Deep Shelter

by Oliver Harris

They needed to meet. Belsey wondered how they were going to arrange this without acquiring unwanted company. They needed refuge. There was one place, of course, that had always given them refuge. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

  “I think we should get a drink,” Belsey said. “For old time’s sake.”

  “Nick?”

  “Only it’s past closing time.”

  “It’s quarter to four in the afternoon.”

  “I feel like it’s gone four in the morning,” Belsey said. “Soon it’s going to be getting light.” Monroe groaned. “We need somewhere that’s going to serve us at this kind of hour.”

  “This better be good.”

  “Don’t get followed.”

  40

  EAST, INTO THE CROOK OF THE RIVER, THE TANGLE OF sullen development that ran between Docklands and the Isle of Dogs. Belsey parked on East India Dock Road, stole some tarpaulin off a skip and covered the car. He weaved a labyrinthine route down soulless streets, past the DLR and the new plastic apartments that crowded the place before you turned a corner and looked up and realised you were in the foothills of Canary Wharf.

  Through to the fish market. No one was following.

  He hadn’t been under the market for a while, past the heady tang of marine life, down the crooked stone stairs, rapping on the door that gave you access to the Ship. Mrs. Kavanagh opened up. She was still alive, painted to resemble an eighty-year-old drag queen. Belsey checked she put the bolts back on.

  “Nicholas, well I never.”

  Déjà vu.

  The tribes were as he’d left them: off-duty ambulance drivers, raucous cabbies, some dying stars of musical theatre. He glimpsed the men in dark corners, gold teeth flashing. The corners of the Ship were still truly unlit. It was mid-afternoon outside, but in the pub’s time zone it was a few minutes to midnight. People were lively. Motown played and someone had plugged in the fairy lights. Two women in transparent platform heels danced with men in bloodstained white coats.

  Monroe stood stiffly at the bar. He glowed with greasy light from the heat lamps of the all-day carvery. He was watching the dance.

  “I could have managed without this flashback.”

  “It worked.”

  A security screen beside the pork scratchings broadcast grainy images of the outside world. Next to it was Dennis Kavanagh himself, who looked increasingly like the greyhounds he used to train.

  “I’ve got a bit of a child support issue,” Belsey explained, slipping him a tenner. “Few people I don’t want finding me here.”

  “They’re fucking vultures, Nick.”

  “Back door still good?”

  “It’s open.”

  “Maybe only regulars in tonight. Let me know if anything else turns up.”

  “Right you are.”

  They got bottles of Nigerian stout, which were a safer bet than the taps. Belsey had used the emergency escape route twice, when the Ship had been raided. It brought you up behind the market. They took a table close to the back door, among decorative netting and lobster pots, but still with an angle on the security screen. Belsey lifted his bag to the table. He found his copy of Britain’s Most Notorious Spies.

  “I didn’t know you were a fan,” Monroe said.

  “Edward Strathmore. He’s in the index, along with JIGSAW.” Belsey passed the book over. “They’re not in the text.”

  Monroe checked both these facts.

  “It shouldn’t be in the index. I was asked to take it out.”

  “Why?”

  “No reason given. Week before it was due to be printed the Attorney General’s office requested a preview. They demanded that everything about Strathmore had to go. That was a lot of interesting research spiked.”

  “JIGSAW?”

  “The Joint Inter-Services Group for the Study of All-Out Warfare.”

  Belsey repeated this to himself.

  “What was it?”

  “The Doomsday Department. Strathmore’s baby.” Monroe took a pull on his bottle. “Strathmore was an air marshal in Bomber Command during the Second World War. He was one of the first to visit Nagasaki after it was destroyed, with the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, and he returned two years later with the After-Effects Research Council. Early 1947 he tries to convince the British government that they need to start preparing for the worst. He’s a civil servant now. His message falls on deaf ears. In 1950 he commissions a report into the likely consequences of a nuclear attack on Britain: fifteen 10-megaton bombs, 12 million dead, half of industrial capacity destroyed. It leaves 40 million survivors living in siege conditions and a blanket of fallout over the country making movement impossible. The report’s presented to government. Within six weeks Strathmore was made permanent secretary and given a blank cheque. The Prime Minister, Attlee, tells him to start writing the War Book, the national plan for the event of nuclear attack.”

  A singalong started. A prostitute said they looked too serious and offered them a line. They declined. She went to dance.

  “Over the next decade there are millions of pounds unaccounted for in civil defence spending,” Monroe said. “Duncan Powell was one of the first to look into this. It seems likely that it was heading to JIGSAW projects. Everything was kept off the books. Strathmore recruited army men, war gamers from the Admiralty, but also thinkers: sociologists, anthropologists—the best and brightest, and then some less straightforward souls. Edward Strathmore wanted people willing to stare into the abyss with him. Men for whom the Second World War never ended. I spoke to retired civil servants who remember JIGSAW being whispered about like a clique, a private club.”

  “And Douglas Argyle was part of that?”

  “Argyle was their man in the MOD. He first proposed the concept of Breakdown, the level of destruction at which a country would no longer be able to function as a coordinated whole. Argyle estimated that about thirty percent destruction of a city renders the whole city population ‘ineffective.’ Meanwhile, the latest research from his teams at Porton were suggesting that fallout and biochemical contamination could make it necessary for people to stay underground for a year or more if they hoped to survive. A year, and then they could emerge to divide the wasteland between them.”

  Monroe sipped the stout again. He looked around. People were smoking. He lit a cigarette.

  “Individuals central to the work of JIGSAW were given cover positions within governmental departments. That was how they drew their salaries. No reference was made to the committee in government correspondence. The armed forces denied it existed and military intelligence assigned the organisation a new level of confidentiality: Top Secret—ACID. The War Book wasn’t even seen by cabinet members. It was kept to about twelve people who were fully initiated into what they called the central secret, codenamed Operation Black Wing. That was the last resort, the wholesale transfer of government and the civil service. No one knew who was in, who’d be selected, where they’d be going. An angel would come down and touch you on the shoulder, lead you through the next steps. Get you where you needed to be.”

  “To Site 3. London is a JIGSAW puzzle.”

  “What’s that meant to mean?”

  Belsey enlightened him.

  “In the 1950s and ’60s the government was tunnelling under London using the cover of the General Post Office. This was when the Brutalist buildings were commissioned. I had a word with a bank robber. He’d found files in the GPO archives. I think there are three ultra-top-secret sites relating to nuclear war—Whitehall, Chancery Lane and a third one—Site 3. Mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “It must be where the High Command would go. What we’re seeing are the ways down. They must have wanted all officials within reach of the tunnels—via postal depots, council buildings, hospitals; anywhere in government control with subsurface access.”

  Monroe was feeling this. He smoked while he thought.

  “It makes sense,” he said. “There may have been less than an hour or so’s warning. And
of course it makes the whole operation invisible. They’re immediately protected from fallout and from surveillance. Damage to roads or rail is no longer an issue.” He nodded. He drank. There were voices raised on the dance floor, the prostitute and one of the women in platform heels having a misunderstanding.

  “Why are you talking to me?” Belsey said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Why’s all forgiven?”

  Monroe downed his drink and ashed in the bottle.

  “You were right. I asked around about Duncan Powell. He’d told his publisher to expect a manuscript in August—that it was going to be big news and they’d need lawyers with experience in fighting injunctions. It had something to do with a new theory: Line X was dedicated to sabotage. You know Line X?”

  “I read your book. Line X is what Ferryman was working for—the network of Soviet spies. So Ferryman sabotaged something.”

  “It would make sense. Maybe something to do with these sites of yours, trying to put the kybosh on all this planning. By the late seventies Moscow could see they’d lost the arms race. Sabotage was a way of striking at the centre. But it depended on insiders.”

  Belsey slid the copy of Military Heritage over.

  “Duncan Powell placed this advert in February.”

  It was strange seeing Easton’s face in the pub darkness. Every time he took the magazine out he expected it to have disappeared. Belsey didn’t mention this aspect of it all, the resurrection. It was possible that a lot of people were about to paint him as mad and bad. They didn’t need more help.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. The individuals in the photo are all dead. They died in an air accident on November 9th, 1983. This is what Powell was working on. So my guess is that this somehow connects to Line X, to his research there, right? To Ferryman, to sabotage.” Belsey let Monroe digest this. “Date ring a bell? November, 1983?”

  “Able Archer.” Monroe looked across the faces. “Duncan Powell, you poor fucking genius,” he said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “It would make perfect sense. A sabotage of the exercise somehow. Able Archer sent the Soviets crazy. They believed the simulation was cover for an actual nuclear strike. That’s how full scale it was. NATO forces went through all alert phases, DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1. There were procedures the Russians had never seen before. And you think Duncan connected this to Ferryman?”

  “That’s what I’d imagine.” Belsey tapped the advert. “Could one of these people be him? The mole?”

  “Ferryman? No, they’re too young. Ferryman was recruited in the sixties. Early sixties. No one here is older than mid-thirties. And you say it’s 1983.”

  Belsey took a cigarette out of Monroe’s pack. The dance floor was friendly again. There had been a reconciliation. People swept ice cubes and broken glass to the side with their feet.

  “How would the Soviets have recruited him?” he asked, after a moment. “Someone who ends up right at the centre of secrecy: what’s the process?”

  Monroe shrugged and offered a light.

  “It depends if he was blackmailed or idealistic. Often the spymasters will have uncovered a personal misdemeanour and used that as leverage. Alternatively they’ll have picked up a sense that he’s sympathetic to the cause, some bright Cambridge undergraduate uncomfortable about the suffering of the world’s poor. One day he’ll get a tap on the shoulder, maybe abroad, maybe in a communist country. A man takes him aside and makes him a proposition: cash under the table and his name engraved in history when it’s over. In return for doing what he was going to do anyway: go home, work his way into the establishment.”

  “You must have some theories about who he was.”

  “I don’t care who he was. If I knew, I’d leave him well alone. I’m sure the current intelligence services feel the same. Whatever he did was a deep embarrassment for them. What are they going to do now? Trade him? Sweat him for thirty-year-old information? It’s not like he’s the only retired spy out there. The music stopped, people froze, dust fell. The world moves on and it turns out everyone dies anyway.”

  “Maybe our suspect knows who he was.”

  “I very much doubt that.”

  One of the dancers was on the bar, one of the men with gold teeth trying to get her down. Belsey checked the security screen; no one appeared to be waiting for him outside. He finished his cigarette, dropped it into the stout and watched the smoke coil.

  “I’m going to need your help on this, Tom. You can take your pick of exclusives. My colleague, Kirsty Craik, was in a crash last night. I think she was side-slammed on her way to a man who claimed to have information for her. She’s now being kept under guard in Cromwell Hospital. Only nobody told the police—as far as we’re concerned she’s a missing person.” Monroe wrote this down. “The man she was trying to get to was killed. He was a resident of St. Matthew’s Hostel in Shacklewell, and is yet to turn up on any news. The crash was caused by people trying to stop Kirsty investigating this. One man responsible is Detective Inspector Gary Finch, from the Confidential Intelligence Unit. Finch was at the hospital earlier. I’m pretty sure Finch and his team killed Duncan Powell. Finch is taking instructions from Lord Strathmore.”

  Monroe stopped writing.

  “Strathmore?”

  “Know where I’d find him?”

  “No.”

  “The man currently calling himself Ferryman is an individual named Michael Easton. I’m trying to find out what I can about him. I want attention on Kirsty. I want her crash to be reported, and I want Gary Finch and Lord Strathmore and whoever else to know that they’re out in the open; we can see them. I don’t want them being able to act in secrecy.” Belsey gave Monroe his pay-as-you-go number. “They’ll try two things: they’ll throw a gagging order at you and then they’ll say I’m responsible.”

  “You’re responsible?”

  “You’re going to hear things about me. Don’t believe them.”

  “Like what?”

  “About a girl. It could turn nasty.”

  “What is it now, exactly?”

  “Not as nasty as it’s going to be.”

  41

  IT WAS 5:35. BELSEY EMERGED FROM THE SHIP, got the old daylight whiplash and caught his breath. Blank cloud reflected in windows. The ice mountains of Canary Wharf provided an ominous kind of cover.

  He walked into Limehouse, tore the tarpaulin off his car and climbed inside. Joint Inter-Services Group for the Study of All-Out Warfare. He scanned the notes.

  Session 14

  Deterioration in past few days. M still “receiving signals” from a past war. Requests increase to five sessions a week. Complains I am not trying hard enough.

  Session 20

  Anger. He has been turning up for sessions either early or late. Today I arrive and he is sitting behind my desk. Begins asking questions about my family, my relationship with my wife, how we met; purposefully intrusive.

  I realise I don’t trust him any more.

  Then suddenly “M” was a different person altogether. Pious and chilling.

  Session 21

  M speaks at length on a topic he has not shown any interest in previously: guilt and the possibility of redemption. He asks whether I believe in hell, whether killing can ever be justified, whether there is a limit to forgiveness.

  Asks if I’d forgive my own killer if I met them, before or after death.

  He still claims to be sleeping only 2–3 hours a night. London is at the centre of his anxiety. I suggest a break from London.

  Session 22

  M does not arrive. I receive a call at 2.30—he is in the West Country. He has taken my advice. He reports first feelings of tranquillity in a long time.

  This was followed by a fortnight’s gap in the notes. As Easton, offstage, presumably strolled Piltbury Down, checked its standing stones and experimented with bomb-making while he got his head together. There were only two further sessions. Apparently
Michael returned calmer. He had what Green described as “the unnerving tranquillity of a suicide risk.”

  Belsey turned to the final entry.

  Session 23

  M tells me he is leaving treatment. Apologetic. This is the wrong place for him. Suggests he has found answers elsewhere. Misses the countryside since returning to London. Reports a new interest in nature. He speaks like someone who has never noticed it before. Has been spending time at the Botanic Gardens in Kew. Says they are teaching him patience. Plants emerge without trying. Everything breaks through eventually. Even government secrets have their own seasons—they will surface when it is time. In his dreams or someone else’s. In slips of the tongue.

  Kew. So was this what he was doing there? Finding a new metaphor? There were no more notes—apart from an illegible scribble at the bottom of the page, a word that began with what looked like “Defe.” Deferral, perhaps. Or Defeat.

  Belsey closed the notes. He wasn’t playing to his strengths. He was a detective; he needed something concrete.

  Easton had been involved in at least one form of official employment. Connoisseur Catering. Belsey had seen the payments; Easton was caught in that web of the mundane that divides the living from the dead.

  Belsey called the tax office. After ten minutes on hold he identified himself as a police officer and things went a little more briskly.

  “I need some details in relation to a homicide investigation. Michael Easton, 6 July 1975. Has he got a National Insurance number?”

  “Yes.”

  Belsey took down the number. “What other details do you have?”

  “Just one address. Been in the system since he turned sixteen.”

  “Can I have it?”

  The address was in Cumbria, in a town called Maryport on the Solway estuary, the very north-west coast of England: 27 Kirkby Terrace, Maryport. HMRC had the address registered in 1991 when Easton turned sixteen and they sent him his first National Insurance card.

  That was the accent Belsey had picked up on the phone: not quite the twang of the north-east, a softer lilt. They still had a landline for the address. Belsey dialled and got through to a creaky-sounding woman who said the Eastons were the previous owners, a couple and their son. The parents died several years ago. The son sold her the house in February. That placed it around the time of Powell’s advert—a few weeks before Michael Easton’s foreign travels.