Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Who did you send the samples to? In Science City?” I asked, holding the tweezers up to the light.

  “Chap called Rudge in Engineering. Know him?”

  I shook my head. “And he says he never got them?”

  “He’s a lying bastard. One of my students delivered them personally.”

  “When was this?”

  Harry swabbed the hole in my arm again and put a dressing over it. “A fortnight ago.”

  “I wish you’d told me about this earlier,” I said, handing him back the tweezers. “When I could have done something about it.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  I rolled my sleeve down and put my jacket back on. I said, “Anna and Lou...”

  He nodded. “They had them too. Judging by where they are, I’d say they were put in during routine TB vaccinations. The vaccination site scars over and you don’t pay any attention to the little lump under the skin.” He put the little object he had dug out of my arm on a cloth in front of him on the desk and looked at it with the magnifying glass. “Why they don’t work their own way out, like shrapnel, I have no idea.” He looked at me and shrugged.

  I sighed. “And here was me thinking I was going to go quietly into retirement.”

  THE BOARD SHOWED no signs of wanting to hang about. When I arrived at work the next morning I found Bob Miller sitting in the outer office, silently glowering at Anne. Bless her, she wasn’t about to let anyone into my office but me until she absolutely had to.

  To his credit, Bob seemed a bit embarrassed by it all. We chatted for a few minutes about this and that; I filled him in on the latest details of the murder investigation, which didn’t take long, then he had to go off and take care of handing over his workload to someone else and I had the rest of the day free, so I went over to Security.

  “WE HAD TO let the Dean go,” said Skinner. “Chancellor came over here personally and told us to.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not your fault. How did he take it? The Dean?”

  “Said he’d have all our jobs. And our bollocks. Sorry to hear about yours, sir. The job.”

  “That’s all right. Do we still have Richard Brooks?”

  “Yes. The Dean wanted him let go too, but the Chancellor said he was the subject of a live investigation and he couldn’t sanction that.”

  “That’s something, anyway. Has anyone spoken to him since we arrested him?”

  Skinner shook his head. “We’ve kept him fed and watered but nobody’s had a conversation with him. He was angry at first, but he’s quietened down now.”

  Down in the cellars of the Security building, the cells occupied a huge space. There was room here to house a thousand people and it had still not been enough in the days of the Old Board; each Faculty had its own overspill cell blocks. Before the Fall, an appreciable percentage of the Campus’s population had been incarcerated.

  The cells were mostly empty now, and we had put Richard Brooks in one that was far from any occupied ones. It was always a sobering walk along these cold echoing corridors lined with doors that were blank apart from a stencilled number and a spy-hole. I’d never been here as an inmate; it was eerie enough coming here as an official.

  The cell we had put Brooks in was one of the smaller ones. There was a mattress on the floor and a slop bucket and a couple of square feet of floor space to pace about on, and that was it. The only light came from an armoured glass fitting in the ceiling, which during the time of the Old Board had burned night and day but now was subject to the same brownouts as everywhere else. Stuck in here for several days, it was no wonder Brooks was starting to look ragged. He certainly hadn’t been given the opportunity for a wash and a shave, or a change of clothes.

  “Up,” I said as Skinner opened the door to let me into the cell.

  Brooks watched me from his seat on the mattress, knees hugged to his chest.

  “Up,” I said, stepping over and grabbing one of his arms and pulling him to his feet. “No, I like you better where you were. Down.” I let go and he fell back onto the mattress.

  “Right,” I said, squatting down beside him. “Doctor Brooks. I don’t need to question you because I have all the evidence I need to imprison you for several years. Unfortunately, your trial isn’t very high on our agenda at the moment so you’ll have to wait here until we get round to you.”

  He gulped. “How long?”

  “Well, the Board want to get started on the trials of the Old Board – you’ll understand that’s a bit of a priority compared to you – and that could take a while.” I shrugged. “Eight months? A year?”

  He looked around the cell, imagining another year in there. “I want to talk to Callum.”

  “Yes, we thought you might, so we got in touch, and he doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “You bloody liar!” he shouted. “I want to talk to Callum!”

  “Sorry.” I stood up. “Anyway, I just wanted to keep you informed. I’ll pop back if there’s any more news.” I turned to go.

  “Wait!”

  I kept going.

  “Tell him I know about Molson!”

  I stopped and turned back. “I’m sorry?”

  He was sobbing on the mattress. “Tell him I know all about Molson. He’ll want to help me then.”

  I gave him a pitying look. “Everybody knows about Molson. A lot’s been going on while you’ve been in here; it isn’t a secret any more. Is it, Inspector Skinner?”

  “Bad lot, that Molson,” Skinner agreed. “Nasty business.”

  Brooks looked at us, his mouth working. “You’re lying!”

  I shrugged again. “You’re the one in the cell, Doctor.” And Skinner and I left. Skinner locked the door behind me, and as we walked away we could hear Brooks’s voice, a little diminishing storm of shouting and screaming and crying.

  “Molson, sir?” Skinner murmured.

  “I have no idea, Inspector,” I said.

  MOLSON, MOLSON...

  The name did ring a bell, actually. Back in the office, I opened the big safe where my predecessor had kept all his very special files. They were considerably better-indexed than the Apocrypha, and it only took a few moments to find the one marked ‘Molson. Andrew Kenneth.’

  Quite why Andrew Molson had come to my predecessor’s notice was unclear. He was a Biochemistry lecturer. No particular expressions of dissidence. My own file, which I had found on my first day in the job, was a lurid penny-dreadful in comparison. Long before the Fall, my predecessor had started to squirrel away information about the Old Board and assorted other staff, just in case he needed it one day. Quite a lot of this information now formed part of the cases being prepared against the Old Board, but there was no dirt on Andrew Molson. Just a bland Personnel file. If you’d just taken it out of the safe at random, you might not have noticed anything unusual, but it stood out against the general background of blackmail in the other files. I hadn’t really thought about it when I went through the safe, but the file was there, I suddenly thought, almost like a memo, a bookmark – this man is worth watching. Why?

  The best place to keep secrets, the aphorism went, is inside your own head. Unfortunately, my predecessor had blown all his most important secrets all over the office carpet and ceiling and walls. If he’d had plans for Andrew Molson, they were gone.

  I heard voices in the outer office, then the door opened and Araminta was standing there, a rucksack slung over one shoulder.

  We looked at each other for a few moments, then she said in a despairing tone of voice, “Rupe, you fucking muppet.”

  “WHAT THE FUCK was going through your head?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Revenge. Blood. Destruction on a huge scale. Punching Callum until his head fell off.”

  “Don’t be clever with me, Rupe.”

  I looked at her, but the words wouldn’t come. I just shook my head.

  We had gone back to my rooms; there was no way to prevent an argument, but at least here my secretary and any visitors
wouldn’t be able to hear it. I got up and put the kettle on, just for something to do.

  “You’ve lost it, Rupe,” she told me. “First that thing with the Colonel, now this. Utterly fucking irrational.”

  “Callum’s got something to do with the bootlegging operation, and he had something to do with killing Anna and Lou,” I told her while the kettle boiled. “We arrest his brother-in-law, and hours later someone I care about very much is murdered. As a message to me to back down. Do I have evidence? No. Am I likely to find any? No. Am I right? Yes.”

  “Did it make you feel better?” she asked. “Frogmarching that bloke all the way back here?”

  “Immeasurably.”

  “Did it bring Anna back?”

  I turned and looked at her.

  “Because if it didn’t, all you’ve accomplished is a few minutes of selfish gratification. And now you’ve lost your job, where you might actually have managed to do some good eventually.” She shook her head. “Berk.”

  The kettle boiled. I poured some water in the pot and swirled it around to warm it, tipped it down the sink, spooned some tea leaves in and poured water on top of them.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “Go back to teaching.”

  “No, I mean about Callum.” I looked over my shoulder and she went on, “You can’t do anything, can you? Because you lost your job.”

  “Not for another week. Six days.”

  “Forget Callum,” she told me. “You have bigger problems than Callum.”

  I poured tea into two cups, handed one to her, took mine back to my chair and sat down. I felt very heavy.

  “I didn’t go home,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been down South. I wanted to have a look at this flu epidemic, and you people are in big trouble.”

  “‘You people’?”

  “It’s not just a bit of a runny nose and a cough, Rupe,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “I’ve seen it before, when I was little. It’s a man-killer. In a population this small – malnourished, poor medical care – it’s an extinction-level event.”

  “What?”

  “Rupe, for Christ’s sake, concentrate.” She sat forward in her chair. “I’ve got all kinds of bad news for you and you need to listen.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  Her expression softened. “I don’t have a lot of time, Rupe, so I’m going to tell you a story and I’m going to ask you to keep your mouth shut until I’ve finished unless there is some part that you absolutely do not understand. All right?”

  “All right,” I said.

  And she told me a mad story about a family of wizards and a map. It took longer than she’d probably intended because I didn’t understand any of it.

  WHEN SHE’D FINISHED, I said, “You can’t expect me to believe a single word of that.”

  She sighed. “No, you’ll need proof.” She put her cup down on the occasional table beside her chair and rummaged around in her rucksack. She pulled out a cardboard tube, uncapped the end, and removed a rolled-up sheet of paper. “Here,” she said, holding it out to me.

  I unrolled the paper. On it was a gorgeous hand-drawn map of the Campus, the Schools ringed by the Mountains, the River running through it all. Beyond the Mountains, the map was blank.

  “That’s your world, Rupe,” she told me. “Everything. The blank bits aren’t there for artistic effect or because data was lacking. They’re there because there isn’t anything else here.”

  I stared at her.

  “You’re living in a pocket universe about two hundred miles across, and someone, somewhere, is taking the piss out of you on an industrial scale.”

  “You’ve been taking drugs,” I said.

  She took another cardboard tube from her rucksack and extracted another rolled-up sheet of paper. This one was a map of a huge expanse of territory. I saw railway lines and forests and lakes and rivers and the unfamiliar names of towns and cities.

  “This is the Community,” Araminta said. “The Whitton-Whytes did this too. They mapped it over Europe. The Campus used to be part of the Community, but at some point in the past couple of hundred years somebody walled it off, sealed the borders. I don’t know why.”

  I looked at the two maps. “I don’t have time for this.”

  She reached into her pocket and took out a flat black rectangle a little bigger than a packet of playing cards. One side of it was shiny, like glass. Araminta poked at it and the shiny side lit up with a picture of lots of little coloured squares. “Do you have time for this?” she asked. She poked at it again and the telephone on my desk started to ring. We looked at the telephone. Then we looked at each other. “Go on,” she said tiredly. “Pick it up.”

  I lifted the receiver and held it to my ear and I heard her voice in the earpiece saying, “This is a mobile phone, Rupe, and that’s impossible for two reasons. The first is that you don’t have mobile phones, and the second is that you don’t have a mobile phone network. Except you do.”

  I stared at her. She was holding the mobile phone to her ear.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “This proves nothing. The Science Faculty have been conspiring against you and hiding stuff from you and they have some hidden agenda you don’t know anything about, blah blah, blah.”

  I put the receiver back on its cradle. “May I see that, please?”

  She handed over the mobile phone. I turned it over in my hands. I touched the glass part and the picture changed. I shook it and she laughed. “Give it back, Rupe, before you start sniffing it.”

  “Hm.” I handed it back and she tapped the glass face of the phone again.

  “You also,” she said, “have the internet. Or an internet, anyway. The phone says there’s a connection available.”

  I shook my head.

  “Doesn’t matter right now.” She poked the phone and it went dark and she put it back in her pocket. “The Science Faculty have been conspiring against you and hiding stuff from you and they do have a hidden agenda. They’ve been developing all kinds of technologies they haven’t bothered to tell you about.” She saw the look on my face. “And before you march out and arrest Callum again, it’s not just him. It’s been going on for years. Centuries. The Whitton-Whytes genuinely intended this place to be a seat of learning, a great University. But they died out, their maps were lost, and someone else took over. They made a deal with the Science Faculty and they’ve been using the Campus to hothouse new stuff, stuff we’re banned from experimenting on where I’m from.”

  I looked at her for quite a long time, wondering whether or not to go along with this lunacy. On the other hand, the mobile phone was an interesting development. I said, “How do you know all this?”

  “Because there are people in London who know about the Campus, and I’ve been talking to them.”

  “London.”

  She shrugged and nodded.

  “Where you’re from.”

  I was starting to regard her rucksack as a bottomless pit of madness. She reached into it again and brought out a book. It was small, and had soft, floppy covers. On the front was a stylised silhouette of a man in a deerstalker hat, under the words The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Under the silhouette was Conan Doyle’s name. I turned the book over in my hands with the same bafflement I’d accorded the mobile phone.

  “In the Conan Doyle books published here, Holmes lives on Baker Street in Lady’s Law,” she said. “That’s because, in all your books and maps and stories, my world has been edited out. If you look at that, Holmes lives in London.” She nodded at the book and sat back in her chair. “If I was crazy, would I go to the trouble of rewritingthe whole ofThe Hound Of The Baskervillesand getting it published?”

  Somebody might. If they were crazy enough. I looked at her for a few more moments, then I unlocked my desk drawer and took out the little glass jar Harry Pool had given me. I held it out to her. “Do you know what these are?”

  Sh
e held the jar up to the light, shook it. It rattled. She squinted at the contents. “They look like microchips,” she said finally.

  “What?”

  She looked at me. “Rupe, where did you get these?”

  “What are they?” I asked again.

  “I used to work in a vet’s,” she said. “We used to microchip cats and dogs. Implant these little... devices under the skin. They’ve got information on them – name, address, owner, stuff like that – and you can read them with another device, in case the cat or dog gets lost. Where did you get them?”

  “One of them came out of my arm,” I said, a cold and quite rational anger growing within me. “Harry Pool thinks we all have them.”

  She blinked at me, and for a moment I had the gratifying sense that I had managed to wrongfoot her. “Jesus, Rupe, they chipped the entire population.”

  “There was a big tuberculosis outbreak about fifty years ago,” I said. “The Old Board started a programme of mass inoculation that’s been going on ever since. Harry thinks that’s how these things are implanted.” I took the jar from her. “Could they be used to tell someone where we all are?”

  She shrugged. “They could be, I suppose. Depends how sophisticated they are.”

  Sciency stuff.I put the jar in my jacket pocket. “Come with me.”

  “THEY’RE WHAT?” SAID Harry.

  “Micro...” I said.

  “Chips,” said Araminta. “Microchips.”

  “We’ve been bloody tagged like cattle for years,” I told him. “By the Science Faculty and the Medical Faculty and the Old Board.”

  He looked at the jar. “Fucking hell,” he said. “How do they work?”

  “Radio,” said Araminta.

  Harry raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s not important right now,” I told him.

  “It’s not? Am I going to need a drink?”

  “You might. So might I. Could we look at the man with the wings, please?”