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There are too many ghosts tonight.
Usually, when she feels them rising, she makes herself a strong cup of tea and finds something to distract her hands. Tidying helps, and she’s no stranger to late-night kitchen cleans or the occasional pile of knitting though she hasn’t completed a project and doesn’t find it as relaxing as it’s sold. But it’s something to occupy the nervous motion of her body and settle her mind and give her something else to think about than the sights that she otherwise likes to pretend she doesn’t remember. Immaculate bathroom tiles and liquor-sticky floors, the scent of dried blood.
Usually she isn’t walking alone down a desolate strip of road in the frigid cold, shivering against the air and figuring out where to go next. Physically, in this case, and metaphorically. She’d placed her trust in one man years ago who saw in her something worth keeping, no matter how noisy the whispers, and now it turns out he wasn’t much of anyone at all, that she’d missed it the way she’d missed a thousand other signs. Another mark against her, another score she wasn’t properly keeping.
She limps for another half-mile before the pinch in her shoes becomes unbearable, but she refuses to look back. She refuses to give Lamb the satisfaction. She’ll walk for as long as she can and then another few feet, and call herself a car as soon as she can’t bear to keep standing.
It isn’t self punishment, she thinks, because she hasn’t done anything wrong.
In her head, his sharp accusing tone rings in her ears. Christ, you really do pick ‘em, don’t you?
She flexes her fingers, jamming her hand into her bag to find her mobile and switch it off. After all, she’s quit. He doesn’t need eyes on her now.
She almost expects to find him darkening her doorstep, but there’s nothing but shadows to greet her when she finally makes it home. The door to her flat has been broken, rattling open against its frame and she steps inside with a grimace, fingering the useless lock. She undoes the bolt and slides the door back into place, and loops the chain on after. It won’t keep much out, but she doesn’t expect she’ll get much sleep tonight anyway.
She switches on the tap in the kitchen and shoves her hands beneath a run of hot water. Her mind drifts, foggy with the events of the last few days, her skin reddening and stinging under the heat when it hits her. She’s quit her job tonight. She’s quit the work that she’s done for the last thirty years, the work that stood in for her life when her life wasn’t much of anything at all, and she has no idea what she’s going to do next. Who in their right mind would want to hire a secretary of her age? And the thought of retirement, endless days and nights with nothing but meals to punctuate the hours, makes her shudder.
Fuck Jackson, she thinks.
Fuck Jackson for doing what he’s always done, upending everything that she’s taken enormous pains to reconstruct and reintroducing chaos into her life. It had taken her years to rebuild a life after she’d hit rock bottom and he’d gone dredging up Charles and all the other old familiar phantoms, dredging up the past and for what? She supposes he’d tell her he’d been doing her a favor, stripping away the lies and telling her the truth, that she’d need to wake up sometime.
She scrubs at her hands one last time and switches the water off, drying her hands on a kitchen towel.
It isn’t the truth, though, is it?
She knew Charles, or she thought she did, knew how he took his coffee and his tea, knew when he woke up and when he went to bed, knew when he was in a bad mood, a good one, or one not fit to see anyone else. She still remembers his favorite flower order. She remembers enormous glass windows and the sun bursting through them, the way he would lean towards her from his desk as he scanned the morning’s reports and ask her thoughts. He trusted her—not like Jackson, withholding and cool at the best of times, leaving her with no greater responsibilities than fetching the milk and making tea.
But there’s a different voice chirping in her head now, a sneer that she can’t look past. You didn’t see everything, did you?
If she were being honest with herself, then: no, there were things she missed in the midday lavatory visits to polish off a mini bottle of vodka or whiskey, in the make-up touchups to cover the flush. Out of her scratchy memories of the past, she remembers Charles differently—his casual rearrangements of his schedule off the books, shooing her out of the office before taking a call or a meeting, pitching his voice low as she passed when she’d been doing nothing but running him his next reports.
A hard voice inside of her pushes back, resists. It can’t be true, she insists, which means that there’s a part of it that must be, that there’s more than a few things she missed while she was busy slipping down the neck of a bottle. Her fingers ball into fists at her side and she pictures his face again, looming over her. He wasn’t saving you.
She switches the kitchen lights off and takes a seat on the edge of the sofa, staring into the dark. She can’t stand to think about it any longer, the harsh fluorescent lights at the petrol station like interrogation spotlights, the shift of Jackson’s eyes as he looked her over, the open contempt. He was fucking using you.
And she let herself be used.
Because it was convenient. Because he paid for her to get clean. Because her eyes were elsewhere and her heart was in her throat and somewhere, with several measures of whiskey and gin inside her, she felt like she was untouchable. Bold and courageous, and the kind of person her father told her she never could be.
Fuck Jackson Lamb, she thinks, for another time that night, and fuck her father for good measure, and Charles—well, she can’t think about Charles yet. Not now. Not when her head’s reeling with an oncoming headache and fuzzed with confusion.
She pinches the bridge of her nose and tries to steel herself into thinking through next steps. There will be a tomorrow, and a tomorrow after. With her resignation, there’ll be severance and if she pools together her savings, time enough for her to figure out where she’ll go next. She has skills. There are opportunities. It isn’t impossible. She’ll make a plan.
Tomorrow.
She drifts towards the windows, thinking to draw the curtains closed, when she sees it. A dim glow down on the street, a haze of smoke. On a clear night, the streetlights dim, she can almost see the curl of smoke in the air.
She pulls on her dressing gown with a huff of disbelief. Of course he’s here. Of course he’s pulling at the strings and trying to get her to dance. He’s always liked tests, pouring her drinks and offering it to her, trying to get her to snap. She’s never understood why.
Fuck you, Jackson Lamb, she thinks, jerking the curtains closed with a sharp tug.
She won’t be so easily bested.
Let him sleep outside for all she cares.
In the days after Charles’s suicide, she remembered seeing him everywhere. She’d thought he’d been outside at the time—Yugoslavia, maybe, or one of the Central Asian countries trying to figure out their footing. She doesn’t remember when he came back in the country, but then again, she barely remembers anything at all about those days, all of them blurring together in the endless questions and the bright lights, the gray-walled rooms deep in the bowels of the Park, Bad Sam sitting across from her and drilling her with names and dates, figures and amounts, until she could barely remember her own name.
When he was there, he hovered in the back of the room, silent but observant, surrounded by an obscuring cloud of smoke. She used to think he did it for effect, a cartoon character drawing up a veil around his own intentions, but he said nothing then, his eyes darting to Bad Sam’s on occasion, tracking her as she spoke, as she crossed the room, as she sipped delicately at the small paper cup of water they sometimes offered. There wasn’t much kindness back then, not from the Park, not when her name had come up. After all, there’d been payments made, shifty transactions in her own accounts, files corrected and moved without a glance. She’d had the opportunity, and the Park had invented the motive. They didn’t need much else.
But he’d been there, mouth clamped down around the end of a cigarette, rumpled into a weeks-old suit that smelled like sweat. She didn’t think he’d remember her really, another secretary among the big suits, and he’d said little to betray whether he did or not, but she remembers one interrogation, as he passed behind Bad Sam to head into the hallway, a light touch of his hand against her shoulder. No squeeze, no pressure, nothing but the weight of it like a gesture of condolence, though everyone knew he could barely stand to be in the same room with Partner for longer than a minute.
Odd that she remembers that. The weight of his hand, the warmth of him. So unlike him.
She waits for the heavy knock at the door, the bellow of her name, the Jackson Lamb show to follow, but he stays quiet. Occasionally she passes by the window on her way for another cup of tea, another glass of water, and pulls the curtains for a peek and there he is again, still, on his same cigarette or the next one, the ember like a beacon in the late night. A widow tending a lighthouse. It’s ridiculous, beyond ridiculous—he’s the one who chased her out, who left her to walk and find her own way home. What can he possibly expect out of her now? To rub Charles’s betrayal in her face and to crow that he’d been right? To force her to crawl back to her desk tomorrow morning?
She won’t give him the satisfaction.
She finds other things, wipes down the range-top, the counters, reorganizes some books left stacked on her coffee table, but the thought nags at the back of her mind and when she makes her next round at the curtains forty minutes later, he’s still there. It’s frigid outside, even colder than it was when she stomped off in a haze of fury, and it’s that thought that provokes the swell of resentment and anger in her belly now. What the hell does he think he’s doing here after everything that he said to her, after everything that he threw in her face? Does he think so little of her that she’d just take it in stride, nod her head weakly and submit to showing up and stamping her time-card the next day?
She shoves her feet roughly into her slippers and shrugs a coat on, unlatching the door and marching all five flights down to the street level and all the way to where he’s loitering a few feet away from a streetlight.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”
He crinkles a paper carton of cigarettes in his hand. “Having a smoke.”
She wrinkles her nose and tries to fight her annoyance. “At my building?”
He answers with a lazy exhale and a small smile. “Free country, innit?”
She draws the coat tighter around herself with a shiver. “This is not funny. I don’t want to see you,” she huffs.
He draws back and looks at her, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her teeth grinding against a chatter. “Thought I’d get some steps in at my age and all,” he says, lightly. “You’re always on about me getting enough exercise.”
She ignores him. “I’m not coming back. I meant what I said.”
He lifts his hands in an exaggerated gesture of surrender. “Don’t get yourself all worked up,” he says. “Who said anything about asking you back?” He sniffs, tossing the end of his cigarette to the ground and crushing it with his shoe. She counts a half a dozen other butts littered around him. “But it’s cold as a witch’s tit out here, and I need to use the toilet or I’m about to destroy some of your neighbor’s foliage.”
She eyes the lawns with a weak grimace and groans, waving him towards the entrance. “Five minutes, Jackson, and that’s all. I mean that.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he groans. “The lady means what she says, I heard you the first time.”
He’s surprisingly behaved as they head upstairs, barely a rude remark or a bellowing shout or a slammed door, though she supposes that might be because of the late hour. But propriety’s never stopped him before. He snorts as they pass through her doorway, taking in the broken lock, watching with narrowed eyes as she pushes the door roughly to shut and slides the chain into place.
“Christ alive, Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-cokehead really know how to go unnoticed.”
She winces despite herself. “Don’t call them that,” she says, flatly. “I’ll call in the locksmith tomorrow.”
He snorts. “May as well get a new door.”
He moves in her flat like a bull in a china shop, surprisingly careful despite his shoulders bumping against the walls, his tread rattling the photo frames. She wouldn’t put it past him to break things just to get under her skin.
“Go on then,” she says, pointing in the direction of the bathroom.
He makes a show of glancing around the corner, picking up the books on the table and tossing them back down. “What’s your hurry?” he says. “You’ve not got one of your toy boys around here, do you? Don’t want to step on any toes.”
“For God’s sake,” she says, rolling her eyes.
When he disappears into the bathroom, she treads into the kitchen and fills the kettle for something to do. She can hear him rattling around in there, rummaging through her medicine cabinet probably and searching for god-knows-what, whatever evidence of her falling apart he hopes to find. She doesn’t know what he’s doing here, what he expects will happen. She doesn’t even know why she let him in through the door except that maybe he'd break in anyway. He’s a bull of a man, pushing her when he feels like it, stubborn and hard-headed and overbearing. She’s certain he has some kind of a plan, that he thinks there’s some magic words he can dangle in front of her to push her back into Slough House without an argument. But a line’s been crossed tonight. He knows that as well as she does.
She’s tired of it, the lack of appreciation, the insults, the tests. The poured glasses of whiskey proffered in her direction, the anticipation that she’s one temptation away from folding. She slots the pieces together in its logic. Guilt by association for something she never knew. Anger rises low in her chest, bringing a flush to her cheeks. All these years, and she’s never managed to clean the smudges off. She’s still as she was to them, to the Park, and her stomach sinks with a lurch of queasiness.
The bathroom door rattles open and she can hear the soft clink of him adjusting his belt buckle as he stomps out to the kitchen.
A show, for her benefit.
She doesn’t bother turning. “Can you go?”
He sniffs. “Think I might have a glass of water?”
She turns, digging the edge of the counter against her hip as she studies him. “Jackson, what are you doing here?” she says. “If you’re here to convince me to come back, I won’t. You can’t—the things you said tonight—”
His eyes are sharp behind his glasses. “Were true.”
She draws back as if stung, her mouth pursing tighter, her hands curled and twisting around themselves. “Why were you outside?”
“Doing my due diligence,” he huffs. “Had to make sure you made it back, didn’t I, given you’ve switched off your phone and all.”
She marches towards her handbag and retrieves her phone, switching it back on. The notifications ping one after another, missed calls and text messages, the last expletive-filled. “You don’t have any due diligence,” she says. “I’m not working for you anymore.”
He shoves his hands in his pockets and assesses her, his gaze level and steady. She feels a prickle of nerves against the back of her neck, recalling those conversations—interrogations—at the Park all those years ago, the same steady glances, the way she was studied like a lab animal before they started trying to prod her. Bad Sam sitting in a chair opposite her, his legs splayed open, barking orders and insults in her face, tossing stacks of cash onto the table and listing out the years of prison that awaited her. Prison, in the best case.
“About that,” Jackson says. “You’re working for me until such time as the Park have processed your resignation. Ergo, I am still your boss. Ergo, spot verification.”
She crosses her arms over her chest and stares at him, watching as he toes around the space of her living room. Circling, as the vultures do, waiting to pick at the bones. Picking her apart, even now. “Jackson, it’s late. Tell me what you want and get out,” she says. “You’re not here for conversation.”
He shifts closer, moving with the careless aggression of an animal, almost boxing her in against the wall. He leaves her a berth of space on the side, she realizes, enough to keep her from feeling trapped or threatened, enough to keep her confused about what he’s doing. “I wanted to see if you were all right,” he says, his voice low. He passes her and heads into the kitchen, plucking open one of the kitchen cabinets and glancing inside.
She turns and follows him, her jaw dropping at the realization. “You think I’m going to drink?”
“It’s been known to happen,” he says. “Big life changes and all.”
“I’m not,” she says, flatly. “I told you, if this is your pitch to get me back…”
“You keep banging on about that,” he says, “And I haven’t said a word. Seems rather Freudian, don’t you think? A bit of reverse psychology?”
She takes him in, the rumpled coat, the smell of cigarette smoke baked into his hair and his clothes and about six inches of air around him, the weary look in his eyes. “I’m not the only one who can say something,” she says. Her hand lands on his elbow, pulling him back to face her. “You could explain yourself.”
His eyebrows lift.
“Or apologize,” she adds.
“After everything I did to get you out of that house,” he mutters.
“You used me as bait.”
“For good reason.”
They’ve known each other too long and while she’s never been stupid enough to believe that she understands him—he’s hardly the kind to pour his heart out—she thought she knew him well enough to understand his cruelties. They were purposeful in their own way. Not like he’d been at the petrol station, needling for the sake of meanness, to reduce her to feeling like nothing. She supposes, if pressed, that’s what stings more than the insults he lobbed, the accusations of her own blindness—that he’s never been honest about how he’s estimated her, that she’s slipped up in a way she couldn’t even see.
Jackson’s never been easy to work for, but he’d been steady enough—until tonight.
Until the news about Charles.
He rubs at his eyes then, looking exhausted and every year of his age. When he speaks, his voice is rough, but warmer than she expects. Unlike him, though she supposes she doesn’t much know what he’s like at all. “Everyone knew how much you ran his life.”
She hears the accusation in it, remembers the whispers of their involvement that passed through the Park’s halls. “If you’re going to accuse me of something, say it plainly.”
His brow furrows briefly, his eyes darkening, and she can sense it again, that undercurrent of rage that he has tight in his fist. She wonders how many other things he carries with him that he can’t forgive, what other things Charles might have done that he can’t reveal to her. She doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to know all the ways she was deceived or manipulated, all of the blood and money that passed just outside her view. She’s tired of feeling angry, tired of feeling wasted and used.
“I’m not going to apologize for telling you. Sooner or later, you needed to know exactly what kind of man Partner was. What he did.”
She blinks, suddenly exhausted, tears rising into her eyes. It’s the sleeplessness, she tells herself. It’s the stress and everything she hasn’t processed. It’s that she can’t remember the last time she ate, and her body is shaking. She doesn’t know how she ended up here—at the other end of a hostage situation, having been the hostage; at Slough House; outside MI-5; in her own flat, looking at a man who, by all rights, she should be pelting with whatever she can take in hand. She feels humiliated by what he told her, humiliated by Charles, and by the shadow of the person she once used to be. She wants to scrub it all out of view, but here he is, a walking grease stain in the middle of her kitchen, looking at her as if she might throw herself out a window. As if he cares.
He should know better.
She should know better too than to believe it, but there’s something almost sincere in it. Maybe it’s the lateness of the day, the dark circles under his eyes, the way his fingers almost brush her sleeve. She doesn’t think Jackson Lamb cares about anything or anyone in this world, not even himself given how he treats himself, but sometimes, in certain slants of light, she wonders if it doesn’t come down to this—to the weight of being disappointed, of knowing that a man that you trusted and saw as everything in this world can have betrayed you so easily and for nothing. Not principle, not loyalty, nothing but cheap money.
The world feels thinner than it ever has.
She raises her chin to him then, her eyes sharp as they meet his. If it’s going to be an interrogation, then it may as well go both ways. “Why did you ask for me?” she says. “All those years ago when you first took on Slough House. Was it because of Charles? Because I didn’t know? Because the Park thought I was going to do something? They wanted to keep me…”
“The Park nothing,” he scoffs. “I wanted you.”
The words land, heavy and snarled with intentions she can’t pull apart. She could ask, but she doesn’t want to know. Not yet.
He could tell her, but he won’t.
These are the games they play, the men and women of the Park, and for all that he pretends he isn’t one of them anymore, he still knows the steps.
His weight shifts, his body leaning towards hers. She forgets the bulk of him sometimes for all that he sinks into his office and his bad habits, and she shrinks backward as his fingers nearly touch her arm. His heat radiates through the air between them. They’ve been together—working together—for so long now that she feels attuned to his movements as he goes around a room, a bodily awareness of him even though they haven’t so much as hugged or even shaken hands.
His fingers brush against her forearm, testing, and she almost jolts at the contact, but he doesn’t pull away.
“I wanted you,” he continues, almost softly, “Because I knew what the Park was going to do to you and you deserved better than that.”
The Park discards everyone sooner or later, she knows that as well as anyone else. Had seen it herself.
“I don’t do anything for you,” she says. “I make the tea and I fuss around with the files, that’s what you say.”
He scratches lightly at the side of his jaw, looking every bit like he’s fighting off a dozen different expletives he’d rather say instead. She’d hardly expect Jackson Lamb to look sheepish, but there’s a tentativeness to how he approaches his next words, a hesitation creeping into the pauses. “The Park didn’t know what they had and they were going to waste it like they waste everything else. You’re better than playing Moneypenny to somebody’s Bond.” He practically spits the name.
“Jackson.”
His hand lands on her shoulder now, an echo of a scene from years ago, and she flinches at the memory, a quick intake of breath like he’s landed a blow. But his hand steadies her, ballast against the quick surge of emotions rising in her, against the past.
“You’re one of mine,” he says, his voice so quiet she can almost imagine she’s dreaming. His thumb brushes along the base of her throat, and she fights a shiver.
Before she knows what she’s doing, she feels her other hand rise up to her shoulder to settle on his.
His eyes flick to hers, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move his hand, barely breathes.
She doesn’t know what they’ve fallen into over the years, doesn’t know that it’s anything at all except it’s different than what she had with Charles, different than what anyone else might consider a normal working relationship. He doesn’t ask her to tend to the little details of life the way that Charles did with his dry cleaning and his pressed suits, flower arrangements and coffee, but he gives her slack, barking at her like a dog trapped in the front yard.
She isn’t Moneypenny any longer, hasn’t been for years, and he isn’t First Desk, and the Wall is nothing more than pieces of shrapnel packaged into overpriced souvenirs for American tourists dumb enough not to know any better. The Cold War has passed them and they’re standing in the shadow, waiting for the sun to set.
No, she’s never been Moneypenny; it’s always been Charles and thin flattery, and something to make her feel like more than she was. She didn’t put his life together; she kept his life from falling apart. There are differences.
The fact that it fell apart anyway, well—
He moves first, his fingers twitching around hers, and she withdraws her hand, a slight touch of color in her cheeks the only sign.
“Diligence done. I’ll leave you to it,” he says, after clearing his throat. His arm nudges hers as he moves, a light jostle, a shift of weight. “Don’t want to get in the way of your roster.”
She shoves at his shoulder with her hand, but the air between them feels different, lighter, like something’s dislodged itself. But nothing has changed since that conversation hours ago. Not really. She isn’t going back to Slough House, no matter what he wants or says or believes.
He didn’t explain anything, but he gave an answer to a question she didn’t ask, and that’s something, too.
They’re all pieces on the board, turning and turning.
Avoid being captured or killed—that’s always the rule.
She walks him to the door and he leans against the frame, rattling the chain with a jab of a finger. He turns suddenly without a word, his arm against the jamb, his body lurching into her space.
She almost thinks to reach up an arm to brace him upright, almost thinks to offer him the sofa. Instead, she shakes her head. “What now?”
“You’ll be all right on your own?”
“Leave,” she says. “Please.”
“Lots of unsavory types all around the neighborhood.”
“Like you, currently, in here,” she huffs.
His hand claps her on the side of the arm, a brief touch that somehow warms her through her clothes.
“I’m not coming back,” she repeats, firmly but quietly. “I’ll tell the others, and I’ll send in my paperwork as soon as I can get it done.”
“All right,” he says, but there’s no change in his expression, nothing at all to suggest that he’s even heard the words coming out of her mouth. “Latch the chain behind me after I go.”
She nods, shutting the door and latching the chain, listening to the heavy noise of his footfalls moving towards the elevator.
She isn’t ready to go back. She needs time and a clear head, and she knows the last place she’ll find either is at Slough House.
But for now, she heads to bed, clearing off the tables and counters, rinsing the last of the dishes, and switching off all the lights. It’s quiet, no rustle of anything as she climbs under the covers and settles into bed.
She closes her eyes and pictures him passing underneath the light of the street lamps, a fresh cigarette in his mouth, a dull gleam of the ember in the low light. Pictures him pausing halfway down the path, his eyes narrowed as he scans past the windows of her flat. The brightness of his eyes, the sharp clarity of them.
A ghost himself, she thinks. A spook.
In the morning, he’s gone.
In the morning, she finds a pile of ten cigarette butts, trailing from the front door along the sidewalk just outside of the front of the building.
She gathers them up and throws them in the bin.
The morning air smells like smoke.