The traffic was moving, the lights green, but two cars remained stationary, their occupants watching the show. She was sprinting now, on River’s heels, and as they turned into the lane where they were parked, blue lights spiralled into her peripheral vision, bouncing off the trees that lined the opposite side of the road. River’s car was winking at him; he’d tossed the stolen phone aside and his keys were in his hand. She fumbled in her pocket for her own. What were they going to do, take off in two separate vehicles? The fast and the futile.
That seemed to be River’s plan. Throwing open his driver’s door he said, “Different directions. They can’t chase us both.”
“Of course they can chase us both! They’re the fucking police!”
And were here already. Two cars pulled into the lane, the second so close behind the first they might have been humps on the same camel; both were unmarked but with flashers on their dashboards, and their blue genies pounded against the squat building to their left, somersaulted River’s and Louisa’s cars, then bounced across the children’s playground before regrouping and doing it all over again. River was shaking his head, anger and frustration boiling off him, and gripping his keys so tightly he might have been making impressions. Police officers emerged from their vehicles. Louisa was wondering just how much trouble they were in when her phone rang.
“Put that down!”
“Put down your phone!”
“Put it down!”
But she answered it anyway.
“What?”
Lech said, “You still want to visit that safe house? Because I can let you have the alarm code, if it’s any help.”
Nepo-brats are an occupational hazard.
This was plainly true in other professions also: acting, singing, modelling, anything involving lounging round a pool, monarchy.
As are former pols living with death threats.
This one more specific, but definitely a growth area in the UK.
What Devon Welles hadn’t mentioned to Louisa was the overlap between the two—last night, while they’d been having dinner, his team had been babysitting a nepo-brat’s birthday bash thrown by a former pol living with a death threat, a duty Devon had been glad to avoid. He was professional enough to keep personal feelings wrapped while on the job, but Peter Judd tested boundaries. Before he had fielded security for the one-time Home Secretary, the most challenging of Devon’s employers had been Diana Taverner, who was equally persuaded of her general rightness, though less inclined towards narcissism and mendacity. That aside, the main difference between watching Judd’s back and working Taverner’s home security was having to suffer the former’s self-satisfaction, which oozed from him like slime from a slug.
Actually, no. The main difference was the amount he was getting paid.
Which was not something that bothered him, he thought—checking his kit, preparing for his afternoon shift—though he sometimes wondered what Emma Flyte would have made of it. He missed her, and still heeded her judgement on important questions, though would admit to resting a thumb on the scales now and again. Emma had understood the need to make a living, but she’d have drawn the line at working for Judd.
Maybe, he admitted, tempting Louisa Guy into working alongside him was a way of spreading the guilt. Which might also explain why he had neglected to mention Judd when doing the tempting. Some death threats, he could imagine Louisa saying, you’d as soon took their course. Words you didn’t want to hear spoken by someone you were offering a job.
Another difference was, he usually wore a tie to work these days. He was knotting this, checking his technique in the mirror, when his mobile rang . . . Judd.
Abandoning his task, he answered, thinking: What now?
So now they were both in River’s car, but going nowhere; their exit blocked by police vehicles; the officers themselves stalking around like geese. River had already tried to shoo them away, using nothing more than his technically invalid Service card.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to remain in your vehicle.”
“You mean, stay in my car?”
“As I said, sir.”
“How long are we supposed to—”
“Until you’re instructed otherwise, sir. If you wouldn’t mind.”
“They’ve been told it’s a Service house and to wait for the grown-ups,” Louisa explained to him. Again.
“I haven’t got time for this.”
“She’s probably fine.”
“So how come—”
“I don’t know. All right?”
River looked at the phone in his hand and began pressing buttons.
“You know her password?”
“Of course.”
“She told you her password?”
River didn’t answer, too busy accessing Sid’s phone.
“Jesus . . .”
On the main road, traffic rolled past. She wondered if the door they’d broken was police taped, festooned with yellow and black bunting. Never a good look on a safe house.
River said, “Withheld number.”
“What?”
“Why’s Sid been called by a withheld number?”
“I don’t know. Because heavy breathers like their privacy?”
“This morning. Not long before she left the house.”
See you later.
Trying to keep River calm was a way of keeping her own fears in check. Louisa had too many dead already, and Sid wasn’t even part of this world any more. Damage had no business reaching for her. Damage should keep its distance.
River had his own phone out, and was maybe about to start juggling. But it was Lech’s number he was after, and when he got an answer said, “Charles Cornell Stamoran.”
“Is that supposed to ring a bell?” Lech asked.
“He does the cupboards at the Oxford safe house.”
Does the cupboards, meaning kept the place tidy and stocked with the basics: toothpaste, coffee, toilet roll.
“Right. I haven’t actually memorised—”
“Which means he’ll be on the list of contacts appendixed to the register.”
“Yeah, okay. So what?”
“So you can access his file,” said River.
“Yeah, I’m really not sure I can do that. I mean the only reason I can view the safe house lists is so—”
“So you don’t identify as a terrorist property somewhere that actually belongs to the Service. I was doing this first, remember? And I know the register’s hyperlinked to the personnel records, so all you need do is click on a link.”
“This is Slough House,” Lech muttered, though it sounded like he was rattling a keyboard. “I click on a link, a trapdoor might—oh. No, actually, that seems to have worked.”
“I’m putting you on speaker. Louisa’s here.”
“Hi, Lou. Yeah, Stamoran was active late eighties, nineties. Was on the semi-detached list after that. And he’s been . . . doing the cupboards the last few years.”
“Tell me about his active service.”
Lech said, “A lot of it’s redacted. Or at least it says, refer to Annex B. That’s sensitive material. So he wasn’t a desk jockey.”
“But no hint what that was?”
“Probably Ireland. He was cleared for work in Ulster in ’89.”
“Contacts,” River said.
Lech said, “I’m kind of worried about hanging around in the—”
“Just do it, okay? His contacts.”
“You owe me a serious drink,” Lech muttered. There was more clicking. “Okay. Yeah, he was part of a crew, they called themselves the Brains Trust. Or someone called them that. You want their names?”
“That would really, really help.”