She drank her coffee while he talked. They were in a café off Fleet Street, at Judd’s suggestion—he wanted somewhere with no danger of journalists being present. London was damp and unlovely, but last week’s snow was a dim memory she’d already heard referred to as fake weather. Now, there was talk of continued drizzle and bitter winds for days to come, which surprised Di Taverner not one whit. There was always a bitter wind blowing from somewhere. If the weather didn’t supply it, you could rely on Whitehall. Meanwhile, Judd was explaining that his clients—those whose company had hosted the party at Caerwyss Hall—were content to draw a veil over the sorry episode. The savage eradication of problems might be their preferred business strategy, but western democracies weren’t really their playground of choice. What should have been the discreet despatch of a troublesome snoop might easily have become a local bloodbath: brushable under the carpet most places their products were regular bestsellers, but rather more noticeable where there were more second homes than secondhand cars.
“Besides,” said Judd, “he rang again.”
“The boy?”
“Sounded as if he were reading off an idiot board. It seems he’s experienced a complete, he called it ‘memory-wipe,’ of all and any events taking place over the New Year. Probably due to an overindulgence in whatever he was smoking at the time. Apologised quite fulsomely. Quite restores one’s faith in the younger generation, the whole drug-taking, blackmailing, body-burning episode aside.”
“So he’s gone home with his tail between his legs and that’s it?”
“Sometimes, we have to accept that wrongdoers walk away unpunished,” offered the man who’d solicited at least one murder, to Diana’s certain knowledge.
Others would face consequences. Slough House needed looking at, Nash had made clear that morning. Whatever one of their operatives had been doing away from his desk, let alone in a knife fight with a mercenary in a snowy field, demanded investigation: the department was supposed to be a holding cell for incompetents, he reminded her, not a halfway house for would-be Tarzans.
She didn’t tell him she already had plans for Slough House. Or that they’d been put in operation the day she took over First Desk.
The rest of the morning’s meeting had been equally frustrating. Diana had expected her revelation that a civil servant working within the Brexit Office had been working for the BND to be met with shock and umbrage, and a concomitant level of gratitude for the Service’s diligence in unmasking her. Instead, there was an air of resigned acceptance that Brexit had thrown up yet another source of embarrassment. Much of the business of government for the preceding two years had been to find a scapegoat for the ongoing catastrophe; blaming at least part of the mess on German interference was, on the face of it, attractive, but wouldn’t play well with the public, who might with some justification wonder why a foreign agent had been appointed to the office in the first place.
“And she was being run in-country?”
This from Archibald Manners, Parliamentary appointee to the Committee, and long-time Park-watcher.
“By one Martin Kreutzmer,” she said. “Something of an old hand.”
“Molly Doran’s work, by any chance?”
Diana had allowed that this was so, skipping over Jackson Lamb’s role in the proceedings, which, anyway, hadn’t weighed more than a two-minute phone call.
Anyway. The Committee didn’t have to hear about that.
And if Lamb thought this little offering made up for leaving bodies strewn about the Welsh countryside in his futile attempt to have Frank Harkness skinned alive, he was going to be disabused in pretty short order.
“I sense that I don’t have your full attention.”
