Richard Pynne, his line manager—Dick the Prick, obviously, but he’d earned it—had bowed a sceptical head. “Yes well but, Alec. There it is. For all to see.” That required a codicil: “Or not.”
“How did you even—?”
“There are sweeps, we do sweeps. Remote sweeps. You must know about that. We issue enough warnings.”
We don’t care how you get your rocks off, his words implied. Just don’t be doing it with Service kit.
That had been the first he’d known of it: the Dogs arriving at his workstation, in full view of the Hub, disconnecting his hardware, going through his desk. Packing everything onto those plastic trays they use at airports. What did they think he’d done? Leaked a secret, blown a whistle . . . It had taken Dick the Prick to teach him, in one of the smaller, windowless interview rooms; the kind to which you were summoned when coffee wasn’t on the agenda.
Pynne was large, and going to be larger still if he didn’t start doing something about it; had long declared victory over male-pattern baldness by shaving his head, and wore thick-framed spectacles, which was all Lech was willing to admit they shared in common, though Lech himself only wore his for close-up work. Pynne was a year or two younger but on a faster track, which might have been the Cambridge degree, and might just have been that he wanted it more. Don’t be fooled by the speech patterns, Lech reminded himself. That hesitancy, the repetition. He was sharp enough, Pynne the prick. One of Di Taverner’s protégés.
But that was all white noise. What mattered was the impossibility of it: child porn, on Lech’s laptop. Which only he used. Which he was responsible for: security, contents, the lot.
“So I’m going to have to ask you, and this is formal, it’s being recorded, I’m going to have to ask you the obvious. Did you do this, Alec? Did you download this?”
“I—no! No, of course I bloody didn’t.”
“And has the laptop been in your possession for the past week?”
“It’s been in my possession for the past year. But I haven’t been downloading bloody—Jesus, Dick, child porn? I’m engaged to be married, for God’s sake!”
It sounded like a hastily concocted alibi. Men with wives, fiancées, partners—men with lives didn’t do that sort of thing. Didn’t use illegal pornography. Except for the ones who did, of course, but Lech wasn’t one of them.
Dick said, “If it’s an error, an integrity issue—I mean integrity of the system, obviously—if that’s the case, then it will all get sorted out. But in the meantime, there’ll need to be an investigation, and while that’s underway, you can’t be on the premises, I’m afraid.”
Escorted out of the building, as if he’d been caught stealing paperclips.
He turned off the road at the sign for Northwick Park.
The same morning, back in London.
Louisa, who lived out on the fringes, never came into the city at the weekend, except on those few occasions which demanded it—a date, shopping, being bored; call it every other Saturday max, or three a month at most—and yet here she was, Soho, like a mindless tourist; one among a million, even in this cheerless weather. She was wearing her new white ski-jacket, and if it didn’t do much for her figure she’d been glad of it walking from the Tube, with London’s air a refrigerated warning. There’d been talk on the radio of a Siberian front on the way. They’d made it sound like a wartime manoeuvre.
The café windows were grey with condensation, and ghosts streamed past in an unbroken flow. Louisa wrapped both hands round her Americano, and the door opened and closed, opened and closed, and by her watch the woman should have been here ten minutes ago. If she finished her coffee, she thought. If the woman hadn’t turned up by then, game over.
It wasn’t like Louisa wanted to be here in the first place.
Something like vertigo had swamped her.
She’d been leaning against what had been Min’s desk, something she had watched him do time without number. He liked to stand when on the phone; he’d had restless bones. Sitting at a desk wasn’t what he’d joined the Service for. Her neither. But their careers had been derailed; Louisa’s because she’d screwed up a surveillance operation that put dozens of handguns on the streets; Min because, in what had since become an accepted classic, he’d left a disk stamped Top Secret on the Underground. If there’d been other people to blame, their lives might have felt easier. As it was, both were crippled by shame and self-loathing, which was probably the igniting factor in their love affair. Which had been their business alone, she reminded herself now. Min’s marriage had already been over.
