by Tim Neilson
Tina glanced across the aisle at Anna and James. Anna’s default reaction to life was one of calm acceptance, so she wasn’t showing overt disappointment that her first experiences of England weren’t exactly glamorous. James, on the other hand, always looked forward to visiting London, so despite the fatigue of travel he exuded cheerful anticipation.
At the sight of James’s buoyant demeanour, Tina perked up a little. She began to look more closely at the streetscapes visible through the train window. She noticed that the plant life seemed intensely green and lush, something that in Australia only really occurred in tropical regions. She turned her attention to the buildings. With only a vague knowledge of British history, she was aware, in a general sense, that English civilisation was much older than Australia’s short colonial history. Ever the romantic, she strained her eyes to seek out evidence of a distant past peopled by knights in armour, perhaps, or Vikings. Her reveries were rudely interrupted as the train plunged back underground.
Tina could observe, amid the swirling spectacle of alighting and embarking passengers at each station, the signs indicating the name of each stop. Earl’s Court, then a few stations further along Hyde Park Corner, the next but one Piccadilly Circus, and so on. Some of the names were familiar to her from barely remembered films or television programmes, but what impressed her most was the sheer number of stops, all underground, on their journey.
The announcements over the station loudspeakers, “Change here for …”, suggested that the line along which they were travelling wasn’t the only subterranean part of the rail network. It seemed that the ‘Underground’ was an aptly named, vast work of engineering. If it was indicative of the scale of the city, thought Tina, what would they see when they finally emerged into the daylight.
“Are we going straight to the train station?” Anna asked.
“We can,” James replied, pointing to the map of the line on the wall of the carriage. “This goes to the King’s Cross St Pancras underground station, which is more or less next door to King’s Cross railway station.”
“I wouldn’t mind a break from just sitting around,” Anna continued. “We’ve been travelling for more than 24 hours. I don’t mean we should go on a sightseeing trek or anything like that, but could we get out just for a while?”
“Why don’t we get out a stop early and walk?” suggested James. “Next one’s the last before King’s Cross.”
They all agreed, and at the next halt they manoeuvred their way out and on to the platform, shuffling with the crowd to the short flight of stairs that led up to the lifts. Tina eyed the stairs next to the lift, winding upwards, but having no idea how far it was to the surface she followed James’s lead and waited patiently. Eventually enough passengers in front vanished upwards in the lifts to allow them to get in the next time a lift opened its doors. After a short ascent, and a shuffle amid the swarm exiting through the electronic turnstiles, they stepped out onto the footpath. Tina finally felt that she had really arrived in England.
Not that she experienced any immediate exhilaration. The buildings directly in front of her were as unremarkable as those she’d observed from the train, and the newsagent opening his doors and the produce merchants uncovering their barrows weren’t exotically foreign enough to provoke a thrill. What did attract her attention and give her a real sense of being in a place very different to home was the sky. The sun had made considerable progress on its upwards path while they’d been underground. Tina shouldered her pack and began walking, gazing curiously at the brilliant intensity of the light overhead. She was accustomed to the light in Australia, at a place much closer to the equator than London; to her the sky seemed more white than blue, as if the colour had been bleached out leaving only the raw presence of pure unfiltered light.
She paused, sensing that Anna and James weren’t as close to her as they had been. She looked back and saw Anna not far behind her. Anna gestured backwards, indicating where James was standing. He was at the wall of a sandstone building on the street corner, jabbing ineffectually at something in the wall with an air of perplexity. She noticed the signage on the building identifying it as a bank and deduced James’s problem. She retraced her steps and immediately saw the problem’s cause. An old ATM, operated by metal buttons built into its mounting, had been replaced by a new touch screen model, but the old mounting had been left in place to contain the new unit. James hadn’t twigged and was wondering why the metal buttons weren’t responding to his prodding. Tina wordlessly tapped the screen, which instantly reconfigured to the next phase of operation.
“Oh!” James exclaimed. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Tina replied, only a trifle smugly, as she politely retreated to a discreet distance while James entered his PIN. James might be very good at contracts or companies or whatever it was that he did at his work, she thought, but in every other way he needed a lot of looking after.
Tina had to remind herself that the angle of the sun in the northern hemisphere was very different to what it would be back home, and only then was she able to calculate that they were walking in a roughly northerly direction. Backpacks were much in vogue among pedestrians in the area, and Tina wondered whether they were in the vicinity of a major tourist attraction. They passed a large building with a substantial sign promising visitors a ‘traditional British experience’. Anna merely smiled mockingly, while James promised Anna that they weren’t heading for anywhere quite as bad as that, from which Tina inferred that it wasn’t an authentic antiquity.
Presently they arrived at a T junction, where they paused to wait for the pedestrian lights to facilitate their crossing to the far side of the vast dual carriageway. “There’s a couple of places we’ll have to visit,” James informed Anna, pointing across the road and slightly to the right. “That’s the Crick Centre,” he said, indicating a large, predominantly glass, modern building. “And that’s the British Library,” he continued pointing to a substantial red-brick structure further to the right. Anna wondered whether the amount of time that they were scheduled to spend in the UK would be anywhere near enough to conduct their search properly.
Tina on the other hand felt her heart race as she noticed, further on from where James was directing attention, a tower on the far side of the road, some way off, poking over the intervening tops of the trees lining the road. As they crossed the road and headed towards it, Tina unconsciously hurried in her eagerness to enter it. She hadn’t been certain of what it would really look like, but the huge, multi-storeyed, profusely decorated red-brick extravagance with its tower and its round-arch windows was exactly as she recalled it from the Harry Potter films. She turned to enter it – and was mystified when James kept walking past, with Anna following.
“But I thought you said we were catching the train at King’s Cross,” she protested in disappointment.
“We are,” James replied, slightly puzzled. But then glancing at the building behind Tina he smiled. “That’s King’s Cross in the films,” he explained, “but not in real life. It’s a different train station. Called ‘St Pancras’,” he added.
“Can we look?” begged Tina. James was fairly confident that the platform scenes in the film had been shot at the real King’s Cross, but just in case he was wrong he acceded to the three of them going inside.
They strolled around for a few minutes admiring the semi-cylindrical glass vaulted roof towering massively over the platforms and trains below, before they turned back and re-emerged into the less aesthetically appealing vista of the traffic that clogged Euston Road.
Tina shifted her pack on her shoulders in anticipation of a long hike, and was surprised when James directed them off the footpath only 50 metres or so further on from St Pancras.
No wonder they used the other one for the film, she thought to herself, observing the low slung, functionally designed, and decidedly unremarkable brick façade of the real King’s Cross. A thought struck her.
“Why do they have two stations so close tog
ether?” she asked James.
“The railways were originally private companies,” James explained. “One of them had the concession for the line to the north west,” he said, gesturing back to St Pancras, “and another one had the concession for the line to the north east. It was probably just a coincidence that they were built so close to each other. And when the government took over the railways, I suppose it was just cheaper to keep both going rather than to close one down and put in a whole lot of extra platforms and line capacity in the other one. When they built the underground railway for suburban trains, they only built one station, though – ‘King’s Cross St Pancras’,” he added. “Anyway, Cambridge is more north east than north west, so this is our station,” he concluded, leading the way inside.
To Tina’s surprise the interior of the station was almost as impressive as that of St Pancras, with similar curved, vaulted, glass roofs overarching the platforms. After obtaining their tickets, and taking the obligatory photographs of Tina at the ‘Platform 9¾’ tableau, they boarded the train, settled into the pale blue upholstered seats and awaited departure.
The train slid almost noiselessly through the north of the city, flanked mostly by suburbia no more remarkable than that on the trip in from the airport at the start of the day. Only the looming bulk of Emirates Stadium, decorated with portraits of Arsenal Football Club heroes, was a momentarily noteworthy landmark in the early part of the journey.
A combination of the comparatively mundane view, the effects of the long flight cramped into an economy class seat, the dislocating change of time zones, and the temporary cessation of the need to focus on any activity, could have induced Tina to slide into slumber, especially as the other passengers in the none-too crowded carriage were making no perceptible noise. James had an infallible ability to fall asleep at any hour and in any circumstance, which he did within a few minutes of the train pulling out from the platform. Anna dozed fitfully, occasionally stirring to cast a sleepy eye at her surroundings. However, the sight of the ‘terminus’ for the Hogwarts Express had reinvigorated Tina’s expectations of adventure and she stared vigilantly out of the window searching for more spectacles. As the train left the built-up area, Tina found herself gazing at undulating green fields dotted by distant sheep or bulky cylindrical rolls of hay. She was able to blot out the modern interior of the train and become mentally receptive to a sense of the historic that underlay the visible aspects of the present.
During their preparation for the trip James had vaguely described the buildings in Cambridge as ‘still substantially mediaeval’, which had conjured up in Tina’s mind half-formed images of castles, moats, drawbridges and the other components of scenes of hand-to-hand combat with edged steel. Anna had been deflatingly insistent that the journey would turn out to be uneventful, but Tina’s mind kept harking back to Cam’s message about the menacing tactics employed by his antagonists. Tall battlement-topped towers and subterranean stone passages were, to Tina’s mind, a suitable backdrop for whatever actions she would need to take against the mysterious assailants who were configuring themselves hazily in her imagination …
A hand shook her shoulder.
“Come on, we’re here,” Anna instructed her.
James warned them that it was a long walk to the hotel, but it was such a brilliant morning that Anna and Tina vetoed taking a taxi. James spoke briefly into his phone before leading them away from the brick railway station, past a row of bulky black cabs, and along the footpath beside a gently curving road. Anna remarked to James that she was surprised not to see any ancient spires ahead of them.
“We’re staying outside the old part of town,” James explained, “but we’ll be quite close enough for …” He paused as a couple of other pedestrians passed them, heading in the opposite direction. “… What we’re here for,” he concluded enigmatically. “Not far now,” he added, turning right into a long street lined with shops and cafés. Despite having insisted on walking Anna and Tina weren’t disappointed with that news. The combination of a brisk walking pace and the sun, surprisingly powerful despite its low angle at that far northern latitude, made the walk a noticeably warm one.
Soon a great swathe of green appeared on their right, lined with trees and dotted with participants in a variety of sporting activities, some organised and some most definitely not. At the far end of it stood an imposing building.
“That’s our hotel,” said James.
Tina’s spirits lifted at the sight of such a stately edifice; it looked exactly like the grand historical architecture of England that she had anticipated. This, she thought, would be a fitting backdrop for an adventure.
Anna, meanwhile, was thinking that for a piece of nineteenth century pseudo-romanticism it wasn’t actually too ridiculous.
Whatever critical thoughts Anna had about the external appearance of the building, the thick carpets and varnished wood panelling inside made her more optimistic about its comforts. However, as it wasn’t yet midday she wasn’t surprised when she learned that their rooms weren’t yet ready and she would have to wait a while longer before she could explore her room. They left their heavy baggage in the care of the staff. Anna assumed they would head back outside until check-in time, but James led the way up a flight of stairs. Anna soon guessed why. At the top of the stairs was a lounge decorated in the hotel’s plush late-Victorian style and occupied by two people, one of whom was Cam.
Cam and James had been good friends years before Cam moved to Cambridge, but they hadn’t seen each other for some time. Anna and Tina met Cam on his last trip to Australia and got on well with him. It might have been expected, therefore, that the mutual greetings would have been warm and cheerful, but Cam seemed flustered and ambivalent about their arrival.
“I’m grateful you’ve come all this way to help,” Cam said, “but I still don’t think it’s a good idea. Oh, sorry, this is my friend Claudia Naismith.”
“Are you working with Cam?” asked Anna politely, after the introductions had been completed.
“Not exactly,” Claudia replied. “My rooms in college are on the same stair as Cam’s, but my field’s mediaeval history, so I wouldn’t be any use in his lab. But …” she continued, suddenly sombre and lowering her voice slightly, “I know what’s been happening and I want to help in any way I can.”
“We might as well sit down and decide what to do now you’re here,” Cam suggested. “It’s a lounge so us just being here shouldn’t attract anyone’s attention, and it’s big enough that if we sit over there anyone walking through shouldn’t hear us.”
“No, there’s been nothing recently,” Cam said after they had sat down, in response to a question about whether the threatening incidents had continued. “But I’m assuming my email is still being hacked. I thought about getting the College to check, but then I decided not to. Even if they didn’t detect anything I still wouldn’t know for certain. And if they found something and fixed it, what would stop someone coming back the next day and hacking it again?
“I decided that the best thing to do is to be very careful about what I say online. Hopefully if anyone is watching they’ll think I don’t suspect them and maybe I can convince them that I’ve backed off from the project altogether.
“It occurred to me that I shouldn’t just do that with my emails, but with everything else I do as well. I know I sound like some ridiculous ‘tinfoil hat’ conspiracy theorist. I don’t actually have any reason to think that I’m under any sort of surveillance, but I don’t know that I’m not. It can’t do any harm to take precautions. That’s why I suggested we meet here,” he continued, gesturing round the room.
“If I am being watched, and we’re communicating with each other regularly, and then you’re discovered looking at records associated with Crick’s work in the late 1950s, then whoever’s watching will probably put two and two together.”
James and Anna nodded.
“There should be no face-to-face meetings, and we shouldn’t email you about wh
at we’re doing. Presumably there should be no phone calls about it either,” Anna mused. “It would be good to work out some way of staying in touch.”
“Yes, it would,” Cam concurred. “Email and phone are definitely out, and we don’t want to meet up too often or too obviously, but maybe we could arrange a meeting somewhere private inside the College occasionally. If this place has a fax machine you could use that, like you did when you sent a fax to the laboratory to tell me you were coming. But even if there is a fax machine here, the message might be slow getting to me. No one tends to use a fax these days. The one at the lab only gets used if someone’s receiving a long document on it. Otherwise it only gets checked about once a day at most.”
“What about the office at the College gate?” James asked. “The one for the ‘porters’ or whatever they’re called. We could leave written notes with them, couldn’t we?”
“Yes, but that’ll still be a very slow way of operating if we need to discuss anything,” Cam replied.
“Well, unless one of us gets a brainwave that will have to do for now,” Anna interjected. “Why don’t you tell us about what we should be looking for and where we’re supposed to look.”
Cam produced a well-thumbed piece of paper.
“This is where the trail starts,” he said. “It’s a letter received by a Fellow of Pembroke while he was on holiday, written to him by a colleague here in Cambridge. It’s undated, but there’s a reference to Harold Macmillan, Hugh Gaitskell and a forthcoming general election, which pretty much fixes its date as the middle of 1959.”