She stared past him for a second, through the glass at the crew on the hub. Then her focus shifted, and she was looking at her own image. She was forty-nine years old. Stress, hard work and Father bloody Time had done their worst, but still: she was heir to good bones, and blessed with a figure. She knew how to make the most of both, and today wore a dark suit over a pale pink blouse, the former picking up the colour of her shoulder-length hair. She was fine. A bit of maintenance between meetings, and she might make it to nightfall without looking like something dragged round a barnyard by pigs.
Provided she didn’t get many unexpected moments.
She said, ‘What shape did this op take?’
‘Someone I thought at the time was a bloke, but—’
‘Sidonie Baker,’ Taverner said. Her voice could have cut glass. ‘Jackson Lamb sicced her on a journalist. Robert Hobden.’
Nick Duffy nodded, but she’d put a hole in his morning. It was one thing to bring a bone to the boss. Another to find she’d buried it in the first place. He said, ‘Right. Sure. It was just—’
She gave him a steely look, but give him credit: he didn’t back down.
‘Well, you said yourself. They don’t run ops from Slough House.’
‘It wasn’t an op. It was an errand.’
Which was so nearly what Duffy had told Jed Moody that it startled him for a moment.
Taverner said: ‘Our slow horses, they push pens, when they’re not folding paper. But they can be trusted with petty theft. We’re stretched, Duffy. These are difficult times.’
‘All hands on deck,’ he found himself saying.
‘That would cover it, yes. Anything else?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry to bother you.’
‘Not a bother. Everyone has to be on the ball.’
Duffy turned to go. He was at the door when she spoke again.
‘Oh, and Nick?’
He turned.
‘There are those who’d take it badly if they knew I’d been sub-contracting. They might think it shows lack of faith.’
‘Sure, boss.’
‘Whereas it’s simply a sensible use of resources.’
‘My ears only, boss,’ he said. And left.
Diana Taverner wasn’t one to make marks on paper when she could avoid it. Jed Moody: that wasn’t much to remember.
On the wall-mounted TV, coverage continued: the orange-clad, hooded boy. For tens of thousands around the globe, he’d be the object of pity and prayer by now, and of massive speculation. For Diana Taverner, he was a figure on a board. Had to be. She couldn’t do what she needed to do, the end result of which would be his safe return home, if she allowed herself to be distracted by emotional considerations. She would do her job. Her team would do theirs. The kid would live. End of story.
She rose, gathered her paperwork, and got halfway to the door before returning to her desk, opening a drawer, and locking inside it the memory stick James Webb had given her the previous afternoon. A copy of Hobden’s own memory stick, he’d told her, made by Sid Baker. Safely delivered. Unlooked at. The interim laptop wiped. She’d believed him. If she’d thought he’d look at it, she’d have had a higher opinion of him, but wouldn’t have set him this task.
On the TV, the hooded boy sat in silence, newspaper fluttering. He’d live, she told herself.
Though even Diana Taverner had to admit, he must be scared.
Fear lives in the guts. That’s where it makes its home. It moves in, shifts stuff around; empties a space for itself—it likes the echoes its wingbeats make. It likes the smell of its own farts.
His bravado had lasted about ten minutes by his reckoning, and less than three in reality. Once that was done, his fear rearranged the furniture. He’d voided his bowels into the bucket in the corner; had clenched and unclenched until his guts ached, and long before he’d finished he’d known this wasn’t rag week. Didn’t matter how edgy these bastards thought they were, this was way past playtime. This was where policemen became involved.
He didn’t know whether it was day or night. How long had he been in the van? The filming might have been yesterday, or might have been two hours ago. Hell, it might have been tomorrow, and that newspaper a fake, crammed with news that hadn’t happened yet …
Concentrate. Keep a grip. Don’t let Larry, Moe and Curly smash his mind to pieces.
Which was what he was calling them: Larry, Moe and Curly. Because there were three of them, and that’s what his dad called customers who came in threes. When they came in pairs, they were Laurel and Hardy.
That had once been so lame: the names, and the fact that his dad used them two or three times a week. Larry, Moe and Curly this; Laurel and Hardy that. Get a fresh script, dad. But now his father’s words were a comfort. He could even hear the voice.
