‘As for me, I liked to make wings so I could fly. That was the only good part. If I had known what happened to our victims, the sources, I don’t think I would have done it. But they only told us that the Huns we killed would die and go to Summerland, as per usual. It wasn’t until our first proper scrap that we found out for ourselves how it really worked. And once we had a taste of it, it was too late to stop.’
Joe refilled his glass, drained it and took a deep breath. Rachel stared at him. She had seen the newsreels, of course, and had a vague notion of how ectoplasmic weapons worked, but had simply assumed they were powered by the energy released when a soul left a dying body. Horrific, but no more so than poison gas or artillery. Only it sounded like that was not the whole story.
Finally, Joe continued.
‘Those poor Hun kids. They died twice, first on the battlefield and then we fed on their souls until only the soul-stones were left.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Sometimes they even got us going with some of our own boys. Deserters, usually. That was the worst part.’
Rachel had heard rumours that ‘primers’ had been required for ectotanks before battle, soldiers sacrificed to power the weapons, but it was a different thing to hear it from Joe. And if they completely annihilated enemy souls—that went completely against the Dimensionists’ claims of humane warfare. She felt incandescent anger, suddenly. It would cause a scandal if it ever got out. Maybe it needed to get out.
‘That is one reason you never talked about it, isn’t it?’ she whispered. ‘You were told to keep quiet.’
Joe looked ashamed. ‘We all agreed that you could never understand it if you weren’t there. It was the only way out of that hell of mud and guts and worse—what else were we supposed to do?’
‘I am not judging you, Joe. Thank you for telling me. Please go on.’
‘The other reason I never talk about the war is I don’t remember that much. You get lost in the flood when the souls come. There is this rush, like the best rugby match I ever played times ten, running forward, getting in a scrum, wrestling away the ball. And the noise, the gunshots, this howl that fills you. Here, back home, it is always too quiet. And I feel so weak. This is probably what it’s like to be a ghost. Everything just passes through you.’
‘You never seemed like a ghost to me,’ Rachel said. ‘Stay here. You don’t have to go back to all that.’
‘Rachel, I do. Not for our boys, not for duty. But because I miss it. Because it’s too hard without it.’
Rachel stared at him. His eyes were red. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.
‘There you have it,’ he said.
She tried to feel sorry for him, tried to understand this had been done to him, he could not help it. But he was still choosing war over her.
The main course, braised veal, sat untouched between them, getting cold. The smell made Rachel nauseous.
She had thought herself so clever, so very modern, persuading him to open up, to talk about his emotions. Just because a traitor had tricked her into feeling better about herself. She had been a fool.
She stood up and flung her napkin to the floor.
‘No, I won’t have it,’ she shouted. ‘I will not have it. It’s not fair.’
A soft muttering spread across the tables as the other diners turned to look at her.
‘Rachel, please, sit down,’ Joe said in hushed tones.
She could barely look at him. But she could not bear to storm out, with everyone looking. Avoiding that had been the whole point.
She took a deep breath and sat back down.
‘This is what I was afraid of, Rachel,’ Joe said. ‘It’s why I didn’t want to tell you.’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Wednesday next week. I can stay at the club until then.’
I don’t want you to, Rachel wanted to say, but the words did not come out. She picked at the edge of the tablecloth again.
‘It’s no trouble, really,’ Joe said. He was putting up a brave front now. ‘I’ll come by and say goodbye before I go.’
Joe spoke to the maître d’ quietly, apologising for the disturbance, slipped him a note, paid the bill and left. Rachel sat alone, surrounded by untouched food. In spite of the candlelight and conversation inside, the mosaic window looked dull and dark.
* * *
A drowsy, half-dressed Susi let Rachel into Max Chevalier’s flat half an hour later. Most of the animals were asleep and Rachel waited in the freezing conservatory while the girl sent an ectomail to Max, who was somewhere in the Summer City.
Finally, Susi wheeled in the Edison doll.
‘I met with Bloom today,’ Rachel said, without preamble. ‘The situation has changed. Tell me: if we give Bloom something, chickenfeed, whatever, how confident are you that we can track him to a meeting with his handler?’
‘In all honesty, it is difficult to say,’ Max replied. ‘He could be using dead drops. We will watch him, of course, but it will be hard to get evidence unless we actually catch him with a handler. It will have to be something big, something urgent, something that requires an in-person meeting. But you really should calm down, Mrs White. Has something happened?’
Rachel took a deep breath. She had not stopped to think and did not want to stop now. What mattered was preventing Bloom from doing anything that would prolong the situation in Spain.
She had never thought it possible to be jealous of war.
‘It’s Spain. We can’t wait any longer. The stakes are too high. Bloom asked me for a file from the Registry. What I want is a plan to collar him if he gets it.’
‘Mrs White, this is most unwise. You want him to trust you. If we act too quickly, all our work will be for nothing. You don’t want to short-circuit the process, believe me.’
‘Bloom is under pressure. You said it yourself. He is desperate for this file, I know it.’
‘Are you sure there isn’t something else affecting your judgement? I hate to suggest this and contradict myself, but if there is a Summer Court investigation going on, should we not consider working with them?’
Rachel shook her head. ‘As soon as there is even a hint that the target might be Bloom, the investigation will be shut down from above, just like what happened to me. No, we have to get evidence. Besides, I told you—I don’t trust Roger.’
The Edison doll’s eyes were unreadable.
‘Very well, Mrs White. There is a stage where the agent’s instincts must take over. I will get my teams ready to hunt.’ He made a small trilling sound. ‘One more thing, though. You must be ready to shield your emotions better this time. You will be hiding something, and it will be very obvious to him. Think thoughts that you feel guilty about. Do something naughty beforehand if your conscience is clean.’
There was a click and the voice was gone, but the room’s dim electric light twinkled in the doll’s nyctoscope eyes, like the ghost of amusement.
18
CHICKENFEED, 1ST DECEMBER 1938
The Old Registry of the SIS was in St Albans, a quiet town known for its Roman ruins twenty miles north of London. That was where Rachel had started her Service career during the war, putting on a simple uniform and joining the ranks of female clerks and analysts who tried to make sense of radio intercepts and aetheric maps compiled by spirit scouts.
They had worked long days and nights, slept at first in temporary lodgings the locals provided, and then in hastily erected barracks. In the rare moments when the relentless pace of typing, translation and filing slackened briefly, they all trailed to the King Harry, a squat Victorian pub with low-hanging beams that they usually filled to the brim.
Rachel found herself there again now, on a Thursday night. This time, the crowd was farmers and local workmen in felt caps and muddy boots, but the smell of spilled beer and burned wood was the same. While waiting at the bar for the pink gin she had ordered, she could almost close her eyes, smell the hoppy air and feel seventeen again, remember Marjorie and Elizabeth and Wen
dy and John and Dilly waiting for her at the battered corner table, all ready to fight the Hun with their razor wit and the joyous idiocy that belongs to the young.
But when the gin arrived and she turned around carrying the small tray it was served on, only old Colonel Bill Woodfield sat there, waving at her unsteadily, his face already beetroot-red; and her mission was to steal one of the colonel’s jealously guarded files for a Soviet spy.
‘It is good to see you, Rachel,’ Woodfield said, after they had toasted and Rachel had told the barman to keep the gin coming. ‘Glad you thought to swing by while visiting Felix Cowgill’s boys.’
The Winter Court’s Iberian Section was also located in St Albans, although it was now considered to be something of a retirement home for rotten apples. As such, it had made perfect sense for Rachel to drop in for lunch and entertain the notion of working for the Section’s chief Cowgill, formerly in charge of Section V. He also belonged to Harker’s informal club of ex-Colonial officers.
‘Well, Colonel, I am very glad you still remember me.’
‘How could I forget? You had such bright eyes. Still do. I knew you would go far.’
Rachel sighed. ‘I am not entirely sure you were on the money, Colonel.’ She briefly related what she considered the official version of her story—a policy disagreement with Harker and an unfair demotion.
‘That is rotten luck, that is,’ Woodfield said. ‘But your star will rise yet, mark my words. You are not going end up an old drunk like me, only good for arranging old paperwork. Sure, every now and then, someone comes here from the city and I help them find things, and sometimes those things are even important. I am starting to look forward to passing over and have done my best to speed things up, but the old liver just keeps ticking.’ He poked his generous paunch.
‘Would you mind if we popped in to see the old place, after a few more?’ Rachel asked. ‘When things are uncertain, well, it is sometimes nice to come back to where things started.’
If Woodfield’s old habits had not changed, a few more gins would take him to near-unconsciousness, and Rachel would be able to go through the old files while he slept blissfully in his office. As plans went, it was not the most sophisticated, but for some time now, the most stringent security measures had been reserved for the Summer Court.
Woodfield looked at her sharply. ‘You are after something now, Rachel, aren’t you? I played the fool around you girls, you know, just for fun, but that does not mean I am one, and you are all grown up. What’s this about, then?’
Rachel sighed. She felt ashamed for trying to get the old man in trouble. Yet her mind was automatically compiling strategies. She could blackmail him: there had been rumours about Woodfield and the girls, back in the day. She could threaten to get him fired by claiming that he felt her up while they were having a drink for old time’s sake. But looking at the clear blue eyes in the dark, gnarled face, the words stuck in her throat.
She sipped her gin and put it down.
‘You are absolutely right, Colonel,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I am looking for an old file that I don’t have the classification to access. A joint Army and Military Intelligence file, from ten years or so ago.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? What do you need it for?’
Rachel hesitated. ‘It’s better if you don’t know the details. It has to do with Spain. But I don’t want to get you in trouble—I will sign the book and everything.’
Woodfield chuckled. ‘Rachel, you can see what I’ve become. Do I look like I care?’ He leaned forward and the golden fillings in his teeth glinted in the light from the pub’s fireplace. ‘I have three brothers in the afterlife, good lads, all went in the war. I never had much of a chance to be brave myself. But you have the look of a person doing something that scares her and is doing it anyway. So if I can help you by digging up some old file, that means more to me than whether you have clearance. Is that understood?’
He smelled of an old man’s sweat and minty toothpaste, but at that moment Rachel could have kissed him.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and ordered another round of gin.
* * *
Rachel accompanied Colonel Woodfield to the old, shuttered manor house that now archived the papers of every SIS agent, countless files on Service-funded research programmes and cross-referenced research materials going back to the Service’s founding in 1908. She expected to see rooms overflowing with stacked paperwork, but instead, the place was spotless: rows upon rows of neatly organised filing cabinets.
‘I may be a sloppy drunk,’ the colonel said, ‘but I take being a librarian very seriously.’
Still, it took them half an hour to locate the CAMLANN file, a thick brown folder tied shut with a cord. Rachel opened it and glanced at the contents. Apart from the summary and budget pages, the rest was in cipher—neat groups of meaningless letters, pages and pages of it. At the end, there were a few photographs. She was not quite sure what they were, maybe copies of nyctoscope images, but they looked like X-rays, with indistinct black and white shapes.
‘Thank you,’ she told Woodfield.
Woodfield smiled. ‘I hope it is of some use to you, my dear. I look forward to seeing you at the King Harry again when you bring it back.’
* * *
It was long past midnight when Rachel made it home to St John’s Wood. The house was cold and dark.
She had a sleepless night ahead with the CAMLANN file: she would do her utmost to find out if it qualified as chickenfeed, and if possible, censor it before surrendering it to Bloom.
She holed up in her study, wrapped in a blanket with a cup of steaming tea, and fought both the fatigue and the drowsy numbness of the pink gin. The finches were asleep in their cage, curled up into tight feathery balls right next to each other. Rachel felt jealous, thinking of Joe and cold winter nights, lying cocooned under the sheets with a hot water bottle radiating at her feet and Joe’s warm, solid curve against her chest and belly.
He would ship out to Spain in a few days. During the Great War, she was too young to really fear for her friends who were sent to the front, and they tended to view it as a jolly adventure when they headed overseas. Now, death itself held far fewer terrors than back then—but she was more concerned about the danger to Joe’s soul. It would almost be better if he met an early end at the hands of the Republicans rather than be consumed by the thing that the RAF had turned him into.
But there was still a way for her to help him by catching Bloom. Maybe she could request a transfer to the Iberian Section, if things worked out.
She shook her head and tried to concentrate, spread the pages out on the floor and kneeled amongst them, trying to look for patterns. The ciphertext was obviously gibberish without the key—although Bloom might be able to crack it, having spent time at the Government Aetheric Codes and Ciphers School earlier in his career. There were schematics for some kind of deep-kata nyctoscope, an aetheric observatory built in the Summer City. Presumably it had been used to take the X-ray like images, although what they showed she had no idea. There were black branching lines against grey, and countless tiny white patches that could have been luz stones.
On the whole, it felt much more like a science project than anything to do with Spain. Still, it was difficult to judge whether she was about to give away something related to a haphazard, defunct programme or expose a key operation.
She was lost in thought when the room grew even chillier than before and the old ectophone in the corner rang—three metallic tinkles of a bell in rapid succession.
‘Hullo, hullo! Is Rachel there?’ said a cheery female voice.
‘Yes, Mother,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s me.’
* * *
Rachel’s mother, Henrietta Forbes-Smith, had been dead for a decade.
She had exercised her euthanasia right early when the lumps first appeared in her breast and had passed away in the place she loved the most, even more than India—the garden of their house in Ealing
, sitting in a folding chair in warm May sunlight, the morphine drip in her arm. She had one last look at the Hinton Cube diagram of the Ticket in her lap, and then held on tight to Rachel and Rachel’s father, one with each hand. She leaned back, let out a satisfied sigh and was gone so quickly Rachel had to touch her smiling face to realise that her mother was dead.
Whenever Rachel felt as if she had forgotten her mother’s face and smell, she thought about the hand in her own: small, like hers, red and dry, with tiny cuts and callouses everywhere, black dirt under the fingernails, a gardener’s hand. It always brought back the rest.
They waited anxiously an hour until sundown, like they were supposed to, and then Rachel’s father fumbled with the tuning dials and fussed over the hiss of static and the howling noises of the passing dead attracted by the aetheric device’s operation.
And then there it was, her mother’s voice in the speaker, low and warm.
‘Hullo, hullo!’ she said brightly. ‘Did you know there are flowers here? Who could have imagined?’
* * *
Rachel sat down in the big armchair in front of the ectophone. It was an old-fashioned model the size of a wardrobe, and did not have a nyctoscope screen like some of the newer models Mr Baird’s company made.
‘How are you?’ she asked distractedly, holding the heavy Bakelite handset between her chin and shoulder, trying to keep studying the CAMLANN papers in her lap.
‘I am still dead,’ her mother said, ‘although it has been so long since you called that I could have been resurrected by the Second Coming in the meantime.’
‘Mother, I have been busy.’
‘I am sure you have.’ Henrietta paused. ‘You look sad. I can see your soul from here, you know, all tangled and spiky, like thorns.’
Rachel swore under her breath. Dealing with Bloom should have taught her how visible her mental state was to the spirits.
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