The Last Day

  And then she recalled the face of the boy in the shambling column. And the policeman outside Thorne’s burgled house, and her brother’s lie about Warwick. And Thorne’s words to her as he lay in bed. You always wanted the truth. Only the truth. And she realized he had been right.

  TWELVE

  It was almost one when Hopper reached her destination. The day had warmed up: first in patches of sun, then in a long, unbroken stretch of cloudless heat. The bus east had limped along despite the quiet of the roads, then had broken down wholly, disgorging its passengers onto the pavement between stops.

  When the next bus had eventually turned up, its driver, grease-lined and sweating, had taken them with ill grace, squinting at their tickets through dirty green-tinted spectacles, complaining that the cheap ink had smudged the date of purchase. He had probably just been trying to save his precious petrol, but it had been tiring and degrading.

  Still, it was worth it to be here, in the canteen of the Times. These days the paper was housed in an old factory in east London, a mile north of Shoreditch. It had been here ever since the great clearing-out of the riverbanks at the time of the floods. The area was an outskirt, yet still within the central zone; a useful terrain vague for unfashionable industries.

  The Times Building itself resembled a vast shipwreck stranded on a dried-up sea. Scattered around it at ground level were smaller buildings like lifeboats, and at its edges, the barnacles of unofficial extensions and lean-tos of corrugated iron. The old factory’s name was still picked out in brickwork at one end of the main building: PLOMLEY’S DOG BISCUITS.

  At the gate, Hopper had been inspected by a suspicious steward, and eventually collected and deposited in the canteen by a cheerful young woman. There she had waited, nervously, for the only man she thought could help her, and who had the least reason for wanting to see her again.

  “So. Are you going to tell me what happened to make you look like that?” David Gamble sat down, sliding her tea and a sandwich across the table. She had ignored all his questions on first seeing him, trying to conquer the crippling personal awkwardness of it and trying to remember: This is more important than feelings.

  “No.” While he had been buying the food, she had tried to discreetly comb the knots out of her hair, feeling the growing lump at the back of her head. “Just fell over. You know me. Clumsy, clumsy.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “As you like.” He had always been easy in conversation. “So, what brings you here?”

  “Do I need a reason to come and see my ex-husband?” She spoke with a lightness she didn’t feel.

  “I suppose not. You were bound to turn up eventually. Crawling back, that sort of thing. You’re only human. Sugar?”

  “No, thanks.” Sugar these days was unpleasant stuff: beet-derived, murky in color, and with a faint tang of grit at the bottom of a cup, as though two separate consignments had been mistakenly married. She often wondered if there was a load of grit somewhere with an unexpectedly sweet savor.

  “OK.” David served himself a liberal dose, watching the two spoonfuls slowly disintegrate as he stirred. He looked around at the busy café with some satisfaction.

  He had hardly changed in four years. Hair as thick as straw, and almost as light; pink cheeks; the same amused eyes, blue flecked with gray. He looked nearly as young as he had at their last meeting, apart from a few more lines around the eyes, and a few gray hairs creeping in at his temples. It had been a shock seeing him so unaltered.

  “Looks like you’re doing well.”

  “I’m only bloody news editor.” He produced a little printed business card, as swiftly as if he’d been holding it ready since her arrival. “Impressed?”

  She smiled, already well into her sandwich. “Very.”

  “Good. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Well, the whole place is doing all right. And recently refurbished. Did I ever tell you about our presses? Original 1930s, resurrected wonders from the great days of print?”

  “I dimly remember you mentioning it once or twice.”

  He grinned. “Sorry.”

  “How’ve you been keeping, though? Really?”

  “All right. Not very much to do except work.”

  “How’s Pamela? She finally give you those children you always wanted?” Hopper was trying to lighten the mood, to confront the awkwardness head-on. As soon as she had spoken, though, she realized her mistake. A deeper spot of color appeared in David’s cheeks, and he looked down and nudged the sugar bowl with his knuckles.

  “Pamela and I are . . . ah . . . no longer together.”

  “Oh God. Sorry, David. I didn’t mean anything by that. I mean, I didn’t mean to . . . you know. Sorry.”

  “Forget it. You weren’t to know. How about you? Any rig sweethearts?”

  “Not really.”

  He grinned. She decided to steer toward safer ground.

  “What’s on the agenda today?”

  “Big report on NTB.”

  She must have looked blank, because he smiled and said, “I forget you’ve been out of town. NTB equals New Tower Bridge.” She remembered now. Davenport had been photographed at the sinking of the first pile, dwarfing a ceremonial spade with his fists.

  “Is it in trouble?”

  “How dare you, Ellie. It’s a significant national project with the PM’s personal backing, and as such is going fabulously. Keep up.”

  “I see. What else is going on?”

  He looked at her for a second, then leaned across the table, lowering his voice as he did so. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff we’re not printing, El. Chaos outside London. Army running low on people, weapons, you name it. Patchy, everywhere. As soon as one blotch of civil disobedience settles down, another bit of the country goes bright red.”

  “Seriously?”

  He nodded. “And that’s not all. Everything in short supply. Right now Britain’s manufacturing base is making an enormous surplus of bullshit and not much else. It’s just as well we still know how to make Scotch tape. Once we lose that, we’re fucked.”

  “Is any of this getting into the paper?”

  “Of course not. But most civil servants sound like they’ve had two hours’ sleep for the last month. Davenport needs a victory pretty soon. If he doesn’t get it, that might be it for him.”

  “Do you think he’ll get it?”

  “Actually, I do. There are rumors. Just rumors, of course.” He breathed deeply, as if appalled by what he was about to say. “But the word is he might be getting what he wants out of the Americans at long last.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ellie, where have you been? The one thing he’s always wanted is the nukes.”

  “Oh. Right. I knew about those. But what would he even do with nuclear weapons?”

  “No one seems sure. But the fact that they’ve been in American hands for thirty years is the one thing that’s been keeping him in check. This would let him restore control over the whole country—everywhere within their effective range, I guess. If he had them, he could invade the Scandis tomorrow, or wherever he wanted.”

  “Christ.”

  “Like I say, it’s just a rumor. Here’s hoping it’s not true.”

  Someone passed close by them. David leaned back and ostentatiously changed the subject.

  “Still living in the rig, then? Still trying to nail down the currents?”

  “Yeah, still the rig. You?”

  “Still the old place. Not many changes.” The “old place” was the home she and David had shared in Queensway, until she had left. “Very quiet these days”—he smiled—“but I’m not there much. Mostly just a place to not get enough sleep.”

  “How are your colleagues?”

  He nodded to himself, staring around the café. “Good, thanks.” He looked a
gain and added, quietly, “Just as much trouble.”

  She kept her voice as low as his. “Still don’t know who’s working for you?”

  “Oh, they all work for us. It’s just that half of them have a second job. Just the kind of industriousness Davenport likes, really.”

  It was an open secret that the government maintained a presence at the newspaper. If the printers looked like going on strike, even if editorial conferences became heated—whatever the news, it would make its way back to Whitehall.

  After the bulk of newspapers had been closed down—just as the state of emergency began, one year before the Stop—the Times had been allowed to keep operating, under an arrangement known as “strategic supervision.” The editor at the time had been acquiescent to the government; the board had proved quiescent. Any journalists who seriously objected had been released from their duties.

  The paper had lived for three decades in a curious state of limbo; neither an official organ of propaganda nor a newspaper in the former sense of the word. There was one other national paper, observed as closely as David’s, and the state radio station.

  “That must be difficult for you.”

  David sighed. “It’s even worse these days. Even when we know who the moles are, there’s nothing we can do about it. If we fire them, we’ll be shut down. Effectively, we’re totally free to print whatever we want, as long as we don’t, and the government will happily accommodate fractionally negative stories because they’re proof they don’t tell us what to write. If I wasn’t so cheerful, I’d tell you how difficult and depressing the whole thing is.”

  “David Gamble, I believe you’re disaffected. I never thought it could happen.”

  “Me? Far from it. I’m here”—he shrugged—“at the prime minister’s pleasure. And what a pleasure it is.” But she sensed his exhaustion.

  He sipped his coffee and brightened up. “Anyway, you didn’t come to see me because you were worried about life at the Times. If you did, they’re not working you nearly hard enough on that giant Erector set you live on.”

  Hopper told him briefly the reason for her visit: the letter, and the summons, and the hospital, and the burglary.

  “Edward Thorne?” David leaned back in his chair. “Didn’t you tell me once he taught you?”

  “Yes.” That was all she had told David when they’d met in London after university, when she’d been trying to rebuild her life. She’d turned the whole thing into a little anecdote: Thorne, the great minister, teaching me. Amazing, huh? Maybe if she’d confronted it head-on, told him the truth, it wouldn’t have eaten away at her, pushing her away from the world, from David. Too late now. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “Not much off the top of my head. Think he had a scientific background at first. Crop stuff, genetics. Matey with Davenport for years before the Stop. Was running half the country soon after it. Almost everything internal went across his desk while the PM ran the military side of things. Then he had some sort of catastrophic falling-out with Davenport and was moved upcountry, or retired or something—after a stint teaching you, of course. I’d assumed he was already dead.”

  “That’s ‘not much’?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “He was pretty big news in his day. But I don’t understand what he could have had to tell you. He’d been out of government for fifteen years.” Not he’s been, but he’d been. Thorne had slipped effortlessly into the past tense, unnoticed.

  “Do you have anything extra? On paper, I mean?”

  “’Course we do. Want me to look him up?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “All right then. I have to go to the archive, though. Come and see it. It’s rather fun.”

  He got up at her nod, and she followed him across the café, watching him greet a few colleagues as he went.

  News editor. He’d always wanted that. When they’d first met, he’d been a court correspondent. Eventually he’d been shunted sideways onto the home affairs brief, where he’d become more biddable and started his rise through the paper’s ranks. He had more gravitas these days, a heaviness that sat strangely alongside the boyish glee she remembered.

  During their marriage, as he had grown more senior, his ambition had overwhelmed the things in him she had found admirable. The court reporter, always pushing a little further than he should, had slowly become the editor, hedging, making little cuts, keeping everyone safe. He carried that seriousness now, for all his jokes and indiscretions.

  And, of course, he had wanted a child she had no desire to bring into the world. That had been it, in the end.

  She had loved him. But his desire for a family—something he had not had in the ten years since his parents’ deaths, and wanted keenly—had stood between them. She had felt entirely unequal to the responsibility. After just four years, the ship of their marriage had been foundering. And when, late on, she had become pregnant, then quickly miscarried, that had become another secret keeping them apart. She had never told him.

  They moved up the stairs at the back of the café, and through drab corridors variously lined in dark wood or painted brown to look like it. Every so often they skirted the edges of larger open-plan offices, where journalists sat typing or murmuring into their phones.

  They went up three flights, over the great clanking factory floor, then back down again. Eventually, in a low-vaulted basement, they passed through a swing door to the archive, a drab space with a counter. Behind it, metal shelves thick with cardboard stretched out until they were lost in gloom.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Gamble.”

  The woman behind the desk was in her mid-forties, sallow, and wore an expression of blank resistance to the world—an expression cast off for a broad simper on one side of her face as soon as she saw David. She took her large tear-shaped reading glasses off immediately and smiled again, before giving Hopper an unfriendly glance.

  David spoke. “Good afternoon . . . Sarah.” Hopper could hear the little snag of memory in his voice, and realized he had read the archivist’s name from the plastic label she wore. “How’s your health?”

  “Oh, not at all good, Mr. Gamble. Very bad.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “But all the better for seeing you.”

  He smiled. “They should prescribe me in hospitals, eh?” He gestured at Hopper. “This is my cousin. She’s visiting me.”

  A little of the hostility went out of Sarah’s manner. “What can we do for you today, Mr. Gamble?”

  “I’d like a personal file, please. Total sweep.”

  “Name?”

  “Thorne, Edward.”

  “Of course, Mr. Gamble.”

  When she had disappeared, Hopper said, a little louder than she’d intended: “You nearly didn’t remember her name.”

  David put his finger to his lips, before pointing at the desk, and whispered, “You know me too well.”

  Not anymore, Hopper thought.

  Eventually, Sarah returned and handed him a slim green folder, with the same lopsided smile. “There you are, Mr. Gamble.”

  “Thank you. I’ll have it back within the day.” He signed a chit for it with a little flourish and grinned at Sarah again. Not for the first time, Hopper reflected on David’s curious popularity with women. He was so enthusiastic, that was part of it. In the full glare of his attention, one felt wholly cared for, at the center of things.

  They made their way back out, David clutching the folder under his arm.

  Outside the archive room, back in the stairwell, he said, “Sorry to shush you. But it’s a bit, ah, porous in there. Half the reason anyone gets caught out in this place is because they forget a name. Remarkable the extent to which minor, unintended slights can reflect on you later.”

  “Why was I your cousin?”

  “I suspect Sarah has a bit of a crush on me . . .”
>
  “Yes, I’d say so.”

  “And if she thinks you’re my cousin, she’s less likely to gossip about it.”

  “Right.”

  “And I thought it would be funny.” David smiled, and Hopper felt a pleasant tremor of déjà vu in that moment of conspiracy. “Here we go, then. Your old chum Thorne. Let’s see what we can’t find.”

  He opened the folder and picked out a docket at the front. “Ah. Thought it felt light.” The file held only a few pieces of paper. The latest entry on the docket was dated two months before, and read simply: Int. Sec. Removal.

  “I’m afraid it looks like we’ve been beaten to it.”

  “Int. Sec.?”

  He grimaced. “Internal Security. It’s the memory hole.”

  “I know. My brother works for Security, remember?”

  “Well, don’t mention it to him, for God’s sake.”

  “You’re saying Internal Security has deleted everything the paper’s ever run on Thorne?”

  “No. But as good as. Firstly, a new all-paper search would take weeks. And secondly, every time you institute a search that big, it crosses the Internal Security desk, so they would know I’d been sniffing around. So . . .” He shrugged. “There you go.”

  “Is there another copy, anywhere, of everything you’ve run on him?”

  He looked at her quizzically. “What are you getting into, Ellie? Stuff they’ve removed is stuff we almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed to repeat. Are you sure looking into this is a good idea?”

  “Yes.” She hadn’t considered it until now, and her voice sounded uncertain. She stiffened it. “Yes. I am. Can you get another copy of this file, without a new search?”

  “We can’t.”

  “Would that woman, Sarah, help?”

  “No. Sarah and her little lot are right in the pocket of Internal Security, which is why I’m so extremely friendly to them.”