The Clown Service (7 page)

Shining looked around as if something useful might be lurking behind one of the bookshelves. ‘I must have had a second desk once. What on earth did I do with it? And what forms will I need?’ He began ferreting in his drawers. ‘I wonder what department I have to contact to sanction office supplies …’

‘It’s all right,’ said Toby, ‘I’ll sort it. I’d quite like to do something mundane for an hour, just while some of this sinks in.’

‘Fair enough. When you’ve employed whatever arcane skills one has to master to get kitted out, I was going to suggest you
did a little reading.’ Shining got up and moved over to the filing cabinet in the corner. ‘I may not be terribly organised about office equipment, but I have kept case studies of everything I’ve worked on over the decades.’ He opened a drawer and leaned on it with a sigh. ‘After all, someone had to – I dare say they burn the copies I send to our noble paymasters.’

He pulled out a large card folder, bulging with paper, and placed it on his desk. ‘That’s the last six months, small beer for the most part: research and speculation. Dive in when you have a moment. Do you mind if I leave you to it? I sometimes find it useful to go for a walk and think things through.’

‘You’re the boss.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am. That’s going to take some getting used to as well. Right then, help yourself to whatever you need. The password for the desktop is written on the corner of the screen. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

Toby waited until he heard the front door close then got to his feet and went over to Shining’s desk.

He sat down and looked at the computer screen. When Shining had said the password was written on it he had imagined it would have been on a sticky note, but Shining had been literal – it was inked neatly on the screen itself in indelible marker.

‘The man’s mad,’ he muttered to himself, tapping the word in. ‘MOCATA’ – it sounded like somewhere in Israel but was no doubt far more esoteric.

He reached for the phone and started the task of trying to get a desk, chair and computer requisitioned. During this typically labyrinthine process of shunted calls, denials of responsibility and more red tape than he would have needed to wallpaper the office, he began to explore Shining’s computer.

This proved harder than he expected.

The computer was like a house that had been hastily abandoned, the documents folder empty but for a handful of bizarre text files that could have no discernible value: half of what seemed to be a short story concerning werewolves, a recipe for clam chowder and a list of books by a man called Dennis Wheatley.

The pictures folder was better populated, if just as baffling. One folder, entitled ‘Sprites’ contained nothing but pictures of trees. Another, labelled ‘Revenant’ was even more dull, offering thirty-nine pictures of an empty room. Toby stared at the pictures, convinced that he must be missing something. He studied the photos, noting the peeling wallpaper, the splintered floorboards, a sagging wicker chair in the corner. But it was a puzzle beyond his ability to solve. As far as he could tell the pictures
were
just as pointless as they looked.

Toby opened the default web browser and checked the history. There were several Wikipedia articles, covering everything from a small town in Spain to the movies of Oliver Reed. A couple of the links appeared to be for Internet forums and Toby clicked on one. As soon as he’d done it he realised that Shining would probably notice the intrusion if he checked when his account had last been online. Still … who bothered to do that? He guessed that Shining would have stored his login information in the browser and was proved correct. He was logged in automatically and given free rein to wander amongst the black and green neon corridors of UnXplained.net. There were pages and pages of posts about unusual phenomena, from crop circles to UFO sightings, all discussed, debated and flamed by such regular devotees as TheBeast666, RidgeMonster and LuvBishop.

‘Just buried gran,’ wrote Truth99. ‘Hope she stays there people saying that some are walking now drugs in the food scared she might come back.’
If only to bring you some punctuation
, Toby thought. The forum members were more forgiving, though GoldDawn’s comment ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbra!’ seemed to have caused a mini bout of Internet rage. The reference was lost on Toby until he scrolled down and discovered it was a quote from a film, but the flaming was familiar enough; there was nothing Internet forums liked more than a good hard bitch at one another.

He checked out some of the other threads, discussion on psychic surgery, poltergeists, mediums … it provided a fairly exhaustive list of all the things he didn’t believe in. He wondered how much his list would change over the next few months. The idea didn’t please him – he enjoyed being narrow-minded. Found it a comfort.

Toby left the forum and decided to search for Shining’s name online. There was nothing.

Toby gave up on the computer. Stuck on hold, waiting while someone in accounts hunted for Section 37’s requisition number, he cradled the phone under his chin and reached for the file of case reports. He began to read.

Shining liked to walk on busy streets. It was an act of immersion, listening to the voices, watching the people. He would subconsciously analyse those around him, watching their movements and piecing together what he could of their lives and motivations. It was important that he could read people. That
was always the uppermost skill in intelligence: being able to see people for what they were and predicting their behaviour and responses. He had known many in the Service who lived out their lives in the false atmosphere of their departments, a world of data and dust that bred a view of humanity that could never be accurate. People were never
that
predictable, but a lifelong student of them could make informed guesses.

He marched down High Road, weaving in and out of the crowds that were a reliable mainstay of this strip of shops and businesses.

He cut into the Wood Green Mall, that cathedral of commerce that had consumed the old railway station, thrived and then floundered. It was a perfect microcosm of the busy world outside its walls. An arena of false light and cold tile, shining shop brands and dreamy shoppers. The echoes of conversation and dreary mall radio formed a soup of sound that drizzled over everyone’s heads as they shuffled in pre-planned loops.

He rode the escalators, working the pre ordained circuit around the mall, letting the wall of sound embrace him as his mind wandered elsewhere. Was the radio signal important? Sometimes, synchronicity was nothing but a random hiccup in the chaos; sometimes it demanded your attention. It was possible that Jamie had simply latched on to the signal by accident. Yes, it was possible … but Shining couldn’t make himself believe that, so he would follow the lead until he could be sure.

Having conducted a full circuit of the mall, Shining stepped back out into the street, breathing in the exhaust fumes from the chains of buses that were dragging themselves towards queues of waiting shoppers.

He stood by a street railing and became oblivious of the rush
of colour and sound, the squeal of hydraulic breaks, the hiss of opening doors, footsteps on the pavement, chatter, secondhand music leaking from everywhere. Then he opened his eyes and found himself staring right into a face he knew well. The man stood on the other side of the road, mirroring Shining. For a moment they stared at one another, Shining unable to quite believe his eyes. Then, as the bubble of shock burst, he pushed his way through the pedestrians, running to the end of the barrier so he could cross the road.
It can’t be
, he insisted to himself,
just can’t be
. All around him, Wood Green fought to keep him from crossing the road. People got in his way, traffic pushed forward, car horns sounded as Shining stepped out into the road regardless of his safety.

‘Watch it!’ someone shouted, their voice punctuated by the squeal of tyres.

Shining ignored them, running between the cars and mounting the other pavement. People were staring at him, something intelligence officers did their best to avoid, but his training was lost to him, swamped by an obsessive need to confirm what he had seen.

The man had gone. Of course he had. How could he have been there in the first place? Looking up and down the street, Shining found no sign of him.

Shining stood a while by the pavement railing, staring at the weathered metal where the man had rested his hands. It was as if he hoped to pick up on the man’s echo, sense a trace of his passing. There was nothing.

Of course there is nothing
, he thought.
Krishnin is dead
.

Shining walked into Oman’s shop with such energy he made the racks of peripheral tat quiver.

‘Give me time!’ complained Oman.

‘Actually,’ Shining replied, ‘I’ve had another thought. If I were to give you a precise location, could you tell whether the signal was coming from there?’

‘That would be a little less impossible,’ Oman admitted, ‘which would be a relief.’

Shining gave him the location.

Toby was lost in reams of the typed-up impossible when he heard Shining’s feet on the stairs.

‘Still no desk then?’ said the old man as he entered, hanging up his coat and lowering himself onto one of the sofas with a sigh.

‘You’ve only been gone a quarter of an hour,’ Toby replied. ‘It’ll be months before we get so much as a pencil holder.’

‘Then maybe I should pass some of the time with a little story. During my walk I saw … or possibly I didn’t … something that has shone a new light on things.’

‘I’m glad things continue to be so clear.’

Shining smiled. ‘Let me tell you about something that happened to me when
I
first joined the Service.’

Espionage in the ’60s reeked of boiled cabbage and old rot. It was a grim, tawdry affair that makes even the present day world of paperwork, politics and accountancy seem attractive.

At that time I was still a few months away from a department of my own. My specialist area of espionage had thrived during the Second World War but petered out as the Service focused elsewhere. That said, there was still enough money and enthusiasm to bring me onboard as a sounding post for other sections. You couldn’t move for funding and the obsession with the Russians was at its peak. If someone in the war office suspected our Soviet friends of being able to fly, they would have had a Cambridge graduate on the roof flapping his arms within forty-eight hours.

I operated out of a creaking office building in Soho. I would walk to work through a maze of blue neon and questionable promises. Posters offered glamour that the threadbare carpets and well-worn stages could never live up to. It was a place of
honey traps, luring the lustful into dark, sordid interiors where their money would be drained away as surely as their dreams. It couldn’t have suited us better.

The front door of the office peeled like an Englishman on a package holiday. The electric bells to the left offered a life insurance company, a tailor, a travel agency and a film production house. They were all as fake as the pneumatic dancers that jiggled on the advertising poster of the club next door.

Stepping inside, you might have thought you had been transported to a solicitor’s office from Dickens. The entrance hall was a mixture of black and white floor tiles and the sort of dark, dreary wood that feeds on natural light.

The Service was an uneasy combination of confused scholars and old soldiers; each quite incapable of understanding the other. The concierge, George, was from the military school – an aged infantryman who had lost his left arm during the war. He compensated for this loss of mass with a paunch that stretched the buttons of his suit jacket until they threatened to pop. It was the sort of belly you can only gain through liquid refreshment, a sack of digested beer that he hauled around like a camel’s hump.

‘Morning, Mr Shining,’ he would say, looking up from his copy of the
Daily Mirror
, before offering a comment on the weather. Those meteorological statements had the stiff formality of codewords, shifting alongside the seasons. ‘Fresh as you like,’ he would say during the cold of winter; ‘Damp enough for Noah,’ when it was raining; ‘Bright as a button,’ when the sun shone. If he ever varied from his script I certainly never heard it. He was reliable, old George, as much a part of the fixtures and fittings as the creeping mould or the carpet that did its best to hold the stairs together.

I’d work my way up to the second floor, where I had my office alongside the fake travel agency, its small windows filled with wilting posters of beaches and old monuments.

I had done my best to make the office comfortable, but it was like placing a cotton valance on a bed of nails. The building fought all attempts at pleasant habitation. The windows were draughty and their sills collected dead flies. The wallpaper was damp to the touch and the furniture creaked when you applied weight to it.

On the morning the Krishnin affair began, I had planned to continue observation on a young man who claimed he could trap ghosts. I had little doubt he was nothing more than a delusional unfortunate surrounded by empty tea chests and with an overactive imagination, but dealing with him beat sitting in that damn office.

It was not to be.

‘You busy?’ A moustache poked its way around my door frame. It was luxuriant, that moustache; you could have painted a wall with it in no time. It was attached to Colonel Reginald King, our War Office presence and most upright of the army lot. He wore his previous life like a security blanket: picture of the Queen on his wall and medals in a case – the sort of things you find shoved away in a dull pub corner these days. If he listened to anything other than marching band music he kept the secret well. He had infected the entire top floor with pipe smoke and tubas.