Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(15)

None of this amounted to much. And three days wasn’t a long time to be invisible, in Whelan’s opinion. Evidence of a more protracted disappearance lay all around him. In the furnace of government, of course, other metrics applied: Sparrow clearly expected hourly contact with—or from—his team, making a lapse like de Greer’s an aberration. But was it mystifying? From all Whelan had heard, Anthony Sparrow was best kept at a distance; the PM’s string-puller according to some, his headbutter-in-chief to others, he was nobody’s idea of a good time either way. Perhaps de Greer had simply decided she’d had enough, and gone to seek more agreeable company: a bunch of drunk golfers, or a basket of rats. But there would always be those who saw, or professed to see, conspiracy, just as there would always be those who engineered it. Few were more aware of this than Whelan.

Because, prior to his elevation to First Desk, Claude Whelan had worked over the river. Scenes & Ways had been his department—Schemes and Wheezes, in the jargon; a typically schoolboy designation for what had begun, literally, as a cut-throat division, its original brief having been to plot assassinations. This had been during wartime, its current operatives would reassure newcomers, sometimes remembering to add “obviously.” In Whelan’s early years, destabilisation scenarios were the hot-button issue; leverage applied by major players to keep the ragamuffin nations to heel. Then the internet levelled the playing field, and the old rule-book was trampled underfoot. Once, you had to appear big to play the bully. Now minnows could be rogue nations too. Keyboards were weaponised, trolls emerged from under bridges, and somewhere along the way free elections turned into free-for-alls, as if democracy were a shaggy dog story to which a joke president was the punchline. All those decades of the arms race, and it turned out there was no greater damage you could inflict on a state than ensure it was led by an idiot. Somewhere, someone, probably, was laughing.

These thoughts required Whelan to shake himself like a dog waking up. The world’s problems weren’t his doing. His own problems, even: not all were his fault either. And yet. And yet. He had worked in a dirty business, which had helped produce a dirty world. Small surprise that when he’d been in a position to make a difference he’d been brought low by dirty tricks; a ruination engineered not by anonymous disruptors, but by the current First Desk herself, Diana Taverner, aided and abetted by the loathsome Jackson Lamb. And here he was, gifted an opportunity to poke around in Taverner’s cupboards . . .

It was possible he was being used. Sparrow’s ambition to open his umbrella over every aspect of the state machinery was well known, and de Greer’s disappearance could be a ruse to allow him access to the Park. Letting Whelan run the investigation was a slap in the face to Taverner—having her predecessor investigate her actions presupposed a guilty finding. If that were all true, where did Whelan’s loyalties lie? Not with either side. Not with any bad actor, whether in the Service he’d led or the government he’d served. So why not with himself, this once? It still rankled, his fall from grace, and why shouldn’t he take some measure of revenge? It wasn’t really him, he knew that. He was nobody’s idea of an avenging knight. But wasn’t it time for a change, and Christ, he was havering like bloody Hamlet. Enough. He had said he would do it. So enough.

Whelan read through the file once more, but learned nothing new. That done, he rang the Park and informed Diana Taverner that he was on his way to see her.





With her office door ajar, an inch-wide view of the landing was available to Ashley. If anyone entered the kitchen, she’d know. No matter how quiet they were, they’d darken her door.

A slim thing to concentrate on, but she had nothing else to do. Literally: nothing. It was like being an extra in a crowd scene—she was dressed the part, she took up space, she had no lines to deliver.

A week ago, she’d followed Lamb home, or that had been her plan—she’d wanted to see where he lived, how he lived. A mental picture was easy: a pigsty with a car on bricks out front. The possibility that he shared this dwelling she briefly entertained, but when she tried to bring a cohabitee into focus, the image seared and melted. Who would share their life with Lamb? Apart from the slow horses, obviously. Slow horses don’t count. She’d learned that much.

But in the end, her plan fell apart. For two hours she’d waited on the Barbican terrace, roosting on a flowerbed’s brick border. Her healed arm ached, a dull reminder of why she sought revenge, as—hood up, mask on—she stared across a meagre flow of traffic at Slough House. By this time in her career, her training completed, her hand-in assessed—and she’d done a good job on that—she should have been assigned to a Park department. She’d been hoping for Ops. Instead she’d had six months of administrative nightmare, fighting her reassignment to Slough House, which happened anyway. So here she was, and the evening had grown smeary and grey long before Lamb appeared, an unkempt figure spilling out of the alleyway. He paused to light a cigarette then stepped off down Aldersgate Street, weaving slightly as if drunk. Unpeeling herself from her perch, she flitted over the footbridge to follow him, maintaining that safe distance drummed into her at the Park: far enough away that you can fade; near enough that there’s no gap he can slip through. Hood up, mask on. Everything was disguise.

The Old Street junction was busy, queues of traffic bidding for dominance, and the cold made Ashley’s eyes water, adding lens-flare to the reds and greens and ambers, the yellows and whites. Lamb was a blurry solid amidst this flashing circus, crossing the road with no apparent regard for moving vehicles. A bus blocked her view but he was still there once it had passed, on the opposite pavement, hobbling north. There was a pub on that corner whose curved windows suggested a bygone era; behind it lay a patch of wasteground enclosed by hoardings. There’d been shops or houses there, but it was now a barely curated absence, a temporary space where you could park all day for twenty pounds. She was crossing the road when Lamb slipped past the horizontal pole guarding its single point of entrance. Did Lamb have a car? One not propped up on bricks? It seemed too normal. But if he did, and this was where he parked it, that was it. He’d soon be gone.