Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(40)

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.