Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  2.

  THE SNOW WHICH blanketed Western Europe had come and mostly gone in England. From the train, he could see fields half-flooded with meltwater, little rivers swollen almost to overflowing, with narrow boats bobbing at their moorings. He wondered what would happen if those rivers did break their banks; would the boats slip away and drift across the waterlogged fields, or would they follow the channels still flowing beneath the surface?

  The day was grey and cold, the trees and hedges like scribbles against the clouds. At one point, the train passed alongside some kind of industrial plant – all blocky concrete silos and angled conveyors and modular sheds – which turned out, judging by the trucks parked at one end of the complex, to be a cement works.

  The train stopped often, at little stations, first in Essex, then in Suffolk. The station car parks were full of vehicles left for the day by commuters, and beyond them Mr Pasquinel could see little villages, small groups of old houses with newer estates grafted on to them, the square towers of Saxon churches rising above the rooftops. A spit of rain dabbed at the windows.

  Almost an hour and a half out of London, Mr Pasquinel took his rucksack down from the overhead rack and left the train at a station which seemed to sit all alone out in the countryside. He was the only passenger to alight from the train, and as it pulled away out of sight around a curve in the track he could see no one on the opposite platform. No staff. No one. He turned the collar of his waterproof jacket up against the wind, shouldered his rucksack, and left the station.

  The station did in fact serve a village, but for some reason it had been built almost two miles from the nearest houses. Mr Pasquinel did not turn towards the village, however. He set out along the road, occasionally stepping up onto the banked verge when a car passed by.

  After a mile or so, he came to a little graveyard with an iron gate. He stepped inside and found himself among perhaps fifty gravestones, most of them dating from the middle of the previous century, some of them more recent. None of them dated from the years of the Xian Flu, and he found that momentarily confusing, until he remembered that by the time the pandemic had reached outlying areas such as this the victims were being taken to isolation centres and then to hurriedly-built crematoria.

  A moss-covered wall ran along the back of the graveyard, broken down in a couple of places. He clambered over tumbled stones into a little wood carpeted with snowdrops and stubborn patches of ice. On the other side of the wood was another wall, this one even more dilapidated. He stepped over it, and there he was, in the churchyard of St John’s.

  Mr Pasquinel knew his hobby had, in the past, been the subject of much innocent humour among his staff and co-workers, but he didn’t mind. No one had ever been cruel about it, and even if they had, it wasn’t in his nature to take offence. Life was too short.

  The church dated from 1346, just before the Black Death had reached England, although it was obvious that the Victorians had given it a thorough makeover. It was stout and no-nonsense, its walls covered with cemented flints the size of his fist, its tower and walls crennelated. Mr Pasquinel walked slowly around it with his phone held in front of him, taking photographs. There was a graveyard here, too, these stones far older than on the other side of the wood. They were mostly covered in moss, their inscriptions all but erased by wind and frost. He could make out a few dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on some stones, the name Hezekiah on another. On one side of the graveyard, where a stone wall separated it from the road, was a line of eight stones all bearing the same surname, their dates fifteen, twenty, thirty years apart. An entire lineage spanning more than a century. Mr Pasquinel took more photographs.

  Returning to the church, he stepped into the porch and tried the door, but it was locked. He went back outside and walked around the graveyard for a while longer, then he sat down on a bench and contemplated his holiday, far from home and the cares of work. Let his colleagues make their jokes; Mr Pasquinel never felt as at peace as he did when he sat in an English churchyard.

  After fifteen minutes or so, he heard brittle undergrowth being crunched underfoot in the wood, and a few moments later a young man dressed in hiking gear and walking with a cane negotiated the broken-down wall and stepped into the churchyard.

  The newcomer’s interests seemed similar to Mr Pasquinel’s. He took photographs of the church, examined the gravestones, took more photographs. Eventually he came over and sat on the bench and put his leg out in front of him, as if it pained him.

  They sat there like that for a little while. A car passed by on the other side of the wall, the hiss of its hydrogen-cell engine fading away into silence as it drove away.

  Finally, the newcomer said, “I understand this parish is where the last wild wolf in England was killed.”

  “Yes,” Mr Pasquinel said. “I remember reading that somewhere.”

  RUDI LEANED BACK and looked into the sky. It was perfectly possible for a drone the size of his hand, hovering a kilometre above them, to hear everything they were saying. You could go mad trying to cover every eventuality of surveillance. “Shall we have a look inside?” he asked.

  “I tried,” said Mr Pasquinel. “It’s locked.”

  Rudi smiled and took from his pocket something that looked like a little battery-powered screwdriver. “No it’s not,” he said.

  The little device opened the door with a faint click, and they stepped inside. Mr Pasquinel looked around. A double line of pews led towards an altar on which stood a diptych showing what appeared to be an angel with a flaming sword defeating a dragon. He thought that might date from the Flu Year. The interior of the church smelled of incense, which was unusual for Suffolk Anglicans. He thought he might like to come back here one day, to see what a service was like.

  Rudi was wandering around the church, taking small matt-black boxes from his rucksack and placing them on the pews, where they sat apparently not doing anything at all. Finally, he came back to Mr Pasquinel and they sat together.

  “Thank you for coming,” Rudi said. “It’s good to meet you at last.”

  “And you,” said Mr Pasquinel. Close up, he realised he had been wrong about the newcomer. He wasn’t young; he had a young face, but there was grey in his hair.

  “Did you have any trouble getting away?” asked Rudi.

  Mr Pasquinel shook his head. “They forced me to go, in the end. Threatened me with Human Resources. I’m sorry it took so long.”

  “Please don’t apologise,” Rudi said. “I can guess how difficult things have been for you.”

  “It has been busy, it’s true,” Mr Pasquinel allowed.

  “How are things in the Republic?”

  “We’re running a limited service through most of Western and Central Europe, as you know. Greater Germany is proving stubborn, but they will come round. Further East...” Mr Pasquinel shrugged. “The explosion severed the Republic; we could run an eastbound service from the Consulate in Chelyabinsk, but Sibir refuses to allow our trains to run across its territory.”

  “They can’t stop you, can they?”

  Mr Pasquinel scowled. “It’s a complex thing. We are a sovereign nation which does not grow a single item of produce. Not one potato, not one orange. We could run out to Chukotka tomorrow, but the Siberians would embargo our supplies. We have a population to feed. Some nations were starting to squeeze us, even before the incident.”

  “Squeeze you?”

  “You’d only see it if you had a regional overview. At a local level, suppliers have been putting their prices up, or even just ceasing to trade with us. Head Office suspects a cartel operation, which is an interesting development.” Mr Pasquinel bent down and rummaged in his rucksack. “It seems the awe in which people held us is finally wearing off. Sandwich?”

  Rudi looked at the shrink-wrapped package in Mr Pasquinel’s hands. “What are they?”

  “Chicken salad.”

  Rudi shook his head.

  “I also have roast beef and horseradish,”
Mr Pasquinel offered. “I was going to save them for the return journey, but we could eat them now and I can have the chicken later.”

  Rudi chuckled. “I’m fine. Really.” He looked around the church. “Why is this place deserted, by the way?”

  “Church of England,” Mr Pasquinel said, unwrapping his sandwiches. “Minority religion, these days.”

  “Really?”

  “The congregation here is probably no more than ten or fifteen strong. Most English people are Catholic or Muslim or Jewish. The ones who’re religious at all. Didn’t you know this?”

  Rudi shook his head. “It’s not something I’ve thought very much about.”

  “There’s talk of a resurgence. The Community is Church of England. Well, a variant, but close enough.” Mr Pasquinel took a bite of sandwich and looked about him. “I hate to see these places unused; they’re quite lovely.” He washed the mouthful of sandwich down with a sip of water from a plastic bottle. “You should see some of the Saxon churches. All Saints at Brixworth is extraordinary. Over a thousand years old, imagine that.” He put his sandwich and its wrapping carefully down on the pew beside him and took a little plastic envelope from a breast pocket of his jacket. “Here you are.”

  Rudi took the envelope and looked at the object it contained, a hard drive the size of his thumbnail.

  “There’s no way to be certain what happened,” Mr Pasquinel said. “The site is under about a billion tonnes of rubble, telemetry tells us nothing useful, surveillance footage is inconclusive; we can’t even establish for sure whether the explosion happened on the train or in the tunnel itself.”

  “But you have a theory.”

  “Pennington,” said Mr Pasquinel. “Kenneth and Amanda. Originally from London, lately resident in Paris. She had one of those T-shirt businesses, he did some media consulting.” He picked up his sandwich again and started to eat.

  “Are you sure?” asked Rudi.

  “No, we’re not. The list of possibilities is quite long; God only knows we get some shady characters taking out citizenship. But there’s something...” He shrugged.

  “They’re too good to be true,” Rudi suggested.

  Mr Pasquinel shrugged again. “Their cover – if it was a cover – was exquisite. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He sighed. “She was pregnant. Two of our staff processed them privately – it seemed inhumane to make her queue in her condition. There was an anomaly on the scan.”

  Rudi raised his eyebrows.

  “She said it was a foetal heart monitor,” Mr Pasquinel mused. “And examining the scan, it could be.”

  “But you’re thinking a bomb.”

  “Something powerful enough to destroy one of our trains but small enough to present as a piece of implanted medical equipment. Is that possible?”

  Rudi thought about it. “No, but it might have been a component of a larger device which didn’t show up on your scan.”

  It was Mr Pasquinel’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “That’s... interesting,” he said.

  “You didn’t hear that from me, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “What have you done with them? Your staff?”

  “Sequestered. Contemplating the error of their ways. Similarly with the Penningtons’ staff. Extramural rendition. They don’t know anything, though. We’ll let them go. Eventually.”

  Rudi sat back in the pew and folded his hands in his lap. “Of course,” he said after a while, “you have to say that. If it’s a matter of your trains being unsafe, that’s the end of the Line – you’ll excuse the pun. Terrorism, on the other hand...”

  “We’re certainly not making this up,” Mr Pasquinel protested mildly. “We don’t go around arresting people for the exercise.”

  “Kidnapping,” Rudi corrected. “It’s called kidnapping.”

  Mr Pasquinel sighed.

  “No fundamentalist tendencies?” Rudi asked. “The Penningtons?”

  “No tendencies of any sort,” Mr Pasquinel said. “No extremist connections of any kind. Their legends go back decades but they have no family, no long-term friends. No former neighbours in London remember them in any detail. For five years everything is concrete; before that it becomes vague. They both attended Brunel University in London, and their names are on record there, but no one remembers them. Classmates think they recognise photographs of them, but they can’t swear to it.” He looked at the stained glass windows. “Nothing you could take into court. It’s all on the drive. Photos, video, documents. Everything I could gather. Perhaps you will have more luck with it.”

  “If we accept the premise that they caused the explosion, the question is who exactly they were, and who they were working for.”

  Mr Pasquinel was quiet for a while, breathing in the smell of incense and old Bibles and centuries of worship. “There is,” he said finally, “going to be a piece of sleight of hand.”

  “You’re going to blame somebody,” Rudi said. “At random.”

  “Not random, precisely,” said Mr Pasquinel. “Plausible candidates. As you say, terrorism is one thing. An accident is something much more far-reaching. And it’s not as if they don’t deserve it,” he added. He thought about it. “Public relations.”

  “And meanwhile, the Penningtons.”

  “They seem our strongest candidates at the moment; if whoever they worked for thought we were going off in the wrong direction, that would be useful.”

  “They won’t,” Rudi said. “Think you’re going off in the wrong direction. They wouldn’t be so stupid as to assume you were blaming some half-arsed terrorist group.”

  “I know.” Mr Pasquinel shrugged. “I don’t make policy.”

  “Also they will have a source within the Republic.”

  Mr Pasquinel sighed. “I had an ancestor who was a Coureur, you know,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “One of the original Coureurs, the French-Canadian traders who explored New France. Jean-Baptiste Pasquinel, a contemporary of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. My family have moved around quite a lot, for various reasons.” Mr Pasquinel started to gather together the wrappings from his lunch and put them back in his rucksack. “I’m old enough to remember a time when we thought there would be no borders in Europe.”

  “Happy days,” Rudi said.

  Mr Pasquinel looked at him and tried to gauge whether he was being sarcastic, but all he could detect was a certain tired wistfulness. He finished doing up his rucksack and said, “Well, it didn’t last long, anyway. Barely long enough to enjoy it, really.”

  “It’s what Europe does,” Rudi said. “Borders.” He didn’t bother to add that the Trans-European Republic had the longest border in Europe. He got up and started to retrieve the little cubes – bafflers against electronic and sonic snooping – and put them back in his rucksack. “By the way,” he said, “have you heard anything about Luxembourg?”

  “The Republic does not run through Luxembourg,” said Mr Pasquinel.

  “Not even diplomatic gossip?”

  “Luxembourg,” Mr Pasquinel said, “is really not chief among my concerns right now.”

  “No,” Rudi said. “No, of course not.”

  “So,” said Mr Pasquinel, standing and shouldering his rucksack, “it was good to meet you.”

  “You too,” Rudi said with a smile. “I hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday.”

  “I’m going to treat myself. A couple of days in London. Wren churches. Wren said he built for eternity.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  They shook hands and Mr Pasquinel went back up the aisle to the door. He opened it, but instead of leaving he stood in the doorway looking at something outside. Rudi paused in picking up the last couple of bafflers, looked at him for a moment, and then went to join him in the doorway.

  A tall woman was standing outside. She was wearing a rumpled three-piece suit, a long grey belted raincoat with its collar turned up, and a fedora. She appeared to have been beamed into rural Suffolk from a Ra
ymond Chandler novel. She was standing looking at them, hands in pockets, smiling broadly. She seemed to be alone.

  Rudi and Mr Pasquinel exchanged glances. Then Mr Pasquinel took a deep breath, stepped outside, walked past the woman, and without looking back went out through the gate, turned left, and passed out of sight down the road. Rudi was quite impressed that he managed to resist the urge to break into a run.

  The stranger had not moved, not looked away from Rudi, not stopped smiling. They looked at each other for some time.

  Curiosity won, in the end. Rudi closed and locked the church door behind him and walked over to the woman and said, “Hello.”

  She was in her mid-thirties, fair-haired. She dipped a hand into an inside jacket pocket, brought it out holding a laminated card. “Detective Chief Superintendent Sarah Smith,” she said. “EU Police.” The phrase ‘EU Police’ was the punchline to any number of jokes, but Rudi just raised an eyebrow and said, “You’re out of your jurisdiction, Chief Superintendent.”

  “Then it’s fortunate I’m not here in an official capacity,” Smith said. She pocketed the identity card. “Are you interested in churches?”

  “All Saints at Brixworth is extraordinary,” Rudi deadpanned.

  Smith nodded and glanced in the direction Mr Pasquinel had taken. She said, “I used to date the Rokeby Venus,” and she looked back to Rudi and beamed.

  Rudi devoted a few moments to wondering how long that particular phrase was going to dog his footsteps. He sighed. “Chief Superintendent,” he said.

  “Will you walk with me?” Smith asked. “There’s a rather nice pub just along the way.”

  Why not? “Lead on, Chief Superintendent.”

  THE PUB WAS called the Black Ben, and the sign outside was so frankly racist that Rudi wondered how it had not been burned down. Inside, though, it was Generic English Country Pub, all polished wood and horse brasses and carpeting and snug velour upholstery. Rudi glanced at the lunch menu while Smith bought them drinks, considered ordering Crevettes en Croute just to see how badly an English pub kitchen could abuse the dish, decided against it.