It figures, thinks Shirley, that Catherine has already established this fact. Catherine was probably on the phone to the San before dawn, checking on Shirley’s whereabouts; adding unscheduled departure to her tally of crimes and misdemeanours, and waiting to pounce as soon as Shirley reappeared.
“What did you imagine you were doing?” Catherine goes on. “Taking on what sounds like a battalion of thugs?”
At a loss for an accurate answer, Shirley says, “Yeah, it’s what Thelma and Louise would have done.”
“Well, I’ve no idea who those people are. But if Thelma and Louise drove off a cliff, would you do that too?”
Shirley doesn’t know where to start.
“Don’t you understand? I’m worried about you.”
“I’m—”
And Shirley is about to say what she always says,
Catherine is now standing in front of Shirley’s desk. “I don’t want you in danger, can you not get your head round that? We’ve had too much grief already. People keep getting hurt. People keep dying. We have to look out for one another.”
“You’ve already told me that.”
Catherine, who doesn’t remember having done so, looks puzzled, but decides not to pursue it. “You need to go back. Today. While everything’s still a confused mess, and you’ll be able to get away with it.”
“Why do you care?”
That one, Catherine finds easier. “What’s the alternative?” she asks, and now it’s Shirley’s turn to be puzzled, while out in the corridor Lech Wicinski is leaving another voicemail.
It’s John Bachelor whom Lech is trying to contact. Lech has only the haziest notion of what’s been going on these past twenty-four hours, but he’s aware that the safe house is no longer occupied: he called in on his way to work that morning—a lengthy detour, justified on the ground that he had his fingertips, at least, on a live operation—but it was deserted. Recalling the crusty array of takeaway cartons, sticky glasses, and the furry atmosphere that smoking leaves, he at least has the satisfaction of knowing who has been in occupation, but since he is also aware that Lamb’s practice is to keep his horses in the dark unless he has absolute reason not to, this knowledge is accompanied by the depressing awareness that whatever happened, he is unlikely to be made privy to the details. Unless Bachelor can share these with him, but so far, all Bachelor has shared is frequent half-minutes or so of voicemail emptiness, into which Lech has poured requests for contact.
He will keep trying Bachelor, on and off, for the next few days, with the same result, but will finally receive a late-night return call, which will pull him from a rare pleasant dream. But Bachelor, aside from making no apology, will make no sense, and simply ramble about loss and beauty and similar abstracts until Lech, not without regret, will disconnect. He already knows about loss and beauty, and what little Bachelor might teach him is not worth broken sleep. But sleep won’t come again, and a little later Lech will be walking London’s pavements until dawn, maskless but scarred as a phantom, attempting to outwalk his thoughts. All that lies in the near future; in the immediate present Lech dawdles back to his desk, whose nearby window, awaiting a glazier, is still shrouded with cardboard, and as he sits hears a murmur of conversation from upstairs, where Louisa has joined Ashley, to clarify a detail or two:
“So Lamb sliced an atomic chili into your nuts and berries.”
“Yep.”
“And you didn’t notice.”
“Nope.”
“Just as well Roddy ate some first, then.”
“It was,” says Ash. “Imagine. It could have been me whose mouth was vulcanised.”
But she appears reasonably sanguine, as if this had never been a likely prospect.
“Yes,” says Louisa, “imagine. But instead it was Roddy. Meaning he was thrashing about on the floor like a dying trout while you were on the phone to Lamb, pretending it was you who’d figured out Rasnokov’s firetrap.”
“Well,” says Ash. “I’d have called Taverner, but it wasn’t clear she was still in the picture.”
“Lamb won’t give you credit for delivering information.”
“No. But he might give me credit for stealing Ho’s work.”
Louisa nods thoughtfully, remembering what she’d thought about Ash: that her anger was going to have to find an outlet, or the woman would explode. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “Roddy’s a knob.”
“But he’s your knob?”
“Roddy is not my knob, no. In fact, let’s pretend you never said that. Roddy’s a knob, but you need to be careful about fucking him over. Lech’s still getting calls from his service providers, asking why he’s cancelled his payments.”
“Yeah, but Lech didn’t fix Roddy up with a date.”
Because Ash has spoken to Leia Six this morning; less out of a need to placate Roddy than to test her own powers of persuasion.
