The Spider Dance

by Nick Setchfield

  He had so many questions for her. So much he needed to know about the man he had been.

  There was no reply. He stared hard into the glass, willing her face to form. All it gave back was his own reflection. The eyes that met him had that tired look he knew from mirrors but somehow he seemed younger, as if an alchemy of glass and moonlight had erased the lines, smoothed the features, taken the years away. It could have been his face from twenty years ago.

  It would have been the face of Tobias Hart, he realised.

  For a moment he was back in that ruined Bavarian basilica, confronting his younger self, transfixed and repelled by what he saw. Hart had stood in front of him, burning with an unholy light, burning with magic, bright and terrifying as an angel.

  That warlock bastard would have known what to do.

  Winter felt a pulse in his forehead. A flicker of wire beneath the skin, steady, insistent. At first he imagined it was a trapped nerve or the first warning of a migraine. Maybe he should throw some pills at it, he thought, lob a couple of Anadin down his throat. But as the pulse persisted it began to feel familiar. A rhythm he had once known, natural as a heartbeat.

  ‘Flesh is memory,’ Alessandra had whispered. ‘Bone is memory. Blood is memory.’

  She had put magic inside him again. It had saved his life. He could sense it in his body, waiting in the veins, impatient to be used. It was like a hunger in his cells.

  Winter raised his left hand and placed it on the glass. He regarded the pale, lean fingers that reached for him, matching his own. The Tyrrhenian Sea seemed to move in the reflected flesh.

  He felt a droplet on his skin. He assumed it was sweat or condensation but as it trailed across his knuckles he saw it was the colour of ink. There was liquid running from the window frame. It was also black, as black as the waves in the bay.

  Instinctively he pushed at the glass. The texture had changed. It was soft, gauzy.

  The pulse beat above his eyes.

  Winter took his hand from the window, suddenly unsure. And then, still wary, he teased the glass again, testing its consistency. This time his fingers slipped right through it. He could feel the night air on his skin.

  ‘My God,’ he murmured.

  The window clung to his wrist. He turned his hand and saw the entire pane swirl, as if the molecules themselves were shifting, kaleidoscoping. His heart was beating fast. This craving in his veins? It made sense to him now.

  Winter smiled to himself. The glass ran like rain between his fingers.

  16

  There was another London, one that was rarely recorded on maps.

  It was a city of inconspicuous doors on unremarkable streets, blank windows in sealed buildings. This London hid in plain sight, perfectly camouflaged, knowing it would never catch anyone’s eye or snag their curiosity. In South Kensington no one heard the hot hum of telexes behind the façade of the Commission for Generational Expenditure. On Euston Road no one saw the wink of switchboards inside a shuttered piano repair shop. Within these unexceptional places telephones rang and ink-stamped pages turned and Britain was defended.

  The geography of this city was drawn with cable and wire, threading beneath concrete, weaving under tarmac. Its gazetteer was written in passcodes and disinformation. The boundaries shifted like evening light. Try to jab a pin on this private map and it would evade you. Place a compass next to it and the needle would tilt, inevitably, into shadow.

  Libby Cracknell loved to keep this unseen A–Z in her head. Sometimes she would piece it together, just for fun, sketching a mental image of how it all connected. The knowledge made her feel connected too, part of something special, beyond the everyday. It made her feel like she belonged.

  Libby had left the MGB on Cursitor Street, stowing the last of her chips beneath the passenger seat, next to that morning’s crumpled speeding ticket. Now she stood on the east side of Furnival Street, facing a drab expanse of brick and soot-smeared tile. A ventilation shaft and metal-mesh fire escape rose above a padlocked goods entrance. NO PARKING stated the sign bolted to the double doors.

  There was another entrance to the left. This was a single door, ostensibly a fire exit. It also had a grimy veneer of disuse, though there was no padlock on this one. DO NOT OBSTRUCT declared white letters on a sheet of red metal that looked hot to the touch in the London sun.

  Libby sucked the tips of her fingers, the tang of vinegar on her tongue. Then she pressed the discreet button at the edge of the doorframe, putting her face to the tiny, vigilant lens concealed in a rivet above.

  There was a hiss of static as the building greeted her.

  ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes,’ she told the intercom, reciting that day’s passcode with the rote rhythm of a kid at school. ‘And I will pledge with mine.’

  The door opened with a shudder of alternating current and the thud of a mortise bolt. Libby stepped from July sunlight into gloom, entering a space that could, if it came to it, defy an atom bomb.

  Chancery Lane Deep Shelter had been built as a fortified warren in 1942. Designed to hold crucial government personnel in the event of siege, its network of tunnels extended beneath the traffic-snarled thoroughfare of High Holborn, all the way to Leather Lane.

  The Inter-Services Research Bureau had maintained a presence here at the tail end of the war, helping its resistance contacts tidy up Europe in the aftermath of Allied victory. Now it was another outpost of the GPO – or so the official line insisted, the one reinforced to the press by a D-Notice. While it was true that Chancery Lane housed a chattering nexus of telecommunications equipment – Kennedy and Khrushchev had flashed through its wires during the missile crisis in ’62 – its primary purpose was to listen to the world’s voices, not add to them. The intelligence service had never moved out, simply retreated deeper into shadow.

  Libby took the stairs, as ever. The sluggish creak of the goods lift had never suited her.

  The corridor ahead was bright with strip lighting. She could hear the steady growl of the filter that kept a welcome chill in these tunnels while recycling the same stale, nylon-tasting air. Water pumped through the overhead pipes, carried from the artesian well that supplied the bunkers. And there, in the walls and the floors, the cabling and the fuseboxes, the drone of the generator, the pulse that kept this subterranean fiefdom self-sufficient.

  The staff canteen was at the end of the corridor. Plates clattered through service hatches and smoke rose to stain the low ceiling, past the mock windows with their photographic murals of tropical gardens. Good for the soul, the psychologists claimed. Libby would have cracked within a week.

  She felt the stares, as she always did. The looks from the secretaries clustered around the plastic-topped tables, cups of tea in hand, putting service gossip on hold as she walked past. Whenever she made eye contact she inevitably saw something hard and resentful. One of the younger women smiled, but the Revlon-coated lips didn’t quite part. Libby returned her best gap-toothed grin.

  She belonged, she told herself. She was a part of this. Yes, she had escaped the gravitational pull of the typing pool. She would never have to negotiate the patronising remarks and the attention of the tweed-suited wolves, itching to add another pair of knickers to their pub boasts – not that they would have got far, given she only bedded women. She was a field agent, and a good one. She had earned that status. No one needed to resent her.

  Something had always set her apart. At teenage parties she had sat on the stairs as other girls sobbed their hearts out over boys. Libby had provided a shoulder to them while wondering how anything so meaningless could hurt so much. That same ache of isolation had given her focus and drive, a determination to prove herself in any world, male or female. She could have let it sit like shrapnel inside her. Instead she used it as a bullet.

  The thought of Winter still made her furious. The way that scrawny, snake-eyed sod had sent her back to London, dismissed like unwanted baggage. His refusal to trust her skills, his need to bundle her out of harm�
��s way. God, she resented him for that, as she still resented every teacher who ever ignored her potential, imagining she’d be content with a slow death of dictated memos and a spinning Rolodex.

  She had been recruited a year earlier, just out of an exasperating finishing school and hungry for purpose. Family connections, of a particularly bleak kind. Her grandparents had fled the brutal pogrom of Minsk in 1919. Exiled to London they had built a respectable role for themselves in the rag trade, embracing their newfound working-class status as a badge of honour. Her grandmother had insisted she learn Russian – as much to preserve a connection to the homeland as anything – and Libby had discovered a facility for languages. Naturally British Intelligence had seized on that talent.

  ‘We can use you,’ they had told her, and it sounded like a promise. ‘Smashing,’ she had said.

  Libby bought an apple, pocketed it, then continued to make her way through the bright, humming corridors. Finally she came to a solid wooden door whose wartime signage still declared CENTRAL BRIEFING ROOM in scuffed bronze. The man standing outside gave the briefest acknowledgement and nodded her in.

  Black-and-white images of London filled the room. They flickered against the far wall, conjured by a rattling projector. A shaft of light cut through the dark, cluttered with dust.

  Libby recognised the streets of Camden. Jack Creadley’s gang were walking in lockstep, all suits and tiepins and attitude, kings of the borough. Winter was among them but somehow apart, his body language not quite in synch with the others. The camera fought to keep the men in focus, the picture blurring into grain. This was surveillance footage, snatched from a window above a laundry on Chalk Farm Road. She had taken it herself, two months ago.

  For a moment all she heard was the threading of the reel.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  The presence in the briefing room had made itself known. Lord Auberon Gallard sat at the desk, the shuddering images playing over his lean, austere features. His voice was calm and precise, as if the question had been posed forensically, with all the emotional engagement of a scalpel.

  ‘He’s still alive.’ She felt the muscles in her throat tighten.

  Gallard considered this in silence. His eyes were hard to read behind the quiver of film.

  ‘You were ordered to kill him.’

  Again the words were detached, impassive. It was a statement of fact, unequivocal.

  ‘I know, sir.’

  ‘I ordered you to kill him.’

  And there it was. The spider-bite of anger on that first syllable. She had been waiting for it ever since she entered the room.

  ‘I had no chance, sir.’

  ‘We make chances.’

  ‘There were circumstances…’

  ‘We shape circumstances. I’ve taught you that.’

  ‘I didn’t have an opportunity.’ The words were hot and fast and she wanted to take them back immediately. They made her feel stupidly young.

  ‘You are opportunity. Every moment you’re in the field. You must be opportunity incarnate.’

  The camera closed on Winter’s face, playing over Gallard’s own. Libby peered through the projected image, trying to keep her focus on the man in the room.

  ‘He’s not exactly a sitting target.’ She was showing her resentment now. She could feel it burning through her skin and she hated herself for it. Be cooler, she thought, for Christ’s sake.

  Gallard’s slender fingers moved on the baize-topped desk, repositioning a fountain pen until it aligned perfectly with a paper knife.

  ‘Oh, he’s certainly skilled. Malcolm Hands had quite the protégé in Christopher Winter, just as I have in you. No, I simply question whether you have it in you, Miss Cracknell. The ability to kill him. Not the opportunity but the backbone. He would be your first kill, wouldn’t he?’

  She thought of that undead thing in Normandy. It didn’t count. It couldn’t.

  ‘I was given a surveillance job. Faulkner told me to keep tabs on him.’

  ‘Situations change. So do our needs. Life has a way of surprising us.’ He gave a disarmingly gentle smile, the skin tightening over hollow cheeks and creating a shell-burst of wrinkles.

  ‘I didn’t expect to have to kill him.’

  ‘We must be flexible.’

  ‘He was one of us for years. I’ve seen the man’s record. He’s a threat now?’

  ‘A liability. A potential faultline. One we must not allow to go uncorrected. Not after what you found in Venice.’

  ‘I take it Faulkner knows? He’s the one who sent Winter to Budapest.’

  A cufflink caught the projector’s light. There was a discreet glimmer of pearl. ‘Ultimately you report to me, not Sir Crispin. The line of command is quite clear.’

  ‘If I’m going to kill him I’d like to know why.’

  ‘I’m sure you would. But ultimately you’re an extension of my will. A muscle may as well enquire of a nerve, “Why are you doing this?”’

  ‘He’s taken a contract. They want him to kill Don Zerbinati. He’ll use a thorn. A holy thorn.’

  There was silence as Gallard considered her words.

  ‘You will report nothing of this to Faulkner. The involvement of the SIS will only complicate matters. Naturally they’ll try and take him back. We must pursue our own course, our own timescale.’

  Gallard swept a fastidious hand across the baize, brushing away some imagined dust. He kept his eyes on the desk as he spoke.

  ‘So tell me, Miss Cracknell. Are you ready to prove yourself? Or should I reassign you to a task more befitting your sex?’

  Libby let her face go blank, burying everything that might betray her. The tone of her voice was resolute. ‘Don’t doubt me, sir.’

  The man in the chair looked up. The hot white beam of the projector found his eyes.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I have every confidence my faith in you will be rewarded.’

  The footage reached the end of the reel. Gallard sat there, perfectly still as it ran to black.

  17

  Chaos was the pulse of Naples.

  The city was frantic, packed with altogether too much noise and motion for its streets to contain. Car horns competed against the racket of motor scooters. Radios blared and hawkers shouted their wares above the slap and thud of kids playing street football. It was a loud, brutally busy crush.

  Centro Storico was the heart of it all. To Winter this quarter felt like a souk, a ramshackle maze jammed with bright flashes of colour and pockets of deep shadow. Tiers of apartments rose above the thin, winding thoroughfares, their balconies lashed together with washing. The light came in patches but it was clean and strong when you found it, picking out a scruffy little chapel or pinpointing a fruit stall. Market tables stood piled with skinned rabbit, fresh octopus and clouded jars of sulphuric water from the slopes of Vesuvius.

  For all the life in these streets the dead were ever present. Naples had an almost cultish fascination with the deceased. Winter spotted shrines to lost souls dotted among the dingy stairwells and crumbling sepia walls; the statues were frozen in flame, trapped in purgatory. Votive candles flickered beside them, the faith strong but the flames weak in the sunlight.

  There was something porous about this city. Its nooks and crevices had absorbed countless cultures over the centuries, from the Greeks to the French to the flash American servicemen stationed here during the war. Somehow it had absorbed the idea of death, too, taken it into its walls and doors and shadows and never let it go.

  A moped rumbled past, weighed down by an entire family. A small, honey-skinned girl was perched above the rear wheel. She regarded Winter with a curious stare, her face terribly serious. The bike was quickly lost to the weaving traffic.

  Winter followed the blackened stone arches of a medieval arcade, pushing past people gorging on gelato in the midday heat. The sirocco wind carried a taste of sand and kept the air punishingly humid. It was easy to forget how close the sea was, as if these streets had folded in on the
mselves, retreating from the coastal sun.

  He kept one eye on the crowd as he walked. There was a lawless edge to this place; Winter sensed it instinctively. It wasn’t just the black-market cigarettes being openly traded next to the busts of saints, cellophane-wrapped cartons stacked on tablecloths for quick removal if the police chose to show an interest. More the hint of something sharp and vicious behind the frenzy. This city watched you with a pickpocket’s gaze.

  Winter had been in Naples for three days now. He had spent that time listening to the streets but he was still no closer to his target. There was a mob presence, of course. Men in good Italian suits and imported American sunglasses, moving among the people with a sense of entitlement in their stride. But if the Camorra were respected like princes, feared but so embedded in the city they rarely needed to be acknowledged, then I Senz’Ombr, the Shadowless, were barely even a murmur.

  Maybe that was real power, thought Winter. Maybe you could be so hidden, so invisible, that not even rumour could nail you down. But the Glorious had shown him that courtroom sketch from ’52. Don Zerbinati existed, or at least he had done, a decade before. He had to be here somewhere in this sun-beaten sprawl.

  Winter had gone from harbourside bars to cellar dives in the Quartieri Spagnoli. An Englishman touting for work, the kind of work that bypassed visas and permits. A little hired muscle, perhaps. A driver for hire – the city was a tangle but he was a quick learner – and one who was good with a gun. He had taken care not to push his questions further than they needed to go but the Neapolitan underworld was understandably wary of a stranger, especially one with a voice like his.

  ‘Come back Tuesday,’ a stevedore had told him in La Sanità, his eyes cautious over a glass of Lacryma Christi. ‘There might be some work in the docks.’ Then again, the wind might shift, the stars might change, God may have other plans for you.