“I am not going to go begging favours from Roddy Ho.”
“Awww, you remember his name. That is so cute.”
“Louisa—”
“Plus you’re bored out of your skull. You know you are.”
“This was your plan all along, wasn’t it? You knew there was no chance in hell I’d go into the Park for you. And you’re hoping because I’d say no to that, I’d be more likely to say yes to this.”
“I have no idea what you mean. Plan? We’re having a girly chat.”
“One in which you play me like a . . . xylophone.”
“Yeah, I can’t play the xylophone. Listen, Emma, seriously? I really need to find this kid. And I don’t think Ho will do it for me. He’s been kind of pissed off since, you know. That whole fake girlfriend thing.”
Emma looked at her empty glass. She was being played, no question.
It was true, though, that she was bored out of her skull.
She said, “I do this for you, you’ll explain what ‘complicated’ means?”
Louisa said, “To the last syllable.”
Emma picked the glass up, walked back to her kitchen. “Okay,” she said. “You want to read out that registration number?”
That evening—while River was turning off his computer at Slough House, then rebooting immediately, thinking ten more minutes; just ten more minutes running Jay Featherstone’s hire car through ANPR, in case it had registered while he was powering down—Richard Pynne stopped for a drink on his way home. He needed it. Instead of researching Frank Harkness, his afternoon had been one of crisis-management: a Park operative had dropped off the map. A contractor, her role was to supervise the incineration of shredded documents, the crushing of superannuated hard drives, and to some she was little more than a glorified janitor, but not to Pynne. The way he saw it, she regularly laid hands on broken secrets. Who was to say they couldn’t be reassembled? So when it had been brought to his attention that she wasn’t at work, and when the resulting knock on her door revealed a vacant flat, it was clear she’d taken her jigsaws to auction. Thus her photo was red-flagged, and took the UK airports’ hit parade by storm; meanwhile, Dick put a team onto assembling a menu of recently sledgehammered work product, a task which involved most of the Hub. And it went well, or as well as these things ever do: by seven, he’d been ready to deliver to Lady Di a list of operations to be regarded as tainted when someone handed him a Post-it the contractor had stuck to her manager’s desk that morning: she had the flu and was going home. Further investigation revealed she’d changed address without updating her personal details. All of which went to show, as Richard emphasised in his end-of-day report, that procedures should be rigidly adhered to. There was a reason red tape existed; it was so things didn’t fall apart. And now he needed a drink.
It was a corner pub off Great Portland Street, with a battle-scarred mirror behind the bar in which he could keep an eye out for undue interest. The afternoon’s false alarm didn’t mean real alarms couldn’t happen, and since leaving the Park he’d had that uneasy sense of hearing footsteps in synch with his own. There were tricks you could pull—double back to check a shop window, pause to fix a shoelace, halt at a bus stop—and he’d tried each in turn. But if he had a tail, it failed to wag. Now inside, he ordered a gin and tonic; made it a double. However exemplary his actions of the afternoon, he didn’t want to dwell on them. Nor was he keen to know what the boys and girls of the Hub would be chatting about over their own after-work cordials.
He wished he were meeting Hannah. Amazing how a hint, a swift deflection, could turn disaster into weather-beaten triumph. Bit of a flap this afternoon. Nothing I can talk about . . . When he looked up, Lech Wicinski was on the stool next to him. “Hey, Dick.”
“What the fuck?”
“I was passing. Saw you through the window.”
Pynne turned automatically to the window, then back to Wicinski. “You shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be talking to me.”
“What are you, royalty?”
Good as, Pynne thought. Given their respective status. He shook his head. “Lech. Remember your letter? From HR? No contact, not with anyone from the Park, while—”
“Yes, I remember. It’s a fucking earworm. But you know what?” Wicinski waved a finger and the barman approached; he ordered a pint, then picked up where he’d left off. “I don’t much care.”
Red tape held things together. Once people like Wicinski started cutting through it, it would be a full-time job maintaining integrity. That wasn’t the reason he’d been let go, obviously, but he wasn’t doing himself any favours.
Now he said, “It turns out I don’t have many friends at the Park.”
“Many? Try none. That was some pretty sick shit you were looking at.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“There’ll be a hearing. You know how this works.”
“I don’t, actually. I’ve never been in this situation before.” His pint arrived, and he forked over a tenner. “You know what they say about you on the Hub, Dick? That you’re one pocket-protector away from being a geography teacher.”
“Very amusing.”
The barman laid Wicinski’s change on the counter.
Pynne watched the mirror while this was happening. The two of them, side by side; you might mistake them for friends. That was how appearances worked: they pulled you one way, reality went another. He slid a hand into his overcoat pocket and said, “Why were you following me?”
“Because, like I say, you have a rep. Geography teacher.”
“And what, you were lost?”
“Meaning you like things done the way they should be done. And I realised something earlier today. I don’t need a friend. I need someone who wants things done properly.”
Pynne drained his G&T, in perfect unison with his reflection. He was okay with the way he looked. Calm. In control. ’Fronted by a pissed-off junior, but not letting it get to him. Hear what the man had to say, then blow his candle out. Gently.
“They will be,” he said. “The hearing happens later this week. Lady Di, Oliver Nash. There’ll be evidence.”
“But I won’t be there to state my case.”
“It’s not a court of law. It’s Regent’s Park.” His hand still in his pocket, he fondled his Service rape alarm, as they were called. Anyone tried to slip a hand between your thighs, you pressed the button. “That being so, let’s both save our breath and you get back on home to, remind me. Sara?”
“Keep her out of this.”
“Sure thing. We done yet?”
“No. I want you to do something. Not for me, not just for me, but because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Hurry it up.”
“A couple of weeks ago, I ran a search and hit a flagged name. A person of interest. I think I triggered something. I think I was being shut down.”
“This is paranoia, Lech.”
“Well in the circumstances I’m entitled, don’t you think?”
“I—”
“Dick, listen. Could you follow up on that name? Please? It’s Peter Kahlmann, that’s K-A-H-L-M-A-N-N. Peter. But don’t run the usual checks, or it’ll be noticed. I was thinking maybe put in a request through GCHQ, with the wanted ads?”
Wicinski meant the list of trigger words the monitoring agency updated daily, as it reaped the national chatter. Emails and phone calls, online conversations: plucking syllables out of static. And since communications between the Service and GCHQ didn’t always flow smoothly, chances were, the same flags wouldn’t be in place on their respective targets. Especially if the flag in question was internal to the Park. Pynne knew all this. He didn’t need it spelled out.