He was to brief twenty men inside a marquee that had been erected a mile inside the exclusion zone. He had a trestle table, a whiteboard, and an overhead projector. Somewhere outside was a generator thrumming away, and engineers were still stringing together lights from the plastic crate by the tent flap.
He waited for them to finish, leave, and for the guard to check that there was only Thacker inside. As the men filed in, each carrying a folding chair, Thacker busied himself laying out his notes on the table, mostly brittle, yellowing pages from the box file that was stamped Top Secret in fading red. Each sheet he took out was also stamped, together with strict instructions: No Copies To Be Made. There were other things, too, things in stoppered bottles, sealed with wax and notarised with peeling labels written in a fine, spidery hand.
He set them out at the far end of the table, together with the hasty report on them from Porton Down.
The last man in was the only one present out of uniform: the Ministry man Thacker knew only as Dickson, someone from MI5 who outranked him but never behaved like he did.
Thacker watched him close the tent flap and cross his arms. He nodded, and Thacker began.
‘There’ll be time for questions afterwards. I want you to all listen very carefully, because this isn’t a scenario we’ve trained for before. Some of the facts may surprise you: they did me. Doesn’t mean they’re not true.’
He looked at their faces, young, eager, a little puzzled. He prised the lid off the black marker pen, and wrote at the top of the whiteboard, ‘Henbury Hall’. Below the title he put three dates: 1834, 1919, and Yesterday.
‘In 1834, Matthew Henbury, a railway magnate, purchased six hundred and fifty acres from the Bishop of Oxford. Henbury Hall was completed five years later, and the man made a peer of the realm five years after that. In 1919, Henbury’s grandson, Robert, had returned to the hall following the death of his elder brother Edward, in the First World War. Robert himself was wounded at Ypres, losing a leg.
‘On the night of the thirtieth of July, 1919, Robert Henbury’s horse was killed in the stables. No other animal was harmed. A contemporaneous report by a Dr. Nathaniel Middleton, FRS, concludes that…’ Thacker’s hand hovered over the papers in front of him, alighting on Middleton’s treatise. ‘“That the whole body of the creature had every calorie of heat removed from it in an instant, to the effect of freezing every part of it inside and out. Death must have been instantaneous, for the beast stood as if still sleeping in its stall, and entirely without signs of injury or distress.”‘
‘Things get a little murky from now on. We only have Middleton’s second-hand account from a statement he gave to the police. On the night of the first of August, a woman employed by Henbury as a maid appears to have died in the same way. She was found on the morning of the second by the butler. She was in bed, frozen solid. Middleton was summoned to the hall and told to drive the rest of the household to safety. Somewhere in this, the butler has died too, but how, we can’t say. Middleton drove the three servants and Robert Henbury’s nurse to the nearby village of Isherham. He left behind Robert Henbury, Jack Henbury◦– Robert’s cousin◦– and a man called George Adams, who acted as Henbury’s valet.
‘A police car was sent from Oxford, but on arrival, found… nothing. Nothing as in, no hall, no estate, nothing, not even the ground on which the buildings had been. As if I took a map, cut a hole five miles across in it, then drew the edges together to make the hole itself disappear.’
Thacker turned on the overhead projector, and angled the square of light onto the whiteboard. A little leaked over the edges onto the canvas of the marquee, but not enough that people outside could see any coherent images.
‘This is an Ordnance Survey map from 1910. Note the position of Henbury Hall, and specifically this road and this river.’ He gave them a few seconds to soak in the detail, then swapped the image for a more contemporary map. ‘This is the same area from a map made in 1982. Note the absence of Henbury Hall, the abrupt termination of the road here and here, and the lake here with an outlet at right angles to the original stream. I could show you pictures of walls that start suddenly, strange cliffs that appear halfway across a field, a tree where one half of it is missing. Henbury Hall vanished, and objects that were five miles apart one day, were touching the next.’
Thacker turned the projector off, and tapped the third date with his pen.
‘Yesterday, for some reason, Henbury Hall came back. We need to find out why, and how, and who. There are aggravating factors: at the precise moment Henbury Hall appeared, United Airlines flight nine-thirty-seven London Heathrow to Chicago was overhead with one hundred and thirty-seven passengers and crew. Their remains are spread out in a mile-long geometrically precise arc on the east side of the site, and the Americans want access to the wreckage now. For obvious reasons, we can’t let them.
‘This situation will not go away if we ignore it. On the pretext of the plane carrying hazardous waste, we have cordoned off a very large area. Sooner or later, that cordon will be breached. We have to ascertain before then whether or not anything inside the Henbury Hall estate poses a risk.
‘We’re all trained in handling and deactivating chemical and biological weapons. We know how to take precautions. We are also soldiers. We know how to work together as a team, watch each other’s backs, and neutralise any threat we may come across.’
He looked at their faces again: still young, but not so eager now. Puzzlement had turned to fear. Eyes were wide and white, mouths open and dry. Some fidgeted, clasping and unclasping their fingers, pulling on their chins and ears and noses, glancing left and right to see if anyone else believed this nonsense. Others were stock still, minds numb, hearing but not understanding, seeing but not remembering.
‘Time is critical. Aside from the American dimension, Henbury Hall has been exposed to the air for some thirty-six hours. Any wind-borne chemical or pathological agent will have already been released. Winds have been light, and fortunately, no rain as yet. But birds have wings, and so does bad news.’
He turned the projector back on, and put a fresh acetate on it: taken from the aerial photo of the hall. ‘We have had one break. Robert Henbury’s nurse is still alive, and still compos. We have a sketchy idea of what the inside of the building used to look like◦– though that might have changed in the intervening years. I want you to look very carefully at this picture.’ Thacker made a dismal attempt at humour: ‘I’ll be testing you on it later.’ He walked away from the screen, and Dickson joined him by one of the slowly undulating walls.
‘Was Emily Foster any use?’
Thacker rubbed his palms together slowly, grinding the sweat down. ‘Better than nothing. Worse than I hoped. Her mind wandered rather◦– I suppose her short-term memory isn’t what it used to be◦– but she was quite lucid when I talked about Robert Henbury. She said she still loved him.’
Dickson tapped out a cigarette and offered the packet to Thacker.
‘I’m a biological weapons expert, Dickson. I’m hardly likely to take half a dozen plant-based carcinogens orally.’ Thacker pressed his hands even harder together, so that he didn’t reach out involuntarily and take one.
‘Suit yourself,’ said the Ministry man, and lit up. He took a long drag, held it, and breathed out through his nose. ‘The Foster woman. Anything else?’
Thacker thought for a moment. ‘Yes. Yes there was. She said she had been cruel to him. Struck me as odd at the time. According to Middleton, she and Henbury were engaged.’
‘Perhaps she felt she should have stayed.’
‘Not that. Some sustained cruelty. Earlier. I have no idea if it’s at all important. Like everything in this bloody awful mess.’