“No. Are you?”
Ashley made a fingers-down-the-throat gesture, and Leia laughed.
“Do not talk to her!”
“He means you,” Ashley said.
“He means you!”
“Dick move either way.”
“Out of my room,” Roddy ordered.
“You’re in his room?”
“It’s an office,” Ashley said. “We work together.”
“What’s he like?”
“You can do better.”
“Now!”
“Is he always like this?”
“I’ve only known him, like, a week. But yeah, appaz.”
Roddy seized a cable and pulled it from the monitor, to no obvious effect.
“I’d better go,” Ashley said. “He’s disconnecting printers now.”
“We should do this again,” Leia said, and vanished from Roddy’s screen.
“Look what you did!”
“What?” said Ashley. “We were just chatting.”
“She was supposed to be chatting to me!”
“Whatever. Anyway, she’s cool. You should date her.”
“。 . . You think?”
“Definitely.”
Roddy smirked.
“I mean, she can tell you’re a prat. But if we ruled prats out, we’d never get laid. Are we doing some work now? Catherine’ll be down in a minute.”
Roddy flexed his fingers.
“So tell me something about Vassily Ronsakov I don’t already know,” he said.
“Well, for a start, he’s called Vassily Rasnokov.”
“That’s what I said.”
“But his nickname as a teenager was The Fireman.”
“Because he used to put fires out?” said Roddy.
“No,” said Ashley. “Because he used to start them.”
Lech and Louisa were walking back down Cheapside. “They wanted to check my shoes,” Louisa was saying. “Who’d they think I was, Rosa Klebb?”
“Well, from a certain angle . . .”
“Fuck you.”
“Consider me fucked,” said Lech. “That was cool, by the way. Getting us out of there.”
Because Kelly had wanted to arrest them.
“Good plan,” Louisa had told her. They were standing in a shabby group on the pavement, the SUV a memory in distant traffic. “You can take my statement now, if you like. It involves your target driving away in your car with your gun.”
There’d followed an exchange of pleasantries, after which the slow horses had made their departure.
“Do you think that counts as mission accomplished?”
“If we’d not turned up, Taverner would have been taken back to the Park by now,” Lech said.
“By the malefactors,” said Louisa.
“By the malefactors. Which is what she wanted to avoid.”
“Yay for us, then.”
“I’m sure she’s suitably grateful.”
“That’s funny,” said Louisa. Then winced and rubbed her shoulder and said, “I’ll have bruises tomorrow.”
“Tell me about it,” said Lech.
Roddy’s fingers blurred, and different sites opened up on different screens. Most of them, password pages suggested, were restricted to authorised users, the accompanying devices indicating that such users served the Crown, one way or another. These warnings didn’t deter him long.
Ashley said, “Pretty slick.”
“Well, duh.”
“And gracious with it.”
Roddy shrugged modestly. “What do you think of Mr. Lightning?” he asked.
“Don’t know him.”
“No, I meant the name. Mr. Lightning.”
“Sounds like a dick,” said Ashley.
“That’s what I thought.”
He muttered it under his breath. Mr. Lightning.
None of the databases had so far yielded Rasnokov’s name, nor the name he’d booked into the Grosvenor under: Gregory Ronovitch. But that had never been likely, given the undercover nature of whatever he’d been doing.
Take away the name, though, and focus on fire-related incidents, linked with the Balvenie brand-name, and— Still nothing.
“Just put ‘whisky,’” Ashley suggested.
Various hits, on various pages.
They took them one by one, the first turning out to be a brawl in a pub involving a number of off-duty fire-officers. This covered the second and third hits also.
Ashley reached for her bag and produced her Tupperware box of nuts and berries.