Europe at Midnight (32 page)

In the kitchen, he had replaced a bare minimum of pots and pans and equipment. There was a bare, gaping hole where the kitchen range had been, and another gap which had once housed the huge SMEG fridge/freezer his wife had talked him into buying. He’d bought himself a microwave oven and a small worktop fridge, and they suited his needs. Pizza and takeaway kebabs featured quite highly in his diet as well, and he balanced the shame of his situation with pride that he was not, at least, putting any weight on.

He microwaved a supermarket ready-meal – something which claimed to be Lancashire hotpot – took it on a tray into the empty living room, and sat on the floor with his back against the wall, eating. The whole house had become a façade. Absent a wardrobe, his clothes were hanging from various doorways on coat-hangers, his underwear and socks stacked neatly in a corner of the bedroom he could no longer bear to sleep in. He’d made himself a bed up in the dining room, using an old mattress, and it was all right, he got by.

Dinner over, he took the empty plastic tray from his hotpot back into the kitchen and dumped it in the bin. He was supposed to separate out recyclable and unrecyclable plastics, but nobody seemed to notice and he was starting to view it as his own little rebellion against the forces of authority, a mask for the real rebellion, the one which could conceivably get him killed.
Look at me, I don’t recycle, I’m an anarchist.

He took a tin of beer from the fridge and went back into the living room, sat in a corner and gazed out across the empty plain of carpet. His wife had gone off the carpet a year or so after it was laid, but getting a new one had always seemed an unnecessary extravagance. One day, she’d said. When we have enough money. He had to keep reminding her that he was, actually, on a Civil Service wage, and the only thing keeping him from a zero-hours contract was the classified material he handled. Jim put the beer down and slid sideways down the wall until his cheek was resting on the carpet. From here, the room looked enormous, a Saharan space of worn shag-pile. He played a little game he had come up with, balancing what was happening in his life with the treason he was committing.
I am saving a life
, he told himself, sitting up and opening the beer.
I am saving a life.

His phone rang. He took it out and looked at the screen. As he put the phone to his ear, someone started knocking at the door.

“K
NOW THE LADY
well, did we, sir?” asked the Inspector.

“We were colleagues,” Jim said, hearing his voice coming from an impossible distance.

“Under stress, was she?” the Inspector said. “Sorry, I shouldn’t ask.”

“That’s all right. No. No, I don’t think so. She seemed distant sometimes, but that was her nature.” He wanted to scream and never to stop screaming, but everything depended on the
façade
, the veneer of the plodding timeserver. “It’s a bit of a shock, really.”

Adele Bevan’s body lay on the carpet of her living room in Shepperton. Someone had put a sheet over her, but one shoeless foot protruded, thickly-stockinged, canted over at a peculiar angle. There was a smell of urine and faeces in the air.

“Familiar with the house, were we, sir?” asked the Inspector.

“I stayed here while my divorce was going through,” Jim said. No point in making something up; he and Bevan had had to fill in reports. “The Professor was kind to me.”

The Inspector thought about this, decided to stick to his original line of questioning. “Any sign of a struggle, then? Only it’s hard to tell.”

Jim tried to look round the chaotic room without seeing the severed section of rope hanging from the ceiling light fixture, its other end still around Bevan’s neck. He said, “The stepladder’s from the cupboard under the stairs.”

The Inspector nodded. “She’ll have stood on that to tie the rope up. Nothing else out of place?”

Jim shook his head, paranoia and professionalism warring within him. “May I sit down, please?”

“Not in here, sir, sorry,” the Inspector said. “We don’t want to contaminate the scene.”

“I told you, I lived here for six months. You’ll find forensics of me all over the place.”

“Even so, sir. You can sit outside in the car, if you’d like.”

Overhead, Jim heard heavy footsteps; other members of the Special Branch team, searching the main bedroom.
This is a test
, he told himself.
Oh, Adele...

“Do you need me for anything else?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, sir. We needed a positive identification, some sort of steer as to whether foul play might be involved. We’ll need to speak with you again, but I think that can wait until the morning. Ah.” Two large men wearing sober suits had appeared in the living room doorway. “Hello, lads.”

“All done, sir?” asked one of the men.

“Yes, I think so. Take her to St Thomas’s, please.”

The two men had a large rubberised body-bag, which they unzipped on the floor, rolled Bevan onto, and zipped up again so efficiently that it was done before Jim could become offended by the inhumanity of it. They went out and came back with a reinforced plastic coffin on a wheeled trolley. They lifted the body-bag into the coffin, fitted the lid, and lifted the coffin onto the trolley. A last bit of paperwork signed by the Inspector, and they were wheeling Bevan out to one of those quiet grey vans with ‘Private Ambulance’ discreetly lettered on the side which undertakers use to transport the dead from their homes.

They had only just left when another group of people arrived. Young, casual, wearing jeans and fleeces, carrying collapsed plastic boxes of the kind that one uses to carry one’s possessions when one has been summarily fired. It occurred to Jim that, for all the Inspector’s caution about contamination, he had seen nobody here wearing the all-over paper suits normally used to stop alien forensics being scattered around a crime scene. It was all just theatre, a muted farewell to Adele Bevan, the only person in his professional life who had never used a false identity.

“I
T’S VERY SAD,
” Shaw said again, reading Jim’s preliminary report. “Personally, I liked her very much.”

Jim swallowed all kinds of possible replies and said instead, “There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle. As far as I could judge, Professor Bevan took her own life.”

There were just the two of them in the conference room at Northumberland Avenue, a
capsule
devoted to Adele Bevan’s death. The table was set for upwards of twenty-five people, but Jim and Shaw were sitting at one end, the screens of their tablets underlighting their faces as they both consulted the same document. It was a strange, frightful moment of intimacy.

“We’ll nod through the public inquest, of course,” Shaw said. “But there will have to be an internal investigation. You and Professor Bevan were close, weren’t you?”

“She helped me through my divorce,” he said. “I liked her too.”

“Are you over that now? Good,” Shaw said disinterestedly. “Always a shame when it doesn’t work out. You’ve got a daughter, yes?”

“Son. Stepson.”

“Always sad, when children are involved,” Shaw sighed. “You spoke with HR about it at the time. I remember.”

“They were very kind,” Jim agreed.

“There was some talk about you taking leave, but you decided not to in the end.”

“There was a lot of work at the time,” said Jim. “I didn’t feel that I could step away from it.”

“But things aren’t quite so busy now, are they?” asked Shaw. “Everything’s running like clockwork, from your reports.”

The committee starts to fill up with people you’ve never met before, and shortly after that you find yourself standing outside in the rain wondering what happened.
He said carefully, “I disagree. Professor Bevan was running most of the liaison with the outside teams and she was doing the bulk of the analyses. If anything, things are going to get a lot busier from now on.” He glanced towards the window. It was beginning to get light outside, and he remembered the first time he had set foot in this suite of rooms. The place had become so familiar to him that he didn’t even notice the wallpaper any more.

“The death of a colleague is always very traumatic,” Shaw said, as if she was discussing something she’d seen on television the night before. “On top of the stress of your divorce – it was stressful, wasn’t it?”

“To be frank, it was something of a relief. For both of us.”

“Well, stress catches us all in odd ways. We don’t want you suddenly becoming ill, do we. We think it might be appropriate if you took that leave now. Just a week or two.”

“Am I being suspended?”

Shaw looked shocked. “Suspended? Whyever would you be suspended? Your friend has just killed herself. No, we just think a period of compassionate leave would be appropriate. But you’d have to be available for the inquiry. It’s a bind, I know, but the Service likes to tidy these things up as soon as possible.” And, incredibly, she smiled at him.

4

L
ATER, HE WAS
quite unable to work out where the time went.

The first week of his leave, he resolved to take charge of his life again. He ordered new furniture for the house, new appliances for the kitchen, and oversaw their installation. He started taking a walk every morning and evening, but he was out of condition and he returned home exhausted. He bought a new car – something sporty enough for the neighbours to think he was going through a mid-life crisis. He considered the garden for some days, then looked up a local gardener and got her to come and spruce things up. A fortnight later, he was able to put his key in the front door and step inside and smell a new home, a new space. His own space, for the first time in years. He started going to the local pub, but he discovered it had been colonised by large tattooed men with attack dogs and he gave that up. He kept expecting to hear from Perigee, telling him to come back, but he never did.

The inquiry into Bevan’s suicide opened and closed on the same day. Jim put on his best suit and tie and presented himself at Thames House, the first time he’d been there since his secondment to Perigee. There were representatives of HR and the Civil Service union and several senior members of the Service, and everyone was very calm and caring, but it was still just one day. With a break for lunch.

He drove his new car over to Shepperton, but when he saw the FOR SALE sign outside Bevan’s house he just kept going, drove out to Datchett and stopped at a country pub where the noise of airliners landing at Heathrow vied with the noise of the entertainment system. He bought a soft drink and took it outside, sat at the table farthest away from anyone else, and called Kaunas.

“You want to pull it, then?” the Coureur asked when Jim had finished telling him what had happened.

“Is that even possible now?” he asked.

“Sure. Any time. Just say the word.”

He thought about it. A few tables away, a young family were tucking into a pub lunch. Husband, wife, two boys, no more than five. Roast chicken, chips, salad, on a nice sunny day in the landscape the Whitton-Whytes had written their custom-built county over. He said, “No. Everything’s in place here; you just have to make best use of it. My access is going to be limited from now on, I think. For a while, anyway.”

“You still haven’t heard from your man, then.”

“No.”

“So he may be dead.”

“He may. But he’s resourceful. He’ll be looking for a way out. He’ll be watching out for signs of the outside world, if he’s in a position to. There’s still sufficient money, yes?”

“Oh yes. We’ve hardly dented the funds yet.”

“Then let it run. Keep me up to speed; I’ll try to help as much as possible.”

5

A
ND THAT WAS
how it went, year by year. He never saw the inside of the building on Northumberland Avenue again, never heard from Shaw. He felt like the victim of a North Korean purge, airbrushed from all official photographs.

He was allowed back to work eventually, a mid-level analyst’s post at Thames House, reading endless intercepts from Scottish and Welsh troublemakers, writing briefing papers for younger, more intrepid officers. Of the Community, there was no sign at all. He followed the corporate doings of the organisations who had taken over the Perigee Committee, and could discern no sign that they were about to move into unusual new territory. He settled into his new post, did his work, kept his head down. He pleased his bosses.

He redecorated the house, bit by bit. Started a half-hearted affair with a woman he met in a pub in town, barely noticed when, fed up with his apparent lack of interest, she drifted off.

Late at night, he followed Kaunas’s Coureur. Coureur Central, or whoever ran things within the organisation, was taking a tangential approach to positioning their asset, and from Kaunas’s reports Jim thought he could discern the interest of other parties too, which was intriguing. Between them, he and Kaunas arranged things just... so. One evening he made three off-the-books phone calls – two to the English Embassy in Helsinki, one to a certain barristers’ chambers in the City of London, and waited to be arrested, but nothing happened. It was like playing chess, if one forgot that the pieces were people. One marshalled one’s forces, let events take their course, let the opposition make all the mistakes.

War with the Community did not come.

O
NE AUTUMN, HIS
GP became concerned enough about his weight loss to send him for some tests. A week or so later, while he was waiting for the results, he got a call to report to one of the committee rooms upstairs. Assuming he was about to perform yet another briefing on England’s undeclared intelligence war with the former members of the United Kingdom, he gathered together his generic lecture packs and took himself up in the lift.

To discover, sitting in the room waiting for him, a woman and a man. They smiled when he entered the room.

“It’s all right,” said the Director-General. “We don’t bite.” She turned to the man. “Do we?”