Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

‘I got us some grilled steaks and fries to wash the beer down.’

‘Great. So, Chris… what’s this thing you want a second opinion on?’

Chris slipped off his shoulder bag and pulled out a manila folder. He set it carefully on the table between them and opened it to reveal a dozen black and white photographs.

‘Ahhh, you’ve developed them already.’

‘Just some.’

Chris spun the folder round so that the pictures inside were the right way up for Mark. He studied them intently for a few moments, spreading them out across the table.

‘They look good.’ He pointed to a group of three images of the body aboard the plane. ‘Nice, you definitely caught his best side.’

‘I want you to look closely at these three pictures.’

‘At what?’

‘I’m not going to say just yet. I don’t want to bias your opinion.’

Mark studied the grim images of the pilot. Chris definitely knew his craft. The photographs were high-contrast. He knew enough about the way Chris worked to know that this was deliberate. The contrast pushed the images away from various greys towards decisive whites and blacks. It made every little detail, every little bump and groove stand out.

‘Well, what do you want? A judgement on the composition?’

‘Of the de-composition more like,’ said Chris. ‘Sorry, go on.’

‘Okay… they’re striking, but I wouldn’t think they’ll make their way onto any kitchen calendars or Mother’s Day cards. You think your employers will go for them?’

Chris shook his head. ‘What, News Fortnite? Nah… It’s a little too visceral for them. This is the kind of scat image that some sick website would love.’

Mark looked back down at the images of the skeletal face. He was right. If it were just a skull it wouldn’t be quite so bad. But the few strands of organic debris clinging to the bone still looked like flesh. And the tuft of blond hair poking out from beneath the leather cap, the vertebrae of the neck descending into layers of clothing all came together to produce an unpleasant portrait of decay.

‘Let me help you a little here. Take a close look at this one,’ he said, picking up a photo and handing it to Mark. It was a close-up of the body. An image that showed the skull and the vertebrae of the neck descending into the leather flying jacket and uniform tunic.

Mark looked it over carefully. ‘No, I can’t see what you want me to see.’

Chris pointed to a metallic object half-obscured by the lower jawbone and radio mouthpiece.

‘Well, now, that looks like, what? A medal or something? ’

Chris nodded. ‘It’s a medal all right… but it ain’t a Purple Heart.’

Mark looked at it again. ‘It looks a bit like — ’

‘An Iron Cross?’

He looked up at Chris. ‘Yes.’

‘Look at the pilot’s tunic, the collar.’

The tone of the tunic appeared to be dark, and amidst the hard-to-read chaotic pattern of high-contrast blacks and whites he could just discern the collar and on it two barely distinguishable oak leaves.

‘You telling me, you think the pilot was a Kraut, Chris? A Luftwaffe pilot?’

A waitress arrived with their grilled steaks and waited irritably for them to tidy away the photographs and make space on the small wooden table between them. Chris ordered a couple more beers before she departed.

‘Yeah. So what do you think?’ Chris asked eventually.

Mark took his steak knife, cut a slice of grilled rump and tucked it into his mouth. His jaw worked on the piece of meat for over a minute before he replied. ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think you may well have one helluva story waiting for you down there.’

‘Yeah. There’s something there, but I don’t want to get too excited yet. There could be a hundred and one reasons why that corpse is wearing what he’s wearing, and any one of them could lead to a dull story… and we won’t know unless — ’

Mark could guess where he was going with that. ‘Unless we go take another look.’

Chris nodded. ‘I might go and see if our friend Will’s around after we’ve finished dinner.’

‘We’re not diving tonight if that’s what you’re thinking. ’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we’ve both eaten dinner, consumed alcohol and I’ve still got to finish fixing the radio. It can wait until tomorrow.’

Chris threw his hands up in a gesture of resignation. ‘Okay, okay

… you win. Tomorrow night, then, that is if I can get that old bugger Will to agree to take us out again.’

It had been asleep for sixty years, file number n-27, a dusty file, containing reams of yellowing paper in a faded and dog-eared cardboard cover. Once upon a time n-27 had occupied dozens of cardboard covers, which in turn had filled several filing cabinets. But over the years, ‘liabilities’ had died off and the unnecessary documentation had been stripped away — old records to do with these long dead liabilities… details of movements, copies of bills and invoices, bank statements, phone bills, discreet liaisons, sexual peccadillos, all of these had been peeled out of the folder and destroyed, no longer useful or relevant. What was left was a barebones file, the skeletal remains. One last, persistent name at the bottom of a list of approximately two dozen on the inside of the front cover had survived the merciless sweep of a black marker pen.

One of them remained alive.

File n-27 had spent its entire life residing in a windowless office off the duty corridor on mezzanine floor 3, beneath an anonymous government building in Washington. More than half a century ago, all of the rooms on this floor had been occupied by staff belonging to this department, which had been hastily assembled and granted a black budget in the final days of the Second World War.

The anonymous men who had once worked here had only ever referred to this place as ‘the Department’. A long, long time ago it had been busy for several frenetic months, then, over the ensuing five years, it had gradually been pared down to a maintenance staff responsible only for collating data from the routine low-key surveillance operations carried out.

In the early years of the department’s life, at any one time, roughly half of the names on that list were being watched discreetly, from a distance. However, over the decades, there were fewer names as Mother Nature had whittled their number down, and in turn the head count on the department’s payroll had slowly dwindled too as the data to collate correspondingly decreased.

To be fair, from time to time, the department’s personnel had temporarily grown. There had been other very special files over the years that had been entrusted to the department to look after. These files had come to join n-27, like reluctant house guests. In particular, file 759-j had arrived in ’63, and had stayed in its own filing cabinet for over thirty years. Its arrival had once more restored, if only for a little over a decade, some semblance of life to the duty corridor. A second water-cooler had even been installed against one lime-green wall, and a poster of Marilyn Monroe had mysteriously appeared one Monday morning. But the years passed, Marilyn’s print faded, the corners and edges of the poster scuffed and ripped. In the mid-eighties, file 759-j was eventually closed and its paper contents incinerated. The second water-cooler was removed as staff became reassigned and n-27 once more slumbered fitfully alone. And as the second millennium came to an end, the department became all but a shell. A single office, a single phone line, a trickle-feed black budget no longer topped-up but allowed to slowly spend itself out and one solitary clerical officer, counting off the last months until his retirement… and just one sleeping file.