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He was a milkman, he explained; a long out-of-date joke having something to do with collecting the empties.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.”
Here, too, he understood her. There was nothing for him in London, but this was where he’d been sent, or at any rate, this was where he was.
When he assured her she wouldn’t have to go anywhere she didn’t want to, she gave a sad smile, and briefly rested her head on his shoulder.
It wasn’t as if he were under any illusions. He was looking at sixty—could feel its breath on his eyebrows—and wasn’t one of those self-deceiving Lotharios whose mirrors were twenty years out of date. His best days were behind him, an even more melancholy thought when he weighed up how feeble they’d been at the time. He’d barely hit his middle years before the mould started showing through the wallpaper, and then there was no stopping it: the capsized marriage, the punctured career, the lack of anything you could mistake for loyalty, support or money.
This, though; this could go on for as long as it wanted. He’d happily while away months coaxing life out of ageing teabags and cooking up suppers from a cupboard-load of tins; spending daylight hours on the landing, Sophie beside him, like a vision dredged out of someone else’s memory. Months hoping not to hear words like:
“He’s coming here, isn’t he?”
It was the afternoon of the fourth day, the cobbles not yet dry from their drenching, and the pair were at their posts, looking down on the mews from the narrow window. One empty tea cup sat by Bachelor’s chair; Sophie cradled the other in her hands. Without her glasses, he noticed—not for the first time—she seemed younger. He would have happily continued to study her, but forced himself to shift his attention instead to the figure she had seen through the window, pausing in the archway to the mews; a bulky mess in a shabby overcoat, lighting a cigarette before stepping into the sunshine.
“Isn’t he?” she repeated.
“Yes,” Bachelor said. “I’m afraid he is.”
Lech said, “Let’s run through that again. You brought in a homemade curry for lunch, and spiced it up with this superpowered chili—”
“A Dorset Naga.”
“A Dorset Naga, right.”
“Which scores, like, 923,000 on the Scoville scale.”
“Okay.”
“Which is the Richter scale, only for chilis.”
“Okay. So you brought this in and left it in the fridge so that if—when—Lamb stole it, it’d blow his head off.”
“Yes.”
“And what do you usually bring in for lunch?” Louisa said.
“I usually buy it.”
“Yeah, okay, and you buy . . . ?”
“A salad.”
“So you usually eat a shop-bought salad until one day you make yourself a curry instead.”
“Well, that’s what he’d expect, isn’t it? The fat bigot.”
Lech and Louisa exchanged a look.
“I mean, obviously I make my own curry.”
They exchanged it back again.
“What?”
“Lamb’s fat,” said Louisa. “And bigotry is his preferred mode of communication, yes. But he’s not stupid. You might as well have labelled your lunchbox ‘Bait.’”
“But he took it!”
“When a rat takes your poison, that’s job done,” said Lech. “When Lamb does, that’s research.”
“I was you,” said Louisa, “I wouldn’t go biting into anything you didn’t prepare yourself.”
And even then, not if you’ve turned your back on it for ten seconds, she mentally added.
“Where is he, anyway?” Lech asked, but no one knew.
They were in the kitchen, because it was that time: Louisa’s need for coffee, always imminent, was at its peak early afternoon, and Lech’s desire to be nowhere near his desk was at its peak most of the time. As for Ashley, neither had gauged her daily requirements yet, because this seemed an unnecessary effort until her ongoing presence had been established. Investing in a fellow slow horse was far from automatic.
Current assessment, though: attempting to kill Jackson Lamb with a turbo-charged curry showed initiative and imagination, indicating that Ashley Khan might be worth getting to know. It was just a pity the same resourceful outlook rendered her long-term prospects negligible.
Roddy Ho entered, opened the fridge, and removed a plastic bottle of radioactive-coloured drink. When he closed the door it slowly swung open again, but he didn’t notice. Instead he leaned against the only length of kitchen counter not already occupied and applied himself to the task of removing the plastic screw-cap with his teeth. This took him, by Louisa’s fascinated count, twenty-two seconds. Then he tilted the bottle back, took a large gulp and shook his head, as if he’d just performed some feat of athleticism out of the reach of lesser divinities. Only then did he address the other three. “’Sup?” he asked.