“Newsflash. All webheads are dweebs.”
“Ho’s dweebness goes deeper. You want to know the first thing he said to me?”
“What?”
“The very first thing, right? I mean, I haven’t even got my coat off,” Marcus said. “First morning here, thinking I’ve just been shipped to the spooks’ equivalent of Devil’s Island, and I’m wondering what happens next, and Ho picks up his coffee mug and shows it to me—it’s got a picture of Clint Eastwood on it—and he says, ‘This is my mug, okay? And I don’t like other people using my mug’.”
Shirley said, “Okay. That’s bad.”
“It’s way past anal. I bet his socks are tagged left and right.”
“What about Guy?”
“She’s doing Harper.”
“Harper?”
“He’s doing Guy.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that hardly amounts to a character portrait.”
He shrugged. “They’ve not been doing each other long, so right now, that’s the only significant thing about them.”
Shirley said, “That must have been them going out earlier. I wonder where they went?”
“We’re still persona non grata at the Park then.”
Which was an odd thing for Min Harper to say, given that they were in a park, but Louisa Guy knew what he meant.
“Do you know,” she said, “I’m not entirely sure that’s the reason.”
The park they were in was St James’s, and the park they weren’t in was Regent’s. They were heading for the palace end and a woman in a pink velvety tracksuit was approaching them along the footpath at about two miles an hour. At her ankles waddled a small hairy dog with a matching pink ribbon round its neck. They waited until she’d passed before continuing.
“Explain?”
So Louisa did. It was to do with Leonard Bradley. Until recently Bradley had been Chair of the Limitations Committee, which effectively controlled the Service purse strings. Every op planned by Ingrid Tearney, First Desk at Regent’s Park, had to be cleared by Limitations if she didn’t want budgeting issues, which was what running out of money was now called. Except Bradley—Sir Leonard, if the title hadn’t been repossessed yet—had lately been caught with his fingers in the tilclass="underline" a Shropshire “safe house,” fully staffed for the recuperation of officers suffering Service-related stress, had turned out to be a beachfront property on the Maldives, though to be fair, it was fully staffed. And the result of Bradley’s peccadilloes—
“How do you know all this?” Harper interrupted. “I thought he’d just retired.”
“Ah, that’s sweet. But you’ve got to keep an ear to the ground in this business.”
“Don’t tell me. Catherine.”
She nodded.
“Girls’ talk? Quick confab in the ladies’?”
He kept it light, but there was an edge. Something he was excluded from.
She said, “Catherine’s hardly likely to call a press conference. When I told her we’d been summoned, she told me this was going on. She called it an audit.”
“How does she know about it?”
Louisa said, “She’s got a connection. One of the Queens.”
The Queens of the Database were who you went to when you needed information, which made them useful friends, and even more useful connections.
“So what’s this audit?”
—and the result of Bradley’s peccadilloes was what was being termed an audit, but might more accurately be called an Inquisition. Limitations’s new Chair, Roger Barrowby, was taking the opportunity to clean the stables: this involved in-depth interviews with all staff, covering their financial, operational, emotional, psychological, sexual and medical histories; just to make sure everything was squeaky clean. Nobody wanted further embarrassments.
“Bit of a cheek,” Min said. “I mean, Bradley was the one stealing cookies. Any embarrassment should be the Committee’s, not the Park’s.”
“Welcome to the world, baby boy,” Louisa explained.
There was a bright side, though. “I bet Taverner’s going spare,” he mused.
But there wasn’t time to explore what Taverner might be going, because here came James Webb, who’d summoned them to this al fresco meeting.
Webb was a suit. He wasn’t actually wearing a suit today—he wore fawn chinos and a dark blue roll-neck under a black raincoat—but he wasn’t fooling anyone: he was a suit, and if you cut him open he’d bleed in pinstripes. Today’s outfit he probably thought was tradecraft: what you wore for a leafy stroll. But the impression he gave was that he’d popped along to his man in Jermyn Street, explained he was going for a walk in the park, and wanted to dress accordingly. He was as much a man in casuals as the pink lady was a jogger.
Still, he was Regent’s Park to their Slough House. Getting the call at all was a jawdropper. When he nodded they nodded back, and fell into step either side of him. “Any trouble getting away?”
He might have been asking how traffic had been.
Louisa said, “The back door jams. You have to kick it and lean on the handle at the same time. Once we were through that, it was a breeze.”
Webb said, “I meant with Lamb.”
“Lamb wasn’t around,” Min told him. “Is he not supposed to know about this?”
“Oh, he’ll find out eventually. It’s no big deal anyway. I’m seconding you, that’s all. Not for long. Three weeks or so.”
I’m seconding you. Like he was a big wheel. Over at the Park, when Ingrid Tearney was in DC, which was about half the time, Lady Di Taverner took the hot seat: she was one of several Second Desks, but top of most people’s list whenever there were rumours of a palace coup. As for Spider Webb, his desk didn’t have a number. He was basically HR, Min and Louisa had heard, and had this connection with River Cartwright neither of them knew the details of, beyond that they’d been through training together, and that Webb had screwed River over, which was how come River was a slow horse.
Maybe some of this leaked out from Min and Louisa’s silence, because Webb said: “So you’ll be reporting to me.”
“On what sort of job?”
“Babysitting. Maybe a bit of vetting.”
“Vetting?” Vetting was mostly clerical, which was the slow horses’ lot, but demanded resources Slough House didn’t run to. And anyway, usually fell to Background, Regent’s Park’s skeleton-rattling department, with the Dogs—the internal security mob—providing back-up as and when.
But Webb affected to believe Min was unfamiliar with the term. “Yes. Personal checks, identity confirmation, location cleansing. That sort of thing.”
“Oh, vetting,” said Min. “Thought you said petting. I wondered if things were getting heavy.”
“It’s not complicated,” Webb said, “because if it was, I wouldn’t be asking a smartarse to do it. But if you’re not up to it, just say the word.” He came to a halt, and Min and Louisa each took an extra step before realising. They turned to face him. He said, “And then you can piss off back to Slough House. And whatever important tasks you’re busy with this week.”
Min’s mouth began responding before his brain was in gear, but Louisa got in first. “We’ve nothing much on,” she said. “We’d be up for it.”
She shot Min a glance.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sounds like a blast.”
“A blast?”
“Within our sphere of competence, he means,” Louisa said. “We’re just a little … nonplussed by your choice of venue.”
Webb looked around, as if only just noticing they were outside: water, trees, birds. Traffic, aware of the Palace, hummed politely beyond the railings. “Yes,” he said. “Well. Always nice to get out.”
“Especially when things are dodgy at home,” Min couldn’t stop himself saying.