The Suicide Exhibition: The Never War (Never War 1) (18 page)

It had watched the three people arrive at the museum, had noted the sense of purpose and urgency of step in the tall uniformed man who led them. When the same man emerged again, alone, the Ubermensch followed.

It did not feel the cold, sharp stones under its feet as it picked its way through the remains of a building. All its attention was on the man ahead. It stopped for nothing, pushing aside occasional other pedestrians to maintain its course.

When the man it was following finally entered a large office
building, the Ubermensch positioned itself on the opposite side of the road. It stood close to the spot that Guy Pentecross and Sarah Diamond had chosen to keep watch, and waited patiently. It would wait for ever if it had to, or until it received new orders or identified a useful source of information.

A light rain dappled the pavement. The Ubermensch turned to look upwards. It had not felt the rain on its face for so long… Now the moisture soaked into the dry skin, filling it out a little, giving it fresher colour.

Picking her way through the streets, taking a shortcut back to her house, Dorothy Keeling hoped the rain wouldn’t come to anything. She had her head down, and didn’t see the man until she collided with him.

‘Careful,’ she chided. ‘You wanna watch where you’re going.’

The man didn’t move. Dorothy peered up at him through cataract-dimmed eyes. She’d seen his feet were bare, and he looked like he was wearing only a tattered coat. His face looked… old. She couldn’t really make out his features. But there was something about his deep-sunken eyes that almost made her walk quickly on.

No, she thought. He was down on his luck like she was. So instead, she asked: ‘You all right, dearie? You look half done in. Caught in the bombs, I expect, like I was.’

He didn’t answer, staring down at her. Perhaps he was in shock. It could happen. Dorothy had stood frozen to the spot for hours, not saying a word, after the bomb hit her house.

‘You get bombed out?’ she wondered. ‘They tried to move me out of my home, but I wouldn’t go. Told me it wasn’t safe, but where is safe these days? These nights? I may as well get bombed to death in me own home as out on a strange street, that’s what I say.’

Still the man didn’t reply. But Dorothy persisted. She sensed a kindred spirit. ‘You know what you need? A good cuppa, that’s what. You come along a me – it ain’t far. Get you a nice cup of Rosie.’

Dorothy lived out towards Blackfriars. It was a bit of a walk, but she often wandered a long way. She had nothing else to do after all. The man still said nothing as he followed her to the house. He didn’t comment when they arrived – didn’t seem at all worried that the whole of the front had been torn off, so that Dorothy’s home looked like a opened dolls’ house with every room on display.

‘You have to keep dusting,’ Dorothy said as she led the way through where the front door used to be. Past the stairs, the kitchen was more or less intact, offering some privacy. ‘It’s dreadful when it rains. Dreadful.’ She pronounced it ‘dretfull’. ‘Just let me put the kettle on. There’s no sugar, of course. Unless you’ve got coupons?’ she added hopefully. ‘No, I didn’t think so.’

She carried the tray with the tea things through to the sitting room. They could look out across the debris in the street at the broken faces of the houses opposite, although Dorothy couldn’t see much past the broken wall of her own house.

‘There’s no one left here now but me, you know,’ she said sadly. ‘Even Mrs Willis moved out last week. I thought she’d stay at least. Took her cat with her, more’s the pity.’

The man watched her sip her tea from a cracked cup before he sipped at his own. If her eyesight had been better, Dorothy might have noticed how he held his cup exactly as she held hers. How his stick-thin little finger curled out just a little, mirroring her own. She might have mentioned that they said Hitler drank his tea like that – little finger extended as if he was proper English, proper brought up. How dare he?

She could see well enough to notice that when the man set down his cup, he lifted a book from the shelf close to his threadbare armchair. She couldn’t see what it was – she didn’t have much time for the books. Couldn’t really focus on the print.

‘That was my Teddy’s chair, that was. Long time ago now. But I still keep his books there. He liked to take down a book and read a bit, like you’re doing.’

Slowly, the man turned the pages. When he got to the end,
he started again. She watched him leaf through the same book four times before she struggled to her feet and collected up the tea things. She fumbled as she reached for the man’s cup. Even her hands were giving out now.

The man looked up from his book at the noise. She smiled at him, and put his cup on the tray. She’d make a fresh pot. It was something to do at least. As she made her way out of the room, her foot caught on the edge of the rug and she stumbled slightly, bumping her shoulder into the doorframe, making the cups and saucers on the tray rattle. She glanced back, smiling apologetically. ‘I’m all right,’ she assured him.

His voice was cracked and dry. ‘Careful,’ he chided. ‘You wanna watch where you’re going.’

Hoffman lifted away the paper. It showed a picture of a book, open on the Ubermensch’s lap. The text was Greeked and unreadable. Pictures were vague outlines.

The next picture showed the old woman again. She was carrying a tea tray from the room, looking back over her shoulder.

Then the book again.

‘It is acclimatising,’ Kruger said. ‘See how it has been through this same volume several times already. It will go through it again and again until it understands what it is looking at. Until it has assimilated all the data.’

Hoffman nodded. He remembered how it had been last time. ‘Just like before,’ he said.

‘Language will come quickly. The rate of absorption is really quite phenomenal. It will learn. How to read, how to speak, how to behave.’

Hoffman watched Number Nine start on a new sheet. Another image of the book as the Ubermensch began the process of learning. But Kruger was wrong, this wasn’t about language or behaviour, at least not in isolation. The Ubermensch was learning how to become human.

THE OFFICIAL STORY
was that Harry had been killed in the previous night’s bombing – along with a good number of other people, no doubt. Guy was angered that the man’s family would never know the truth, but that anger was tempered by the fact that at least they would know he
was
dead. There were so many families who were in limbo, not knowing if their loved ones posted as ‘missing in action’ were still alive. Hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

He pushed thoughts of the dead man to the back of his mind, and followed Elizabeth Archer as she led the way through the corridors of the museum.

‘Have you worked here long?’ Sarah was asking.

‘Since I was younger than you.’

‘An ambition fulfilled?’ Guy wondered.

‘Not really. I wanted to be an actress. I rather fancied taking to the stage.’

‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ Davenport assured her with a smile.

They passed through a large exhibition gallery. It had been cleared of contents and was just a vast empty space. The walls were blackened by smoke, and the damage to the ceiling was extensive.

‘Incendiary bombs,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘Over a dozen of them hit in one night about six or seven weeks ago. Gutted the
place. The museum’s been closed ever since. Not sure when we shall open again, to be honest.’

‘I’m surprised you stayed open this long,’ Guy said. ‘Did you lose much of value in the fires?’

‘Most of it was shipped out a long time ago,’ she told them. ‘But we lost the Suicide Exhibition.’

‘The what?’ Sarah said.

‘When the war started, we had a dilemma,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘On the one hand we had to keep the exhibits and artefacts we held safe. On the other, it would have been bad for morale to close the museum. So the Suicide Exhibition was devised.’

‘It was impressive,’ Davenport told them. ‘Unless you knew, you wouldn’t guess, but it was made up of things that the museum could afford to lose.’

‘Some were duplicates. I don’t mean copies, but spares if you like. Some were artefacts that simply aren’t that rare. There were a few facsimiles, but not very many. Hence “Suicide Exhibition”.’ Elizabeth gave a wry smile. ‘Well, perhaps calling it that was tempting fate. And fate intervened when the incendiaries fell. So now we really are closed for the duration.’

‘But we’ve got to the point where that hardly affects the nation’s morale,’ Davenport said.

‘The fact you’ve taken a hit might even help,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘Like with Buckingham Palace.’

‘But
you
haven’t been moved out,’ Guy said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t even know what you do.’

‘Whatever she likes,’ Davenport said.

‘Thank you, Leo.’ Elizabeth led them out of the burned-out shell of the exhibition area and down a flight of steps. ‘The museum’s artefacts are grouped into departments. Most are geographical, like “Greece and Rome”, and some are thematic, like “Prints and Drawings”. I am the curator of one of the departments.’

‘Which one?’ Sarah wondered.

‘The one that handles things that don’t fit into any of the
others, or which no one else wants. The artefacts I care for are defined as
Un
classified.’

‘Which is rather ironic,’ Davenport added, ‘since the department itself is certainly classified. Very few people know of its existence.’

‘Why is that?’ Guy asked. ‘Why keep secrets in a museum?’

‘Best place for them,’ Davenport said.

They had arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Elizabeth Archer led them down a narrow corridor and into a large room. It was so cold in here, despite the summer heat outside, that their breath misted the air. The room was unfurnished, but one whole wall was taken up with what looked like a huge metal filing cabinet. More than a dozen large drawers, each with a sturdy handle, were labelled with simple combinations of letters.

‘Why’s it so cold?’ Sarah asked.

‘Because these drawers are refrigerated,’ Elizabeth told her.

She had taken out a small key, and unlocked one of the drawers at about waist level. It was marked ‘TQ’.

‘The reason my department is kept secret,’ she said as she pulled open the drawer, ‘is because we store and examine artefacts like this one.’

The drawer squeaked as it pulled out under the weight of whatever was inside. Cold mist rose like steam, obscuring the contents. The drawer was long, sliding out six feet or more. Elizabeth lowered a strut from beneath it which then acted as a prop to support the weight. The sides of the drawer were hinged and she unclipped them and folded them down.

The drawer was now a shelf or slab, covered by a grey cotton sheet. Guy could already guess what lay beneath. He could make out the shape through the material. Despite the cold, he could smell it – reminding him of the day he went to Ipswich. Burned flesh.

Davenport helped Elizabeth fold back the sheet, revealing the body that lay beneath.

It was charred almost beyond recognition. Like a statue carved out of coal. One leg had shattered and broken away.
The arms were twisted in front of the chest, hands bunched into fists, fingers fused together by the heat.

Sarah gasped, and turned quickly away. Davenport, who must have seen it before, looked pale. Guy felt sick, forcing himself to look. Only Elizabeth seemed unaffected, regarding the corpse with the same studied interest with which she probably inspected any artefact.

The face was like something out of a nightmare. The skin had drawn tight over the skull, blistered and pitted, lined and weathered. The eyes were sunken pits. Cracked teeth clung to the gums of a lipless mouth. The ears had burned away and there was no hint of hair.

‘Some of the uniform is in evidence on this side,’ Elizabeth said. ‘German, of course. SS, or so I’m told.’

‘Where was he found?’ Guy asked. He could hear the strain in his own voice.

‘He washed up in Shingle Bay, after the incident.’ She evidently expected them to know about the ‘incident’.

‘Shingle Bay?’

‘Middle of nowhere,’ Davenport said. ‘Just north of Ipswich.’

That made sense, Guy thought.

‘It’s horrible,’ Sarah said. She had turned back, but was not looking at the body. ‘But dozens of soldiers and flyers must have been burned to death. Hundreds, probably. Why are you keeping this one?’

‘Because this isn’t just any burned body.’ She gestured for them to look at the shattered leg. It looked like a brittle, snapped tree stump – jagged and ridged. ‘It’s pretty damaged, of course. But the internal structure of the body is… interesting. Do you know anything about anatomy?’

‘Not a lot,’ Guy admitted.

Sarah shook her head.

Elizabeth asked to borrow a pen from Davenport, then to his disgust used it to prod at the broken end of the corpse’s leg.

‘These filaments here, you see?’

Guy nodded. ‘I assume they’re blood vessels.’

‘That’s a very reasonable assumption. But they’re not. Perhaps they used to be, but not any more. And I don’t mean because of the fire.’

‘Then what do you mean?’ Sarah asked. Her voice was regaining its confident tone, but she still looked pale.

‘We opened one up – look.’

‘Oh God,’ Sarah gasped, stepping back. Guy stepped back too, instinctively putting his arm round her shoulder. Once it was there he didn’t like to remove it, so they stood together, in a loose embrace, forcing themselves to look down at the grisly scene.

Elizabeth had run the tip of the pen up the burned leg, lifting back a wide section of burned skin that had been cut away. She folded it back, exposing the tissue beneath. The burning was less extensive inside the body, and the internal structure was revealed – bone and muscle, flesh and tissue.

The colour was what surprised Guy. The inside of the upper leg had an orange tinge. There were areas of more pronounced colour, like patches of moss growing in a lawn. Elizabeth prodded at one of these with the pen.

‘This is not normal.’