Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(84)

The woman said, “It’s a private facility. We have no rooms available.”

Shirley thought: Yeah, and how come he’d just wandered through the front door? The San wasn’t high security, but it didn’t put out a welcome mat. How come this character had got as far as the reception desk?

He’d tipped his head to one side. It was possible he thought this charming. “A friend’s staying here. I’m just paying a visit, okay?”

Shirley remembered from her morning walk how you could approach the house through the woods, if you had a mind to. Because they weren’t prisoners. Even Shirley was here of her own free will, if you overlooked the fact she’d been given zero bloody option. So yeah, she could walk out, anyone could, but the other side of that coin was, if you had a pressing need to get in, it wouldn’t take military genius.

“Just for a few minutes?”

The accent was familiar; so much so, it took a moment for Shirley to clock it. He was Italian. Shirley had an Italian grandfather, though she’d never met him. To be honest, she wasn’t convinced her grandmother had known him all that well. Still, blood was blood: she had that accent in her genes. She knew it when she heard it.

“For the last time, sir, if you don’t leave, I’ll have to call security.”

“There’s no need. Just a quick visit.”

Press the button, thought Shirley. He’s a threat or he’s a flake. But whatever he is, he’s not a lost tourist.

And then he said, “My friend, she’s called Shirley Dander. Just give me her room number, and we’re all good.”

Driving out of London had been easy, and traffic light. For the first half hour, Whelan listened to the news—the PM had just shared his vision of post-Brexit Britain as an imperial powerhouse, its weights and measures system the envy of the world –then a podcast on rising racial tension in the wake of low vaccine take-up in minority communities, before deciding silence was preferable. This carried him through the next sixty miles, and by the time he was approaching the small town nearest the San he recognised familiar territory, though one ravaged by recent events. About half the retail premises were shuttered, and a canvas banner reading “Food Bank—Tues/Thurs” had been hoisted across a car park gantry. London, he knew, had taken a battering. But this felt like a disaster zone; a community flattened by history, and not yet back on its feet.

It was a relief to be out the other side; to leave the main road and bear left, heading uphill along a single-track lane. On his previous visit, in early summer, this landscape had been all greens and gentle browns, the British countryside at rest. Now the car was surrounded by waves of blacks and blues, shifting in the wind. On both occasions, the lane approaching the facility took its time; it bent round fields, and went some distance out of its way to admire a farmhouse. Driving slowly, nervous of curves, Whelan was starting to have doubts. It was nine thirty; late to be paying a call. On the other hand, the San was a medical institution. Not all of its guests would arrive in daylight; some would be delivered as wreckage, under cover of the small hours. And he was still a figure in the Service; his name would ring bells, open doors. Besides, if memory served, when the car crested the next hill he’d be almost there; in his headlights’ beam he’d have a view of the San below; its elegant driveway behind its tall iron gates, the long wall bordering its eastern side. All of it at ease with the peaceful countryside.

But memory didn’t serve. It was the next hill but one that allowed the remembered view, and when it arrived, it had altered. Whelan’s car dipped, and its headlights picked out the long wall, but in place of the iron gates was a twisted mess: one still hung on a hinge, badly buckled, and the other was no longer there. The red tail lights of a large vehicle, a truck or a bus, were heading up the elegant driveway at speed. Whelan had the sense of other shadows, swarming in the darkness. All this in the half-second or so that his lights illuminated the scene. And then the lane curved again, showing him only the darkness ahead, which would in another minute reach those broken gates. Before he’d driven half that distance a bright light appeared at the side of the lane, directed straight at him, and a silhouette flagged down his car.

“Shirley Dander. Just give me her room number, and we’re all good.”

“I’m calling security now.”

“Okay,” the man said, but not to her; he was speaking into the mobile he’d produced from his pocket.

“Would you put that away?”

“Sure,” he said, but instead leaned forward and hit her in the face.

The same moment the woman toppled backwards, Shirley heard a distant revving followed by an elongated crash, one which started with a metallic crunch and continued for some while as a twisted, scraping form of torture.

The woman was shrieking, and on the floor, but Shirley didn’t think she’d reached that button. No alarm was sounding. Or not until Shirley jabbed her elbow into the little glass panel at the top of the staircase, triggering an electronic howl that came from everywhere at once. The man froze, then froze again as Shirley took the stairs three at a time—can you freeze twice? Don’t ask me, I’m busy—sweeping a vase from its sidetable as she reached ground level and sending it hurtling at his head: it would have been nice if it hit him. But it struck a wall and shattered: water pooled on the floor, flowers rearranged themselves. Someone else was coming through the door, and he didn’t look like security. The first man pointed at Shirley and shouted an instruction she couldn’t hear. But she wasn’t an idiot: she spun and ran back up the stairs.