Down: Pinhole (8 page)

Dirk cackled at that.

“No one dies here, didn’t you know? That’s the thing ’bout Down, John Camp. There’s no way out.”

One of the MI5 agents was yelling, “Take him, take him down!” but Trevor called them all off. Another agent demanded that the lab personnel evacuate, prompting a rapid but controlled rush to the exits.

The young man stood at the spot where John had been a moment before, his hands empty with no visible weapons. The gangly, dirty kid was shaking like a cold, wet mutt and Trevor immediately sensed that it would be best to go easy. He holstered his gun.

“What’s your name, mate?”

The kid stared in panic at the men encircling him, pointing pistols at his chest.

“Don’t be scared. We’re not going to hurt you. My name’s Trevor. What’s yours?”

“Duck.”

“Duck?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a good name, mate. Yeah, I like it. So Duck, before we go somewhere nice and have a chat, I’m going to just pat you down, ever so gently, to make sure you don’t have anything on you that could hurt us. Okay?”

“Wot’s pat me down mean?”

“Touch your clothes. To see if you’ve got a weapon.”

“Me brother ’as a knife, but I don’t.”

“I hear you. Can I check anyway?”

Duck swallowed and nodded. Trevor slowly approached and ran his hands over his smelly shirt and dirty trousers. Duck’s shoes were caked in wet mud. Trevor had him slip his bare feet out of them to check inside. He flinched at the smell.

“Okay, it’s all good,” he declared. “How old are you, Duck?”

“That’s an ’ard question.”

“Really? If I had to guess I’d say you were eighteen, nineteen. Maybe twenty.”

“Oh, in those kinds of years. I’m nineteen.”

“What other kind of years are there?”

Henry Quint had remained in the control room and when he called out, Duck looked up at him in alarm.

“Ask him where he’s come from, for God’s sake!”

“Who’s ’e?” Duck asked. “The lord of this shire?”

“Yeah, in a way,” Trevor said. He turned to Quint and said, “We’ll get to all that, Dr. Quint. Why don’t you let me do this my way, all right?”

Quint mumbled something and showed his anxiety by clicking his pen furiously.

“I think we can all put away our weapons,” Trevor told the agents. “Duck’s going to be a good, cooperative chap, aren’t you, Duck?”

“Where am I?” Duck asked.

“This is Dartford. In England.”

“Don’t look like Dartford.”

“You know it?”

“’Course I do. I’m from there, an’t I?”

“Okay, Duck. I reckon we’ve got a lot to talk about. Let’s go someplace nice and quiet, maybe get you some fresh clothes and a good wash. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“Got any beer ’ere?”

Trevor smiled. “I think we can manage to find you a beer.”

“Where is he?” Quint asked.

It was midafternoon. Trevor was punch drunk. It had been the strangest of days.

“He’s having a kip. We’ve got him tucked away in one of the security-guard overnight suites.”

“Is it secure?”

The other man in Quint’s office answered with the elocution of a public school boy. Ben Wellington was the lead security agent at MI5 and he’d been shadowing Trevor all day. He was one of the agency’s pedigreed breeds with a pocketful of Eton and Oxford credentials, the kind of man destined for high office within the security services. He was crisply turned out in a bespoke suit and silk tie with freshly cut hair. “We’ve installed locks on the outside of the door and have three agents on duty outside. In addition we have installed monitored video cameras in the bedroom and the loo.”

“He’s not going anywhere,” Trevor said. “And quite frankly I don’t think he wants out. He’s happy as a monkey with a peanut machine.”

“Tell me what you’ve found out,” Quint said.

“I rather think you should look at the recorded interview,” Ben said. “It’s the kind of thing that’s best appreciated first-hand. I’m going to recommend that we play it in its entirety to the principals on the eighteen-hundred hours videocon.”

Quint nodded his agreement.

“You got a seat belt?” Trevor asked.

“Why is that?”

“’Cause you’re going to fall off your chair.”

Trevor located the file on the security department server and started playing the interview on Quint’s screen. As he always did, Quint began taking notes in one of his hardbound diaries but he soon let the pen slip from his fingers and simply stared. In the video Duck was seated at the head of a table flanked by Trevor and Ben, dressed in a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit, the smallest female size used by the engineers. During the forty-minute interview he fidgeted and scratched and kept asking for more chocolate biscuits and cola, which he wolfed down voraciously.

Ten minutes into the recording, Quint had them pause it.

“Do you believe any of this?” he asked.

Ben showed a palm in futility. “It’s going to be impossible to independently authenticate. With Brandon Woodbourne we had police and other records to verify that he died in 1949 and forensic data to prove it was the same man. This lad says he died circa 1790. We’re unlikely to find any contemporaneous accounts of Duck’s claimed execution but the research group at HQ tells me there were some three-dozen broadsheets in London and the provinces in the eighteenth century. I’ve got someone over at the British Library looking into it.”

“Well, it all seems ridiculous on the face of it. By the way, what kind of name is Duck anyway?”

“I asked him that while we were giving the boy a shower,” Trevor said. “He didn’t know how to operate the plumbing and he was scared of it. Should have seen him when he saw the toilet flush. Anyway, never saw so much dirt come off a human body. He said it was the name his parents gave him because he waddled like a duck. He says he’s got an older brother named Dirk. Just an aside and something you’ll not get from the video, even after a good scrubbing he still had a very distinct body odor.”

Quint asked him to elaborate.

“It’s like decaying flesh. Like a body that’s had a day or three of decomposition.”

“Not at all pleasant,” Ben said. “I’ve got an agency doctor and nurse on the way here. Later this afternoon we’ll run a battery of tests.”

“All right, let’s keep going with the video,” Quint said.

When it was over Quint stood and poured a coffee from his sideboard.

“Do you agree we ought to show this to the principals?” Ben asked.

“I do,” Quint said, taking his seat again. “Seeing is believing, I suppose, though as a scientist this seriously stretches my belief system.”

“He came from somewhere,” Trevor said. “Brandon Woodbourne came from somewhere. And according to Duck’s statement, Dr. Loughty wound up, very much alive at that somewhere. We have to assume that John is there too.”

Ben nodded. “We have incontrovertible evidence that Woodbourne is dead yet now he seems quite alive. There’s little basis to doubt that the same is true for Duck. If we get bowled out at the British Library, it occurs to me that we could get a linguist to study Duck’s speech patterns to see if they’re compatible with the eighteenth century. Beyond that, I think we’ll have to stick with what we have: his firsthand account of this place he calls Down.”

“We’ve only scraped the surface with him,” Trevor said. “When he wakes up we’ll need to carry on with interviews and milk everything he knows about his world.”

“As you can see,” Ben said, “he’s unfocused, childlike and none too bright. It’s going to be a challenge to effectively milk him, as Trevor says, but it’s imperative we do it right. The more we know, the better chance we’ll have of understanding Brandon Woodbourne and what we’re dealing with.”

Trevor opened his laptop and clicked on the video feed of Duck’s bedroom. The duvet was pulled up to his neck and he was sleeping soundly with a look of pure pleasure on his young, clean face.

“The clock’s ticking,” Trevor said. “We’ve got six and a half days until we fire up the collider again. We’re going to do everything in our power to find Woodbourne in that time and I’ll bet anything that John is in that godforsaken place doing everything in his power to find Emily.”

Des and Adele Fraser, a couple in their sixties, returned to their Hillside Road home and began piling bulging suitcases on the walkway. Mr. Fraser paid the driver. They had taken a taxi from Gatwick to Crayford, just west of Dartford, because their son was away on business in Manchester. It was midday, the bright sun casting no shadows.

“Did you draw all the curtains when we left?” Des asked his wife.

She looked toward the windows of their modest semi-detached home and said, “I don’t think so but I really can’t recall. We left two weeks ago, didn’t we? Seems like forever.”

“You go on. I’ll shift the bags.”

Adele used her house keys and left the door open for her husband who carried the lighter bags through the threshold then struggled with the biggest one. In the hall he put the unwieldy bag down, grumbled about his back, and said they’d have to unpack it downstairs rather than lug the monster up to the bedroom. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that his wife hadn’t moved from a spot in the sitting room and hadn’t removed her coat.

“You all right, luv?”

A large man stepped into the hall, pointing a pistol at Des’s middle.

“Close the door,” he said. “And keep your trap shut.”

“Who are you?” Des asked indignantly.

“You haven’t done what I told you. Do you want me to kill her?” Woodbourne said.

Des closed the door and was herded into the front room. It was in a state. There were food tins, plates, and utensils strewn about, the contents of the cupboards scattered and broken on the floor.

“Sit there. Both of you. You, what’s your name? Cook me something. I’m sick of eating from tins.”

“My name is Adele.” Her voice was thready with fear.

“Right, Adele. Make us something tasty then. If you open the back door I’ll kill him straight off. I cut the telephone lines so don’t you bother with that neither.”

“I have to see what I’ve got,” she said. “We’ve been away a fortnight.”

She removed her coat, exchanged a desperate glance with her husband and went to the kitchen.

“That’s a tele, right?” Woodbourne asked, pointing the gun at the flatscreen.

“Of course it is,” Des said.

“Can’t see where the tubes go. Couldn’t figure how to switch it on neither. Do it for me.”

“You need to use both boxes.”

Woodbourne looked around. “I didn’t see no boxes.”

“These,” Des said, picking the remotes off the carpet. “One’s for the set, the other’s for the cable.”

“Just do it, all right?”

Des turned it on. “What channel?”

“Don’t be daft. The BBC.”

“One, two, three, or four?”

“Don’t be smart with me. There’s only the one BBC. I want the news to see if they’re saying anything about me.”

Des put it on the BBC news channel. Woodbourne looked startled and marveled about it being in color.

“What did you do to be on the news?” Des asked.

“The usual, I suppose. I came, I saw, I conquered. Who said that? Can’t never remember.”

“Julius Caesar.”

“Yeah, him. I looked all over for a wireless. You got one?”

Des was in his late sixties. He looked Woodbourne over curiously. He didn’t seem to be older than forty or so. He was heavy-set and muscular, Des’s own shirt and trousers, tight on his large frame. His black hair was slicked back. He smelled of a combination of rot and his wife’s soap.

“I haven’t heard a radio called a wireless for a very long while. We’ve got a clock radio by the bed.”

“Is that what that is? I couldn’t work it neither.”

“Why did you break into my house?”

Woodbourne limped across the room and rubbed at his thigh. “I used to have a mate who lived round here. Couldn’t find it. Must’ve been torn down. The house was empty so in I came. Had to go somewhere. My car’s in your lock-up. That yours in the drive?”

Des nodded.

“Didn’t need it for your hols?”

“We were in Australia, visiting our daughter.”

“Long way, that.”

“You’re limping. Are you hurt?”

“I’m all right. Just grazed.”

“Look, why don’t you leave after my wife feeds you? We won’t call the police.”

“That’s what they always say, don’t they?”

“Then you’ve done this sort of thing before.”

Woodbourne looked up. “I have done.”

It wasn’t long before a picture of Woodbourne appeared on the TV, an image grabbed from the MAAC cameras.

The newsreader said, “There continue to be no apparent further developments in the case of the unnamed man who broke into the Massive Anglo-American Collider in Dartford, interrupting a key scientific experiment. This man later kidnapped and killed journalist Pricilla Knowles who was on site covering the event. Despite the largest manhunt in Kent history, the perpetrator remains at large. Once again the public is encouraged to report any sightings of this man, who is considered armed and extremely dangerous, to the number appearing at the bottom of your screen.”

Woodbourne seemed quite pleased and said, “You hadn’t heard about me then?”

Des’s hands had started shaking during the newscast. “We heard something about this in Adelaide.”

“There’s a bit more to the story,” Woodbourne said with a queer smile.

“I don’t need to know anything more. I have to use the loo. Can I, please?”

“Use the one down here.”

The downstairs lav was near the kitchen and Des was able to give his distraught wife a soothing word.

Inside, the door had no lock and the best he could do was lean against it while he reached for his mobile phone in his pocket. He was about to hit 999 when the handle turned and Woodbourne pushed in.

“I don’t like you closing doors on me. What’s that in your hand?”

“My mobile,” Des mumbled.

“The only thing I want to see in your hand is your cock. Give it here.” He inspected the phone. “What’s it do?”

“You don’t know?”

Woodbourne grabbed Des by the collar and hauled him back to the sitting room where he roughly pushed him onto the sofa.