Bad Actors полностью

Maybe she’d just short-circuit the whole process and bring a bomb into work.

And as the morning traffic thickened and her day began to crawl, Louisa wondered if that wouldn’t be the most efficient way to deal with Ashley’s anger and all the other issues bottled up in Slough House; simply to detonate them all together, in one final crowd-pleasing moment.

It had arrived through the post, like a bomb in the olden days, and she’d been tempted to hold it to her ear and listen for its tick. But it was important to maintain the cover of innocence, even with no one watching, so Ashley had simply collected the package from the doormat and carried it into her room, which was on the ground floor. One small window with a smudged view of nothing much, and a single bed that occupied most of the floorspace. There she’d sat and dismantled the parcel, revealing, in reverse order, a stapled cellophane bag inside a small cardboard box inside a jiffy bag. Her name misspelt on the label: Kane instead of Khan.

She’d torn this off for shredding. Put the box in the bin. Studied the cellophane bag and its ripe red content, which might almost have been a souvenir from an anatomy class: the muscle of some unlucky subject, a rabbit or a fox . . . In keeping with such imagined butchery, there were rumours it could stop your heart. Not that its intended recipient had one.

Not much later than that, she was heading for work: a dreary destination at the far end of a dull commute. In an odd, be-careful-what-you-wish-for, or at least, be-careful-what-lie-you-tell kind of way, Ashley Khan’s real job was now as miserable as the one she’d invented for her parents. This company you work for, it has little online presence, her father informed her. Very little. He was a man who cast a shadow himself. You did not, as his regular broadcasts throughout her teenage years underlined, you did not become senior partner in a leading dental practice without exhibiting drive. Without displaying gumption. And what is it they do again, is it burglar alarms? Ashley had thought she was being clever when she’d told her parents she’d found a job with a security firm. But all this conjured up for them was decoy boxes screwed onto walls, and signs reading guard dogs on premises. beware. A high second from St. Andrews had promised a glittering future, so how come she was stuck in an office job, the lowest rung on a shaky ladder? The ladder wasn’t the only thing shaking. Her parents’ heads had swivelled in unison: Ode to Disappointment. The household anthem.

On the other hand, had she told them she’d been recruited by the intelligence service, this information would have been dispensed to her father’s patients one after the other, as they sat before him in open-mouthed astonishment. Ashley, the eldest, she’s working for MI5 now. Very important, very top secret. And rinse. Worse still, any catch-up she offered would have had to include the bitter information that, far from flying high in her chosen career, she’d been derailed almost before it had begun.

You see, I was on a covert surveillance exercise, tracing this guy across London, only I was spotted by his boss . . .

We all make mistakes.

Who broke my arm.

As it was, she’d had to invent a workout accident.

“A collision, was it? On one of those stationary bicycles?” Her father’s amusement alternated with a litigious glint. “Your uncle Sanjeev, did you forget he is a solicitor? This accident, there should be compensation.”

Compensation, no, thought Ashley.

Payback, though. That was something else.

And if a certain type of onlooker could have seen Ashley Khan’s smile through her face-mask, they’d have made sure to socially distance themselves the length of a carriage or two, and possibly adopted the brace position while doing so.