Another War

Chapter One

Thacker would normally have flirted with the nurse. She was neat in her blue uniform, a white belt accentuating her hourglass figure. Perhaps she would have expected it of him, also in uniform, pips on his shoulder, a lean strength about him that told of experience and confidence.

Today wasn’t the moment. He felt uncomfortable and hurried. He wasn’t the sort of man to turn up at an old people’s home in an army Land Rover, complete with a squad of men with rifles. Neither was he the type to rest his hand on the butt of his pistol as he invaded the too-warm foyer and asked politely to see Miss Emily Foster.

Give her her due, the nurse the nervous receptionist called acted calmly and coolly. She didn’t allow guns inside her establishment. He apologised, but said those were his orders. She told him that telephones had been in common usage for several years. He apologised again.

Then he said it was an urgent matter of national security, and she relented.

The nurse led him down a corridor rich with paintings and flowers to a conservatory full of bright summer morning light. The view swept down a long hillside, over the town, and across the sea. On a clear day, France was visible as a thin dark streak on the horizon.

There were thickly upholstered armchairs and hothouse plants. It was as warm as the Algarve, but the slight figure in one of the chairs wore a thick cardigan and trembled as if cold.

‘You’ll have to leave,’ he said to the nurse.

‘No,’ she said simply.

‘This conversation will be covered by the Official Secrets Act. You haven’t signed it, and you will have to leave.’

‘Then find me a copy to sign. I’m staying, and that’s that.’

He looked at his watch. Time was running out, of that he was certain. The unknown factor was how much time he had in the first instance. ‘Stand by the door. Make sure no one comes in, and please, face the other way. I need to show Miss Foster some things that you cannot see.’

He was so serious, so urgent, that he managed to shock the nurse into compliance. She nodded, and took her position.

Carefully and slowly, he sat down next to Emily Foster. She made no sign that she was aware of him. She stared out to sea with milky blue eyes, and the sun full in her face managed to illuminate the bones under her parchment-thin skin.

He unbuttoned his battle smock. He was sweating from the heat and from nerves. Nothing in his extensive training had prepared him for this whole insane situation.

‘Emily? Emily Foster?’

She turned, slowly, her head trembling all the while.

‘My name is Major Thacker. I’m with the army. Do you understand?’

Emily Foster thought, and then she remembered.

‘Army?’ she said. Her voice was very quiet, almost shy. ‘Like Robert was? He was a captain, you know.’

She leaned slightly forward, holding her hand clawed with arthritis towards him.

Thacker took it in both his huge hands and gently pressed it. ‘Just like Robert,’ he said. ‘It’s Robert I’d like to talk about, Miss Foster.’

‘Oh dear. It’s a very long time since I saw Robert.’

‘I know.’ Thacker felt that as long as he held her hand, he would hold her attention. ‘Do you remember Henbury Hall at all?’

‘I’m a hundred and five, you know.’

‘Yes, I do know, Miss Foster. I know a lot about you. And about Robert, and Doctor Nathaniel Middleton. But I don’t know enough to help me. Will you help me, Miss Foster?’

‘A long time since I saw Robert.’

It had been a mistake to come here, thought Thacker. He was getting nowhere and he didn’t have the time to waste. One last try.

He let go of her hand and reached inside his battle smock and took out an aerial photograph. ‘This is Henbury Hall, Miss Foster. Do you know it?’

He gave her the glossy print and she brought it to within two inches of her nose. The tremble in her hands made reflected light dance across her face.

‘You must be mistaken, dear. You see, Henbury Hall vanished.’

‘On the second of August, 1919, at roughly ten thirty in the morning. But at quarter to seven yesterday evening, it came back. We don’t know where it’s been for the last eighty years, but we’d like to find out.’

‘It came back?’ she said, and started to cry. ‘Oh Robert.’

Thacker slid his finger between the old woman’s face and the photograph. ‘This is the main hall, yes? What’s this collection of buildings here?’

‘I miss my Robert. I missed him all my life. I was cruel to him.’

‘Miss Foster? Before I can send my men in to see what happened to Robert, I need your help.’ He found a cloth handkerchief and delicately dabbed her tears away.

‘The stables,’ she said. ‘Those were the stables.’

He seized his chance. ‘And this?’

‘Some sort of workshop. Garden tools and the like. Robert lost his leg in the war, you know. The Great War.’ She sighed.

‘Where was Robert’s room?’

‘Oh, on the ground floor. He didn’t hold with stairs, afterwards. We were all in the east wing. Kitchen, drawing room, dining room. The servants lived up on the third floor. Little rooms. Poor Adele. She was a maid.’

Thacker knew. ‘Yes, Miss Foster.’

‘So few people in such a big house. Robert’s brother was killed in the war. Such a pity. So many gone.’

‘Were there cellars, attics?’

‘Yes, and yes. Not very big. I looked once. That was all. Tell me, what ever happened to Doctor Middleton?’

‘He died about fifty years ago, Miss Foster.’

‘Ah, I’m the last. That’s because I’m so very old.’

‘Yes, Miss Foster. Is there anything else you think I might need to know?’

She looked again at the photograph. ‘I loved it there. It was beautiful in a sad sort of way. Such a long time ago.’

Thacker thought the moment had passed. He took the print away from her feeble grasp and put it back in his battle smock. ‘I’m sorry to bring back difficult memories, Miss Foster. I’ll leave you now.’

‘Yes, yes. Poor Robert. If you find him, tell him I still love him.’

‘I’ll tell him, Miss Foster. Goodbye.’ He got out of the chair and strode over to where the nurse was standing, half turned away. It was something, he supposed.

‘Is it about that awful plane crash last night?’ she said.

Thacker remained stone-faced. ‘Nothing that you’ve heard must leave this room. If it does, I’ll know, and so will my superiors.’

She looked at him squarely, faintly amused. ‘Is that supposed to be a threat?’

He shrugged. ‘I assume so. More of a statement of fact. I think you’d disappear more thoroughly than Henbury Hall was supposed to have done. That’d be a shame. You’re very pretty.’ He hated this part of his job: all so bloody cloak-and-dagger.

Her smile slipped as he walked on, back down the corridor, into the foyer with its armed men. He summoned them to his side with a wave of his hand, and they flanked him as he closed the distance to the Land Rover.

‘Tell the helicopter to stand by. I’m going back to Oxfordshire immediately.’

‘Sir.’

He got in beside the driver, who waited for the last door to slam shut before spinning his wheels on the gravel drive. When they were on their way, he took out the photograph again, and pointed to each part in turn, memorising the location and the function of each building, before turning to the main house and mentally labelling it.

Quite why he had been chosen over everyone else escaped him.

He was to brief twenty men inside a marquee that had been erected a mile inside the exclusion zone. He had a trestle table, a whiteboard, and an overhead projector. Somewhere outside was a generator thrumming away, and engineers were still stringing together lights from the plastic crate by the tent flap.

He waited for them to finish, leave, and for the guard to check that there was only Thacker inside. As the men filed in, each carrying a folding chair, Thacker busied himself laying out his notes on the table, mostly brittle, yellowing pages from the box file that was stamped Top Secret in fading red. Each sheet he took out was also stamped, together with strict instructions: No Copies To Be Made. There were other things, too, things in stoppered bottles, sealed with wax and notarised with peeling labels written in a fine, spidery hand.

He set them out at the far end of the table, together with the hasty report on them from Porton Down.

The last man in was the only one present out of uniform: the Ministry man Thacker knew only as Dickson, someone from MI5 who outranked him but never behaved like he did.

Thacker watched him close the tent flap and cross his arms. He nodded, and Thacker began.

‘There’ll be time for questions afterwards. I want you to all listen very carefully, because this isn’t a scenario we’ve trained for before. Some of the facts may surprise you: they did me. Doesn’t mean they’re not true.’

He looked at their faces, young, eager, a little puzzled. He prised the lid off the black marker pen, and wrote at the top of the whiteboard, ‘Henbury Hall’. Below the title he put three dates: 1834, 1919, and Yesterday.

‘In 1834, Matthew Henbury, a railway magnate, purchased six hundred and fifty acres from the Bishop of Oxford. Henbury Hall was completed five years later, and the man made a peer of the realm five years after that. In 1919, Henbury’s grandson, Robert, had returned to the hall following the death of his elder brother Edward, in the First World War. Robert himself was wounded at Ypres, losing a leg.

‘On the night of the thirtieth of July, 1919, Robert Henbury’s horse was killed in the stables. No other animal was harmed. A contemporaneous report by a Dr. Nathaniel Middleton, FRS, concludes that…’ Thacker’s hand hovered over the papers in front of him, alighting on Middleton’s treatise. ‘“That the whole body of the creature had every calorie of heat removed from it in an instant, to the effect of freezing every part of it inside and out. Death must have been instantaneous, for the beast stood as if still sleeping in its stall, and entirely without signs of injury or distress.”‘

‘Things get a little murky from now on. We only have Middleton’s second-hand account from a statement he gave to the police. On the night of the first of August, a woman employed by Henbury as a maid appears to have died in the same way. She was found on the morning of the second by the butler. She was in bed, frozen solid. Middleton was summoned to the hall and told to drive the rest of the household to safety. Somewhere in this, the butler has died too, but how, we can’t say. Middleton drove the three servants and Robert Henbury’s nurse to the nearby village of Isherham. He left behind Robert Henbury, Jack Henbury◦– Robert’s cousin◦– and a man called George Adams, who acted as Henbury’s valet.

‘A police car was sent from Oxford, but on arrival, found… nothing. Nothing as in, no hall, no estate, nothing, not even the ground on which the buildings had been. As if I took a map, cut a hole five miles across in it, then drew the edges together to make the hole itself disappear.’

Thacker turned on the overhead projector, and angled the square of light onto the whiteboard. A little leaked over the edges onto the canvas of the marquee, but not enough that people outside could see any coherent images.

‘This is an Ordnance Survey map from 1910. Note the position of Henbury Hall, and specifically this road and this river.’ He gave them a few seconds to soak in the detail, then swapped the image for a more contemporary map. ‘This is the same area from a map made in 1982. Note the absence of Henbury Hall, the abrupt termination of the road here and here, and the lake here with an outlet at right angles to the original stream. I could show you pictures of walls that start suddenly, strange cliffs that appear halfway across a field, a tree where one half of it is missing. Henbury Hall vanished, and objects that were five miles apart one day, were touching the next.’

Thacker turned the projector off, and tapped the third date with his pen.

‘Yesterday, for some reason, Henbury Hall came back. We need to find out why, and how, and who. There are aggravating factors: at the precise moment Henbury Hall appeared, United Airlines flight nine-thirty-seven London Heathrow to Chicago was overhead with one hundred and thirty-seven passengers and crew. Their remains are spread out in a mile-long geometrically precise arc on the east side of the site, and the Americans want access to the wreckage now. For obvious reasons, we can’t let them.

‘This situation will not go away if we ignore it. On the pretext of the plane carrying hazardous waste, we have cordoned off a very large area. Sooner or later, that cordon will be breached. We have to ascertain before then whether or not anything inside the Henbury Hall estate poses a risk.

‘We’re all trained in handling and deactivating chemical and biological weapons. We know how to take precautions. We are also soldiers. We know how to work together as a team, watch each other’s backs, and neutralise any threat we may come across.’

He looked at their faces again: still young, but not so eager now. Puzzlement had turned to fear. Eyes were wide and white, mouths open and dry. Some fidgeted, clasping and unclasping their fingers, pulling on their chins and ears and noses, glancing left and right to see if anyone else believed this nonsense. Others were stock still, minds numb, hearing but not understanding, seeing but not remembering.

‘Time is critical. Aside from the American dimension, Henbury Hall has been exposed to the air for some thirty-six hours. Any wind-borne chemical or pathological agent will have already been released. Winds have been light, and fortunately, no rain as yet. But birds have wings, and so does bad news.’

He turned the projector back on, and put a fresh acetate on it: taken from the aerial photo of the hall. ‘We have had one break. Robert Henbury’s nurse is still alive, and still compos. We have a sketchy idea of what the inside of the building used to look like◦– though that might have changed in the intervening years. I want you to look very carefully at this picture.’ Thacker made a dismal attempt at humour: ‘I’ll be testing you on it later.’ He walked away from the screen, and Dickson joined him by one of the slowly undulating walls.

‘Was Emily Foster any use?’

Thacker rubbed his palms together slowly, grinding the sweat down. ‘Better than nothing. Worse than I hoped. Her mind wandered rather◦– I suppose her short-term memory isn’t what it used to be◦– but she was quite lucid when I talked about Robert Henbury. She said she still loved him.’

Dickson tapped out a cigarette and offered the packet to Thacker.

‘I’m a biological weapons expert, Dickson. I’m hardly likely to take half a dozen plant-based carcinogens orally.’ Thacker pressed his hands even harder together, so that he didn’t reach out involuntarily and take one.

‘Suit yourself,’ said the Ministry man, and lit up. He took a long drag, held it, and breathed out through his nose. ‘The Foster woman. Anything else?’

Thacker thought for a moment. ‘Yes. Yes there was. She said she had been cruel to him. Struck me as odd at the time. According to Middleton, she and Henbury were engaged.’

‘Perhaps she felt she should have stayed.’

‘Not that. Some sustained cruelty. Earlier. I have no idea if it’s at all important. Like everything in this bloody awful mess.’

‘You should plan for everything.’

‘I don’t have the time, men or resources to do that. I can only plan for what is likely, and currently, I haven’t a clue what to expect from a rematerialised neo-gothic Victorian country estate.’ Thacker gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘Any suggestions gratefully received.’

Dickson puffed away furiously. ‘You’ll think of something.’

‘We’ll end up with standard army procedure: straight down the middle, lots of smoke.’

‘Anything from Porton Down?’

‘Anything new? The grass and tree samples are clear. No known or unknown pathogens or chemical agents. They’re just very, very dead, like they’ve been locked in a dry, dark room for eighty years. Brittle. Just turns to dust. If the wind gets up it’ll be all over the south of England in a matter of hours. A good shower of rain will wash it away. It’s only still on the ground through force of habit.’

‘I have to get back to London tonight. What should I be telling the minister?’

Thacker took off his cap and rubbed at his scalp. ‘You could make something up about how it’s all under control.’

‘That’s the politicians’ job. I’m a civil servant. They’ll get the truth from me.’

‘Good for you, Dickson. Tell him we’re going in at first light with every piece of scientific equipment we can carry and some heavy ordnance just in case.’ Thacker leaned closer. ‘Tell him it’s important that some sort of failsafe is arranged. And a failsafe for that, too.’

Dickson dropped the cigarette butt to the floor and ground it out with his heel. ‘I’ll impress on him the ah, novelty of the situation facing us.’

‘I’d be obliged. What about the Yanks?’

‘The phone cables are running red hot. Sooner rather than later, we’re going to have to tell the CIA. They’ll have satellite photographs within a day or so, and be asking us some very pointed questions.’

‘Fortunately, that’s not my problem,’ said Thacker, ‘though I don’t envy the person who has to tell them one of their airliners has been brought down by an English country house.’

He walked back behind his table, and extinguished the light on the projector. He cleared his throat, set his cap back on his head, and asked: ‘Right. Has anyone got any questions? Sensible ones that I might be able to answer.’