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Diana hadn’t known. She hadn’t fucking known. Whelan rocked up in the middle of a desperate week and a desperate moment and told her that Molly Doran had been let go and she hadn’t known.
The only thing there was to do was to look towards Jackson, who was visibly as shocked as she, and it was clear he hadn’t known either. He and Molly still got together, sometimes, she knew, though they pretended they didn’t. Didn’t matter. They’d all been there, under the OB’s thumb. The three of them had stuck together then, but where Diana had decided to ride the OB’s favor to the top, Molly had been taken off active service for obvious reasons and Jackson had turned on Cartwright during the Partner thing. The Partner thing! An enormous scandal that even now could bring down her, and him, and Catherine Standish too, and she thought of it as a “thing.” One of those things.
Whelan was one of those things too, and she still hadn’t quite worked out what she’d be able to do with him, and that was a thorn in her side like nobody would believe. Well, everybody could believe; everyone could see how much it galled her, Jackson more than the rest, and would he lift a fucking finger to help? No. All Diana’s plans thus far had failed, and Molly knew that all too well, and yet Molly still let him go over to her place sometimes, she still gave him files from the Park and offered him whiskey from the Highlands, and if Diana used to sit and seethe in bars when the Wall was still standing watching Molly wrap Jackson round her fat little finger wondering what he had that she didn’t, well, it didn’t matter any longer. Molly had moved on from her too definitively and besides nobody was getting any at their age.
She touched her mouth almost unconsciously at the memory of their last kiss, which, what the hell, she did still think of sometimes, despite the intervening decades, and she wondered how much Jackson had known, then, about her and Molly, when he’d been sleeping with both of them, and how much Molly had told him since.
“I don’t think I can cope with your pity,” she’d told him, and left the room, because she didn’t have the wherewithal to think about Molly right then, and besides there were Libyan terrorists out there, promising the next step of a plan she’d learned at the OB’s beck and call and Jackson had worked it all out without once setting foot in the Hub, and Christ alive, if he wasn’t so odious in his Slough House incarnation, she’d still be glad to find herself under him any day of the week if he offered. Molly too, if she thought about it, though she was less sure about the mechanics of it now.
Of course he went to her immediately, because he was like that, and whatever he taunted her with, Diana found an encrypted file in her inbox once all the systems were back online but she didn’t bother to input the password and find out what it said because more than anything she needed to take off her skirt and pour a glass of wine and go the fuck to sleep, and before all that happened Whelan found himself on the wrong side of a gun and Cartwright the Younger found himself on the right side of one, and that was Sunday.
Monday she used the facade of Second Desk to inquire, politely and then less so, with HR, and tried to call Molly at the number in her personnel records, but either it was the wrong number or the anodyne answering machine message was placed there deliberately to taunt her, and in any case by mid-afternoon she was First Desk. When Jackson rang her cell she was still too full of the adrenaline that had flooded her when she’d gotten the call from the minister and she feared her gloating was not quite up to par, but settling onto the couch in her new office she looked over at the bottle of whiskey on her new sideboard and remembered when Ingrid had brought it over to taunt her, and thought perhaps it deserved a new outing.
Jackson refused the canal, being obstinate for reasons of his own, and told her to stop by Slough House on her way home, as if Aldersgate was anywhere near her flat in Marylebone, but she put the bottle in her ridiculously oversized purse and had the Dogs drive her across central London at rush hour, not noticing the traffic in favor of reveling in her triumph.
She was mentally moving down the list of state secrets she was now fully, wholly, responsible for, when they pulled up outside the rickety metal steps that led to Jackson’s lair, a place she always thought of with a grimace, though she supposed the recent building works must have replaced his smells with something a little more industrially intoxicating. She had been here just a couple of days ago, had locked eyes with an irritated Catherine Standish as she sat pretending bravery in the kitchen, to remind Jackson of Service Standing Order 27 (3), and had placed the whole stable under house arrest after he reminded her of their shared history. Funny, almost, in light of what she was about to do now.
Standish was on her way out as she stepped in—it was five o’clock on the dot—and nodded cordially as she tied the belt on her coat. “Ma’am.”
“Catherine,” Diana nodded back. She used first names with the secretaries, though she had no real reason to, it was just the way things were at the Park when she was coming up. She was “Ma’am” to nearly all her reports, an ever-growing circle, and “Diana” to just a few, Jackson and Molly and Whelan, except only two of them had really earned it. “I presume he’s still lying in state upstairs.”
“Yes,” Standish replied carefully, her large eyes taking in the details of Diana’s dress, for what end she couldn’t imagine, given Standish’s own sartorial proclivities. “Though I should warn you that he is currently sober.”
“Aiming to fix that,” Diana said, and showed her the bottle. She’d expected a kind of prudish despair, but instead a look of resignation crossed Standish’s face.
“It’s been that sort of day,” Standish said, “or rather, year,” and slammed the door behind her.
Diana winced at the metal clang, but put whatever axe Standish had to grind out of her mind as she made her way steadily upstairs. She found that Jackson already had two glasses, perhaps even clean ones, placed on his desk, though the man himself seemed to be locked in the toilet, and she steeled herself for the inevitable stench that would follow his emergence.
When he appeared, however, it was to enter the office through the main door, or door frame, she supposed, wearing his coat, and to castigate her for not finding him at his car.
“Now, Jackson,” she said, “I thought the first rule was to never let a hippie take you to a second location.”
“Not a hippie,” he said.
“You certainly smell like one.”
“But I never wear that—whatever you call it,” he said, in mock offense. “Patch something.”
“I meant the lack of regular washing,” she said. “What makes you think I want to drink my whiskey in your car?”
“They’re both aged?” he offered. “If you want to make your way to Molly’s alone, be my guest. Saves having to get the crisp crumbs off the front seat.”
“Molly’s?” She’d assumed he had asked her to Slough House out of sheer perversity, and she had been in too good a mood to truly press the point.
“I’d thought you’d want to do this as a throuple, or whatever the kids call it now,” he said. “Seeing as those were the terms of the pact we made.”
The memory of a night at the Joiner’s Arms all those years ago suddenly came back to her, where they had promised each other that if they made it out of training and up through the ranks the one to make First Desk would buy enough drink for the others to swim in.
She’d been very young, they all were, and very new to the Service. No woman had even made it to Second Desk, then, and it was already clear that Jackson, despite being the most talented recruit in their cohort, didn’t have the flair for paperwork required by the admin side of the Park. In fact, he’d failed to provide an emergency contact so many times that the OB nearly had him expelled from training, which had led to a rather entertaining encounter she’d witnessed where he’d asked Molly during a smoking break if she minded if he put her name down. Molly, who even then had little regard, let alone respect, for men’s egos, had glanced up and down Jackson’s form before saying, “Alright, but I’m not having your babies. Not enough there there, I think.” An obscene gesture had accompanied the pronouncement.
She and Molly had laughed about it in private later, but given how it had all shaken out she guessed there was enough, in the end. As far as Diana knew Molly was still the emergency contact listed on Jackson’s forms, though perhaps Catherine Standish had edged out Molly recently. Molly’s forms gave a brother in Cheltenham, whom she never mentioned. Diana thought it likely he was in government comms, and wondered briefly what made some families so tight-lipped as a general rule.
“Yes, I guess that was the deal,” she said, and there must have been something in her voice, a tiredness or a deflation—for all the joy of her promotion had suddenly gone out of her—and Jackson cocked his head at her.
“Well, I can’t make her come here!” Jackson said. “Bloody lift’s never fucking worked.”
“I know,” Diana said. “It’s there for morale.”
“Oh, we’ve got plenty of that.”
“Keeping it down, rather.”
“Didn’t know keeping morale up or down was a stated provision of the Equality Act,” he said. “Anyway, let’s go. Her flat’s not far but she told me she wanted an early night.”
“What for?” Diana pushed past him to head for the stairs. “There are no rules in retirement. No reason to rise early either, as far as I can tell.”
“Er, well,” Jackson said, and clanked noisily behind her four flights down and around the street to his car. Diana knew she and Jackson were both the sort who would die at their desks before countenancing the idea that a lifetime of hard work might mean they had earned some right to rest and relaxation, but Molly had always been more capable of genuine pleasure than either of them.
After waving off her Dogs—they’d follow her anyway, bless them, although it was becoming clear that this First Desk thing did seem to mean that field encounters would become an even scarcer rarity than they already were, and wasn’t that a pity—Diana looked at him out of the corner of her eye as she waited for him to unlock the door and saw that he had pulled out a cigarette and was fiddling with it like he wanted to speak, but he didn’t still seem inclined to answer her question.
“She’ll be expecting a call, won’t she,” Diana said eventually, and it wasn’t really even meant for his ears, just another item on the to-do list for herself: Call HR.
“Yes,” Jackson said, solicitously sweeping a whole mess of papers and food wrappers off the front seat and into the footwell. “Yes, I think she will.”
Diana eyed the situation with distaste, reminded herself that her dry cleaner was very good, and settled in to Jackson’s car as gingerly as she could. “And don’t light that thing,” she said. “I can’t have the kids on the Hub knowing what I get up to.”
“It’s my gaff,” Jackson grumbled, but he just let the fag hang from his lips, unsmoked, and Diana found herself taking her eyes away from the steady creep of traffic to study his mouth and the side of his face. Rounder, now, yes, saggier, certainly, a few more lines that could do with a moisturizer and a scruff that could stand to be neatened, but the same old Jackson Lamb she’d known for over thirty years, with the same sharp eyes.
“Where does Molly live?” she asked, to fill the air with something other than her inadmissible fondness for him.
“You haven’t been?” he said. “Horrible place near Islington. Just big enough for the chair.”
“We don’t talk much at work,” she said primly, letting the implication that they no longer talked much outside of work either slip away. “Molly does not consult me about her real estate decisions.”
There was a time she had, of course, when they had been close to going in together on a flat near the Park, so that Diana could escape a cramped studio with no light and so that Molly could leave behind roommates she had outgrown, but, well, things had happened and times had changed. It wasn’t like either of them were the sort to throw housewarming parties or to invite colleagues round for a drink on the spur of the moment, and to some chagrin Diana realized her current home was in fact inaccessible to Molly as she was now.
The building was indeed grim, all landlord white and fluorescent hell, but the lift worked, and Molly opened the door to her flat with a flourish.
“Madam First Desk,” she said, looking past Jackson’s bulk. “Good of you to trouble yourself.”
Diana paused at the threshold, seeing past the gently teased hair and real blouse to notice that Molly had not been coping well at all, that there was rubbish on the end tables and dishes in the sink, and that the incense she was so fond of, there on the shelf next to the other sundry trinkets from her time in south Asia, had gone unlit for some days and there was a stale smell in the air.
“It’s better for everyone if I get out now and then,” she said eventually, and followed the whir of Molly’s chair to the living room with its single small sofa and no rugs.
“I’ll get the glasses,” Jackson said gently, and Diana briefly thought, when did he become capable of gentleness, and then, how does he know where the glasses are, and then she found herself quite unable to think at all for several moments, pierced by a spike of red hot jealousy that she had believed she had outgrown when Ingrid quit and left her the unquestionably most capable body in the Service. There had been no point to being jealous of Whelan, only pitying, and as for material desires—such as they were—Diana got what she wanted as a matter of course. Molly and Jackson had evidently been carrying on without her for some time, and Diana realized she had absolutely no one in her life who knew which cabinet she kept the wine glasses in, except perhaps the maid, who did a perfunctory dusting every two weeks.
When she came back to herself, she found Jackson and Molly looking at her expectantly and she hid her tightened jaw in rummaging in her bag, pulling out the whiskey and a lipstick. “Give me a moment,” she said, passing the bottle to Molly and gesturing towards the hall. “Your loo is—that way?”
Molly nodded. “First door on the right.”
Diana went and ruffled her hair, reapplied her lipstick, stared into her eyes in the mirror wondering if she ought to do something about the crow’s feet, decided she wouldn’t have the time to spare, stared into her eyes again wondering why nobody ever seemed to stare into them these days, shrugged, flushed the toilet and washed her hands for good measure, and squared her shoulders before opening the door and striding back to the living room.
“Brush,” she murmured to herself, remembering an old book on deportment that suggested saying it as one entered a room put a brilliant smile on one’s face, but she rather thought she had lost that facility, and when her heels stopped next to the desk facing the windows, Molly looked up with concern.
“Weight of the world on your shoulders, Diana?”
“As per,” she replied and tried to fix her muscles into crossness rather than forlornness. “What’d you do with my drink?”
“Here,” Jackson grunted, sloshing some on the floor as he passed the glass her way, and Molly and Diana fixed him with the exact same sort of exasperated glare.
“Don’t gang up on me so quick,” he said. “Old ticker won’t be able to keep up.”
“Get a rag, Jackson,” Molly said, and turned her chair to properly face Diana, who was still hovering next to the desk. “I’m sorry you’ll have to sit next to that, but I don’t keep much seating in the place.”
“I quite understand,” Diana said. “But I’ve already had to be in his car, and as long as he doesn’t smoke I shall grin and bear it.”
“Hey,” Jackson complained from the kitchen. “Molly lets me smoke whenever I want.”
“And then I have to air the place out for three days,” Molly called back, and the two women shared tight smiles that did not reach their eyes.
They sat and drank in silence for some time. Diana kept looking between Molly and Jackson, trying to gauge whether they still were sleeping together, or if the tension in the air was just the strained formality of old friends turned into supervisor and employee and, well, ex-employee, or if the whiskey just hadn’t quite hit them all yet.
“Seen the latest Manchester game?” Jackson eventually said out loud to no one in particular.
“Like you watch football,” Molly scoffed, at the same time that Diana spoke.
“Molly, I’ll be bringing you back to the Park,” she said.
Molly rolled her eyes. “Don’t be earnest, Diana, it doesn’t suit you. Besides, I haven’t said if I want to go back.”
“It’s for security as much as anything,” she started, but Jackson barked a false laugh, and Diana tried not to look affronted.
“Where was your concern for security when Cartwright’s nutso father came and tried to kill her right in this room?”
Diana breathed in sharply through her nose. “I believe the Park offered the appropriate counseling and restitution after the debrief.”
“You believe?” Jackson said. “What happened to seeing all the details through for yourself?”
“Some of us oversee departments of more than six people, Jackson.” Diana sat up very straight. “Haven’t you heard of delegating?”
“I delegate plenty,” Jackson snorted. “Just shows how you don’t have your finger on the pulse in the way you think you do, locked up there in your glass office, Dogs running around at your bidding. The archives aren’t visible from those windows. No wonder you forgot.”
“I care about every department,” Diana said evenly. “As a matter of fact —”
“Enough!” Molly barked.
Jackson grunted in disgust, and Diana rolled her eyes to look upwards, although if there was still a god in heaven she was sure he didn’t haunt her, and anyway being petulant wasn’t fun anymore, the way it was at fourteen or even twenty-four, and she surprised herself wishing more than anything that she and Jackson could talk like they used to, that every interaction didn’t have to be filled with so much loathing (his) and disgust (hers), and that maybe their disparate approaches to the game didn’t have to result in quite so many bitter jabs, that perhaps whatever happened in Berlin, once, and in London, many times, could be put aside, and they could enjoy these few moments here with the woman they were both so fond of, still, so many years later. Diana did not precisely love Molly anymore, if she ever had, but she was quick, and she was fun, a lot of fun, Whelan was right, and she had come up with her in the Service at the same time with the same earnest initial reasons, and once she had lain sprawled across a bed—hers, theirs, who was to say—watching Molly picking up clothes from across the flat, and the woman’s cheeky grin hadn’t changed, even though so much else had.
Molly was busy sighing. “If the two of you could pause your sniping at each other, I will thank you to let me worry about my department, and who protects it.”
“So you will come back,” Diana cut in.
Molly glared at her. “I’ll admit I’ve got little else going on, but you’ll have to make it worth my while.”
Jackson grinned like the old lecher he was. “Oh, I’d pay to see that.”
“No,” Diana said smoothly. “Online pornography is free. You’d pay to participate.” She was proud of herself for not blushing, and for not missing the huff Jackson did his best to conceal, and for not blinking, in shock or sorrow or otherwise, when Molly said, very softly, “Diana, all that’s over now.”
“Doesn’t have to be,” she replied, nonchalantly. “But if a raise is all you want, I can figure out something. Long record in the Service, special award following on from a traumatic incident, restitution for wrongful firing. We’ve got forms for all that.”
Molly smiled and Diana let herself relax, just a fraction.
“Yes,” Molly said. “And I know where they’re filed.”
~fin~