Free Real Tigers by Mick Herron

fate or not, “for good” didn’t happen. “For bad” looked like it had come to stay instead.
    Enough of that. She checked the bathroom. The air was dry, and there were no damp towels. Catherine hadn’t been here for a day or more.
    Louisa returned to the sitting room, trying not to compare and contrast with her own studio flat, which was tiny and crooked and needed serious attention, like maybe arson. Everything here was, if not arranged in straight lines, at least in its proper place, and care had been taken in deciding what that place was. So far, so Catherine. None of this would surprise any of the slow horses, except probably Ho, to whom it wouldn’t have occurred to form an opinion. But it didn’t tell the whole story. This was where the surface Catherine lived, that was all. Which was why there was no wine cache in a cupboard; no spirits in the fridge, or emergency sherry on a dresser. Or even any glasses, or not proper ones. Louisa frequently ran out of glasses, but that was because glass broke easily, not because she was avoiding the issue. Here, it was deliberate, as if the occasional use of a suggestive receptacle, even for a virgin fruit juice, might nudge a scale that would tip the drinker into a puddle outside the nearest bar.
    So now came the obvious thought, that Catherine had fallen off the wagon. She knew Catherine was an alcoholic, not because the two women had ever discussed it but because Lamb made reference to it often enough. And one thing everyone knew about alcoholism was, it wasn’t like the flu. You didn’t shake it off and carry on; you tamped it down and hoped it wouldn’t reignite. Which meant anything could have happened; Catherine could have been on her way home and some tiny incident, invisible to everyone else, could have thrown a switch inside her, redirecting her to oblivion. Louisa wouldn’t put it past Lamb, even—who always kept booze in the office—to have tempted her with a taste. Leaving Catherine with an unkillable thirst, and the whole of London mapped with watering holes.
    But the image wouldn’t stick. Catherine drunk; Catherine passed out under a hedge, or under a stranger—it was like a punchline to an unsuccessful joke. Because all of Catherine’s ramrod rectitude—the right-angled efficiency of her office; the primness of her dress; the fact that she so rarely swore—these things didn’t make it funny that she’d once been an habitual drinker; they were her defences against ever again becoming one. The same way her flat was, with its places for everything, and all of them filled. Even the private parts of her public life were a form of cover, because they were all joes in the end, all spooks were joes, even those who never set foot outside their secret offices; from the anoracked stoats monitoring phone calls in GCHQ to the intelligence weasels over the river; from the blue-eyed boys and girls on Regent’s Park’s hub to the slow horses themselves, gradually disappearing under reams of yellowing paper—they were all joes, every last spook of them, because they all knew what it was like to live nine-tenths of their lives undercover. It was why they’d joined the Service in the first place: this sneaking suspicion that the whole damn world was hostile. The only ones you could trust were those you worked alongside, and you couldn’t trust them either, because there was no friend falser than another spook. Always, they’d stab you in the back, cut you off at the knees, or just plain die.
    Louisa didn’t yet know which of those Catherine had done, but she was certain she hadn’t gone off on a bender. She guessed Lamb thought that too, but she opened her phone to let him know anyway. There was no such thing as too much information.
    Seventy-nine minutes . . .
    It had not taken the man long to explain what he wanted. He gave the impression of being used to imparting