Wimbledon Common, London
THE SERVICE CAR had deposited Angela Scott at the end of her street, and she was back in her Wimbledon flat by late morning. It had already been searched. The Service had made no secret about that, they just weren’t telling her what, if anything, they had found. Suspended on full pay, pending the investigation, she was under strict instructions to speak to no one about her employment situation. If anyone asked what she was doing at home at that time on a weekday she was to say she was suffering from a mild cold. And what exactly, she wondered, as she looked around her silent kitchen, was she going to do now? Being at home during working hours was utterly alien to her, apart from those brief, unhappy months of lockdown during the pandemic. No, she shook her head, this wouldn’t do. She needed to get out and clear her head.
Locking the front door behind her, she walked purposefully up Wimbledon Hill Road, past her favourite Japanese restaurant, along the quaint, curved high street of Wimbledon Village, where she couldn’t afford to live, and out onto the open space of the common. She needed to make sense of what had just happened. A serious lapse of digital security. A breach in the Service’s firewalls that had been traced back to her phone. OK, that was bad, she’d be the first to admit it. But what had she actually done wrong? No one had explained that to her. They had sent her home, like a disruptive schoolchild, banished from the community she had served for more than two decades. There were no charges – yet – but those grim-faced men from Security Section had made it abundantly clear: she was under suspicion of committing ‘digital negligence’, of allowing a hostile state to insert a ‘worm’ into the system.
She stopped by the pond and sat down on an empty bench. A light breeze was sending ripples across the dark surface of the water and ruffling the feathers of the two swans that paddled up to take a look at her. For a moment, she envied their innocence.
‘You’re not being investigated by Security Section, are you?’ she found herself saying to them, mouthing the words inside her head. ‘You’re not under suspicion of committing a gross error of negligence that’s about to cost you your whole career. No, you’re doing just fine. Well, aren’t you the lucky ones?’ Seeing she had nothing to offer them, the swans soon lost interest in the woman on the bench and went on their serene way.
The few people out and about on Wimbledon Common this lunchtime all seemed to have dogs, calling after them in commanding, strident voices, and she almost wished she had one of her own to take her mind off other things. But, no, Angela was a cat person, always had been, always would be. Her own animal, Faustus, was twelve years old now and spent most of his time asleep on his favourite cushion or watching her, eyes half closed and barely moving.
She leant forward on the bench, put her head between her hands and closed her eyes. How, in God’s name, could this have happened? She had lost count of the number of in-house digital safety courses she had attended – the Service was understandably obsessive when it came to this – so how could she have been so careless? Then she sat up, eyes wide and alert. Where would this leave Luke and Jenny? Still out in the field, trying desperately to track down the collector, Hannah Slade. With her phone taken from her, she had no means of contacting them. Now, she supposed, Luke’s incoming calls would go straight to the duty officer at Central Collection Point where they’d be logged, transcribed and passed to someone else when it should be her, Angela, who was shepherding them through this mission.
Angela still had no idea, as she stood up and began to walk wearily back to her flat, that her phone had sent Luke and Jenny right into the path of danger.