by David Laws
He turned his attention back to the TV. Below a cacophony of conflicting voices discussing a roadblock in the talks in Brussels, a newsflash was running across the bottom of the screen. The EU, it said, had announced a new list of negotiating red lines: all EC citizens and children living in the UK must have full EC rights in perpetuity; no compensating subsidies were to be allowed to manufacturers following imposition of EC tariffs, and no compensating reductions to UK corporation tax. Plus an exit bill of £150 billion, and £20 billion a year to join the Customs Union as an associate member.
Harry studied the list. It seemed increasingly clear in his mind that undeclared war was breaking out in Brussels. The Europeans weren’t just presenting a position. They were setting out to block every move by the UK. Somehow they must have seen what the British Cabinet wanted and ruled it out in advance. Clearly, they were reading the script of Britain’s negotiating position before it reached Brussels. They had inside knowledge, he decided. They were in the know.
How could this be?
Harry clapped his hands. Obvious! A secret source with inside information – their man in the British Cabinet, the still-unexposed Home Secretary, the Right Honourable Christopher Tresham. It must be. It had to be. Harry was convinced by his own logic. Despite being sworn to Cabinet secrecy, like all ministers, Tresham was surely the source of the leak. The thought was a clincher. All the more reason, then, for Harry to back his hunch and pursue the Blue List story to the last: to expose Tresham’s treachery. Thoughts of his father and an old injustice added force to his change of mind.
Harry considered himself a fighter. He told himself he would not give in, whatever obstacles blocked his path. It was a decision made and there would be no turning back. He didn’t yet know precisely how he was going to do it, but what he did know was that he would chip and chisel away at the rock face of the Stasi’s hidden history until he found the cave where they buried their most disreputable secrets. Then he’d work to expose Tresham and, if fortune favoured him, open up a reckoning for an injustice much closer to home. Many believed the Stasi had never truly been held to account, that most of the interrogators and functionaries of that benighted and brutal organisation had gone unpunished, free to mutter in dark alleyways and plot their return.
But for certain individuals he had yet to identify, Harry had other plans.
Chapter 11
24 days to go
Silently, keeping to the shadows, Harry edged towards his goal, Hector’s yard in an alleyway behind the pub. He concentrated on keeping well away from the street lights in Cannon Street so as not to alert any watcher, deliberately placing himself in peril, testing himself against Erika’s as-yet-unseen adversaries, the first move in his new commitment to running down Tresham’s dark secrets.
Of course, there was another reason. He wanted to please her. He wanted her on board. He didn’t want to lose her again.
Using a parked van as cover, he dodged into the brewery yard by the Old Cannon pub, confident the tall wall at the end of the building would shield him from view. Then he made for the rear of the premises. As he placed one foot on a wooden bar, preparatory to jumping the back fence, he wondered about the nature of Erika’s ‘nasties’. If they knew their business they’d be staking out his flat just along the street. And if they were the true professionals she thought they were, the watcher would be focused on the inside of the pub, probably waiting for Harry to take his place in the usual corner with his favourite tipple: Gunner’s Daughter, brewed on the premises.
His advantage: he hoped to keep them looking in the wrong place.
By now he had reached the alleyway and put an arm over the top of a head-high gate to release the latch, catching a strong whiff of fresh creosote. Wrinkling his nose, he gave it a gentle nudge and silently thanked his good fortune that his friend had oiled the hinges. They opened without the usual squeak and he trod lightly down the path, key in hand as he approached the shed.
The Triumph Bonneville was one of the few possessions Harry truly treasured. He was not a materialist, had no desire to show off, but the Bonneville was different. He’d ridden it with pride and pleasure across Europe, especially in the East of Germany during his student days. Because his flat had no garden or yard he’d had to keep Hector’s pints topped up to make use of the shed. Inside, however, all was darkness – and junk.
He had to squeeze alongside a lawnmower to push his machine off its stand, fumbling in the darkness and addressing an angry whisper to the absent Hector: “For God’s sake, man, why put a toolbox and your old washing line on my saddle?”
The publican’s programme of improvements had not yet reached the shed’s interior. Harry had to use his torch to disentangle the bike. He’d only parked it there a week back, but already there were chairs, a bicycle, a garden vacuum and paint tins blocking the floor, all scatted and dumped in haste.
The junk cleared, Harry hesitated, just for a moment, before finally committing himself. He took a deep breath. Initially, he had thought going to Erika’s cottage utterly foolish, but Erika had been adamant; she needed to retrieve money, a diary and compromising material before any watcher decided to break in and take possession.
Harry had objected strongly: “Impossible! You can’t go back, you said so yourself. They’re still staking out your place, ready to pounce. Just waiting for you to show up.”
His new determination changed all that.
He propped open the door and eased the Triumph past the mower and chairs, up the path, through the gate and into the alleyway. Close to the exit, he leaned the machine against the fence. The passage was an anonymous place, narrow, slippery underfoot and smelling of cats. He took a peek along the street and all, as far as he could see, was clear. He sat astride the bike, switched to ignition, opened the petrol taps, tickled the carburettor primer and gave her a kick.
A bronchial wheeze of cogs and pistons ripped through the quiet of the night. That was the trouble with this hour. No background noise from the street. He tried again. A cough, an explosive stutter, a dying moan.
“Don’t let me down, old girl, not this time!”
Harry was just about to bank on third time lucky when a face appeared at the end of the alleyway. And it wasn’t Hector’s.
“Can I help?” A crooked smile, bear-like arms, a black raincoat.
Harry attacked the kick-start again and got lucky. The Bonneville roared, he let in the clutch and twisted the throttle.
The figure in the raincoat just had time to step aside to avoid a collision as Harry shot out of the alleyway, on to Cannon Street and away into a noisy distance.
The road out to Great Barton was the only one he could take, and he kept his eye on the rear-view mirror. So much for the first of the watchers!
There was little traffic in the town at night and the bike was made for cutting corners. He gave the petrol tank an affectionate pat. The sheer poetry of this machine was a delight. He had neglected the pleasures of speed and the open road for too long. It was good to feel again the familiar vibrations. He loved the staccato throb of the big motor, luxuriated in the feel of the wind on his face. It reminded him of flying.
A momentary doubt spoilt this pleasure as he asked himself again about the logic and wisdom of what he was doing. A touch of housebreaking, even with the owner’s permission, was a novel addition to his CV. And then he wondered about the people he was going up against. A bunch of latter-day Stasis, willing to commit to an operation on foreign soil? Sure, they wanted the Blue List back, but the size, commitment and persistence of their stake-out seemed to suggest something more.
The telegraph poles flashed rapidly by as he checked the mirror. When there were still no trailing headlights he steered left off the main road and left again into a lane, cut the motor and drifted noiselessly to a stop behind a hedge four hundred yards short of Erika’s cottage.
All was dark and silent, but
he was sure the watchers were present, somewhere out there in the darkness, alert and waiting for someone like him to show up. He took from his pannier a large plastic bag containing a garden trowel. “No time for gardening, Harry,” Erika had told him before leaving, but he simply smiled and said nothing.
He waited a few minutes to get his night vision, then set out. It was hard going. He stumbled uneasily along the rear of some back gardens where a ploughed field abutted the hedge, tripping several times when his shoes caught on enormous clods of soil the farmer had yet to till.
He passed a wood-beamed Tudor property, a sprawling bungalow and a ramshackle ’30s semi with pigs grunting in a shed. The stink made him want to retch. Then, a little further on, he picked up another smell. Someone had a wood burner going. The full ambience of rural Suffolk.
Harry ploughed on, thinking of Erika waiting anxiously for his return to the Grange. He wanted to impress her, determined not to let her go again, even though their current status was unresolved. Others, he knew, had questioned the relationship. On his last visit to his brother’s place in Birmingham, his sister-in-law Jane had been direct to the point of bluntness: “When, Harry, are you going to find yourself a sensible woman?”
“Sensible?”
“Yes, sensible. You always have such crazy girlfriends. This last one… well!” She shrugged.
“Erika is different,” he said.
“Different? Oh yes.” Her tone was acid. “You’ve certainly got different.”
Harry approached a line of farm labourers’ cottages, once housing five families, now divided into three. Erika’s was the one showing no lights and no smoke from the stack. Still clutching his plastic bag and trowel, he went over the fence and down the path, key at the ready. He glided to a window, cupping his hands around his eyes to peer inside for signs of illicit occupation.
Then he dropped back into her vegetable patch, heedless of the lettuces and sprouts, scooping up the fine tilth of her soil and filling the bag half full, tying the top in a knot. He waited, listening, alert for whispers, clicks, unintended rattles, peeps or beeps from phones.
It was as he crouched silently in the garden that another worrying thought hit him, something else that didn’t quite add up: what were these people really up to? He tried to think through Tresham’s motive for helping the EC. What was in it for him – or his Stasi friends? Why take sides on Brexit?
He sat in the darkness for more minutes than he intended, wrestling with these questions without finding answers. Finally he used the key to enter the back door, having memorised the map Erika had drawn for him and his checklist: diary, money, schoolbooks. Oh, and she had added coffee – decent coffee, mark you, not that instant sort. Typical Erika priority, he thought.
The first task was easy: the kitchen-table drawer was unlocked and the diary and passports the first things he grasped. He flashed his torch around, expecting a butler sink and antique furniture. Instead, scrubbed surfaces and glass-fronted cupboards, the contents betraying their origin: the upmarket kitchen shop on the Haymarket. He expected the smell of coal; instead, lily of the valley.
He paused in the hallway, listening for signs of hidden watchers, before mounting the stairs, the risers creaking despite his best efforts at a light touch. He eased open the door to the big bedroom, shone in his torch and located the boiler cupboard. The doors of these things always screeched with disuse and he flinched at the noise while feeling behind the tank. For a few seconds he panicked. No sign! Someone had found it before him – until his fingers touched a dust-covered, cobwebbed envelope. Inside he could feel the crinkle of currency.
Next room, the boy’s. He expected a typical boyish mess. Clothes strewn about the place, a chaos of disordered living. None of that. Pristine order. OCD tidy, he decided, and quite unbelievable for an eleven-year-old boy. Everything was in its place, the books arranged in piles of three. Harry knew the lad was odd, but at least that made finding the stipulated schoolwork easy. He tucked the diary, passports, money and school stuff into his jacket pockets, ready to slip out of the house unobserved, his presence hopefully undetected. He’d already told Erika to forget about the hairbrush, black jumper and cute five-year-old picture of her son. “I won’t get the chance to go through your wardrobes!”
As he stepped back into the hallway he was blinded by a sudden light. Momentarily dazzled, he threw up a hand to shield his eyes and glimpsed the shape of a figure by the top of the stairwell.
“An intruder!” said a gruff voice. “A thief!”
Something odd about the intonation, but there was no time to ponder the point.
“Time to call the police!” the voice snapped again.
Harry swallowed, recovered and forced himself to speak. “Hardly,” he said. “This is my friend’s place. I’m just collecting some stuff. School books and the like. In fact, I’m wondering what you’re doing here.”
Harry blinked in the starkness of the electric light but was able to make out the figure before him: at least six foot, wearing a heavy black jumper and blue bobble hat. What was intriguing was the gap in the bottom set of teeth. He didn’t exactly introduce himself, but Harry had already decided on an instant name to fit the body shape: Bruno.
The figure was pointing. “You’re Harry Topp. Recognised you. We’ve been looking for you.”
“Oh yes?”
“You’ve got something that belongs to us and we want it back.”
Bruno was pointing at the bag in Harry’s hand. Harry held it out questioningly. “Oh, this?”
“Yes, that! “We only want what’s ours. Much the best for you just to hand it over.”
Harry gave the appearance of weighing up the pros and cons of resistance. There was a certain inevitability about the man’s assumption: that the bag contained the Blue List and this was what Harry had been retrieving from some secret hiding place. An assumption Harry wanted to foster as he licked his lips and shrugged, slumping in apparent resignation, acting defeated. “OK then, in the circumstances, I suppose I have to accept… you win.”
“Very good. Wise decision…”
Bruno shifted his gaze from the bag back to Harry, apparently surprised at this unexpected capitulation. That’s why he didn’t see the thing coming. The thing. Harry’s soil-filled sock, a brutish club, a weapon. Harry sighed and stepped forward in an apparent gesture of surrender, but turned his body fractionally to the right to mask the movement of his arm backwards to get a good swing. The bag arced through the air as Harry catapulted it forward and launched it like giant punch into the man’s temple just above his left eye.
The blow caught Bruno off balance at the same moment that Harry vaulted the banisters, landing awkwardly halfway down the staircase, but propelling himself forwards and downwards in a great rush. He managed to maintain his balance until he reached the ground floor and crashed with a breathless smack into the front door.
He heard the glass crack, then scuffling noises emanating from the floor above.
Bruno was getting to his feet.
Harry winced at a pain in his left knee but still made a limping dash for the back door before any movement took place upstairs. He shut the door behind him with a crash and locked it from the outside, then hobbled up the garden, dived over the fence and stumbled in a painful, panting lope back along his clod-strewn route towards the Triumph. Passing the pig shed he heard noises behind him – a door shutting, a shout, a window rattling, voices – but knew not to look back.
Keep going! His breathing was as painful as his left knee, but he kept running. He’d been lucky. Only one watcher, Bruno, had been in the house but once alerted the others would scour the area. He had to make it to the bike before they could organise a proper search. His shoes were picking up more and more of the clinging soil as he went, his pace slowing, his legs getting heavier. Past the bungalow now, then the Tudor place, and finally on to the lane where he kicke
d at his shoes to free them of mud as he jogged along the road.
With a great final heave he burst into his hiding place behind the hedge and stopped. His mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
The space where he’d parked the bike was empty. No Triumph Bonneville on which to make his escape.
Chapter 12
24 days to go
Erika was on edge. Would Harry succeed in retrieving her things or would he be caught? What then?
She peered out of her upper-floor lookout, anxious for the first sign of his return. He was determined all right, intent on success once his mind was set on some task, even if at times he was a little naive. Her mouth twisted into a wry grin. She’d entertained him with some pretty tall stories of her past. Her favourite was the old aristocrat. Well, it was partly true.
She was illegitimate, she knew that – her ghastly stepmother had told her that in a rage one day – but Erika liked to embellish, so she gave vent to her imagination and painted a picture for Harry of a father figure with a ‘von’ in front of his name, whom she had in reality never met but who came to life in sudden, explicit and splendid detail: his blood-red face, his wrinkly felt hat, loden coat, brown cord woodman’s trousers and a lazily smoking old pipe. So perhaps, she thought, she had met him after all, displaying a fine confusion of fact and fiction. However, there were some parts of her reality she’d tried to banish to history, that she’d rather not remember. Old nightmares had a way of returning. Once again she told herself they’d never given her a fair chance at life. Damn her parents! Damn the Stasi!