The Last Day

by Andrew Hunter Murray

  There were fifteen or twenty other people in there, sitting along the uncushioned benches. An enormous bearded man, rough-faced and scarred, slept fitfully, shifting around in a futile search for a comfortable position. Three bored women in tight skirts sat together, picking at their nails and muttering to one another.

  Hopper sat as far as she could from anyone—two spaces from a small, mild-looking woman in a thick brown coat. The woman looked up as she approached, then back down again immediately. She was knotting and unknotting her hands, wrestling with her knuckles one by one as if they were rosary beads.

  She spoke as Hopper sat. “What have they arrested you for then?”

  “I’m not sure yet. They’ll tell me soon enough. What about you?”

  “Ration fraud.” The woman’s voice was soft, embarrassed. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t.” Hopper had practically forgotten about ration cards. She’d been on government food for three years.

  “I got three kids. They only give us two lots of rations. I told them again and again, we need an extra ration. They told us no, that we should put our eldest in the army. But he doesn’t want to go. He’s only fifteen.” Her eyes were watering behind her glasses. “He can’t go and fight.”

  “I’m sure it won’t come to that.” Hopper wished she sounded more convincing.

  The woman looked back at her lap. “They keep telling us we got to do better. We’re doing our best, but they don’t believe us.” She kept manipulating her knuckles.

  It was the same story everywhere these days, Hopper knew. Shortage, shortage, shortage; shortages of food, of water, of fuel, of sleep, of levity, of decency. The shelves in shops were a carousel of shifting produce depending on which supply chains had collapsed or—more seldom—been reestablished. On the rig, they had charted the fortunes of the mainland by the state of the supply boats.

  Eighteen months ago, the shipment had been half its normal size. Schwimmer had phoned headquarters, confident of some mistake, that another shipment would be on its way already—only to find an exhausted official explaining that for the next two months, rations were halved. The crowning insult was that three of the rice sacks had been shot full of larvae.

  The meals—never generous—had become pitiful. The soldiers had grown thin, their muscles shrunken. Deck duty had been cut back. Iceberg crews were similarly pruned, almost disastrously so. When the next supply shipment bore the same paltry cargo, the rig troops had accused the crew of stealing their food. If the supply boat’s crew had not been as etiolated as the troops, they might have been attacked.

  Eventually the food supply had recovered, and these days it was as regular as it had been before the interruption. Occasionally there were new stocks, new lines opened, the sudden shock of a forgotten flavor reestablished. Nevertheless, the direction of travel was unmistakable. The list of foods available shrank monthly. Hopper wondered when the last human would taste pepper, or coriander, or an orange.

  “You should send him into the army,” she said. She was surprised at herself. The woman looked up, just as surprised. “He might receive an easy posting. I’m on one of the rigs in the North Atlantic. It’s not a bad life out there.”

  “The rigs? You’ve been out then?” The woman’s voice had risen a little.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it true about the Breadbasket?”

  “Is what true?”

  “They keep them working eighteen hours a day, the convicts. The locals too. And if they don’t work, they get shot. That’s what I heard. And when they die, they get fed to the soil, to grow the crops they’ve been picking.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’m not on the Breadbasket. I’m on the rigs.” Clearly, the difference between one foreign environment and another had not impressed itself on the woman.

  “My husband’s out there. Breadbasket.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She smiled. “Don’t be. He was a bad lot. Deserter. Did this to me.” She pulled down her collar and gestured to a pink, puckered burn mark at the base of her neck. “Fertilizer’s all he’s good for.”

  They were interrupted by the door at the end of the room opening. A new officer, burly and ill-kempt, looked down at his clipboard and spoke in a broad West Country accent.

  “Selkirk.”

  A redheaded young man got up and shuffled toward the far end of the room.

  “Wharton.” Nobody moved. He repeated the name, louder, and the huge sleeping man jolted awake and heaved himself up and after the boy.

  “Hopper.”

  She stood and spoke to her neighbor. “Good luck.”

  The woman looked up at her, eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell them anything.” She seemed, for a second, totally in control of herself, not the pitiful creature of a moment ago, and Hopper wondered which was her true self.

  She was roughly escorted from the room by the new officer, her arms still tethered in front of her. The pleasant thought occurred to her that if the policeman outside Thorne’s house needed to handcuff anyone, he wouldn’t be able to.

  They walked down a long corridor, lit only by bulbs whose electric scent gave the air a harsh, burned quality. The carpet underfoot was frayed, and after about fifty yards it stopped completely, replaced by hard brown squares of linoleum. Then, through another door, they were in a translucent plastic tunnel, gridded with steel on the outside.

  She knew they were leaving the headquarters of the civilian police. Although the police today had guns and tear gas and frequently full riot gear, they were still the people who investigated burglaries, assaults, ration cheats. But the long, low building adjacent to New Scotland Yard, she knew, was reserved for Internal Security. At the other end of the tunnel, they passed through two more doors and her escort signed a form.

  They climbed three floors. For a second Hopper thought they were taking her to the fabled rooftop cells, but they turned off onto another almost featureless corridor, studded with pairs of doors along one side. As she moved, she considered the body of evidence suggested by her behavior.

  Her notebook—with the notes from her conversation with Chandler inside it—was in her bag, doubtless being pawed through already. She should have left it in Thorne’s house, in a heap where they’d never look for it. Too late now. What else did it contain? The notes on Thorne’s obituary, written by Harry. Oh God.

  But the photograph of Thorne in front of the strange device: she had put that down her bra just before she had run. She could feel it there now. What was that box Thorne and his colleagues had been standing in front of?

  What else did they know? They knew she’d shown up at Thorne’s house the day before and lied about her name. They knew she’d been to see Chandler. They would know where she was staying. And the bookshop. They’d be able to tell she had phoned up.

  They had arrived outside a pair of doors, indistinguishable from the others. The officer escorting her opened the left-hand one, gestured her into a room furnished with a desk and four chairs, then asked her to sit, checked her handcuffs, and left. A second after the door closed, a set of bolts clicked shut behind him.

  The room was windowless, gray. The only light came from a fluorescent tube overhead, a couple of flies lying on their backs inside. Darkness: usually the preserve of the rich, and here it was being dished out to dangerous criminal suspects. Funny. The inevitable mirror lined the wall to her left.

  She was not afraid; not yet. She felt even a little distant from the whole situation. It was so absurd. She had been cut off from the world ever since her marriage ended. All she had been doing since was observing the seas, trying unsuccessfully to make sense of this dying world. And now here she was being treated like a criminal. What would they use against her? They could hardly threaten people she was close to. Apart from Mark, and David, and perhaps Harv, she had few friends.

  Once they
found Harry’s obituary notes, would they call at the Times? She couldn’t bear the thought of costing David his job.

  Footsteps approached along the corridor—more than one set. She heard the door to the adjacent room opening and closing. A few minutes passed and then it opened again, followed by the door to her own cell. In the doorway stood Ruth Warwick.

  “Hello, Dr. Hopper.” She moved lightly into the room. Behind her, the man who had accompanied her on the rig, Blake, came in, closing the door gently behind him. The pair sat opposite her.

  Today, Warwick was wearing another ensemble reminiscent of an old film: a double-breasted houndstooth jacket and matching skirt, too heavy for this weather. She was smiling softly. As she fussed with some papers and received a glass of water from an officer, Hopper took the chance to observe the man, Blake, more closely. He was sparsely built, legs and arms long, his hands outsized and bulbous, his gray-mottled hair scraped back from his high forehead and plastered down with grease. His skin was dry, and two thick lines ran from the corners of his mouth down to his chin, giving him the look of a dummy. He wore the same gray suit he had done on the rig.

  “I’m sorry we have to meet again under these circumstances, Dr. Hopper.”

  “I’m sure you’re not wholly surprised.”

  “Not wholly. Well . . .” Warwick opened the file in front of her, “you’ve been busy since we last met. You remember Inspector Blake here, of course.”

  “Why have I been arrested?”

  “You broke into Dr. Thorne’s house. The laws of England still apply in this case, Dr. Hopper, even if the victim of the offense is in no position to do anything about it.”

  “His house had already been broken into. I was trying to find—”

  “Find? Find what?”

  That had been a mistake. “The house was unlocked. I wanted to see if his family were there, offer my condolences.”

  “It’s customary to phone, Doctor, or to write. Not to ransack the home of the deceased. Why did you take his medical notes from the hospital?”

  “I needed to know his address.” They had her bag; there was no possible benefit to be gained from lying here. Save up the lies. The line popped into her head, from her schooldays, when she had been caught stealing from the kitchens. The absurd congruity between the two situations—being hectored, in both cases, by a well-spoken woman determined to seem disappointed rather than angry—made her grin suddenly. Blake looked momentarily surprised, then cast his eyes down at his knuckles where they rested on the table.

  “Why did you go to Thorne’s house?”

  “I’ve told you. I wanted to offer my condolences. There might have been family I didn’t know about.” The lie sounded thin, even to her.

  “Why not ask the officer who was waiting outside on your first visit?”

  “I wanted to see for myself.”

  “Why lie about your name to him, then? That’s hardly how most mourners behave.”

  “It’s none of his business who I am.”

  “Dr. Hopper—Ellen—you had no right to be there.”

  “Neither did you. I didn’t see any badges on the two men you had searching the place.”

  “Sometimes, Doctor, a little discretion is necessary in the prosecution of the law. The fact remains that you are under suspicion of breaking and entering. The penalty for this crime—after trial, of course—is transportation.”

  Hopper knew what kind of trial Warwick was referring to. Soon after the Stop, the British judicial system had been reformed with little protest into an administrative arm of the state’s labor policy. She had read once that before the Slow, some trials had taken weeks. These days they lasted ten minutes; some took five. Acquittal was almost nonexistent, the idea of a jury as archaic as a horse-drawn plow.

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “We know you went to visit one of Thorne’s colleagues. Graham Chandler.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “He rang us, not long after you arrived.”

  She thought back to the creaking stairs in Chandler’s house, after he had gone to make the tea.

  “Thorne had mentioned him to me in the past. I wanted to break the news of Thorne’s death to him personally.”

  “With some cock-and-bull story about being from the newspapers?”

  “I lied to him. I wanted to know more about Thorne.” Hopper put her elbows on the table. “So transport me.”

  “I don’t want to. It would be a shame. And your record of service to the state”—Warwick gestured at the thin file she had brought in with her—“is something to be very proud of. We’re just trying to solve this little matter to everyone’s satisfaction.” She moved her mouth into a smile. “So why were you there?”

  Hopper paused. “I’ve already told you.”

  “Come along.”

  “I’m serious. I took Thorne’s medical notes because I wanted to visit his house and see it for myself. That’s it.” Stop talking; the liar is condemned by her need to embroider. Each extra lie is a new strand in the rope they will use to hang you.

  “Your association with him goes back some years, I believe.”

  “He taught me at university. I haven’t seen him since I left.”

  “Then why did he want to see you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Warwick leaned forward. “Dr. Hopper. I know our acquaintance hasn’t been smooth so far. Nobody wants you to be in this cell. I want you to succeed, and I want this country to be made safe from harm. Thorne was not a healthy man. It’s in our interest and yours to find out the truth about his activities in his later years. So I ask you, from that simple position, trusting you will do the right thing: what did he try to give you?” She moistened her lips as she breathed.

  “I don’t know what you mean. I hadn’t heard from him since I left university: that was fifteen years ago. He didn’t try to give me anything then or now.”

  Warwick looked at her and sighed, a disappointed teacher once again. She opened the file in front of her and pulled a paper out. “As you wish, Doctor. If you are determined to be unhelpful . . .”

  “I’m not being unhelpful. I’m telling you the truth.”

  Warwick spoke over her. “We will give you more time to think. Lots more time.” She signed the piece of paper in front of her. “Your employment on the Westerly 12 rig is terminated, immediately.”

  “What?”

  “Your belongings will be sent back here. Your results will be—”

  “You can’t just do that. I don’t work for your department.”

  “You’re not working for anyone anymore, Doctor.”

  “But . . .” Hopper was panicking now. “My work. My work on the currents. It’s important.”

  “Only to you. Perhaps others will take it on, if anyone with sufficient interest can be found. And I can guarantee you won’t ever find another job in science. Perhaps you can work on the solar farms. They always need new laborers.”

  Warwick paused and licked her lips again. Hopper was fighting for breath.

  “You might make your way back to the rig, of course. If you remembered anything else about your time with Dr. Thorne.”

  And there it was. The offer of safety if she helped them. She could go back to the rig. She would see Harv again, could stay studying the currents and living on her island, semidetached from this crumbling world.

  She could feel the photograph inside her bra, scratching her skin. With surprise, she realized she didn’t want to go back if it meant giving it up. Whatever it was.

  “I’ve told you everything I can. You’re just wasting your time.”

  Warwick took a little watch from her top pocket and consulted it. “As you wish. Other work calls me away. We’ll speak again. But for the time being, I will leave you with Inspector Blake.” She stood, p
icked up her glass of water, and drained it. “A shame.” She walked over to the door and knocked. The bolts slid back and unknown hands pulled it open.

  Before leaving, Warwick looked back into the room. The strip of light behind her head in the corridor gave her a sickly yellow halo. “I hope you remember, Doctor, why we do the things we do. We are making this nation whole again. And we will succeed. Don’t forget that.”

  As she moved away, the door closed and the bolts slid home again. Immediately, with a fluid grace, Blake stood, slid the table aside, and punched Hopper hard in the stomach.

  The force of the blow propelled her from the chair, and she landed awkwardly on her shoulder, hands still bound before her, unable to break her fall. Her shoulder took the brunt of it, but her head still landed hard on the concrete. For a few seconds she was dazed, too muzzy to register anything except an incipient wetness on her cheek. Then, as the pain started to flood her torso, Blake hauled her off the floor, righted the chair, placed her back in it, and returned to his own. She sat, slumped, still struggling for her breath.

  “What did you take? Where did you hide it?”

  She tried to speak. Anything that would defer the next blow until she could ready herself.

  “I . . . I didn’t take anything. You can search my bag. I haven’t got anything—”

  He was already upright again. This time she readied her stomach muscles. But instead of punching her, he placed his foot on her chair, between her legs, and gave it a violent thrust. She shot back. The chair hit the wall first, followed by her head, and once again she fell sideways, on the same side as last time. There was a thin rivulet of blood making its way down her temple. She could taste blood too; she must have bitten her tongue. She thought she heard muffled laughter from behind the mirror.