Nobody had arrived in response to the bell, and the desk at the front was abandoned, finger-deep in more papers and studded with half-full mugs of tea. The milk in the mugs had coalesced at their surfaces, drifting across them like a pale algal bloom.
How did Fisher make his living? Some people must come for paperbacks from before the Stop. And there were a couple hundred new novels printed each year—various combinations of adventure, romance, and propaganda. A few positioned themselves squarely amid the Stop, and based their action around that. Most ignored it, setting themselves in prelapsarian versions of the past that only a diminishing number of readers would even remember.
She moved through the shop toward the back. Halfway along—she realized now that it was a clumsily converted house—stairs sprouted upward, narrow and unlit. She continued to the rear of the building. After the corridor, the place opened into what must have once been a back parlor.
The books changed here. Where the front had held fiction, this room was full of books about—she looked up at the sign, one corner torn off—Lifestyle. Books about houses, how to build one’s own home or buy one better than the one you had. How to improve one’s relationship, how to love oneself, how to be thin, how to be rich.
One corner was exclusively given over to books of recipes, stuffed with ingredients nobody could acquire anymore, manners of eating that must have seemed like a calculated insult in the days of famine. The cuisines were alien, the names those of places discussed by adults in her childhood. Lebanon. The Philippines. Vietnam. Here was the lifestyle the world had been forced to abandon, gradually ceded as privation had folded into catastrophe. Here was the biography of the world that had died.
Still no signs of life. Hopper moved back toward the front. At the foot of the stairs, she hesitated. A sign read: PRIVATE: MANAGEMENT. She called softly up the stairs: “Hello?” No reply came.
She moved up. As she climbed, the air grew even warmer than on the ground floor. Her skin prickled, and her thick shirt—so useful on the rig—rubbed at her, heavy with her sweat.
At the top of the stairs there were two doors. The first was ajar and led to a kitchenette, a cramped and moldy room with a fridge unit, a freezer, and a few low cupboards. The freezer door hung open. On the far side of the room, shielded by a thin curtain, was a bathroom hardly worthy of the name, consisting mostly of a toilet and a sink. The carpet ran out before it reached them, frayed and blackened at its edge. The patch of tiled floor also held a drain, a bucket, and a cake of soap, which might have served as a shower.
Hopper returned to the top of the stairs, to the second door. It was closed, seemingly dark inside—no light came through the cracks onto the dim stairwell. She knocked, and when no reply came, tried the handle. The door moved a little, but sprang back when she stopped pushing. Something heavy was blocking it from the other side. She looked down and saw a tidemark of dark liquid creeping to the edge of the landing carpet, and realized with a lurch of horror what lay behind the door.
Eventually, after a lot of pushing, she was able to squeeze around and into the room. The confirmation of her suspicion made no difference to the wave of nausea it provoked. She had been pushing at the outstretched hand of a man’s prone body, which had become wedged under the door as she tried to open it. As she closed it, the hand remained depressed, no blood returning to the pale fingers.
He was sprawled out facing the door, lying on his front. His clothes were unexceptional: slack brown trousers and a casual jacket. Below him there was a dark pool of blood, still sticky. Hopper forced herself to kneel and push the corpse over onto its side. He had been large. After a few seconds of struggling to gain purchase without touching him too much, she abandoned the attempt to give him dignity and rolled him, heaving him onto his back, his left arm folded under him. She sat back, looked for the first time at his face, and had to twist her head away, tasting bile in her throat.
He was—had been—bearded, his scalp thinning and grayed. The left half of his face remained unharmed—the intact cheek was yellowed, puffy, and the eye stared out and up toward the ceiling. The rest of his head was almost unrecognizable. His shirt was soaked in blood. Moving him had disturbed a small throng of flies, which had been walking in the remains of his head, and they buzzed, irked, for a few seconds before settling back down to feed. Hopper really did feel sick now. She groped her way over to the shutters across the window and threw them open, pulled the sash open too, and leaned out.
The light and air revived her somewhat. She stayed looking outward, trying to avoid the man on the floor. This must be the man she had spoken to on the phone yesterday afternoon. Fisher. She remembered a strained quality in his voice. Had she interrupted him after he had first heard someone in the shop? Or had she interrupted the killing? The possibility that the killing had been prompted by her phone call, that the men in Thorne’s house had checked the phone records and come straight here, was so distasteful she hardly let it into her mind.
After another minute surveying the bricks opposite her, she turned to look at the rest of the room. It had been an office-cum-bedroom, lined with shelves; a desk and chair sat in one corner, and opposite them was a single mattress on a low frame. Between the desk and the bed were huge cardboard cartons, full of books.
Her gaze was drawn back to the body again and again. Had he been surprised, or greeted by someone he knew? Her mind twitched to Blake, his skin stretched tightly over his skull, itching to use his brass knuckles, and she felt certain it had been him. She thought she could detect his individual brand of violence on Fisher’s corpse. Had Warwick been here too? It was hard to envisage her committing violence—but easier, since yesterday, to imagine her requesting it.
She realized there was a long smear of blood on the floor, leading almost to her feet and thickening as it neared the corpse. He had been struck in the chair, still alive, and had crawled toward the door.
Wait. No. The blood curved around to the right. He had been crawling, but not toward the door. He had been aiming at something else.
As the door opened into the room, it skirted three low shelves in a little corner. The bow of blood arced darkly around toward them—he must have collapsed back onto the door with his last movement. She moved over to the shelves and squatted, her gorge rising as her foot brushed Fisher’s hand. The body, rolled over from the door to let her in, was now too close to her, and she pushed it—him—back into its original position. His jacket stuck to the flesh beneath.
She had a few square feet to move in now. The books on the shelves were almost all on a single theme. There were a few outliers at the top left—a poetry anthology, a few classic works of fiction—but most were geopolitical tomes, dealing predominantly with the Coldside. Winter in America. The Next Ice Age. Longitudes of Conflict. One by one she pulled them down and looked inside.
All were marked AF inside the front cover, and annotated in the same hand. Nothing struck her as special; no notes fluttered out as she leafed through them. When they were all out, piled along the floor under the window, she looked at the shelves themselves. The case was not fixed to the wall, but was cut out at its base to fit neatly above the high skirting board. She shoved the pile of books away, and removed the shelving unit from its place.
Behind it, the wall was smooth and intact, the floor solid. There was nothing there of interest—no crack in the floorboards that might be exploited, no safe built into the wall. And then she saw. At the junction between the floor and the wall, a tiny loop of fabric stuck out from the edge of the high skirting board.
She pulled it. A section of the board some two feet long came out from the wall, cracking as it reached the corner. She leaned forward—her torso still protesting after yesterday’s encounter with Blake—and looked inside. There was something in there. She reached in, dislodging a couple of spiders, and her hand found a long, low metal case. Her breathing was suddenly shallow.
It was
a dull tin case, locked. She looked around, found no key, searched in the desk, found a chisel. She inserted it in the tiny gap available to her, gained a little purchase, repositioned the chisel, pushed . . . and felt the lock crack.
Inside was a smaller box. Not the box from Thorne’s photograph, though. This was a radio. It wasn’t like the radios they had been issued on the rig—this one had dials she had not seen before, and a small microphone with wires. It was a transmit radio. Outside of the armed forces and security services, ownership of them was illegal. Hopper extended the radio’s aerial, pressed the largest button on its front, careful not to twist the frequency dials, and after a few seconds, music filled the air.
It was an old tune, one of the European classicals. She had heard it once before; it swayed, skipping up and down, leaping up scales, sliding back, surprising and soothing in equal measure. She sat back against the wall, facing the dead man and letting the music surround her. After a minute, the piece ended. A woman’s voice filled the air.
“This is Radio Albion. That was Brahms’s Fifth Hungarian Dance, performed by the English Symphony Orchestra. The news again: a military engagement outside Harrogate has destroyed a consignment of Trojan tanks being escorted north for the pacification of the Borders. With government forces already pushed from the Hebridean Islands, and stretched tight across Scotland, this means . . .”
There followed more news of supply lines intercepted, consignments firebombed, the blundering army harried. Then more music. Hopper had heard of these illegal radio stations. They sheltered on wavelengths inaccessible to the average citizen, broadcasting to almost nobody. Or at least nobody admitted listening to them. The penalty, for listening or broadcasting, was transportation. She snapped the music off. As the room fell into silence, she smelled once again the musty, sharp tang of decay—as though the music had temporarily cleaned the air.
So Fisher had been one of the small, deluded band devoted to bringing down the government. The label “resistance” hardly applied. Assorted democratists, monarchists, and separatists had devoted themselves to the idea of reclaiming the country from the government almost since the Stop. There was little popular appetite for it, then or now. Most people today were too exhausted by survival, never mind rebellion.
Then again, if they were losing troops even in the prosperous north now . . . No, for Christ’s sake. The upset and misery in the country was not cohesive, was not the sort that would ever swell into the ugly fruit of a popular revolt. It was nothing but the delayed violence of the Slow, the daily wounds engendered by food shortages, and a freshly stoked hatred of anything foreign. The element of foreigner hatred was the least palatable, to Hopper at any rate, perhaps because her parents had both been killed in their own ways by their inability to relinquish their attachments to people unlike themselves.
She looked at the microphone attached to the radio. Had Fisher been a broadcaster? Had he sat up here reporting London’s failures, the bombs and the riots and the shortages even in the capital? Was this why he had crawled across the floor in agony, half-dead? Was it why Thorne had contacted him in the first place?
On the back of the radio there was a switch: RECEIVE/TRANSMIT, it said in small, precise lettering. She pressed it, extended the antenna, and turned the set to the front. Where was the wavelength he had been broadcasting to? Next to one of the dials on the front was a tiny groove, carved into the plastic by a human hand.
She pictured the signal radiating outward. Was it being caught and filtered along the way? The fact of Fisher’s death made it likelier. Then again, they hadn’t found his radio.
She tapped the microphone and one of the dials spiked. So the sound was going through. Still she did not trust it. She tapped the microphone again, using the first Morse code message that came into her head. She’d learned Morse on the rig, during a bored afternoon, and she and Harv would sometimes make each other laugh by tapping messages on the desks during briefings from Schwimmer.
F-I-S-H-E-R-K.
The K was “over.” She remembered that, God knew from where. Then she switched to Receive, and waited. After thirty seconds, she sent the message again.
F-I-S-H-E-R-K.
And then, from the speaker, there came a voice.
“Who’s there?”
The voice was rich, and male, and American. So, as well as listening to banned British stations, Fisher had been in contact with the Americans somehow. She didn’t know whether she should speak.
“Fisher? Is that you?”
Hopper realized that whoever these people were, they had been friends of Fisher’s. And Fisher had been a friend of Thorne’s. So she spoke.
“Fisher’s dead. I’m sorry. I found his radio.”
“Dead? Jesus. Who are you?”
“I was coming to see him. I thought he could help me with something. We had a friend in common.”
“How did he die?”
“He was stabbed, I think. Or clubbed.” Her voice was trembling, and she didn’t look behind her at the bulk on the floor. “Who is this?”
“I’m Fisher’s receiver in the American Zone.”
“You’re in the American Zone? Now?”
“We are.” The voice didn’t clarify how many “we” meant, and Hopper had thought of another question.
“Who was Fisher to you?”
“He was one of our London representatives, although I’m sure you’ve already guessed that. Who are you?”
“My name’s Ellen.”
The voice sounded mistrustful for a second. “And how do I know you didn’t kill Fisher, Ellen?”
“You can’t know that. But I didn’t. I just found him here.”
The voice paused. “All right. I guess I’m inclined to believe you, for want of anything else to believe. Are you his contact? Did he give you anything to send?” The voice had an edge to it as it spoke those questions—a kind of strain. A burst of coughing came through the speakers, harsh and wet.
Hopper looked around her at the miserable room. “I’m afraid I’m not. I just knew someone he was in touch with. There’s nothing obvious around here. Even if he had something, they might have taken it after they . . .” She gestured to the bulk on the floor, forgetting for a moment that the voice wouldn’t see.
“Are you sure there’s nothing there? Are you positive? He said there was something big coming when we last spoke. But we’ve been waiting a long time and it never came through.”
“I think . . .” She didn’t know why she believed this voice. Something in it—the tired quality, the frustration—made her think it could be trusted. “I think I’m looking for the same thing.”
“We don’t have long, Ellen.”
“No.”
“I’m serious. The conditions here . . . We need help. Can you keep hold of the transmitter in case you think of a way of helping us?”
“They’re not legal on this side.”
“From the sound of your voice it sounds like you’re already involved. Legal doesn’t matter anymore. Or it won’t in a few days. Please. Keep hold of it.”
“I’ll think about it. Listen.” She’d never had the chance to speak to an American before. “What’s it like where you are?”
“Where we are?” The voice laughed a little, thinly. “Not so good, Ellen. I’m sure it’s no picnic where you are either. But we’re really in it right now.” Another cough, and the voice spoke again. “I need to report this upward right now. Will you keep the radio? In case?”
“All right. Yes, I will.”
“Thanks, Ellen. Good luck to you.”
“What’s your name?”
She spoke too late; the signal had clicked off. She put the radio back in its tin box and looked at it for a second. It would be an unpleasant risk carrying it with her. But she’d taken enough risks already that one more made little difference. And she had said she wou
ld. That counted for something. She shoved it into her satchel before pushing the false panel back into place and returning the books to the shelf.
As she stood and turned to face the door, she noticed a photograph. It was of a graduating Cambridge college, the 2003 year. The young men and women stood locked there in their gowns, clutching their mortarboards and smiling, wholly unaware of the cataclysm to come.
There he was. Two rows from the back, a slender young man with a gentle smile. Adam Fisher. Thorne had graduated in 2004. Fisher would have been a year older, not in Thorne’s league academically, but nonetheless they must have known each other. She turned and looked back into the room. There was no sign she had been present.
She wondered if anyone would find the body. The shop had been left casually open, as though nobody ever came in. Eventually, she supposed, even thieves would have taken all the flimsy paperbacks they desired. The remaining books would rot or soak, and the time before the Slow would take one more step toward its inevitable final position: a myth.
At the bottom of the stairs, she picked up her jacket and left the shop, turning toward St. Martin’s Lane. Not long until noon. Her steps carried her south, and she moved past the site of the old opera house—now a community of tent-dwellers, slowly moving around in the gloom inside. Still a few hours before she had to meet David. The sky was overcast, the city descending from blazing sunlight to a prickly, heavy heat.
She found a bench overlooking the top of Trafalgar Square, tore a page from her notebook so she could discard it once it was clear in her mind, and began to write a chronology.
T sick—realizes seriously. Writes to EH. Then tries to phone EH on rig. Call blocked. Why?
Internal Security bring EH over to see Thorne, then follow EH’s movements. Why bring EH over in first place if T’s call blocked?
T contacts Fisher—unsuccessful. Fisher’s contact expected something—did not receive. Americans looking too. T in hospital soon after contacting Fisher.
The Last Day Page 18