Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(23)
“Highlights?”
“He spent two hours in Harrods.”
“No prizes for originality. There’s footage?”
“Yes.”
“Josie?”
“Cueing it now,” said Josie, and the viewing wall changed as she dabbed at her keyboard, now showing Gregory Ronovitch in the men’s department at Harrods, holding two ties, visibly deciding between the two. If he’d chosen to pose for Pete Dean’s study, he couldn’t have adopted a more useful stance; a neutral observer would have assumed Dean was being asked his opinion.
“Here’s another question,” said Diana to the luckless Op. “Do you think there’s a chance Gregory was aware of your presence in Harrods?”
“Ah . . .”
“In your own time.”
“I didn’t think so then.”
“And now?”
“Now, yes. It looks like he clocked me.”
“And following his shopping trip?”
“That first picture was him arriving at the embassy ninety minutes ago. Which was when I handed over to—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Still on her feet, Diana approached the image on the wall so that it shimmered across her own head and shoulders. She looked out at the room as if she too had just been transported to Harrods, and was choosing a tie. Gregory Ronovitch’s head was next to her own, almost touching, and much larger. The two of them stared out at Pete Dean taking the picture then, and at everyone else looking at it now, as if no time had passed between the two moments. Nobody spoke. The silence held for a quarter of a minute.
She said, “Someone. Please. Put me out of my misery.”
It was Josie who got there first. “Oh my god.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Diana. “Anyone else?” She scanned the room. “Imagine it’s important. Imagine you work for the intelligence service.”
When realisation swept round the table it did so by morphic resonance, alighting on all present one after the other. Two heartbeats earlier, no one bar Josie had known what had triggered Lady Di. Now everyone did; the more foolish among them with mounting excitement, the rest with a sense of dread. Ops looked at hub and hub looked at Ops, and both wondered what might lie on the other side of the door Diana had just kicked down.
Someone, anyone, spoke. “He’s grown a beard.”
“He’s grown a beard,” Diana repeated flatly. “He’s grown. A. Beard. Well. If I’d known we’d be dealing with Dick Emery, I’d have thrown in the towel long ago.”
“But . . .”
“But yes, what?”
The speaker couldn’t follow through. “He looks different. That’s all.”
He did, but not enough that it should have taken them this long. Diana Taverner herself had never set eyes on the man, but she’d studied the same footage they all had, had grown familiar with the way he moved, with the hand gestures, with the rubbing of the—admittedly clean-shaven—chin. There’d even been, for a while, a photo pinned up in the hub’s breakout area; a rather self-conscious elevation of the man to celebrity status. The picture had shown him receiving a medal from the Gay Hussar himself, and wearing the expression most serving officers wore when posing alongside Putin, one adopted following instructions not to make eye contact, or sudden movements.
The silence in the room, now knowledgeable rather than ignorant, wasn’t any more comfortable than it had been.
“So,” said Diana at last. “How worried should we be, do you think?”
No one dared answer.
“Let me put it another way,” she said. “Vassily Rasnokov, First Desk of the Russian secret service, has been in town since yesterday morning, and it’s only just come to our attention. Gosh, do you think he’s been up to anything we should know about?”
Mostly, Catherine Standish viewed her history as scenes from a flickery, black-and-white world, and knew that her current sober colours were the real thing: a little muted, several rinses short of dazzling, but true nonetheless. She moved among washed-out reds and faded blues, the greys and browns of city streets, but this was better than the monochrome existence of the drunk, who is always only one thing or the other. But there were moments, still, when she suspected that she had this the wrong way round, and that her alcoholic years were brighter, more Technicolor, than anything she knew today. Once, her daily palette had included deep dark reds and crystal whites, smokey ambers and velvety golds, each the colour of a curtain waiting to be drawn. Together, they made today’s rainbows watery and thin. Made the noises from bars and public houses, the lights of off-licence windows, a welcome mat.
When she had such thoughts, she was careful not to chase them away too quickly—that would be to underline their attraction—but subject them to a quietly rigorous examination. These were the colours of blood and vomit, of false friendship and foul laughter. Blackouts were called blackouts for a reason. White nights were mental blizzards in which travellers got lost. Catherine might not be in Kansas anymore—or perhaps she was not in Oz—but wherever it was she wasn’t, she was at least home. And when she wasn’t home she was in Slough House, or, as now, moving from one to the other, picking her way past the noises from bars and public houses, between the lights of off-licence windows. There were other premises too, innocent ones, but they never called out to her as she passed.