The Last Day

by Andrew Hunter Murray

  She pulled the photograph out, and looked closer. It felt thicker in places; it had been altered somehow. She held it up, held it perpendicular to her eye, and there, catching her eye, she saw. There was a diagonal seam right across the front of it, almost invisible unless you looked in the right light. She scrabbled for something sharp. One of the shards of glass from the frame. That would do. She levered it out, held it carefully, and made a small incision in the corner. As soon as she had done so, the rest of the picture yawned open, Thorne swinging away from his wife and child. The photo had been bisected with a scalpel at some point, across its front. She folded it out. Inside the picture of Thorne and his family, there was another photograph.

  It was a group of people gathered in a loose semicircle, facing the camera, in a half-posed, half-awkward framing. They stood in a nondescript office of tiled ceilings and thin-carpeted floors. Outside one window was the tower of Big Ben. She recognized Thorne immediately. He was accompanied by three men and two women, all in suits. Names were written on the back: Hollis, Lee, Drabble, Symons, Gethin, and in the corner, Nov. ’43. Less than a year before she had met him for the first time. The first four names were crossed out, with little annotated dates. The dates were close together, she noticed: all around a year after the picture was taken.

  Gethin was standing at Thorne’s right hand, was wearing a suit, but must have been no more than thirty to Thorne’s sixty. He looked lawyerly, saturnine. His features were sharply defined, his little round glasses tied with a knot of tape and resting on a slender, patrician nose.

  The group were assembled behind something. In the foreground of the picture was a small white oblong box. On the side were three semicircular indentations, all the same size; on the top a long groove was scored along the whole length of the box. What was it?

  At that moment, she heard voices outside and footsteps approaching the house up the broad gravel drive.

  She ran to the window and glanced out, almost too quickly to tell anything. Two figures—they looked like the men who had been following her at Chandler’s house. How had they found her here? No time to think about that now. She grabbed the photo of Thorne and his colleagues and shoved it into her bra, threw the photo frame back facing downward. She shouldered her bag, ran back onto the first-floor landing, moved to the stairs—if she could just get downstairs, she could slip out of the house at the back—and froze as she heard a key twist in the front door. They were in the hall.

  “Want a drink before we finish the bedroom?”

  “Yeah. Whatever’s in the cupboard.”

  One set of footsteps started climbing the stairs. Hopper moved back into the first room she had seen. The footsteps arrived on the landing, turned right into the bedroom she had just been in. She risked a glance. The door was angled: she wouldn’t be seen if she moved to the head of the staircase. But if she ran into the other one as he came up the stairs . . . She would have to take the chance.

  As gently as she could, she slipped out of the study, across to the stairs, and descended, hardly breathing. She stopped and flattened herself against the wall as a voice came from downstairs, loud and coarse:

  “You want ice?”

  The man in the bedroom responded: “Is there any?”

  “There should be.”

  “Yeah, go on then. Not too much.”

  She kept moving. She was halfway down now, on the little landing between the two flights, by the doorway to the bathroom. Before she could move again, the voice came from downstairs: “The freezer’s on the fritz. Have to have it without.”

  She heard footsteps moving toward the hall, about to reach the stairs. She eased back into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, sliding the bolt shut.

  The glass in the door was frosted. Anyone passing by would see there was someone in here. She moved back and sat on the closed lavatory as she heard the footsteps approach up the stairs. They paused for one awful second, then passed her. The second man was continuing up. He must have seen her and thought she was his colleague. In a few seconds she would have a chance to slip out. And then, as he passed, he shouted back, toward the bathroom door: “Hope you like your whisky neat.”

  A second’s pause. Then a voice came back from the bedroom. “No problem.”

  In that pause, she could almost hear the second man turning back to the bathroom. And before he had the chance to move, she unbolted the door, heaved it open, and ran. She barely saw the man, still holding a tray with two glasses on it, staring at her.

  She ran down the stairs, heard a smash she later realized was the tray landing on the ground. She crossed the hall, heaved open the heavy front door, heard footsteps clumping behind her, gaining. She was on the path, running between the weeds toward the gate.

  And just as she reached the gate, already planning her route back to the main road, to anywhere, she ran straight into the back of the police officer stationed once again at the front of the house.

  EIGHTEEN

  It had been too hot for a fortnight. Nobody was sleeping, and people were starting to lose their tempers. Most people, that is, but not Thorne, who smiled as Hopper entered his office, flustered and late.

  “Take your time. No rush.” Then, once she had settled herself, he said, rather more sharply: “All right then. Showpiece day. This had better be worth a month’s work.”

  “It is. I swear it.” She dug the folder out of her satchel and handed it to him. “I phoned the Department of the Environment and told them what I was studying. They told me they’re only focused on coastal waters. There are no expeditions planned for more than ten miles from the coast, barring naval activity.”

  “Wait a second. Before I even start to read, how does all this”—he waved the document—“help your colleagues trying to get an extra annual crop out of a cabbage field in Lincolnshire? That’s what people will want to know.”

  “It makes all the difference.”

  “Go on.”

  She breathed in. “As I said last time, we know the water will have cooled dramatically on the other side. Much of it may have frozen over already. And the oceans here will have warmed dramatically. But there will be new currents established by now, replacing the old ones. Much of the churn will be around the edge of the Coldside, but there should be some bigger currents too: warm surface water flowing outward from the Hotzone, and colder water flowing in the other way from the Coldside, probably beneath it. But we’ve got almost no information about any possible new current systems.”

  “Granted.”

  “All anyone’s focused on is more crops, and getting soil-free as fast as possible. But the currents are the way to do that. If we don’t know about them, we don’t know where’s going to be most habitable.”

  “Go on.”

  Time to go for it. Don’t fuck up. “I think Europe’s in the path of one of those colder currents. I think it might be cooling the whole continent as it goes, making places like Britain—especially Britain—more habitable. It seems very possible, but because of the coastal blockades, nobody’s being allowed near it or allowed to study it.

  “So”—please don’t let him laugh at me—“you remember those drifter devices I mentioned?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wrote to a friend from home who’s in the navy, and asked him to drop a few prototypes I made off his ship as he goes. He’s in the Irish Sea. They should be able to measure the currents. They’re wired to automatically radio the signals back to me. You can see the results there.”

  He stared. “Did you really do that?”

  “It’s in the file I’ve given you.” He thumbed his way to the right page. “I hope it’s not too obvious. Or treason, for that matter.”

  He ran a hand over his jaw as he read, back and forth. “Well, it’s not too obvious. Almost certainly treason, though, interfering with the workings of Britannia’s navy. How did you rig these
devices up to send the results?”

  “A little blip. I found a wavelength I can receive the locations on and calculate the movements. A friend in Scotland’s going to help me triangulate. We’re using a broadcasting set I picked up.”

  “Those aren’t allowed, Ellen.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But the prototypes weren’t hard to build, and a lot of the wavelength is going to waste. I just had to know.”

  “You really did this?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the results?”

  “My friend is still on his way. I think—if it works, if we roll it out—we could discover all sorts of new currents. If the navy agrees. There’s nobody else in this hemisphere with the ships to do it. The more we know, the greater the chance of survival.”

  “This is . . . yes, I think it’s fair to say this is worth a term’s work.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “This might have an impact.”

  He flicked the pages back and forth once more, slowly, pausing to look at the diagrams of the drifter she’d built. “Your parents were scientists, you said before.”

  God, he was going to mention them again. Last time she’d felt furious and manipulated. She wouldn’t be this time. “Mum was a doctor, not in research. But yes. Both scientifically minded.”

  “I wish you could have shown them this, Ellen. I can’t pretend to have known them, of course, but I think they’d be impressed.”

  There was a lump in her throat. “Thank you.”

  As she crossed the quad back to her room, between the huge, crumpled college buildings, she couldn’t help grinning. He had seen her work. Thorne, the great man of government, had found her idea impressive. She’d thought of something nobody else was doing. The scientific wings of government had been cut so brutally and chaotically that there must be almost nobody left to think about the long term.

  It embarrassed her a little that her mind had been changed so quickly about staying at university. He had returned her first essay the same day she had submitted it, torn to shreds in the margins, with a reading list appended. A week later he had secured her a special permission for the university library’s rare books collection, with instructions to spend as long as possible working on her next one.

  They had met twice a week since then, and had talked about plankton, whales, tidal collapse, everything. He was relentless. From the quad she often saw his office light still on behind his curtains long into the hours of curfew, faint against the sunlight but still gleaming. She could see why he had been successful in government. And there was something of her father about him. The dedication, the drive. Back in her spartan room, she wondered what her parents would have thought of him.

  Yet in all their tutorials over that term, he never referred to the years—the decades—before he had come to Oxford. It was as though they had never happened, except for one or two moments when she could have sworn that, at the brink of saying something, he’d stopped himself speaking and changed the subject.

  And she could not help noticing that there were times when he became completely lost in abstraction, and a curious kind of depression. Mid-conversation, he would bring a session to an end and request that they carry on next week. After she left, she would look back across the quad and see his curtains twitch closed. When they met the following week, no mention would be made of it.

  These moments were irregular, and not wholly predictable. Even so, it was not beyond her attention that these strange lapses of Thorne’s tended to come whenever she mentioned the southern coast, and particularly when she referred to the rusting jaws of the Tidal Defense Zone.

  NINETEEN

  The back of the police car was unshaded and overheated. Hopper’s wrists were handcuffed to the back of the seat in front of her, shackled in a patch of sunlight. She could feel her skin pinkening.

  Harv had once told her the security services in London used the sun to their advantage. On cloudless days, prisoners would be moved to the roof, placed in glass-capped cells with walls of polished steel, and left without water until they were delirious. You might be there for days, crimsoning and blackening in the heat, your only companion a distorted reflection of your own burning body. Maybe that was where she was going now.

  She had been knocked to the ground by the officer at the gate. He had picked her up and wrestled her back into the house, assisted by the men in coats. At one point she had jerked her head back and made satisfying contact with the policeman’s nose, hearing a little crunch and feeling a dribble of wetness on the back of her scalp.

  She’d been seated on one of Thorne’s armchairs. The policeman had left again and the two men had stood there, the shorter one panting angrily, furious that he’d been forced to humble himself by breaking into a run. The taller one, who seemed the older of the two, had asked her name. She had said nothing. His colleague, red-faced, had slapped her, putting as much weight as he could into it. When she moved her jaw, experimentally, little tendrils of pain arced all the way to her ear.

  The older one had sighed, and asked his colleague to go and make a phone call, then sat with her, reading a book of verse Thorne had owned and humming a little tune. Within ten minutes, an unmarked car had pulled up outside, and she was pushed into it, her wrists bound with the gate policeman’s borrowed handcuffs. He had looked embarrassed putting them on her, with his nose swollen and scarlet. Outside the room, she had heard him telling the two men about her visit to the house yesterday.

  As they had pulled away, she had looked across the street. In the first-floor window she saw the woman with her baby, dispassionately observing the scene.

  The car swung around the corner to the main road and started heading south. The shorter man turned in his seat, grinning at the coincidence that had brought her back into their orbit so soon after she had fallen out of it.

  “You ever been arrested before?” His ear had been malformed by some violence, she noticed.

  She did not answer. She felt frightened yet elated, as though this journey could not help but bring her closer to whatever they were searching for, to what had pushed Thorne out of government in the first place.

  She had been arrested before, just once. After her mother had died.

  It was six years after the Stop. She had been ten years old. Her mother had been in northern Europe, working with the human wreckage after the collapse of the Hotzone. She had been away for a month. Hopper had spoken to her just once in that time, on a crackling phone line, noises of distress and chaos in the background. She couldn’t remember her exact words, just the sense of standing in their family hall, clutching a phone to her ear, thinking how strange it was to hear people suffering a hundred miles away. Her father had spoken to her mother next, and after he had put the phone down, he said to Hopper and her brother: “It’s all right. She’s found a ship. She’s coming back. And she won’t leave again.”

  The ship, so her father later related, was the Elpis, a Greek-flagged vessel. It had two thousand people on board, miraculous survivors of the remains of the Middle East. Some deal had been struck to allow the residents passage; some payment, whether in gold or guns or food, had been weighed and found adequate. The phone call her mother had made was to say she had secured a berth, that she would be home within two days.

  She never arrived. Enquiries to the authorities were useless, met with hostility or a blank wall of ignorance. And a few days later, reports began to spread of the major new security system established by General Richard Davenport, guaranteed to protect Britain’s shores from chaos, and the positive results it was already yielding in the Channel.

  Two weeks after her mother’s disappearance, walking through London, still stricken by the grief swelling within her, she had wormed free of her father’s grip and thrown a stone at a police officer outside the admiralty buildings. It amazed her now to think that furious child had once been her. She had been plucked from her father and
thrown into a van, one of her skinny ribs broken in the process. She had been released within a day, thank God, thanks to some bribe or intercession by her father. The Elpis never appeared. But for months afterward, bodies had washed up along the south coast with their few possessions. An empty dinghy. A sodden Red Cross ration sack. A doll.

  The car was making its leisurely way through the evening traffic. They were coming down through Bloomsbury. Pretty squares rolled past the window. They would be beautiful on their upper stories if one could ignore the human wreckage lower down.

  Thorne had phoned her on the rig just before he went into hospital, although Warwick had claimed he had not asked for her until the day before his death. Perhaps that was why she had been summoned with such urgency on Thorne’s final day: Warwick and her colleagues were convinced he would tell her some information they wanted to know. But he’d been too careful for that.

  And now she knew about the bookshop he had phoned, and the name of his lawyer, Clayford. And tucked under her clothes she had the picture of Thorne and his colleagues around that strange box. What had it been?

  The car made its way along the north bank of the Thames, westbound, until the concrete tower of New Scotland Yard rose up before them. They drove through two discreet black gates, into a little asphalt car park abutting two buildings: one tall tower and one longer, lower block. They parked at the end of a row of similar cars; the lean man got out and pulled open her door.

  “Out you get.”

  Hopper was signed in, briefly patted for any weapons by a gangly female officer, and taken through into a large, airless chamber at the base of the taller building. The men had taken her bag with them.

  “Wait here.”

  It was a long, rectangular room, lined with three wooden benches. The only door was dark metal, complete with sliding hatches. The sole decorations were a row of faded posters on the right-hand wall. The prime minister’s sorrowful, heroic countenance, discreetly touched up. A grotesque cartoon squirrel holding a sack and saying, If You Don’t Save Up Your Rations, You’re Nuts! Another encouraging the public to register as donors: to give blood for the troops, labor for the farms. Everyone wanted something from you these days.