Whelan spoke to the editor of Dodie Gimball’s paper; then to that paper’s lawyer; then to a Service lawyer, and then to the paper’s editor again. That second conversation was fairly short. When he had all the details he needed he rang the number the editor had at last given him, and spoke to a man named Barrett, whose rich voice it was a pleasure to listen to. Barrett, a former cop, carried out investigative work for the paper, a necessary gap in the news-gathering process now that most journalists rarely ventured beyond Twitter and the nearest Nespresso machine. Barrett relayed the details of his job for Dodie Gimball without hesitation, repetition or deviation. When he’d finished Whelan thanked him and disconnected. Then resumed staring through his glass wall.
The PM was not going to be happy.
Night keeps its head down during daylight hours, but it’s always there, always waiting, and some open their doors to it early; allow it to sidle in and bed down in a corner. Molly Doran was among this number. She had become a creature of the dark, the brightest hour she felt comfortable in the violet one, and had long ago washed up in this windowless kingdom some floors below where Claude Whelan sat. Home was a ground-floor apartment in a new build, a twenty-minute taxi ride away, but that was simply a box she hid in when custom deemed it necessary. Here was where she felt alive, especially now, on the late shift, when night was out of its basket and prowling behind her as she propelled herself along the aisles.
There were rows and rows of files in her archive, each containing lives; there were operations minutely recounted, whose details would never be open to the public, and she was fine with that. It was called the Secret Service for a reason. Transparency and openness were for pressure groups to bleat about, but Molly Doran knew that much of what keeps us safe should be kept hidden. The appetites that keep democracy alive can be unseemly. There were stories here to make liberals combust, and while Molly occasionally felt she could have done with the warmth, such a bonfire might easily get out of control.
Sometimes she spoke to her files.
‘So, my dears,’ she said aloud. ‘What are we looking for tonight?’
They didn’t answer, of course. She wasn’t insane. But she spoke to the world gathered round her the way shut-ins might speak to their walls; it was another way of talking to herself, of underlining her presence.
‘The watering hole,’ she said. ‘Such a quaint turn of phrase.’
Quaint, in this case, meaning old; postwar, but old.
Her chair made little noise. She often wondered, were she to get down on hands and useless knees, whether she’d detect grooves in the floor from her years of ceaseless trundling. Didn’t matter any more. They’d be ejecting her soon – another six weeks;
‘Let’s start here, shall we?’
Here being the late fifties, and some never-implemented contingency plans, strategies,
Hardly worth saying that the hunt she was on was a sacking offence. Jackson Lamb was so much persona non grata that Regent’s Park practically amounted to a no-Jacksons club, and even if he hadn’t been there were protocols, none of which involved having someone just turn up and beg a favour. So the whole six-weeks’-notice-and-why-not-have-a-skiing-break? could turn out to be moot: one slip-up now and being dumped on the pavement without fanfare would be the upside, inasmuch as prison would also be possible. Molly Doran didn’t fancy prison much.
But nor did she like being handed her cards by Diana Taverner. Not that Lady Di had made an appearance herself, but her fingerprints were all over this: Taverner mistrusted the eccentric, her definition of which covered anyone whose vision didn’t coincide with her own. Though if she’d ever spent time here among the records, she’d know it was the eccentrics and fantasists, the borderline cases, who’d always flown the Service’s flag highest.
