Europe at Midnight (19 page)

The front door opened onto a short hallway, off which five doors opened. To the left were the dining room and bathroom, to the right the living room and bedroom. Straight ahead, down a couple of steps, was the kitchen. Jim put on a pair of latex gloves and went to work.

And the moment he stepped into the dining room he knew it was pointless. Furniture had been moved about, cupboards opened and not closed. Plates and various bits of crockery were stacked on the stripped and varnished boards of the floor. The upholstery of the dining chairs had been slashed.

There was similar disorder in the bathroom. In the bedroom, the mattress had been stripped and cut open. There was a table by the window where dangling cables proclaimed a lack of a computer. Books had been taken out, riffled, dropped on the floor.

Jim sighed and looked at it all and took out his phone.

3

F
OR
B
EVAN,
R
UPERT
was the validation of her life’s work. It was as if a scientist from SETI had suddenly found herself in the company of a being from a distant star, except this being was recovering from near-fatal stab wounds and had a strange, lilting, almost-West Country accent that Bevan called ‘Mummerset.’

She spent hours assembling and reassembling the results of Rupert’s debriefings, endlessly turning them and trying to fit them into her own research. It was rather a delight to watch her.

“He didn’t know about the Community,” she said one morning. “None of them did. The poor bastards.”

“Why would they do that?” asked Jim. “Aside from the fact that they could, of course. Why would the Whitton-Whytes go to the trouble of mapping and settling the Campus and then just wall it off from the rest of the Community?”

She shrugged. “There’s nothing in the contemporary documentation that we have. Nothing about a Campus at all. Mind you, we don’t have all the contemporary documentation, not by a long way.”

Jim’s own wanderings through the contemporary documentation had been like reading a confusingly episodic and picaresque novel. There were Parliamentary records, copies of
Hansard
, the notes for a play which had been banned on the night of its premiere on the orders of the Lord Chancellor, a desiccated, brittle poster advertising day-trips to Stanhurst, the county town of Ernshire, interviews dating back to the 1920s with three people who claimed that while on separate holidays on the Continent they had found themselves in a strange but oddly familiar European country where everyone seemed to be English. All three had given their interviews while inmates in the Colney Hatch asylum in North London. Bevan had been patiently searching for fragments like these for years, putting them together like a jigsaw, never doubting that she had stumbled upon something extraordinary. And now here was Rupert, with his story of a university the size of a small nation ruled by Stalin.

“The brother,” Shaw said, trying to bring the meeting back under control.

“Rafe William Delahunty,” Jim said, consulting his notes. “Age thirty-seven. Double First from Oxford. Geneticist specialising in viruses. We have a file on him, of course.” The Service kept an eye on many people in many walks of life, but took especial care with those who were expert in fields applicable to weapons of mass destruction. “Chief researcher at L5 Technologies in Wantage – they’re developing new agricultural technologies. Took a leave of absence a year ago, never came back.”

“And a flag didn’t go up?”

“Seemingly not.”

Shaw sighed. “Well
that’s
no good,” she said. She made a note. “Silly sod could have gone
anywhere
.”

“No especial political or religious leanings,” Jim read. “No membership of extremist groups.”

“That bloody thing was probably compiled when he left Oxford,” she muttered. “We’ll have tapped him up for a job at Porton if he was any good; he’d have been vetted before we even made the approach. Christ only knows what crazy stuff he believes now.”

“He believes in parallel universes,” Bevan said softly, and smiled at them. “That crazy enough for you?”

Jim looked at Shaw, but she didn’t react to the joke. He had been working with her for almost a year now, and he was still no nearer to getting close to her in the way he had grown close to Bevan. She was younger than he had first thought, in her late thirties perhaps, and sometimes she wore a perfume that smelled dry and brittle and delicate, maddeningly familiar but unidentifiable. She had once arrived at the office with what he believed was the very edge of a lovebite peeking from the buttoned-up collar of her blouse. And that was it. She was efficient and apparently entirely humourless. The thought that she might have a private life, or indeed a sex life, was at once repellent and weirdly erotic.

“Are we taking seriously Araminta Delahunty’s theory that the Xian Flu originated in the Campus?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” Bevan said. “There isn’t enough information. Araminta isn’t a healthcare professional; it’s just her opinion.”

Bevan, Jim thought, was having a hard time coming to terms with the possibility that the people of the Community might actually have carried out a preemptive biological attack on Europe. In her heart of hearts, she had never really believed they might represent a threat.

“Are we any closer to standing our man’s story up?” asked Shaw.

“He was certainly at St Katherine’s,” Jim said, checking his notes again. “Or someone who looked very like him, anyway. This chap Murchison was arrested for shoplifting; he’s doing a fifteen-year sentence on Dartmoor.”

“Fifteen years? For shoplifting?” Bevan shook her head. “Jesus.”

“It was his third conviction,” Jim said. “He was lucky; the court could have given him life. Anyway, I went down to Devon and showed him a photo of Rupert, which he positively identified. ‘Rupert The In-U-It Chappie.’”

“All right,” said Shaw, moving on down the agenda. “The burglary.”

Jim called up more notes. “On the face of it, just a burglary. The kitchen window was forced, not terribly expertly. The usual electrical goods taken; jewellery too, probably.”

“Did you look in the fridge?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Lots of people do that,” said Bevan. “Hide their valuables in the fridge. They think nobody will bother to look.”

“Really?” he said.

“
You
didn’t.”

“Right.” Jim made a mental note to mention it to his wife, during their next window of communication. Then he mentally erased the note. “Anyway, I called in a team of cleaners to do the job properly and there’s no sign of a hard drive or a folder of notes. There’s no evidence that it was anything more than a casual burglary.”

“The way there’s no evidence that the stabbing was anything more than the work of some sociopathic lowlife,” Bevan said.

“Life is like that, Professor,” Shaw told her. “Sometimes, there really is no conspiracy.”

Bevan narrowed her eyes.

Shaw sighed. “We really are in some danger of losing ourselves here. Perhaps we should concentrate on the things we have evidence for.”

“If we did that this committee wouldn’t exist,” Bevan grumped.

“And some of us might be happier if it did not,” Shaw snapped. It was, Jim thought, the first honest human emotion he had seen her express, and from the look on her face she regretted it the moment the words were out of her mouth. She scowled and went back to scrolling through her notes. Jim saw Bevan start to formulate a comeback, but he caught her eye and shook his head and she backed down unwillingly.

Someone’s phone rang. And kept ringing.

“Oh, all right,” Bevan said after a while with a little grin. “It’s me.” She took out her phone and answered it. Jim sighed.

Bevan hung up and beamed. “We’re in.” She looked at Shaw. “Will that be evidence enough?” she asked sweetly.

4

A
LL THEY HAD
was Rupert’s story, and some bits and pieces which might or might not have confirmed it, depending on how charitable you were feeling that day. The one irrefutable piece of evidence was the existence of the Campus itself, and of the route he had taken to escape.

To this end, a group of researchers, in the guise of a National Trust river conservation team, had been attempting to find the tributary Rupert claimed led from the Campus into the River Trent. This had proven to be less straightforward than anyone had expected, although in retrospect Jim wondered how they could ever have thought otherwise.

“It’s the damndest thing,” Lew Hines told them, leading them from the car and across a scruffy playing field towards the river. “It’s perfectly obvious once you’ve seen it the first time, but until you notice it you don’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

“What does it look like?” asked Bevan, almost bounding along beside him.

“It’s a channel, about three metres wide. You can’t see it from the riverbank at all, only from water level.”

“That’s because it’s only
there
at water level,” Bevan murmured.

They reached the collection of tents the team were using as a base, and Lew handed them both a life jacket. “Health and Safety,” he said apologetically. “You’re supposed to have some training as well, and sign something. But I’ll let you off.”

“Thank you, Lew,” said Bevan. “Very kind of you.”

“You
can
swim, though?”

“Not a stroke,” Bevan said, shaking her head. “Where’s the boat?”

The boat was moored just downriver from the team’s camp, a long, flat-bottomed punt-like craft with a small electro-catalytic outboard motor, just powerful enough to drive it against the strong slow currents of the Trent. No one was in any hurry to get anywhere; they had been carefully mapping and measuring and photographing both sides of this stretch of the river for months now, simultaneously wanting to find the route onto the Campus and trying not to do anything that might damage or destroy it.

Lew helped the newly-lifejacketed Bevan into the boat. Jim stepped down from the bank to join them, and Lew switched on the engine and cast off.

“We found it by accident,” he said as the turned the boat out into midstream and gave the engine maximum revs. “In a stretch of the bank we’d already surveyed. We just went right by it. I have no idea how.”

“Where?” Bevan said, trying to look at both banks of the river at the same time. “Oh.”

A little further ahead, another of the punts had been moored. Some figures were moving about on it, shifting equipment from one place to another, seeming to dress one of their number. As they got closer, Jim could see that the person who was being dressed was wearing a wetsuit, and the other two people on the punt were helping him into his rebreathing gear.

“SAS bloke,” Lew said from the rear of the boat. “Name of Challis. Great chap; awfully good with automatic weapons.”

“You’ve not been letting him take pot shots at the locals, have you?” Bevan asked.

“Heavens no!” Lew was like an enthusiastic young archaeology don out on a particularly jolly and fascinating dig. “He can field-strip and reassemble an SR-365 blindfolded, by touch, in complete darkness, wearing gloves. Really impressive.”

“It’s only really impressive if he can do it while you’re mortaring him,” said Bevan. “Can he do that?”

“I have no idea,” said Lew. “Can you?”

They all laughed, but only Jim was close enough to hear Bevan mutter, “Cheeky little fucker,” in an appreciative tone of voice. Then louder, “Ahoy! Captain Challis! We meet again!”

On the other boat, Challis looked round and broke into a wide grin. “Prof!” he called. “They roped you into this thing as well, did they?”

“I’m running it!”

Jim spent a few moments wondering how Bevan and Challis shouting to each other across the river could possibly be construed as maintaining operational security. He decided to think about it some other time.

“The Captain and I were involved in a thing,” Bevan confided loudly to Jim and Lew. “Year before last, wasn’t it, Captain?” she called across the decreasing distance between the boats.

“The Scotland thing? Three years!” he called back.

“Really? Time flies.” Lew steered their punt beside the moored boat and brought to it a halt, so Bevan didn’t have to shout. She reached across and shook Challis’s hand. “Good to see you again, Neil.”

“Likewise.” Challis didn’t look like a soldier. He looked like an accountant. A very, very fit and capable accountant. Who looked good in a wetsuit. “Anything I need to watch out for?”

Bevan shook her head. “As far as we know, the tributary curves around and rejoins the river, but it’s a different river.” She smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Neil. You’ll come out in a secluded spot. Just take some photos, have a quick shufti, come back.”

“Kind of job I like,” Challis grinned. Jim noticed he had a pistol strapped to each thigh. He made sure the rebreather rig was settled comfortably around his neck, popped in the mouthpiece, pulled his goggles over his eyes, and a moment later and with barely a ripple he was in the water and swimming away.

“Scotland?” Jim asked.

“Field trip,” said Bevan.

“Hm.”

The top of Challis’s head was just visible, swimming along beside the bank. Abruptly, he seemed to veer
into
the bank, and disappear. Jim tried to see where he had gone, but the angle was wrong. He looked at his watch, sat down on the seat in the back of the boat, and lit a cigarette.

He’d barely had the chance to finish it when Lew said, “He’s coming back.”

They all stood up in the boat, and sure enough there was Challis, stroking strongly out towards the middle of the river, letting the current carry him past the boats, and then swimming back into the bank. Where he just trod water.

“Neil?” Bevan called.

“It might be best if you all kept your distance,” Challis called back. “Lew, would you be so good as to put a crash call in to the nearest NBC containment team, please? And a doctor.”

“What’s wrong?” Bevan called.

Challis held up his hand, and Jim could see he was holding a little camera. “I got you some piccies, Prof. You can’t see them yet, though, because the camera’s probably radioactive.”