Roderick Ho hadn’t been to bed. Roderick Ho didn’t sleep much anyway, but tonight he had business. Tonight, he was paying off a debt. On his way home he’d picked up two economy-sized bags of tortilla chips, and had dropped both when a twat in a Lexus honked him on a zebra …
His glasses had slipped off when he’d bent to retrieve them, and the twat in the Lexus honked again, and it was obvious he’d been enjoying this, was simply livening up those dead moments when he’d been forced to wait at a crossing for a pedestrian, for fuck’s sake. Because the road belonged to car-users. Belonged to SI 123, as his plate had it. Ho retrieved his glasses, gathered up his bags of chips. He’d barely cleared the Lexus’s wheelbase when it roared past, and he knew he wasn’t even a memory by this point. At best, he was a punchline. Should have seen the chinky jump. That had been then.
This was now: SI 123 was Simon Dean of Colliers Wood, and Ho wasn’t up at four because it had taken him that long to discover this, he was up at four because he was taking Simon Dean’s life apart piece by piece.
Simon Dean was a tele-salesman for a life-assurance company, or that’s what he probably still thought he was, though one of his last acts before leaving work, according to the rigorously backed-up email system his company maintained, had been to send a resignation note to his boss, accompanied by a detailed account of Simon’s intentions regarding the boss’s teenage daughter.
Since then, Simon had maxed out his credit cards, cancelled his standing orders, transferred his mortgage to a new lender at a distressingly poor rate, changed his phone number, and sent everyone in his address book a wedding-sized bouquet of flowers accompanied by a coming-out note. He’d donated his savings to the Green Party and embraced Scientology; had sold his Lexus on eBay; and within forty-eight hours would become aware of his status as a registered sex offender, as would everyone else in his postcode.
All in all, Simon Dean was not in for the happiest time of his life; but, looking on the bright side, Roderick Ho felt chirpier than he’d done in ages. And his tortilla chips, it turned out, hadn’t been much damaged by their fall.
— Slow Horses (Mick Herron), Loc. 4385–403