Bad Actors (Slough House, #8)(4)
It had arrived through the post, like a bomb in the olden days, and she’d been tempted to hold it to her ear and listen for its tick. But it was important to maintain the cover of innocence, even with no one watching, so Ashley had simply collected the package from the doormat and carried it into her room, which was on the ground floor. One small window with a smudged view of nothing much, and a single bed that occupied most of the floorspace. There she’d sat and dismantled the parcel, revealing, in reverse order, a stapled cellophane bag inside a small cardboard box inside a jiffy bag. Her name misspelt on the label: Kane instead of Khan.
She’d torn this off for shredding. Put the box in the bin. Studied the cellophane bag and its ripe red content, which might almost have been a souvenir from an anatomy class: the muscle of some unlucky subject, a rabbit or a fox . . . In keeping with such imagined butchery, there were rumours it could stop your heart. Not that its intended recipient had one.
Not much later than that, she was heading for work: a dreary destination at the far end of a dull commute. In an odd, be-careful-what-you-wish-for, or at least, be-careful-what-lie-you-tell kind of way, Ashley Khan’s real job was now as miserable as the one she’d invented for her parents. This company you work for, it has little online presence, her father informed her. Very little. He was a man who cast a shadow himself. You did not, as his regular broadcasts throughout her teenage years underlined, you did not become senior partner in a leading dental practice without exhibiting drive. Without displaying gumption. And what is it they do again, is it burglar alarms? Ashley had thought she was being clever when she’d told her parents she’d found a job with a security firm. But all this conjured up for them was decoy boxes screwed onto walls, and signs reading guard dogs on premises. beware. A high second from St. Andrews had promised a glittering future, so how come she was stuck in an office job, the lowest rung on a shaky ladder? The ladder wasn’t the only thing shaking. Her parents’ heads had swivelled in unison: Ode to Disappointment. The household anthem.
On the other hand, had she told them she’d been recruited by the intelligence service, this information would have been dispensed to her father’s patients one after the other, as they sat before him in open-mouthed astonishment. Ashley, the eldest, she’s working for MI5 now. Very important, very top secret. And rinse. Worse still, any catch-up she offered would have had to include the bitter information that, far from flying high in her chosen career, she’d been derailed almost before it had begun.
You see, I was on a covert surveillance exercise, tracing this guy across London, only I was spotted by his boss . . .
We all make mistakes.
Who broke my arm.
As it was, she’d had to invent a workout accident.
“A collision, was it? On one of those stationary bicycles?” Her father’s amusement alternated with a litigious glint. “Your uncle Sanjeev, did you forget he is a solicitor? This accident, there should be compensation.”
Compensation, no, thought Ashley.
Payback, though. That was something else.
And if a certain type of onlooker could have seen Ashley Khan’s smile through her face-mask, they’d have made sure to socially distance themselves the length of a carriage or two, and possibly adopted the brace position while doing so.
An incoming text roused Lech and he surfaced abruptly, every inch of him feeling like he’d Sumo-wrestled a walrus. This wasn’t quite normal service. The post-Sumo effect was recent—a souvenir from Wimbledon—and sleeping through the night was rare too. Insomnia was one of the few traits he still had in common with the Lech Wicinski of old, who had been on an upward trajectory: a good job—analyst at Regent’s Park—a nice flat he shared with his fiancée; walks by the river on Sunday; meals out with friends once a week. Insomnia, yes, but he’d learned to accept it, treating it as extra space, a quiet time when he had nothing but his own thoughts to attend to. Often he walked it off, striding through the city after dark, paying attention to details that were invisible by day, as if haunting a cinema after the audience had gone: here were the empty seats, the abandoned popcorn containers and takeaway cups; all the signs indicating that life went on here, just not at the moment.
And while this still happened—one night out of three he’d be roaming the streets; blowing this way and that, like litter—the rest was change. He no longer had a job at the Park, or a nice flat, and Sara had emailed yesterday to let him know—she wouldn’t want him to find out any other way—that she was seeing someone else. So was Lech, but only in the mirror. The scarred face there was a whole new chapter in a different story; most of the damage self-inflicted, to conceal the original message carved by a bad actor. PAEDO. A lie, but what difference did that make? Had it been true, he’d have obliterated it just the same.
The scars he’d made to hide that lie had hardened to a mask. Something he could hide behind, and others shy away from.
And his days were no longer spent at Regent’s Park but at Slough House, where the Park’s cast-offs laboured. Their tasks were of the boulder-rolling kind: they never came to an end, they just felt like they might, right up to the moment when they began all over again. To be assigned to Slough House meant you’d committed some egregious error; had endangered lives, or caused embarrassment, or invited the wrong sort of attention, all of which were among the seven deadlies on Spook Street. Lech’s own mistake had been to do someone a favour, and the only consolation he’d devised for himself since had been the promise that he’d never do that again; that from here on in, he was his only trusted friend. Being at Slough House actually helped in that regard. It was a place that encouraged you to remain behind your mask, and focus on rolling that boulder. Either you’d get it to the top of the hill despite yourself, or you’d come to your senses and give up.