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Diana returns home in the chilly December dawn after one of the longest nights of her career to find an unexpected guest squatting amid her frozen rhododendrons. Well, perhaps not that unexpected given the supporting role she’d asked him to play in the night’s events. Jackson sits out there, smoking, little puffs of breath catching in the cold air, as the winter albedo turns the London sky from pink to gold. He’s made himself at home in her absence, lounging at the quaint little café table she never found time to sit at. Enjoying a garden which has never held a garden party, nor hosted any friends in all the years she’d lived there.
A strange thought suddenly stabs her through the heart—that Jackson’s presence there meant that he was her only friend. A thought best drowned with a glass of pinot noir.
She saunters over to him, wine in hand.
“Heard you had a busy night. All sorted?” he asks.
“Done and dusted.”
“Am I supposed to believe you did this all to avenge a dead joe and a mangled civil servant?”
He’s goading her, poking at her, even more viciously than usual. She’d like to snap back at him, but she won’t give him the satisfaction, won’t let her see how much his ingratitude wounds her. “Believe what you like, Jackson,” she says coolly.
“All for the good of your precious Service,” he says with a sneer. “Anything else was just extra, the cherry on top of a shit sundae.”
“I didn’t get to be First Desk without learning how to occasionally kill two birds with one stone. In this case, Schenker and De Vries were the same bird.”
He takes a nip of whisky from a flask in his pocket and offers her some, which she declines. “And you cooked up the whole thing by your lonesome, put yourself square in the middle of the op without an iota of field experience—”
“I have been in the field before—”
“As David Cartwright’s errand girl thirty years ago? Hardly the same thing and you know it. You’ve not been in the field before, not like this.” There’s anger in his voice as he speaks, and something she’d almost call concern. “If your PS were any less good at her job, they’d be clearing the calendar at St. Leonard’s for your funeral.”
“Are you done with the post-mortem? Because it’s really quite cold out here,” she says, an unexpected chill having suddenly come over her. Nothing to do with the thought of her own near-death, she swears.
Jackson holds her gaze steadily, watching for something. He crushes the butt of his cigarette beneath the heavy sole of his shoe. “Nah, I don’t think we are. Better take this inside,” he says, nodding in the direction of her house.
"Fine,” she says, “I guess I’ll invite the devil in.”
As she’s opening the door, Jackson leans in close. “No blood on your hands, but you’ve got just a drop right here,” he says, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. Her nerves are wired taut from the op and the unexpected touch sends a familiar shock of lightning straight through her.
“Am I going to regret this?” she asks him.
“See, that’s your problem, Diana. You regret the things you shouldn’t and don’t regret the things you should.”
*
Jackson makes himself as at home in her pristine white kitchen as much as he did in her back garden. In a flash, he has somehow put the kettle on and laid out a single mug for tea with an efficiency that would put the best of the Park’s PAs to shame.
“No cracks about my living space?” she asks, steeling herself for it. “I’m sure you have opinions.”
“Looks like something out of a magazine—straight from the pages of Cold Bitch Digest. That what you were hoping I would say?” He delivers his banter distractedly, like his heart isn’t quite in it.
“Well, your interior decorator—Oscar the Grouch—was busy.”
She’s standing there in the warmth of her kitchen but instead of feeling the expected thaw in her limbs, all she feels is cold. Cold overtakes her, ice water sluicing down her spine and pooling in her chest. She’s shivering, shaking, with no apparent reason or cause.
“Jackson…” she begins, dumbstruck. “I’ve got…chills. Can’t seem to stop.”
Without saying anything at all, he pulls her into his arms, holding her tightly, surrounding her in a great bear hug. She’s aware of him rubbing soothing circles on her back, quietly shushing her as he rocks her back and forth. “You got a bad case of the bends, love. Happens after an op. Which you would know, if you’d ever been in the field.”
At that precise moment, the whistle of the kettle blows as if Jackson has timed this action down to the second. He pours hot water in her mug and adds a generous dollop of whisky from his own flask.
“Now, you are going to drink that entire thing,” he says as he passes her the mug.
She’s still shivering, but takes the mug greedily, soaking up its warmth. In a trice, Jackson has seemingly produced the cashmere throw from her sofa out of thin air and wrapped it around her shoulders. His arms linger there and she finds she doesn’t want him to let go.
When her teeth finally stop chattering, she asks, “Does it happen to you? And the others, your joes?”
He gives an empty laugh. “Oh, not for donkey’s years. I got wired for it long ago. With the adrenaline high, the crash hits you later on, when you finally feel safe. Hits people hard their first time. And you’re not exactly a spring chicken.”
Diana finishes her drink, feeling the warmth and the whisky seep through her veins and steady her. She’d known stress, adrenaline before, run her share of nail-biting ops. But this—the crash of the glass, the bullet whizzing over her head, a body in a pool of piss and blood at her feet—was altogether different.
“Some joes go chasing that high. Mind you don’t get addicted, now you’ve had a taste,” Jackson admonishes.
She shakes her head no, for once without words, and sets her now empty mug on her polished quartz countertop.
“All right then. To bed with you,” Jackson orders. “I’ll wait out here while you change into your jimjams.”
“That’s not really necessary—”
“Diana, will you for once just do as I say without going forty rounds about it? Trust the hard-won wisdom of my vast Cold War experience.”
Berlin was always Jackson’s trump card.
Still in a state of shock, she goes to her bedroom and begins to change. She has the presence of mind to put on her plain cotton pajamas—if she put on the silk ones, heaven knows Jackson would never let her hear the end of it. Or worse, get the wrong idea.
In the mirror she notices that Jackson was right—there is the tiniest sliver of crimson among the grey and blonde of her hair. Diana wonders if it will come out with a wash. She’s not sure if she wants it to.
She walks out of her bedroom into the hallway. “Satisfied?”
“Much better. Now, turn off your bloody phone and get into bed.” She attempts to protest but he hushes her up. “You need rest, proper rest. Not some power nap and then back to the Park before teatime.”
“All right,” she says, the “bends” or whatever Jackson called them leaving her without the strength to put up much of a fight. She climbs into bed and Jackson helps tuck the duvet up to her chin.
It comes out, almost instinctually. “Would you stay? Just until—”
“Yeah,” he answers. He closes the blinds, sheds his coat and shucks off his shoes before resting in bed beside her on top of the coverlet.
Reflexively she rolls into him, the animal of her body seeking that pleasant warmth and nothing more. He smells like cigarettes, whisky, and beneath that, clean soap. The utter absence of sweat and week-old curry is remarkable.
“Did you shower this morning? For me?” she asks.
“Pure coincidence.”
The grey light, the twilight closeness of him in this secret hour together makes her want to say what she would normally leave unspoken.
“Jackson?”
“Hmm.”
“I did it for the Park…and I did it for you.”
Jackon lets out a deep sigh. “I know.”
A minute or two or three goes by in gentle silence. Finally, Jackson whispers softly, “You were a joe today.” He sounds a bit impressed.
She snuggles closer to him. “And Jackson Lamb always takes care of his joes, is that what this is?”
“Something like. Go to sleep, Di.”
*
It’s well past noon when Jackson makes an appearance at Slough House. Later than normal, even for him.
“Where have you been all morning?” River asks.
“Curled up in bed with Taverner,” Jackson answers, matter-of-factly.
“Oh yeah, were you the big spoon or the little spoon?” Shirley rejoins, calling his bluff.
“Took turns. We’re modern like that,” he says, deadpan. “Now fuck off.”
Catherine lingers at the doorway after the others have gone. “I heard First Desk had a close call in the tender hours of the morning. Had a gun pulled on her by a former agent of the Stasi.”
“She’ll be fine. It’ll take more than a bullet to kill Diana Taverner. Stake through the heart, I believe, is the traditional method,” he says, not even glancing up from his newspaper.
Catherine gives him that grey-eyed look that lets him know he doesn’t fool her. She picks up the mackintosh he has left draped over the sofa and hangs it on the coatrack. “And would that be the reason your coat smells like ladies’ perfume?”
“Haven’t you got any office supplies that need mothering?” he barks back. “Some orphaned staplers in need of gathering in? I passed the copier on my way up the stairs and it seemed lonely without you.”
“All right, Jackson.” Catherine leaves his office but on her way out she catches a glimpse of him over her shoulder. He doesn’t look younger per se, but different. He squares his shoulders just a bit straighter, relieved of an invisible burden that had always weighed him down. And Catherine doesn’t know if it’s stranger to see him free of it or to think Diana Taverner might have been the one responsible.