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Authors: Dave Hutchinson

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BOOK: Europe at Midnight
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More texts, more questions. The car drove through North Finchley on the Great North Road, up through Whetstone and the congested high street of High Barnet. Just outside Potters Bar, the driver turned off the main road and drove for a little while down a winding side-street of suburban houses, crossed another main road, and pulled into the drive of what appeared to be a large private house, hidden from the road behind a screen of mature oak trees.

Inside, a small, trim, neatly-bearded man wearing a suit and a bow-tie came across the harlequin-tiled floor of the entrance hall to meet him, hand outstretched.

“Doctor Kumar?” asked Jim, shaking the man’s hand.

“I need to see your identification,” Kumar said. “Sorry.”

Jim showed him the card and asked, “How is he?”

Kumar turned and walked away, beckoning Jim to follow him up a flight of stairs to the first floor. “Three puncture wounds to the abdomen,” he said as they walked. “Deep wounds, inflicted by a very sharp double-edged blade. Massive blood loss, then all the palaver of transferring him from University College to here. We lost him twice on the table.”

“Will he recover?”

“Recover?” Kumar snorted. “It’s a miracle he’s alive. He’s stable at the moment. He lost some of his small intestine and he’ll need further surgery. We’ll visit ‘recovery’ when we’re able.”

On the first floor, Kumar led him down a corridor. At the far end, two large men in business suits sat on chairs on either side of a door. Kumar and Jim showed their identification to the men, and Kumar opened the door and motioned Jim to step through.

Inside was a modern hospital room, white-painted and sterile-smelling. At one end, a single hospital bed was surrounded by monitors and drip stands. In the bed, his face obscured by an oxygen mask, lay the victim of tonight’s stabbing.

“He’s sedated at the moment and I’d quite like him to stay that way for a while,” Kumar said. “So if you were wanting to speak to him tonight you’re going to be disappointed. He’s been in the wars recently, apart from the stab injuries. There are cuts and bruises, some of them older than others, and what seems to be a tyre mark on the side of one of his legs. He’s also suffering from malnutrition. He’s at least two stone underweight.”

Jim couldn’t tear his eyes from the figure on the bed. The victim was average height, but very thin, with receding brown hair. Beneath the oxygen mask, Jim thought he could make out a nose that had been broken a couple of times in the past. “When will he be able to talk to us?”

“Tomorrow night. At the very earliest. Of course, we could bring him out now but I can’t be responsible for the consequences and I don’t know how much sense you’d get out of him anyway.”

“No,” said Jim. “Let him sleep. Could I have hourly reports on his condition, though, please? I’ll speak with you tomorrow afternoon.”

Back in the corridor, he said, “I’ll need a list of anyone he might have spoken with before he went into surgery.”

“He was unconscious when our people picked him up from UCH,” said Kumar. “I can’t speak for what happened there. You’ll have to talk to the NHS.”

“He was compos mentis enough to speak to the police who answered the emergency call,” said Jim.

Kumar shrugged. “As I said, you’ll have to talk to the A&E staff who treated him. But the chances are that he lost consciousness very quickly. He lost a lot of blood.”

“Do you have his clothes?”

“We have everything he was brought in with. Which wasn’t much. This way.”

The victim’s clothing sat, in two large yellow plastic bin-liners, on a table in another guarded room just down the corridor. With Kumar standing respectfully off to one side of the room to protect the chain of evidence, Jim put on a white paper one-piece suit and a pair of surgical gloves, opened the bags, and tipped their heavily-bloodsoiled contents onto the table.

Shoes. Brown leather, both sole and upper. Soles scuffed. Jim felt around inside, checked the heels for any obvious hiding places, put them back in the bag along with the man’s black cotton socks and cheap-looking Y-fronts. He checked the turnups and pockets of the black corduroy trousers. The turnups were empty. The pockets contained a white cotton handkerchief, two ten pound coins, and a leaflet folded into quarters. As he unfolded it, the image on the front sprang into life – an animated cartoon cat of some kind – and began to sing in a faint scratchy voice about a department store sale in Kensington. He folded the leaflet up again and left it on the table.

White shirt. White once, anyway. Now in tatters and soaked with blood. The smell was awful. Jim felt the collar and cuffs, put it back in the bag. Grey knitted tie. No obvious signs of seams having been unpicked and resewn to hide something. He searched the pockets of the jacket – tweedy, but not quite tweed, something subtly
different
. Packet of twenty cigarettes, an imported brand, the words on the outside in Polish, eleven cigarettes missing. Disposable catalytic lighter. Two more animated advertising leaflets, one for the British Library and one for a fair in Battersea Park. Two disposable pens, one black, one blue. A printed copy of the
London A To Z
, brand new – he riffled the pages for insertions, riffled them again to check for notations. A packet of chewing gum, menthol flavour, two sticks missing. An apple. He laid the jacket out on the table and felt its seams and lining. Same routine with the black overcoat – this one more
prosaic
, something from a charity shop or taken from a recycling bin. Unopened carton of orange juice in one pocket, half-empty plastic bottle of water in the other.

Well.

Jim repacked the bags, signed for them, and took them down to the car. He checked his watch. Half past ten, four hours or so since the incident at Camden Town Station. He thought about the assailant, about the man in the hospital bed in the house behind him. He thought about the victim’s jacket, how the weave of the cloth had felt under his fingertips, through the latex of the gloves.

 

 

2

 

T
HESE WERE INTERESTING
times to be a member of His Majesty’s Security Services – not that Jim suspected they had ever been particularly dull. The War On Terror had settled in for the long run, periodically stoked up by the chaotic proliferation of tiny states and caliphates and kingdoms in the Middle East. In Europe, it seemed that every month or so there was a new sovereign territory to learn the name of. The majority didn’t last long enough to feel the need for an intelligence service, but those that did tended to embrace espionage with all the vigour of die-hard Ian Fleming fans. Look at us, we are an independent nation; what are
you
up to...? Most of these were endearingly amateurish; it was almost a sin to arrest and deport their operatives. Some of them, though, were sly.

Interesting times, and busy times. Also well-funded times. Even in the truncated United Kingdom, cash-strapped and austere after decades of economic near-collapse and the Xian Flu, the Intelligence budget kept increasing. Britain-as-was had been a fiercely cosmopolitan nation – in the early days of the century there had been almost half a million French nationals living in London alone – and was a rich territory of potential sleeper operatives for nascent countries. There was no telling what would happen next. You could wake up one morning – as Jim had last year – and find that Venice had finally declared independence from Italy, and all of a sudden you were being tasked to identify every Venetian and descendant of Venetians living in England, just in case they might become a security risk. In this case, that included two Labour MPs, the great-great grandchildren of Italian immigrants.

The steady increase in the number of nations was accompanied by an increase in the number of people seeking asylum in England. New countries were fractious places; differences of opinion, followed by mass arrests, followed by mass flight, were by no means unusual, although the Scots and Welsh had so far been decent enough not to try it on. Jim had no idea what he was supposed to make of an asylum seeker of apparently white English ethnicity.

 

 

I
T WAS ALMOST
half past eleven before the car deposited him, a yellow plastic bag in each hand, on the pavement outside an anonymous building on Northumberland Avenue. He stood there for a moment, looking up at the lighted windows, trying to rehearse. Something about tonight’s stabbing victim had piqued the Security Service’s interest – it was unusual for someone of Jim’s rank to be sent out to deal with an asylum claim, no matter how mired in attempted murder.

Security in the building was informal but rigorous. Card checks, a retina and fingerprint scan, a scan for metal and explosives, a scan for electronic devices, all carried out by cheerful but professional personnel in plain clothes. Jim got one of them to sign the chain of evidence protocol for the bags, and watched them being placed in a safe.

On the seventh floor there were more checks. His phone and tablet were confiscated. He was photographed and issued with a numbered badge. Then he was ushered down a corridor and shown into an anteroom with only his thoughts for company.

After a few minutes, the interior door opened and he was invited into a larger room, windowless and papered with hideous crimson flock wallpaper. At one end, two women sat at a table, a single chair facing them. Jim sat on the chair.

One of the women was in early middle age, blonde, wearing a black business suits over a white shirt. The other was older, grey-haired, untidy. She was wearing a cardigan under her jacket and she looked at Jim over the tops of a pair of half-moon spectacles.

Jim gave a brief verbal report of the evening’s events and his involvement in them, winding up with an account of his visit to Doctor Kumar’s private clinic in Potters Bar. The younger woman made occasional notes. The older one just watched him. When he reached the point in the story where the unidentified victim was stabbed, he thought he saw her wince slightly.

When he’d finished, the blonde, who had introduced herself as Shaw, said, “And your reading of these events is...?”

“On the face of it, it seems to be a simple case of assault,” he answered carefully.

“Have you considered,” asked the older woman, “a
political
motive?”

“He requested asylum,” he answered. “That automatically casts a
political
light on everything to do with him.” The older woman smiled and made a note on her pad.

“Could it have been an assassination attempt?” asked Shaw.

He thought about it. “Certainly,” he said finally. “But there’s no way to ascertain that until we’ve identified the victim.”

“And yet you ordered him sequestered at Potters Bar, and authorised the story that he had died,” said Shaw. “Why did you do that?”

Jim looked at the women, trying to gauge how much damage this evening could cause his career. He said, “I didn’t authorise his admission to the clinic. Someone else made that assessment. He was already at the clinic when I got the call. My subsequent actions followed from there.” The grey-haired woman made another note.

“And the story of his death?” asked Shaw.

“As I said, someone had already made the decision to sequester him. Based on that, and until I had more information, it seemed reasonable to allow his attacker to think he was dead. At the very least it would improve our chances of finding the assailant if it were considered a murder case rather than an assault.”

“Surely that would be a decision for the police to make?”

“I was tasked to –”

“You were tasked to make an assessment,” Shaw reminded him crisply. “Not to make operational decisions.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said the older woman. “Can’t we just
tell
him?”

Shaw looked at her, then at Jim.

“Tell me what?” he asked.

For a moment, he experienced the feeling that he was watching this scene from outside his own body. There were the two women, sitting at their table; Shaw making notes, the older woman staring at him. And there he was, on his uncomfortable chair in the middle of the ugly carpet, outwardly calm and relaxed. It was an image, he thought, that he would remember for the rest of his life, an image of himself when something quite fundamental happened to him.

Shaw looked at her colleague again, then made an
after you
gesture and started to write something on her pad.

“My name is Adele Bevan,” the older woman said. “I’m on secondment from Jesus College and I’m very interested in your stabbing victim because I think he may come from a parallel universe.”

There was an eternity of silence. Shaw continued dabbing at her pad, frowning slightly. She shook her head.

“I beg your pardon?” asked Jim.

Shaw looked up. “The first thing you have to remember is that the Service is yet to be entirely convinced of Professor Bevan’s theories. She has provided just enough evidence for this committee to be instituted.” She glanced at her pad. “The way the MoD used to have a department which investigated UFO sightings,” she added sourly.

“You’ll read the material later,” Bevan told him, “but the gist of it is that two hundred years ago a landowning family in Nottinghamshire somehow created an English county to the west of London. They called it ‘Ernshire’. We don’t know how they did it, but we have circumstantial evidence that Ernshire was, and presumably still is, a real thing. The map which may have shown routes into and out of Ernshire has disappeared; no one knows how to visit it or even contact it.”

Tell them I’ve seen a map.

“Is this some kind of test?” Jim asked carefully.

“No,” said Shaw, “it is not a test. You’re in the presence of the Twilight Zone department of the Service. We’ve been tasked with assessing the existence – or otherwise – of Ernshire and what sort of threat it might represent to the nation.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Bevan smiled at him. “Oh, we are. I am, anyway. I’ve been working on this for over twenty years. There’s an invisible county where Heathrow is, it’s full of people, and we have no idea what they’re doing.”

BOOK: Europe at Midnight
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