31

As morning dawned on the fourth of December, snow covered the ground. It lay as a thin film of white reflecting Christmas illuminations and car headlights in sparkling dots, making the world seem quite a comforting place after all. If you didn’t know better.

As Christina wandered through town, hands in pockets and eyes to the ground, she met the very last dregs making their way to work for the day. It was after ten, and the flows had begun to thin out, the pavements were slippery with snow compacted by thousands of morning feet.

The news room was only a fifteen-minute walk from the hospital, but she headed in the opposite direction. She couldn’t go there, not yet. She couldn’t face meeting them, answering all her colleagues’ questions, receiving their sympathies. Or, worse still–if they didn’t yet know about it–having to be the one to tell them.

Home? She didn’t have one. What she needed to do now was to look up, force herself to go forward, and the mere thought of that bloody flat in Sollentuna made her gasp for breath as though she suddenly wasn’t getting any oxygen. And over on Skeppargatan was an apartment she couldn’t get into, whose keys she had posted through the letterbox, convinced that she would never want to return.

She headed down Fleminggatan instead, towards the city centre. When she got close to Central Station, she picked one of the hotels, checked in even though the lobby was full of people checking out, and got a room with huge soundproofed windows overlooking the street. She stood there for a long time without moving, watching people and buses and emergency services pass by in silence.

She wouldn’t be able to sleep, but she was going to have a shower, try and eat, and maybe then she’d realise what she should be doing next. One step at a time.

As Mark Winslow jumped out of the taxi on Brompton Road, he reflected on the night before. He’d spent the latter part of the evening in his sparsely furnished flat, and the later it had become, the more he’d been haunted both by his heartburn and all the thoughts that always popped up in the darkness. When one had led to the other for long enough, he’d treated himself to a couple of sleeping pills and got into bed.

He’d dreamed sweaty, troubled dreams, because he always did. Thoughts floated through the fuzziness of the tablets colliding with each other, the same thoughts he had when he was awake, only now in a single, feverish column. And then, as the night went on, the dreams had started to be about his dad.

They did that sometimes. Always when he was stressed, when he was feeling insecure, never helping the least. Each time they would wake him up with a feeling of emptiness that was actually just phantom pain, a grief he had felt as a child but that he had swapped for something else along the way–for a fear that one day he was going to end up like him. That one day the stress and the worry would finally break Mark Winslow too, just as they had his father, and it all became a vicious circle that generally didn’t start to ease off until long into the afternoon.

They said it wasn’t hereditary. But how could he be sure?

When the taxi door slammed behind him, he hadn’t been up more than forty minutes. Yet last night’s dreams were already gone without a trace. Mark Winslow had more important things to worry about.

The first thing he’d noticed when he woke up were the unread text messages. He’d received twenty during the night, all from his boss, each one an increasingly irritated order to call him, now, where the hell are you, ring me now!

Winslow had leapt out of bed, rushed into the bathroom, and realised that on top of everything he’d overslept by two hours. Sleeping pills never failed. And as he was thinking about that the twenty-first text arrived. This time though, it wasn’t from his boss. The text had been sent directly by one of the servers in the department, an automatic message. Briefing 0900. Compulsory.

Each detail added a new layer of burning sensations in his guts. Briefing–not a meeting. That meant something had happened. Compulsory meant that it was something big. And the time? Half an hour’s notice for God’s sake…?

He’d thrown yesterday’s clothes on and rushed onto the street for a cab, and when he’d finally got hold of one his phone had bleeped again. This time though, it was his boss. Where the hell are you? We’ve had to start without you. We have a problem. H

I’m in a cab, he wrote, before adding, in traffic on Millbank, as though it was somehow less embarrassing if he claimed to be closer than he actually was.

Outside, the traffic was crawling, inching forward in between long standstills, and with each passing second Winslow felt the heartburn building to a black, compelling strain. A weight settling on his shoulders, a nausea that sooner or later was going to explode. Not hereditary? Are you sure about that? He forced himself to stare out of the window, count cars, whatever.

It was going to take at least another twenty minutes to get to the ministry. The briefing, it seemed, was already under way. The only thing left to do was to close his eyes and relax, and he leaned back in his seat, told himself to at least try and listen to the radio. And soon he realised that without knowing it, he was getting the briefing anyway. North-west of London, the radio said, the A40 was closed in both directions, around RAF Northolt. An accident overnight was causing chaos in the rush-hour traffic.

‘Something’s going on,’ said a voice from the front seat.

Winslow looked around, catching the driver’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

‘Believe you me,’ he said. ‘They’re hiding something.’

‘Who are “they”?’ asked Winslow.

‘Dunno. The authorities.’

‘What makes you say that?’

The driver pointed at the radio. ‘I came on duty last night,’ he said. ‘I live out that way. The road was already closed at one a.m., long bloody diversion. Accident? Do me a favour.’

‘What was it then?’

‘I saw the smoke. It was coming from the airbase.’

Mark Winslow asked the driver to stop. He passed him a note without even looking to see what denomination it was, then threw himself out onto the pavement of Brompton Road, along with all the other stressed people on their way somewhere. Moments later he was bent over an electricity box and vomiting, watching as the passers-by gave him as wide a berth as possible.

Twelve hours ago, he had suggested that John Patrick Trottier should head off to Stockholm. Now Winslow had twenty missed text messages from the Minister, a high-level briefing was under way at the MoD, and an accident had occurred at RAF Northolt. That was enough for him. And he stayed there, slumped against the box, feeling the aftershocks passing through his body.

As soon as he’d finished throwing up he was going to run all the way to the MoD on Whitehall and find out what the hell was going on.