Books by Mick Herron

The Oxford Series

Down Cemetery Road

The Last Voice You Hear

Why We Die

Smoke & Whispers

The Slough House Series

Slow Horses

Dead Lions

The List (A Novella)

Real Tigers

Spook Street

London Rules

The Marylebone Drop (A Novella)

Joe Country

The Catch (A Novella)

Other Novels

Reconstruction

Nobody Walks

This Is What Happened

Copyright © 2020 by Mick Herron

Published by

Soho Press, Inc.

227 W 17th Street

New York, NY 10011

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952884

ISBN 978-1-64129-234-4

eISBN 978-1-64129-235-1

Printed in the United States of America

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THE CATCH

THE CATCH

They came for him at dawn, just as he’d feared they would. But instead of using the Big Red Key so beloved of SWAT teams—the miniature battering ram that reduces a front door to matchsticks—they entered in civilised fashion, and when he opened his eyes they were in his bedroom, one regarding him as if he were a carving on a tomb, and the other examining a photograph on the dressing table that showed Solomon Dortmund when young, a mere fifty or so, holding hands with a woman the same age, and whose quiet smile for the camera could pull a drowning man ashore. Surrounding this photograph were a pair of beloved relics: a hairbrush and a small velvet drawstring bag, an inch square, containing three baby teeth and an adult molar. This was disturbing, but when you appropriate a man’s life without his blessing, you leave his family treasures where you find them.

“Two minutes, John. You’ll be on the pavement in two minutes.”

“Could you make it five?” His voice was scratchy, and badly dubbed. “I could do with—”

“Two minutes. Richard here will keep you company.”

And then it was just John Bachelor and this man Richard, a large, shaven-headed thirtysomething with thick-framed spectacles, who gazed at him unsmiling. It seemed unlikely that they would arrive at an odd-couple friendship in the time allowed.

When he shifted, a sour smell escaped from the blankets.

“You couldn’t pass me my trousers?”

Richard patently regarded this as either rhetorical enquiry or statement of fact.

There is a peculiar humiliation in dressing in front of a hostile stranger, particularly when one’s body is an increasingly rackety collection of limbs attached to a soft, baggy frame, and one’s clothing a medley of items purchased at bargain prices. Bachelor’s corduroy trousers were shiny at the knee, and his shirt had a faint spray of blood on the collar. His own, it’s important to note. Even so, it was a relief not to be standing in his briefs in front of someone whose own physical decline, if already etched in outline beneath his dark blue suit, had yet to be framed and hung for all to see.

Squeezing his feet into socks produced the kind of hyperventilation that running up stairs once triggered.

He stood up. “I need to, ah . . .”