‘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.’
Chapter 6
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.
That all changed with a small clipping from a local newspaper, arriving by internal post in a plain brown envelope.
The clerical officer read it quickly and understood its importance instantly; his traditional mid-morning cheese and bacon bagel was forgotten for now.
The Medusa has been found.
The clerical officer knew what to do.
There was a protocol to follow; a protocol originally written with a fountain pen sixty years ago, and again on a typewriter ten years later, and when the ink on that had finally faded, rattled off on a dot matrix printer… and that too was fading now.
The clerical officer read through it and finally located in faint grey dots the name he was after.
He dialled the number, hoping that it was still current. If not, he wasn’t sure whom he would have to call next… there was no one else’s number to dial.
He tapped in the number, surprised at how edgy he was. After so long, file n-27 had come back to life.
Chapter 7
It had been raining all day.
Chris finally decided to venture out of the coffee shop and head back to the motel as the dull grey of the afternoon was darkening with the approaching evening. Normally he would have grumbled and cursed the mean- spirited weather, as the fresh wind pulled at his clothes and the rain stung his cheeks, but right now his mind was on that aborted phone call to the museum and the very odd way it had ended.
The shortcut from the coffee shop led him down from the coast road, through dunes of sand peaked with wild grass, to a small, deserted cove. Across the cove he could see the bright quayside lights of Port Lawrence.
There were numerous boats at rest on the shingle, many of them little more than dinghies or just the stripped-down remains of larger vessels. All of them eroded by the elements, many worn away to exposed ribcages of ageing timber. Littering the ground between these dead and dying hulls like scattered body parts were ropes, tackle, anchors, cleats… the loose detritus of several dozen boats. A man could make a fortune selling this sort of junk in the right place to the right kind of people. A trendy little boutique in Greenwich Village, catering for dim- witted rich people seeking a slice of ‘traditional’ to slot inappropriately into their modern homes.
The shower was easing now, nothing more than a few wilful spots.
It was then that he heard a cough behind him. Not an honest, out-loud bark, but a short, brittle grunt that sounded smothered.
He spun round. Amongst the dimly lit silhouettes of dead hulls around him, he could make out nothing. He debated whether to call out a challenge. But he knew his own voice would unsettle him even more. He held his breath, and listened intently for any noise other than the tide on the pebbles and the occasional clatter of wind- borne debris. A few seconds passed, and Chris was prepared to believe it was his over-active imagination playing the devil when he heard the clatter of pebbles and the crunch of a clumsily placed foot.
‘Okay, who the fuck is that?’ he growled in a voice he hoped sounded menacing.
He heard another footfall, and then, his eyes growing keener, he picked out an indistinct form moving slowly between two of the beached vessels.
‘You’re the news man, aren’t you?’ said a voice coming from the dark shape; an old man.
News man? Chris found himself grinning in the dark. The natives were gossiping.
‘Yeah, I’m the news man.’
Chris heard the crunch of feet drawing closer, and the dark form grew until he could make out a lined and weathered face framed by the hood of an old canvas raincoat.
‘My name’s McGuire,’ he said. Chris could see by the fading light of the overcast afternoon that he was holding out a hand.
He grabbed it awkwardly. McGuire’s grip was surprisingly strong.
‘You’re here about that plane out there, aren’t you?’
Chris wondered whether to play it dumb, but then Port Lawrence was a small town. Undoubtedly old Will must have been spreading the news about his two passengers, like some old dear in a salon.
