The War in the Dark

by Nick Setchfield

  And then the head tilted again, retrieving the shadows. A new face.

  It was almost Joyce.

  The woman regarded him. Still silent, still only half conceding his presence, she casually turned her back. Placing her hands into the pockets of her coat – a coat he had never seen before – she began to walk into the fog as if dismissing this whole wordless encounter.

  Winter’s memory flashed to the night before. He recalled the man he had mistaken for Hatherly.

  He strode after the woman. He wanted an answer. He caught up with her. He grasped her arm.

  It was as if he had seized live voltage. A blast of white light filled his vision.

  Winter opened his eyes. He was alone in Matilda Park. There was a numbness in his hand, like an echo of some greater pain. Was it the arm he had been stabbed in? He blinked, uncertain. It felt as though a fragment of memory had just been snatched from him.

  Had there been another person standing there just now? Someone he knew?

  The fog had cleared, surprisingly quickly. He looked through the trees, past the wrought-iron Victorian railings to the city beyond. Dawn was on its way.

  * * *

  It was already Tuesday. Winter slunk the car into the cul-de-sac, as quietly as he could, aware of Jubilee Close dozing around him. There were no milk bottles on the doorsteps yet. The early morning light was clear and tinged with crimson.

  He parked the Ford in the drive and walked the gravel path to his front door. There were no lights on in the house. The bedroom windows were shut. He paused, key in hand, scrutinising the lock. Had that grease-smudge of a fingerprint been there yesterday? Was that a fresh scuff in the paintwork? He glanced down. There was a single silver screw at the foot of the door, squeezed between the frame and the brickwork.

  Good. Undisturbed. Just where he had left it.

  Reassured, he turned the key in the lock and stepped inside his home. The empty hall had a stillness, the kind you only ever found in waking houses. He placed his keys in the dish by the door, shrugged off his overcoat and made his way up the stairs, his hand trailing on the smooth pine banister.

  The door to the bedroom was closed. He turned the doorknob, gently. There was the cinnamon scent of Joyce’s perfume, the one she’d worn since that birthday in ’59. And there was Joyce, asleep, one arm slung over the white sheets. She looked serene in the rose-coloured light that found the gap in the curtains.

  He walked over to the bed, brushed the black fringe from her eyes and kissed her, softly, needing her to stay dreaming. You beautiful girl, he thought.

  She shifted beneath the kiss but didn’t wake.

  Winter left the room, crossed the landing and entered the bathroom. He eased himself out of his jacket and placed it on the wicker washing basket. And then he unbuckled his shoulder holster and placed that and his gun on top of it.

  He tugged a cord and turned on the wall-mounted heater. He could smell the dust as it began to burn on the bars. And then he switched on the electric light and studied himself in the mirror. It was an unforgiving reflection. He noted the pinprick fretwork of blood where that bruiser had headbutted him. He looked closer. His eyes were rimmed red and distant. Of late he swore he could see another man meeting his gaze in mirrors.

  He inspected his bandaged arm. The bloodstain had grown, weeping through the gauze.

  He needed to do something about that wound. TCP, perhaps. A fresh dressing. He turned to the bathroom cabinet and opened one of its doors. Joyce’s bag of toiletries was stuffed behind it. It tumbled to the floor. Unzipped, it spilled some of its contents on the tiles.

  He reached down to collect the scattered items. Earbuds. A lipstick. And a rectangle of foil studded with tiny blue pills.

  He examined them. Valium. Benzodiazepine. Mother’s Little Helpers. He knew them from the service. Sometimes they helped to anaesthetise the darkness. Now they were prescribed to housewives. Was this what Joyce needed? A way to chemically numb her days? He felt a strange amalgam of guilt and betrayal. Could she not talk to him about this?

  He returned the pills to the small leather bag, debating how and when they could ever discuss them. And then he spotted something else, tucked deeper inside the pouch. A fat hypodermic. It held a viscous amber liquid.

  He removed the syringe, held it to the light. The liquid shone and the needle gleamed, threateningly long. He had seen one exactly like it, only hours before. It had been held by that silent man in the briefing room. It had been thrust into his arm.

  Instinct made him turn.

  Joyce was standing behind him. She had taken the gun from his holster and now levelled it directly at him, both hands clutching the grip. One of her fingers encircled the trigger. He saw that the gun did not shake as she held it. She matched his gaze.

  Time held itself like a photograph.

  ‘Joyce,’ he said, uselessly.

  In that moment he wanted her to be anyone but Joyce. But she was. She was his wife. She was the woman he loved, and she had his gun, and she looked prepared to shoot him, here in this bathroom, in their bathroom, in their home.

  Winter rushed her. He slammed her backwards. As her body hit the wall he seized her arm and fought for the gun. She resisted, invoking a strength he never dreamt she possessed. The gun twisted between them, pivoting in their hands.

  There was a shot and the bonfire scent of cordite.

  Winter felt a quick, slick wetness on the front of his shirt, tacky and thick. He looked down. Joyce was sliding against the bathroom wall, her white nightie riding against the tiles. There was a bloom of blood on the nylon.

  ‘Joyce!’

  Her body sank to the floor. She was still breathing. She was still breathing.

  He stared at the hole the bullet had torn in her chest. It was the ugliest thing he had ever seen. He dropped to his knees and leant over her, assessing the wound, calculating her chances. She continued to stare at him. He watched as her nostrils tightened and flared, every breath a struggle.

  Winter placed his hands either side of her face, brushing the familiar wayward fringe from her eyes. He knew this woman. He knew her.

  ‘Jesus, Joyce,’ he said, breaking inside.

  He willed her to reply but she said nothing. Her eyes stayed on him and never left him.

  He held her, then, as life left her body. He saw her pupils shrink, then freeze, sightless. He was the last thing she would see in this world.

  The bathroom was very still. Overhead the bulb continued to glow, hot and bright. It flickered almost imperceptibly. The remaining dust burned on the bars of the electric heater. And Christopher Winter cradled his wife, whoever she was, whoever she had been, as her blood dried on his skin.

  5

  They had come to the beach in the early hours, the girl tripping down the steps of the Promenade des Anglais, tossing her heels to the sky to go barefoot on the shore. Behind them the lights of the great hotels still burned, the grand dome of the Negresco stubbornly bright, reluctant to surrender its gamblers and drunks to the coming day. The moon was equally defiant, full and lemon-hued despite the first hint of a Mediterranean morning. The sea already held a firefly glitter of fishing boats.

  ‘It’s all bloody pebbles!’ cried the girl, wincing as she crossed the clutter of stones that marked the shoreline. She was trying to dance, a giddy solo waltz fuelled by one too many brandy Alexanders. ‘Can’t they afford sand, for God’s sake? It’s disgraceful!’

  She slipped and laughed. The man called Hart followed her on to the beach, watching as she became a silhouette against the water. What was her name? She must have said, surely. His mind was elsewhere. That telegram from London that waited in his room. British Intelligence. It was a tempting offer they had made.

  ‘Maybe they import them,’ she continued, talking as much to herself as her companion. ‘Individually selected by connoisseurs. Luxury pebbles, all the way from Whitstable…’

  Antonia. That was it. A minor duchess or a countess or some slightly les
s impressive title. A blue blood. The English aristocracy at its flightiest and prettiest. They had met at the tables at the Palais de la Méditerranée only an hour before. She was already halfway to an irritation.

  ‘Give it time,’ he said. ‘Pebbles turn into sand eventually.’

  ‘Well, I think they’ve got a rotten sense of urgency.’

  Antonia strode to the edge of the tide and let the froth lap at her toes. She took a red chiffon scarf from her throat and held it above her head with both hands, allowing the dawn breeze to fill it like a sail. The thin silk of her dress shivered around her, a second skin.

  ‘This place. It’s sublime.’

  Hart placed an empty gin bottle on a rock. He took his eyes from her body and looked at the curve of the headland, the long, elegant sweep of coastal road fringed with palms and oleander. In the distance lay the slumbering peninsula of Cap Ferrat, jutting like an interloper between Nice and Monaco, its promontory just discernible by daybreak.

  ‘La Baie des Anges,’ he said. ‘The Bay of Angels. They say it’s where Adam and Eve came when they were booted out of Eden. The angels brought them here.’

  Antonia looked out across the water, beyond the dark outlines of the yachts and their tight huddle of masts, out to where the horizon had begun to lighten. Her expression was suddenly sombre.

  ‘Do you think there’ll be another war? It’s always special before a war, isn’t it? Sweeter, somehow. Like you know it’s precious without really knowing why. Or is that just the way we remember it?’

  Hart shrugged as he stepped across the shingle. ‘There’s always a war. You don’t necessarily have to see it to know it’s happening.’

  She turned to him, lowering her scarf to her chest. ‘You’re odd,’ she decided. ‘You’re really rather odd.’

  Hart considered this. ‘And you’re just a little tedious. I think we’re even.’

  For a moment she seemed affronted. ‘Well,’ she said, returning the billow of chiffon to her throat, ‘you’re not just odd. You’re rude. Rude and ghastly. On balance I think I’m winning.’

  She brightened again, her mood made mercurial by the brandy.

  ‘Show me another one of your tricks.’

  ‘Why?’ His voice was flat, disengaged. The thought of that telegram in his room at the Beau Rivage still nagged at him. There were possibilities in that line of work. He could see that.

  ‘Because I like your tricks. And I don’t know how you do them. And I like that, too.’

  Hart slipped out of his satin-trimmed jacket. He placed it around her body, noting the arc of each shoulder blade, geometrically sharp beneath the bare skin. He wanted to trace his fingers along them, feel the truth of her bones.

  ‘Here. Wear this.’

  The moment of chivalry surprised her. ‘Perhaps you’re not so ghastly after all. That was positively gentlemanly.’

  ‘Oh, I’m certainly not a gentleman, Antonia.’

  Hart strode to the water’s edge. The tide came for his shoes, washing over the leather. He unclipped his pearl cufflinks and rolled his sleeves along his slender forearms until they bunched at the elbows. It was a magician’s gesture, unashamedly theatrical. He stood there, on the cusp of the sea, the wind loosening his black curls. There was a rim of sunlight on the horizon now. A snatch of gulls rose from the east.

  He turned to Antonia as she came to join him. ‘So what would you like to see?’

  ‘Surprise me. Something even better than the flying spoons!’

  Hart smirked, an arrogant crease to his mouth. He looked back at the ink-blue bay. And then he closed his eyes and inhaled, a deep, protracted breath. A nerve pulsed on his forehead, beating against the skin.

  The sea began to stir. It was almost imperceptible at first, a tiny variation in the rhythm of the current. As Antonia watched, the gap between the waves narrowed, the tide folding back upon itself. The swell gathered, the waves piling and colliding in a clash of spray. The gulls fled the commotion.

  ‘Dear God,’ she whispered.

  A pillar of water emerged from the churn, climbing out of the waves. It seemed to sculpt itself as it grew, forging a rudimentary body from the sea. It was assuming the shape of a man.

  No, not a man, realised Antonia. An angel, with a halo of spume and wings that dripped seaweed and saltwater as they unfurled. It rose above the shoreline, translucent as rain. Antonia could see the coastal stars through its face, almost where its eyes should have been.

  She stared at it, incredulous. And then she stole a glance at Hart. The vein on his brow was drumming.

  ‘How am I seeing this?’

  ‘Because I want you to.’

  She gazed again at the angel. It made her shiver beneath the borrowed jacket. ‘What are you?’ she asked Hart, just a little afraid of him. ‘An illusionist?’

  ‘Would you prefer an illusion?’

  She shook her head, transfixed. The angel cascaded, its great wings pouring down. It was beautiful and it was impossible and it made her feel very small.

  Hart opened his eyes. The shape collapsed, tumbling back into the tide. The torrent smashed into the sea and flung a barrage of water at the figures on the shoreline.

  Antonia burst out laughing as the wave hit her. ‘Am I dreaming?’ she demanded, turning to Hart in her drenched silk.

  He held her by the wrists and brought her close. Her skin was slick and cool with seawater. The salt scent overpowered her perfume, the one he had noticed at the Palais, the one that had reminded him of an orchard. He sensed a pulse at each wrist, racing now.

  ‘You shouldn’t have to dream, Antonia. Only the blind need to dream.’

  He explored her hands, feeling the peaks of her knuckles. She had exquisite bones. Ideal for the ritual he had in mind.

  ‘My room?’ he suggested, brightly.

  6

  Vienna was a whispering city.

  Winter had come to it by the wine road that clung to the north shore of the Danube. Now, as he swung his hired Daimler along the Ringstrasse boulevard, past the baroque buildings and their alabaster saints, he imagined he could hear the phantom chatter in the air: the wire-taps, the eavesdrops, the stolen snatches of radio conversations; great ghost-drifts of intelligence that murmured through the city’s colonnades and alleyways.

  The October sun glimmered on the body of the car, reflecting statues stained sea-green by a century of Austrian rain. Winter saw rearing copper stallions, commanded by men in military plumage whose swords sliced at the gulls that perched on them. Somewhere along the way Vienna’s imperial dream had curdled. Nostalgia had turned to decay. It was a remembrance of a place now, surrendered to history and haunted by the glories of the fallen House of Habsburg.

  The Allies had carved it all up in ’45, slicing the city like cake. British, American, French – and a portion for the Russians. It had been an uneasy division of power. For a decade the defeated capital was ruled by everyone and no one, its four zones bleeding together in the shadows. Spies had naturally flocked to it like insects drawn to light. Eight years ago Vienna had regained its independence and now declared itself neutral. Of course, like all defiantly neutral places, it was nothing of the kind. The city was riddled with treacheries and betrayals. These were the faultlines of espionage.

  Even the geography of Vienna made it the perfect playground for the intelligence community. The central district, its ancient heart, retained a medieval configuration of winding streets and pinched, cobbled lanes. It was a labyrinth at the best of times – and didn’t the Schönbrunn Palace boast a genuine labyrinth in its summer gardens? Winter grimaced. The Viennese soul loved a maze.

  The Daimler slowed. The Ringstrasse was congested today. Winter looked at the dull crawl of Volkswagens and Opels ahead of him. The only vehicles with any forward momentum were the motor scooters that tore brattishly between the cars. What were they called again? Schlurfraketen. Spiv-rockets. The perfect name. Envious, he watched them outrun the slog of afternoon traffic.

&
nbsp; Winter moved his gaze to the rear-view mirror. The bullet-grey BMW was still there, tucked two cars behind. He had first spotted it on the autobahn outside Linz and it had appeared to be tailing him ever since. Always subtly, never quite declaring intent. Winter recognised its accelerations and fallbacks as feints, standard operating procedure for a discreet pursuit.

  He wondered who they were. East German intelligence? Or StB, the Czechoslovakian boys? They fished in Austria, he knew. For a moment he wondered if they might even be British Field Security, performing their usual gruntwork for the SIS. Again he tried to catch the face at the wheel but sunlight obscured the BMW’s windscreen. No worry. He would allow them their fun and shrug them off near Stephansplatz.

  To his surprise the BMW pulled to the right a minute or so later, escaping the crush of the Ringstrasse. Winter watched its tail-lights disappear into Innere Stadt. Perhaps it had been nothing after all. A holidaymaker or a returning businessman. You always tried to uncouple paranoia from professional intuition but there were times when the two inevitably tangled. He drummed his fingers on the Daimler’s wheel and waited for his own chance to escape the jam.

  It was almost dusk when he arrived at his hotel. It was an unassuming three-storey building near the Danube canal – or as unassuming as any building in Vienna could ever be, he reflected, noting the ornate pediment over its doorway. He removed his case from the boot. It thumped to the ground. There was a scent of roasted chestnuts on the air, blending with the ozone tang of the trams whose overhead wires criss-crossed the street in a glistening cat’s cradle.

  Finding his room, he lay on the bed in his shirtsleeves, his tie loosened at last. He reached for the cigarettes he had bought at that kiosk in Calais. Capstans. A daft little tribute to Malcolm. He lit one and watched as the smoke sailed to the ceiling.

  He wondered how many people knew he was here, on this bed, in this room, in this city. Someone had to know, for all that he had told no one and taken care to keep his movements sly and nimble. He was good, but he knew other people, on all sides, who were just as good. It was never easy to vanish. This world knew how to hunt its own.