Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Why?”

  Bevan shrugged. “We don’t know, of course. My theory is that there was a change of regime. There was a moment when they almost established contact with us, then someone else took over and the borders were closed.”

  “And where you have tightly-defended borders you also have people who range beyond those borders to try and determine their neighbours’ intentions,” Jim said.

  Bevan nodded. “We’ve all read your final year position paper, the one you wrote in training about the intelligence implications of Scottish and Welsh independence. I liked it. Elegantly-written.”

  “Thank you.”

  “In some ways, that was why you were assigned the job tonight, why we’ve decided to induct you into our little club of crazy people. I’ve convinced some people in the Service that the thing the Whitton-Whytes created represents the same intelligence problem as Scotland and Wales. You’ve shown some understanding of that.”

  “How did you manage to convince them? You must have some proof.”

  “Oh, we have proof. And a very tangled and sad story that is, too.”

  Jim looked at his watch. Looked at the curtained windows. It would be getting light soon, but all of a sudden he didn’t feel tired any more.

  Bevan said, “Sometimes things are just so magnificently impossible that they must be possible.” She smiled at him. “And now I’m going to tell you something that makes it worth your signing the Official Secrets Act, Jim, all by itself.”

  “Oh?”

  “They didn’t stop at a county.”

  SOMETIMES THINGS ARE just so magnificently impossible that they must be possible...

  He got the driver to drop him off a couple of streets away from his home, and walked the rest of the way through the crisp early-morning quiet. In an hour or so, people would be starting to head off to work, taking their children to school, but just now everything was still, the streets deserted. He didn’t want to go home just yet, for a number of reasons.

  There was a little park not far from his house – not much more than a deep grass verge with a couple of graffiti-scored benches mounted on a square of concrete. He sat down on one of the benches, lit a cigarette, and looked about him, feeling all of a sudden that the fabric of the world was very thin.

  “We’ve spoken to people who’ve encountered them,” Bevan was saying. “Just a few. A handful. It’s a country, Jim. A nation. It goes from Portugal to Moscow and they call it the Community. Millions of people, Jim, we don’t know how many. It’s not a risk we can ignore. They’re here, doing things, spying on us, just as we would on them, and we need to get a handle on them. We need to find a way in, and even if we can’t do that, we need to be ready because if they do decide to cross the borders we can’t possibly defend against them.”

  Jim leaned back on the bench and drew on his cigarette. An entire country, written on top of or underneath or to one side of Europe. A huge Continental nation. And in a room in a house in Potters Bar, a man who, until a short time ago, may have been living there.

  “It’s a topological freak,” said Bevan. “It’s not magic. I’ve spoken with some really quite out-there mathematicians and they concede that it’s not impossible, although they couldn’t give me the first idea of how it might work.”

  Jim looked down the street, where, dead on time, front doors were opening and parents were ushering schoolchildren out to the family SUV or people-mover. He wondered, idly, how humanity had ever coped without personal vehicles the size of moving-vans.

  “We have the very very vaguest idea what the Community is like, and we need more information,” said Bevan. “We have to open channels of communication with them, start some kind of dialogue. But whatever else we do, we absolutely have to improve our intelligence-gathering. We have to assess whether your asylum-seeker is the real thing. And if he is, we’re going to have to make a hard decision.”

  He was starting to get some odd looks from the departing school run parents. Lone man, sitting on a bench in a street full of children. Even people who knew him looked surprised to see him there. He got up and dropped the cigarette, ground it out with his toe against the concrete. This time yesterday, he had been a middle-ranking member of the Security Service. Now he appeared to be one of the point-men in the opening moves of an intelligence war.

  He wondered if his wife had forgiven him yet.

  1

  MY REPORT ON Mass Grave 42, along with its accompanying documentation and interview transcripts, was almost four inches thick, and I had to clear some less incendiary stuff out of my office safe just to make room for the original and its carbon copies. It was basically the death warrant for every surviving member of the Medical Faculty, including the students who had been helping Harry Pool. I closed the door of the safe on it, spun the combination dial, and felt enormously tired.

  Outside, frosty mornings and chill nights had given way to blossom on the trees and strong, hot sunshine, although the temperature still plunged at night or when it got cloudy. The Board were starting to make noises about scheduling the first series of trials of the Old Board, and recent meetings had been attended by someone named McIntyre, an eerily-serene – considering that they had helped draft a lot of the Old Board’s legislation – member of the Law Faculty. I argued that we were nowhere near ready, but nobody paid any attention and I supposed I couldn’t blame them; at least a trial would show that we were making some progress. It would, I ventured wearily at one meeting, be just as effective if we simply lined everyone we didn’t like up against a wall and shot them without going through any legal formalities first. This got me a hard stare from everyone in the room except McIntyre, who seemed to regard me as an interestingly-talented pet, but I was far past caring what people thought of me.

  Into the space Araminta had left in my life, Callum had caused to be delivered a particularly Callum-like gift – Science Faculty records, unfiled and unindexed, simply a stack of boxes of paper that reached from floor to ceiling almost all the way across one wall of my office. One of the boxes also contained half a bottle of whisky and a folded sheet of paper on which someone had drawn an odd little glyph, a circle containing two dots and an arc, so that it looked like a smiling face. Callum’s little joke. He’d delivered at least part of what I had requested from him, and I had no time to read it myself and no one to spare to read it for me. I asked Anna Glasgow if she could spare a Librarian to help, but she just laughed.

  “You still look terrible, by the way,” she said.

  I leaned back in my chair and stretched. “Thank you.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “This is all just too much for you.”

  I looked at her. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever met, far brighter than I was. We had parted friends, but we had definitely parted. We were never going to have sex again, and I was never going to see her naked again, and all these things made me sad.

  I said, “How’s Lou?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  I shook my head. It was weeks since I had heard from my new Research Assistant; I was too tired to chase her for reports.

  “She’s a natural Librarian,” said Anna.

  “Really?”

  “Really. Taken to it like a duck to water. She’s never out of the Apocrypha. Her notes are a complete mess, but she seems able to make sense of them. I’d quite like to have her, when you’re done.” She looked at the pile of boxes. “Callum’s a complete shit, isn’t he?”

  “It’s my own fault. I asked him for the records. I didn’t bother to ask him to put them into some kind of order first.”

  She dipped a hand into her pocket, brought it out holding a little white cardboard box. She shook it, and the contents rattled. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I sighed and held out a hand, and she gave me the box. Inside were half a dozen little beige tablets. “What do they do?” I asked.

  “They make people happy,” she said. “For a while, anyway. Then you sleep for about twelve hours and wa
ke up with flu symptoms.”

  “Great.” I tipped some of the pills into the palm of my hand and looked at them. The temptation to take one – or maybe all of them – was almost unbearable. Flu symptoms seemed a small price to pay in order to be happy for a little while.

  “One of my staff had them. She got them from someone in the English Faculty.” She put a folded slip of paper on my desk. “That’s his name.”

  “Thank you,” I said bleakly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, and she really meant it. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  I put the pills back in the box. “Yes, you did the right thing, Anna. Thank you.” I found a piece of paper and a pen and slid them across the desk to her. She wrinkled her nose. “I need a statement, and I need a chain of evidence for these pills.”

  “Does it matter?” she said.

  “If we’re going to attempt to do things properly, yes, it does.”

  She shook her head. “You’re fighting a one-man war to do things ‘properly,’ and it doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters, Anna. To me if to nobody else. The Old Board suspended habeas corpus about a hundred years ago, and until we have a police force and a judiciary we trust again, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure we don’t go back to that. I don’t care if I’m the only one. Somebody’s got to do it.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “Well, as ideals go, it’s not a bad one, I suppose.” She picked up the pen. “Can I cook you dinner later?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe another time.”

  “I have lamb,” she said. “And potatoes.”

  I blinked at her.

  “No,” she said. She pointed at me with the pen. “No, you are not going to ask me where I got them.”

  I sighed. In truth, it was impossible to stop hoarding and black marketeering; people just wanted to feed themselves and their families, and pretty much everyone had convinced themselves it wasn’t really a crime anyway. I picked up the cardboard box and rattled it. “Quite soon, if it hasn’t happened already, the people you get your lamb from are going to be handing these out,” I told her. “It’s only a matter of time, I promise you.”

  She glowered at me and started to write. “Just don’t ask me, all right?”

  “All right,” I said. “And thank you.”

  She glanced up.

  “For the offer of dinner. I’m just not very good company right now.”

  Her expression softened. “I heard about your friend.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. I thought about it. “Not just that, anyway. Too much on my mind right now. Maybe another time.”

  She smiled. “I’ll try to get something legally.”

  “That would be good,” I said. But I knew that before too long that wouldn’t be an option any more.

  BACK IN MY rooms, I stood in the doorway of Araminta’s bedroom. Everything was tidy, the bed made. It was as if nobody had ever been here. I crossed the room, knelt down, and felt under the bed. My fingertips brushed metal, encountered a handle, and I slid her metal suitcase out into the open. I lifted it up and placed it on the bed and then stood looking at it. The sides of the case were scratched and battered, and the paint had worn off the little wheels of the combination lock. The case wasn’t very heavy; when I’d tipped it gently from side to side on a previous occasion, I had felt things slide around inside. Maybe books. I had also tried the combination lock, turning the wheels slowly, trying to feel a slight sticking or freeing which might indicate that the combination had engaged, but there was nothing. I put my hand on top of the case and sighed. Then I put it back under the bed and went to have a cup of tea.

  2

  WE ARRESTED RICHARD Brooks in the middle of a tutorial on Daniel Defoe.

  I wasn’t in a mood to be particularly discreet; I just marched into the classroom with two Sergeants, walked up to the front of the room, and in a loud voice told Brooks and his students what he was being arrested for. To his credit he came quietly, didn’t make a fuss. Sudden, massive embarrassment will do that to a man. Glancing around the room as we took him away, I saw a number of students exchange panicked glances, and mentally noted their faces.

  We took Brooks over to the Security Faculty, put him in a cell, and left him there. I did some work, then went home, had a bath, ate a cheese and pickle sandwich, and went to bed. I was dreaming of roast lamb when a hammering on my front door woke me.

  YOU NEVER GET used to seeing dead people. That was one important lesson the Fall had taught me. You’d think that after the tenth, the twentieth, the fiftieth, it would start to get easier. But it doesn’t.

  I took one look at the bodies and went for a walk into one of the darker corners of the cellar.

  It was better when I came back, but not by much. Lou and Anna lay beside one of the tables the Librarians sat at when reading files. Lou was face-down, Anna on her back. Their hands had been bound behind them and their throats had been cut, and they lay with that peculiar boneless absence of the dead. The smell of fresh blood was very strong. One of Anna’s shoes hung half off her foot, and it was an almost physical effort not to bend down and replace it.

  “Professor?”

  It was one of the Sergeants – not the one who had come to wake me but the one who had stayed behind to guard the scene. I said, “Yes?”

  He paused uncertainly. “Another Librarian found them,” he said finally. “About forty minutes ago. We’ve got him in one of the rooms upstairs.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Skinner,” he said. “Roger Skinner.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Skinner.” I looked around the ranked filing cabinets of the Apocrypha and willed my brain to work. “Were you and your colleague the first on the scene after the Librarian raised the alarm?”

  “Yes, Professor,” he said. “We made sure the scene was secure, then George went to get you.”

  “And you didn’t touch anything?”

  “No, sir. We’re supposed to make sure life is extinct, and request medical help if the victim’s still alive. But that didn’t seem necessary here.”

  I nodded. The Sergeants were a temporary measure, a stopgap between Security and a proper police force, intended for situations where armed men were not called for. All they had to work with was some sketchy training and common sense. “And no one entered or left the Apocrypha until George came back with me?”

  Skinner shook his head. “I was standing outside the door the whole time.”

  I looked back towards the door. There was a quiet commotion on the other side, in the little anteroom. “Has anyone found the guards yet?”

  “I sent someone to their Residence; they’ve not come back yet.”

  “All right. Thank you. Could you stay here a while longer, please? Dr Pool should be here soon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I turned away from the bodies and went back to the door. In the anteroom, Rossiter and a couple of the other Board Members were standing with several Sergeants. As I emerged, Rossiter said, “What’s happened?”

  “Anna’s dead,” I told him. “And my Research Assistant.”

  Rossiter looked flustered. His hair was uncombed, and the ends of his pyjamas poked out from his trouser cuffs.

  I said, “We don’t know the circumstances yet. The guards who were supposed to be here are missing; we’re still looking for them.”

  “I only saw her yesterday...” he said. He stepped forward and touched me on the arm. “Anything you need,” he said. “Any resources, any manpower. Just ask. Yes?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I need to order the Admin Building sealed off. Everyone here will have to stay until they’ve given a statement.”

  “Of course.”

  The outer door opened and Harry Pool stepped into the room. He was carrying a heavy-looking bag. He saw me and said, “Where?”

  “Through there,” I said, nodding at the door to the Apocrypha. “Sergeant Skinner will show yo
u where.” I turned to one of the Sergeants. “I hope you’re keeping a note of who comes and goes here,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.” He held up a notepad.

  “Good.” I had the temptation to yell very loudly at anyone who didn’t seem to be doing their job. I rubbed my eyes.

  Harry paused by my side on his way into the Apocrypha. “I suppose the chances of your taking my advice to go home and get some sleep are quite slim,” he said quietly.

  “Quite slim, yes,” I said.

  “You look awful.”

  “I know. People keep telling me that.”

  He smiled sadly at me, and for a moment I remembered the days of the Fall, Harry and some other volunteers with basic First Aid treating wounds and infections with what medications they could get their hands on. Afterwards, the others had gone back to private life, and I couldn’t blame them, but Harry stayed on because, he said, we needed someone to look after our medical needs and we couldn’t trust anyone from the Medical Faculty. He was completely self-taught, but he said that was all right because most of the time he dealt with people who were already dead and he couldn’t hurt them anymore.

  WE FOUND THE missing guards the next day, stuffed into a cupboard on the third floor of the Admin Building. They’d both been tied up and throttled. According to Harry, Anna and Lou had been killed using a knife with a very thin, sharp blade. Privately, he admitted to me that yes, it could possibly have been a scalpel, but he pointed out that it was hardly an insurmountable task to get hold of a scalpel and that I shouldn’t jump to conclusions about anything.