Toby felt his anger suddenly dissipate. ‘If I was nothing you wouldn’t be wasting your time here. You may be good at finding people but you’re a lousy liar. Perhaps it’s you that needs to rethink your career.’
She stared at him for a moment and then stood up and walked away.
Well now, Toby thought, this transfer might be interesting after all.
CHAPTER FIVE: ARCHEOLOGY
a) Shad Thames, London
‘You know,’ said Toby on meeting Shining the next day, ‘I was thinking of offering my resignation this morning.’
‘Really?’ Shining’s face fell. ‘It would hardly have been the first time, but I had hoped you’d stay a little longer.’
They cut through the train station, emerging onto Tooley Street and then moving up towards the river.
‘To be honest,’ Toby continued, ‘I think I was just panicking a little. I couldn’t see what my place was in the section. It was all weirdness, a world outside that which I’d trained for. I couldn’t see what use I would be. I could think of nothing worse than spending the rest of my days watching on in confusion while you explained some new and unbelievable bit of nonsense.’
Shining laughed. ‘So what changed your mind?’
‘I met a woman who tried to convince me I was right, that it was all beyond me. I reasoned she’d hardly be saying it if it were true.’
‘A woman?’ Shining stopped walking. ‘What woman?’
Toby told him everything that had happened the night before.
‘How interesting,’ said Shining, as they continued on their way.
‘I assume it was something to do with that enemy of yours in Whitehall, Sir Robin?’
‘I doubt it, it’s not his style at all. He’d just have threatened to cut your pension.’
‘Great.’
‘Stick with me and you won’t live long enough to claim one.’
‘That’s a relief. So who do you think she was?’
‘No idea – isn’t that lovely? You can’t beat a bit of intrigue. I dare say you’ll hear from her again.’
‘I look forward to it.’
They emerged onto the riverside, went past HMS Belfast and towards the lopsided glass onion of City Hall.
‘For now,’ Shining continued, ‘let’s keep our eyes on the road. I took a gamble yesterday as to the location of the numbers broadcast and Oman has confirmed my suspicions.’
‘Well, that makes things easier.’
‘Actually, probably not; it opens up a whole new can of worms.’
‘Oh good.’
Shining patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re a new man this morning! Where’s the sullen cynic of yesterday?’
Toby shrugged. ‘He’ll be back soon enough. For now I’m taking the path of least resistance. No doubt I’ll be up to my neck in something utterly impossible before the morning’s out. Until then I may as well just enjoy the walk.’
It was a pleasant day for a walk. The sun was bright, and had brought the tourists out to stare at the water and photograph one another’s fixed smiles.
The two men worked their way along the waterside, past Tower Bridge and on towards the scrubbed, false world of Shad Thames.
‘We love our history with all the soot removed,’ said Shining, ‘Industry as a charming ghost rather than a grunting, sweating, creaking beast.’
The older man moved away from the river and into the tight network of streets.
He stopped in front of an apartment block and stared up at its stone and glass body. ‘How interesting.’
‘If you like Terence Conran,’ said Toby, noting the shop beneath the building. ‘Personally I find it all a bit Emperor’s New Clothes: spindly nothings, the only heft is the price tag.’
‘Hmm…’ said Shining, glancing at a clear Perspex chair in the window. ‘I stumbled upon a real ghost chair once – cost more than a couple of hundred quid to sit in it. I wasn’t looking at the shop, though.’ He stepped as far back as he could, resting his back against the external wall of the building opposite. ‘Look between the buildings. What do you see?’
Toby stood next to him. ‘A bit of industrialist grey with a door in it, staff entrance to the shop maybe? I don’t know – just looks like a join between the two buildings.’
‘Keep looking.’ Shining walked across the road, marched up to the divide between the shop on the right and the clean walls of Cinnamon Wharf on the left. He reached his hands out towards the plain, grey concrete. Then he continued to walk and Toby was faced with exactly what he had predicted only a few minutes earlier: the utterly impossible.
From the young man’s perspective, the narrow stretch of concrete – no more than six feet wide – shimmered and ballooned outwards, changing its appearance entirely. It was a warehouse. Not the spruced-up, rebuilt apartment blocks that now filled the area but an ageing, crumbling, dirty stretch of wood and brick. Once the illusion had been broken, Toby could see it clearly, unable to believe he hadn’t noticed it in the first place. There was an entire warehouse between the shop and the apartment block. Shining reappeared, framed in the large, tatty doorway, having pushed open the double doors.
‘You see it?’
‘I see it.’
‘Come on then, if you’re going to accept the impossible you may as well explore it thoroughly.’
Toby walked across the road, narrowly avoiding a bicycle courier.
‘Open your eyes, mate!’ the cyclist shouted. Toby thought he could tell him the same.
‘I’m trying to remember walking past it,’ he said to Shining as he entered. ‘Surely you must notice it’s taking you too long to get from one place to the other? Your eyes say it’s only a few feet and yet you spend too long walking next to it.’
‘Did you notice?’
‘No.’
‘Then you have your answer.’
Toby looked around. The ground floor was open, some signs of a few crumbled partition walls, a rotting staircase heading up to a second level that could be glimpsed through the occasional hole in the ceiling.
‘Some form of perception field, I imagine,’ said Shining, continuing to explain the trick that had hidden the building from sight. ‘You can only see it if you know it’s there.’
‘A spy’s dream.’
‘Hardly one hundred percent reliable though. It didn’t take much encouragement for you to see it, did it? If I were them, I’d have put up more protection than that.’
There was a crashing sound from upstairs.
‘What the hell was that?’ asked Toby.
‘More protection?’ wondered Shining.
‘I’m really beginning to hate this job,’ said Toby. ‘What’s it going to be now? A dragon? A yeti?’
‘Nothing so subtle I expect,’ muttered Shining, dropping to the floor and beginning to trace in the dust with his fingers.
Toby shook his head in exasperation and began backing towards the door. ‘And this would be why she was right, telling me that I wasn’t cut out for this section…Years of training and it’s still like sending a plumber to fix your computer. I don’t suppose you thought to sign out a firearm?’
‘I haven’t carried a gun for ten years,’ Shining admitted, busily drawing a large circle in the dirt. ‘I think there may be an old revolver in the office kitchen if you want to bring it with you in future. I’m pretty sure it still fires. They built things to last in the ’40s.’
‘You’re not making me feel any better.’
‘In truth, neither would the gun. It would be no more use to you in a situation like this than a roughly sharpened pencil. In fact, the pencil would be better… Easier to draw with than your finger.’