Horatio and Marty exchanged glances in the gloom. Neither had to say it. This was not the work of normal burglars. Or of Snell’s men. Or even of abnormally gifted vandals. This was the real thing. They edged their way around the outside of the house and peered into what Horatio imagined had once been the dining room.
Every chair had been tipped upside down and the stuffing ripped out. The sideboards and cupboards were on the floor, hacked into small bits. The paintings had been taken down, turned back to front and slashed. The dining table itself, a strong, solid, Victorian mahogany affair, was upside down in pieces. This had not just been done by the most thorough operators, thought Horatio, but by sadistic, philistine professionals.
They had enjoyed it.
It reminded Horatio of that dark September morning when he finally returned from Paddington Green to discover what P.I.D. Special Branch had done to his flat in their search for evidence about Leila.
‘Look,’ he whispered to Marty around the corner, grabbing his elbow, ‘either they found whatever the Admiral had meant to give me or they didn’t. Either way we should go. There’s no way we could do a better job!’
Marty, who by this time was surveying a similarly devastated kitchen, nodded reluctantly. They made their way across the lawn, back towards the pub.
Their torches picked out evidence that the garden had been subjected to much the same treatment. There were clods of earth on the lawn where strategic areas had been dug up. A smashed sundial. Even the dovecote was lying on its side on the ground in halves.
Back inside Marty’s car and driving away from Ibworth, Horatio tried to think logically. There was no point in involving Marty any further in this. He had got into enough trouble on his account. Marty said that if P.I.D. discovered that Snell had told him about the will it could well be a sackable offence to have released Horatio without having sought further permission from ‘E’. From now on, Horatio decided, he was on his own.
‘Horror, old man,’ said Marty as they approached the Chiswick toll booths, ‘what are you going to do?’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘I’d just try to forget about everything. Get away. I’d probably skip the Union to Norway or somewhere. From the look of that place you’re obviously up against some very serious people. It was textbook Ultimate Search Procedure. I’m speaking purely as a friend now. Why don’t you just chuck it in and get the hell out? Something’s obviously going on here, but trying to find out what could get you badly hurt.’ Horatio nodded. ‘If you need any help in making yourself scarce, I’ve got some friends in the Emigration Commission who owe me. Let me know what you decide.’ Horatio nodded again and murmured his thanks.
It was good advice from someone who’d always had his best interests at heart. But he had to ignore it. He promised Marty that if he wanted to bolt, or if the Admiral’s memorandum somehow fell into his hands, he’d contact him immediately. But in the drive along the M3, at the exhilarating speed Marty’s ungoverned auto could do in the special lane, a plan had developed in Horatio’s mind. More a series of alternating, interlocking moves based on differing scenarios. They were complex and would have impressed the reigning Oxford University chess champion, if it had not been him.
But on a far less cerebral level, Horatio realised just how badly he wanted revenge.
CHAPTER 12
09.00 MONDAY 3 MAY
Horatio was first into the Institute of Historical Research when the doors opened on the dot of 09.00. It was situated in a high, white tower built early last century in Malet Street, Bloomsbury. Formerly the Senate House of the University of London, Horatio remembered reading somewhere that it had also housed the Ministry of Information during the Second Nationalist War. Then it had been concerned with directing, censoring, massaging and witholding information. Today, he hoped it would divulge a lot.
He wished he could have gone to the new South English Library at St Pancras for his information, but it was not due to open until 2051. He wondered whether the billion euros spent strengthening the 1990s structure, which had itself of course never been occupied, would prove worthwhile? He doubted it.
As his I.D. card passed through the sensor he prayed silently that Snell had not put an alert on it since Sunday afternoon. He held his breath. From the totally impassive face of the security guard sitting behind the screen he saw he hadn’t.
For the first time Horatio started to think of his I.D. as a potential enemy, rather than, as the Commission ads put it, ‘your empowering friend’. With his photo, thumbprint, citizen number, identifying marks, D.N.A. ‘fingerprint’, biorhythm chart, blood type and signature printed on it, the card was believed to be impossible to forge.
Just as well, because that single magnetised plastic strip with its microchip on the back held his bank account details, property registration, Frankfurt and regional bank credit rating (such as it was), dental and medical records, cash movements record, V.A.T. number, hotel and restaurant customer loyalty points, council tax rating, museum entry pass, Euro-Lottery number, passport and visas, next-of-kin-details, emergency services information, organ donor exemption statement, Regional Insurance number, F.R.O. reader’s ticket, Times office entry pass (doubtless now revoked), health insurance, pension book, flat key, Bodleian, London and Brompton Libraries card, vid-phone card and (post-Leila) Europol record. If he had been a driver it would also have had his auto key, vehicle registration document, auto insurance, driver’s licence, Euro-Auto Club breakdown policy, motorway toll charger, depot voltage counter and parking metre points as well. Instead of sending him to prison, he thought, they could always just confiscate his card, thereby condemning him to a life on the streets.
Sooner or later, when buying something, travelling somewhere or making a call from a public box, the card would betray his whereabouts to the police. He knew that. It was how everyone was caught. It was simply a matter of time.
The knowledge had him quickly at the EuroNet terminal on the first floor, in the West Mercia room. His I.D. accessed it successfully. To allow himself total concentration he switched his pager and watch-phone onto ‘Hold’. The blotting paper had mentioned a ‘Mrs Robson’. Allowing for the smudginess, could he assume that this actually referred to Mrs Dodson – perhaps Jacob’s wife, daughter, sister or mother? Where was she? And where was Jacob?
Also ‘your roving godfather’? Who were Ratcliffe’s godchildren? How could he find out?
Calling up the South-West Region telephone directory he found no Jacob Dodson but about seventy Mrs Dodsons. He hadn’t the time to call them all. He then checked newsagency obituaries. Nothing. Why should there be anything for a minor electronics expert? After that, old vid-directories, going back year by year. No Jacob Dodson for the Forties, Thirties or Twenties. Then census returns for 2041, 2031 and 2021. Again, nothing. After ninety minutes’ search, EuroNet finally turned up a Dodson, Jacob in the vid-phone directory for 2019. He lived in Lymington on the South Coast. He quickly called up news stories involving Dodsons for all the papers local to Lymington for 2019. He prayed there’d be no power cut now. That would ruin everything.
He didn’t have long to wait. The computer came up with something immediately, for the very second day of the year. The front-page headline of the Bournemouth Evening News and Mail for 2 January 2019 read ‘LYMINGTON MAN DIES IN ROADS CHAOS.’
Dodson, it seemed, had been one of the first of dozens to be killed that month when the five former British regions adopted right-hand drive, in accordance with the Road Traffic Standardisation Directive. At the Coroner’s Court inquest a fortnight later it was reported that Dodson had been driving on an otherwise deserted road in the New Forest when an Atlantic Gas pantechnicon wrote off his auto in a head-on collision. Francis Anthony Evans, 26, the driver, testified that Dodson had been on the left-hand side of the road. The article dwelt on the explosion that might have taken place if the Atgas had caught alight, but Horatio was more interested in the name of Dodson’s widow.
; From the 2044 vid-directory he discovered Jean Dodson’s present address:
Number 4, The High Street, Ibworth, Hampshire, RG2 5SX.
He then started to order up all the Ph.D. theses relating to the background of the Aachen Conference, Treaty and Referendum. Reading the Aachen Ph.D. research work was, he supposed, something he ought to have done earlier for his articles. There were the usual detailed analyses of obscure topics such as late twentieth-century dentistry and studies on the history of post-Cold War hairdressing. How could anyone spend three years writing eighty thousand words on a subject as esoteric as the politics behind Gerry Adams’ Nobel Peace Prize, he wondered?
He only wished he had more time. One day he would come back and make time to read The Rolling Disestablishment of the Church of England, 1998–2020; The Partition of the Middle East Between the Great Powers 2031–2; A-P.E.Z: Free, Independent Nation States Cooperating Economically: De Gaulle’s European Vision Successfully Applied to Asia and the Pacific Rim 2017–20 and finally A.F.T.A: Genuine Free Trade Area or American Economic Imperialism? Right now, though, there was only time to look into works relevant to Aachen.
There were three: The Aachen Referendum and the Creation of the European Superstate, by an academic from Oxford Brookes University called Summerskill, The Aachen Referendum: A Regional Analysis of British Voting Patterns by Dr Manfred Klaushofer of Vienna University, and finally Maastricht, The I.G.Cs., The Single Currency, Aachen: Political Opposition to European Unification 1990–2020. This last had been written by none other than Peter Riley, who after being sent down from Oxford for monarchism had finally found a place at Carl-Friedrichs University in Berlin.
He started with the Summerskill. He could tell by the tone of the introduction that it was very federationist. Syrupy prose, too, for a serious academic thesis.
The beautiful and ancient town of Aachen, just on the German side of the pre-Schengen border with Belgium, was the ideal place for the Conference which, in March 2015, at last produced agreement for the complete, final and irrevocable political and constitutional unification of the European Continent into the United States of Europe. Over twelve centuries before, in Rome on Christmas Day 800, Charlemagne – Carolus Magnus or Charles the Great – had been crowned Emperor of the West by Pope Leo III. He was the first ruler France and Germany ever had in common. The territory of the Original Six of 1957 covered almost exactly the same area as his Carolingian Empire.
The greatest of all the Frankish Kings, born only twenty kilometres from Maastricht, Charlemagne chose Aachen for his imperial capital. It was there he built his great palace. The shade of the Second Great Unifier of Europe was doubtless present when the Treaty was signed there by all the heads of European governments on 1 April 2015. They created the first superpower in history ever to be brought into being at the stroke of a pen rather than by bloodshed: the United States of Europe.
Only one hurdle remained; to obtain ratification from the peoples of Europe for what their political masters had wrought. This was to come in the form of national referenda, all of which were held on Thursday 4 May 2015. The results were by no means a foregone conclusion …’
Horatio doubted he’d learn much from this one. The regional voting thesis looked impossibly long and dull, so he moved straight on to Riley’s.
In the Acknowledgements Peter had recorded his
thanks to the redoubtable octogenarian Mrs Biddy Cash for allowing me access to her late husband Bill’s extensive and invaluable archives relating to the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty of European Union. Also to Messrs Hywel Williams and Iain Duncan Smith for allowing me to interview them such a short time after their release from house arrest. That they spoke so freely is a tribute to their courage and dedication to the anti-federal cause.
Small wonder, thought Horatio, that after making such a clearly biased statement, Riley had been denied his doctorate. For over the first page of the thesis was stamped: ‘FAILED UNDER PROVISIONS 7, 8 AND 14 OF THE POLITICAL ENLIGHTENMENT & NOMENCLATURE DIRECTIVE.’
Horatio thought it remarkable that the thesis was even made available for researchers at all. Possibly another example of what Riley later described as ‘the twin unconscious brakes on Euro-tyranny – corruption and inefficiency’. Then a surname further down the Acknowledgments page caught his eye.
His own.
‘My thanks must also go to Mrs Heather Lestoq, widow of Commander Robert Lestoq.’ So his mother had helped too. He might have guessed. She wouldn’t have been able to resist. Why had she not mentioned it though?
Despite its heavy use of irony and somewhat wooden prose, the Riley thesis made fascinating reading. It took Horatio chronologically through the whole story. The chapter headings said it all: ‘Maastricht and National Self-Delusion’, ‘The Schengen Agreement and the Abolition of Frontiers’, ‘The 1996 Inter-Governmental Conference: Further Faltering Steps’, ‘The Millennium: Six Go Down the Fast Lane’ (sounds like the title of a book by the discouraged author Enid Blyton, thought Horatio), ‘Britain Forced to Follow On’, ‘Convergence Pains’, ‘Economic & Monetary Union: The Soft Euro Gets Hard’, ‘Aachen: A Megastate is Born’, ‘Gibraltar; Ulster and the Falklands: Great Britain Disintegrates’, ‘Scottish and Welsh Independence’, ‘Subversion or Insurrection?: The Doomed Revolt of Spring 2016’, ‘Charles III Quits the Scene’, ‘Depatriation’, and so on.
There were long and learned appendices such as ‘Denmark Under Martial Law’ and on Brussels’ hilariously disastrous attempt in 2022 to outlaw certain American words and phrases. Riley had obviously spent a long time in all the relevant archives researching this. As a veteran of a number of them himself – the Federal Records Office, the Hurd diaries, Commission Records, the Colindale Newspaper Library and so on – Horatio appreciated how much work must have gone into this.
Riley had dug up a few nuggets which brought wry smiles to Horatio’s face. Edward Heath’s July 1971 White Paper on British Entry into the Common Market, for example, had promised that ‘decisions are only made if all members agree’. He laughed out loud when he saw it had also stated that ‘There is no question of Britain losing essential national sovereignty.’ That was true enough in a way, there had been no question at all. It was inevitable.
Then there was the policy paper, pregnant with threat, put out by the ruling C.S.U./C.D.U. coalition in Germany back in September 1994. ‘If European integration were not to progress,’ went ‘Reflections on European Policy’, ‘Germany might be called upon, or tempted by its own security constraints, to try to effect the stabilisation of Eastern Europe on its own and in the traditional manner.’ The Chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, went on record to describe Maastricht as ‘an interim step, albeit an important one, on the road to European Union. The parts of the Treaty dealing with political union are just as important as those concerning economic and monetary union.’
As Riley pointed out, Europe had been warned. Like Snell had said of him and Ratcliffe’s murder, in taking over the de facto running of the United States of Europe, Germany had the motive, opportunity and method.
Alex Tallboys appeared in the doorway.
His dark green loden coat, which Marty had told Horatio was the standard uniform of P.I.D. operatives, cloaked nearly two metres of broad-shouldered Aryan viciousness. How had he known where to find him? Probably the I.D. card swipe at the door. Clenching and unclenching his fists, Tallboys stalked over. Horatio glanced around the room. He was relieved to see a number of people at their terminals. Even with people’s tendency to look the other way during violence nowadays, Tallboys would surely not try on anything physical here.
‘Hullo,’ Horatio said, with as much bonhomie as he could muster. But unlike Tallboys’ visit to the Federal Records Office on Friday, this was clearly more than a routine snoop.
‘Shut up you disgusting, fat’ – he searched around for a rude enough noun – ‘intellectual. I know what you’re up to. I’m still married to Cleopatra you know, which gives me th
e perfect legal right to smash your piggy little snout straight down your throat.’ Horatio made no comment on this novel interpretation of family law. ‘I know you’ve got plans to see her.’
‘I’m not seeing her.’
‘Oh yes you are. I know you are. I know everything about you. But if you pollute her perfection by laying so much as one of your podgy trotters on her, you die. You can talk all that clever-clever stuff to amuse her over the phone, be all sophisticated’ – he spat the word – ‘but that’s it. I mean, you’re hardly a threat in the sex department, and a short period of seeing you might bring her back to her senses. It will only be short because there’s bound to be a warrant reissued for you any moment and when it is I’ll be there to serve it. In the meantime watch it. And I’ll be watching you. I might even send Cleo the tapes we have of you and that Estonian slut. That’d put her off. Remember’ – Tallboys leant forward so close that Horatio could see the hatred in his clear cornflower-blue eyes and smell his garlic-enhanced halitosis – ‘if you ever touch her I’ll find out. And then’ – he thrust his huge thumbs straight in front of Horatio’s face and hissed – ‘I will take enormous pleasure in poking out your piggy little eyeballs. I’ll squeeze them till they splatter all over my hands like hard-boiled eggs. I’m not saying I’ll be forced to, mind you. Or that I’ll have to. I’m saying I’ll enjoy it.’
Then he was gone.
It took some minutes before the spasms and involuntary shaking subsided. It was the last part, about enjoying it, which completely authenticated the threat. That and what Marty had said about Tallboys volunteering for the nastiest jobs. What would he do? Blow Cleo out for dinner tonight, of course. Was that cowardice speaking, or just a man who valued his eyesight? Right now time was running out. Logic told him he must force himself to concentrate on Riley’s thesis.
The Aachen Memorandum Page 10