Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(21)

The files had come with no key attached; no explanation of which number dialled sat on which desk. All he had was the number de Greer had called: a landline, out of sequence with most others on the list. More significant was the timing. The call had been placed on the afternoon of the day de Greer disappeared, which meant that any possibility that the two events were unconnected faded like a forgotten flavour, because the Park was the Park, and coincidence was outlawed within its precincts. The Park was where plots were hatched and nurtured and set loose from their cages, and no one knew this better than him.

He had the sense of standing by a long-grassed meadow, aware that some of the rippling on its surface was made by the wind; the rest by small creatures scurrying about out of sight.

The clock’s ticking had grown louder, as good an indication as any of time passing. He attempted to put an end to this by arriving at a decision: the best way of finding whose phone de Greer had rung was calling it, so he called it. It took an unconscionable time to be answered, but when it was Whelan found himself holding his breath, and once he’d disconnected without speaking, he remained motionless for some while. It was as if he had just stepped into that long-grassed meadow. It was as if the rippling were heading in his direction, and he would soon feel either a soft breeze whispering past him, or some sharp-toothed rodents sawing at his legs.





In this last brief heatwave of the year, which faded every evening with the dimming of the day, London had dragged itself back to normal, setting the memory of two miserable years aside, and letting its age-old hallmarks reappear. So the river slowed to a crawl as the day departed, just as it always had, and the skies purpled in the distance, soothing the edges of office buildings. Sounds seemed softer: the sighs and exhalations of weary cars, and the buzzing of swarms of bicycles steered by skintight black-and-yellow riders, mere whispers compared to the frantic careering of rush hour, though the helicopters shredding the air overhead, ferrying important people to important places, were as angry as ever. Lower down, in the green spaces, trees soughed and whistled, and runners tapped to the pavements’ beat in brutally expensive footwear; prams trundled on boardwalks by the lakes, wheelchairs rattled over paving stones, and music was everywhere, like mist; leaking from doorways, broadcast from speakers strapped to couriers’ handlebars, and performed with huge sincerity and varying degrees of talent by buskers: someone, somewhere, was playing a cello while coins splashed into its case. Underneath this music, the liquid lub-dub that was London’s heartbeat could be heard once more: the pouring of pints and glasses of wine; the sloshing of water in the bottles everyone carried; the streaming of piss into toilets and urinals, followed by the flushings of cisterns that sent it cascading into sewers, their pipes laid along the beds of forgotten rivers, which once lapped to the same tidal pull that amplifies the Thames. And most constant of all, visible everywhere if you knew where to look—in the building sites, in the long black cars, in the designer suits and jewelled throats, in wristwatches and cufflinks, tattoo parlours and nailbars, in a million glittering windows and a billion slot machines—the tumbling wet slap of money being laundered, over and over again.

Funny how her thoughts dragged her that way, as she was driven to the Russian embassy on Bayswater Road.

Diana had a nine o’clock appointment with the PM; their weekly meeting was a fixture but its timing varied, principally—she suspected—to provide him with a ready-made alibi should his domestic circumstances demand. Even without that clouding her evening, the embassy reception was one she’d regretfully declined some weeks previously, on the unstated ground that no one in their right mind wanted to spend a late September evening in the company of gangster-state diplomats, no matter how high-end the catering. But that afternoon’s catch-up in the hub’s screening room had turned, if not the world, at least the day upside down.

It had started ordinarily enough, the format the usual: Diana at the head of the long table, facing the video wall; her theme, as ever, Impress me. By her side, Josie—just back from delivering to Claude Whelan the data he’d wanted; she wasn’t quite Oscar material, Josie, but she had her moments—and lining the table two rows of boys and girls, some of them hub, others from Ops; the former somewhat tense, as if the occasion kindled memories of seminars with a particularly tetchy tutor; the latter more pleased with themselves, a satisfaction evident in the amount of space they took up: elbows well apart when leaning forward, legs the same when they pushed their chairs back. Ops, their stances read, was rock and roll. Those on the hub might fancy themselves the brains of the outfit, but the streets were where doors were kicked down. The boys and girls from Ops didn’t do the kicking themselves (you had Ops and then you had Muscle, a department which didn’t actually go by that name but probably should), but if it turned out in the course of the meeting that any doors needed opening suddenly, the Ops guys were confident nobody would be looking at the hub sissies to take first go.

It wasn’t always this combative. Well, it was, but it wasn’t always so blatant. Meetings, though, brought out the worst.

The first half hour took a little less than twice that long, which was par for the course. There was a presentation (hub) on the importance of changing passwords at least once a month, a theme which rolled round with the regularity of a Take That farewell tour, and generated as much interest; and a head-cam recording (Ops) of a takedown of a suspected sleeper cell operating out of a two-bed flat in Brighton. This had proved a false lead—the “cell” was in fact a bridge school made up of off-duty bus drivers—but the process involved in storming the premises and scaring the shit out of everyone was textbook, and the subsequent night out worth a twenty-second rehash before Taverner cleared her throat and silence prevailed.