Taylor headed down to the terminals, two floors underground. One night guard on the door watched Taylor sign in. The room was small and bare, but large enough that none of the four monitors was visible to anyone but the individual seated there. As it was, she had the place to herself. She typed in her own password, then input the code for the file on Ascension and Quadrant. She got a message saying Item not found. Taylor tried again, with the same result. It wasn’t there.

DX was an odd designation. Usually this would tell you the department number: D7, D9, and so on. Taylor had never seen DX before. She checked this ID on the personnel directory, and it came up canceled.

As a last resort, before packing up, she emailed a request for further info to a friend in Personnel, with instructions to contact Taylor directly if they knew anything about this officer. She was watchful as she began to drive home. Canceled was an odd designation too. It suggested they’d either left the service suddenly or were dead.

22

Home, since the divorce, was a flat in Angel. For the ridiculous money Taylor spent on rent, she could have been closer to Vauxhall, but she didn’t want to be. Something felt right about having the river between her and work. And something felt right about renting; she didn’t have the will to pretend she was settling this time.

A lot of dark thoughts clattered on the journey home. Was she now spying for the BND? How predictable it would look when she was caught: breakdown, divorce, impending suspension. Into the arms of another lover and all their subterfuge. But her cause wasn’t entirely self-serving.

Taylor grabbed some food from the kebab shop at the end of her road. If she was ever found murdered in mysterious circumstances, these would be the neighbors saying how normal she had seemed. Normal but distracted, they might say: anxious, kept strange hours. At home she ate, showered, then tried to imagine how she might achieve some sleep. She was too agitated. Alcohol would have been one solution, screaming itself in the empty house. But she was going to have to get through the night without it. She turned the TV on and then off again, sat on the sofa, thinking of the various people who had once been part of her life and wondered what their Friday nights looked like. Her home was very quiet. How did its quietness compare to Ascension Island? Only one voice remained in the room with her: that of Dr. Glenning. I don’t think he killed himself.

Taylor picked up her laptop, hesitated, then put it on encrypted mode. She typed in “Jack Moretti” and got the same results she’d seen before. She went into her personal emails and downloaded the zip file of Perryman’s investigation.