Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(53)

And if Lech was right, and she was some kind of plant, her handler wouldn’t have a team watching her back. That would be tantamount to hoisting the Jolly Roger.

Lech said, “Maybe you’d better abort.”

“I’m not leaving her.”

“Louisa, if they are tailing her, and they’re not a security detail, they’ll be from the Park. And if we fuck up a Park surveillance—”

“Yeah, or it’s two guys following a woman on a dark common.”

“Shit . . . Hang on.”

A padded thump, as if he’d dropped his phone on the passenger seat.

She couldn’t see de Greer, and the silvery eleven was no more than a ghostly squiggle in the dark.

Lech came back. “Are you on the same path you set off on?”

“No.”

“. . . Any idea at all where you are?”

Yes, she thought. I’m in the fucking dark. Could you be any less helpful?

A sentiment echoed that moment by Roddy Ho, and directed at Shirley Dander, though the wording differed.

“I’m trying to drive!”

“I’m not stopping you!”

“You’re fiddling about! Stay out of my glove box!”

Shirley slammed it shut. It contained nothing interesting anyway: a pair of gloves was all.

She often succumbed to déjà vu when a passenger in someone else’s car. On the other hand, she often succumbed to Groundhog Day just turning up for work.

“Can you not drive faster?”

“Can you not shut up?”

She should never have let him get behind the wheel. There was a kind of purgatory in this; to feel herself rushing towards some waiting event, one crying out for her presence, while in reality she was travelling at the speed of a hobbled cow, with every traffic light in existence throwing a red glare in her direction, and every other car on the street laughing at her in its rearview mirror. The scowl she wore was like a swan’s wing: it could break a man’s arm if he got too close. And the way her blood was fizzing, she might burst before they reached their destination.

There was action somewhere, and she was being sidelined again. She could feel it in her bones, in the itch beneath her skin.

Shops and houses. Someone walking a dog. Streetlights and zebra crossings; the flat expressions on darkened panes of glass. London had different textures, a different grain, every postal district.

Roddy said, “How do you know what they’re up to, anyway?”

“I don’t,” she said. “That’s the point.”

“Then why—”

“They were talking about a KGB colonel.”

“In Bonn,” said Roddy. “In 1988.”

“. . . You know who she is?”

“Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya?”

“Yeah. Her. Who is she?”

“Dunno.”

“So how come you know her name?”

“It was a speed test.”

“Yeah?” Shirley looked through her side window, checking whether they were keeping up with pedestrians. “How’d that work out?”

Roddy’s phone lay on his lap, winking up at him: he seemed able to assimilate information by glancing at a screen, as if he were one step away from being plugged into a giant motherboard. She imagined his head full of digital splinters, his tongue a slippery coil of wires. All his thoughts lined up in binary rows.

On the other hand, he didn’t handle human communication well. Which reminded her:

“Those women. The ones who want to be Princess whatsername.”

“Leia.”

“Yeah. Was that a Tinder thing?”

“I told you. It wasn’t a sex party.”

“Maybe not for you. But any woman desperate enough to dress up as a cartoon character is looking to get laid.”

The car might have hit a bump or something.

“Actually, Leia, laid. Clue’s right there, when you think about it. Hey, is this Wimbledon?”

Roddy’s gargled response wasn’t audible, but Shirley could read a street sign. This was Wimbledon.

She snatched the phone before he could prevent her. “How close are they?”

“Give it back!”

“When you tell me—”

“I don’t know without looking at it!”

He had a point. She tossed it back into his lap, screen down, and he fumbled it the right way up. “They’re on the common. Or Louisa is. Her phone, anyway.”

She’d already seen a marker for the common: they were heading in that direction.

“And Princess Leia’s not a cartoon.”

“She isn’t?”

Roddy rolled his eyes. “Well, sometimes she is. But that’s for kids.”

They’d rounded a junction and a darkness opened up ahead; they took another corner, and it settled on their right. Somewhere out there, Louisa’s phone was throbbing. Louisa lived miles away; even a crow in flight would have its work cut out. So what was she doing here, if not engaged on some adventure or other? With Lech? And how come other slow horses got to pair off, while Shirley was stuck with Roddy Ho? It wasn’t fair.

She dipped a hand into her pocket and fastened her fist around an inch-square cellophane envelope. And then a bus rolled past, masked passengers staring out from alternating seats, and in its wake a car; the driver’s face briefly visible as a grid of tattered lines.