The Cilla Rose Affair (16 page)

“Got a job as a travel agent.”

“Yes, I know—not the sort of career The Two Doctors had in mind for their only daughter, is it? Still, we can’t all be university fodder like our brilliant older brothers. There was a time when I thought I might manage to squeak in—got all the requisite exam results—and then I sat down and had a good think about it all, and I said to myself, ‘Sod it, Woodford, that’s not what you want,’ and off I went to travel school instead. The Two Doctors never forgave me, of course—but at least we’re on speaking terms with one another again.”

“And you’re working in London.”

“Yes. Actually, I’d rather not be where I am at the moment, but beggars can’t be choosers. He’s a nice enough man, my boss…but he’s not quite the most ethical chap in the world. I think he’s only in it for the cheap seats and half price hotel rooms.” She picked up a broken bit of shell.

“What time’s this wedding dance over and done with, anyway?

“Roundabout eleven, I should think.”

“Eleven.” He shook his head, disbelieving.

“You’re in England now,” Sara reminded him. “Lights out, doors bolted, the cat on the front step with the empty milk bottles. All the old dears gathered in the corner, waiting to be taken home to their beds. We simply can’t manage anything later than eleven o’clock over here, Robin—it’s not constitutionally possible.”

The white sand beach below The Cliffs was deserted, the moonlight shimmering on the water, mingling with the raucous reflection from Bournemouth Pier, half a mile in the distance. Robin extended his arm, and Sara slipped beneath it, and tucked her own arm comfortably around his waist.

Her first love. It really had been love, in spite of Terry’s taunts, and Robin’s mother’s looks of bemusement.

Summer love, unfinished.

She remembered their last, sad day together, her hand in his as they walked along the road, high above West Vancouver, the tragedy too great a burden to allow for words.

She remembered there was a mist, and the earth smelled damp, and the alpine air was clean and cool. And she remembered him stopping to pick a tiny bouquet of wildflowers, and giving it to her. They’d held each other’s hands, not saying anything at all. And in the lingering mauve twilight, with nobody else about, softly and gently, they’d kissed each other goodbye.

“I did miss you, Christopher Robin Harris,” she said.

Robin looked at her. Her dark brown hair was still long and caught up at the back in a large, careless bow, her eyes still peeking out beneath a straight, squarely-cut fringe.

“I missed you too,” he said. “Sara Jane Woodford.”

Sunday, 01 September 1991

“Anyway, sir, this sound cannon thing didn’t originate with Dr. Jurgen Wimmer at all. He only borrowed the concept and made improvements to it. The original device was invented by one Dr. Richard Wollauscheck, and it consisted of a series of large, parabolic reflectors, the last of them measuring over ten feet across. The reflectors were connected to a chamber made up of several sub-firing tubes, the purpose of which was to allow a mixture of methane and oxygen into the combustion chamber. The two gasses were then detonated in a continuous cyclical explosion.”

“Right at the signal lights,” Victor advised.

Rupert made the turn. He’d not often travelled through this part of London—Lambeth and Stockwell and Balham, past endless parades of cluttered shopfronts, row houses and brick walls, railway bridges. He recalled once going by train from Victoria to Gatwick and seeing vast areas of devastation—dwellings dating from the last century, with broken windows, beyond habitation, left to rot in wastelands of rubbish and weeds, the odd billboard thrown up to divert captive eyes away from the dereliction to the promise of developing commerce.

The worst of the slums were gone now—the ones along this road, anyway.

“The length of the firing chamber of this thing was exactly one quarter of the wave-length of the sound waves produced by the continuing explosions. And each one of those produced a reflected, high-intensity shock wave, initiated by the one before, the end result being an extremely high-intensity sound beam radiating at pressures in excess of 1,000 millibars from a distance of 50 yards. At that range, it was estimated exposure for half a minute would have been enough to do away with the average man.”

“Fascinating,” said Victor. “And this was the basis of the Jurgen Wimmer project in the mid-1960s.”

“Yes, sir. Dr. Wimmer shrank the sound cannon down to a more workable size—and he replaced the gases and the combustion chamber with an electrical component. So there you are, sir. And I think you ought to know, sir, that I believe there’s a definite correlation between the Underground and our mysterious events.”

“Events? I wasn’t aware there had been more than one.”

“Yes, sir, four, in fact, sir, including the broken water pipe at the Fitzroy and Mrs. Carter’s earthquake. She’s bang on top of the Northern Line, midway between Tooting Broadway and Colliers Wood. And at almost precisely the same time she was being rocked out of her bed—at half past two in the morning yesterday—LEB reported two more power outages: one at Haverstock Hill, in North London, and the second at Kennington Park Road, SE11. Sir, the site at Haverstock Hill was right across the street from Belsize Park tube station. And Kennington Road—”

“Sits directly above the Northern Line as it travels from Kennington to Oval,” Victor finished. “All right, Rupert, your theory is duly noted.”

“All I’m saying, sir, is that if there is something peculiar going on, I think we should be looking to the tube for our clues. I’ve arranged to see someone from London Underground tomorrow night, and together we’re going to examine the stretch of tunnelling that runs beneath the Fitzroy. I believe very strongly that these mysterious events are being orchestrated from below. And if that’s the case, sir, then all of subterranean London could be at risk.” He stopped the car outside a semi-detached house with a pair of red-hatted gnomes guarding the front garden path. “If you see my point, sir.”

Mrs. Ruby Carter had never experienced an earthquake. However, having survived the Battle of Britain in a flooding Anderson shelter dug into the bottom of her garden, she was of the opinion she could accurately define all aspects of a disaster, both manmade and natural, and what she’d felt under her floorboards at half past two the night before was nothing short of a shaker.

The fact that the rest of Tooting, including the neighbour to her immediate right, Mr. Hasiz, had failed to notice Mrs. Carter’s tembler was quite beside the point. Mrs. Carter was adamant. “I know what I felt,” she insisted, serving tea in chipped china cups with mismatched saucers. “I know what I heard.”

“And what was it, exactly, that you heard, Mrs. Carter?” Rupert asked, leaning forward on the sofa.

“I heard a rumble,” Mrs. Carter answered, indignantly. “I felt a rumble. Under me bed. And then the electricity went off. I was reading. Jackie Collins.” She folded her hands across her pinafore. “The windows rattled, and all of me good china in the cabinet downstairs. Things fell off shelves.”

“And what sorts of things might those be?” Victor inquired.

“Well,” said Mrs. Carter, as if it were somehow a personal affront for him to be asking. “All me little things from abroad. You know. All me little knick-knacks.”

Rupert cast a dubious look around the room. On the mantlepiece were several sets of salt and pepper shakers in various stages of disguise, a plate painted with a Spanish sunset, and something bronze—a dancing nude, was it? A creature of Greek mythology?—with a clock—stopped at 2:33—embedded in its navel.

“And was anything broken?” Victor continued, mundanely.

“No,” said Mrs. Carter, weighing up the net gain to herself if she were to tell an untruth, and say yes. “No,” she decided, with certainty.

“I don’t mean to doubt your word, Mrs. Carter…but isn’t there just the remotest chance what you felt and heard last night could have been something else? Sewer gas, for instance…?”

“Wasn’t nothing to do with the sewers,” Mrs. Carter glowered. “I’m telling you—it was an earthquake, pure and simple.”

“Right, I’m in.”

Nora Darrow abandoned her post beside the bedroom door and turned her attention to the young man in the public school tie who was sitting in front of his computer terminal.

“You are a treasure,” she said, cosily. “How long have you been able to access the Registry at Macdonald House?”

“This time, four days. They’ll change their passwords next week and I’ll be locked out again. Sometimes I can’t get in for months. It doesn’t do to go making a nuisance of yourself—if you hack in too often you’re shopped. They put a tracer on you and you’re done for. How’d you hear of me, by the way?”

“My son,” Nora replied. “Kevin.”

“Kevin Darrow,” Justin said, thinking. “Still owes me for a little job I did for him last Christmas with the DHSS. Remind him about that for me, would you? I wouldn’t like to think of him being unaccountably struck from their records.” He addressed his computer screen. “Let’s do this quick. I don’t like to linger. Makes it easier for them to spot you. What’s the name?”

“Harris,” Nora said, standing behind him, lighting a cigarette. “Evan.”

“Harris,” Justin repeated, typing in the letters. “Right, here we go. Harris, Evan. Intelligence Officer, level eight.”

“Let me see his particulars.”

“Be quick about it.” Justin accessed a second screen.

“How terribly interesting,” Nora said, bending down to read. “One ex-wife and three little progeny. Can you print that for me?”

“Cost you extra.”

“Never mind the cost. What does that star beside Ian Harris’s name mean?”

“Haven’t got a clue,” Justin answered, impatiently. “Cross reference of some sort. Come on, missus—are you finished looking?”

“I’m not, as a matter of fact. Let me see the next page.”

“No. Sorry. I’m done here. I’ll be shopped. Come back another day. Take your printout.” He exited the Registry. “That’ll be ten pounds.”

“Highway robbery,” Nora muttered, opening her handbag.

“Do it yourself next time,” Justin countered. “Ten quid.”

The printout beside her on the passenger seat, Nora drove across Mitcham Common. There was one particular spot, as one travelled the road from Croydon to Mitcham, where those entrusted with the safety of citizens of wartime London had seen fit to erect an air raid shelter. The shelter itself was of the trench variety, dug into the soil beside the road and covered over with a roof of reinforced concrete, and then further strengthened with a substantial layer of earth, across which grass and coarse shrubbery had advanced in the years following the arrival of peace. The shelter was not dissimilar in size and shape to numerous others that had been scattered over the landscape of the city, and were now either incorporated into public parks and commons as grassy knolls, or were excised, like skin tags, leaving patchy scabs in the ground that never altogether healed.

The Mitcham Common shelter appeared, for all intents and purposes, to have been completely forgotten about. Indeed, in the 1960s, when it had served as one of Nora’s several dead letter drops, it had already been reclaimed by the brambles and the grasses. You couldn’t see it from the road: you had to be looking down from the top of a bus to know it was there, and even then, you had to be warned in advance to be on the lookout.

Nora hoped, as she drove along the Croydon Road, slowing traffic and creating a general annoyance to those backed up behind her, that she could still remember where it was. There was a bus stop nearby—a Request stop—and a bit of a lane—two wheel ruts in the grass, really—ah, there—yes. She flicked on her signal and turned into the lay-by, switched off her engine and got out of the car.

The graffiti artists had been busy over the years. So had the littering gypsies and the midnight lovers, from the looks of the surrounding area. Nora picked her way around the worst of the muck, and found the tree—the signal tree, one chalk arrow pointing to the sky to indicate Letter Posted—No Go if the arrow was pointing down.

Arrow up.

There was a brick blast wall in front of the entrance to the shelter—the remnants of a wall, anyway, the top half of it having long ago crumbled into elemental time, the bottom half buried in an archaeological compost of flattened tins and shattered bottles, newspapers, plastic bags, a woman’s shoe.

Nora knelt down and dug away at the rubbish with a prudently gloved hand. Third brick from the far end, four rows up…She jiggled it loose, like a tooth, and found the envelope, nestled inside the cavity, plain white, all business, with a self-sealing flap.

She sincerely hoped whatever message it contained would not require translating after all this time. Her code books were gone—burned or shredded—that aspect of her life, she had thought—erroneously, quite obviously—long past.

The message was not enciphered: it was in plain English, and had been typed.

IMPERATIVE WE MEET

HAMPSTEAD HEATH, HALF PAST TWO, MONDAY

VICTOR

Nora tore the note into stamp-sized shreds, set them afire in the grass with a lighter from her handbag, and watched the tendrils of paper curl and glow and revert to ash.

Hampstead Heath, she thought, making her way back to the car. Victor’s favourite old haunt. I wonder what he wants.

There were any number of ways a person could avail themselves of the contents of another’s private conversations, and Evan knew most of them. There were the bugs: single microphones, extremely small, tethered by wire to their distant listening posts; microphones coupled with transmitters, somewhat larger, connected to existing power supplies or fitted with miniature batteries; passive devices designed to lie dormant for weeks or months, until they were stimulated to life by a remote radio signal.

Transmitters might be physically incorporated into existing telephone lines, or simply soldered into the instrument’s printed circuitry. Or embedded in a square of adhesive and stuck to the corner of a window pane. Or concealed in the curtains, its thread-thin antenna woven right into the fabric. A dedicated listener, unable to penetrate a target room by conventional means, might even resort to picking up the minor vibrations of a person’s voice by bouncing laser beams off his window. Or by dropping a microphone into an air vent attached to a toilet—the theory being that the water in the toilet would act as a diaphragm and conduct the nearby noises up the pipe.