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Back The Nursery Save as PDF
Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise
  3. Dedication
  4. Prologue
  5. Part One
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Part Two
  10. Chapter Four
  11. Chapter Five
  12. Chapter Six
  13. Chapter Seven
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Part Three
  17. Chapter Ten
  18. Chapter Eleven
  19. Chapter Twelve
  20. Chapter Thirteen
  21. Chapter Fourteen
  22. Chapter Fifteen
  23. Chapter Sixteen
  24. Part Four
  25. Chapter Seventeen
  26. Chapter Eighteen
  27. Chapter Nineteen
  28. Chapter Twenty
  29. Chapter Twenty-One
  30. Chapter Twenty-Two
  31. Part Five
  32. Chapter Twenty-Three
  33. Chapter Twenty-Four
  34. Chapter Twenty-Five
  35. Chapter Twenty-Six
  36. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  37. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  38. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  39. Chapter Thirty
  40. Chapter Thirty-One
  41. Chapter Thirty-Two
  42. Part Six
  43. Chapter Thirty-Three
  44. Acknowledgements
  45. About the Author

Mother. Secret agent. Two roles. Two lives. There are days when it’s tough. Of course there are. But today is one of those winning days. Where I crammed it all in. Saved a colleague. Picked up my daughter. Whipped up some fish fingers for her dinner. Succeeded in getting her to eat three pieces of carrot. And got her to bed after only six bedtime stories and three threats of banning pudding for a week. Victorious days like this are few and far between and it’s important to revel in them.

Will arrives home as I’m sitting on the living room sofa, toasting myself with a large glass of red wine.

‘My dry-cleaning upstairs?’

Shit.

Part One

Part One

Bite

bite, v.

1. Use the teeth in order to inflict injury on.

2. Take the bait or lure.

Chapter One

Chapter One

A BUSKER WITH A TOPKNOT was singing about ‘running’ in an enthusiastic falsetto at the bottom of the escalators at Holborn tube station. I recognised it as a Florence and the Machine song. A few commuters winced. It was a little too high-pitched for early Monday morning.

I gave him a nod as I walked past him and joined the escalators up into the daylight.

The weekend had been quiet. All active missions were on hold. My orders had been to not leave London, keep my head down and await a full update at today’s briefing. After two days of a husband still grumpy about ShirtGate and a daughter wielding a glue gun demanding craft time, I was ready for whatever the Platform could throw at me.

I walked up to the grey office building adjoining the tube station. I swiped my specially modified Oyster card against the double doors and entered. In the small reception area was a waiting lift. I walked in and pressed a combination of buttons that took me down to the hallowed halls of Platform Eight.

Our offices were situated in a disused underground network of rooms and tunnels coming off Platform Eight at Holborn tube station. It was a fitting location for our covert branch of the security services – we could roam all over London hidden from the all-seeing CCTV, whilst the sounds of the trains helped mask the noise from uncooperative interviewees. Only we knew the dark truth behind the seemingly innocuous tube announcements. ‘Signal failures’ were often caused by over-enthusiastic interrogating shorting the electricity supply and affecting the whole underground grid. A ‘person on the tracks’ could be a person who would rather die than answer our questions – it was a particularly effective disposal method as ‘splatters’ were near impossible to do autopsies on.

I entered the lift an everyday commuter and exited an underground secret agent.