Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(14)

The kettle boiled as Ashley came in, still wearing her mask, and carrying a Tupperware box with a sticker attached. hands off, it read. “It smells like wet dog in his office,” she said.

“I’ve stopped noticing,” Louisa said.

“You do realise that’s not a good thing? Can I get in there?” The fridge, she meant. Lech moved aside, and she bent to deposit the box, apparently trying to conceal it behind a tub of margarine.

“Is that your lunch?” Louisa asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Because the chances of Lamb not stealing it are up there with the chances of him going on a diet.”

Ashley shrugged and shut the fridge door, then shut it again when it swung open. “Did he really make you all come in during lockdown?”

Lech said, “His point was, we’re in the security service. If it got out that we’re not remotely key workers, it might be bad for public morale.”

“Because that’s a priority with him,” said Ashley.

“You have to understand,” Louisa told her, “most of what he says and most of what he does is just to wind us up. That’s what being at Slough House is all about.”

“If the boredom of the work doesn’t see you off,” Lech said, “the stress of his constant goading might do the trick.”

“Well when I’m back at the Park,” Ashley said, “he’s going to face the stress of some serious grievance procedures. Lots of them. He smokes in here. That’s not even legal.”

Louisa and Lech shared a glance.

“What? It isn’t. There’s a law.”

“You do realise this isn’t a temporary posting?”

“That’s only when you’ve messed up. And I didn’t. That bastard broke my arm. He’s the one should be reassigned.”

“That should matter,” Lech said, “but it doesn’t. Once you’re here, you’re here.”

“It’s like the Hotel California,” Louisa elaborated. “Only for demoted spooks instead of cokehead clubbers.”

“Well, Shirley,” Lech said.

“Yeah, okay, Shirley. But my point stands. You don’t get passage back to where you were before.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. What’s California got to do with it?”

“Never mind. But forget about the Park. If you hate it here, quit. That’s your only option.”

“Well you both obviously hate it,” said Ashley. “So why do you stay?”

The kettle turned itself off, bubbling steam into the air.

“In case we’re wrong,” Louisa said at last.

The file on Dr. Sophie de Greer was slender, and an hour spent on Google hadn’t fleshed it out much. De Greer was an academic, attached to the University of Berne but on sabbatical these past six months, working in London with a group chaired by Anthony Sparrow, codenamed—or possibly just named—Rethink#1. Her discipline was political history, but her attraction for Sparrow was her status as a superforecaster; someone with a knack for accurate predictions, particularly, in her case, regarding electoral responses to policy initiatives. Such talents were assessed, Whelan knew, in clinical conditions: in de Greer’s instance, in a string of tests carried out in Switzerland and France. One result gave her ninety-two per cent accuracy in forecasting voting swings in a series of local elections across four European states, an achievement, the file suggested, on a par with scoring a hat trick in a World Cup final. It would have impressed Whelan no end, if he’d admired conjuring tricks.

But superforecasting was, to his mind, flavour-of-the-month stuff. Every administration brought its own stage dressing, from Blair’s “pretty straight guys,” who had briefly imagined themselves the living embodiment of some TV liberal fantasy, to the current crew, a homogenous bunch—because those with independent outlooks had been culled in the first weeks—under the sway of a wave of Svengalis with that fetish for disruption that had rolled tsunami-like across the globe this past decade. Weirdos and misfits they proudly asserted, as if the groundstaff of any political movement had ever comprised anything else. Sociopathy had long been recognised as a handy attribute in politics. Only recently had it been considered worth boasting about. This was the context in which those with de Greer’s peculiar talents were enrolled like jesters at a medieval court, which was better than being rounded up as witches, Whelan supposed. Better for them, anyway. How it would work out for everybody else had yet to be determined.

And lately, prized or not, Sophie de Greer—blonde, thirty-seven, five five; suit and tie in the accompanying photo, though presumably not always—had dropped off, if not necessarily the map, at least some pages of the A–Z; those covering Whitehall and the offices occupied by Rethink#1 on the South Bank, a short walk from Waterloo. Scheduled to attend a meeting chaired by Sparrow three days previously, she had neither turned up nor sent apologies; phone calls went unanswered, emails ignored. Later that day, one of Number Ten’s security team was despatched to her apartment to determine that she hadn’t fallen ill, died or ODed in bed, and reported back in the negative. Nor were there signs of abduction. It was hard to determine whether she had packed for departure, given the few belongings she’d brought to London, but it seemed that, wherever she was, she had a walking-round kit: wallet, phone, iPad, passport. There was no record of her having left the country, no apparent reason for her to want to vanish. Her flat, a six-month let, had weeks to run. Her position on Rethink#1 was “secure”: Sparrow’s word.