Europe at Midnight (21 page)

Shaw looked at the thin folder of notes before her again, a proposal so classified it couldn’t be committed to electronic media. She sighed. “He has to do it willingly,” she said. “I don’t want this coming back to us and somebody accusing us of forcing him into it.”

Bevan nodded. “Of course.”

Shaw thought about it some more. “Very well,” she said finally. “I’ll take this to the D-G. If she signs off on it, we go ahead. If not, we never discuss this again. Agreed?”

Bevan nodded. “Agreed.”

R
UPERT LOOKED AT
Challis’s photographs, the short piece of video he had shot, without changing expression. When he’d finished, he said, “I don’t understand.”

“These are pictures of the Campus,” Jim said. “We think something terrible has happened there.”

“It’s Winter,” Rupert said. “Why is it Winter there and Summer here? I thought we had the same seasons.”

“That’s not snow,” Jim told him, hating every word he said. “It’s ash.
Fallout
, we call it. The result of intense heat caused by very powerful explosions.”

Rupert stared blankly at the photographs again. “Explosions,” he said.

“Someone has deliberately destroyed the Campus,” said Jim. “We don’t know who, and we don’t know why. But the place is a wasteland. It’s dangerous even to go there at the moment. It might stay like that for years. Centuries.”

“Araminta...” Rupert said very quietly.

“If she survived the explosions... well, let’s hope she didn’t.”

Rupert turned his head and looked at him. “The Science Faculty,” he said. “They did this.”

“Maybe,” Jim said.

“They’d
won
,” he said. “They were in control.”

“Something went wrong. It could have been an accident. We don’t know.”

Rupert frowned. “I genuinely have no...” he began. He shook his head.

Jim sat forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “I really have no right to ask you this, old chap,” he said, “but we’ve come up with a bit of a plan. You can say no if you wish, but we’d like you to help us.”

“Help you?”

“We have a book...”

1

R
OWLAND THOUGHT IT
was unlucky to meet someone twice in the same place. It was one of his lesser superstitions, something which might have manifested itself in a normal person as flicking spilled salt over the shoulder or not walking under ladders, but he knew a lot of people and I always wondered how he managed to keep track of where he had met whom.

In the course of our association, we had met at the British Museum, on the steps of St Paul’s, and any number of pubs and cafés. This week it was the fourteenth-floor restaurant of the St George’s Hotel on Langham Place.

I arrived at half past ten and the first thing I noticed was that the place was almost empty. The second thing I noticed was the immense floor-to-ceiling windows and a staggering view out over West London.

“I know,” Rowland’s voice said beside my shoulder. “I never realised this was here, either.”

I turned. “Don’t ever sneak up on me again, Rowland,” I told him.

He shrugged. “I just went for a piss,” he said. “Saw you getting out of the lift as I left the bog. Didn’t mean to startle you.” He smiled. “Coffee?”

There was a little area with easy chairs and coffee tables. Rowland led the way over to a table near the windows and put his briefcase down on a chair. “Won’t be a minute,” he said, and went off to find a waiter.

I stood at the window. Beyond the glass was an immense vista of buildings under a sky piled high with fluffy grey clouds.

“All right,” Rowland said. He took his briefcase off the chair and sat down. “Sit.”

I sat in the chair opposite him. Then I shifted the chair so the view wouldn’t distract me.

“Good week?” he asked.

“Not bad. You?”

“I’ve had better.” He put his briefcase on his knees and opened it. I’d never seen a briefcase in such poor condition. It looked as if it dated from the days of Lloyd George, and someone appeared to have been playing football with it on a regular basis ever since. It had been re-stitched several times without bothering to replace the previous stitching, so it looked kind of fluffy along the edges. “Did you find it?”

I took the envelope from my coat pocket and handed it to him. He stuck his finger under the flap and ripped it open. He turned the envelope upside down and a small hardback book dropped into his palm.

A waiter came up with a tray and proceeded to put a coffee pot, sugar bowl, milk-jug and two cups on the table. Rowland was busily examining the book, so I thanked the waiter and he went away with the briefest of disapproving glances.

“It’s in good nick as well,” Rowland said, paging carefully through the book.

I poured coffee for us. The sugar bowl was full of those big amber-coloured crystals that take an hour to dissolve. I put a spoonful of them into my cup and allowed myself a look at the view. Two big aeroplanes were descending towards Heathrow, sandwiched between the clouds and the buildings. A ray of sunshine broke through the clouds and swept across London like a searchlight. It was all I could do not to stare in awe.

“Tustin’s
Where To Go In Wartime
,” Rowland said, shaking his head. “Can you imagine they actually published a book like this?”

I nodded. Six months of being associated with Rowland had eliminated my capacity for surprise.

He favoured the book with a smile that someone else might have used for a kitten or a new-born child, then he looked at me with a concerned expression. “Was it expensive?”

“We were under budget,” I told him.

The smile reappeared and he took to paging through the book again. I poked at my coffee with the spoon, but the sugar showed no signs of dissolving yet so I sat back and watched Rowland obsessing over his newest acquisition.

He was wearing a perfectly ordinary grey pinstriped business suit today, but he still managed to radiate an air of seediness. His shoulders were dusted with scurf, and what remained of his hair was plastered to his scalp with liberal quantities of Brylcreem. He’d had a shave this morning, which was unusual, but he hadn’t bothered to extend the shave below his jawline. There was a faint but persistent aura of mothballs and Scotch about him. It was hard to imagine that he had ever been a policeman, let alone – as he claimed – a Detective Chief Constable.

He looked at me. “What?”

I shook my head.

“Fine.” He scratched his head. “Expenses.”

I handed him the envelope containing my train tickets, taxi receipts and hotel bills, and he dropped it into his briefcase without bothering to look at it. “How much?”

“Five hundred and seventy-seven pounds and eighty-one pence.”

He blinked at me. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“That’s a lot of money for a trip to Sleaford.”

“It is,” I agreed. “But the book wasn’t in Sleaford. It was in Sandwell.”

He looked nonplussed for a moment.

“It’s in the West Midlands,” I told him. “But I didn’t go directly there. Your friend in Sleaford sent me to Chesterfield, and his friend there sent me to Sandwell.”

Rowland still didn’t look convinced, but he shrugged. “Oh well, I suppose it all works out in the end.” He reached for his inside jacket pocket. “Shall we call it five hundred and seventy pounds?”

“Shall we call it five hundred and eighty?”

He smiled and took out his wallet. “Five hundred and seventy-five, for change?”

“What does that mean,
for change
?” I asked. “I’ve never understood what that means.”

He shook his head. “Buggered if
I
know.” He opened his wallet and looked down into it like a man taking a last look at his favourite child before they leave home forever. He took a wad of notes out and held them out to me. “That should be enough.”

I took the money and counted it. “It’s thirty quid short.”

Rowland shook his head again and gave me a twenty and a £10 coin. I put the money in my pocket and then we sat looking at each other.

Finally, he opened his briefcase, reached in, and took out a long buff envelope. “Three this time,” he said, putting it on the table and sliding it across to me. “I’ve got buyers for two of them already.”

“I want a bigger cut this time,” I said.

He blinked at me impassively. “Oh yes?”

Alison and I had been rehearsing this ever since I got back from Sandwell, but now the moment had come I felt my resolve waver. Rowland just sat there looking bemused and rather sad and vulnerable.

I said, “Look, Rowland, this job takes up a lot of my time. I could be using the time to do something else.”

He narrowed his eyes. “So, what, you’re doing me some kind of favour?” he asked.

“Virtually, for the money you pay me.”

Rowland sat back and rubbed his chin. “I’d have thought there’d be dozens of people who’d be glad of the money I pay you,” he mused.

“Possibly.” Alison had told me to threaten to quit, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had the sudden feeling that Rowland would accept my resignation and then just go off and recruit someone at the nearest Job Centre.

“You’re good, Tommy,” he said. “No doubt about that.” He half-turned in his chair and looked at the view. “Do you think I make a lot of money?”

“I think you probably do.” I knew for sure that he had three other people travelling around the country looking for rare books for his business. “I think you can probably afford to cut me in on a percentage of the sale price of the books I find for you.”

I actually saw him wince slightly. “Well,” he said. “That’s a new one, Tommy.” He turned away from the view and looked at me. “Tell you what,” he said, nodding at the envelope. “You go and find me those books, and we’ll talk about it when you get back.”

If Alison had been sitting beside me, she would have told me to get up and walk out. But she wasn’t sitting beside me. So I picked up the envelope and put it in my pocket.

2

I
HAD MET
Rowland through someone I met in a pub, which was as good a way of finding a job these days as any. Rowland looked for books on behalf of specialist bookshops and collectors. It was a basically peripatetic life, travelling the country from auction to closing down sale to bankruptcy clearance to car boot sale. There were those who painted the whole business with a sort of cloak-and-dagger veneer, shady deals in the car parks of out-of-town shopping centres, exchanges of plain brown envelopes, but really it was just grown men looking for books for other grown men. And it was a man’s life. There seemed to be very few women involved.

I spun this chap I met in the pub my patented hard-luck story – unable to get a job, girlfriend and landlord to support, drowning not waving – and he said he might know somebody who might need some help in his business, and so Rowland had come into my life.

It was not, when all was said and done, a terribly difficult business. Rowland got requests for specific volumes from clients, he passed the titles on to me, and I went to look for them. I was still relying mostly on Rowland’s contacts, but I was starting to build up my own too.

The trick was, Rowland and I were not the only people out there looking for rare books. Quite often there would be only one or two extant copies of a book, and the thing was to get in first, make the best offer to the seller, and get it back to the buyer before someone else came along with another copy. It didn’t pay enormously well, but it paid.

“I would have walked,” Alison said when I told her.

“I know you would,” I said. “And that would not have been helpful in the slightest.”

She shook her head. “Tommy, I can’t work you out.”

We were sitting in the living room of the flat we shared in Kentish Town, eating fish and chips off trays on our laps. The entertainment set was playing a BBC soap opera which had actually been running for a hundred years. Or maybe it just felt that way.

“He’s taking the piss, Tommy,” she said. She was a stout woman in her early thirties, sexy in a no-nonsense sort of way. “Exploiting you.”