Bad Actors полностью

“So you put a civilian in hospital. Louisa and I aren’t up to anything, and if we were, you’re the last person I’d want along, unless for some reason I hoped it would go tits up in the first five minutes. Clear?”

She kicked the wall hard enough to cave plaster in, and that was Shirley with trainers on. Give her a pair of boots, she’d bring down the house.

She stomped back to her office, and Lech carried his tea to his room, where Roddy Ho was still hunkered behind his screens. “Sorry, man,” he said. “Mr. Lightning came in twenty seconds quicker.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“Well, I’ll do my crying in the rain.” He sat, drank his tea and looked over the work product on his monitor, a list he barely remembered amassing. Was this really worth chasing down? It was made up of the names, the noms de web, of barely hinged individuals who’d dropped from social media after a flurry of hate-filled rants: Had they become radicalised and vanished undercover, the better to fulfil some real-world outrage? Or had they just got laid and calmed down? It was Slough House in a nutshell: a blizzard of random incidentals it might take years to sift through, leaving you with a handful of nothing, or possibly, just possibly, one solid nugget in your palm . . . Lech thought again of John Bachelor in the pub, his hangdog air dispelled as he outlined what he’d glimpsed on a news broadcast. A face from yesterday. What if it meant something? It certainly felt solider now, the photographs adding weight to the story, but all Lech was sure of was, this wasn’t something to take to the Park. Not because it might turn out a waste of time, but in case it didn’t. He allowed himself a moment’s imagining: of presenting the hub, not with a loose thread but a tightly wound bobbin, and the reaction that would get. They’d thrown him onto the waste ground, and he’d struck gold there, and carried it back. Imagine that . . .

Oh Jesus, he thought. Just listen to me.

Wiping thoughts of glory from his mind, he opened a new browser, logged onto a Service database, traced an address for Sophie de Greer, then turned his computer off without bothering to close the other programs first. Tell me about it in the morning, he thought. Or, you know. Just burn and die.

Ho glared at him as he pulled his jacket on. “You rigged the timing so it looked like I lost.”

“No, I didn’t,” Lech said, with absolute honesty.

“I bet Louisa knows it too.”

“Louisa’s got the hots for Mr. Lightning.”

“Got them for me, more like.”

“She should learn to hide that.”

He left the office before Ho could think of a rejoinder—which gave him a ten-minute window—and took the stairs two at a time. He didn’t plan to wait for Louisa in Slough House’s yard, whose walls were held together with moss, so followed the alley round to Aldersgate Street, and crossed the road, and sat at the bus stop. Looking across at the glum takeaway, the suicidal newsagents, and the three storeys of dead-eyed windows stacked on top of them, he thought, not for the first time, How did I end up here? And felt his face, beneath its veil of scars, harden into a scowl.

An expression that wasn’t clear to Louisa, looking down from her room, but even if it had been she might have failed to recognise it; might have simply noticed that she could look at Lech’s scars now without thinking about what they hid: the word PAEDO, which he’d scrubbed away with a razor. Well, she was thinking about it now. But she hadn’t been a moment ago. Maybe there’d come a time when she could look at Lech and simply see him, rather than the mess he’d made of his face, but she wasn’t there yet. Nor was he. Everyone carries wounds, she thought. But they don’t always stare back at you from every reflecting surface.

She shook her head. Maybe it would be a wasted evening, no more; maybe she’d have to terminate a pass, in which case it might as well happen tonight as any other time. And maybe—just maybe—Lech wasn’t wrong, which in turn might mean they wound up in serious trouble, because whoever Sophie de Greer turned out to be, she moved in the world of chimp politics, where it was always the nastiest monkey ran the show. Anthony Sparrow, appearances notwithstanding, was currently King Kong, which made de Greer Fay Wray. If she had Kremlin connections, Sparrow either didn’t know about it or did, and either way wouldn’t look kindly on anyone digging into the matter. Would be likely, in fact, to bang his chest and start throwing faeces around. But that was a thing about life in Slough House: you grabbed any opportunity for excitement with both hands, and even knowing you were doing that didn’t stop you doing it. Hadn’t done in the past. Wouldn’t now.