by Peter Millar
One by one a few others began to drift in. Stark couldn’t tell how many. He understood it would be inappropriate to turn round and look. He had been invited in, as a guest. But he was also at their mercy. He had considered informing Lavery where he was going and then at the last minute decided against. If something went wrong, the sergeant would guess soon enough where to start looking. And he did not expect anything to go wrong. He had not come unarmed.
‘You’ve all heard what Mr Ransom has told us about this young man’s father, who he was and what he did for the movement.’ Canon Rye was standing at the front of the little room as if he was preparing to say mass.
There was a rumbled murmur of assent. Stark understood that the old blind man had some sort of venerable status in the group but, for obvious reasons perhaps, his approval was not considered sufficient in itself. These were men of an altogether different complexion. And a very different generation,
A man seated just behind Stark said: ‘I’m not sure about this. It’s a funny moment for somebody just to turn up on your doorstep, Canon, immediately after what happened to Michael’. The canon looked away and dropped his head. Stark saw him wipe away a tear. ‘And anyway, I’ve heard stuff. About his father. There’s stories and then there’s stories.’
‘That’ll do,’ said a big man in the corner, speaking with a broad Dorset accent. ‘But you’ll just cause more problems than you might solve.’
The man reddened. He was not to give up.
‘Has anyone even searched him this morning. He might be carrying a wire for the DoSSers.’ A couple of men from the sides moved towards Stark as if preparing to pat him down. Which would not reveal a hidden microphone but would certainly uncover a police issue revolver.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Stark. ‘I’ve come here on my own. You know who I am. Maybe more than I know myself.’ He wasn’t sure how sincere he sounded. He wasn’t sure how sincere he was. But he wanted to avoid being frisked if at all possible. The two lads stopped in their tracks, partly distracted by someone else entering the room at the far end.
The man seated behind Stark hadn’t noticed and wasn’t going to be put off his stride.
‘We might – and I say “might” know who you are – but we don’t know what you are. I say we wait until Malcolm gets here.’
‘I’m here,’ the new arrival said. Loudly. ‘And I know what he is.’
Stark recognised the voice, but only vaguely. He turned round to see a large, middle-aged man in a leather bomber jacket. The face too seemed oddly familiar: thick spectacles, floppy greasy hair, and flabby age-spotted hands. He was staring at Stark as if he were the incarnation of Satan. One of the tough kids moved towards him.
A scream sounded above them. A clatter of boots on the stone stairs and then Harry Stark’s head exploded and his world was engulfed in darkness.
Chapter 39
Fleet Street, even in the hour before dawn, could be a busy place. Not as busy as it had once been when it had been home to both editorial offices and printing works for a dozen newspapers feeding the appetite of the world’s most voracious consumers of news, analysis and tittle-tattle. Back in the 1930s the rags had rolled off giant presses throughout the night before being transported by fleets of lorries to the railway stations where consecutive editions were loaded onto the relevant night trains departing for Aberdeen, Edinburgh or Liverpool and Hull, the packet boats for the continent and eventually the far-flung reaches of empire.
Fleet Street remained the centre of newspaper production for the English Democratic Republic. But its fiefdom was greatly diminished. As was the size and quantity of news sheets it produced. Two great buildings, patched up from their wartime wounds, still dominated the street, though their owners had changed. The great stone edifice that had once housed the Daily Telegraph was now home to New Times, the official organ of the ruling party.
Since partition the Telegraph, the archetypal paper of the old Right, had been produced in distant Manchester, as was its former neighbour the Daily Express with its deliberately provocative ‘chained crusader’ masthead. The old Express building, in its day an ultra-modern art deco temple of glinting black glass and steel with great glistening silver warrior statues in the atrium, had been refurbished as the new home for the Guardian, an old left-wing newspaper that itself ironically had relocated south from Manchester and was now the house journal of the DoSS. It also produced The Watchtower, a monthly magazine for frontier guards.
As befitting the serious duties performed by its audience, the Guardian rarely descended to the trivial. But it did pay homage to the human side of its readership with occasional articles on everyday fashion, with the unstated understanding that ‘everyday’ included ‘operational’. It would have been interesting to know to what extent the authors of such articles would have approved, had they been present in their office at such an hour and looked out of their window, of the taste on display. There appeared to be a marked preference for short leather jackets amongst the men gathering in ones and twos outside the closed pub, or the municipal tea kiosk that served print workers and lorry drivers a stewed milky version of the national beverage in reusable plastic cups.
Later there would also be a display of navy blue trench-coats although these were mostly not yet on parade, their owners still being seated in the number of parked cars, unusual for that time of the morning, or indeed any time of the day on the southern side of the street near the junction with Ludgate Circus, almost directly opposite the New Times building and along New Bridge Street.
There were four men in each. All of them were wearing watches, so they did not need to look up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s to see the clock on the front of Sir Christoper Wren’s battered masterpiece which in any case had long since relinquished its time-keeping functions. The minute hands on the men’s identical service-issue Sekondas ticked relentlessly towards 5.30 a.m.
At 5.28 a long black Bevan had swung into the street and slid to a halt precisely next to Bride Lane in the lee of the wedding cake pinnacle that was all that remained above ground of St Bride’s. But it was not what remained above ground that interested its occupants, or their gathering army.
At precisely 5.30 the rear door of the Bevan was opened from within and a tall figure in the trademark navy trench-coat got out, looked up at the imperceptibly lightening dishwater sky, adjusted a wide-brimmed black hat on his head and gave an abrupt decisive nod of his head.
The charred wooden door was reduced to splinters in seconds. The crunch of heavy shoulders assisted by the leverage of iron bars saw to that. The noise of its breaking merged into the thunder of boots on stone steps and the scuffing of leather sleeves on stone walls. Powerful torch beams cast hard white light on sepulchral walls scraped out centuries before by monks with iron spoons. Neat piles of ancient bones, cranium and clavicule alike, were shattered with iron bars by men for whom such mortal remains held neither terror nor awe. This jetsam of departed souls was smashed not deliberately but out of the habit of destruction and long familiarity with the powerful intimidation inspired by a display of wanton violence. The blows were not systematic but randomly struck by those who followed as the vanguard ploughed bellowing into the labyrinth.
If there was any apprehension in the minds of those who led the charge there was nothing to demonstrate it. These were men used to following orders not questioning them, men who delighted in force because it was something they dispensed, who were blind to the concept of danger because it was something others encountered in their presence. Except that in this instance the others were missing.
The camp beds against the wall were tipped up and turned over. Bottles of precious ink were wantonly smashed, and two ancient Roneo copying machines hurled to the ground and set upon with lead-lined wooden truncheons, reduced in seconds to battered scrap. At the end of a long corridor of skulls a small room laid out like a Sunday school classroom, though none present could remember such things, was reduced to a repository for broken furnitur
e.
And then, all fury spent, they looked at one another. A few, in response to barked commands, investigated side passages that led to dead ends or fallen rubble or broken bones. The hubbub diminished, the adrenalin eked away to be replaced by the frustration of unexhausted anger, contained only by the strictures of discipline and training as heels clicked together and left hands snapped to foreheads with the automatic stiff-lipped ‘Sir’.
Striding amongst the debris the man in the trenchcoat and the hat, which he had deliberately disdained to remove on entering so-called hallowed ground, pursed his own lips pensively and ran his eyes over the scene like a pirate captain who has seized control of a prize ship only to discover her an abandoned rotting hulk. The men who had carried out his will stood to attention in his presence, fearing that somehow they might be held to account for having attacked a mirage.
‘So,’ he said, as if he were consciously choosing the words of the English monarch who attempted to stop the march of fate and in so doing met his death at the executioner’s axe – and given Marchmain’s enthusiasm for the history of the first republic he might well have been, ‘I see the birds have flown.’
‘All except one,’ said the leather jacket behind him.
Marchmain turned and saw the creature held by the scruff of the neck by his lieutenant. But the thing he held did not so much resemble a bird with the means to fly as a fledgling sparrow, thrown out of the nest by an invading cuckoo: featherless, crippled and blind. Except that this creature was nearer the end of its life than the beginning. Much nearer, in fact.
‘Take him away,’ snapped Marchmain.
Chapter 40
Long after you are dead and the worms have eaten your brains, boys will play football with your skull, Harry Stark had been told by a particularly cruel history teacher at school. Now it had already happened and his soul was condemned to live through the experience.
The space between his ears vibrated like timpani in a Wagner opera, his cranium ached as if the bone had been surgically removed; nerve endings burned where his eyes should be. If they were still there, there was little to prove it. The world was a featureless void. Except, he realised with a curse, banging his shin on something hard and angular, that it wasn’t empty. It also stank, of damp and something sickly sweet, almost chemical, vaguely familiar. There was a metallic tang in his mouth.
He tried to sit up but his feet were trussed, his hands tied behind his back. He rolled on to his side and realised he was lying on rough, cold ground – probably stone or concrete. There was something metallic, like a box or a bench, on the floor next to him, a little out from the wall. That was what he had banged his shin on.
The darkness was real. Either that or something really had happened to his eyesight. He choked on bile at the thought of Ransom with his eyelids sewn together. He could hear water, running water. Not close, and not like a tap or a pipe. Maybe he was close to the river. There was something else too: a faint hum and every so often a louder, but still distant rumbling, and then near at hand, barely distinguishable but unmistakable: voices.
With difficulty, in a motion like a crippled crab, using his elbows and knees, with his toes for leverage, he inched himself painfully along the hard surface of the floor towards the sound. It was coming from his left, a few metres away, the other side of a door maybe, though if it was it let no chink of light escape. He could make out two voices. Then it stopped.
He froze. Had they heard him? Did he want them to? Whoever it was had to know he was there. Had to have brought him there. Wherever there was. He tried to reconstruct what had happened and failed. There had been shouting, footsteps, A raid? A DoSS raid? Had to be. And that explained where he was too. In a DoSS cell, some tomb deep under the Barbican he shouldn’t wonder.
And then the voices started up again and he realised he was wrong.
‘I still say we shouldn’t have left Ransom.’ It was the broad West Country accent of the man who had spoken in the room below the crypt. The second voice was also male, but sounded older, more educated, yet still strangely familiar although the context seemed wrong.
‘He refused to come. What were we going to do? Knock him unconscious too and carry him? It would have killed him.’
‘He’ll talk.’
‘He won’t. He’ll tell them whatever he wants to and nothing more, but they’ve done all they ever could to him and he’s too frail to take any more. He’ll die.’
‘Almost certainly. I’m quite sure he intends to.’
‘I still don’t like it. And in that case, why’d we bring him?’
Stark caught his breath. There was no doubt who they were talking about.
‘Because like you said – today’s the day of the parade, there’s only hours to go and all of a sudden we get a visit from a copper, whatever his supposed pedigree. And then this happens. We need to know what he knows. And who he’s told. Before the others get here.’
‘If he knows anything …’
There was a grunt that sounded like acknowledgement.
‘If he’s a spook, we have to know, if only to know how much they know. We were damn near caught like rats in a trap this morning.’
‘It is still possible he might be on the level.’
‘But how likely? We’ve been caught before by being too trusting. We can’t afford to take risks. Not now. We’ll find out when he wakes up.’
‘What do you want me to do.’
‘Give him a bit of a slap. Nothing too hard, for the moment at least. See what he says.’
‘And if he says nothing?’
There was a perceptible pause. Then, the same voice continued:
‘I know what I’d do.’
‘What?’
Another pause. Whatever he would do was obviously being demonstrated rather than enunciated. Then: ‘Don’t be stupid. Apart from anything else, it’s far too risky.’
Another pause. Then the other voice again: ‘There’s always a risk involved in this sort of business. The question is, whose risk? Look what happened with the American.’
‘That was different.’
Stark’s mind whirled. They’d had to leave the old man somewhere but taken Stark with them, unconscious and trussed. And now they were going to beat him, interrogate him … or worse. What did they know about Fairweather? Or were they referring to the other American? The dead one?
He had to get out of there. If he was going to talk to these people again it would be on his own terms. Or not at all. He wondered how much time he had and decided it was not long enough. The only advantage was that they thought he was still unconscious. That meant they had drugged him – chloroform, that was what the smell was. And it explained the taste in his mouth.
‘Should I go and look at him?’
His heart stopped.
‘Leave it a while yet. That stuff should have him out for another half an hour at least. Let him sweat a bit, then go in and kick him gently in the balls. I’ll see you later.’
Stark breathed again. Silence. Where the hell was he? No longer in the crypt, that at least was certain. It reassured him slightly to know that he was not surrounded by human bones. Although he might have found something to help him escape. He had a vision of himself working on his ropes with an ancient human jawbone.
His bindings were not so tight as to be painful; they had relied on the chloroform to keep him quiet. And the lump on his head. He wondered if he had sustained brain damage. A cerebral haemorrhage could kill him two days or two weeks from now. But he had to live that long first.
He had to get his hands free, and then untie his feet. His feet! He was wearing the size 10 black leather brogues that had belonged to his father. He had waited years to grow into them and never quite managed it. In so many ways. They were still one size too big for him. Which just might be his salvation.
Painfully rubbing his ankles together, slowly he pulled his heel out of the left shoe, then, more slowly because he had done the laces more tightly, the other. P
erspiration was dripping off him. His gamble was that without his shoes he would be able to pull at least one foot through the rope that bound his legs.
Arching his back he tried and failed, failed again and then finally succeeded in getting his hands, tied behind his back, to the ropes at his feet. There was no way he could untie them in this position but at least it gave him more leverage. With a wrench that felt as if he had dislocated his spine, to add to his other injuries, he eventually managed to get his right heel inside the loop, and then slowly, minus his sock, through it. The relief was a minor transport of ecstasy. With one foot free, he could pull the other through, although not quite as easily as he had imagined. The rope remained caught around his ankle until he managed to use the other foot to keep it taut. At last, he could stand.
That meant he could walk, even if he did still have his hands tied behind his back. Crushing down the leather at the heel, he crammed his feet minus one sock back into his shoes. He held his breath. How much noise had he made? There was no sound from behind the door. Was it the only way out? Were his captors still there? If they were not – and it had been silent for several minutes at least – then maybe he could get out that way.
Walking sideways, he edged along the wall feeling his way with his fingers behind him: cold, stone, no, not stone, too smooth, not brick either, there was no pointing, concrete probably. The darkness was complete. Did that mean he was still underground. Buried somewhere in the bowels of the earth beneath St Bride’s. But then wouldn’t the wall be rough stone not smooth concrete?
Then, almost beside him, came an unexpectedly loud, squeaking, scraping noise. He froze. Immediately to his left he could feel cold metal. He was next to the door, yet not a chink of light emanated. The sound again. Not so extreme. Someone pushing back a metal chair from a table, scraping on a stone floor. Then a cough. And again silence. Just one of them, waiting for the other to come back, before they would make their decision. Then from the other direction, somewhere in the distance, came the same noise he had heard before: a long, low rumbling that rose and then fell again.