Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(44)

“Don’t.”

“Back on the hub, we’d follow this through. It’s way over the credibility line.”

“So take it to the hub.”

“It may be over the credibility line, but I’m not.”

“Lamb’ll listen.”

“Lamb can take a fucking walk. Anyway, what would he do? He’d send us out to watch her. You and me.”

“You’re very sure of that.”

“Well he’s hardly going to send Shirley and Ho.”

“You’ve not known him as long as I have. Anyway, aren’t you forgetting someone?”

“Who, Ash? She’s not been here ten minutes. He had me chained to my desk the first two months.”

“Which would be all the reason he needs.” Louisa looked at the two photos again, side by side. Mother and daughter? Caught cold, she might even have thought them the same woman. Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya was uniformed, her hair tied back, her expression severe; Doctor Sophie de Greer wore glasses, and had softer hair, but the eyes were the same. They might have been options on a dating site: here’s me as stern librarian; me as the Red beside your bed. God, where did that come from? She should get out more. She said to Lech, “So what are you suggesting? That I give up my evening and spend it watching your supposed ringer, waiting for her handler to make contact?”

Lech said, “It’s something to do, right?”

Like she’d said earlier. He was worse than River Cartwright.

He looked at his watch. “I’ll leave you to think about it,” he said. “Twenty minutes?”

“Not going to happen.”

“See you outside.”

He stopped in the kitchen on his way downstairs, put the kettle on, and was wasting moments looking for a clean mug—which went to show he was still a relative newcomer; the last clean mug in Slough House commemorated Charles and Di—when Shirley appeared in the doorway, like one of those bollards that rise up out of the tarmac when you don’t expect.

“What were you and Louisa talking about?”

“We’re thinking of adopting.”

“No one’ll let you. You’d scare a kid stupid just being in the same room.”

“Always a pleasure, Shirley. But don’t you have things to be getting on with? I don’t know, accidents to cause or furniture to break?”

He found a mug that at least had a handle, and rinsed it under the tap.

“You’re up to something.”

“Shit. You got me. This whole thing about being an office worker doing boring stuff in a crappy workplace? That’s just pretending. I’m actually a spy.”

“I want in.”

“There’s nothing to be in.”

“I’ll tell Lamb.”

“Where are we, nursery school?” The kettle boiled and he poured water onto a teabag. “Look, remember Old Street Station? Remember we decided to take out one of the newbies sent to follow us?”

“. . . Yeah. So?”

“So you put a civilian in hospital. Louisa and I aren’t up to anything, and if we were, you’re the last person I’d want along, unless for some reason I hoped it would go tits up in the first five minutes. Clear?”

She kicked the wall hard enough to cave plaster in, and that was Shirley with trainers on. Give her a pair of boots, she’d bring down the house.

She stomped back to her office, and Lech carried his tea to his room, where Roddy Ho was still hunkered behind his screens. “Sorry, man,” he said. “Mr. Lightning came in twenty seconds quicker.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“Well, I’ll do my crying in the rain.” He sat, drank his tea and looked over the work product on his monitor, a list he barely remembered amassing. Was this really worth chasing down? It was made up of the names, the noms de web, of barely hinged individuals who’d dropped from social media after a flurry of hate-filled rants: Had they become radicalised and vanished undercover, the better to fulfil some real-world outrage? Or had they just got laid and calmed down? It was Slough House in a nutshell: a blizzard of random incidentals it might take years to sift through, leaving you with a handful of nothing, or possibly, just possibly, one solid nugget in your palm . . . Lech thought again of John Bachelor in the pub, his hangdog air dispelled as he outlined what he’d glimpsed on a news broadcast. A face from yesterday. What if it meant something? It certainly felt solider now, the photographs adding weight to the story, but all Lech was sure of was, this wasn’t something to take to the Park. Not because it might turn out a waste of time, but in case it didn’t. He allowed himself a moment’s imagining: of presenting the hub, not with a loose thread but a tightly wound bobbin, and the reaction that would get. They’d thrown him onto the waste ground, and he’d struck gold there, and carried it back. Imagine that . . .

Oh Jesus, he thought. Just listen to me.

Wiping thoughts of glory from his mind, he opened a new browser, logged onto a Service database, traced an address for Sophie de Greer, then turned his computer off without bothering to close the other programs first. Tell me about it in the morning, he thought. Or, you know. Just burn and die.

Ho glared at him as he pulled his jacket on. “You rigged the timing so it looked like I lost.”