by Tim Neilson
“This one’s not going to Victoria, it’s going to Pimlico,” Anna announced loudly.
“No, it isn’t,” Tina protested equally loudly, just as the two jewel-encrusted heavies tried to clamber past her.
“Watch who you’re pushing,” Anna snapped at them with well-feigned anger, obstinately standing her ground in front of them.
“Get out of the way, we want to get on,” one of them snarled. At that point Tina jumped back down onto the footpath, insisting that it wasn’t the right bus.
“Alright,” Anna responded ungraciously, and followed Tina. The two men jumped in, the doors closed, and the bus moved off, leaving Anna and Tina behind. And also, James, who had followed his instructions admirably, going straight to the front of the bus as soon as he was aboard, and leaving by the front doors as soon as he saw all other passengers, including his pursuers, were inside. He jogged past Anna and Tina, glancing cheerily, but obeying his instructions by not even breaking stride, gliding easily back through the UCL gates to put as much distance and as many divergent routes as possible between him and the stalkers before they could get off the bus and double back.
Anna had no doubt he would complete his assigned tasks by making his way back to the ground floor café at the British Library. It had been a counterintuitive choice for the place to make their rendezvous, Anna knew, but she figured that James’s pursuers would assume he had finished his work at the Library, plus there was a kind of double bluff in James hiding somewhere they had seen him already.
All in all, a very satisfactory piece of work, Anna thought to herself.
But Tina didn’t think so. She’d been unable to resist glancing at the bus as it pulled away. She’d enjoyed the sight of their two antagonists staring in consternation at James as he ran back past. But she had been less pleased to spot them changing their gaze to peer suspiciously at her and Anna.
“Let’s get out of here,” she urged.
“What’s wrong?” asked Anna.
“Those guys on the bus. I reckon they’re suspicious of us. We’d better get away in case they come back here after they … I don’t believe it,” Tina gasped.
“What?” Anna demanded.
“Two men in suits,” Tina responded, quietly and without any gesture. “On the other side of the road. They watched James go, but now they’re watching us.”
“Tina …” began Anna.
“Trust me,” Tina insisted, and Anna knew better than to reject her sister’s advice on any matter of that type. She started strolling casually south, towards an intersection where a smaller road crossed the street which they were on.
“I wonder if that bookshop across the road on the corner has a second exit?” she murmured to herself.
“What is it with you people and books?” Tina hissed with suppressed exasperation. At the intersection, instead of crossing to the bookshop, she swung left and headed away militantly. A variety of emotions and impulses swept through Anna’s mind, but almost instantly she decided she had no choice except, just this once, to follow Tina’s lead.
If there had been time to reflect on the matter, Tina might have admitted her decision wasn’t obviously a good one. The side street she’d chosen led into an open plaza, thinly populated because it was, in essence, just a very broad section of road. Worse still, it had no obvious facilities for evading a pursuer. Not far along the footpath they reached a small service road, leading back into the morass of buildings comprising the main UCL campus. It was a dead end and Anna couldn’t tell whether there were any suitable pedestrian exits from it, so she decided to press on straight ahead. Across the street to the right, past the bookshop, there was a broad, long, straight road – too broad, too long, and with no obvious means of making an escape. All the while, Anna fought an urge to stare backwards. There were enough people around the bookshop and the footpaths that any sort of attack seemed highly unlikely, but Anna’s lack of information about their antagonists left her with a tingling feeling in her back.
At the far end of the footpath they were on, the road continued straight ahead, but there was also a side road heading left, back to the north. The side road was largely hidden behind a vast sandstone church on the corner, which they were approaching, but Anna could see that across the side road was a garden square, and judging by how far along the road straight ahead the greenery extended, she guessed the square would be quite extensive to the north as well as to the east.
“Slow down,” she murmured to Tina.
“Stop, like we’re looking around for something,” Tina whispered back. “I want a look at them.”
Anna did, too. They ambled to a halt, glanced at their phones as if checking a map, and gazed vacantly around. The two suited men were a fair way back, obviously hoping to remain undetected.
“Slowly,” Anna instructed, “and keep looking round. Make like we’re planning to keep going straight ahead, but when we get to the corner, be ready to run to the left.”
They drifted along the footpath, keeping to the right, close to the road, gesturing straight on as if pointing to a destination in sight some distance to the east, but glancing casually behind themselves occasionally, a tactic which Anna was glad to observe did seem to have encouraged their trackers to hang back even further than they had been. She dawdled to the corner, Tina strolling alongside, and …
“Now.”
They took off up the footpath to their left. Anna’s eyes darted along the fence surrounding the garden, looking for an entrance with good cover nearby. However, before she selected an entrance into the garden on their right, she noticed a brick and stone tunnel into a building to their left, leading in a direction doubling back on the route that they had been strolling along next to the plaza. She could see a number of doorways leading off the tunnel, and at the far end, around yet another left-hand turn, she could see what she judged to be natural light. That last left turn couldn’t lead back to the plaza, Anna reasoned, since the tunnel wasn’t very long, and would probably run straight up to the massive old church. But perhaps it was some sort of lane leading back to the service road they’d passed very soon after Tina’s rebellion had sent them eastwards away from the bookshop.
She grabbed Tina and pulled her towards the tunnel. A fraction of a second’s hesitation crossed Tina’s face, but she knew better than to cause a delay by arguing. They plunged in. There was a door on the left immediately inside the tunnel but it had no external handle. There were other doors further ahead, but Anna and Tina had an instinctive fear of delaying to examine any other inaccessible door while still being visible from the street, so they raced ahead, reached the end of the tunnel and swung left into a further short passageway, out of sight of the road, and towards the light, which they hoped indicated a means of escape.
The light was indeed natural light, but it didn’t come from any exit.
The Chaplain walked out of the door of his office, just near the altar, light streaming from the high windows on the long side of the chapel, illuminating two young women who appeared to have very recently arrived through the main entrance at the back. They seemed in a hurry. They were both dark-skinned, not so much as to appear non-European, but perhaps heavily suntanned, he thought. One of them nudged the other and pointed at the altar. They both bent slightly at the knee, bobbed their heads and made the sign of the cross on themselves. Mediterranean by descent, perhaps, the Chaplain thought to himself. He walked up to them.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” the slightly older one replied, “we just wanted a bit of time off the street. Away from other people,” she added, glancing slightly nervously back at the passage from which they had entered. The Chaplain decided not to comment on her evident apprehension, but just nodded politely.
“We all sometimes feel the need for some sort of escape,” he said.
“That’s right,” the younger looking one began. “You see, James …”
“Shut up you imbecile,” interrupted the older one
savagely, “this isn’t the time to …”, but then she grabbed the younger one and bolted to the front of the chapel and into the Chaplain’s office. The Chaplain was still gazing after them with bemusement when a voice spoke behind him.
“Excuse me sir, have you seen two young women in here?”
“Young women?” he responded, turning to see a man, probably in his thirties, dressed in a conservatively cut business suit, with his hair cropped short in a military fashion.
“Yes, sir, two young women,” the man repeated. “Dark hair, light-brown skin, and wearing fairly brief summer clothes, one of them a blue-coloured …”
“Scantily clad women in here?” he asked, smiling. “Are you sure you’re in the right place?” All the while his mind was racing. The man had an American accent, so was unlikely to be from the police or any other British government agency, he thought. So what was he doing?
The man in the suit looked a trifle impatient at the Chaplain’s levity, but he remained scrupulously polite.
“So, you haven’t seen them?” he asked.
It didn’t sound as though the girls had done anything terribly wrong, the Chaplain thought to himself. If they’d been shoplifters, or had evaded a restaurant bill, or anything of that sort, the man in the suit would presumably be telling him about it so as to enlist his sympathy. He decided not to give away the girls’ location. Still, he couldn’t actually tell a lie, so he gestured around with a shrug of his shoulders and a smile.
“Do you want to leave a message in case they arrive?” he asked.
“No, thank you, sir,” the man responded. He hesitated for a moment, but then seemed to decide that it would be beyond the bounds of courtesy to press the matter further with an ordained clergyman. “Sorry to disturb you, sir,” he added, and moved off.
“Not at all,” replied the Chaplain cheerfully. He followed the man back out the main entrance of the chapel and into the tunnel facing back into the street, and waved him goodbye. The man gazed, perplexed, at the other doors leading off the tunnel, but then strode briskly back out into the street. The Chaplain turned back into the chapel and headed towards his office, feeling as baffled as the man who had just departed.
He looked up at the stained-glass windows in the wall above the altar, which showed four images that were originally taken from the reported visions of the prophet Daniel, but were traditionally used by Christian artists to represent the writers of the four Gospels.
The Lion, the King of the jungle. The Lord was King, of course, but how best should the Chaplain do His will in this strange scenario that had just unfolded?
The Ox, symbol of service and sacrifice, whether by a quick death on the altar or a long lifetime of arduous toil pulling a plough. It symbolised the Gospel’s portrayal of Jesus as the ultimate servant of humanity mirroring humanity’s duty to serve God – yes, but again, how best to serve right now?
The Man, reminding worshippers of Jesus who had lived the life of an ordinary human being, even being named ‘Yeshua ben Yusuf’, which in first-century Aramaic society was about as normal as being named ‘John Smith’ in a modern English-speaking environment, as if to emphasise how utterly unremarkable his earthly background had been. His followers were human as well, all too human, and the Chaplain was worried that his own human limitations might cause him to choose badly in dealing with the competing claims of the girls and the man who had enquired about them.
The Eagle, the only one of God’s creatures that can stare directly into the sun without being blinded. It was always used by artists to portray St John the Evangelist, who more than any other ordinary mortal had understood the mind and will of God Almighty in His human form. Yes, that was it.
Give me whatever insight and wisdom I need to get this right, he asked silently.
All of this had flickered through his mind in the few seconds it had taken him to reach the door of his office. He opened it and went in where he was greeted by the sight of two furtive young women ready to wrench open the other door on the far side if necessary, and bolt through.
“You were wise not to go out that way,” he told them, pointing at the other door. “There’s another man standing at the bottom of the steps, who is clearly a colleague of the one who came in after you.”
Anna nodded.
“It was tempting. I could tell that this was the first door in the passageway, right near the street. But when I saw the shadow coming into the chapel from that electric light in the passage, I thought it was only one person, and it made sense that one of them would have stayed outside, so after we’d got in here we decided to wait and see.”
“Lucky we had time to make it in here. He must have been stopping to check the doors,” Tina added.
“But now,” the Chaplain intervened, “it’s time for you to tell me, quickly, why I shouldn’t repent of having misled that man, and go out there now myself to tell them where you are.”
Anna looked at him appraisingly and decided that complying was their only chance of remaining undetected.
“A friend of ours is a medical researcher at Cambridge,” she began. “He’s been working on something that he thinks could be very useful, but which may cut across some patents that one of the big pharmaceutical companies owns. We’ve been doing some background research to help his case against them. But it seems like the drug company isn’t going to stay within the law. We don’t know why those men are following us – we’ve never seen them before – and we don’t want to find out.”
The Chaplain examined her intently.
“Seriously,” Tina broke in. “They were at the bus stop and we headed off and turned left at the bookshop and they followed, we headed left at the garden and they followed again, then left into here … it was like going in this spiral that was getting smaller like a trap, and …”
“That’s enough,” Anna interrupted irritably, glancing at the Chaplain warily.
The Chaplain pondered her story, peering at her to try to assess her sincerity. It seemed an utterly outlandish tale, but he felt that he shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. After all, there was the fact the man had indeed been pursuing them and hadn’t given any explanation as to why he was doing so. In any case, even if the men hadn’t intended any real harm to the girls, that didn’t mean that the girls weren’t genuinely concerned about something of that sort. And it certainly didn’t mean that the girls had done anything wrong.
One useful test to apply, he thought, is to ask what would happen if my choice of action is wrong. He realised that if there were any threat to the girls’ safety, then telling the men could be disastrous. On the other hand, he assumed that if there were a good and serious reason why the men needed to apprehend the girls, no doubt they would be able to get the assistance of lawful authorities to track them down.
“Alright. Wait here,” he ordered them. They stared at him with suspicion.
“I’m just going back to the passageway to make sure it’s safe for you to leave,” he assured them. Anna shook her head.
“If they’re still watching they’ll be careful not to be visible,” she said. “They’ll be nearly totally under cover, and the moment they get a glimpse of you they’ll duck out of sight.”
“Experienced at this sort of thing, are you?” the Chaplain enquired, having second thoughts about his decision.
“It’s a long story,” Anna said, “but our family have had to make a lot of effort to stay out of the road of crime gangs. Can we get out through that wooden door just near the entrance to the chapel? The one that you can’t see from the street?”
The Chaplain nodded. He opened the door back into the chapel and gazed around.
“There’s no one inside. I’ll go back up to the entrance,” he said. “Give me enough time to get there and check that they aren’t hanging around. Then if you haven’t heard me make any sort of racket, come out of here and up to the entrance.”
When Anna looked furtively round the door she saw, to her relief, the Chaplain at the chap
el’s entrance signalling the all clear. They exited the office and crept along the chapel towards him, moving with instinctive stealth despite the Chaplain’s continued calm appearance. When they reached the short passage between the chapel and the tunnel, the Chaplain moved to a large wooden door and applied a bulky key to it. He swung it open and peered out.
“Seems fine,” he remarked, and stepped through. The girls followed, finding themselves in a narrow laneway running along the side of the great church they’d passed when coming in the opposite direction beside the plaza. Anna guessed they were heading to the service road they’d seen soon after Tina had led them on their first left turn.
And so it was. They thanked the Chaplain profusely, looked slightly nervously up the service road, then steeled themselves to brave the exposed space of the plaza, whence they would head back past the bookshop, straight across Gower Street, heading in the opposite direction to Tina’s rebellious march, and leaving chapel, garden, plaza, UCL and the bus route behind them.
The Chaplain turned and retraced his steps. The grand church building stood silently above them all, quickly forgotten about by the girls as it was also ignored by the vast majority of passers-by. These days it was used only by a small group of devotees, very unlike the hordes of worshippers who had packed it every Sunday in its heyday, soon after its construction in the nineteenth century. But perhaps today’s little congregations were like those tiny gatherings of Christians who had met unobtrusively amid the bustle and chaos of the crowded cities of the Roman Empire, back in the days when there were still some members of the movement who had met Christ in person.
Chapter 12
Defensive Driving
“I haven’t been able to get any news about Cam,” James informed Anna and Tina after they seated themselves at the table he was occupying in the British Library’s cafeteria.