Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  His phone rang. He took it out and looked at the screen. As he put the phone to his ear, someone started knocking at the door.

  “KNOW THE LADY well, did we, sir?” asked the Inspector.

  “We were colleagues,” Jim said, hearing his voice coming from an impossible distance.

  “Under stress, was she?” the Inspector said. “Sorry, I shouldn’t ask.”

  “That’s all right. No. No, I don’t think so. She seemed distant sometimes, but that was her nature.” He wanted to scream and never to stop screaming, but everything depended on the façade, the veneer of the plodding timeserver. “It’s a bit of a shock, really.”

  Adele Bevan’s body lay on the carpet of her living room in Shepperton. Someone had put a sheet over her, but one shoeless foot protruded, thickly-stockinged, canted over at a peculiar angle. There was a smell of urine and faeces in the air.

  “Familiar with the house, were we, sir?” asked the Inspector.

  “I stayed here while my divorce was going through,” Jim said. No point in making something up; he and Bevan had had to fill in reports. “The Professor was kind to me.”

  The Inspector thought about this, decided to stick to his original line of questioning. “Any sign of a struggle, then? Only it’s hard to tell.”

  Jim tried to look round the chaotic room without seeing the severed section of rope hanging from the ceiling light fixture, its other end still around Bevan’s neck. He said, “The stepladder’s from the cupboard under the stairs.”

  The Inspector nodded. “She’ll have stood on that to tie the rope up. Nothing else out of place?”

  Jim shook his head, paranoia and professionalism warring within him. “May I sit down, please?”

  “Not in here, sir, sorry,” the Inspector said. “We don’t want to contaminate the scene.”

  “I told you, I lived here for six months. You’ll find forensics of me all over the place.”

  “Even so, sir. You can sit outside in the car, if you’d like.”

  Overhead, Jim heard heavy footsteps; other members of the Special Branch team, searching the main bedroom. This is a test, he told himself. Oh, Adele...

  “Do you need me for anything else?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so, sir. We needed a positive identification, some sort of steer as to whether foul play might be involved. We’ll need to speak with you again, but I think that can wait until the morning. Ah.” Two large men wearing sober suits had appeared in the living room doorway. “Hello, lads.”

  “All done, sir?” asked one of the men.

  “Yes, I think so. Take her to St Thomas’s, please.”

  The two men had a large rubberised body-bag, which they unzipped on the floor, rolled Bevan onto, and zipped up again so efficiently that it was done before Jim could become offended by the inhumanity of it. They went out and came back with a reinforced plastic coffin on a wheeled trolley. They lifted the body-bag into the coffin, fitted the lid, and lifted the coffin onto the trolley. A last bit of paperwork signed by the Inspector, and they were wheeling Bevan out to one of those quiet grey vans with ‘Private Ambulance’ discreetly lettered on the side which undertakers use to transport the dead from their homes.

  They had only just left when another group of people arrived. Young, casual, wearing jeans and fleeces, carrying collapsed plastic boxes of the kind that one uses to carry one’s possessions when one has been summarily fired. It occurred to Jim that, for all the Inspector’s caution about contamination, he had seen nobody here wearing the all-over paper suits normally used to stop alien forensics being scattered around a crime scene. It was all just theatre, a muted farewell to Adele Bevan, the only person in his professional life who had never used a false identity.

  “IT’S VERY SAD,” Shaw said again, reading Jim’s preliminary report. “Personally, I liked her very much.”

  Jim swallowed all kinds of possible replies and said instead, “There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle. As far as I could judge, Professor Bevan took her own life.”

  There were just the two of them in the conference room at Northumberland Avenue, a capsule devoted to Adele Bevan’s death. The table was set for upwards of twenty-five people, but Jim and Shaw were sitting at one end, the screens of their tablets underlighting their faces as they both consulted the same document. It was a strange, frightful moment of intimacy.

  “We’ll nod through the public inquest, of course,” Shaw said. “But there will have to be an internal investigation. You and Professor Bevan were close, weren’t you?”

  “She helped me through my divorce,” he said. “I liked her too.”

  “Are you over that now? Good,” Shaw said disinterestedly. “Always a shame when it doesn’t work out. You’ve got a daughter, yes?”

  “Son. Stepson.”

  “Always sad, when children are involved,” Shaw sighed. “You spoke with HR about it at the time. I remember.”

  “They were very kind,” Jim agreed.

  “There was some talk about you taking leave, but you decided not to in the end.”

  “There was a lot of work at the time,” said Jim. “I didn’t feel that I could step away from it.”

  “But things aren’t quite so busy now, are they?” asked Shaw. “Everything’s running like clockwork, from your reports.”

  The committee starts to fill up with people you’ve never met before, and shortly after that you find yourself standing outside in the rain wondering what happened. He said carefully, “I disagree. Professor Bevan was running most of the liaison with the outside teams and she was doing the bulk of the analyses. If anything, things are going to get a lot busier from now on.” He glanced towards the window. It was beginning to get light outside, and he remembered the first time he had set foot in this suite of rooms. The place had become so familiar to him that he didn’t even notice the wallpaper any more.

  “The death of a colleague is always very traumatic,” Shaw said, as if she was discussing something she’d seen on television the night before. “On top of the stress of your divorce – it was stressful, wasn’t it?”

  “To be frank, it was something of a relief. For both of us.”

  “Well, stress catches us all in odd ways. We don’t want you suddenly becoming ill, do we. We think it might be appropriate if you took that leave now. Just a week or two.”

  “Am I being suspended?”

  Shaw looked shocked. “Suspended? Whyever would you be suspended? Your friend has just killed herself. No, we just think a period of compassionate leave would be appropriate. But you’d have to be available for the inquiry. It’s a bind, I know, but the Service likes to tidy these things up as soon as possible.” And, incredibly, she smiled at him.

  4

  LATER, HE WAS quite unable to work out where the time went.

  The first week of his leave, he resolved to take charge of his life again. He ordered new furniture for the house, new appliances for the kitchen, and oversaw their installation. He started taking a walk every morning and evening, but he was out of condition and he returned home exhausted. He bought a new car – something sporty enough for the neighbours to think he was going through a mid-life crisis. He considered the garden for some days, then looked up a local gardener and got her to come and spruce things up. A fortnight later, he was able to put his key in the front door and step inside and smell a new home, a new space. His own space, for the first time in years. He started going to the local pub, but he discovered it had been colonised by large tattooed men with attack dogs and he gave that up. He kept expecting to hear from Perigee, telling him to come back, but he never did.

  The inquiry into Bevan’s suicide opened and closed on the same day. Jim put on his best suit and tie and presented himself at Thames House, the first time he’d been there since his secondment to Perigee. There were representatives of HR and the Civil Service union and several senior members of the Service, and everyone was very calm and caring, but it was still just one day. Wit
h a break for lunch.

  He drove his new car over to Shepperton, but when he saw the FOR SALE sign outside Bevan’s house he just kept going, drove out to Datchett and stopped at a country pub where the noise of airliners landing at Heathrow vied with the noise of the entertainment system. He bought a soft drink and took it outside, sat at the table farthest away from anyone else, and called Kaunas.

  “You want to pull it, then?” the Coureur asked when Jim had finished telling him what had happened.

  “Is that even possible now?” he asked.

  “Sure. Any time. Just say the word.”

  He thought about it. A few tables away, a young family were tucking into a pub lunch. Husband, wife, two boys, no more than five. Roast chicken, chips, salad, on a nice sunny day in the landscape the Whitton-Whytes had written their custom-built county over. He said, “No. Everything’s in place here; you just have to make best use of it. My access is going to be limited from now on, I think. For a while, anyway.”

  “You still haven’t heard from your man, then.”

  “No.”

  “So he may be dead.”

  “He may. But he’s resourceful. He’ll be looking for a way out. He’ll be watching out for signs of the outside world, if he’s in a position to. There’s still sufficient money, yes?”

  “Oh yes. We’ve hardly dented the funds yet.”

  “Then let it run. Keep me up to speed; I’ll try to help as much as possible.”

  5

  AND THAT WAS how it went, year by year. He never saw the inside of the building on Northumberland Avenue again, never heard from Shaw. He felt like the victim of a North Korean purge, airbrushed from all official photographs.

  He was allowed back to work eventually, a mid-level analyst’s post at Thames House, reading endless intercepts from Scottish and Welsh troublemakers, writing briefing papers for younger, more intrepid officers. Of the Community, there was no sign at all. He followed the corporate doings of the organisations who had taken over the Perigee Committee, and could discern no sign that they were about to move into unusual new territory. He settled into his new post, did his work, kept his head down. He pleased his bosses.

  He redecorated the house, bit by bit. Started a half-hearted affair with a woman he met in a pub in town, barely noticed when, fed up with his apparent lack of interest, she drifted off.

  Late at night, he followed Kaunas’s Coureur. Coureur Central, or whoever ran things within the organisation, was taking a tangential approach to positioning their asset, and from Kaunas’s reports Jim thought he could discern the interest of other parties too, which was intriguing. Between them, he and Kaunas arranged things just... so. One evening he made three off-the-books phone calls – two to the English Embassy in Helsinki, one to a certain barristers’ chambers in the City of London, and waited to be arrested, but nothing happened. It was like playing chess, if one forgot that the pieces were people. One marshalled one’s forces, let events take their course, let the opposition make all the mistakes.

  War with the Community did not come.

  ONE AUTUMN, HIS GP became concerned enough about his weight loss to send him for some tests. A week or so later, while he was waiting for the results, he got a call to report to one of the committee rooms upstairs. Assuming he was about to perform yet another briefing on England’s undeclared intelligence war with the former members of the United Kingdom, he gathered together his generic lecture packs and took himself up in the lift.

  To discover, sitting in the room waiting for him, a woman and a man. They smiled when he entered the room.

  “It’s all right,” said the Director-General. “We don’t bite.” She turned to the man. “Do we?”

  “I’ve had my moments,” mused the Deputy Director-General. “But please,” he added to Jim, “come in and sit down. You’re not in any trouble.”

  “Or rather, you’re in all the trouble in the world and it doesn’t matter anymore, so we may as well sit and speak as friends, eh?”

  Jim closed the door behind him and sat down at the table with them. He put his briefing materials down in front of him and looked at his superiors.

  “Would you like some tea?” asked the D-G. “We’re going to have tea.”

  “Yes, please,” said Jim.

  Tea was duly brought in, and a plate of biscuits. The D-G and Deputy D-G drank theirs black, with lemon. There was a brief period of that very English kind of smalltalk where nobody actually says anything at all, just mumbles and uses body language, then the D-G put down her cup and smiled at him.

  “Well, Jim,” she said. “Firstly, we’d like to thank you for your efforts on behalf of the Service.”

  The D-G was in her early fifties, a legend in the Service. There were tales of her exploits in Crimea, Moldova, Cornwall; all probably apocryphal, but still. She was attractive in a businesslike way, kind-looking but no-nonsense. She looked good in front of Parliamentary Committees and giving lectures on television. Jim had never met her, but he had seen her in the media many times, and this was the first time he had noticed that both she and the Deputy D-G had faint almost-West Country accents very much like Rupert’s.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you could begin by telling us what you know about Professor Mundt.” And Jim’s heart broke.

  1

  THE BELLS IN the Town Hall were ringing nine o’clock as I arrived to open up. It was a lovely morning; swifts were darting across the Market Square, building their nests in the eaves of the old stuccoed buildings. I had sat outside Henderson’s with a cup of tea and a scone, watching the world go by, for an hour or so before moving on to work. I was pleased to see the swifts back.

  The bell over the door tinkled as I stepped inside, and again I was struck by that wonderful smell of old books and worn lino and furniture polish and weathered leather upholstery. It was a joy to enter the shop. I opened the blinds and let what little light made it down into the alleyway into the shop, then I went and put the kettle on.

  Christine arrived while I was making a pot of tea. She’d bought a bag of cheese savouries from a delicatessen on Charter Street, and we sat at the cash desk having early elevenses, as we always did. Christine was the owner of the shop, a tall, straight-backed woman in her sixties whose carriage and manner of speaking always suggested to me that she had been in the military at some point in her life, although I had never asked her. Christine and I were not friends, but we got along all right.

  The postman arrived a little after half past ten, wheeling his little trolley up the alley, the chimes on its wheel hubs jingling on the uneven paving stones. He looked somewhat military himself, in his grey uniform and peaked cap. In his trolley, he had two boxes of books for us, and when he had gone we opened them and stacked the contents on the desk.

  Customers started to drift in around eleven. We didn’t get any passing trade at all, because of where the shop was. All our customers were regulars; collectors, people looking for a specific volume, old folk wanting to just sit on our cracked and comfortable sofas and while away a few hours in a favourite book. Christine always dealt with the customers in the morning, while I catalogued and shelved whatever new stock arrived that day.

  Today was a box of science books and a box of romances, none of them less than a century old. The romances were turgid potboilers with titles like A Storm Of The Heart and Moorland Summer. The science books were full of arcane equations and diagrams. I entered the titles and authors in the big ledger from the back office, then spent a couple of hours wandering contentedly along the shelves finding places for them. Rowland would have loved it here.

  I always went for lunch first, unless Christine was meeting her sister for coffee. There was a little art gallery in the opposite corner of the Market Square with a café which offered a solid menu of pies and puddings and vegetables. For the first time in years, I was starting to look a little plump.

  Afterwards, I usually had a wander around the centre of town, unless it was raining. The fashions in the
shops were still tantalisingly familiar but strangely exotic. People in the Campus had dressed like this, in sensible, sober clothes. There was no denim anywhere in the Community, no crop tops. For all its noise and pollution and continually-fracturing nations, Europe looked like a place from a science fiction novel in comparison.

  Sometimes, if I had time to spare, I took a tram out to Camberton, which had a nice little restaurant and a pleasant park I liked to stroll in. Camberton was a genteel place and the park was usually full of nannies in stiff black and white uniforms pushing their little charges in prams or shepherding toddlers along. It was also next to the Parliament of the Presiding Authority, a big seven-storey building with lots of windows and a hideous decorative fountain at the front. The Directorate’s offices were in one wing of the Parliament, and sometimes Michael came out to join me on my walk around the park, and we chatted about this and that and I told him who had been in the shop recently and he complained about departmental infighting and backstabbing.

  The street we were on was really a narrow alley, just wide enough for two people to walk side by side without bumping into each other. It struck off from a corner of the Market Square, a double row of little clothes shops and ironmongers’, and just before it reached a dead end there was us. The shop didn’t even have a name. It was known locally as ‘Christine’s Bookshop,’ or just ‘The Bookshop’.

  Christine liked to nap in the afternoons, so I took care of the customers for a couple of hours. Then she put on her hat and coat, bade me a good evening, and went home. Half an hour later, if there were no more customers, I closed the blinds, locked up the shop, and went home myself.