Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)

by Mick Herron

Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations—Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!!—Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the GBP, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the tax-man blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (“Damn fine city,” he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. “Probably worth defending next time.”) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle. And here he was now, bursting through the kitchen door with an alacrity that had Mr. Sleek making a sharp sideways step to avoid being flattened. “Robert Hobden!” he cried. “PJ.” “Robert. Rob—Rob! How are you?” “I’m not so bad, PJ. Yourself?” “Oh, of course. Seb, take Robert’s coat, would you?” “I won’t stay long—” “But long enough to remove your coat! That’s just dandy, that’s just fine.” This to Seb, if that was Sleek’s name. “You can leave us now.” The kitchen door swung closed. PJ’s tone didn...

a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations—Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!!—