The Clown Service (10 page)

Nowadays I’d drag in a charming young lady called Eleanor. As a diviner she’s second to none: she’d have picked up its location the minute she stepped off the Tube. But back then we relied on shoe leather and amateur dramatics.

Circumnavigating the boring details of how I found it – it was tedious enough doing it the first time, without reliving it – I found myself facing what I had decided was my best bet. The place was trying its hardest to seem as abandoned as those around it but failing in important details: the hinges on the main gate had been recently oiled and the chains that secured it, were new; the wooden struts that boarded up cracked windows were tight and secure. Abandoned buildings shrug up their secrets, and wear their ignoble state with carelessness. This was a building that wished to avoid attention and keep out intruders. It loomed on the street, an ancient wooden hoist jutting out above its gate like an old gibbet.

I took care to give it minimal attention and walked back to the river. I had a couple of hours before I was due to replace O’Dale, so there was time to explore further. Still, broad daylight was no friend to housebreakers, so a little extra insurance seemed in order. I walked until I came upon a phone box and put a call through to O’Dale.

‘Just wondering who was home,’ I asked.

‘Father’s currently reading the riot act,’ O’Dale replied, keeping his answer vague as per protocol. ‘His naughty boy is complaining about having had to take out the rubbish.’

‘Then he’s too busy to worry about me at the moment.’

‘I would have thought so. Still, who’s to say when he might want to pop out and do chores?’

‘Understood.’

I put the phone down and made my way back towards the warehouse. I had no idea how many men might be over here under Krishnin’s control but at least
he
was absent for now.

During the five minute walk I came up with a plan.

While the warehouse I was interested in was faking its emptiness, the building next door wasn’t. It truly was a crumbling ruin of red brick and corrugated metal.

I stood in a doorway, several feet away, pretending to do up my shoelace but really ensuring I was unobserved as I walked the last few steps and slipped past the broken door and into the abandoned building.

The air inside was a soup of smells: captured carbon from old fires, urine, dust, rot and, somewhere in the recipe, the faint scent of stale flour. The light creeping in from fractured windows fell in thin beams, patterning the floor like scattered white poles. The shadows were dense enough to hide anything but I moved as quietly as the dusty concrete floor would allow. I reached the side of the building that was adjacent to the real source of my interest, and ran my fingers across the old brick, hoping to pick up a sense of what might lie beyond.

As I inched my way along, keeping my ears close to the wall on the off-chance of hearing signs of occupation, I made a potentially fatal mistake. You know that in our line of work we need to cast the net of our attention wide. If we focus on any one thing we’re likely to miss something important. As I centred my entire attention on the building next door I ceased to pay attention to the one that I was actually in.

All around me, shifting from those deep shadows and pulling themselves free from beneath their junk castles, the tenants of
that warehouse had realised they had an intruder in their midst. I had considered the place uninhabited but it was not. I should have known that any building so easily accessed would draw in the homeless.

Turning around I saw several indistinct shapes shuffling their way towards me. Their humanity was hidden beneath layers of shabby clothing and shadow. For a moment I was struck by the thought that whatever I had aroused was something unearthly. The sign, no doubt, of reading far too much M.R. James. It was only as one of them stepped close enough for me to catch the shape of the eyes and mouth within the dank hood of their hair that I realised what I was looking at.

‘Terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m from the council, you see. They send us to check these places out from time to time.’

They kept advancing.

‘Just for the sake of safety, you understand,’ I continued. ‘The last thing anyone needs is for one of these old walls to come tumbling in and crush some poor chap to death.’

If they had any interest in what I was saying they showed no sign of it and I was once again struck by the impression that what was surrounding me was more – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say less – than simply a gang of homeless people.

The closest was nearly on top of me so I moved to one side, determined to keep a little space between us. It was a mistake, as I was now further away from the door and had cut off any chance of a quick escape.

‘There’s no need to worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not here to turf anyone out. Who am I to deny a man a roof to keep the rain off, eh? You’re welcome to the place; it’s no concern of mine.’

I continued to back away, stuck now with only one route of retreat, moving further and further away from the door.

And still none of them spoke. Just continued to move towards me, vacant and yet somehow hostile.

I tried one last attempt at friendly exchange, raising my hands in an amiable fashion. ‘I’ll just leave you to it, shall I? I’ve seen everything I need to, no need to disturb you further.’

The man closest to me reached out towards me and I was struck by the length of his dark and uneven nails. They looked like weapons. My nerve broke and I tried a run towards the main door, but by now I was too hemmed in. I turned on my heels and ran further into the warehouse, hoping there would be a rear exit I could use. Light pushed through gaps in the windows but it revealed so little of the floor that I was convinced I would stumble at any moment. The deeper I ran the darker it became, and after a few panicky seconds I suddenly realised I could see nothing at all. But what else could I do but keep moving? I could only be a few feet away from the far wall and, if I moved carefully and quietly, the darkness could even be an advantage. If
I
couldn’t see them, how could they see
me
?

I pushed on, but more slowly now, one hand held out in front of me to stop me walking straight into the far wall. Why was there no light at all? Surely there had to be some gap between the boards that covered the windows? There was nothing. And, as I slowly advanced, I realised that the lack of light wasn’t my only concern. Considering how far I had come there was no way I couldn’t have reached the other side. A warehouse might be large but this one seemed endless. I stopped walking.

I checked behind me and I was presented with an identical view; there was now no sign of the light from the front of the
building either. I was surrounded by darkness. I tried to catch the sound of pursuit, a shuffled foot or two – there was nothing. Either the homeless gang had given up on me or – and this was beginning to feel more likely – I had gone somewhere that they were now unable, or unwilling to follow me.

Where my story goes next will be hard to believe, but I make no apology for it. Mine has been a career full of impossibilities and I could discuss barely a single day of it without stretching your credulity.

About how I could have stepped from that warehouse by the river to this indefinable place I will, for now, simply say: the world is a thing we perceive subjectively; sometimes geography is a state of mind. A good deal of what we refer to as magic comes down to perception. Altering a state of reality is difficult – the laws of physics are not easily broken, but altering the subject’s
perception
of reality is relatively simple. To put it briefly: I was by no means certain I had left the warehouse, but I was convinced that someone was trying to make me believe so. Continuing to walk on, therefore, was simply giving in to that. I could spend all day trying to reach the other side of the building and would never do so. The only way out of this situation was to pause, take stock and try to see the world how it really was. Sounds easy, but some people have been trying, and failing, to do that for years.

I sat down, closed my eyes and worked at trying to imagine the warehouse around me. This was hard enough as I hadn’t given the place much attention. It had been a means to an end, not important in itself. It occurred to me that my perceptions might well have been interfered with from the moment I had crossed the threshold. That army of homeless, rearing up from the shadows to attack me. Had they even been real?

I tried to build a picture of the warehouse in my mind, imagining the front wall, its loose door, the pattern of the shutters on the windows. I might have thought I had been ignoring the place, but we always take in much more than we realise. Unimportant details litter our brains – things we’ve barely glimpsed linger in our memories. I recalled the dusty concrete floor and the piles of leaves and dirt, blown in and left to turn crisp in the dry, sheltered air. The abandoned timber, rat-chewed and warped. The remains of old fires, blackened on the ground like silhouettes left by a nuclear strike. I recreated the entire building in my memory, cramming in every detail I could. I kept my eyes closed, reached forward and rubbed my fingers on the floor. I lifted up my hands and rubbed the fingers slowly together, feeling the grit and dust crumble on my skin:
details
.

Tentatively, I opened my eyes and looked upon the empty warehouse once again. There was no sign of the homeless army, a figment of my imagination as much as the impenetrable darkness. I had fallen into some trap, an echo left for the unwary snooper.

I checked my watch. Somehow, an hour had passed.

Was Krishnin still on Farringdon Road? Had I lost the window of opportunity that had been open to me? Common sense demanded that I retreat and return later, but I was loath to give up. Leaving there now felt like failure. But leave I did. Whatever Krishnin was working on in the adjacent building was important enough to require protection. I needed to plan this properly, do it right. Otherwise none of us would be any the wiser and I could very easily join that unknown Russian somewhere in an unmarked grave.

‘You can’t just leave it there!’ Toby shook his head in exasperation.

‘I can for now,’ Shining replied with a smile. ‘The day’s dragging on and I have business to attend to. We’ll continue this tomorrow morning, in situ.’

‘In situ?’

‘I want you to meet me at London Bridge – shall we say half past nine? It’ll all start to make sense then.’

‘I doubt that.’

Shining got to his feet. ‘Don’t underestimate yourself. Do you know my last member of staff tried to jump out of the window on her first day? We’d only had one briefing … I assume she had an innate fear of pixies.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘Of course I am.’ Shining shrugged on his coat. ‘Make sure you lock up on your way out.’

Toby was almost surprised to find himself back home. His mind had been so occupied as he travelled back from the Section 37 office that he’d been oblivious to his journey. Even now, leaning back against the front door of his flat, he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.

Did he want food? A drink? A few lazy hours in front of the telly? It all seemed inappropriate. Like a cheerful song at a funeral. Real life was something that was hard to settle into when you worked in intelligence. Extended periods abroad, a name that changed as often as the shirt on your back. He might have hoped that his new posting could at least have afforded him some stability, but no, it had offered a step away from ‘real life’ even further than ever before.

He sat down and waited for a useful thought to come to him. Something that didn’t involve astral projection, numbers stations or mad Russians. Before anything came Toby was distracted by an envelope on his coffee table. It was an envelope he had never seen before and it had his name on it. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes intelligence officers run for the front door, make an emergency phone call and change their address. Someone had been in here in his absence, been here and left him a message.

He got up and made a circuit of the flat, checking for signs of disturbance. There was nothing – which didn’t mean the place hadn’t been turned over, just that the people who had done it were good at their job. But why cover up any sign of your presence and then leave a letter proving you’d been there?

Toby went to the kitchen and fetched a pair of rubber gloves from beneath the sink. He pulled them on, retrieved the letter
and brought it back into the kitchen where the light was at its brightest. He sniffed the envelope, held it up against the neon strip in the ceiling, examined it as closely as he could. It seemed to be nothing more than it appeared: a note in an envelope. His name was handwritten, another casual touch.

There was little else to do but open it. Inside was a folded sheet of writing paper, off-white, generic. The sort of thing you could buy from a high street stationers were you one of the few people who could be bothered to write a letter anymore.

He unfolded it. Written across the sheet in plain capitals was the message:

‘AUGUST SHINING WILL GET YOU KILLED. HE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED. LEARN THE TRUTH OUTSIDE EUSTON STATION. 20.45.’

Toby folded the letter back up and replaced it in the envelope. He dug a freezer bag from one of the kitchen drawers, placed the note inside it and put it in his pocket. He looked at the clock on the microwave. Half-past six. Just over a couple of hours until his anonymous visitor wished to meet him. His evening now had purpose.

Shining took his time going up Parliament Hill, not because he was unfit but because he liked to savour it. He strolled, he allowed himself a moment to watch the view change, watch London slowly reveal itself as he climbed higher. He nodded at the dog walkers and the romantic couples, stepped aside as the joggers cut past him, even took the time to sit on a bench and sip his way through a takeaway coffee. He was, for all the world,
a man with time on his hands spending it in a calm and pleasant way. Nobody even noticed as he reached beneath the seat of the bench and ran his fingers along one of the struts, feeling his way towards the packet he knew would be there. Nobody, that is, except the old woman who sat down next to him, a colourful confection of brightly coloured wool and a startling pink cap.