Bad Actors

In the San’s basement was a gym, described in the brochure as fully equipped, but lacking, Shirley noticed, a wooden horse. If they’d had one, she’d have half-inched a couple of spoons and dug a tunnel. Instead, there was a row of treadmills, on one of which an idiot was walking at a speed that indicated she needed to be somewhere in a hurry, and with an expression suggesting she was late. Most of the inmates—the brochure said “guests”—seemed similarly wrapped, tending to appear calm to the point of disconnection while at rest, but harried by demons when they thought no one was watching. Another good reason for making tracks as soon as possible. Shirley was pretty sure being a mentalist wasn’t catching, but wouldn’t want to bet her sanity on it.

Her morning keep-fit routine didn’t take long—everyone always went on about how important cooling down exercises were, so Shirley skipped the workout and just did those instead. Some ankle touches, some glute stretches. You could hear things popping if you did them correctly, unless you only heard that if you were doing them wrong. Then several minutes of downward dog, the least dignified position Shirley had attempted without at least one other person being involved. The walls were mirrored, and it was impossible not to catch sight of herself: her head looked like a tomato this side of bursting. Time to call it a day.

Leaving, she ran into a grey-headed woman who was backing through the door carrying a yoga mat. She dropped it when they collided, and the pair mutely watched as it unrolled, releasing visible dust into the air. Then looked at each other.

“My fault.”

“Uh-huh.”

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Ellie Parsons,” she said. “Panic attacks.”

“Shirley Dander,” Shirley replied. “Substance abuse,” and pushed through the door.

She showered in her room. According to the computer-generated schedule pushed beneath her door there was a group session in half an hour at which her presence was “expected.” Yeah, she thought, scrubbing a hole in the misted mirror. Except her presence had other ideas; she’d send her absence along as a proxy. Hope this suits. Judging by the mirror, it would have to: her reflection wasn’t taking any crap. Her last act of freedom had been a buzz cut, which was what she generally went for when on a war footing. No way was this baby attending any session she didn’t want to.

In black jeans and grey hoodie, her usual trainers, she set out for a walk round the grounds. The woman at reception gave her a smile, which was a plus, but also said something about “twenty minutes,” which Shirley took to be a reminder about the group session. Everyone on bucket seats, sharing bad moments. Seriously: fuck. Shirley had no problem with people seeking help, but also had no problem, end of. The fact that she hadn’t punched anyone yet proved her self-control, right?

The San nestled in a dip between hills, its tree-lined driveway a gentle slope ending in a gravelled expanse in front of the house, which was redbrick, with blue and white woodwork round windows and gables, and a big copper beech behind. It had been a farmhouse in a previous existence, the brochure explained, but those days were long gone. For obvious reasons, there was a certain amount of security: a wall blocked any view of the building from the road, and the gates were controlled from within the house—there was an intercom, and a camera, and you presumably had to have good reason for entering, along with the right ID. There were no guards in evidence, but she had that sense of an unseen presence which came with surveillance, though also with habitual cocaine use. She guessed there’d be more cameras among the trees; maybe someone observing her on a screen right now, admiring her buzz cut.

That said, it wasn’t a fort. The outer wall ended a few hundred yards from the main gate, melding with a row of stables before giving way to a wooded area, separated from the road by a ditch and coloured wire, which looked designed to deter foxes or badgers rather than marauding humans, some of whom would probably have the nous to step over it. And she’d seen from her window that part of the estate’s boundary was a lake, which she doubted was croc-infested. The San might not invite casual wanderers, but if you had a mind to leave—or arrive—there wasn’t a lot to prevent you. She could walk out, make her way to the nearest station, steal a ride and be in London in however long the train took: couple of days, maximum. She’d be back in the clubs before her buzz cut lost its edge.

And then what?

Last night, she’d tried to remember the precise details of Monday evening, and found most of it shrouded in blurry matter. There’d been argy-bargy with Roddy Ho—had he thrown a computer at her?—and then they’d been in a car in Wimbledon, she couldn’t recall why, except that it had something to do with Louisa and Lech. And then the fight with the bus; she’d had a damn good reason for that, but attempts to recall it broke into a welter of shattered plastic and changing lights. Nothing stayed still long enough for Shirley to get a fix on. But that was what happened with memories: more memories piled on top of them, and it got so you couldn’t tell one from the other.

People keep getting hurt. People keep dying. We have to look out for one another.

Catherine’s words, but what did she know? She hadn’t even been there for most of Shirley’s deaths.

You’re doing lots of things, Shirley. But trust me, “fine” is not among them.

Whatever.

But it was true things hadn’t been great lately. She could remember that much: things hadn’t been great.

She was in the stableyard now, if you still called it that when the horses had bolted. It felt like an empty room. Four stables either side, with those wooden half-door arrangements, all hanging open. She looked inside one. It was dark and damp. The wooden shutters on its far wall, which presumably opened onto the road, were closed. She wondered what it must have been like for the horse, stuck in here, looking out on passing cars, but didn’t wonder long. It was a little too familiar.

For some unfathomable reason, she wanted to cry.

A staircase ran alongside the outer side-wall of the farthermost stable, leading to a hayloft or tack room or something—a tack room was a thing, wasn’t it? Whatever it was its door was locked, but she sat on the thigh-high wall of the landing a while, gazing down the road. No traffic. A wind was scuffling about in the woods to her right. She couldn’t actually see it, but she could see what it was doing.

And when that got old she descended the stairs and wandered into the wood. Tears weren’t her thing: she hadn’t cried when Marcus was shot. The night River took that toxic payload, she’d gone dancing. Why would stuff catch up with her now? You’re doing lots of things. It hadn’t rained lately; the ground was snappy with twigs. But “fine” is not among them. Maybe Catherine had a point. Maybe she had a stupid point. Maybe Shirley should stay here a while, keep her head down, wait for the bad shit to pass. It wouldn’t take forever. Who knew: she might get to like it. Few weeks’ R&R, and if she kept up with the exercise regime, she’d go home fit as a star’s body double.

Besides, medical staff on the premises, there was bound to be someone she could score off.

“Ms. Dander?”

She turned. Speaking of staff: the woman addressing her was one of those who’d annoyed her the first afternoon. Snappy twigs or not, she’d got pretty close pretty quietly.

“What?”

“You’ll be late for your session.”

Happy-clappy crap, more like.

A moment hung there, during which Shirley could have gone either way. But it passed; drifted into the wood like smoke. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

The woman knew enough not to speak as they walked out of the trees, past the stables, towards the house. Or maybe she was listening, as Shirley was, to a car on the nearby road, stretching its approach out to a long thin whine. By the time it faded, they were almost at the door.

One thing about this place, she thought. You’d know when you had visitors.

Not that you would. There was a reason they put the San in the middle of nowhere. Out-of-sight meant forgotten about.

The San was the last place on anybody’s mind.

The San, thought Claude Whelan.

He used to work over the river, remember? Schemes and wheezes; devious bullshit. One side effect, he liked to think, was that he could recognise a game when someone else was playing it. Take this, for instance: one of Lamb’s crew—the so-called slow horses—gets shipped off to the Service’s drying-out facility the morning after Sophie de Greer disappears. The morning after de Greer makes a phone call to Jackson Lamb. It was a matter of patterns; he saw them where others noticed only random particle motion. And here was one. That incident in Wimbledon—Shirley Dander attacking a tourist coach with an iron—was too outlandish to be anything other than a cover story. And the San was too exclusive, too Park, for a Slough House agent’s treatment.

He’d said as much to Lamb, and the crafty sod had changed the subject. Dander’s treatment is none of your business. Schemes and wheezes; devious bullshit. He’d seen through Lamb that same moment: it wasn’t Dander who’d been packed off to the San. It was Sophie de Greer.

Nor was Lamb the only one playing games. There’d been a paragraph in that morning’s Times, tucked away on page seven: Concern is growing as to the whereabouts of Dr. Sophie de Greer, an academic and researcher at ReThink#1, the policy discussion group headed by Number Ten’s chief adviser Anthony Sparrow . . . A Downing Street spokesperson dismissed rumours that de Greer’s disappearance was a result of action taken by the Security Services. “Without concrete—indeed, waterproof—evidence that any such malpractice has taken place, we can assume this is baseless gossip.”

A declaration of hostilities, thought Claude.

Because this had all the characteristics of a turf war. Sparrow had already left his mark on most Whitehall departments, the majority of whose advisory staff were now appointed by Number Ten, effectively Sparrow himself, rather than by ministers. The centralisation of authority had long been the government’s aim, devolvement having been decried by the PM as his most successful recent predecessor’s biggest domestic failure, a target easier to locate than the PM’s least successful recent predecessors’ biggest domestic triumphs. With the regions restless in the wake of economic fallout from the pandemic, there was good reason to fortify Downing Street. And it was clear that Sparrow intended Regent’s Park to become part of the fortifications, a move which would require a cooperative First Desk. De Greer’s precise role in all this Whelan couldn’t see, but that barely mattered. All that counted was that she was now in play, and that Sparrow had finagled the word waterproof into the paper of record.

What Taverner’s reaction would be, Whelan couldn’t know either. But he could make a reasonable guess.

It was late morning; he was drinking coffee, and staring from his back window at the summer-struck garden. Until lately the garden had been Claire’s province, and Whelan a suffered guest; his presence occasionally called upon when heavy-ish lifting was required—for actual heavy lifting, a professional would be summoned—but otherwise deemed unnecessary except as a witness to her careful curation. Now the garden spoke only of neglect, and he felt unable to remedy this. The best he’d managed was the shifting of leaves and other windfalls. Claire’s absence was nowhere more apparent than in the presence of unwelcome flora: the weeds that might yet strangle the roses; the harmless but unlovely dandelions. These incursions predated her departure, in fact. It was peculiar how one obsession could replace another; or if not peculiar, at least worthy of comment. Or if not that, then something else. Damn it, he was running out of thoughts. His own presence bored him. He supposed he could hire a gardener. But meanwhile, he had a phone call to make.

“The San?”

“A Service facility for the hard of drinking,” explained Nash. “Also drugs, and associated behaviours. And the various other traumas that befall those who put their country’s good before their own health and sanity.”

Sparrow hadn’t wanted a bloody lecture.

“And he’s a hundred per cent certain that’s where de Greer is?”

“He says eighty. But he’s a cautious man.”

Said like this was a virtue, rather than the tedious plaint of the ineffectual.

Nash burbled on some more, then asked Sparrow if he wanted the San’s details in an email, and Sparrow asked him if he was an idiot. In this post code, emails were for when you couldn’t afford a promotional video. Instead, he jotted down the necessary geography, all the while brooding at the wall, which in his mind’s eye became a map in a war room. Knowing where de Greer was meant a victory flag. So did planting the word waterproof in this morning’s Times. What people failed to realise was, success didn’t depend on coherent strategy—coherent strategy left you nailed to one course of action, and at the mercy of events. But once you grasped that there were some problems nobody would ever solve, your options widened. Chaos became an alternative, a fertile ground out of which new possibilities arose . . . This, the bedrock of his political philosophy, had seen Sparrow through some shaky patches. He’d occasionally been knocked off balance, true. We don’t need no stinking lockdown, he remembered telling the PM. What are we, French? But even this had an upside, distracting attention from a harder Brexit than the wet-legged had been expecting, and post-Covid paranoia was a flame worth fanning. Take the anti-vaxxers, or the G5 arsonists, whose celebrity-endorsed idiocy made the Home Secretary look a model of reason . . . Every national panic permitted a government to lace its boots tighter, which was why every government needed a visionary unafraid to sow chaos.

Sparrow knew this because he’d read it on a blog, or written it on his own. Or both—the distance between the two was measured in how long it took to cut and paste.

But besides all that, Sophie had been a true believer—a Brexit fluffer, giving the PM a No-Deal stiffy when it looked like one was needed—and had fervently supported Sparrow’s aim of removing any latent traces of autonomy from the major Whitehall offices. In particular, Regent’s Park: history, she’d pointed out, was littered with examples of heads of secret services becoming heads of state, both the USA and the USSR figuring on that list. Never say it can’t happen here. Personally, too, they’d been on a wavelength: she’d been first to nod approvingly when he’d explained to the PM that the real hero of It’s a Wonderful Life was Old Man Potter, because he didn’t allow sentiment to interfere with business. All of which, in roughly that order, had flashed through Sparrow’s mind like a drowning man’s last newsreel when he’d encountered Vassily Rasnokov in Moscow a month ago. We’re so pleased you’ve created a role for Dr. de Greer. A splendid addition to a team, I’ve found.

A blank stare had been the best Sparrow could manage.

Rasnokov might have been lying, of course—he was a spook—but once home Sparrow had made discreet enquiries into de Greer’s superforecasting qualifications and had learned that the tests for such abilities weren’t always carried out with the rigour brought to, say, an online credit check or an internet degree. Following which he’d had an episode: glass had been shattered, and carpet chewed. Consequences contemplated. If Rasnokov had planted de Greer in Downing Street, one of two things might happen: he’d lock the information away in a Kremlin cupboard, alongside those movies of sex workers pissing on a hotel bed, and spend the rest of his career chuckling at the damage he could wreak with the turn of a key. Or he’d go ahead and bring the noise: light the story up, then warm his hands on the fire. That was the disruptor option, and Sparrow recognised a fellow expert when he saw one.

It was true that his first response had backfired: he’d reached out to Benito of the Ultras—real name, Alessandro Botigliani; who couldn’t be called an ally, exactly, but they’d fought in the same woods—and let him believe that he and his confederates, who numbered about ninety strong, were on a Home Office shit-list, which Sparrow had the muscle to edit. And that long-term visas were not out of the question. More than enough to secure loyalty, though as things turned out Benito didn’t have to sell him out to fuck him over, because his crew had shit the bed like the ill-trained chimps they were: instead of simply tracking her movements, his pair of goons had waylaid de Greer on her evening run and had their arses kicked from here to Sunday, sending de Greer into the arms of the Park. Which had raised the stakes higher, giving Taverner the advantage.

But some basic truths still held sway, chief among them being: lie and bluster through two news cycles, and you’re home free. The headlines fed like a shark—constantly, but always on the move—and the further afield the scraps you tossed them, the more distant they became. So, the new plan was: make the de Greer narrative one about the Park being up to mischief. By planting the word “waterproof” in the Times, he’d cast de Greer as victim in a dirty tricks campaign, while his own role faded to that of supporting player. Sparrow never minded being way down the cast list. You got more done in the shadows.

And meanwhile, if Taverner or her lackey Jackson Lamb had de Greer stowed away in a Service facility, Sparrow would fetch her out and offer her a starrier part. One he was confident she’d be happy to accept, once the alternatives had been road-mapped for her: a nice cosy job in a lobbying outfit, or some hard yards answering questions posed by any number of hostile agencies . . .

So it was time to talk to Benito once more. His crew had been a letdown, sure, but that would put them on their mettle; besides, Sparrow had no other team handy.

Meanwhile, Nash was still talking.

He cut through the man’s fawny solicitude. “What name did Whelan say they’d stashed de Greer under?” He made a jotting of the reply: Shirley D.A.N.D.E.R. “And you need to call a Limitations meeting. Now. What do you mean, why? I’m about to tell you why. Pay attention.”

Of those lingering in the park while Diana put papers and thoughts into order, not everyone had an evident excuse: there were mothers with toddlers, a carer wheeling her charge’s chair, a businessman soliloquising into a phone, but also a lone woman with her hands in her pockets, staring at the sky; a lone man grumbling to and fro between gatepost and bin. It occurred to her that watchers in her profession wouldn’t dare behave like ordinary people. Spooks needed reasons, props and cover. People just did what they were doing.

So, bag looped over one shoulder, she left the park to its late-summer sunshine. The year was turning a corner, disregarding the havoc in its wake. One day she’d have time to release a breath, and celebrate recovery. Just now, though, she was wondering who to fuck up, and in what order.

Vassily Rasnokov, definitely. If Lamb’s reading was right, the embassy visit had been cover for a private game, and it didn’t require tactical genius to deduce that this involved concocting an exit strategy. Working for a paranoid psychopath meant walking a constant edge—you never knew what might trigger a rage: a fly landing on a knuckle; a memory whispering from the wings. This many years into the job, Rasnokov must be spending half his time looking for the nearest open door, in case his boss took it in mind to examine his innermost thoughts, perhaps by spreading them across a carpet.

But Rasnokov was back in Moscow, and there were other dangers nearer home. If the Russian’s schemes involved sowing chaos here in London, he’d made a good start: for all Sparrow’s studied indifference to the traditional norms of government, inviting a foreign intelligence agent to help formulate national policy was more than a standard cock-up even for the 2020s. Thanks not least to Sparrow himself, lying in office was no longer a career-threatening felony; the consequence of misleading Parliament was nowadays a lap of honour, and you could even, as a witlessly self-revealing Home Secretary had suggested, be fucking useless and remain securely in post, provided you were no threat to the PM. But inviting a spy inside Number Ten, allotting her a coathook, that was a serious embarrassment. Which meant Sparrow would be hoping to get his defence in first.

Even as Diana was having these thoughts, she was checking her messages. Among them, an alert from the morning’s Times.

Waterproof . . .

The word brought her to a halt, provoking a muttered Jesus from the pedestrian in her wake.

She was a beat behind, and had been for days. Should have known it was a serious matter when Claude turned up at the Park: The word waterproof has been mentioned. Of course it bloody has . . .

But at least this answered a pressing question: who to set about fucking up first.

On the move again, she set her thoughts in order. It was clear she needed de Greer before the Limitations Committee, puncturing any claim that Waterproof had been used, and singing her heart out about Sparrow’s hamheaded gullibility. The PM preferred the public to believe that his ineffectual blustering was a stage act, and he mostly got away with that. But the outing of his sidekick as a Kremlin stooge would puncture the image, and sooner than suffer that he’d bow to Diana’s demands, chief among which would be hanging Sparrow out to dry.

That done, she could get on to the equally serious matter of fucking up Rasnokov, which would begin with Lamb’s observation about the missing whisky bottles.

She rang Josie, who told her: “The hotel’s recyclables are collected twice a week. We went through the dumpsters before the first of those. No Balvenie bottles.”

Diana had the impression of events unfolding on the other side of the connection; movement she couldn’t see happening in the Park.

“And he didn’t have them with him when he left?”

“He had carry-on only. They’d have shown on his X-rays.”

While he could have waltzed them through diplomatic channels, what would have been the point? If he’d intended them as take-home presents, he’d not have paid hotel prices.

“Get hold of whoever cleaned his room,” she said. “And find out politely, or find out the nasty way, if they walked off with a couple of abandoned half-empties. Or took actual empties for refilling with cheap stuff and selling on.”

Josie took a moment to answer. “That’s already been done. I think.”

“Excuse me, am I boring you?”

“Sorry, ma’am, there’s something going on, I don’t know what.”

“What do you mean, there’s—”

The young woman’s voice became muffled, as if she were holding a hand over her phone. Diana thought she heard her own name.

“Josie? What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry—”

“Josie?”

The connection was cut.

Dead phone in hand, Diana turned a corner. She’d reached City Road. There was traffic, moving at an average speed; there was a bus at a stop fifteen yards away, its rear-end mural declaring this her city. There was a helicopter shuttling overhead. And her phone was ringing again.

A hoarse whisper on the other end. “Red Queen. Red Queen.”

That was all.

Removing her phone’s batteries, Diana dropped it in a bin attached to a lamppost, and hurried across the road, reaching the bus in time to slip on board and be carried away.

It must have rained overnight, because the mews’ cobbles were shiny-wet and glistened in the morning sun, but no; whoever occupied the cottage opposite had been watering the plant-life, soaking the terracotta pots that laid siege to those premises like a Chinese army. And was cottage right, even? John Bachelor had temporarily occupied a number of properties lately—empty offices, friends’ sofas, his car’s back seat—but this was his first cottage, and the word sounded odd, applied in central London. On the other hand: whitewashed walls, a trellis arrangement, and a small tropical forest out front. It was hardly inner city.

He turned off the radio—the PM had just shared his vision of post-Brexit Britain as a culinary powerhouse, its takeaway delivery services the envy of the world—as the kettle reached the boil. Watching such devices perform this function was his career in a nutshell. Though the role was referred to as “milkman,” it mostly involved tea. But yesterday Dr. de Greer—Sophie—had praised the results, and that was the first compliment Bachelor remembered receiving this millennium.

“You’re being funny.”

He really wasn’t.

Bachelor had babysat before, and was familiar with the mindset of the usual Service casualty: someone whose career was an open book, its index busiest under the heading “Grudges, slights and injustices.” So when Lech Wicinski had asked about his availability, he’d jumped straight over the small print to focus on more important matters. “And the per diem aspect, you’d be covering that?” he’d heard himself say, with that inward sense of shame that felt as if someone were turning his corners down. Only once that had been established had the penny dropped. The baby he’d be sitting was Sophie de Greer.

“So I was right.”

“Truthfully?” Wicinski had asked. “I haven’t the faintest.”

But whatever was going on, de Greer had been targeted, and, thanks to Bachelor himself—who’d been the one to point Wicinski at a TV screen—it was the slow horses who’d brought her to sanctuary.

So here he was, in a Service safe house, with no current worries about food or shelter, and in his care an unfamiliar sort of client in that she was young, attractive, and in peril she hadn’t brought upon herself via the familiar triathlon of alcohol, sex and disgruntlement. Also, there was something in her conduct towards him that Bachelor had to take a few stabs at before it registered. Respect. Christ, it had been a long time.

He poured water into the pot, scalding it nicely. She brought out the protector in him, a trait usually summoned by his more elderly clients. Something helpless about her; uncalculating. And they had a ready-made connection, of course.

“I knew your mother.”

“. . . Really?”

“Well, not knew knew.”

He wasn’t sure how much he could say about Bonn. Somewhere, there was a former spook who’d been burned by the KGB, and it had never been clear to Bachelor whether the poor fool had committed the sins he’d been accused of, or whether, rather than having put a foot out of line, he’d simply found the line redrawn beneath his foot. Standard procedure for the time. The Cold War wasn’t all muffins at Checkpoint Charlie. Which this young woman presumably knew, her mother having been a combatant.

“And now you’re in the same line.”

“I wasn’t given a choice.”

This made sense to Bachelor, whose own horizons, he sometimes believed, had been crayoned in by another hand. “Blackmail?”

“Not me,” she said. “My mother. They said . . . They said she’d be turned out onto the streets. And she’s old. And . . .”

And all the things that went with being old. This, too, was an ancient story: a lifetime’s service trampled underfoot. They wore you out, then weaponised your uselessness and aimed it at your children. Dr. de Greer was crying, so automatically became Sophie. He could not comfort her while addressing her by title.

That first night he more or less ordered her to get some sleep: it was amazing, he trotted out, how different things looked in the morning. He’d then taken stock of the safe house, focusing on fridge and kitchen cupboards. No alcohol. Plenty of tinned food, though, and a freezer compartment stuffed with ready-meals. A box of teabags, not quite stale. Still no alcohol. But they wouldn’t starve. As for sleeping arrangements, there was only one bed; he’d settled on the sofa, and had known worse berths. When sleep arrived it came dreamlessly, but when he’d woken he’d lain for an hour or more remembering Bonn, the three or four days he’d spent staring at Sophie de Greer’s unsmiling, unspeaking mother; the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. And here he was sharing a house with her living image. Life brought you in circles, if you waited long enough. It sometimes seemed to Bachelor he’d done little with life other than wait through it.

Now they had a routine, Bachelor keeping station by the landing window, where he could clock strange arrivals, hear unusual sounds, be alert for danger; Sophie perched beside him on the top stair, as if they were engaged in a joint effort, rather than one in which he was the knight, she the fair maiden. He was wary of asking questions, knowing that the professionals, when they came for her, would expect to find her intact, but she had no such compunction.

“How long have you been a spy?”

“That’s not really what I do.”

“But you work for the intelligence service.”

He was a milkman, he explained; a long out-of-date joke having something to do with collecting the empties. A care-worker, really. It was strange, he found himself saying, the byways along which a career could take you. She seemed happy to share this insight, and even treat it as a small joke. Which, like his career, he supposed it was.

He made one of her own career, too: “Have you always known you wanted to be a superforecaster?”

Seeing her laugh was a new experience. He’d spent days in Bonn hoping to see that face smile, but Sophie’s mother—raised amidst grim state machinery—didn’t have the muscles to make that expression work.

There was a lot he wanted to know, but nothing he was able to ask. He hoarded what clues came his way, though:

My mother made great sacrifices.

She sent me away. I studied in Switzerland.

I always knew there’d be a debt to pay.

Fragments of a story the professionals would put together. But Bachelor felt he knew her better than the Park’s inquisitors ever would.

When Lech visited on the second day, Bachelor asked when they could expect company—when, in particular, Lamb would be dropping in.

“You’re asking me?” Lech said. “I’m hardly in the loop.”

Afterwards, when Bachelor related this non-information to Sophie, she said, “They’re deciding who gets me.”

“Who do you want to get you? I mean, where do you want to be? Do you want to go home?”

“Zurich’s my home. But they won’t send me there. They’ll send me to Moscow.”

“And what’s there for you?”

“Nothing.”

Here, too, he understood her. There was nothing for him in London, but this was where he’d been sent, or at any rate, this was where he was.

When he assured her she wouldn’t have to go anywhere she didn’t want to, she gave a sad smile, and briefly rested her head on his shoulder.

It wasn’t as if he were under any illusions. He was looking at sixty—could feel its breath on his eyebrows—and wasn’t one of those self-deceiving Lotharios whose mirrors were twenty years out of date. His best days were behind him, an even more melancholy thought when he weighed up how feeble they’d been at the time. He’d barely hit his middle years before the mould started showing through the wallpaper, and then there was no stopping it: the capsized marriage, the punctured career, the lack of anything you could mistake for loyalty, support or money.

This, though; this could go on for as long as it wanted. He’d happily while away months coaxing life out of ageing teabags and cooking up suppers from a cupboard-load of tins; spending daylight hours on the landing, Sophie beside him, like a vision dredged out of someone else’s memory. Months hoping not to hear words like:

“He’s coming here, isn’t he?”

It was the afternoon of the fourth day, the cobbles not yet dry from their drenching, and the pair were at their posts, looking down on the mews from the narrow window. One empty tea cup sat by Bachelor’s chair; Sophie cradled the other in her hands. Without her glasses, he noticed—not for the first time—she seemed younger. He would have happily continued to study her, but forced himself to shift his attention instead to the figure she had seen through the window, pausing in the archway to the mews; a bulky mess in a shabby overcoat, lighting a cigarette before stepping into the sunshine.

“Isn’t he?” she repeated.

“Yes,” Bachelor said. “I’m afraid he is.”

Lech said, “Let’s run through that again. You brought in a homemade curry for lunch, and spiced it up with this superpowered chili—”

“A Dorset Naga.”

“A Dorset Naga, right.”

“Which scores, like, 923,000 on the Scoville scale.”

“Okay.”

“Which is the Richter scale, only for chilis.”

“Okay. So you brought this in and left it in the fridge so that if—when—Lamb stole it, it’d blow his head off.”

“Yes.”

“And what do you usually bring in for lunch?” Louisa said.

“I usually buy it.”

“Yeah, okay, and you buy . . . ?”

“A salad.”

“So you usually eat a shop-bought salad until one day you make yourself a curry instead.”

“Well, that’s what he’d expect, isn’t it? The fat bigot.”

Lech and Louisa exchanged a look.

“I mean, obviously I make my own curry.”

They exchanged it back again.

“What?”

“Lamb’s fat,” said Louisa. “And bigotry is his preferred mode of communication, yes. But he’s not stupid. You might as well have labelled your lunchbox ‘Bait.’”

“But he took it!”

“When a rat takes your poison, that’s job done,” said Lech. “When Lamb does, that’s research.”

“I was you,” said Louisa, “I wouldn’t go biting into anything you didn’t prepare yourself.”

And even then, not if you’ve turned your back on it for ten seconds, she mentally added.

“Where is he, anyway?” Lech asked, but no one knew.

They were in the kitchen, because it was that time: Louisa’s need for coffee, always imminent, was at its peak early afternoon, and Lech’s desire to be nowhere near his desk was at its peak most of the time. As for Ashley, neither had gauged her daily requirements yet, because this seemed an unnecessary effort until her ongoing presence had been established. Investing in a fellow slow horse was far from automatic.

Current assessment, though: attempting to kill Jackson Lamb with a turbo-charged curry showed initiative and imagination, indicating that Ashley Khan might be worth getting to know. It was just a pity the same resourceful outlook rendered her long-term prospects negligible.

Roddy Ho entered, opened the fridge, and removed a plastic bottle of radioactive-coloured drink. When he closed the door it slowly swung open again, but he didn’t notice. Instead he leaned against the only length of kitchen counter not already occupied and applied himself to the task of removing the plastic screw-cap with his teeth. This took him, by Louisa’s fascinated count, twenty-two seconds. Then he tilted the bottle back, took a large gulp and shook his head, as if he’d just performed some feat of athleticism out of the reach of lesser divinities. Only then did he address the other three. “’Sup?” he asked.

“You forgot to say ‘dude,’” Lech pointed out.

“Yeah, well, you forgot to say . . .”

They waited.

“. . . Fuck off.”

“Sorry,” said Lech. “Fuck off.”

Louisa kicked the fridge door shut.

“He might just think I like really hot curry,” Ashley said.

“Or you could rely on his famously forgiving nature,” said Lech. “That might work.”

Roddy said to Louisa, “That du—that guy, the one at the embassy? Who wouldn’t look at the cameras?”

“What about him?”

“He left. First thing this morning.”

“. . . And did you catch his face this time?”

“Yeah.” Roddy slurped another mouthful of bright green energy. “He sort of waved, in fact. Weird.”

“So did you run him through the program?”

“Nah. Sent you the clip, though.”

“You’re an absolute star.”

Roddy shrugged. “You can owe me one.”

Ashley, who’d filled the space when she wasn’t talking by looking at her phone instead, raised her head suddenly. “Oh. My. God!”

“What?”

“Red Queen.”

All three stared. “What?”

“Red Queen!” She gestured with her phone. “It’s all over the network. Like, ‘This is not a drill.’”

“So it’s really happening?” said Lech.

“Yes.”

“Not a practice run?” said Louisa.

“No.”

“Actual Red Queen. Actually happening.”

“Yes! How many times?”

Lech said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s Red Queen?”

“Duh,” said Roddy.

Catherine appeared in the doorway, with a suddenness which might have been alarming if it weren’t a firmly established trope. “What’s going on?”

“Red Queen,” Roddy said importantly.

She looked at each in turn. As always, her over-neat appearance, the long-sleeved, mid-calf dress, the lace collar and cuffs, the buckled shoes, lent her the appearance of, not necessarily a governess, but of an illustration of a governess in an out-of-print children’s book. Of the four looking back at her, two underestimated her for that very reason. “Red Queen,” she repeated, instinctively reproducing the capitals. “I don’t know what that means.”

Roddy rolled his eyes. “Double-duh.”

Ashley said, “It means—”

“No, really,” said Lech. “I want to hear Roddy explain it.”

“Me too,” said Louisa.

“Yeah, no,” Roddy said. “It’s her story, not mine.”

“That’s okay,” said Ashley. “You can tell them.”

“Yeah. You can tell us, Roddy.”

“Well, it’s like—it’s like Red Queen. You know?” He looked at Ashley, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

“Ho, you’re a waste of bandwidth,” Lech said.

“Amusing as this is,” said Catherine, “a little clarity would be nice.”

“Red Queen’s what they call the Candlestub Protocol on the hub,” Ashley said. “Sort of a nickname.”

And now she got the shocked silence she’d been expecting.

“Candlestub,” Catherine repeated at last. “Well well.”

“Ding dong,” said Lech.

“Taverner’s gone?” said Louisa.

“Candlestub’s a suspension,” said Catherine. “Not a dismissal. Or that was the original protocol. It might have been amended.”

“What are the triggers?” Louisa asked.

Catherine frowned, recalling. “The usual. Conduct unbecoming. Criminal activity. Misuse of powers.”

“So strike three,” said Lech.

“Who’s on First?” Roddy asked. Then: “What?”

“If First Desk leaves office unexpectedly, dies or is otherwise incapacitated, interim control passes into the hands of the most senior Second Desk,” Catherine said, with the air of one quoting. “That’s traditionally been Operations. But in the case of a suspension, the chair of Limitations takes the helm. In other words, Oliver Nash. Under close supervision of the Home Office.”

“Well, this’ll be a train wreck.”

“Though not necessarily the Home Secretary herself.”

“Small mercies.”

Louisa looked down into her empty coffee cup, as if reading the future in its grounds. Diana Taverner had been around forever; had been Second Desk (Ops) when Louisa signed on, and First Desk in all but name during Claude Whelan’s tenure, whose ending she’d helped engineer. Her suspension from duty would send shock waves through the Service. And Lamb had, variously, been in Taverner’s coterie, confidence and crosshairs. If she went, there was no guarantee he’d survive her departure. And if Lamb went Slough House fell, and there’d be no safe harbour for any of them. And where was he, anyway?

She hadn’t spoken aloud, but Catherine partially answered her. “Lamb was meeting her this morning. I’ve no idea what about.”

Lech and Louisa glanced at each other.

“Though I daresay some of you have a better idea than I do. If Taverner’s suspension is fallout from whatever you’ve been up to lately, I’d be seriously worried. If she goes, everyone involved is on shaky ground. And if she stays, well. I don’t expect she’ll be looking back fondly on this episode, do you?”

Louisa said, “Nothing we’ve done has anything to do with Taverner.”

“In that case, you must be feeling particularly relaxed right now.”

She wasn’t used to Catherine being acerbic.

Roddy said, “Told you,” and they all looked at him. “Taverner,” he said. “At the Russian embassy yesterday. Taking a secret meeting, like I said. Simples.”

“First Desk, spying for the Russians?” said Catherine. “That’s quite the merry-go-round.”

Her eyes had grown dark, but no one dared ask.

Somewhat numbed, they set about returning to their rooms, Louisa first rinsing her cup out; Roddy hunting for the plastic top of his unfinished energy drink; Lech putting something in the bin. Ashley paused on the landing. “I’ve never asked why it gets called Red Queen,” she said. “Instead of its proper name.”

“Oh, I’d have thought that was obvious,” said Catherine.

“‘Off with her head,’” said Oliver Nash.

“There’s a process to be undergone,” said Toby Malahide. “Underwent? Either way, we’re hardly hauling her off to the guillotine.”

“No, I meant that’s why they call it Red Queen. You know. Alice in Wonderland.”

“Hmph.”

Malahide was one of that army the Civil Service call upon when asked to put a body in harm’s way: it wasn’t that he was expendable, necessarily; more that his ingrained sense of entitlement rendered him impervious to damage. Early sixties by a mortal calendar, but managing to exude the impression that he’d overseen the Siege of Mafeking, he was the Home Secretary’s choice of point-man for what might turn out to be a tricky undertaking, one of those shitstorms that blow up out of nowhere. The Limitation Committee’s hurried assembly, its single-issue emergency meeting, its unanimous decision that Diana Taverner be relieved of her duties pending investigation of rumours that the illegal Waterproof Protocol had been instigated: all this demanded a degree of arse-covering that would require even the PM to up his game. The stake was worth playing for. If the story proved true there’d be an opportunity to overhaul the Service, the kind of power-grab that doesn’t come along every Parliament. But if it wasn’t true, and worse still didn’t stick, Taverner would burn everyone associated with its having been suggested in the first place. Hence the need for a Toby Malahide. The Home Secretary regarded herself as the consummate politician, and if this was based on little more than the fact that she was indeed Home Secretary, it was generally agreed that she at least offered a synthesis of two main schools of political theory, inasmuch as if she ever became involved in a conspiracy, she’d find a way to cock it up. But nobody disputed her ability to put a large public schoolboy-shaped barrier between herself and impending consequences when the situation demanded.

Meanwhile, Diana Taverner, having somehow caught wind of her predicament, had disappeared into London’s brilliant parade. Her last phone call put her on City Road; her last card payment had her stepping onto a bus. But she hadn’t been on that same bus three stops down the road, when the first Dog on the scene boarded it. “So where is she now?”

“I’m told we’re working on it,” said Nash.

The Park was in a flurry, though you wouldn’t have guessed with a casual glance. The boys and girls of the hub were at their workstations, and there was hush, or what passed for it in an office environment. The usual suspects had shucked their footwear, and were padding around in stockinged feet; the local hardware issued its ambient hum. But Nash, a familiar here, recognised a fractured normality. The figures by the doorways were Dogs, officers of the Service’s internal security division; their presence on the hub spoke of the potential for heads to be thrust upon spikes. An edge had opened up the full length of the building, and all who worked there were balanced upon it. And Nash was acutely conscious of having wielded the shovel that broke the ground.

Malahide continued to harumph. As was common with the breed, he retained a certain bafflement that the position of First Desk had been allotted to a woman; the current complications could have been averted had anyone noticed this earlier and put a stop to it. “Because what the devil does she think she’s playing at? It’s admin, that’s all. A temporary suspension, as laid down in Service Regs, and applied with haste—admittedly—but in absolute accordance with procedure.” He spoke with the confidence of one who’d been in possession of the finer detail for five minutes, and without appearing to remember that Nash himself had supplied this. “What’s called for next is a hearing, at which she’ll be asked to stand down—that’s what the reg demands, that she be ‘asked’—while an investigation is carried out.” He shook his head. “And she decides to play hide and seek. She might as well have signed a confession.”

“That’s jumping the gun,” Nash said. They were in the office adjoining First Desk’s: occupying Diana’s territory would have felt an act of lèse-majesté, or at any rate premature. “Diana is innocent of wrongdoing until proved otherwise. Rather what our justice system is based on.”

“Well, if we’re talking about the justice system, old man, she might argue that one cryptic reference in the Times is hardly enough to base a prosecution on in the first place. Yes, yes. I know.” He waved away Nash’s rejoinder: that the word “waterproof,” in that context, was tantamount to an air-raid siren. “Point is, this might be hush-hush”—and here he made an expansive gesture, taking in the office, the hub, the Park, the secret world—“but it’s still government-issue. Which means appearances matter.”

“It’s not even certain she’s taken flight. Her diary’s clear for the next few hours. For all we know, she’s taking personal time.”

“Which would presume she’s ignorant that Candlestub’s been implemented.” Malahide waggled his eyebrows. “But she dumped a perfectly good phone in a bin on City Road, which is hardly the action of an unflustered woman. No, she’s aware of what’s going on. Which isn’t to say there’s not a hokey-cokey being danced down the usual corridors. And we don’t need a little birdie to tell us”—and here, the eyebrows saw action again—“who’s calling the steps. Mark me, this is Number Ten’s gnome-in-residence ploughing on with his land grab. No, if Taverner wants to fight her corner, she’d better turn up to do it. Otherwise, she’ll find all that’s left of her empire is a six-foot plot by a drainage ditch. Do they do table service here, by the way? Generally take a stiffener round about now.”

Nash said, “We should formulate a plan of action. Clearly, an investigation into Waterproof has to begin even in Diana’s absence.”

“Top of the list is this de Greer woman, I suppose. There a file on her or anything?” Malahide, who’d taken the chair on the operational side of the desk, opened a drawer, glanced into it and slammed it shut again. “If she has been rendered waterproof, I don’t suppose there’ll be much in the way of paperwork. But there’ll have been instructions. Somebody must know something.” First rule of the Civil Service, his tone implied. “We need to speak to everyone Taverner’s spoken to since the woman disappeared. Before then, in fact. In the days leading up to.”

Nash’s instructions on that score had been specific. When he’d relayed Whelan’s belief that Sophie de Greer had been quietly bagged and delivered to the San, Sparrow had said, “And that’s the spit we’ll roast Taverner on. Meanwhile, forget about it. Because if Taverner finds out we know, she’ll have de Greer disappeared again, probably for good.”

Now, Nash said, “We have access to her calendar, and her staff. We can start interviewing right away.” Standing by the open door, he surveyed the hub again. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it without Diana present, and it was hard to believe he’d never do so again. But in time, if Sparrow’s promises meant anything, all of this would fall under his own purview, and whoever rose to First Desk status in Diana’s wake would have all the governance of a ship’s figurehead: proudly leading the way, but wholly directed by other hands. Long used to the spoils and spills of political life, what surprised him most was not that it was Sparrow who’d brought Diana low—he was familiar with the Whitehall edict that it’s those you have most contempt for who do the most damage—it was more that, gazing out at his kingdom-to-be, he felt, for the first time in what might have been forever, a lack of appetite.

“Right time to be woolgathering?”

“Steeling myself for what’s to come.”

“Just the usual day’s work,” said Malahide. “Seeing who’ll be first to chuck their boss under a locomotive.” He ran a hand over his balding head. “Ever felt this was something you’d fancy for yourself? First Desk, I mean? Head of the whole shebang?”

“Lord, no,” said Nash. “I’ve always done my best work behind the scenes.”

When Taverner’s phone rang, it could only be one caller.

It had struck her, threading through the maze of alleys round Bank, that it had been years since she’d worked the streets. As First Desk, her view was usually sci-fi: the city seen via CCTV, or from satellite footage or thermal imaging; as a moving backdrop through tinted windows, from a back seat. Easy to forget the pavements sticky with gum, the air thick with street-food smells; the sickly sweet aroma of burnt caramel drifting from the parks . . . London’s signature perfumes, signs that the city was hauling itself upright again. Breathing them in, she felt her own spook identity reassert itself too, now she was alone and hunted. Red Queen. Someone was hoping to chop off her head.

Meanwhile, her phone was ringing, her secret phone; the one only her caller knew about.

“I hear you’re having a little local difficulty,” said Peter Judd.

The fact that he knew this already surprised her not one whit.

She’d had enough cash to buy a hat and scarf from a tourist boutique; they wouldn’t withstand a second look from a Dog, but to the idle onlooker she wasn’t the same woman she’d been ten minutes ago. Phone to her ear, she was on a business call. There wasn’t a human soul within half a square mile who wasn’t, or if there were, they were looking for her.

“Anthony Sparrow saw an opportunity,” she told him. “And he jumped on it with both feet.”

“You have a counter-plan?”

“I have a current intention. I’m going to use his head as an ashtray, and feed the rest to my neighbour’s cat.”

“Delighted to hear you have everything under control.”

As she stepped out of the alley maze, her unease grew. This was how joes must feel, plying their trade on unfriendly streets. The Park would be in confusion now: Candlestub was an admin issue, suspension “without prejudice,” but you didn’t have to be Michael Gove to recognise an opportunity to put the knife in. Effectively, a Sit Vac notice hung on her office door. The hub would be crippled by speculation, Oliver Nash’s committee would be staking claims, and Sparrow would be enjoying the chaos—but it was the street talent she had to worry about. With that in mind, she’d binned her phone, or the one the hub knew about; had cracked her credit cards and dropped them down a drain—only the newer reissues could be traced whether in use or not, but she was taking no chances. She needed to stay free. Once they took her to the Park, once she’d been formally stripped of status and forbidden contact with anyone with a security clearance high enough to open an Easter egg, her future looked dim.

“What’s amusing,” Judd went on, “is that they’re after you for something you haven’t done, rather than any of the things you have.”

“Did you just call to gloat, Peter? Only I’m pressed for time.”

“Actually, I was hoping to hear I’d been misinformed. If you end up in the Tower, it’s not going to reflect well on me. It would be selfish of you to have your career go up in flames when I’m preparing for an election.”

A bus was crawling lazily along Threadneedle Street, a taxi fuming in its wake. For a moment, the possibility arose of flagging it down, waving her Service card in the driver’s face . . . The resulting piece of street theatre would be on YouTube before the laughter died down.

“I need money,” she said.

“Leave the country money, or one last bottle of Pol Roger money?”

“I’m not running. I plan to take this piece of shit off at the ankles.”

“I love it when you talk violent. Makes me regret the path not taken.”

The path had in fact been taken, but only a few times. And if Diana didn’t look back on the episode as a mistake, exactly, she’d long since barred and chained the gate leading to it.

She needed to get to Chelsea. When it came to taking down Sparrow, his Russia-planted appointee was the smoking gun of choice.

Judd had the tone of one stroking his chin. “Some investments are best flushed, you know. As soon as the stock starts to fall.”

“And some investors get caught in the blast when what they thought was a bust goes boom.”

“Now, that’s not an especially accurate—”

“I need some fucking money.”

“There’s my girl. You know Rashford’s?”

“On Cheapside?”

“Talk to Nathan. He’ll be behind the bar.”

She felt a slight loosening of the tension that had been gathering in her chest since the words first reached her. Red Queen. “Thank you.”

“Consider it a hedged bet. And Diana? Joking aside, if this actually happens—if you’re out on your ear?”

“You’ll stand by me when everyone else has fled?”

“That’s sweet. No, I’ll splash every last detail of our association across the national breakfast table. Without you I’ve no skin in the game, but I can embarrass all kinds of fuck out of the government. Their own intelligence service, funded by Chinese capital? Even the PM’ll have his work cut out, lying his way past that.”

“Peter—”

“I realise that means suspension will be the least of your worries, but I’ve never been the sentimental type. I hope you understand.”

Understand? She’d have been alarmed if he’d pretended otherwise.

Judd, imagining himself dramatic, ended the call.

Keeping her phone to her ear, continuing a conversation that was now the only observable thing about her, Diana headed for Cheapside, her hat shielding her from the capital’s digital voyeurs.

They’d opened the door before he’d knocked, he’d walked in scattering ash in his wake, and just like that the house was his: a little darker for his presence, less safe. Underneath the smoke, he smelled of coffee. A creamy smear on his lapel was recent. This probably counted, in Lamb’s world, as box-fresh.

He revolved on the spot, taking in his surroundings, and by the time he was facing them again, a new cigarette had appeared in his mouth. It was pointing downwards when he spoke. “Fancy a walk?”

“. . . Sorry?” said Bachelor.

“Oh, did I say ‘fancy a walk’? I meant fuck off. Me and Mystic Meg have things to discuss.”

Bachelor had known Lamb by reputation, but the reality was higher definition. Like when you’ve heard about a lorry ploughing through a front window, and then see it happen. He glanced at Sophie, and Lamb caught him at it.

“You need permission? Christ, it’s been three days. Your cycles can’t be in synch already.”

“I’m supposed to be watching over her.”

“Yeah, and one day this might be a musical. Meanwhile, take a turn around the block.”

De Greer put a hand on Bachelor’s arm. “John? It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Lamb beamed. “There, we’re all happy. Now get your fucking skates on.”

“I won’t be far away,” Bachelor said.

“Don’t spoil the moment.”

They watched through the window as he trudged across the cobbles and under the archway, leaving the mews.

“Wrap him one more time round your finger, he’s gunna burst like an overripe condom.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Condoms. Rubbers. The man puts one on his—”

“He’s very nice. He’s been taking care of me.”

“He might as well be wearing an Emergency Exit sign. Soon as it’s necessary, you’ll go straight through him. Of course, he hasn’t worked that out yet.” The cigarette between Lamb’s lips rose to point upwards. “Your mother. Alexa Chaikovskaya. She was old school KGB, right?”

“In the secretarial division.”

“And rose to colonel. Shows an admirable dedication to sharpening pencils.”

“She’s in a home now. With nurses, carers. She’s not in good health.” De Greer bit her lip briefly. “They told me she’d be turned out on the street. If I didn’t do what they asked.”

“Impressive,” said Lamb. “The lip chewing. You take lessons, or does it come natural?”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s better. Now, while Sir Galahad’s off imagining all the ways you might fall on his sword, why don’t we drop the crap? You work for Vassily Rasnokov. He dangled you in front of Number Ten’s chief gremlin, who’s just the type to be impressed by the superforecaster credentials, and next thing we know you’re shaping government policy.”

“Shaping?” De Greer shook her head. “I was adding my voice to a prevailing chorus, that’s all. Helping steer Rethink in the direction it was already headed.”

“Course you were.” Lamb rummaged in a pocket and found a disposable lighter. “Sparrow already had it in for the Civil Service, didn’t he, because of the cash mountains waiting for whoever replaces it with private contractors. But a little encouragement never hurts. Set a mole to writing briefs for a cabinet already a few boats short of a ferry company, you’d be entitled to think job done. But Rasnokov’s more ambitious than that, don’t you think?”

“What I think is, you’re not like I’d pictured,” she said.

“Yeah, they photoshopped a thigh-gap in my publicity stills,” said Lamb. “Imagine my distress.” He clicked his lighter, then did it again. When it failed to respond with more than a dry scratch, he tossed it over his shoulder. It took a nick from the wall and dropped to the carpet. “Got a light?”

“Smoking’s a disgusting habit.”

“Spying’s pretty gross too. But I try not to be judgemental.” He found another pocket to rummage in. “So where was I? Oh yeah. Your boss. He was well aware of Sparrow’s general approach. The man calls himself a disruptor, right? Tossing imaginary hand grenades around, and thinking that makes him Action Man. So my first thought was, in planting you, Rasnokov was playing him at his own game. Simply causing chaos. Put you in place, then cause maximum embarrassment by burning you.”

If the words startled her, it was only for a moment.

“Join in any time you like,” Lamb said.

“Are you recording this?”

“Fuck, no. I’m barely paying attention. I mean, you might think you’re the hottest property since Anthony Blunt was keeping Her Maj’s nudes well hung, but I’ve better things to do than debrief entry-level spooks. My lunch won’t eat itself.” From a pocket he extracted a second lighter, which sparked encouragingly, but didn’t hold its flame, and he was about to send it the way of its twin when de Greer relieved him of it. After shaking it vigorously she clicked once, and Lamb leaned forwards, the tip of his cigarette touching the flame.

“Don’t mention it,” she said.

He breathed out smoke. “But when your boss burned you, he did so to the one person guaranteed to keep it under wraps. Sparrow himself. So it’s not like he was running some half-arsed honey trap. Unless you’re about to tell me you’ve a sex-tape ready to leak.”

De Greer tucked the lighter into his breast pocket and stepped back. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Just as well. I leak a bit myself these days, tell you the truth.” Lamb removed his cigarette from his mouth and studied the lit end for a moment. “Even so, your boss’s little bombshell must have had Sparrow shitting himself, which sounds like a good day’s work to me, and we’re not even on the same side. But look what he did next. Came all the way to Blighty to whisper similar sweet nothings in Diana Taverner’s ear.”

“Perhaps he fancies her.”

“Stranger things have happened. For instance, I got a phone call on my way back to the office just now. Want to guess what it told me?”

“You’ve been mis-sold PPI?”

“That someone’s pulled the emergency cord at Regent’s Park. Not many able to do that, but I’m guessing the PM’s number one bitch-slapper is among them.” Lamb took a long drag, then flicked the still burning cigarette the length of the room. It bounced off the curtain with a shower of sparks. “And that’s what this is really all about. Rasnokov wasn’t trying to embarrass Sparrow out of his job. No, he wanted Sparrow declaring full-on war with the Service, before the Service realised he’d invited a Kremlin pointy-head into Downing Street. And just to make sure things really kicked off, he followed that up by priming First Desk, letting her know that he’d had a private hobnob with Sparrow back in Moscow. Like lighting the blue touch paper at both ends. Because he doesn’t care who wins, he just wants to see both sides taking lumps out of each other while he carries on with his own scheme.”

De Greer, nodding thoughtfully, crossed the room to stamp on the sparks smouldering on the carpet.

“So congratulations seem to be in order. You were slotted into place to stoke up a little not-so-friendly rivalry.” Lamb slid a hand between two buttons of his shirt, and began to scratch. “And it looks like you’ve managed to ease Diana Taverner out of her job.”

Rashford’s was open to the public, but liked to give the impression it wasn’t. Occupying the third and fourth floors of a building on Cheapside, its sole entrance was sandwiched between plate-glass windows whose mannequins’ blank stares were aimed at the well-heeled passerby: winter coats their current garb. The door was propped open, but the red-carpeted staircase, with its polished brass handrail, seemed less an invitation than a glimpse of forbidden pleasure. Diana, who kept herself informed of who was drinking where, knew it had enjoyed a brief vogue between lockdowns, its speakeasy vibe chiming with the panicked pleasure-seeking of the times. This afternoon, it seemed deserted. The carpet swallowed any sound her heels might have made, but the staircase seemed full of empty echoes nonetheless.

At the top of the fourth half-flight were a pair of glass doors, and behind them a wide room, lit by dusty daylight and the one or two tassel-shaded tablelamps. A lone man sat in a red-leathered booth, absorbed in his phone. It wasn’t too late to turn and run. Judd was barely trustworthy, and might have decided to play a joker. The Dogs could be heading here even now. But she pushed through the doors regardless and found herself standing by a long, curved bar. Its tender moved sleekly towards her, dropping the cloth he’d been holding onto a tap. “Good afternoon, and how can I help you?” Though the way he said it, the look he gave her, he already knew.

“I’m looking for.” The name escaped her. Her memory was a series of corridors, lined with lockers; keys hung in each, with labels attached. Nathan. “Nathan.”

“Ms. Huntress?”

That sounded right.

He’d done this before, she could tell. Had an envelope prepared, tucked under the till. She wondered, briefly, what strands tied this man, or this bar, to Peter Judd; bound them tightly enough that it only took a phone call and there was cash to hand. “Thank you.”

“No problem. And let Sir know we look forward to his company again soon.”

Feeling more like a joe than ever she went back through the glass doors, envelope in hand, and stopped on the landing to make a quick count: five hundred, in tens and twenties. Had she not done that, she’d have met them on their way up: three of them, by the sound of it; their tread muffled on the staircase carpet. Friends or colleagues, out-of-towners or local wetheads: any of these would be making noise. Would be laughing with each other, already picturing that first glass being passed across the polished bar.

Diana turned and headed up the next flight.

At the top of which was a second bar, shrouded in darkness, its doors locked. There was no more red carpet; a sign reading staff only was taped to the wall beside the next flight of stairs. Someone had made a sad face out of the O. The crew of three—face it, they were Dogs—went into the lower bar; she could hear Nathan greeting them over-enthusiastically as she moved quietly upwards. There were two doors at the top. The first warned about unauthorised admittance, and was locked. The second opened, but was a cupboard. She saw brooms, a pail, a ziggurat of cleaning fluid bottles, and a plastic-wrapped palette of light bulbs, their ghostly faces Munch-like in the gloom. A metal box on the wall probably shielded fuses. If it did, and she pulled wires about, she might set off an alarm, and in the ensuing confusion grow wings, or become invisible. But it was padlocked: a flimsy piece of hardware, maybe two quids’ worth. She looked in her bag, found a pen, slid it into the closed hoop of the flimsy padlock and pushed hard. The padlock broke. Dropping its parts into her bag, she opened the box to find, instead of fuses, several rows of keys, which, like those in her memory, were labelled; one read Roof. She took it, closed the cupboard, and paused before slipping the key into the first door’s lock. Voices. Nothing of clarity, though if Nathan were cooperating, the Dogs would already be standing next to her. The Roof key opened the first door, and she stepped through it onto another staircase, then locked it behind her. The noise as the tumblers fell was louder than a stolen goose.

She forced herself to wait in the darkness, breathing through her mouth to make less noise. Someone was coming up the stairs. The doorknob turned and the door rattled, Diana’s darkness momentarily broken by its outline, sketched in light. There was a pause. It happened again. Then the second door was tried, and its contents silently inventoried: cleaning fluids, broom, pail. Those mutely screaming lightbulbs. A metal rattle as the box was opened. She braced. Anyone on their game would join these dots: a locked door, a row of keys. A Dog discovering which key wasn’t there would kick her door down in a second or two. She counted them. And then someone was heading downstairs again. She gave it another moment, then found her phone. By its light she went up eleven stairs, unbolted the next door, and stepped onto a flat stretch of roof.

Diana hadn’t spent long in the dark, but London’s light was still at first staggering; buildings seen from unaccustomed angles, the smell of the Thames on the sunlit wind. She thought what every joe thinks, after a close encounter with discovery: I’m alive. And then she regarded the burner phone in her hand, with its single contact listed, and tapped out the only number she had by heart.

Catherine had the sense of following an instruction she’d written for herself, possibly in a dream. It’s not complicated. The phone is on his desk. Sometimes it rings. She was at her own desk, and Lamb was who knew where? If he’s out and it rings and I hear it, I’ll answer it. If I get there in time. And as she reached the receiver a strange thought occurred: How many more times would she answer a ringing landline? It almost never happened anymore.

“Where is he?”

“I have no idea.” She’d heard Diana Taverner’s voice often enough to recognise it. “Can I take a message?”

Silence. Or not quite: for some reason Catherine could hear an airy nowhere breathing loudly in her ear.

Candlestub had been initiated, and in all likelihood—she did not, whatever her colleagues thought, have total recall of the Service handbook—she should terminate this call, then report it. First Desk was tainted. But there were occasional advantages to being a slow horse, one of which was, it was unlikely that anyone would follow up her actions, so instead, she waited for Taverner’s response.

“I need some help.”

She wished she’d recorded that. Diana Taverner, seeking her help. The woman who’d done her best, some years ago, to drive a double decker bus through her sobriety: Tell me, Catherine. Something I’ve always wondered. Did Lamb ever tell you how Charles Partner really died? Now could be the moment to discover what it felt like, pressing a heel down on someone else’s throat, but even as that thought stirred she was listening to Taverner, mentally prioritising the tasks ahead. Was it habit or weakness that made her act like this? In the end, she supposed, it didn’t matter. You played the part you were given, and it was never in her to be a bad actor.

The call over, she stood for a while in Lamb’s musty office, trying not to picture the possible calamities Taverner’s requirements might provoke.

Then she phoned Lamb, and put him in the picture.

“Okay, you can uncover your ears now.” Lamb put his phone away. “Where were we?”

“I was easing your First Desk out of a job,” said de Greer. “And you were offering congratulations.”

“That right? Could have sworn you mentioned a cup of tea.”

“You may have mistaken me for your housemaid.”

“Nah, she’s shorter, and wears a leather basque.” He stood abruptly and headed into the kitchen, leaving her no choice but to follow. “Attacking the Service was your brief, wasn’t it? Reminding Sparrow the Park’s a little too independent, with Taverner at the wheel.” He located the kettle, flicked its switch, and leaned against the counter. “So when Rasnokov let him know he was nursing a viper to his tits, he was nicely primed. Sparrow knew the Park would rip him to shreds first chance it got, so he went straight on the attack.”

De Greer reached past him, turned the kettle off, and lifted it from its base. “Sparrow already hated the Park. A smoking ruin, he called it.” She filled the kettle at the sink, then put it back and flicked its switch once more. “And he hates Taverner the way all weak men hate powerful women.”

“Only he tried to deal with you first,” said Lamb.

“He had people following me,” she said, dropping teabags into a pot. “They were so bad at it, I thought they were your people at first. Slough House.”

“Only they were even worse,” said Lamb. “Which, fair dos, I wouldn’t have seen coming either.” He opened the fridge, eyeing de Greer speculatively. “You look to me like a MILF.”

“. . . I beg your pardon?”

“Milk in first?” He removed a carton. “Or have I got that wrong?”

She took two mugs from a cupboard and set them on the counter. Lamb divided about a twentieth of a pint equally between them and the surface, and said, “You think he was planning on having you killed?”

“No. I think he was hoping to convince me to deny I was a plant.”

“How hard would that have been?”

“Maybe not as much as you might think.”

“Depends on what he was offering, right? Head girl in the PM’s pole-dancing troupe?” He reached for the kettle as it boiled. “And what would Rasnokov have made of that?”

“He’d have thought I was doing my job.”

“But instead you jumped into our arms when Sparrow’s thugs tried to snatch you.”

“If that’s what they were trying to do. They seemed a little . . . uncoordinated.”

“Compared to my lot,” said Lamb. “Who managed to get arrested and run themselves over.” Steam furrowed the air as he poured water into the pot. “Still, better the dickheads you know. Bring that.” He marched back into the sitting room, leaving de Greer to carry teapot and mugs.

By the time she’d done so, Lamb had kicked his shoes off and arranged himself on the sofa in what might have passed as an alluring pose in someone with inoffensive socks. “Your disappearance must have given Sparrow a fright. One thing worse than having a tarantula appear in your cornflakes is having it vanish again. I mean, where the fuck’ll it show up next?”

“If you’re trying to flatter me, you’re not doing a very efficient job.”

“I leave seduction to the professionals. Speaking of which, you planning on screwing Bachelor? Because the excitement might kill him. And you could get him to do whatever you want by just dropping ‘hand-job’ into the conversation.”

De Greer lifted the teapot and filled both cups.

“But here’s me bimbosplaining,” said Lamb. “Anyway. Sparrow recovered, because next thing we know he’s playing the waterproof card and sending a former First Desk out looking for you. Which puts Taverner in the hot seat. So far, so very Westminster. When you’ve got a guilty conscience, scream loudly and point at someone else.”

“They prefer to think of it as reframing the narrative.”

“Whatever they call it, it’s done the trick. Because the Park’s overflowing with Biro-bashers, and according to my Miss Havisham, Taverner’s hiding on the roof of some wine bar off Cheapside.” He slurped some tea, and scowled. “That’s gunna taste better coming back up.”

“The teabags are very old.”

“Anyway, point is, you’re in demand. Diana needs you to prove you’ve not been waterproofed, and Sparrow needs you so he can, yeah, reframe your narrative. Well, that or bury you somewhere. And as for me, you know what I want?” Lamb put his cup down. The hand that had held it was now wielding a cigarette. “I want to know why you made that little startled movement when I said Rasnokov burned you. Because if that was always the plan, then why the surprise?”

“I wasn’t surprised.”

“But you twitched.”

He pulled the lighter from his breast pocket, and tossed it at her. She caught it, shook it, clicked it, and lit his cigarette. Then said, “How many of these do you get through?”

“I’m supposed to keep count? They’re called disposables for a reason.”

She clicked again, and as the flame burst into life held it up, so she was staring straight into it. An act of self-hypnosis, perhaps. She said, “How much do you know about Rasnokov?”

“My Top Trumps set’s out of date. But I know he can plot round corners.”

She laughed softly. “This was never Rasnokov’s plan, Mr. Lamb. Back when he was what you’d call a joe, he had a handler. And it’s her he still looks to for his brightest ideas.”

“‘Her?’”

“My mother.”

Through the window, a figure appeared in the mews: John Bachelor. For a moment he wavered on the threshold, as if keeping balance on the cobbles were as much as he could focus on. And then he reached out and knocked on the door, and Sophie de Greer faded back into the nervous, twitchy victim he was expecting before going to let him in.

Catherine said, “And that’s your mission. Should you decide to accept it.”

“Leg it to Cheapside, locate Taverner, extricate her from . . . malefactors, and get her to Chelsea,” said Louisa.

“That’s right.”

“Except she didn’t say ‘malefactors,’” Lech suggested.

“No,” said Catherine. “She didn’t say ‘malefactors.’”

“And what’s in it for us?” asked Louisa.

“I’m tempted to suggest Taverner’s undying gratitude. But I think we all know the concept’s alien to her.”

“What’s Lamb say?”

“He said, ‘This is going to be good.’”

Louisa was at her desk; Lech by the window. Catherine had closed the door behind her, and stood regarding the pair of them. She didn’t appear to be enjoying the moment, probably because she knew what their response would be.

“So what are we waiting for?”

She said, “I should remind you that it’s only a few days since your last adventure. And,” looking pointedly at Lech, “you’re still walking like somebody stole your stretcher.”

“A bit stiff, that’s all. Besides, that was Ho’s fault. And he’s not joining us, is he?”

“No,” said Catherine. “Lamb had something else in mind for Roddy.”

Of all the reasons Diana had for wanting to run Sparrow’s head up a pole, here was number one: that she’d been forced to enlist the slow horses for aid and succour. The only upside she could see was they’d be bound to fuck things up, and the way things stood, even that wasn’t actually an upside.

She was on the roof. On the street below, a black SUV—a Service car—was illegally parked outside Rashford’s door, its team, bar the driver, now in the building. Theoretically this should have been a source of gratification—her boys and girls on the hub could track a warm body through London’s streets as easily as if she had a red balloon tied to her sleeve—but just once, she’d have found ineptitude welcome. Because the Dogs were here to take her back to the Park, and from that moment on she’d be officially suspended, a career limbo from which few emerged intact. And if she were relying on Slough House for rescue she’d be better off with an actual red balloon, one she could float away on.

Meanwhile, she was still carrying her secret mobile, and the last thing she needed to be found in possession of was a link to Peter Judd. Stepping back from the edge, she was removing the sim card when the mosquito buzz that had been nagging away in the background penetrated her consciousness.

Looking up, she saw the drone hovering twenty yards overhead.

This doesn’t get covered in the style mags, but good-hair days bring their own problems. Running a comb through his locks, Roddy offered his reflection a steely glance, then mussed himself up again and activated the engaging, puppyish grin. Then tried a steely/tousled combo, which was a bit of a mixed message frankly, before opting for the side-parting/puppyish look.

Check. It. Out.

Roddy Ho is in the house.

He’d decided, after some magnificent brooding on the matter, to nix the phone call and go for Zoom. Play to your strengths, dude—he’d be an idiot not to put the goodies on the counter. Face it, he’d dazzled her during the audition; she’d seen the role, not the man, and figured him for some charismatic crumbly. Her bolshiness had been down to understandable disappointment. Only fair to let her see what lay beneath the Hobi-Wan robes. And let’s not forget what you’re playing for: Any woman desperate enough to dress up as a cartoon character is looking to get laid.

Here we go.

“Babes, I can’t be the only one who felt a little friction the other night—and friction’s what it’s about, ya feel me? I push a little, you push back . . .”

(Miming this, so she got the picture.)

“Am I right or am I right? I mean, I could definitely be into you.”

This being the chief objective, when you got down to it.

But his rehearsal was interrupted by noises on the staircase.

He waited until they’d gone—Louisa and Lech; off skiving—and decided: okay. No time like the now. It was after four so those wasters wouldn’t be back, and he was unlikely to be interrupted. So: Zoom invite—“Important Follow-Up”—twenty minutes from now—despatched. Roddy leaned back and cracked his knuckles. Then thought: Hang on—was it Leia Six or Leia Seven who’d been the bolshy one? Because he’d just sent the invite to Leia Six, and—

“Roddy?”

And here was Catherine, crashing his train of thought.

“I’m busy.”

“So I see. But this takes priority.”

He shook his head wearily. That was the trouble with being indiroddyspensable: you were first port of call for the pea-brained.

“There’s something Lamb needs you to do.”

Roddy adjusted his expression to read “Born Ready,” tried to crack his knuckles again, and winced.

“And if you can manage to listen without hurting yourself,” Catherine continued, coming into the room, “this is what he’s after.”

“She’s on a rooftop in Cheapside.”

“And is she planning unassisted flight?”

Nash said, “I’d have thought that unlikely.” Malahide’s company was beginning to grate, his demeanour towards those they’d interviewed so far—the hubsters whose worksheets showed recent one-to-ones with Diana—having proved borderline hostile. When challenged, he’d raised an eyebrow. “Gone native, old boy?” A salutary reminder, Nash thought, that you always had to be on one side or another in the Whitehall Kush.

He glanced at the memo he’d been handed by Josie. “A wine bar, Rashford’s?” He made it a question, though was aware of its existence, its name having made it popular with backbenchers. “She was picked up on camera, there’s a crew at the premises now.” He looked at his watch. “They’ll have her here by five.”

“And this wine bar has a rooftop terrace?”

“I think it’s clear she’s evading, ah, capture.”

“Like I said. An admission of guilt.” Malahide clasped his hands behind his head, and rocked back in his chair. “This famous window of hers, the one that frosts when you press a button. What do you suppose she got up to in her office when no one could see her?”

“We’re conducting a preliminary enquiry,” said Nash. “Not inventing scurrilous rumours.”

“If you say so,” said Malahide. “If you say so.” He sat up straight. “Well, I suppose we’d better put Sparrow in the picture.”

“Leave that to me,” said Nash.

He left the office holding his phone to his ear, but without making a connection.

As he passed Josie’s desk, unseen by Malahide, he made a follow-me gesture with his eyes, an invitation Josie accepted a few moments later.

“Remind. Me. Why. We’re. Running?”

This was necessarily a conversation Lech was having in his head because, well, they were running . . .

And the answer, besides, was obvious. Cheapside was about a quarter mile from Slough House, or, by car, maybe three times that. Add roadworks, traffic lights, and you were looking at a half-hour minimum.

“She’s on the roof,” Catherine had said, and Lech had wondered if this were like the joke about the cat, and she was gently breaking the news that Taverner was dead.

Louisa was way ahead, but she was a runner. Give Lech the streets after dark, he could pace ten miles and barely notice, but speed was a different story. Besides, there were people about, staring as he passed. Facial scarring made him the automatic villain. He was basically a trigger warning; a horror-meme waiting to happen.

Sod it.

A team of Dogs, Catherine had said. There for a Safe Collect—Taverner wasn’t armed, and was anyway unlikely to initiate a gun battle on the streets of London. Had he imagined it, or had Catherine laid a slight stress on unlikely? But whatever the outcome, this had to do with Sophie de Greer, and the last time he’d left Slough House on a mission involving her, Roddy bloody Ho had ploughed him down on a dark common. What delights awaited him today?

Panting round the long curve below the Museum of London he could see Louisa at the Cheapside junction, so ignoring the pain in his thighs he increased his speed, the pavement’s damp calligraphy blurring beneath his feet.

Roddy leaned back and made one of his expressions. He had several of these, and Catherine was familiar with all, but was never sure what he was attempting to convey, beyond some brand of superior weariness.

“So this Ronsakov—”

“Rasnokov,” she said. “Vassily Rasnokov.”

“What I said. This Ronsakov dude was at the Grosvenor two nights, only nobody knew it was him at first so he was, like, totally off radar.”

“. . . Yes.”

“And Lamb wants to know what he got up to.”

“. . . Yes.”

“In London.”

“That’s the size of it, yes. I’m sorry.”

In the circumstances, she had to admit, weary superiority wasn’t entirely without foundation.

Roddy reached for his energy drink.

“He might have been asleep,” he said.

“Yes,” Catherine agreed. “He certainly wasn’t watching TV or using wifi. But he ordered two bottles of The Balvenie from room service.”

Roddy looked blank.

“It’s a brand of whisky.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“The empties weren’t left in his room, and he didn’t take them back to Moscow.” Give her credit, Catherine delivered this information as if it were an important part of a soluble puzzle, and not, as it had appeared to her fifteen minutes previously, random facts plucked from an inconsequential blizzard. “So there’s a chance he met with someone. Because the Balvenie might have been intended as a present.”

“Balvenie?”

They turned. Ashley Khan was hovering on the threshold. She had her coat on, and her bag over her shoulder, but her departure had evidently snagged on the overheard word, so there she was, repeating it in the doorway.

“The Balvenie,” she said again. “That’s Vassily Rasnokov’s brand.”

The drone hovered insolently, and for a short while Diana saw the world from a different perspective—as one of the monitored, one of the watched—and in so doing understood the impulse the ordinary citizen has when confronted with the unceasing intrusions of daily life, “in the interests of security.” So she did what every ordinary citizen does, most often internally but in this case with a kind of slow-motion deliberation: she raised her middle finger, and invited the unseen watchers to go fuck themselves. Then she turned her back on it and put the sim card in her mouth.

The drone rose higher, its buzz-saw whine diminishing, allowing her to hear more noises: a door being forcibly opened; feet coming up a dark staircase. She dropped the mobile and ground it underfoot, and was just swallowing the sim card when the rooftop access door opened, and the first of the Dogs stepped out into cold sunshine.

“One with the car. Three on the stairs.”

“Stairs?” said Lech.

“There’s always stairs,” Louisa told him.

And there were always four Dogs, or that was how she remembered it. Though it was true that nobody kept Slough House up to date when procedures were modified.

They were on Cheapside, approaching Rashford’s, outside which a black SUV was parked. A man easily identifiable as Dog leaned against it, his gaze directed at the bar’s doorway. Lech was breathing hard, which was his own fault. No excuse for being out of shape.

Reading her thoughts, or perhaps her expression, Lech said, “I was run over a couple of days ago, remember?”

“At, what, ten miles an hour?”

“Still counts.”

“In which case, you’d better take it easy. You can have the driver.”

“In the sense of . . . ?”

“Keep him busy. So he’s not watching the doorway when I come back out.”

“Okay . . . So what’s the plan?”

“Plan?”

“Great,” said Lech. “Situation normal.”

Waving two fingers Louisa left him there, a hundred yards short of their destination, and—ignoring the car parked outside—disappeared through Rashford’s door.

“So your written assignment—”

“They call it a hand-in.”

“Hand-in, right.”

“I’ve no idea why.”

Because you handed it in, presumably. Which didn’t matter. Catherine said, “So your twenty-thousand-word hand-in was on Vassily Rasnokov.”

The hand-in was part of every fledgling spook’s first six-month assessment, regardless of whether their ambitions lay in field work or analysis. Most chose to critique an op from years gone by—a safe enough topic provided the career-blighting embarrassment of, say, picking an operation handled by Diana Taverner was avoided—and it had been some while since the straightforward biographical essay had been in vogue. This was largely because nothing boosted a mark like fresh information, and there was little chance of this being captured by a beginner.

Then again, there was fresh and fresh.

“I found a cross reference to a pre-digital source,” Ashley said. “A case report from the late seventies.”

“I didn’t know Rasnokov was KGB back then. Wouldn’t he have been a child?”

“A teenager,” said Ashley. “And he wasn’t official.”

Which was a detail missing from Rasnokov’s Service file: that prior to his recruitment, he’d carried a shovel on several KGB cases involving the harassment of known dissidents. The oversight was down to a misspelling—“Ronsakov” for Rasnokov—whose handwritten emendation had never been carried over to the master document. So a few small facts about his early career had been lost to history, buried in a cardboard folder deep in Molly Doran’s domain, to which baby spooks were granted access while completing their hand-ins.

“Good work,” Catherine said, meaning it. “That—well. It would have been noticed.”

If Ashley’s training wheels hadn’t come off altogether, that was. If she’d finished her hand-in and handed it in.

Roddy said, “Yeah, fascinating. But if this reference didn’t mention what he was doing the other night, it’s not much help, ya get me?”

The women shared a look.

Catherine said, “How many pieces of information did we have two minutes ago?”

He counted them in his head. “One?”

“And now we have more. How is that a hindrance?”

Something blipped: an incoming email.

“You’ve got a Zoom booked?” said Ashley, who was by Roddy’s desk now, with a partial view of his screens.

“No.”

“Because that looks like—”

“Yeah, right, it’s nothing.”

Catherine said, “Well in that case it won’t distract you.” She looked at Ashley. “I’m sure you won’t mind giving Roddy a hand.”

“Lamb says I’m not supposed to do anything.”

“He’ll make an exception for this,” Catherine said.

“You think? Because—”

“I’m making an exception for this.”

Ashley paused, then nodded.

Roddy said, “Look, I’ve got this thing—”

“I’ll be back in half an hour,” said Catherine. She moved towards the door. “Play nicely,” she said, over her shoulder, and was gone.

It was all very courteous. They’d tarried on the rooftop while the more junior of the Dogs scraped the remains of Diana’s shattered mobile together and put them in an evidence bag, and then they’d processed back into the building: Dog One, then Diana, then Dog Two. Dog Three—whom Diana knew by name; Nicola Kelly—was waiting on the landing.

“Sorry about this, ma’am.”

Not as sorry as she would be, Diana’s answering smile promised.

She took Diana’s bag and rifled through it. Finding the envelope stuffed with cash, she raised an eyebrow at nobody in particular.

“I know how much is in there,” Diana said.

Kelly replaced the envelope in the bag, which she didn’t return.

On their way past the bar Diana looked for Nathan, but he wasn’t in sight. He’d be on the phone to Peter Judd, reporting her capture. And Judd would be unsurprised. I’ll splash every last detail of our association across the national breakfast table, he’d said, and while Judd wasn’t what you’d call reliable, that was a promise he’d keep. After which, Sophie de Greer was a sideshow: Diana could have her lap dance the entire Limitations Committee for all the good it would do. Proving herself innocent of instigating Waterproof while Judd was revealing that she’d colluded with Chinese backers would be like standing up to her elbows in blood, indignantly explaining that she’d never shoplifted in her life. Meanwhile, Sparrow would be taking cover behind the hostile headlines, his role in employing de Greer reduced to an anodyne soundbite: Clearly, there are lessons to be learned. The ability to bury bad news was bullet-point one on the Westminster CV, practised by interns, perfected by PMs. Produce your mea culpa on the weekend a major royal dies. Nastier cowards than Sparrow had pulled this trick.

As for expecting aid and succour from the slow horses, that just went to show she was losing her grip. Might as well pray for divine intervention.

But as they trooped down the final staircase, Nicola Kelly bringing up the rear, the sunshine falling through the doorway was blocked for a moment by a silhouetted figure.

“So he was staying at the Grosvenor,” Ashley said. “And ordered two bottles of The Balvenie.”

She’d removed her coat and dragged a chair across so she was next to Roddy, the pair of them flanked by his screens, three of which currently displayed the Service log-in page. One of the others was downloading something; a second showed columns of figures absent any headings, and was quite possibly intended to suggest a heavy workload rather than achieve a specific result; and the third showed Ashley and Roddy, flanked by screens.

“. . . Mirror mode?”

Roddy tapped a key, and the screen flipped to a gif of Yoda performing a backflip. Then he grabbed a comb from the desk and dropped it in a drawer.

“I don’t like you being this side,” he said.

“I’d noticed.”

“And I’ve got this thing happening—”

“Your Zoom call.”

“It’s private.”

“Yeah, I don’t care. What have you done to trace Rasnokov?”

“Apparently you’re the expert,” Roddy said sulkily.

“More than you are. On the other hand, you’re supposed to be good at this shit.” She waved a hand at the glass and plastic world in front of them. “So impress me.”

Roddy made a face.

“Are you in pain? Or was that your Tom Cruise impression? Now, let’s start. Vassily Rasnokov is sixty-two years old.”

Roddy rolled his eyes.

“Do you want my help or not?”

“Not.”

“Too bad. We’re doing this. He’s sixty-two years old, and—”

Roddy trilled on his keyboard some more, and one of the Service log-in pages turned into a screenshot of Rasnokov’s passport. He rolled his chair sideways, hit more keys on a separate board, and a second screen came to life, on a template familiar to Ashley. On text, indeed, that she knew by heart.

“There,” said Roddy. “His Service file. Which gives me his age and his weight and his photograph. His career to date, his regular contacts, his family life, his pet dog. But guess what?” He asked a quick question, with fingers too fast for Ashley to follow, his search terms masked by asterisks. No results found. “None of that tells me what he was doing with two bottles of whisky on Tuesday night.”

“Are you always such a dick?”

“Are you always such a . . .”

She waited.

“. . . moron?”

“I’m a woman, I’m brown, I’m younger than you. Is that the best you can do?”

“Spreader,” muttered Roddy.

“That’s not a thing. Now. Rasnokov’s file can’t show us what he was up to Tuesday night, but what about stuff that’s not on his file? Because like I said, some of the data I found isn’t on the mainframe.”

“Aren’t, not isn’t.”

“What?”

“Data’s plural.”

“True,” Ashley conceded. “But also, and I can’t stress this enough, fuck off.”

Roddy sighed.

Then the alarm on his phone went off, alerting him to his Zoom call.

The stairs were reasonably wide, but there was an etiquette, post-virus: you didn’t start up them if there was someone coming down. So of the four people descending from Rashford’s, three weren’t expecting the newcomer to step onto the staircase, the fourth being Diana Taverner, who’d recognised Louisa Guy.

Who was weaving, as if drunk.

This wasn’t going to work for long, because while she could move drunk and sound drunk Louisa didn’t smell drunk. But it only had to get her up four steps, at which point she’d be level with Dog Two, who was behind Dog One: then she’d stumble, grab hold of one or the other and—well—as Lech had implied, plans weren’t a strong point. But once there was a free-for-all on the stairs, then whatever plan the Dogs had clearly wasn’t running to order either. And Louisa would at least have the element of surprise on her side.

Which remained true up until the moment Diana Taverner said, “Watch her. She’s Slough House.”

Louisa was barely out of sight before Lech approached the driver, saying, “This is Rashford’s, right?”

The driver glanced at him, looked away, and then looked back, something between horror and fascination painting his face.

“I mean, you’d think they’d put a sign up. It’s like they don’t want you to know it’s there.”

“I’m busy right now.”

“That’s weird because you don’t look it. Is this your job? Standing next to a black car?”

“I’m going to ask you to move away, sir.” He’d managed to recompose himself, but it was clear Lech’s appearance had touched a nerve.

Which was Lech’s only advantage, so far as he could see. The man wasn’t any taller than him but he was broader, and if violence broke out Lech was clearly going to get his arse kicked. Then again, Lech could have had six inches on him and it wouldn’t have made a difference: Lech had been an analyst back in the day, and while his training had included a certain amount of physical activity, Dogs were coached to a higher standard. On the other hand, Louisa’s instruction, Make sure he’s not watching the door, didn’t necessarily involve getting physical. He could just point in the opposite direction.

At, for instance, the traffic warden crossing the road, already snapping the SUV on her phone.

Lech said, “You know how, sometimes, there’s something you need to do, and then someone else comes along and does it for you?”

“What are you on about? Sir?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Lech.

“Is this your car?” asked the approaching warden.

The driver turned.

Lech moved away, towards Rashford’s open door, so he was the only one watching when Taverner came out.

A moment after Diana had spoken Louisa was flat against the wall, her right arm halfway up her back, and while the element of surprise had certainly made an appearance, it hadn’t done so in the way she’d expected. Which, come to think of it—

But Louisa didn’t have time to think of it; she was busy being pinioned and shouted at.

“Are you armed?”

“Does she have a gun?”

“Check her shoes.”

My shoes? . . .

She was still puzzling over that when Diana hooked a foot round Nicola Kelly’s ankle and pushed her down the stairs.

And here was the element of surprise again. This time Louisa embraced it, throwing herself backward and dislodging one of the pair restraining her, who promptly tripped over the tumbling Kelly, and pushing the other back against the opposite wall, where they both teetered for a moment before they too succumbed to gravity, and joined the sprawl at the foot of the staircase. A mêlée which didn’t seem to inconvenience Diana, who picked her way past it untroubled, bending to retrieve sundry articles on her way.

When she stepped out onto Cheapside, in full view of Lech, she was carrying her bag, and also Kelly’s gun.

All she needed was a pair of shades, as Lech put it afterwards, and she’d be Bonnie Parker.

Diana emerged into sunshine feeling like Clyde Barrow. A slow horse—the one who’d been through the grinder—was waiting on the pavement, his jaw slack.

“Your colleague needs assistance,” she told him. When he didn’t move, she said, “Now,” and he made to speak, changed his mind, and hurried into Rashford’s, where he’d discover the impromptu game of Twister at the foot of the stairs.

The SUV was still double-yellow parked, an infraction being investigated by one of London’s traffic enforcers, a paramilitary-uniformed Nigerian woman. She had her phone out, taking details, but froze like Elsa at the sight of a well-dressed middle-aged woman accessorised with hat and gun.

Diana, coming within three inches of her, said quietly, “Check it against your don’t-even-think-about-it list, bury the paperwork, and find somewhere else to monitor. Clear?”

The woman nodded.

“Excellent.” She waited another beat, and the warden scurried away.

And now the remaining Dog. It was presumably the gun, she thought—it couldn’t be the tote bag, classy as it was—that was reducing everyone to marble. Instead of approaching him, she crooked a finger. He came to her with the air of one summoned by dread. She spoke.

“Your boss is in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, this Candlestub bullshit will be history by bedtime, and I’m First fucking Desk. You have two seconds to decide where your loyalties lie, and by loyalties I mean career prospects.”

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Good choice. Here.” She handed him Kelly’s gun. “Now, door.”

He put the gun in his pocket and opened the back door for her.

“Quick as you like.”

The others were piling out of Rashford’s as the SUV took off down Cheapside, a motley looking bunch, dim and ragged, as if a trip to see the wizard hadn’t paid off the way it ought. But Diana didn’t look back. She was too busy instructing her driver.

“This is private,” Roddy whispered furiously.

“It’s not as private as all that,” Ashley pointed out. “I’m here, for a start.”

He’d dialled into his Zoom call because obviously—obviously—as soon as he’d done that she’d make herself scarce: go make a cup of tea or whatever. But she’d just pushed her chair back and settled in to watch: cramping his style. Which was a lot of style to cramp, but she was putting effort into it.

“Is there someone with you?” Leia Six asked.

Which was another problem: he’d got his Leias mixed up. Six was definitely not the Leia he’d experienced the meet-cute tension with.

“No,” he told her.

“Yes,” said Ashley, leaning into shot. “Hi. Are you Roddy’s girlfriend?”

“No. Are you?”

Ashley made a fingers-down-the-throat gesture, and Leia laughed.

“Do not talk to her!”

“He means you,” Ashley said.

“He means you!”

“Dick move either way.”

“Out of my room,” Roddy ordered.

“You’re in his room?”

“It’s an office,” Ashley said. “We work together.”

“What’s he like?”

“You can do better.”

“Now!”

“Is he always like this?”

“I’ve only known him, like, a week. But yeah, appaz.”

Roddy seized a cable and pulled it from the monitor, to no obvious effect.

“I’d better go,” Ashley said. “He’s disconnecting printers now.”

“We should do this again,” Leia said, and vanished from Roddy’s screen.

“Look what you did!”

“What?” said Ashley. “We were just chatting.”

“She was supposed to be chatting to me!”

“Whatever. Anyway, she’s cool. You should date her.”

“. . . You think?”

“Definitely.”

Roddy smirked.

“I mean, she can tell you’re a prat. But if we ruled prats out, we’d never get laid. Are we doing some work now? Catherine’ll be down in a minute.”

Roddy flexed his fingers.

“So tell me something about Vassily Ronsakov I don’t already know,” he said.

“Well, for a start, he’s called Vassily Rasnokov.”

“That’s what I said.”

“But his nickname as a teenager was The Fireman.”

“Because he used to put fires out?” said Roddy.

“No,” said Ashley. “Because he used to start them.”

Lech and Louisa were walking back down Cheapside. “They wanted to check my shoes,” Louisa was saying. “Who’d they think I was, Rosa Klebb?”

“Well, from a certain angle . . .”

“Fuck you.”

“Consider me fucked,” said Lech. “That was cool, by the way. Getting us out of there.”

Because Kelly had wanted to arrest them.

“Good plan,” Louisa had told her. They were standing in a shabby group on the pavement, the SUV a memory in distant traffic. “You can take my statement now, if you like. It involves your target driving away in your car with your gun.”

There’d followed an exchange of pleasantries, after which the slow horses had made their departure.

“Do you think that counts as mission accomplished?”

“If we’d not turned up, Taverner would have been taken back to the Park by now,” Lech said.

“By the malefactors,” said Louisa.

“By the malefactors. Which is what she wanted to avoid.”

“Yay for us, then.”

“I’m sure she’s suitably grateful.”

“That’s funny,” said Louisa. Then winced and rubbed her shoulder and said, “I’ll have bruises tomorrow.”

“Tell me about it,” said Lech.

Roddy’s fingers blurred, and different sites opened up on different screens. Most of them, password pages suggested, were restricted to authorised users, the accompanying devices indicating that such users served the Crown, one way or another. These warnings didn’t deter him long.

Ashley said, “Pretty slick.”

“Well, duh.”

“And gracious with it.”

Roddy shrugged modestly. “What do you think of Mr. Lightning?” he asked.

“Don’t know him.”

“No, I meant the name. Mr. Lightning.”

“Sounds like a dick,” said Ashley.

“That’s what I thought.”

He muttered it under his breath. Mr. Lightning.

None of the databases had so far yielded Rasnokov’s name, nor the name he’d booked into the Grosvenor under: Gregory Ronovitch. But that had never been likely, given the undercover nature of whatever he’d been doing.

Take away the name, though, and focus on fire-related incidents, linked with the Balvenie brand-name, and—

Still nothing.

“Just put ‘whisky,’” Ashley suggested.

Various hits, on various pages.

They took them one by one, the first turning out to be a brawl in a pub involving a number of off-duty fire-officers. This covered the second and third hits also.

Ashley reached for her bag and produced her Tupperware box of nuts and berries.

“Got any proper food?”

She put the box on his desk. “Your parents should have asked for a refund.”

“Yeah, and your parents should have asked for a . . . Hang on.”

“What?”

“That fire off the Westway.” He was pointing at one of his screens: a report filed by an arson investigator the previous morning. “Look what was found in the wreckage.”

Among the cremated furniture, the collapsed ceiling, the reeking, sodden remnants: two glass bottles, probably containing whisky.

“Confirmation awaited,” Roddy read aloud.

“I saw that in the paper,” said Ashley. “Someone died.”

They looked at each other.

“You think—?”

“I think we’re cooking with leaded,” said Roddy, and reached for a handful of Ashley’s nuts and berries. Stuffing them into his mouth, he continued, “I think we’ve hit the motherlode.”

And then he threw back his head and screamed.

The day was losing the light when Diana reached the mews. The driver had discreetly dropped her at Marble Arch and continued on his way to the Park on her instructions: his subsequent admission that he’d lost her en route wouldn’t do much for his credibility, but—she’d assured him—he’d flourish once she’d rendered the current situation null and void, a guarantee she justified to herself on the ground that if she failed to do so, he’d be the least of her worries. At Marble Arch she’d dipped underground, reappeared wearing headscarf and sunglasses bought from a street trader, and had set off on foot across Hyde Park. Late summer cast a warm glaze on everything, and there was a sweet sense of liberty in the air that the young, at least, were revelling in, but Diana felt a chasm between her own and their early evenings: they weren’t being fucked over by sundry enemies, and they all had phones to play with. Still, visions of Anthony Sparrow being chewed by wild dogs amused her on the way. And now she was crossing the cobbles towards the safe house, one unknown to Park records. Opposite its front door, the tropical plants in their terracotta exile had settled into shadow.

The door swung open before she reached it. The shabby character on the threshold was one John Bachelor; an appropriate place for him, inasmuch as he was someone you just naturally wanted to wipe your feet on. Inside, Jackson Lamb squatted in an armchair like a yeti in a biscuit tin: spilling over its edges, but not seeming to care. Last time Diana had been here, the fragrance was furniture polish and fresh paint. Now the air was muddy with the remnants of what appeared to be a four-course Indian meal for seven: tinfoil trays lay everywhere, studded with plastic cutlery, and luminous spillages glistened on every surface within Lamb’s reach, and also a fair distance away. Underneath all that, an expert nose might detect his trademark smog of cigarette smoke and damp wardrobes.

In the armchair facing him, legs folded beneath her like a resting fawn, was Sophie de Greer.

“Here’s an interesting thing,” said Lamb. “Back when he was still breaking legs for a living, our friend Vassily was known as The Fireman. Guess why.”

Diana looked at Sophie de Greer, who said, “He worked as a debt collector. There were stories that it was best to pay up when he came knocking. Or you’d find your home a pile of ashes.”

“Well, aren’t you just spilling all your secrets.”

“That would be down to my interrogative skills,” Lamb said, and farted modestly. “The good doctor’s poker face slipped when I told her she’d been burned. After that, well. You know me. Get the bit between my teeth, I’m like a dog with a boner.”

“You certainly have similar table manners.” Diana scanned the room. “Enjoy your meal?”

“Tasted better than skinny feels, I can tell you that.” One of Lamb’s hands disappeared down the back of his trousers, and he scratched energetically. “Speaking of dogs. You eluded them, I see.”

“No thanks to your idiots. Who trained them, Laurel and Hardy?”

Lamb shrugged. “They were like that when I got them.”

He raised a hand, which somehow now held a cigarette, and de Greer tossed him a lighter.

“Bring me a chair,” Diana said, without turning round, and when Bachelor carried an upright through from the kitchen, she gestured towards it for de Greer’s benefit.

After a moment, de Greer unwound herself and abandoned the armchair.

Sinking into it, Diana said, “A drink would be nice.”

“Mi casa su casa,” said Lamb, making no move towards the bottle at his elbow.

Bachelor was already fetching a glass.

Diana stared at de Greer, now perched on the kitchen chair, and looking like an applicant for a job she didn’t want. “So you’re who all the fuss is about.”

“Sorry.”

“Let me guess. You were planted to steer Sparrow in the right direction. Chip away at the democratic processes.”

“It was nothing he didn’t want to hear. You know what he calls backbenchers? Chimps.”

“When I’m ready for your input, I’ll let you know.” Accepting the whisky Bachelor poured, she took a hefty swallow. “And this included curbing the Service, did it? When I nod like this, that’s me letting you know.”

“Rasnokov would prefer you not to be First Desk. That’s a compliment, when you think about it.”

“Jesus. I’m going to enjoy wrapping you up and sending you back to him.”

An approaching cloud signalled that Lamb had lit up. “That’s if you can find him,” he said.

“I’m prepared to put her in separate parcels,” Diana said. “And send one to every address we have.”

Lamb looked at Bachelor, lurking in a corner. “That walk you took earlier?”

“. . .Yes?”

“Take it again.”

Bachelor looked like he was about to complain, but Diana’s basilisk stare dissuaded him. The air in the room shifted with the opening and closing of the door.

“You’re not very nice to him,” de Greer said.

“On the other hand, I’m not pulling him round the room by his cock. So, you know. Swings and roundabouts.”

“Why won’t I find Rasnokov?” Diana said.

“Because he burned a building down the other night with someone still in it.”

“. . . Let’s start at the beginning.”

“Rasnokov slipped out of the Grosvenor first night he was here. The same night a garden flat off the Westway burned to a cinder. Two empty bottles of whisky were found in the rubble.”

“The Balvenie.”

“Yeah.” Lamb blew a smoke ring. “Rasnokov may be a murdering thug. But he’s not cheap.”

“Who was the victim?”

“Don’t know. But I can guess.”

“So guess.”

“An understudy.”

“Right.” Diana looked at de Greer. “Did you know about this?”

“I don’t even know what an understudy is.”

“Well, there’s a body in a burnt-out flat without an identity,” said Lamb. “Which means that somewhere there’s an identity lacking a body.”

“Rasnokov has a fake identity waiting for him,” de Greer translated.

“More than that. A whole fake life someone’s been living. Probably for years.” Lamb reached for the bottle, and poured a measure bordering on obese. “Some poor bastard with a passing resemblance to our Vaseline, and with Rasnokov’s own face plastered all over his ID, has been decorating a legend. And now it’s ready for Rasnokov to move into. A vacant possession.”

“Rasnokov’s going to disappear?”

“If he’s got any sense, he’ll fake a death. You don’t just walk away from a job like his. Not with Norman Bates for a boss.”

“But he can’t just step into this . . . ready-made life. If the fake Rasnokov’s been creating a whole existence, then people will know him. And they’ll know he’s been replaced. The resemblance can’t be that great.”

Lamb looked at Diana. “Feel free to chip in.”

Diana said, “The resemblance wouldn’t need to be total. When Rasnokov steps into the dead man’s shoes, he’ll be about to relocate, somewhere far away. Somewhere nobody knows him.”

“Couldn’t he do that with a fake passport?”

“Lots of people do,” said Lamb. “Trouble is, it’s all surface tension. Put a little weight on it, your foot goes through.” He held his glass up, and stared into its amber brilliance. “Wherever Rasnokov ends up, he’ll be leaving behind an actual lived life. A quiet one, sure—our fake will have kept himself to himself, no close friends, no family—but with real roots. He’ll have real jobs behind him, real debts and savings, credit history, career map, maybe the odd drink-driving escapade. All of it paper-trailed up the arse.”

“And what about the dead man? What was in it for him?”

“Whatever Rasnokov promised him,” Lamb said. “He must have thought his time was nearly up, that Rasnokov would arrive with money and a clean passport and cut him loose. Or maybe he knew what was coming, because he’d have had to be a fucking idiot not to.” Lamb sucked hard on his cigarette, its lit end a manic glow. “Maybe that was the deal. Maybe Rasnokov plucked him from prison, offered him five years of life and all he could eat, after which . . . pfft. Might not seem so bad if the alternative’s a slow death in an icy cell. But either way, the understudy came to London as arranged, and sub-let a room for cash. And what his name was these past years, and where he lives, all the things Rasnokov plans to slip into sometime soon, no one knows.”

“Battleship Potemkin,” Diana said. “He was laughing at us.” She looked at Lamb. “How much of this is guesswork?”

“Most of it. But Rasnokov’s nickname, and firestarting habits, come from Khan as well as Doctor Toblerone here. She might have her uses after all.”

“And I assume Ho tracked down the fire and the body and the bottles.”

“He’s a treasure,” Lamb agreed. “I plan to bury him someday. Though, point of fact, I haven’t actually spoken to him. Apparently he’s suffering severe mouth burns.” He adopted a pious expression. “Can’t think how that happened.”

De Greer was looking from one to the other. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“So that when we send you back to Moscow,” Diana said, “you’ll be able to let them know your whole operation was a smokescreen. That should make Vassily popular. Not to mention dead for real, if the Gay Hussar has a hangnail that day.”

“I don’t want to go back to Moscow.”

“Too bad.” Diana stood. “I need to make a call.” She had to call Judd, to forestall him dropping any info-bombs on the Park. “And I don’t seem to have a phone.”

“There’s a landline upstairs,” de Greer said. When Diana had left the room, said, “Will she really send me back?”

“Probably.”

“They’ll think I was part of it. That I knew what he was up to.”

“Then I wouldn’t bank on them declaring a public holiday.”

“Can I have a cigarette?”

“No.”

De Greer stared, then looked towards the window. There was no sign of Bachelor returning. Her gaze fixed in that direction, she said, “You forgot for a moment, back there.”

“Forgot what?”

“Forgot to be yourself. You were too caught up in explaining what’s going on. Being clever instead of being gross.”

He sneered.

“I’d have been better off letting Sparrow’s men grab me,” she said. “At least he’d have tried to bribe me.”

“Well, he’s not gunna find you here,” Lamb said. He drained his glass. “Let’s face it. He thinks you’re somewhere else entirely.”

The day finished early—or night came too soon—so Shirley was contemplating getting into bed at a time she’d normally have been pre-loading. Midweek she rested, like any sane person—her Wednesday evenings were sacrosanct—but otherwise she’d be on the prowl, looking for something she’d recognise when she found it. A want, awaiting fulfilment. And it was in the night—in its bars and backstreets; in its clubs and on its buses—that she hunted it down, usually finding that the search itself, and the consequent adventures, placated her want for a while. But here in the San, with its well-swept floors and clean sheets, with its constant hush, she found herself all want, all neediness, and hated it. Stripped of camouflage, stranded like a chameleon against a neutral background, she was the centre of her own attention, and subject to its moods.

There were few other resources available. The bed on which she lay, fully clothed; the lamp, which she hadn’t switched on. The moonlight falling through the window, whose curtain she hadn’t yet drawn. Though she was on the third floor, the available view was of various kinds of nothing, all of them shrouded in darkness. There was no TV, no radio; they’d taken her phone “because you won’t be needing to make calls, will you?” She couldn’t decide whether it was the content of that clause or the way it was framed as a question that most made her want to punch the speaker in the face, though accepted that either on its own would have done the trick. It was as well she was maintaining the quiet dignity thing. There was a coffee-table book on a coffee table: One Hundred Things to See in Dorset. Fat chance. There was a picture of a tree. And there was almost no noise.

Which was what most bothered her. Ignore the San’s various other hatefulnesses, like its institutional odours and the trademarked smile of its staff, and that picture of a tree, and what most bothered her was its hush. It felt like a religious undertow, its effect being to magnify every unintended noise. A coat hanger shifting in a wardrobe. The chink of a cup on its saucer. The people here—the “guests”—might as easily be called ghosts. They might not move through walls, but they were careful to enter rooms quietly. The loudest thing Shirley had witnessed since her arrival had been a jigsaw puzzle. It was enough to make her want to scream, and what worried her most was the fact that she hadn’t. That she was as quiet as everyone else, after only a couple of days.

People keep getting hurt. People keep dying.

And maybe she was one of them. Maybe she’d die inside, if they kept her here long enough. By the time they posted her back to Slough House she’d be a drooling wreck, scared by sudden movements and startled by passing noise.

Which might have been why—lying on her bed, the clock effortfully dragging its way to 9:26—when Shirley heard sounds downstairs, she sat bolt upright.

Afterwards, Whelan was never quite sure what tipped him over the edge. All afternoon the impulse had gnawed at him; the suspicion that things were not as he had relayed to Oliver Nash. The possibility that an alternative reading existed. Back in Schemes and Wheezes, there’d sometimes come a point when you had to ask, were you the player or the game? And was the mousetrap you’d just built one you’d walk into yourself? He had helped create a character once, a role for an agent to inhabit, who was the precise and perfect fantasy partner for a target of interest, an arms dealer. The chosen agent had occupied the role so completely that that was pretty much the last anyone saw of him, though it was thought he and the target were living happily ever after somewhere south of Rio. In the inevitable handwashing that followed Whelan had been tasked with writing a paper addressing the flaws inherent in the scenario his team had developed, along with what the minutes chose to term a “structured corrective.” In what was, for him, a rare display of ill-temper, Whelan’s addendum read, in its entirety, Don’t use humans.

An admonition which had been swirling round his head all evening. He had been used himself, that much was clear, and had registered no objection—the Service was called the Service for a reason, and he still felt the tug of its call to duty—but he worried nevertheless that he’d fallen into the backroom habit of forgetting that actual people were involved. In this instance, for example, what precisely was Sophie de Greer’s role? Was she in hiding, or had she been snatched? Would his involvement result in her rescue, or had he helped throw her to wolves? And whose wolves: Ours or theirs?

The list of who “they” might be was a long one. But then, the question of who “we” were could be equally knotty.

There was good cause to persuade himself that, having played his part, he should put it out of mind. He remained subject, after all, to Official Secrets legislation. Besides, if the information he had relayed to Nash had been acted upon, that was an end of it: de Greer would either no longer require, or be beyond the reach of, assistance. But information was bankable, and not always spent as soon as in hand. In which case it was possible that de Greer remained where he had traced her to: the San, in Dorset. And if so, it would be straightforward enough to verify that she was safe. He might no longer be active, but he still had a name; one that rang enough bells to open a door at a remote, hardly maximum-security Service facility.

Whelan had visited the San once, on a handshaking tour. It wasn’t such a long drive. Or it was, but making the effort would ease his conscience. And while it was true that, going by her photograph, Sophie de Greer was very attractive, it was almost equally true that this played no part in the decision he arrived at. Which was to put a jacket on, find his keys, and drive to Dorset.

It had been a door closing, nothing more, but it had happened without care. Someone had come in—or gone out—allowing the door to slam behind them, instead of easing it back into place.

Even during daylight, this would have been frowned upon. Would have wounded the hush.

Shirley hopped off the bed, wondering if she’d heard the first postcard from a rampage through the building. If someone had flipped their lid, and were even now running up the stairs, prepared to scream their excitement to the walls.

If that happened, she wanted to watch.

But when she peered down the corridor, there were no sideshows in evidence. Only the dull mumble of voices downstairs.

Dinner had been served at seven. At nine, the common room was locked. There was nowhere to go but bed. Whoever was still down there must be staff.

Except the staff knew to use doors quietly. If they knew nothing else, they knew that.

Shirley didn’t spend a lot of time weighing up her next move. If the minor ruction had been caused by one of the Nurse Ratcheds having a bad-care day, and if their meltdown involved, say, a bottle of something, or a line of something else, Shirley was more than prepared to keep quiet about it. She’d be silent as a fucking aardvark. Provided whoever it was slipped her a taste of the contraband.

Trainers on, she padded to the staircase. There was a floor-to-ceiling window at its head, and she could see her reflection as she approached. If she’d been holding a candle on a gravy boat, she’d have thought herself a ghost.

Passing one of the other bedrooms, she thought she heard a whimper from inside. Night tremors.

She descended two flights silently, dropped to a crouch on the landing and peered round the banisters, like a child in a movie, eavesdropping on parents.

In the lobby below, a woman was behind the reception desk. Shirley could see the back of her head, enough to identify her as the staff member who’d fetched her from the stableyard that morning. She was capable looking, with hair nearly as short as Shirley’s, and a slightly squashed nose, and was calmly explaining to a bullish-looking man that he was in the wrong place, all the while with one hand out of sight. There’d be a button beneath the desk, Shirley knew. Press it and security would come.

She switched her focus to the visitor, who was broad-shouldered, and either worked out a fair bit, or spent part of his day lugging barrels from one side of the street to the other. Dark curly hair; stubbly throat and chin. Jeans and a zip-up jacket. She could make out a stain of some sort, unless it was a tattoo, on the back of his right hand: visible as he rubbed his jaw.

The woman said, “It’s a private facility. We have no rooms available.”

Shirley thought: Yeah, and how come he’d just wandered through the front door? The San wasn’t high security, but it didn’t put out a welcome mat. How come this character had got as far as the reception desk?

He’d tipped his head to one side. It was possible he thought this charming. “A friend’s staying here. I’m just paying a visit, okay?”

Shirley remembered from her morning walk how you could approach the house through the woods, if you had a mind to. Because they weren’t prisoners. Even Shirley was here of her own free will, if you overlooked the fact she’d been given zero bloody option. So yeah, she could walk out, anyone could, but the other side of that coin was, if you had a pressing need to get in, it wouldn’t take military genius.

“Just for a few minutes?”

The accent was familiar; so much so, it took a moment for Shirley to clock it. He was Italian. Shirley had an Italian grandfather, though she’d never met him. To be honest, she wasn’t convinced her grandmother had known him all that well. Still, blood was blood: she had that accent in her genes. She knew it when she heard it.

“For the last time, sir, if you don’t leave, I’ll have to call security.”

“There’s no need. Just a quick visit.”

Press the button, thought Shirley. He’s a threat or he’s a flake. But whatever he is, he’s not a lost tourist.

And then he said, “My friend, she’s called Shirley Dander. Just give me her room number, and we’re all good.”

Driving out of London had been easy, and traffic light. For the first half hour, Whelan listened to the news—the PM had just shared his vision of post-Brexit Britain as an imperial powerhouse, its weights and measures system the envy of the world –then a podcast on rising racial tension in the wake of low vaccine take-up in minority communities, before deciding silence was preferable. This carried him through the next sixty miles, and by the time he was approaching the small town nearest the San he recognised familiar territory, though one ravaged by recent events. About half the retail premises were shuttered, and a canvas banner reading “Food Bank—Tues/Thurs” had been hoisted across a car park gantry. London, he knew, had taken a battering. But this felt like a disaster zone; a community flattened by history, and not yet back on its feet.

It was a relief to be out the other side; to leave the main road and bear left, heading uphill along a single-track lane. On his previous visit, in early summer, this landscape had been all greens and gentle browns, the British countryside at rest. Now the car was surrounded by waves of blacks and blues, shifting in the wind. On both occasions, the lane approaching the facility took its time; it bent round fields, and went some distance out of its way to admire a farmhouse. Driving slowly, nervous of curves, Whelan was starting to have doubts. It was nine thirty; late to be paying a call. On the other hand, the San was a medical institution. Not all of its guests would arrive in daylight; some would be delivered as wreckage, under cover of the small hours. And he was still a figure in the Service; his name would ring bells, open doors. Besides, if memory served, when the car crested the next hill he’d be almost there; in his headlights’ beam he’d have a view of the San below; its elegant driveway behind its tall iron gates, the long wall bordering its eastern side. All of it at ease with the peaceful countryside.

But memory didn’t serve. It was the next hill but one that allowed the remembered view, and when it arrived, it had altered. Whelan’s car dipped, and its headlights picked out the long wall, but in place of the iron gates was a twisted mess: one still hung on a hinge, badly buckled, and the other was no longer there. The red tail lights of a large vehicle, a truck or a bus, were heading up the elegant driveway at speed. Whelan had the sense of other shadows, swarming in the darkness. All this in the half-second or so that his lights illuminated the scene. And then the lane curved again, showing him only the darkness ahead, which would in another minute reach those broken gates. Before he’d driven half that distance a bright light appeared at the side of the lane, directed straight at him, and a silhouette flagged down his car.

“Shirley Dander. Just give me her room number, and we’re all good.”

“I’m calling security now.”

“Okay,” the man said, but not to her; he was speaking into the mobile he’d produced from his pocket.

“Would you put that away?”

“Sure,” he said, but instead leaned forward and hit her in the face.

The same moment the woman toppled backwards, Shirley heard a distant revving followed by an elongated crash, one which started with a metallic crunch and continued for some while as a twisted, scraping form of torture.

The woman was shrieking, and on the floor, but Shirley didn’t think she’d reached that button. No alarm was sounding. Or not until Shirley jabbed her elbow into the little glass panel at the top of the staircase, triggering an electronic howl that came from everywhere at once. The man froze, then froze again as Shirley took the stairs three at a time—can you freeze twice? Don’t ask me, I’m busy—sweeping a vase from its sidetable as she reached ground level and sending it hurtling at his head: it would have been nice if it hit him. But it struck a wall and shattered: water pooled on the floor, flowers rearranged themselves. Someone else was coming through the door, and he didn’t look like security. The first man pointed at Shirley and shouted an instruction she couldn’t hear. But she wasn’t an idiot: she spun and ran back up the stairs.

. . . He used my name. No particular shock attached to the knowledge. There was, if anything, a sense of comfort. Here she was, miles from anywhere—exiled, even, from Slough House—and she was still the centre of events. Still pursued by bad actors.

Of whom this particular example turned on some speed, enough that he could grab her by the ankle. As she reached the top of the stairs, Shirley hit the floor face first.

“What seems to be the problem?”

Odd how he fell into deferential mode as he lowered his window and craned his neck to address the shadow. Something to do with being English, he supposed. Or everything to do with being Claude Whelan.

It was a young man with a long face, sideburned and stubbled. Whelan could smell alcohol as he crouched to speak through the window.

“Accident.”

“Is anyone hurt?”

“. . . Eh?”

“Is. Anyone. Hurt?”

The young man nodded vigorously.

“Many. Yes. Big accident.” He put his hands together then moved them apart slowly, to indicate the violence of whatever had just occurred. “Boosssshhhhhhhh . . .”

From the direction of the San a fire alarm burst into life.

“Well, that should bring help,” Whelan said, and pressed the button to raise the window.

The young man put his hand in the gap, preventing it from closing.

“What are you doing?” said Whelan.

“You have to go back.”

“The road seems clear.”

“No. All blocked. Go back the way you came, yes? No worries.”

“I see. Yes, fine. All right, then. I’ll go back the way I came.”

He studied his wing mirror for traffic, then made doubly sure by looking over his shoulder, one or other of which actions satisfied his new friend that he intended to reverse to a passing place and turn the car around. The hand was removed from the window.

Whelan nodded politely, closed the window and drove forward, the car leaping a little as if eager to be on its way. In his mirror, he saw the young man prancing about: Was he shaking his fist at the car? Whelan rather thought he was. That was pleasing. His own arms were tingling in a way that might have been worrying in another context, but in this one spelt energy, coming off him like sweat.

He turned where the gates used to be, and there was the San at the end of the driveway, its ground floor lit. The truck that had ploughed through the gates had parked by its entrance; it was in fact a people carrier, now flanked by a pair of cars, their doors wide. A number of motorbikes were lined up behind, like an honour guard. And meanwhile a fire alarm pulsed steadily, beneath which Whelan could make out a different rhythm, one he had no name for, but recognised from crowd scenes: demonstrations turning edgy; railway stations when trains refused to arrive. Even inside the car he could feel the drumbeat. It was the wrong place to be—like the moment you drop a cup, before it hits the floor. Something’s going to break. He stopped abruptly just short of the other vehicles, and changed gear. Then flinched as a face appeared by his window.

A fist rapped on the glass.

There was someone behind him, too, blocking his exit.

He reached for his mobile and fumbled it, dropping it into the footwell, when the fist bashed against his window once more. Words were shouted.

Open the door. Get out of the car.

Not going to happen.

He unclipped his seatbelt and bent for his phone. As he did so the fist hit the windscreen again, hard enough to make the car wobble, and causing Whelan to bang his head on the steering wheel. Sudden pain, and with it fear: What the hell had he been doing, driving into a mini-riot? And he sensed, rather than saw, other figures clustering round the car, casting shadows onto its interior.

Another thump. How much would the windscreen stand, and what if they used something other than bare fists?

He found his phone, slid back upright, and all four car doors rattled as their handles were gripped and tugged.

The San was open, light spilling onto its forecourt. And maybe these are patients, thought Whelan. Maybe this was a multiple-medication failure . . . But they were all male, and much of an age, not the diverse range of the damaged the San hosted, and how was this happening? Where was security, for god’s sake? Even as he had the thought a man in a blue shirt, dark trousers, came flying through the front door to land sprawling on the gravel. He’d barely hit the ground before one of the marauders leaped out after him and kicked him in the head. Then did it again.

Whelan’s innards tightened. If they pulled him out of the car, he’d be compost in minutes.

If Claire could see you now.

But she couldn’t, and nor could anyone, save this bunch round his car.

But the Park must know the alarm was ringing; help must be on its way. There was no one to call, nothing to do except leave, now, quickly. Dropping the phone into his lap, he grabbed the wheel with one hand, reached for the brake with the other, and the car lurched, throwing him forward again, and then he was leaving the ground—Christ alive, he was in Chitty fucking Bang Bang—and then falling back to earth with a crunch, an impact felt in his teeth, in his eyes, in his spine. He was surrounded by mad laughter, the men howling with glee as they pounded his car with their fists.

On the gravel, yards away, the security man tried to push himself upright, and someone stamped on him.

Whelan’s face was wet. Nose bleed. His glasses had disappeared. An image of Sophie de Greer careered through his mind, blonde, glasses, suit and tie, and who on earth was she really? Couldn’t they just grab her and run, leave him alone? And now the bastards were lifting his car again and Christ here goes they were dropping it—

Something came loose with that second crash, something broke. He shook his head, which was wrapped in gauze. Noises were muffled, and reached him through sound-baffling voids; vision helter-skeltered, a whirl of headlight and shadow. Figures spun, slowed, went into reverse, and then a shape rose out of fog and into focus, wielding a lump of rock. Whelan flinched, and the rock hammered down onto his windscreen. Safety glass spiderwebbed, and peeled away from the edges. Cold air swamped the car, and noise pumped back up to maximum, the fire alarm drilling into the back of his head. Hands tugged at the broken screen, peeling it away like a door on an advent calendar, revealing Whelan as the little surprise nestled inside.

The man had climbed onto the bonnet, and was reaching for him.

Whelan had only soggy thoughts left. Now they’d drag him onto that gravel, and stomp him into mush.

“Fucking copper, yes?”

This was the man crouching on his bonnet, his face inches from Whelan’s own, his fists wrapped round Whelan’s lapels.

“I fucking hate coppers.”

And then a body dropped from the sky and flattened him.

Her head pressed against the carpet, a man bent low over her, his breath hot in her ears: give or take a gender preference, it might have been a quiet evening in.

The kidney punch, though, was bang out of whack.

The carpet’s weave dissolved along with Shirley’s vision, and when she gasped for breath, it was all dust and hair.

She felt his hand on her head; his weight brought to bear.

“Shirley Dander. Know where she is?”

Right that moment, Shirley couldn’t have said for certain.

But a voice behind her could. “I do.”

The man raised his head to see who was speaking, so the book that hit him broke his nose.

His weight slipped off her and she rolled free. He was on his side, cradling his face in his hands, and the best she could manage was a two-fingered jab into his throat. Not her most powerful shot, either; not after being rabbit-punched. Still, her second go had a little more force, and the third was the charm.

“You might kill him,” said the voice, but not in a discouraging way. More like: FYI.

“Ungh,” Shirley said, partly in warning. The man who’d punched the woman in the lobby was coming up the stairs; not in a hurry, and apparently amused by the fate of his companion. He said something nobody heard.

The corridor was busy; all doors open, and nervous faces peeping out. Like Watership Down on fireworks night. Shirley got to her feet before Man One reached the top of the stairs.

Someone called, “Is this a drill?”

“Use the other exit,” Shirley’s saviour said. It was Ellie Parsons, the woman she’d met in the gym, and she was brandishing a bloodied book, One Hundred Things to See in Dorset. “I wondered why they left copies of this. Now we know.”

“‘Panic attacks’?” Shirley managed. Breathing was painful.

“Oh, I’m medicated up to the eyeballs, dear.” Parsons smiled, gently. “I’ve called this in. But I imagine some kind of response will be automatic, don’t you?”

I work in Slough House, thought Shirley. Expecting anything other than blind indifference was optimistic. But anyway, here he came, Man One, shaking his head. Man Two was prone and gagging, unless that was a death rattle. She couldn’t find it in herself to give a toss.

“It’s getting a little, uh, busy,” Man One said. He wasn’t kidding. The fire alarm, the crashing about outside, the breakage downstairs, some to-and-fro yelling. If he hadn’t been using the top of his voice, they wouldn’t have heard him. Given that he was, his accent was more noticeable. Uomo Uno, Shirley amended.

“Yeah, you might want to fuck off now. There’ll be men with guns in a minute.”

“For a care home?”

Parsons raised both eyebrows. She spoke to Shirley. “Do I look like I belong in a care home?”

“How do you think I feel?”

“We can sort this out simples,” said the man. “We’re looking for Shirley Dander. We find her, we leave.” He spread his palms. “Nobody needs to get hurt.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Shirley.

Yet another pair were coming up the staircase; one bald and bearded, the other clean-shaven and raggy-haired, like alternates in an identikit parade. Both wore expressions bordering on glee, as if this wild rumpus were the stuff of daydreams. Without looking round, Uomo Uno held an arm out to stop them.

The corridor was bustling. The fire exit was at the far end, and dressing gowned figures were shuffling that way, though two men had approached Shirley’s end and stood behind Parsons now, evidently expecting trouble. One was elderly; the other Shirley’s age. He had thinning blond hair, a wispy goatee, and a nervous twitch that pulled his face to one side at irregular intervals. And he carried a bedside lamp, its shade removed, its flex wrapped round his wrist.

Uomo Uno regarded them with amusement. “If you want a fight, I can spare a few seconds. Don’t think we’re all as easy as him.”

This with a gesture towards his broken-nosed companion, who chose that moment to groan.

The elder of the men behind Parsons said, “Naples? I’m hearing Naples.”

From downstairs came the sound of shattering glass.

Uomo Uno said, “One last time. Shirley Dander?”

“I’m Shirley Dander,” said Ellie Parsons.

“No, I’m Spartacus,” the nervous twitcher said, in a surprisingly deep voice.

“Okay, so one of you’s going to break a bone now,” said Uomo Uno. “You, I think.” He pointed at Spartacus.

To do them credit his back-up pair recognised their cue, but their execution lacked finesse and it all fell apart before it got going. When the first of them hard-shouldered Shirley aside she dropped to the floor, but grabbed him by the beard as she did so, pulling his head low and making it a simple target for Spartacus’s lamp. This caught him square in the mouth, not hard enough to satisfy Shirley, but she was aware she could be over-critical. His companion, meanwhile, reached for Spartacus just as Parsons kicked his kneecap: not a high-scoring move, but again best judged by results, because when he stumbled the elderly linguist put both hands to his chest and pushed him back into Uomo Uno, who caught him in an embrace at the top of the stairs. For a moment they were vulnerable, one good heave away from toppling down the staircase, and Shirley released the beard intent on precisely that, but someone grabbed her ankle: Man Two. She’d forgotten him. Too many people in not enough space was the problem: this needed a big finish if it wasn’t to end in farce. She collapsed onto all fours again, assuming the size and rough shape of an occasional table, while Bearded Man, now upright, spat a tooth and lunged for Ellie Parsons. This brought him square into the track of Spartacus’s lamp once more, which he was swinging as if creaming a full toss over the bowler’s head. The resulting crunch, with liquid notes, wasn’t quite drowned out by the alarm, and helped Shirley picture the impact later—at the time, she was preoccupied with stamping her heel into Man Two’s face. But she felt Bearded Man all the same, as he reeled backwards and tumbled over her as neatly as if the whole thing had been choreographed, with the big window waiting to welcome him. The noise he made passing through it had an orchestral quality: one big boom accompanied by a thousand tinkling minims. And then he was gone, and a cold wind was blowing into the corridor, while the wailing alarm slipped out through the wreckage and howled away into the night.

The man who’d been scaling the car’s bonnet was a bloody mess, his face mashed into the crumpled windscreen inches from Whelan’s own. He remained there while whoever had just landed on top of him slid sideways onto the gravel. Glass was falling from the sky, glistening like snowflakes, turning the scene into a zombie nativity, except that, instead of gathering round like adoring shepherds, the gobsmacked crew that had surrounded the car were fleeing like frightened sheep. Whelan’s hands were trembling; his whole body felt scraped to the bone. Dimly, through his now barely connected windscreen, he understood that a new noise had joined the raucous soundtrack: a bass-like whump-whump overhead that was possibly the wrath of God.

His soggy thoughts solidified. He was master of his car now, rattled as it was. He reached for the brake, forgetting he was in reverse, and the car shunted backwards, releasing its bloody cargo, which sprawled on the ground in the wash of his headlights. The shock caused Whelan to spasm: the car skewed slantways, and he felt the crunch of metal hitting stone. The whump-whump grew louder, and assorted marauders were looking skyward. Out of the San’s doorway tumbled another pair, and what had looked like an unstoppable invasion appeared to be becoming a rout. But there was no sign of Sophie de Greer. She might be lying dead in a room. The invaders might be on their way because their job was done.

Whelan shook his head, then realised that his glasses, thought lost, were balanced neatly on one shoe, their arms hugging an ankle. Retrieving them, he slid them onto his nose, and the world shifted into focus: it was still a confused mess, but only because it was a confused mess, and not because he wasn’t seeing it clearly. A motorbike roared to life. One of the cars flanking the people carrier was pulling away; at the same time another car was arriving: big and black, with tinted windows, and he didn’t need to see its sleek, dark-garbed occupants emerging to know the professionals had arrived. Not that order immediately fell. There was shouting everywhere. The fallen security man was still in a heap, and that, thought Whelan, was certainly something he could deal with. He climbed out of his car and was kneeling by the wounded man, the alarm still blotting out most things bar that overhead clatter, when more figures came crashing onto the gravel: one of the marauders and, in hot pursuit, what looked like a slightly wider, much less hairy, Tasmanian devil, wielding a baseball bat.

There’s nothing like putting someone through a window for altering the dynamic of a situation. Uomo Uno and his bosom companion stood staring at the empty space where Bearded Man had been a moment before, and for all the attendant noise, which now included something airborne and getting nearer, seemed lost in a reverie. Shirley, meanwhile, was continuing to kick Man Two in the face, a placeholder activity while she determined her next move. His grip on her foot had long since loosened, along with any sense of enthusiasm. Spartacus was studying his table lamp, his face still twitching, but satisfaction evident there too. His companion was removing a hearing aid, which was as good a way as any of pressing Mute. And Ellie Parsons was glaring at the pair on the staircase, her crimson copy of One Hundred Things to See in Dorset tucked under an arm, in case she planned to add a hundred-and-first later.

Quiet evening in, Shirley remembered.

The two on the staircase reached a wordless conclusion and fled, Uomo Uno’s previous nonchalance as shattered as that window. Outside, scattering gravel announced the arrival of more cars, and Shirley felt a lurch inside: it was over, would be over in the next few minutes, and she had no idea what it had all been about. Scrambling to her feet, nodding a farewell to her erstwhile comrades, she hared after them, the sound of battle still raging below.

At some point during the last five minutes, her want had stilled. The needy voice crying out for something, she didn’t know what, had quietened.

Unless she just couldn’t hear it for all the crap going on.

At ground level she found a scrum. Reinforcements had arrived, and two black-clad professionals in semi-riot gear—heavy vests, but no shields or helmets—were facing six of the marauder crew. The newcomers were wielding wicked-looking truncheons; the old firm relying on low-tech battery, with two lengths of lead piping and one baseball bat between them, though one hardy nutcase was attempting a headbutt as Shirley arrived, a move both ill-advised and brief. He hit the floor like a badly tossed pancake. In other circumstances, a sympathetic Shirley noted, the truncheoneer would have enjoyed the opportunity to lather his victim a while, but there was no time for such luxuries, and he was already engaged in a one-two with the baseball fan. Uomo Uno was holding back, fists bunched, eyes on the door, and Shirley padded toward him, not sure what she planned, but confident of spoiling his day. But the room shifted, or its gladiatorial epicentre did; the marauders wheeling round as the pros moved towards the reception desk, and the door became accessible. Uomo Uno seized his chance, and as Shirley followed something struck her on the ankle—she sprawled, reached out, and her hand found the baseball bat, which had come skittering across the tiles, liberated from its wielder by a truncheon. Shirley grabbed it, thanked her good-luck fairy, and was on her feet in an instant, following her prey into the night.

In the pool cast by the helicopter’s searchlight, the San’s forecourt had become a circus ring, in which a troupe of Service muscle was knocking seven bells out of twenty assorted hard cases. This should have been a picnic, had everyone been reading from the same script, but while the professionals knew what they were doing, and tended towards the swift and economical, the hooligans had the advantage that they viewed violent encounters as leisuretime jolly rather than occupational necessity. Those knocked down kept getting up for more, and those upright took the windmill approach: fists and feet flying; teeth ready to take a chunk from anything within reach. It was like fighting wild dogs, with the added interest of not knowing what diseases they carried.

Surveying the mayhem Whelan wondered if any of the players remembered what the evening’s objective had been, or whether the whole thing was just a mad game of Chinese Whispers.

Weaving between separate clusters of violence, he helped the battered security guard to his feet, and together they crunched across broken glass to the building, where Whelan propped him against the wall. “Best stay upright,” he said, having no clue as to established practice, but reasonably sure it wasn’t a good moment for a lie down. Looking round, he prayed for signs of sanity, and at that precise moment the alarm shut off.

Ridiculous to pretend that what followed was silence, but for half a second it felt like it: a relief from aural torture. And then chaos poured back through the evening’s open wound: the clashing of bodies and armoured sticks, the whoops and yelps of the warriors, the techno-beat of the hovering chopper, and even his own puny car alarm, which Whelan hadn’t noticed until then, a limp whimper more likely to incur embarrassment than attention.

But in that oasis of imaginary quiet, he’d heard a woman’s voice laying down a challenge.

“I’m Shirley Dander,” she’d yelled. “Who wants to know?”

When Shirley ran through the door the helicopter was hovering twenty feet up, drowning the forecourt in light. Pitched battle was raging: a people carrier was parked slantways, frozen waves of gravel at its tyres; a small car had reversed into the front of the building; and the goon she’d helped through the upstairs window appeared to have landed on one of his comrades. Double score! A blood-smeared middle-aged man in glasses was an unlooked-for absurdity, crouched over a floored figure in security guard’s black-and-blue livery and victim’s red-and-white head wound, but she didn’t pause to question the sight. The baseball bat felt good in her hands, and Uomo Uno was well within reach. He looked like he was running for the carrier, the chicken. Empty-handed, but holding the answers she sought.

Why did you come for me?

As he reached the van she hurled the bat. It bounced off his head and he sprawled against the vehicle, testing its suspension. She paused to retrieve the weapon, and by the time she’d done so he’d steadied himself, turned and thrown a punch all in the same flow, aiming for her face probably, but missing by half a mile. She had his number now. He was a thug, plain and simple. Put him in a boxing ring, he’d be canvas-patterned in a moment. But put him in a cage and he’d rattle the bars loudly enough that you wouldn’t want to enter.

The good thing about snap judgements was that you could be doing something else while making them. In Shirley’s case, this involved swinging the bat into his thigh, keeling him sideways like a broken tree. The fire alarm she’d triggered a hundred years ago ceased its screaming then, the same moment she chose to scream herself: “I’m Shirley Dander. Who wants to know?” He didn’t reply, but more pressingly, someone was rushing her from behind: she knew this the way you’d know if a bull was approaching. Bulls have never mastered the surprise attack. If this newcomer planned to, he could start by making notes as to what happens when you give your position away early: in this case, a full-bodied swing of a baseball bat. Shirley felt the impact in her shoulders. Her attacker felt it in his ribs, and probably every other bone holding him together—not since she’d hit a bus with an iron had Shirley felt quite so fulfilled. I am fucking invincible, she decided. That was a fresh learning right there. I am fucking invincible, and I’m taking these bastards down one by one.

That was the last thought she had for a while, as the sun rose and set in the blink of an eye, all of it inside her furious, buzz-cropped head.

So that was Shirley Dander.

What interested Whelan was that she wasn’t Sophie de Greer, despite what he’d told Nash; that Lamb’s got something going on, that he’s stashed de Greer in the San, under the name of Shirley Dander. Assertions that had made sense that afternoon. From his new perspective, sense was the other side of the county line. It was the quiet warmth of his study, where he should have stayed. Sorry, Oliver. I’m retired. How hard would that have been?

Someone was rushing Dander from behind, but she seemed to have matters under control: even Whelan felt the resulting blow, and he was twenty yards away. The villain hit the ground like a cartoon piano. Dander’s glee outshone the helicopter’s searchlight; evil and innocent at the same time, it made a pumpkin lantern of her face. And then someone blew her candle out.

It was the man she’d been chasing, the one she’d had spreadeagled against the carrier a moment before. Whelan couldn’t see what he’d hit her with, but her baseball bat dropped to the ground, followed by Dander herself, and then she was scooped up and tossed inside the van: all this while fighting raged on; the Service troops heavily outnumbered, but not, on the whole, too bothered by that. Various lumps on the gravel were conquered invaders, their groans audible now the alarm had ceased. The carrier’s door shut and Dander’s attacker was easing into the driver’s seat. The helicopter shifted overhead, and the world tilted as its spotlight slid across the ground. Whelan said, “Wait here,” and let go of the wounded security man, who remained on his feet, which was a good sign. The whirring rotor blades were artificial weather, and Whelan crossed the forecourt like a mime. Someone backed into him, avoiding a truncheon; Whelan pushed and the man staggered forward, straight into the truncheon’s upswing. There was a spray of blood, a destroyed face: all a blur, even with one hand holding his glasses in place, but Dander’s abandoned baseball bat was there at his feet and he collected it without thinking. The people carrier lurched forward, Dander inside, the man she’d been chasing at the wheel . . .

Whelan stood, bat in hand, as the vehicle careered onto the lawn and headed off round the building.

This was what you got when you took your eye off the ball. Something landed on your head; either part of that helicopter—not an essential part; it was still airborne—or an improvised sledgehammer put together by the Italian thug who was just now learning to drive. Shirley had been flung across a row of seats, but rolled onto the floor as the carrier went into an interminable curve. A car was bleating close at hand, and ignorant armies were leathering away at each other, their repetitive clatter and thwock the motor’s backbeat, but all she could see was carpet. A pain at the back of her head was coursing through her body, and when she tried to pull herself up, her hands slid from the seat covers. Whatever the bastard had hit her with, she wanted one. Any moment now she was going to make her way to the front of the vehicle and feed him whatever came into reach, but for the time being was lost in a pinball machine, rocking and rolling with every lurch of the van, which was off the gravel now, crashing over the lawn, swerving the copper beech, and scattering the residents who’d gathered behind the building after evacuating their rooms. And then they were on gravel again. Full circle. The van was back on the drive, heading for the road, and taking her with it—mission accomplished, presumably, though she’d yet to discover whose mission, and what outcome they had in mind.

It occurred to her that the evening’s row of triumphs, from ushering one invader through an upstairs window to kicking another repeatedly in the head, was washed away by this end result, her having become a piece of luggage. As soon as her headache went, she’d do something about that. But meanwhile—

But meanwhile an angry metal howl ripped the night, as the van ran over something which brought it screeching to a halt. Uomo Uno swore loudly and thumped the steering wheel. Now’s the time, thought Shirley, and was halfway up when the van reversed with a lurch, scraping another scream of inanimate agony from whatever lay under its wheels. She went sprawling again, and then, after a rabbit hop and another tearing sound, the van was away once more, turning right, past the stable block she’d wandered round this morning.

Its motion was lopsided, its balance punctured by its recent encounter.

A moment later she flinched, as something crashed onto the roof.

Still holding the bat, Whelan ran for his car. He might have been wearing a magic ring, rendering him invisible; on all sides, the San’s defenders and attackers slugged it out, but he moved unhampered past them. The truth was, he was of no consequence; a pencil pusher, pointless in a brawl. If the marauders won, one or other would snap him in two as an encore, but while there was fighting to be done, he was surplus to requirements. Which suited him. He reached his car, but it was hors de combat. And the people carrier was out of sight.

He kept running, the San’s geography returning to him; there was a stableyard by the gates, or where the gates had been. He remembered a staircase, a vantage point. From there he could see which direction the carrier went . . . It was less a plan than a displacement activity, but he had to do something. Besides, his body was on automatic, pursuing an agenda he hadn’t known was there.

There always came a moment, didn’t there, when the mild-mannered drip found his inner Tarzan?

He was down the driveway, yards from the stables, when he heard the people carrier at his heels, its headlights grabbing his shadow, hurling it in front of him. He braced for impact, expecting to lose contact with that shadow and everything else, but the moment didn’t come: he felt the van’s weight as it rushed past, but he was out of its path; was careering into the stableyard while it headed for the main road. There was copper in his mouth, a pounding in his chest, a sudden metal shriek as the vehicle screamed into the corpse of the wrecked gate, and then Whelan was in the stableyard, memory sending him to the far end. He hadn’t run in years; was amazed to find the ability existed. Wouldn’t have been surprised if it deserted him now, leaving him a puddle on the stones. But his newfound energy carried him on, and there it was; the external staircase by the furthest stable, leading up to the hayloft. Onestep, threestep, fivestep, seven. His knees trembled but held. Watery muscles were a childhood memory. At the top he leaned on the thigh-high wall. The people carrier was emerging onto the road, listing heavily—that broken gate had torn a hole in an offside tyre. A horrible idea grabbed Whelan’s mind and squeezed.

It wasn’t possible. He wasn’t built for this. But the van had lurched across the road, was passing slowly beneath him.

And he was, or had been, on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Hadn’t he?

If you could see me now, he thought, unsure whether he was addressing that same Majesty, Claire, Diana Taverner, Josie, or even Sophie de Greer, whoever she was. Then he clambered onto the wall and dropped onto the roof of the lumbering van.

Whose flip-flopping was its own funeral dirge, da-duff da-duff, a lament already winding down: within the minute, that burst tyre would be a roadside python. But the thump on the roof was something else and Shirley was wondering what—who—had just landed there when a baseball bat slammed into the windscreen, making a porridge of the oncoming view. Screaming his rage, Uomo Uno thumped the steering wheel, which didn’t improve the situation. The baseball bat crashed down again, and the vehicle swerved from the wrong side of the road to the right, sending something banging into Shirley’s knee. A three-kilo training weight. This was what the bastard had used to knock her out of gear.

Visions of clouting him round the head with it, pasting what passed for his brains across the dashboard, had to be put on hold. She couldn’t stand for the rocking, not to mention the wavy motion inside her head: a dull strobing light behind her eyeballs. That taste in her throat—she didn’t remember throwing up. Another outburst from Uomo Uno; another lurch from the wayward bus. These last minutes were a movie trailer; had begun with Shirley on her bed, hungry for something, she didn’t know what. Then staircases and chase scenes and fights and action . . . And someone on the roof, come to rescue her. They didn’t know about the Dander jinx, that teaming up with Shirley offered poor long-term prospects. Or maybe they did, but had risked it anyway; jumping onto a moving vehicle wielding a baseball bat . . . Whoever it was probably thought themselves the hero. And then that notion was swallowed, along with everything else, by blinding light, as the helicopter dropped its searchlight onto the limping van, and hovered above it for its last few moments of motion. A loudspeaker was shouting instructions, which almost certainly included the word Stop!, but whether that was the clinching argument, or whether the people carrier had simply run out of life, was hard to tell. With a final squealing complaint from a tyreless wheel the vehicle crunched to a halt and Uomo Uno spilled out beneath the helicopter’s all-seeing eye, in full view of the approaching police cars with their angry swirling lights. As Shirley fumbled with the door, she could see the blue devils these lights released capering across pitch-dark countryside, scaling trees, hurling themselves into hollows; each followed by another and another and another . . . Uomo Uno was sinking to his knees in surrender when Shirley fell onto the road and looked up at the stars, though they were way too distant to see. Instead, she found herself focusing on a face looking down from the top of the people carrier.

“Shirley Dander, I presume,” it said.

“Who the hell are you?” said Shirley, then closed her eyes and grabbed a little rest.

Night-time raids come in different shapes and sizes.

Oliver Nash was no stranger to the domestic kind: the padding on slippered feet to the kitchen; the lure of leftovers offering recompense for being alert in the small hours, dream-remnants smeared across every surface. Tonight, though, his journey involved a sudden start at the foot of the stairs, when a shadow in the living room detached itself from the furniture. With an aplomb that would have surprised those who took him at face value he recovered instantly, nodding at his uninvited guest and continuing into the kitchen, where he turned the light on. “I assume you used the spare key,” he said, without looking round. “I must find a better hiding place.”

“You must join the twenty-first century. This is London, Oliver. Not The Archers.”

“But as you’re here anyway, we might as well be comfortable.” He reached for the thermostat and adjusted it several degrees. From upstairs came the comforting noise of organised heat awakening: a dull thunk, a whispered whoosh. Nash tightened his dressing gown cord. “You’ve caused quite the hullaballoo.”

“I have?”

“What would you call it? You left a pack of Dogs in a heap on a staircase and used the lone survivor as an Uber. He’s taking some hard knocks, by the way. When he returned Ms. Kelly’s gun to her, I thought she’d use it on him.”

“He knew it was a long-term investment,” Diana said.

“And then you vanished like a woodland sprite. Down on the hub, they don’t know whether to build you a crucifix or find you a crown. Coffee?”

“Please.”

“And there’s a rather good seeded sourdough. I could run us up some toast?”

“Who’s been parachuted into the Park?”

“Home Office man, bit of a donkey. Name of Malahide.”

Diana pursed her lips.

“Needless to say, he takes your disappearing act as a sign of guilt.”

“If I’d shown up, it would have been game over. You know that.”

“Indeed I do, but you know what that department’s like. They’ve got so used to pretending they’re not as smart as their boss, some of them have actually got that way.” With an economy of motion belying his size, Nash dropped four slices of bread into the toaster and attended to the Nespresso machine. “And he hasn’t learned from you how to think round corners.”

“What did Sparrow offer?”

“What you’d expect.” Nash opened a cupboard, and began excavating little tubs of jam, the size that come with hotel breakfasts. “The Park’s to be, what shall we call it, streamlined? More oversight, less, ah initiative. Committee-led. With Yours Truly at the helm.”

“I hadn’t realised your ambitions lay in that direction.”

“Upwards? Everyone’s ambitions lie in that direction. Law of physics. Besides, once he’d played the waterproof card, the next step was inevitable. Either I went along, or I’d be squashed against the tiles. Though, as you’ll remember, I did give you advance warning.”

Red Queen, Red Queen, he’d whispered down her phone.

“Playing both ends against the middle.”

“Oh, please. I’d never turn against the middle. Black, yes?” He placed a coffee cup in front of her. “Sparrow doesn’t know you like I do. He thought activating Candlestub would render you harmless. Whereas I knew that putting you in a corner would get your dander up.” He barked, unexpectedly. “Which, come to think of it . . .” Reaching into his dressing gown pocket, he produced his iPhone. A few taps later he passed it to her. “That came in an hour ago. Woke me, as it happens.”

Diana read the activity report he’d opened. “An attack on the San? This was Sparrow?”

“He seemed to think de Greer was being held there. On your instructions.”

“I approved a placement there a few days ago. For one of Lamb’s misshapes.”

“Shirley Dander.”

“Who Sparrow thought was de Greer, right? Because Whelan steered him that way.”

“Claude put two and two together and made five.” He held out his hand, and she returned the phone. “Though I can’t help wondering if your Lamb didn’t nudge him in that direction. Bit of a disruptor, that man.”

“He’s been called worse. But either way, where did Sparrow find a wrecking crew?”

The toast popped up, as if it too were eager to hear this part.

Nash used wooden tongs to place the slices in a rack. “He appears to have allied himself with, I believe they call themselves Ultras? A collective of over-enthusiastic football fans.”

Diana had pulled a chair out. “And where did this information come from?”

“Field work. My own, actually.”

“You’re a joe now?”

“I appreciate that you find that amusing. Though you might care to ask yourself which of us is seeking help.”

“Help? I’m not yet holding your feet to the fire, Oliver. But the moment might come.”

Nash, seated, carefully buttered his toast. “There’s a restaurant called La Spezia, off Wardour Street. Sparrow has been seen—by me—visiting its premises, and it’s not somewhere you’d expect to find him. So after a little, ah, surveillance, I asked the very able Josie to do some digging, and she informs me that the under-manager there, one Alessandro Botigliani, is what I believe they call a capo of a branch of these so-called Ultras, affiliated in his case to Lazio.” Nash applied jam, and ferried the result to his mouth. The resulting expression was one frequently sought by Renaissance artists, reaching for tokens of religious ecstasy. Then: “They’re of a far-right persuasion, though there’s grounds for suspecting that ideology, and indeed the beautiful game, is of less concern to them than kicking many kinds of carrots out of opposing fans. A ready-made wrecking crew, as you put it.”

“And Sparrow persuaded them to do his dirty work?”

“Persuaded, paid, blackmailed. Nobody ever accused Sparrow of being unable to get others to grubby their hands on his behalf.”

“I’m sure ten minutes in a basement will have any number of them clarifying the situation.”

“Careful. It was whispers of strongarm tactics that started all this in the first place. Besides, you’re in no position to dictate events. When you failed to surrender yourself, Sparrow pulled strings at the Met. There’s a warrant out for your arrest, Diana. Not to mention an emergency meeting of Limitations scheduled for ten a.m., where your suspension will be ratified and Malahide confirmed as pro tem First Desk. He will, of course, be taking instruction from the Home Secretary, which is to say that Sparrow himself will be effectively controlling the Park by coffee time. And I somehow doubt that an investigation into his own guilt will be top of his to-do list.”

“On the other hand,” Diana said, “should I arrive in person at the Limitations meeting with Dr. de Greer in tow, where she can testify not only to the absence of anything resembling Waterproof having been instigated, but to her own status as an agent of the GRU, hired wittingly or otherwise by Anthony Sparrow in order to influence national policymaking—well. How do you think that would play?”

Nash helped himself to another slice of toast, and seemed to be addressing the array of jam jars rather than Diana when he replied.

“I imagine you could sell tickets,” he said.

Even given his status as quondam First Desk, it had been hours before Claude Whelan had managed to extricate himself from the chaos at the San, and such release only came with the promise of a thorough debriefing once the Park had its ducks in a row. Though judging by the calls the senior agent at the scene had been getting, those ducks were currently in a flap, causing Whelan to suspect that the hostilities he’d divined between Taverner and Sparrow had ignited. Reason enough to keep his head down. He’d had cause to regret becoming involved in dirty politics before.

Driving his own car was out of the question, so after cleaning himself up as best he could in a San bathroom, he squeezed what was left from his former rank and commandeered one of the enemy vehicles, which was grubby but unscathed by combat. As he pootled up the drive towards the broken gates, manouvering round various vans into which cuffed figures were being bundled, he could see torches flickering in the woods beyond the stables as the last marauders were hunted down, and it was as much to the runners as the chasers that he sounded his horn in farewell, a thoroughly uncharacteristic action. On the other hand, everything he’d done in the last few hours had been out of character, as if, having been badly miscast, he’d thrown himself into the part regardless, and was now coming offstage expecting acclaim. He’d received precious little so far. Some things, you had to organise for yourself.

He adjusted the rearview mirror and glanced into it. “So. How did I do?”

In reply, all he heard was the noise of the engine, and the dark road unravelling beneath the tyres.

“Did you think I was talking to myself?”

From the footwell behind the passenger seat, Shirley Dander said, “Got anything to eat?”

. . . John

John

“John?”

His name approached him as if down a long corridor, the door at the end of which was ajar, and as usual his waking feeling was one of fear: What would happen next? It would involve that door opening wide. But there was a soft hand on his shoulder, and Sophie was bending over him. The light breaking through the curtains was the now-familiar glow of the sole streetlight that graced the mews.

“Are you awake?”

It was a whisper, so he replied in kind. “Yes.”

“Get dressed.”

He already was.

In the dim light, he could make out the gross and sour-smelling form of a creature that might have slipped through the door in his dreams, but was actually Jackson Lamb. Since he was neither eating nor smoking he was presumably asleep. Bachelor gazed for some seconds before shaking himself free and slipping his feet inside his shoes. His mouth tasted like an abandoned nest, and his bones ached from sleeping in a chair.

Sophie, taking no chances, pointed at the door rather than spoke.

It was what, three in the morning? Bachelor had already been exiled twice tonight, sent walking the streets rather than hear ongoing discussions. On the other hand, this was Sophie inviting him. He risked a taste of his own breath in a cupped hand, and made a mental note to avert his head when speaking. She opened the door so quietly, she might have spent their captivity practising.

Outside was colder than he’d expected. Little clouds accompanied each breath; his own heavier, more pungent, than hers.

“We need to leave now.”

He’d been expecting this moment.

Keep her here. No contact with anyone other than me, Louisa or Lamb.

Lech’s instructions, back when his own first concern had been the per diems.

And Lech was his friend, who’d stuck by him through thin times, even though their association had cost the younger man dear. It would be the act of a rogue to betray his trust. So he averted his head to shield Sophie from his phosgene breath before replying, and to the neutral observer must have looked as if he were addressing the terracotta pots and their sleeping citizens when he whispered, “Okay.”

They left the mews in a quiet hustle. Neither looked back, so neither saw the shape at the window, watching; his bulk briefly illuminated, on and off, by the repeated clicking of a lighter which seemed reluctant to burst into flame.

“I always get hungry after a ruck.”

“Me too,” Whelan said.

She shot him a sideways glance.

“Or so it would appear,” he added.

He’d stopped the car and she’d climbed into the front, where the first thing she’d done was snap open the glovebox and peer inside. She was Shirley Dander, and had never, it transpired, been Sophie de Greer, nor even knew who de Greer was. “Does she live in Wimbledon?”

Whelan had always been good at keeping a file in his mind. “Yes.”

“Figures.”

“I owe you an apology,” he said. “All of what just happened, the violence, everything—it was my fault.”

“What did you do?”

“I jumped to a conclusion.”

This, judging by her expression, was a feeble way of kicking off a riot.

I rescued you, he wanted to say. I jumped onto a moving vehicle. Remember that part? I was an action hero.

“Can we stop somewhere?”

“What, you mean . . . a bush or something?”

“Do I look like I want to eat a bush?”

“Oh. Right. No.”

“I meant like a service station.”

“I expect there’ll be one somewhere.”

“Could do with a crap too, to be honest, but mostly I need a burger or something.”

“. . . Yes. Fine.”

“Or chocolate. Minimum.”

There was little traffic about, but a light shone way behind them: a single headlight. Motorbike, he thought.

“Why were you there?” he asked abruptly. “In the San?”

Fields crawled past. In the hedgerows, tiny lifecycles churned their way through insect millennia.

At last Shirley said, “People keep dying.”

He didn’t know how to reply to that.

“I don’t mean in general, though that too. It’s just that, every time I get close to someone . . . they die.”

She was staring out of the window on her side, though he guessed she wasn’t seeing anything.

“So don’t get paired with me. Not a good idea.”

He said, “I’m sure that’s . . .” but he wasn’t, when it came down to it, sure of much, and whatever he was going to say threatened to dissolve in the space between them. He hauled it back. “I’m sure none of it’s your fault.”

“Keeps happening. So it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is.”

This with the air of one who has reached a conclusion, and accepted that no other was viable.

A few moments later, she added, “I suppose, sooner or later, I’ll be the one drawing the short straw.”

Whelan said, “There’s some kind of service station soon. An all-night garage. They might do sandwiches.”

Shirley nodded.

The fields grew wider apart as the road morphed into a dual carriageway. Not long after he’d spoken, they passed a sign promising a garage, toilets, food, not far ahead.

When the taxi dropped Diana off, two hundred yards from the mews, she waited until its taillights had diminished to pixels before heading for the safe house. The note of grim humour in that name tolled loudly tonight—the safe house was tainted by the funds which had provided it, and if its existence were brought to the attention of the Limitations Committee, which would be pondering her career in a few hours, it would go from des res to memento mori in no time flat. But in her defence—and there was never a time when some part of her mind wasn’t working on her defence—in her defence, her job demanded compromise. It was her ability to function despite its constant presence that made her an effective First Desk.

A role she planned to continue filling for the foreseeable future, and Anthony Sparrow be damned.

The cottage was in darkness, but she sensed company even as she turned the key. That was Lamb, flat on the sofa, cigarette in mouth, one hand rummaging between the buttons on his shirt. A hollow space opened inside her, one that grew as she scanned the rest of the room, and the lightless kitchen through its open door. “Where’s de Greer?”

His gaze remained fixed on the ceiling. “What did Nash say? Apart from the obvious?”

“. . . Which is?”

“That he’s the one gave you the heavy-breath warning?”

She was long past showing surprise at Lamb’s crystal-ball readings. “The court-martial’s set for ten, the firing squad for ten past. Except I’ve a trump card which blows Sparrow’s gunboat out of the water, or I did have. Where is she?”

“Nice to hear ‘trump’ in a positive context,” Lamb offered. “I’d forgotten what that sounded like.”

“Stop arsing about. Where is she?”

Somehow, he managed to shrug without levering himself up. The sofa shifted an inch. “Must’ve dropped off. Woke up and the place was empty.” He removed his cigarette long enough to adopt a rueful expression for the ceiling’s benefit. “I blame myself.”

Approaching the sofa, she was entering the heat-fug of his body. The anger her own was generating was a match for it. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m generally a ball of fun, yes. But this time, no. She’s gone.”

“. . . You’ve been waiting for this, haven’t you?”

“Been waiting for what now?”

“The chance to shaft me.”

Tilting his head, he cast a critical eye. “That ship sailed.” He resumed his study of the ceiling. “And all things considered, your future prospects matter less to me than whether my next dump’s a floater or a stone.”

“Oh, they matter. You’d do anything to fuck a First Desk over, because you think it should have been you. And that’s why you’ve become a stinking useless wreck. It’s not the dead weight of your history behind the curtain or over the wall or under the carpet or whatever metaphor your fucking mythology prefers, it’s wounded pride. Because the Service used you up and shat you out.” None of this seemed to be getting through. But Diana wasn’t finished. “You thought you had it made back when you were Charles Partner’s blue-eyed boy, you thought all you had to do was serve your time and it would be handed to you on a plate. And look at you now. Burnt out doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“Done yet?”

“Yes. No. You’re a fucking arsehole. Now I’m done.”

Lamb removed his cigarette and studied the glowing tip while it faded to grey. “Last time I saw Charles Partner, he was using the contents of his head as bubble bath. Being his blue-eyed-boy didn’t look so clever then, I can tell you. As for you, I’ve pulled your dick out of more slamming drawers than I can count. Any time you want me to stand back and watch, just say the word.”

“Where is she?”

“Like I said. Gone.”

“I need her, Jackson. I need her singing before that Committee. What if she goes back to Sparrow? Because right now, he’s got to be thinking about making her a better offer, and if that happens—and she takes it—what then? She’ll deny being a plant, I’m a lame duck, and the PM’s string-puller’s still in place, with a hard-on for the Service.” She was staring down at Lamb’s upturned face. “And once it looks like I’m on the skids, Judd’ll drop his China bomb, and that’s when they’ll send the carpet cleaners into Regent’s Park. Every decision made for a decade, every operation I’ve ever had a hand in, it’ll all be under a spotlight. And tell me this, how long do you think Slough House will last then? How long before questions are asked about your own career?”

Lamb was quiet for a moment. Then he squinted at his dying cigarette, and flicked it towards the nearest takeaway carton.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “If that happens, we might have a problem.”

It wasn’t much of a service station—a garage with a four-pump forecourt, and a car wash shrouded in darkness—but it had a shop which, alongside its array of pasties and sandwiches, had a mini rotisserie, and even more importantly was open. Shirley wouldn’t have been averse to a spot of ramraiding had it been otherwise, but Whelan might have objected. He’d been through enough trauma this evening, and even her aversion to vehicles travelling any less than slightly more than the prevailing speed limit had to be modified in face of this. Another triumph for her self-imposed programme of dignified silence; she’d barely mentioned their lamentable speed more than two or three times before they pulled up by the pumps.

“I don’t have any money,” she said, getting out of the car.

“I can get this.”

“Yeah, you’ll need to.” Because she didn’t have any money. Whelan obviously needed things spelt out.

There were no customers inside, and one bored youth at the till. While Whelan filled the tank, Shirley collected half a dozen chocolate bars, a family bag of Doritos, a two-litre bottle of Coke and the two least small roast chickens on the electric spit. She waited by a window while the youth dragged himself away from his phone to pack her catch in a cardboard punnet, and watched a motorbike pass at about half the speed it should have been doing. Whelan joined her as the boxed chicken was being placed on the counter, alongside a spork and, at Shirley’s insistence, seven sachets of barbecue sauce.

“Do we need a whole chicken each?” he asked.

She made a face. “Oh. Did you want one?”

There was no eating area so they went back out, where Whelan suggested that they eat before setting off again, or, indeed, getting into the car. Something about the smell: Shirley wasn’t paying attention. She was literally starving. There were children featured on charity envelopes who weren’t as hungry right now. Perched on a wall next to the car wash, she opened a couple of sauce sachets, squirted their contents over the first chicken, then pulled a leg free. Whelan seemed to be trying not to watch. He’d opted for a sandwich, cheese and pickle. Shirley gestured towards the Doritos in case he fancied a side, but he didn’t seem keen.

She didn’t normally open up like she’d done in the car, and had to put it down to the blow on the head. Still, getting stuff off her chest hadn’t felt bad. Maybe the touchy-feely types had a point, and it was good to share—especially with someone who didn’t share back. One-way therapy. Best of both worlds.

He said, “My wife left me.”

Shit.

After a moment, her lack of response growing awkward even to her, Shirley said, “So, what, she found someone else?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

That was annoying, when people did that: took a simple question and turned it into a fucking enigma.

He said, “She found God.”

Shirley couldn’t help it. “Ha!”

“It’s not funny.”

It was a bit funny. “Yeah, that wasn’t a laugh. I just thought, you know. God. Stiff competition.”

“I hadn’t looked at it that way.”

Shirley took advantage of the pause to toss a bone over her shoulder.

“She joined an order, a closed community. Nuns. It was supposed to be for a limited time, a retreat, but she hasn’t come back. And she won’t speak on the phone, or answer letters. No email, obviously.”

“Sounds like a cult.”

“Not really. They just live an enclosed life. Grow vegetables, that sort of thing. There are bees, I think.”

“Bees?”

“For honey.”

“Yeah, I know what bees do. I just didn’t know nuns were into that.”

“These ones are.”

Shirley had a vision of a nun in a beekeeper’s outfit, like someone going to a fancy dress party twice.

Then the motorbike that had passed earlier returned, its headlight picking out Shirley and Whelan on their wall by the car wash before it pulled onto the forecourt, and Shirley felt a familiar lurch inside as she realised the night wasn’t over yet.

Sparrow—head on his desk, laptop humming—was woken by his phone. The blogpost he’d been writing had run out of steam around the 3,000-word mark, though tendrils of it still shimmered, phrases aglow with meaning as he’d slept, but rendered incomprehensible by the interruption. This vegetable abrogation. He looked at his phone.

Unknown number.

He answered, and heard nothing.

“Hello?”

Still nothing.

“Timewaster.” He disconnected.

It was after four.

Sparrow didn’t need much sleep. He prided himself on this, as he did on other habits, traits, thoughts and words, each of which did their bit to elevate him above the herd. Phone down, he looked to his screen again, and tried typing this vegetable abrogation, to see if concrete shape would restore impact to the phrase. It didn’t.

Blogging was a displacement activity; a way of dispelling the white noise in his head, of which there’d been plenty tonight. Word had arrived of the fiasco at the San, and the Ultras’ failure to extricate Sophie de Greer. It was true that this failure didn’t have Sparrow’s name on it—Benito hadn’t taken part himself, and he alone knew of Sparrow’s involvement—so in political terms could be judged a success, but Taverner also remained at large, and if she turned up before the Limitations Committee with de Greer in tow, Sparrow’s future would become difficult indeed. Hence the displacement activity: a takedown of the government’s adviser on ministerial standards, who’d recently suffered a second nervous breakdown. With luck, this blog might trigger a third. Thus melt all snowflakes, he thought, and his phone rang again. This time, his caller got through.

“Anthony?”

For a moment, he was too busy savouring her voice to reply, enjoying the way the difficulties he’d been contemplating had just whispered into silence.

A silence she broke by repeating herself. “Anthony?”

“Sophie,” he said. “About time. What can you do for me?”

Shirley passed the cardboard punnet of chicken to Whelan.

“No, really, I—”

“He followed us.”

At a distance. Despite the careless frenzy of the attack on the San, this character must have noticed that payback came with truncheons, so was exercising caution, making sure they were alone before doubling back to confront them. Well, that or he’d not initially noticed they’d stopped here, but Shirley was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Best to treat an opponent with respect until it proved unnecessary.

Right now, the opponent-to-be was dismounting and pushing his visor up, and in the yellow forecourt light Shirley recognised one of the crew she’d faced down on the landing, the one whose comrade had gone through the window. Couldn’t remember his number but he’d been there, and must have slipped away in the following chaos. And here he was, disturbing her meal, the bastard, which would be cold before this was done. Which might be counting chickens, but hell: she’d seen this joker off once already, and he’d been in company then. And Shirley had a partner now, even if only to hold her dinner.

Breakfast?

Whatever.

She rose to her feet, ignoring whatever Whelan was about to say.

In the shop, the kid was pressing his face against the window, some sixth sense for aggravation pulling his attention away from his iPhone.

Shirley said to the biker, “You lost?”

He shook his head.

“I’m making a call,” Whelan said behind her.

He could do what he liked. Because there were drugs and there was dancing, sure, but what there mostly was was this, the prospect of action and the way it lit a spark inside her, which apparently was what she was supposed to be cured of. But that would be curing her of being Shirley. So Whelan could make a call, and reinforcements could arrive, but if anyone thought the interim was going to be spent shouting insults across a garage forecourt, they’d wandered into the wrong opera.

Just to make sure they were all reading from the same script, she said, “If you want to get back on your bike, I won’t stop you.”

The newcomer’s grin widened while, to make things interesting, his hand delved into his jeans pocket and came out wielding a knife.

Shirley looked down at her fist. Just like a slow horse, she thought. Bringing a spork to a knife fight.

Then it started.

There was an all-night café off Glasshouse Street, one John Bachelor was familiar with: he hadn’t been in years, but it came to mind when Sophie needed a potential meeting place at four thirty in the morning. And he was a milkman, not a handler, his experience of late-night rendezvous limited to movie images; he wasn’t wearing the right coat, there was no mist creeping along the pavements. But he did his best, making Sophie wait in the lee of a car-park wall while he performed lamplighter duty, assessing the café from the opposite pavement—just the one customer—trying to take a photograph with his eyes.

“It looks safe enough,” he admitted.

“I’m going to be fine.”

But what if you’re not? What happens to me then?

She’d made the arrangement on the world’s last payphone, and he hadn’t been allowed to listen but knew who she was meeting, and wasn’t happy about it. His own world had collided with the powerful in the past, one of the reasons its pillars were shaky. The last thing he needed was a similar collision now, just when he’d glimpsed a sunset ending. . .

Look at yourself, a voice in his head chided, but he knew better than to listen to that.

“What was the second call you made?” he asked.

Sophie was looking down the street. The pavements were quiet, illuminated by blocks of light spilling from uncluttered windows. She looked different from the woman he’d been cloistered with in the safe house, more confident, as if she’d shed a layer of nerves between there and here.

“Don’t worry about it,” she told him.

“I just want to be sure—”

“I wouldn’t hand you a job like this if you weren’t up to it.” For a moment, the old Sophie shone through. “Just wait. Please, John?”

He nodded, and she leaned forward and kissed his cheek, the contact leaving a scorch-mark. But Bachelor forbore from touching it, and simply watched as she made her way down the road, and stepped through the door into the café.

Whelan couldn’t tear his eyes away.

He’d called it in, and been assured of a swift response, but here they were, middle of the night, and Shirley Dander was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a knife-carrying thug. Who hadn’t removed his helmet, the effect of which—a shiny black head, glinting under the lights—was science fiction, as if this newcomer were an alien killing machine, recently uncoiled from a heap of pumps and hoses. He only hoped the creature wouldn’t notice that Dander’s weapon was a piece of plastic cutlery.

But Dander was weaving, dancing, footloose; making quick, dainty jabs that never connected—her body language suggesting that if one did, the biker would deliquesce on contact—before whipping the spork out of sight behind her back. He’d call it bravery, if it weren’t the stupidest thing he’d ever seen. And he remembered Shirley had been in the San, a sanctuary for trauma and addiction survivors, true, but also where the Service kept those of its soldiers who’d come mentally unglued.

“I’ve called the police.”

The boy from the garage had joined him.

“They said keep right away. Keep inside.”

Whelan nodded. It was the sensible thing to do.

He was hoping for blue lights, or better yet, the whump whump of that useful helicopter, because if help didn’t turn up soon he was going to have to get involved, and he couldn’t see that ending happily.

Don’t get paired with me. Not a good idea.

Whelan didn’t believe in jinxes.

But the fact that Shirley Dander did was keeping him on the sidelines for now.

Even without her Westminster power-suit, de Greer looked out of place. The café was the 1970s’ last foothold on the capital: yellow-tiled floor, Toulouse Lautrec posters, and two-seater tables graced with vases that looked fashioned by out-patients, each boasting a plastic sprig of ferns. To blend in, she’d have had to be wearing an afghan and tinted granny-specs rather than jeans and black jacket. The man behind the counter, his ponytail presumably a job requirement, kept throwing her the odd glance, but the only other customer was buried in an almost tangible fog of misery, staring into an abyss disguised as a tea cup.

So effectively she was alone, thought Sparrow, exactly as she’d said.

A bell above the door tinkled, as if he were walking into a sit com. Ignoring the counter, he took the spare seat opposite Sophie without uttering a greeting.

“No table service, pal,” said the man at the counter.

“Cup of tea,” said Sparrow, not taking his eyes off Sophie.

Who wasn’t wearing her glasses. Perhaps they were part of her costume: this is what a wonk looks like. His mind scanned through various discussions she’d taken part in—decisions she’d helped steer—and knew that once it became known she’d been planted by the Russian secret service, he’d become a joke. The party would survive, because it always did; the PM would remain unscathed, because he’d gaslit the electorate often enough to get away with anything, but he—Anthony Sparrow—might as well start wearing a jester’s motley and bells. Or a fucking ponytail, come to that.

He hadn’t mentioned this train of thought when they’d spoken on the phone.

The cup of tea was waiting, some of its contents carefully slopped over the rim. When it dawned on Sparrow that he was expected to fetch and pay for it he did so with a heavy sigh, but when he returned to the table Sophie said, “You mentioned a lobbying job.”

Game over, thought Sparrow.

Once they started negotiating, it was game over.

She raised her mug to her lips, and he mirrored her action before replying. It was something you learned to do when you wanted people to think you were on the same page. By the time they realised you were holding a different book, the ink was dry on the deal.

“Why did you drop from sight?”

“I wanted to worry you.”

“But now you’re back.”

“Like I said. You mentioned a lobbying job.”

“I can fix that.”

“And resident status.”

“Piece of cake.”

“And protection in the event that my, ah, former employers object to my new career.”

“Your former employers won’t want to embroil themselves in a diplomatic headbutting contest.”

“Diplomatic doesn’t worry me. But they have been known to adapt a more forthright approach.”

“Only towards those who’ve been a public irritation. This will be a private arrangement. You appear before Limitations this morning and categorically deny any rumours about your affiliation to the Russian secret service. That’s all I require.”

She half-smiled. “To make a rumour go away?”

“It will make Diana Taverner look desperate. Desperation and First Desk don’t mix. Once that’s minuted, she’s history. And given that it’s Limitations decides her successor, and I’ve enough pull to determine who appears on the shortlist, yes, I can make the rumour go away. Because I’ll be dictating the outcome of the inquiry.”

“If you’ve got that much pull, why do you need me at all?”

“We both know there are processes to be gone through.”

She nodded, thoughtfully. “Tell me more about this job.”

And there was the deal, done and dusted.

It wasn’t altogether that shaky, either, and might even work, with a following wind. But why take the risk? A car pulled up outside, and a man got out.

Sparrow said, “There are several options. We’ll go through them. Meanwhile, I’d feel happier if you were somewhere secure. And to that end, I’ve enlisted help.”

Sometimes, the timing just works.

The bell above the door jangled again, and Benito walked in.

It was a small but wicked knife. Any longer, and he’d have cut her by now.

She must have the magics tonight, or he’d have reached out and cut her anyway. But the Daft Punk look wasn’t doing him any favours, limiting his peripheral vision, blurring his colour control, and as long as she kept dancing he wouldn’t see that her own blade was a plastic toy. Besides, he knew what she was capable of. He was probably worried there was a window he hadn’t noticed yet, that he’d be going through if she got too close.

All the same, he didn’t seem to be tiring, whereas the evening’s adrenalin had scorched Shirley’s system, and the blow to her head—that sucker-thump with the dumbbell—had knocked some fight out of her. True, she had more fight in her to start with than the average ice hockey team, but it had been a long week. And this guy was psyched up.

It struck her again what a strangely amateur attack that mess at the San had been.

He made a lunge and she jumped back, but scored a kick to the knee before he’d regained balance. She might have had him then, but caution held her back: he had a helmet, his knife was sharp. Three inches was laughable in most situations, but on this particular date, anywhere he stuck it was going to cause grief. That thought made her snarl, which had been known to inspire consternation, but all she was getting from him, safe in his helmet, was her own reflection, and she was still looking at that when he lunged again, and she almost slipped. Recovering, she moved sideways, putting the pumps between them. And there was an idea: soak him with petrol, apply a match. Give him a movie-style ending.

Shit: the trouble she’d be in if that happened.

When he moved left, she mirrored with a shuffle to her right. This wasn’t something she wanted to play for long, because if he got the idea she was scared, that was the fight lost then and there . . . His crew at the San, they’d had no tactics. Or at best, a three-word plan: Smash it up. They’d not been expecting fightback, so what the fuck had they been doing, attacking a Service facility?

Unless they hadn’t known it was a Service facility.

So how come they’d been looking for her?

Before she could disentangle herself from that thought, he jumped through the gap between pumps and was almost on her, an arm’s reach away, and she leaped backwards, landing on her heels, ready to lunge left or right depending on which way he flickered—she could read him like a script—though he seemed focused now, staring at her hand, and the little plastic orange threat it wielded.

Idiot move.

Shirley turned and ran into the dark and silent car wash.

“On the other hand,” said Lamb, and paused to scratch his chest, a sandpaper moment. When his hand re-appeared, it was, to Diana’s surprise, not holding a cigarette. “De Greer, it turns out, is like you. She might be a backstabbing spider-minded vampire, but she’s not stupid enough to piss on her own sausages.”

“Is there a compliment in there?”

“Christ, I hope not.” Still on his back, he raised both knees, like a man preparing to perform an abdominal crunch. This, it turned out, was not what he was preparing to perform. Diana took a step backwards. “De Greer knows Sparrow’ll promise her anything not to go public with who she really is. But she also knows he tells the truth about as often as he gets his eyes tested, and she’s not about to hand her future to a man who’d sell your medical records to a tree surgeon.”

“You’re up to something.”

He said, “Wheel de Greer before Limitations, she’ll spike Sparrow’s guns, but she’ll also spill everything else she knows. Including about Rasnokov having an understudy.”

“And?”

“And Limitations leaks like a Catholic condom. So you’ll blow Rasnokov’s game, and in a month or two we can light candles for him. But keep her quiet, let him get away with it, and you’ve got a former Moscow First Desk in hiding from his ex-employers, who won’t bother changing the locks on their filing cabinets because they’ll think he’s dead. You’ll own him, body and soul, and all his secrets will still be current.”

“Own him? We don’t even know where he’ll end up.”

“We’ve got his understudy’s body. And we’re supposed to be an intelligence service. How difficult can it be?”

“Do you really want me to quantify that?”

“I want you to show some balls. And instead of fighting all your battles in your own backyard, try taking on some real enemies.” He’d finagled another cigarette from somewhere, and inserted it, unlit, between his lips. Having a cigarette in his mouth had never prevented Lamb from speaking. If it had, most of his lines would go unread. “And don’t worry about Sparrow. He’s just a Westminster chancer, and he’s grown used to the people he’s stabbed in the back pissing off to run a bank. Instead of rearranging his prospects with a shovel and some plastic sheeting.”

Light dawned, if not through the curtained window. “The Ultras,” Diana said.

“My my, Nash has been earning his pastry allowance. Yes, the Ultras. Seems Sparrow gets his kicks playing soldiers in the woods with the big boys. Which makes them prime candidates for the secret army he drafted to trash the San.”

“De Greer told you this?”

“She kept a black book on her erstwhile employer. Whose dubious contacts include a Soho charmer name of Benito. Have you got a light, by the way?”

“What is this, a suicide pact? I’m not striking a match in here.”

“Chicken.” He paddled about beneath his own bulk, and when his hands reappeared, one was holding a plastic lighter. “And Benito’s the sort of ally it’s best to avoid upsetting.”

He punctuated this with a click of his lighter. The effect would have been more impressive if he’d produced a flame.

“You think he’ll want payback for tonight’s farce.”

“Like I said, Sparrow’s used to those he tramples on muttering darkly and exiting stage left. I don’t think these boys’ll go quietly.” He clicked the lighter again, this time with success. Applying the flame to his cigarette, he said, “Neither does de Greer. And she’s the fortune-teller.”

She said, “So that’s why you let her go? On condition she throws Sparrow under a hooligan bus?”

“Any objection?”

“You’re assuming this Benito won’t decide that sticking with Sparrow’s a better bet than payback. He’s virtually running the country, after all.”

He said, “We’re talking football fans, Diana. Not the type to change sides.”

“What did you promise her?”

“That you’d let her walk away. Rasnokov’s not the only one who’d like a little distance between himself and the king of the Kremlin.”

“Christ. You’ve become an idealist in your old age, is that it? Help the joes get away, no matter whose joes they are.”

“Well, exit pursued by a bear,” said Lamb. “I seem to recall what that’s like.”

She thought for a while. “Does Bachelor know about this?”

“Too much information would only confuse him.”

“But he went with her?”

“Well I wasn’t keeping him here.” Lamb drained his glass. “I strongly suspect the man has a drinking problem.”

She thought for a while. “I haven’t forgotten,” she said, “that the only reason de Greer knows about Rasnokov’s scheme is that you let her stay in the room while you told me about it.”

His hand made a wavering motion, causing smoke to spiral and squirt towards the ceiling.

“And anyway, what happens if you’re both wrong?” asked Diana. “And Sparrow’s more persuasive than you give him credit for? It’s both our careers you’re gambling with.”

“Yeah,” said Lamb. “But only one of them’s worth anything.”

The car wash was in darkness, a low-slung chain blocking its entrance, and its three big blue brushes—two vertical; one horizontal—breathing out damp cold air. Shirley hurdled the chain and ran past a keypad at car-window height while something swiped at her back—fuck—and then a brush was offering protection; the pair crouched either side of it, making darting movements left and right, the biker’s blade whittling the air. When Shirley hurled her futile spork at him, it bounced off his helmet into the shadows.

Which were plentiful. While the structure had no walls—just a series of struts supporting a roof that was once clear plastic—it was thick with obstacles: the rails the brushes moved on, lengths of cable and hosepipe, a metal bucket padlocked to a standpipe. What Shirley needed was a weapon, ideally an assault rifle, though she’d have settled for the bucket, or that metal bar against the nearest upright, a yard away . . . She reached it only to find it welded in place, a discovery accompanied by another scorching sensation down her back, this one lighting up her whole body, and she screamed in outrage—chickenshit bastard!—and span and kicked, but he was out of range. Liquid ran down her spine. Keep moving, she warned herself, because the biker’s height and helmet were handicapping him, and the more he had to dodge and weave the more frustrated he’d get. Eyes fixed on him, she slipped round a metal box on a stand, its face a slanted panel with two spherical knobs: one red, the other green.

A Hollywood solution whispered in her ear.

Shirley dropped to a crouch and the biker moved forward, knife extended, between the two huge blue brushes. Behind his visor, she knew, he was grinning.

He’d stop grinning now.

“You’re all washed up, dickhead,” she said, slamming the green button with her palm.

Nothing happened.

She did it again.

Nothing happened.

Fuck.

He pushed his visor up. “Seriously?”

“. . . What?”

“You think hitting that button’ll make the car wash start?”

Well, yeah. That’s what she’d been hoping.

“It’s not even switched on.”

“I thought that’s what I was doing.”

He was shaking his head. “There’s a code.” Even with his accent, she could tell he thought this ridiculous. “You buy a ticket at the counter, it’s got a code stamped on it, you key it into the pad at the entrance. Then the washer starts.”

“So what are these buttons for?”

“Might be a manual override,” he conceded. “But it won’t work when the whole thing’s powered down.”

“You know a lot about car washes.”

“I work at a car wash, man.” He dropped his visor. “Idiot.”

“What do you mean, you work at a car wash?” Shirley said, but he was already rushing her again, with his small but wicked knife.

Just wait.

He’d spent most of his life just waiting, and here he was, doing it still.

A car had arrived and its occupant had joined Sophie and Sparrow in the café: a hulking sort, looking like he’d be comfortable whacking a cleaver into sides of meat all day long. Bachelor could picture himself, almost, deciding this was a sinister development; deciding to intervene . . . All it would take was true grit, a smidgin of star quality, and the ability to step out from the wings and act like a hero.

He shivered, and wished he had a hip flask. Wished, while he was at it, he had ten years’ less bad luck behind him, or ten years’ more self-belief. Or even just ten minutes’ grace in which to summon up the qualities he needed, now, while the café door opened and the two men came out, Sophie sandwiched between them. She didn’t so much as glance in his direction, and afterwards he convinced himself that this was the reason he remained in the shadows; nothing to do with that new arrival, whose watchfulness as the trio crossed the road suggested professionalism, or at least experience. No: Bachelor made no move because all was evidently going according to Sophie’s plan. Which meant his role now was to just wait.

Every extra knows the show’s about him.

Every stand-in knows she’s the star.

But John Bachelor . . . Bachelor, watching the car ferry Sophie de Greer down Glasshouse Street, understood that his marquee moment was never going to happen. The car turned at the junction, and London’s backdrop came into focus once more: its shop windows tired and garish, like a peep-show worker going off shift; its soundtrack a distant medley of overlapping noise. He was part of it, but just a small part, mostly unnoticed. His star didn’t shine as brightly as it might. Though when you thought about it, that was true of everyone.

The cardboard punnet had grown cold in Whelan’s hands, and, next to him, the boy from the garage was bouncing on his toes like an activated desk toy. Since Shirley and the biker had disappeared into the car wash they might as well have been transported to another planet. He’d heard the occasional crashing noise, plus a brief interlude of what sounded like dialogue—but he must have imagined that—and otherwise only the swooshing of tyres when a car passed.

The boy said, “I hope the police get here soon.”

Or a Service team, thought Whelan. It couldn’t be more than two minutes since this kicked off: even so his eyes kept flicking skywards, as if that helicopter might be approaching, its crew preparing to rappel earthwards, and deal with the situation. Somebody had to.

She’d been wielding a spork for Christ’s sake.

He turned to the boy. “Don’t you have a—?”

A what? A shotgun, a time machine? A cutlery set?

Then Shirley came rolling out of the car wash, her sweatshirt flapping loosely behind her, and a moment later the biker appeared too, his slow-motion swagger a statement all by itself: this fight was nearly over.

Sparrow was climbing into the back seat next to Sophie when Benito said, “What am I, an Uber?”

It took him a moment to get what was meant.

“I’d sooner be in the front anyway,” Sophie said, climbing out and into the passenger seat. That was okay. It made no difference.

“Turns out she’s not in Dorset after all,” he’d told Benito on the phone, after Sophie had made contact.

“Where most of my crew went,” Benito said. His accent wasn’t that thick, considering, but he was the most Italian Italian Sparrow had come across: the five o’clock shadow, the curly hair, the hint of volatility beneath a handsome, battered surface. The shoes. Other men might have felt themselves in the shade anywhere near him, but Sparrow felt only that two-way connectivity alphas feel.

“I was fed bad information.”

“The . . . opposition they ran into. This wasn’t a rival team.”

“No.”

“They were soldiers. Armed.”

“No one was killed.”

“But there were injuries.”

There were always injuries. Everyone knew that.

“Alessandro—”

“Benito.”

“Benito, anyone who got hurt will have another set of scars to show off. Or are you telling me your crew wet their pants?”

“They’ve been arrested. Most of them. Some got away.”

“They’ll be charged with affray.” He had no idea what they’d be charged with. “A night in the cells, a fine. Small price for a battleground memory.”

“And deportation orders all round. That’s a bigger price.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“You sound very sure.”

“I’m in a position to deliver on promises.”

There was another pause before Benito said, “And that’s why you rang, Mr. Sparrow? To assure me that you are able to clean up tonight’s mess?”

“That and . . . something else.”

Replaying the conversation in his head, Sparrow congratulated himself on how he’d explained to Benito what he needed without ever coming within shouting distance of describing how that might be achieved.

“What you’re asking, it’s quite . . . serious.”

“Yes and no. About as serious as what happened to your predecessor, Benito. Who was also called Benito, am I right? When he wasn’t being called Rico Lombardi.”

And Benito was silent again.

“‘Returned to Lazio,’ wasn’t that the story? Rico returned to Lazio. Which is marginally more convincing than ‘went to live on a farm,’ but amounts to the same thing. Stop me if your English isn’t up to this.”

Benito said, “Rico is happy and well. I spoke to him just last week.”

“You must put me in touch with your network provider. Mine have trouble reaching Norwich, let alone the afterlife.”

“You are a funny man, Mr. Sparrow.”

“And a talkative one. Maybe, when I’m securing visa extensions for your associates, I’ll ask them what they think happened to Rico. We can exchange opinions on the topic. I’m sure they’ll get back to you if there’s any confusion.”

Benito said, “Politics, politicians. And people think we football supporters are the extremists.”

“Football’s your excuse for doing the things you do, Benito. And politics is mine.”

Maybe, one day, there’d be occasion for a blog on that topic Sparrow thought now, as the car came within sight of the Thames, which flowed just as strongly—just as surely—in the dark as in the light. He looked at de Greer, who was also staring through the window at the water, but probably seeing something different. No one looks at the same river twice, he remembered reading somewhere. Or maybe it was drowns—no one drowns in the same river twice? Yeah. That sounded right. Any way you looked at it, you only drown once.

The paramedic shook his head.

Whelan couldn’t blame him.

Even with the gore on her sweatshirt, Shirley looked at peace, and might have been sleeping. Whelan couldn’t grasp the suddenness of the switch: from sixty to zero in the time it took to blow out a match. The ambulance’s blue light was still strobing, its relentless throb draining colour from them all: the paramedic himself, Whelan, the boy from the garage. The biker was long gone. Only in Shirley’s resting features did the looping splashes add life, probably because Shirley’s face alone lacked it right then, the others being in various states of visible emotion: shock, bewilderment, and a kind of resigned irritation.

This was the paramedic. He said, “You let her eat?”

Whelan could have taken issue. Even on their relatively brief acquaintance, he was pretty certain that letting Shirley Dander do anything wasn’t how those things got done. You just watched her do whatever she’d set her mind on. That or listen to her talk about it.

Besides: Eat? She’d spilled more than she’d swallowed. It was as well her sweatshirt was ruined anyway, because that barbecue sauce wasn’t coming out.

Without opening her eyes, Shirley said, “I was hungry.”

“You’re not supposed to eat,” the paramedic grumbled. “In case you need an operation.”

“Stitches.”

“You’re still not—”

“That was good, what you did,” Shirley said, this time to Whelan. “He was all washed up,” she added, a wistful note to her voice for some reason.

Whelan nodded. He could have done with a lie down himself, the previous minutes having been eventful, if not entirely as planned—when he’d trained the hose on the biker, he’d had visions of a water-cannon pinning him to a wall. The actual result was a pissed off biker, sopping wet but upright, and things might have got ugly if flashing blue lights hadn’t appeared down the road. As it was, the ambulance, still far enough away to be taken for police, encouraged departure: the biker, shinier now wet, had resembled a monstrous insect as he’d climbed onto his machine and gunned the motor, Whelan still hosing him, having raised his trajectory to ensure contact, which decreased the stream’s effectiveness but maximised its indignity. The boy was performing a rah-rah dance beside him, shouting “Aim for the wheels!,” though Whelan remained happy to mimic pissing. In its own way this was even more out of character than jumping onto a moving vehicle, but it had been a long night.

“I’d worn him out,” Shirley said, opening her eyes.

“Yes.”

“I’d have kicked his helmet clean off his shoulders.”

“I could tell.”

“With his head still in it.”

The paramedic was maintaining his disappointed outlook. “You shouldn’t eat chicken if you need medical treatment.”

“Is that an actual law?” Shirley asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Specific to chicken?”

Speaking of actual law, there was a police car approaching, and also a black SUV, probably one of those originally dispatched to the San. Without thinking about it Whelan reached out a hand, and Shirley took it and pulled herself to her feet, leaving the punnet where it lay. The paramedic started saying something about not moving when you were injured, advice probably worth listening to, though neither were. The last hour had either contracted or expanded, whichever was the right way of indicating that it had happened in its own time zone, while other events taking place elsewhere had moved at their own pace, leaving them stranded in a moment of their own. For as long as it lasted, it seemed they were partners; and if it were already beginning to end, well, only diamonds are forever.

“Where’s my chocolate?” asked Shirley.

From the back seat, Sparrow studied de Greer. She still thought she was in for a lobbying job, a whole new life, and in normal circumstances he’d enjoy bursting her bubble, but the last thing anyone needed was an hysterical woman in a moving car.

As if reading his thoughts, she looked over her shoulder. “Where are we going?”

“Like I said, somewhere safe. Until any difficulties have been smoothed away.”

“And you’re coming too?”

“Me? No. But Benito will take care of you, so no worries on that score.”

“Where, exactly?”

Benito said, “I can’t tell you that. More secure. You understand.”

If she didn’t, she decided not to make an issue of it.

They were heading towards Elephant and Castle. Much further, and they’d be outside Sparrow’s comfort zone. He said: “Anywhere along here’s fine,” despite it being a barely peopled road at whatever time it was now—he checked. Four fifty. Anyone abroad would be poorly paid, if not actively indigent. London was hostile territory, depending on the hour and the post code. But he could take care of himself, as he’d actively demonstrated in both woodland and boardroom. Anyone accosting him—or demanding a meeting—would be dealt with in short order.

Benito said, “The corner after this one.”

“Why not this one?”

The rolling of an Italian’s shoulders can be multilingual. “Tube station.”

I’m not catching a fucking tube.

“Are they even running yet?”

De Greer said, “You won’t have long to wait.”

No longer than it takes an Uber to show. Through his window, the shopfronts, the buildings, were decelarating. He glimpsed a sleeper in a doorway, and posters boasting happy-meals, cut-price getaways, cash prizes. Two men loitered by the locked-up station entrance, and both stopped smoking at the same moment, flicking their cigarette ends in opposite directions, as if aspiring to the condition of a firework. Benito cruised to a halt.

Sparrow leaned forward, putting his head between de Greer’s and Benito’s. “You’re going to be comfortable,” he told her.

“Thanks,” she said. “Will I see you soon?”

He opened his door. “. . . No.”

“Well,” de Greer said. “You got that right.”

Before he could climb out, one of the men climbed in, forcing Sparrow into the middle of the seat.

“What the fuck? . . .”

The other man had walked round, and was getting in the other side.

De Greer said to Benito, “Thank you.” Then to Sparrow: “I was remembering something you said once. About how the true hero of Psycho was the psycho. Because he just carried on being a psycho.”

“. . . What are you on about?”

“I’ll leave you to think about it. Bye.”

Her door closed with a definitive clunk.

The men hemming Sparrow in had a familiar feel; thick legs, cable-tense arms, the kind of hard-bodied trunks you might find in a wood. Neither spoke, but sat with their big shoulders forcing him into a supplicant’s cringe, staring ahead at a road that was on the move again.

“Alessandro—”

“Benito.”

“Benito, am I missing something?”

“What makes you ask that, Mr. Sparrow?”

“Because I’m still in the car. And de Greer isn’t.”

“Right.” He changed lanes, to overtake a night bus. “An interesting woman, Dr. de Greer. We had a most enjoyable conversation.”

“. . . When?”

“Shortly before you called me. It was strange, she knew exactly how our conversation would go. They have a name, don’t they? People who can predict outcomes?”

“Benito—”

A heavy hand on his shoulder discouraged further protest.

“She knew the things you’d promise, and the threats you’d make,” Benito continued. Traffic was gathering and the streetlights had grown weary, their glow a pallid offering that seemed to drop to the ground rather than reach into the dark. “And what she wanted to know was, how about if all your promises, about dropped charges and secure visas, could be fulfilled by someone else. She mentioned Regent’s Park?”

“She was lying, Benito. She can’t deliver on any of that. Only I can.”

“I’m not sure. She was very convincing. She—”

“Of course she was convincing! That’s her job!”

“She made a reasonable point. She said, why trust you, when you’ve already had my team run into what some people might think was a trap, when I could trust her instead? I thought that was an interesting viewpoint.”

“She’s nobody. She’s a spy. She’ll be arrested by morning, none of her promises mean anything!”

“So you know what I did? I followed her advice and asked my crew what they thought about it.”

“Let me out. We’ll forget this ever happened.”

“Of course, not many of my crew were available, on account of last night’s activities. But the Stefanos here—they’re both called Stefano. I hope that’s not confusing for you?”

“Stop the car!”

“Because arguably, it’s simpler. Anyway, the Stefanos here didn’t join in last night’s fun on account of a previous engagement. Which is lucky for me and also for you, because—”

“Stop the car!”

“Please,” said Benito.

One of the Stefanos clamped a hand round Sparrow’s mouth, while the other brought a hammerlike fist down on his testicles. This combination of events occupied Sparrow for a while, but Benito was considerate enough to give him some minutes before continuing.

“As I was saying. This is lucky for both of us. For me, because I like my crew to have a part in the decision-making process.”

Sparrow still couldn’t speak.

“And for you because I know how much you enjoy the fun and games we have in the woods.”

“Where are you taking me?” Sparrow managed to say.

“What was that expression you used? ‘Going to live on a farm’?”

He couldn’t be serious.

“In any case, it’s nowhere you haven’t been before.”

Stefano tightened his grip on Sparrow’s shoulder, in what might have been a gesture of reassurance and support.

But might not.

The sun was coming up before they reached the woods. It silvered the branches like a dusting of snow, or a tinkling of bells, or a promise kept.

In the days to come, news will find its way to Slough House from various corners of the wider world, one a continent away. There has been a boating accident on the Barents Sea, four friends on a fishing trip having come unstuck in wild weather, and rumours are beginning to circulate that Vassily Rasnokov, Moscow’s First Desk, was involved. No body has been recovered, but that’s not an uncommon outcome in such circumstances: the wind whips up the waves, and the water reveals its depths, and what happens in the gap between can remain forever an undisclosed secret. And if other possibilities exist—that, for example, Vassily has pulled off a vanishing act, the better to slip into anonymous retirement—that’s a problem for his own Service to ponder, and is presumably unconnected with the recent off-the-books purchase by Regent’s Park of an undistinguished flat on the Holloway Road. Here, a small but operationally experienced team has assembled; its codename Rosebud; its remit, to discover the identity of the man who burned to death in a dosshouse near the Westway, and to wait by the open door of his vacant life, to see who, if anyone, steps through it. It’s a job requiring a humdrum dedication to detail, a million miles removed from high-tech movie-spookery, yet nor is it the daily trudge that the minions of Slough House endure. Because for Rosebud, a positive result to their investigation might lead them into the realms of gold, whereas for the slow horses, the end result of unvarying labour tends to be reams of dross, and no matter how much shit they shovel, they always remain in the stables.

On a more prosaic level, the Extraordinary Meeting of the Limitations Committee called to inquire into Diana Taverner’s suitability as First Desk is an unexpectedly meek affair, there being no one to present a prosecution case. Mention is made of whispers on Westminster Corridors—that old chimera Waterproof has been bandied about—but since the supposed victim of the Park’s machinations, one Sophie de Greer, makes a brief online appearance apologising for her failure to follow the procedure for taking sick leave, such mention is swiftly dismissed as groundless gossip. Following a short address by Taverner herself, in which she recommends that any future such sessions be preceded by the Park’s own assessment of the evidence, the Committee, under the careful stewardship of Oliver Nash, bemoans the unexplained absence of the meeting’s instigator, one Anthony Sparrow, before declaring the proceedings, in effect, a waste of time. The company deconvenes, the firing squad remains unassembled, and when Diana re-enters the hub that morning, it is to a standing ovation from supporters and detractors alike, who can at least find common ground in their appreciation of a skilled operator. Diana herself doesn’t mind why anyone applauds, so long as they do so on their feet. Not that she is unaware of how differently things might have gone. “For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble,” she murmurs in passing, but only Josie hears, and, since she isn’t sure she’s meant to, that young woman makes no reply. For the rest of that day, Diana fulfils promises made on her behalf by Jackson Lamb: resettlement arrangements for Sophie de Greer; the ironing out of administrative wrinkles for the multifarious friends of Alessandro Botigliani; and while this is small enough recompense for how things have turned out, finds such busywork irksome all the same.

As to Sparrow’s whereabouts, these will not become clear for another day or two, but at the moment of Diana’s triumph he is cowering under a hastily assembled pyramid of earth and leaves, simultaneously straining to hear every creak and whistle in the surrounding wood—the same wood in which he made first contact with Benito, an encounter he now quite seriously regrets—and striving to deny that he’s hearing anything at all, a reframing of the narrative which for some reason is less effective than usual. On one level he is certain that those hunting him down, after allowing him a sporting four minutes’ start, intend no more than to scare and humiliate him, while on another he is confident that they will beat him to a soup with sticks and stones. He is correct about one of these outcomes, but it will be some while before he reaches the stage of not caring which it is, so long as it happens without further delay.

Also involved in assembling piles of leaves is Claude Whelan, who is doing a little tidying in the garden—nothing complicated, nothing ambitious; a man’s got to know his limitations—while he thinks back over his recall to arms, in particular dwelling on the surprising discovery that the things he’d have expected to be good at, such as ferreting out the whereabouts of Sophie de Greer, he failed to achieve, while the moments of heroism he has always quite genuinely thought beyond him proved to be his finest, well, not hour. But minutes. He spent some minutes being heroic. And when the dust has settled, he decides, and after he’s been debriefed by Oliver Nash—a process whose conclusion will leave one of the two in possession of more information than when it started—he might contact Shirley Dander, who, though never having been Sophie de Greer, and indeed having no clue as to why anyone might think otherwise, proved an interesting companion: a Robin to his Batman, say. Not that he has thoughts of anything untoward—no, he currently believes that, until Claire has concluded her negotiations with God, and decided whether or not she is coming home, his own behaviour will remain irreproachable on that front; besides, Shirley has neither the shape nor appearance that he generally finds beguiling—but still, there was a moment when she took leave of him, climbing out of the car while a London sunrise struggled to be born, during which he felt they’d made a connection he’d seldom found anywhere else. He suspects she felt this too. “So long,” she’d said to him, “partner.” Then she was gone. He wonders if she’s thinking about him now.

She isn’t, and not only because Catherine has just stepped into her office, the look on her face an unwelcoming welcome. Shirley is about to be reminded that she has no business being in Slough House today; she’s so certain of this that it’s barely worth Catherine opening her mouth to speak.

“You’re supposed to be at the San.”

“Yeah, there was a thing happened? I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

“It’s still operational. And you’ve not been discharged.”

It figures, thinks Shirley, that Catherine has already established this fact. Catherine was probably on the phone to the San before dawn, checking on Shirley’s whereabouts; adding unscheduled departure to her tally of crimes and misdemeanours, and waiting to pounce as soon as Shirley reappeared.

“What did you imagine you were doing?” Catherine goes on. “Taking on what sounds like a battalion of thugs?”

At a loss for an accurate answer, Shirley says, “Yeah, it’s what Thelma and Louise would have done.”

“Well, I’ve no idea who those people are. But if Thelma and Louise drove off a cliff, would you do that too?”

Shirley doesn’t know where to start.

“Don’t you understand? I’m worried about you.”

“I’m—”

And Shirley is about to say what she always says, I’m fine, but instead remembers the feelings she had on waking, could it be only yesterday? She’s not fine; she just hasn’t hit the ground yet. And she doesn’t want to tell Catherine this, but suspects that Catherine knows; suspects, in fact, that Catherine has experienced something similar in her long-ago past.

Catherine is now standing in front of Shirley’s desk. “I don’t want you in danger, can you not get your head round that? We’ve had too much grief already. People keep getting hurt. People keep dying. We have to look out for one another.”

“You’ve already told me that.”

Catherine, who doesn’t remember having done so, looks puzzled, but decides not to pursue it. “You need to go back. Today. While everything’s still a confused mess, and you’ll be able to get away with it.”

“Why do you care?”

That one, Catherine finds easier. “What’s the alternative?” she asks, and now it’s Shirley’s turn to be puzzled, while out in the corridor Lech Wicinski is leaving another voicemail.

It’s John Bachelor whom Lech is trying to contact. Lech has only the haziest notion of what’s been going on these past twenty-four hours, but he’s aware that the safe house is no longer occupied: he called in on his way to work that morning—a lengthy detour, justified on the ground that he had his fingertips, at least, on a live operation—but it was deserted. Recalling the crusty array of takeaway cartons, sticky glasses, and the furry atmosphere that smoking leaves, he at least has the satisfaction of knowing who has been in occupation, but since he is also aware that Lamb’s practice is to keep his horses in the dark unless he has absolute reason not to, this knowledge is accompanied by the depressing awareness that whatever happened, he is unlikely to be made privy to the details. Unless Bachelor can share these with him, but so far, all Bachelor has shared is frequent half-minutes or so of voicemail emptiness, into which Lech has poured requests for contact.

He will keep trying Bachelor, on and off, for the next few days, with the same result, but will finally receive a late-night return call, which will pull him from a rare pleasant dream. But Bachelor, aside from making no apology, will make no sense, and simply ramble about loss and beauty and similar abstracts until Lech, not without regret, will disconnect. He already knows about loss and beauty, and what little Bachelor might teach him is not worth broken sleep. But sleep won’t come again, and a little later Lech will be walking London’s pavements until dawn, maskless but scarred as a phantom, attempting to outwalk his thoughts. All that lies in the near future; in the immediate present Lech dawdles back to his desk, whose nearby window, awaiting a glazier, is still shrouded with cardboard, and as he sits hears a murmur of conversation from upstairs, where Louisa has joined Ashley, to clarify a detail or two:

“So Lamb sliced an atomic chili into your nuts and berries.”

“Yep.”

“And you didn’t notice.”

“Nope.”

“Just as well Roddy ate some first, then.”

“It was,” says Ash. “Imagine. It could have been me whose mouth was vulcanised.”

But she appears reasonably sanguine, as if this had never been a likely prospect.

“Yes,” says Louisa, “imagine. But instead it was Roddy. Meaning he was thrashing about on the floor like a dying trout while you were on the phone to Lamb, pretending it was you who’d figured out Rasnokov’s firetrap.”

“Well,” says Ash. “I’d have called Taverner, but it wasn’t clear she was still in the picture.”

“Lamb won’t give you credit for delivering information.”

“No. But he might give me credit for stealing Ho’s work.”

Louisa nods thoughtfully, remembering what she’d thought about Ash: that her anger was going to have to find an outlet, or the woman would explode. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “Roddy’s a knob.”

“But he’s your knob?”

“Roddy is not my knob, no. In fact, let’s pretend you never said that. Roddy’s a knob, but you need to be careful about fucking him over. Lech’s still getting calls from his service providers, asking why he’s cancelled his payments.”

“Yeah, but Lech didn’t fix Roddy up with a date.”

Because Ash has spoken to Leia Six this morning; less out of a need to placate Roddy than to test her own powers of persuasion.

“A date? He can barely talk.”

“This is Roddy. Preventing him from talking is like giving him a makeover.”

Still, both will be somewhat surprised when Roddy, as yet unable to speak, has a reasonably successful first date with Leia Six; and more so when, still unable to speak, he has a reasonably successful second. But by the third date his mouth will be more or less recovered, and he will turn up at Slough House the following morning with a black eye.

“So who knows?” Ash continues. “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“You think so?”

“Nope.”

“Welcome to Slough House,” says Louisa, getting to her feet. “Oh, one other thing? You want to shift your stuff back where it was. River’ll be needing his desk.”

“He’s coming back?”

“Better believe it,” Louisa says.

She leaves, not pausing to look up the remaining flight towards Lamb’s room, from which no noise issues. But he is there, one of his hands holding a cigarette, the other nursing a shot glass. The blind on his window is down, and the lamp by his desk, balanced on a pile of yellowing phone directories, casts the room’s only light, his cigarette tip apart. And in this self-imposed gloom, he is thinking, if he is thinking at all, of Vassily Rasnokov, who is either floating on a cold sea or preparing to slip into a life he’s been building for years; a life warmed up for him by a now-defunct scarecrow, whose body lies unclaimed in a vault somewhere in Greater London. Eyes closed, cigarette shedding its chrysalis of ash even as a smoky butterfly rises to the ceiling, Lamb barely breathes as he contemplates the future that awaits one who’s walked away from the spy trade: a carrel in a European library, say, or a stool on a beach bar under a Bahamian sun. Or a life of unrelieved ordinariness, in which the papertrails established by a now-dead understudy—the water bills and council tax debits, the credit cards and gym memberships, the electronic footprints, the economic handholds; each of them locking a life into place the way pegs hold down a tent—lead remorselessly to their only possible destination: in the end, whatever role you choose, you reach the end of the drama; the paperwork is shuffled into binbags, and the tent blows away. But the triumph lies in making the choice, rather than accepting the part you’re given. Lamb’s cigarette glows like a candle, briefly, and if his eyelids flicker, and his gaze appears fixed on the drab painting of a bridge which is his office’s sole decoration, that’s likely no more than chance; just as, if his lips move beneath their filtered burden, and their mumble sounds like Rosebud, he’s assuredly thinking of that team on the Holloway Road. But perhaps, in fact, he mumbles nothing at all, and his exit line remains unspoken. It’s possible the trembling of his lips is a quiet belch. Well, nobody’s perfect.

From the street below, a snatch of what might be music drifts upwards, though is more likely the accidental percussion of daily life: heel on pavement, tyre on a loose drain lid. Whatever it is, this theme penetrates Slough House for a moment, probably through that cardboard-patched window, and dances round in the dust-deckled air, attempting to get a party going. But this enterprise is doomed from the start, and lasts no longer than it takes a sudden draught to slam a door, after which the building—its creaky stairs and broken skirting boards—its rackety furniture and stained ceilings—its peeling paper and plasterwork—its bewildered wiring, its confused pipes—its ups and downs and highs and lows and all its debts and credits—slumps into its usual stupor, as the morning’s wax surrenders to the afternoon’s wane. And if, outside, the day carries on with its usual background business, inside it pauses for a drawn-out beat, and then drops like a curtain.