The Clown Service (21 page)

Derek Lime was startled to find her hovering over him, his attention lost to a cat’s cradle of wiring he was trying to replace.

‘I am friend of …’ She stopped herself, remembering what Toby had told her. ‘… Leslie. I mean you no trouble.’

‘Pleased to hear it,’ he said, extending one of his large hands
to shake hers. ‘I’ve more trouble than I can handle as it is. No need to add more.’

He gestured around the room at the equipment that was lying everywhere. ‘Charles – or whatever his name is – has got me trying to get all this back into working order. I’ve had to pull a sickie at work and …’ he floundered, ‘… well, to be honest I’m a bit freaked out. Glad of the company. I keep thinking that bloke who snatched Leslie is going to turn up again and have a pop at me.’

‘There has been no more trouble?’

‘Not a thing. But my nerves are broken. I just don’t understand what happened and, as a physicist, that’s a bit like discovering your legs are broken when you really need to walk somewhere. I rely on my head, on understanding. That’s not to say mystery can’t sometimes be a pleasure, but only if you know you stand a chance of solving it. How can he just have disappeared?’

‘I do not know. But I’m not like you, I don’t
need
to know. Life is a river. You do not have to know the making of water so as to swim.’

She wandered around the warehouse, looking in all the shadows, checking under Derek’s van.

‘You are safe to carry on your work,’ she told him. ‘Nobody will harm you while I am here.’

‘I’m not exactly defenceless you know,’ Derek replied. ‘I’ve got a whole lock-up filled with championship trophies for wrestling.’

‘This was a long time ago, yes?’

‘Well … yes.’

‘Then
you
play with your wires and I will punch anything that needs punching.’

April took a restorative nip from her hip flask before offering it to her lunch companion.

‘Here you are darling. Nothing peps up a cheese and pickle sandwich better than washing it down with a drop of Stolly.’

‘You know I shouldn’t drink alcohol while working,’ said her friend, taking a large mouthful before handing it back. ‘You have to be Chief Commissioner before you can get away with that.’

April took another swig and then placed the flask between them on the small Formica table. There were two ways to put Johnny Thorpe in a positive frame of mind. She was beginning to accept she was getting too old for one of those so had settled on the other: hard liquor.

‘I’m beginning to think he doesn’t love me anymore,’ she said. ‘It’s been positively ages since he took me out to dinner.’

‘You awful tart; you always ran us all ragged.’

‘Perhaps, but I never brought
him
a packed lunch so I must love you the most.’

Thorpe took a mouthful of his sandwich and winced. ‘Did you make the sandwiches yourself?’

‘Of course.’

‘Thought so.’ He placed his back in the lunch box and reached for the flask again. ‘I should just retire, take my pension and blow it all in a last, desperate binge. At least I’d go out smiling.’

‘Not if you’ve only got a state pension, darling. You’d be lucky to get as far as a King’s Cross hooker and a cheap bottle of blended Scotch.’

‘That would be enough these days; I haven’t the stamina anymore.’

‘Then tell me all about Harry Reid – before the vodka puts you to sleep.’

Thorpe reached for a folder of notes. ‘Absolute madness, of course. Just what’s needed to pep up a dull week. We’ve had a hell of a time even getting the permission to examine him. All medical tests show that he’s dead and yet he’s moving. I don’t know what strings they pulled at the Home Office, but I finally got to get my scalpel into him. He’s definitely Harry Reid, deceased 1963. Dental records have confirmed it. He has no brain activity, no pulse, no respiration at all. And yet … he’s moving. He’s an absolute medical impossibility. Which is both exciting and yet also really fucking annoying. They’ve got me and my team trying to prove that he wasn’t dead before so that the case makes sense. Which we can’t, because he was.’

‘A fun morning, then.’

‘Infuriating. And wonderful. The decomposition is all wrong, which I think is what gives CID hope. He appears to have been preserved by some kind of chemical, rendering him so hard it was a nightmare to cut into him. He’s more like a rubber facsimile of a cadaver than the real thing.

‘His toxicology reads like a sci-fi novel. The tissue was positively reeking of alien contaminants.’

‘Alien?’

‘Steady, old girl, not in the space ship sense.’

‘That’s some relief.’

‘I’m not sure it is; at least that would have explained a few things. I’ve taken samples but I won’t have the analysis back for a few hours. It must be the cause of his condition because … well, Occam’s Razor – we’ve an unnaturally preserved corpse, and
it’s packed full of unknown chemicals … Seems that the facts must be related.’

April pulled her brother’s set of old case notes out of her bag, rifling through them until she found the ancient pharmacology report for the sample taken from the warehouse. ‘Make a copy of that and let me know if your results match would you?’

‘Any reason why they would?’

‘Only a guess. Occam’s Razor again, I suppose. I have a feeling that a case my brother is working on might be heavily linked.’

‘Do you have any idea what could be going on?’ Thorpe took her hand. ‘All jokes aside, we’re looking at what my delightful trainee likes to call an “absolute clusterfuck”. I’m out of my depth and don’t mind admitting it.’

‘If I knew, I’d tell you,’ April replied, ‘but at the moment I’m as in the dark as you are.’

‘You’ve never been in the dark in your life, you infuriating cow.’

‘If only that were true; I’m just better at hiding it than the rest of you.’

Tamar made her way upstairs, as much to get away from Derek’s constant chatter as to investigate the upper floor. She was sure the man meant well, but she was not interested in his conversation, only the return of her August.

She paced the length of the upper floor, listening to the creak of the old timbers beneath her feet.
Old ghosts
, she thought,
I am always surrounded by old ghosts
.

As she turned towards the daylight flooding in from the open hatchway, it almost seemed as if she caught a glimpse of one. A figure, dressed in dark fatigues. She held her hand up to her eyes, filtering out some of the sunlight. There was nothing there.

‘Derek?’ she shouted, just to ensure he was where he was supposed to be and all was well.

‘Yeah?’ came his voice. ‘Please don’t tell me you want me to come up there. I don’t think the stairs would take it.’

‘No, just checking on you.’

‘Still here, still soldering on.’ He chuckled at his own joke and returned to a world of fuses and circuit boards.

Tamar, having no idea what he found so funny – and caring even less – walked over to the open hatchway. She supposed it was possible that her eyes had deceived her. The afternoon sun was now catching the open doorway head on and the glare made coloured shapes dance before her. And yet … Tamar knew what she had seen. A silhouette of a man in military clothing. She was not fanciful by nature nor was she easily confused. Things
were
or they
were not
. She did not believe in ghosts.

She would have approved of the fact that the boot which collided with her lower back was reassuringly solid, were it not for the fact that it pushed her straight through the open hatchway and into thin air.

It was a relief to get a phone call from April as I needed the distraction. My patience with Gavrill had worn perilously thin but punching him was only going to make both of us feel more miserable.

‘I have to take this call,’ I told him, ‘in private. But we’ll talk some more. Krishnin is active and a clear threat. You will tell me everything I need to know in order to deal with him. Understood?’

‘I’ve told you everything that I can …’

‘I don’t believe that for a moment, but we’ll discuss it in a minute. Can I trust you not to start phoning any old colleagues the minute my back is turned?’

He shrugged. ‘I am an
old
traitor. Who would I call?’

I took the phone outside. ‘Hi, sorry, I was in mixed company.’

I told her about Gavrill and the little he had admitted to in our conversation.

‘And what is he doing now?’ she asked.

‘I very much hope he’s calling whatever remains of his old contacts within the FSB,’ I said. ‘Shining overheard a Russian being tortured during his original surveillance back in the ’60s,
which suggests Gavrill’s telling the truth about Krishnin being rogue even then. I could spend the next hour or so knocking the old sod about a bit until he coughs up everything he knows, but I’d rather not. He’s damned irritating, but beating up pensioners has limited appeal.’

‘Pleased to hear it. Whereas if he’s encouraged to co-operate by his own people …’

‘Who would no doubt want to avoid Krishnin becoming an antique embarrassment …’

‘It’s in everyone’s best interests.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You manipulative little bugger – you’ll be a decent spy yet.’

‘I’m so glad you think that. So, what do you know?’

She gave me a breakdown of what she’d learned at the police mortuary and flicked through the details of August’s original file. It went some way towards confirming what I had just heard.

The operation had been classified as a limited success. Though Shining had failed to get to the bottom of Krishnin’s plan, the fact that he was dead and therefore no longer deemed a threat was good enough for the powers that be. Shining had also believed Krishnin to be acting outside his remit and that it was therefore unlikely someone else would continue his work. All that may have been true, but offered little comfort to us now, fifty years later.

‘They’re still working on the chemical analysis of Reid,’ April said, ‘but some of the ingredients found in the sample O’Dale picked up all those years ago are suggestive.’

‘Go on.’

‘Phenol, methanol and formaldehyde.’

‘Preservative chemicals.’

‘Absolutely. The base ingredients when preparing an arterially administered embalming fluid.’

‘They were injecting this stuff into the dead.’

‘And I think we can hazard a guess as to what the unidentified elements in the sample do.’

‘They make someone like Harry Reid pop up from the ground and forget their condition.’

Neither of us said anything for a moment. ‘Well,’ I finally added, ‘at least I can rest easy that even you find this one hard to believe.’

‘And yet the evidence points to it.’

‘It does,’ I agreed. ‘I look forward to drawing my therapist’s attention to the fact when they lock me up.’

‘On the subject of the embalming fluid, if that’s indeed what it is—’

‘Let’s just throw caution to the wind and accept the fact shall we?’

‘Can we find out how much of it was distributed?’

This was, of course, the most important point. Was Harry Reid a guinea pig? An isolated case? It was doubtful, and when the countdown on the numbers station reached zero I suspected we’d have our answer.

I finished the call with April and went back inside.

‘I hope that gave you enough time?’ I said.

Gavrill had the good grace to smile rather than argue.

‘I may have made a brief enquiry as to how someone would expect to proceed were it true that Krishnin is not as dead as had been assumed.’

‘And the response?’

‘I can tell you anything you need to know, as long as it helps make the situation go away.’

‘Go away?’

‘Nobody wants an international incident. There is no reason for one man’s lunacy to become a serious political issue.’

‘Fine. His actions do not represent, nor did they ever represent, the wishes or intentions of his homeland. A fact that is reflected in said homeland’s generous assistance in bringing the man to justice. Right?’

‘I knew you would understand.’

‘Operation Black Earth.’

‘Yes.’

‘It was an operation designed to reanimate the dead?’

Gavrill gave an awkward shrug. ‘Absurd, I know.’

‘So absurd it appears to be happening.’

That certainly surprised him. ‘Really? It works?’

‘We have a body dating from 1963 that should be nothing but dust and yet has been dangerously active.’

‘How dangerously?’

‘One man dead.’

Gavrill shook his head, got to his feet, topped up his glass and began to talk once more.

‘In its simplest terms the idea was this: what better sleeper agents could we hope for than the dead? People die every day, millions of the population, boxed up and hidden away, from coast to coast. If there was a way of weaponising them, of turning them to our advantage, we could cripple a country in a matter of hours.

‘The principle is sound enough, albeit too macabre for most politicians’ taste. It would be hard to fly the flag of glorious victory when that victory had been won by rotting cadavers. Apparently they would rather drop nuclear bombs.

‘Sünner had developed a serum that he claimed would achieve two distinct things: preserve the body post mortem (it’s all very well using the dead as sleeper agents, but how long are they of any viable use?) and turn the corpse into a controllable shell. The former was achievable, the latter was not. You’re working against impossible factors. The body is dead, its brain nothing more than meat. Even if you could somehow preserve the viability of the nervous system how could you control the body remotely? They still achieved the impossible: they reanimated test subjects, but they could not control them.

‘I was actually there for one of the experiments. The body was subjected to a sonic wave, a trigger signal I assume, activating the nervous system. I watched the corpse of a homeless man suddenly thrash and contort on the operating table, a violent wreck. It was utterly silent; I think that was the most disturbing thing – it didn’t scream or grunt, its face was rigid and empty. It just
fought
.