Free Slow Horses by Mick Herron

She wondered if she should tint it, bring the blonde out, but who for? And would anyone notice? Apart from the odious Jackson Lamb, who’d ridicule her.
    She could accept, Charles Partner being dead, that there was no place for her at Regent’s Park. But Slough House felt like a deferred punishment for a crime she’d already atoned for. Sometimes she wondered if there were more to that crime than her own wine-dark past; if she were held responsible in some way for Charles’s suicide. For not knowing it was going to happen. But how could she have known that? Charles Partner had spent a lifetime dealing in other people’s secrets, and if there was one thing he’d learned, it was how to keep his own. You had a key to his house? she’d been asked. And: You were expecting this to happen? Of course she hadn’t. But she wondered now if anyone had ever believed her.
    Ancient history. Charles Partner was bones, but she still thought about him most days.
    Back to the mirror. Back to her own life. Lovely woman had stooped to folly, and this was where it had left her.
    My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.
    She hadn’t had a drink in ten years. But still.
    My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.
    She turned off the bathroom light, and went to make supper.
    Min Harper spent a chunk of the evening on the phone to his boys: nine and eleven. A year ago, this would have left him knowing more than he needed to about computer games and TV shows, but it seemed both had crossed a line at the same time, and now it was like trying to have a conversation with a pair of refrigerators. How had that happened? Change should come with a warning, and besides, shouldn’t there have been a breathing space where his nine-year-old was concerned? More childhood to negotiate before adolescence crept in? But prising information from him was like scratching at a rock. By the time his ex-wife was on the line Min was ready to take it out on her, though she was having none of it:
    ‘It’s a phase. They’re the same with me. Except all the time they’re grunting and saying nothing, I’m cooking their meals and washing up. So don’t tell me you’re having problems with it, right?’
    ‘At least you get to see them.’
    ‘You know where we are. Would it kill you to get round more than once a week?’
    He could have fought a rearguard action—the hours he worked; the distance involved—but marriage had taught him that once the battle lines were drawn, defeat was only a matter of time.
    Afterwards, he couldn’t settle. It was hard, after such calls, not to end up thinking about the trajectory his life had taken; a free fall he could pin down to one specific moment. Prior to that brainless second, he’d had a marriage, a family and a career, along with all the accompanying paraphernalia—dentist’s appointments and mortgage worries and direct debit arrangements. Some of which still happened, of course, but its relevance, the evidence it supplied that he was building a life that worked, had been washed away by the Stupid Moment; the one in which he’d left a computer disk on a tube train. And hadn’t known he’d done so until the following morning.
    He supposed few people had had their careers dismantled via Radio 4. The memory hurt. Not the abject belly-panic as it sank in that the object under discussion was supposed to be in his keeping, but the moments before that, when he’d been enjoying a peaceful shave, thinking: I’m glad I’m not the pitiful bastard responsible for that . That was what hurt; the notion that all over the country other people were having exactly the same thought, and he was the only one who didn’t deserve to.
    Other, more drawn-out painful moments had followed. Interviews with the Dogs. Comedy riffs on TV shows about secret service idiots. People on the street didn’t know Min was the butt of these sketches, but they were laughing at him all the same.
    Worst of all was the assumption that incompetence had