by Ivo Stourton
On Parliament Square the black bomb barriers glistened in the wet, and the protestors huddled in their tents beneath the statues of Churchill and Roosevelt. The rain soaked their cardboard placards, dissolving the demands. There were ranks of rough sleepers under the bridges. Still and silent in their bedrolls, they reminded Oates of rows of body bags, and of how heavy they were when you had to drag them into long lines under a hot sun.
Past Blackfriars, robotaxis bore the tired lawyers back from the honeycombs of midnight offices to their sleeping wives. Oates had a feeling Grape was out there somewhere in the east; he had never asked her where she lived, and she wouldn’t have told him if he had, but you could hear the lairy pride of Bethnal Green in her voice.
It took him almost an hour to make it out to the eastern edge of the city. The first thing he saw was the light atop the great dome, glimpsed through a screen of trees as he came out of the City through Canary Wharf and crested the hills on the edge of Essex. It was a shining red beacon designed to warn away the planes landing at City airport, but with the rise and fall of the earth, the darkness and the distance, it was impossible to get a sense of scale. He carried on along the A13, but the buildings hemmed in the view as he came through Rainham, flats stacked on top of fast food outlets and boarded shops, and it wasn’t until he passed the London Road that the staunch ranks of the Victorian High Street fell back, giving a view of the Great Spa nestling in the girdle of the M25. When he saw it for the first time, his instinct was to pull over on the hard shoulder of the motorway, to get out of his car and stare at the structure whilst the traffic swept eastwards beside him.
In the five years since construction of the dome of the Great Spa had begun in earnest, Oates had resisted exhortations to visit the building with a certain grumbly pride at his own refusal to be excited. He had secretly been hoping for some job or personal errand that would take him out east so that he could see it without having to go to see it, but no such occasion had presented itself, and as the building moved from construction to completion, and the commentary moved from protest and excitement to simple awe, his stubbornness had compelled him to perpetuate his initial whim. He had seen photographs, he had even succumbed one evening alone in the living room to watching footage of a flypast by a BBC helicopter, but no photograph or recording of the thing could prepare you for the impact. The pace of the cars around him slowed perceptibly along with his own, as if the vast building exerted a gravitational pull at its periphery, and Oates craned forward over the wheel to get a full view.
The building was composed of two distinct parts – the central structure was a dome stretching a kilometre and a half into the black, rain-strewn sky. It was the shape of an upright egg half-buried in the earth, so that the walls rose quite steeply from the ground and tapered into a rounded point. At its uppermost limit, the great red beacon on the top was so close to the rainclouds that the light illuminated them from beneath with a cherry-red glow, giving the sky above the spa the look of a vast special effect, a stage show for the passing motorists. Down the sides of the dome there trooped long lines of maintenance ladders studded with blue lights. Around the circumference where the dome met the earth was a chain link fence which must have been thirty feet high, though, beneath the rise of the dome, it looked like a toy; a spot of detailing on a model prison.
The chain link fence was supplemented with guard towers at hundred metre intervals, their eyes turned outwards on the world. Beyond this, green fields stretched away to the M25 on one side and the edges of the east London suburbs on the other. They were illuminated in the glare of stadium lights erected around the building’s edge, so that the residents on the London side spent their nights in a perpetual false dawn.
The second part of the structure consisted of two giant tubes snaking away from the dome, extending half a mile in either direction. Along the sides of these were a series of buildings accessible from the outside of the structure, and Oates guessed that these were maintenance buildings and accommodation for staff. The whole edifice was so grossly out of proportion with the world around it that rather than being part of the landscape, it seemed to alter the dimensions of the sky and the earth to accommodate its own needs. Oates had the queasy impression that the whole scene existed not on the land, but deep beneath the ocean, and the Great Spa was not an artificial thing, but organic, a vast anemone spotted with bioluminescence, drawing in men and women like curious amoebae across the fields and motorways.
The purpose of the giant construction was not so much mysterious as vague. They didn’t administer the Treatment in there, that much everyone agreed. The Treatment was handled in a single Nottingham Biosciences clinic in Harley Street. They had been performing it for years before the Great Spa was even talked about. But you had to have had the Treatment to stay there. Nottingham had originally called it a health spa, a place its clients could de-stress, and it was that description which had given birth to the nickname that was now so universal that most people would have been hard pushed to remember the official one – Avalon.
Oates thought being eternally young and rich would have been enough on their own to massage the stress out of most men, but apparently not, as the Great Spa had been hoovering up footballers, potentates and billionaires since the day it opened its doors if the press were to be believed. He knew as much from Lori’s gossip magazines. He never read them, but she left them on the bedside table and beside the bath, and somehow just having the damned things in the house stimulated a kind of gossip osmosis.
He saw the signs for the exit from the A13 onto the road that led to the spa, and he found that as the distance closed with the dome the effect of its size receded, as the height and width of it wasted their energies beyond the edges of his windscreen. At the exit itself there was a huge billboard bearing the name of the spa, and the slogan of Nottingham Biosciences picked out in bright cursive lettering: Don’t fear the reaper. Above the tagline, a woman’s smiling face, youthful and bright, was illuminated in a spotlight. Someone had drawn a penis on her forehead, and in the lower right corner, the letters ‘M.R.’ were scrawled in red spraypaint. It was a tag he had seen going up all over London in the past few months.
Apart from himself, the road was bare of traffic. He switched off the radio and drove with the hum of the heater, and the tapping of the rain on the roof. The metronome of the windscreen wipers kept a quick time.
An avenue of high wattage streetlights set on either side of the carriageway guided Oates’s rusty old car towards the gatehouse. As he approached a checkpoint, a guard emerged in the rain. His face and shoulders were concealed by a waterproof poncho, and an automatic weapon hung at his side. Oates slowed the car and wound down the window. A second guard came out with a dog on a leash, and walked around the car. Flecks of cold rain spattered his cheeks. The first guard leant down, a dripping bill above eyes and an unexpected smile. Oates showed him his police pass, and he took it and pressed it against a machine he held under his coat. He returned the card to Oates and waved his arm at someone in the guardhouse, causing the metal barrier to rise.
“What’s with the dog?” Oates asked.
“Mortal Reformers. In case they put a bomb in the boot,” the guard said, and laughed. There was nothing particularly funny in that as far as Oates could see.
He passed underneath the raised arm and through the steel membrane of the perimeter fence. As he approached the smooth mountain of Avalon he slowed his car, and then stopped completely. The surface of the road simply vanished into the blank wall. He stared at it, and to his astonishment the whole structure seemed for a moment to lift up from the earth on a cloud of orange light. A blink and a toss of the wipers revealed a shutter coming up in the wall, and Oates drove through into the garage beyond. The air smelt of diesel, and the concrete floor was piebald with oil stains. The shutter closed behind him, and he expected someone to emerge from the little office up a small flight of stairs to the side of the room, but no one came. For a few moments he waited, th
en opened the door of his car and shouted, “Hello?”
He listened, and could hear the sound of music playing on a stereo in the office. He sat back down on the driver’s seat, and was just wondering whether to leave his car and head into the office when a movement caught his eye near the striplights hanging from the garage ceiling. A Painted Lady butterfly.
It was so cold in the garage that Oates could see his breath as he watched. The butterfly descended from the ceiling. It paused for a few moments on the bonnet of his car, the surface beaded with rain. It flexed its wings once, twice, and then, seemingly refreshed, it rose to rejoin its gentle battle with the light.
Oates was still watching it when a door in the opposite wall began to open. He climbed back into his car and shut the door, and so he did not at first feel the warm breath of scented air that came from inside the dome. When the door was still only half way open, the sunlight streaming through made Oates blink, and by the time his eyes adjusted to the brightness the gate had slid up into the ceiling, disclosing the entire scene beyond.
20:30 HOURS
THURSDAY 18 JULY
1976 (THE GREAT SPA)
AS OATES GAZED out through the opening in the wall, he was reminded of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, a book his father had read to him as a child, and which he had read to his own kids. He thought of the moment the children push through the fur coats in the back of the magic wardrobe, and find themselves in the snow-covered forest of Narnia.
Outside the garage with its gulp of winter night, there was a summer evening. Gone were the motorways and floodlights, and in their place was a long avenue of trees, the shimmer of a breeze turning the silver undersides of their leaves to the setting sun. Fields stretched away on either side of the avenue. A bicycle with books in the basket stood propped against a tree. Dotted across the fields were groups of young men and women in whites, playing cricket whilst their fellows lay in the shadows under the trees. A man rode on a bicycle along the towpath beside the river, calling instructions to an eight as their blades dipped in unison into the sparkling water.
Beyond the river rose the red brick walls of a courtyard, and a bell tower with the purple sky framed by the arch. Around and behind this central structure was a further collection of buildings which had the unmistakable aspect of a school. The brick quadrangle and the river and the fields basked in quiet splendour. Yet as Oates watched, he detected something uncanny in the movements of the figures playing cricket. At such a distance he could not distinguish anything of their features, but the way they moved and stood prompted an instinctive disquiet.
Only the warning rattle from the roof as the gate began to descend startled Oates from his reverie, and he accelerated quickly through the closing door. He rolled on down the long drive, approaching the main buildings across the fields. As he drew closer, he saw further buildings beyond the court, undistinguished blocks of new-builds alongside the Victorian brickwork. The drive led up to a gap flanked by wrought iron gates on the other side of which was a carpark. Beside the gate was a groundsman in blue overalls. The man waved to him and gestured for the car to head through. Just as Oates passed he leaned down to peer in through the windows, and a look of horror appeared on his face.
Beyond the wall the carpark was flanked on three sides by what looked like science classrooms. Oates caught a glimpse through the long windows of benches with sinks and gas taps at regular intervals. Seeing the still interior of the room in the evening light, he had the odd conviction that he knew exactly how it would smell – the air slightly acrid with chemicals, the old dust warmed by the sun, and the happy boredom of adolescent bodies. He parked in the shadow of the beech tree in the centre of the carpark. He got out, and was wondering how to find Bhupinder when he heard a cry from behind him.
“Stop! You can’t be here!”
He turned to see a portly middle-aged man with the sausage-pink skin of the colonial Englishman running towards him across the grass. He was dressed in a suit that flared slightly at the trouser cuffs, and his hair sat shoulder length. A mutton chop moustache completed the ridiculous ensemble. He looked as if he had wandered off from the set of a seventies sitcom. The groundskeeper Oates had passed by the gate was coming from the other direction, talking discretley into a microphone hidden in the wrist of his jacket. The portly man reached him first, and grabbed Oates by the arm. Oates caught his hand, and turned him neatly onto the bonnet.
“Ah, ah, ah! DCI Oates, I take it?” he said, looking back over his shoulder, with his pink cheeks pillowed on the rusting bodywork.
Oates released him, feeling compliance in the soft bicep.
“That’s right.”
“Well, will you please come with me immediately? It’s extremely important.”
The man ushered Oates in through one of the doors that connected the block of classrooms with the court, and bundled him into a bare stone toilet, pushing in behind him. The room was no bigger than an old fashioned phone box, and when Oates turned around his companion’s tummy brushed up against his armour.
“I’m sorry about that, but I understood your commanding officer had been quite clear with you. You can’t wear those clothes inside the school. We have a suit for you. I believe it’s right that a man of your rank would not normally have been in uniform in the seventies? Perhaps you don’t know, anyway, our period specialists have confirmed it. Your colleagues are all in period appropriate uniform.”
“Who are you?”
“How rude of me, I’m Charles Golden. I’m in charge of public relations here at St Margaret’s.”
“Avalon?”
“Within the school we refer to it as St Margaret’s. Listen, I will give you and your men a full briefing as soon as we can gather everyone together, and you’ve had the chance to change. And I’ll introduce you to our director, Miranda.”
“I need to see the crime scene.”
“Absolutely! Of course. All the more reason to dispatch the necessaries as quickly as possible.” Charles said, and clapped him on his shoulder pad, “Besides, what will people think, if they see two burly chaps like us coming out of the bogs together!” He reversed out of the room with some difficulty, pressing himself against Oates in order to swing the door inwards.
Oates was left alone in the old fashioned cubicle, with the chain flush on the cistern, and a bin for sanitary towels down by his boots. It was a dangerous position, for each moment he waited stripped him of a little of his dignity and authority in dealing with the management, and yet to leave in his present state was to defy a direct order from John. This is where you got yourself, with a reputation for a nose and a delicate touch – locked in a toilet.
He put the lid down, sat on it, and splashed some cold water from the taps over his face. He wondered if the PR had manipulated him into this deliberately. If he had, it was a blinding move. Be suspicious of any man who appears to be stupid, and who occupies a position which requires high intelligence. Charles seemed to Oates like the kind of boy who had always been picked last for sports at school, and had taken that shame inside himself, into the workshop of his soul, and fashioned it into something sharp.
IT WAS ANOTHER of the handymen who brought him the suit, and a leather hold-all for his uniform. He waited outside whilst Oates changed, and then accompanied him through the college to a set of rooms in the headmaster’s lodge where the remainder of his team was waiting. The suit itself was a good wool, though heavy for the weather, and it had the same ridiculous flaring and wide lapels as the one Charles wore.
As they walked through the external passageways, Oates could not help but feel a certain amazement. The purple sky above them, complete with a complement of clouds to make a poet proud, was as natural as any summer he had ever seen, and the breeze seemed to move with a perfectly judged freshness through the stone passages. The sandstone walls were still warm from the touch of the sun.
It was difficult to tell with the sudden and jarring transition between the seasons, but it seemed to O
ates that he had not only moved from winter to summer, but had also come backward by about eight hours when he passed through the walls of the Great Spa. Darkness was drawing in, and an early moon shared the sky. It was odd that it had risen in the time since Oates’s arrival.
They passed the school dining hall, where supper was taking place, and Oates looked out over the ranks of students eating their spaghetti bolognese. They wore white shirts and grey blazers, the girls in skirts and the boys in long trousers. Though they were too old for schoolchildren, he could not detect any embarrassment at the uniforms they wore. Indeed they did not even seem to think it strange. He had never seen so many of the new-young together, even on television.
The entrance to the headmaster’s rooms was a small portal in an ivy-covered wall, and Oates had both to stoop and to turn his broad shoulders as he made his way through into the cool interior of the lodge. A wide staircase, the banister posts decorated with oak carvings of previous headmasters, wound up to the first floor, and it was here that Oates found six junior officers and Sergeant Bhupinder sitting at a series of old fashioned desks before a lectern, at which stood the man who had accosted him in the carpark. They were dressed in police uniforms older than he was. Looking at them all in costume, he had an uncanny sense that they were nothing more than actors playing the role of policemen, and at any moment a director hidden somewhere in the scene would shout “Cut”, and the room would come alive with a bevvy of make-up artists and assistants adjusting their lapels.
At the back of the room was a young woman, no more than a girl really, in a floral print dress. At first he wondered who she was, before he noticed the way the groundskeeper was looking at her as he lingered by the door. He was unsure of whether or not to leave, and he watched her instinctively for a clue. The groundskeeper was a tough-looking man in his forties, and from this doggish vigil at the doorway Oates surmised that his young mistress must in fact be new-young, and that this was most likely Miranda, the director of the Great Spa.