Guy Adams - The Clown Service

‘Just buried gran,’ wrote Truth99. ‘Hope she stays there people saying that some are walking now drugs in the food scared she might come back.’ If only to bring you some punctuation , Toby thought. The forum members were more forgiving, though GoldDawn’s comment ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbra!’ seemed to have caused a mini bout of Internet rage. The reference was lost on Toby until he scrolled down and discovered it was a quote from a film, but the flaming was familiar enough; there was nothing Internet forums liked more than a good hard bitch at one another.

He checked out some of the other threads, discussion on psychic surgery, poltergeists, mediums… it provided a fairly exhaustive list of all the things he didn’t believe in. He wondered how much his list would change over the next few months. The idea didn’t please him – he enjoyed being narrow-minded. Found it a comfort.

Toby left the forum and decided to search for Shining’s name online. There was nothing.

Toby gave up on the computer. Stuck on hold, waiting while someone in accounts hunted for Section 37’s requisition number, he cradled the phone under his chin and reached for the file of case reports. He began to read.

e) High Road, Wood Green, London

Shining liked to walk on busy streets. It was an act of immersion, listening to the voices, watching the people. He would subconsciously analyse those around him, watching their movements and piecing together what he could of their lives and motivations. It was important that he could read people. That was always the uppermost skill in intelligence: being able to see people for what they were and predicting their behaviour and responses. He had known many in the Service who lived out their lives in the false atmosphere of their departments, a world of data and dust that bred a view of humanity that could never be accurate. People were never that predictable, but a lifelong student of them could make informed guesses.

He marched down High Road, weaving in and out of the crowds that were a reliable mainstay of this strip of shops and businesses.

He cut into the Wood Green Mall, that cathedral of commerce that had consumed the old railway station, thrived and then floundered. It was a perfect microcosm of the busy world outside its walls. An arena of false light and cold tile, shining shop brands and dreamy shoppers. The echoes of conversation and dreary mall radio formed a soup of sound that drizzled over everyone’s heads as they shuffled in pre-planned loops.

He rode the escalators, working the pre ordained circuit around the mall, letting the wall of sound embrace him as his mind wandered elsewhere. Was the radio signal important? Sometimes, synchronicity was nothing but a random hiccup in the chaos; sometimes it demanded your attention. It was possible that Jamie had simply latched on to the signal by accident. Yes, it was possible… but Shining couldn’t make himself believe that, so he would follow the lead until he could be sure.

Having conducted a full circuit of the mall, Shining stepped back out into the street, breathing in the exhaust fumes from the chains of buses that were dragging themselves towards queues of waiting shoppers.

He stood by a street railing and became oblivious of the rush of colour and sound, the squeal of hydraulic breaks, the hiss of opening doors, footsteps on the pavement, chatter, secondhand music leaking from everywhere. Then he opened his eyes and found himself staring right into a face he knew well. The man stood on the other side of the road, mirroring Shining. For a moment they stared at one another, Shining unable to quite believe his eyes. Then, as the bubble of shock burst, he pushed his way through the pedestrians, running to the end of the barrier so he could cross the road. It can’t be , he insisted to himself, just can’t be . All around him, Wood Green fought to keep him from crossing the road. People got in his way, traffic pushed forward, car horns sounded as Shining stepped out into the road regardless of his safety.

‘Watch it!’ someone shouted, their voice punctuated by the squeal of tyres.

Shining ignored them, running between the cars and mounting the other pavement. People were staring at him, something intelligence officers did their best to avoid, but his training was lost to him, swamped by an obsessive need to confirm what he had seen.

The man had gone. Of course he had. How could he have been there in the first place? Looking up and down the street, Shining found no sign of him.

Shining stood a while by the pavement railing, staring at the weathered metal where the man had rested his hands. It was as if he hoped to pick up on the man’s echo, sense a trace of his passing. There was nothing.

Of course there is nothing , he thought. Krishnin is dead .

f) High Road, Wood Green, London

Shining walked into Oman’s shop with such energy he made the racks of peripheral tat quiver.

‘Give me time!’ complained Oman.

‘Actually,’ Shining replied, ‘I’ve had another thought. If I were to give you a precise location, could you tell whether the signal was coming from there?’

‘That would be a little less impossible,’ Oman admitted, ‘which would be a relief.’

Shining gave him the location.

g) Section 37, Wood Green, London

Toby was lost in reams of the typed-up impossible when he heard Shining’s feet on the stairs.

‘Still no desk then?’ said the old man as he entered, hanging up his coat and lowering himself onto one of the sofas with a sigh.

‘You’ve only been gone a quarter of an hour,’ Toby replied. ‘It’ll be months before we get so much as a pencil holder.’

‘Then maybe I should pass some of the time with a little story. During my walk I saw… or possibly I didn’t… something that has shone a new light on things.’

‘I’m glad things continue to be so clear.’

Shining smiled. ‘Let me tell you about something that happened to me when I first joined the Service.’

a) Soho, London, 19th December 1963

Espionage in the ’60s reeked of boiled cabbage and old rot. It was a grim, tawdry affair that makes even the present day world of paperwork, politics and accountancy seem attractive.

At that time I was still a few months away from a department of my own. My specialist area of espionage had thrived during the Second World War but petered out as the Service focused elsewhere. That said, there was still enough money and enthusiasm to bring me onboard as a sounding post for other sections. You couldn’t move for funding and the obsession with the Russians was at its peak. If someone in the war office suspected our Soviet friends of being able to fly, they would have had a Cambridge graduate on the roof flapping his arms within forty-eight hours.

I operated out of a creaking office building in Soho. I would walk to work through a maze of blue neon and questionable promises. Posters offered glamour that the threadbare carpets and well-worn stages could never live up to. It was a place of honey traps, luring the lustful into dark, sordid interiors where their money would be drained away as surely as their dreams. It couldn’t have suited us better.

The front door of the office peeled like an Englishman on a package holiday. The electric bells to the left offered a life insurance company, a tailor, a travel agency and a film production house. They were all as fake as the pneumatic dancers that jiggled on the advertising poster of the club next door.

Stepping inside, you might have thought you had been transported to a solicitor’s office from Dickens. The entrance hall was a mixture of black and white floor tiles and the sort of dark, dreary wood that feeds on natural light.