Slough House полностью

Elsewhere in Regent’s Park, the Queens of the Database managed information: stored it, catalogued it, rendered it readily obtainable for the boys and girls on the hub. They were the digital do-it-alls, and prided themselves on the meticulous nature of their record-keeping. They also fielded a formidable pub quiz team. Molly Doran, meanwhile, stalked the perimeter of her analogue estate like an old-world gamekeeper, if admittedly one on wheels; her archive, modelled on the stacks found in its real-world counterparts, was some floors below the surface, at the end of a blue-lit corridor. It occupied a long room lined with upright cabinets, set on tracks allowing them to be pushed together accordion-style when not in use, and in these cabinets languished acres of dusty information, the Park’s past lives and glories, and also its failures and dismal misadventures. All of which could be housed on a thumb drive, if the money was there for digitisation; a process which would be carried out over Molly Doran’s lifeless corpse, as the woman herself had asserted, in the apparent belief that this was a disincentive. When the Beast – Molly’s collective name for the array of databases and info-caches the Queens oversaw – when it broke down or, as daily seemed more likely, turned out to be also available in Mandarin, her shelves would be all that remained secret and untarnished. She’d have shielded the past from the present, which, as far as Diana Taverner was concerned, was the almost exact inverse of the task in hand.

But useful or not, one thing Molly Doran most certainly was was out of the way. Her archive was her island, and she never came to shore. Though check-in data showed she spent more time in the building than anyone bar Diana herself, she might as well have been a ghost on wheels, unnoticed by any but the most sensitive, and dismissed as a story by everyone else. And yet eight weeks ago she’d registered a complaint; reported one of the in-house police team – the Dogs – for ‘unwarranted intrusion, unacceptable language and all-round arseholery’, the last of which wasn’t a recognised infringement of a house rule, but could probably be taken as character appraisal. The complaint had been investigated; an HR lackey sent to mollify Molly, which probably ranked as the most thankless task available to that department; and a mild wigging delivered to the miscreant, in the form of an email suggesting he read up on the disability protocols outlined in the staff handbook. Thereafter, the wheels of the Park had ground on, as had, presumably, the wheels of Molly’s chair.

The Dog in question: Tommo Doyle, Damien Cantor’s ‘man’.

This information had come her way when Diana had looked up Doyle’s employment record on her return to the Park. Cantor’s impertinent valediction, How’s Doyle working out?, had been intended as a one-fingered salute, that was clear; Cantor was a show-off, a man-child, like most men, and clearly convinced of his own cunning. She’d checked the CCTV capture of his tourist outing, and he’d been wearing glasses and a windcheater. A disguise. No wonder Oliver noticed him. And all it was, she thought, was manspreading; he was pissing on a lamppost, marking territory. There was no shortage of such behaviour in this business, or any other; there were always men in the background, imagining they were centre stage. The newer variety, who were careful to keep their inner Weinstein on a leash; older ones like Peter Judd, who wore their chauvinism like battlefield decorations; and uncategorisable miscreants like Jackson Lamb, who probably thought the glass ceiling was a feature in a Berlin brothel. She remembered, not long back, an uncharacteristically informal conversation with Josie, who worked on the hub. It’s funny, Josie had remarked, how we always end up working round male insecurities. The Bechdel test gets flunked here on a daily basis. ‘Our job is tackling crises and clearing up messes,’ Diana had reminded her. ‘That’s pretty clearly going to involve discussing men.’

It was not beyond the bounds of probability, she now thought, that whatever Tommo Doyle had been up to that pissed off Molly Doran would lead back, like an unravelled clew, to Damien smugging Cantor.

There was an alcove just inside the archive room, a wheelchair-sized cubbyhole where she expected to find Molly, but it was currently vacant, and the room silent. You could not, she thought – Molly could not – navigate her way round here without a certain amount of mayhem; the aisles were surely too narrow for a wheelchair to manoeuvre freely. There would be caution, hesitation and stop/start calculation. Except there wasn’t. What there was instead was a smooth cornering on near-silent wheels, and the sudden appearance of Molly Doran barrelling towards her, like Mr Toad in a fury.

She came to a halt with her front wheels a precise inch in front of Diana’s toes.

‘Very impressive,’ Diana said drily.

‘I practise a lot,’ said Molly.