Give a born thief like Roderick Ho five minutes with an internet connection, River thought, and he’d bring back the PM’s vetting history, if it was out there to be snaffled.
Which was why the PM’s vetting history wasn’t held online, but stored in the Park’s personnel archive, on the level River was heading to now.
It was definitely a double-decker bus. One of the old-fashioned type, with a deck you could jump onto as it pulled away, if you didn’t mind being shouted at by the conductor. It was open topped, its upper deck shrouded in canvas, and was parked head-on to the house, so Catherine could see its destination window, which read hop aboard! There were no other vehicles in sight. She’d been right about the outhouses, though; three smaller, bluntly functional buildings, flat-sided, windowless, with sloping roofs. Garages or storage units. Nothing looked currently in use. It was as if her captors had stumbled on this place as a vacant possession, and taken advantage. Except that stumbling on things didn’t fit into Sean Donovan’s worldview. Any mission he was on would be double-plotted; every detail stress-tested for the unexpected, the potential loose screw.
A sudden bitter thought flared. A loose screw—that’s all I was to him then.
So what am I now?
She had been awake for hours; had barely slept. Too much confusion flying around her mind, and this question the biggest of them alclass="underline" What am I now? A figure out of Donovan’s past, snatched into his present—why? She couldn’t pretend it was because of anything she meant to him; it had to be because of what she did. And what she did was nothing much; was only tangentially Secret Service. What she did was Jackson Lamb’s paper-shuffling; organising the slow horses’ ditchwater-dull number-crunching into what resembled reports, which she then parcelled off to Regent’s Park so they could be officially ignored. If anything they’d done at Slough House lately warranted this kind of excitement, it had passed her by . . . Hours ago, lying on the narrow bed thinking all this, she’d heard the front door closing, and had reached the window in time to see Donovan climbing into the van they’d fetched her here in. He’d driven down the track, turned into the lane, and vanished from sight.
Whatever was happening, there was no stopping it now.
The light on this corridor, three levels below where he’d been talking to Diana Taverner, was blue-tinted, as if replicating the effect of dusk in the outside world. It was mildly disorienting, stepping out of the lift: not only the light, but the blank white walls and tiled white floor. Below the surface, everything changed. Wood panelling and marbled surfaces were nowhere to be seen.
Behind him the lift door closed, and machinery murmured.
Twenty-eight minutes.
So far, no alarms. River had left his pass in the lift, in case it was chipped so Security could track him. He hoped they’d been distracted by the pair of armed terrorists down the road, but it wouldn’t take long to shoot them and get back to work. And he had twenty-eight minutes, or twenty-seven, to retrieve the file the man in the suit wanted, so his thugs wouldn’t vent their poor impulse control on Catherine.
“. . . Break into the Park? Seriously?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
The thing was, he almost had. It was that supercilious smirk he’d worn, the upper-class sneer.
“I’ll keep it simple. You don’t even have to steal it. Pictures will do fine.”
“They don’t let you just walk in,” River had said, stupidly.
“We’d hardly have needed to take your colleague if they did.”
Through an open door down the corridor, a figure appeared.
She was quite round, with a messy cap of hair, and her face was a thick white mask of powder; a childish attempt to make up as a clown, was River’s first thought. But there was nothing childish about her eyes, which were steely-grey as her hair; and nothing of the toy about her wheelchair, which was cherry-coloured, with thick wheels, and looked capable of powering itself over or through any manner of obstacle: a closed door, an enemy trench, River Cartwright.
And this was Molly Doran, of whom he’d heard much, some of it good.
She rolled towards him, head to one side. A faint ping from the closed shaft behind him was the lift stopping on another floor, but could as easily have been this woman beginning to speak: he’d not have been surprised if she vented in a series of pips and squeaks—nothing to do with the wheelchair (he told himself); everything to do with that doll-like face, its porcelain veneer.
But her voice, when she spoke, was standard-issue, no-nonsense, mid-morning BBC.
“One of Jackson’s cubs, aren’t you?”
“I . . . Yes. That’s right.”
“What’s he after this time?”
Without waiting for a response she reversed through the doorway she’d appeared from. River followed her, into a long room not unlike a library stack, or what he imagined a library stack looked like: row upon row of upright cabinets set on tracks which would allow for their being accordioned together when not in use, and each stuffed with cardboard files and folders. Somewhere along this lot was the file he’d been told to steal. No, keep it simple. He only had to photograph its contents.
Molly Doran slotted neatly into a cubbyhole designed to accommodate her wheelchair. Her legs were missing below the knee. For all the tales River had heard about her, not one had ever laid down the indisputable truth as to how she’d lost them. The only thing all accounts agreed on was that it was a loss—that she’d once had legs.
She said, “Maybe you didn’t hear me. What’s he after this time?”
“A file,” River said.
“A file. So you’ll have the requisition form then.”
“Well. You know Jackson.”
“I certainly did.”
She was a bird of a woman, though not the usual bird people meant when they used that phrase. A penguin, perhaps; a short fat bird in squatting mode, head tipped to one side; her nose becoming beakish as her head jutted upward. “What did you say your name was?”
“Cartwright.”
“I thought so . . . You’ve the look of him. Your grandfather.”
He could feel himself becoming heavier, as if the time ticking past was accruing weight, loading him down with the consequences of its passing.
“It’s around the eyes. The shape of them, mostly. How is he?”
“He’s sprightly.”
“Sprightly. There’s an old person’s word if ever there was. Women are feisty and old people sprightly. Except when they’re not, of course. What’s this file Jackson’s after?”
River began to recite the number the man on the bridge had given him, but she cut him off.
“I meant what’s it about, dear? What interest does our Mr. Lamb have in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Keeps you in the dark, does he?”
“You know Jackson,” he said again.
“Better than you, I expect.” She appraised him. “How did you get in?”
“Get in?”
“Upstairs. Or have they adopted an open-door policy since this morning?”
“I made an appointment.”
“Not with me you didn’t. Where’s your laminate?”
“I had a meeting with Lady Di.”
“My, aren’t we grand. I didn’t know she lowered herself to parleying with exiles. Or does your grandfather’s name open doors?”
“I’ve never relied on it,” River said.
“Of course not. Or you wouldn’t be a slow horse.”
River didn’t care to follow this thread. And the seconds were ticking away. It occurred to him to take out his phone and show this woman the image of Catherine. All he’d have to do was ask her help.
And Security would be kicking down the doors a moment later.