This was what business as usual looked like, Taverner thought, observing the hub through the glass wall of her office. The boys and girls—because, damn it, who had time to enumerate gender preferences when what mattered was that the boys and girls did their jobs?—the boys and girls were hustling to and fro, and on the screens all around them London was dancing. A surveillance op was under way; they were monitoring a sting on a newly fledged angry band who’d been making waves on the dark web and thought they were about to buy half a dozen automatic weapons from a local gangster. What the angry band was angry about wasn’t entirely clear, but it involved the usual suspects: immigrants, politicians, journalists, the liberal elite, plus, for some reason, people who lived on barges. All in all, it was best they didn’t come into possession of weaponry, though judging by the literacy and sophistication of their online muttering, they’d harm themselves more than others if anything more lethal than plastic cutlery fell their way. Besides, an easy win was always welcome. And should the worst happen and the proposed sting go south, well, that would provide a useful distraction from yesterday’s events, which were theoretically under wrappers so thick armour-piercing bullets wouldn’t penetrate, but were doubtless even now being murmured about in corners. The Park’s chief gossip-mongers could give Mumsnet a run for its money. They rarely reached the same levels of savagery, but their commitment to trivia was beyond reproach.
Every so often, one of the junior crew would glance in her direction, anxious for approval; not yet established enough to know that this never arrived before the last
She was careful, sipping coffee, not to allow a hint of appreciation to ruffle her face.
The microcassette recorder had been some time coming. That was the difficulty with being new in government; you couldn’t always put your hand on everything, and didn’t know who to ask. Standard piece of office equipment; directions to the fallout shelter: It came to the same thing. She and the PM had spent the interlude doing nothing differently: he glaring into space; she studying the walls with an air of unconcern. When it arrived, the aide delivering it ushered himself from the room as swiftly as if he’d read in the atmosphere an approaching meteor, and didn’t want to be near when it landed.
When Taverner inserted the cassette, the PM had bristled.
“Where did that come from, anyway?”
She told him.
“So there’s no chain of evidence, no official record of provenance.”
“But it’s got a beat and you can dance to it.”
“What?”
She said, “Best if you just listen.”
Which is what they did. When they reached the end, his face had turned to stone. Without speaking, she clicked the tape off, rewound a short while and replayed a section.
She hit the switch again, turning it off. The sudden silence in the room felt out of place, as if it were being piped in from somewhere else.
At last he said, “And that’s it?”
“It’s enough to be getting on with.”
She could see him marshalling arguments. She waited.
He said, “The full details about Pitchfork will hardly come as a revelation. The
“The government of the day pensioned off a known rapist and murderer who’d been an active member of the provisional IRA for more than a decade. God knows how much blood was on his hands before we turned him. Finding out how much blood was on his hands after we did so—well. It’s likely someone could come up with a ballpark figure.”
“All of which, as I’ve already said, has been the subject of public speculation for years.”
“I’m starting to feel like Sam. Do you want me to play it again? Very well. I’ll play it again.”
“You can’t really believe—”
She waited.
“Nobody is going to—”
She waited.
He said, “It was a long time ago.”
“And you were a young lawyer, already showing great promise. Trusted with matters of state. Destined for greatness.” She made an open-palmed gesture. “As we can see. The giddy heights.”
“Ancient history,” he said.
“For which there’s a surprising appetite these days.”
“Nobody is going to care.”
