That was all.
Removing her phone’s batteries, Diana dropped it in a bin attached to a lamppost, and hurried across the road, reaching the bus in time to slip on board and be carried away.
It must have rained overnight, because the mews’ cobbles were shiny-wet and glistened in the morning sun, but no; whoever occupied the cottage opposite had been watering the plant-life, soaking the terracotta pots that laid siege to those premises like a Chinese army. And was cottage right, even? John Bachelor had temporarily occupied a number of properties lately—empty offices, friends’ sofas, his car’s back seat—but this was his first cottage, and the word sounded odd, applied in central London. On the other hand: whitewashed walls, a trellis arrangement, and a small tropical forest out front. It was hardly inner city.
He turned off the radio—the PM had just shared his vision of post-Brexit Britain as a culinary powerhouse, its takeaway delivery services the envy of the world—as the kettle reached the boil. Watching such devices perform this function was his career in a nutshell. Though the role was referred to as “milkman,” it mostly involved tea. But yesterday Dr. de Greer—Sophie—had praised the results, and that was the first compliment Bachelor remembered receiving this millennium.
“You’re being funny.”
He really wasn’t.
Bachelor had babysat before, and was familiar with the mindset of the usual Service casualty: someone whose career was an open book, its index busiest under the heading “Grudges, slights and injustices.” So when Lech Wicinski had asked about his availability, he’d jumped straight over the small print to focus on more important matters. “And the per diem aspect, you’d be covering that?” he’d heard himself say, with that inward sense of shame that felt as if someone were turning his corners down. Only once that had been established had the penny dropped. The baby he’d be sitting was Sophie de Greer.
“So I was right.”
“Truthfully?” Wicinski had asked. “I haven’t the faintest.”
But whatever was going on, de Greer had been targeted, and, thanks to Bachelor himself—who’d been the one to point Wicinski at a TV screen—it was the slow horses who’d brought her to sanctuary.
So here he was, in a Service safe house, with no current worries about food or shelter, and in his care an unfamiliar sort of client in that she was young, attractive, and in peril she hadn’t brought upon herself via the familiar triathlon of alcohol, sex and disgruntlement. Also, there was something in her conduct towards him that Bachelor had to take a few stabs at before it registered. Respect. Christ, it had been a long time.
He poured water into the pot, scalding it nicely. She brought out the protector in him, a trait usually summoned by his more elderly clients. Something helpless about her; uncalculating. And they had a ready-made connection, of course.
“I knew your mother.”
“。 . . Really?”
“Well, not knew knew.”
He wasn’t sure how much he could say about Bonn. Somewhere, there was a former spook who’d been burned by the KGB, and it had never been clear to Bachelor whether the poor fool had committed the sins he’d been accused of, or whether, rather than having put a foot out of line, he’d simply found the line redrawn beneath his foot. Standard procedure for the time. The Cold War wasn’t all muffins at Checkpoint Charlie. Which this young woman presumably knew, her mother having been a combatant.
“And now you’re in the same line.”
“I wasn’t given a choice.”
This made sense to Bachelor, whose own horizons, he sometimes believed, had been crayoned in by another hand. “Blackmail?”
“Not me,” she said. “My mother. They said . . . They said she’d be turned out onto the streets. And she’s old. And . . .”
And all the things that went with being old. This, too, was an ancient story: a lifetime’s service trampled underfoot. They wore you out, then weaponised your uselessness and aimed it at your children. Dr. de Greer was crying, so automatically became Sophie. He could not comfort her while addressing her by title.
That first night he more or less ordered her to get some sleep: it was amazing, he trotted out, how different things looked in the morning. He’d then taken stock of the safe house, focusing on fridge and kitchen cupboards. No alcohol. Plenty of tinned food, though, and a freezer compartment stuffed with ready-meals. A box of teabags, not quite stale. Still no alcohol. But they wouldn’t starve. As for sleeping arrangements, there was only one bed; he’d settled on the sofa, and had known worse berths. When sleep arrived it came dreamlessly, but when he’d woken he’d lain for an hour or more remembering Bonn, the three or four days he’d spent staring at Sophie de Greer’s unsmiling, unspeaking mother; the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. And here he was sharing a house with her living image. Life brought you in circles, if you waited long enough. It sometimes seemed to Bachelor he’d done little with life other than wait through it.