He used to work over the river, remember? Schemes and wheezes; devious bullshit. One side effect, he liked to think, was that he could recognise a game when someone else was playing it. Take this, for instance: one of Lamb’s crew—the so-called slow horses—gets shipped off to the Service’s drying-out facility the morning after Sophie de Greer disappears. The morning after de Greer makes a phone call to Jackson Lamb. It was a matter of patterns; he saw them where others noticed only random particle motion. And here was one. That incident in Wimbledon—Shirley Dander attacking a tourist coach with an iron—was too outlandish to be anything other than a cover story. And the San was too exclusive, too Park, for a Slough House agent’s treatment.
He’d said as much to Lamb, and the crafty sod had changed the subject. Dander’s treatment is none of your business. Schemes and wheezes; devious bullshit. He’d seen through Lamb that same moment: it wasn’t Dander who’d been packed off to the San. It was Sophie de Greer.
Nor was Lamb the only one playing games. There’d been a paragraph in that morning’s Times, tucked away on page seven: Concern is growing as to the whereabouts of Dr. Sophie de Greer, an academic and researcher at ReThink#1, the policy discussion group headed by Number Ten’s chief adviser Anthony Sparrow . . . A Downing Street spokesperson dismissed rumours that de Greer’s disappearance was a result of action taken by the Security Services. “Without concrete—indeed, waterproof—evidence that any such malpractice has taken place, we can assume this is baseless gossip.”
A declaration of hostilities, thought Claude.
Because this had all the characteristics of a turf war. Sparrow had already left his mark on most Whitehall departments, the majority of whose advisory staff were now appointed by Number Ten, effectively Sparrow himself, rather than by ministers. The centralisation of authority had long been the government’s aim, devolvement having been decried by the PM as his most successful recent predecessor’s biggest domestic failure, a target easier to locate than the PM’s least successful recent predecessors’ biggest domestic triumphs. With the regions restless in the wake of economic fallout from the pandemic, there was good reason to fortify Downing Street. And it was clear that Sparrow intended Regent’s Park to become part of the fortifications, a move which would require a cooperative First Desk. De Greer’s precise role in all this Whelan couldn’t see, but that barely mattered. All that counted was that she was now in play, and that Sparrow had finagled the word waterproof into the paper of record.
What Taverner’s reaction would be, Whelan couldn’t know either. But he could make a reasonable guess.
It was late morning; he was drinking coffee, and staring from his back window at the summer-struck garden. Until lately the garden had been Claire’s province, and Whelan a suffered guest; his presence occasionally called upon when heavy-ish lifting was required—for actual heavy lifting, a professional would be summoned—but otherwise deemed unnecessary except as a witness to her careful curation. Now the garden spoke only of neglect, and he felt unable to remedy this. The best he’d managed was the shifting of leaves and other windfalls. Claire’s absence was nowhere more apparent than in the presence of unwelcome flora: the weeds that might yet strangle the roses; the harmless but unlovely dandelions. These incursions predated her departure, in fact. It was peculiar how one obsession could replace another; or if not peculiar, at least worthy of comment. Or if not that, then something else. Damn it, he was running out of thoughts. His own presence bored him. He supposed he could hire a gardener. But meanwhile, he had a phone call to make.
“The San?”
“A Service facility for the hard of drinking,” explained Nash. “Also drugs, and associated behaviours. And the various other traumas that befall those who put their country’s good before their own health and sanity.”
Sparrow hadn’t wanted a bloody lecture.
“And he’s a hundred per cent certain that’s where de Greer is?”
“He says eighty. But he’s a cautious man.”
Said like this was a virtue, rather than the tedious plaint of the ineffectual.
Nash burbled on some more, then asked Sparrow if he wanted the San’s details in an email, and Sparrow asked him if he was an idiot. In this post code, emails were for when you couldn’t afford a promotional video. Instead, he jotted down the necessary geography, all the while brooding at the wall, which in his mind’s eye became a map in a war room. Knowing where de Greer was meant a victory flag. So did planting the word waterproof in this morning’s Times. What people failed to realise was, success didn’t depend on coherent strategy—coherent strategy left you nailed to one course of action, and at the mercy of events. But once you grasped that there were some problems nobody would ever solve, your options widened. Chaos became an alternative, a fertile ground out of which new possibilities arose . . . This, the bedrock of his political philosophy, had seen Sparrow through some shaky patches. He’d occasionally been knocked off balance, true. We don’t need no stinking lockdown, he remembered telling the PM. What are we, French? But even this had an upside, distracting attention from a harder Brexit than the wet-legged had been expecting, and post-Covid paranoia was a flame worth fanning. Take the anti-vaxxers, or the G5 arsonists, whose celebrity-endorsed idiocy made the Home Secretary look a model of reason . . . Every national panic permitted a government to lace its boots tighter, which was why every government needed a visionary unafraid to sow chaos.