“I wonder if you could help me,” he said.
I smiled my best booksellers’ smile. “I’m sure I can,” I said. “What were you looking for?”
“It’s pretty rare,” he told me, taking a piece of paper from his pocket. “I think I must have tried all the other bookshops in town.” He read, “Ernshire: Fact And Fiction, by James McCoy Hawley. Do you know it?”
It didn’t ring a bell, but that was not what you told customers. “Let’s check, shall we?” I took down the relevant volumes of the inventory and looked it up under ‘Hawley,’ ‘McCoy,’ ‘McCoy-Hawley’ and the title, but we didn’t have it.
“We did have a copy,” I lied, “but we sold it a couple of weeks ago. I can order you one from our supplier, if you’re interested.”
He beamed at me. “Excellent,” he said. “I’ve been looking for this one for years.”
“Short print run,” I extemporised. “Small press, solely academic interest.” Customers loved this sort of thing. It sounded arcane and a bit exciting, a glimpse into a secret world, something they might pay a little extra for. “Shall I order it for you, then?”
“Absolutely. Yes, please.”
I picked up a pen and found a scrap piece of paper on the desk and wrote down the title and author. “Can I just have your name and address, please?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s Delahunty. Rafe Delahunty. I say, are you all right?”
AFTER HE’D GONE, I shooed the pensioners out, which was a bit like herding chickens, locked the door, and put the CLOSED sign up. I closed the blinds and went back to the desk and sat staring into space. I looked at the address Rafe had given me. It was in Mount Royal, not far from the home where Christine’s mother was fulminating out her final days. Nice part of town, expensive houses, lots of little parks and formal woodlands and old money. A lot of the Presiding Authority lived out there.
In the distance, I heard the Town Hall bells strike eleven-thirty. I made a couple of quick telephone calls to some of our usual contacts, and one had a copy of the Hawley. I put my coat on and went out.
IT WAS QUITE a long tram ride out to Mount Royal. Władysław was larger than Nottingham, smaller than London, but the trams were never in any hurry, this particular route had a lot of stops, and this being a Wednesday town was full of people trying to get their shopping done before everything closed.
I got off a couple of stops early and walked the rest of the way. Mount Royal was laid out in a gridwork of formal avenues and squares lined with lime trees, one of the oldest districts of the city. The River Herne ran along one side, and there was a pretty little railway station, like something from a child’s toybox, but that was all there was as far as sights of interest. Apart from a little High Street with a pub and a café, and a couple of greengrocers’, there weren’t even any shops.
What there was, here, was old families. One of the questions Baines and Adele Bevan had wanted answered was where the people who had settled the Community had come from. The present population was somewhere around seventy million, which sounded a lot but was quite small compared to the population of Europe. Their ancestors had to have come from somewhere, and there were no records of mass disappearances from England. It was quite far down the list of questions they had given me when they briefed me to infiltrate Charles’s intelligence cell, but the Europeans knew so little about the Community that every piece of intelligence – even what the weather was like – was valuable.
I knew that the Community had been watching Europe for almost its entire existence. The Directorate had been running cells into various European countries for well over a century, collecting information, keeping an eye on the political breezes, reporting back, but as far as I was aware that information had only flowed one way. If anyone in Europe’s patchwork of intelligence agencies had been able to get someone into the Community, I wasn’t aware of it.
Having said that, people had come here. The late and unlamented Mr Tustin had visited during a period of relative mellowness on the part of the Presiding Authority towards their European neighbours. There had not been an active effort to bring in tourists, the way there had been in the Summer of 1890, when someone – I couldn’t discover who – had invited Queen Victoria here, but neither had there been a complete locking down of the borders. The Community was an arcane secret among some Europeans – mostly in England. It was spoken of in hushed meetings late at night with the curtains drawn, rumours of trains and secret paths and rivers whose currents suddenly changed. Rafe, according to Araminta, had fallen in with some of these people, but he had succeeded where they had always failed. He had found a way across the border. Not only that, he had managed to find himself a really nice place to live when he got here.
Rafe’s house was on the corner of Steerpike Square, tall handsome townhouses enclosing a pleasant little formal communal garden. The Head of the Directorate lived a few streets away, which I found amusing in a not-very-funny kind of way.
I walked around to the tradesman’s entrance at the back of the house and rang the bell. The door was opened by a uniformed maid. I took off my cap, told her what I was here for, showed her the brown-paper-wrapped bundle I’d brought with me from town, and she ushered me into a waiting room.
The house was very quiet. The waiting room was panelled in oak and floored with marble in a chessboard pattern. There was a clock on the mantel and I could hear it ticking slowly and calmly. Presently, I heard footsteps outside, the door opened, and Rafe came in, smiling.
“I didn’t expect you so soon,” he said genially, shaking my hand.
“Wednesdays are never very busy,” I told him. “I called someone and they had a copy; I thought I might as well bring it out to you.”
“Well, that’s customer service above and beyond the call of duty,” he said. “I’ll see there’s a little extra in it for you.”
I handed him the book and he undid the string and unwrapped it. Hawley’s book was a weighty tome, full of maps and photographs, and it was written in a dry and pompous style, as if Hawley thought he was passing down the wisdom of the ages. Rafe seemed pleased to have it, though.
“Tell you what,” he said, “do you fancy a cup of tea? It’s a long trip out here from town. I can’t just let you go straight back.”
“I am a bit parched, to tell you the truth,” I said humbly, like a good tradesman.
“Excellent,” he said, and he clapped me on the shoulder. “Good man. Come on upstairs, then.”
We passed through the still air of the house, up a staircase lined with staid landscapes and formal portraits of men and women, to a little drawing room on the first floor, where Rafe settled me in an armchair before ringing for the maid and ordering tea.
“I’m afraid I don’t know your name,” he said to me when she had gone.
“I’m Tommy, sir,” I said, settling deeper into my role. “Tommy Potter.” I couldn’t resist adding, “From Oakford.”
“Oakford? I’ve never been there. Is it nice?”
“It suits me, sir,” I said.
“Good man,” he said. “Excellent.”
The maid returned with a tray on which were a teapot under a knitted cosy, two porcelain cups, and a milk jug and sugar bowl. She placed the tray on the occasional table between us, curtsied to Rafe, and withdrew.
“That’s not a Władysław accent, is it?” he asked me as he poured the tea.
“No, I’m from somewhere else,” I said. “Black, please, sir. Two sugars.”
“Whereabouts?” he asked. “Sorry to pry, but I’m making a bit of a study.”
“Not at all. I’m from Norbury Vale. Up by Parminster.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Parminster. Yes, I’ve heard of it. Never met anyone from there, I’m afraid.”
“There’s not much there, really. Just a quiet little place.”
He didn’t look remotely like Araminta. She had been tall and exotic, outgoing. Rafe seemed very self-contained. Polite, but guarded. His fingers were long a
nd his nails neatly-manicured, and he was wearing a suit which I would have had to work at the bookshop for the rest of my life to afford.
We chatted for a while about books, and it turned out he was on the lookout for a couple more volumes which he had been having trouble tracking down. I got him to write down the titles and authors’ names and promised to see if I could source them for him, and we finished our tea and I made an excuse about having to go back to the shop and do some cataloguing while we were shut, and he showed me downstairs again. Back to the tradesman’s entrance, of course.
As we walked down the staircase, I heard a piano strike up a hesitant tune somewhere higher up in the house.
“My wife,” Rafe explained with a smile. “She’s been learning the piano for almost a year.”
“She sounds pretty expert,” I told him.
He chuckled. “I’ll tell her you said that. She still has a way to go, but she’s getting better every day.”
He let me out, and I went up the alleyway beside the house and out onto the square. Turned left at the bottom and headed back towards the tram stop. To be honest, Rafe’s wife was still a terrible pianist, but she was good enough that I had been able to recognise the tune she was trying to play. It was called ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ and the last time I had heard it had been on television at the house in Highgate.
ONE OF THE secrets of intelligence work is to let the other party do as much of the work as possible. You set up the conditions and let events take their course, and when it’s all over you have whatever it is that you need. That’s the theory, anyway.
I found the books Rafe wanted fairly quickly, but I didn’t contact him about them. I settled back into the shop routine and a week or so later Christine and I were having our elevenses when he came in.
“I was just wondering if you’d managed to make any headway with those books I told you about,” he said apologetically when I’d made the necessary introductions. “I was in the Market Square and I thought I’d pop in...”
“Of course,” I said. “I did put out the word. Let me just check.” I went into the back room and moved some boxes and piles of books about for a couple of minutes, then I picked up one of the books and went back into the shop.
“Arrived today,” I told him. “Sorry, I didn’t have chance to look at our new deliveries. It’s just the one, though.”
He took the volume and grinned. “But you think you’ll be able to find the other one?”
“That’s up to our contacts, I’m afraid,” I said. Christine was looking at me strangely, but I ignored her. “I’ll let you know if it turns up.”
“Excellent. Thank you.”
He paid for the book, Christine wrapped it for him – she was a wizard at wrapping things – and he left again. When he’d gone, she said, “Are you going to tell me what that was all about?”
“New customer,” I told her. “I’m cultivating him.”
“Playing him for a bit of a fool, more like,” she said. “You want to be careful with that one.”
“Why?” I’d done a bit of research at the Library on the other side of the Market Square, and not found a single mention of Rafe, or indeed the surname ‘Delahunty.’
“He’s in with the Presiding Authority,” she said. “Big high mucky-muck, some kind of scientist.” She said it as if it was a faintly grubby word and tasted bad.
“All I know is that he’s got a big house out in Mount Royal and his wife can’t play the piano,” I told her. “And he wants to buy books.”
“Lot of money there, certainly,” she allowed. “Most of it the wife’s.”
“Oh?”
“Old Stanhurst family,” she nodded. “Founding Fathers.”
Stanhurst was the county town of Ernshire, the site of the Whitton-Whytes’ earliest experiments in worldbuilding, somewhere to the West of London. It stood to reason that the Community’s oldest families would come from there. I still wasn’t quite sure how I felt about Rafe, but he didn’t seem to be one to let the grass grow under his feet. He’d been in the Community for six years and he was already a citizen of some status. I wondered if his wife knew where he was from.
“YOU KNOW, ONE does begin to wonder whether there’s any purpose to this,” Michael said. “You’ve been there eight months, and so far not a tickle.”
We were sitting on one of the benches by the pond in Fitzroy Park in Camberton. Michael had a paper bag full of bits of stale bread, which he was throwing at the ducks.
“It was always going to be a long shot,” I told him. “I said so at the time.”
He glanced at me, a languid, almost effete man in late middle age. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I do remember you saying that, now.” He pitched a crust towards the pond; it hit one duck on the head and the others rushed to get to it first in a frenzy of splashing and quacking. “So, do you want to call it off?”
“I’m happy to stay there as long as I have to.”
He chuckled and said, “Yes, I bet you are.” He sent a piece of bread flying out across the water with a flick of his wrist, and smiled at the subsequent stampede of water fowl. “Well,” he mused. “Apart from the fact that it takes you out of circulation, the whole thing isn’t costing us anything. I’ll speak with the Committee, but I’m happy to let it run for another month or so.”
“Suits me.”
“It’s not a holiday, though,” he warned. “Let’s not get the wrong idea about that, all right?”
“I never thought it was. You were the one who said they were going to use the shop as a rendezvous.”
“That was our best intelligence at the time. Fuck off, you greedy bastards!” This last to a pair of moorhens which had decided there was not enough bread for everyone. “They’ve been going out of town lately. There’s a village hall in Trenthithe; they’ve hired it to rehearse a play.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter?”
“No.” I watched the ducks and the moorhens squabbling. “I suppose not.”
“We’ve identified another three members of the group. Lecturers from the University.”
“Lecturers, eh? Shady characters.”
Michael smiled a thin smile. “Geography Department. Cartographers.”
“I thought you vetted them all.” From a certain perspective, maps here – and the people who made them – were the most dangerous things in the world. Maps showed you the shape of the land, showed you how to get from one place to another.
“We do, but sometimes people experience... epiphanies. One can never legislate for epiphanies.”
“Amen to that.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Michael said to the water birds. He tipped the paper bag upside down and shook the last few crumbs out, folded it neatly, put it in his jacket pocket, and brushed his palms together. He stood up. “Call it two months,” he said. “Then you can hand in your notice and we’ll find you something else to do.”
“All right.”
“Something a bit more bloody exciting than selling books.”
4
THE COMMUNITY WAS the most civilised place on Earth, according to Mr Trenchard. Mr Trenchard was my teacher, my tutor in all things Community. Mr Trenchard was almost entirely devoid of anything even resembling patience and he had a fearsome temper. To disagree with Mr Trenchard was to ruin the whole of one’s day.
I had not expected a teacher. I had, from previous experience, expected incarceration and a period of beatings and torture, possibly followed by execution. What I got instead was a room in a perfect replica of a large English country house in the countryside outside the city. Even the atmosphere there was faintly familiar. It reminded me of the clinic where I had been taken that night in Camden; everything looked calm and relaxed, and it was only when you caught sight of the guards patrolling the grounds that you had an inkling that it was anything else but a bucolic retreat.
I was interviewed – ‘interrogated’ was too strong a word for it – by a succession of amiab
le, professional people. Interrogation is a tricky thing; often information flows both ways. These people knew a lot more about the Campus than Charles had; it was obvious from their questions that, if they hadn’t had direct experience of it, then they had at least been briefed by people who did. They wanted to know about Dresden, and about Mundt, and they were curious about the Coureurs. When I wasn’t being interviewed, I walked in the grounds or read in the house’s library. In the evenings, I ate alone in a dining room large enough to seat thirty people. The food was stodgy and unimaginative.
Eventually, without any warning or fanfare, the visits from the amiable professional people simply stopped. I mentally braced myself for whatever was about to happen, but nothing did. My days went on as before, except I had more time to read. I asked one of the house’s staff if there was anywhere nearby I could go fishing, and she said she’d ask, but that was the last I heard of it. I entertained a fantasy of a committee somewhere, meeting late at night in an atmosphere of tension and tobacco smoke, making decisions about my future, but if the committee really did exist it was in no hurry to make up its mind. A month went by. Then two. Summer turned to Autumn; the trees in the grounds decked themselves out in a spectacular display of colours, and then, with the first strong winds of the year, divested themselves of all their leaves.
There was frost on the lawns and along the spindly bare branches of the trees before anyone else came to see me. He was a slightly apologetic man named Michael.
“You must think we’d forgotten all about you,” he said to me in one of the house’s drawing rooms, sitting beside a blazing fire and drinking tea.
“Not for a moment,” I said.
He smiled. “Of course not. You’re in my line of work, aren’t you. A Doctor of Intelligence. What a wonderful title. Almost makes one wonder if there are Doctors of Stupidity.”
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