The Suicide Exhibition: The Never War (Never War 1) (19 page)

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Sarah said.

‘In fact,’ Elizabeth went on, ‘it’s more like plant matter than human tissue. The veins are full of the same material.’

‘It seems to have grown
into
the body,’ Davenport said. ‘I’m no expert, but this substance is apparently rather akin to a fungus.’

‘Inside someone’s
body
?’ Guy said. ‘While they were alive?’

‘Undoubtedly. Though whether they were alive in the sense we usually mean, who can tell,’ Elizabeth replied. ‘This fungus, or whatever it is, gives extra strength to the body. It’s incredibly resilient. Fire is about the only thing that could destroy it short of ripping the whole body apart.’

‘Is it an infection?’ Sarah wondered.

‘Quite possibly. In fact, I think this fungus has grown through the man’s body over a long period of time. Certainly
weeks, possibly months or even years. It strengthens the body, but it also looks as though it mirrors the nervous system, perhaps making the host’s system redundant and replacing it.’

‘Host?’ Guy repeated. ‘You mean this stuff is a form of, what – a parasite?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Elizabeth agreed. She flipped the folded skin back into place and handed Davenport back his fountain pen.

Davenport took it rather gingerly, hesitating before returning it to his jacket pocket.

‘This material takes over the body, providing its own internal systems. We have no way of knowing how or if it affects the brain. But kill the human host and the secondary systems would just keep going.’

‘Like ivy growing through a tree,’ Davenport said. ‘The tree might die, but the ivy isn’t directly affected.’

‘And you think this is a German secret weapon of some sort?’ Sarah said.

Elizabeth and Davenport exchanged a look.

‘Not exactly,’ Davenport said. ‘Though the Germans obviously have some degree of involvement. As Elizabeth said, he was wearing an SS uniform.’

‘If they had an army of near-indestructible soldiers like this,’ Guy said, ‘then we’d surely know about it by now. So this must be a one-off.’

Sarah stepped away from Guy to look closer at the body. ‘A body that keeps going long after it should be dead,’ she said. ‘Is this connected with last night?’

‘It’s a very real possibility,’ Davenport said.

‘The man who attacked me was
ancient
,’ Elizabeth said. ‘His features were decayed, his face little more than a skull.’ She leaned forward slightly, looking straight into the blackened face of the charred man. ‘Apart from burns, he looked rather like this.’

STATION Z OCCUPIED
most of the first floor of the building. From what Guy could gather, the ground floor was taken up with some sort of army administration group, while the upper floors of what had been a large Regency townhouse were given over to the storage of files and a few logistics staff.

Davenport led Guy and Sarah through a door into the set of offices that comprised Station Z. There was one large room furnished with four desks. Miss Manners sat at one, surrounded by telephones and piles of papers. The wall beside her desk was papered with maps and charts showing all of Britain and most of Europe. Guy saw that a map of the Soviet Union was pinned up on the adjacent wall, and he guessed it was a new addition.

‘There’s a small kitchenette through there,’ Davenport told them, pointing to a side door. He nodded towards another door at the end of the room. ‘Brinkman’s office.’

Miss Manners peered at them through her spectacles before standing up and coming over to greet them.

‘I’ve had desks brought in for you,’ she said, indicating the two desks nearest the door. ‘Decide between you who gets the window and who gets the draught from the door.’

‘What about that desk,’ Sarah said, pointing to one further in the room.

‘Sergeant Green sits there.’ She glanced at Guy. ‘You might outrank him, Major, but the sergeant and I need to be within shouting distance of Colonel Brinkman.
His
shouting that is, not ours.’

‘And I guess the sergeant was here first,’ Guy conceded, smiling to show he wasn’t too bothered.

‘Indeed.’ Miss Manners did not smile back.

‘Don’t you get a desk?’ Sarah asked Davenport.

‘Lord no,’ he laughed. ‘What would an interloper like me do with a desk? If I need to do anything cerebral I’ll take a room at the Atlantean Club thank you.’

‘Where the tea is no doubt rather better,’ Miss Manners added.

‘The brandy certainly is.’

The area was bigger than it at first appeared. As well as the small kitchen area, the side door also led to a conference room and two more offices. Davenport took them through to the conference room where they waited for Colonel Brinkman to join them.

‘Is this all the staff he has?’ Guy wondered. ‘A colonel commanding a sergeant, a secretary and an actor?’

Davenport smiled. ‘He’s got a major and a pilot now too, don’t forget. But no, Brinkman can commandeer resources as and when he needs. Green’s got half a dozen soldiers on call, but when he doesn’t need them they do normal duties at the barracks in Knightsbridge. And then there’s Dr Wiles out at Station X, who you’ve already met, of course.’

Brinkman joined them, Sergeant Green just behind him. Miss Manners entered a few moments later, carrying a notepad and pencil.

‘I take it you’ve seen the body from Shingle Bay,’ Brinkman said, starting straight in. He made no effort to introduce anyone or set an agenda. ‘So – thoughts?’

There was an uneasy silence before Guy and Sarah realised he was expecting them to respond.

‘Bizarre,’ Sarah said at last. ‘Unpleasant. Worrying.’

‘All of those,’ Guy agreed. ‘But we need to know more
about it. I mean, is he something the Germans created. Some sort of experiment. Or a freak of nature – what?’

Brinkman drummed his fingers on the table. ‘You’re here, both of you, because it’s easier and probably safer to have you with us rather than against us. But if you’re going to stay, you need to prove your worth.’

‘And how do we do that?’ Sarah demanded. ‘We don’t even know what you do here, let alone what you expect of us.’

‘None of us knows what we do here,’ Davenport said quietly. ‘Which is why, although the colonel won’t admit it outright, we need help from people like you. People who will worry at a thing until they understand it. People with tenacity as well as insight.’

Brinkman sniffed and folded his arms. He leaned back in his chair. ‘You probably know almost as much as the rest of us already. But to spell it out in simple terms, we believe there is a third force in this conflict. I don’t mean the Soviets, I don’t mean the Italians. But I don’t know who I do mean. Maybe it’s some faction of the German forces with access to technology the rest of the Wehrmacht doesn’t have; certainly the Germans are utilising their resources, although only to a limited extent. But whether as allies or through acquisition…’ He unfolded his arms and leaned forward again. ‘Whatever the case, there is a potential threat. Our job is to analyse that threat and then neutralise it.’

‘The threat being that burned soldier, or people like him?’ Sarah said.

‘That’s part of it. Then there are the UDTs.’

‘I’ve heard the term. But what exactly are those, sir?’ Guy asked.

It was Miss Manners who answered. ‘An Unknown Detected Trace, called a UDT or an “Unknown” is just that. You probably know that the government publicly admitted just a few days ago that we have a radio-detection system that warns of incoming enemy aircraft.’

‘RDF,’ Guy said, to show he was aware of it.

‘We call it RADAR now, apparently, but yes,’ Brinkman
acknowledged. ‘Sometimes it picks up aircraft that don’t fit the pattern of an incoming raid or reconnaissance. Usually they turn out to be aircraft anyway – our own, or something unexpected like Hess’s flight back in May.’

‘Oh yes – Hess…’ Guy wanted to ask about how Hess was involved.

But Brinkman waved the question away. ‘We’ll discuss him later. I was in Glasgow, quite by chance because his plane was originally flagged as a UDT.’

‘The plane I saw,’ Sarah said slowly. ‘If it
was
a plane.’

‘Another reason you’re here. You are one of the few witnesses actually to have seen one of these things. The three Hurricanes we scrambled when it showed up got there too late, there was no sign of it. As usual. But you actually
saw
the thing.’

‘I saw
something
. As I described to the sergeant and Miss Manners.’

‘And we are working on the assumption that there is a connection between these UDT craft and the body from Shingle Bay?’ Guy said.

‘We are assuming nothing,’ Brinkman told him. ‘But neither can we rule anything out. Both remain unexplained, which is enough of a link for now.’

‘So what is Shingle Bay?’ Sarah asked. ‘How did the body end up at the British Museum?’

‘Shingle Bay was the site of an invasion,’ Brinkman said. ‘Or at least, an incursion. We received information that the Germans intended to put ashore a small force that would include what they referred to as an “Ubermensch”.’

‘Ubermensch?’ Guy interrupted. ‘That’s what the German soldier in the hospital said.’

‘It’s a term we’ve come across before,’ Miss Manners told them. ‘In Ultra traffic originating with the SS, specifically from Himmler’s command.’

‘Ultra?’ Sarah asked.

Brinkman ignored the question. ‘The point is, we have reason to connect the word with the UDTs. They’ve been
referred to, albeit in different terms, in communications that also reference Ubermensch. We assumed it was a code word.’

‘Is it?’ Sarah wondered.

‘It’s German for “super man”,’ Guy said. ‘In the way that Hitler thinks the Aryans are the master race. Superior, better than the rest of us. So what exactly happened at Shingle Bay?’ he asked Brinkman.

Brinkman nodded to Sergeant Green, who told them: ‘Several small boats were launched from a U-Boat off East Anglia. But thanks to information received, we were waiting. We had a couple of large petrol tankers concealed on the cliffs above the beach, and ran pipes out into the bay. We had no idea what sort of force we were up against, not much time to react, and under the circumstances it would have been difficult to get cooperation from other units.’

‘You burned them,’ Guy said quietly. He could remember the charred wreck of the man in the hospital bed. The awful stench of his blistered flesh.

‘We did,’ Green admitted. He didn’t sound proud or remorseful, it was a statement of fact. ‘When we saw the boats coming in, we pumped petrol out into the bay. It floated on the water and we ignited it with a flare gun.’

‘The whole sea was burning,’ Sarah said quietly. ‘Like some Biblical catastrophe.’

‘Sorry?’ Brinkman said.

‘Something one of the other ATA girls said. She was describing what she saw below her on a delivery flight. That was somewhere on the Suffolk coast I think. Was this late last summer?’

‘There
was
a plane,’ Green said. ‘We were afraid it would scare off the boats. Anyway, afterwards, we collected up the bodies.’ He looked down at the table. ‘Not a very pleasant job. They were all normal, though badly burned of course. All except the one that Mrs Archer has in her care.’

‘And just the one survivor?’ Pentecross asked.

‘One more than we intended,’ Green said. ‘And as you know, he didn’t survive long, poor bastard.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘I still don’t understand how you knew about this raid, or whatever it was, how you knew it was going to happen.’

Miss Manners gave a polite cough. ‘I have a friend,’ she said, glancing at Brinkman for his permission to elaborate. He nodded, and she adjusted her spectacles before continuing. ‘She is part of a group that makes various claims, including that they can divine information from some rather unorthodox sources. But her… employer, if I can call him that, has been right before.’

‘But this employer of hers isn’t deemed reliable enough to be able to second troops from regular army units?’ Guy guessed.

Again Miss Manners glanced at Brinkman before she went on: ‘Her employer, though I use the term rather loosely as he’s more of a mentor I suppose, well… He’s Aleister Crowley.’

There was silence for several moments. Guy was aware that his mouth was open in surprise.

‘Who?’ Sarah said.

‘You’ve never heard of him?’ Guy was amazed.

Sarah shrugged. ‘The name sounds familiar, but…’ She shrugged.

‘The press called him “the wickedest man in the world”,’ Miss Manners said.

‘That’s not far off the truth,’ Green said. He was smiling and making a point of not looking at Miss Manners. ‘Bit of a libertine. Spiritualist. He’s into all that occult mumbo-jumbo and talking to the dead stuff.’

Miss Manners coughed again. ‘And he
did
predict that the Ubermensch would come ashore at Shingle Bay, Sergeant.’

Green’s smile faded. ‘He did, yes. Well, after all I’ve seen – maybe there’s something in that nonsense after all.’

‘There were also Ultra intercepts, as well as Crowley’s rather less orthodox information-gathering,’ Brinkman said.

Guy recalled hearing the term ‘Ultra’ earlier in the meeting. But Brinkman was not forthcoming.

‘All you need to know is that we are occasionally allowed
access to information from an unimpeachable – and entirely non-spiritual – source. You’ve been to Bletchley and met Wiles, I’m sure you can put two and two together. Just keep the answer to yourselves.’

‘And how is Wiles involved?’ Guy asked, deciding to save the mental arithmetic for later.

‘The UDTs emit signals,’ Davenport said. He’d been sitting back with his arms folded, watching and listening with amusement to the previous exchanges. ‘Transmissions that are picked up and recorded by the Y Stations. They monitor all radio traffic. Dr Wiles is a bit of an expert at unravelling such things. Though he’s not made a lot of headway so far.’

‘It’s been more of a hobby for him up till now,’ Brinkman said. ‘But I’ve finally secured permission for him to put together a small team at Station X to work exclusively on the UDT problem. Hopefully we’ll get some results.’ He leaned across the table towards Guy and Sarah. ‘It’s a lot to take in, I know. And a very incomplete picture, I’m afraid. Like yourselves, we have more questions than answers.’