The List (Slough House, #2.5)

by Mick Herron

When a spy passes, his cupboards need clearing out.

which was not to say there weren’t still pockets of it here and there, because friends need spying on as much as enemies.

It sometimes amused Bachelor, sometimes depressed him, that he worked for the secret service in an era where half the population aired its private life on the web. He wasn’t sure the Cold War had been preferable, but it had been more dignified.

They were vacant and unlit, and drifting from their gloomy shadows came a mixture of odours Coe couldn’t help adumbrating: coffee and stale bread, and takeaway food, and cardboard, and grief.

It was extraordinary, thought Coe, how much a badly dressed shoeless fat man could look like a crocodile.

Her own still sat where she’d left it, untouched. She was trying to pretend it wasn’t there. If she looked at it by accident—if it looked back—she would turn to stone.

Information is a tart—information is anybody’s. It reveals as much about those who impart it as it teaches those who hear. Because information, ever the slut, swings both ways. False information—if you know it’s false—tells you half as much again as the real thing, because it tells you what the other feller thinks you don’t know, while real information, the copper-bottomed truth, is worth its weight in fairy-dust.