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Authors: Dave Hutchinson

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BOOK: Europe at Midnight
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It was around that time that I went back to the river. The first morning, watching the float bob gently on the surface, a rhythmic splash-splash from upstream announced the appearance of a young woman single-mindedly paddling a canoe. I sat where I was and the canoe shot past me and ran my float down.

The canoe splashed away downstream and out of sight round a curve in the river, and I was left to reel in. At the end of the line was nothing but an end of line, curling like a pubic hair. Hook, float, shot and about a foot of leader had been torn clean off.

While I was packing to go, the splash-splash came back. She paddled in to the bank and grabbed at a protruding root to stop herself floating away.

“Hey.”

“Hey what,” I said.

She gave a little jerk of the chin towards my fishing gear. “Catch anything?”

“Not a thing, no.”

She looked about her, at the river, at the bushes along the banks. “Ever catch anything?”

“Not a thing, no.”

She wrinkled her nose at me in a fashion I found rather attractive. “Not much of a fisherman, are you.”

I did up the buckles of my fishing bag and slung it over my shoulder. “There is a school of thought,” I told her, picking up my fishing rod, “which teaches that fish are actually more intelligent than people, but, having only short-term memories, keep forgetting how bright they are. The task of the angler is, therefore, to judge when the fish are at their stupidest and most easily caught.”

I’ll give her her due; she thought about it. “But that’s bollocks!” she said.

“There are also no fish in this part of the river. It helps me to think,” I added, in case she thought I was crazy. “Where were you going?”

“I’m looking for a job.”

“What do you do?”

“I teach Literature. Is there a post here?”

I laid my rod aside. “What’s your name?”

“Araminta Delahunty. What’s yours?”

“Rupert of Hentzau.” I’d been reading too much Anthony Hope in the recent past. I reached a hand down to help her from the canoe. “I’m sure we can find some space for you somewhere.”

 

 

I
LEARNED TO
regret my choice of introduction. She cracked seemingly inexhaustible jokes about
The Prisoner Of Zenda
. She refused to use my real name, preferring to call me ‘Rupe’ instead. She taught with a passion and ferocity which unnerved and entranced her students by turns. She wouldn’t sleep with me, but persisted in wandering naked about my rooms, and saw nothing out of the ordinary in coming into the bathroom and engaging me in conversation while I was on the toilet.

She said she had canoed almost a hundred miles from School 902, on the East Side, and she had something of the long vowels of the Eastern accent in her voice. She was always full of questions. She wanted to know how the Fall had taken place on this part of the Campus, what last Winter had been like, how the Residence records were organised. She had a terrible sense of direction – “The only way I got out of that fucking place was on the river, Rupe,” she told me one day. “You can’t get lost on a river.” – and gathered maps in bewildering numbers. “Just getting my bearings,” she called it.

From the East, she brought four changes of clothing and a locked metal briefcase. She read voraciously, putting in four and five hours in the Library after a full day of classes. She meditated in the mornings, and in the evenings she practiced a form of dance called something like ‘capybara,’ which she claimed was also a species of unarmed combat.

Meanwhile, the small sad mystery of Escape Group 9 was beginning to eat up an appreciable amount of my time. The fact that we still didn’t know the identities of the four bodies brought up from the river was an irritation, true, but the Fall had left us with hundreds of unidentified and often unidentifiable corpses, and I felt that I could live, if unwillingly, with the idea of four more. There has to come a point where you stop obsessing about the dead.

 

 

“T
HEY MADE THEIR
run four days before the Fall,” I told the Board.

“Poor buggers,” said someone.

Rossiter looked at me for a few moments. “And?”

I checked my notes and shrugged. “And.”

“That’s it? After two months?”

“It’s all I could get out of the Apocrypha,” I told him, and we engaged in a brief staring contest, which I lost.

Joe Richardson said, “If Escape Group 9 wasn’t the first, and all the others were the same size, that’s thirty-six people. Thirty-two of whom are unaccounted for.”

“That’s if they were all the same size,” Ian Daniel put in, always eager to jump on a bandwagon. “Maybe we haven’t found all the bodies from Group 9 yet.”

“I had the river dragged again, and we didn’t find any more bodies,” I said. “Don’t you lads read my reports?”

“Gentlemen,” Rossiter warned.

“This is getting ridiculous,” I told him. “I haven’t got the time to spare for this. I’m still helping to prepare the case against the Arts Faculty.”

“I’d judge this is pertinent to your work then,” said Rossiter. “Runway Four was Arts Faculty territory.”

I sighed. It wasn’t going to go away, no matter how hard I tried. “All right, I’ll look into it. But I’ll need some help. The Librarians won’t wear this one, you know what they’re like. I’m understaffed, and what staff I do have are overstretched. I can’t plough through the whole of the fucking Apocrypha on my own.”

Rossiter nodded. “All right, you get your way. I’ll see to it that you get a Research Assistant.”


Several
Research Assistants.” We stared at each other for several seconds, but I knew it was no use and finally I just took a file at random from the pile in front of me and waved it wearily at him to demonstrate my ever-increasing workload.

He nodded at the file. “This,” he said, “is exactly the same as that.”

I suddenly realised what I was waving. “It is not,” I told him. I’d read the file that morning, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before.

He ran the tip of his tongue between his top lip and his teeth. “It’s all atrocity,” he said crisply. He started to gather up his notes. “We need all our available people to help with the reconstruction over on the East Side.”

“The East Side can
wait
.”

He looked at me and shook his head. He tut-tutted. “Shame on you. And you living with your bit of Eastern totty.”

“She is not my totty,” I said, and there was a ripple of laughter round the table, which was what Rossiter had wanted. The atmosphere in the regular meetings had become noticeably strained in recent weeks. Nobody looked as if they were getting enough sleep. The phrase
mass execution
had come up more than once in relation to the Old Board. We were all finding Democracy more difficult than we’d imagined.

Rossiter smiled. “I can’t spare you half a dozen people,” he said.

“Half a dozen wouldn’t have been enough anyway,” I muttered peevishly.

“You get
a
Research Assistant,” he said firmly. “Now. Drugs.”

I looked around the room. It was small and musty and smelled of cabbage, but from here the Old Board had ruled us for more than two hundred years. I tried to come here as little as possible, for any number of reasons. “Doesn’t anyone
else
here do anything?”

“You wanted the exciting job,” said Ian.

“I did not want the exciting job,” I told him. “I
inherited
the exciting job. And it’s not
that
fucking exciting.”

Rossiter took off his spectacles and polished them on the hem of his cardigan. “Drugs,” he said again.

“Some of the reconstruction gangs have been caught using pep pills,” I said. “Harry Pool says they’re not standard issue.”

“Science City,” Rossiter said, and there was an almost-comical moment when the other members of the Board tried to look busy with their notes in case they got drawn into the conversation and wound up having to do something about it.

“There’s nothing to link them to the Science Faculty, but I’m going to see Callum about it,” I told him.

“I wish you all the luck in the world with that,” he said.

“If anyone has a better suggestion, I’m listening,” I said, but no one did.

 

 

“I
CAN’T REALLY
see the problem,” Araminta said, picking a rag of wilted lettuce from the middle of her ham salad roll and dropping it delicately into the ashtray in the middle of the table. The slice of ham underneath was almost transparent, the roll of very poor quality. “You told me yourself that the Faculty registers are full of missing people. Your thirty-six missing escapers will be in there somewhere.”

I shook my head. “The registers aren’t complete. People got into some of the Faculty offices during the Fall and made bonfires with any documentation they could get their hands on. We did our best to stop it, but we couldn’t be everywhere.” I took a sip of my beer and winced. Unlike food in general, the Administration pub’s beer was cheap and plentiful. It was also virtually undrinkable, and even if you could stomach it, it was impossible to get drunk on.

“So what now? You check this Apocrypha thing?”

I started to take another drink of beer, but thought better of it. “The problem with the Apocrypha is that every bit of official, semi-official and unofficial paper the Old Board ever collected is there, and nobody understands their filing system. All you can do is start at Filing Cabinet A and just read the stuff until you bump into what you’re looking for. We were lucky to find that one mention of Escape Group 9.”

“So it might take a while to track the rest of the operation down, right?”

“Right.”

She shrugged and drank some beer; the appalling taste didn’t seem to bother her.

I said, “Are things this bad over on the East Side? I haven’t been there in years.”

“Missing people, you mean?” Her eyes took on a dreamy, sad expression. “Everybody knows someone who disappeared.”

“You too?”

She focused back on my face and she smiled a sad little smile. “Me too.”

This wasn’t the right time or place to ask who, so I said, “It’s a bad do. We’ll be years clearing up the mess they left.”

“I think you take too much on yourself, Rupe, you know?”

“I get it given to me.”

All of a sudden, she broke into a huge smile. “Oh, Rupe, sometimes I could just hug you, you’re such a good soul.”

I actually felt myself start to blush. “I’ve been called a lot of things...”

She laughed. “I’m sure.” Then she suddenly turned serious. “Rupe, am I cramping your style?”

“What?” She was always using unfamiliar words and phrases and sentence constructions, East Side slang. Another few years of the Old Board and we would have been speaking different languages.

“Having me living with you,” she said. She grinned slyly. “Some of my students say you’re pretty popular with the girls.”

“Oh.” I suddenly caught up. “Oh, no. No.” Shaking my head vigorously.

“I hear you have a reputation,” she said, still grinning.

“A reputation, perhaps. But no time.” I was starting to blush again. “I haven’t had time for
that
for a long while.”

She half-stood, bent forward across the table, and kissed me on the top of my head. “Bless you, Rupe, you’re a sweet lad.”

“Thank you,” I said, hoping nobody I knew was in the pub.

“Anyway,” she said, sitting down again. “Escape Group 9.”

“Yes.” I’d almost forgotten about them. I had also, at some point in the last couple of minutes while my attention was elsewhere, managed to drink all my beer without noticing, which was probably for the best. I looked at the bits of grey scum in the bottom of my glass. “Well, the Board are right.”

She tipped her head to one side, a gesture I’d learned to interpret as Araminta-speak for a question which did not need to be asked. You just had to work out for yourself what the question was.

“All right. Look. Four people – room-mates perhaps – take it upon themselves to try a blitz. They have a plan. They keep it to themselves, keep security tight, trust each other and no one else.
Nine
groups, all working on the same plan, would need an organising committee, access to workshops, secure caches of food and clothing, a whole infrastructure aside and apart from the people who were going to make the actual escape attempts.” I waved a hand in the air. “Another two or three dozen people who wouldn’t be leaving. They should still be here, and we can’t find them, or any mention of them. Good grief, they should be going around
boasting
about it.”

“Maybe Groups 1 to 8
were
the infrastructure,” she suggested. “Maybe the whole organisation just took itself out in groups of four.”

I’d thought of that already, but the idea still made me scowl. “You can’t maintain security in a group that large. It’s impossible. Four is the classic scenario.”

“So you compartmentalise the operation, break it up into groups of four –”

I was shaking my head. “I can’t convince myself that it would work. It’s just too damn big, Araminta. If the first eight Groups made it, that’s thirty-two home runs. The biggest mass-blitz in the Campus’s history. They must have had a blazing good gag to get that many people out.” Especially if they used Runway Four; that wouldn’t just have been a good gag, it would have been a miracle.

She tipped her head to the other side.

I sighed. “What Rossiter and the rest of the Board are so exercised about is what the first eight Escape Groups imply. They imply that somewhere out there is a runway capable of taking at least thirty-two people out of here. Do you understand?”

Araminta smiled.

“It’s been four months since the Fall, and we’re still clearing boobytraps and digging out rogue Security men who don’t want to believe it’s all over. We still haven’t got anyone near the Far Fences, and we probably won’t this year, not without losing people. And here we are with Escape Group 9 and their friends and their foolproof way of getting out.”

“You could still find thirty-two bodies somewhere out there in those woods on the other side of the river,” she pointed out.

BOOK: Europe at Midnight
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