She made her way to the main road and began to walk. Hitching along the south coast. Going to visit a friend in Margate. (Or Cliftonville: dare she say Cliftonville?) Didn’t get a lift out of Folkestone, so spent the night there, sleeping rough by the roadside...
That was the story she would tell to whichever motorist picked her up. Someone would pick her up. Some man, most probably. She was a single woman, young. They might lecture her about the dangers of hitching alone. She would listen. She was a good listener. A lorry driver might even go out of his way and take her to Margate or Cliftonville in a single run. Of course, he would expect a favor in return, something more than her good ear. Her good mouth maybe. But that was all right. That wasn’t a problem for her. She was someone else after all, wasn’t she? And tomorrow she would be someone else again...
Cassandra
Tuesday 2 June
Everyone in the Collator’s Office had what might be termed a “clerical mind.” Which is to say that they were scrupulous in their filing. They were, in fact, a kind of pre-information technology production line, feeding data into the central computer. This was their purpose in the Collator’s Office. It was up to the computer to decide whether some news item or other might be important. The computer was capable of taking a petrol station holdup in Kelso, the abduction of a girl in Doncaster, and the finding of a body in rural Wales, and making of them a pattern.
But most of the time it didn’t. Most of the time it just sat wherever it sat, a glutton’s bottomless stomach, ingesting story after story, item after item, without excreting anything in return. A lot of false roads were taken, a lot of palpable nonsense spewed up by the computer. And occasionally a nugget of truth, but not often. No, not very often.
There were times when Collator’s Assistant Jack Constant thought that the only things keeping him sane were the editions of French newspapers which he brought into work with him. Constant thought he’d plumbed the depths of boredom and futility during his yearlong stint as clerical assistant in the office of Her Majesty’s Collector of Taxes. He’d spent the year sending out demands and reminders and final notices, noting payments and passing the nonpayers on to his boss. A year of ledgers, producing in him a ledger mentality. But then computerization had “saved” him by taking over his most onerous tasks, and a series of shuffles between departments had seen him dropped finally into the Collator’s Office. The pit.
“So how goes the Font of All Knowledge?” asked Cynthia Crockett, a fellow CA. Each day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes after the lunch break, she asked this question with the same quizzical smile. Maybe she thought it was funny.
“Foak knows,” replied Constant, FOAK being the Font of All Knowledge, the central computer. Another CA, Jim Wilson, had another name for it. He called it the Fat Controller or, when in a bad temper, even the Fat Bastard. He’d once come into work wearing a T-shirt printed with the legend WHO’S THAT FAT BASTARD? Mr. Grayson, the office head, had summoned him into the inner sanctum for a quiet, disciplined word about dress code.
Afterwards, Wilson had not been mollified. “Wants us wearing suits and bloody ties. I mean, it’s not like we’re dealing with the public, is it? We never see anyone. Nobody except old Grayskull himself.”
But he hadn’t worn the T-shirt again.
Constant suffered his colleagues, even “old Grayskull” of the shiny head and tweed-knit ties, drifting towards his pension. Mr. Grayson’s wife packed him exactly two salmon sandwiches, one apple, and one small chocolate biscuit for his lunch every day. Yvette would never do that. It would be a fresh baguette and some Camembert, maybe with pickles or a small salad with vinaigrette. The French took their food seriously, and Yvette, Constant’s girlfriend, was French. She lived in Le Mans, which meant that they met only for holidays and occasional frantic weekends (trips barely sustainable on a CA’s salary, not when his phone bill was so big). Yvette was still studying, but would soon come to England for good. She’d get a job as French assistant in some school. They would be together.
Meantime, he had his newspapers. Usually Le Monde but occasionally one of the others. He read them to improve his French, and also because Yvette didn’t seem so far away while he was reading. So, whenever a break was due, Jack would reach into his desk drawer and bring out his French newspaper, something to digest with the unspeakable coffee.
He read the snippet of news again. It was squeezed onto the front page below a much longer story about forest fires in the Mediterranean. A boat had sunk in the Channel, barely twenty kilometers from its home port of Calais. There were no survivors. Four sailors dead. The story jogged Jack Constant’s memory. He’d filed a story earlier in the day, something about a boat sinking off the south coast of England. Coincidence? He wondered if he should mention it to someone. He looked up from the paper and saw that Mr. Grayson had appeared from his inner sanctum. He was looking around as though bewildered to find himself there. He saw Constant looking at him and decided to approach for a conversation. Another day, someone else would suffer. Past the computer screens and the brown file cases and the newspaper cuttings and the printouts and the fax sheets he came. Past the clack of keyboards and the sizzle of disk memories. Towards Jack Constant.
“Jack.”
Constant confirmed this with a nod.
“Everything quiet?”
“Quiet as it gets, sir.”
Grayson nodded seriously. “Good.” His breath smelled of salmon. With a sad half-smile, he began to turn away.
Why not? thought Constant. It might pep the old bugger up a bit. “Oh, sir?” he said. “I’ve got a story here might be of interest.”
Mr. Grayson seemed to doubt this. To be honest, Constant was doubting it, too.
Wednesday 3 June
In the service, there was always someone above you. But the information ladder could splinter — a missing rung. The information ladder depended on people like Jack Constant reporting something to someone like Mr. Grayson. And it depended on Grayson’s instinct or “nose,” his ability to weed out what was interesting from what really was mere coincidence. The information was then passed up the ladder to his superior, who might make further inquiries before either filing the piece or passing it on to someone more senior yet.
These were lofty heights now. Working from his own small office, Grayson had never met his superior’s superior. He’d once received an inquiry from that person. The inquiry had been dealt with as a priority. Mr. Grayson’s office had never had to deal with inquiries from yet higher officials.
The item, the bare comparison of two sinkings on a single night, was passed quickly from rung to rung until it reached an office somewhere in central London where a twenty-five-year-old man, only two years older than Jack Constant himself, read it. He was humming an aria and chewing a pencil and had his legs stretched out in front of him, one foot crossed over the other. He had pushed his seat out from his desk to facilitate this, his legs being too long to stretch beneath the desk itself. There was a wall immediately in front of the desk, with memos and postcards and fire instructions pinned to it.
He read the item through three times. Spotted in Le Monde of all places. Either somebody was on the ball or this man... what was the name, Grayson? Yes, this man Grayson ran a tight ship. Poor metaphor under the circumstances. The item had grown unwieldy by now, attached as it was to notes from the various offices through which it had passed. But though unwieldy, it was also irritatingly flimsy, constructed from thin sheets of fax paper. It had been faxed (standard practice) by the last office to see it. The real thing would turn up here eventually, but the fax was supposed to save valuable time. Michael Barclay did not like faxes. For a start, no matter how often the Engineering Section explained it to him, he couldn’t see how they were safe from a tap. Tap into a fax line with your own fax, and you’d get a copy of anything sent to the original machine. Codes could be decoded, scramblers unscrambled. As he’d told his colleagues from Engineering, “If you can make something, you can unmake it.” To prove his point, he’d rigged up his own interception device. It had worked, just, proving his point if nothing else. After all, Government Communications made a living from information intercepts, as did the listening posts dotted around the UK. If anything, there was an intelligence overload these days. Too much information to assimilate.