The Medieval Murderers - The Lost Prophecies

Shiva remembered his last visit to the capital, for Marwood’s trial. He had not given evidence, because if his face appeared in the newspapers he could never do undercover work again, but he sat in the public gallery on the day of the verdict. It was the rainy season, and the courtroom was muggy and sticky. Rain lashed down outside, spattering the windows. The evidence of fraud was overwhelming, and though the trial had lasted for four weeks the jury took only half an hour to reach a verdict. Sentenced to ten years, Marwood had shouted from the dock that he was innocent, this was not justice. Staring around wildly, he saw Shiva and from his look Shiva saw that, despite all Marwood had done, all the evidence of lies and deceit, he somehow believed he was innocent and that Shiva, the employee who had become a friend, had betrayed him from some unfathomable, base motive.

The train slowed as they approached the city. More old houses now, though still interspersed with modern earthhouses, and fields and vegetable gardens where once industrial sites had stood. Then they were in the warren of the old city centre. Shiva hauled his heavy suitcase out into New Street, loud with voices and bicycle bells, the buzz of electric cars and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. Huge nineteenth-century buildings loomed over him.

Dusk was deepening into darkness, and behind the streets generators hummed as the dim streetlights came on. The passers-by were mostly white but with a heavy sprinkling of other colours, the English racial mix frozen when immigration ended in 2020. People looked hot and tired, waiting for the monsoon.

Shiva entered Victoria Square. Great pillared and porticoed edifices, monuments to nineteenth-century civic pride, still stood. The old Council House was now the administrative centre for the European Union.

One of the guards standing outside the Council House let him in. Inside, the building was crowded, cavernous old rooms partitioned into hundreds of small offices. A receptionist at the front desk made a telephone call, and an elderly clerk came and led him into the great warren.

Shiva was taken up a flight of stairs, blue-uniformed guards at the top and bottom, to one of the original offices where long-dead councillors once held sway. Behind a large battered desk strewn with papers, a white-haired man in a yellow cotton suit and black, wing-collared shirt sat reading papers by the light of an antique standard lamp. He was thin, his cheekbones prominent under sallow skin. He rose and shook Shiva’s hand with a cold, dry clasp. His eyes were blue-grey, piercing. Behind him on the wall was a map of Europe, a thin band of habitable land coloured green between the blue of the seas and the yellow of the deserts, the irradiated zone at the eastern border coloured dull grey.

‘Inspector Moorthy. You made good time. I am Commissioner Williams.’ He spoke in the clipped, military tones that officials had adopted to deal with the endless crises of the Catastrophe and which had now become an affectation.

‘Caught a train as soon as we landed.’ Shiva responded in the same manner.

‘Good, good.’ Williams waved him to a chair before the desk. ‘Moorthy, that’s a southern Indian name, I think?’

‘Some of my forebears came to England after Indian independence.’

Williams nodded, then glanced at his watch. ‘I’d like to talk now, got a meeting at 22.30. Afterwards you can rest; there’s accommodation for you here. Sorry to have interrupted your holiday,’

‘I was getting bored.’

The commissioner looked at him with interest. ‘I would have thought after the Green World trial you’d need a rest. Good to see Marwood go down, by the way. These people who say they’ve found magic solutions to all our problems waste a lot of time and money. Formula for a new type of artificial soil, wasn’t it? For greening the Norwegian mountains?’

Shiva was sure the commissioner knew the story, but Williams listened attentively as he told it again, the lamp making deep shadows in the lines of the old man’s face.

‘Green World said they’d made a breakthrough. A soil with a high ratio of sand to organic components, easy to produce in large quantities. They had apparent good results with experiments in Canada, and the Norwegian government gave them a contract. Science Office had doubts, but the Commission didn’t back them.’ He was criticizing the Commission, but there was no point in gilding the lily; it had all been in the press.

When he was finished, Williams’s face looked sad and tired. ‘So eager to solve our problems,’ he said. ‘Makes us vulnerable to tricks. Snake-oil salesman. The Norwegians want their mountains farmed, the Commission wants a Europe independent of Chinese soil technology. I argued against giving Green World a licence. Overruled.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Mr Marwood addressed the commissioners; he was very plausible.’

‘He had the greatest skill a confidence trickster can have.’

‘Which is?’

‘He believed that what he was saying was true when he said it, and that somehow it became true because he said it.’ Again he remembered Marwood’s face at the trial, frantic and accusing.

‘How did your people get you into Green World?’

‘Marwood was looking for a head of public relations and I applied. He had an interest in nineteenth-century furniture – his house was full of the stuff – so I read up on it. He liked educated people working for him, giving him admiration. It took a year, but I managed to get papers out showing the Canadian results were doctored.’

The commissioner studied him closely. ‘What was it like? Working closely with him, when you knew what he was?’

Shiva smiled sadly. ‘I came to like him. He had a sort of infectious optimism. He came up from nothing, you know; he was brought up in an orphanage.’

‘So were many of us. But it must have made it hard, if you liked him.’

‘You always have to remember that the people you’re spying on are telling lies for themselves, while you’re telling yours for higher ends.’ He met the commissioner’s appraising gaze.

‘And fear? You must worry about what might happen if you are ever found out.’

‘You have to live with that. Some agents even enjoy it.’

‘But not you.’

‘No.’

There was silence for a moment. The sound of voices came faintly from the crowded street, the neigh of a horse.

‘Your ancestry is mixed Indian and English, I believe?’ the commissioner asked abruptly.

‘My father’s forebears were Indian. My mother’s were English. With a dash of something else.’

‘Most of us have a dash of something else, I guess. In you the Indian genes look predominant. Your parents are dead, I think.’

‘In the Guildford smallpox outbreak five years ago.’

‘Yes. We thought we had the disease under control; that outbreak was a shock. No other relatives?’

‘No.’ You must know this, Shiva thought. You’ve obviously seen my file.

‘Ever searched for ancestors on the internet?’ Williams asked. ‘So many do.’

‘No. You can end up building a bond with some distant relative you don’t like.’ Shiva paused. ‘And I don’t like looking at the records. Seeing how many billions died.’

The commissioner nodded. ‘That must be especially hard if you have ancestors from the destroyed nations. Like India. Though some people spend all their time researching their past these days. Becomes an obsession. Didn’t have time for that when I was young. Too busy trying to rebuild.’

‘Yes.’

‘In the last fifty years we’ve come very far. The main diseases are coming under control, and we no longer face a crisis after a bad harvest – in Europe, anyway. Relations with America and China tolerable if not close. The refugee camps are emptying, most going to Norway and Iceland. But there are still threats. The continued warming, the irradiated waters, the nuclear arsenals the three powers took north with them.’ He looked at Shiva. ‘And now another old danger is coming back. Religious fundamentalism.’