He scanned the pages. Ho was a slow horse – all branches of the Service went by one unofficial name or another; Whelan himself was a weasel; but the slow horses were different, their name tinged with contempt – and like the others of his type, his brief bio was a study in decline. From Regent’s Park to Slough House; a distance that could be walked in a brisk thirty minutes, though the return journey was unclockable, because nobody had ever made it. Oddly, though, there appeared to be no defining blot on his copybook. Exile was usually preceded by some catastrophic performance failure; Ho was simply assigned there, as if he’d been misaddressed in the first place, and his re-delivery a simple correction of error.
Which wasn’t the point. Whatever had sent Ho to Slough House, he clearly belonged there, because the honeytrap he’d fallen into was ludicrously familiar. If the Park ever got round to producing a training manual in comic-book form, here was its template: a bar-girl latching on to a keyboard warrior whose sex life probably depended on a Wi-Fi connection. And having got what they wanted, the girl’s controllers evidently decided to eliminate him, which was where Ho bucked the odds by getting lucky. But what the hell had they been after, anyway?
Josie was back, panting a little, but Whelan barely noticed. He’d focused on two pieces of information on the typescript in front of him, the first of which concerned the girl. A UK citizen, but of North Korean descent.
The second was the nature of the document Ho had passed her way.
‘… Sir?’
It took him a moment to swim back to the here and now.
‘You wanted to know about Dancer Blaine,’ Josie said.
‘… Did I?’
‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘Do you know,’ Whelan said, ‘I’m not entirely sure.’
‘Your name’s Kim Park. You’re Roderick Ho’s girlfriend, or passing as. And he supplied you with documents you subsequently dealt to some very bad actors. You’ve been aiding and abetting terrorism, Kim. You know what the penalty for that is?’
‘Fuck you.’
While her nose was a mess, and her eyes black and swollen, the girl’s mouth was intact and functioned fine. Underneath the hostility, though, Emma Flyte could hear fear. Hard case or not, she was young and she was damaged. And Flyte didn’t feel good about pressing down on a fracture; on the other hand, this kid had greased the wheels on a series of events that had the entire country reeling. Having a car door bashed in her face was about as gentle a reception as she could currently expect.
‘This isn’t going to last long, because if I don’t get answers within five minutes, I’m washing my hands. The next crew who come for you – and it will be a crew – they’ll be rougher than me. They see a young girl like you withholding information and they light up like football players at a roast. I think you know what I’m saying. There are different ways of doing this, but all of them end with you spilling everything you know. Your choice.’
‘This is England,’ the girl said. ‘They can’t do that. So fuck you.’
‘This is England, and a few days ago a village got shot up by the bastards you’ve been playing show and tell with. Maybe you had reasons for going along with them. Maybe they threatened you, threatened your family. But you might as well hear this now because you’ll certainly hear it later. It makes no difference to anyone what forces were brought to bear. Not to anyone. As far as the rest of us are concerned, you might as well have been there yourself, Kim. You might as well have been pulling a trigger.’
‘I was nowhere near.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Never did, in legal terms, and less than ever in the current climate. All you can do now is cooperate, in the hope it gets less nasty down the road. Tell me you understand that. And don’t say—’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Four minutes. The clock’s running, Kim.’
‘Fuck you.’
But the fear was getting louder.
She was alone in the car, but only for moments. When the door opened, a woman climbed in and joined her on the back seat. She was about Dodie’s age, and wearing it without obvious surgical assistance. Her shoulder-length hair was chestnut brown, and her suit Chanel, dark-blue or black; her blouse crimson. She nodded at Dodie and said something. Dodie had to ask her to say it again.
She said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘Who are you? What are you doing in my car?’
‘My name’s Diana Taverner.’ She paused, as if anticipating recognition. ‘And I’m sorry to interrupt your journey, but it’s important that we speak.’
‘Are you with the police?’ But even as she was asking the question, Dodie was answering herself: shaking her head; an angry denial. ‘No. No, you’re not, are you? You’re MI5.’
‘I can’t confirm my precise role, but yes, I’m with the security services.’ She flashed a card which might have been a John Lewis gift token for all Dodie took in. ‘And we need to talk about what just happened.’
‘My husband was murdered.’
