Bad Actors полностью

“Well, he’s not gunna find you here,” Lamb said. He drained his glass. “Let’s face it. He thinks you’re somewhere else entirely.”

The day finished early—or night came too soon—so Shirley was contemplating getting into bed at a time she’d normally have been pre-loading. Midweek she rested, like any sane person—her Wednesday evenings were sacrosanct—but otherwise she’d be on the prowl, looking for something she’d recognise when she found it. A want, awaiting fulfilment. And it was in the night—in its bars and backstreets; in its clubs and on its buses—that she hunted it down, usually finding that the search itself, and the consequent adventures, placated her want for a while. But here in the San, with its well-swept floors and clean sheets, with its constant hush, she found herself all want, all neediness, and hated it. Stripped of camouflage, stranded like a chameleon against a neutral background, she was the centre of her own attention, and subject to its moods.

There were few other resources available. The bed on which she lay, fully clothed; the lamp, which she hadn’t switched on. The moonlight falling through the window, whose curtain she hadn’t yet drawn. Though she was on the third floor, the available view was of various kinds of nothing, all of them shrouded in darkness. There was no TV, no radio; they’d taken her phone “because you won’t be needing to make calls, will you?” She couldn’t decide whether it was the content of that clause or the way it was framed as a question that most made her want to punch the speaker in the face, though accepted that either on its own would have done the trick. It was as well she was maintaining the quiet dignity thing. There was a coffee-table book on a coffee table: One Hundred Things to See in Dorset. Fat chance. There was a picture of a tree. And there was almost no noise.

Which was what most bothered her. Ignore the San’s various other hatefulnesses, like its institutional odours and the trademarked smile of its staff, and that picture of a tree, and what most bothered her was its hush. It felt like a religious undertow, its effect being to magnify every unintended noise. A coat hanger shifting in a wardrobe. The chink of a cup on its saucer. The people here—the “guests”—might as easily be called ghosts. They might not move through walls, but they were careful to enter rooms quietly. The loudest thing Shirley had witnessed since her arrival had been a jigsaw puzzle. It was enough to make her want to scream, and what worried her most was the fact that she hadn’t. That she was as quiet as everyone else, after only a couple of days.

People keep getting hurt. People keep dying.

And maybe she was one of them. Maybe she’d die inside, if they kept her here long enough. By the time they posted her back to Slough House she’d be a drooling wreck, scared by sudden movements and startled by passing noise.

Which might have been why—lying on her bed, the clock effortfully dragging its way to 9:26—when Shirley heard sounds downstairs, she sat bolt upright.

Afterwards, Whelan was never quite sure what tipped him over the edge. All afternoon the impulse had gnawed at him; the suspicion that things were not as he had relayed to Oliver Nash. The possibility that an alternative reading existed. Back in Schemes and Wheezes, there’d sometimes come a point when you had to ask, were you the player or the game? And was the mousetrap you’d just built one you’d walk into yourself? He had helped create a character once, a role for an agent to inhabit, who was the precise and perfect fantasy partner for a target of interest, an arms dealer. The chosen agent had occupied the role so completely that that was pretty much the last anyone saw of him, though it was thought he and the target were living happily ever after somewhere south of Rio. In the inevitable handwashing that followed Whelan had been tasked with writing a paper addressing the flaws inherent in the scenario his team had developed, along with what the minutes chose to term a “structured corrective.” In what was, for him, a rare display of ill-temper, Whelan’s addendum read, in its entirety, Don’t use humans.

An admonition which had been swirling round his head all evening. He had been used himself, that much was clear, and had registered no objection—the Service was called the Service for a reason, and he still felt the tug of its call to duty—but he worried nevertheless that he’d fallen into the backroom habit of forgetting that actual people were involved. In this instance, for example, what precisely was Sophie de Greer’s role? Was she in hiding, or had she been snatched? Would his involvement result in her rescue, or had he helped throw her to wolves? And whose wolves: Ours or theirs?

The list of who “they” might be was a long one. But then, the question of who “we” were could be equally knotty.