Man-hauled wagons crawled past, delivering water, carcasses from the meat market, oil for generators, crates of flour and much else, the teams stooped forward into the yokes, sustaining the standard sixty paces per minute. Donald proceeded up the main avenue north towards the gates of Bloomsbury district at Euston. From there he turned left—west—onto Euston Road. The air was foul with smoke billowing from trucks, half-tracks and armoured cars rolling to and from the great glory depots at Euston and King’s Cross. He was retracing the journey he had made up to Ladbroke fort and out to North Kensington basin. Except that, this time he was doing it during daytime and on a weekday.
He returned an hour later. Brother Bartram would not even talk about Sarah-Kelly. It was clear there had been a family rift. Bartram’s wife Rosa intercepted Donald with a hasty, embarrassed whisper.
“We’ve not seen Skay for days… Bartram and she have the same iron will. Try Bloomsbury College. If she’s not there, she’ll be out at Brent Cross—she doesn’t know folk anywhere else. If you find her, tell her to get in touch, this is no world for a handsome young lady to be alone in.”
As it happened, Bloomsbury College was on the way home, although Donald had only a hazy idea of where it lay. It had no campus or grounds, no grand prospects, no quads, no towers, no medieval authority. All that announced it was a sharp increase in people walking in and out of some side-streets off the main avenue just inside the frontier of Bloomsbury district. He turned down the first side street. It was a shabby, dank sort of ravine. At this time of the year, the sun never reached below the gutters. Weeds and bushes grew along the buildings and even in the roadway. Evidently no vehicles came this way. Everybody he could see was ordinary; men and women, young and middle-aged, from footmen to chambermaids. There were even rough-looking types who were probably stokers or trimmers. Dressed in his old leather raincoat and jeans, Donald almost fitted in. What failed him was the calm aloofness on his face. This could not have been disguised had he tried.
He approached an ugly concrete building, its exterior badly spalled and leaking out streaks of rust like blood. It had the look of what had been a skyscraper in the Public Era, later ‘stumped’ under the Naclaski laws to a mere three storeys. People jostled through its grubby doorway. He joined the flow and got carried inside to a dim, crowded reception area. Everyone was yattering and laughing at the tops of their voices between swigging from wooden cups and tankards. The area seemed to be an impromptu bar. The glory troops would have a field day breaking this lot up, if they ever came in here. Not a square inch of wall space was available amongst the cacophony of posters, political artwork and scrawled messages, all of it being constantly added to, at the expense of the old and weak, which slid to the floor and got trampled into a paste of mud and mushed paper.
He drifted along one wall, pretending to look for someone. Just as he reached a stairwell on the opposite side of the hall, someone gripped his elbow and turned him around.
“Can I help, friend?” asked the middle of three large men confronting Donald. He stared pointedly at the hand gripping his arm until it let go. This gave him a few seconds to appraise them. They juggled anvils for a living, to judge by their necks and biceps. They wore black leather waistcoats over brown woollen shirts and trousers, although their clean-shaven jaws and wafts of after-shave hinted at a degree of status. Donald guessed they were security.
“Got any ID?” the middle one asked.
Donald had a choice of using either his real passport or his messenger’s counterfeit. He showed his real ID to the Samson in the middle, who was obviously the senior of them. This character leafed through the passport, noting stamps for the Lands of Krossington and North Kensington basin, as well as the unlimited security clearance for the whole of the Central Enclave.
“A widely travelled man. Are you armed?”
“Yes. I have a licence.”
He showed them his licence to carry. That impressed them. Only the most trusted citizens held a licence to bear arms within the Central Enclave. Likewise, Donald’s passport, with its access to all districts, was not a common possession. The Samson handed the documents back.
“My name is Valentin. Sorry about the inconvenience—as you can appreciate, we have to be careful.”
“Yes, I understand,” Donald said.
“Do you have an appointment, or anything?”
“No.”
“Wait here and I’ll see what I can do for you.”
Donald had no idea what this was about. He played along with it out of curiosity while Valentin hopped up the steps out of sight. Some tedious minutes passed, in which the other two oxen would not chit-chat. Valentin returned, obviously pleased with himself.
“Come on up, the boss will see you now.”
As they wound up to the top floor, Donald guessed Valentin had simply assumed someone of high status would only have come to see ‘the boss’, presumably the chancellor of the college. This could be awkward. The chancellor would assume Donald was here to make a donation. All these bloody assumptions…
The top floor was an open office radically sunny relative to the dank lower floors; Donald had to squint into the sun beams streaming in almost horizontally. The air was clear of the usual fug of tobacco—prominent signs forbade smoking under pain of a fine of three silver sovereigns, or equivalent, in accordance with Health Committee Ordnance 05/018.
Valentin led him up the central aisle, amid a general air of earnestness. Bald heads pow-wowed over reports. Others sat in silence, chin cupped on a palm, digesting reports. Although the furniture was old and scarred, it
