Bad Actors полностью

But it was true things hadn’t been great lately. She could remember that much: things hadn’t been great.

She was in the stableyard now, if you still called it that when the horses had bolted. It felt like an empty room. Four stables either side, with those wooden half-door arrangements, all hanging open. She looked inside one. It was dark and damp. The wooden shutters on its far wall, which presumably opened onto the road, were closed. She wondered what it must have been like for the horse, stuck in here, looking out on passing cars, but didn’t wonder long. It was a little too familiar.

For some unfathomable reason, she wanted to cry.

A staircase ran alongside the outer side-wall of the farthermost stable, leading to a hayloft or tack room or something—a tack room was a thing, wasn’t it? Whatever it was its door was locked, but she sat on the thigh-high wall of the landing a while, gazing down the road. No traffic. A wind was scuffling about in the woods to her right. She couldn’t actually see it, but she could see what it was doing.

And when that got old she descended the stairs and wandered into the wood. Tears weren’t her thing: she hadn’t cried when Marcus was shot. The night River took that toxic payload, she’d gone dancing. Why would stuff catch up with her now? You’re doing lots of things. It hadn’t rained lately; the ground was snappy with twigs. But “fine” is not among them. Maybe Catherine had a point. Maybe she had a stupid point. Maybe Shirley should stay here a while, keep her head down, wait for the bad shit to pass. It wouldn’t take forever. Who knew: she might get to like it. Few weeks’ R&R, and if she kept up with the exercise regime, she’d go home fit as a star’s body double.

Besides, medical staff on the premises, there was bound to be someone she could score off.

“Ms. Dander?”

She turned. Speaking of staff: the woman addressing her was one of those who’d annoyed her the first afternoon. Snappy twigs or not, she’d got pretty close pretty quietly.

“What?”

“You’ll be late for your session.”

Happy-clappy crap, more like.

A moment hung there, during which Shirley could have gone either way. But it passed; drifted into the wood like smoke. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

The woman knew enough not to speak as they walked out of the trees, past the stables, towards the house. Or maybe she was listening, as Shirley was, to a car on the nearby road, stretching its approach out to a long thin whine. By the time it faded, they were almost at the door.

One thing about this place, she thought. You’d know when you had visitors.

Not that you would. There was a reason they put the San in the middle of nowhere. Out-of-sight meant forgotten about.

The San was the last place on anybody’s mind.

The San, thought Claude Whelan.

He used to work over the river, remember? Schemes and wheezes; devious bullshit. One side effect, he liked to think, was that he could recognise a game when someone else was playing it. Take this, for instance: one of Lamb’s crew—the so-called slow horses—gets shipped off to the Service’s drying-out facility the morning after Sophie de Greer disappears. The morning after de Greer makes a phone call to Jackson Lamb. It was a matter of patterns; he saw them where others noticed only random particle motion. And here was one. That incident in Wimbledon—Shirley Dander attacking a tourist coach with an iron—was too outlandish to be anything other than a cover story. And the San was too exclusive, too Park, for a Slough House agent’s treatment.

He’d said as much to Lamb, and the crafty sod had changed the subject. Dander’s treatment is none of your business. Schemes and wheezes; devious bullshit. He’d seen through Lamb that same moment: it wasn’t Dander who’d been packed off to the San. It was Sophie de Greer.

Nor was Lamb the only one playing games. There’d been a paragraph in that morning’s Times, tucked away on page seven: Concern is growing as to the whereabouts of Dr. Sophie de Greer, an academic and researcher at ReThink#1, the policy discussion group headed by Number Ten’s chief adviser Anthony Sparrow . . . A Downing Street spokesperson dismissed rumours that de Greer’s disappearance was a result of action taken by the Security Services. “Without concrete—indeed, waterproof—evidence that any such malpractice has taken place, we can assume this is baseless gossip.”

A declaration of hostilities, thought Claude.