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

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

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

“My fault.”

“Uh-huh.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then what?

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

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

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

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

Whatever.

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

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

For some unfathomable reason, she wanted to cry.

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

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

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

“Ms. Dander?”

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

“What?”

“You’ll be late for your session.”

Happy-clappy crap, more like.

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

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

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

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

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

The San, thought Claude Whelan.

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

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

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

A declaration of hostilities, thought Claude.

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

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

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

“The San?”

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

Sparrow hadn’t wanted a bloody lecture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A blank stare had been the best Sparrow could manage.

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, Nash was still talking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waterproof . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me, am I boring you?”

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

“What do you mean, there’s—”

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

“Josie? What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry—”

“Josie?”

The connection was cut.

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

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

That was all.

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