Slow Horses by Mick Herron EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Mick Herron
- Genre: Traditional Detective Mysteries, Kidnapping Thrillers
- Publish Date: 1 June 2010
- Size: 2 MB
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Avail for Download
- Price: Free
Let us be clear about this much at least: Slough House is not in
Slough, nor is it a house. Its front door lurks in a dusty recess
between commercial premises in the Borough of Finsbury, a
stone’s throw from Barbican Station. To its left is a former
newsagent’s, now a newsagent’s/grocer’s/off-licence, with
DVD rental a blooming sideline; to its right, the New Empire
Chinese restaurant, whose windows are constantly obscured
by a thick red curtain.
A typewritten menu propped against the
glass has yellowed with age but is never replaced; is merely
amended with marker pen. If diversification has been the key
to the newsagent’s survival, retrenchment has been the longterm strategy of the New Empire, with dishes regularly struck
from its menu like numbers off a bingo card.
It is one of
Jackson Lamb’s core beliefs that eventually all the New
Empire will offer will be egg-fried rice and sweet-and-sour
pork. All served behind thick red curtains, as if paucity of
choice were a national secret.
The front door, as stated, lurks in a recess. Its ancient black
paintwork is spattered with roadsplash, and the shallow pane
of glass above its jamb betrays no light within. An empty milk
bottle has stood in its shadow so long, city lichen has bonded it
to the pavement.
There is no doorbell, and the letterbox has
healed like a childhood wound: any mail—and there’s never
any mail—would push at its flap without achieving entry. It’s
as if the door were a dummy, its only reason for existing being
to provide a buffer zone between shop and restaurant. Indeed,
you could sit at the bus stop opposite for days on end, and
never see anyone use it.
Except that, if you sat at the bus stop
opposite for long, you’d find interest being taken in your
presence. A thickset man, probably chewing gum, might sit
next to you. His presence discourages. He wears an air of
repressed violence, of a grudge carried long enough that it’s
ceased to matter to him where he lays it down, and he’ll watch
you until you’re out of sight.
Meanwhile, the stream in and out of the newsagent’s is
more or less constant. And there’s always pavement business
occurring; always people heading one way or the other. A
kerbside sweeper trundles past, its revolving brushes shuffling
cigarette ends and splinters of glass and bottle tops into its
maw.
Two men, heading in opposite directions, perform that
little avoidance dance, each one’s manoeuvre mirrored by the
other’s, but manage to pass without colliding. A woman,
talking on a mobile phone, checks her reflection in the window
as she walks. Way overhead a helicopter buzzes, reporting on
roadworks for a radio station.
And throughout all this, which happens every day, the door
remains closed. Above the New Empire and the newsagent’s,
Slough House’s windows rise four storeys into Finsbury’s
unwelcoming October skies, and are flaked and grimy, but not
opaque.
To the upstairs rider on a passing bus, delayed for any
length of time—which can easily happen; a combination of
traffic lights, near-constant roadworks, and the celebrated
inertia of London buses—they offer views of first-floor rooms
that are mostly yellow and grey.
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