Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(65)

“So I was right.”

“Truthfully?” Wicinski had asked. “I haven’t the faintest.”

But whatever was going on, de Greer had been targeted, and, thanks to Bachelor himself—who’d been the one to point Wicinski at a TV screen—it was the slow horses who’d brought her to sanctuary.

So here he was, in a Service safe house, with no current worries about food or shelter, and in his care an unfamiliar sort of client in that she was young, attractive, and in peril she hadn’t brought upon herself via the familiar triathlon of alcohol, sex and disgruntlement. Also, there was something in her conduct towards him that Bachelor had to take a few stabs at before it registered. Respect. Christ, it had been a long time.

He poured water into the pot, scalding it nicely. She brought out the protector in him, a trait usually summoned by his more elderly clients. Something helpless about her; uncalculating. And they had a ready-made connection, of course.

“I knew your mother.”

“. . . Really?”

“Well, not knew knew.”

He wasn’t sure how much he could say about Bonn. Somewhere, there was a former spook who’d been burned by the KGB, and it had never been clear to Bachelor whether the poor fool had committed the sins he’d been accused of, or whether, rather than having put a foot out of line, he’d simply found the line redrawn beneath his foot. Standard procedure for the time. The Cold War wasn’t all muffins at Checkpoint Charlie. Which this young woman presumably knew, her mother having been a combatant.

“And now you’re in the same line.”

“I wasn’t given a choice.”

This made sense to Bachelor, whose own horizons, he sometimes believed, had been crayoned in by another hand. “Blackmail?”

“Not me,” she said. “My mother. They said . . . They said she’d be turned out onto the streets. And she’s old. And . . .”

And all the things that went with being old. This, too, was an ancient story: a lifetime’s service trampled underfoot. They wore you out, then weaponised your uselessness and aimed it at your children. Dr. de Greer was crying, so automatically became Sophie. He could not comfort her while addressing her by title.

That first night he more or less ordered her to get some sleep: it was amazing, he trotted out, how different things looked in the morning. He’d then taken stock of the safe house, focusing on fridge and kitchen cupboards. No alcohol. Plenty of tinned food, though, and a freezer compartment stuffed with ready-meals. A box of teabags, not quite stale. Still no alcohol. But they wouldn’t starve. As for sleeping arrangements, there was only one bed; he’d settled on the sofa, and had known worse berths. When sleep arrived it came dreamlessly, but when he’d woken he’d lain for an hour or more remembering Bonn, the three or four days he’d spent staring at Sophie de Greer’s unsmiling, unspeaking mother; the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. And here he was sharing a house with her living image. Life brought you in circles, if you waited long enough. It sometimes seemed to Bachelor he’d done little with life other than wait through it.

Now they had a routine, Bachelor keeping station by the landing window, where he could clock strange arrivals, hear unusual sounds, be alert for danger; Sophie perched beside him on the top stair, as if they were engaged in a joint effort, rather than one in which he was the knight, she the fair maiden. He was wary of asking questions, knowing that the professionals, when they came for her, would expect to find her intact, but she had no such compunction.

“How long have you been a spy?”

“That’s not really what I do.”

“But you work for the intelligence service.”

He was a milkman, he explained; a long out-of-date joke having something to do with collecting the empties. A care-worker, really. It was strange, he found himself saying, the byways along which a career could take you. She seemed happy to share this insight, and even treat it as a small joke. Which, like his career, he supposed it was.

He made one of her own career, too: “Have you always known you wanted to be a superforecaster?”

Seeing her laugh was a new experience. He’d spent days in Bonn hoping to see that face smile, but Sophie’s mother—raised amidst grim state machinery—didn’t have the muscles to make that expression work.

There was a lot he wanted to know, but nothing he was able to ask. He hoarded what clues came his way, though: My mother made great sacrifices.

She sent me away. I studied in Switzerland.

I always knew there’d be a debt to pay.

Fragments of a story the professionals would put together. But Bachelor felt he knew her better than the Park’s inquisitors ever would.

When Lech visited on the second day, Bachelor asked when they could expect company—when, in particular, Lamb would be dropping in.

“You’re asking me?” Lech said. “I’m hardly in the loop.”

Afterwards, when Bachelor related this non-information to Sophie, she said, “They’re deciding who gets me.”

“Who do you want to get you? I mean, where do you want to be? Do you want to go home?”

“Zurich’s my home. But they won’t send me there. They’ll send me to Moscow.”

“And what’s there for you?”

“Nothing.”