Real Tigers (Slough House, #3)

by Mick Herron

The only reason for the absence of a sign requiring entrants to abandon all hope is that, as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you.

knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.

treachery, double-dealing and stabbing in the back—more like a marriage than a love affair.

Tiger teams were hired guns, essentially. Hired not to wipe out your enemies but to test the strength of your own defences. You set a tiger team to launch

Victory, she had once heard someone say, was about ensuring your opponent never again put head to pillow without thinking with hatred on your face. Tearney, who had never married, had thought this over the top, but had little difficulty accepting it as one of Judd’s credos.

deference. Besides, if his party stood for anything, it was for defending the right of the strong to flourish, which meant preventing the weak from taking up unnecessary space.

That a delicacy for the pampered was acquired through brutality was hardly news. By any civilised standard, it was how luxury ought to be measured—wealth meant nothing if it didn’t create suffering. Because the standard liberal whine that the rich were cushioned from life’s harsh realities was laughable ignorance: the rich created those realities, and made sure they kept on happening. That was what kitchens were for, along with prisons, factories and public transport.

So the rich, by which he meant the powerful, took messy violence in their stride—it was the cost of doing business—which