“I would have walked,” Alison said when I told her.
“I know you would,” I said. “And that would not have been helpful in the slightest.”
She shook her head. “Tommy, I can’t work you out.”
We were sitting in the living room of the flat we shared in Kentish Town, eating fish and chips off trays on our laps. The entertainment set was playing a BBC soap opera which had actually been running for a hundred years. Or maybe it just felt that way.
“He’s taking the piss, Tommy,” she said. She was a stout woman in her early thirties, sexy in a no-nonsense sort of way. “Exploiting you.”
“Well, he’s hardly the first, is he?”
“If you let people push you around, you’ll never get anywhere.”
“Will you please stop doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Criticising me like that. I don’t like it.”
“I’m only saying it for your own good,” she said. “Pass the vinegar, would you?”
I passed her the vinegar. “Anyway, he’s got the book now. It’ll keep him happy for a while at least. And I’ve got another bunch of things to find for him.”
She picked up her tablet and looked at the document on the screen. “You’ll have to start taking buses,” she said. “And maybe knock the motels on the head. This is costing us a fortune.”
“Fine,” I said. “Buses are fine.” I’d miss the motels, though. I liked motels.
“He has to start paying you more,” she told me firmly, putting her tablet back on the sofa beside her. “We can’t keep this up.”
THE LIST OF books Rowland had given me included two which his sources told me were in London. I poked around for a few days and found one of the London books at the home of a recently-deceased lecturer in French literature. His widow seemed angry with him more for dying than anything else, and she was systematically stripping their house in Twickenham of every trace of him.
“Take it,” she said, thrusting the book into my hands. “Take the whole fucking lot of them.”
I’d already spotted another couple of volumes which recent experience had taught me were worth some money, but I didn’t have it in my heart to take them, so I just told her the one book would be fine.
“I’m going to burn the lot of them,” she told me. “Thirty years and he was more interested in his fucking books than he was in me.”
I thought about it. “Well, if you’re only going to burn them...” Alison would be pleased.
The third book on the list was just outside Sheffield, a teacher living in the Peak District. He was more tricky, but I was already way under budget so I could afford to take him for lunch at a restaurant in Hathersage and give him the benefit of my charm. I hadn’t been doing this for very long, really, but I’d discovered that I wasn’t bad at it. The teacher thought he was driving a hard bargain. Most people fail to understand just how much books are worth, though, and I left the Peak District with a healthy chunk of my funds still intact.
On the bus back into Sheffield, I tried to phone Rowland and Alison, but both their numbers were engaged. I tried them again a few hours later, on the National Express coach heading back to London, but it was the same thing.
I finally got into Victoria coach station around ten in the evening, tired and hungry. I found a Burger King and had a Chicken Royale with cheese, which was still one of the most exquisite things I had ever tasted, and I got a bus up to the Tottenham Court Road and another bound for Kentish Town. As we passed Camden Town Station, I felt a little pang in my stomach.
I never reached our flat. I got off the 134 and crossed the main road and turned into our street, only to find that blue and white tape with the words POLICE INCIDENT printed on it had been stretched across it and tied to trees on either side. Further down, I could see police vehicles and fire engines outside the house where our flat had been. The whole top floor was a wreck. It was still smouldering.
I turned and started to walk away, taking my phone out of my pocket, but a voice behind me said, “Mr Potter? Mr Tommy Potter?” The voice had a West Country accent.
I looked round. Standing behind me were two men. One was handsomely middle-aged and wearing a tweed suit and a tie; the other was younger, tall and muscular and blond and untidy, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. He looked as if he had been brought up on a farm.
“I’m Lionel,” the man in the suit said pleasantly. “We have your girlfriend. If you want to see her alive again, I suggest you cooperate.”
I looked at Lionel. I looked at the Farmboy. I said, “What? Who are you? What are you talking about? My flat...” I gestured into my street.
Lionel looked sad. “I regret that. One of my colleagues can be a little... overenthusiastic sometimes.”
“You did that?” I shouted. The Farmboy took a step towards me, and I took a step away from them.
“Not us,” Lionel said. “A colleague. Please, Mr Potter. Don’t be unreasonable.”
I said, “I’m calling the police,” and I dialled quickly and put the phone to my ear. The Farmboy stepped forward again, unhurriedly took hold of my upper arm, removed the phone from my hand, dropped it to the pavement, and put the heel of his workboot on it. I heard things break. The Farmboy’s grip was like a large, friendly vice.
“We don’t want to hurt anybody else,” Lionel said calmly. “Please, Mr Potter. Your girlfriend needs medical attention, and if you don’t help us she won’t get it.”
“Who are you?” I said, trying unsuccessfully to pull away from the Farmboy. “What do you want?”
“I’m Lionel,” he said again. “I want Rowland Forsythe.”
THEY HAD A van parked in the next street, a little white Honda builders’ van with a dent in the side. Lionel and I got in the back and the Farmboy got into the driving seat. When the back doors were closed and locked, Lionel took a piece of cloth from the floor and held it out.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Would you mind...?”
I tied the cloth around my head so that it covered my eyes, and Lionel checked to make sure I couldn’t see anything, then he said something to the Farmboy and the engine started and we moved off with a clashing of gears.
I didn’t see anything of the journey, but I heard the horns honking around us and felt the sudden swerves and braking manoeuvres. The Farmboy was a terrible driver.
We didn’t drive very far, but I didn’t know London well enough to have an idea where we might be. Certainly we went up and down some hills, because I heard the engine labouring and some dreadful noises as the Farmboy tried to find the right gear. Finally, we made a sharp right turn and bumped over something, then I heard gravel crunching under the tyres. A last tussle with the gear lever and the Farmboy pulled the van to a halt.
“Please keep the blindfold on for the moment, Mr Potter,” said Lionel. I heard him open the doors. “Just give me your hand and I’ll help you out.”
I slid cautiously along the floor of the van, held out my hand, and felt Lionel grasp it. His hand felt smooth and hard. He helped me climb down from the van, then he led me a short distance across the gravel and up a single step and then I felt a change in the air currents as we stepped inside. We walked up a flight of stairs, then along a carpeted landing, and through another door. I smelled disinfectant and heard a voice say, “Well you took your fucking time.”
Lionel took off the blindfold. I was standing in a brightly-lit room occupied by a single bed, and on the bed lay Alison, her head bandaged and her right arm in a sling.
I said, “What’s going on?”
“Oh, it’s good to see you too, Tommy,” she snorted. “These bastards kidnapped me and blew the flat up and they say it’s your fault.”
“Rowland Forsythe,” Lionel said beside me. “It’s his fault.”
“Fucking Rowland,” Alison said. “I told you he’d get us both in trouble.”
“No you didn’t,” I said.
“I did. If I said it once, I said it a dozen times
. Shifty fucker.”
“Please,” Lionel said tiredly. He looked at me. “We’ve done what we can for Ms Shand, but she needs to see a doctor. Certainly she needs an x-ray. Now, can we talk in private for a moment?”
“Sure,” Alison said. “Don’t mind me. Fuckers.”
Lionel led me out of the room, along the corridor, to another room. This one smelled musty. The curtains were drawn and a single bare bulb was burning in an overhead light fitting. There was some furniture stacked neatly in one corner and covered with several dusty-looking rugs. In the middle of the room were two chairs. Lionel asked me to sit on one of them. He took the other. The Farmboy came in, closed the door behind him, and stood with his back against it.
“Now then,” Lionel said, not unkindly. “Where is Mr Forsythe?”
“I don’t know. If I did, I’d kill him myself.”
Lionel laughed. “You’re not the murdering kind, Mister Potter. I doubt you’d even speak harshly to him.” He took a packet of Rothmans and a lighter from his pocket, lit one, and blew smoke at me. He suddenly looked concerned. “Cigarette?”
“Please.”
He gave me a cigarette and lit it for me and went back to his chair. He looked at me for a while, rubbed his eyes, looked at me for another minute or so.
“Mr Forsythe has something we want,” he said finally.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I have no idea where he is. I tried to phone him earlier and he was engaged. I could have tried again, but your friend here smashed my phone and I can’t remember his number.”
Lionel looked at the Farmboy and pursed his lips. He looked at me. “He seems to have gone to ground,” he said. “Somehow, he got wind that we were looking for him. We’ve searched his home and we can’t find what we’re looking for. We assume he has it with him.”
I leaned forward. “Is it,” I asked, “the book?”
He became very calm and still. He tipped his head to one side and smiled at me. “Now why would you say that?”
“Take me to the post office,” I said, “and I’ll tell you.”
“ROWLAND HAS THIS little trick,” I told Lionel and the Farmboy as we pushed through the doors of Mount Pleasant Post Office the next morning. “Not so much a trick, more a truism. Between the time you post something, and the time it gets delivered, it vanishes to all intents and purposes.” I glanced at Lionel. “It goes off into another dimension.”
Lionel nodded and smirked. “Very good,” he murmured.
“He posts things to himself that he doesn’t want people to get hold of. Legal documents. Bank statements. Accounts. The deeds to his house. That kind of thing. And when they’re delivered he just goes out and posts them again. And nobody can find them because until they’re delivered nobody knows where they are.”
“And if they go missing in the post?”
“The postal service in this country is a lot better than most people think,” I told him. “It’s just a bit slow sometimes, which suits Rowland. And I’m sure most of the things he posts to himself would be better off going missing.”
Lionel shook his head in wonderment. “Extraordinary,” he said, like a tourist having the mating rituals of a Stone Age tribe explained to him.
We reached the post restante counter and I told the man behind the glass screen, “I’m here to pick up some post for Rowland Forsythe.”
The man behind the glass screen looked at us for a moment. Then he went off through a door.
“Won’t he want identification?” Lionel asked quietly.
“Let’s hope not.”
“Yes,” he said, not smiling any more. “Let’s.”
The man came back through the door. He was holding a yellow Jiffy Bag. I said, “That’s it,” and he slipped it under the glass screen and Lionel and the Farmboy and I turned and walked out of the post office.
“THE SECURITY OF your post offices is terrible,” Lionel said.
“Fortunately for us,” I said.
We were sitting in the Burger King on High Holborn. The Farmboy had lifted the top of his BK Flamer and was frowning at what was underneath as if unsure what it was for.
“So,” Lionel said.
“I want to know,” I told him, my fingers curling around the edges of the envelope on my lap.
“I was under the impression you already knew.”
I watched the Farmboy reassemble his Flamer, lift it out of the box, and bite half of it off in one go. “I want to know.”
Lionel sighed and sat back and gestured to me.
I lifted the Jiffy Bag and pulled at its tear-strip and Tustin’s Where To Go In Wartime dropped neatly into my palm. While Lionel ate his fries one by fastidious one, and the Farmboy crammed the rest of his Flamer into his mouth, I opened the book and paged through pages of black and white plates of Cornish coastlines, Agatha Christie country houses and bleak Scottish islands. I closed my eyes. Opened them. “Which one is it?”
“Page twenty-seven,” he said. “The village green at Hopkins’ Halt.”
I turned to the page and looked at the photograph Tustin had taken, all those years ago, of a quiet village green. There was a little pond with ducks and swans, a weeping willow, a half-timbered pub and a bow-windowed village shop. A stout woman wearing a small hat and a long coat and carrying a wicker shopping basket was frozen forever at the top of the steps, pushing open the shop’s door. Under the plate were directions how to get to Hopkins’ Halt, this oasis of calm and tranquillity in a world gone mad.
I said, “Did anyone ever go to Hopkins’ Halt?”
Lionel ate some fries. The Farmboy had finished his food and seemed to be assessing his meal’s packaging for nutritional value.
I said to them, “Are you not at all curious about how I found this in the first place?”
“I will admit some curiosity as to how you knew it was this book we were looking for,” Lionel said. “Yes, that is interesting.”
I said, “I found it in a safe. In the Geography Faculty in the Campus.”
Lionel’s expression didn’t change. He glanced at the Farmboy and jerked his head slightly, and the younger man got up from the table and went outside.
When he’d gone, Lionel looked at me for a long time before saying, “Would you say that again, please?”
I said, “I brought the book with me from the Campus.”
Lionel looked at me for a long time again. Then he said, “Please excuse me a moment.” He got up and went outside. I half-turned in my seat and saw him standing on the pavement with the Farmboy, speaking into a mobile phone.
Baines had warned me that this was the most dangerous moment of all, the point of transition from bystander to player. I had to keep them interested. They had the book, so I had to give them something else. I claimed to be from the Campus, so I had to explain how that came about. “Narrative,” Baines had told me. “Always narrative. They will want to know everything, and by the time they know everything they have to trust you.”
I looked around the restaurant. There was only one way in or out, but I wasn’t going anywhere. I was Tommy Potter from the Campus and I had finally made contact with my people. Why would I want to leave? I finished my Chicken Royale.
Finally, Lionel came back and sat down opposite me again. “Well,” he said. “I certainly didn’t expect this when I got up this morning.”
“There’s nowhere called Hopkins’ Halt on the Campus,” I told him. “Are you from the Community?”
He grimaced slightly, as if he had just been afflicted with a slight headache. Narrative. Make them want things.
“There was a map,” I said. “In the safe.”
Lionel sighed. “Tustin was a friend. It was a long time ago and we trusted Europeans. Some of them, anyway. He found evidence of the Community, made contact, wanted to visit. We let him. He was supervised, but somehow he managed to take at least one photograph without us being aware of it.” He nodded at the book on the table. “He made an agreement not to speak with anyone about h
is visit, but he reneged on it. He published the book. A vanity publication with a print-run of just seventeen copies.” He smiled at the look on my face. “Mister Tustin’s finances couldn’t run to more. He couldn’t resist slipping in that photograph. The man had a huge ego; he couldn’t bear the idea of never telling the world his secret, even if the world didn’t understand what it was seeing.” He stopped smiling. “We traced and destroyed fifteen copies, and then all we could do was hope that the remaining two were lost forever. We had no idea one was in the Campus.”
I looked at him for a long time. Then I picked up the book and waved it at him. “There’s another one of these?”
He looked embarrassed. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. We don’t know.”
“What happened to Tustin?”
“Oh, Mr Tustin led a full and happy life eventually. With us.” He smiled at me again. “Now, what are we going to do with you?”
“I want to go home,” I told him.
“Of course you do.”
“There are weapons here we could use, retake the Campus from the Rebels.”
Lionel chuckled. “Just you and us?”
“If the map I saw is accurate, there are enough people in the Community to help.”
He nodded. “I’m afraid you’re missing some of the story, my friend. And in order to learn more of it, you’re going to have to talk to my superiors.”
“All right,” I said. “But first, get Alison to hospital. Then I’ll talk.”
ROWLAND SENT ME a postcard with a picture of Prague’s royal castle on the front, although I wasn’t stupid enough to think that he was still in Czechoslovakia – if he’d ever been there at all. The stamp was Austrian and it was postmarked Vienna. The postman had been uncertain about where to deliver it, the flat not being there anymore, so he had stuck it under a plant pot in the front garden. The message on the back was a scrawled and insincere wish-you-were-here.
“Wish he was here, more like,” Alison said when I showed her the card. “If I ever see him again...”
Europe at Midnight Page 17
