It had started earlier that week: Lech Wicinski and John Bachelor meeting for a drink in the upstairs bar at The Chandos on St. Martin’s Lane; Lech late, because he didn’t want to come; Bachelor early, having nowhere else to be. These circumstances combined to allow Bachelor to be two drinks up, or down, by the time Lech arrived to pay for his third. The older man was drinking G&T, and had some patter prepared about how more thought went into the T than the G, but Lech wasn’t listening. He was worried Bachelor was going to ask if he could move in—“just for a day or two, until I get a new place sorted.” He’d been guilt-tripped before into letting Bachelor sleep on the sofa, which was how come Bachelor had ended up looking after Lech while he sweated out the virus, a circumstance pretty certain to be mentioned when the favour was asked. So Lech would have to say yes, and a few days would turn into a fortnight, and he’d end up growing old in the company of John Bachelor, spending his evenings in dismal pubs, his weekends counting loose change, his Christmases watching The Great Escape. Simplest thing would be to let Bachelor finish framing his request, then just leave his door keys on the table and take a header through the window. Probably why Bachelor had chosen the upstairs bar. This sort of thing must happen to him a lot.

“Fever Tree, anyway.” Bachelor was winding down. “Wouldn’t have thought that a selling point these days.”

Lech dragged himself into the conversation, almost. “I think it’s . . . Never mind.”

“How are you?”

“Fine, John. Just fine.”

“No, uh, relapses, nothing like that?”

“Like I said. Fine.”

Though the truth was, being with Bachelor tended to bring the worst of it back; not so much the painful breathing—that sensation of being slowly vacuum-packed—as the fear that this was how it would all end: in a rented flat, furnished to nobody’s liking; his companion a broken-down spook whose career made Lech’s own look like a Martini advert. Would his life unfold before his eyes? The choice between death and reliving Slough House was a little close to call. And then he was past the point of deliberation, and in his fevered dreams Slough House figured largely, its rooms, its manky staircase, all swollen out of proportion, as if he were wandering through the internal organs of some giant, diseased beast. Lech had never known whether to trust the feeling of having a recurring dream, whether you actually slipped in and out of the same narrative, or whether it was one of the brain’s little tricks; that hoary old contrivance déjà vu endowing never-before encountered scenes with the artificial familiarity of a shopping centre or a Vin Diesel movie. But this time, he was sure, his dream-state had been the same each time, as if every trip to a waking surface had left the gates open behind him. He’d find himself in bed, his head on a pillow, a glass tipped to his lips—Drink this—and for a moment he’d be here in the world. And then he’d sink back to those engorged offices with their frightening colour scheme. From overhead came thumping, as if a trapped lizard were beating its huge tail against a boulder. A summons, Lech knew, but not one he wanted to answer.

Long story short, after a while he got better.

The things that didn’t kill you made you stronger, apparently, though that was a lie; truth was, too many things left you still alive but broken and disturbed, and it was better not to experience them. But he’d experienced this. And what he’d wondered since was how bad he’d have had to become before Bachelor sought medical help, or would the older man have just kept tipping water into him until he stopped swallowing, then hunkered down in the flat until bailiffs turned up? He knew, from drunken conversations, that something similar had happened before. But Lech wasn’t proud of such thoughts; even less so when he recalled the look on Bachelor’s face when he’d said I think I’ve got it. Instead of fear or alarm, he’d read there only concern.

So anyway. All of that, and now here they were, much later, and he was worried Bachelor was going to put the arm on him again: wanting not money but space, time, his company. Wanting to intrude on Lech’s solitude, which was all Lech had left that he considered valuable. Even this small amount of it, an hour or so after the working day, he’d sooner close his fist around and keep to himself.

But Bachelor was talking. “I’m fine too. In case you were wondering.”

“Oh, yeah. Glad to hear it. Sorry, John.”

“You’re worried I’m going to ask if I can move back in, aren’t you?”

“I’m what?”

“Worried I’ll ask to move in. Into your flat.”

Lech said, “Look, the thing is—”

“Yeah yeah, it’s okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Forget about it.” He put a hand on the younger man’s arm. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

Later, leaving the pub, Lech had walked home, all four miles or whatever it was: the streets weren’t fully dark, and it hardly counted as one of his insomniac rambles, but it wore him out enough that he had no trouble falling instantly asleep when he hit the pillow. But he was awake again two hours later, Bachelor’s story climbing round his head. It was absurd, of course, and would lead nowhere—obviously—but at least the older man hadn’t asked him the favour he’d been dreading. There was that memory, too, of Bachelor’s concern when he, Lech, had been locked in Covid’s monstrous offices.

He was remembering a line his father had enjoyed quoting—everyone is more or less of Polish origin. It seemed to fit Bachelor. Another reason for Lech not turning his back.

Which was why, the following afternoon, he’d wandered from the office he shared with Roddy Ho to talk with Louisa Guy, whose room was on the floor above, its view ever so slightly better than his. Same street, same Barbican: tarmac and brickwork and concrete. But a little higher up.

He said, “You busy?”

She was busy like a slow horse: plenty to do, none of it mattering, all of it skull-numbing dross. More specifically, she’d reached T on her library project. Library project—it sounded like something a primary school might inflict on its defenceless charges. The reality was worse. Way back when, round about the Middle Ages, Lamb had had one of his pet ideas; the kind of brainwave which doubtless struck somewhere between the fourth and fifth drink, the second and third vindaloo. Why not make Louisa’s life a screaming, maddening hell? Actually that was less an idea, more a mission statement; what the actual idea was was, why didn’t Louisa spend the rest of her life drowning in library-loan statistics? Because there were books out there which banged a certain kind of drum, and Lamb couldn’t help wondering who, if anyone, was marching. That was how he’d put it: I can’t help wondering. Help wondering? He could barely keep a straight fucking face. Once he’d realised every town in the UK had its own library, or used to, he’d have ordered a fifth or sixth drink, a third or fourth vindaloo. Islam: A call to arms. The blood-dimmed tide. He didn’t even have to make these titles up. All he had to do was get Louisa to check Public Lending Right statistics for the past few decades, and match the borrower names that came up against various red-flag lists the Service collated. Thereby devising a whole new list.

“And I hate lists,” he’d beamed.

“This might be a long one.”

“Maybe devise a points system,” he suggested. “You know. Bonus marks if they’re already on the hot map. Double that if they have a . . . dodgy name.”

“Dodgy name?”

“I’ve always thought ‘Gary’ a bit suspect.”

So far she’d taken special notice of those who’d borrowed a supposedly inflammatory text without ever, as far as records showed, returning it. Which meant she was flagging with budding-terrorist status those who’d committed the fearsome crime of losing a library book. But it was keeping the national security candle alight, or at least keeping herself in a job. She was aware that these weren’t the same thing exactly.

To Lech, she said, “Yeah, no. Same old usual. Why?”

“I heard something odd last night.”

“How odd?”

He glanced around. “We have a scale?”

“Just so long as it doesn’t involve library books.”

“You know John Bachelor?”

She knew the name. “He’s been staying with you, right?”

“He did. A while back.”

“An old family friend?”

“We confused ourselves into thinking so. I met him at a wedding, so somebody’s family was involved. Then we discovered we both worked for the Service.”

Lech still at the Park then, and Bachelor a milkman, whose round covered the old, the infirm, the clapped-out; those who’d once fought the Cold War and now were just fighting the cold. Bachelor made sure their heating bills were paid, that there was food in their fridges, all the while growing steadily worse at managing any such thing for himself, his misfortunes reading like instructions for a midlife crisis: divorce; his working hours cut; his savings lost to bad investments. So, Lech said, he’d been adrift for a couple of years, subletting rooms when he could, sleeping in his car when he had to, sofa-surfing until he ran out of friends; all the while hanging onto his job by cracked and bleeding fingernails. . . The point where this was going to be more boring than the job in front of her was approaching fast. “And what’s he done?” she said.

“He saw someone he recognised.”

Louisa said, “I really hope there’s more to this story than that. Because, you know, I could be reading lists of names.”

“Before Bachelor was a milkman,” Lech said, “long before, he worked on the London desk, and carried bags for David Cartwright. Once, he carried them all the way to Bonn.”

“Bit of a stretch from London.”

“Are you telling this or am I?”

“Sorry.”

What had happened was, someone at the British consulate in Leningrad had been caught shoplifting, or buying drugs, or something, anyway, which the KGB liked catching you doing when you were working at a British consulate, especially if you were really working for the Service. And what David Cartwright went to Bonn to do was sort out a deal which would allow the poor sod in question to come home without both countries having to resort to the usual tit-for-tat fandango, firing diplomats, rolling up local networks, and generally making a musical out of one tired old song. The sort of thing the David Cartwrights of the Service were born to do, though this particular David Cartwright, Louisa knew, had been River Cartwright’s grandfather. River probably hadn’t even been born then, but let’s not think about River right now.

The reason Bonn had been chosen was that it was neutral territory and had good hotels, Bachelor had explained. Every meeting was conducted in at least three languages, because of course the Russians weren’t going to field someone who’d admit to speaking English, and Cartwright preferred not to demonstrate how fluent he was in Russian, and as for the Germans, well, they were supplying the coffee and cakes, so why the hell shouldn’t they speak their own language? Bachelor had little Russian, less German, and the whole thing would have been boring to the point of coma if it hadn’t been for the woman taking notes on the other side of the table.

Louisa rolled her eyes. “So JB had the hots for the stenographer. That must have helped while away the hours.”

“Yeah, except old man Cartwright put him right on that.”

“She wasn’t a stenographer.”

“No, she was a full-fledged KGB colonel.”

“Who was?”

They looked round.

Shirley Dander was in the doorway, holding an iron.

Louisa said, “Uh, private conversation?”

“Yeah, I could tell. What’s it about?”

“Nothing. What’s the iron for?”

“Duh, ironing? Who was the KGB chick?”

“I think Lamb was looking for you,” said Lech.

“What did he want?”

“Something about a performance appraisal?”

“. . . Don’t believe you.”

Lech and Louisa both shrugged in such perfect unison, they might have spent the morning practising.

“I fucking hate both of you,” Shirley said, and went back downstairs, the iron leaking a spatter trail behind her.

“So what happened?” Louisa said.

“In Bonn? The usual stuff. A deal got made, there’ll be a record somewhere. Probably in Molly Doran’s archive. Bachelor was a bit hazy about it, what with everything being translated three times—”

“I really hope this is going somewhere.”

“He saw her the other day.”

“The KGB colonel?”

“Here, in London.”

“. . . Okay.”

“And that’s not even the odd thing. John says he’s looking at her, and she hasn’t aged a day, he’s seeing exactly the person he remembers from Bonn. Still in her early thirties, thereabouts. Same hair, same skin. He says.”

“So he thinks he’s discovered Wonder Woman?”

“I’m not sure that’s in his frame of reference, but you get the picture.”

“Seriously? You’ve got a drunk telling you he’s seen someone who looks like someone from his old days. I’m still waiting for a punchline.”

“He sat on the opposite side of a table from her for four straight days, closer than we are now. He says he’d recognise her anywhere. And no, he’s not a complete idiot, he knows it can’t be the same woman. Shall I tell you what he thinks?”

“You might as well.”

“He thinks it’s her daughter.”

“. . . Okay.”

“You don’t think that’s strange?”

“I’m still not convinced it actually happened. But even if it did, so what? KGB colonels have daughters? I’m not sure that’ll light them up on the hub. It’s biology, not tradecraft.”

He was about to reply, but a sudden metallic crunch made both look up: Lamb’s office wasn’t directly overhead, but if he were hurling thunderbolts, that was roughly the direction to worry about. Only it hadn’t come from above but below, a realisation they reached at precisely the same moment. “Shirley,” they said in unison, though Shirley would have denied she’d been the one that made the noise—what had made the noise had been the iron. She hadn’t even been holding it at the time, had she? Otherwise it wouldn’t have been hitting the floor.

Cocaine logic.

She’d brought the iron into work because she was cruising Shoreditch later, and didn’t want to start the evening creased. Standards. And since it was now four, which put her on her own time if you didn’t count the next hour and a half, she’d decided to speed the evening up by both doing her ironing and taking a small bump to get her in the mood. It took a small bump to get her in the mood for most things these days, except those things that took a big bump, but it wasn’t like she was made of money, and people didn’t give the stuff away, or not round Shoreditch. Everyone had a living to make; everyone had a plan. Here was hers: hit a club or two, make enough of a score to see her through to the weekend, work off some energy on the dance floor, and—who knew?—she might decide to get lucky. Say what you like about Shirley’s looks, Shirley’s figure—and people had in the past—but she knew this much: deciding upfront whether you intended to get lucky pretty much put the outcome beyond doubt. She picked up the iron—which had gouged an inverted pyramid out of the threadbare carpet—and got on with the task in hand, enjoying the feeling of being productive and efficient, and trying to squash the niggling knowledge that she was being left out; that Lech and Louisa were plotting something—a KGB colonel, for fuck’s sake; okay, ancient history, but still. They had some action going on, even if they were digging up old bones to find it. And weren’t planning on letting Shirley join in, because if you partnered up with Shirley Dander, chances were you’d end up a blood-red mist on an office wall, or a smudge on a snowy hillside—

“What on earth are you doing?”

She nearly dropped the iron again.

“. . . What’s it look like?”

What it looked like was some kind of art installation, thought Catherine Standish, though she supposed, if you clung to the details, it also looked like Shirley was trying to iron a T-shirt. It was that she was using her desk as an ironing board that was the problem, and that she hadn’t cleared the desk first, making it more assault course than smooth surface. And also, the iron was either leaking or had a full-on steam setting: Shirley seemed to be having a sauna at the same time as getting her household chores done, which was in turn the point at issue. Household chores? She was in her office.

“Shirley—”

“What?”

Not a polite What? either; more a challenge. The best way to deal with Shirley was to tread softly, everyone knew that. Shirley had issues. Catherine, who had issues of her own, was the last person to want to make her life difficult, but on the other hand, she couldn’t have Shirley making everyone else’s life difficult too. It probably didn’t matter much that Shirley was ironing a T-shirt in her office, but whatever she got up to in here, legitimate business or not, she shouldn’t be doing it high. And Shirley was high.

Not a moment to be treading softly, then. Sometimes you had to stamp.

“What are you on?”

“On? What sort of question’s that?”

“A straightforward one. You’re high, you think I can’t tell? What have you taken?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Shirley, you’re at work. You work for the Service, for God’s sake. You’ve got a boss upstairs who’ll throw you out of your job without a thought if you give him an excuse.”

Job? He’d throw her out of a window.

“He won’t notice. He’s probably drunk. Besides, I took some cough mixture, that’s all. I’ve a bad throat. You can’t be too careful.”

Shirley was saying all this holding the iron at chest height, which in her case wasn’t that high, but still. With steam pouring from it, she looked like she was standing behind a special effect.

But her eyes were pinholes. If that was cough mixture, there’d be big demand for it.

Catherine said, “And why ironing, anyway? Why aren’t you doing that at home?”

“Saves time.”

“You’re not supposed to be saving time, you’re—oh, I can’t stand this. Put that away. Drink some water or whatever it is you do to bring yourself down. And do not take any more . . . cough medicine.”

“You should loosen up,” Shirley told her. “You’re too uptight. You’ll give yourself a seizure.”

“It’s not so long ago you assaulted a fundraiser in the street. And then there’s the man in the toilet at the tube station—”

“That was Lech.”

“Lech was there. There’s a difference.”

“I get blamed for everything!”

“Not without reason. And do you really think ironing on a desk is going to work?”

“I was doing fine till you butted in.”

“You’re doing lots of things, Shirley. But trust me, ‘fine’ is not among them.” Catherine realised she’d adopted a posture she was always warning herself against: arms folded, brow knitted. Damn. But she couldn’t stop now: “Like I said, you’ve got a history of doing the wrong thing. And yet you’re still with us. Which means you’ve been seriously lucky so far, and that won’t go on happening forever.”

“I’ve been lucky? Being in Slough House is lucky?”

“You know exactly what I mean. So put a lid on it. If I send you home, I’ll have to tell Lamb why. And that’ll mean you don’t get to come back.”

“Like this is where I fucking want to be!”

“Your choice.” Catherine left, her heart beating rapidly. When she’d heard that metallic crunch, she’d almost thought it a gunshot—a buried terror: guns had been fired in Slough House before. She was glad, mostly, that Lamb hadn’t stirred, but this wasn’t a source of long-term comfort. When Lamb failed to be furious now, he might be planning incandescence later. And Shirley was so far beyond last chances, her suitcase should be packed.

“What’s going on?” Lech called as she passed Louisa’s room.

“Shirley,” Catherine said.

“. . . Figures.”

Louisa, irritated by the interruptions, said, “Counting down from ten now.”

“What makes it interesting is where he says he saw her,” Lech said. “He was watching TV. She appeared on the news.”

“What’s she done?”

“It wasn’t about her. It was about the Home Office. About the team of ministerial aides being disbanded to ensure, what was the phrase?—a cleaner line of authority from Number Ten. All part of the ongoing power grab by Anthony Sparrow, you know?”

“The PM’s enforcer.”

“One way of putting it. And while they’re saying this, there’s footage of Sparrow coming out of Number Ten like he owns the place, with a folder under his arm and a couple of aides trotting at his heels.”

He paused, except it wasn’t quite a pause. He was waiting.

Louisa said, “Ah . . .”

“Yeah, ah,” Lech agreed. “So what John wants to know is, why is the daughter of a one-time KGB colonel carrying bags for the PM’s special adviser?”

It was Louisa’s turn to pause. Then she said, “That Swiss woman?”

“Sophie de Greer. Doctor Sophie de Greer. Sparrow’s superforecaster, so-called. She’s been on Sparrow’s team since Christmas. There was a profile of her in one of the Sundays.”

“And this didn’t mention mummy being in the KGB?”

“It said little was known of her personal background. She’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma, yada yada yada. Sparrow recruited her after she scored in the top two per cent in a superforecasting tournament. That’s when you make accurate predictions about real-world outcomes—”

“ Lech—”

“—and not just vague remarks about possibilities. What?”

“I know what a superforecaster is.”

“Oh. Sorry. Anyway, yeah. That’s the odd thing. Interested?”

Louisa said, “It’s a hell of a stretch.”

“I know.”

“This de Greer woman looks like someone else. No, sorry, wait. Some old drunk says she looks like someone else.”

“Will you not do that?”

“Do what?”

“Call him an old drunk.”

Louisa thought about it, then said, “Sorry. Why doesn’t he go to the Park?”

“Because, well, let’s just say the last time he got involved in anything this size, it didn’t end prettily.”

“I’m surprised he’s not here with us.”

“He’s an irregular, on a two-day week. They’d have to bump him up to full time if they assigned him here, wouldn’t they?”

“How should I know? What’s he expect you to do about this anyway?”

Lech said, “He wants me to have a look at her.”

“Because you’re a spook. He is aware of Slough House, isn’t he? I mean, he knows we’re not in the loop?”

“Yeah, sure. But I’m someone he knows. And I owe him.”

“Because he looked after you when you had the virus.”

“I don’t know about looked after me.” Lech paused for a moment. Then said, “Well, yeah, okay. He looked after me.”

“Don’t be so male about it. You caught a bug, it’s not like you let the side down.”

Lech shrugged.

“God, you’re worse than River.”

Outside, traffic grew heavier as the working day declined. Neither felt like they’d got through much work themselves, but that was normal in these offices, with these chores: you could spend all day shovelling sand, but if you were standing on a beach, the results weren’t noticeable. The prospect of other, more fulfilling tasks was an overheard possibility, just discernible over the nudge and mutter of the traffic.

Louisa said, “She looks like she might be somebody’s daughter. That’s all you’ve got to go on.”

“I know.”

“And even if you’re right, or Bachelor is, you think that’s not going to punch you in the face? Establish a connection between Number Ten’s uber-apparatchik and a former KGB colonel, even one a generation old, and it won’t end happily.”

“I know.”

“And where would you start?”

He said, “With the Bonn meeting.”

“Because you want a picture of the colonel.”

“I’m guessing there’ll be one in the archive. Trouble is . . .”

“The archive’s at the Park.”

“You know Molly Doran, don’t you?”

“I know she breathes fire.” Louisa stood. “On the other hand, you don’t always go to the dragon. Sometimes you consult the newt.”

She led the way downstairs. There was a hot damp smell on the staircase, a hint of steam in the air, as Louisa explained that Molly’s archive went way back, covering all the spying the Service did before the Flood, but that, until the budget ran dry, there’d been plans to digitise everything, an all-but-neverending chore which had been dumped in the lap of—

“You’re kidding.”

Louisa said, “Yeah, no. Our very own Roderick Ho.”

Who looked up suspiciously when they entered his office without knocking. It was Lech’s office too, of course, so knocking wasn’t required: still, it was always fun to see if you could catch Ho doing something quintessentially Ho-like, such as watching movie trailers, or building a spaceship out of pizza boxes. As it was, before they were both through the door he’d passed a hand over his keyboard, presumably restoring his monitors to something approaching respectable work-product. Whatever they were displaying, they were banked in front of him like a drawbridge, sealing him off from the real world.

“What do you want?”

“Do I have to want something?” Louisa said. “I was just coming to hang.”

Ah, right, thought Roddy. Of course she was.

Of course she was.

Because one of the things about women—and Roddy ought to write a book—one of the things about women was, throw a little competition into the mix, and they drop the stand-off act pretty damn fast. Fact was, Louisa had had it too good for too long. If you ranked the talent in Slough House, sure, she came out top, partly because she was reasonably hot, but also because, well: Shirley and Catherine. Fifty was in Catherine’s rearview mirror, so she was special-interest-only, and as for Shirley, any kind of mirror was going to offer pretty brutal feedback. Don’t get him wrong, the Rodster was as feminist as the next guy, but there were ladies you shag and ladies you bag, and Shirley was definitely in the bagging area. So yeah, Louisa had had it easy, but into this three-horse race, just lately, had come Ashley Khan, and now the field was looking different. It wasn’t a complete turnaround—grade inflation did no one any favours—but Ashley was a solid seven, shading to seven and a half when she didn’t look like she was planning an office shooting, so Louisa was clearly starting to feel wobbly; suddenly there was competition, and what do you know? Here she was, come to hang out with the RodMeister, despite having struggled against their mutual attraction for, like, ever. It took all his self-control to withhold his trademark wry grin. You could play it too cool for too long, babe, he thought. Sure, I’m interested. But there’s such a thing as market forces.

There was also such a thing as Lech Wicinski, who’d chosen this moment to return to his desk. No flair, no finesse, that was his problem. Well, that and having a face like a rained-on barbecue. You had to pity the guy, but even so: cock-blocking broke the bro code, and that was a rule, not a tongue-twister. Even a sap like Wicinski should know there were lines you don’t cross.

Roddy said, “So, you wanna hang here, or go somewhere less crowded?”

With a glance at Wicinski which slid off him like a meatball from an underdone Sloppy Giuseppe.

“Nah, here’s good,” Louisa said.

Lech said, “Louisa says you’ve worked on archive material.”

Ho rolled his eyes. “I’ve worked on all sorts, dude. Fingered every pie in the Service.”

A moment’s silence followed this.

“I was telling him what a fast worker you are.”

“And I was telling her about this guy on the hub,” said Lech, “he had the workstation next to me. And I have never seen anyone retrieve data quicker than this . . . dude. Seriously, you could ask him how many yellow cars—”

“Yellow car,” murmured Louisa.

“—crossed Clifton Suspension Bridge last August, and he’d have a solid number inside ten minutes. He’s a freak of nature.”

“That is fast,” Louisa admitted.

“Fast? It’s like he’s personally wired into CCTV, Google and the dark web all at once.”

Roddy said, “What’s his name?”

Lech paused. “We just called him . . . Mr. Lightning.”

“Mr. Lightning?”

“Mr. Lightning.”

“That’s coo—uh, yeah, right. No, I think I’ve heard of him.”

“You’ve heard of Mr. Lightning?”

“Yeah, right. If he’s the dude I’m thinking of. We’re kind of tight. I mean, you know. Not IRL.” He nodded towards his screens. “On the dark side.”

“I can picture it,” said Louisa. “You and Mr. Lightning. On the dark side.”

Roddy could tell she was doing just that. She had a turned-on gleam in her eyes. “So you’re Team Rodster,” he said. “Good to know.”

“Whereas me,” said Lech, “I have to say, I’m sceptical.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“But then, I’ve seen Mr. Lightning in action.”

“He’s got moves,” Roddy said. “Makes a good wingman. But it’s like Goose and Maverick. Only one Top Gun.”

“That is a good way of putting it,” said Louisa. “A really good way.” She touched her lips with her index finger. “Wonder how we could arrange for the pair of you to go head to head?”

“Can’t do it in real time,” Lech said, giving it thought. “They’d shit bricks on the hub if we roped in Mr. Lightning just to watch him trounce Roddy.”

“But maybe we could devise something,” Louisa said. “Come up with some insanely difficult piece of data for them both to retrieve—”

“What, and time them doing it? That’s brilliant.”

“Just need to work out what . . .”

Lech screwed his face up, trying to recapture a distant memory. “Here’s something,” he said. “Friend was telling me about a KGB colonel he saw once, a woman, in Bonn. This would have been . . . ’88 or thereabouts.”

“Be realistic,” said Louisa. “We want difficult, not impossible.”

Lech shrugged. “Sounds like you’re worried you’re backing Goose.”

“No, I just meant—”

Roddy said, “That’s it? A KGB colonel in Bonn?”

“At a meeting. David Cartwright was there. 1988.”

Roddy Ho cracked his knuckles. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Start your watches.”

A quarter of an hour later Lech and Louisa were back upstairs with a printout, comparing the photograph of Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya with one of Sophie de Greer they’d downloaded from the Guardian.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Don’t know? Come on. They’re practically identical.”

“Lots of people look practically identical.”

“And de Greer’s history’s a blank. She could be a plant.”

“You’ve sold yourself on this, haven’t you? Yes, okay, they look alike. Mother-and-daughter alike. But what are the odds? That a KGB colonel’s daughter is being used in some kind of undercover play decades after mum was on the scene?”

Lech said, “David Cartwright was a big wheel at the Park, and remind me what his grandson ended up doing?”

Louisa said nothing.

“Sometimes it’s a family business.”

“Okay,” she said. “But you can’t know for sure this de Greer woman’s a blank page. Just because a newspaper comes up short on intel.”

“Well I suppose I could ask Mr. Lightning to check her out.”

“LOL.”

“But either way, you have to admit. Not necessarily that there’s something dodgy going on. But that there is a distinct possibility that there’s something dodgy going on. Back on the hub—”

“Don’t.”

“Back on the hub, we’d follow this through. It’s way over the credibility line.”

“So take it to the hub.”

“It may be over the credibility line, but I’m not.”

“Lamb’ll listen.”

“Lamb can take a fucking walk. Anyway, what would he do? He’d send us out to watch her. You and me.”

“You’re very sure of that.”

“Well he’s hardly going to send Shirley and Ho.”

“You’ve not known him as long as I have. Anyway, aren’t you forgetting someone?”

“Who, Ash? She’s not been here ten minutes. He had me chained to my desk the first two months.”

“Which would be all the reason he needs.” Louisa looked at the two photos again, side by side. Mother and daughter? Caught cold, she might even have thought them the same woman. Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya was uniformed, her hair tied back, her expression severe; Doctor Sophie de Greer wore glasses, and had softer hair, but the eyes were the same. They might have been options on a dating site: here’s me as stern librarian; me as the Red beside your bed. God, where did that come from? She should get out more. She said to Lech, “So what are you suggesting? That I give up my evening and spend it watching your supposed ringer, waiting for her handler to make contact?”

Lech said, “It’s something to do, right?”

Like she’d said earlier. He was worse than River Cartwright.

He looked at his watch. “I’ll leave you to think about it,” he said. “Twenty minutes?”

“Not going to happen.”

“See you outside.”

He stopped in the kitchen on his way downstairs, put the kettle on, and was wasting moments looking for a clean mug—which went to show he was still a relative newcomer; the last clean mug in Slough House commemorated Charles and Di—when Shirley appeared in the doorway, like one of those bollards that rise up out of the tarmac when you don’t expect.

“What were you and Louisa talking about?”

“We’re thinking of adopting.”

“No one’ll let you. You’d scare a kid stupid just being in the same room.”

“Always a pleasure, Shirley. But don’t you have things to be getting on with? I don’t know, accidents to cause or furniture to break?”

He found a mug that at least had a handle, and rinsed it under the tap.

“You’re up to something.”

“Shit. You got me. This whole thing about being an office worker doing boring stuff in a crappy workplace? That’s just pretending. I’m actually a spy.”

“I want in.”

“There’s nothing to be in.”

“I’ll tell Lamb.”

“Where are we, nursery school?” The kettle boiled and he poured water onto a teabag. “Look, remember Old Street Station? Remember we decided to take out one of the newbies sent to follow us?”

“. . . Yeah. So?”

“So you put a civilian in hospital. Louisa and I aren’t up to anything, and if we were, you’re the last person I’d want along, unless for some reason I hoped it would go tits up in the first five minutes. Clear?”

She kicked the wall hard enough to cave plaster in, and that was Shirley with trainers on. Give her a pair of boots, she’d bring down the house.

She stomped back to her office, and Lech carried his tea to his room, where Roddy Ho was still hunkered behind his screens. “Sorry, man,” he said. “Mr. Lightning came in twenty seconds quicker.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“Well, I’ll do my crying in the rain.” He sat, drank his tea and looked over the work product on his monitor, a list he barely remembered amassing. Was this really worth chasing down? It was made up of the names, the noms de web, of barely hinged individuals who’d dropped from social media after a flurry of hate-filled rants: Had they become radicalised and vanished undercover, the better to fulfil some real-world outrage? Or had they just got laid and calmed down? It was Slough House in a nutshell: a blizzard of random incidentals it might take years to sift through, leaving you with a handful of nothing, or possibly, just possibly, one solid nugget in your palm . . . Lech thought again of John Bachelor in the pub, his hangdog air dispelled as he outlined what he’d glimpsed on a news broadcast. A face from yesterday. What if it meant something? It certainly felt solider now, the photographs adding weight to the story, but all Lech was sure of was, this wasn’t something to take to the Park. Not because it might turn out a waste of time, but in case it didn’t. He allowed himself a moment’s imagining: of presenting the hub, not with a loose thread but a tightly wound bobbin, and the reaction that would get. They’d thrown him onto the waste ground, and he’d struck gold there, and carried it back. Imagine that . . .

Oh Jesus, he thought. Just listen to me.

Wiping thoughts of glory from his mind, he opened a new browser, logged onto a Service database, traced an address for Sophie de Greer, then turned his computer off without bothering to close the other programs first. Tell me about it in the morning, he thought. Or, you know. Just burn and die.

Ho glared at him as he pulled his jacket on. “You rigged the timing so it looked like I lost.”

“No, I didn’t,” Lech said, with absolute honesty.

“I bet Louisa knows it too.”

“Louisa’s got the hots for Mr. Lightning.”

“Got them for me, more like.”

“She should learn to hide that.”

He left the office before Ho could think of a rejoinder—which gave him a ten-minute window—and took the stairs two at a time. He didn’t plan to wait for Louisa in Slough House’s yard, whose walls were held together with moss, so followed the alley round to Aldersgate Street, and crossed the road, and sat at the bus stop. Looking across at the glum takeaway, the suicidal newsagents, and the three storeys of dead-eyed windows stacked on top of them, he thought, not for the first time, How did I end up here? And felt his face, beneath its veil of scars, harden into a scowl.

An expression that wasn’t clear to Louisa, looking down from her room, but even if it had been she might have failed to recognise it; might have simply noticed that she could look at Lech’s scars now without thinking about what they hid: the word PAEDO, which he’d scrubbed away with a razor. Well, she was thinking about it now. But she hadn’t been a moment ago. Maybe there’d come a time when she could look at Lech and simply see him, rather than the mess he’d made of his face, but she wasn’t there yet. Nor was he. Everyone carries wounds, she thought. But they don’t always stare back at you from every reflecting surface.

She shook her head. Maybe it would be a wasted evening, no more; maybe she’d have to terminate a pass, in which case it might as well happen tonight as any other time. And maybe—just maybe—Lech wasn’t wrong, which in turn might mean they wound up in serious trouble, because whoever Sophie de Greer turned out to be, she moved in the world of chimp politics, where it was always the nastiest monkey ran the show. Anthony Sparrow, appearances notwithstanding, was currently King Kong, which made de Greer Fay Wray. If she had Kremlin connections, Sparrow either didn’t know about it or did, and either way wouldn’t look kindly on anyone digging into the matter. Would be likely, in fact, to bang his chest and start throwing faeces around. But that was a thing about life in Slough House: you grabbed any opportunity for excitement with both hands, and even knowing you were doing that didn’t stop you doing it. Hadn’t done in the past. Wouldn’t now.

Louisa powered her computer down and checked she had keys and wallet. Turned the light off. The office across the landing was where Ashley Khan had been put, and Louisa looked in before heading downstairs. Ashley had been allotted the desk furthest from the door, though she’d shifted to River’s desk instead. This might have been because it was better lit, or less susceptible to scrutiny from the doorway, or simply because it wasn’t the desk she’d been assigned, and this was her two-fingered response. Fair enough. Louisa remembered her own early days, wrapped in a fog of misery, and she didn’t have Ashley’s excuse of having had her arm broken by Lamb before she’d even started. Talk about a tough interview.

Truth was, Louisa hadn’t made an effort with Ashley, because you didn’t. That was the rule. There was no knowing how long a slow horse would survive, even leaving aside the grim mathematics of the bigger picture. You didn’t have to expect a colleague would take a bullet in the head—or a knife in the gut—or put their hand to a toxin-smeared doorknob—to know they weren’t necessarily going to be around forever. Lamb’s usual method of inducting a newby was to not give them anything to do for the first few months, which, if they took as an invitation to turn up late or knock off at lunchtime, would also be their last few months. So far Ashley had stood the course, but “so far” was still in single figures, if you were counting weeks. That wasn’t bad going—Louisa recalled counting days; hell, hours—but it was still all uphill, and wouldn’t get easier.

“Hey,” she said to Ashley, who was slumped across the desk, her dark hair pooled around her.

The young woman started. “I wasn’t asleep.”

“Didn’t think you were,” Louisa lied.

“Is he still around?”

No need to ask who “he” was.

“Yes. But dormant,” Louisa said, stepping inside and keeping her voice low. Sound followed peculiar waves in Slough House; syllables that couldn’t be heard a social distance away might yet reach Jackson Lamb’s ear. “Are you on anything yet?”

“Like her downstairs, you mean? No, not so far.”

“I meant work.” Not pharmaceuticals. “Has he given you an . . . assignment?”

There must be a better word than that for a slow-horse task. ‘Assignment’ sounded like it might have meaning somewhere down the line.

Ashley Khan said, “I’m to adjust myself to the realities of performing within attenuated parameters,” and Louisa couldn’t tell whether she was quoting, or had retreated behind irony.

“Yeah, that sounds about right. But, you know. It gets . . .”

“Better?”

“Not really.”

“That’s what I thought.”

There was a plastic box on her desk containing a mixture of nuts and dried berries. Ashley reached into it without looking and collected a palmful, then sat back and regarded Louisa with unnerving frankness. “How long have you been here?”

“It’s best not to think in terms of time.”

“Not the most inspiring response. I was told I should just quit.”

“Who by?”

“Friends. Others on the hub.” Her gaze shifted from Louisa. “I mean, that was back on day one. Day two. They haven’t been in touch since. None of them have.”

“They’re worried it’s catching, being a slow horse,” said Louisa. “They’re shielding.”

“They can screw themselves,” Ashley said, her flat tone suggesting she was describing an uncanny ability rather than indicating a course of action.

Louisa didn’t feel like offering an alternative point of view. The number of people she was still in touch with at Regent’s Park was zero. Less than, if you counted unanswered voicemails.

She looked round the office, which hadn’t changed in any essential since Ashley’s arrival. It wasn’t the kind of workspace you’d try to personalise, because if you were someone who liked to personalise your workspace you’d be somewhere else, and also because it was the kind of workspace that would actively resist such attempts. Pot plants would wilt before your eyes, and photographs of loved ones fade in their frames, familiar shapes becoming ghostly presences, then absences, then blanks. A bit like your friends on the hub, on hearing the news of your exile.

What Ashley’s personal space might look like, Louisa didn’t know. She was young, and had barely cut her teeth at the Park before running foul of Lamb, so hadn’t specialised yet; was what the Park called wet material, ready to be moulded into whatever form it chose. As things had fallen that would be down to Lamb now, so the odds were good she’d end up a shapeless mess. That aside, all Louisa knew was that Ashley had grown up in Stirling: this nugget from her personnel file, via Catherine. And, Louisa suspected, there was a little money in the background. That or some badly hammered plastic. Because Ashley dressed well, and trainee spooks enjoyed a starting salary apprentice chimney sweeps wouldn’t envy.

Ashley, meanwhile, appeared to be waiting for her to justify her presence, so she said, “You’ve swapped desks.”

“Yes, well. It’s not like it’s in use.”

Louisa thought better of replying. Another reason for not making an effort with a newcomer was that newcomers didn’t usually welcome it. This was temporary, that was their mantra. This couldn’t be happening to them, so would soon stop. Wrongs would be righted, the curtain would fall. When it rose again, everything would be just the way it was.

“Anyway,” Ashley said. “I’m going back to the Park.”

She tipped the handful of fruit and nuts into her mouth.

“Of course you are,” said Louisa. “See you tomorrow.”

She headed down the stairs. Passing Ho’s office, she didn’t bother calling a farewell, her mild guilt at having played him—again—not being enough to warrant an apology. The way she saw it, Ho would do something offensive within the next little while, and the books would be balanced again. Having a dick for a colleague means never having to say you’re sorry.

Lech Wicinski was waiting in the bus queue opposite; the only one not wearing a face mask, though from a distance he looked like he was. Louisa crossed the road to join him.

“Wimbledon,” he said.

“We’re doing code words now?”

“That’s where she lives. You drove in, right?”

She had driven in, yes.

“So let’s go.”

“If you’re under the impression this decisive crap comes off as macho, you’re way off beam,” she told him, but he shrugged.

Her car was near Fortune Park, and three minutes later they were in it and heading back towards Aldersgate Street, where both noticed, but neither commented on, Shirley Dander, entering Barbican tube station. Shirley, who saw them but pretended not to, wasn’t catching a train; was heading, rather, for the footbridge leading into the Barbican itself, where she followed the painted yellow line before dropping down to Whitecross Street. The food market had packed its bags, but she found the man she was after, who worked on one of the Thai stalls, in the pub on the corner. Shirley was one of his regulars, both for the food he provided during working hours and for the cocaine he supplied on demand, and the manner in which they greeted each other and shared five minutes’ gossip must have appeared, to a casual onlooker, like genuine friendship: they were good mates, these were brief times, but there were future meetings on the cards. When Shirley left, her wallet was lighter but her pocket reassuringly held a cellophane envelope, enough to keep her from hitting the ground for a few days to come, if she practised a little restraint.

Which might involve not taking any at work.

 

What are you on?

What’s it to you?

You’re at work. You work for the Service, for God’s sake . . . 

Yeah, kind of. Not that the Service had noticed lately; as far as Regent’s Park was concerned, Shirley might as well be training mice to build catapults.

You’ve got a boss upstairs who’ll throw you out of your job without a thought if you give him an excuse.

Which showed how much Catherine Standish knew. If Lamb felt like throwing Shirley out of her job, he wouldn’t need an excuse.

The hit she’d taken earlier had worn off, leaving her feeling dumpy and out of sorts. The obvious fix for this was close to hand, but she didn’t feel ready to dip into that yet. You’ve been seriously lucky so far, and that won’t go on happening forever. Yeah yeah yeah. Until she got Miss Bossy out of her head, there was no point relaxing. Coke had been known to make those voices louder. Last thing she needed was a travelling chorus, pointing out her misdeeds every step she took.

So she spent the next two hours on cruise control. If the City was the Square Mile, to its east was the Hipster Hectare, and Shirley kind of liked hipsters, for not being afraid to look the way they did, and not being ashamed of their stupid opinions. But they were rarer than they once were, most of their ventures—cereal restaurants, beard oils—having proved the opposite of recession-proof, and she soon tired of the safari. The original plan had been to kill time in a bar or two and then dance her mood away, but already it felt like her mood would win, regardless of the bounty in her pocket and the freshly ironed tee on her back. Catherine bloody Standish. Not to mention Lech bloody Wicinski and Louisa bloody Guy. That pair were plotting something—a KGB colonel?—and the thought of being left out was grating on her. What had she done to be excluded? Okay, so what Lech had said about Old Street station might have been more or less true, inasmuch as, yes, she had coshed a civilian there and left him comatose in a public toilet, but that bare summary had hiphopped over that she’d done so to save Lech having his face smashed in. Which you’d think he’d show a little gratitude, even if a bit of hands-on remodelling might have improved his looks in the long run.

All she wanted was a piece of the action. It didn’t matter what it was about; they could keep her in the dark if they liked. But she wanted to be there when things were happening, because otherwise what was the point of it: the endless slogging through Lamb’s endless tasks? Which he only invented because he wasn’t actually allowed to torture them physically, that was Shirley’s take. Otherwise he’d have them all in the cellar on a daily basis.

The thought of hitting the dance floor felt hollow now, its moment past. It was time to head home instead, even if home was a cheerless apartment: its floors unswept, its sheets unlaundered, its kitchen frankly dangerous. At least it was somewhere to be. At least there was stuff to do there.

She finished her drink—her fourth, maybe, but counting was for babies—and left the bar to find herself not far from Shoreditch High. Mentally, she plotted her journey home: tube-wise she’d be better off starting from Slough House. And if she went that way she could pop into her office and collect her iron, before one of her colleagues walked off with it.

Darkness had settled on London’s streets, and probably elsewhere too, but it had a particular flavour here; the shadows congregating overhead, their whispered plotting barely audible. Shirley headed back the way she’d come: up onto the Barbican walkways. Lights were on in the towers, evidence of lives lived elsewhere. She wondered what it was like, being one of the people you passed at a distance; glimpsed once, then seen no more. Crossing the footbridge, she saw that Slough House’s lights were mostly off, though Roddy Ho was still in his room, doubtless pursuing some online fancy. She’d nip in, collect her iron. Catherine would be gone, and there’d be no reprise of the afternoon’s lecture.

The stairs were a little unsteady, but that was Slough House for you. Always shifting underfoot.

In her room, she grabbed her iron; on the way out, she paused on the landing, hearing voices from Ho’s office.

Did he have company?

He didn’t, but only in the technical sense that there was nobody in the room with him. Taking the larger perspective, Roddy was surrounded by admirers, though that was barely worth the footnote: if the Rodster wanted crowds, crowds happened. Charisma was the word. He should link to an online dictionary, email the definition to Mr. Lightning. Not that he believed what Wicinski had said about a twenty-second victory margin, but it was as well to keep a rival in his place. Mr. Lightning might have them gasping in awe on the hub, exclaiming fork! and sheet! every time he flexed his digits, but if he thought he was a match for the Rodinator, he had brutal lessons coming. As for Wicinski, a lesser man might be tempted to seek revenge and cancel his direct debits, but the more enlightened soul would rise above the insult, and pass by on the other side.

Because, Roderick Ho reminded himself, there comes a time when you accept your maturity. Graduate from fresh-faced acolyte to wise mentor, at whose feet new generations gather, eager to collect the pearls that drop from your lips. The puppy becomes the full-grown hound; the cub becomes the lion. Which, in a nutshell, was why he was in a Zoom room now, with women digitally queued before him, each of them seeking the aid, the salvation, only Roddy could bestow.

Help me, Hobi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.

How many times had he heard that?

(Six.)

But it had to be said, this latest attempt lacked what you might call feeling. Didn’t do justice to herself or, especially, him.

Roddy allowed the slightest of frowns, the merest flicker of disappointment, to cross his worldly features.

“Let’s try that again.”

“Why, what was wrong with it?”

What was wrong with it was, he’d just told her to try it again. Had this woman never been mentored before?

He said, “It lacked . . . gravitas.”

“Yeah, well, it’s spelt wrong. It should be Obi-Wan. You’ve got Hobi-Wan.”

Her fellow hopefuls watched mutely from their little windows, one or two shaking their heads, as well they might. It was round one of the audition process—early days—but you had to live the part, and if you were Princess Leia, you didn’t answer back to Hobi-Wan.

But then, sad truth, Roddy wasn’t working with the cream of the crop. Of the eight would-be Princess Leias, six were overweight and this one downright bolshy, and even if any were capable of delivering their key line with the sincerity he was looking for, the gold-bikini round was going to see most of them hitting light-speed on their way out. They’d be in a galaxy far, far away before you could say I have a bad feeling about this.

He said, “If you’re having difficulty with the script—”

“Didn’t say I was having difficulty. I said it’s got the wrong words.”

Roddy’s right hand gripped the hilt of his light sabre. This couldn’t be seen by anyone, but it was important to have the props if you were going to project the image. Subtle, but key. Not that it was his actual light sabre, which was in a cupboard at home, in the box he’d never taken it out of, but a stand-in he’d improvised using a length of strip lighting, an adaptor cable, and duct tape for a handle. He’d plugged it in, and it actually hummed when he wielded it, but you had to be careful not to turn it on for long, on account of duct tape peeling off when it got hot. All of which was information the bolshy Princess Leia might usefully have been given—she might get the message that you gave it a hundred per cent or you took an early bath—but Roddy just sighed. Sometimes the points you wanted to make screamed like an X-Wing over the heads of the ill-informed. More in sorrow than in wrath he terminated her part in the discussion, then gazed at the remaining faces. “I’ll say it again,” he said. “South Bank CosPlay. One of the biggest gatherings of the Jedi community on this or any other planet. And only one of you can go as Princess Leia.”

“Well, that’s not true,” one of the women said. “We can all go as Princess Leia if we want.”

Roddy terminated her too. “Only one of you can go as Princess Leia with me,” he told the others.

“Jesus screaming fuck!” said Shirley.

“Force-be-with-you-I’ll-be-in-touch,” said Roddy, killing his screens.

“I mean, shit!”

“Get out of my office!”

“Door was open.”

“No, it wasn’t!”

“It clearly was. Are you on Zoom? Is that a cape?” She came further into the room, whose door had indeed been open, once she’d very quietly given it a push. “Are you . . . are you dressing up?”

Roddy said, “It’s not a cape.”

It was in fact a cagoule draped over his shoulders, and he let it fall to the floor as he stood. If this was an attempt to reassert his dignity, it failed.

“Is that a light sabre?”

“No.”

“Can I have a go?”

“No. What are you doing here?”

“Collecting my iron.” She held it up in evidence. “But fuck me, this is brilliant. The others are literally going to shit themselves. I mean, literally. There is going to be shit, everywhere.”

“You tell them and I’ll fuck you up.”

“Totally worth it. Who were those women? They were women, right?”

“Friends.”

“You haven’t got any friends.”

“Neither have you.”

“Dickhead.”

“Beast.”

“Asshat.”

“Spreader.”

“. . . Spreader? What does that even mean?”

Roddy said, “You know, like, spreader. Like, you spread the virus.”

“Nobody says that.”

“Some people do.”

They glared at each other; Shirley brandishing her iron, Roddy with one hand on the hilt of his light sabre.

If you strike me down now, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Shirley said, “So what was that, anyway, some kind of fancy dress booty call?”

“None of your business.”

“Seriously, this is everyone’s business by first thing tomorrow. You might as well save us the bother and fill in the blanks.”

“I don’t fire blanks,” Roddy said. With his free hand he waved at his laptop, nestled amidst the ranked screens. “Say hello to my leetle fren’.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“Someone sounded their horn at me in a crosswalk once. I came right back here and sold their house.”

“You’d have to buy me one first.”

“I’ll trash your bank account.”

“Already trashed.”

“. . . You’re gonna find you’ve ordered all this shit you don’t even want.”

“Yeah, that’s normal. What planet are you on?”

Roddy looked about to reply, but thought better of it.

Shirley came further into the room, placed her iron on Lech’s desk, then levered herself up, and sat swinging her legs. What had looked like a dead loss of an evening had turned around, and she was planning on getting her luck’s worth. But even as she watched Roddy’s face enact the seven deadly sins, it occurred to her that there was more than one way to skin a nerd.

He was waiting for her to speak, so she let him wait longer. His room was the same as hers, more or less; the same as all the offices, bar those on the top floor. But his had more kit, both on his desk and on the rackety metal shelving round the walls. Unattached keyboards and lengths of cable; boxes of floppy disks and thick-spined operating manuals. All of it junk, but if you piled up enough junk, you left your stamp on a place.

On Lech’s side some attempt had been made to create a mess-free area, but not enough of one to bear fruit.

“Who’d you share with before Lech?” she asked him.

“Nobody.”

“And who before that?”

“Can’t remember.”

“You ever had a partner?”

“A what?”

“Forget it.” She gestured towards his desk. “You’ve got these tracing apps, right?”

Roddy rolled his eyes.

“Can you find Louisa’s car?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what happens if I do.”

“Maybe people don’t get to hear about your little Star Wars production.”

“‘Maybe’?”

“Tell me where she is, and I won’t say anything.”

“. . . How do I know I can trust you?”

She laughed. “It’s Slough House. You can’t trust anyone.”

Oddly, this seemed to reassure him.

He went back round his side of the desk and by the time she’d joined him had set something in motion: a little icon that looked like a silverfish trying to eat itself was toiling away on his largest screen. A blink or two later and this coloured itself in: they were looking at a skeletal street map, laid out in straight lines as if someone had tidied the city up in a burst of optimism. Pulsing dead centre was a red circle, like a pimple waiting to explode.

Shirley said, “Isn’t this just Find My Friends?”

“. . . So?”

“So how come you and Louisa are sharing that?”

Because Louisa didn’t know was the strictly accurate answer. Some apps wormed their way into your phone as soon as you clicked on the email. Or they did if you knew what you were doing.

“Where is this, anyway?”

He zoomed out, so they could see the bigger picture. “Wimbledon.”

“What’s in Wimbledon?” Shirley said, but she was talking to herself.

The car was parked not far from the common, though she supposed you were never that far from the common if you were in Wimbledon to start with.

“What are they looking at?”

“‘They’?” said Roddy.

“She’s with Lech. They’re up to something. What are they looking at?”

Roddy shrugged, and opened another browser. A quarter minute later they were looking at a street scene, broad daylight; a residential pavement. Most of it was houses, but there was an apartment block at a junction; a brick building with glass front doors showing a lobby with what looked like a cheese plant in its centre. Big green leaves, anyway. Shirley marvelled, briefly, that here they were on one side of the city looking at a building on the other, trying to recognise a pot plant in its lobby, and then reminded herself that this was film, not a live broadcast. Clues included that it was broad daylight and that Louisa wasn’t in sight, though the other screen indicated that her phone remained close by.

And was, in fact, in Louisa’s hand, and Louisa herself in her car. Lech was beside her, and they were across the road from the apartment block Lech had identified as Sophie de Greer’s address. Without being confident she was in her flat, they knew she hadn’t left it while they were watching. Louisa had suggested—several times, by this point—that the odds were she hadn’t come home yet: politicos, she maintained, worked ungodly hours, and it was only just after nine. Lech had countered by pointing out that de Greer was Swiss, and as such perhaps adhered more strictly to an acceptable timetable.

“Except if you’re right, she’s not Swiss. She’s Russian.”

“Such a thing as cover.”

Since this exchange Louisa had mostly been reading the news on her phone, wondering at what point she’d kick Lech out and head home. He had the air of one who wasn’t going anywhere until he’d been proved right. Which was possibly just another way of pointing out that he was male.

She put her phone away. “How pissed off was Roddy?”

“Don’t know.”

“Hard to tell?”

“Hard to care.”

“He has his uses, you know. Maybe we should be nice to him for a change.”

“Yeah,” said Lech. “We could scrape a few quid together and rent him a girlfriend experience.”

“I’m not that sorry.”

“How expensive could it be? To have someone stand him up, then laugh about it on Instagram.”

“Bitter, much?”

“You don’t know the half of it. Is this her now?”

It was, or seemed to be: a tracksuited figure, emerging from the apartment block and pausing on the threshold, fiddling with something on her wrist. She was blonde, but wearing goggles that obscured much of her face. Still: right approximate height, right approximate age. She bounced up and down on the spot for some seconds in a manner that had Lech nodding thoughtfully, though offered no conclusive evidence as to her identity. The tracksuit was grey, with reflective bright orange piping that matched her trainers.

“It’s about mileage, not stylage,” Louisa muttered.

“What?”

“I said, what do we do?”

Lech said, “Follow her?”

“Because obviously she’s on her way to a secret meeting.”

“Well we won’t know that until she gets there.”

She’d already made a start, bounding down the street with an ease which belied Louisa’s suggestion that she was all kit, no grit. Louisa started the car and pulled out into the empty road. Lech kept his eyes on the running woman.

“We’re going to look like an abduction attempt,” he said.

“Thanks, that’s constructive.”

“She’s probably heading for the common.”

Louisa’s trainers were in the boot, and under her blouse she wore a sleeveless vest that would pass for a running top in the dark. Or might do. “Eyes on her.” She pulled ahead of de Greer, if that’s who it was, and took the next right. A dark expanse opened up at the end of the road: that would be the common.

“She’s still behind us,” said Lech.

A parking space materialised: disabled only. My boss, my colleagues, my love life, Louisa thought. More than enough handicaps to qualify for a blue badge. She pulled into it and hopped out without turning the engine off. Opened the boot, removed her blouse. Lech joined her, facing the way they’d come, as the woman drew level on the other side of the road and then sailed past.

“Ninety per cent sure it’s her,” he said.

Louisa had shed her shoes, was doing up the laces on her trainers. “You’d better bloody be right.”

The woman had reached the road bordering the common and was jogging on the spot while waiting to cross.

“Take the car,” Louisa said. “Try not to lose us.” She dropped her shirt in the boot and grabbed a head torch.

“Got your phone?”

Obviously.

The woman was over the road, and bounding into the dark. Louisa pulled the torch onto her head and set off after her.

The unseasonable warmth of the day had fled. This didn’t deter the dogwalkers, or other runners, but the common boasted space enough to absorb them, and it was easy to feel alone once the road and the traffic, its noise and lights, were behind her. Louisa averaged 5K a day weekdays, and hit the occasional 20 on a weekend, but had never felt part of a community, and ran mainly to purge herself of work. In her secret self, she thought of runners the way everyone else did: as roving germ circuses, scattering spit and sweat.

But Sophie de Greer, if that’s who she was, looked like she didn’t care. Barely had she hit the common than she was off, running not much faster than Louisa’s habitual speed, but with an effortless grace that suggested she could keep it up forever. Still, she’d be visible from a distance. The orange piping on her trackie gathered what light there was and painted it in stripes across her running form: to Louisa, de Greer resembled a figure from an ancient video game.

If it was de Greer.

I’m going to stop adding that caveat, she thought. Because if it’s not her, this is going to be even more of a fucking parody than usual.

Her breathing settled into a rhythm, and the path felt light beneath her feet. She could have done with her sports bra, and a warmer top, but it felt good to be in motion after a day at her desk. And if the pointlessness of the exercise nagged at her—even if this were de Greer, what good would following her do?—she wouldn’t be the first slow horse to find comfort in the notion that she was at least doing something.

Breathe in, breathe out. Her muscles were finding their stroke. She’d not run more than a few hundred yards along the path before Lech lost her, Louisa fading into the insubstantial, darkening air.

He got back into her car, driver’s side. He was on Windmill Road, not far short of a set of temporary lights, where passage briefly became single-lane, to accommodate roadworks. The casual way she’d left him the keys felt good. So did the way she’d headed off after de Greer: no discussion, just got on with it. Lech hadn’t been Ops, though he’d watched a few from inside a van, and it always gave him a kick to see the way the guys had each others’ backs—afterwards they might argue the toss, come to blows even, about how things should have gone, but at the time they just got on with it. Which was how Louisa had reacted to de Greer’s appearance: it might not be de Greer, might be a random jogger, but the op was to keep her in sight, and that was what Louisa had done, no questions asked. Take the car. Try not to lose us. Okay, not a hundred per cent confidence, but still. When someone tossed you their car keys, it felt good. It showed trust.

Compare and contrast with Roderick Ho’s response when Shirley asked to borrow his.

“No fucking way.”

“It’s important.”

“You said that last time—”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“—and it ended up in a snowdrift.”

“Wasn’t my fault.”

“In Wales.”

“It’s not snowing, we’re not in Wales, and if you don’t lend me your car, everyone’ll hear about your weird sex party.”

“It wasn’t a sex party.”

Shirley paused. “You are so fucking straight, you know that?”

Which was more than half the problem. Get a line or two down the little prick, he’d not only lend her his car, he’d sledge on top while she took fast corners.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of doing just that, of getting some coke into him, even if it involved blowing it up his nose herself, but the thought fell apart in the face of how much it would pain her to gift Roddy Ho a line, or, indeed, see it scattered like dust across the shelves and carpet of this unlovely room.

How could anyone stand to turn their office into a graveyard for out-of-date tech?

He was glaring at her still, and seemed to be under the impression that just because he’d refused her request, that brought the matter to a close.

She plucked a keyboard from the nearest shelf. It had its cable wrapped round it, and looked no older than the one attached to her computer. In better nick if anything: its E was still legible.

“How come you keep all these?”

Ho said, “You never know.”

“Never know what?”

“When you’ll need one.”

“Do you think you’ll need this?” She waved the keyboard at him.

He shrugged. “Might do.”

“It looks pretty standard.”

“They said that about the first gen Amstrad.”

“Good point,” said Shirley, and slammed the keyboard against the side of Lech’s desk, where it exploded in a loud scatter of plastic. When she replayed the moment in her head later, the air was filled with a confetti alphabet. In real life she was left holding a computer keyboard folded in two, its halves held together by wiring.

“Fuck!”

“I know, right?” she said.

“Don’t do that!”

“I just did. And I have to say, I was not expecting it to make so much noise.” She let what was left in her hands fall to the floor, and took another keyboard from the shelf. “Do you think they’ll all be that loud?” She smashed it against the desk. “Certainly looking that way.”

“You’re a fucking maniac!”

“It’s been said before.” She dropped the junk and reached for a monitor: flat-screened, 18-inch. Already she was picturing the contact it would make with the wall; all those pixels whooshing everywhere, like glitter. All the crunching underfoot that would ensue.

Ho didn’t dare come closer, preferring to keep his desk between them.

“You wanna make me stop?” she invited. “You’re the one with the light sabre.”

“Lamb’ll go ape shit.”

“That’ll be fun. How far do you think I can throw this?”

“Put it down!”

“I’ll break every piece of kit in this office,” she said. “Including the stuff that’s still plugged in. And while you’re crying about it, I’ll tell Lamb what you were using it for while it still worked. And when he’s finished laughing, he’ll do to you what I’m doing to your toybox.”

“Put it down!”

Instead she raised it above her head with both hands and made a chimp-like noise. There’d be glass and plastic everywhere, and the ghost of every image the screen had ever displayed would flow into the wall it broke upon, and spend an eternity trapped in the bones of Slough House.

That was such a pleasing thought it almost came as a disappointment when Roddy screamed, “Okay! Okay!”

She hovered, unwilling for the moment to end. One more small explosion? Couldn’t do any harm . . .

“I said okay!”

Reluctantly, she placed the screen on Lech’s desk.

“You’re a fucking maniac.”

“You already said that.”

“There’s . . . crap everywhere now.”

“There was crap everywhere before.”

He came out from behind his desk and snatched up the monitor, cradling it in his arms. You’d think she’d threatened to drop his baby out of a window. Then she thought, Ho, with a baby? Jesus. Some stuff, you don’t want in your head.

She held her hand out. “Keys.”

“No way.”

“. . . You want me to start again?”

“You’re not taking my car. I’m coming with you.”

She hadn’t been expecting that.

“You’ll just get in the way,” she said.

“Don’t care. You’re not taking my car. You’ll just smash it up.”

To be fair, evidence of her propensity for smashing stuff up wasn’t hard to find. He looked pretty determined, and while she didn’t think it would take her long to break that determination—about as long as it would take to break another keyboard—time wasn’t necessarily on her side, not if she wanted to catch up with Louisa and Lech before whatever was happening happened. Besides, Ho could keep her up to speed on their position. And another besides: if she was right about being jinxed, then teaming up with Roddy Ho was a win-win.

She said, “Okay. One minute,” and stalked out of the room and into her own office.

Ho thought: Christ, that was close. It was like dealing with a wild animal, one you had to talk out of its temper when you didn’t even share a language. Hardly a surprise his razor-sharp recall was letting him down, not after dealing with Dander’s tantrum . . . He’d come this close to bringing her down—quick jab to the throat—and was thankful he hadn’t: last thing he needed was an ex-colleague on his carpet. Sure, Lamb would have seen things his way—there are times you can’t keep your powers in check: ask any man—but that wouldn’t have kept da Feds at bay. Imagine, the Rodster behind bars. He’d seen enough movies: it would have been a full-time job defending his sweet virtue. He’d have been unlikely to come out of it without a scar or two. He raised a hand to his face, traced an invisible line down one cheek. An eye would be partly closed, its surface gone milky. One-eyed Rod. He’d be bitter, a loner, but still devoted to the cause of justice. He was still clutching the monitor, too. He put it back on its shelf, then looked darkly down at all the broken plastic. Someone was going to have to sweep that up.

When Shirley returned she was sniffing aggressively, and wiping the back of a hand across her nose. “So where you parked then?”

He was parked where he usually was, in a residents only space the other side of Fann Street. Not that he was risking a ticket: he had an actual permit in the name of an actual resident, and if ninety-six-year-old Alice Bundle’s neighbours ever wondered why she owned a D-reg electric blue Ford Kia—with cream flashing—when she’d been a lock-in since ’03, well, life was full of mysteries.

“So let’s go.”

Shirley led the way, jigging down the stairs like they were hot; Roddy paused to grab jacket and baseball cap—when you were working the streets you had to blend in, dig? Cap on sideways, though there were fools who still wore them backwards. Then again, he philosophised, style moved faster than a bucking bronco, and not everyone could be hip to its bang and boom. Welcome to the Rod-eo. Some were thrown in the first few seconds; the brilliant few were born to ride.

“Are you fucking coming?”

Like there was an emergency waiting.

Which possibly involved laundry, Roddy noted, because she was carrying her iron. Though it was possible she hadn’t noticed: never tightly wrapped, there was a more than usual bouncy agitation to Shirley’s movements now, like he’d observed in clubs sometimes. People who kept dancing even when they were standing still. Poor coordination. Worse than average bladder control too, given the number of times they disappeared into the toilets: he didn’t lack sympathy, but seriously, why did they even bother going out? They couldn’t be enjoying themselves.

“Let me drive.”

“No way.”

“It’ll be quicker.”

Yeah, but the whole point of him being here was to not let Shirley get behind the wheel of his car.

Ignoring her, he climbed into the driver’s seat, and for a moment imagined peeling away and leaving her, her stupid iron in her hand. But that pleasurable bubble burst, replaced by a vision of her returning to Slough House and continuing her destructive catalogue of the contents of his room . . . No. Safest thing was to take her to Wimbledon and deliver her into the keeping of the others. Alternatively, he could take her to Wimbledon and just abandon her there. She’d probably find her way back eventually, but it wasn’t something you’d lay big money on.

Now she was tapping on the passenger window with the tip of the iron.

He leaned across and unlocked her door.

“So what are we waiting for?” she asked, climbing in.

“Seatbelt.”

Shirley shook her head. “So fucking straight,” she said again, then noticed she was holding the iron. She barked a strange laugh, dropped it in the footwell and clicked her belt into place. “So what are we waiting for now?”

Pulling away, Roddy glanced at his phone, still displaying Find My Friends. Louisa had moved, and appeared to be adrift from the obvious bones of the skeletal map. Well, she wouldn’t be hard to find. Middle of London: it wasn’t like you could disappear.

Which Louisa would have been glad to hear, even from that dubious source, because night on the common was inky deep. The lamps along the pathways were widely spaced, and somewhere round the mid-points patches of darkness puddled; every time she reached one she felt like she was stepping offstage. Try not to lose us, she’d told Lech, but it wasn’t like he could drive along behind her. And off the lamplit paths, the puddles of darkness became seas. Anyone could be swimming there, or suddenly appear from their depths . . . Up ahead, de Greer left the path and disappeared behind a cathedral. This turned out, on nearer inspection, to be a stand of trees: a brief screen, there then gone. The new route followed no path, but there was a track underfoot, the grass worn away by runners, dogwalkers, hedgehogs. Louisa turned her headtorch on, and the effect was to make her feel visible rather than to illuminate much. But she could still make out the orange piping of de Greer’s tracksuit, and now, in her wake, two other shapes: a pair in dark kit, one with green fluorescent trainers; the other with the number eleven in silver on his back.

Runners ebbed and flowed—they murmurated—and you couldn’t keep an eye on all of them at once. But Louisa didn’t like it that these men hadn’t been there, and now were; didn’t like the way they’d come out of nowhere. As if they’d been waiting.

De Greer’s lack of hesitation at any moment since leaving her apartment suggested that this was her regular route. If you knew about that, Louisa thought, you wouldn’t have to hang around by her apartment block to pick her up. You could just wait and collect her at the darkest point available.

It was possible, of course, that she was being paranoid.

And let’s not forget, it was possible that this wasn’t even de Greer.

Whoever it was, if she kept on in a straight line she’d reach a road sooner or later. Possibly even the road Lech was on. Without slowing, she squeezed her phone from her jeans pocket. He answered on the first ring.

“I’m not the only one following her,” she told him.

“. . . Seriously?”

She didn’t have words for that.

He said, “Shit. No. Sorry. Who are they?”

“Pardon me while I stop them and ask. But there are two, male, and it looks like they’re watching her.”

“Security detail?”

Louisa didn’t think so. Who was de Greer, a political adviser? She might have high-level clearance, but not full-time bodywatchers. She wasn’t royalty.

And if Lech was right, and she was some kind of plant, her handler wouldn’t have a team watching her back. That would be tantamount to hoisting the Jolly Roger.

Lech said, “Maybe you’d better abort.”

“I’m not leaving her.”

“Louisa, if they are tailing her, and they’re not a security detail, they’ll be from the Park. And if we fuck up a Park surveillance—”

“Yeah, or it’s two guys following a woman on a dark common.”

“Shit . . . Hang on.”

A padded thump, as if he’d dropped his phone on the passenger seat.

She couldn’t see de Greer, and the silvery eleven was no more than a ghostly squiggle in the dark.

Lech came back. “Are you on the same path you set off on?”

“No.”

“. . . Any idea at all where you are?”

Yes, she thought. I’m in the fucking dark. Could you be any less helpful?

A sentiment echoed that moment by Roddy Ho, and directed at Shirley Dander, though the wording differed.

“I’m trying to drive!”

“I’m not stopping you!”

“You’re fiddling about! Stay out of my glove box!”

Shirley slammed it shut. It contained nothing interesting anyway: a pair of gloves was all.

She often succumbed to déjà vu when a passenger in someone else’s car. On the other hand, she often succumbed to Groundhog Day just turning up for work.

“Can you not drive faster?”

“Can you not shut up?”

She should never have let him get behind the wheel. There was a kind of purgatory in this; to feel herself rushing towards some waiting event, one crying out for her presence, while in reality she was travelling at the speed of a hobbled cow, with every traffic light in existence throwing a red glare in her direction, and every other car on the street laughing at her in its rearview mirror. The scowl she wore was like a swan’s wing: it could break a man’s arm if he got too close. And the way her blood was fizzing, she might burst before they reached their destination.

There was action somewhere, and she was being sidelined again. She could feel it in her bones, in the itch beneath her skin.

Shops and houses. Someone walking a dog. Streetlights and zebra crossings; the flat expressions on darkened panes of glass. London had different textures, a different grain, every postal district.

Roddy said, “How do you know what they’re up to, anyway?”

“I don’t,” she said. “That’s the point.”

“Then why—”

“They were talking about a KGB colonel.”

“In Bonn,” said Roddy. “In 1988.”

“. . . You know who she is?”

“Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya?”

“Yeah. Her. Who is she?”

“Dunno.”

“So how come you know her name?”

“It was a speed test.”

“Yeah?” Shirley looked through her side window, checking whether they were keeping up with pedestrians. “How’d that work out?”

Roddy’s phone lay on his lap, winking up at him: he seemed able to assimilate information by glancing at a screen, as if he were one step away from being plugged into a giant motherboard. She imagined his head full of digital splinters, his tongue a slippery coil of wires. All his thoughts lined up in binary rows.

On the other hand, he didn’t handle human communication well. Which reminded her:

“Those women. The ones who want to be Princess whatsername.”

“Leia.”

“Yeah. Was that a Tinder thing?”

“I told you. It wasn’t a sex party.”

“Maybe not for you. But any woman desperate enough to dress up as a cartoon character is looking to get laid.”

The car might have hit a bump or something.

“Actually, Leia, laid. Clue’s right there, when you think about it. Hey, is this Wimbledon?”

Roddy’s gargled response wasn’t audible, but Shirley could read a street sign. This was Wimbledon.

She snatched the phone before he could prevent her. “How close are they?”

“Give it back!”

“When you tell me—”

“I don’t know without looking at it!”

He had a point. She tossed it back into his lap, screen down, and he fumbled it the right way up. “They’re on the common. Or Louisa is. Her phone, anyway.”

She’d already seen a marker for the common: they were heading in that direction.

“And Princess Leia’s not a cartoon.”

“She isn’t?”

Roddy rolled his eyes. “Well, sometimes she is. But that’s for kids.”

They’d rounded a junction and a darkness opened up ahead; they took another corner, and it settled on their right. Somewhere out there, Louisa’s phone was throbbing. Louisa lived miles away; even a crow in flight would have its work cut out. So what was she doing here, if not engaged on some adventure or other? With Lech? And how come other slow horses got to pair off, while Shirley was stuck with Roddy Ho? It wasn’t fair.

She dipped a hand into her pocket and fastened her fist around an inch-square cellophane envelope. And then a bus rolled past, masked passengers staring out from alternating seats, and in its wake a car; the driver’s face briefly visible as a grid of tattered lines.

“Was that Lech?”

It was, or had been.

He’d driven in a circle: the length of Windmill Road, then, pleasingly, left onto Sunset, which made him feel all Hollywood. He was now heading back up Parkside, whose trees hid the common from view. Louisa was out there but couldn’t offer clues as to where precisely, beyond feeling she’d run in a curve since leaving the car—nobody steered by the stars anymore, or not in London, where light pollution swaddled the city like a tea cosy. And there were two men out there with her, also following de Greer, and if they weren’t Park they could be anyone. It wasn’t so long since a pair of Russian hoods had toured Britain, leaving mayhem in their wake . . .

But once you started a hare, you had to follow it to its den. Louisa was out in the dark because of him, which meant he had to be ready to help her if needed. All those times he’d been inside the van, admiring the way the guys watched each other’s backs: here those moments were, like an immersive flashback. But he had to find her first.

He turned onto Windmill Road again. “You still with me?”

Louisa’s voice was laboured. “Uh-huh.”

“Are you on a path?”

“Not anymore.”

“Do you know what direction you’re heading?”

“I think back the way I came. But I’m not positive.”

Lech rubbed a hand across his cheeks, a gesture that had changed meaning in the past year. Once, he’d have been checking whether he needed a shave. Now, he was verifying that his face remained a welter of crazy scars.

“Can you see the road? Or any road?”

“A road. Dimly.”

It was a difficult distance away, difficult to estimate and difficult to keep in focus, and Louisa had other things to worry about, such as the way the ground dipped and lurched with every step. The two men in front had moved further apart, gaining ground on de Greer, and even as she watched they were putting a spurt on, as if this were their optimal moment; the darkest patch of ground between here and the world. She didn’t think they knew she was there. She’d turned her headtorch off, shrouding herself in darkness, which meant she wasn’t moving as quickly as them: the ghostly number eleven floating easily over the stumbly ground, the green trainers an effortless rise and fall, closing the gap between themselves and the orange piping on de Greer’s tracksuit. Only Louisa felt like a whole person; a solid figure in a murky landscape.

One thing was clear, though. Whoever these comedians were, they weren’t innocent souls on an evening run. They were closing in on de Greer the way dogs move in on prey, or the way Louisa imagined they might; with extra sudden speed, and joy coursing into their tastebuds.

She heard a woman gasp: de Greer realising she wasn’t alone.

And then the world grabbed Louisa by an ankle.

Like most falls, this one took forever, and she was already counting its possible cost before she hit the ground: she might break a bone, or mash her face into something unforgiving. But instinct reached out a helping hand: she was halfway curled into a ball before she landed, taking the brunt of the impact on her right shoulder. My shooting arm, she thought. She didn’t have a gun. Where did these thoughts come from? It hadn’t been soundless, her brief and unexpected flight, but she hadn’t cried out, and when she righted herself, and located the other figures again, they didn’t appear to have heard her. Shaken but unstirred, she got to her feet. Green Trainers and Number Eleven had come to a halt. Sophie de Greer stood halfway between them. No physical contact appeared to have occurred, but it didn’t look to Louisa like a meeting of friends.

She put a hand to her shoulder, gripped hard, and felt tomorrow’s bruise taking shape. But only a bruise. Nothing serious.

What mattered more was—shit—something was missing.

She’d dropped her mobile.

“She’s stopped moving,” Roddy said.

The pulse on his screen was stationary, as if Louisa had come to a halt out there in the dark.

They’d made a U-turn after spotting Lech, and were heading that same direction now, up the main road. To their left, hiding behind a screen of trees, lay the common. The thought of it had Shirley wriggling in her seat, as if, deep in its shadows, lay something to satisfy the restless cravings which were creeping up on her again. Which were always creeping up on her.

“How close is she?” she said.

“Dunno. But we’re nearly parallel.”

They reached a junction and turned, heading towards the roadworks, and keeping the common to their left. Its bordering trees thinned out, offering glimpses into the darkness: she peered, but couldn’t make out anything much. Roddy followed her gaze, and unlike Shirley could make out shifting shapes in the dark—the Rodster’s night vision was up there with your average cat. There were people; there was action. The scenario unfolded before him like a one-take movie: Louisa, lured onto the common by a former KGB Colonel, taking revenge for ancient defeats. There were black prisons in remote corners of the former Soviet states; Roddy knew about them—everyone did. British spies, long written off as missing in action, were among the captives; locked up with no hope of release, and treated with inhuman cruelty. It was all starting to happen right now, not far from here, in the dark. Under the pitiless eyes of ex-Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya, Louisa was being bundled into a sack, thrown into the boot of a car, dispatched from a private airfield, and the next time she’d see daylight, it would be falling on stone-cold snow and rock. An orange jumpsuit and a bucket in the corner . . . Yeah, right. Not on Roddy’s watch. His upper lip twitched, the only outer sign to betray his mental preparation for action, and something inside him hardened at the thought of the battle to come; the split-second reflexes he’d rely on—

“Red light.”

“. . . Wha’?”

“Red light!”

Roddy braked, and screeched to a halt in the path of the tourist coach coming the opposite way.

The noise of the coach’s brakes—like a pair of pigs being sheared—startled Lech, who was close at hand, having pulled over on the far side of the roadworks, where the road became two lanes again. He was standing by the car, mobile in hand, peering into the darkness beyond the trees, and hearing nothing from Louisa’s end. He’d said her name twice before the noise of the near-collision nearly made him drop his phone, though that same sound, transmitted through the ether, reached Louisa, the squawk erupting just yards from where she stood, and more audible than Lech’s voice had been. She scooped her mobile up gratefully, and turned back to where the men had waylaid de Greer, if that’s what they were doing. If that’s who she was. She switched her headtorch back on and ran to within yards of where the trio had clustered. “Still here,” she said into the phone. Then called to the group in front of her: “Hey!”

The woman had seen her approaching. The men hadn’t, and didn’t look welcoming.

“Hey,” Louisa said again. “Are you okay?”

The one with the shirt reading Number Eleven said, “You talkin’ to me?”

“I was talking to her,” Louisa said.

The blonde woman pushed her goggles onto her forehead. It was de Greer, Louisa noted with relief. One possible way of the evening ending up a fiasco was off the table. Others remained.

“Are you okay?” Louisa repeated. “Do you need help?”

It seemed to her that the woman smiled.

Green Trainers said to Louisa, “We’re all friends here. We’re just having a chat.”

“Yeah, no, it just seems an odd place to be doing that? So I wondered.”

“No need.”

The accent, she thought, was Italian. The looks matched: dark features, generous stubble, probably black hair—hard to tell in this light—but product definitely involved. The guy had been running for ten minutes, and his mop looked like he’d just stepped out of a wardrobe.

Ignoring him, she spoke to de Greer. “That’s right? They’re friends of yours?”

De Greer said, “I’ve never seen them before in my life.”

“She’s joking,” said Green Trainers.

“Then we have a problem,” Louisa said, “because I don’t have a sense of humour. But I do have a phone. You want me to call the police?”

“What we want,” said Number Eleven, “is for you to fuck off and mind your own business.”

“Hey hey hey,” Green Trainers said, and spread his arms forgivingly. “Let’s not get taken away. Come on. My friend and I, we’d like to invite you ladies to join us for a drink.”

“The same friend who just told me to fuck off? Yeah, let me think about that.” Louisa looked pointedly at de Greer. “And let’s get some uniforms here, shall we?” She raised her phone, and it said, “Louisa?” Cutting Lech off, she said, “Nine nine nine,” thumb poised to hit the number.

Give them a chance, she thought, to just head off of their own accord.

They didn’t.

Instead, Number Eleven lunged towards her at the same time as Green Trainers said, “No, don’t—”

It wasn’t clear to which of them he was speaking.

Louisa, anyway, didn’t get to make the call, though Eleven didn’t manage to snatch her phone, either; she sidestepped him, letting her arm drop as if it held a cloak, as if he were a bull. Pity she had no sword. He snorted past, whirled abruptly, and threw a blow that wasn’t a full bodied punch, more of a slap, which caught her on the shoulder. He thinks I’m a girl, she thought, and hit him on the nose, then danced back. He howled, more in anger than in pain she thought, and then again—more worryingly—in what sounded like delight. He bunched his fists. Seemed she wasn’t a girl anymore.

Still dancing, she tucked her phone into her jeans pocket, trying to ignore the fact that it immediately started to ring. Lech, she thought, and threw the thought away. Concentrate on the moment. Lech, not as far away as she supposed, was left staring at his own phone in frustration: Answer, damn it. And then: Where are you? He walked past the line of trees; felt the grass beneath his feet. It would be the height of stupidity to just set off into the dark and hope to find her; on the other hand, there weren’t any doors nearby he could kick down. This was as much as he could do.

So that’s what he did, his vision gradually adjusting to the dark that stretched out in most directions. He liked the dark, Lech Wicinski; in the dark, his face was no more scarred than anyone else’s. But this dark had a solid quality to it he didn’t often encounter on his night-time treks; the dark feels different when not buffered by buildings. It occupies the air more completely. The world behind Lech dropped away as if a curtain had fallen, smothering the light and killing most of the sound, not all of which was mechanical. Tempers were being lost; voices raised. Roddy had stalled trying to reverse out of the coach’s way, and the coach driver, an excitable type, had climbed out of his cabin to offer advice, much of which was retrospective in nature, and covered areas Roddy might usefully have attended to before venturing onto the roads or, indeed, leaving his mother’s womb.

Shirley said, “Just start the fucking car.”

“I’m trying!”

“Try harder?”

“He’s putting me off.”

This being the coach driver, who was bending down by Roddy’s window, indicating with hand motions that he should roll his window down, but doing so in such a manner that nobody in their right mind would comply.

“This should have been so easy,” Shirley said. “All we had to do was find Louisa. Now this guy wants to break you into pieces.”

Roddy took his hands from the steering wheel and shook his open palms at the louring coachman. “You’re not helping!” he shouted.

“Get out and give him a slap,” Shirley suggested.

“I might just do that in a minute.”

“Do you think he reads lips?”

Roddy tried the ignition again, and the car wheezed as if he’d gone for a choke-hold. The coach driver stepped away and sized the car up, estimating his chances of wrapping his arms round it and heaving it into the trees. You wouldn’t have laid good money against. The car, meanwhile—electric blue, cream flashing, chronic asthma—considered its immediate prospects and shuddered, while in front of it a coachful of tourists grew restless. Behind, as the temporary lights changed to green once again, a growing queue of traffic was rehearsing a symphony; light on strings, heavy on the horn section. The rumpus was enough to penetrate the row of trees; to reach out onto the common and tap Lech on the shoulder; enough, even, to reach Louisa a further few hundred yards away, and alone now with Green Trainers and Number Eleven—de Greer had turned and fled when the first punch had been thrown. Gone for help? Louisa wondered. Or just gone?

But she was too occupied to ponder long, because Number Eleven was aiming a kick at her head, and nearly connected, too.

And now here came Green Trainers on her left, his cack-handed attempts at brokering a truce abandoned. He was hopping from one foot to the other, keeping her guessing as to his next move. It wasn’t the first time this pair had tried to kick somebody’s head off. But they weren’t trained for it and they weren’t professional, otherwise why let their target slip away like that? She could see their teeth shining: they were enjoying themselves, and weren’t about to go on their merry way yet. Any time either of them made a connection, she was going to know all about it.

Her head torch was offering a target. She stripped it off and flung it over her shoulder, where it cartwheeled through the air before dropping blind to the grass. From a distance, it must have looked like a dying fairy’s last flight.

Number Eleven darted in and threw a punch. Louisa stepped back, nearly stumbled, righted herself and skipped sideways to avoid another kick from Green Trainers.

They knew what they were doing. And weren’t taking chances; it was as if they were used to facing down foes armed with basic weaponry—sticks and stones, perhaps; the bonebreaking standbys.

“Glad you came along, lady,” Number Eleven said. His breath was coming in short pants, as if this were foreplay.

If she hit the ground they’d be on her like dogs. Everyone there knew it, and two of them liked the idea.

Be nice to have a monkey wrench round about now.

Or a partner. Someone to watch her back.

Instead what she had was Shirley, watching Louisa shrunk to a pulsing dot on Roddy’s phone, which she’d swiped from his lap while his attention was elsewhere. The scale was such that Louisa appeared motionless, making Shirley wonder if she’d stopped for a lie down.

There was an idea—Louisa and Lech? Doing it in the dark, out there on the common?

Hard to picture, though that might have been because of all the racket. Roddy’s attempts to start the car, increasingly uncoordinated, had deteriorated to the point where they largely consisted of his offering it unspecified pleasures if it behaved itself. The coach driver, unimpressed by this development, was standing with his hands on his hips, framed by the windscreen. It was like being at a drive-in, thought Shirley, right up near the screen. And watching the wrong movie. What would he do next? What he did next was raise both arms in gorilla fashion: You are not gunna do that, she thought. But he did. He brought both fists down on the bonnet, making the vehicle shudder, and causing Roddy to yip—only word for it. As for Shirley, what she was feeling was the bliss of justified outrage. He’d just assaulted Roddy’s car. That was well out of order.

Behind him, the tourists in his coach were gathered upfront, staring from the wide windscreen at the unfolding spectacle. Not a few were filming it. A lot of this was already on Facebook, or that’s what Shirley assumed, reaching into her pocket for a face mask. The coach driver had stepped away, looking pleased with himself: you could see the indentations his fists had made on Roddy’s bonnet. Well out of order, she repeated to herself; maybe this time out loud. At any rate, Roddy turned towards her. “What you doing?”

“This,” she said, fastening the mask on, opening her door, climbing out.

The coach driver nodded sarcastically. “So he sends his little lady out, does he?”

“Little” depended on which angle you took, but Shirley was happy to accept the compliment. Not that this diminished the offence already caused.

“You hurt my friend’s car,” she said.

“Your friend’s a tosser!”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

The coach was two yards in front of her; the bottom of its windscreen about level with her head. She bobbed a little—once, twice—preparing her move.

“. . . What’s that in your hand?” the driver asked.

“We deal in lead, friend,” she said—though actually it was her iron—and launched herself off the ground.

It was nearly ballet; very nearly ballet. Maybe a little less delicate. At the moment the flat of the iron hit the glass she was airborne—an echo of the clubbing she might have been doing now, had the evening taken a different turn—and in the second of contact, the windscreen went opaque; she enjoyed a frozen moment during which a huddled group of tourists stared out at her, terrified, as if their entertainment had unexpectedly turned 3D. And then she was on the ground again, having executed a damn-near perfect superhero landing—the fingers of one hand touching the ground, iron raised like a hammer in the other—and the coach behind her was blind, and its driver stunned speechless.

Roddy’s car chose this moment to come back to life.

It sounded crazy loud, though had a lot of competition—horns were blaring from the traffic behind, and there was a certain amount of wailing coming from the bus. A police siren, too, had joined the chorus, though was some distance away; the noise remained a flashing blue suggestion behind a screen of trees. Only the coach driver had lost his voice, and he didn’t even yelp when Roddy missed him by maybe half an inch—Roddy couldn’t reverse, because the traffic behind had shunted forward, so swinging round the fat idiot who’d started all this was his only option. It would have been the work of a moment to lean across, open the door and let Shirley jump in, so Roddy really should have thought about doing that, but he was too busy avoiding the tree which had reared up, grinding against his paintwork as he passed, and suddenly all he had in front of him was nothing, a big black darkness that his headlights barely scratched, while the ground beneath his wheels was all over the place; an assault course of bumps and shallows and missing bits. He was breathing noisily—okay, maybe yelling—and the resulting sound ran up and down its own peculiar scale in time with the rockabilly motion of the car. It was all he could do to keep both hands on the wheel. Welcome to the Rod-eo: a lesser driver would have been thrown through the windshield by now.

Really should have given serious thought to being a stunt-man.

Because he was getting into the groove now, and it felt kind of wild. Okay, not doing the suspension any favours, but face it: a hot rod belonging to Hot Rod was going to have its suspension put through its paces sooner or later. As for the scene he was leaving behind, yeah, things had got messed up, but what could you expect with Shirley Dander providing distraction? Any job involving that mad chick was bound to go fruit-shaped. Enough to make you wonder whose side she was on. But that didn’t matter right now.

What mattered right now was: on the passenger seat lay his phone, screen upwards, dumped there by Shirley when she left to kill the bus.

And what mattered was: the pulsing dot that was Louisa’s phone was getting nearer. Or rather, Roddy was getting nearer the pulsing dot.

Which had been the mission all along, and he was the only one out here completing it.

The only one bar Lech, that was, though Roddy didn’t know Lech was on the common. For his part, that he was on the common was about the only thing Lech did know, as far as his whereabouts went. Until the commotion following Shirley’s shattering of the coach windscreen, he’d been striding in what he hoped was a straight line, this seeming a more sensible option than wandering in circles, though neither amounted to what could be called a plan. Odd sounds had drifted his way—sighs and mutterings—but it was possible, he thought, that the ground had stored away these daytime whispers; was softly releasing them, now night had fallen, like so many pockets of gas. But the noise that erupted after Shirley’s party trick blew past him like hot air. He turned, and saw the distant chaos as if it were a rock concert viewed from afar: all the light and sound focused on one corner of the darkness. But even as he had that thought, something broke away from the stage; a pair of headlights had come loose, to make their bumpy way across the common. Had to be some kind of idiot, thought Lech. But given that the vehicle was heading more or less in his direction, it at least provided illumination of sorts; when its twin cones of light weren’t pointing at the sky, they were throwing themselves haphazardly onto the common, and picking out movement somewhere not far ahead.

Some of this was Louisa, dodging another kick thrown by Number Eleven.

It was a favourite gambit of his, despite its lack of success so far. Perhaps he’d watched it done on screen; perhaps he thought he was doing it right. A good talking to would have put him straight, but Louisa was saving her breath for where it would do most good, this being keeping on her feet and moving about enough that neither man could land a blow. Her main problem was that there were two of them. Neither on his own would scare her much, but one mistake on her part would leave her open to being stomped on, and worse. So when Roddy’s headlights made themselves known she felt her spirits lift; not enough to distract her from her current vigilance, but more than they would have done had she been aware they were Roddy’s.

“Company’s coming,” she said.

Eleven’s reply was another kick, which he signalled enough that she had no trouble dodging.

Green Trainers was more of an issue. Bald, bearded and sleeve-tattooed, he was less inclined to use his feet as weapons, but nimbler on them than his companion. And while he was enjoying himself just as much—his small, even teeth bared in a grin—there was calculation too. He was letting Eleven wear Louisa out. When she made a mistake, he’d drop on her like a raptor . . . But she had something this pair didn’t, she’d walked away from gunfights, and that thought sparked a gallery of images: of being shot at way above London by a Russian hood; of waging a small war underground, River at her side; of decking a mercenary with a monkey wrench on a snow-covered lane in Wales. All that and more. Others, true, had died, but Louisa was still standing. And these guys were amateurs. So when Number Eleven aimed his latest kick—yawn—instead of dancing back she moved sideways, grabbed his ankle and twisted. Threw him away. She didn’t break anything—she would if he tried it again—but he gave a satisfying yelp all the same.

But while Eleven was briefly airborne, Trainers made his move: nipping in, throwing a punch. It contained more energy than finesse but caught her on the shoulder all the same, and as she quick-stepped backwards, the ground disappeared beneath her foot—only a two-inch depression; the scrabbling of a fox or a dog, but enough to rob her of balance. Bad shit happened in the dark: next moment she was on her back, Green Trainers on top of her, his hands on her throat, his face too close. He snarled something, its gist clear. Those headlights weren’t arriving fast enough, and she was dimly aware that Number Eleven was getting to his feet; soon they’d both be on her, and that would be that. She tried battering Trainers’s head, but made no impact: his hands were squeezing, hard. Stars popped in her eyes as her left hand went scrabbling for something—anything—that would work as a weapon. A gun would be nice. An event took place out of sight, a thud followed by a sigh and a slump, and meanwhile her hand, bless it, found an object, plastic, hard, her headtorch? Her headtorch. She mashed it, bright and hot, into Green Trainers’s left eye. This did the trick. He screamed, though he’d have a more macho word for it, and pulled back, allowing her to breathe once more. The night air tasted of blood. While she sucked in as much of it as she could Green Trainers slid sideways, all cohesion leaving his features. She must remember how she did that. And then a goggle-faced blonde woman was crouching beside her. “Are you all right?”

“. . . I think so.”

Though she felt like a jellyfish must feel: all nerves on high alert, but a distinct absence of muscle-tone.

Doctor de Greer was holding a brick. Where had Dr. de Greer found a brick? Maybe she’d ordered it from somewhere, Louisa’s jangled brain suggested. It was, after all, just what the doctor—

To her left, Green Trainers was struggling to his feet. She pushed herself upright, ready to kick his teeth in, but this proved unnecessary. He stumbled away into the dark. Number Eleven had already made tracks. As double dates went, you couldn’t call it a big hit.

De Greer started to say something, but at precisely that moment the approaching car hit level ground, allowing its headlights to stare directly at them, and as she raised a hand against the glare, Louisa caught sight—like an image from a pinhole camera—of a stick-like character trapped in the twin beams. It had its arms raised, as if alerting the oncoming driver to its presence, an action it seemed to undertake in slow motion though in actual fact happened at the speed of reality, which in this case was about twelve miles an hour. Which felt a lot faster to Roddy, attempting to steer his bouncing bronco over the dark common, and an awful lot faster to Lech, whom Roddy clipped on his way past. For a second Lech was a blur in his own mind, his sense of self dissolving like the wisp of a dream upon waking, but shortly afterwards he was definitely corporeal once again, and every square inch hurting. Roddy wasn’t aware he’d hit anything, because one bump feels much like another. Besides, he could make out two waiting figures at the far reach of his headlights, and was pretty certain one of them was Louisa. The second was also a woman, which was fine by him. There was nothing like making a good first impression, and who wouldn’t want to see Roddy Ho turning up in the nick of time, dispensing whatever justice was required?

Louisa, realising it was Roddy, and who he must just have run over, said to de Greer, “Still got that brick?”

“Are you a spook?”

“What’s a spook?”

“That’s right,” de Greer replied. “I thought you probably were.”

Roddy rolled to a halt while, a hundred yards away, Lech lay on his back and swore at the moon. Even further away, Shirley was being encouraged to put the iron down by a pair of commendably unflustered police officers. All in all, just another day in and out of the office.

Louisa looked at de Greer, who seemed pretty composed for someone who’d just bopped a pair of second-division thugs on their heads with a brick.

“We’d better talk,” she said.