Once inside, he asked for a table for one, and was taken downstairs and placed in a corner booth. Two others were occupied, both by elderly couples audibly engaged in eating pasta, and by the time Nash was seated—after waiting in vain to be relieved of his coat; he settled for draping it on the banquette opposite—a laminated menu had been slapped in front of him, illustrated with photographs of the dishes on offer. All of this, too, would have puzzled any watcher. Nash’s regular haunts required reservations and appropriate footwear. La Spezia’s kitchen seemed more likely to be graced by a Pirelli calendar than a Michelin star. Besides, Nash was on his own, and dining solo was not his habit. A possible, if unkind, explanation might be that Nash had found somewhere he might indulge himself without witnesses; an arena in which he could not only let his appetite off the leash, but sit back and admire its turn of speed. But the cannier observer would be aware that Nash was studying his surroundings, and making notes on his phone. Oliver Nash was on the job.
He paused, unable to either make out the name scrawled in Sharpie on the shirt, or recognise the team colours.
It wasn’t evident that any of this information mattered, but he was here, and would follow his instincts.
One such approached Nash’s booth now and asked if he’d made his choice, or at least, so Nash interpreted his monosyllabic enquiry.
“What do you recommend?”
This earned a blank stare.
“What’s the chef’s speci—”
“Fettucini’s good.”
With prawns, though their provenance wasn’t mentioned. The travails of the joe in the field. “Very well. And the bruschetta to start. And a glass of the Amarone.” He squinted at the wine list. “That’s number . . . seventeen. A large glass.”
The young man disappeared through the swing doors into the kitchen, and Nash added
But the wine arrived swiftly, as did his starter, and the odours filling the room were promising. There was no piped music, which was a plus—
It had been his first summons to Sparrow’s presence, but he was aware of precedents. Some had involved civil servants of forty years’ standing, the resulting interviews curtailing their careers in the time it would take to drink a cup of tea, had such courtesy been offered. Others had learned that their departments were coming under new admin structures more directly controlled by Number Ten; “reforms”—a bastardised word if ever there was one—that were in reality a show of strength from a government whose weaknesses had been on national display over the previous eighteen months. This performance was largely due to the prime minister himself, whose sole qualification for the job had been the widespread expectation that he’d achieve it. Having done so, he was clearly dumbstruck by the demands of office: the pay-cut, the long hours, the pandemic, and the shocking degree of accountability involved. For a man who’d made a vocation out of avoidance of responsibility, this last was an ugly blow. Nash didn’t much care about any of that—the man’s character had been evident for decades, and people still voted for him—but it mattered that, as a consequence, the PM had come to rely on a series of advisers whom no one had voted for. And “rely on” was putting it mildly. While the PM still racked up soundbites on a regular basis, they mostly came out as “gottle o’ geer.” His lips might move, but it was Sparrow writing his script.
Sparrow’s script-writing ambitions stretched beyond the odd political broadcast.
“How do you find Diana Taverner?” he had asked Nash the previous afternoon, before the topic of Sophie de Greer had been broached.
“Diana? She’s an effective First Desk.”
