Louisa’s mouth twitched and she seemed about to say more, and then, exactly as if some big red button or other had actually been pressed, the moment was erased and her lips flatlined. “You realise the place is now basically a warehouse.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
“Minimally staffed.”
“Yeah, I read that bit too.” It was on the tip of River’s tongue to tell her to lighten up, and then he wondered if James Bond–type shit was the kind of thing she’d used to laugh about with Min, so didn’t. “The south-west corner. Which one’s that?”
Louisa was already pointing, phone in hand, compass-app working.
“I’m hoping for a nicely oiled trapdoor.”
What they got was a drain cover, its handle packed tight with dirt.
“Oh great,” said River, looking round for a stick or something to scrape it clean.
“Maybe we should try the main entrance.”
This was at the southernmost point of the complex, and doubled as an access tunnel to the city’s Victorian sewage system. As such, it was something of a tourist attraction. It had closed for the day by this hour, but remained more likely to be populated than the old factory; besides, it was a long hike from there to the complex’s nerve centre, directly below them. Unless there really was a secret railway.
“We’re here now,” River said. He’d found a foot-long length of metal siding, and used it to prise up the drain cover, releasing various stinks into the already fetid air. “Jesus.”
Louisa said, “You thought it would be all shiny metal? It’s a secret entrance.”
He pushed the cover aside, feeling at the base of his spine the noise it made scraping the floor. “Want to go first?”
“I think I’ll let you do that.”
She produced a torch and aimed it down the hole. With this to guide him, River dropped into darkness.
Dame Ingrid was signing off the minutes of that afternoon’s Limitations Committee meeting, each set of initials at the foot of each column a work of art; her pen never leaving the paper as she bestowed approval upon a series of opinions that the act of transcription had somehow rendered gnomic . . . Each member invariably left a session convinced that his or her criticisms had been taken on board, and a window opened on a grubby corner of the covert world that would henceforth gleam untarnished. Only with the passage of time would it become apparent that the window remained closed, its curtain securely drawn. And were this state of affairs ever drawn to Dame Ingrid’s attention, she would express surprise that anyone might think otherwise, and produce the minutes to prove that it had never been intended so.
An ability to think round corners was often cited as a prerequisite for Service work. Perhaps more critical was the ability to bend other people’s thoughts through 180-degree angles. Come to think of it, that was why Peter Judd represented such a threat: he knew how to play a meeting as well as she did. Luckily for Ingrid Tearney, his attempt to short-circuit the process had left him vulnerable.
Though even as she framed the thought, it struck her that luck was not an element she usually relied on.
Capping her pen, she reached for her glass of water and sipped from it, considering. As things stood, the upper hand was hers. Judd’s tiger team, intended to demonstrate the shaky grasp Dame Ingrid had on the Service, was now an object lesson in how ministerial arrogance could leave blood on the streets: a career-ending fiasco, even for the so-far impermeable PJ. Mopping up was under way, with Nick Duffy primed to trace Donovan to his lair once the Grey Books were in his possession. It was one thing to allow the ex-soldier to waltz off with his fool’s treasure—that was another nail in Judd’s coffin:
But still, there was that idiot whisper loose in the room now, the one that kept reminding her that luck was the grease in the wheel. If Donovan hadn’t proved a wild card, everything would have gone Judd’s way.
Ingrid Tearney realised that she was uncapping, recapping, uncapping her pen in a way that in a lesser mortal might reveal uncertainty. She placed it firmly on her desk. Time for a walkabout.
