Bad Aji

by Simon H Scott

Bad Aji is the 50,000 word novella that I wrote when participating in the 2006 National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I thoroughly recommend taking part as the exercise of keeping to a daily word count irrespective of quality, of forging ahead with something and resisting the temptation to go back and edit demonstrates how much one can achieve in such a short space of time. My writing rarely hangs on its plotting, so the decision to write a conspiracy thriller was challenging too. I tended to write myself into a corner and then struggled to find a way out of it again. Naturally I had grand plans for the ms; a reworking, a fleshing out, a more lucid explanation of the conspracy and a cleaner execution of the "bad aji" notion that drives much of the tale, but of course I have done none of it. What follows is the version as it stood on the 30th of November, all ablush in its petticoats.

“…so I’d just like to say, thank you again for all your hard work and commitment, and I wish you every success for the future.”

The eight people crowded into the mailroom applauded mutely as Hal Jennings handed John Stoole a gaily wrapped and wine-bottle-sized package and card.

“Thanks, Hal, really. This is too much.” John lifted the tabs of the wrapping as deftly as the last two months of opening other people’s mail would allow him and lifted the flap of the box. Inside was a bottle of the red wine that the building’s caterers supplied. John estimated it probably cost the firm about £3 a bottle, and the caterers about a tenth of that.

“Oh!” John said, in mock surprise, before turning to the assembled. “I’d just like to say what a pleasure and a challenge it has been working with the team over the past few weeks, and I’m very grateful for what I have learnt in my time here, both personally and professionally. I hope the team goes from strength to strength despite, or maybe because, of my absence. Thank you.” There was a polite laugh at John’s feeble attempt at humour, and his speech closed to the same mute clapping as before. The assembly dissolved, in that curious undefined way, ceasing to be a group and suddenly becoming a disparate collection of individuals. Some moved over to the two trays of sandwiches and St Michael tubs of chocolate minirolls. Others moved towards John to shake his hand, pat his back, and then leave.

“So,” Hal began, and for John the dread set in, “Are you going on to something, workwise?”

“No.” John said, his voice tracing a well-practiced inflection, “my agency reckons it may have something soon, but nothing confirmed.”

“Ah! A man of leisure for a while then?”

“Yep.” Silence grew dark between them. Then John said “Well, I’d better…”

“Okay,” Hal held his hand out, “thanks again.”

John shook it, lifted his bag, and headed out of the door.

So it was.

So it always was.

John wandered past the permanently employed, all beavering away at their desks over rushed reports and slipshod spreadsheets. He always got a strange feeling once one of his assignments had reached completion, anxiety about his growing overdraft, but sheer pleasure at a slate wiped clean.

But now, he had approximately three to five days of doing nothing. And before that, a bottle of wine and an evening of solitude.

“A time for reflection,” he said out loud, nodded to the ever-changing security guard and felt the embrace of the cold November air. It ought to further his unnerving that this assignment had drawn to a close so close to Christmas. He was most often called in to tread water while a replacement for an abrupt and cloud-covered leaver was found, but with Christmas on the horizon, the permanently employed would knuckle down, sniffing the carrot of Christmas bonuses and the stick of morally imperative consumerism. However, he seemed curiously buoyant, and as his feet hit the pavement he half imagined them dangling, as he floated along New Bridge Street, bobbing between the work-shackled on the way to Blackfriars station. Balloon, he thought to himself. Balloon. He mouthed it now, enjoying the roundness of the word.

The train, when it arrived, was four carriages too short, but Stoole didn’t mind the crowding. Tonight he had decided to savour the crowding, to bend to the will of the crow, and allow himself to be sandwiched, manhandled, elbowed and groped, as each station made its exchange of commuters. His eyes darted from the Evening Standard, headlining with Race Clash At Old Baileys, and the ragged blocks of colour of the train’s corporate art. Usually Stoole would find the visions of countryside idyll insulting, but today the ironic sense of the crowded carriage and the woodland tableau appealed to him. He wandered into the image, imagined the red tower before him was his own, a dwelling far more pleasing than the squalid but affordable flat his letting agency had found for him.

He lived by agency – for employment, for residency, and it was an arrangement that suited him. London was an odd place, so impermanent, anonymous. John felt that if he tried to hang on to anything it would merely lead to stress. He decided, he forgot how long after he’d moved to London, that he should give up finding a permanent work, or a mortgage. At first he convinced himself that he was merely shopping around for the right work, while earning rent at the same time. At first he convinced himself that he was merely waiting for the house market to collapse before he pursued the ownership of property. But the more assignments that John got through, and the further and further out of reach local property prices grew, John began to see the weaknesses inherent in wanting either. He felt now that there was a greater happiness and security in the ability to walk away from the minor commitments of temporary work and rented accommodation than he would under the weight of a permanent job and a mortgage.

It soothed him that tonight Hal would find himself thinking of how to darn the gap in the workforce. It soothed him more to ponder what Hal would do when the logsheet database John had designed for him finally fell over. Did that make him cruel? He didn’t think so. He liked to think that he demonstrated his own value in every job he was given, and if that value was overlooked, and it usually was, then that was the responsibility of management. Besides, John would be long gone by that point, two or three assignments down the line. What is more, the agency would have long since received Hal’s glowing feedback sheet, too. It was almost a con.

John liked a takeaway when he’d finished at a firm, especially in a job he despised. He had this fantasy that if he acted recklessly with his money, this would somehow lead to the agency receiving work for him. It was superstitious and irrational, and John knew that, but he didn’t care. He had come to enjoy such rituals, and saw them not as any powerful piece of magic, merely something that leant his life a little structure, and in a life of leaps from flat to flat, and job to job, he needed a little of that.

He unlocked the deadbolt, and the Yale, and slipped inside his flat. On the floor was the usual slurry of pizza menus, come-ons from the local Estate Agents, and official looking letters from residents passim. These he scooped up as he wandered into the kitchen, placing the wine on the table and the mail in the bin. He kicked off his shoes, undid the top button of his trousers, and wandered into his lounge-cum-bedroom. Slumping on the sofa he removed from the envelope the leaving card that he had briefly glanced at in the mailroom. By the look of it they’d sent Frap, the New Zealand receptionist, out to buy the card, a crudely drawn cartoon girl, tears streaming, and the slogan “Sorry you’re leaving.” Clinton Cards genius. He flipped it open and read the messages as uninspired as the card’s design, most of which had been written by people who he only knew from his rounds with the mail wagon. He often puzzled at why the companies he worked for chose to give him a proper send off. It meant little to him. It was a “one to many” relationship. Most managers he worked for had fewer temps than he had had managers; he wouldn’t mind too much if he just went home of a Friday in the same way he went home every Friday, and simply never returned. In most cases he would prefer it, to avoid the awkward questions asked by the permanents, to have to feign the emotional register associated with someone leaving after a much longer service than a few months. He’d decided, in the end, that it simply came down to guilt and vanity on the part of the managers. It wasn’t so much the urge to say goodbye to him “properly” but to be seen to say goodbye to him properly, to not appear cold.

John finally reached for the well-thumbed Chinese Takeaway menu, dialled the number, which he didn’t need to look at, but nevertheless required the number in front of him, and listed his phone number and menu choices to the girl at the other end. She for her part feigned the writing down of the order, so familiar it was to her. This John realised only by knowing he would do the same thing in her place. He was told it would be about thirty to forty minutes, which he knew already, and the phonecall was ended.

John stood, wandered over to his bookcase and took down another, almost identical leaving card from the uppermost shelf, replacing it with the latest piece in this collection of empty gestures. He wandered back into the kitchen, pressed down the pedal of the bin, glanced at the mess of signatures lining the card and dropped it into the bin. Washing up to The Archers, he thought.

Warm hands immersed in water to a backdrop of the implausible extramarital affairs of dairy farmers. Some days he resolved to make the switch, to wash up after he ate, rather than before, but somehow a full stomach stood between him and the sink every time. As the sink was draining, and the Archers theme was undercutting the drama of the final scene, his phone began to ring. Drying his hands, he retrieved the receiver but all that was to be heard was the dialling tone. Fucking NTL, he thought, returning to the kitchen to cork the wine. Breathing cheap red wine was an odd business – the time being determined more by John’s desire for inebriation, than any requirement of his palette.

Hal had reached the end of his tether. His wife had left him two months ago, taking his three-year-old daughter with her. He hadn’t let on to anyone, of course – couldn’t afford to give management any excuse for an attack; the joy of being utterly dispensable, a job secured by employment law as strong as dental floss. The house, stripped to a few sticks of furniture, seemed vast without the sound of his daughter, or the warmth of Julia. The phone gave up ringing and switched to a steady tone. He depressed the cradle and hit redial. Stuck to the wall by the phone the letter she had left, cruel, blunt, short; an instrument of torture.

The Chinese lad at the door had been delivering dinners to John for as long as he could remember, always hurried, and strangely self-conscious. He’d never learnt his name, but he’d often wanted to. It was similar to the commuters he shared a train with, usually for only a couple of months at a time, until his agency moved him on. He’d watch them in the reflections in the windows, imagined their lives beyond the carriage, judge them by that life. He’d often see their lives so clearly he had to remind himself that it was just his fantasy, that the reality of them lay out of reach. Oddly, he couldn’t imagine any kind of life surrounded the boy. He watched the lad scrabble around in his pouch for change, and wondered if he was studying, what his aspirations might be.

“£1.60 change.” The boy said.

“Thank you.” John replied.

Forty minutes later, John lay replete, a half-empty bottle of red by his side. He was dozing slightly, watching weak comedy play out to a curiously generous audience. The phone rang again, and again no-one was on the other end. John replaced the handle, lifted it again and dialled 1471. The automated voice informed him that the last person to phone him had done so at 2pm that day and had withheld their number. He sighed, and hung up. So much for that service, he though, and struggled to his feet. Strong wine this. TV flicked to standby, he rolled onto his bed and allowed himself to doze off, looking forward to a few days of nothing, so long as he didn’t let himself worry. As sleep overtook him, something began to niggle, a thought nagging at his mind like a mosquito, but its whine was no match for the cheap red.

“Vladimir!” the figure before him said, gleefully, and from a dozen different places in the rain slick alley took up the cry “Vladimir! Vladimir!” and a chorus of giggles followed close behind.

“What do you mean?” John said, voice smudging its way treacle-slow through the air.

“Vladimir!” the figure said again, before turning tail and scuttling into the dark.

“Wait.” John pursued, but too slow, much too slow. Waves of darkness seemed to ripple before him. He held his hands before him, but they seemed unreal, idealised, like the smooth and featureless fingers of a mannequin. He looked up, and watched the ripples make their way along the alley. After each wave of darkness, the light seemed to return all the stronger, and he saw now that the alley ended in an impenetrable wall. The small figure seemed to have vanished. There was nothing there save for a palette leaning against the wall, and a newspaper blown into pieces, drifting as if to emphasise the fact that John was alone. John was always alone. The banging of wood on wood could be heard, and underneath it the sound of someone laughing under their breath. John saw now (how could he have missed it) that there was a darker darkness beneath the palette. His taunter was hiding. John fought against the intimidation, and approached, pulling the rough-hewn wood from the wall.

“Vladimir?” He asked, attempting to limit the question to a single word. The figure raised his head, eyes streaked with tears. John’s brow furrowed.

“Hal?” he said. “Hal…Jennings?”

The sound of wood on wood, but louder this time. John started awake, rubbed the back of his neck and squinted at his radio alarm clock. 3am. The noise sounded out again, and in shock, without thinking, he called out “hello?”

The banging stopped, and a knot of tension rose in John’s stomach. He looked around for something weapon-like, but there was nothing. A few books, which would hardly suffice. Nor would his television. He held his breath and listened. He could hear nothing now, but knew how little that might mean.

Swallowing, he rose to his feet, trying hard to make as little sound as possible, and made his way to his bedroom door. Steeling himself, he lurched into the corridor and across into the kitchen. Light streamed in from the streetlamp outside. The window was open, and the gusts of November air was rocking it in its frame. John finally relaxed, walked over to the window and closed it. He screwed the holding bolt into place, and it made little screeching sounds that reminded him of something that he couldn’t automatically place. Ah yes! The chattering laughter of the strange creatures in his dream. And what was it they had said to him? Vladimir. Why did that name seem familiar?

He wandered back into his bedroom and looked at the weeping cartoon girl. He lifted the card down and flipped it open. Mystery solved – there amongst the names was a strident signing of the name Vladimir. He replaced the card, but in so doing knocked another off the shelf. This he lifted from the floor and idly glanced at the signatures. There, again, was the name Vladimir, and beneath it the phrase “You’ve escaped!” Quickly he snatched a third leaving card from the shelf, and a fourth, and a fifth. Each one had the same name, in the same handwriting, and the same message. “You’ve escaped!” He took the last card down; Vladimir, and staggered back, letting the cards fall to the floor. What did this mean? What did this signify? In a daze he wandered back into the kitchen, this time drawing the blind. He turned on the kitchen light, opened the bin with his foot, and retrieved a seventh card from beneath the remains of his takeaway. Brushing off the strips of green peppers and water chestnuts, he opened the card, knowing before he did so what he would see. “Vladimir!” and underneath “You’ve escaped!” Was this some kind of joke? Someone from his employment agency somehow getting to the card. Perhaps he was being stupid, and this was actually some sort of procedure from the agency that he hadn’t picked up on, like that lunch they had bought him when he received his first payslip.

He dropped the card back into the bin. He knew he should sleep, but the various Vladimirs seemed to be standing in the way of any rest tonight. He swigged wine from the bottle, but it tasted sour to him now and so he poured it down the toilet, flushing it back into the water supply. He replaced the cards, one by one, on his bookshelf, and lay back down on the bed.

He would phone his agency in the morning, ask to speak to Vladimir, and that would be that, because what else could there be? A bizarre cabal set up to play a mindless trick on him that flew so far below his radar that it was in danger of stopping traffic? But still there was something worrying about it, and as much as he tried to dismiss it from his mind and sleep, he would find his thoughts returning to it, like a hand unconsciously returning to a half-formed scab. Underneath it all was that squat, dark figure, gleefully shouting the name out to the night. What was behind that glee? Why, if his subconscious was so insistent on him making the connection, did his dream take on the shape it did?

John sprang up, rushed into the kitchen, sprung the blind up, and opened the window.

“Vladimir!” he shouted to the night, laughing at himself for doing so. “Vladimir!” he shouted, and felt, for a moment, as though he had escaped, but he still had no idea from what. When he returned to his bed, he found sleep welcomed him with open arms.

Chaddick’s arms were aching, a sure sign that he had been overdoing it. Good, then, he thought. I should be overdoing it. He flicked the keyboard underneath the monitor, and stood. His office was windowless, a security measure he had been advised not to fight, and so he had insisted that the four CCTV cameras on the east side of the building be fed through to four plasma screens on one wall of his office. London never stopped. It went to bed, certainly, but the roads were always with traffic, be it pedestrians or cars. People arriving, people leaving, people about their business. He sighed, and wandered over to the screen that depicted the corner of Vauxhall Bridge, where a woman in a full-length coat had been waiting for some time. Periodically she checked her wristwatch; her mobile phone. He reached out to the screen, and stroked the line of her.

A gentleman approached her, from behind. She turned, arm raised to her heart as if shocked. Then she lowered her arm, approached the man and kissed him. Good, Chaddick thought, and smiled,

“She’s a whore.”

Chaddick turned to see his aide standing in the middle of the room.

“You didn’t knock.”

“It’s late, I thought you may have nodded off.”

“What makes you think she’s a whore.”

“We know she’s a whore, sir. We managed to isolate a frame of the CCTV to run against the index. She has previous.”

“Sometimes it’s nice not to know such things.” Chaddick said. The couple were departing, arm in arm. “They seem so young, so full of love. I bet they don’t even know they’re being watched.”

“We’ve had a shift change.”

“A shift change? An action?”

“Yes sir. We didn’t have much choice.”

Chaddick sighed. “As you see fit.”

“Are you okay, sir?”

“Tired, Cabbs. Just tired. I don’t suppose there’s been any news about our… our quarry?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“And this whore of yours? Will you have her followed? Have someone pick her up?”

Cabbs just shrugged. “Not our brief, sir.”

“And how long did it take you to find her in the index?”

“About an hour. That’s not reflective of the time it will take when the system goes live, of course, but it does demonstrate progress.”

“So you can find out the… the dress size of a stranger on the street outside in an hour, but you can’t find fact one about my brother’s killer?”

“I’m… I’m sorry sir. The scene was cold. All we’ve ever had to go on is rumours and rumours of rumours, and they’ve all come to nothing.”

Chaddick stepped towards his drinks cabinet, ran the top off of a bottle of whiskey and poured himself a couple of fingers.

“You want something?”

“To drink? No sir.”

“No, that’s right, you don’t.” Chaddick said, keeping his tone neutral, hoping that his aide wouldn’t be able to tell if he was merely remembering the fact or issuing a dictum.

“I have some paperwork that needs signing. It can wait ‘til tomorrow.” Cabbs dropped a manila folder onto Chaddick’s desk.

“What are they?”

“Information releases. We’ve exposed about 300 cases in the past year that would have been easier to investigate if certain lines of enquiry were open to us. Library records, supermarket loyalty schemes, that sort of thing.”

“My God. Everything will come through us in time.”

“It is inevitable.” Cabbs said, and wandered over to the screens. “I took the liberty of putting some of the case notes in with the paperwork.”

Chaddick slipped the paperwork out of its folder. Murder, rape, molestation, weapon trade. Cabbs looked over and smiled.

“Grim reading,” Chaddick said.

“It’s what we’re up against now, sir. Quite a change from your days in the field, I bet?”

“It seems so, Cabbs.” Chaddick said, and reached for his pen. Chaddick was an old fashioned fellow. There were those that said he was too soft. Cabbs had spoken in the past of eavesdropped conversations, of cowardly accusation of cowardice in the line of duty. Chaddick knew then that he’d have to sharpen up or be thrown to the dogs. Lucky then, to have found an aide such as Cabbs, someone with a nose for the kind of business his life had become. His standing with the firm changed almost overnight, and if his conscience had been pricked at all, those pangs were put paid to when his brother was killed. Someone had waited one morning in the grounds of his brother’s house. As his brother had driven towards the gates, the car had been riddled with bulletholes and then set alight. A meaningless killing and the person responsible was still at large. This confused Chaddick. Every action that he was required to authorise, every push at opening up further data sources, gave him new hope that the data would lead to an advance in the case of his brother’s murder. This he kept to himself. He feared that if he voiced these beliefs, even if it were just to his aide, then it would lead to trouble, that he would be put out to pasture.

He passed the paperwork back to Cabbs, who methodically checked each signature. That done he clicked his heels, turned, and left Chaddick to his ruminations. Chaddick took a swig of whiskey and turned back to the monitors. Dawn was still hours away, but the IR sensitivity of the cameras gave the illusion that sunrise was just moments away, He looked out to the horizon, as if to take in the whole of the city.

“You’re out there somewhere,” he said, and downed the rest of his drink.

John had had a rough morning. The wine, still unfinished, had taken far too great an effect on him and he was left with a clawing hangover. His mouth felt as if it were lined with grease, and his head was pounding. He stumbled into the kitchen, downed paracetamol with milk drunk from the carton. He finished the milk, and as he binned the container, remembered the revelation of the previous night, the recurring name in his token leaving cards, a mystery buried in false sentiment.

He still resolved to check with his agency, to determine if there was a Vladimir amongst them that would account for the repeated name, but he was in no state to talk to anyone as yet. He finally sloughed his work clothes, and staggered into the bathroom. He caught his reflection, grey and stubbly. He parted his dried lips, took a fearless look at his gums and teeth, still discoloured from the night’s drinking. He brushed his teeth – mint-foam and blood, and swilled his mouth out. This did nothing for his stomach, but rid his mouth of the phantom kebab. He shaved, nicking himself in several places, and then showered in water he kept marginally too cool for comfort. Tingling he dried himself off, and crowbarred himself into his “ice-cream” clothes, so named because of his habit of lounging around at home in them while eating icecream.

Again he delayed making the phonecall. The day was bright and cloudless. Brisk. He decided a visit to Brockwell Park would be the order of the day, a stroll to blow the cobwebs free, and he could make his enquiries afterwards. He had the door of his flat open when the phone rang. He answered it.

“Hi John?” a familiar voice sounded out.

“Hi Fiona. How’s you?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Good good.” Conversations with his agency were as scripted as the rest of his working life, but he didn’t mind that so much. It allowed him to take a stand back, sometimes.

“John, you’re not working at the moment are you?”

“No, no I’m not.”

“Okay, will you be available for a position starting on Monday?”

“I should be. What is it?”

“Mailroom again, I’m afraid. Would that be okay?”

“Sure, sure. Keeps the wolf from the door.”

A well practiced laugh from Fiona. “It’ll be on the 15th floor at St Andrews Tower, which is just a short walk from-“

“No, Fiona. I think you’ve made a mistake there. I just finished two months there.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It should be on my record. I mean, I’m pretty sure they don’t need anyone, but if they do, then I’d be happy to go back. It just strikes me as odd, that’s all.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll go back to them and see what the story is, and get back to you to let you know where we stand. There’s probably been a breakdown in communication somewhere.” Fiona laughed nervously.

“I dare say.” John said. “Oh, while I’ve got you, do you have a Vladimir working for you?”

“Vladi-” Fiona said, not finishing the name.

“Yeah, a memorable name, I’d’ve thought.”

“Not that I’m aware of. Look, I’ve got to let you go, I’ll get back to you about this Andrews Tower business, soon as.” And with that she hung up. John shrugged, and headed back out again.

The park was as picturesque that morning as he’d hoped, and with the painkillers finally kicking in, he began to feel the grip of his hangover easing. Joggers made their way along each path, and the keepers’ vans made slow progress along the perimeter, changing the bags in the litterbins. It was quite for a London park, but John would make a game of how many people came there. He would make his way out to the middle of the park, stare at a verge of grass, and usually within a minute or two someone would cross his view. Today, though, John was happy just to wander. He had dressed deliberately lightly, in just a t-shirt and jeans, and let his walking and the sun provide him with warmth. It had taken John several visits to the park over the past few months for him to see all that the space had to offer. The most surprising discovery was the dirt BMX track, which seemed too large to have been missed the first time he had gone there. He headed there first, but kept his distance. A lone man, he felt, always seemed to make people suspicious, and this was no more true when it came to the keepers, who he felt kept constant watch over him whenever he was there.

His mobile rang, but the number didn’t show. Rather than take the call and disturb his day, he refused it, and switched his handset off. He took a deep breath of air, felt it cold in his lungs. It was as if he was still in the shower, that his cleansing still continued. He moved on, listening to the thwack of tennis balls. Above him a plane made its way across the sky, and to John even that progress seemed strangely idle. If only every day could be spent like this; in pursuit of happiness. He felt a sadness then, but not an unpleasant one, as his mind drifted towards forthcoming work.

He offered a cheery good morning to an elderly couple that were gripping the chain link gates to the community greenhouse, and walked on. He liked to make his way to the middle of the park. Dead centre, the city seemed kept at bay. He closed his eyes, and faced the sun. In his mind he was back on the train, looking at the redbrick building surrounded by trees and fields. How long would he have to work before he could afford such a place. The grey commuters either side of him bled away into nothing. Even the carriage became less real, and the crudely laid out blocks of colour seemed to him almost concrete. He pictured himself there, imagined the park grass beneath his feet grew from the earth at the foot of a house that he alone kept, and far from the madding crowd, the odd abstract jobs, chasing pieces of data around dark buildings, with each move making more data, each move adding more work to someone else’s load.

He headed now to the small white picket fence that belonged to the curious model railway track, the latest of his discoveries. Someone had chalked up “rides 10:30-15:00” but he’d never seen the train running. He straddled the track, a colossus, stooped, closed an eye, and watched the tracks draw closer together the further away they ran from him. He followed the track along, where it split off into two sidings. He ducked down the path that ran between the end of the diminutive railway and the lido, closed for a winter of renovations, its walls peeled back. He crossed the road, headed up past the blocks of flats, the Prince Regent, and turned onto his street.

As he approached his house, the traffic noise seemed to fall away. This happened with a happy regularity in Herne Hill, and John liked to make the most of it when it did. He stood still, a hundred yards or so from his door, and listened to what could be heard, birdsong, the laughter of children too young for school, even the kind of over-the-fence chitchat supposedly long-dead. His eyes flitted up and down the road, and then he saw them, two people sitting in a car and staring at his house. No sooner had he seen them than he made eye contact with the driver. Realising they had been spotted, the driver slapped his mate, who started, and followed his gaze. The car screeched away at speed, and John turned to watch it leave. As the car left his view, he was instantly annoyed at himself for not noting the license plate.

Nervous now, he approached his front door, opened it, and stepped inside. He was reminded of his fears of the previous night, the noises emanating from his kitchen. He thought for the first time as to whether or not he had actually left the window open. With a chill, he realised he had no recollection of opening it. He felt an urge he’d not felt for a very long time. An urge to run.

Cabbs was in his office, working his way through a Double Whopper. Cabbs liked junk food, it was his only vice, save for power, and he felt that they both reflected each other quite nicely. Cabbs was a man of beliefs, and chief amongst these was the belief that big was beautiful. Big government, big business, big burgers. It all amounted to the same thing as far as he was concerned. He had, in his youth, expressed a certain degree of fear and trepidation as he began encountering large organisations. He, like most people, had been on one or two occasions the victim of an administrative error that had led to a degree of hassle and discomfort, but unlike most people this had given him a thirst not to rid himself of the intervention of large and unwieldy organisations, but to join them, to worm his way into them, and use his position for his own protection.

A phone masked by a square of greaseproof paper chirruped. Cabbs flopped the burger down and punched the speaker button.

“Speak” he said.

“It’s Hunter.”

“What have you to report.”

“The action. We’ve a hiccup.”

“Define hiccup.” Cabbs asked, and stood up. He had a feeling he would have to be outwardly aggressive, which he found distasteful but occasionally necessary, and much easier to pull of when standing.

“It’s CASM1735.”

“What of him.”

“We couldn’t get to him last night.”

“That’s not a problem, is it? He’s got no plans. You could have had him sorted out by the morning.”

“We tried, but he got the jump on us. I don’t know how. And… he’s seen us.”

“Seen you?”

“Yes.”

“And that is a problem why?”

“He’s seen us before. That can cause us problems.”

“So you fear you’re fearful symmetry has provided him with a mnemonic trigger?”

“It happened before.”

“So we’ll get him lifted by someone else. Where is he now?”

“We… we don’t know. We felt it would be prescient to leave the area.”

Cabbs sighed, sat down, and took a bite.

“Sir? Sir?”

“What’s he saying?” Husband asked.

“He’s not saying anything.” Hunter replied. “Sir?” he asked into the phone again, and then to Husband, “I think he’s… I think he’s eating.”

Husband put his hand to his face.

“Right,” Cabbs said, finally. “This is what’s going to happen...”

John couldn’t say why he had the urge to run. He never liked being watched. One of the few virtues of the city was that it afforded him anonymity. All that seemed to have gone now. He fished a holdall from the bottom of his wardrobe and stuffed it with underwear. Paranoia was welling up in him, and whereas he’d often recognise paranoia in himself and dismiss it as such, he was finding it more difficult to discern between foolish fears and those with real grounding. He grabbed a pair of trousers, balled it up and shoved it in. He ran over the events of the past few days, and everything took on a troubling hew; the phone calls, the opened window, the wine. He paused for a moment, then grabbed the leaving cards and put those in the bag too. Where could he go, though? His city friendships were short-lived, and usually built around work. He knew no-one he felt he could ask, and if his presence might bring with it the attention of dark forces, then it was all the more an imposition. Best to get out of the city all together, he decided. Not with family, somewhere random but familiar. He thought back to his school days, pictured the almost prison-like school gates. A decision then, he’d go to Marlow, maybe the distance and the time would put all of this into perspective. He reached for his phone. Still off. He allowed his thumb to hover over the power button, but then thought better of it, placing the handset, still off, into his pocket, before heading for the station.

No easy journeys now for John. No daydreaming his way into corporate watercolours. He took in every face, judged everyone without any shade of guilt. He felt trapped, and that sense of entrapment was made no easier as he struggled against public transport. He was being followed, being watched, of that he could be sure, but much was that pursuit worth to his pursuers. He couldn’t tell. As his train to Victoria is stopped outside the station, he had to bite down and bite down hard on a growing panic. He was sure he’d not been seen at Herne Hill, simply by virtue of the fact that the platform was all but empty, and had someone been interested in stopping him, then they could have done so with ease. He watched a fox, curled up in the undergrowth beyond the fence, clenched and unclenched his jaw, not feeling any kind of relief as the train finally arrived. But the train wasn’t boarded, it merely allowed another train to pass, then continued its way into Victoria. He walked briskly through the station, stepping through the opened turnstyle, and made his way across the concourse. Again, his eyes flitted from face to face to face, most concern being paid to the early morning drinkers sitting at the Mezzanine. He was paying so much attention to them that he wandered into the path of a bearded blind man, hurrying towards the platforms, his guide failing to keep pace. As the man collided with John, he clucked loudly at him, an eerily accurate impression of a chicken. John let out a whimper, and felt sweat prickle his forehead. Gritting his teeth, he turned his back on the councourse and hurried into the underground. Planned engineering works muddied his journey further, forcing him onto the street and a replacement bus service. By the time he reached Paddington he was sick to the stomach, and on the verge of turning back. Had it not been that he’d have to run the same gauntlet to get back to the privacy of his flat, he probably would have turned tail. As it was he had reached Paddington in once piece, and seemingly unobserved. As he slumped into a loose cushioned seat of a Maidenhead train, he consciously decided to relax. At this rate he would have a cardiac arrest by the time he reached Marlow.

Cabbs made a call.

“Stand down. We just recorded 1735’s Oyster card going through the underground turnstyles at Paddington.”

“He got past me?” the agent asked,

“I don’t think so. Your colleagues must have spooked him.”

“So what now?”

“He could be anywhere. We’ll have to trawl through his record, see if anything leaps out at us. Return to the Grue house, before you’re missed.”

Cabbs replaced the receiver. The morning’s antics had left him hungry. He punched at his keyboard and pulled up a map showing routes out of Paddington. Clicking his intercom, he put in a request for lunch, and the file on CASM1735, Time to get his hands dirty.

John was struck with how quickly the map of his childhood returned to him. Unprepared as he was for this trip back to Marlow, a snug, if slightly pretentious village on the Thames, as soon as he stepped from the train he could recall which way to reach the town centre. He passed the barbers where he had had his hair cut through his youth, and on to All Saints Church. He wandered down to where the graveyard met the river, and sat on a wooden bench that was located there. He watched people come and go on the far bank, in the grounds of the Compleat Angler. It had been thirteen years, he had worked out, since he was here last night, and what struck him was how little things had changed. Having finally stopped moving, he now realised he had done little to formulate a plan of action. If there were answers to be found, they lay back in London, not in this sleepy province. But nevertheless, here he was. He imagined that he had slipped off of someone’s map, managed somehow to take himself out of the reach of some shady organisation or other, but saw now that what little freedom that had engendered did not leave him with many options. But freedom he did feel, and as if to prove this to himself, he stood, wandered over to the river, and leapt from the graveyard to the canoe club, a distance of only a couple of feet, but a jump he’d never had the bravery to make in his youth. From here he made his way round to the park. He punctuated his life with parks, he realised, found in them a peacefulness where he could reflect on his situation, and get in touch with himself. No resolution came now, however. The problem he faced now seemed too vast, too nebulous to be dealt with. He pushed on, made his way up the highstreet, and left onto West Street, wishing to see his old school. So strange, he thought, to be of an age where school was his entire world, such a microcosm. He had, since leaving, faced the same strain of individuals that he had encountered whilst at school, and had realised that school had not really prepared him for dealing with them. But somehow the fact that he had survived school offered him some kind of hope that the problems he faced now were not insurmountable.

But as he drew nearer he began to feel as though something was wrong. The familiarity that had greeted him stepping from the train began draining away. And as he drew nearer, the sickness that he had felt in London returned to him. Where his school should be there was a row of terraced houses. A field lay behind the houses, which ought to have matched the sports field on which he had been humiliated in enforced team sports, but even that seemed disjointed. He wandered along the row of houses, hoping he could convince himself that maybe the school had been closed down, and the land sold for development, but it was no use. The houses had clearly been standing for some time. As if to drive home this truth, a blue heritage plaque was nailed up next to one of the first floor window, stating that Jarvis Cocker had finished writing The Pride Of Bingy Boo on the premises whilst residing their in 1975. John felt his hope snatched away from him once more.

He hurried back to the highstreet, ducked into the local branch of smiths and bought a notebook and a pen. With it he began writing everything he could remember about the school, from the year of its establishment and its motto to the names of his classmates, friends and foes alike. Page after page he filled, as if in a fugue state, and with this done, he began to grow in confidence that the school was real. It was too detailed for him to have somehow conjured it up out of nowhere. But then why was it not where he could remember it being? How could he be sure of its existence when he was clearly in the wrong as to its location? If the school was real, then it had to be out there somewhere, and if he could find it, then maybe he could establish some clue as to what was happening to him, maybe he would begin to find answers.

His headache was starting to return, and the evening was drawing on. He needed to find a place to rest, and soon. Wary of using his cashcard, he spent the last of his cash on a night’s stay at a bed and breakfast.

He was glad of the face of the old dear that took his money and showed him to the room(en suite sink; coffee-making facilities), he was glad of a face he felt he could trust, and even though the room smelt damp, even though the sheets were not entirely comfortable, the curtains in the room were pleasingly thick, and drawing them gave him the welcome illusion of placing an opaque, impenetrable barrier between him and whatever strange cabal seemed to have formed against him. Nevertheless sleep evaded him. His mind was ablur with the events of the previous thirty-six hours and he felt as though he was floundering blindly about in the darkness, with nothing certain to cling onto, no purchase to be had. He closed his eyes only to see the small figure in the alleyway, the one whose cry of Vladimir had sent him on his haphazard journey into the depths of uncertainty.

He turned over, held an arm over his face, and willed the figure away, but no sooner had it vanished he saw where he was. The gates of his old school. They opened slowly, and the darkness within seemed to reach out for him. He shuffled forwards, to terrified to turn from the gate, too terrified to enter. The darkness receded slightly, and he began to pick out details; the bicycle sheds, the palm court, the old wooden door leading into the cloisters. The wind rattled at it until it opened, catching on the red and black tiled floor. Stoole stepped forward, reaching out with an infant hand to better guide him. He wandered along the corridor. The moon seemed so bright tonight, would be full in a matter of days. In the quad he could see, hugging their knees on the floor, seven boys, laid out in more or less a figure eight. Four of the boys wore black shirts, the remaining three white. The figure wandered quick-slow up the path towards him. Jonathan stood his ground. “Vladimir?” he said. Two of the cowering boys glanced up and tittered. The creature silenced them with a glare, then returned a softer gaze to Jonathan. It smiled but shook his head.

“Ko,” it said.

“Ko?” Jonathan asked. It was not a name at all familiar with him.

“Ko.”

It turned again to face the seven boys. An eighth came forth out of the shadows, white-shirted, and took his place in the arrangement. One of the black-shirted boys stood, and wandered dejectedly from the group. The creature turned again to face Stoole.

A tuneless buzzing niose, wake-the-dead loud near deafened Jonathan and he shot out of bed. He found himself in the middle of the room, arms raised in front of him, heart pounding, before his gaze turned to the flashing red digits of the digital alarm clock set into the head of his cot. He caught himself, let out a slight whimper, and deactivated the alarm. He took a towel from the cupboard, pulled on last night’s trousers and tee-shirt, and made his way to the communal bathroom, where he exchanged a functional but uncomfortable nod with a gruff looking fellow, bushy of whisker, as he made his way from the steamy confines. A warm shower this time, hot water a miracle in such a modest establishment, and Jonathan lathered himself liberally with the soap provided. All the while he said “Ko” over to himself, hoping that its repetition would lead to meaning. As he stepped out of the shower and into a stiff towel, he dismissed the word. A dream can still be a dream, he decided, even in the middle of this confusing mess.

Over a full English breakfast he wandered through the notes he had made the day before, as much to assure himself of the reality of his memories as to find any further clues to the school’s disappearance. Here and there he made additions, details that had appeared in the dream and in so doing had jogged his memory further. Yet the further he pursued this mental voyage, the more he began to sicken. As undoubtedly real the place and the memory of it was to him, he found it difficult to place himself within it. He could recall the buildings, the classrooms, a teacher or two. He could conjure up the smells of the place, the texture – the ragged edges and smooth surfaces of the wooden school chairs, yet he could recall lessons, or school friends, or anything that would place him there. It was as though he was merely recounting scenes he had watched a hundred times in a favourite movie, not episodes from his own life. Chewing on a fried slice of bread, he focused on the blanks then, pushed himself towards imagining a child, any child, within the cloisters, or traversing the quad, or filing into the breezy chapel. Slowly, as if coagulating out of mist, someone did start to form. Indistinct he was, but in the black and red splashes of colour, Stoole began to build a school uniform. The boy’s face (he supposed it was a boy) remained a blur, but blazer was there, and jumper, tie and trousers. The tie was patterned with the same badge that adorned the blazer pocket, two arms gripping a horseshoe, and below it… below it… the school motto. Te digne sequere. Te digne sequere.

Stoole scribbled the words, meaningless to him, in his notebook, slurped down the still too hot coffee and left the table. Within minutes he had found his way to an internet café in a building that once housed, if his memory served him well, the old post office. He launched google and keyed in the motto.

Chaddick was irritable. Cabbs had descended on him no sooner had he reached his office with a relentless series of briefings, debriefings, requests and questions. To make this experience worse, Cabbs had arrived reeking of onions, his breath the victim of his junk food diet. After two hours of it Chaddick could not contain his restlessness, stood up, and jingled the keys in his pocket. Cabbs had been mid-sentence, and did not break off speaking for a few words.

“You alright Mr Chaddick?” he didn’t answer, merely stared at his aide.

“I can come back and do this later if you prefer, it’s just I really want to get the ball rolling on some of these actions.”

“I fancy some air. Let’s say we break off for a few minutes, take in the river?”

Cabbs looked around the office, but for what Chaddick couldn’t surmise.

“Sure,” he said.

Minutes later Cabbs was walking uncomfortably alongside the old man, and Chaddick enjoyed the discomfort he was inflicting, forcing the young blood to slow its pace a little.

“Wonderful weather today, don’t you think?” He asked.

“I guess,” Cabbs said. “Is that why you brought me out here? To discuss the weather.”

Chaddick smiled at this. “Do I need a reason? And would that be an unreasonable one?”

“I suppose not.” Cabbs said, and fell silent. Chaddick stopped walking, looked out to the Houses of Parliament. There had been a time when he had felt that the building had stood for something; that it was a meeting place for idealists, labouring hard at preserving something noble and worthy. Years of clandestine manoeuvring and gesture politics had worn that view down, in time. He wondered, and not for the first time, exactly what his function was,

“Why do you do what you do Cabbs?” Chaddick asked.

“I’m sorry?” Cabbs replied.

“Why domestic intelligence? What draws you to it?”

“I just believe in giving something back, sir.” Cabbs replied.

Chaddick laughed loud at this. Bullshit, he thought.

“You want to know why I went into it?” Chaddick said.

“Sir.” Cabbs replied.

“Lyndsay Jarvis.” Chaddick replied. “The prettiest girl of all time.”

“Sir?” Cabbs asked.

“She was a joy to watch, Cabbs. She’d walk into a room and time would hang, just for a moment, as though the heart of the universe skipped a beat.”

Cabbs stared at Chaddick as though he were insane, which merely made him laugh.

“Well, if I can’t be a little poetic at my age, when can I be? I had a great many designs on her, but she was always so serious. In the end I tried to match her seriousness, boned up on the Suez crisis and signed up for the ministry. But of course, by the time I was in a position where I felt I stood any kind of chance with her, she’d gone.”

Chaddick watched the duck-ride, the amphibious vehicle ride, chunder its way up the side of the bank, children bouncing and squealing as the vehicle jettisoned the water it had taken on, whilst there mothers tried, with barely contained terror, to keep them in their seats.

“What happened to her?” Cabbs asked.

“Oh, she died. Trying to save the world. Be wary of serious women, Cabbs.”

The vehicle drove the rest of the way up the slip and turned onto Albert Embankment. A chirruping noise emanated from Cabbs pocket. He withdrew a pager and read from its scrolling LCD screen.

“I have to take a call.” He said, and headed back towards the entrance. Chaddick remained within the embattlements, amongst the curious, almost religious castellation. Oh, Lyndsay, he thought to himself. What path did you set me on? Where have I ended up. Not a single day had gone by without his thoughts turning to her at some point. He had known her so well, it was as though he carried her around with him in his head. Every action he took he could show to her, and watch her smile or tut-tut at him. Recently the smiles had declined.

Every anniversary of her death, he would meet up with his brother, who had been just as smitten with her, if not more so, and they would drink a toast to her, and drink themselves into a shallow oblivion. But now his brother was gone too; another of the great and good struck down by the tyranny of the world; and who was left now to share in his toast to Lyndsay? Cabbs? Cabbs was just another drone. The longer he had stayed on with the agency the more he had come to recognise the way in which it stripped people of their characters, wore them down, twisted them out of shape, and all to the ends of the agency itself. Sometimes he felt that the agency was a living breathing entity, a vast consciousness striving for its own survival. And what then, Chaddick wondered, was he to it? For all his power little more than a flea.

“Speak” Cabbs said, as soon as he reached the confines of his office. The inane conversation with Chaddick had irritated him more than he thought possible. The crazy old goat was obviously getting close to the end, which meant Cabbs would have to do a serious amount of work if his grand plan was to come off. He was in no position to inherit the department just yet. He would have to sharpen his knives.

“We think we’ve got him,” said the voice at the other end of the phone.

“Where, and how?”

“Marlow, Buckinghamshire. We’ve been monitoring web-searches on various tags associated with 1735’s memory set. Part of his base programme is a school memory. It’s pretty much Shenton’s school, over in Oxford, we just transferred it over from his record. Someone in Marlow just searched for the school motto, ah, Te Digna Sequere. Gibberish to me.”

“Follow the path that is worthy of you.” Cabbs said. “Do we have anyone in Marlow?”

“No. We have someone in Maidenhead, though. We could watch for the connection.”

Cabbs stopped to think.

“What if he’s not heading to London? You said this school was in Oxford, right?”

“Either way it’s a change at Maidenhead.”

Cabbs thought some more.

“Okay, do it.”

Stoole raised his head from the cool porcelain. What had he been expecting, he wondered, before another wave of nausea brought a heave from him. He knew the school was gone, why should it be such a surprise that it should appear somewhere else? He pulled the handle, and the flushing water chilled the air, refreshing him a little. He wiped the bile from his mouth and took to his trembling legs.

He ought to go to Oxford, but he was beginning to lose hope of finding answers. He had spent a good half hour running through the school’s website but finding little comfort. The familiar and the unfamiliar rubbed up against each other without any kind of logic or pattern. What would he learn if he physically went there? But the only other path led back to London, and that was no more welcome a prospect. One of the peculiar shocks he had experienced stepping outside of London was the relative paucity of CCTV cameras. Save for those pointed at the children’s playground, the roundabout at the top of the high street and the station, there were hardly any. Watching his step, and hiding himself from unseen voyeurs was an easy thing here, but if he were to return to London he would rarely be out of sight of their unblinking lenses. That said, it was slowly dawning on him that if answers to his questions lay anywhere it was there, in the lion’s den.

To add further worry to his situation, he was now out of cash, and the only way of getting more would involve him using a cashpoint. He was certain that, as soon as he did this, his enemies would have him. The frustration of it was that he still had no idea as to the scale of what he was up against. His confused memory suggested an organisation with powerful means, but the only intervention he had seen involved a clutter of leaving cards, a possibly drugged bottle of wine, and two spooks parked outside his door. It was, he realised, a presumption that the organisation, however able to play with his mind, could gain access to his bank account.

“Fiona’s here.” Cabbs’ intercom blurted.

“Good, good. Show her in.”

A trouser-suited woman in her late twenties walked nervously into Cabbs’ den.

“Please, take a seat.” Cabbs gestured to the chair.

“It seems… Fiona?”

Fiona nodded. Cabbs always liked to feign an uncertainty as to the identities of the subordinates. It reminded them of their insignificance in the organisation.

“It seems, Fiona, that you were the last person to talk to CASM1735. Is that the case?”

“Yes, sir. I contacted him yesterday morning to advise him of his, erm, his new position.”

“New position.” Cabbs smiled, which made Fiona comfortable enough to allow herself a self-conscious smile of her own.

“Yes, except when I’ve spoken to him before, he’s been oblivious about it all.”

“As he should be.”

“Right, but he knew straight away that he was going back to the same place.”

“I’m afraid, Fiona, that some of your colleagues have not been quite as efficient as your good self.”

Fiona smiled her self-conscious smile again.

“Was there anything else you noticed about him?”

“Well, I didn’t really have much to go on. Protocol stipulates that if the memory wipe appears to have failed we are to terminate the conversation as quickly as possible and notify our line manager. All of which I did.”

“No-one’s doubting that, Fiona. Now think, anything at all that might help us track him down.”

Fiona thought for a moment. “His tone,” she said, finally. “The CASMs are usually so docile when you speak to them. He seemed different. As soon as I said the address he cut in; he was certain there had been a mistake. I mean, CASMs are never assertive are they? That’s the point of them, isn’t it?”

“Quite.”

“Oh, and of course the question he asked me. It’s all in the report.”

“Yes, that has been rather alarming. I trust that you have kept your word and not mentioned it to anyone other than your line manager.”

“I have, Mr Cabbs. Protocol is quite explicit.”

“Indeed. Well, I won’t keep you from your duties any longer, Fiona. You’ve been very helpful.”

Fiona rose to her feet. She had a look to her that Cabbs knew of old. A hundred questions were no doubt burning away inside her that she could never ask, That will fade, with time, thought Cabbs. And if it doesn’t, then Fiona would be due a career adjustment. It would be a shame, but that was the way of it. Cabbs opened the door for her. Vladimir was already in the antechamber, and gave Fiona a puzzled look as she filed past. Fiona did not meet his gaze.

Jonathan stared with no little trepidation at the cashpoint, his card gripped in a sweaty hand. A yellow box had been painted on the floor marking out an area people were encouraged not to enter should the cashpoint be in use. It provided no comfort.

“Are you using it or what?” a teenaged girl behind him asked.

“Ah. Feel free.” He said, making a gesture towards the machine. “Forgotten my PIN.” He said, and forced a smile. The girl rolled her eyes and made a show of pushing past him.

Too quickly she had completed her withdrawal, and Jonathan was faced again with the emotionless screen. It ought to be simple really. If he could gain access to his account, he would take out all the cash that he could and make a dash for the station. If he couldn’t then he would make the dash for the station just the same, and pray that he wasn’t caught. But there was a monumental fear in him. He was uncertain, but there was a comfort in that uncertainty, in the not knowing. He knew that when he inserted his card, keyed in his pin, that uncertainty would vanish. But he was backed into a corner, and his fear served no purpose. He gritted his teeth, and stepped into the privacy zone.

“Do you know what I like about large organisations, Vladimir?” Cabbs asked. He sat on the corner of the desk, legs crossed at the ankle, pelvis tipped towards the boy’s face.

“Hierarchy?” Vladimir said, glibly.

“No, not the hierarchy. It’s the hive. A thousand tiny little brains beavering away in their own cells, oblivious to what is happening around them. They’ve got their tiny little task to be getting on with, and they get on with it. Everyone else does the same, and great and wonderful things happen. The hive takes on a life of its own. It recognises its own objectives, and puts them into practice at the speed of thought, and all based on everyone doing their bit. Everyone pulling together, mastering what little aspect of the whole they have been given to take care of.”

“I see, sir.”

“You see. Good. Except you’re not a busy little bee, are you? Oh, you started out well – breaking your targets, feeding back the right kind of information to management, keeping your head down.” Cabbs held open a folder and read from it “You were an ‘efficient and ambitious operator,’ a ‘good team player.’ Didn’t you even start up a football team amongst your colleagues?”

“Disbanded sir. Security risk.”

“Ah yes. I remember signing the order.” Cabbs dropped the folder onto his desk. “Are you happy, Vladimir?”

“Happy, sir?”

“Working here. Does it make you happy?”

“It… it did sir. Like you say, at the start it did.”

“But something crept in?”

“It’s… it’s just that it’s all the same, sir. The numbers come in, we analyse them, we push them up to the next level. It’s all just abstract.”

“Abstract and…”

“Abstract and boring, sir.”

“Abstract and boring. Indeed. You could have pursued promotion, Vladimir. You were well on your way.”

“Promoted to what though, sir? It’s just more of the same.”

“Oh dear me. So what route do you propose to utilise, to escape the boredom you are facing?”

”Sir?”

“How will you relieve the tedium of your existence, Vladimir?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Cabbs picked up another folder, and from it plucked out a pink and orange rectangle.

“Do you know what this is, Vladimir?”

Vladimir looked at it and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Cabbs set it on his desk.

“It looks like a leaving card, sir.”

“It does look like one doesn’t it. Leaving card with…” Cabbs raised his fingers to his nose and sniffed long and slow. “ginger, green peppers, onions.” He lowered his arm, rested it on the desk. “That card was retrieved from the kitchen bin of operative C.A.S.M.1735 yesterday morning. Now, why do you think I would make such an order, do you think?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Vladimir said, gaze levelled squarely at the card’s lurid design. Cabbs reached out and opened the card.

“This give you a clue? I could read it out to you if you like. ‘Vladimir! You’ve escaped!’”

“Sir, I can explain. I was just… I’d had a really bad day, and I was given a load of cards to sign for the CASMs. It just seemed such a pointless exercise.”

“Signing them?”

“Giving them, sir. I mean, they’re not leaving, are they? And they won’t remember that they’ve had the cards.”

“The kind of memory manipulation we use is a very delicate procedure, we need to maintain a very specific structure to their work cycle. The leaving cards are window dressing for that structure. The leaving cards, the office gossip, the slow perception of change, all go to preserve the fiction that they’re living. Your juvenile little protest has disrupted that balance, and now we’ve got a rogue operative. I’m in the ridiculous situation where I’m having to move heaven and earth to recoup a fucking mailroom worker.”

“Because I signed a few cards with the same message?”

“Hard to believe isn’t it? But unbelievable things happen when you fuck around. That’s why we rather prefer it that our operators, and I want to make this very clear, don’t fuck around.”

Vladimir stared at his hands, crossed in his lap. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I don’t want you to say anything, Vladimir.” Cabbs said, as he picked up a small black box and opened it. “I just want you to sit back and relax.”

A box popped up on a monitor, light green and blinking.

“Gotcha!” The seated operator put down his coffee and punched a couple of keys.

“Is that 1735?” a syut approached, leaned in to better see the screen. “Where is that?”

“HSBC, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. You want me to contact Cabbs?”

“No, I’ll do it. You know how much of a stickler for protocol he is.” The suit reached for his phone, keyed in four digits.

“Speak.”

“We’ve got him, sir, Stoole. Bank transax in – where was it? Marlow.”

The operator waved to get the suit’s attention. “He’s wanting to make a withdrawal. Do I withhold funds, or what?”

The suit began to relay the question, but Cabbs interrupted.

“I heard.” He said. “Let him have the cash, for all the good it’ll do him. Besides, he spooks easily, and I want to run him out a little further before we reel him in.”

The suit nodded to the operator, and the operator hits return. Somewhere in Buckinghamshire an ATM ejects £400 pounds in twenty pound notes into the adrenalin soaked hands of Jonathan Stoole.

“Now what?” The suit asked of Cabbs.

“Now we see which way he jumps.”

Breathless now, body afloat, Stoole ran to the station, bolting his way through near-closing doors, and collapsing into his seat. He let out a whimper and, without any kind of warning slowly began to weep. Two deep and shuddering breaths, a wipe of the nose and he composed himself, looked up and down the carriage to check he wasn’t bringing attention to himself. The carriage was empty which, instead of calming him, made him all the more nervous. A few seconds of worry was all that he allowed himself before holding himself in check. The fear he had faced in withdrawing as much cash as his card and account would allow him, fear which he could not classify as needless, had left his system flooded with adrenalin and now he had no outlet for it save for his continual anxiety. Stuck he was on the train now, his destiny a single path before him from which he could not feciate. At least not until he reached Maidenhead.

Vladimir sat slumped in a chair in Cabbs office, legs twisted around as his unconscious weight brought the chair slowly to the left. His eyes were glazed over, and a single string of saliva ran from the boy’s slack mouth.

“That’s the ticket,” Cabbs said, staring into those unthinking eyes. He slid a drawer out and removed a near hemisphere of cloth, run through with a marble pattern of shiny black wires. He walked over to Vladimir, turned the chair slightly, and pushed the boy’s head forwards. The cap went on without much fuss and Cabbs took a step back to admire his handiwork. His phone began to chirrup.

“We’re in position.” His caller stated.

“Good,” Cabbs said and smiled at the zombified operator before him. “Call me as soon as you’ve made contact.”

“Are we to apprehend?”

“Just observe. I don’t think Stoole’s flight poses too many problems, and this could be the only chance we get to observe someone coming out of the process in an open environment.”

“We’ll let you know as soon as he’s sighted then.”

“Very good. Auf wieder horen.” Cabbs recradled the receiver and sat down. He was feeling oddly buoyant as though his initial concerns at 1735’s flight had turned into a game; one that he was winning. Vladimir omitted a moan.

“What’s that, Vladimir?” Cabbs said, eyebrows raised. The boy stared on.

“It seems,” Cabbs continued, “that your colleague is having quite the adventure. I do hope we don’t break him when we finally bring him in,”

Vladimir’s leg began to kick, slightly at first, but soon with an arrhythmic determination.

“Don’t fight it, boy.” Cabbs admonished. “So much better if you don’t fight it.” The kicking slowed, stopped, and Vladimir was at rest.

“We will shortly be arriving at Maidenhead,” a recorded voice, stern but slightly sensual, announced to the empty carriage. Here it was, then, Stoole thought grimly, do or die. He felt not unlike an actor must feel, taking to the stage following an interval and a lousy first act.

Stepping down from the train he quickly surveyed the faces of those assembled; college kids, young mothers, fatigued factory workers returning home from an early morning shift. Oxford, Stoole decided, and with a hand in his pocket, thumbing the corners of the notes he held in a roll there, joined the queue at the ticket office.

It wasn’t that he saw them. It was more a feeling. Just as the Oxford train began boarding he felt he was being watched. Glancing down the platform his gaze met that of a slightly portly but otherwise well-turned-out man in a long coat. The man turned a shade too quickly, as though he’d received a shock, and then made a passable impression of aimless wandering. The door of the train stood before him. What was he to do? He stared at the gap between the train and the platform, before glancing again at his tail, who now stood still, back turned towards him, doing nothing. Stoole allowed himself a grim smile then, feeling as though his actions were causing a fearful paralysis in his pursuers. It was clear, however, that he was being followed not to be intercepted but merely to be observed. This realisation at once told him what he had to do. He boarded the train.

“Fiona?”

Fiona all but pulled the headset from her such was the shock at hearing Stoole’s voice. Quickly she waggled her mouse, dispensing with the screensaver so she could check that the call was being recorded.

“Jonathan!” She said, with a pleasure that was only half artifice, and a volume designed to alert the attention of her line manager.

“Hi Fi. I was just calling in to see if there was much work about. Also I’ve been having phone trouble lately, so just wanted to touch base with you.”

“Oh, right, um, well it’s kind of slow, to be honest. You know how November can be like.”

”Don’t I just.” Stoole replied.

“I’ll let you know as soon as anything comes in.” She looked desperately to her line manager who was making expansive gestures with her hands.

“Ah, so, Jonathan, have you been making much use of your time off?”

“Oh, you know,” Stoole said with a smile in his voice, “visiting a few old haunts, that sort of thing. Look I’ve got to go. Ticket inspector. Speak soon, I hope.”

“Sure, sure.” Fiona replied to the click of the call’s termination. She turned and shrugged at her line manager, but she was already placing a call through to Cabbs’ office.

Stoole stared at the glowing screen of his mobile and grinned. How strange it was, he thought, to have a plan. What a difference it made. He still felt he was cut off somehow from reality. He was still brutally aware he had only the scantest idea of what was happening to him, but now he felt he suddenly had direction, even if it was just for a time. He had moves he could make, and if he played them well, he might just be able to afford himself enough slack to unpick the tangle his life had become.

The boffins were thoroughly pleased with themselves. Cabbs watched as a red bead blinked and flashed its way slowly across a map of the United Kingdom.

“Let me take you in closer.” Jenson said, and flicked his mousewheel forwards a few notches. Place names bhlossomed around the bead as the window focused in on a smaller and smaller area of the country.

“It came online a few moments ago.”

“Yes, Jenson, I know.” Cabbs said. He had received a call from the CASM switchboard operators only a few minutes ago to tell him that Stoole had been in touch, so Jenson’s arrival had not proved too much of a surprise, nor the news that he was now able to track Stoole by way of his mobile phone.

“The unit that Stoole has, how reliable is it?” He asked.

“Very reliable. Failure rate is almost non-existant. We can’t afford one.”

Cabbs had spent the last two days struggling to gain a fix on the fugitive Stoole, yet within the space of an hour he had the man’s motivation, destination and position all land on his plate in quick succession. However Stoole had complained of phone problems to Fiona, and phone problems there were doubtless none. It was convenient to Cabbs to think that he, and the rest of the agency, had misread Stoole’s disappearance. It was not behaviour common to 1735, but it was possible he had just decided to make use of the time he had between assignments. The news should be welcome, and there should be no reason for Messrs Hunter and Husband to avoid paying Stoole another visit with cloche and needle just as soon as the AWOL operative returned from his peregrinations.

But Cabbs had grown up without much trust for convenient truths. In fact he had spent much of his working life engineering the right convenient truths for other people in order to shade actions, both his and the agency’s, from the world at large. Cabbs felt as though he were swallowing a fiction of his own devising. He could see in painful detail what was about to happen, and was also aware that there was very little he could do about it. The train was virtually at Oxford now, and all he could do was wait for the events to unfold, take stock of the mess he was doubtless left with, and then make his best move from there. That sense of elation he had had only moments ago had transformed into something he had not felt for a long time; unease.

Something was bothering Hal. He sat in the diminutive mailroom office and drummed his fingers loudly on his uncluttered desk. He had long completed his daily duties, had given the mailroom boys their daily briefing and all that was left for him to do was to respond to the few phone calls that came to him. This sense of being at a loose end, however, only counted for a small scintilla of his currently disturbed state of mind. He stopped his drumming and scratched his leg, which had begun to itch quite violently. The itch vanished only to reappear a mment later on his shoulder. He transferred his attentions accordingly and the itch moved down to his right buttock. He stood abruptly, annoyed with himself, and moved towards the lockers with which he shared what little office space he had.

He was caught in as loop, he realised. His placeless irritation was now feeding back into itself. He felt that urge to escape, and considered the possibility of leaving for the day. He wandered out into the mailroom and watched his six team members beavering away at their respective tasks. He surveyed them over and over. He felt he was on the verge of a significant discovery but it remained tantalisingly out of his grasp. It was almost as if there was a seventh person before him, darting around with such stealth and speed that he remained always at the edge of Hal’s vision. Hal crossed the room, sat down, and rested his head, which had begun to pound to the dull rhythm of his heart. All at once the pain ceased, and the room seemed to get lighter, as though the sun had suddenly emerged from dark clouds.

Hal stood.

“Jonathan Stoole” Hal said, almost belching the words out, a welcome release of troubling wind. The workers stopped working and stared at him. He looked from one to another before saying it again.

“Jonathan Stoole. Has anyone seen Jonathan Stoole?”

The workers blinked for a moment, looked at each other, and frowned. One of the girls clutched her forehead, staggered slightly on her feet, then sat down.

The red bead drew closer and closer to Oxford station, and the knot of tension in Cabbs stomach grew tighter, balled up like a bony fist.

“We’re going to have to stop the train.” He said, and reached for the phone.

“We’ve been stuck here for thirty bloody minutes. I’ve travelled halfway round the country to be at a god-damn meeting I am now not going to make.”

“I assure you sir, we’re doing everything we can to get the train moving, but for the moment I do ask you to please stay in your seat. I hope to have some news for you very shortly.”

The businessman actually quivered, so apoplectic with rage he was, but regardless of this, he turned on his heels, and sat firmly down. The ticket inspector glanced out of the window. He had been told that the car would not be marked, had only been told as much so that he not be alarmed when it finally did show up. He had been stuck on a train like this before, albeit under circumstances less cloak and dagger. He had had the misfortune of working on a train that had failed in the height of summer, too close to the station to allow passengers to disembark. They had been kept waiting for hours before being walked into the station, and in the meantime there had been much noise and fury. Windows had been broken to make up for the defunct air conditioning, and one woman had fainted dead away, before selling her “train hell” story to the next day’s Evening Standard. The revenue protector wondered, not for the first time, why the Government had not renationalised the railstock as soon as it had got into power.

The businessman was tapping away at his blackberry, no doubt emailing every PA he had listed to inform them not only of his absence from whichever meeting he could not get to, but also of the gross incompetence of the train company he had chosen to do business with. He clicked on send, and an egg timer appeared on the screen. Usually it was but a glimmer as the Blackberry connected, discharged its mail, and disconnected. He barely even saw the egg timer under normal circumstances but there it was, spinning away. He watched it and felt his exasperation grow. His fingers tightened around the box as the Blackberry finally gave up, warning him that a connection could not be made. He let out a growl of frustration before slinging the useless box into his briefcase. He stood, then, pushed open the window and glared out at the free world. An RV pulled up beside the train, and two men got out.

“Finally, some action!” the businessman declared, as the driver dropped onto the tracks and made his way over to them.

“Is this going to take long?” the driver asked. “My customers are getting difficult to handle, and I don’t know what to tell them.”

“We’ll take as long as we take,” Hatchet said. “And as for what you can tell your customers, that’s your problem.”

“Why don’t you tell them what you usually tell them,” Hinckley said with a smirk, as they began to walk the length of the train.

“Leaves on the track,” Hatchet said.

“Wrong kind of snow,” Hinckley said.

“Points failure.” Hatchet said.

“Signal failure.” Hinckley said.

“Oo, how about, ‘due to an earlier train’? Always been a favourite of mine, that one” and the two of them laughed. Hinckley held a small box which he waved along the length of the train. It emitted a wavering whine.

“What’s that?” the driver asked.

Hinckley stared at it a moment. “That’s classified.” He said, after a moment’s consideration.

“Look, we’re going to be a little while. Why don’t you go back and sit in your little box ‘til we come and get you?” Hatchet asked.

The driver turned, and made his way back towards the front of the train. “Wankers,” he muttered, under his breath.

“Don’t think we didn’t hear that!” Hinckley shouted after him.

“Too harsh?” Hatchet said to him, quietly.

“Absolutely!” Hinckley said with a grin.

The pair moved further along the train, and the whine increased.

“So, whose dropped a bollock this time, d’you reckon?” Hatchet asked.

“We don’t drop bollocks,” Hinckley replied, with a smile, “but my money is this is full on, top level fuck up.”

“Yeah?”

“Heads will roll, Hatchet. Heads will most definitely roll.”

The pitch grew and grew, then suddenly began to diminish again.

“Hello!” Hinckley said. He waved his arm forward and back, and the whine peaked once more.

“Shall I go and get his nibs?” Hatchet said.

“I think so. And be nice to him, Hatchet. You were a little offhand with him before.”

The carriage held about fifty people. Hatchet and Hinckley moved along the aisle, followed closely by the ticket inspector, who had been instructed he was, under no circumstances, to allow “this pair of arseholes”, out of his sight. Nevertheless, he was keeping his distance. As the one that was called Hatchet had clambered onto the carriage, his jacket had gaped slightly, revealing a holstered gun. His eyes had met those of the inspector, and something had been communicated between the pair of them, something that sat between promise and threat. Now Hatchet held back slightly, thumb tucked into the waistband of his trousers, while his colleague waved his device about and took in each of the passengers in turn. The passengers for their part acted with an understandable level of unease, one which was in no way soothed by the manner of the two spooks. One passenger in particular stood out from the rest. A pallid sweat had broken out on his face, and he had started uncontrollably to wring his hands. He was the furthest passenger along, and his composition deteriorated the closer they came to him. Finally, Hinckley reached the man, waved the box over him, and removed his earpiece.

“Hatchet,” Hinckley said.

“This him?” Hatchet asked.

“Looks like it.” Hinckley replied.

Hatchet opened his jacket, flashed the weapon that hung against his chest. “No trouble.” He said, as if stating a plain fact. The man nodded, and moved forward on numb legs.

The inspector watched as the man was taken from the train, handcuffed, and pushed into the back of the RV. As the car turned to make its way down from the track, Hinckley waved to the driver, who responded with an extended middle finger. Hinckley recoiled in mock horror, and Hatchet laughed uproariously. A few minutes later the train was finally given clearance to proceed, and made its way into the station. Meetings were missed, meals were skipped, but the world carried on.

The Mailroom was in chaos. One by one Hal’s team had succumbed to headaches, nausea, vomiting and seizures. Hal’s moment of clarity had receded, and he found himself once more confused by the world he found himself in. Suddenly he remembered his training. For reasons that had never been made clear to him, the mailroom faced the risk of malicious parcels. For this reason, a large and oppressive looking x-ray machine, an uglier version of those found at airports, sat in the middle of the room. All incoming mail passed through and were checked by one of two of the team members, who would yay or nay the packages based on their appearances. In all the time he had spent doing this job, he had never once witnessed anything untoward coming into the office, but he now had a very clear reason to suspect that not only had something untoward come in, but that it had managed to get past the security devices in place. He remembered his training, walked over to the wall and struck the Big Red Button. Alarms sounded, lights flashed, and an impossible number of security officers rushed into the room.

The three of them sat around the table and stared at the mobile phone that sat between them. Hatchet got up, walked over to the door, opened it, and glanced up and down the corridor. He hated using police stations to carry out these interrogations. Too many unknown quantities – nosy constables, conniving CID officers. He much preferred abandoned buildings, as counter-intuitive as that seemed. The openness of them appealed to him, the ability to take in at a glance whether anyone was approaching. What is more, abandoned buildings most often afforded more privacy than a locked room. People, he had realised long ago, generally behaved themselves. Save for kids and squatters, who were generally easy to deal with if encountered, people tended to avoid places they knew they were supposed to avoid. Terrified they were of being labelled as ne’er-do-wells. Terrified they were of encountering a tableau close to Hatchet’s heart, the simple aesthetic of a man tied to a chair, one suit interrogating, the other holding back, maintaining the security of the area and at the same time suggesting a bigger, nastier gun that was being held back. Hatchet had long ago abandoned nice cop nasty cop in favour of quiet cop, nasty cop. It let the interviewee make up his own mind whether quite was nice or nastier still.

He closed the door, turned to the pair of them. He made eye contact with Hinckley, and nodded towards their captive. Hinckley raised his eyebrows, looked at the fool before them, stood up, and punched him in the face. The man fell, then, tried instinctively to break his fall by raising his arms, but they were cuffed behind him, and he succeeded only in ensuring his head and shoulder hit the floor with even more force.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Hinckley said, and lifted the man back onto the chair. “I think I may have interrupted you mid-sentence. Mid Sentence?” He smiled at the man, stared into his eyes as though he were an errant dog, then gently slapped his cheek a couple of times.

“Please,” the man said, his eye beginning to blossom into a bruise. “This is not my phone. Truly!”

Hatchet sighed.

“You want me to hit him again?” Asked Hinckley. This made the captive start crying.

“Nah. Fun as this is, we’d better call this in.” He withdrew a mobile, and pressed a few buttons. “George,” he said, “I’m gonna take your photo now. Are you going to give me a smile.”

“What?” George said, through his tears.

“Oh come on now. Let’s get rid of those tears.”

Hinckley fished a clean handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at the man’s tears. George took a breath.

“Now. How about a big smile?”

George tried his best to smile, but could only manage a grimace. His head began to shake. Hinckley stood behind him, held his head steady and angled it towards the lens in Hatchet’s phone.

“Say cheese.” He said.

Cabbs watched as the picture formed on his monitor. It wasn’t Stoole. He’d expected Hatchet and Hinckley to turn up the phone abandoned, tucked, perhaps, into a train cushion, or dropped out of the train window. George had been a bit of a surprise. It also added to the mix the headache of what they would now have to do with George, but that was a problem for someone else. Right now all Cabbs could care about was tracking Stoole down. He could be reasonably confident that Stoole could not leave the country. He was passportless, and border controls were on the look out for him. But that was small comfort, as was the faintly malicious act that may or may not have taken place on the train. The story George had provided Hatchet with was that Stoole had sold him the phone for ten pounds. Cabbs had before know had Stoole down as an innocent, a do-gooder. How on earth, Cabbs wondered, could you remain on the lower rungs of the career ladder, the property ladder, the everything ladder unless you were unable to play the game? Yet Stoole was playing now, and this worried Cabbs no end, not least of all because of the complete breakdown of the CASM mailroom. The lab had the staff under sedation, but had yet to begin their interrogation of them. If they began to recover memories of their former lives, then the assumption that Stoole’s flight served no threat was unaffordably erroneous. Again Cabbs was left waiting, uncertainty creeping into his predestined, planned, black and white world.

Stoole felt more alive than he had ever felt in his entire life, although as he pedalled on he realised that what he could remember of his life did not count for very much at all. With each downward thrust of his legs, he felt the stress he had been under slip away. The dark clouds that had gathered above him were dissipating and he could feel the warm sunlight on his face.

He felt a small twinge of guilt. He had interfered quite dramatically with the lives of two people, two strangers towards whom he held no hostility. It was a shame, then, that his current and no doubt fleeting freedom was founded on two acts that had effectively oppressed others. His intention had been to merely ditch the phone, to merely leave it on the train, but he had grown concerned that if the phone was being monitored as he’d hoped, its lack of movement once it reached Oxford would have given him away, and he was desperate to buy as much time as he could. If he was being totally honest with himself he would have to admit to a certain level of pride in managing to sell the phone so quickly. He had selected his customer with care, and done a decent enough job of presenting to him a feasible story – the sudden need for cash, a handset he was due to replace anyway, that the sale of the handset for ten pounds seemed perfectly reasonable, and their remained the possibility that he was mistaken, and that the phone wasn’t being monitored at all. Either way, he felt with greater certainty that he was slipping from the clutches of whichever power was so interested in keeping tabs on him.

Whatever legitimisation he could allow himself for selling on the phone (and after all, it was not he who was monitoring the phone, it was not he who commanded the individuals monitoring the phone, so whatever happened to the phone’s new owner, Stoole could hardly take that much of the blame) he could afford very little when it came to the theft of the bicycle on which he now pedalled. He had wandered into another carriage after dispatching his phone, and had alighted at the next station. His nervousness had remained, but he realised that because that nervousness was now yoked to some specific purpose, it became an energy and a strength. He strolled confidently across the platform, crossed over the footbridge, and walked into the carpark. He’d hoped to find an unchained bicycle, but to his dismay all of them were secure. As he turned to think of an alternative mode of transport he could use with some degree of security, a lycra-wearing cyclist pulled up beside him. Without time to think, he pushed the cyclist, crouched down, a chain at the ready, such that sprawled onto his back. Stoole deftly swung his leg over, and pedalled away, not daring to turn his head, even when he heard the cyclist turning the air blue behind him.

“I’m very sorry!” Stoole shouted out, but could not help allowing himself a chuckle. With each kick of the pedal he felt the distance between himself and his pursuers grow.

He stayed off the main roads, which added distance to his journey, but meant he would appear less frequently on traffic cameras. He expected to feel fatigue set in and quickly, but his body surprised him, matching his ambition step for step. What surprised him too was his apparent independence from any conscious navigation. He had anticipated the requirement of a map at some stage, fancying himself getting lost up labyrinthine country roads, but at each turn in the road he found himself confidently taking a left or right, and sooner than he thought possible found himself nearing London.

His decision to abandon his investigations in Oxford had been made for him by the spook at the station. Even if he could have shaken off his pursuers before he reached Oxford, it wouldn’t take them much effort to know of his intended destination. It would be the easiest thing in the world, he surmised, for them to people the place with spooks. He’d be tagged and traced within an hour of setting foot in the city. So he would have to turn and face his enemies. He knew that things were probably going to get more difficult, which was perhaps why the cycle journey had brought him to such a state of elation. The pleasure and freedom he experienced was all the sweeter for being ephemeral and tempered by melancholy. He hit the Camberwell Road. Quite by accident he realised he was drawing dangerously close to his flat. He could not say for certain, but he assumed that were he trying to catch someone, and he had agents at his disposal, he would station one at his quarry’s place of abode. He revised his route accordingly, taking himself off into Brixton, an ideal place to leave the bicycle.

Brixton was heaving, as ever, but he felt a welcome security in the crowds. Police were dotted about the place, and the crowd bobbed and dodged under the ever-present eyes of CCTV cameras, but somehow by being part of a crowd, he could blend in, pass unnoticed amongst them. He wandered into ______, bought a hooded top, a jacket he had found in the sale, and a bag. He’d left what clothes he had brought with him to Marlow back at the bed and breakfast, so keen he was to escape, and now all he had was what he stood in. He found a bar with News 24 on, got changed in the toilets, bought himself a well-earned lager, and watched the world go by.

The screen showed wobbly footage of a train stranded outside a station, the distant figures of two gentleman emerging from a vehicle and approaching the train. The entire screen was suddenly filled with orange, and as the picture zoomed out, this orange was shown to be a high-visibility vest worn by a railway security guard. The guard urged the camera crew back, and the picture faded to a live image of a reporter stood at Oxford station, speaking to members of the public who had no doubt been stuck on the much delayed train, but still had enough time to appear on television.

The subtitle changed from “train horror” to “terror suspect removed from Oxford train,” causing Stoole to wince, and glare at his pint. “Sorry mate,” he said to himself.

He switched from lager to lemonade as he watched darkness descend on London. He resolved to get close to his flat, to try and ascertain whether or not it was still under surveillance. He suspected it almost certainly was, if his subterfuge on the train had evidently been discovered. He made his way up Railton road, crossing over as he reached his street so as to afford himself a reasonable and nonchalant glance in the direction of his flat. As he watched, he saw a light in his flat turn off. Interesting, he thought. It would appear that whoever had been posted to watch over the flat was doing so from within the building itself. This made a sick kind of sense to Stoole. The realisation that this was the case, though, meant that he could cast himself as the watcher. He clearly had nowhere to sleep for the night, and to that end had plenty of time to kill. He meandered down to Herne Hill station before doubling back on himself, following Dulwich Road up to the opposite end of his street. That sense of nervous excitement that had once been his enemy, was rapidly becoming an old friend. He wondered idly as he turned the corner and stopped, whether he was becoming addicted to the chase, this cat and mouse game he was at the centre of. He wished he still smoked.

He took up position at a point he knew could not be seen with any clarity from his apartment, but afforded him a reasonable view of what little remained of the front garden. He raised his hood, thrust his hands deep into his pockets and waited. After twenty minutes a familiar car pulled up into an available parking space some 300 yards from his front door, and a young Chinese boy got out. As he made his way towards the front door, Stoole ran, fast and low and shadowed, along the row of parked cars and ducked down behind the delivery boy’s beaten up Escort. Stoole chose his moment well. The boy glanced back at his vehicle, then turned as the door was opened by yet another spook. John popped the back passenger door open, got inside, and closed the door again. He dared not check to see if this entry had been seen. Instead he buried himself amongst the folded paper bags and prawn cracker fragments that littered the floor. A moment later the driver door opened, and Stoole felt the vehicle rock slightly as someone got in. A phone beeped a could of times as keys were pressed.

“Suze, it’s me. I’m done here. We got anything else to go out?”

A muffled voice, too indistinct for Stoole to make out, followed.

“Okay – see you in a bit.”

The car started up, and began to move. Blindly, Stoole started on the next phase of his journey.

Chaddick had decided to pull another late night at the office. The new file system that Cabbs had convinced him would make a valuable contribution to the work of the agency had so confounded him that he again found himself almost entirely reliant on Cabbs’ assistance in keeping up with what was occurring in the agency. He had kept things to himself, of course, but he was beginning to realise that this was exactly what Cabbs wanted, for Chaddick to be demoted to little more than a rubber stamp, wielded by his aide who remained quite free to show or hide whatever information, report, guidance or decision that was required of him.

Chaddick took a casefile from one of the many buff folders that littered his desk, keyed in the code number, complied with the prompt for his pass code (which he transcribed from his pocket diary, so convoluted and ever –changing it was) and hit return. The screen sat dolefully, the cursor blinking. Chaddick drummed his fingers, felt as though he was sinking in the quicksands of a world that made no sense to him any more, until finally the screen changed, regurgitating a series of facts and figures. Chaddick only required a moment’s glance over the information before he realised an error had occurred, and that he was looking at a completely different record. He closed his eyes, sighed, and reached for the phone.

“Cabbs, when you’ve got a moment.” He said, before scrolling through the information before him. It had appeared on his screen unbidden, but it was such a rarity for Chaddick to be able to get any kind of information out of the newly installed databases that he thought he could at least pay it some attention, how ever arbitrary its selection process. The notes referred to a series of fruitless interviews given to members of the mailroom staff in the St Andrew Street building. It meant little to him, so he dismissed it.

Cabbs glided into the room.

“You’re working late tonight.” Cabbs said, brightly.

“I know.” Chaddick said. The pair fell into silence.

“Is that all, sir?” Cabbs said, finally.

“Don’t get cocky, Cabbs. I’m still your superior, however much you manage to wrap me up in this technological bilge.”

“Bilge, sir?”

“Bilge, Cabbs. Can you kindly explain how it is possible for us to sink several million pounds into developing a secure database that is about as much use as a string condom?”

“The database has been a great success, sir. Our data entry’s up, the background analysis is smoother than its ever been, and the system we’ve developed for prioritising actions is already beginning to have a genuine impact on results. We’ve managed to infiltrate and destroy several terrorist cells within two months of the system going live.”

“That’s all well and good, Cabbs, and I’ve seen the reports, so I’m fully aware of the marked improvement this system supposedly has, but how can it be that, two months on, I am still unable to gain access to the information that I require to at least show some pretense that I have the first scintilla of a clue as to what is going on beyond the door of this building.”

“Sir?”

”Would it be possible for you to divert that fantastic and ruthlessly ambitious energy of yours to discovering why it is that I cannot access the reports that I need to? I’m to appear before a select committee in a couple of weeks, and I would like very much to have read up on the pertinent files before I go in there.”

“I can brief you, sir. It’s really no bother.”

“Oh but it is, Cabbs. I require assistance, but I oughtn’t be helpless. We’ve spent a small fortune of tax-payers money in order to render me an invalid.”

“I’ll… I’ll contact the contractors tomorrow and have them look at it for you. I imagine there’s some issue with the user permissions.”

Chaddick nodded with incomprehension.

“Any way, Cabbs, why are you here so late? Not got a hamburger restaurant to get to?”

“Oh, just going over a personnel issue.” Cabbs smiled, “nothing too worrisome. One of the mailroom boys failed to turn up.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you.”

“Very good, sir.” Cabbs said, and left.

“Very good, sir.” Chaddick grimaced, and span himself slowly in his chair.

Cabbs slumped into his chair, stared at the ceiling for a moment, then reached over to his mouse. He brought up the camera in Chaddick’s office. Chaddick was on his feet watching those bloody screens of his. He was beginning to suspect, that much was clear, but how long would that give Cabbs to perform his coup? If Chaddick left he could easily bring Cabbs down with him, and even if he didn’t it would be a massive setback if Cabbs had to begin working on another director from scratch. And all this was a distraction from the more immediate threat posed by Stoole. The mailroom invalids were starting to recall things that everyone had long assumed were buried away, and although Cabbs had seen that Stoole’s memory was scrubbed out that much more closely than the others, he now had no confidence that those memories were gone for good. And with Stoole’s now off the map, the possibility of Cabbs undoing was very real. There was only one place that Cabbs liked to go to at times like this. He always experienced anxiety as heat, could even now feel himself prickled with sweat. It was a wonder he had managed to keep his cool with Chaddick, so sickening he found the old fool. The feeling, Cabbs glibly realised, was becoming mutual. What gratitude Chaddick had shown him for turning around his office was now falling away. Cabbs cut his own thoughts off, as neatly as though he had done so with a scalpel. He rose to his feet.

Everything about the server room appealed to him. It was the coolest part of the building, and in the incessant low roar of the air-conditioning he found a strange inner calm, a steady tone against which to meditate. He would often come here to escape the pressures of his situation, to plan the next stages. He’d even arranged it so that no-one could enter or leave the room without his proviso, meaning that it was the one room in the building in which he could be assured an absolute degree of privacy. The intelligence community had long ago turned in on itself, watched itself endlessly for signs of weakness or infiltration. Here in the cool of the server room, there were no eyes.

The lights were triggered by changes in the infra-red spectrum, so if Cabbs stood long enough in one spot, the lights would turn off, and he would be alone in a dark peppered with the artificial stars of a hundred green LEDs. He had removed his clothes, leaving them in a neat and tidy pile by the inner door of the dustlock. He took up position before the main server bank. It was through this unit that all the information fed to the agency, from the internet, from Echelon, from the other members of the JISC encountered one another, colliding in a tempest of supposition, of perhaps. A tireless array of pattern recognition algorhytms sifted through the data, matching like against like, before flagging any kind of significance on the monitors of the army of operators that staffed the site. Cabbs was not a religious man, but if he wished to choose a god, it would be the ever-running behemoth before him. He raised himself up on the balls of his feet, stretched his arms as wide as he could, and spread out his fingers. The cool air embraced him, and after a few moments, hamstrings straining, Cabbs was plunged into darkness. Cabbs closed his eyes, allowed his thoughts to get lost in the roar of the air-conditioning. He fancied, not for the first time, that messages were embedded in the slight clicks and mis-steps in that steady stream of noise. He fancied, not for the first time, that he could hear a voice, a low and urgent whisper, speaking to him in a long-lost language he alone could understand.

“Soon,” Cabbs said. “Soon.”

Stoole was struggling to keep awake. The low rumble of tyre on tarmac, and the too-quiet voice of the talk radio station his unwitting chauffeur was listening to were providing a gentle lullaby to the slow rocking of the car in which he travelled. He tried to focus intently on the words that were being spoken, some nut waffling on about the internet becoming some kind of emergent consciousness too complex for mere humans too understand. How satisfactory, Stoole thought to himself, to come up with such a belief and place its proof beyond the capabilities of science. The car pulled up on squealing breaks. This slow push had come to shove.

As the delivery boy was busy gathering together the gratuities he had received from his latest round, Stoole rose up from his hiding place. The boy jumped, his cry being knocked short as his head collided with the car’s low ceiling. Stoole placed a hand over the boy’s mouth.

“It’s okay. I’m not here to hurt you. You recognise me?”

The boy’s eyes, wide-open as he fought against his terror, finally relaxed. He nodded.

“Right. I’m going to take my hand away, and you’re not going to call out, okay? I just want to talk.”

The boy nodded again.

“Okay,” Stoole said, and withdrew his hand.

“What the fuck are you doing in my car?” The boy said at once. “What the fuck!” and delivered a cool and precise blow to Stoole’s chin. Stoole was knocked clean on his back, and when he struggled back up, saw that the boy was busily struggling with the keypad on his mobile phone. Stoole at once knocked the handset.

“I really don’t have time for this.” Stoole said, and grabbed at the boy’s shoulders. He at once struggled free, and popped the driver door open. Stoole attempted to open his, but the unfamiliar door and inadequate light forced him to fumble for the catch. This gave the boy more than enough time to activate the central locking. Stoole heard it go, eyes widening, and scrabbled at the hole wherein had sunk the locking buttons. He frowned at the boy, thumped a couple of times against the window, then at once stopped. The boy had made an attempt to run, but had faltered. Now he stood and stared at his captive. Stoole calmed himself, ran a haggard hand through his hair and smiled a piteous smile.

Cabbs smiled and understood. Stoole was in a prime position for running to ground. In the right place he could stay hidden in perpetuity, even once the National Identity Register rumbled onto its inexorable path to failure. And if Stoole was capable of hiding, then Cabbs was just as capable at flushing him out. As for the threat Stoole represented, Cabbs could neutralise it in an instant, drawing a single simple line from A to F and waving it under the right nose.

The boy neared the car window. Stoole looked up at him. The boy could easily now make good his earlier attempt at calling the police, but was choosing not to. Stoole supposed, and supposed correctly, that the boy had questions. Reaching forward, Stoole wound the sunroof open just enough for his voice to escape the car.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

”Lee.”

“Well, Lee, where do we go from here?”

“You’re the guy on Wilmot Lane, aren’t you?”

“That’s me. John. My name’s John.” Stoole smiled at the awkwardness of an introduction made to someone he had spoken to countless times before.

“You always order the same thing, Chicken Satay, King prawn fried rice, prawn crackers and pork balls.”

“That’s my order.” John smiled.

“Big eater, huh?”

“Not really. I usually end up ditching half the rice and most of the balls. Always order them though.”

“So who’s that new guy then? Boyfriend?”

John chuckled at this. “Boyfriend/”

“Well, you never know. He seems right at home.”

“Truth is, Lee, I don’t know who that guy is, but I’m damned sure he knows who I am.”

The theme from Mission Impossible suddenly cut through the conversation. Lee reached for his pocket, then looked up at John.

“Mobile,” Lee said, and gestured with his hand. John leaned forward, grabbed the mobile from where it had been thrown. He looked at the screen.

“Suze?” Stoole asked.

“That’s my sister.” Lee said. Jonathan shrugged and pressed the green button.

“Where are you, you cretin? If you’re lost again…”

“Hang on. This isn’t Lee. I’ll just get him.”

Jonathan wound the sunroof open further, and popped the mobile up through the roof.

“I’m trusting you, Lee,” he called out as the boy took his phone back.

“No I’m not lost. That? That’s Jonathan. 73 Wilmot Lane. Yeah.”

John watched, waited for his fate to hang in the balance.

“No, sis, I’m outside. We’ve got a bit of a situation. Come out and see.”

A moment later, emerging from a door, was a Chinese girl in her late twenties, dressed to lightly for the cold November night. She hugged herself as she approached the car.

“What’s happening here?” she asked her brother, who by way of explanation nodded towards the car. Jonathan made a pathetically light-spirited wave.

“You’ve trapped one of our customers in your car? He not tip you?”

“He never tips me. I got back here, and he just springs up out of the back seat at me. I managed to get out and lock the door, and that was just about when you phoned.”

“You a car jacker, Mr Wilmot Lane?”

“My names Jonathan Stoole, and I’m not a car jacker. Please, can we go somewhere private? I need to talk.”

“Is a police cell private enough for you, Mr Stoole?”

“Hey, come on! Give me a break! Please.”

“You’re asking us to trust you, but you’ve just tried to steal our car.”

“I wasn’t trying to steal it. I… I just need someone I can talk to. I’ve been… I’ve been running from something I don’t understand, and I’m worn out, and I stink, and I just need to rest and work out where I have to go from here.”

“And you need us for that?”

John looked up at her then, her eyes angry and accusing. He was, he began to realise, asking the impossible.

“Please,” he asked of her, “somehow you two are the only people I have any kind of contact with in this city. Just, just listen to what I have to say. If you want to call the police after that, then that’s fine, do that, but please, give me a chance to explain.”

Suze, took a step back, and turned away from the car. Lee looked between his sister and the familiar stranger in the car.

“Am I right in saying that you want this conversation to take place in our home?” She asked.

“There is nowhere else.” John replied. “Not now.”

“Okay,” Suze said, and John’s face brightened. “Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“You want us to trust you, take off your clothes. You can pass them through the sunroof.”

“What will getting me naked achieve?”

“”It’ll stop you running. Lee, give me the car keys and hold the front door open.”

Lee did as he was told. Jonathan muttered under his breath, but struggled his way out of his hooded top and tossed out through the sunroof. Suze caught it and approached the vehicle.

“Shorts too.” She said.

“A lady wouldn’t have found out if I was wearing shorts.”

“I’m no lady.” Suze said taking his trousers and underwear from him.

“Right,” she said, “when I count to three, I am going to unlock the car. You are going to get out, and you are going to run in through that door there. You will run up the stairs, my brother will follow you closely from behind. You will enter the lounge, which is the second door on the left. There you will wait with Lee for our little chat. Understood?”

“Sure.” Jonathan said. He sidled over to the car door, cupped himself, and waited for Suze to begin the count.

“One… two… three.” A low whine emitted from the car doors, and the lock buttons popped up. John did as he was told, gritting his teeth against the icy cold that robbed the souls of his feet their feeling. He darted into the hallway, barely registering the steamy bright ground-floor entrance to the kitchens. Instead he ascended the stairs, and turned into the lounge. Suze closed and locked the car door, walked businesslike back into her home, and followed the rushing figure of her brother as he kept pace with the naked interloper.

Stoole stood in the lounge, hands cupping his privates, at a loss how to respond to his surroundings. Lee for his part was also unsure of what to do. He was used to his sister making sometimes rather odd decisions, something that, in the arrogance of adolescence, he had taken to be a sign of her stupidity, but as he had matured, now took to be a sign of her intelligence.

“Nice place.” Jonathan said. Lee didn’t so much as crack a smile. Jonathan padded over to the far wall to take a look at the montage of family photos that hung there.

“These your folks?” He asked. Lee stared on. Jonathan couldn’t determine whether his silence was supposed to represent a hard front, or if the boy was simply embarrassed by the situation. From the next room, the sounds of clashing cutlery could be heard.

“That Suze?” Jonathan asked.

“She’s hiding the knives.” Lee said, and smiled.

“Nice.” Jonathan replied.

“If I know my sister, she’s probably keeping one back, too.”

Suze walked briskly in. Jonathan noticed at once that she was no longer carrying his clothes.

“Where are my-”

“Put this on.” She said, and flung a silk dressing gown at him. Despite himself, he caught the garment with both hands, allowing himself a grimace only as he turned to the wall and struggled into its small dimensions.

“So.” Suze said, sitting down, curling a single leg beneath her. “You wanted to talk, now talk.”

Jonathan sat in the opposite chair. He was at a loss as where to start. He tried again and again to formulate a sentence that would give him a way into describing what had happened to him over the past few days, but whenever he tried, the words seemed to turn his situation into a deranged fantasy. A minute passed by; then another.

“Shall I just make that call now?” Suze said, leaning forward as if to stand.

“No! No, sorry. I’m trying, really I am.” He took a deep breath. It made sense, he finally realised, not to start with the leaving cards, or the spooked watchers, or the relocated school. It made sense to start with them, with Suze, Lee and himself.

“I started ordering food from you, what? Three months ago, right?”

Suze chuckled, “yeah, and the rest.”

“What?” Jonathan asked, confused.

“You’ve been calling us every couple of weeks or so for three years.”

“Three years?”

Suze sighed and looked up at the montage of photos, as if seeking guidance from the muted family portraits.

“Okay, no that’s good, that’s useful. You see, I remember… that is to say I have a memory of moving into the flat on Wilmot Street three months ago.”

“Three years ago.” Suze said, returning her gaze to him.

“I’m not disputing that I’ve been there for three years. All I’m saying is that I can only remember moving in three months ago. As far as I can recall, I moved there three months ago, and before that I…” Jonathan reached for the memory of his previous residence but found it missing.

He crumpled.

“Where do you work now?” Suze asked.

“I... till a few days ago I was working at St Andrews Tower in the city. 213, St Andrew Street.”

Suze crossed over to a bookshelf in the corner of the room and extracted a laptop. She plugged it in, and fired it up.

“What did you do there?” She asked.

“Just... just mailroom stuff. Nothing really.”

“What sort of mail did you have coming through?”

“I don’t know, a lot of internal stuff. We had a lot of these weird plastic boxes with combination locks on them. Other than that the usual stuff.”

A fanfare announced the laptop’s launch.

“Okay, so you say you can’t remember much of the last three years. What does that mean?”

“It’s like I’m not aware that stuff is missing until I think about it. But other stuff I can remember clearly, only it turns out to be wrong. I tried to find my old school but it wasn’t where it should be. Then it turns up in a place I know I’ve never been to.”

Suze began tapping away at the laptop.

“What was the company you worked for?”

“Hm?” Stoole said. “___ Tech.”

“No you didn’t.” Suze said, and swivelled the laptop round. On its screen was a picture of St Andrew’s Tower etched out in bold and foreboding lines. Above it the slogan “Behold, the Ministry of Love?”

“This,” Suze said, “is one of the key MI5 buildings in London. By the sound of what you say they’re responsible for some kind of paper archiving of classified information. That’s where you’ve been working for the past three years.”

“That can’t be right. It was a marketing firm. We bought and sold information about customer purchasing patterns; that sort of thing.”

“Oh, they trade in information alright, but I don’t think it’s how many yoghurts we buy at a time.”

Stoole sat there in silence, eyes closed. He knew he was being watched and followed, and knew that whoever was doing so had a large enough array of resources for them to have Government backing and funding, but in his heart he had hoped for different news. In his heart he had hoped to find out that it was not the authorities behind his current persecution, but some crime syndicate or terrorist cell, someone from whom the authorities could be in a position to protect him.

“Lee, get Mr Stoole a glass of water.”

When Jonathan opened his eyes, he saw that he had been weeping.

“Please, Suze. Don’t hand me over to the police. I need to find out what they’ve done to me. I need to find out who I am.”

Suze sighed and rose to her feet.

“We’ll talk more in the morning.” She said as Lee re-entered the room, glass in hand.

“He’s staying the night?” Lee asked.

Suze nodded. “He can take my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“You don’t believe his story do you?” Lee asked. Suze silenced him with a glare.

“Stoole, the bathroom’s across the way. Why don’t you take a shower. Can’t have you stinking out my room.” Stoole creaked and cracked his way to his feet, and left the room. There was a moment, just as the door behind him closed, and just before he pushed the door in front of him, in which he was surrounded by darkness, and when that darkness hit him, a panic rose like a fist in his throat. He scrubbed himself raw, hoping beyond hope that he could wash the fear from him.

“Are you nuts? You can’t possibly trust him!” Lee hissed at his sister.

“You said yourself there was a stranger in his house, a stranger who has ordered from us the past two nights.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. He could have been evicted.”

“Did he look like he was being evicted the last time you saw him?”

“No.”

“Well then.”

“What if he’s in some other kind of trouble? He seems pretty desperate.”

“Oh doesn’t he just.”

“He could be wanted by the police for all we know. Some weird guy being at his flat doesn’t prove anything.”

“If he was wanted by the police, I don’t think he’d stick around. He’s after something.”

“So what? You believe that he’s some brainwashed zombie?”

“I don’t know. But I know he doesn’t know what he is either. I think we should help him find out. I think... I think that’s what Dad would have wanted us to do.”

“Dad?” Lee said with disgust. “That’s your answer for everything.”

“He would have helped. You know he would.”

“He’s dead, Suze. And in case you forgot, he died helping.” Suddenly the weight of the conversation was too much for him and he moved towards the door. Suze raised an arm, meaning only to touch her brother, to console him, but he took it as though she was trying to block his departure. He forced his way passed her, slamming the door behind him. A few moments later the car outside struggle its way into starting, and made its way into the night.

Suze brushed herself down, and took in the room. She stowed the laptop away, and wandered into the hallway, listening to Stoole shower. The water stopped running, and she listened as he squelched and squeeked onto the tiled floor.

“You okay in there?” She asked.

“Ah, yeah. Towels?”

Suze slapped her forehead. “One second.”

She returned a moment later with a towel warm and dry from the airing cupboard, opened the bathroom door a crack, and held it out. As Stoole took the towel from her, their fingers touched, causing her to recoil in shock.

“Got it.” He said. “Any chance I can get my clothes back?”

“I don’t know. I still don’t want you running.”

Stoole opened the door, more or less dry, the towel held around his waist.

“I’ve nowhere I can run to, Suze.”

Suze shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

“I’ll run them through the wash tonight. They’ll be dry by morning for you. Bedroom’s through here.”

As Stoole padded into the hallway, he looked about him.

“Lee not here?”

“He and I had a bit of a disagreement. He’s gone to cool off.”

“My fault.”

“Yes.” Suze said, and blinked.

“Sorry.” Stoole said as he wandered haphazardly into Suze’s bedroom. He took the room in, small, minimalist, functional, and turned.

“You sure this is okay?”

“Fairly sure.” Suze said.

Stoole took the room in all over again, before turning to her once more.

“Thanks, Suze. Really.”

“Sweet dreams.” Suze said, and closed the door.

Lee had always had a problem with anger. At school they had wittily nicknamed him Grizz, a prefix to his already diminutised first name. He had, in those days, lashed out at whoever or whatever was closest to him, a taste for violence his father couldn’t come close to understand. In time, though, Lee had learnt how to control his anger, to send it down non-violent channels. This had made him a more insular person, by and by, and he too much held his emotions in check, but in his mind it was one or the other, and he’d rather remain peaceful and grow an ulcer than hit out at the people nearest to him. What Lee did more and more when he was angry, and especially when he was angry with his sister, was to put distance between them, to walk, run or better still to drive. The soothing hum of tarmac under tyre rubber, and the strange place his mind wandered to whilst caught up in the complex actions and reactions of driving, cooled the rage in him. Perspective most often came with distance, and so it was that driving would often lead him to a more rational outlook on whatever had caused him to flare up.

Lee hadn’t realised where he was driving at first. It was only as he took the left and felt the urge to pull in that he realised his rage-fuelled navigating had led him back to Wilmot Lane. This would do, he thought, and stopped the engine. A few moments consideration later, he killed the power too. Beyond his windscreen lay Stoole’s apartment. A light tried to penetrate through the blinds that hung in the three windows on the top floor. In there, Lee surmised, lay the solution to whatever mystery Stoole did or did not represent. He couldn’t get inside, but he could watch, and he could wait. He pondered this for a moment. Not for the first time he considered it a deep part of his identity, the standing, waiting and watching. He imagined all of history occurring around him, and his task in it all was to take it in, to observe and note everything so that, on some future day of reckoning, he alone would be able to make sense of it all.

The lights clicked off. As he watched, someone approached the door, and knocked. A few moments later the stranger, the one Lee had at first supposed may have been Stoole’s boyfriend, answered. The men exchanged a few words, before the visitor entered. The first gentleman, Lee’s new customer, instead of following him inside, stepped out onto the street, making his way off away from where Lee had parked. A few seconds later the lights clicked on. The night was torn apart by the cries of rutting foxes.

A sense of passing through a low tunnel, a breeze running over his body. A low rushing noise beneath him, and the sound of children laughing...

When Stoole awoke it was beneath a single cotton sheet in a strange bed in a strange room. The depth of his sleep had been so profound, and his drifting from it so gradual, that when he finally reached consciousness he had quite forgotten the events of the previous evening. As he hitched himself into a sitting position, became simultaneously aware of his nudity and of the freshly laundered clothes lain out on the foot of his bed, things began to return to him. He got to his feet and began hurriedly to dress. As he wrestled his way into the unfamiliar hooded top, a knock came at the door.

“Are you decent?” Suze asked.

“Yes.”

Suze walked in, a pale top and jeans. She walked with mixed certainty, it being her room, and he being a stranger.

“You hungry?” she said, and he at once realised he was very hungry indeed.

Suze watched as he scooped the last of the scrambled eggs into his mouth. He was eating as though he were eating for the first time, shovelling food into his mouth with barely a pause. He all but threw his fork down once he was done, and instantly looked embarrassed.

“They were good eggs,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take your relish as a compliment.” She said, before pushing away from the table and standing.

“So,” she said, “what’s your plan for today.”

“Plan?” Stoole said.

“We need to get inside that head of yours somehow.”

“Well I don’t really have anything to go on.”

“You said something last night, that you’re not aware of memories being missing until you reach for them.”

“Yes. When you asked me where I’d worked before, I knew that I have worked somewhere else before, but there’s no detail. It’s almost as though I’ve just got a placeholder there.”

“But you can’t define what is or isn’t there unless we go looking, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Then let’s go looking.”

Cabbs was in deep. He’d been hugely influential in the creation of the new systems in place, had insisted the design and implementation of the database be split between various contractors, giving a spreading of risk as the reason, but as Jung stated, there are two reasons to do anything, the proper reason and the real one. By Cabbs occupying a central position, a conduit between the various IT firms, axis to a wheel of his own designing, he was able to exercise a surprisingly tight control over the system, ensuring that he could get in and change pretty much any data he chose to, even the audit trail, allowing him to cover his own tracks. So it was that he ensured that the right piece of information appeared in the right file. He, too, had a deep understanding of the autonomous patternfinding algorithms, so could give the gentles of pushes to a suspects file in order for it to get attached to a particular crime. He thought of himself as tying flies for fishing, though his art was all the sadder because not only was he the only person that could probably appreciate it as such, he couldn’t even acknowledge that own self-appreciation to the world at large. But it was enough for him to bask in the glory of the increased solution rate that his data manipulation caused. It was enough for him to know that the work he put in maintained and increased budgets across the entire agency. It didn’t matter, of course, that this was all propped up on false accusation, that innocent men and women (or as innocent as people get nowadays) were sent to prison, sometimes even extradited because the wrong pieces of information appeared in the right file. All that mattered was feeding the organisation, ensuring its survival and growth.

The collection of sheets of paper grew around the crouching figures of Suzy and Jonathan as they attempted to map out what he could remember. The job had started out almost in fun, as Suzy badgered him with questions. They first of all returned to the notes that Jonathan had made in Marlow, the notes concerned with the school he was now almost certain he had never actually attended. To this they began adding memories about Marlow itself, a relatively clear recollection of falling from a boat into the Thames, of time spent standing on the strangely out of scale bridge, watching the water tumbling through the weir, an evening spent with a nameless friend drinking warm cider in the park while the night tipped its way from pink dusk to a dark and starry backdrop. This done they moved on – Jonathan was sure he had taken some sort of degree or other, but couldn’t say where he had taken it, or even if he had completed it. He had a vague memory of a summer spent playing pool in the corner of a student union that was shaped, more or less, like a vast red pyramid, yet he was also aware that the memory of the building seemed to stem as much from his recollection that it was a pyramid than it did from the building itself, as though he had been told it was a pyramid and had then allowed his imagination to fill in the detail. This sense of loose, nebulous memories based on sold but symbolic certainties came up again and again as the pair flickered through whatever life-changing events.

As for Stoole’s mood through this process, it ebbed and flowed, rocked so violently it nearly capsized the whole exercise. More than once he had to leave the room, and on these occasions Suzy would leave him to it, while she tried to impose order on the fragments of biography that surrounded them. She was uneasy about the process. Each pocket of memory seemed convincing in itself, but no piece seemed to match another. It was as though they had tipped out a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle, only to find that each piece had come from different puzzles. This thought she kept from Stoole, hoping that if they progressed further and further into the minutiae of Stoole’s memories, they would find something that would link some of the pieces together, at least enough that they could establish which of the other pieces they should treat with suspicion.

Stoole wandered back into the livingroom, his puffed up eyes letting Suze know that he’d been crying.

“I’m sorry.” Suze said.

“What for?” Stoole said, his right hand resting over his heart.

“I’ve pushed you too hard into this. I’ve been treating it like a game, but it’s your life; your reality.”

“It’s what I need, Suze.”

“Well, I think we’re both due a break. You want a tea?”

“Coffee?”

“Sure. How do you take it?”

Stoole hesitated, as though the questions Suze had put him through had somehow unseated even that certainty.

“I’ll bring it to you black, with milk and sugar and you can add to taste. How’s that?”

“Okay.” Stoole nodded.

Suze walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle. Stoole stood over the notes still strewn on the floor. Occasionally stooping to see what was written on this or that sheet. He moved over to the window, pulled the net curtain to one side, and watched traffic pass in the street below. As cups and spoons rattled in the next room he wandered back over to the family photos, a younger Suze and Lee posing with a beamish man Stoole presumed to be their father.

“Where’s Lee? Did he come back last night?” Stoole called through to Suze. He wandered over to the bookshelves which, like the ones in his flat, had been given over to storing sundry items; the laptop from last night, a pot-pourri of peach-stones and wood-shavings, and a further object that caught his eye, two short pieces of wood, one tongued, the other grooved such that they could be slotted together, and two small lacquered bowls, one black. He took one of the pieces of wood out and examined it more closely. Run about on three edges was a taper, and on one side a grid was laid out. In a few points from each tapered corner was a spot, and a further three spots at other places on the board.

“Please!” Suze almost shouted. Stoole looked up to see her standing in the doorway, tea tray in hand. “Be careful with that. It was my father’s.”

Such meaning, thought Stoole, in those words. He looked back at the board. Something about the criss-crossing of the lines struck a cord with him, and he found himself back in the school quad, facing the strange dwarfish character and the giggling of the crouching boys. Time, for Stoole at least, stood still.

“Are you alright, Stoole?” Suze said at last, breaking the spell.

Stoole turned his head sharply and looked at her.

“This means something.” He said.

“We take it in turns to place stones on the board,” Suze said, “and the aim is to surround more territory than your opponents. When a piece is played, it is not moved, except if it is captured by your opponent, in which case it is removed from the board.”

The board, assembled, lay between the two of them, and Suze rushed her way through the moves while Stoole ran his fingers through the cool black stones.

“An opponent can capture stones if he occupies all of the various adjoining points. If an army of stones only has one space, or liberty left, it’s ‘dǎ.’ At the end of the game any stones that have been captured are added to the territory, along with any stones that are within the territory and cannot be captured.”

“Seems straightforward.” Stoole said, and took a swig of coffee that he had over-sweetened.

“But does it seem familiar?” Suze asked.

“Vaguely. I’m not sure.”

“Well let’s play. You’re black, you go first.”

Stoole lifted a black stone and placed it on one of the larger dots in the corner. Almost immediately, Suze placed a white stone in the opposite corner.

“Why start there,” she asked him. Stoole shrugged and laid another stone down, this time in one of the two remaining empty corners. Stoole’s shrug seemed to end the conversation. The pair of them played stone after stone until there were about thirty in place. Stoole stopped at this point and took in the board. His stones were gathered together near the corners but were beginning to spread to the edges. Suze’s stones were also gathered in the corners, but had spread along the edges further in. Suze watched Stoole ponder his next move. He played a stone beneath one of hers, with only a single gap between them.

“This was your father’s game?” Stoole asked.

Suze sighed. “Yes.”

“That’s okay,” Stoole said, “we don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Suze said, placing another stone, “it’s just that there’s still a lot of emotion there. I guess I’m still afraid of it.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.” Stoole placed another stone. They played on for a little while in silence.

“Is this helping?” Suze asked, strengthening a group of stones against Stoole’s slow but steady encroachment.

“It’s odd. I feel as though my hand’s being guided, like I know where I want to play, but I don’t know why.”

Suze nodded at this, and watched as Stoole placed a stone down in such a way that it destroyed any chances of her keeping a weak group of stones alive.

“Does anything else come back to you?”

“Yes, but it seems unrelated. A smell, of lavender. And noises too. Birdsong. But it all seems out of place.”

Stones followed stones. The board slowly revealed itself to the two players. And with each stone played Stoole felt he was taking another step towards a revelation. The smell of the lavendar had transformed itself into dense bushes of the stuff, either side of a white painted door. A pain, the size of the qí stones they played with, formed behind his eyes. He rubbed the spot between the eyes.

“Headache?” Suze asked.

“Yeah.”

“You want something for it?”

“No. No, I’m fine.”

“Okay... we’re running out of places to play now.”

“Right. How does the game end?”

“Well,” Suze said, “we play until the only places left to play would take away our territory. When a player reaches that point they pass, and when both players pass, that’s it. We work out the scores.”

“So... here, here, here and here?”

“That’s about it.”

The pair took turns filling in the last neutral and worthless spaces on the board. As soon as Suze placed the final stone, Stool took off the dead stones, passing his to Suze, and adding hers to his prisoners. Suze watched, bemused, as he reintroduced the stones to the board blocking areas of territory, then sliding the pieces around, turning the spaces that remained easily calculable boxes. He looked up, then, and took in Suze’s look.

“What?” He said, and “Oh.” He looked down at the board again. “Was that wrong?”

“No, Jonathan, that’s how my father used to work out the score, too. And to add insult to injury you’ve beaten me by over eighty points.”

“Sorry.”

“No, Jonathan! This is good. You were right. This does mean something.”

“I just wish I could work out what. There’s a house, I’m sure of it. I think I may have gone there often.”

“And it’s related to the game?”

“Yes. I think that’s why I went. To play.”

“I know!” Suze said, her face open and bright. She grabbed her coat from the landing, turned to Stoole and said, “don’t go anywhere. Better still, go through into my room, make yourself comfy.”

Stoole offered up a sideways smile at this, but Suze was down the stairs and out. How comfortable did Suze want him, he wondered, as he walked through into her room. Bathed, in clean clothes, and in less than hostile surroundings, he could almost forget the strange journey he was on. Despite the moodswings he had experienced recounting what little he could recall of his life, and despite the odd sinking feeling when playing a game well, without understanding it, he felt reassured by the way the day was progressing. Suze seemed totally transformed from the hard-edged woman that had forced him out of his clothes at the threat of the police. No, it wasn’t that she was transformed, more that that hard-edged quality had changed its focus from needing to control him to needing to understand him. Somehow she had got herself caught up in the mystery of who he was, and that pragmatism already seemed to be giving up dividends. He slipped his socks off, undid the top button of his trousers and loosened his top, before spreading himself out on top of Suze’s bed. He let his eyes roam the textured plaster of the ceiling, likening the rolls of light and shade to that of the mamma of a cumulonimbus. He rolled the word around his mouth, wondering where it came from.

When Suze returned, she had a brief moment of panic, thinking that Stoole had perhaps left. The flat seemed strangely empty, and so it was a certain sense of relief when she found him dozing on the top of her bedcovers. It was a shame to disturb him, she thought, and watched as his chest slowly rose and fell. It was strange to have him around. What little the pair of them knew about him, she felt she’d never learnt so much about a person in such a short time. And there he was, snoozing away in her bedroom. She wondered what her father would have made of the situation. She remained certain that he would have wanted to help Stoole, but she wondered also if he would have struggled to maintain a barrier between the two of them. And then she wondered why she wondered that, and her thoughts became muddled and she stopped.

“Jonathan?”

He stirred then. She half expected him to start awake, to be terrified, to suspect capture, but instead he raised an arm slowly up to his face, pinched the bridge of his nose, and finally said, “Suze.”

Suze walked further into the room, surreptitiously dropping a tightly folded bag on the chair she largely used to leave her clothes when she was too tired to take them through to the laundry basket.

“Sorry to wake you.” She said, and looked down at him with a guarded fondness.

“That’s okay.” He said. “What are we doing.”

“Sit up a minute. I want you relaxed, but you’re no good to me unconscious.”

Stoole did as he was told, was beginning to get used to these orders, always delivered, he suspected, with a level of obligation lower than her tone suggested. There was something comforting in that, almost nannyish.

Suze stacked pillows up behind his back, and pushed him back down again with a firm hand on his shoulder. She wandered over to her stereo, selected a CD from her meagre collection and put it on. Soft slow sounds, the kind made from instruments so old they were in danger of dying out. She lowered the volume, till the music could barely be heard, then wandered over to the window and drew the curtains.

“Now,” she said. “Tell me again about the house you saw?”

Stoole lay back, and tried to evoke the memory once more, but it wouldn’t come.

“Don’t try and force it, just relax and let your mind wander back there.”

“It’s no use,” Stoole said.

“The game. Play through the game again in your mind.” Suze quickly padded through to the sitting room, and returned with half of the board and a bowl of stones. She returned, placed the board on the table and then started taking stones and placing them on the board, one after the other. The sound helped him. Before him now he could see fleeting images of the house. A floral front garden lay behind a wrought-iron fence. As the rhythm of the stones striking wood continued, Stoole caught a glimpse of a hand that was not a hand, stretched out before him, pushing at the gate.

“I’m there,” he said, “in the front garden. It’s so peaceful here.”

“What’s the garden like. Can you describe it.”

“Little shrubs. Flower beds. Pretty, really. And the smell...”

Suze returned to the plastic bag, unwrapped it as delicately as she could. Inside lay a packet of fresh lavender, which she popped open, rubbing the individual sprigs between her fingers. She waved some in the air around Stoole, grateful that his eyes were closed.

“I’m going up to the door now. I go to knock, but it opens before I get the chance. A man. Big moustache, grey and ginger. He’s pleased to see me. He’s asking me in.”

“What is he saying to you?”

“I... I can’t hear him. We’re going into his house now. So much clutter! So many books! We keep going, down a hallway, out through into the garden. There’s an old travel blanket laid out, and a qí bǎn, and a hamper. The old guy’s having a time getting down on the ground. I lend him a hand. I can hear...”

Stoole tailed off.

“What is it?” Suze asked. “What can you hear?”

“It seems... it can’t be right.” Stoole said, and with this the mild spell that Suze’s sounds and smells had wrought.

“What didn’t seem right, Jonathan?”

“It’s, it was just wrong. That’s all.”

“It could be important.”

“I... in the trees. I was lying back, waiting for the old man to play, and I looked up, and in the trees I could see parrots. I’m certain that house, and that old man... I know I was in England, but in the trees, parrots. I’m sorry. I think we’re wasting our time.”

“No.” Suze said, excitedly. “No, that’s it! That’s where you were! Richmond! There are parrots in Richmond.”

Stoole frowned.

“They reckon some old dear lost her parrots years ago and they bred in the wild. There aren’t many, but they’re definitely there.”

“So that’s where we find out house?”

“I’m sure of it!” Suze said. She cradled his head then, and kissed his forehead. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” She said. Stoole placed his arm around her, as much for balance as anything else, but with his hand flat against her back, he found he had no compulsion to let her go. He felt as though he were floating, like a child on a swing, reaching the heights and hanging, waiting for gravity to retain his pull him back down again. But it was Suze who fell first.

Lee had made it home late, slept little, and left early. Occasionally, just occasionally, his sister would work her way under his skin to such a degree that he would be sent almost into crisis. He loved her, of course, and his relationship with her was never weakened by actions on either side, but nevertheless, the distance he sometimes felt the urge to put between them became colossal. So it was that, after his stakeout at Stoole’s apartment, from which he had little to report save for a shift-change, he drove around London until boredom and fatigue began to set in. As soon as he felt that the annoyance at his sister may prove genuinely life threatening he took himself home, where he found his sister in a light sleep on the sofa, and his bed mercifully empty.

Since their father’s death neither had slept easy. The running of the takeaway on its own had led to a somewhat idiosyncratic routine but with the death of their father what little sleep they enjoyed had fractured into a thousand restless nights. Slowly Lee had strived to put his life back together, to draw a line under his grief and move on, but it forever seemed that his sister had other ideas. For her her father was a yardstick against which she should be measured. His painful habit of finding in himself the generosity and decency to help any waif or stray whose shadow fell across his threshold, the habit which bitterly led to his own death, seemed the one aspect of his personality that Suze was keen to preserve. Lee, on the other hand, saw in his father’s death proof that such benevolence only led to pain and misery, and as such was best avoided. Yet here he was in a situation where his sister had taken in a comparative stranger (Lee could conjure up a dozen customers who, although seemingly charming and always ready with the cash, he would never in a million years trust beyond their own threshold). Lee had to accept it. The flat was a shared space, and he had invested into its tranquillity. He was well aware that Suze had retained her judgement on the women he had occasionally managed to entice back to the family seat. Suze, in her own way, had done no worse than his philandering. Indeed, in the grand scheme of things, she ought to be commended, but nevertheless Lee was left with a bitter taste in his mouth, a nagging discomfort at Stoole’s presence in the flat. He found himself in a tight balance between the love and respect that he held for his sister, and his inherent distrust of his fellowman.

None of this troubled him by the time he got home. He stumbled, in a way that he had stumbled a thousand times before, from hallway to bathroom to bedroom and slipped, slick easy, into a sleep he felt he had well deserved. But regardless of his fatigue, he still rose early, the sun draggin him from his bed and belching him out on the street, where he hoped the cool autumnal air would blow the cobwebs from his brain.

Even then, in the cold crisp November morning, his discomfort at Stoole’s presence made itself known, yet he felt it was a discomfort he ought to confront. He felt as though it was clear, when all was said and done, that his sister had chosen to do the right thing, that Stoole posed no threat in and of himself, and that Lee had no place in being discomforted by his presence. Nevertheless there was a deep mystery at the foot of the man that had suddenly entered their lives. Lee knew that, irrespective of who was wrong or right, were they to find more about Stoole’s history, they would be in a much better position to determine their next action.

Lee viewed it almost as a no lose situation. The more he found out about Stoole’s life, the better able he would be to either put his trust in the man, or convince his sister that they were better off without him.

And so, on waking, he scrubbed himself up, got back into his car, and took himself into the city, and to bugger with the congestion charge. He drove his way over to Blackfriars bridge, found St Andrews St, and ultimately discovered its tower. The City was no place, however, for people to slow down, to wind down their windows and take in the view. He found himself a parking space and took to the pavement, walking up and down the street, imitating a lost tourist, just so that he could get a better measure of the building in which Stoole had worked, apparently in a state of suspended amnesia.

As he watched and waited, people came and went, some with visible signs of anxiety, others with the languid confidence that only came with the easy acquisition of power. After an hour or so he began to realise that, despite the odd familiar face (a politician here, a broadcaster there) there was little to be gleaned from his monitoring of the building, and so he retrieved his car from the multi-storey and made his way home.

It was the heat of the flat that first alerted him. A strange warmth lingered in the air. He wandered through into the sitting room, where lay a sprawl of sheets of paper, on which were scribbled myriad notes about their blank page visitor. He looked up then, as the noise of something shifting took his notice. Beyond the hallway lay the open door to his sisters bedroom. He approached it gingerly. Inside lay Stoole, slumbering naked beneath a single cotton sheet. Lee found himself transfixed. The sheet that covered his unwelcome guest covered him in the slightest of senses. His physique, not unenviable, was on full display, and the bedclothes were gathered about his midriff, and Lee sense with a sickening dread that the bedclothes were well filled, and worn. Off and to his left a toilet flushed, and his sister soon emerged, in t-shirt and knickers, the look of contentedness swept from her face as soon as her eyes met his.

“You didn’t waste any time.” Lee said, an open accusation.

“Shh. You’ll wake him.” She said, pulling him away from the door and closing it.

“What are you playing at, Suze?” Lee asked. He had thought, on finding Stoole naked in his sister’s bed, that he would be more angry, but as he spoke to her he found the expectant anger lacking. What stood there in its place was a concern; an incomprehension.

“I don’t know,” Suze said, with an honesty that surprised him. “It just sort of happened.”

“You’re getting worse.” Lee said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh come on! You know what I mean. Ever since dad was killed you’ve had an eye out for any lost cause that presented itself to you. It’s not enough you waste time and money on them, but now you have to sleep with them too?”

“Oh please!” Suze said. “This isn’t a threshold! I’m not going to start dropping my knickers for anyone I meet!”

Lee rolled his eyes at the mention of his sister’s underwear. He had somehow managed to direct himself with blind confidence far outside his own comfort zone.

“So what is it then? What does all of this signify?”

“Why does it have to signify anything?” Suze asked. “I feel like everything I’ve done since father died has had to have some deeper meaning. Yes, even taking him in in the first place. But when it comes down to it I slept with him because I wanted to sleep with him. That’s all there needs to be to it. I didn’t think it would take us anywhere, unlock any secrets, benefit us in any way. It was just something I wanted to do, and I did it, and it’s done. I don’t see why you have to act so bloody sanctimoniously about it.”

“You don’t get it do you?” Lee said, suddenly unable to look at her.

“Why don’t you explain it to me.” Suze said, hand on hip and venom on her tongue.

“I worry about you.” Lee said finally. “Dad dying changed us, and I don’t think either of us have worked out who we have become. So when I see you acting in ways I’m not used to I get scared. There. It’s stupid and irrational but that’s how I feel, and that’s why I am like I am.”

Suze didn’t know how to respond to this. On the one hand she was angry with Lee, sensing in him the criticism she doubtless would have incurred had she found herself in bed with Stoole whilst her father was still alive. On the other hand she knew in ways more complete than Lee could perhaps understand that his feelings were totally appropriate, and that their absence may even be offensive to her. This left her with few things to say.

In the end she said “thank you,” and ruffled his hair in the way that she had when he was younger and mercifully shorter than she was.

“Just be careful.” Lee said back to her, a warning as much out of conversational necessity as out of genuine concern.

“I’m always careful.” She said, as though voicing some aspect of her persona that she secretly despised. “I have a favour I need to ask.”

“Oh yes?” Lee replied.

“You’re pissed at me, aren’t you?” Stoole asked.

Lee continued driving, a safe slow thirty miles an hour down the tree lined streets of Richmond.

“I like your sister.” Stoole said. “I hope you’re okay with that.”

“Just keep looking for this house of yours.” Lee said. “You’re lucky I haven’t hit you.”

“You have hit me.” Stoole said, rubbing the chin that still ached from the punch he had been dealt the night before.

“I know.” Lee said, smiling, and turned the car right onto a road that brought it out behind the station.

Lee had been to Richmond maybe once or twice before, on errands for his sister. He hated it here – the myth of England as some great forever summer garden, a place of high tea and strawberries, all a few minutes away from the grime and the dirt that was the ever-present backdrop to his own existence. Lee had read once of tribes in the South American rainforest who, due to the fecundity of their surrounds, due to the fact that they could beyond the confines of their encampments see only a foot or two in front of them, had as their key planks of belief not sight but sound. For them it was to hear is to believe, rather than to see. Lee’s life in London mirrored this in ways of which he was only too bleakly too aware. Too often he would find himself listening to the screams of children, raised voices, the kind of noises that could just as easily be cars backfiring, fireworks, or gunshots, and only have his imagination to fit them into some kind of event. Reading the myths of the tribesmen he could at once see how they too had built their stories around the things they could hear but not see – of great giants and monsters hidden deep in the forests. Here in Richmond he was afforded more viewing distance, could take in more of the world around him, but rather than revel in the fact, he resented it. He felt as though he had broken through cloud cover at the top of a vast parabola, but would only be able to take in the view for a short time before gravity did its trick and pulled him down into the grey darkness once more.

And all this went through his head as he tried to bite down and bite down hard on the anger he felt towards his charity-case passenger. All this went through his head as he tried to force from his mind images of Stoole and his sister together. With his father gone, he felt a certain level of duty to protect his sister, to stand in as a guardian for her, despite her being three years his senior. He knew such levels of protection were not welcome, but the urge remained and there was little he could do about it save recognise it and wait for a moment when that feeling could be exercised.

The car stopped at a crossroads.

“Which way?” Lee asked.

Stoole closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them. The lights changed from amber to green and a car pheeped behind them.

“Straight on.” Stoole said, and they drove forward.

It was not that Lee had anything specific against Stoole. Lord knows he had been a good enough customer over the years, had tipped well enough off and on. He had always been polite, ready with the money, and Lee sensed there had always been something unspoken between them. Nothing so bold as friendship or even potential friendship. More a mutual respect. But all that was spoiled now. Breaking into the car, talking his way into the flat, talking his way into Suze’s... Lee stopped himself short. He had in him a desire to honour his sister’s wishes, even if it was just so that when things did go wrong, when the stranger sitting next to him, taking in his surrounds like a meerkat, did visit upon the pair of them some injustice, violence or theft, or brought the dark forces of which he spoke down on the pair of them, even if it was just so that when that happened, Lee would be able to say that he had been right, that Suze shouldn’t let the ghost of their father make all of their decisions.

“Stop” Stoole said, so abruptly that Lee momentarily feared that he had been thinking out loud. More pheeping from cars behind who struggled to overtake, but were too polite to create in the way that such driving would have been responded to in zone 2. Stoole, for his part, had practically lapsed into catatonia, transfixed by a large blue house, set back behind a garden and a wrought iron fence.

The gate moaned on its hinges as Stoole opened it. The scene played out for him twice, in memory and in actuality, and given the odd way in which the memory was shrouded, and the queer but growing certainty that the memory didn’t belong to him, he likened the experience to deja vu. He took his time along the short path to the door, even stooping to run his hands through the bushes he found growing there. He breathed in the lavender, bringing the memory further into his consciousness, and cementing the notion that although the memory was certainly contained within his head, it was quite simply not an experience of his own. He mounted the two low concrete steps and stood. He turned back, then, saw Lee sitting patiently in the car, staring back at him. He smiled, but the smile wasn’t returned, and when he went finally to knock on the door he hesitated, and it was only then that he recognised in himself a great fear, that however convincing the memory was, and how much the space in which he found himself in matched it, this was merely another dead end, another blank piece of paper to be filed away with all of the others in Suze’s livingroom. He stole himself and knocked.

His heart sank. The door was opened by a young Latin-American girl who looked at him with uncertain, timid eyes.

“Yes?” She asked.

“I.” Stoole said, short of words. “I was hoping to meet with someone here.”

“Someone here?” She asked.

“An old man. Big moustache. I think perhaps he may have lived here once but, and I’d hoped he would still be here.”

“Christina!” a voice from within called out. Annoyance tempered by the wisdom that comes with age.

“Christina, who is it? If it’s that woman from the charity tell her I’ve no jumble for her. No, no, tell her I am jumble.”

An old man, big of moustache and slow on his feet, stepped forward into the light. As he approached his volume dropped.

“To part with any of these things would be to part with myself. And now I see you are not the lady after jumble.” He looked at Stoole over the rims of his glasses. “Now. Who have we here.”

“I’m Stoole. Jonathan Stoole. I was hoping I might speak with you, sir.”

“Speak, is it. And what have you to do with me?”

“I’m not certain.”

“Not certain.” The old man said. “Not certain, is it. Christine? You were going into town, weren’t you? To meet your friend?”

Christine looked nervously at Stoole. “Si,” she said, before wandering into the house to retrieve a coat and shoes.

“Indispensible, that woman,” the old man said, “but too damned timid for her own good. Now where were we? You want to speak to me, but you don’t know why?”

“I know why, it’s just... I’m sorry, this is a little confusing. I... We’ve never met before have we?”

“Met? We? I don’t think so no?” the old man looked over his glasses again. “Should we have?”

“I remember coming here. We played qí, in your garden.”

“Ah! You play! You’re here for a game! Good good! Come in! I’m afraid I don’t really keep up with the club. Is it a tournament match, or just a friendly.”

“Club? No no, I’m not from any club.” Stoole protested, but as Christine made her way past them and off on her travels, the old man leaned into him, winked, and tapped his nose.

“You are now, son.” He said in a low voice. He beckoned Stoole over the threshold.

The house, like the garden, fitted more or less precisely with his memory. Books were staked by doorframes, odd little ornaments, of seeming African or India origin, dotted every shelf and supporting surface. Everything seemed clean enough, save for thick layers of dust on the glass and the china.

“I’m Grue, by the way.” The old man said. Since Christine’s departure Grue seemed to have grown a couple of inches and to have thrown of the old-aged befuddlement that had coloured their door-step conversation. “You’ll have to excuse the mess, but I am old, and can’t bring myself to throw things away. Or people for that matter. I just let things pile up. Qí, you say? So you’re of the Chinese rather than the Japanese persuasion?”

“Sir?” Stoole said.

“Sir!” Grue said. “Sir!”

“Mr Grue, then.” Jonathan said with a smile.

“Well, it’s usually just Grue, actually, but Mr Grue will do. I do have a first name but it’s buried in here somewhere and I’ve not the time to go about looking for it.”

“How do you manage?” Stoole asked, playing along with the old fool’s nonsense.

“One names enough I think. Especially as my circle of friends continue to diminish. And of course, not too many Grues about these days. But as I was saying, you follow the, ah, the Chinese terminology?”

“In the game? Yes, I suppose I must do.”

Grue frowned at this. “Suppose I must do. Hmm... You have, if I may be so bold at this early stage in our friendship, a peculiar way of putting things. Please, do sit.”

Grue had walked Stoole into a study, although Stoole suspected most of the doors in the house led into studies. A table was set out, a game halfway through.

“Go, I prefer to call it.” Grue said. “More scope for misunderstanding, what?”

Stoole sat, Grue sat, and at once the old fellow began clearing away the pieces.

“Oh please! If you’re halfway through a game, don’t-“

Grue tapped away at his forehead “All in here, my boy! All in here.”

Stoole found it doubtful that the old man could forget his first name, but remember an entire board, but he didn’t press the point.

“Now.” Grue said, taking a handful of black stones in one of his hands. “Odd or even?”

“Even.” Said Stoole. Grue nodded, opened his hand and revealed seven.

“I shall let you go first.” Grue said. “Now why don’t you tell me how you come to be here.”

Stoole, feeling he now had something to prove to the old fellow, and still awash with relief that his memory had not been a fabrication, and that he was a step closer to confirming that strange things had been done to him, doubtless without his consent, played slow and careful, attempting to squeeze out every ounce of worth from his stones.

He began his story at the beginning, with the discovery of the repeated messages in his leaving cards, the curious dream (which interested Grue greatly) the flight into Marlow (which Grue seemed less fascinated by), the spooks that had been following him, the vanishing school, the hunch that his mobile phone could be used in order to track him, the fact that his flat was now occupied by whoever it was that was in pursuit of him, and that he had sought refuge with people selected as much by fate as by design, and that slowly he had pieced together not only how little of his memory he actually had, but the likelihood that what little he could recall was somehow inauthentic. Grue nodded routinely throughout this retelling, playing stones only when Stoole’s narrative lulled. Stoole tried hard to read Grue’s responses but could barely decide whether Grue was paying more attention to the story or to the game. By some chance, as the time came to fill in the neutral spaces, Stoole also came to the end of his tale, omitting his brief moment of passion and bringing himself to Grue’s door just as the last stone was placed.

“Fascinating.” Grue said, as he began taking the dead stones form the board, before adding them back into the territories. “So you came here to test this memory of yours.”

“Yes, and because I hoped you might be able to tell me something of who perhaps that memory actually belongs to.”

“Belongs. Such curious words we use to describe things. Do our memories belong to us, or are we owned by our memories? Who creates who?”

Stoole had imagined as soon as it had become apparent that Grue wished to play out a game with him, that he would win, and in that victory against someone as adept as he imagined Grue to be, would lie the proof that his story was indeed true. But Stoole only had to look at the board to see that he was beaten by a similar margin to that which he had beaten Suze the day before.

“Yes, Stoole, I do know exactly who this memory of yours belongs too. I imagine, too, that the memory of the school was also his.”

“Then you can help me?”

Grue nodded.

“Fantastic” Stoole said, almost upsetting the board. But this sense of joy was not shared by Grue. He stood then, knees cracking, and wandered over to the window.

“He’s dead, of course.” Grue said, the sentence pulling the rug from beneath Stoole. “I mean I’ve known for some time that it was likely. From what you tell me I see that what little hope I had of being wrong on that front was foolish.”

“Oh... Oh God, I’m sorry. I never imagined...”

Grue pointed to the board.

“Your story, by the way, lacks any kind of credibility. You seem to be suggesting that the Government employs administrative staff that are kept on low wages and have their memories wiped, and that they are capable of pursuing people halfway across the country based on CCTV cameras, mobile phones, and any other piece of technology that people use without necessarily understanding. Your story is the stuff of cheap thrillers, rattled off in the middle of the night fuelled by red wine and a need to pay the mortgage.”

Stoole seemed confused.

“But the game... He’d always leave his skirts open, you see.”

Grue strode quickly back to the board, quickly replacing the dead stones, before pulling out stones one by one, reversing his way towards the early mid-game.

“So I could always get under him. And here...” he added stones rapidly, fastforwarding toward the endgame. “He’d always give me these kind of openings, you see. I can always get in, but he can only prevent me spreading in one direction or the other. Too many weak groups that he can’t defend simultaneously.”

He smiled then, as though his dead friend had returned to him, which in sense he had.

“This is his game. That’s how I know everything that you say, the whole preposterous story is true. Silly sod. Silly silly sod.” Grue, still smiling, blinked tears.

“I’m sorry.” Stoole said again. “I should never have come.”

“No. Don’t be daft. You clearly had no choice.” Grue laughed. “It’s almost as though he sent you.”

“Who was he?”

“Jack Bryce, but really his name is not important. What he was, though... He was a scientist. He was a philosopher. He was my friend. You see we are products of our memories, and our memories are a product of ourselves. We are hands that draw themselves. This Jack understood, and clearer than most. He believed that it could be possible to take a memory out of one person’s head and stick it into someone else’s. That was his grand idea, and it probably wasn’t as original as all that, the stuff of schlock TV series, of pulp science fiction. But of course it doesn’t have to work in science fiction. The writer can just make it up as he goes along. Jack, though. Jack made it work.”

“Really?” Stoole said, at once feeling foolish.

“Evidently, Stoole, evidently. It was all to do with rehabilitation for Jack. There was a big concern at the time that convicted criminals tended to reoffend, to the tune of seventy or eighty percent. Jack believed that the reason for that was that these people were in a rut. They’d never experienced what it was like to really participate in society and experience any kind of gratitude or reward for doing so. But if you could take a memory of someone experiencing that, and just give it to one these guys, he reckoned even if that person knew the memory was fake, it would really change their way of thinking. You see, what he wanted to do was to turn people into their own role models.”

“But I’m not a criminal. Am I?” Stoole asked.

“Well it sounds like you’ve been rubbed out completely, Stoole. I know that wasn’t something Jack had ever wanted for anyone.”

Silence descended, its only respite the slow ticking of a clock. Grue regarded Stoole for a moment.

“Stoole. We are what we do. That’s basic cognitive psychology for you, but I think it’s useful. Whatever might lie in your past may be lost for good, and that’s something you’re going to have to get used to. Heck, for most people the past is a foreign country; it would probably be healthiest for you to consider your past self a foreigner, someone who is only tangentially related to you.”

“I don’t think that’s enough, somehow.” Stoole said.

“Give it time. You’ll see. It’s a blank sheet you’ve been given. A reset. I can think of a dozen people who would welcome such a chance.”

“Perhaps. So what happened to Jack?”

“Oh, well, as soon as he even made a hint at what he had developed in public the bad guys started sniffing around him. They wanted it for interrogative purposes, or to brainwash dissidents, all manner of unethical suggestions. But Jack was principled. Almost to a fault he was principled. He had developed the technology with one purpose in mind and as far as he was concerned if it were to be used for any other purpose he would gladly destroy the whole lot, the hardware, the research, everything. He’d made that threat to all manner of people, and meant it, too.”

“But they wouldn’t take no for an answer?”

“When do they ever? One guy in particular, an Alvin Cabbs, was most insistent. He’d tried to butter Jack up, offering him funding for research, honours, even a peerage, but Jack wasn’t interested. I suspect that Cabbs was seen as the final straw. I suspect that the idea was if Cabbs failed, then they would have to take more drastic actions. I received a phone call one night from Jack saying that he had something important to tell me, and that was the last I or anyone else heard of him. He vanished, the contents of his house vanished, the contents of his lab vanished. A further two of his researchers disappeared, and the remainder fled the country thinking they were on some sort of hit list.”

“They got to him, then?”

“By hook or by crook. They made some noise, of course, suggesting some sort of terrorist action, but you didn’t have to be 10 Dan to work out what had happened. And as unexpected as your visit here today was, it was one that I’ve been waiting for.”

“He could still be alive, couldn’t he?” Stoole asked.

“No. I don’t think so. What made his device so dangerous was that it could let anyone with force take any information out of someone’s head that they wanted. And too often the only thing preventing that force doing unspeakable things to people is because of the information that those people’s heads contain. Something Jack was always too naive to see. That memory of yours is as good as a death certificate.”

“That’s what I call a day’s work!” Stoole said, smiling, as he climbed into Lee’s car.

“Back seat.” Lee said. “We’ve got trouble.” Stoole just looked at him blankly.

“Back seat! Now!” Lee said, clicking on the radio.

“-for a spate of murders that took place four years ago. The police have stated that new DNA evidence has been discovered, and it is highly likely that the killer is still at large.”

The break in the clouds that Stoole had taken so much pleasure in had at once healed over. He didn’t have to hear the rest of the story as he clambered into the back seat, resuming the position that he had used to hide the previous night.

“The man, using the alias Jonathan Stoole, is believed to have been employed for some time as an office temp in London, using his status as a means of gathering information for his potential victims. The most known victim, Aldwin Chaddick, brother to the senior intelligence officer Roger Chaddick, was gunned down in his driveway in a killing described as highly professional and ruthlessly coldblooded in a statement from Roger Chaddick’s aide Alvin Cabbs.”

“We are so fucked. So fucking fucked.” Lee said, as he took the car out of Richmond, trying to drive normally, despite his urge to run.

Stoole felt the world closing in on him, but still the name of Alvin Cabbs reached out to him through the noise of Lee’s driving, and the sound of the chilled blood rushing through his ears. Alvin Cabbs. The word seemed to resonate through his mind. He closed his eyes to it, a vibration almost painful. He could hear the sound of rain falling on gravel, of water hissing in fire. His head began to pound.

The door to Suze and Lee’s apartment opened as soon as the car pulled out. Suze called out in Cantonese to Jonathan, who frowned at her from within his raised hood. Lee chuckled something to him then, also in Cantonese, and struck his back. Slowly catching on, Jonathan chuckled too, repeating back the last two words Lee had spoken. Then in through the door and up the stairs.

“That’s the neighbours dealt with.” Suze said. “But... what’s wrong with you?”

“Headache.” Stoole said, slumping down on the sofa and clutching his forehead.

“I haven’t the time for headaches, Stoole.” Suze said, and for the first time he noticed an edge in her voice. He wasn’t, he realised, being welcomed back to his safe haven. Something had changed. Pain or no pain, it wasn’t long before he worked out what. Lee brought him something fizzy and presumably analgesic while Suze switched on the television and cycled the channel through to News 24. Mute footage showed a burnt out vehicle in the front of a large country house, crossfading into shots of men in white all-over suits entering tents, and policemen standing guard over a taped off area.

“Stoole,” Suze asked pointing at the screen. “I need you to tell me. Was that you? Did you do these things?”

Jonathan looked at the rolling images, which soon began to repeat. That odd feeling of deja vu, the same feeling that had come over him in Grue’s front garden washed over him, but it all seemed strangely out of kilter. Again he had the sense that this was a place he had been to. More troubling still, the image of the burnt out car seemed familiar too. But that wasn’t what was being asked. What Suze wanted to know was whether or not she was harbouring a murderer. He reached into his soul then, tried to find in himself a killing streak. Despite the soluble aspirin his headache was worsening. Almost blinded by white pain, he looked up at Suze.

“I couldn’t have.” He said, and collapsed.

Rain pelted down. The car a twist of metal, flame and smoke belching from its interior. The sickening smell of burning flesh. Stoole looked down. Beside him stood the dwarf, who looked up at him, expressionless. Stoole looked back at the car.

“I’ve got to hand it to you, Cabbs, you’ve done a sterling effort on this.” Chaddick said, thumbing through the file he had been given.

“Bit of an own goal, really, sir. I’m only sorry it took us this long to realise.”

“Well persistence is everything, as I’ve so often said.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“How did he end up on the CASM programme in the first place?”

“Coincidence, I think, sir. We, ah, acquired him in the first wave of volunteers.”

“Curious bunch, those. Can life really get so bad that they’d throw it all away?”

“You can’t throw away the past, sir.”

“True enough, but still, to want to forget who you are.”

“They’re duly recompensed, sir, and they have the chance to really make a difference in the battle to defend the nation.”

Chaddick harumphed at this. “So we picked him up and wiped his memory of the very crimes we wanted to find out about?”

“Not wiped, sir, recorded. But the only way of accessing those memories would be to implant them in someone else. There are colossal dangers in doing that, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.”

“Turn ‘em into killers, you mean?”

“Precisely so, sir. What is more it was part of the deal that their memories would remain their own personal information; that we wouldn’t pry.”

“And do we know how the DNA was missed, why the connection hadn’t been made?”

“Again, another benefit of sharing information, sir. We had both DNA samples on our records, but in two separate arms of the Government. We now have powers to compare one against the other, and happily this was one of the first matches we encountered.”

“And how close are we to capturing him?”

“That’s going to be the hard part, sir. He’s demonstrated, since coming out of the influence of the CASM programme, some quite wily behaviour. He totally misdirected our attempts to track him through Oxford, and as a result we have very little idea as to where he might be. But we have his image going up everywhere very shortly, and we’ve already cleared release of his name. It’ll only be a matter of time before Joe Public comes forward with some information.”

Stoole slid through dark metal. Something was on top of him, pinning him down, and he spiralled through the darkness.

Cabbs for a time had become quite obsessed with mazes. In his youth he had run biro paths out of every kind of maze under the sun, enjoying the simple pleasure of finding his way, using his own ingenuity alone, out of the problems he encountered. He had begged his parents to take him to hedge mazes, wherein he would happily get lost for hours at a time, finally happening upon the inner sanctums, the prize of a picturesque garden, some statuary, or a tower. This obsession came to an abrupt end one day when an uncle, no doubt thinking he was doing the boy a favour, pointed out that mazes were almost always easier when run back to front, to start at the prize and work backwards towards the starting point. Their thrall ended with that simple revelation. Cabbs had dallied for a time with ignoring this fact, of running the maze as it had been intended, but this just seemed hollow, as if the fact that he was denying himself the information made every success a failure. And it was the difference between success and failure that was all. Cabbs realised that he was faced now with a fresh maze, and in order to solve it, to find Stoole, he would have to work out what the treasure was and where it lay. He put himself in Stoole’s shoes, pondered at what was driving him. Unless he was a great deal more astute than his file led Cabbs to believe, he would still be trying to work out what had been happening to him, and few people knew that. Of these people, Cabbs thought about which ones he could be certain about, and which ones would Stoole be able to track down. The majority of them, of course, were agents and operators, and could be relied upon as far as usual. He doubted very much they would want to aid or abet Stoole, however, as although they were capable of being disloyal, it was always at a price, and Stoole had no leverage whatsoever. That left three people, two of whom Cabbs could say with an absolute certainty were dead. Cabbs set about finding Grue.

Grue placed his hand beneath his nose, and ran his fingers and thumb down over his badger-brush moustache. Before him lay, as far as he was concerned, the world, laid out in 361 points, some occupied with stones of dark slate, some of white shell. Stout armies sat in their corners, facing the centre of the board, and extending from them stones in one or two space jumps. Here and there the black and the white had met, touched each other, pushed, walked, captured and killed. This was perhaps the noisiest game that he had played against Jack, the one Jack had come closest to winning, and when his thoughts returned to his absent friend it was this game that he liked to return to.

“So much potential Jack, if only you could see it.” He said to the empty chair. He placed a few stones down, a variation on what had been played, and at once the board began to looked more favourable to black.

“Always good at building up your influence, but you could never make the leap and turn it into territory.”

He removed stones one by one, returning them to the bowls, bringing the game to its thirtieth move.

A cat mewed. Not his, but the next door neighbour’s. It had made Grue’s house of clutter and bric-a-brac a second home, and would spend many an afternoon gingerly stepping through the odd menagerie of carved creatures and ornaments.

Grue played on, his mind occupied mainly by the board, but occasionally drifting to the news on Radio 4. He considered himself well out of the loop these days. What little influence he had had over world developments was long-since past. The world was not his for the saving any longer, a realisation he had made long ago, and so to listen to the news was almost to peep through net curtains at the neighbours rowing; something of only a marginal interest, but strictly speaking of no real concern. He had past his mantle on, and that was that.

As he moved his hand across to the black bowl, however, the radio spoke a name to him. It said “Jonathan Stoole,” and it caught him by surprise. His hand knocked the bowl from the table, scattering its contents into the already strewn carpet.

“Hell’s beels!” Grue said, and gingerly lowered himself to his knees in order to gather up their contents. As he collected them up, he listened more closely to the radio, heard it speak of murder, of a wanted man, of an old enemy.

“Stuff and nonsense.” Grue called out, placing upset stones back in the bowl. Getting to his feet, he dug up a telephone from beneath a mass of journals and continuation paper, and dialled a number.

“Chaddick please.”

“Can I ask who’s calling please.”

“Grue.” He said, gruffly. Cabbs was tightening a noose about Stoole’s neck, he realised, and he wasn’t about to watch as an innocent man was destroyed for the sake of Governmental pride.

“And may I ask what this is concerning?”

“Never might what it is concerning, young lady. It is very urgent that I speak to him.”

Next door’s cat bolted suddenly, knocking over a stalk carved from a cow-horn, no doubt chasing the moths Grue shared his house with.

“I can put you through to Mr Cabbs’ PA if you’d like. As you can understand Mr Chaddick is a very busy man, and received many phonecalls from a wide variety of-”

“I’m former staff.” Grue said. There was a pause.

“Well, in that case I’m sure you can appreciate the difficulties in putting a call directly-”

“Look, you call Chaddick now and tell him I want a word with him. If he tells me to go to hell, then so be it. I rather doubt that he will.”

“Very well sir. Will you hold?”

“Yes I’ll hold.”

“Thank you sir,” the operator said, in mock politeness. Some pastoral piece of classical music began to play down the phone at him. He wandered over to the fireplace in order to seek out his pipe. The phone cord snaked out behind him, but he knew well enough there was nothing that could be knocked over. Despite the seeming chaos within each room of Grue’s house, he knew from day to day the position of every item. The music stopped.

“Ah! Chaddick?” Grue said, but there was no response. “Chaddick?” he said again. If he ended up speaking to that operator again he would be most irate. But instead of the operator, he heard a dialling tone. Turning around, he expected to see the cat purched over the phone, staring guiltily up at him, but it was not the cat.

“You?” Grue said.

“The one and only.” Cabbs said, gloved hands held out in a mockery of a music hall performer.

Grue, who never found such antics remotely intimidating, merely took them as signs of false bravado wandered up to Cabbs, and replaced the handset.

“Had any visitors lately?” Cabbs enquired.

“What do you mean?” Grue replied, knowing at once that his response had given him away.

Cabbs smiled. “Oh, you know, murderers on the run, delusional schizophrenics spouting tales of national conspiracy, you know the routine.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grue said, and returned to his chair. As he began placing stones, and doing the best to ignore his intruder, Cabbs walked slowly around the back of him, circled the table, and sat down.

“Othello is it?” Cabbs asked.

“You know full well what it is.” Grue replied sternly. Cabbs was sitting in Jack’s chair, and the perversity of that sickened Grue to his core. If he had had the strength he would have grabbed a fire iron and clubbed the fool to death, and hang the consequences.

Cabbs watched the man at play for a time, before speaking.

“Look at you, beavering away over your little games.”

“These games, Alvin, were important once. Very important, though you’re probably to young to remember.”

“What did you tell Stoole?” Cabbs asked. A cheap trick, Grue thought. He’d played it well enough himself to unseat less experienced players. Attack in an unlikely part of the board to focus your opponent’s attention away from some slight trifle elsewhere; a trifle on which would hinge the whole game. A cheap trick and he did his best to ignore it.

“I’m an old man, Cabbs. What have I got to teach anyone?”

Cabbs smiled at this, and sat back. He steepled fingers gloved in black leather. Was this his tactic now, Grue wondered, to try and stare him out as would some adolescent?

“What’s it all for, Alvin? What’s any of it actually for?”

Cabbs leant forward. “Don’t call me Alvin,” he said, and sat back again.

“You take on these technologies, sometimes before you can even understand them, you push for more money, more powers, more responsibility, and for what? Where does it actually get us?”

“What’s this?” Cabbs asked, “A liberal spy?”

“Spy!” Grue said, and waved the word out of the air with his hand. “I played a few games abroad, and came back with more than I went away with. Hardly spying. But for the record I thought what I was doing might actually have meant something in the long run. For the record, I’m allowed to change your mind.”

“No.” Cabbs said. “People won’t be getting that chance any more. It causes administrative problems.”

“Yes, that sounds about right, curtail freedom for the benefit of a, what, bureaucratic protocol?”

“An unfortunate necessity of the times we live in.” Cabbs said flatly.

“Pah!” Grue said, the only rejoinder he felt Cabbs’ statement deserved.

“This isn’t about civil liberties any more, Grue. This is about...” Cabbs looked to the air for inspiration, and found it. “This is about modernity.”

“Oh yes, Cabbs, run your flag up an abstract mast, by all means, but don’t expect people to salute.”

“A naval metaphor!” Cabbs said, as if in genuine glee. “Grue?”

“Yes?”

“This.” Cabbs placed a hand beneath the table between them, and threw it to one side. The goban and stones showered down, and despite himself Grue shrank back.

“I’m a little bored of talking.” Cabbs said, rising to his feet. He reached inside his jacket and withdrew a pistol. “So why don’t you tell me what it was you told Stoole, and then we can both move on.”

Stoole slept on. Lee and Suze had tried and failed to wake him, so had instead carried him to Suze’s bedroom, hoping that with time he would wake of his own accord.

“What do you think?” Lee asked of his sister as they both stared at the prostrate Stoole.

“I don’t know.” Suze said. “He can’t be a murderer can he?”

Lee shrugged.

Stoole slept on. Lee and Suze had tried and failed to wake him, so had instead carried him to Suze’s bedroom, hoping that with time he would wake of his own accord.

“What do you think?” Lee asked of his sister as they both stared at the prostrate Stoole.

“I don’t know.” Suze said. “He can’t be a murderer can he?”

Lee shrugged.

“I don’t think he’s going to be able to stay here.” Lee said finally. “Even if he’s innocent, even if this is all part of whatever it is he’s running from. We’ve done enough already.”

“What did you find out at the house?”

In all the excitement of getting Stoole home, of staying out of people’s sight long enough to ferret him back to the flat, Lee realised he hadn’t asked once as to what the “day’s work” had entailed. He shrugged again.

“There wasn’t time,” he admitted.

Suze suddenly found she was intimidated again by Stoole’s presence in her life. She had been intimate with the man prostrate on her bed, in an act that somehow was more than physical. Tears had welled in his eyes after they had climaxed, and when she had asked him what was wrong he admitted that he didn’t know if this was the first time he had had sex; that he couldn’t recall ever having sex with anyone, although he was certain he must have done. They had held each other then, held on to each other in the harsh reality of what had been done to Stoole, the full extent of it. “It’s a little like I’ve died,” he had said, and she had kissed his tears and watched him sleep.

“Everything could be true.” Suze said, glibly. “His story of his mixed up memories, the murder. They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“So what are you saying?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know. I believe him. I believe his story. So what does that mean? What does the idea of him being a murderer mean? This is something that happened years ago. If you take the memory of a crime away from someone, doesn’t that stop them being guilty of it?”

“The crime still happened.”

“Yes but does the person who committed the crime still exist?”

Lee stared at Stoole.

Grue had lost. He knew he had lost as soon as he had allowed his face that slight and tell-tale flicker when Cabbs asked him of his visitors.

“It takes a long time to die from a wound like that.” Cabbs said, pointlessly indicating the growing red flower in Grue’s stomach.

The pain seemed to have fled Grue, which probably meant that death was closer to hand than Cabbs realised. If he could just keep a hold on that thought, that death was not something to be feared, but instead was a release, then he would be fine; Stoole would be fine.

Grue tried for some words.

“You’ve-” he said.

Cabbs raised his eyebrows, shooked his head slightly, as if impatient at the dying man’s slow progress.

“You’ve still not answered my question.” Grue said, even managing a smile.

“What the fuck do you think is going on here, little man?” Cabbs asked, scratching his ear. “In case it had escaped your attention, I’m the one with the gun, and you’re the one with the information and the bullet wound. How about you answer my question?”

“You believe in it... don’t you?” Grue said. A growing ache forced him to shift in his seat. “You believe in the beast – the great and ineffable thing.”

“You’re rambling man.” Cabbs said.

“You see, it doesn’t have to be for anything at all, does it? These things that you do? You act only to feed the bureaucracy.”

“You talk a lot for a dead man.” Cabbs said. Grue smiled. Every time Grue smiled he could see Cabbs getting a little more rattled.

“Jack...” Grue said, and regretted it.

“Ah, Jack.” Cabbs smiled. “I was with him at the end, you know. So sad.”

“Oh,” Grue said, “Jack’s not dead, you idiot. He’s still alive. You’ve kept him alive all this time and now he’s coming for you!”

Cabbs smile dropped from his face.

“You’re not very good at this are you?” Grue said. Cabbs struck out with the hand he held his gun in, striking Grue across his cheek bone, and discharging a round which shattered a rather kitsch porcelain dog that had taken up position on Grue’s mantelpiece. Grue fell to the floor, a stabbing pain tearing into his stomach. He coughed a little, and a spray of blood hit the carpet. Cabbs followed through the attack, kicking Grue so that he rolled over onto his back.

Not much longer, Grue thought, and was suddenly sad for all the world and everything in it. How could the world be as wretched as this, he thought, and yet it still break his heart for him to leave it? He coughed again, bringing him back to his surrounds. He looked up at Cabbs. That’s where he likes to be, Grue thought, standing over people and looking down. Grue smiled a smile he had used a thousand times; a terrific piece of bravado he liked to pepper his games with. It was the smile of someone who still had some tricks to play out. It mattered little if those tricks were there, but the suggestion that they were was enough to rattle people.

“What?” Cabbs asked. Grue smiled on. He felt something on the floor beneath him, a pea beneath a mattress. He would have to roll. The pain nearly made him pass out, but it was the sudden appearance of a plan that made him drive on into it. Cabbs watched him struggle to turn himself over.

“Where are you going, little man?” Cabbs asked. He knocked one of the arms out from under Grue, who rolled onto his back again. Grue knew Cabbs would attack him if he moved, but it had given him the time he needed.

Cabbs shook his gun at Grue’s clenched hand.

“What have you got?” he asked.

Grue smiled that same smile. It occured to him that Cabbs really wasn’t enjoying this, which gave him yet more pleasure.

“You can show me now, or I can find out afterwards.” Cabbs said.

Too bad about Christine, Grue thought suddenly. Christmas was drawing closer. Not a good time to be looking for work. He gripped his fist all the tighter. A mixture of pity and hatred radiated out towards Cabbs; how dare he disrupt her life in this way.

“Do you know something, Cabbs?” Grue said.

Stoole knew he must be dreaming, but the reality of the scene before him disturbed him greatly. The twisted wreck continued to belch flame and smoke into the night air, and he could feel its heat on his face.

“Ko!”

Stoole looked down to see the diminutive white fellow beside him.

“Ko!” he said again, face open.

“You said that before.” Stoole said. “What does it mean?”

The creature looked about him, then beckoned for Stoole to stoop down. Stoole did so, offering up an ear, but instead of whispering, the thing kissed him on the cheek.

An odd sadness overwhelmed him at the touch of those lips. He raised himself once more, not abruptly, but slow. The heat from the fire brought tears to his eyes, and he welcomed them as grief took him down. This fire before him was for him, he saw. It was a tableau of the world being lost, a soft, once-intelligent creature burnt alive in a crumpled machine.

That had been it for the old man.

“Do I know something?” Cabbs said as he watched the fool’s eyes cloud over. He walked amongst the falling detritus of the fallen.

“So much clutter!” Cabbs said. “What an earth is all of this for?”

He felt odd; cheated somehow. The old man hadn’t talked, which probably meant that he had told Stoole as much as he knew. Thankfully that didn’t amount to a great deal, but it was still a dangerous amount of knowledge for the drone to have banging around in that empty head of his. But that fucking smile? It was burnt into his retina now, hanging over everything like that of the Cheshire Cat. And what had he meant about Jack Bryce? Cabbs dismissed the question – Grue was obviously delirious – high on pain and adrenaline. Shameful really.

Cabbs squatted over Grue’s body, finally rehoused his gun in its holster, and raised the old man’s still clenched fist.

“Now what was so important to you?” He asked, and made an attempt to prise Grue’s fingers apart. They held fast to a degree that almost convinced Cabbs that the man was still alive. Finally, with the snapping of bones, Cabbs managed to free the treasure from the dead man’s hand. Stuck to his palm were three small black stones, something from that stupid game he had been playing.

“Ha!” Cabbs said loudly. “That it? You wasting my time?” He stood then, was about to leave, but looked back down at the three stones. They seemed to call out to him. They seemed to mean something. They had to mean something for the old man to protect them so. Cabbs angled his head in the way that a dog might as it listened to words it did not understand. Despite himself, he picked up the three black stones, pocketed them, and made his way out onto the deserted street.

Suze was alone with him when he finally woke. She was sitting by the bedside, holding his hand, but not for comfort. She was looking at it as though in its lines and creases it held some truth about the stricken man before him. He woke slowly, gently, as he had done before, rasining one arm to cover his eyes, before opening his mouth and breathing. It took him a moment to notice that Suze was there at all. When he did see her, he smiled. Already they could both feel something was wrong between them, an atmosphere in the room of distrust and anxiety.

“What time is it?” He asked, his voice cracking.

“A little after nine.” Suze said. “You remember much about yesterday?”

Stoole nodded. “I’m still wanted for murder, I take it?”

Suze nodded. “There’s something else.”

“Oh?”

“What happened at the house?”

The conversation with Mr Grue felt like it had taken place weeks ago, and the worrying feeling Stoole had of ever-narrowing enclosure had distracted him utterly. That and the collapse.

“We talked. Me and the old man. Grue, he’s called.”

He sat up then, as the words of the old man began to run through his head a second time.

“He... I’m not crazy. This is all real! Grue told me there was a guy, a Jack somebody, who’d developed a thing for altering people’s memories. He’d wanted to use it to rehabilitate prisoners, but.... but then someone in the government killed him, and took the technology.”

Suze shook her head at this, and stood. She walked over to the window, looked at the world outside. It was a grey day, but bright. People wandered past on the pavements outside, pursuing their normal lives, without the worries of insane conspiracy theories and state-sanctioned murder.

“Took it to do what?” Suze said, still facing the window. “Staff a... a mailroom.”

Stoole suddenly felt, for the first time, that he had been put outside his own life, his own experience. He knew what he was saying was preposterous. Even without the brainwashing, the story was too hard to swallow. But for Stoole it wasn’t a leap of faith, because he was right in the middle of it, and because he was right in the middle of it, he had barely noticed the biggest problem with the story. It was too great a risk, too colossal, surely, an expense, to use it for such a small gain as a heightened level of security in a single mailroom.

Stoole swung his legs round.

“There’s something else, isn’t there. I’ve put myself in the centre of this plot, but it’s not been about me, it’s never been about me. Whatever that mailroom is for, we weren’t working there just to deliver mail.”

Suze’s shoulders began to shake, and she lowered her head, leant it against the glass.

“Suze? Look, I know this is all hard to believe. Why don’t... why don’t we got back to Grue’s place, he can probably explain all of this better than I ca-”

“Grue’s dead, Stoole!” Suze span round, face torn through in grief and rage. “At some time between my brother driving you there, and you collapsing in my living room, someone killed him.”

“What? How?”

“You don’t know?” Suze’s words fell like tombstones. Whatever she did or did not believe about Stoole’s story, she harboured a whole set of other fears that he saw at once it was pointless to allay.

“Oh. Oh God, Suze. You don’t trust me do you?” Stoole said defeatedly.

“I want to, Stoole, I really do, but I can’t. I look out there,” she gestured to the window, “and I see people, normal ordinary people who don’t have their memories wiped, who aren’t under surveillance, who don’t tend to leave a trail of dead bodies behind them. That’s my world, Stoole, not this. If I could be certain about you maybe I could help, but even if I was, I doubt I’d be able to help very much. I’m just a small Chinese woman underachieving her way through life in the mistaken belief that she can make a difference. I can’t make a difference here; I’m sorry.”

Silence then, a second, an hour, Stoole couldn’t tell. Suze’s anger seemed to have blown itself out, sucked all of the energy out of the room, and left nothing in its place.

“What will you do?” Stoole asked, eventually.

“Well I can’t hand you over, if that’s what’s worrying you. I’ll just land myself in trouble then.”

“Okay. So...”

“So you get to run, Stoole. If you’re caught, you were never here. If we’re asked we never saw you.”

Stoole was on his own again. Stoole was running again. But he was far from back to square one. He had come to Suze and Lee with nothing, and come away with information about himself he hadn’t had before, the resilience to struggle on, and, he hoped, the cunning to employ what little he did know to the greatest advantage.

“Okay then.” He said. “I’ll get my things. And Suze?”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

“You okay, Vlad?” Trixie asked.

“I’m fine.” Vladimir said, and spooned in another mouthful of cereal.

“Last night was... fun.” Trixie smiled.

Vladimir looked at her over the breakfast table.

“Yes. Yes it was.” He said.

Trixie giggled to herself. “I can’t believe you stayed the night! You never stay the night!”

“I don’t?”

“Oh, you know you don’t!” Trixie replied, scornfully.

Vladimir ate more cereal.

“How are your Crispies?” Trixie said.

Vladimir looked at them, as though their quality was not in question.

“Nutritious, delicious.” He said.

Trixie laughed at this. “Been watching too many commercials!”

Vladimir looked at her, his brow furrowed.

“Okay, I was just joking! Are you always this cranky in the mornings?”

“Oh!” Vladimir’s face brightened. “You were making a joke. I’m sorry.”

Trixie picked up her plate of toast crumbs and took it over to the sink.

“I had better hurry.” Vladimir said. “I might be late for work.”

“Oh. I was hoping you might want to pull a sicky, spend the morning with me?”

“I can’t do that.” Vladimir said. “UK industry loses billions of pounds every year through hours lost as a result of sick leave.”

Vladimir padded out of the kitchen. Trixie cleared the rest of the breakfast things. When Vlad returned he was in his work clothes.

“I’m sorry I have to leave for work, now, Trixie, but I would very much like to see you again, perhaps next weekend?”

“Yes.” Trixie said, “I’d like that.”

Vladimir gave her a peck on the cheek, and departed, whistling.

Trixie stared down at her hands, part submerged in the soapy water.

“What was that all about?” She asked the crockery.

Stoole inserted a fifty pence piece and dialled.

“Hal ______?”

“I’m afraid Hal’s on sick leave at the moment.”

“Oh. Oh really?” Stoole said, pondering the significance.

“I’m afraid so. If there’s anything I can do to help?”

“Oh probably. My name’s Jenkins, I’m with Central Services. Mr ______ reported some disturbances on this particular line, so I’m doing some tests for him. I was just calling to ask him to press a button sequence for me which will allow me to isolate his phone on the network. Could you possibly...”

“Shoot!”

“Right. Once you’ve dialled you can just put the phone down, and if all’s well and good, you won’t hear from me again.” Stoole allowed himself a chuckle, which was shared by Hal’s replacement.

“Okay,” Stoole began again. “I appreciate your assistance, if you can dial star, nine, hash?”

“That it?”

“That’s it.”

“Okay.”

Three keypad tones sounded down the line, and after the third, Stoole heard a dialling tone. He dialled again, this time on the ministry’s dollar, and on the ministry’s number.

“City Fruits and Flowers?”

“Hello, Chaddick here at the ministry. I’d like very much to place an order.”

Cabbs sat in his office, his chair angled back, allowing him to place his two crossed feet on his desk. The monitor before him displayed a camera angled at Vladimir as he laboured intently over his facts, figures and reports. This was the beginnings of the hive that Cabbs had craved. In a way he was grateful to Vladimir for stepping out of line in the way that he had. It had given Cabbs just the opportunity he needed to test phase 2 of the CASM project. Perhaps this was a little premature. The mailroom staff could not be described as experiencing a great deal of comfort at present, but these sorts of setbacks were bound to happen. It had not been a failure, but a valuable learning experience. Vladimir slid a file into a window, and began typing.

Cabbs withdrew his feet and stood, walked over to the wall, and leaned backwards, arms outstretched. He had been trying desperately hard to put the previous days activities from his mind. Killing was best to be avoided for the most part. He’d pacified the worry he had felt over it by reminding himself that Grue, being of pensionable age, was just a drain on someone’s budget. The financial benefits in Grue’s death were not to be sniffed at. What is more, Grue knew too much. Pressing on with the plan would have become impossible with Grue at large. And it was pleasing, too, that Christine, poor little Christine, when she had quite finished with crying for her master, had given the police a perfect description of Jonathan Stoole. Suddenly Stoole’s four-year-old crimes had become almost irrelevant. He was now an active killer, and the net being cast for him had been rewoven all the finer for it.

Cabbs reached a hand into his pocket and felt the three black stones he had taken from the Grue house. Perhaps a foolish thing to have taken, he supposed, but there was a mystery to them. They represented what Grue would no doubt have termed bad adji, bad taste; something left on the board that, although dead, still posed a potential threat. Cabbs took one out, held it beneath his office lamp and looked it over. He had done this ten times or more that morning, and he found, in the fine, almost imperceptible lines that scoured its surface, what he had found ten times before; absolutely nothing.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come.” Cabbs said, pocketing the pebble.

“This arrived for you sir.” an operator approached, nervously, reverently, carrying a large wicker basket holding fruit.

“A fruit basket? Not on the way out, am I?” Cabbs said, with a smile. The operator did not smile, but placed the basket on Cabbs desk.

“Not there!” Cabs barked. “There.”

The operator moved it all of three inches.

“Thank you, sir.” he said, before leaving.

Cabbs sat down, took an apple, then stared at the basket. He pressed his intercom.

“This basket?” He said.

“Yes, sir?” the self-same operator replied.

“I presume it’s been swept?”

“Of course sir.” the operator replied. “Oh, and it’s from our usual firm, too.”

Cabbs raised his eyebrows, then took a hearty bite from the apple. He looked at the arrangement again, and noticed, amongst the out-of-season fruits and drupes, a small envelope. Gripping the apple in his teeth, he took the envelope, opened it, and slipped out the small card.

Printed on its dappled surface was the legend “You won’t succeed! All the best, Jack Bryce.”

Cabbs apple hit the wall. How much had he swallowed? One mouthful? He grabbed the bin from beneath his desk, stuck his fingers down his throat and vomited a pancake and sausage breafast, two cups of coffee and a few lumps of apple. He wiped his mouth and reached for the intercom.

“Who the fuck sent this basket?” He shouted. Standing, he looked at the basket again, suddenly afraid of it. He walked into the reception area of his office, where his idiot operator was saying repeated hellos into his phone. He glanced up, seeing his boss.

“Sorry. The problem is?”

“This is a lockdown. I need that basket checking, and I need it checking now.”

Cabbs watched on the screen as the robot approached the basket. The various monitors relayed readings in a variety of spectrums back to the security officer, who watched on with boredom. He looked up from his controls.

“This is a wasted effort, sir. The basket was scanned when it came in. I did it myself.”

“Then you’ll have to scan it again, officer, won’t you.”

The officer sighed, and returned his attention to the console.

Behind him, Cabbs’ assistant was still on the phone to City Fruits and Flowers.

“I... yes I appreciate that you supply us with baskets all the time. I know that, I just need to know who, on this occasion, made the order. That really isn’t possible. Can I ask which budget code they quoted?”

Cabbs turned his attention towards his put-upon aide, who was scribbling a code into his notebook.

“I... I’d also like to send someone over to you, a Mr Hadley. He should be with you very shortly. No, no, just some questions that can’t really be dealt with by myself.”

Cabbs walked over to his aide’s desk, tore off the top sheet of the notepad and read it.

Chaddick, it said, and B6-0241-1432-17. Cabbs reached for his mobile, and called finance.

“That’s the mailroom at St Andrew’s Tour. It’s their reserve franking fund.”

Cabbs almost felt like laughing, were it not clear to him that something had changed in Stoole; he wasn’t quite the flighty brainless idiot Cabbs had taken him for. This little drama playing out in Cabbs’ office was entirely of Stoole’s construction. Cabbs saw now that he was going to have to raise his game, but he had a lot of game left to raise. He terminated the call, slipped his phone back into his pocket. The security officer fumbled with the controls, and the robot swung violently sideways, knocking the basket over completely, allowing it’s oranges, pears and apples to roll across Cabbs desk and onto the floor, where they made dull thudding noises.

“It’s just fruit, sir,” the officer said, “it’s just fruit.”

There was little solace for Stoole now. The thought of the flap that he hoped would follow Cabbs’ fruit basket brought him a smile, but he was still stuck out on the streets with nowhere to go. At first he had panicked, seeking out the shadows, the blindspotted cameras. He stuck to places rundown, laiden heavy with graffiti and vandalism. There, he suspected, he would find fewer patrol cars to avoid, fewer cameras able to identify him.

He had a curious moment when catching sight of a photograph that all of the newspapers were running. The Evening Standard was alone in attaching his face to Grue’s murder, blank eyes, poorly digitised, staring out at the public. If Stoole had seen the picture and not known it to be him, he wouldn’t need to make any kind of leap of faith to believe it was the picture of a killer. That did not unsettle him as much as the fact that he had no memory of sitting for the picture. Luckily the photograph, and the attendant drawing sketched, Stoole learned, from a description given by Christine failed to look that much like him. Regardless of this, he kept himself hooded as much as possible, something that didn’t look too out of place in the November cold.

The conversation, as unwelcome as it was, with Suze had given him much to think about. Indeed it was as much the questions posed that had led to the sending of the fruit basket. Whatever was going on obviously went much further than controlling the secrecy of a particular mailroom. If he could only find out what this Cabbs man was actually up to, then he could do something, even vindicate himself for the crimes he was supposed to have committed.

Stoole stole into a greasy spoon, and ordered an all day breakfast. As he ate it, and thumbed through the rest of the ES, he pondered on what possible purpose the brainwashed mailroom might serve. From what Grue had told him, it seemed likely that the technology being used was very new, and if the main brain behind it was, as the old man had suspected, dead, then there would be few people who were able to take on the task of adapting it for other uses. There was a world of difference between making a convicted criminal a set of memories designed so he can better integrate into society and creating a troupe of office workers. A chill ran down Stoole’s spine, so severe he suspected it might rob his fry-up of its heat. Such a cooling wouldn’t matter; the idea that had just hatched in Stoole’s mind had taken away his appetite. He put his fork down, stood, and stepped back out into the cold autumnal air.

Suze and Lee sat in silence in their livingroom. Suze picked at the webbing of her fingers, a nervous habit from her eczema days. They had been sat like this for nearly an hour. Lee had returned from his morning duties to find Suze on her own. She had told him a little of the earlier conversation, told him that Stoole was gone, and that was that. Lee’s response was mixed. He had been annoyed somewhat, as if Suze’s decision had not been a decision at all. He recognised in her the response though, saw in it her business sense at work. The contract between the three of them had failed, somehow, and so she had returned each party to the position before the contract was struck, as well as could be managed, and left it at that. He hadn’t said as much, though, because his feelings were oddly mixed. He could not pretend to like Stoole very much, but he felt a sympathy for him. The sight of him collapsing the previous night, and his subsequent unconsciousness had worried Lee more than he felt he was in any position to. And now the object of that worry was gone. So be it, Lee thought to himself.

“You did the right thing,” he said.

“I hope so.” Suze replied.

“Do you want me to take the calls tonight? Get a relief driver in?”

“Would you mind?”

Lee shook his head.

“He couldn’t have stayed here any longer.” Suze said. “Whatever else might happen, he couldn’t have stayed here.”

“I know. You don’t have to explain.”

“We’ve cut ourselves out of the loop, now, though, haven’t we?” Suze asked. “This... this not knowing. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Shall I put the news on?” Lee asked, reaching for the remote.

“No,” Suze said, and then, eyes closed, “yes.”

The screen faded in, and Lee cycled through the channels to News 24. There was footage of people with protest banners being guided into the back of a police van, of arrests being made outside the Houses of Parliament.

“Scenes there this morning outside Parliament. And we can go back, now, to Donald Mayfield who I believe has some information about the murder of an elderly gentleman in Richmond. Donald, I understand the police have released some more information about the killing?”

“That’s right, John. The police are still refusing to identify the name of the deceased, and it seems his neighbours either didn’t know the gentleman at all, or have been asked not to give anyone that information. What the police have come forward with, however, is the likely time that the killing took place. Based, they say, on a number of factors they believe that the gentleman was murdered at approximately nine o’clock in the evening.”

At this, Suze yelped, raised a hand to her mouth.

“Turn it off!” She shouted. “Turn it off!”

Lee complied, fumbling slightly with the remote.

“It doesn’t mean anything’s different,” Lee said, moving over to his sister to comfort her.

“He came to us for help, and I forced him out onto the streets. He didn’t kill that old man, he couldn’t have killed him. He was here with us! Why didn’t we help him?”

“We did help him, more than most would. And so what if he didn’t kill the guy in Richmond? We still don’t know if he murdered those people four years ago.”

Suze tried to take it all in. She was lost to events either way. If he was innocent, if the story he told was true, she had turned her back on him. If he was guilty, then she had helped him, whatever his agenda might be; she had helped him, harboured him, even slept with him. She looked at the dormant television, which reflected the room back at her in a darker shade of grey.

“Why?” She said. “Why would someone kill that old man, that Grue? Jonathan visited him, then later that night, he gets murdered.”

“It could be anything. It might not even have anything to do with him.”

Suze shook her head. “No. What Jonathan was saying... it all fits together somehow. Grue was murdered because he knew things, things he told Jonathan. Things Jonathan told me. I don’t believe he killed anyone four years ago; I think whoever did kill those people killed Grue, that Jonathan’s just a scapegoat for it all, a tying up of loose ends for something else.”

“What?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know. I told Jonathan that it seemed like a lot of bother to go through, brainwashing a load of people just so they could work in a mailroom. I bet it’s something more than that. Something worth killing for.”

“So what good does knowing that do us? Except put us in danger. We can’t help Stoole now.”

“Oh yes we can, little brother. Oh yes we can.”

Chaddick had had an emotional time of it. He had lived with his brothers death for so long and, thanks to his line of work, felt that he could not put him to rest until his killer had been brought to justice. Identifying him had done a great deal. The fact that Stoole was still out there somewhere bothered him, but at least he now knew who was responsible. Chaddick also faced a great feeling of guilt over his brother’s death. He and his brother had always counterbalanced each other, and so it was that the higher Chaddick rose within the intelligence community, the more vocal his brother became about civil liberties and human rights, things that were often at odds with the work that Chaddick had to do. Chaddick and he had spent many an evening arguing over such things, with Chaddick taking a “greater good” line of defense, but his brother taking on the belief that if individual rights are protected and honoured, then much of Chaddick’s work became irrelevant. Such discussions, needless to say, never reached very far; the brothers never agreed on what they believed in, although they would certainly agree on the things they did not believe in. What mattered to Chaddick, and his brother realised this, was that the dialogue between them remained; that they continued to test each others viewpoints, because in so doing, those viewpoints remained robust and workable. And then, in the early morning, four years ago, someone had shot his brother just before he headed off to the airport for a short lecturing tour in America. They shot him in cold blood, and set fire to his car; and Chaddick could never shake from his mind the idea that possibly that killing happened not because of who his brother was, but because of what Chaddick did. If Chaddick could get Stoole, bring him back here, return his memory to him, then he would finally have the answers he required about his brother’s killing, he would finally know where the blame lay, and if from that understanding he found he needed to seek forgiveness, then at least he could seek it with an open heart.

Cabbs, it appeared, had had quite a turn. Despite the wasted expense, despite the fact that security had, in effect, been breached, Chaddick had allowed himself a chuckle when he received the report concerning his aide’s paranoid reaction to the receipt of a fruit-basket. In a strange way, seeing someone he had come to depend on so much fail in so embarrassing a manner had given the old man new life. This was tempered, however, with the recognition of the threat that lay beyond the walls of the ministry. Whatever mishmash of memories that Stoole still had, he was obviously still capable of a cunning not unlike that which Chaddick sought in his own agents. That made Stoole a top priority, especially if it was true that he had cleanly dispatched Grue the previous night. Chaddick had received a call from one of the operators notifying him that Grue had tried to contact him that night, and in time Chaddick knew he would return to that fact and feel yet more guilt for putting up with such an obstructive chain of communication.

He watched life roll past him on the plasma screens. How much dirt he had had to wade through over the years, both of his own Government’s making and those of other countries, just so that these unknowing, often ungrateful people could go about their lives under a sweet delusion of freedom and security. Chaddick sighed. He didn’t want the screens. What he wanted more than anything was a window, a proper untempered glass window that he could open when he chose too, and say bugger to the security, and bugger to the air conditioning. The needs of security had boxed him up, filed him away, where he had no chance of accessing real, normal life. And then he was presented with a never-ending stream of decisions that directly affected those with real normal lives. How could he possibly make those decisions with even an ounce of conviction? Yet made them he had, rightly or wrongly.

Chaddick shook his head. He recognised the approach of the black dog and he wouldn’t have it. He reached for Stoole’s file once more, hoping to spot something that Cabbs all-knowing algorithms had failed to recognise, some simple thing that would allow them to capture his brother’s killer with ease. It was preposterous. The information on Stoole was scant; almost curiously so. Chaddick dropped the file, ran his fingertips along the bottom of the buff folder. There was another option, of course. Chaddick drummed his fingers onto the folder three times, and then stood up.

“What are you doing here?” Collins said, as he saw Chaddick approaching. Collins had the unnerving habit of, in shock, blurting out the first thing in his head, something that had on many an occasion landed him in trouble.

“I work here, Collins.” Chaddick said, gesturing that the technician should take a seat. It was Collins lab, so such a gesture was a show of authority on the part of Chaddick, one that invited Collins not only to sit down, but also to think before he spoke.

“I have some questions about the CASM project that I’d like you to answer.”

“Oh. Okay.” Collins said. “I’m used to dealing with Cabbs, but, well,” he stalled then. “What is it you’d like to know.”

“The volunteers for phase 1. There memories are all recorded and stored on site, are they not?”

“They are indeed, sir.”

“Good. And the volunteers are to have their memories returned to them once phase 1 has been completed.”

“Yes.”

“But anyone can take these recorded memories and, sort of, install them in somebody else.”

“Yes – in fact that’s pretty much what we’ve done with the volunteers. The memories that they operate with are patched together from various pieces we’ve been able to isolate from those we’ve had previously on record. Bryce’s mainly, as he had gotten further with the analysis of his own record.”

“Bryce, yes. It was a shame we lost him the way we did.”

“Well, it’s a high pressure job, sir. I only wish we’d spotted the signs.”

“Indeed. Now this process, this isolation and editing of memories, that’s done how exactly?”

“Well, Bryce was the expert there. Much of what he had learnt was lost with him, I’m afraid. We’re really unable to do much beyond, ah, beyond play and record, if I can put it in those terms.”

“So we wouldn’t be able to isolate Stoole’s memory of his killings, temporarily give them to someone else, and then interrogate them.”

“Stoole’s memories, sir?” Collins asked, his face a cloud of confusion.

“Yes. Stoole was phase 1, we have his memories on tape here in the building-”

“I’m sorry, sir, but it was Stoole’s tape that was destroyed.”

“Destroyed? You’ve lost someone’s... my God, I don’t know what you’d call it. You’ve lost someone’s life?”

“You know all this, sir. Each person’s memories are stored in their own bank. There was some flaw in the wiring of Stoole’s bank, and a power surge destroyed what data was stored in it.”

“And why wasn’t I informed about this?”

“You... you were informed, sir. In fact I came under quite a severe level of criticism from you. You instigated a full inquiry into the design and maintenance of the power infrastructure for the lab.”

“I did, did I?”

“Certainly, you did. Cabbs was most explicit in how angry you were about the whole episode. The lab was not a very comfortable place to be for quite some time after that.”

Chaddick was speechless. He glanced about the all-but-deserted lab, in its pale green light. He had known for some time that Cabbs was rather economical in what was and was not brought to his attention, but he’d always assumed it to be just a little bit of spin; Cabbs pursuing the agenda that he felt the ministry as a whole wished to pursue. This, however, was a spin too far. It put into question everything that Chaddick thought he knew about this Stoole character, even the part he had played in the murder of Chaddick’s brother.

Chaddick stood.

“Thank you, Collins, you’ve been most helpful.” He made for the door. “Oh,” he said, turning back, “one more thing, not a word to Cabbs, eh?” And to drive the point home he tapped the side of his nose, as though he were an uncle who had just given a sulking nephew some chocolate.

Chaddick wandered down to the medical bay, where the remaining mailroom staff from St Andrew’s Tower were being kept. Each one had a private room, a synthetic window through which poured light that grew brighter and faded with the passing of time.

“How are they doing?” he asked the duty nurse.

“Oh, they’re fine,” she replied.

Chaddick sensed she held something back.

“Was there a but after that fine?”

She blushed. “Well, it’s not really my place to say, but... they were, you know, quite psychotic when they came in. Then they calmed down, and some of them began to remember things, you know, from before they had their memory wiped. Little things. Fragments. Since then nothing. None of the doctors think that they’re going to remember anything more, so why are they still here? Either they go back on the programme, or they get their memories back. Why are they still here?”

Suze had worked solidly since the thought had occurred to her. Driven by guilt and anguish, she had sat down at her laptop, keyed in every detail of Stoole’s story she could recall, leaving nothing out. She knew that every verifiable truth she could include in this short document would lend credence to the more difficult aspects of his brief and patchy history. She took great pains to make clear in no uncertain terms that she and her brother represented an alibi for Grue’s murder. She took great pains to include the man’s name, one that had yet to be made public.

It was her plan, at five o’clock, to post the story to every internet forum, every chatroom, every mailing list she had been able to find. She had at first targeted the more serious of the forums that she had found, on news sites, on local interest online communities, but over time, and with Lee’s uneasy suggestion, she had started to register to the more tin-foil-hatted websites, those devoted to science fiction fandom, or conspiracy theorists who she had at first avoided for fear of her case being undermined by their support. It was Lee who pointed out that she needed the message spread as widely as possible, that their rabid pursuit of whichever truth had swum into their purview would carry with it its own energy. They had, Lee stated, been doing this for years.

The one aspect of Suze’s course of action that scared her most, though, was that she could in no way make the claims anonymously. It was paramount that the story should be seen to have come from a single and genuine source. She was hoping further that her record, or lack of one, would lend a further degree of believability to the story. However, in so doing she would be marking both herself and her brother as targets for whatever dark machinations were at work in bringing Stoole down. So it was, they had decided, that with the evening’s duties complete, they should go into hiding. Lee had already made arrangements with relief staff, so that the restaurant could run on in their absence. The extended family that Suze and Lee had surrounded themselves with could be relied on to honour the business, and could be relied on not to ask questions as to what was about to happen. Lee explained that there was a crisis, that it needed immediate attention, and that he did not know for how long they would be away for.

One of Lee’s friends had supplied him with, at short notice, a video camera, and Suze had recorded herself, silhouetted, reading through the statement that she had prepared. She presented it neatly, succinctly, with clear diction. She remained businesslike, but held in her tone the faintest suggestion, not of accusation, but that accusation from others would be welcome. This video, lasting no longer than ten minutes, had been burnt onto discs, and its audio track uploaded to a variety of file distribution websites, ready to be linked into the forum posts.

At a little before five Suze wandered over to a nearby coffeehouse, and began the job of posting the story to the forums. There were hundreds to get through but she soon got into the rhythm of it, working through a list of URLs and dragging a conveyor belt of tabs across the Firefox window, spreading the word. While she laboured away at this, her brother was darting from newsroom to newsroom all over the capital, motoring away on his sister’s moped. It seemed that with a motorcycle helmet, a Jiffy bag and a clipboard he could gain access to the receptions of almost anywhere. It seemed, as well, that by the time he was finishing his run, news of what was contained on the disc was spreading ahead of him. He repeatedly had to turn tail and run, as people became more and more intent of stopping him, of trying to find out who he was.

Lee took the moped back to the restaurant, picked up Suze from the coffeehouse, who ran the tension behind spreading Stoole’s story and escaping with her life. It seemed like such a little thing, she had said in the statement, to merely free the information that was endangering Jonathan and, indeed, herself, but it was all she could do, as it turned out. She only hoped it would be enough.

As Suze slipped into the car, her brother hugged her closely, and as he began to pull away from the kerb, turned to her and said, “do you know what day it is?”

“No.” Suze said.

“Fifth of November.” Lee smiled, and they began their traffic-logged journey out of London.

Lee’s assessment had been astute. The post Suze had made, almost always using her genuine full name, was taken up by thousands within that first hour. Posts began appearing on the more obscure forums, pointing to this or that place on which one could read Suze’s words, or download the audio track. Suze had decided not to post the video online, realising that they needed to engineer a sort of narrative for the expose. People would tune in to see the video if it was played as part of a news broadcast and as a result would receive whatever further information the news agencies had acquired.

As Suze and Lee sat behind a seemingly endless series of red lights, they listened to the news filtering through on the radio. It came as an interruption of an existing news story concerned with the arrests made outside Parliament that morning, the newsreader, caught offguard, read excerpts of the statement, explained the context in which the statements had been made, and promised further coverage later in the programme.

The various news desks in who’s in trays the disc had landed were each experiencing a localised explostion of activity. Editors despaired, recognising instantly the difficult position they had been put in. What little they knew of Stoole suggested that this could be a part of the devilish cunning he was said to be capable of. How could they be sure, they said, that the alibi was genuine? How could they be sure, even, that Suze had not made the statement under any kind of duress? Yet such waters were muddied by the content of the statement. The editors knew that the only information about Stoole that they had so far received had come to them through government sources alone. Reporter after reporter handling the Stoole manhunt had voiced their concern that, try as they might, they had been unable to ascertain any additional information whatsoever about the man – he appeared on no voting register, no reporter had yet managed to provide so much as a birth certificate for the man, no-one had come forward to volunteer any knowledge of Jonathan Stoole at all. It had been quipped in more than one newsroom that Stoole had simply been invented, a personified bogeyman for the Government to use to further take away civil liberties, and drive anxiety into the heart of middle England, so it could sit back and reap the rewards of comfort spending.

And added to these editors worries was the fact that they were, not before long, aware that they were not sitting on an exclusive. Every editor in the city seemed to be facing the same set of dilemmas, which meant that the pressure was on for the editors to come up with the biggest sell. How best they married that up with their own sense of journalistic ethics was a matter for their own consciences.

For the most part the decision came to cover the fact that the statement had been distributed at all. The second decision to be made was for the inclusion or otherwise of the recording Suze had made. Here her earnest address came into its own. The majority of editors believed that the veracity of her statement lay in the tone of her voice, and the willingness for her to put herself in danger. They would, they knew, be accused of playing into Stoole’s hands by running the footage, and to this end they provided a coda, orchestrated a number of studio debates over the authenticity of both the footage and the story. The decision to run the footage was made all the more easier by the fact soon made apparent that the statement had been effectively bill-stickered all over the internet.

It was the BBC that hesitated the longest, as the decision to run the story at all bounced up to the controller. His had been a difficult task, hired under accusations of cronyism, and held up as the sole creator of the perception that BBC News had been muzzled. Here now was a story that drove right to the hearts of the issues that had dogged him since his dubious inauguration. He knew, though, that he had no choice but to run it. With every news agency in the city running with their own take, it would be damningly conspicuous by it absence.

“Do it, then,” the instruction came, “but treat every unknown as such.”

Suze gripped her brother’s hand on the gearstick as her voice came back to her over the radio. Rockets had begun to explode overheard in starbursts of red, orange, green and blue. She watched the strange ephemeral flowers of light and silently wished Stoole good luck. This really was all that she could do now, to wish him luck, and to pray that fate would allow their paths to meet once more.

With Grue’s name came enlightenment. He had been a name, briefly in the seventies when Go had enjoyed something of a fad in Britain. Grue had been seen as a leading light for the game, had enjoyed a meagre degree of celebrity, and had been heralded as a cultural bridge between Great Britain and China. He had returned from China defeated utterly, but was able to take on the role of underdog well enough for the British public to keep him in their hearts at least for a little while. He had vanished into obscurity in a way that seemed baffling to today’s celebrity-minded public, and with the conspiracy suggested at in Suze’s statement now fresh in their minds, they began to make dark connections between his fall from fame and untimely death.

Jack Bryce was dusted down also, his achievements revisited, his disappearance redocumented. Could his and his colleagues’ vanishing be evidence that they had been absconded onto a secret, unauthorised programme?

What little information Suze had provided seemed to stand as a starting point for a wealth of conjecture, and so little of that conjecture seemed to begin with the notion that what she had said was wrong. As families stood around bonfires and burnt effigies of their figures of hate, they traded theories, ideas and opinions about the Stoole case, arming themselves with whatever titbits they had come across in the intervening news coverage.

The hunt for Stoole had changed tack. The police, needless to say, had not withdrawn their advice that Stoole was a dangerous and desperate murderer who should not be approached, but with conspiracy on everyone’s lips, Stoole began to represent something other than a source of fear. To some he had instantly become some kind of hero, to others a hypocritical whistleblower as connected to the peculiar Governmental operations as those who had instigated them. To others still her remained a threat.

Chaddick was concerned. He flipped from news channel to news channel, looking from opinion piece to editorial to debate. He had been asked for an opinion, of course, but had decided as he knew nothing beyond CASM phase 1, and had certainly not sanctioned any assassinations, it was better that he said nothing. What is more he felt suddenly as though he had no real control over the agency, that whatever had been planned for CASM it was not what he had signed off. The words of the nurse in the medical unit had greatly troubled him, suggesting that the poor humans continuing to suffer an oblivious existence under an artificial sky were facing such an ordeal merely for the connivances of wicked men. And at the heart of it, he knew, was Cabbs.

Cabbs told himself he wasn’t troubled by the events unfolding beyond the walls of the ministry. He knew Stoole represented a danger, but this Chinese woman had only increased the heat under the pot in which he boiled. Now London wasn’t populated with people fearing Stoole. Now Stoole was being actively sought out. And as soon as he broke ground, Cabbs would have a Hatchet, a Hinkley, a Hudson or any number of agents whose names began with H ready to silence the irksome postroom boy forever. Sadly the information was not that which he could keep from Chaddick, and Chaddick had not so much as mentioned the statement, or asked for progress on Stoole’s capture. No matter; all of this would be sorted out once Stoole was dead, even if it meant sacrificing Chaddick along with him, and ensuring he was replaced by someone sympathetic to Cabbs’ grand plan.

From the shadows Stoole watched the sea change in public opinion take place. Suze had irrevocably changed the board. He had all but given himself up for dead, yet now he saw whole knew avenues to pursue. But he knew that all the talk that was now centring on him would only make his pursuers all the keener to capture him. And there was that name that he kept going back to, Alvin Cabbs. His intuition told him that if there was one person he needed to contact, one person who could end this nightmare journey, it was him. A plan was beginning to form in his mind, one which might allow him direct access to Cabbs. As he wandered towards Brockwell Park, feeling the strange need not to stray too far from his flat, he mulled over the possibility, warmed to it more and more. He found himself a tree in the park whose branches brushed the ground. He clambered up it, sat wedged between its boughs, and awaited morning, and an end to running.

The night had brought an endless pursuit of information, both within the intelligence community and the world media, such was the desperation to find out more information about the mysterious Stoole, and Suze his untraceable alibi. Little of the attention focused on the claims that Suze and Stoole had made, which was a relief to some and a frustration to others. Bryce, it was shown, had indeed worked on developing some method of duplicating and storing a person’s memory, but this was public information, so the revelation that he may be connected to all this could easily have been a fabrication. It seemed likely that no confirmation would occur, although their remained the puzzle of how a Chinese restaurateur had come to know the identity of the victim. Some believed that she was an accomplice in the same murder, others that she was perhaps an old friend of Grue’s from his Go days, others still that all she had said was true, that Stoole was an innocent caught up in governmental matters to such an extent that he was now their victim.

All of this was noise, however. An endgame drew near, and it was sensed by all those involved. The question was, who would make their move first.

Stoole stood hooded on the concourse of Waterloo Station. He had not had a pleasant night’s sleep, and was busy cursing himself at not having risked a bed and breakfast, or even a homeless refuge. He knew that such places were probably being monitored, however, so perhaps it was for the best that he had spent an all but sleepless night in the branches of a tree. The journey to Waterloo had warmed him slightly, and he had only allowed himself a few minutes of verbal self-flagellation before seeking out a suitable person to sell an oyster card to. The card still had a few days of Travelcard left on it, and he was certain he could pass it on to someone too busy to queue, and too weary of the machines to risk inserting folding money or a bank card into them. He settled at last on a flustered American, who was slowly turning the air between himself and the touch-screen a darker and darker shade of blue.

“Can I help you?” He asked the tourist.

“Yeah, you could tell me who I gotta fuck up the ass for unleashing this hunk a shit on the free world.”

“They are a bit awkward. Have you tried at the windows.”

The guy gave him a look then, as if he were suggesting he ought to buy shares in ozone depletion.

“I’m sorry, but I am not dealing with those people.”

Stoole chuckled at this, “that’s a sentiment I can relate to.”

“Can you help me make sense of this?” the tourist asked.

“Not really, but I do have a card you can have. It’s good for zone 2 for the next couple of days.”

“You shitting me?”

“Nope. I’m not going to be needing it, and it would be a shame to, ah, let these bastards get away with selling the same thing twice, so to speak.” This Stoole delivered with an inward and conspiratorial lean.

“That’d be real great, son. How much are you wanting for it?” The tourist reached for his wallet.

“No, no, call it a favour.” Stoole explained. “It pains me that we put visitors through this rigmarole just so they can get around this fair city of hours. I’d like to think of this as a small attempt at recompense.”

“Now I know you’re shitting me!” the tourist said with a barking laugh.

“Really, take it.” Stoole said, and passed the blue and white plastic to his newfound friend.

“Well that just about beats it. Thank you sir. I really appreciate it.”

Stoole smiled and allowed the American to pass by and make his way towards the Underground. That ought to do the trick, he thought, and took up the position he had found earlier that morning.

He had made a series of suppositions on which hung his plan. Firstly he believed that like his mobile phone, and his cash card, his Oyster card too was being closely monitored. He also supposed that if he were to get an audience with Cabbs he would have to misdirect as many of his colleagues as possible. This he believed would be possible because he believed Cabbs sought that selfsame audience. He could rely on Cabbs to manipulate the colleagues in the way that Stoole wanted. And the reason he believed that was because whatever was or was not in Stoole’s head, it was of most value to Cabbs. This was a gut feeling. As soon as he’d heard Grue say the man’s name he had had a shudder of recognition; something indefinable yet certain. All he had to do was rely on Cabbs assuming Stoole had more information than he did, and hopefully his bargaining, for he was sure there would be bargaining, would reveal more. So he stood on the concourse, and stared up at the CCTV camera and waited.

“We’ve just registered Stoole’s Oyster heading through the turnstyles at Waterloo.”

The voice was breathy with excitement.

“I see.” Cabbs replied, gripping the received with a hand looser than his mood. “Hmm… another bluff, do you think?”

“Double bluff, I’d say. Wherever it is he’s going, he definitely doesn’t want us following.”

Cabbs paused. Clearly illogical nonsense, he thought. Stoole was clearly at Waterloo, was clearly waiting to be picked up, no doubt so he could spill the beans to the rest of the department. He dialled into the Transport for London CCTV system, and began cycling through the cameras at Waterloo. He went straight past Stoole and had to cycle backwards until he found the camera he wanted.

“Sir.”

“Yes, quite right. Wait for him to break ground, and when he does, do whatever it takes to bring him in.”

He hung up, brought his face towards the screen, and took over the telemetry of the camera. He angled it towards the dark figure standing stock still amongst the commuters, staring up with that same troubling grin that Grue had worn so close to death. Cabbs zoomed the camera in till the figure filled the screen, staring up, cocksure, unblinking, waiting.

“Cocky little shit.” Cabbs said, disconnected from the camera, and prepared to leave.

Cabbs reached the concourse in doublequick time and breathless, but of Stoole there was no sign. Cabbs glanced up and down the platform but could not see his quarry, he glanced up at the CCTV camera that had led him there, and it was then that he heard the phone ringing. Spitting on the floor, he approached the four pods of phones and determined which one was being called.

“Hello.” Cabbs said.

There was a pause, and then “Hello Cabbs.”

“This is a lot of trouble to go through just to get me on the phone.”

“Oh, no, I want to speak to you face to face. I just wanted to make sure we’d be alone.”

“That suits me.” Cabbs said.

“I thought it might. If you’d like to make your way to the London Eye, you should find me in the queue.”

The line went dead. Cabbs stared at the receiver. “Cocky bastard.” He said, and hung up.

“Cabbs please.” The operator asked.

“Cabbs is out of the office at the moment. I can reach him on his mobile.” There was a pause. “I’m afraid he’s not answering his mobile. Can I take a message.”

“This is urgent. Better bounce it upstairs.”

There was a click, and then, “ Chaddick. Speak.”

“Hello sir, sorry to trouble you. We’ve had something come up on the Stoole case. A card transaction at the London Eye.”

“I see. Has Cabbs been informed?”

“He doesn’t seem to be reachable.”

“Fancy” said Chaddick. He called up the CCTV cameras local to the wheel and began cycling through them.

“Sir?” The operator said.

Chaddick stared at the image of Stoole smiling grimly whilst following the queue.

“What are you doing?” Chaddick said.

“Sir?” The operator said again.

“Our man seems to be queuing for the rides. Place a couple of people there and observe. Oh, and make sure they report to me directly.” As Chaddick said this, Cabbs walked onto his screen, approached Stoole.

“Oh and one more thing.” Chaddick said. “See that you keep Cabbs out of this particular loop.”

Stoole had a part to play, and he played it well. He had, he realised, lived a life of playing parts, of putting on one costume or another, to fulfil some duty or purpose not his own. And now he had the greatest part to play of all. He knew Cabbs at once, could almost feel him arrive before his eyes fell on him. Cabbs nodded to him and approached.

“Cute.” He said.

Stoole smiled.

“You’ll have to forgive all of the dramatics, but this is a busy city; so difficult to find any privacy anywhere.”

“I’m sure. New phone, I take it?” Cabbs asked.

“Pay as you go. Thought I could do with one.” Stoole said with a smile.

A silence fell between them. They took each other in, assessed each other, taking sly glances of each other out of the corners of their eyes, like rival suitors.

“A whole pod to ourselves?” Cabbs asked.

“Extravagant but necessary.” Stoole said, with a measure of sternness.

Two security guards approached, and it seemed it was Cabbs alone who was troubled by them. One of them waved a metal detector, which whined as it met Cabbs jacket. Cabbs reached inside for his wallet, withdrew ID and surreptitiously showed it to the guard. The guard tipped a nod, tapped his colleague, and withdrew. Cabbs and Stoole entered their pod.

“So,” Cabbs said, as the door slid shut, “what’s this about? Why the sudden surrender.”

“It needn’t be a surrender.” Stoole said, and turned away from him, watching the young family in the pod opposite coo with excitement as the great wheel span round.

“So what is it.”

Stoole looked back it him then. “I’m tired of it. Of all this running.”

“Okay. So you want me to take you in.”

“What would happen, if you took me in?”

“We’d put you back on the programme.”

“Ah!” Stoole said. “The programme.”

“Well, what did you expect?”

“I was hoping you’d be able to make me a more attractive offer than the mailroom.”

Cabbs folded his arms. “Stoole, you don’t have anything to bargain with.”

Stoole smiled at him then. “That’s not exactly true, is it, Cabbs.” He said.

“Oh come now! Any bargaining you could have done ended as soon as that door closed. You’re not leaving my side, and as long as you don’t leave my side, then whatever leverage you think you have in this situation remains utterly impotent.”

“That’s not strictly true. I imagine I’ve become rather important to the programme all of a sudden. A test case, out in the public eye. If you don’t bring me in, if anything bad happens to me, then it’s going to make your life extremely difficult.”

“But it’s my programme, you idiot.”

“You’re not a law unto yourself just yet, Cabbs. You can be leant on, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

Stoole turned his attentions to the family in the next pod, a clutch of Japanese. A girl of four or five clutched a balloon in her hand. Stoole mouthed the word balloon a couple of times, while he waited for Cabbs to respond.

“So what you’re saying is you’ll sacrifice yourself? You’ll do whatever it takes to get away from me because you think if you die, it’ll mean that CASM will fail?”

“That’s about it.” Stoole said.

Cabbs watched Stoole’s back. He placed a hand in his pocket and cradled the pneumatic syringe he held there. It would be the easiest thing to spike Stoole where he stood, claim he’d become ill – passed out due to the height, say, and that would be that. But something in Stoole’s lack of defence disturbed him.

“I doubt it would pose much of a threat to the programme. You’re a murderer. People aren’t going to give a damn if you live or die.”

“Oh, Suze has changed all that.” Stoole smiled.

“We’ll catch up with her. Silence her. We’ll make her an accessory to Grue’s murder. Face it Stoole! You’ve nothing.” This Cabbs didn’t truly believe. Something was being held back. That wasn’t the only reason Cabbs felt he couldn’t just end it here and now. There was the mystery of the three stones, to begin with, but also it was now a matter of pride. Stoole was allowing himself to be talked into coming in, and he had a point. If he died, it would cause problems, but if Cabbs could bring him in, then the ministry would lay alms down for him.

The pod had almost reached the top of it’s circular path. Cabbs stepped up to the glass, looked with Stoole over the city.

“It’s not a bad dream I have for this place, you know.” Cabbs said. “Look at them down there.”

“Like little ants.” Stoole said.

“No, not like ants. Ants are orderly, efficient. They’re given a job and they do it, with no thought for themselves. They will gladly lay down their lives for the good of the colony. People? Pah. Look at them! All wandering around with their own ideas, their own drives and ambitions. And what does it bring them? Stress, misery, conflict. There’s no synergy of effort. When the programme really starts rolling out, all of that anxiety, all of that worry, all of that wasted energy will be harnessed, and yoked to a grander purpose – the betterment of the state.”

“You’re mad. They’ll never go for it.”

“You over estimate your fellow man, Stoole. Do you know how many people self-medicate? Do you know how many people fill the gaps in their lives with every third-rate quasi-religion, just so they can make it through the day. Phase 1 didn’t just prove that the technology worked, it proved that people could be willing to sign away their very existence, if it meant a quieter, less troubling life. They volunteered, Stoole!”

“I didn’t.” Stoole said, chancing his arm. This wiped the smile from Cabbs face.

“No,” he said, “you didn’t.”

“And I’m not a murderer,” he said.

Cabbs looked at him then, allowed himself to blink.

“Yes, Stoole. You are. I had you kill Chaddick’s brother, so I could sharpen him up a bit. I’d have never got CASM started without that annoying Jimminy Cricket forever whispering in his ear. So I had you take him out, and then I scrubbed you out. You started blackmailing me, so I decided you were eligible for the programme. There’s blood on your hands.”

“No.” Stoole said, turning away. He held a hand out to support himself. Truth came to him like a fist in the stomach. Suddenly he was back in the driveway, in the darkness, rain fizzing in flame. He felt again, the kiss of the creature, which he realised, some 135 metres in the air, was all that was left of Jack Bryce. He opened his eyes, pulled himself from the scene of his crime, and looked out over a London that seemed to hold its breath. Grue’s words came back to him then. His past was dead to him, which allowed him to start again, to become what he wanted to be in the present. He remembered his purpose, but kept it from Cabbs, lowering his head.

Cabbs placed his hand on Stoole’s back.

“Look, let me take you in, I’ll see that you’ll forget all of this, the running, the death. You can be in your old job before no time; back to the old routine.”

Stoole nodded, then, as the pod made its slow progression groundward.

By the time Agent Harkett had arrived on the scene, the two men were already aboard the observation wheel. After a few words with the security staff, the agent lingered with the oncoming crowds, phoning in the state of play. Back in his office, Chaddick watched events unfold. He saw Cabbs break Stoole quickly and easily, a butterfly, Chaddick thought with a rye smile, broken on a wheel. But why was Cabbs there at all? It seemed clear Stoole had instigated this meeting. Nothing seemed to make sense. Harkett was keen to move in, but Chaddick told him to hold back. They needed to know what was going on before they acted. Harkett and Chaddick watched the pod descend.

Stoole slipped into his second role of the day, slumping into defeat shoulder to shoulder with Cabbs, a nemesis he had only known by inference now made flesh by Stoole’s own actions. The pod slowly swung down, its doors opening ready to belch out the two men and allow the next clutch of tourists onboard. As Stoole stepped out, meekly, gently, he turned to Cabbs and said, “promise me something.”

“Yes?” Cabbs said.

“Keep Suze out of things?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Cabbs said.

“Oh and Cabbs?”

“What now?” Cabbs asked, but received a fist in the face in reply, one thrown with such force that it took Cabbs off his feet. Even the security men seemed stunned, shrinking back from the scene rather than closing in. Stoole chose the moment to flee, raising himself onto the bars of the gangway, and launching himself into the hubbub of the SouthBank afternoon.

He was certain that Cabbs was armed, and hoped only that his derangement would not allow him to shoot in such a crowded area. The man from the ministry had supplied him with all of the information that he had needed. Now all that he had to do to succeed in his plan was to allow himself to be captured by anyone other than Cabbs. With luck, the rest of the work would be done for him. He ran, shrugging off the mask of defeat, hoping that he could stay alive long enough for the information to be passed on.

Running behind him was a rapidly flagging security guard, the harsh plastic of his hi-visibility clothing making short little noises.

“Stop” the guard cried out, but slipped on the fallen leaves, landing hard on his coccyx.

Cabbs struggled to his feet, batting angrily away the arms held out by the security guards that had remained on the scene. He at once felt in his pocket for the hypodermic, which remained intact, then unsheathed his gun.

“Stoole,” he shouted, his voice rushing ahead of him along the banks of the Thames, before taking up the chase.

Chaddick watched Cabbs vanish into the distance from the comfort of his office.

“Sir?” Harkett asked via the speakerphone.

“Follow them,” Chaddick said, “but keep your distance. I’ve still not got the measure of this.”

Stoole darted between the trees that punctuated the South Bank.

“I thought you were tired of running, Stoole!” Cabbs called out after him.

“I’ve always been running.” Stoole shouted back.

Beyond the Thames lay the rest of London, and he still had a far enough lead on Cabbs to break off, to lose himself in the city, but whenever the contemplated such an action, something in his mind stopped him. Something seemed to say to him, “be predictable. Let the follow you. Let them come.” Rationality had not served him greatly over the past couple of months. He had learnt to trust these impulses, these sudden snap decisions. His rational choices had been based on a false memory, and so he could put no faith in them. The present in which he found himself was a place in which snap decisions and gut instinct was all he had. He pressed on, hoping beyond hope that his instincts wouldn’t fail him.

A shot rang out, which cause Stoole to pick up the pace, taking him across a circle of benches and on towards a row of balconied shot. Boats a blur to the left of him and toys of the same to the right, and on towards Blackfriars Bridge. French music came to him then, and he found himself surrounded by nearly a hundred Spanish children, crammed into the walkway beneath.

“How long do you think you can run for, Stoole.” Cabbs called out.

Stoole struggled against the flow of children, who grinned and smiled and waved and helloed, until he was through to the other side. He turned, to see Cabbs approaching the same obstacle.

“As long as it takes Cabbs.” He laughed, and ran on. There was a gunshot and screams.

“Okay, that’s enough! What the flying fuck is Cabbs playing at.”

“I’m nearly up with him, sir, do you want me to stop him.”

“If he’s waving a gun around I’ll say we should.”

He sat back then. He had seen agents behave in this way before, and always when they were up to no good. The suspicions he had had that Cabbs was devising something grandiose and unpalatable grew ever stronger. But why was Stoole making such an asinine job of getting away. Chaddick called up the map on his screen. It seemed clear if Stoole was attempting to escape in earnest, he would not be following the river, but losing Cabbs in the labyrinthine streets that lay to the South. There were two reasons to follow a particular route, either out of a lack of choice or because of an intended destination. Stoole was heading somewhere, at speed, with a dread inevitability.

“Operations,” Chaddick shouted into his intercom. “Now!”

Someone ran up behind Cabbs then.

“Wait,” this stranger said. Cabbs turned, stopped and allowed the stranger to approach, before bring an uppercut that knocked the man stone cold.

“I really don’t have the time,” Cabbs said, before turning and continuing his pursuit. He saw his quarry, his run unimpeded by such interruptions, increasing the distance between them.

“What are you hoping to preserve?” Cabbs shouted. The two men had grown tired, their running ragged and slowed. Stoole, the pursued, ducked behind any object that leant him. He ignored the question.

“You think you’re preserving yourself? You think you can save Jonathan Stoole.”

“I can try.”

“All you are is a name I gave you! You’re nothing!” Cabbs shot off another round, powering into a tree just beyond the ever-fleeing Stoole.

The sad truth was that Stoole had meant what he’d said on that overgrown Ferris wheel. So appalled was he at the scheme Cabbs had in mind for the population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and so detached he was from his own inauthentic existence, that he would gladly end his life if it meant he could be sure that the truth of Cabbs plan was revealed irrefutably to the world at large.

Another shot rang out. Stoole looked at possible routes that would take him away from the river, away from the real possibility of Cabbs killing him, but again the instinct in him made itself known so forcefully that it might have been a voice, the thing that was Bryce, saying to him “not much further, stay with the river,” and then, “here! In here!”

Stoole ran towards a vast building, its single chimney pointing at the carpet of grey cloud that hung over the afternoon, driving away all shadow, all depth, rendering the world in muted, flat colours. He approached glass doors that opened so readily it was as though the voice in him had reached out into the physical world and used it to beckon him forward. He shot through, the doors closing behind him, and he dared a glance at his pursuer, who had slowed somewhat, as if taking in the place that he’d been led to.

A hall lay beneath the mezzanine on which he stood. It lay empty. This was a gallery, he knew, but could not find its name in the moth-eaten scrabble of his mind. The place, however, was deserted, a mystery on which he had no time to ponder. A series of metal pipes circled there way to higher levels, and he at once knew their purpose, at once knew what it was that he had to do.

Chaddick sat in the back of a car, hand interleave together over the pommel of an umbrella. Chaddick’s driver fought against the traffic.

“Whatever it takes, driver. I may be the only one able of stopping this.” Chaddick said. The driver took a siren from the glove compartment and fixed it to the top of the roof.

“You will switch that off when we get within earshot?”

“Consider it done sir.” the driver said, and sped on through the city.

Cabbs arrived outside the gallery just in time to see the partly obscured from of Stoole disappear inside. His spirits raised at this. The fool had seemed to efficient in getting away from him, some sign, perhaps that although his memory was well and truly scrubbed, some residual talents lay behind. If Stoole was serviceable by the time Cabbs was done with him, they would have to investigate ways of getting rid of such innate abilities. They were playing havoc with Cabbs’ ego.

Cabbs rushed into the Turbine Hall, slowing to allow the automatic doors to slide apart. The hall was empty of people. He glanced about him then, turned his ear to the room. The automatic doors closed with a hum, and beneath it all the louder hum of the transformers in the switch station behind the south wall.

“Stoole!” Cabbs shouted, and his voice echoed back at him. He waited for its ring to die away, and listened. He ran his eyes along the spiralling tubes before him, and only then did he see their potential, only then did he hear the patter of shoes coming from the stairwell. He kicked off his own shoes at this, and began his ascent.

In the giftshop beneath security guards held a hush over the cowering gallery-goers that there-in lay. One of the guards spoke, quickly, urgently, into the mouthpiece of his radio, received a response and nodded to the far end of the shop, where a guard led a group of panicstricken children to safety. The rest, surrounded by books of colour and shape, waited their turn, waited for their own run to freedom.

Stoole made his way up to the fifth floor, marked ironically with the word velocity, for here it was that he stoppped, breathless and took in the situation he had created. Ahead of him lay the mouth, the entrance to the tubular slide that ran down in a spiral back to the floor of the Turbine hall. He approached the glass, hesitantly, having not heard a sound from Cabbs since that first shout of his name. Staring down at the ground as it lay behind the dull reflection of the level on which he stood, he tried hard to make out any kind of movement. He had to rely on Cabbs coming after him. He was certain that Cabbs realised he had to reach Stoole alone and deal with him himself, that any intervention from others would bring with it failure. But Stoole heard no footfall on the stairs. Had Cabbs outwitted him? Was he, even now, edged back against the wall, waiting for the sound of Stoole beginning his descent?

He would have to draw him out.

“Cabbs!” He shouted. “Run out of steam have you?”

He listened to the hum of the building which, though low and quiet, was not subsumed with any other sound. The slide was beckoning, almost inverted into an arm that reached out for him. But he knew that the moment he entered the slide Cabbs would know, would be at the very least heading for the floor. Stoole was beginning to regret having gone to the extreme of the fifth slide. Cabbs would easily have been misdirected to the fifth floor, so fast and hard had the run be. If Stoole had chosen a lower slide, he would have perhaps stood an even better chance of improving his lead.

“I can wait all day in here, Cabbs!” Stoole shouted. “Times the one thing I’ve got.” He approached the glass again, looked down, directly down, at the ground floor. He could make out the edge of the balcony beneath him, the one that he had entered. There was a shape down there that meant something to him, if he could only make it out in clearer detail. He edged towards the mouth of the pipe, to improve the angle. The image, so tiny, so far below him, resolved itself readily into a shoe. As soon as Stoole saw what it was, what it signified, he turned to face the stairwell, in time to see Cabbs leaping forth on stockinged feet. In his hand he held what, in that brief split-second before impact, Stoole took for a gun, but as Cabbs collided with him, carying him off balance so that he landed clumsily within the tube, Stoole knew what it was, and what it was was worse than any death.

Cabbs was on him then, and Stoole raised his hand, tried to keep the hypodermic from him, the struggling edged the two men towards the bend in the tube, the point at which gravity’s pull was stronger than the slight friction keeping them from falling.

“Slide.” The voice rang out through Stoole’s centre, raising a whimper from him. “Slide.” It said again, and Stoole, almost powerless to do anything else, pushed at the edges of the pipe, and the two men began their descent.

“Fucker!” Cabbs said, as the pipe’s inner surface began to rocket past him, and struggled with renewed vigour against Stoole’s clumsy blocking.

And a noise so soft, so quiet, it went unnoticed, lost in the clatter of the men struggling their way floorward. A feeling so soft, so slight, that Stoole didn’t notice it at all. It was only as the solution began its work, only as Cabbs stopped his struggling, that Stoole realised he was lost, lost again to the forgetting.

“No!” Stoole cried out. With nothing left to defend, he struck out, swiping at Cabbs chin to little effect. Cabbs actually smiled at this, held on tight, seemingly even enjoying the ride.

The real fight now lay inside Stoole himself. He couldn’t say what it was exactly that was happening to him, just that the world around him was beginning somehow to lose its shape. He knew, of course, and had known for some time, though he knew not how, that this passage had awaited him, but as the men made their slow way down, what had occurred before the two had entered the pipe became clouded. He had been running from something, he knew, he had worked somewhere, but could not picture the place, and soon the idea that he had worked at all became uncertain. It was as though he were some kind of complex shell fish, and that scale after scale of shell was being removed, making him lose all character, all definition, only to be left a soft, warm, wet grub, exposed to whatever evils lay in the world. But all through this forgetting (how long had he been in this pipe?) one thing remained, and as the world he knew fell away from him, such that he and Cabbs were hanging in a dark unnatural space, the reality beyond which could only be inferred through their own actions within, on thing remained. However unclear it was to Stoole, whose very name was fading from familiarity, he was certain that the man sprawled ontop of him, doing his best to keep him pinned down at wrist and ankle, this man stinking of onions and sweat, was the man that had killed him. Something within him told him that not only had this man killed him, but he had done so again and again and again, that he would go on killing him again and again and again until the Earth boiled up in the Sun.

And down they slid, and on, and more and more of Stoole fell away until their remained that one last seed of certainty.

Cabbs landed gracelessly on the coffin-sized crash-mat that lay waiting at the bottom of the slide. The last turn had flipped him and Stoole over, but Stoole’s struggling had ceased, no doubt as the drug had wiped from him the need and the means with which to fight. Cabbs rolled Stoole from him, panted for fresh air. He sat up then, kneeled forward, spat onto the floor of the Turbine Hall.

“So much easier if you don’t fight, you know.” He said, turning to Stoole, but Stoole there was none.

“Oh what now?” Cabbs asked, standing, but no sooner had he rose to his feet than he felt an almighty blow to his kidneys.

“Fucker!” Cabbs said as he was knocked towards the second set of crash-mats and sent toppling over. Stoole waited for nothing, leapt upon Cabbs and began delivering blow after blow to the man’s face. Cabbs tried as best to defend himself against the blows, was grateful for the soft mat on which he lay to soften the impact of the punches. Cabbs stole himself against the pain, raised his legs and managed to flip Stoole from him. Stoole flipped backwards but no sooner had he found his feet than he sprang at Cabbs again, a look of pure animal aggression in his eyes. He punched at Cabbs again, the fist connecting clumsily but with enough force to send Cabbs again from his feet, this time colliding with one of the upright girders that supported the slides. He went down then, skidded to the floor, and Stoole went on, nothing left in his head but the need to destroy the man before him.

Around him he heard clattering noises, hard surfaces struck against hard surfaces. The noises he was creating were softer. He began again to deliver punch after punch to Cabbs’ increasingly unrecognisable face, with each blow being dealt all the harder for the metal that provided a cruel and unforgiving cradle for his skull.

Bright, unnatural yellow flanked either side, and arms grabbed at him, shoulders blocked him, and he found that he could not now reach his quarry.

“Enough!” was shouted at him, and “Stop!” and finally “He’s dead!” And it was only then that his body renounced its cause. He was held back then, and firmly, by two guards. Before him lay the ragged asymmetry of his persecutor, finally undone. Stoole let out a moan then, a loud and mournful keening for every version of himself that had been lost to this man, as if to say to them that their vengeance had at last come. And then soft cushioning on his back, and above him the spiral reaching high up above, and rest, and peace, and oblivion.

Chaddick, a guard on either side, and one following, walked up to the grizzly tableau that lay before him. He went at first to his former aide, a piece of meat wedged grimly into the supporting girders of the latest installation. He squatted then, looked at what remained of the man’s face. Had he been too slow to intervene? He had held his guards back and out of sight and perhaps as a result of that this man had died.

“You brought this on yourself, Cabbs, old chum,” Chaddick said, safe within the privacy of his own head. “The more you fuck around with people’s lives, the harder and nastier your fall becomes.”

And then he did say, out loud and despite himself. “A lesson learned too late.”

He then wandered over to Stoole, gore-spattered, grief-stricken Stoole, lying flat out, moaning slightly as his eyes ran stupidly up and down the spiral slide.

“Should we charge him sir?”

“Charge him?”

“For killing Cabbs sir, and the others.”

“Oh, I don’t think this is our man.” He squatted then in front of Stoole, looked deep into his eyes, and saw nothing lying behind them.

“How could he be.” Chaddick said, grimly, “He’s just a nobody.”

Stoole saw then that someone was regarding him. He met the man’s eyes, and smiled, open and childlike.

Epilogue

Stoole worked the fork deep into the earth, rocked the tool back and forth, and watched for the thirtieth time that morning as the soil split apart. He smiled, withdrew the tines and took a step to the left. The would be here soon, he thought, and as if conjured up by thought alone, he heard an engine approach. He looked up, saw the tinted windows and dark exterior of a car make its way along the drive and up to the old house.

Stoole could still not quite gather who these visitors were, or why they came. They would ask him the same questions over and over, and he would answer them as best he could. Dr Moff was his favourite of them. Moff was interested in the dreams that he had. Stoole liked to talk about his dreams. His waking life seemed an endless puzzle, but in his dreams such puzzling seemed at an end. In his dreams he could be, to exist in the moment and not to worry about the strange emptiness that preceded his waking at the hospital, restrained, a policeman, fearful, at the foot of his bed.

Stoole waved at the car as it drew nearer, before turning towards the house. Stoole drove the fork into the earth, and broke up more soil.

Chaddick stepped out of the vehicle, swinging one, then two immaculately tailored legs out of the car. His chauffeur offered him a hand that he did not take. The day he required assistance getting in and out of a car was the day in which he retired, and he was not ready to retire yet, not by a long chalk. So much work left to be done.

Suze, drying her hands with a tea towel, walked through the open door at the front of the cottage.

“Mr Chaddick! You’re early!” She said with a smile. Chaddick smiled back.

“Just the two of you today, is it?” Suze asked.

“Ah, yes. I wanted this to be just me and Stoole for today.”

“Okay. Come inside and let me fix you a drink.”

Chaddick and his chauffeur entered the cottage. Suze raised a hand to her forehead, picked out Stoole working his patch of earth, and called out to him. He looked up to see her waving at him.

“Five minutes!” He called back to her, and she nodded and went inside.

Stoole looked down at the earth he had just loosened and saw that in his carelessness he had somehow split a worm in two. It lay there wriggling in the dirt. Stoole looked at it for a moment, tutted, then headed back inside.

Suze had made it a strict rule that no business at all be discussed over the dinner table, and as the four of them tucked into their meal, they chose instead to discuss the building, the grounds, whether or not there was anything that the pair of them needed. This, technically speaking, was business too, but Suze recognised in it a normality, a, dare she say it, domesticity that she felt was healthy for Stoole and roundly appreciated. Then as Suze cleared the table, with the chauffeur keenly assisting, Stoole and Chaddick took themselves into the sitting room where an open fire fought valiantly against the February cold.

“So how have you been since we last spoke, Stoole.” Chaddick asked.

Stoole smiled. He was asked this routinely every day, either over the phone or in person.

“I’m well. I’m well. I’ve been planning out the vegetable patch, and I’m going to make a start on renovating the barn soon, too.”

“The old barn?” Chaddick said with a smile. “We’d been meaning to do something with it for years. It seems fitting that you’ll take that on. But of course, I wasn’t really asking about the work you’ve kindly been doing for us here, I mean, have things become any easier for you.”

“My dreams don’t bother me as much as they used to.” Stoole said, after a time of consideration.

“Ah, Dr Moff had intimated as much. He thinks that’s a very good sign. And any memories?”

Stoole shook his head. “Dr Moff thinks that my memory might still be there. He says that my dreams prove it, but I don’t see how. They’re just settings, and faces. They’re nothing real, just bits of information floatinf around in my brain.”

“Perhaps,” Chaddick said. “Now I’ve spoken with Moff and he says you’re ready for something. We’d been in two minds about it, because, well, it’s not particularly orthodox of us, but we feel that yours is a special case.”

“You have my file?” Stoole asked.

Chaddick smiled at this. “You’re too sharp, Stoole, anyone ever tell you that?”

“Sometimes.” Stoole smiled.

“Now, you’ve spoken to Moff, haven’t you, about what the possibilities are.”

“Yes, sir.” Stoole said.

“And you know that in all likelihood, your past won’t be a comfortable thing for you to know about.”

“The past can’t hurt me, sir.” Stoole said.

“Good. Well,” Chaddick said, tapping his briefcase. “I’ll just leave you two alone together.”

The chauffeur was finishing the drying up while Suze smoked a cigar outside the back door.

“Got one for me?” Chaddick asked.

“Today’s the day then?” Suze said.

“It’s up to him really.” Chaddick said. “It’s always been up to him.”

Suze, who did not have one for Chaddick, offered him the cigar. He took a couple of pulls on it and passed it back with a smile.

“Am I doing any good by being here?” Suze asked.

“Oh I think so.” Chaddick said. “You’re the softest contact with the past that Stoole has. And more than that you make his life in the here and now all the richer.”

“I suppose.” Suze said. “Did Dr Moff tell you we’ve started playing go together? Another failed trigger, but Jonathan enjoys it. Still beats me.”

“Well there you are then.” Chaddick said with a smile.

“How’s your work?” Suze asked.

“Oh, well, it wasn’t really how I’d anticipated ending my career, but we’re making progress, slowly.”

“Have you identified any more of Cabbs men?”

“No, not yet. That’s the trouble with the kind of cabal he’d created. Careerist agents without principal; they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. With Cabbs gone, they’ll stop making their plans and just get back into the routine; and wait for the next opportunity.”

“And have you reached a decision about Cabbs record?”

“Oh, well, we don’t even know if that’s possible yet. The brain activity had ceased, so the record is massively corrupted. We might one day manage to develop the technology that will allow us to go in and browse what’s left, but somehow I think that might be technology we don’t really want to have.”

Chaddick received the cigar again, and blew smoke across the heavens.

In the sitting room, Stoole looked into an open briefcase, wherein lay a manilla folder with his name on it. Next to his name was written CASM 1735. He took the folder out but rather than open it, he closed the briefcase and placed the folder on top of it.

His life, all that the black curtain obscured, was in that folder, his family, his birth, his education, his career. Everything before the hospital bed, all questions answered. He drummed his fingers on the cover. What Chaddick and Moff had said was correct, though. He could be anything, the worst kind of monster imaginable. Or he could be as great and grand a hero as Suze seemed to take him for. Stoole walked over to the window and looked out over the grounds.

Chaddick, he knew, wanted to give him this place. He was, at present, just the caretaker, and Suze the housekeeper, but both were left free to do whatever work they felt was required. A bedroom was left empty for Chaddick, but Chaddick had never spent the night there. In practical terms the house was his and Suze’s.

Her presence was another part of the mystery. She had arrived not long after he had been set up as the caretaker, and had surprised him on their first meeting with the biggest and warmest of hugs. He’d even caught her welling up as he had shown her around the house. So they had known each other before, he had supposed, but never brought it up with her. It seemed clear she was under a strict embargo, and so it seemed unfair of him to force her into revealing anything she really wasn’t supposed to.

Spring was unfurling. The land beyond his window, in all its fecundity, just waiting for him to take it in his hand and mould it to his will.

Stoole looked from the grounds to his palm, where in the lines and creases and calluses he found himself. Whatever he had been, he was the caretaker now. He laboured in his vegetable patch, made small repairs as and when they were required, chopped wood for the fire, and kept Suze company. Sometimes, when the meal she had prepared was of a particularly fine quality, and the wine had added to the warmth of the cottage, he would take her in his arms and they would dance. Never more than dance, but they would dance all the same.

He wandered back to the briefcase and took up the folder. This was not his life, but a series of documents and papers. It had no power over him, no control, just a record of a profounder kind of information that was now forever lost. He wandered over to the fire and cast it in, without ceremony; without regret. He went back to the window, where a robin had perched on the creeper growing up the side of the wall. It stopped there for a moment, regarding him, before launching itself into the air.

It will be a good spring, Stoole thought.

2006 copyright Simon H Scott