Now they had a routine, Bachelor keeping station by the landing window, where he could clock strange arrivals, hear unusual sounds, be alert for danger; Sophie perched beside him on the top stair, as if they were engaged in a joint effort, rather than one in which he was the knight, she the fair maiden. He was wary of asking questions, knowing that the professionals, when they came for her, would expect to find her intact, but she had no such compunction.
“How long have you been a spy?”
“That’s not really what I do.”
“But you work for the intelligence service.”
He was a milkman, he explained; a long out-of-date joke having something to do with collecting the empties. A care-worker, really. It was strange, he found himself saying, the byways along which a career could take you. She seemed happy to share this insight, and even treat it as a small joke. Which, like his career, he supposed it was.
He made one of her own career, too: “Have you always known you wanted to be a superforecaster?”
Seeing her laugh was a new experience. He’d spent days in Bonn hoping to see that face smile, but Sophie’s mother—raised amidst grim state machinery—didn’t have the muscles to make that expression work.
There was a lot he wanted to know, but nothing he was able to ask. He hoarded what clues came his way, though: My mother made great sacrifices.
She sent me away. I studied in Switzerland.
I always knew there’d be a debt to pay.
Fragments of a story the professionals would put together. But Bachelor felt he knew her better than the Park’s inquisitors ever would.
When Lech visited on the second day, Bachelor asked when they could expect company—when, in particular, Lamb would be dropping in.
“You’re asking me?” Lech said. “I’m hardly in the loop.”
Afterwards, when Bachelor related this non-information to Sophie, she said, “They’re deciding who gets me.”
“Who do you want to get you? I mean, where do you want to be? Do you want to go home?”
“Zurich’s my home. But they won’t send me there. They’ll send me to Moscow.”
“And what’s there for you?”
“Nothing.”
Here, too, he understood her. There was nothing for him in London, but this was where he’d been sent, or at any rate, this was where he was.
When he assured her she wouldn’t have to go anywhere she didn’t want to, she gave a sad smile, and briefly rested her head on his shoulder.
It wasn’t as if he were under any illusions. He was looking at sixty—could feel its breath on his eyebrows—and wasn’t one of those self-deceiving Lotharios whose mirrors were twenty years out of date. His best days were behind him, an even more melancholy thought when he weighed up how feeble they’d been at the time. He’d barely hit his middle years before the mould started showing through the wallpaper, and then there was no stopping it: the capsized marriage, the punctured career, the lack of anything you could mistake for loyalty, support or money.
This, though; this could go on for as long as it wanted. He’d happily while away months coaxing life out of ageing teabags and cooking up suppers from a cupboard-load of tins; spending daylight hours on the landing, Sophie beside him, like a vision dredged out of someone else’s memory. Months hoping not to hear words like: “He’s coming here, isn’t he?”
It was the afternoon of the fourth day, the cobbles not yet dry from their drenching, and the pair were at their posts, looking down on the mews from the narrow window. One empty tea cup sat by Bachelor’s chair; Sophie cradled the other in her hands. Without her glasses, he noticed—not for the first time—she seemed younger. He would have happily continued to study her, but forced himself to shift his attention instead to the figure she had seen through the window, pausing in the archway to the mews; a bulky mess in a shabby overcoat, lighting a cigarette before stepping into the sunshine.
“Isn’t he?” she repeated.
“Yes,” Bachelor said. “I’m afraid he is.”
Lech said, “Let’s run through that again. You brought in a homemade curry for lunch, and spiced it up with this superpowered chili—”
“A Dorset Naga.”
“A Dorset Naga, right.”
“Which scores, like, 923,000 on the Scoville scale.”
“Okay.”
“Which is the Richter scale, only for chilis.”
“Okay. So you brought this in and left it in the fridge so that if—when—Lamb stole it, it’d blow his head off.”