The Clown Service

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE FEAR

a) Shad Thames, London

The Fear never really hit me until 2008. I’m not talking about being scared; I’ve been that many times in my life, not least during that spring in Basra when the air was filled with fire and the world a place of smoke and the dead. I’m talking about The Fear. It has capitals. It has teeth.

Looking back on it, I wonder if it was always there. I suppose it must have been. But 2008 is when I met it head on. 2008 is when I gave it a name. I was back in the UK, my life intact, despite formidable odds. I had received a psychiatric evaluation after Basra that had flagged up a possibility of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Naturally, I had denied it. I didn’t want to admit there was anything wrong with me. I didn’t want to be seen as ‘weak’ (and yes, I am perfectly well aware now that suffering from PTSD is no such thing, but I couldn’t make myself believe it then).

I was no longer under threat. I was no longer being assaulted. I was simply watching the television in my apartment. One minute I was sitting on the sofa, idly contemplating ordering a takeaway, and the next I was hunched foetally on the floor in front of the TV, convinced the roof was about to crash down on me.

There is always the sense that the world is shrinking, compressing you. You know the sensation you feel when walking under an object that comes close to bashing your head? That tingle in the back of your skull that says, ‘Careful! You nearly misjudged that and smacked me with something large and painful.’ It’s like that. All the time. When there’s nothing around you. The world has grown teeth and it wants to sharpen them on you. No matter where you move you’re going to graze a knuckle, stub a toe, bend back a finger. Add to that the way the silence seems to roar at you. Everything your body would do in response to a deafening row, the wincing, the flinching, the sensory overload, the inner voice that begs for the sound to stop… all of that, but with no sound actually triggering it. The Fear is an attack without an attacker, being under siege with no external foe. And it’s been with me ever since.

Of course, I didn’t tell anyone. You don’t admit to weakness when you work in intelligence. These days my attacks are rarely so strong that I can’t grit my teeth and weather them until I can get somewhere private, take a few deep breaths and wait for things to settle down. They’d send me for ‘evaluation’. As if I wasn’t managing to sabotage my career just fine without adding that to my file. Was The Fear a problem? Yes. Of course it was. But it was my problem.

At that moment, with Shining gone and the sound of Derek’s machinery closing down around me, The Fear was back with a vengeance. So much so I had to take it outside.

The street seemed charged with danger: every step on the road felt insubstantial, as if the tarmac could simply vanish from beneath me at any moment; as if the whole world was a trap just waiting to snap shut on me. What was I going to do? Just what the fuck was I going to do?

I caught my breath enough to be able to deal with Derek, walking back in on a man who appeared in an equally bad state. ‘OK,’ I said, determined to give orders rather than converse. I couldn’t bear the thought of a conversation, which might entail questions whose answers would only make my state worse. ‘I need you to repair whatever needs repairing and be ready to go again if need be. Can you do that?’

‘Of course, but…’

‘Please. Just do that; I need you to do that.’ I gave him a business card with my mobile number on it.

‘It says your name’s Gerard.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘I bet it’s not Charlie Berry, either.’ He scribbled his own number on a supermarket receipt and handed it over.

‘Probably not. But it’ll do for now. I need to leave you to this, all right? I’m sorry but I need to run. I need to… Well, I need to.’

Derek held up his hand. ‘It’s fine. I understand. Do your thing. I’ll call you.’

I nodded and left, my hands twitching, my legs moving so fast I was in danger of losing my balance. I wanted to run, to run – and run – and run. To start screaming, to fill the rushing air with noise and anger and fear. I was a hair’s breadth from losing control. You’re probably judging me for that, yes? Writing me off as weak? Well, fuck you. I’ve seen things that would make your teeth bleed. Sometimes those things gang up on me, that’s all.

If Shining had gone missing on what could be termed a ‘normal’ mission (God knows what constitutes ‘normal’ in any branch of espionage, but you’ll admit it rarely involves time travel and living-dead Russians), there was a protocol to be followed, a plan to fall back on. But at that moment I was utterly lost. Barely a day old in the world of Section 37; I was no better than a tourist. I was suddenly the entirety of the section, with an unresolved countdown and a missing officer. I hadn’t a clue where to begin.

My only option was to let The Fear go, burn itself out, and let me think.

I headed towards the river, walking in circles. Eventually I sat myself down on a bench looking out towards Tower Bridge and breathed out the last of the poison that had filled me.

Life had become clearer. I was the only active member of the Section. I knew I could expect no support from outside my newly-inherited office. Either I would solve this problem or I wouldn’t. Anything else was just mental white noise. Compartmentalise. Tag the problems you can deal with and disregard the rest.

Next question: should I tell my superiors about Shining? It wasn’t a simple decision. On the one hand, of course I should. On the other… If this was the only section that had a chance of dealing with his disappearance, nothing would be gained by bumping the problem up the ladder. Also, the department would certainly face closure if Shining were lost, so I had to consider keeping it dark. What sold me was that I knew that’s what Shining would have wanted me to do. Keep my mouth shut for as long as possible. Keep it in house. Twenty-four hours and I was already offering him more faith and devotion than any other section head in my career. I couldn’t decide whether I felt proud or foolish about that. So I just went with my decision.

I had a book of agents, madmen all, and, given that countdown, about two days in which to put them to good use.

Fine.

b) High Road, Wood Green, London

The first step was to head back to the office. I needed to gather intel and think.

I stopped by Oman’s first, and was furious to find it closed. I needed the app he had given Shining on my phone. At that point I had no way of monitoring the numbers station. I didn’t even know the frequency; those details having been confined to the two of them. Realising that made me more angry, and I paced up and down High Road wanting to punch something. It would certainly have been Oman had I clapped eyes on him. However, it was another target that presented itself. I was standing in the middle of the bustling pedestrians, looking across the road at the entrance to the mall when I recognised a woman in the crowd – the one I had seen the day before, outside Euston Station. She had irritated me then, with her cockiness and her patronising attitude. I was fuming now. Certainly too angry to let her wander about unchallenged so close to the office. Had she been keeping an eye on us? Had she maybe even been in the building while we were out? I didn’t imagine Tamar would have taken kindly to that; she clearly took pride in keeping an eye on ‘her August’. I had certainly been treated with utter suspicion, but who knew?

The woman entered the mall and I cut across the road after her, determined she wouldn’t go to ground.

I could see her a short way ahead of me once I stepped through the automatic doors. She was staring at the display window of a jeweller’s. Casual. Normal. Just someone filling her lunch hour with window shopping. That made my mood even worse, probably because I knew that I was being anything but casual. My hasty movements around the busy shopping centre couldn’t have drawn much more attention to myself. The Fear had turned into full-blown rage now, as it always did, and I was struggling to suppress it. I walked up behind her. For a horrible moment I had an urge to just reach forward and shove her face into the glass. Smash that smug face into a pulp. Embarrassment and shame came swiftly after. I had no real idea who this woman was; fantasizing about hurting her was not the real me. Or not a ‘me’ I wanted to accept. I was still angry when I took hold of her shoulder, but I was partially back under control.

‘Thought you’d pop by?’ I asked as she spun around. ‘How lovely to see you again – and so soon.’

The look on her face was perfect: an utterly genuine mask of confusion. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘You must remember our little chat last night? Perhaps it’s the suit?’

‘I’ve never seen you before in my life.’ Her confusion had shifted to anger, but it was nothing compared to mine.

‘Oh, fuck off,’ I whispered, doing my best to keep a forced smile in place for the benefit of any onlookers. ‘Life’s too short for pointless games. Was there anything in particular you were after or were you just sticking your nose in where it wasn’t wanted?’

The anger on her face turned to fear then and I felt a brief twinge of uncertainty – her performance was exceptionally good.

‘I have no idea who you are,’ she insisted, casting around for someone who might be able to help.

‘Don’t bother,’ I said, stepping in closer, blocking off her view.

That was a mistake.

‘Help!’ she began shouting. ‘This man is harassing me!’

I stepped back immediately. ‘Nice,’ I conceded as people began to turn towards us.

I turned and began to walk away as casually as I could.

‘Some sort of problem?’ a man asked as I passed him.

‘No problem,’ I insisted, but he reached out to take hold of my arm. I smacked his hand away, which was a second mistake as it antagonised him. He grabbed me by my shoulders, his fingers digging in hard.

‘I think you should apologise to the lady,’ he said, the look on his face suggesting he didn’t consider the point open to debate.

Part of me knew that the only sensible way forward was to calm down and play the game; the other part – the bigger part – had absolutely no intention of giving in. With my training I could easily floor this man if I wanted. Stamp my heel onto his foot and his grip would lessen, the palm of my hand to the bridge of his nose, and job finished. I considered it.

‘The lady doesn’t need an apology,’ I told him, struggling to stay calm. I turned to face her and found myself looking at a frightened woman. She looked deeply uncomfortable, scared and desperate. I almost felt sorry for her. I hadn’t made a mistake though; she was definitely the woman I had met the night before, the woman who had tried her best to scare me off working for Section 37.

‘Looks to me like she’s owed one,’ the man insisted. I looked at him: big feller, tracksuit, a full, hard face that spoke of gym hours clocked and fights enjoyed.

We were starting to attract a crowd. I had lost control of the situation.

The woman was backing away, though out of fear or a wish to avoid public spectacle I could no longer tell.

‘Fine,’ I said, swallowing both pride and anger, knowing that the professional way forward was to take the quickest escape route being offered. ‘I apologise if I worried you.’

Then, to the Knight Errant in sportswear, ‘Good enough?’

He looked to the woman. ‘Just let him go,’ she said. ‘He’s off his rocker – as long as he doesn’t follow me…’

‘He won’t be doing that, will you mate?’ The big feller stated, releasing my arms.

‘Not a chance,’ I replied, marching off quickly in the opposite direction before my anger got the better of me and I ended up making the situation worse.

I headed for the exit, aware that too many people were watching me as I weaved between the shoppers and out into the daylight.

Once outside, I released a held breath and leaned back against the railing between the pavement and the road. Twice now she had got the better of me in public. She was really beginning to make me mad.

‘That could have gone better,’ said a quiet voice next to me.

I looked down to see a tiny old man dishing out copies of the Evening Standard.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘She didn’t know you, did she?’ he said. ‘You were a complete stranger to her.’

‘She knew me well enough,’ I countered, then wondered how the hell this guy could even have seen what had happened. He smiled and there was a twinkle of malevolence behind his rheumy eyes.

‘Another lesson learned: we can be everywhere, we can be everyone,’ he said. ‘She no more remembers she’s talked to you before than this old fool will. We are Legion.’

‘Trying my bloody patience is what you are.’

‘Shining vanished, has he?’

This knocked the confidence from me. How the hell did he know that?

‘He’s not with us,’ he continued, ‘so there’s hope for him yet. If his little monkey can step up to the mark that is.’ He smiled again. ‘That would be you, by the way.’

I squared up to him.

‘I wouldn’t,’ he said, ‘unless you really want to make an idiot of yourself. I won’t resist, of course, but beating up an old man only seconds after threatening an innocent woman really isn’t going to get you far, is it?’

‘Who are you?’

‘August knows, though he won’t want to tell you. If you ever see him again perhaps you should ask him.’

‘Where is he?’

‘That’s for you to find out; it’s nothing to do with us. We’re just observers here. Tell you what though, just to show we can occasionally be helpful: when you get the phone call about the body outside St Mathew’s you need to give it your full attention. It’s important.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You will.’

The old man looked away and momentarily lost his balance. I reached out instinctively, trying to keep him steady. He sighed and looked up at me.

‘Legs not what they were,’ he said, his voice somehow gentler, older. He held up a paper. ‘Evening Standard?’

‘No thanks.’ Whoever I had been talking to was gone. Somehow, I just knew that. Say what you like about Toby Greene but at least he’s not slow on the uptake.

I walked back to the office.

c) Section 37, Wood Green, London

Oman had returned to his shop by the time I reached it. At least dealing with him might temporarily push my confusion to one side. Who was it that had taken such an interest in me? And how was it possible they could talk through anyone they felt like, hopping from body to body like a communicative virus?

‘Where were you five minutes ago?’ I quizzed him.

‘Warming up my lunch,’ he said, holding up a steaming Tupperware box. ‘That allowed?’

‘Sorry – not having the best morning.’

‘You don’t know bad days until you have to deal with my customers. What can I do for you?’

‘I want the app that monitors the radio broadcast,’ I said, pulling my phone out of my pocket. ‘Can you do that?’

He looked at my phone. ‘Where’s the boss?’

‘Busy.’ I had no idea how much I should trust anyone at this stage and I wasn’t about to blurt out everything that had happened.

He nodded. ‘Isn’t he always? I can’t put it on that without jailbreaking it.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Just do it.’

‘Fine. And I’ll only charge you thirty quid, company discount as it were.’

Cheeky bastard.

‘Whatever. Can you do it straightaway?’

‘Yeah, but it’ll still take me a while.’

I thought about it. The idea of leaving my phone with him wasn’t comfortable but if Shining had trusted him then I supposed I should do the same. I needed that app.

‘OK, I’ll be upstairs. How long do you need?’

‘Come back in an hour, forty-five minutes – if you’re lucky.’

I left the phone on his desk and walked around the corner to the office entrance. Which is when I realised that I hadn’t been given a set of keys.

I didn’t have it in me to be angry anymore; I just pressed Tamar’s bell and steeled myself for an argument.

Eventually she appeared, this time she was at least properly clothed, in a pair of jeans and a crop top with ‘Superstar’ encrusted on it in gold sequins.

‘Remember me?’ I asked, ‘August’s friend.’

‘And I know you’re his friend because?’

‘Because I really am. In fact, I work with him.’

‘That doesn’t make you friend,’ she replied. ‘The men I “work with” – they are certainly not friends.’

‘Please let me in.’

‘Why you not call him?’

‘Because he’s not in.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I…’ I was spent by this point, frustrated and tired now the anger and panic had left me. ‘I don’t know. I need to try to find him. He’s in trouble and he needs me to help him.’

She looked at me and, after a moment, her entire mood softened. She reached out, took my hand and pulled me inside, shutting the door behind us.

‘I have a spare key for the office,’ she said, leading me up the stairs as if I was a child, ‘and I will help how I can. August is very dear.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose he is.’

‘Well,’ said a voice from the landing above us, ‘I suppose that’s one word for him.’

And that was how I first met April Shining.

‘Might I suggest we let the poor boy sit down?’ April said, shooing me into the office ahead of both herself and Tamar.

‘I’m all right,’ I tried to say, but there is nothing as dominant as an April Shining in full flow. She’s a hostile weather front in a cardigan and beads.

‘Nonsense, it’s obviously all gone horrendously tits up and you need to take stock, bring us up to speed and then we can get on with getting things back on an even keel.’

Somehow, without planning it, I found myself seated behind the desk.

‘Get the kettle on, darling,’ April encouraged Tamar. ‘I dare say we’d all appreciate something warming and, as my brother never had the common sense to stock a reasonable supply of medicinal alcohol, we’ll have to make do with tea.’

Tamar didn’t argue. Like me, I’m not sure she quite knew how.

‘Look,’ I began, ‘this is all very kind, but I haven’t really got time for socialising. I’m afraid I have a lot of work to do.’

‘Naturally,’ April replied, ‘which is precisely why I said you should bring us up to speed.’

This was a step too far.

‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss anything,’ I insisted. ‘Your brother and I—’

‘Are the nation’s last great hope for survival against the forces of darkness,’ she said, collapsing onto the sofa in an eruption of patchouli scent. ‘It’s terribly exciting, and Tamar and I know all about it.’

‘I doubt that…’

‘Oh, my sweet little man, don’t imagine there’s a thing August doesn’t tell his two Valkyries. We are his rock, his last line of defence, his—’

‘Shocking breach of national security?’

‘Poo to that! You men and your secrets.’

‘Secrets are important. Even if you’re cleared to know what your brother does for a living, I can’t believe that he would give you any real information about it.’

‘Perhaps he just knew whom to trust?’

‘Apparently everyone in the Greater London area,’ I replied.

‘Oh hush now, my brother’s not an idiot – which you must have realised, however briefly you may have worked with him. The work you do here is unconventional on every level, so if you want to get anywhere, you have to go about it in an unconventional manner.’

I shrugged. I had hardly spent the morning behaving in an exemplary fashion and Shining’s lack of security protocol seemed my least important problem.

‘Besides,’ April continued, ‘you don’t really have the first idea who I am and what I do in the government. One doesn’t like to flash one’s credentials around – it’s vulgar and boring – but August isn’t the only Shining sibling to have ended up working behind the scenes on national business.’

‘And I am his bodyguard,’ announced Tamar as she returned with three mugs, one of which she dumped in front of me somewhat aggressively. ‘Head of security.’

‘Right.’ I had no idea what else to say. I had spent the last couple of days being surrounded by absurdity. Sooner or later you have to look to the bigger picture and let the little things go.

I told them what Shining and I had been doing and what had happened. If that was a mistake then, to hell with it, just one more my life was littered with. I was going to need all the help I could get to pull off a successful operation in the next forty-eight hours. When you no longer have a viable career to worry about, it’s amazing how quickly you home in on the important parts of the job. I began to understood why Shining had become the man he was.

When I had finished talking, I made my way over to the filing cabinets and began to search for old files that might be pertinent to Krishnin.

‘Oh August,’ April said, ‘you finally get a nice young man to help you with the creepy stuff and then you go and get yourself kidnapped or killed.’

‘Not killed,’ I said, ‘at least not yet. Krishnin will want to know how much we know; that’s the only reason he could have for kidnapping August. Standard protocol – take an officer, interrogate them, ascertain how far your operation is compromised.’

‘“Interrogate them”,’ repeated Tamar. ‘That not good, not in this work. He will be hurting August.’

‘My brother is made of stronger stuff than people give him credit for,’ said April, ‘and we won’t help him by sitting here fretting. Eyes forward, my petal. Let us concentrate on the mission in hand.’

‘There’s nothing here older than a couple of years,’ I said, slamming the filing cabinet shut.

‘Of course not,’ said April. ‘Section 37 hasn’t been sat on its bottom for the last fifty years you know. August’s old case files are safely hidden away. You leave that part to me. Whatever reports he filed I can dig out.’

Something occurred to me. ‘From what he told me, the night that he and O’Dale visited the warehouse they found a sample of some form of chemical. I don’t suppose O’Dale…’

‘Long dead, darling. Drank himself to death at the arse-end of the ’70s. If they did bring any evidence out though, I’m sure I can find it. A report on its contents anyway.’

‘An original sample would be too much to hope for after all this time, I suppose, though I feel we’d have a much greater chance of analysing it now than they did back then.’

‘I’ll see what I can find, but yes, I can’t imagine there’ll be anything but paper for us to work on.’

‘What should I do?’ asked Tamar.

‘No idea at the moment,’ I admitted. ‘We just need to get every bit of information together that we can.’

‘I could go to warehouse and try to find him. Krishnin must have been seen.’

‘You’d think so, yes, though he vanished into thin air, so I wouldn’t bank on it.’ I kicked the filing cabinet in frustration. ‘That’s the bloody problem! I’m not prepared to deal with this kind of thing. It’s all nonsense to me. He could have been snatched by leprechauns for all I know.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling, the leprechauns keep themselves to themselves since the ceasefire in Northern Ireland.’

I stared at her and she fluttered her eyelashes in a manner that she no doubt thought of as coquettish but just struck me as smug.

‘You’re as bad as he is,’ I said. ‘You know what I mean, this is not a situation I’m trained to handle. I don’t know the rules, the possibilities… it’s all above my head.’

‘Rubbish, you’re an intelligence officer. Now use some. For what it’s worth though, I think you’re right to keep his disappearance a secret. We’re on our own – Section 37 always is.’

As if to reinforce her point, the office phone started ringing and it took me a moment to realise that I was the only one who should answer it.

‘I don’t even know how he answers the bloody phone!’ I exclaimed.

April sighed and took over. ‘Dark Spectre,’ she said, ‘publishers of the weird and wonderful.’

Our cover was a publishing house?

She listened for a moment. ‘That’s quite all right. Our senior editor is out of the office at the moment, but I’m fully capable of handling your enquiry.’

She listened a little more then rifled around the desk for a pen and a piece of paper. ‘Yes,’ she said, while taking notes, ‘fine. I’ll send one of our men right over. His name’s Howard Phillips. He’ll introduce himself.’ She put the phone down.

‘Who the hell’s Howard Phillips?’ I asked.

‘You are, dear, at least for today. That was one of August’s contacts at the Met. It appears they’ve found a dead body that fits his brief rather more than theirs.’

‘I haven’t the time to be chasing other things,’ I insisted. ‘We have to focus on the operation in hand.’

‘Up to you, of course, but she’s expecting you outside St Mathew’s in Aldgate.’

‘St Mathew’s?’ I remembered the bizarre message from the newspaper seller. ‘Fine, I’ll go.’

SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

‘Shining? Wake up. I know you can hear me.’

‘I can hear you.’

‘We must talk.’

‘I suppose we must.’

‘You got old.’

‘Yes. You didn’t. Which is fascinating. Perhaps not quite as fascinating as the fact that you shouldn’t even be here, but fascinating nonetheless.’

‘I shouldn’t be here?’

‘No. Of course you shouldn’t. You should be dead.’

‘How can you be so sure I’m not?’

‘The fact I’m talking to you?’

‘We know better in our business: things are not always as they should be.’

‘No. That’s true. Still, this would be my first conversation with a dead man.’

‘Really? I used to interrogate them all the time.’

‘Echoes. Shades. A walking, talking dead man? That’s new to me.’

‘Perhaps you were mistaken then. Would that make you more comfortable? Perhaps I’m not dead at all.’

‘No. No, sorry that won’t do. I know you died. You’ll forgive me if it’s tactless to bring it up. I know you died. I was the one who killed you.’

‘I’ve forgiven you.’

‘Then maybe you’ll untie me? My old bones aren’t what they once were.’

‘I think not. Forgiveness will only stretch so far.’

‘A drink of water then?’

‘Perhaps. Later. I must admit I wondered if you’d still be alive yourself. You’re very old.’

‘Very. We Shinings were built to last. Extraordinarily resilient.’

‘Time will tell.’

‘A threat?’

‘I would take no pleasure in torturing an old man to death.’

‘Even the old man who killed you?’

‘Even him. But we must talk.’

‘And what is it you would like to talk about? Cabbages and kings?’

‘I would like to know what you know. I think that would be helpful. I think that would be sensible.’

‘How long have you got? It’s been a long old life – as you kindly point out. I know a lot of things…’

‘But what have you told others? You always did surround yourself with agents and freaks. But how important are they? Who in power might listen to them? My sources tell me that you are operating on your own. And now I have you. Perhaps that will be enough? When the entirety of Section 37 is tied to a chair and totally vulnerable, even the most cautious man would have to admit its potential threat is diminished.’

‘They would.’

‘And yet you smile. You are alone, aren’t you?’

‘I’m sure your sources were quite thorough. Section 37’s been a one-man band for years.’

‘Yes. The world moved on, didn’t it? My own work seems to have been ignored. The department disbanded.’

‘These are impoverished times. Your country is no longer what it once was.’

‘We shall see about that. It has always struggled to thrive under unimaginative leadership.’

‘Since the glorious days of Stalin?’

‘You mock, but at least he had vision. That said, no, I had no love for the old dictator. My father died under his regime. Stalin was a maniac. But perhaps that is also what they say of me?’

‘And are you?’

‘I am… determined. I am an aggressor. I want to attack, to grind this country beneath my heel. I want power. I want control. I want… death. Yes, perhaps I am a maniac after all.’

‘Perhaps you are. And is that really how you want to be remembered?’

‘Remembered? I don’t know if that’s important to me. I resented the fact that my government turned against me, but I think that was more frustration than a feeling of injustice. They weren’t willing to do something that could so easily be done. And will be done. Soon.’

‘Ah yes – the countdown. Wonderfully theatrical. I take it I triggered that by entering the warehouse?’

‘A basic safeguard, in case you were more of a threat than you appear. So, I say again, what do you know?’

‘Ah… But here’s the problem. As you say, we’ve both been playing this game for a long time. If I give you the information you want, I become dispensable. Not what I’d want at all.’

‘But maybe I’ll kill you anyway?’

‘Maybe you will. Either way I seem to be staring death in the face. Any advice on how I deal with it? You being a man with experience.’

‘Yes, I know all about death, August. I know how to receive it and how to give it.’

‘I wonder which side of that equation you’ll end up today.’

‘I too wonder… Perhaps we should find out?’

CHAPTER NINE: RECOGNITION

a) St Mathew’s Church, Aldgate, London

Shining’s contact within the Met was not what I imagined. My experience of the police had been having to handle jaded lifers– men who wore their years served with the same apathy as they did their tired suits and ties. After this, plainclothes detective Geeta Sahni was a breath of fresh air.

She met me a short distance from St Mathew’s. I could see the police tape and the predictable gaggle of journalists sniffing around it, digital cameras poised to snatch a juicy morsel of death for their pages.

I had expected she’d take some convincing to talk to me. Shining had clearly built a strong sense of loyalty with his assets and I was not the man she had been hoping to see. And yet she was only too happy.

‘About time he had a bit of help,’ she said, and that was it.

‘I thought it best if we kept our distance,’ Detective Sahni said. ‘There’s little left to see on site anyway – we had to let the CSEs clear everything away. The last thing the brass wants is to see pictures of Jimmy Hodgkins all over the news. They’ve spent the last few weeks going on about how violent crime numbers have dropped over the last twelve months; pictures of a bloke with his skull beaten to a thick broth are “against the current promotional agenda”.’

‘I bet they are. What was it about the scene that made you think of us?’

‘Oh it’s a weird one, no doubt about that.’ She pulled out a USB drive and handed it to me. ‘I copied all the images I could – they’re not nice. Body was found by a dog walker at seven o’clock this morning. He chucked up all over the steps, which was lovely, and then gave us a call. The dead man’s name is Jimmy Hodgkins. Worked in advertising.’

‘No wonder someone wanted to kill him.’

‘I seriously doubt the attack was personal.’

‘You said his head was bashed in.’

‘Absolutely pulverised; nothing above the neck but burger meat.’

‘Sounds pretty personal to me.’

‘You’d think so, but there’s no way the attacker could have known him.’

‘You know who did it?’

‘No doubt at all. He was found a few streets away covered in the victim’s blood. Only one problem: he was dead.’

‘Maybe Hodgkins got a lick in early, a fatal wound that eventually took effect?’

‘No. You misunderstand me: the attacker was dead before Hodgkins. A long time before. Fifty years before in fact.’

OK, so that had my attention. ‘Explain.’

‘It seems impossible – which is why I called you, of course – but the attacker seems to be a man called Harry Reid; died of heart failure in 1963. Buried in St Mathew’s churchyard where, by all accounts, he had the good grace to stay. Until last night.’

‘You’re saying the other body was already a corpse?’

‘A remarkably strange one. The skin is almost like plastic, as if it’s been varnished for preservation. One of the CSEs touched its cheek and it cracked like porcelain.

‘It took us some time to confirm the identity. It would have taken even longer if not for a leap of logic on the part of one of the investigating officers.’ She smiled. ‘That would be me, in case you were wondering. Right next to the body of Jimmy Hodgkins was an open grave. I cross-checked the identity of the body interred there with the attacker, expecting there to be some link. What I wasn’t expecting was that it would turn out to be the same person. Can you blame me?’

I shook my head.

‘It looks – and I know how this sounds so please don’t argue – as if Harry Reid pulled himself out of his grave, picked up a rock and battered Jimmy Hodgkins to death. Reid then promptly ran up the street and got hit by a bus. The majority of his body was found, still writhing, under the rear left tyre. What’s left of him is currently strapped onto a gurney and defying all medical knowledge at the mortuary. It’s still moving. As is its right leg, even though it was severed on impact.’

I had no idea what to say to that. Neither did she. She just shrugged. ‘Like I said, impossible. There’s something else too…’

‘Oh good, I was beginning to think it all seemed too straightforward.’

‘There was a word, written in Hodgkins’ blood, daubed over the tombstone next to his body.’ She pulled out her mobile, scrolled through her images folder and showed me a picture of the word:

‘Russian,’ she said, ‘Apparently it translates as “Black Earth”.’

I’d picked up my mobile from Oman before heading out of the office. Now, walking away from the Aldgate crime scene and the disturbing light it cast on things, I couldn’t resist turning on the app and hearing the countdown once more.

‘Nine hundred and fifty one, five, five, seven…’ it intoned.

The countdown would reach zero at midday on the 31st. Was that time significant? The fact that it was precisely midday was portentous; it suggested that the countdown had been precisely timed. Was it timed to coincide with something in particular or was it simply a threat in and of itself? No. We’d triggered the countdown by entering the warehouse, that much seemed clear. So the timing had to be a coincidence. I tried not to let my imagination run away with me. The business of Section 37 naturally leans towards the fantastical and dramatic, but it would be a mistake to jump to firm conclusions just yet. Had the body of a long-dead man been not only strangely preserved but reanimated? Was that the threat of Operation Black Earth?

I called April.

‘Darling, I can’t work miracles. You’ve only been gone an hour. I haven’t found anything yet.’

‘It’s all right. I hadn’t expected you to. I want you to look into something else though.’ I told her about what I’d found at the crime scene.

‘How ghastly. So you need me to look into anything similar?’

‘I do. Might any of those bragged-about connections of yours extend to someone who could give us post-mortem information?’

‘Oh yes, I know just the man.’

‘Then once you’ve finished there, I need you to get me the details on both Hodgkins and Reid. If the latter really did dig himself out of a fifty-year old grave, and now refuses to go back in one, we need to know.’

‘I can’t see how anyone could dig their way out of a grave. Surely it’s physically impossible?’

I’d already thought about that and where my thoughts led didn’t please me. ‘It’d only be physically impossible if the person doing the digging was troubled by such things as needing to breathe. Just because the body was unnaturally preserved doesn’t mean anything else was. The casket would have rotted away long ago. I’m not saying it would have been quick. I imagine, dead or not, it would be a long business pulling your way up through several feet of earth but it could be possible.’ I laughed at what I was saying. ‘Possible! What am I talking about? You know what I mean… it’s possible within the fucked-up remit of this section.’

‘I understand.’ She paused. ‘He was right about you.’

‘Who was?’

‘August. He said you showed potential.’ She hung up, leaving me feeling both patronised and complimented.

So what next?

I sat down outside a coffee shop, trying to collate everything I knew into something coherent.

Fifty years ago, Shining had been investigating an operation known as Black Earth. The man leading that operation had died and yet now seemed active again. He was not alone in that, as Jimmy Hodgkins had discovered to his cost. So – and I gritted my teeth as the fantasies piled on top of one another – if I accepted the fact that death might not be the inarguable full stop any sane man would consider it, Black Earth had something to do with reanimating the dead. To do what? On the evidence of Harry Reid, it seemed mindless violence was the goal. But what was the point of that? Disturbing, yes, but not in itself world-shattering. Jimmy Hodgkins might have had something to say on that score, but it was my job to look at the bigger picture. Presumably, when the countdown finished, something massive was expected to occur, something game-changing.

Krishnin had taken Shining. Where to? How did you simply vanish into thin air? That one was beyond me.

What had we seen during Derek Lime’s experiment with time? I had recognised someone. I was sure of that. A familiar face amongst the crowd of men who had been working for Krishnin. I tried to bring the face to mind but the memory was elusive. It had only been a brief glance, not long enough to commit the man to memory. Perhaps that was the wrong way of looking at things, though. I was new at Section 37. My experience was limited. How could I have recognised someone? Was it something I had seen in the handful of reports I had read? No. I had recognised the man because I had met him. And, having settled on that, the whole thing fell into place.

I headed back towards King’s Cross.

b) 58 Sampson Court, King’s Cross

It took Gavrill some time to answer his door. This didn’t surprise me. I had no doubt his tardiness had little to do with his old age.

‘Yes?’ he asked, looking at me as if he didn’t recognise me, a calculated and admirable impression of a vague old man, fearful of what a knock on the door might bring.

‘We met yesterday morning,’ I told him. ‘I was in the company of August Shining. You remember, I’m sure?’

‘August?’ He pretended he was trying to remember.

‘Give it a rest,’ I said, pushing my way past him and stepping inside his flat. ‘You know exactly who I am. You took over the Russian department for…’ I realised I had no idea what the counterpart to Section 37 had been called, ‘preternatural affairs? I’m sure you lot would have given it a much more longwinded title. Doesn’t matter. You took over some time after Olag Krishnin’s death in the ’60s.’

‘I’m not sure I…’

‘Shut up, I haven’t time. The thing is: you knew Krishnin, didn’t you?’

I continued moving through the flat, wanting to make sure we were alone. Gavrill took that opportunity to make a break for it. I wasn’t worried. Oh, I swore like a trooper as I dashed out onto the balcony after him, but the day a seventy-year-old man manages to give me the slip I’ll accept any harsh criticism my superiors offer and retire.

I caught up with him on the stairwell, offering as reassuring a smile as I could to a woman peering at us through the window to her apartment.

‘Come on, Dad,’ I said at some volume, ‘you don’t want to cause a scene, do you? You’ll only embarrass yourself.’

He sighed and gave a nod. ‘Fine, we’ll talk. I don’t want any more trouble.’

I led him back to the open door of his flat, pushed him inside and closed and locked the door behind us.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m an old man; all of that is a long time ago. Ask Shining – he knows. I’m retired. I’m a UK citizen now, and I don’t want to go raking all that up.’

‘You mean you don’t want your comfy lifestyle threatened by past crimes?’

‘Crimes? I committed no crimes. You know. This work we do – it’s above all that. We do what our country tells us; we’re tools not ideologists.’

‘You’re clearly not, or you wouldn’t have moved here. Or are you still working for your old employers?’

He sighed and settled down into a ratty-looking armchair, gesturing for me to do the same. ‘My old employers? Who are they? My country is gone. Russia is a new world, full of businessmen and crooks. Who can tell the difference? In the ’80s we stood against your Thatcher and Reagan, said we had principles. Bullshit. We’ve become the same. I don’t care. Like I say, I was never an ideologist. Life is more comfortable here.’

‘I’m glad you like it. So tell me about Krishnin.’

‘He was a monster. Mad. We disowned him even before he was shot.’

‘What about Operation Black Earth? Was that a state-backed operation?’

He looked at me in genuine discomfort. ‘You know about that?’

‘Not as much as I’d like. Why do you think I’m here?’

He rubbed his face with his hands. Whether this was an attempt to prevaricate or because he found the subject hard to discuss was neither here nor there. I didn’t care how difficult he found it. He was going to tell me everything he knew.

‘We need a drink,’ he said.

‘This isn’t a social visit.’

‘I don’t care. I need one if I’m going to talk about this. I would suggest you need one if you’re going to hear it, but that’s up to you.’

I reluctantly agreed – anything to get the old Russian’s mouth working. Of course, I needn’t have worried on that score: like all these old buggers, once he started talking I thought he’d never stop.

CHAPTER TEN: ARCHIVE

April Shining got out of her taxi, paid the fare to the penny (she considered having to listen to the driver’s loathsome views on racial immigration more than sufficient by way of a tip) and made her way down Morrison Close.

At the far end stood number thirteen, looking out on this dull bit of South London with dirty, apathetic windows. The small front garden was an unruly cultivation of grasses boxed in by privet. The front gate seemed determined not to let her in but she’d got past better security in her time. April Shining prided herself that there was not a building in the land that could keep her out if she was on form. She had once dropped in on Tony Blair to give him a piece of her mind and ended up staying for a distinctly awkward afternoon tea. If you were forced to describe her in one word you would likely fall back on ‘indomitable’ but you would consider ‘terrifying’, ‘incorrigible’ and ‘dangerous’ first.

Unlike her brother, April hadn’t followed a linear path through the Civil Service. She had flitted from one department to another, from the foreign office to a brief position in the Cabinet. She had dallied in various offices, embassies and battlefields during a long and amusing life. She had retired into a small flat in Chiswick with nothing but a state pension and an irascible cat to while away her dotage. This had been in character, revealing what little value she placed on social progression, how uninterested she was in encumbering herself with possessions.

If only her brother could say the same on the latter point.

According to the budget paperwork, number thirteen was a Section 37 safe house. In reality it was August Shining’s history stored on three chaotic floors.

April removed the front door key from her handbag and began the frustrating business of coaxing the lock to accept it. The lock needed replacing but August was too forgetful about the little, practical things in life to do it. He visited the house no more than once a year. He would dump a new batch of files as well as collected evidence and personal items he no longer had the room for in his own flat, then lock the door on them and walk away. April pondered on the psychology of it until the door finally let her in. Perhaps this entire building was an act of compartmentalisation. August took all the business he couldn’t bear to part with, shut it away here and returned to life unburdened.

In the front hall, she hung her hat and coat on a bust of Kitchener that had once talked and offered up ancient state secrets. It had been silent for decades, but she felt more comfortable knowing it was covered up and not watching her as she walked around the place.

There was a frustrating lack of order to the house. August admitted that had he known how full the place would become, he would have implemented a system when he had first started using it. But things had quickly got out of hand and the job of organising them became more than any sane man could bear. The chaos had deepened year by year.

April started in the front room, pulling open the heavy velvet curtains to allow in a little light. The flapping fabric kicked up clouds of dust that swirled around her as she began to open boxes and case files.

She worked her way past a tea chest filled with restaurant receipts, several oblong boxes containing Silver Age American comic books (taking a few minutes to flick through an issue of Doom Patrol because she liked the cover) and a leather holdall filled with what appeared to be toy rubber snakes. Delving deeper she found a set of case reports from 1976, a signed picture of James Herbert and a run of Evening Standards from the ’80s.

‘I despair of you, you silly old man,’ she muttered before moving into the kitchen. If she could at least make herself a cup of tea, the hunt might be a little more tolerable. She filled a kettle and put it on the hob, crossing her fingers that August had kept up with the gas bill. The ring lit and she pottered around the cupboards on the hunt for teabags while the kettle burbled and whistled like a lunatic talking to itself. Doing this, she discovered that most of the cupboards were given over to sample jars: liquid evidence gathered by August over the years. At the point of either giving up or seeing what ‘Ectoplasmic Residue Borley Rectory 1993’ tasted like in boiling water, she discovered a small tin of Earl Grey teabags in the bread bin.

She took her tea upstairs, walking between the narrow corridor afforded by the tottering piles of magazines on either side. She noticed several stacks of Fortean Times, esoteric partworks and copies of the Eagle.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a bathroom with another set of steps that would take her to the attic, a room she didn’t intend to go into. The last time she had been here had been with August and there had been frequent sounds of banging from behind the closed hatchway, something he had dismissed as being due to ‘the more unruly volumes in my library’. She had decided then that she had no wish to come face to face with any book that could send showers of plaster dust raining down on the carpets by beating on the rafters.

The first bedroom contained physical evidence; items August had gathered from all over the world. She took a moment to reminisce, taking in the still-captured scents of foreign climes. A poster of Aleister Crowley was pinned to the door of the wardrobe with a knife that she recognised as the ‘Blade of Tears’, a sacrificial weapon that August had picked up in China. In the far corner, a dusty display case contained the stuffed remains of an ancient orangutan (nicknamed Edgar by August). There appeared to be things moving within its dirty fur.

The second bedroom was all about paperwork and, with a truly regretful sigh, this was where she set about her most thorough exploration. Interrupted only by a phone call from Toby, she spent the next hour sifting backwards through years of the absurd and horrifying exploits of Section 37. She reminded herself of the details of the Brent Cross exorcism, the possession of Arthur Scargill and the night in the early ’80s that the entire population of Wales had forgotten how to read.

She finally found herself in the ’60s, having almost boxed herself in between three towers of cardboard files. Predictably enough, the deeper she dug, the earlier the reports were dated. Finally, barely able to see in the shadow created by the discarded folders around her, she laid her hands on the folder covering August’s beginnings in the Service. She flicked through the yellowing sheets of foolscap, reassuring herself that the winter of 1963 was fully represented, and began the ignoble task of climbing back out of the mess she had made. She was precariously balanced across a stack of index binders when she heard a banging at the front door. It wasn’t someone knocking, rather someone trying to get it open. She had left it unlocked, and therefore, warped as it was, it was only a few seconds before it creaked open and she heard feet on the wooden flooring of the entrance hall.

Moving as carefully as she could, April continued on her slow way towards the door of the bedroom. Downstairs she heard the visitor moving through the front room and into the kitchen. Once she was sure they were at the furthest reach of the house she moved a little quicker.

April had no idea whether the intruder was friendly or not. She decided not. Pessimism had allowed her to live a long life. Nobody but her and August knew of number thirteen (at least she assumed not, though her brother could be remarkably foolish about that sort of thing – even as she had berated Toby for suggesting as much, she knew he had been quite right). Whoever was moving around down there was either extremely unlucky to have entered the place during one of the rare occasions the building was occupied, or they had followed her here. If it was the latter then she had to wonder what had taken them so long to decide to come in. Actually, she wasn’t sure that she did want to think about that. If someone’s orders had changed from surveillance to interception it couldn’t mean anything good.

The footsteps returned to the entrance hall just as she stepped out onto the landing. Was there somewhere she could barricade herself in, call Toby and then wait it out?

The intruder began to climb the stairs.

In a few moments, they would reach the turn in the old stairway and both parties would be able to see each another. On one hand, that was the point at which April would know for sure what she was dealing with. On the other, it was the point at which she would no longer be able to hide. But where could she hide? She could make a run for the attic? The intruder would most certainly hear her, especially as she tried to open the hatchway door, but she might be able to keep them at bay. Hesitating over what might lurk in there delayed her too long.

The man appeared on the stairs. He was dressed in black military fatigues. His skin was pale, shining unnaturally in the light from the landing window. He glistened. His mouth was open and rigid, a strangely expressionless grimace. He stared at her for a moment then charged up, his feet slamming hard on the steps and sending piles of magazines toppling in his wake.

April stepped back into the first bedroom, looking around for something to defend herself with.

The man came crashing after her. She yanked the Blade of Tears from its place in the wardrobe door, the poster of Aleister Crowley fluttering face down to the floor, as if its subject was feeling uncharacteristically coy about what was going to happen next. April considered trying to use the knife to intimidate the man, then discounted it. Another reason she had lived a long life was that she rarely wasted time with threats. She thrust the knife forward, embedding it in the man’s chest. There was a cracking sound as it struck his hard skin, and he stood there, as if perplexed but not overly inconvenienced by what had happened.

‘Oh dear Lord,’ she said, ‘I rather think you’re like the chap Toby found in Aldgate, aren’t you? How can I kill you if you’re already dead?’

She shoved her way past him, making for the door, but he sprang to life once more, snatching at her hair and yanking her off her feet. April fell with a loud cry to the floor of the landing. The man came after her, his big, pale hands, reaching down to grab her by the head. Though in pain from the awkward fall, April knew that if he got a firm grip she would be incapable of breaking free. If the knife hadn’t troubled him, an old lady’s punches were unlikely to be a problem. She rolled along the floor, pulling her way towards the stairs. If she could just manage to outrun him…

April was just getting to her feet when he crashed into her from behind. With an angry scream she toppled to the left, curling herself into a ball. If he was going to kill her she was damned if she was going to make it easy for him. Then, suddenly, he flipped to the right, his foot slipping on the glossy cover of a spilled copy of the Fortean Times. He crashed down the stairs, rolling and flipping around the bend to continue his descent out of sight. She listened as banisters splintered, kicked out by the man’s flailing feet. He finally hit the bottom with a resounding crash.

This would be her only chance. If he was still alive – well, active – he would soon be back on the offensive. She had to get moving now. She got to her feet, wincing at old joints that were crying out from the hammering they’d received, and limped down the stairs. Turning the corner April now saw what had caused that one last crash. The bust of Kitchener had toppled from its podium. Of her attacker there was no sign.

April went back upstairs, into the second room and picked up the file she’d been after. She made her careful way downstairs again, expecting her attacker to reappear at any second. He didn’t. He appeared to have vanished into thin air.

Forsaking her coat and hat, she hurried to the back door, hopped over the garden fence and made her shaky way through the rear gardens of her neighbours.

‘Can I help you?’ asked a surprised-looking man pegging out washing as she came limping through his flowerbeds.

‘No thank you, dear,’ she replied, giving him a wave and pulling herself over the wall into the next garden along. ‘I think I can manage.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN: NOSTALGIA (3)

A Russian sets great stock by his homeland. Even one who has defected, like me, finds it hard to let go. Patriotism was a badge you could wear, a patch you stitched over the wounds of the state. I’m over-simplifying, of course, but you’re not here for a lesson in loving your country. You want to hear about Krishnin – don’t worry, we’ll get to him in time. In those days the country was a ruin of haves and have-nots; things were hard, and the only way you ignored the fractures, the compromises and the discomfort was to sew that patch on and swear to yourself that everything you did was for the best.

I never wore it comfortably.

My father had been stationed over here under a French passport since the late fifties. He spoke the language fluently and his accent was natural enough, especially to London ears.

My mother’s death left me with no other family, so he was given leave to have me with him. Had anyone thought him important, it would not have been allowed; I would have been a distraction, a weakness, a target. But he was a nobody, an unused asset who spent most of his life working as a grocer in Surbiton. Some nights he would get drunk and rage about having been forgotten, abandoned over here to a pointless life. In truth I think he rather enjoyed it. I certainly did. Would you rather be a teenager in Moscow or London? I was there at the birth of rock’n’roll and shrinking hemlines.

He liked to pretend he was important – don’t we all? He received his final insult from the bumper of a car on Tottenham Court Road, eliminated not by enemy agents but by a salesman who wasn’t looking where he was going. My father died as he had lived, unnoticed and still feeling ill-used.

I should have been brought back to Russia but the lack of interest towards my father extended to me. I ended up in the care of another officer, a dour, isolated man who blessed me with his indifference. His attitude towards me was fluid: I was a burden, but I was also a useful worker. Soon, I was performing courier runs and surveillance tasks, the grunt work that nobody else wanted.

When Olag Krishnin arrived in the winter of ‘63, I was seventeen, and soon found myself one of the men under his command, shifting packing crates, cooking food, keeping watch. We were based in a warehouse by the river, a good location; it was a credible hive of activity in the middle of a dead zone. Nobody paid us much attention.

People claimed Krishnin was charming, but I never saw it myself. Perhaps it was the unblinkered eyes of youth, but when I met him I knew I was in the company of a monster. Later, as I began to get authority and respect (and eventually the section he had once controlled) I found out what his masters had thought of him. They were afraid. He terrified them. You think it was August Shining that ended Krishnin’s career in espionage? Only by default. He had already been marked as a threat. Agents had been sent to deal with him. If Shining hadn’t pulled the trigger, someone else would have done. He was uncontrollable, he was dangerous and, above all, he was quite, quite, mad.

I came across him once, just sitting on his own in the corner of that warehouse. I don’t think he knew I was watching him but he just sat there in the semi-dark, whispering to himself and working at the skin beneath his fingernails with the point of a stone he had found. That was the Krishnin I remember, not the authoritarian, the magician, the master spy, no… To me Krishnin will always be the madman in the dark making his fingers bleed.

I knew little about the operation. We just followed orders, believed what we wanted to believe and did as we were told. Krishnin was not a man you questioned.

What we didn’t know was that Operation Black Earth was not officially sanctioned. Instead it was the conclusion of a path Krishnin had followed since the war. He saw it as his master plan, the ultimate strike against the West.

He had been working with a German scientist, Hans Sünner, off and on for years. Like Krishnin, Sünner’s interests lay in combining modern scientific thinking with magical methodology. Most of his work was nonsense. Years later I worked through his notes in the hope of finding salvageable material. I came away with little more than a headache and a profound contempt for a stupid man with a dull mind. Krishnin did not share my opinion. To him Sünner was the guiding light in a number of his later operations and experiments.

A few of us had been working late in the warehouse. I say working; when Krishnin was not there his authority dwindled. The men liked to talk brave when they knew they could not be heard. They called him the Soviet Satan, Comrade Frankenstein… names I can’t help but wonder if he would have relished. There were five of us in total, hidden away on the upper floor, drinking and playing cards. We didn’t imagine we were ever under any threat from your country’s authorities. I assumed they would assess the work as we had: grotesque but pointless, no threat to anyone. I, in my ignorant way, just picked up on the mood of the others and adopted the same casual air. I was living in a cheap room of my own by that point, a cold and wet little place that I tried to avoid spending time in. The landlady had designs on me. I think she had designs on everybody. So, I would hang around with the others, drink their liquor and smoke their cigarettes. Sometimes I would even win a hand or two. That was as good as life could get back then.

Despite our lack of concern we had guarded against being caught unawares. The rear entrance was alarmed. So there we were, half drunk and happy without the shadow of Krishnin, when suddenly the alarm went off.

Leonid was the one who always pulled rank; he had been an officer in the army and never failed to remind us of the fact. The minute the alarm sounded he was whispering orders, demanding we dowse the lights and get ready to either fight or make a break for it, depending on who it was that trying to creep up on us.

We lay in wait at the top of the stairs, listening as two people – Shining and another man, whose name I never learned – broke in through the rear door and began to nose around.

I was actually terrified. I hadn’t seen combat, I just fetched and carried, kept my head down. It had been easy to forget that I was part of a force on enemy soil, a spy who would likely be shot if discovered. I think I had subconsciously adopted the country as my own even then, a problem I had to deal with many times over my subsequent career.

Once we were sure what we were dealing with, Leonid went first. Shining had been heading up the stairs and Leonid shone his torch on him, pointing his gun at the young man’s head while a couple of the others ran down the stairs past him, to detain his companion.

It was a brief and painless business. Shining’s associate fired a single shot but didn’t manage to hit anybody; I think he was too surprised to aim properly.

I was sent to contact Krishnin – a pointless exercise, I would soon discover, as he was already on his way to the warehouse. I have no idea whether he had been aware of Shining’s interest or was there through dumb luck – I never found out.

At the time I didn’t care. I was happy to leave the building, having no desire to see what was to happen to the two intruders. I was young and naive, but I wasn’t stupid. There was no way they would be leaving the warehouse alive.

Does it sound as if I’m trying to present myself in a positive light? Painting a picture of a reluctant young man caught up in business he had no taste for? Partly that was true, then. My career afterwards was another thing. I have not always been so reluctant in matters of violence; there’s plenty of blood on my hands. After that night there would be a period of chaos and uncertainty, one that I filled with training and preparation. I got out of the country for a while and when I returned I was not the uncertain boy who had left. I still could not claim the fervent ideologies of some of my peers, but I adopted my role with relish and determination. I have, in short, done many bad things for what I hope were the right reasons. That those reasons were contradictory to your government’s welfare I make no apology for. Both of our governments have torn at each other’s throats over the years. I am what I am.

When I could get no answer from Krishnin on the telephone that day, I was torn. I will admit that I was tempted not to return to the warehouse. It struck me in that moment, in the gentle cold of an English winter, that I was in a position where I might run. Whatever was going to play out in that building would do so with or without me. I was not a deciding factor. Might I not, instead, just walk off into a new life, leave all that behind? Well, it’s obvious which decision I made.

By the time I was back at the warehouse, Krishnin had arrived. I hung back, hoping to observe but remain uninvolved. What a coward I sound. But there, it’s the truth.

Krishnin had got both Shining and the other man tied to chairs and was interrogating them. They were not stupid; they were aware that the moment they gave up their knowledge they would die.

My attention was immediately taken by Shining. He seemed out of place in that room, blood trickling from a wound in his forehead. An academic in a war zone. Perhaps that is what he always was. Though, like me, he learned how to fight soon enough. Perhaps that night was his first lesson.

‘I have no intention of telling you anything,’ he said. ‘Do what you like.’

You don’t mean that, I thought, or you wouldn’t, if you knew what this man is capable of.

‘Will you be still saying that,’ Krishnin replied evenly, ‘when your colleague has lost the first of his eyes?’

‘I doubt it will come to that,’ Shining said. ‘We’re not quite as vulnerable as we appear.’

‘Oh, really?’ Krishnin laughed at that and a couple of the other men joined in, sheep as always. ‘And what is your cunning plan of escape?’

‘Well,’ said Shining, ‘if I told you that, it would hardly be very “cunning” would it? But you’ll see soon enough.’

And then I saw the strangest thing.

Afterwards, I would hate myself for my inaction. I could have stopped what followed. I think it was guilt about that which spurred me in my later career and gave me the conviction I had previously lacked.

At the time I was simply confused. You could hardly blame me. Others were a good deal closer than I was, and if I could see what was happening, then why couldn’t they? Later, when working through some of our intelligence on Section 37 and its agents, the mystery of that night was solved. The reason nobody else saw the turning point in the situation is because they weren’t looking directly at it.

The prisoner whose eyes Krishnin had threatened was being all but ignored. His chair was facing Shining’s but some distance away.

Because of Shining’s statements, and his confidence, all eyes were on him. Nobody but me saw the small stranger simply walk up to the other man’s chair, cut the binding ropes with a knife and place a revolver in his hand. Because nobody ever did see Cyril Luckwood, did they? Not unless they were paying very close attention indeed.

What came next was so quick, so unbelievable, that I struggle now to describe it with any degree of accuracy. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, the important thing is the result not the action. Both Luckwood and the man he had just freed brought their guns to bear and, within a matter of seconds, the battle was over. There had been five men plus Krishnin, men I had known well. Men I had liked. Now there was just Krishnin, the smell of cordite in the air and a good deal of screaming.

There was little I could do; I was not armed. It is with no shame at all, therefore, that I admit that I hung back. I knew that I was as beneath their attention as Luckwood had been. Hidden in the shadows by the front door, I watched transfixed as the little drama concluded.

Shining was released. He took a gun from Luckwood and pointed it at Krishnin. But my employer had one last card to play. He possesses a singular skill – an ability that had kept him alive even when his superiors had all but lost faith in him, and the curse that I truly believe robbed him of his sanity. He began to fade, his body disappearing even as we looked on. In that moment, Shining had to make a choice: allow this man to vanish or take the opportunity presented. There was no time to consider how the disappearance might be possible – thoughts about that would come later.

He pulled the trigger.

I do not blame Shining for taking that course. I am aware that he still questions it, wonders if there had been another option. There was not. This man was clearly a deadly threat and Shining did what he needed to. He shot Krishnin at point blank range, unloaded a .44 cartridge right into the man’s chest even as he faded away completely. In moments, the only thing to show the man had ever been there was a patch of blood on the concrete floor. The body was never – could never – be found. Neither your service nor mine saw any reason to look. Not even Krishnin could survive a bullet wound of that calibre to the chest.

I dare say Shining’s superiors wrote his report off as delusional. Perhaps they assumed Krishnin had attempted to escape via the river, his body lost to the tides. My side simply didn’t care. Krishnin was gone, Operation Black Earth was stalled before it could even take effect. A potentially embarrassing situation was avoided. We were happy.

Me? I ran. Out into the night. Perhaps I never really stopped running until a few years ago.

CHAPTER TWELVE: GHOSTS

a) Shad Thames, London

Tamar knew it was unlikely she would find August, but she had to occupy herself with trying. She was not someone who relished inactivity.

‘You’ll wear out your shoes,’ her mother had once said. ‘Burn them right off your feet. When will you learn just to sit still?’

The answer to that was: never. Something her mother would have grown to accept had she not been killed, like so many, by the aerial bombing during the war.

Tamar had been seven years old when a strafe run wiped out her village. She had her wandering feet to thank for her life. When the bombs fell, she had been up in the mountains, seeing how far she could climb and how far she could see. She had climbed high enough to be knocked off her feet by the slipstream of the planes as they soared past after dropping their cargo. It seemed as if she had been climbing back down ever since.

The next few months had been a mess. Living off the food she could find or steal, running from troops, running from everybody… Tamar found herself quite at odds with the world; it had nothing she wanted in it.

Picked up by Azerbaijani troops, she finally lost sight of herself altogether.

In the years that followed she still chose to shut away, a locked chest stuffed with a life nobody would choose to relive. Passed from camp to camp, she had been slave, then lover, then fighter. Eventually, the Azerbaijanis traded her to a group of Russians as part of a weapons’ sale. In her, the head of that Russian cartel found a potent weapon, an angry young woman who would sell sex or deal death, depending entirely on the whims of her new owner.

If she hadn’t met August Shining in the summer of 2006, she would almost certainly have died, by her own hand if need be. He had got her out. She had helped him with intelligence; he had found her a passport and a new life.

Seven years later and she still felt she owed him, despite his insistence otherwise. August was still the only thing in her life she chose to love. He couldn’t understand why she hadn’t completely left her old life behind, had begged her to give up the trade in her body that she conducted in her small flat above his office. He had tried to find her other work, even offered her a wage through Section 37. Tamar would not have it.

Her body meant little to her. It was a tool. One that had saved her life on a number of occasions. August assumed she continued to sell it because she felt worthy of nothing else. He assumed it was an act of self-punishment. August was very sweet, but he shouldn’t assume so much. Men always liked to get beneath the skin of women, some were just more obvious about it than others. She knew he meant well, and was just trying to understand, but she didn’t need his understanding, just his friendship.

It was about perception. It was about who retained the dominant position. She did what she did because it allowed her to be financially independent and, if she was perfectly honest, emotionally distant. Her clients were all regulars; from the lonely IT manager who brought her presents (sweet little things, tokens that made him feel like he was in a relationship of the heart not the wallet) to the cold and silent ‘Mr Green’ (she was not stupid enough to think it was his real name) who coupled, grunted, paid and left. It was business. It was controlled. She didn’t take on new clients now, didn’t take risks. She survived. And, in doing so, she kept an eye on the one person in her life that she considered important: August. She was not a woman who took her debts lightly and August was a man in terrible need of looking after. Or had been until now.

Toby. What did she make of him? He was a man who needed to get out of his own way. So many people seemed to spend their lives constructing roadblocks to their progress. Maybe August would help Toby just as he had helped her. If they found him. If she found him. It was not a job she could entrust to someone else.

Tamar found the warehouse by following Toby’s instructions, and took a small moment to appreciate the magic of its invisibility as she walked from the modern world into this dark, forgotten corner of the ’60s.

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.’

b) Iain West Forensic Suite, Westminster, London

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.’

c) Shad Thames, London

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.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: TRUTH

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.

‘They kept it alive for four days. Four days of this thing beating itself (or anyone or anything that came anywhere near it).

‘I remember one of the other men in the team crossing himself and offering an apologetic prayer. “It fights to be free,” he said. “It knows it’s unnatural, is desperate to return to the darkness.” We Russians always were pompous old sods.

‘Having brought it back to life, they couldn’t “kill” it again. Whatever they did, it continued to writhe around. In the end they cut it up and dumped it.

‘Krishnin was ordered to cease the experiment, to reassign the funding and men to something more palatable and actually viable. But Krishnin was not a man to give up so easily. Besides, he had already been pursuing Black Earth off his own bat for some time. He considered the experiment a success and had already rolled out a program of contamination. The serum was being distributed on a large scale; undertakers all over the country were using it. Security was negligible – nobody worries about poisoning the dead. The serum was spread far and wide.’

‘And then?’

‘This went on for some considerable time. Krishnin was determined he would prove our government wrong. In the end though, he was shot, and as far as we were concerned the matter was buried. Literally.’

I took my phone out of my pocket and triggered the app. ‘It’s been dug up again.’

‘Eight hundred and seventy three, five, five, seven, five, five, seven…’

‘When that countdown reaches zero, I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot more bodies clawing their way back onto our streets. How many?’

Gavrill looked panicked. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t… but… hundreds of thousands! You have to understand we were distributing that stuff for well over a year. Nearly two. Shining only became aware of it when Krishnin returned from that final visit to Moscow.’

Wonderful. A fifty-year-old time bomb, ignored by everyone, was about to blow up on my watch.

‘We have to stop the control signal,’ said Gavrill. ‘It’s the only thing we can do. A bomb without a trigger is nothing.’

‘No shit, Ivan,’ I said, biting down on The Fear.

This was too much. I had to find a way of getting the rest of the Service involved. There was no way I could handle it on my own. But would anyone believe me? I had the evidence of Harry Reid… but could I convince them that he was only the tip of the iceberg? That there might be whole armies waiting to follow his example?

‘So stupid,’ Gavrill was saying, his manner, calm until then, overcome by his own panic. ‘He should never have been allowed to operate. They knew what he was like, knew he was mad. That thing he did, that ability of his… you’re not supposed to be able to take your body with you. That was what did it. That’s what turned him, I’m sure of it…’

Some of his words filtered through my thoughts and triggered an alarm at the back of my head. I realised that I hadn’t asked the one question of him I should have done. Suddenly The Fear lifted.

‘Say that again…’

SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

‘Are you all right, Krishnin old chap? I heard one hell of a kerfuffle going on upstairs. Argumentative rats? Oh… If you’ll forgive me for noticing, you don’t look your best either. Something happen to your chest? You look like someone’s been using you as a pin cushion for a particularly lethal pin.’

‘I have been keeping an eye on your colleagues. For someone who claims to be working on his own, you seem surrounded by people.’

‘A few well-meaning amateurs, perhaps, nothing more. Did one of them take umbrage? With something sharp?’

‘It is of no consequence. I am in a better condition than you, I think.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me some stitches, ibuprofen and a lazy week in Brighton won’t fix. We Shinings heal quickly.’

‘Then perhaps I should see about making your condition more permanent.’

‘If you were going to kill me, you’d have done so by now. It’s obvious I don’t know anything and, even if I did, tied to a chair and steadily bleeding on my nice suit trousers, I’m not in a position to do much with the knowledge. I suppose you craved the company?’

‘It has been a quiet few years. It is better here if one keeps to oneself.’

‘A strange choice for a base of operations, certainly.’

‘It is peaceful and, thanks to my unusual condition, the residents tend to leave me alone.’

‘Unusual condition. Yes. I’m impressed. You move well, considering. Is there a gym here?’

‘I am better than most. My motor functions seem relatively unimpaired. Other test subjects varied. The process is imperfect. So far, for example, I have been the only candidate with sufficient strength of will to continue functioning intelligently.’

‘Strength of will? From what you said I think it’s more likely you owe your continued thought-processes to my youthful squeamishness. I didn’t take a head-shot. You died slowly. The transition was controlled, the switch from one state of being to the other gradual. How long were you even medically brain dead I wonder? Seconds?’

‘I wasn’t in a fit state to judge.’

‘I imagine not. Could have made all the difference though, don’t you think?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Intelligence isn’t necessary to have Black Earth prove a success. I need an army of fighters not thinkers.’

‘A common enough assumption on the part of dictators.’

‘A dictator? No. I have no wish to rule. I just want to destroy things.’

‘Hardly a noble goal. I realise we never knew each other that well, but I confess I expected better from you. I thought you were a man of learning?’

‘I am. I have learned what I would like to do.’

‘But why? Where’s the gain? Is it revenge? Is it ideology?’

‘There must have been a good reason once. As the years have gone by it becomes hard to remember. Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters! You’re proposing to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. You can’t just do that sort of thing on a whim.’

‘It feels like I can. And that might be the most important thing. I do it because I can.’

‘That’s an aphorism for climbing mountains, not mass slaughter. You said before that you want power, you want control… Power over whom? Control over what?’

‘I don’t know. You’re trying to analyse me. Trying to understand me. Why? Is it because you think that knowledge will help you talk me out of what I want to do?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘But the thing I really want, the thing that drives me more than anything else is to see this happen. You have nothing to argue against. I am doing this because I want to.’

‘But there must be a reason…’

‘Must there? Not anymore. I am a simpler man. I am a force. A solid punch aimed at your country. I look forward greatly to clenching my fist.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: TRAVEL PLANS

a) Sampson Court, King’s Cross, London

I pressed the doorbell at number sixty-three, and paced up and down waiting for it to be answered.

‘Oh, it’s you…’ It was Jamie. ‘How unexpected and slightly annoying – I’m on the last few pages of Death Comes as the End and it’s all working out rather well.’

I pushed Gavrill inside.

‘How charming,’ Jamie shouted over his shoulder. ‘Alasdair, have you been ordering old men online again?’

‘He’s a neighbour of yours and he has something to discuss with you.’ I looked at Gavrill. ‘Tell him what you just told me.’

The old Russian squirmed. ‘I do not make a habit of discussing state secrets with strangers.’

‘I’m not asking you to make a habit of it. Just tell him about Krishnin.’

‘Should I put the kettle on?’ Jamie asked.

‘Just pay attention.’

Jamie sighed, ushered us through into his lounge and turned off the radio. Lauren Laverne was cut off halfway through extolling the virtues of the latest bright young thing to pick up a guitar and sing about heartbreak.

‘Krishnin was a traveller,’ said Gavrill. ‘He could step out of our plane of existence and into a higher one.’

‘Him and me both,’ said Jamie. He looked to me. ‘Are you trying to get some social club started?’

‘Krishnin had a special skill, though,’ Gavrill continued. ‘Not only could he travel in that other plane mentally, he could pass physically into it. He could step out of our world completely and into the other.’

‘That’s not possible,’ Jamie declared. ‘People are uncertain how to even define the other plane, but most agree on one thing: it’s theoretical not physical. It’s head space, a concept, not a solid geographical location.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Gavrill. ‘It’s both – a region of the mind that exists as a real, solid place. But you are right that Krishnin should not be able to go there. It is the ability to do so that made him the creature he is.’

‘You’ve been there,’ Jamie said to me. ‘You’ve seen what it’s like. A hollow nightmare of a place, outside the physical laws we’re used to. Locations shift, time isn’t a constant… It just isn’t possible – a person can’t physically go there…’

‘It was that skill that made him so precious to my government back then,’ Gavrill continued. ‘Think of it: a perfect spy or assassin, able to step in or out of our world as he chose. You want to plant a bomb at the heart of your enemy’s stronghold? Fine. He will carry it there, place it where needed and then vanish once more.’

‘He can carry other physical objects with him?’

Gavrill nodded. ‘Of course, although in actuality, it wasn’t as simple as that. If we had been able to control such a man, we would have been unstoppable.

‘However, the act of passing between the planes had a great effect on him – it exhausted him. He had to rest between the transitions. More importantly, time is not synchronised between the two planes. There was no way of guaranteeing when he would arrive back in our world once he had left it. His skills looked good on paper, but they didn’t work on a practical level. Still, the potential was there and he was the darling of the Service because of it.’

‘But it affected his mind,’ I prompted.

‘Yes. The other plane, whatever it is, does not like intruders. It tries to repel foreign matter, like a body expelling a bullet. It altered him, twisted him. By the time I met him I’m not entirely sure he was fit for either world. Eventually, as you know, he proved too unreliable and there was no other choice but to have him removed.’

‘Except someone saved you the job.’

‘They did.’

‘Or rather didn’t, as has now been proved by the fact that Krishnin is alive and well and has snatched the old man from beneath my very nose.’

‘Tim’s in trouble?’ asked Jamie.

‘He is, and he needs you to help him.’

Alasdair appeared in the doorway. ‘Oh God, spies again? We must have a word with the council; they can’t keep cluttering up the place.’ With this he promptly retreated.

‘Of course I’m happy to help,’ said Jamie, ignoring Alasdair’s interruption. ‘What do you need me to do?’

‘Where Krishnin’s gone, we need to follow.’

b) Section 37, Wood Green, London

Back at the office and trying not to take out my frustration on the soft furnishings, I was descended on by April. It felt like the last straw on my particularly over-burdened and aching back, but she managed to calm me down.

‘Sit down or I’ll slap you,’ were her words.

I told her everything I’d discovered from Gavrill and filled her in on my plan for Jamie and I to follow Krishnin. She took it all in her stride – was there anything that could ruffle this woman’s feathers? She sat and listened, filling the office with the smoke from endless menthol cigarettes.

‘And you’re still here because… ?’

‘Jamie won’t go right away. He says he needs time to prepare. Which I think means get drunk. Or catch up on The Archers, I really don’t know, but it’s driving me up the wall.’

‘You say that time between this plane and the other doesn’t run in parallel?’

‘Normally, though it’s certainly parallel enough for the countdown to be working. Maybe the radio signal is holding the two in sync? Oh I don’t know… Still, I can’t force him, can I? It does make sense to be refreshed and we have until the 31st. I just can’t reconcile delay with the fact that Shining’s trapped in that place and the clock is ticking.’

‘Understandable, but I suppose you have little choice bar holding a gun to the boy’s head.’

‘Precisely.’

‘And what’s Gavrill doing in the meantime?’

‘Talking endlessly to Moscow, I imagine, preparing a cover story for use when this all blows up in our faces.’

She smiled. ‘Glad to see you’re feeling positive.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, how can I? I thought I was managing, you know? Keeping pace with the weirdness, accepting what was going on and dealing with it the best I could. But now I’ve stopped. The adrenaline is running out and I can’t even begin to get my head around the absurdity of everything.’

‘Oh, it’s all mad, certainly. August’s life always is. I don’t know how he manages. I suppose he’s been doing this so long it’s become second nature. I joke with him, of course, as the one person who knows as much about this section and its cases as he does, but it’s beyond me too. I just let it wash over me. Because I can. Because it’s not my problem. So I do sympathise.’

‘I just…’ I leaned back on the sofa, resting my head and closing my eyes, trying to find a sense of calm. ‘Your brother acted as if I was more than capable of handling all this and, to be honest, that was lovely. That was a first. My career has not been exactly plain-sailing. I’ve made a few mistakes and—’ Was I going to tell her this? Yes. I rather think I was. ‘I’ve been suffering from panic attacks for a few years. They’re not too bad. Nothing compared to some people, certainly. I manage. But August doesn’t really know me. He thinks I’m stronger than I am and right now he’s depending on me and… I can’t share his sense of faith. I am not the man he thinks I am.’

‘I dare say you’re not the man you think you are, either,’ April said. ‘Seems to me the only real problem you have is one of self-doubt. Well, that and a truly disastrous dress-sense, but that’s hardly life-threatening.’

‘What’s wrong with my dress-sense?’

‘We were discussing your sense of self-doubt.’

‘Fuck that! I want to know what your problem is with my suit.’

‘Nothing at all. I’m sure it was excellent value and it’s lovely that you like to donate to charity.’

‘It wasn’t second-hand!’

‘Oh, I was wondering why such a thing would have been bought twice. A catalogue then?’

‘This from the woman who looks like a cake stand in a self-indulgent French patisserie.’

‘Good enough to eat, certainly. Now, have we stopped fretting about ourselves quite so much? I’m not terribly good at counselling.’

I smiled at her and shook my head. ‘Terrible woman. God knows how your brother stands it.’

‘I am his rock.’ She stubbed her cigarette out on the damp wood of the windowsill, improving the look of it considerably.

My phone rang and with it came the sudden realisation that I had forgotten something… someone.

‘Derek?’

‘Charles. Look, I’m in a bit of a panic. Has that girl come back to you? She said she was a friend of yours and Leslie’s. Only… it’s my fault. I’ve been so caught up in what I was doing. You know what it’s like: the repairs were a nightmare and I lost track of time and—’

‘Derek, calm down and tell me what’s happened.’

‘She was upstairs, just looking around. I wasn’t really worried. I just… well, I kind of forgot about her.’

That made me angry because I had forgotten her too, being so caught up in everything else.

‘I just finished,’ he continued, ‘and realised I hadn’t heard her for a while so I went to look and… well, there’s no sign of her. She’s nowhere in the building. I thought she might have come back to you?’

‘She’s not here.’

‘Oh God… you don’t think… like with Leslie…?’

‘It’s my problem, not yours. Just get out of there for now and I’ll meet you tomorrow morning. Can you do that?’

‘Of course, but I should look for her, she must still be…’

‘Listen, Derek, I need you just to get out of there. OK?’ I wasn’t about to risk the same thing happening to him. ‘I’ll meet you first thing, say six o’clock, outside the cafe where we saw you today. I’ll handle this.’ I hung up on him. I could explain properly the next day and the more back-up I had the better. In my panic at the moment August disappeared, I had insisted Derek get his machine functioning again. As time had passed I now realised it had been unnecessary: August hadn’t vanished into another time; he’d been snatched by a man who was very much a problem in the present. Both Derek and Tamar had been placed in a vulnerable position for nothing. I really needed to focus before I risked the safety of anyone else.

‘It’s Tamar,’ I said to April, the words uncomfortable in my mouth. ‘She’s vanished too.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: GONE

I tried to call Tamar but there was no answer. I hadn’t expected there to be, but I would have been an idiot not to try.

We had now lost two of our people. I tried not to let that trigger The Fear. Objectively the mission hadn’t changed. I would get both of them back. Hopefully.

April and I took our leave of the office. She agreed to use her connections to get things moving here in case I failed – a possibility I had to accept. If our plan to find Krishnin and sabotage the signal didn’t work, then there needed to be back-up, someone to prepare people for what was coming.

I went back to my flat to eat and sleep, to recharge my batteries.

I even called my father, God knows why. Perhaps because I felt I needed even more of an emotional kicking. The call went straight through to his answer phone. I couldn’t be bothered to leave a message.

I spent the night on the sofa. Turning everything over in my head, trying to find some sense. Maybe even a logical answer to everything, something that would prove that all of this was just delusional, that there was a sane explanation.

I gave up at about three in the morning. Sometimes you just have to look the crazy in the eyes and get on with it.

I showered and changed then left the apartment at about five.

By the time I made it to Tower Bridge, the sun was coming up over the water. I took a moment to stop and stare. Just to soak a little of it up. After all, I might not get the chance again.

I had opened the app on my phone on the way over, listening to that repetitive voice for a few minutes before shutting it off again. To hell with countdowns; they didn’t help. I had about thirty-six hours to deal with Krishnin. Either I would manage it or I wouldn’t. Time had little to do with it. I could only hope it might be enough for April to do something constructive if I failed. Though what I couldn’t begin to guess. What could anyone do? Put an armed guard on every graveyard in the country?

I pushed the thought away. For now that was her problem. My job was to make sure nothing like that would be necessary.

I walked down to the waterfront and along the river, allowing the time to make myself as calm as possible. I should have been exhausted from the lack of sleep, but I was still wired. If I was lucky enough to get through what lay ahead, I would no doubt come crashing down. For now, it was all I could do to swallow the nervous energy and hope to use it constructively.

Jamie was seated on a bench on the promenade, Derek pacing nervously up and down next to him.

‘I’m finally getting to meet all the gang,’ said Jamie as I joined them, his voice slightly slurred. ‘Thanks for that. Maybe we can even have a Christmas party this year. Providing we’re not all horribly dead.’

He took a long draught from a takeaway coffee mug and smiled blearily at me.

Derek pulled me to one side. ‘I don’t mean to worry you,’ he said, in that way people have when they mean to do exactly that, ‘but the lad is steamed. I mean, utterly off his head. Whatever’s in that cup, it isn’t a bloody latte.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘it’s all part of the plan.’

‘Alasdair wouldn’t come,’ said Jamie, taking another drink. ‘I did try to convince him he ought to, seeing as I might never come back, but he didn’t come in from clubbing until two hours ago and he fell asleep in the bath. He thinks he’s making a statement. As far as I can tell the statement is: “I can’t handle how amazing my boyfriend is, so I fall asleep in bathtubs”.’

‘He worries for you,’ I said.

‘How sweet. I’ll tell him you said that once I’ve got home and prized the loofah off his cheek.’

‘Are we ready?’

‘What do you think?’ He took another drink.

‘I’d say so.’ I turned to Derek. ‘OK, is your van nearby?’

‘Just around the corner.’

‘We need to go there.’

I helped Jamie walk the short distance, trying not to panic about the fact that he seemed to find paving stones both hilariously funny and impossibly hard to walk on.

‘I’ll have to shift it soon,’ Derek said once we’d arrived. ‘I don’t want to get a ticket.’

‘That should be fine. Jamie…’ I shook him, trying to get his attention, ‘does it matter if Derek moves our bodies?’

‘Nah,’ he shook his head, ‘we’ll always come back to them. If we can.’

That was as good as I could hope for under the current circumstances. I tried to explain to Derek what it was we were about to do. Needless to say he took some convincing, but his panic over Shining and Tamar had made him was willing to just do as he was told.

‘I need you to keep our bodies safe,’ I said. ‘That’s your job, OK? We’re going to lie down in the back of the van and then we’ll be out of it, dead to the world.’

‘Not the best choice of words,’ said Jamie, trying to open the van’s back door.

‘You need to make sure the bodies aren’t interfered with –’ I continued, slapping Jamie’s hand away from the handle ‘– that they are left in peace and are safe for us to return to.’

‘Fine, I’ll watch you like a hawk.’

‘I don’t know how long we’ll be gone,’ I explained. ‘Jamie tells me time moves differently over there, so what feels like minutes for us could be hours to you – I really don’t know. To be honest I’ve barely got my head around it myself. Just don’t worry and keep us safe.’

‘You can rely on me.’

‘I know I can.’ I patted him on his big arm, opened the back of the van and climbed in. I lay back and indicated the floor next to me. ‘Come on, lie down. Let’s get on with it.’

‘It’s like sixth form all over again,’ Jamie chuckled, clambering in, ‘getting up to no good in the back of a Transit.’

‘Just shut up and do whatever it is you do.’

He lay down, put his drink next to him and took my hand.

‘Takes a minute,’ he explained. ‘I just need to…’

He drifted off. I closed my eyes.

The morning was quiet but I could still hear the distant sound of traffic, the way our breathing echoed inside the confined space of the van.

‘How do you know if it’s working?’ Derek asked.

I was about to tell him to shut up when I felt myself sink away.

When I was a kid I broke my arm. I was stupid: playing on a rope swing with some mates from school. We’d built a large bed of leaves and the challenge was to see who could swing the highest and land on them. I won. Later, in hospital, lying on the gurney after the anaesthetist had put a cannula in the back of my hand, I listened as she told me to count back from ten. I would be unconscious before I finished, she assured me. She opened the valve and I began to count. I could feel the liquid rising through my arm, a heat that emanated from the back of my hand soaring upwards. I’ll be asleep by the time it reaches my head, I thought. It reached my biceps and I switched off. Blank. Gone without even being aware of it.

This was just like that.

Then I was aware again. Surrounded by silence. The floor of the van beneath me felt distant, as if I had been lying on it so long that my nerves had gone dead. The only thing that felt real was the touch of Jamie’s hand in mine. The only true sensation. The anchor. The lifeline.

I opened my eyes.

SUPPLEMENTARY FILE: BERLIN, 1961

Olag Krishnin made his way across Alexanderplatz, his mind filled with the future. He had always been a dreamer. A man born to change things. His father had always said as much, right up until the NKVD put a bullet in his head for sedition. Krishnin had learned from that. To foster great ideas was only natural, but you kept them to yourself if you wanted to draw breath long enough to act on them.

He made his way to Mollstraße, chain-smoking his unfiltered cigarettes as he walked. He was like a locomotive, glistening in his long, black leather coat, puffs of smoke dissipating in his wake.

Sünner’s apartment was on the top floor of a short complex and he made himself run up the stairs, always determined to challenge himself if he could. If you made things difficult and yet succeeded, you were always the champion of your world.

‘I hope you brought something to drink,’ said Sünner after letting him in. ‘I haven’t left the house in days and we will want to celebrate.’

‘You’ve done it?’

‘In my own time. Go through. Let me have my moment; they do not come so often since the war.’

Sünner’s living room was a chaos of abandoned moments, meals half-eaten when the hunger became too profound to ignore, papers half-read. A selection of blankets on the sofa suggested he had taken to sleeping in here.

‘I’m using the bedroom for storage,’ he explained, making a half-hearted attempt to tidy. ‘There just isn’t the space.’

Krishnin pulled a half-bottle of vodka from the poacher’s pocket of his coat. ‘Find some glasses. Clean, if possible.’

Sünner went in the direction of the kitchen while Krishnin made space for himself on one of the chairs. The German soon returned, holding a glass which he offered to Krishnin and a teacup which he kept for himself. ‘Always give the guest your best,’ he said and laughed.

‘Tell me how it happened,’ said Krishnin after he had poured them their drinks.

‘The irony is delicious,’ said Sünner. ‘The breakthrough came from the Jews. I savour that. It’s a little piece of poetry.’ He hunted for a cigarette, eventually accepting one from Krishnin.

‘You are familiar with the Golem?’ he continued.

‘No.’

‘It is a creature from their heritage. A man made from mud, brought to life with the word of God, a little piece of magic buried inside the dirt. It has always been a symbol of their fight against oppression.

‘There are many accounts but this is the most famous: In the sixteenth century, Rudolph II sought to expel the Jews from Prague. The rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel built a Golem from river clay, bringing it to life with the secret name of God and using it to defend his community. Legends claim that it was their saviour, until Rabbi Loew forgot to deactivate it on the Sabbath and it went wild, killing Jew and Gentile alike.

‘The truth, of course, is more brutal. The Golem was always mindless, a thing without a soul, dead matter that sought only to attack and kill.’

Krishnin had been growing impatient, only too aware of Sünner’s habit of wandering off the point. These words brought his attention right back.

‘That makes you think, eh?’ said Sünner, draining his cup of vodka and holding it out to be refilled. ‘It did the same for me. Come this way.’

He led the Russian through to the bathroom, a yellowing, foul-smelling place of mould and dripping pipes. He pointed towards the bath where a stunted figure lay in a few inches of dark water. It was a rough sculpture of a man, about a third natural size, its face a rough flower of gouged clay.

‘I built one,’ said Sünner. ‘And have spent the last few weeks trying to isolate the process for giving it life.’

He looked at Krishnin. ‘The secret name of God, eh? My reading is expansive but that took even me a while.’

He pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his shirt and dropped it into the hole in the sculpture’s face. He smoothed over the clay and stepped back.

‘It’s not just the name,’ he said, moving over to the sink where a bulky cassette recorder lay inside the chipped ceramic bowl. ‘It’s the prayer.’

He pressed play on the cassette and a hissy recording of chanting filled the small room. Krishnin could recognise none of the words; the low quality of the recording and the damaged speaker rendered it into an indistinct wall of noise. But the thing in the bath heard it well enough as it began to thrash, its wet, paddle-like hands slapping the tin sides, its stumpy legs kicking and flexing, spraying dirty water across the wall where it dripped like arterial spray.

‘Impressed?’ asked Sünner.

He was. Of course he was.

Sünner switched off the recording.

‘Once it’s awake the prayer’s done its work,’ he said. ‘The only way you can stop it now is to remove the word of God.’

Sünner advanced towards the thing in the bath. The Golem grabbed at him, trying to beat his hands away as he shoved his fingers into its soft skull and pulled out the piece of paper buried there.

‘The thing is mindless. I cannot control it. Not yet. But if one can bring mud to life, then one can animate any inanimate matter.’

‘Cadavers?’

‘Cadavers.’

‘But the name… the piece of paper.’

‘Oh yes.’ Sünner led them back through into the sitting room and walked up to a set of bookshelves filled with a mixture of occult texts and medical manuals. ‘Inserting the secret name of God – that was the stumbling block. But you can write with more than just pen and ink.’

He held up a petri dish. ‘A nucleic acid sequence, for example, can, theoretically, be expressed as a set of letters. A notation. You can translate words into DNA. Combine that with the preservative—’

‘And you have a Golem made of flesh and blood. All you need is the prayer to activate it. A radio broadcast.’

They both drank their vodka, Krishnin’s hand shaking with excitement as he poured them one more.

‘In this case,’ Sünner continued, ‘it is not so easy to deactivate them. The word is written through their entire being. It cannot simply be torn out.’

‘Deactivate them?’ asked Krishnin, taking a mouthful of vodka. ‘Why would we ever want to do that?’