Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(64)

But Rasnokov was back in Moscow, and there were other dangers nearer home. If the Russian’s schemes involved sowing chaos here in London, he’d made a good start: for all Sparrow’s studied indifference to the traditional norms of government, inviting a foreign intelligence agent to help formulate national policy was more than a standard cock-up even for the 2020s. Thanks not least to Sparrow himself, lying in office was no longer a career-threatening felony; the consequence of misleading Parliament was nowadays a lap of honour, and you could even, as a witlessly self-revealing Home Secretary had suggested, be fucking useless and remain securely in post, provided you were no threat to the PM. But inviting a spy inside Number Ten, allotting her a coathook, that was a serious embarrassment. Which meant Sparrow would be hoping to get his defence in first.

Even as Diana was having these thoughts, she was checking her messages. Among them, an alert from the morning’s Times.

Waterproof . . .

The word brought her to a halt, provoking a muttered Jesus from the pedestrian in her wake.

She was a beat behind, and had been for days. Should have known it was a serious matter when Claude turned up at the Park: The word waterproof has been mentioned. Of course it bloody has . . .

But at least this answered a pressing question: who to set about fucking up first.

On the move again, she set her thoughts in order. It was clear she needed de Greer before the Limitations Committee, puncturing any claim that Waterproof had been used, and singing her heart out about Sparrow’s hamheaded gullibility. The PM preferred the public to believe that his ineffectual blustering was a stage act, and he mostly got away with that. But the outing of his sidekick as a Kremlin stooge would puncture the image, and sooner than suffer that he’d bow to Diana’s demands, chief among which would be hanging Sparrow out to dry.

That done, she could get on to the equally serious matter of fucking up Rasnokov, which would begin with Lamb’s observation about the missing whisky bottles.

She rang Josie, who told her: “The hotel’s recyclables are collected twice a week. We went through the dumpsters before the first of those. No Balvenie bottles.”

Diana had the impression of events unfolding on the other side of the connection; movement she couldn’t see happening in the Park.

“And he didn’t have them with him when he left?”

“He had carry-on only. They’d have shown on his X-rays.”

While he could have waltzed them through diplomatic channels, what would have been the point? If he’d intended them as take-home presents, he’d not have paid hotel prices.

“Get hold of whoever cleaned his room,” she said. “And find out politely, or find out the nasty way, if they walked off with a couple of abandoned half-empties. Or took actual empties for refilling with cheap stuff and selling on.”

Josie took a moment to answer. “That’s already been done. I think.”

“Excuse me, am I boring you?”

“Sorry, ma’am, there’s something going on, I don’t know what.”

“What do you mean, there’s—”

The young woman’s voice became muffled, as if she were holding a hand over her phone. Diana thought she heard her own name.

“Josie? What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry—”

“Josie?”

The connection was cut.

Dead phone in hand, Diana turned a corner. She’d reached City Road. There was traffic, moving at an average speed; there was a bus at a stop fifteen yards away, its rear-end mural declaring this her city. There was a helicopter shuttling overhead. And her phone was ringing again.

A hoarse whisper on the other end. “Red Queen. Red Queen.”

That was all.

Removing her phone’s batteries, Diana dropped it in a bin attached to a lamppost, and hurried across the road, reaching the bus in time to slip on board and be carried away.





It must have rained overnight, because the mews’ cobbles were shiny-wet and glistened in the morning sun, but no; whoever occupied the cottage opposite had been watering the plant-life, soaking the terracotta pots that laid siege to those premises like a Chinese army. And was cottage right, even? John Bachelor had temporarily occupied a number of properties lately—empty offices, friends’ sofas, his car’s back seat—but this was his first cottage, and the word sounded odd, applied in central London. On the other hand: whitewashed walls, a trellis arrangement, and a small tropical forest out front. It was hardly inner city.

He turned off the radio—the PM had just shared his vision of post-Brexit Britain as a culinary powerhouse, its takeaway delivery services the envy of the world—as the kettle reached the boil. Watching such devices perform this function was his career in a nutshell. Though the role was referred to as “milkman,” it mostly involved tea. But yesterday Dr. de Greer—Sophie—had praised the results, and that was the first compliment Bachelor remembered receiving this millennium.

“You’re being funny.”

He really wasn’t.

Bachelor had babysat before, and was familiar with the mindset of the usual Service casualty: someone whose career was an open book, its index busiest under the heading “Grudges, slights and injustices.” So when Lech Wicinski had asked about his availability, he’d jumped straight over the small print to focus on more important matters. “And the per diem aspect, you’d be covering that?” he’d heard himself say, with that inward sense of shame that felt as if someone were turning his corners down. Only once that had been established had the penny dropped. The baby he’d be sitting was Sophie de Greer.