Shoes. Brown leather, both sole and upper. Soles scuffed. Jim felt around inside, checked the heels for any obvious hiding places, put them back in the bag along with the man’s black cotton socks and cheap-looking Y-fronts. He checked the turnups and pockets of the black corduroy trousers. The turnups were empty. The pockets contained a white cotton handkerchief, two ten pound coins, and a leaflet folded into quarters. As he unfolded it, the image on the front sprang into life – an animated cartoon cat of some kind – and began to sing in a faint scratchy voice about a department store sale in Kensington. He folded the leaflet up again and left it on the table.
White shirt. White once, anyway. Now in tatters and soaked with blood. The smell was awful. Jim felt the collar and cuffs, put it back in the bag. Grey knitted tie. No obvious signs of seams having been unpicked and resewn to hide something. He searched the pockets of the jacket – tweedy, but not quite tweed, something subtly different. Packet of twenty cigarettes, an imported brand, the words on the outside in Polish, eleven cigarettes missing. Disposable catalytic lighter. Two more animated advertising leaflets, one for the British Library and one for a fair in Battersea Park. Two disposable pens, one black, one blue. A printed copy of the London A To Z, brand new – he riffled the pages for insertions, riffled them again to check for notations. A packet of chewing gum, menthol flavour, two sticks missing. An apple. He laid the jacket out on the table and felt its seams and lining. Same routine with the black overcoat – this one more prosaic, something from a charity shop or taken from a recycling bin. Unopened carton of orange juice in one pocket, half-empty plastic bottle of water in the other.
Well.
Jim repacked the bags, signed for them, and took them down to the car. He checked his watch. Half past ten, four hours or so since the incident at Camden Town Station. He thought about the assailant, about the man in the hospital bed in the house behind him. He thought about the victim’s jacket, how the weave of the cloth had felt under his fingertips, through the latex of the gloves.
2
THESE WERE INTERESTING times to be a member of His Majesty’s Security Services – not that Jim suspected they had ever been particularly dull. The War On Terror had settled in for the long run, periodically stoked up by the chaotic proliferation of tiny states and caliphates and kingdoms in the Middle East. In Europe, it seemed that every month or so there was a new sovereign territory to learn the name of. The majority didn’t last long enough to feel the need for an intelligence service, but those that did tended to embrace espionage with all the vigour of die-hard Ian Fleming fans. Look at us, we are an independent nation; what are you up to...? Most of these were endearingly amateurish; it was almost a sin to arrest and deport their operatives. Some of them, though, were sly.
Interesting times, and busy times. Also well-funded times. Even in the truncated United Kingdom, cash-strapped and austere after decades of economic near-collapse and the Xian Flu, the Intelligence budget kept increasing. Britain-as-was had been a fiercely cosmopolitan nation – in the early days of the century there had been almost half a million French nationals living in London alone – and was a rich territory of potential sleeper operatives for nascent countries. There was no telling what would happen next. You could wake up one morning – as Jim had last year – and find that Venice had finally declared independence from Italy, and all of a sudden you were being tasked to identify every Venetian and descendant of Venetians living in England, just in case they might become a security risk. In this case, that included two Labour MPs, the great-great grandchildren of Italian immigrants.
The steady increase in the number of nations was accompanied by an increase in the number of people seeking asylum in England. New countries were fractious places; differences of opinion, followed by mass arrests, followed by mass flight, were by no means unusual, although the Scots and Welsh had so far been decent enough not to try it on. Jim had no idea what he was supposed to make of an asylum seeker of apparently white English ethnicity.
IT WAS ALMOST half past eleven before the car deposited him, a yellow plastic bag in each hand, on the pavement outside an anonymous building on Northumberland Avenue. He stood there for a moment, looking up at the lighted windows, trying to rehearse. Something about tonight’s stabbing victim had piqued the Security Service’s interest – it was unusual for someone of Jim’s rank to be sent out to deal with an asylum claim, no matter how mired in attempted murder.
Security in the building was informal but rigorous. Card checks, a retina and fingerprint scan, a scan for metal and explosives, a scan for electronic devices, all carried out by cheerful but professional personnel in plain clothes. Jim got one of them to sign the chain of evidence protocol for the bags, and watched them being placed in a safe.
On the seventh floor there were more checks. His phone and tablet were confiscated. He was photographed and issued with a numbered badge. Then he was ushered down a corridor and shown into an anteroom with only his thoughts for company.
After a few minutes, the interior door opened and he was invited into a larger room, windowless and papered with hideous crimson flock wallpaper. At one end, two women sat at a table, a single chair facing them. Jim sat on the chair.
One of the women was in early middle age, blonde, wearing a black business suits over a white shirt. The other was older, grey-haired, untidy. She was wearing a cardigan under her jacket and she looked at Jim over the tops of a pair of half-moon spectacles.
Jim gave a brief verbal report of the evening’s events and his involvement in them, winding up with an account of his visit to Doctor Kumar’s private clinic in Potters Bar. The younger woman made occasional notes. The older one just watched him. When he reached the point in the story where the unidentified victim was stabbed, he thought he saw her wince slightly.
When he’d finished, the blonde, who had introduced herself as Shaw, said, “And your reading of these events is...?”
“On the face of it, it seems to be a simple case of assault,” he answered carefully.
“Have you considered,” asked the older woman, “a political motive?”
“He requested asylum,” he answered. “That automatically casts a political light on everything to do with him.” The older woman smiled and made a note on her pad.
“Could it have been an assassination attempt?” asked Shaw.
He thought about it. “Certainly,” he said finally. “But there’s no way to ascertain that until we’ve identified the victim.”
“And yet you ordered him sequestered at Potters Bar, and authorised the story that he had died,” said Shaw. “Why did you do that?”
Jim looked at the women, trying to gauge how much damage this evening could cause his career. He said, “I didn’t authorise his admission to the clinic. Someone else made that assessment. He was already at the clinic when I got the call. My subsequent actions followed from there.” The grey-haired woman made another note.
“And the story of his death?” asked Shaw.
“As I said, someone had already made the decision to sequester him. Based on that, and until I had more information, it seemed reasonable to allow his attacker to think he was dead. At the very least it would improve our chances of finding the assailant if it were considered a murder case rather than an assault.”
“Surely that would be a decision for the police to make?”
“I was tasked to –”
“You were tasked to make an assessment,” Shaw reminded him crisply. “Not to make operational decisions.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said the older woman. “Can’t we just tell him?”
Shaw looked at her, then at Jim.
“Tell me what?” he asked.
For a moment, he experienced the feeling that he was watching this scene from outside his own body. There were the two women, sitting at their table; Shaw making notes, the older woman staring at him. And there he was, on his uncomfortable chair in the middle of the ugly carpet, outwardly calm and relaxed. It
was an image, he thought, that he would remember for the rest of his life, an image of himself when something quite fundamental happened to him.
Shaw looked at her colleague again, then made an after you gesture and started to write something on her pad.
“My name is Adele Bevan,” the older woman said. “I’m on secondment from Jesus College and I’m very interested in your stabbing victim because I think he may come from a parallel universe.”
There was an eternity of silence. Shaw continued dabbing at her pad, frowning slightly. She shook her head.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Jim.
Shaw looked up. “The first thing you have to remember is that the Service is yet to be entirely convinced of Professor Bevan’s theories. She has provided just enough evidence for this committee to be instituted.” She glanced at her pad. “The way the MoD used to have a department which investigated UFO sightings,” she added sourly.
“You’ll read the material later,” Bevan told him, “but the gist of it is that two hundred years ago a landowning family in Nottinghamshire somehow created an English county to the west of London. They called it ‘Ernshire’. We don’t know how they did it, but we have circumstantial evidence that Ernshire was, and presumably still is, a real thing. The map which may have shown routes into and out of Ernshire has disappeared; no one knows how to visit it or even contact it.”
Tell them I’ve seen a map.
“Is this some kind of test?” Jim asked carefully.
“No,” said Shaw, “it is not a test. You’re in the presence of the Twilight Zone department of the Service. We’ve been tasked with assessing the existence – or otherwise – of Ernshire and what sort of threat it might represent to the nation.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Bevan smiled at him. “Oh, we are. I am, anyway. I’ve been working on this for over twenty years. There’s an invisible county where Heathrow is, it’s full of people, and we have no idea what they’re doing.”
“And the gentleman who was stabbed is...” Jim asked carefully.
“Bless him, he was telling us he has something to trade,” said Bevan.
“Thin stuff,” said Shaw, shaking her head. “The mutterings of an injured man.”
“He was establishing his bona fides, sending us a message. He knows we’re watching.”
“He can’t possibly know.”
“He was claiming asylum because he knew the authorities would take notice,” Bevan said. “He mentioned the map because he knew word would get back to people like us and we would know what to do.”
“Do we?” asked Jim, feeling slightly dizzy. “Know what to do?”
Bevan shook her head. “No. In that respect, our friend has completely overestimated us.” She added, “You did the right thing tonight, Jim. Keep him on ice, let whoever attacked him think he’s dead. We need time to talk to him, find out who he is and what he knows.”
“There was an advisory,” Jim said. “Last month. Special attention to be paid to claims of asylum. All claimants to be sequestered pending interview.”
“It’s entirely possible – probable – that this evening’s events have no bearing at all on the interests of this committee,” Shaw put in. “Professor Bevan, however, has convinced us to take them seriously for the moment.”
“Convinced your superiors,” said Bevan. “Some of them, anyway.”
“For the moment,” Shaw said to Jim, the very image of forbearance, “this committee’s purpose is to assess the existence, or otherwise, of what on the face of it seems to be a pocket universe.” She pronounced the last two words with distaste, perfectly aware of how crazy it sounded. “Should this committee establish the existence of this... entity, its next task is to assess the threat, if any, which it poses to national security. Those are our remits, and within them we have an extremely narrow degree of latitude.”
“Basically, we watch and we wait,” said Bevan. “We gather what intelligence we can. And now one of them may have fallen into our laps.”
“So,” Shaw said, “in that context, can we go back to the original question? What is your reading of tonight’s events?”
“There’s no way to know,” Jim answered, trying to catch up. “All we have is his claim of asylum and his mention of a map.”
“A map he says he’s seen,” she pointed out. “Not a map he has.”
“He had a copy of the A To Z,” Jim said. “Are we talking about that?”
“No,” said Bevan.
“He was carrying no ID at all,” Jim went on. “In fact, it seems that he’s been sleeping rough for several days at least.”
“And no indication of why he was going to North Finchley.”
“No.”
“If he is what we think he is,” Bevan said, “he got out somehow. He’ll know that route for sure. And that’s all we need. Just the one route and one of them to tell us about it.”
Shaw looked at Jim. “Until further notice, you’re excused all other duties. You’re on secondment to a working group called Perigee. Perigee’s product is known as Tombola.You are not to share this product with anyone outside the working group. Is that understood?”
Jim nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You, and only you” – she raised a hand to stem a protest from Bevan – “will be the Perigee Committee’s contact with our asylum-seeker. You will report back only to the Perigee Committee. Is that understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You are not to discuss the existence of our asylum-seeker, Perigee, or Tombola, with anyone outside the working group. Is that understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Professor Bevan will handle your indoctrination into Perigee.” She looked at her colleague, and when Bevan didn’t say anything she stood up. “Then I declare this meeting of the Perigee Committee suspended, until such time as we can speak to the asylum-seeker.”
Shaw left the room, but Bevan came over and shook Jim’s hand. “I’m sorry, but that was handled badly,” she said. “Can we start again?”
“I have no idea,” Jim said.
“I’m the whacko, Shaw is the cynic set to watch over me. This is a hell of an idea to try to sell to the Security Service. What’s he like?”
“Excuse me?”
“Our boy. Does he have horns and a barbed tail?”
“He looks just like... I’m sorry, this is all a little... sudden.”
She beamed. “Sudden, but fun, no?”
He shrugged.
“Actually, this isn’t suddenat all. It only looks that way from where you’re standing. From my point of view, this is long overdue. Would you like to be indoctrinated over a cup of coffee?”
Jim blinked. “Sorry? Yes.”
“The coffee here’s some of the ugliest stuff I’ve ever drunk,” she said, starting to bustle away across the room. “And I’ve drunk some ugly coffee. But I’m not allowed to talk to you about this thing in Starbucks.”
Jim followed her. “About what thing?”
“About the invasion,” she said over her shoulder.
THE COFFEE WAS about as bad as Bevan had promised, and it was served in another hideously flock-wallpapered room, this one smaller and seemingly furnished from a closing-down sale at a large provincial department store, The coffee machine was the first piece of even vaguely electronic equipment Jim had seen since passing through Security – he checked his watch – three hours ago. He felt tired and wound up both at the same time, caught between wanting to fall asleep and needing to look over the edge of whatever he had found himself on the edge of.
“You’re tired,” Bevan said as if reading his mind, “but it’s best we do this now.”
“Yes,” said Jim.
They sat in matching armchairs which appeared to have been upholstered by some long-ago Ministry of Works artisan. Jim noticed that the room smelled of damp digestive biscuits.
“So,” said Bevan, beaming at him intensely enough to make him burst into flame
s. “Our newest recruit. Bless you, young Jim, good to have you on board.”
“Could you perhaps,” Jim asked, “tell me what’s going on? What ‘invasion’?”
“Well, that may have been exaggerating it just a little bit,” she said. “But we have reason to believe they’re here and have been for some considerable time.”
“Evidence?”
Bevan held her hand out and tipped it from side to side. “Signs and portents. Also, plain common sense. It’s what we would do.” She sipped her coffee and winced. Blinked at Jim. “This all starts – or at least, the bit we know about starts – with a family called Whitton-Whyte. English landowning gentry in the Midlands. It used to be the fashion for the English landowning gentry to build follies, but the Whitton-Whytes decided to go into mapmaking instead. Except they were charlatans, bless their cotton socks. They stole almost every map they ever published. They copied existing Ordnance Survey maps, stole data, bribed surveyors. The only reason they didn’t wind up in court is because there was no evidence, and there was no evidence because they bought all the witnesses.
“In October 1822, the Whitton-Whytes publish the first edition of Sheet 2000, a map of the area to the West of London. It contains a number of... errors. It includes a village called ‘Stanhurst,’ where no such village exists. Over the next seventy years or so, they publish a number of revisions which not only compound the error, but add to it, until the final revision shows a completely imaginary county, called ‘Ernshire,’ in great detail. The family seem obsessed with Ernshire and the map. It ruins them; an Act of Parliament is passed banning them from ever making another map.
“And there, if this was all neat and tidy, the story would end,” Bevan said. “Except life is never neat and tidy, because there’s an unsubstantiated account that the last surviving member of the family was visited by someone from Ernshire. Someone who claimed to be a relative. Also, in the Summer of 1890, there was a wave of hoaxes related to Ernshire. Someone wrote to Queen Victoria and invited her to visit. This is important, Jim. Something was happening. Someone in Ernshire wanted to reach out, join the real world. And then they stopped.”
Europe at Midnight Page 8
