And what Louisa thought about it was, she didn’t know. Probably Sid was dead, and it was best to work on that assumption, because otherwise you’d jump every time the phone rang, or spend your life looking through windows. She hadn’t said as much to River, though perhaps should have done.
But that was in a different country. Because here she was, in Wales.
The snow worsened, and the last twenty minutes of her journey took almost an hour. SatNav was a stranger here, and led her up a few false roads, but in the end there it was, Bryn-y-Wharg, a whitewashed cottage at the top end of a steep lane perpendicular to the main road through the village. Similar properties lined the lane, down one side of which a row of cars was parked, iced with snow an inch thick. It was early afternoon but streetlamps were already lit, flakes swirling round them like a plague of moths. The cottage itself was dark, its windows blank. Louisa parked opposite, where the lane widened before angling around a church wall, and sat reconsidering the day’s decisions. She’d kitted up well: she had walking boots, and the ski jacket she’d bought before Christmas, when a previous snowfall had blanketed the capital. Even so, she was in new territory, looking for someone she wouldn’t recognise, and had nowhere to stay. But this was the choice she’d made. Getting out from under Jackson Lamb’s meaty presence; breathing clean cold air, and enjoying being a stranger. Being somewhere new gave you licence. You could reinvent yourself, adjust to a different reality.
And it wasn’t like she’d made a life-or-death choice or anything.
Snow drifted across her windscreen. The temperature in the car was rapidly falling.
Louisa grabbed her jacket from the passenger seat, struggled into it, and stepped out into the world.
Secrecy was the Service’s watchword, but leaking like a sieve was what it did best. When the leaked material was classified the leaker was tracked down and strung up, or so the Handbook required, but gossip was and always had been fair game—who’d lunched who, and where, and how often—and Di Taverner knew better than to attempt to fix that. So when she had a meeting off the books she tagged it Personal Time in her calendar, happy for her staff to weave erotic legends around her absence, just so long as that kept them from any darker truth.
This lunchtime she was in a club off Wigmore Street, whose members-only dining room was a throwback to what passed for pastoral in the public school imagination: actual wooden benches ran alongside two long tables, gazed down upon by portraits of stern, academically garbed homunculi. This arrangement might have led to communal feasting and lively interaction, but in fact fostered cliquery, which was its main purpose. Diners paired off, or clustered in small groups, with intervening spaces across which to pass the salt, or shuttle a basket of rolls. The occasional woman, suffered as a legislative necessity, was treated with that degree of reverence which borders on contempt, and never realises how transparent it is. The dress code tended towards the baggy.
Most voices bounced off the ceiling; the louder they were, the shallower their content. But underneath that was the bass murmur of business being done.
Di Taverner enjoyed her rare visits, partly because it was always salutary to observe the Establishment with its braces loosened, and partly because it amused her to be one of the few who knew the club to be the brainchild of one Margaret Lessiter, a college contemporary of hers, who had been trading off the blinkered self-regard of men since Freshers’ Week.
There were few diners, the cold weather keeping them away. For the young, winter brings a glow to the cheek; for those of Lady Di’s vintage, a certain amount of upkeep is required outside the normal temperature range. She disappeared briefly on arrival; on her reappearance her face was fresh, her features unravaged, and she sat at the far end of one of the benches barely acknowledging the scant others present, whose conversation was muted, but organic—there was a rule about mobile phones, and the rule was: No mobile phones. These remained out of sight; dismantled too, in Di Taverner’s case, both battery and SIM card removed. Though she was always struck, on performing such measures, that the increased security they offered was partly offset by a heightened awareness of the vulnerability that demanded such measures in the first place.
For some reason this observation reminded her of her erstwhile boss, Claude Whelan. He’d have enjoyed it. Absent friends, she thought; though, as with the majority of her relationships, it was only absence that made friendship feasible.
