Chapter Text
Following Moody's "incident" and Shirley's relocation to Marcus's office, no one had to endure sharing space with Ho anymore. "Endure" was the term commonly used, with relieved remarks exchanged whenever the topic came up on the upper floors of Slough House or in the clandestine chat group carefully shielded from Ho.
During discussions about the vacant spot and related matters, Marcus and Shirley argued that Lamb had softened in recent months. Shirley, in particular, was willing to acknowledge that sliver of humanity in Lamb, especially since a convoluted series of events had ushered her out of Ho's domain. Marcus, a much more engaging debating partner whom Shirley enjoyed teasing, only occasionally provoked her desire to land a punch—a sentiment that surfaced hourly when she was mere meters away from Ho. In small doses, even that awkward nerd became bearable now.
Ho wouldn't have acknowledged Lamb's humanity if asked. He was convinced that after his heroic double-decker driving feats, Lamb would never pair him with one of the incompetents he was forced to work with. Lamb held his genius in too high regard, evident by the fact that he had conspicuously allocated Ho an entire room to himself. However, no one had sought his opinion on the matter, especially considering that Ho never failed to emphasize having "a private office" at least once a week.
River suspected that the empty chair behind Ho was one of Lamb's tactics: keeping it vacant served as a reminder of what could happen to anyone who screwed up so spectacularly as to deserve spending eight hours a day sharing space with Roddy Ho and the mountains of pizza boxes, Red Bull cans, and electronic components that had slowly taken over every available horizontal surface in the room. He harbored this suspicion but refrained from voicing his thoughts aloud. It was so rare for anything resembling optimism to take root in Slough House that he didn't want to spoil it prematurely.
If pressed, River was also prepared to admit that lately Lamb had exhibited slightly less sadism than usual. Conversely, River's demeanor had become more guarded and simultaneously nervous. Sitting comfortably in a chair for eight hours a day had never been River's style. Inactivity, stagnation, and routine were his worst nightmares. He often found himself wandering around the office, taking the stairs, and seeking excuses to leave Slough House and vanish for a few hours. But lately, he was especially restless.
Many in the office attributed his growing restlessness to the realization that a prolonged period away from any vaguely operational assignment awaited him after the last mission nearly led to his demise. The more time River spent behind the desk, the more agitated he became. They would be surprised to learn that River no longer even bothered keeping track of the days and hours since the last field assignment, as he used to. It was a different kind of stalemate consuming him: one that had emerged after certain events related to his accidental cocaine overdose.
Few could claim to emerge from their first encounter with drugs with a better job, decent health coverage, and a closer relationship with their coworkers—those who had been coerced into listening to your delusions and helping you with washing and eating for several days, of course. But even fewer had been pushed into an overdose on direct orders from a senior Intelligence official. Perhaps not as few as one might think, River often pondered, emerging from the experience even more paranoid than before. Thanks to Lamb's retaliation against Diana Taverner, Cartwright’s overdose had become the best thing to ever happen for the cohesion and spirit of Slough House's inhabitants. For Lamb, River's escalating paranoia was likely another feather in his cap in the chess game he had decisively won against the second desk.
But River couldn’t reconcile with the emptiness that had engulfed him after what had, in fact, been his… no! He thought. He couldn’t even bring himself to articulate the word in his mind.
He hadn’t even realized he had spoken the "no" aloud, which had halted him from admitting to himself that he had made a declaration of love to Lamb. Sort of. He had kissed him on the lips. Wasn’t that a declaration? Okay, he was in the midst of an overdose, but there was no chance Lamb had misunderstood the genuine intentions behind River’s gesture. And to top it off, Lamb had reciprocated that same evening.
Or had he not?
River reclined in his chair, abruptly resting his forehead on the desk's edge with a resounding “thud.” His thoughts ground to a halt: had Lamb kissed him? Did he recall it correctly, or was it merely a trick of his mind? He lingered there, propped against the desk, arms hanging loosely, trapped in the loop of his fixation. The only way to uncover the truth was to ask the person involved—the sole individual not under the influence of drugs during the exchange. But what if Lamb hadn’t kissed him? What repercussions would arise if River broached the topic again and confessed to imagining, desiring, even longing for Lamb’s kiss?
But what if Lamb had indeed kissed him? Was it a gesture of mockery, returning his near lip-to-lip contact? Did Lamb intend to diminish it, echoing the action as if it meant nothing? This behavior didn’t align with Lamb’s character: beneath his layers of sarcasm, Lamb typically spoke with intent. He hinted, dodged, but never outright lied. Yet it was unlike Lamb to ignore the opportunity River had unwittingly presented him. So why the silence? Except, Lamb did say something.
You kiss well, even without tongue.
Reflecting on that moment sent River’s mind into overdrive. What was Lamb’s tone when he uttered those words? Kind? Serious? Ironic? Playful? Seductive? River couldn’t quite decide.
It had been a month since that night, and River’s brain had scrutinized every detail of that memory—dissecting it, reconstructing it, embellishing it, and then tearing it apart again. Yet it remained firmly etched in his mind. Was it a genuine recollection, a figment of his imagination, a fantasy? River felt like he was losing his grip on reality. Once, he had almost mustered the courage to ask Louisa if she had witnessed anything, but how does one broach such a topic casually? “Thanks for the tea. Oh, by the way, Louisa, amidst my delirious call for my mum and conversations with Webb’s ghost, did you happen to notice if Lamb kissed me while you were nursing me?”
A deep grunt rumbled from River’s throat, and he returned to his work, oblivious to the fact that he, too, was excluded from a clandestine chat group. The one where, albeit reluctantly, Ho had finally been granted access. The one dedicated to monitoring his increasingly peculiar behavior. Louisa had initiated it, weary of being summoned to Catherine’s office under false pretenses to check on River’s well-being. Marcus and Shirley had been promptly added, aware of how close to madness River was and determined to keep him under their watchful eye—after all, they had a few bets riding on his next move. Ho had sensed the situation and volunteered to keep an eye on River in the digital realm in exchange for access to the secret chat. As it turned out, River had devoured every article, paper, or blog post about hallucinations induced by drug overdoses. Nothing unusual there, then.
Louisa quickly typed: “Forehead on the desk, long string of grunts. Here we go again.” At first, she had been extremely cautious about typing messages in the secret chat while facing River. However, it was now clear that his mind was elsewhere. The real question was: was it a lingering effect of the overdose? Was River still dissociating from reality without realizing it? Medical tests said no: River came out clean. But something was off. After two weeks of this ordeal, Louisa approached Catherine, and together they went to Lamb, letting him read the chat. Lamb scrolled through it with unexpected interest and enthusiasm. But after a while, he burst into such loud laughter, so amused, that the two women looked at each other, open-mouthed.
“Yes, it’s a lingering effect of the overdose, in a way. Nothing to worry about. It’s a problem that Cartwright will solve on his own, in due time. Go back to your paperwork, mother hens,” he said, ushering them out of the office with rare kindness, clearly in a good mood. As Louisa was about to close the door, Lamb called her:
“Guy?”
“Yes?”
“Even a hothead like you doesn’t deserve the torment River will inflict on you. I almost feel sorry for you.”
“Huh?”
A week had passed since that peculiar conversation with Lamb, and Louisa found herself realizing that he was the usual fortune teller, capable of predicting the future. She was teetering on the edge of a hysterical crisis. She kept jumping at River’s sudden outbursts of “no!” or “ah!” emitted without warning, and she was irritated by the long string of grunts and sighs coming from behind the files that partially obscured her view of her colleague’s desk. Not to mention the times he would start shaking his head as if trying to shake something loose. She had been on the brink of confronting him several times, but… what if he was experiencing some sort of dissociative episode again? She didn’t want to alarm him. Lately, River was constantly on edge and struggled to exchange more than a few words with the office occupants.
The reason for his distress was evident in his eyes: a profound, abyssal embarrassment. They had all been to his house, heard him deliriously calling for his mother for hours, and seen him more or less naked and crying. River approached every verbal exchange like it was a firing squad. No one had the courage to fire the first shot, but once it was fired, they would be the target of an incessant barrage of fierce irony, and Louisa and the others couldn’t wait to participate. No one had really had the courage to do it because Louisa, Marcus, and Shirley were dying to tease him, but they were embarrassed by what they had discovered about River. Catherine, on the other hand, would never make fun of such topics and would never hurt River. After the overdose, she could hardly restrain herself from hugging him.
One of the ongoing bets in the office centered around who would fire the first shot: Lamb or Ho? Lamb had the authority to do so, but he seemed to prefer using the same strategy as his deadly farts—holding back until everyone was relaxed enough for a foul-smelling surprise to have maximum impact. River, however, was like a taut violin string and jumped—literally—every time Lamb entered his field of vision.
The wild card in the situation was Ho. Roddy knew little to nothing about River's delusions, having only stopped by his house briefly to return his colleague’s phone. However, he knew enough to potentially disrupt the fragile truce in the office. He was so incapable of reading the room that the only reason the truce still persisted was because he hadn’t realized it was in effect at all. If he had sensed how much River feared that moment, he would have rushed into his office to start the barrage himself.
"I have a question that only you lot of dimwits can solve."
Louisa jumped at the sound of Ho’s voice. He had appeared in the doorway of River’s and his office—a rare sight, as he was usually glued to his chair and computer. He held a can in one hand and his smartphone in the other. Louisa felt a mix of panic and excitement: what could Roddy be bringing if not the chance to break the truce and torment River? She wrestled with her inner conflict: should she intervene and buy River more time, or let events unfold and witness another one of River’s mishaps, hoping that after the embarrassment, he would return to being “normal”? Her hesitation had already decided for her. Shirley and Marcus had joined Ho, ready to witness the spectacle. River turned to look at Roddy, puzzled.
Exasperated, Roddy repeated: “I have a question for you… tech-retards.”
Louisa held her breath.
“Why do people do things like… this?” he said, indicating the screen of his smartphone.
Louisa was perplexed and a little impatient. Why was Ho being so evasive?
On Ho’s phone screen, the feed of a social media platform was scrolling by. Thousands of users were posting a picture of themselves as children alongside a current one. It was the challenge of the moment. Shirley and Marcus peeked at the screen over River’s shoulder, intrigued.
“Because… it is… fun?” Shirley said.
Ho looked at her as if she had answered in an ancient Sumerian dialect.
“Fun?”
“Well, you see if a person as a child showed any premonitory signs of what they would later become as an adult—the look in their eyes, a certain expression, that sort of thing.”
Marcus nodded in understanding.
Ho turned to Louisa, who gave a slight shrug to indicate her agreement. Finally, he looked at River, who had a confused expression on his face.
Ho misinterpreted River’s confusion and went full throttle: “Can you all be so… obtuse? Even River, with all his limited intelligence, is puzzled.”
“Puzzled by what?”
“Puzzled by what?! How this herd of idiots voluntarily and gratuitously trains the artificial intelligence algorithms of some foreign or multinational power by posting pictures of themselves as children alongside current ones, refining predictive facial recognition technology!”
Louisa let out a sigh of relief as Ho launched into a lengthy diatribe aimed at labeling everyone in the world as idiots: those who posted the photos and the colleagues who didn’t understand the danger of this gesture. Despite being distracted, River couldn’t help but notice the irritating duality of Ho’s speech. On one hand, it was undoubtedly a brilliant argument based on solid facts he had gathered from his eternal wanderings through the dark web. Ho was a convinced conspiracy theorist, and if he said that behind this innocent challenge there was a data collection scheme orchestrated by some entity, it was probably true. By provoking him effectively, one could also be spurred to act and find out who, exactly, was behind it.
Ho’s problem was that he couldn’t resist turning every interesting observation into an opportunity to humiliate his colleagues. This was evident from the disdainful tone with which he peppered his speech with technical terms—“data mining” and “data scraping” being his absolute favorites—to emphasize the vast gap between himself, who knew what they referred to, and them, who only had a vague idea. As often happened, it was Shirley who vocalized the thought forming in the minds of those present:
“Cut it out, Ho. You’re so unbearable that you make me want to post a photo of myself as a child.”
Ho looked at her, resentful for being interrupted and contradicted. Behind them, Catherine appeared, and naturally found the right words to defuse the situation:
“You could share it in the office common chat (the third one, where everyone is included except Lamb). I would be delighted to see a photo of you as a child. Since it’s a chat controlled by Roddy, there would be nothing to fear. Right, Roddy?”
A slight blush rose on Roddy’s cheeks. Shirley chuckled as she returned to her desk:
“Yeah, don’t count on it. The real problem is if one of my photos ends up in the hands of the nerdy idiot here.”
Towards the end of the afternoon, a notification on River’s smartphone screen pulled him from the seemingly endless task of comparing two lists of license plates for suspicious discrepancies. It was unlikely there would be any; if there had been, the lists would be on a desk in Regent’s Park, not his. Nonetheless, he doubted he would find anything, as his attention kept drifting in a completely different direction. River gave up, picked up his smartphone, and as he unlocked the screen, he heard Louisa’s voice from behind the files:
“Shirley would do anything to irritate Ho.” There was a sweet, delighted note in her voice.
River immediately understood why, glancing at the screen and feeling the corners of his mouth stretch upwards. A girl with red hair tied up in two high pigtails was banging two wooden spoons on a pot like a rock star. It was clearly Shirley, about five or six years old. In her effort to make what was probably a deafening noise, she had stuck out the tip of her tongue from the corner of her mouth. Louisa quietly moved to take a picture of River’s reaction as he looked at the screen, finally smiling. She sent the photo to the chat from which he was excluded, with the comment, “A point for Dander!”
At 5:01 PM, as the shift ended, Catherine’s comment appeared in the main chat:
“What an adorable shot, Shirley! I never doubted you were a lively child. :)”
Catherine’s use of the old-school emoticon drew a smile and a look of understanding between Louisa and River.
Shortly after dinner, two more photos appeared in the chat: one of Louisa and one of Marcus. Louisa was at a ceremony, perhaps a wedding, surrounded by tables covered with elegant tablecloths and the legs of well-dressed adults. She proudly displayed her light blue tulle dress, her eyes reflecting a determined gaze that she still had and which could intimidate those who didn’t know her. Marcus, on the other hand, was busy with two other children in a lively game of Uno. He had added a caption that read, “My first underground gambling den.” River laughed, setting aside the book he had been reading on the couch. His laughter echoed in the empty apartment. After each photo came a long-winded message from Ho, laden with links about the dangers of sharing personal photos, and a much shorter and gentler comment from Catherine.
River found himself thinking that Ho’s presence in the chat was oddly beneficial: he would never post his own photo, just as Catherine probably wouldn’t. This absence spared him from the problem of photos becoming another issue to navigate in the office. It wasn’t late, but he decided to head to bed; the obsessive thought of Lamb’s kiss had drained his energy. He hadn’t been this fixated on a vague memory since the days of blue shirt under a white tee or white shirt under a blue tee, which now seemed distant and almost comically simple.
As he got into bed, he found himself thinking, with a hint of surprise: “Thank you, Ho, for sparing me.” What he didn’t know was that Ho was already plotting yet another cruel prank.