

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