1. Acro. 2. Adelman. 3. Anderby. 4. Arnos. 5. Astro. 6. Avis. And so on, down the page. She turned to “Arnos.” Information summary for three males suspected of plotting to detonate an explosive device in Central London. Suspects observed by Nautilus for three weeks. Grounds for further observation warranted. Then, a few paragraphs down, Recommend search and arrest. At the bottom of the page was a note in larger, less formal writing. Conclusions: house raided. Three suspects returned fire; shot dead. Presented to Featherby in end-of-year summary.
She leafed through the rest of the folder. Each code name seemed to link to a real person who had been placed under surveillance for whatever reason. The details were always capped by her brother’s observations at the side in dark ink. They seemed like private observations too: he would occasionally write blunder, or once, sackable blunder here. Occasionally the text was adorned with a tick. She turned to the front folder, the index, and found it consisted of a key, a long list of the code names and the real names of the surveillance targets they matched up to. Neither Gethin nor Thorne appeared.
The next drawer down had another alphabetically arranged rack of files hanging in it. At first, she couldn’t tell why the files had been placed in different drawers. And then, on the front of the top drawer, in tiny capital letters, she spotted the words BRITAIN CENTRAL (2046–). The next drawer down was BRITAIN NORTHERN. It contained another batch of files covering the same span, the last thirteen years. After that, BRITAIN SOUTHERN. The bottom drawer was marked OFFSHORE. She knelt on the rich carpet, opened it, and pulled out the index file.
This one was slimmer. Fewer people were living offshore to be spied on, she supposed. She ran her finger down the list of surnames, by this point not really expecting to see Thorne or Gethin. But immediately one name jumped out at her:
Cromwell = Hopper
If she hadn’t already been kneeling, she would have sat down abruptly. Her ribs ached suddenly, the blood rushing to her muscles.
Neither of the first two folders contained the name Cromwell.
The third did. It was several entries back, thicker than most of the others in the file. She felt her fingers grow clumsy as she turned to it, rifling the paper, deaf to the noise it made.
Subject entered Westerly 12 rig (LB4) 26/03/56. Rig representative has kept her under observation through close professional contact. That must be Schwimmer. She had been wrong to assume the CO wouldn’t spy.
And then she read on: Rig operative has entered an intimate relationship with subject; does not believe himself suspected. Subject emotionally self-contained and mistrustful. Hard to persuade with financial inducements: best means of approach uncertain. If approach is ever necessary, suggest appeal to patriotism. Hopper’s heart grew thick in her chest.
Behind this were crabbed notes of correspondence, signed by her brother.
Intimate relationship. Not Schwimmer, then. Harv. The man she had lain with, exchanging confidences on those small metal bunks; had played music for, an ancient tape deck balanced between them. Harv had slept with her, and submitted notes on her, and her brother had requested them or stolen them in his turn.
She sat back on her heels. So that was why Warwick and Blake had come for her. Thorne had almost got the letter to her without interception; but Harv had found it, had opened and read it before carefully resealing it and letting it reach her. She tried to remember what else she had told Harv, until she realized it didn’t really matter. It was all too late. At the very end of the folder, in darker ink, in her brother’s writing, were the words: Subject released after initial arrest, pending second arrest. The third-person writing was as wounding as anything else.
She closed the file, returned it to the drawer, locked the cabinet once again, and moved back to the door, scuffing the carpet to remove the indentations of her footprints. Before she left, she looked back, surveying the room, seeing nothing out of place, and turned the lights off behind her before slipping out and relocking the door.
Upstairs, she noticed the door of her own room was slightly ajar. She was certain she had closed it before leaving the house in the morning: remembered the thunk of the oak against the white-painted frame. On the rig she had got into the habit of pressing doors shut: unclosed ones could lash around. So someone had been in her room. Perhaps Mark had waited for her in here at first. She pushed at the door and flicked the switch inside.
The first impression she received was of an odd transference to Thorne’s house, as though a door in this building opened onto a room in that. Her room had been shredded. Her clothes were piled at the foot of the bed, the sheets torn off. The mattress was at an angle, one corner hanging weakly over the edge like a tongue from an exhausted mouth. The bedside tables were miniature volcanoes, their contents spilling over the floor. The carpet was slashed.
In the center of the bed was an unsealed envelope—a strange formality. It contained a single piece of card, bearing four short words: We will find it. The card was unsigned.
This was why Mark had sat up waiting for her. He hadn’t been worried: it had been his way of forewarning her of the scene upstairs, a scene he had eventually lacked the courage to describe. Perhaps he thought letting it happen was helpful, that it would show her what these people were like. As if she did not already know. As though he had not seen the state of her outside Scotland Yard.
The photo. Had they found it? She moved to the door of the room and onto the landing, pristine by comparison. She edged the side table out and groped behind it. For a moment she felt nothing. Then her finger just grazed the edge of it in its cubbyhole, and she pulled it out by her nails. Thank God she had left it out here.
She moved back into her room. Perhaps Mark had tried to dissuade them from tearing her things apart: perhaps he had called them in the first place. It didn’t matter either way. She had to leave.
She made her way over to the window and opened the thick black curtains, lifting them as she did to prevent the brass rings scraping on the rail. She leaned over to the white shutters and shifted one slat up, very slowly.
The road was lined with cars; all empty, as far as she could tell. A flicker of movement caught her eye: a bird, scratching in the ground of the front garden.
For several minutes she stood and stared: first to her left, then to her right, toward the station. And then she saw it. A tiny shift under the windshield. One of the cars parked three doors along was occupied.
She looked intently through the almost-closed shutter, saw nothing, looked so long her eyes began to blur, thought perhaps she had imagined it, until finally she saw it again: a little movement of an arm. And when she saw that, the rest of the shapes inside the car resolved themselves, like one of those pictures you had to squint at to see the meaning inside, and she made out a human figure in the passenger seat.
It must be Security. It was exactly the car they would pick to look unofficial—a dark-green family sedan, roomy but harmless. It looked a little too clean, considering how infrequently most cars were driven these days.
Around her, the house felt unconscious, even though Mark and Laura slept just two rooms away. Laura was the only risk; Mark would be dead to the world. She reached up to the top of the open wardrobe, found a yellow sports bag. She gathered a few clothes from the pile on the floor: not too many. She moved to avoid making any noise, only taking items that would not disturb the papers on the floor.
She added her notebook, her wallet, a few toiletries, and transferred the transmitter from Fisher’s shop, still in its iron box, over from her satchel. She looked at the heap of her possessions for some souvenir of her life so far, some object with sentimental value, and found nothing. The contents of the bag would be better anonymous. The only things she took that had any meaning were the transmitter, the photo of Thorne with the boxlike object, now safely tucked into her wallet, and the amulet she had salvaged from the boat. It reminded her of her mother now.
/> And then, as an afterthought, she looked under the bed and found what she half remembered had been there the last time she had visited: a short, blunt rod of hard wood, half of an old pool cue, lined with brass at one end. She jammed it into the top of her bag.
She moved to the doorway and looked back. She wondered who would come into the room next—Mark, thickheaded and remorseful the next morning, or Laura, horrified by the anarchy wrought by her sister-in-law. Before she closed the door, a thought occurred to her. She moved back and found a pen in the detritus of the desk, turned Warwick’s note over, and wrote on it, in thick block capitals: Tell harv to go fuck himself. Then she turned the light off and made her way out and down the stairs, trying to remember which ones creaked.
Downstairs, she retrieved her jacket, moved into the kitchen, opened the thick curtains blocking the back door, and for a minute looked out for some sign of surveillance. She found none. Eventually, satisfied there was nobody observing from this angle, she undid the bolts and slipped out into the burning light of the garden beyond.
THIRTY-TWO
It was a hot night, too bright to hide anywhere. Clouds had massed to the north like a high, distant mountain range. The garden was a riot of scents, fresh soil mingling with the sweet honeysuckle on the house’s back wall. Beyond Laura’s vegetable patch was a thin stretch of lawn, lined by laburnum, forsythia, even a couple of fuchsias sheltering along the shaded side. It was impressive, Hopper thought, what you could do with enough water.
A few apple trees stood farther down the garden, their trunks gnarling out of the ground, thick with bark. A handful of apples, unpicked and shrunken, clung to their upper boughs. Mark had called the trees “the orchard,” ironically at first, and over time the joke had been forgotten and the orchard was what it was, sliding somehow from a joke to a boast. For the sunny side of the house Laura had bred plants that would survive well in constant sunlight—most people had by now. Untended patches of common ground had become tiny, scrubby deserts, a reminder of the dry land in southern Europe pushing its way gradually north.
Hopper was grateful for the orchard now. The trees should shelter her from any observers, unless they were stationed in the houses on either side. Even then they might find it difficult to notice her as she was currently dressed, in jeans and a long-sleeved top with her black jacket over it. Mark and Laura’s bedroom looked out on the garden, but their shutters were closed.
And yet she felt her heart beat tighter in her chest, her breathing shallower and less controlled than usual.
Barring a few birds muttering to themselves in the shaded branches of the trees, and the rustle of the leaves, the garden was silent. She walked to the far end. It was less luxurious up close. The soil down here was drier; the sunlit plants had browned and wilted, unrelieved by rain.
At the back of the garden the soil formed a handy ramp, making the fence on the right easier to climb. There were just three gardens between here and the side street. From there she might be able to make her way along back routes, might just avoid meeting any police. It would be surprising to see anyone on the roads apart from one of the curfew vans, but it would take only one neighbor looking out of their window, insomniac or patriot, to call the police. It would take only one car to deliver her back to Warwick and Blake.
The side fence was her height, sturdy, supported by staves Mark had placed on this side. She reached over, deposited her bag, and pulled herself up, treading on one of the crossbeams for support. It creaked, but held, and she was over, in the next garden, her hands reddening where the wooden fence had bitten in.
This garden was longer than Mark’s. Here there was long-dead mulch on the ground, and the lawn had been dug into vegetable patches, quartered by thin paving slabs. Hopper moved across, surveying the house warily, and found herself at the next fence. It was rickety. She threw her bag over and climbed up, reaching one hand to a tree branch to support herself as she did. It wasn’t enough. As she hauled herself up, a section of the fence gave way, and she fell, clawing at the air. The jagged upright edge scraped the inside of her wrist, and some protuberance ripped her jacket sleeve. She slithered over into the next garden, dropping to the hard earth with a grunt.
She hauled herself up, sitting behind one of the shrubs at the end of the garden and waiting to see if anyone had heard her. Mercifully, the wood of the fence was rotten enough not to have made a loud crack as it snapped. After a minute, no window had opened, no head had poked out. Perhaps she had been mistaken for a fox.
She inspected her wrist. The top layer of skin had been scraped away, droplets of blood starting to ooze out. Could have been worse. She looked around. This garden was more affluent. Although still dug for vegetables, it had a small pagoda at this end, the white-painted window frames flecked with algae.
The third fence was as weak as the second. She found an alternative—the low branches of the oak that overhung it. She swung her bag over, scrabbled up the tree to a convenient fork, and dropped six feet or so into the final garden before the street. Just one more fence to go—taller, this one, and sturdier.
As she crossed the garden, she saw movement at the other end and froze.
A dog. A big one. It had been lying in a small, shaded kennel abutting the house, and emerged from it slowly. It looked like a Doberman—she had seen them straining on the arms of the police, barely restrained from violence by their handlers’ grips. This one moved forward, looking at her, padding slowly into the sunlight. She could hear it growling from here.
Very slowly and carefully, she started to walk toward the far fence, looking down. Wasn’t that the thing to do? Avoid eye contact, make yourself unthreatening?
When she was halfway across, the dog broke into a bark and a run. Hopper ran too, the final fence high in front of her, the barking so loud it would surely wake up half the street. She pitched her bag awkwardly over and jumped onto the lower struts of the fence. The dog was almost on her as she scrabbled upward, not feeling the pain in her arm or her ribs, and she kicked blindly backward, making contact and hearing a bark turn into a yelp.
And then she was over, tumbling onto the other side of the fence, landing on top of her bag. This was a narrow side road, houses only on one side, and she was mercifully shielded from view by a parked van. She waited there, hearing the dog on the other side of the fence, leaping up again and again, shaking the panels. Its bark was enormous, street-filling.
A window swung open behind her. “Shut that dog up!” someone shouted. She heard the click of another latch, and an answering “Get fucked! Monty, shut up, will you?” The dog left off barking, and its panting receded.
Hopper’s hands were raw from the final fence, and her ankle was burning. It felt like she’d twisted it. She maneuvered into a better position, and the pain abated a little.
Sitting on the hot pavement, she pulled her bag from under her; there were painkillers in one of the pockets. She took two, forcing them down her gullet dry. She had to swallow a few more times and stayed crouched on the narrow pavement between the fence and the van, waiting for an engine, for approaching footsteps, for the car outside her brother’s house to nose around the corner and spill out officers.
But the street remained silent. After a few minutes, feeling the warmth of the pavement beneath her, the pain in her ankle had become a dull throb. She stood, leaning on the fence for support, careful not to move it in case the dog came back, and tried walking, taking a few steps up and down in the concealed space behind the van. Her ankle was sore but the pain was manageable. She checked the bag: four aspirin left. She would take a couple more in a little while.
Moving through the streets during curfew was dangerous; then again, so was staying in one place. It would make more sense to find a quiet alley and wait there, maybe snatch a few hours of sleep before moving. There were still—she checked her watch—six hours left before curfew was lifted.
But staying ar
ound here had risks too. Her brother might wake, drunk and remorseful, go to her room, find her missing, raise the alarm.
The treacherous thought of turning back also occurred to her. She had pushed it away several times, sitting on the pavement with torn clothes and bruised palms, but now she thought again: she could do it. March into the street, approach the front door, and ring the bell. Before the policeman in his car could arrest her, someone would have come down; she would be back on her brother’s property, safe for a few more hours.
Except she would have to sleep in that ruined room, taking Mark’s hospitality, knowing it was worth nothing. Given what she had read in Mark’s files, it seemed likelier he would welcome the police in. Hopper pulled herself upright, stretched her legs, and began to walk.
She’d made her decision. From here it couldn’t be more than four miles to where she needed to be, five with the zigzag of the streets. She could do it in a couple of hours, even limping. She would keep the sun at her back as she walked, so knew she was heading northwest—first to the end of one residential road, then right onto a broader one for fifty yards before she could duck back onto a side street.
There were a few foxes around, filthy, mangy beasts, unadapted to life in daylight, snatching what food they could. Some people, she had heard, had resorted to eating them a few years ago, when the shortages were very bad. Their numbers had recovered since then, though many people still thought of them as a mobile larder for the next time it happened. She had no doubt there would be a next time.
She kept thinking of Harv. She remembered lying with him, playacting a proper relationship, talking for hours, gradually letting him into her confidence. And all that time he had been listening, then going back to his room to take notes. Was she his sole charge? Was he taking notes on Schwimmer, on the other soldiers? Probably. But she was the one he had become closest to. Had he written in his notes the precise occasions they had slept together? Had he been instructed to, or simply taken her body as an optional extra?
The Last Day Page 24