Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(95)

Then the motorbike that had passed earlier returned, its headlight picking out Shirley and Whelan on their wall by the car wash before it pulled onto the forecourt, and Shirley felt a familiar lurch inside as she realised the night wasn’t over yet.

Sparrow—head on his desk, laptop humming—was woken by his phone. The blogpost he’d been writing had run out of steam around the 3,000-word mark, though tendrils of it still shimmered, phrases aglow with meaning as he’d slept, but rendered incomprehensible by the interruption. This vegetable abrogation. He looked at his phone.

Unknown number.

He answered, and heard nothing.

“Hello?”

Still nothing.

“Timewaster.” He disconnected.

It was after four.

Sparrow didn’t need much sleep. He prided himself on this, as he did on other habits, traits, thoughts and words, each of which did their bit to elevate him above the herd. Phone down, he looked to his screen again, and tried typing this vegetable abrogation, to see if concrete shape would restore impact to the phrase. It didn’t.

Blogging was a displacement activity; a way of dispelling the white noise in his head, of which there’d been plenty tonight. Word had arrived of the fiasco at the San, and the Ultras’ failure to extricate Sophie de Greer. It was true that this failure didn’t have Sparrow’s name on it—Benito hadn’t taken part himself, and he alone knew of Sparrow’s involvement—so in political terms could be judged a success, but Taverner also remained at large, and if she turned up before the Limitations Committee with de Greer in tow, Sparrow’s future would become difficult indeed. Hence the displacement activity: a takedown of the government’s adviser on ministerial standards, who’d recently suffered a second nervous breakdown. With luck, this blog might trigger a third. Thus melt all snowflakes, he thought, and his phone rang again. This time, his caller got through.

“Anthony?”

For a moment, he was too busy savouring her voice to reply, enjoying the way the difficulties he’d been contemplating had just whispered into silence.

A silence she broke by repeating herself. “Anthony?”

“Sophie,” he said. “About time. What can you do for me?”

Shirley passed the cardboard punnet of chicken to Whelan.

“No, really, I—”

“He followed us.”

At a distance. Despite the careless frenzy of the attack on the San, this character must have noticed that payback came with truncheons, so was exercising caution, making sure they were alone before doubling back to confront them. Well, that or he’d not initially noticed they’d stopped here, but Shirley was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Best to treat an opponent with respect until it proved unnecessary.

Right now, the opponent-to-be was dismounting and pushing his visor up, and in the yellow forecourt light Shirley recognised one of the crew she’d faced down on the landing, the one whose comrade had gone through the window. Couldn’t remember his number but he’d been there, and must have slipped away in the following chaos. And here he was, disturbing her meal, the bastard, which would be cold before this was done. Which might be counting chickens, but hell: she’d seen this joker off once already, and he’d been in company then. And Shirley had a partner now, even if only to hold her dinner.

Breakfast?

Whatever.

She rose to her feet, ignoring whatever Whelan was about to say.

In the shop, the kid was pressing his face against the window, some sixth sense for aggravation pulling his attention away from his iPhone.

Shirley said to the biker, “You lost?”

He shook his head.

“I’m making a call,” Whelan said behind her.

He could do what he liked. Because there were drugs and there was dancing, sure, but what there mostly was was this, the prospect of action and the way it lit a spark inside her, which apparently was what she was supposed to be cured of. But that would be curing her of being Shirley. So Whelan could make a call, and reinforcements could arrive, but if anyone thought the interim was going to be spent shouting insults across a garage forecourt, they’d wandered into the wrong opera.

Just to make sure they were all reading from the same script, she said, “If you want to get back on your bike, I won’t stop you.”

The newcomer’s grin widened while, to make things interesting, his hand delved into his jeans pocket and came out wielding a knife.

Shirley looked down at her fist. Just like a slow horse, she thought. Bringing a spork to a knife fight.

Then it started.

There was an all-night café off Glasshouse Street, one John Bachelor was familiar with: he hadn’t been in years, but it came to mind when Sophie needed a potential meeting place at four thirty in the morning. And he was a milkman, not a handler, his experience of late-night rendezvous limited to movie images; he wasn’t wearing the right coat, there was no mist creeping along the pavements. But he did his best, making Sophie wait in the lee of a car-park wall while he performed lamplighter duty, assessing the café from the opposite pavement—just the one customer—trying to take a photograph with his eyes.

“It looks safe enough,” he admitted.

“I’m going to be fine.”

But what if you’re not? What happens to me then?

She’d made the arrangement on the world’s last payphone, and he hadn’t been allowed to listen but knew who she was meeting, and wasn’t happy about it. His own world had collided with the powerful in the past, one of the reasons its pillars were shaky. The last thing he needed was a similar collision now, just when he’d glimpsed a sunset ending. . .