Europe at Midnight (18 page)

I lay back on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.
Idiot boy. Embarrassing boy.

St Kat’s had five
computers
, aged obsolete things that still had to be housed in wire cages and padlocked up to stop someone stealing them. The machines had been donated by a local political party, so the residents could look for work. I had seen shops in town selling computers which you operated by waving your hands in the air in front of them and pantomiming typing, but these had keyboards and little plastic devices you moved around on the tabletop.

I went and sat down in front of one and tried to remember Murchison’s instructions for operating it. Murchison had been quite drunk at the time, and it had been a bit of an adventure.

I got the screen switched on, and managed to move the
mouse
so the little arrow shot across the
desktop
. I found the little image to search for things, positioned the arrow, and clicked a button on the mouse. And then I sat, thinking.

I couldn’t get home. Not without a boat, anyway. So what was the next best thing? The next best thing was to stay here and try to get hold of enough money to buy a boat. I searched for kayaks, and it turned out they were very expensive.

Next best thing? I needed a job to earn the money to buy a boat to get home. What skills did I have? I could lecture in Literature, but every book I had ever read was a fake. Everything I knew about the works of Hope and Conan Doyle and Fielding and Dickens was wrong.

What else? I was a Professor of Intelligence. Granted, I had inherited the title rather than working my way up through the ranks, but I had done the job. How much different could intelligence work here be?

I bent forward until my forehead touched the table, and groaned.

I sat up and typed
Whitton-Whyte
into the search box, and the
internet
gave me just one result.

6

T
HE CUTLERY THEY
gave us to eat our meals at St Kat’s was plastic, rendered brittle and almost unusable by repeated washing in water that was far too hot. The kitchen, however, was staffed by trusties – residents who had been at the hostel for a long period and proven themselves trustworthy and helpful until they were basically unpaid members of staff, which was how Barry managed to keep the place going on a very small budget – and they used metal utensils.

One night, after dinner, I took my tray back to the serving counter as usual, and while the trustie’s back was turned I leaned over and took one of the two-pronged metal forks used to serve sliced meat. I popped it up my sleeve and was away before anyone knew what I had done.

Britain had been trying to render itself a cashless society for decades, apparently. The ideal was plastic cards, or mobile telephones, which you could use to pay for purchases. It was sold as more convenient for shoppers, but really it made money not only for the shops but for the big companies which made the plastic cards and the phones and the devices which performed the transactions.

It had only been partially successful, anyway. The English liked their money, liked to know the head of their King was on every coin and note. They were a conservative people. So there were still machines and kiosks in every town where, by using a plastic card, you could withdraw money from your bank account. I went out late one evening and found one of these being used by a well-dressed young woman. I walked right up to her, grabbed her arm, stuck the serving fork into her side hard enough for her to feel the prongs, and shouted over and over again, “Give me your money! Give me your money!”

She gave me the three hundred pounds she had just withdrawn from the machine, and I was off again. There were security cameras everywhere in England, but half of them didn’t work properly or weren’t monitored, so I thought I stood a chance. As I ran down the street, I passed a black overcoat hanging discarded out of a rubbish bin. I grabbed it as I went by, put it on, turned up the collar, headed for the station.

Where two hundred and fifty pounds bought me a one-way ticket to London. It was economy class and I had to stand the whole way because there were no seats, but at least I was out of Nottingham. I had been lucky that the young woman had been in the process of withdrawing so much money; I’d thought I would have to rob several people.

The train was late and it was slow, and it was almost one o’clock in the morning when we pulled into St Pancras. I went to the Budget Hotel next door to the station and spent almost all my remaining money on a room a little larger than a coffin. And there, with the door securely locked, I had my first decent night’s sleep since arriving in England.

The next day, I did some research. Bought a paper book of maps, found the address I had memorised, went back to St Pancras to use one of the public information kiosks to find out about how to get there. I planned to arrive sometime in the early evening, so there would be more chance of finding someone at home. I bought an apple and some water and a little carton of fruit juice, for later, took a couple of advertising leaflets from people handing them out in the street.

Around five o’clock, I consulted the book of maps and walked to a bus stop. When the bus arrived I got on and offered the driver a coin.

“North Finchley, please,” I said.

1

“S
ILLY SOD,
” B
EVAN
chuckled.

“Do we know about these North Finchley Whitton-Whytes?” Jim asked. “I thought the family was supposed to have died out.”

Bevan waved the question away. “Very,
very
distant relatives. We looked at them years ago; I went to have a chat with them, once. He’s a tax accountant, she does voluntary work. They don’t know anything about the Nottinghamshire side of the family, they’ve inherited nothing from them, they have no maps.”

“So Rupert...”

“Fool’s errand,” she said. “He doesn’t understand the internet, poor lamb. He thinks you ask it a question and it gives you the answer you want. He wanted to find the Whitton-Whytes and the search gave him the wrong ones.”

“He really did mean to confront them,” Jim said. “Demand that they help him.” He shook his head. “Imagine how that would have turned out.”

“I’d have just stolen a fucking boat from somewhere and gone back, if I could find the way,” said Bevan. “But he was in shock; he wasn’t thinking straight. He just made one bad decision after another. In a way, it’s a good thing he was stopped when he was. I think he’s quite capable of killing someone, you know, if the circumstances are right.”

H
E WAS SITTING
in a deckchair in the garden, a rug over his knees in case of a sudden chill, eyes closed, head tipped back to let the weak sunlight fall on his face. He opened his eyes as Jim approached.

“Good afternoon,” Jim said. “How are we feeling today?”

“Tired,” he said. He looked thin, pale.
Haunted
, Jim might have said. “I’m not up to another session today, I’m afraid.”

Jim shook his head. “We have all the time in the world.”

He chuckled. “No you don’t. You need as much information as humanly possible, in as short a time as possible.” There was a tablet on his lap; carefully selected bits of world and European history and science had been made available to him, and he was ingesting it in huge gulps. Analysis suggested that he was not interested in one particular subject. He wanted to read about
everything
, and he seemed to be doing it with a kind of horrified fascination.

Jim walked over to where another deckchair stood propped up against a tree. He brought it back and opened it next to the other one. “We don’t want to make you ill,” he said, sitting down.

He had refused to tell them his real name, requesting instead that he be referred to as ‘Rupert of Hentzau,’ although Jim had pointed out that ‘Rudolf of Ruritania’ would have been more accurate. This attempt to bond over the novels of Anthony Hope had foundered on the incontestable fact that Hope had provided happy endings for very few of his characters.

“I have something for you,” Jim said, unzipping the antique leather document case he was carrying and extracting a slim plastic folder containing several sheets of printed paper. He handed them over to Rupert, who read quickly through them.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he said, returning them.

“It’s your asylum request,” Jim told him. “Pro tem, anyway. Citizenship will take a little longer. One has to study for an exam.”

Rupert took the pages back and looked at them again. “It seems... nebulous.”

“It affords you all the protection available,” Jim said. “But under... special circumstances.”

He nodded. “Special circumstances. That’s me.”

“Have you thought any more about testifying before our Committee?”

Rupert shook his head. “I’m not ready for that yet. And neither are you.”

It was one of the few things he refused to step back on. He was happy to be debriefed – on the days when he felt well enough, he could spend five hours at a time narrating his story, and then another five hours while Jim or another interviewer questioned him on the details – but he didn’t want to make face-to-face contact with the Security Services until he had finished. Jim wasn’t entirely sure what he was worried about, but it seemed a minor enough concession, for the moment.

The Service, for its part, seemed content to play everything by ear. Bevan provided Jim with a daily list of questions, many of them based on the previous interview session, which he assumed came from other, so far unidentified, interested parties. He was given no steer on whether he was doing a good or a bad job, and there was no sense of any urgency. Bevan was entranced by the transcripts, and by the recordings of the sessions, and Jim couldn’t understand how she was able to keep herself from marching into the interview room and sitting in. He sometimes thought that, if she ever found herself in Rupert’s company, the first thing she would do would be to lick his face.

“There are things you have to understand, and you have to understand them in order,” Rupert told him. “I’m sorry. I know how committees work; they’ll want to know everything at once and then they won’t understand anything.”

“There’s no rush, old chap,” Jim told him. “Really. They just asked me to ask, that’s all.”

Rupert nodded. “Have they made any progress in trying to find the man who stabbed me?”

“No. I’m afraid he seems to have evaporated.”

“That probably wasn’t hard to do, from what I know of your surveillance systems.”

“We have every available scrap of CCTV footage from Mornington Crescent all the way up to Archway, and along the entirety of the 134 bus route, for two months before the incident,” Jim said. “And we’ve been monitoring everything since then. He hasn’t turned up on any of it, apart from a couple of sections on the evening you were stabbed. That suggests he isn’t local.” He didn’t mention the favours which had been negotiated with the NSA in order to get hold of the software to accomplish this colossal feat of facial recognition, which had, in its munificence, also turned up four hundred wanted shoplifters, a hundred and fifty illegal immigrants, thirty-seven missing persons, eight suspected rapists, and a former peer of the Realm on the run from a fraud conviction. In terms of law enforcement, it had been a rather splendid exercise; in terms of its actual objective, it had been disappointing, to say the least.

“You’re safe with us, you know,” said Jim.

Rupert looked at him. “Am I?”

“Yes. You have my word.”

Rupert put back his head and laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m safer here than I was, perhaps. But
safe
?” He shook his head soberly. “No.”

“That’s slightly... worrying, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Good.” Rupert looked away across the huge gardens of the private clinic, at the discreet guards positioned here and there among the shrubbery. “Good,” he said again. “You have a lot to worry about.”

2

N
UMBER
7, F
ALKLAND
Gardens, was in Notting Hill, but it was in the wrong part of Notting Hill. It caught the edges of Carnival and all that entailed, but it was a stiff walk from the fancy antique shops and £12 million townhouses down beyond Ladbroke Grove station.

Delahunty, Araminta Jane. Age 33. 2.1 from Keele in English Literature. Owner or partner in any number of failed enterprises, from a stall selling vinyl records in Camden Market to, most recently, The Sit Up And Beg Café on Portobello Road, from which her partner had decamped with most of the takings while neglecting to pay the business’s rates and rents. There had been a brief and heated court case, which had been smoothed over by her smarter elder brother, Rafe, of sudden disappearance into another universe fame.

Araminta’s flat was on the ground floor of Number 7. It had its own front door, separate from the one which served the first and second floor flats. Jim had the keys from the letting agents, and some bumph identifying himself as one of said agents, should anyone ask. He let himself in, closed the door behind him and leaned back against it, allowing himself that momentary thrill of walking into someone else’s life.