Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘Oh, that doesn’t seem good,’ Maddy whispered. She checked her watch. The one-hour window was due in just under ten minutes. She decided to make her way back across Piccadilly Circus; now, with the exception of the rattling wheels of the trams and the overhead fizzing of sparks along the contact wires, it was an almost completely frozen tableau.

She walked up the steps and through the frosted-glass double doors they’d emerged through earlier. Halfway down the dimly lit hallway, she passed the office on her left. The sound of clacking keyboards had ceased and she glimpsed inside — every typist in the long room was now gathered round a single desk, watching something glowing a flickering blue. She could hear the thin warble of the newscaster’s voice echoing out of the still and silent office, following her down the dark hallway towards the doorway opening on to the yard.

‘… for everyone to be prepared for the worst possible scenario. That a state of war may soon exist between… ’

In the yard she was relieved to see Liam was waiting for her, a fat, heavy-looking book tucked under one arm.

‘I think this might not be a future we want to hold on to,’ said Liam as Maddy joined him.

She checked her watch. Five minutes to go.

‘I’ve got a feeling you may be right.’

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

‘This is incredibly fascinating,’ said Maddy. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘From Jack the Ripper goofing up and getting himself killed in 1888, here we have a 2001 sitting on the brink of global thermonuclear war!’ She looked at the others. She had the history book Liam had ‘borrowed’ open on the desk in front of her and resumed reading passages aloud.

‘ The revelation that the Whitechapel murders were perpetrated by a Cathcart-Hyde, a member of the House of Lords, proved to be the final straw. His intended victim, Mary Kelly, a common street woman, was hailed as a hero for overpowering him and killing him in self-defence. Upon her arrest for his murder, riots erupted across the East End of London.’

She looked up at them. ‘Which we saw for ourselves.’ She resumed reading. ‘ Her trial in the spring of 1889 led to mass riots across the country. She was prevented from taking the stand and testifying publicly, because the authorities feared Mary Kelly would incite the working class to open revolt, so popular a figure was she by then. ’

Maddy turned the page, and scanned the text.

‘ December the fifteenth 1890. The hanging of Mary Kelly led to the Winter of Rage and the subsequent “Trafalgar Square Massacre”; three hundred rioters were shot dead by soldiers of the fifth Hampshire rifles and another hundred and seven people were cut down during a charge down Oxford Street by the Queen’s own Blues and Royals of the Household Cavalry! ’

She turned another page. ‘ May the seventh 1891, Queen Victoria and the royal family escaped to Canada as the Libertarian Workers’ Transition Council took control of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament and the first socialist state in the world was officially declared.’

She flipped through several more sections of the thick book, taking her forward through time. The others sat in silence as she skim-read the pages and timelines of dates and events.

‘So…’ she said presently, ‘it seems… then, when the Second World War should have been happening in correct history, there was no war in this timeline; instead, a growing consolidation between two sides. And an escalating arms race.’

‘Two sides? What, America versus Britain again?’ said Sal. ‘Just like that time when the American Civil War didn’t finish?’

‘No, not so much countries, Sal. Ideologies: socialism versus capitalism.’

‘What does that mean exactly?’ asked Liam.

Maddy looked at him. ‘Oh, come on! Seriously? You must’ve read enough history books by now to know what those words mean, right? It’s the struggle of the worker versus the banker. The poor versus the rich. The idea of shared wealth versus personal wealth.’

‘Oh, right, that.’ He shrugged. ‘Aye, I knew that.’

‘On one side we have Russia,’ her finger ran across a colour-coded map of Europe, ‘which has its revolution in the 1920s. Germany, Britain, Poland, Austria… one after the other, by the look of these dates, they experience their own workers’ revolutions. And then on the other side we have America and Canada and some of the South American countries becoming one big “Free World Zone”. That’s what they call themselves.’

‘It’s an Atlantic divide, then?’ said Rashim. ‘The Americas against Europe?’

‘No, not exactly.’ Maddy flipped through some more pages until she found an entry she’d read earlier. ‘Ah, here it is… 1937: The DuMann/Roosevelt Accord. President Roosevelt and Congress approve a loan of several hundreds of millions of dollars to the French to help them invest in industry and weapons development. France is seen by the American public as one of the last major outposts of capitalist values in Europe.’

She checked an index at the front. ‘The rest of this century, it seems, is one long Cold War. Tensions rising on both sides. There’s a doozy of a quote right here at the front of this book.’ She flipped to the title page.

‘ The twentieth century will prove to be a century devoted to one purpose alone — preparation for an inevitable war. Almost a hundred years spent in a race for industrial and technological supremacy. A race in which the winning post will almost certainly be a brutal and catastrophic global war… and no country will emerge unscathed. ’

‘Jay-zus,’ muttered Liam. He recalled the strained look on that poor young girl’s face in the library. She’d seemed so worried, so haunted by looming events. And Liam reminded himself how he’d casually, glibly, batted away her concerns as if she was being silly. So easy for him to be devil-may-care. His was a fleeting visit. But she… she was stuck there waiting, like every other person in the country, to see how far the Americans were prepared to push their challenge.

The young lady had returned with his book and a mumbled apology for the awkward invitation she’d extended to him. She’d covered her mouth, her braced teeth, as she’d whispered, but he could have sworn she’d said something like, ‘ I just don’t want to be on my own… if… when… it happens.’

‘Everyone knew what was coming,’ said Liam. ‘They could see it coming, God help ’em.’

Maddy picked up one of the newspapers. She looked at the others, Rashim and Sal in particular. ‘They have nuclear weapons in this timeline, but they call them “atomics”. It looks like both sides have “atomics”. They’ve been stockpiling warheads for decades.’

‘We need to see how it turns out, Maddy.’

She nodded at Liam. ‘I think so. It didn’t look good. We need to go further forward, Rashim. Can we do it?’

He shook his head. ‘I said it before. We don’t have the power to send you any further, Maddy. Maybe remote-viewing. A pinhole-viewing.’

‘That’s fine. That’s all we need. How far forward can we go?’

‘I need to work it out.’

‘2070? Can you get us a look at that year?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ll work it out. Just give me a moment.’ Rashim took a chair at the desk and pulled up a program on the screen.

They waited silently, listening to him tap on the keyboard and mutter calculations under his breath.

‘It’s always the same,’ said Sal after a while. ‘One way or another, mankind ends up wiping itself out with some big weapon, doesn’t it? Why are people so completely stupid?’

‘It’s what we do best, isn’t it?’ said Liam. ‘Invent things that we can use to kill everyone. It’s what we’re good at, I suppose.’