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

“This should test your ingenuity,” the man had said. His tone had that same punchable quality you heard when government ministers dripping with inherited wealth lectured the nation on the culture of entitlement.

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.

The public, on the other hand . . . The public was like one of those huge Pacific jellyfish; one enormous, pulsating mass of indifference, drifting wherever the current carried it; an organism without a motive, ambition or original sin to call its own, but which somehow believed, in whatever passed for its brain, that it chose its own leaders and had a say in its own destiny.

Because belief was not about actually believing; belief was simply somewhere to shelve hope.

But she suspected that he enjoyed testing the limits of other people’s survival instincts, probably because his own had been subjected to rigorous examination over the years. The forms this had taken, she’d never heard him speak about—a thought she’d once had about Lamb was that when they’d pulled the Wall down he’d built himself another, and had been living behind it ever since.

The article had been intended to inspire shock, but Judd had barely managed surprise. 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.