When EH visits, T suggests something in his house she should see.
T’s house burgled, then his lawyer.
T may have considered stowing something with lawyer. Did not.
Was picture what T wanted to pass on? Or box? Where did box from picture go?
T’s contact Gethin most important person to speak to next. Still working? Why kept on?
Fisher dead.
In the square below, the gulls pecked at each other, occasionally hopping to the edge of the dry fountain and looking in, waiting for water they distantly remembered might one day reappear. She crossed out dead after Fisher’s name, and substituted it with the proper word: killed.
TWENTY-THREE
“All this work, Ellen . . . it’s very good. But you’re never going to make progress unless you can get out there.”
They were sitting side by side on a bench in Oxford’s University Parks, overlooking the river. The river was sitting higher than usual in the muddy groove of its bed: there had been heavy rains to the north and west five days ago. It was March.
“I know. But the department isn’t recruiting. They said to come back in two years.” Hopper sighed. “It’s all taking too long.”
Thorne smiled at her, broad and knowing, and she noticed afresh how his smile changed the whole cast of his face, how charming he looked. “Good thing I’ve told someone about you, then.”
“Someone? What do you mean, someone?”
Thorne carried on evenly. “I’ve phoned an ex-colleague and told her there’s a student she might be interested in, one who’s absolutely worth recruiting over the summer.”
“But aren’t you . . .”
“Aren’t I what?”
“In disgrace?”
He gave her a sidelong glance—so long she started to worry she had insulted him—and then laughed. “I suppose I am. But the fact that I left in a hurry doesn’t mean I’ve lost all my contacts in the building. Write to my friend Hannah—here.” He handed Hopper a card. “Send her your ideas. She wants to see you.”
The thought of other eyes reading her work panicked her. And now more than ever she realized how much her work here was tied up with him; the discomfiting extent to which it was done to win his approval. “Edward . . . this is very kind. Why are you helping me with all this?”
“You’d be a dead loss in the army.”
“Seriously.”
He looked out at the river, oozing past like treacle, and his smile faded.
“You’re bright. You ask the right questions. There are enough people learning the ropes of crop science, hydroponics, land work, but we left the sea to the navy. It was stupid. There’s almost nobody dealing with the oceans in Environment at the moment. They need ideas. And you have ideas. You could change the whole map of this country. What an achievement for a scientist.”
She felt her face redden. “Really?”
“Really. I haven’t taught for a while, but as far as I can remember I’ve never had a student like you.”
They sat silent for a few minutes. She couldn’t believe he meant it. And she felt something else too: fear. She wasn’t going to have Thorne’s advice during her summer away. She would be working for people who didn’t care whether she succeeded or failed, who only wanted her ideas. Or maybe they wouldn’t even want those. They might laugh at her. Eventually, Thorne spoke again.
“Although frankly there’s every chance we won’t last the century, so it’s a pretty big task you’re setting yourself.”
“You really think not?”
“Well, it’s hard to know, isn’t it? Let’s take it point by point.” He started counting on his fingers. “The whole planet’s magnetic field is much weaker these days, so we think the atmosphere may be eroding. We think there’s a growing hole above the Middle East already, although nobody knows how fast it’s expanding and in general we don’t know nearly enough about that. Then there’s biomass. We don’t know the state of vegetation around this side of the planet, never mind the Coldside, so it’s hard to make predictions about the oxygen levels. The only thing we do know from the Wojtek expedition is that the desert’s still advancing toward us on this side.”
“What do you think we should do?”
Thorne looked at his fingers. “Well, if by ‘we’ you mean this country, I think we should enact your data-gathering plans for the ocean. There’s no harm in knowing as much as we can.” He smiled again. “And for the rest of it, we wait, and we see if the oxygen in the air declines, and by how much. If it declines by more than a few percentage points, it won’t matter much either way after a few decades.”
“So what’s the point?”
He shrugged. “We might have enough oxygen after all. Maybe the world’s vegetation is thriving in places we haven’t visited. Maybe the atmosphere is hardier than we thought. And then you’d feel foolish at having given up, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re so optimistic, Edward. I wish I was.” Hopper paused. “You know, I think I’m going to find it difficult going from here straight to a government department.”
“There’s nothing to worry about. Your work is solid.”
“Yes, but . . . it’s different being here. You’re very supportive.”
“Only because your work is good.”
She felt a little affronted suddenly. Here she was, trying to explain—to hint—how much he mattered to her, and he was just turning it into another discussion about work.
“But what if they laugh at me? What if they’ve already rejected all my ideas for a good reason I haven’t thought of yet?”
“They won’t. They’re sensible people.”
Hopper had resolved to ask Thorne about his work in this week’s meeting. Ever since she’d first heard that he’d been fired, she couldn’t help wondering why he had left government, why he had been exiled here. And this felt like her opportunity. She took a deep breath. “You know, I think I’d feel better if I just knew a bit more about what it’s like in these departments. Can you give me an example? Something you worked on?”
He gestured vaguely. “I’m more interested in your future. My past has little bearing on the breakthroughs I think you can make.”
“I think it would be helpful to me. Maybe there’s something you’re proud of. Maybe something from your time working with the prime—”
He cut her off. “The future you’re trying to make can’t be worse than the past, Ellen. It can’t be.” His voice was a little louder and his cheeks a little pinker than usual. “So we have to make it better. You’re one of the few people who can have any effect on it. So let’s talk about how you do that instead of dredging up these old matters. This country has been through enough.”
She was angry now. At their first meeting she had told him about her past, her parents. He knew all about her, things she’d never told even her few friends here. And now he was keeping her out. It wasn’t a fair exchange.
She spoke again. “I don’t know why you say ‘this country.’ Other countries had it much worse than this one. And we’re the ones who shut them out. We let the world die.”
His voice was really loud now, loud and ragged. “We’re not talking about this, Ellen. We’re here to discuss the ocean. I think your time today would be better spent reading. And I have just the book for you. Here.”
As he leaned over from the bench to dig the volume out of his bag, she noticed that his hand was shaking.
TWENTY-FOUR
The walk to Regent’s Park took longer than Hopper had expected. Every couple hundred meters she ducked into a shop, took an unexpected turn, turned back on herself, all the while scanning vehicles, drivers, faces. She saw nobody familiar. The other pedestrians, the tired shopkeepers lingering in their doorways, the rickshaw boys touting for trade: all gazed impassively back at her, if they met her gaze at all.
Fishe
r had been in contact with the Americans. And Thorne had been on the brink of getting information to Fisher. So what had Thorne wanted to tell the Americans?
Either way, their efforts had come to almost nothing. Thorne was dead. Fisher was dead. Thorne’s home, his lawyer’s office, had not yielded whatever Warwick and her men were looking for. The loop was almost closed now. There was no link between the world Thorne had lived in, with whatever secret he had been trying to pass on, and this world.
No link, at least, except Hopper herself.
She arrived with only ten minutes to spare, and noted with pleasure that Regent’s Park was largely unchanged since the last time she had been here. The most southerly part of the gardens was still maintained and green, and the large playing fields to the north were still dry scrubland, a world away from the unnatural lushness of the park’s lower half.
She and David had often met in Regent’s Park when they had first been going out, at the central water fountain, two-thirds of the way up the wide boulevard between the city and the biodiversity gardens. They had had an enjoyable little game, finding the largest possible place and developing a shorthand for it. “Waterloo” had meant not the clock, but the station’s northwest steps. “Paddington” had been the noodle stand at the base of the station’s first platform. “Regent’s Park” had meant this spot. A few months ago, she had tried to start a similar game with Harv, but had felt a preposterous sense of semi-adultery and had instantly abandoned it.
The fountain was beautiful—an elegant bit of Victorian absurdity, a rearing edifice of marble and bronze far more ornate and two tons heavier than its function necessitated. It must have felt right at the time: a fountain fit for the gilded capital of a nation that owned a quarter of the Earth, the natural center of gravity for plunder from lesser realms. Marble belonged here; so too statues, friezes, jewelry. And now people from the same lands as the marble, and the statues, and the friezes toiled in the fields for the right to survive, cringing to make themselves useful enough to avoid eviction. Clearly the nation’s old slaving spirit survived.
She used to think the fountain was a folly. Nonetheless, it was a shock, as she walked up the wide boulevard, to see that it wasn’t there anymore. The marble structure had been torn up like a dead tree, and tarmac hastily poured over the surface, blotchy and uneven.
Hopper retreated to one side, sitting on one of the benches that remained around the edge of the little plaza, surveying the mutilation. It was still hot, clouded but nevertheless uncomfortable. When would the rain come? Two policemen approached, walking slowly, one glancing at her then saying something to his colleague. Her muscles tightened, and she looked south to see David approaching, scarcely looking at the police as he passed them. As he neared, she remembered with a start the last time they had met here. It had been near the end of their marriage—a crisis meeting, held on a tranche of neutral turf they had discovered together.
What a marriage it had been. Always stimulating, founded on love, but doomed to failure by . . . by what? Perhaps by her own resistance to proximity, she thought now. Toward the end she had loved solitude more than her husband. Perhaps it was a reaction against the death of two parents, her brother’s remoteness. Then again, she had friends from her student days who had been orphaned and who were happily settled now, their spouses civil servants, farm administrators, solar planters. Not like her own existence, clinging to a bit of metal flung out into the cold sea, hunting for patterns in black waves interrupted only by lumps of ice and floating coffins.
She could not ignore, of course, the influence of Thorne, the man who had let her down so thoroughly. It felt cowardly to blame another, but her preference for her own company, and her inability to trust others, also felt connected to him and their final, dreadful parting.
And during the marriage itself, of course, the main problem had been the children. In many ways, their attitudes to the idea of parenthood had served as microcosms of their whole feeling about their place in the world. Despite the nature of her work, she had seen no purpose in continuing the species; despite the cynical nature of David’s work, it was all he wanted. Once that had been established, it was only a matter of time before one or the other left.
As David came nearer, his smile dropped.
“Jesus, Ellie. What happened?”
She hadn’t seen herself in a mirror since the morning—her bruises might have developed by now, flowering into purples and yellows. She should have put on more makeup. “Promise you’ll hear me out.”
“I promise anything. Just tell me.”
She told him about going to Thorne’s house, and about her arrest and release—just that. She left out—for the moment—the photo, and the part about Warwick and Blake taking her bag with Harry’s notes.
When she had finished, he looked away for a few seconds, out across the gardens. “You have to stop this. This is madness. You’ll end up in the Breadbasket, or worse.”
“I’m fine.” She saw him visibly suppressing a comment to the effect that she clearly wasn’t. To distract him, she asked him a question, one that had been on her mind since she had heard how stressed he was at the office: “What’s going on at the paper?”
David frowned. “Big news. Really big. Davenport’s getting his victory.”
“What?”
“It’s our lead tomorrow. Christ, it’s going to be our lead for the next six months.” He pulled a thin sheaf of paper from his pocket and read aloud. “‘Prime Minister Richard Davenport will this week welcome to Downing Street a delegation from the American government to finalize plans for a new Bill of National Unity. Mr. Davenport announced that the time was right for America to acknowledge its increased debt to Britain, and that a true union between the United States and Britain would benefit both nations while acknowledging this debt.
“‘If the bill is passed, the American legislators will be granted limited representation in the House of Commons’—which means nothing, let’s not forget—‘in exchange for prospecting rights and the formal union of the British and American armed forces. The American people will be naturalized and receive the protection of the British state, and the assets of the American and British nations will be combined.’”
Hopper felt dazed. “Meaning?”
David sighed. “The Americans are caving, at last. They must be starving. We guessed they were pretty hungry for a few years, but it must be much worse than we thought. Either way, it’s huge. No more Divided Kingdom. They’ll get citizenship, the border into the American Zone will come down, the whole thing.” He paused. “Don’t you see? Davenport’s getting the lot. A massive glut of manpower, whether for the fields or the army, all that land . . . He’s been wanting this for years, and it looks like the Americans are finally willing to accept it. It also means he’s got something to threaten the Scandis with, and the Russians. Christ, he’ll be able to blow up half the planet when he gets his hands on the nukes.”
“Do you think he’ll use them?”
“Hard to say. We’ve known for years how much he wants them. But maybe just having them is enough.” He turned to her, his face flushed. “All right, your turn. What do you think Thorne was sending you to find?”
“Actually, I think I found it.” She took a breath. Here she was, about to trust her most significant find to someone else. Some deep-buried part of her couldn’t stop her blurting out, “This is all secret, you understand.”
“No shit, Ellie.” He smiled.
“All right. Well, when I was at Thorne’s house, I found a photo.” She told him about the picture frame, and the family picture with the seam across its front, and what the photo showed: the mysterious box, the names on the back: Hollis, Lee, Drabble, Symons, Gethin. Only one of them not crossed out.
“So that’s why you wanted to track down this Gethin man.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have the photo here?”
> “No. I’ve hidden it.”
“Shame. I would have liked to see it. Do you think that’s what he wanted you to find?”
“Maybe. Or perhaps he wanted me to find the box in the picture. I’m pretty sure that the people who picked me up, Warwick and Blake, are looking for either the box or the photo. So that’s why I need Gethin. I think he could tell me more. Did you track him down?”
“I did.”
“Where is he?”
“You might not like the answer . . .”
“Just tell me, David.”
“He died fourteen years ago.”
Hopper felt a knot in the pit of her stomach.
“That’s not possible.”
“I checked, El. He’s dead.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“There’s an obituary. We ran it, for Christ’s sake. I have it here.” He fumbled in his pocket, brought out another piece of paper. She looked at the copy of an obituary. The headline read, Talented Scientist Dead at 36. The picture at the top was of the same man as in the photo.
David spoke again. “Why’s it not possible?”
She remembered Chandler’s words when she had spoken to him. I was walking through Whitehall—and I saw him. He was going into one of the ministries—Internal Security, it was. She fumbled in her notebook, and found the note. “Look. He was alive three years ago. Chandler—Thorne’s ex-colleague—saw him. He was certain about it.”
“He may have misidentified him.”
“No.” Yet even as she spoke she felt a bubble of doubt in her gut—felt the protestations she was making were defensive, the rearguard action of someone incapable of accepting they were wrong. “He can’t be dead.”
David sighed. “Have it your way, Ellie. I just looked him up.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” She felt tears, involuntary and stupid, pricking at the back of her eyes. She hadn’t slept enough for the last couple of nights. She missed the rig and its simplicity. She took a breath. “There’s something else.”
The Last Day Page 19