The waitress came and collected their crockery. Whelan found his gaze drifting in her direction, admiring the way her uniform adhered to her shape, and slapped his own mental wrist.
“I don’t know, Oliver,” he said, which was a lie. He did know. This shouldn’t be touched with a hazmat suit on. It had politics scribbled all over it, and there was no way you could wander into that kind of firefight without getting bits of you shot off: your reputation, your career, your pension. It was politics that had proved his undoing at the Park. Well, and also the connection between a working-paper he’d written years ago, a massacre in Derbyshire and a bloodbath involving penguins, but that could have happened to anyone; it was politics had sharpened the knife. So yes, he knew: shake an apologetic head and walk away.
On the other hand . . .
Reputation, career and pension. He was probably overstating the risk. His pension was secure, and his career largely over; had dwindled to committee work and charitable enterprise, the rubble that remained after a failure to launch. As for his reputation, the circumstances demanding his departure from office had never been made public, so rumour and gossip had rushed to fill the gap. An unexpected rise to prominence; a sudden crashing to earth—whispers suggested a #MeToo moment, and men his own age offered sympathetic headshakes. No, his reputation was already shot. So perhaps what was on offer here was the opportunity to settle a score. With that thought, another name from the past popped up unprompted: Taverner’s sparring partner, Jackson Lamb. He’d rather enjoy tilting his lance at that bad actor. And yet one more consideration: having a mission would get him out of the house. That could only be a good thing, surely?
He said, “Your face, Oliver.” He gestured to the corresponding section of his own. “You have some . . .”
Then, while Nash was wiping icing sugar away with a napkin, said, “All right, then. All right. I’ll give it a shot.”
Okay, a soft touch. But he wasn’t a busy man.
Catherine was busy that morning, not least of her tasks being an attempt to negotiate her way towards a mended window, which involved an extended conversation with Regent’s Park’s facilities manager. But the recent hiatus during which Slough House had been wiped from the Park’s map—its location removed from internal records, and the slow horses themselves rendered formless and floating—had served to make an already thankless process a migraine-inducing ordeal, and it became clear that the functionary on the other end of the call wasn’t happy about admitting the building’s official status, let alone despatching a Security-approved operative to perform maintenance work there.
Perhaps, Catherine suggested, she should just go ahead and Google the nearest available glazier?
Which would be a breach of Service regulations: admittance of non-vetted civilian personnel onto premises deemed classified.
“Except you’ve just told me we’re not deemed classified. We’re barely deemed existent.”
But Catherine’s insistence on seeking the necessary permissions indicated her own belief that the premises were indeed a Service satellite, rendering any initiation of such non-approved admittance a breach of her oath of service, itself a regulatory offence.
“So if I hadn’t sought clearance, I wouldn’t have needed it?”
He seemed pleased she’d grasped the basic idea.
This wasn’t a conversation to be relayed to Jackson Lamb, though he was also on the morning’s agenda—whether or not Lamb liked things, in the normal human sense, was a matter for philosophers or possibly zoologists, but what was certain was that there were things he insisted happen, among them team meetings. Not that he went out of his way to prepare. When she crossed the landing to his room five minutes before today’s gathering was due to start, carrying a small wooden stool and a bottle of hand sanitiser, he was slumped in his chair like a bean bag on top of a clothes horse; a cigarette burning in one fist, the other inside his trousers. Both his eyes were closed. The smell of tobacco almost overpowered a recent bout of flatulence.
She put the stool by the door; placed the sanitiser on top of it.
Lamb opened one eye. “Lubricant? Pretty optimistic for a staff meeting.” He closed it again. “But I suppose it’ll be a chance to swap these gender fluids I keep hearing about.”
“As I believe I’ve mentioned already,” she said, “it might be an idea to curb your boyish humour in front of Ashley. Give her half the chance, she’ll bring a harassment charge.”
Lamb adopted a wounded pout. “What did I ever do to her?”
“Broke her arm?”
“She’s still on about that? Bloody snowflake.”
