So, there was an Atrocity Commission? Lawrence picked up more details in the crowd. Kalchelik had been broadly correct. The Commission was hunting officers, not troopers. Witnesses who came forward would have immunity. At least three independent statements with corroboration were required to place an officer on the arrest list. Lawrence thought back to all the basics he had dismissed because they lacked the stomach for prevention. Well, did it really matter if he turned up on an arrest list issued by the National Party? Decent society would just laugh at such impudence. Lawrence had always felt the strongest arguments for the glory trusts came from the feeble reasoning of the radicals. After his crisis of the previous day, he felt he was regaining some confidence that his own past was justified, even if he was glad it was behind him.
In all of this drama, never had it occurred to Lawrence that the guarding of the turnpikes had been disrupted. It was wariness of the National Party cordons that gradually pushed him down to the south end of the market. From there he saw that the toll gates were lifted and the blockhouse shuttered up. Traffic was wandering south towards Duddon Hill bridge in the distance. Lawrence cursed himself for not having taken advantage of the wide-open turnpike sooner. He adopted a simple plan: to reconnoitre the frontier of North Kensington basin, find a way in and contact Sarah-Kelly’s family. There was no point in thinking any further than that.
However, after clearing the summit at Duddon Bridge he gained a fine view down towards the Grande Enceinte. He was astonished to observe that the gates of Ladbroke fort were completely open and touristic opportunists were flowing in and out. To join them was a magnetic temptation—but suppose the glories came back while he was in the Central Enclave? He would be trapped like a rat.
While he was wrangling over these risks, a deep and languid throbbing distracted him. He looked around, expecting to see some enormous glory vehicle breasting Duddon Hill. However, the noise was coming from above. It was a flying boat, a large and graceful bird with slender wings like a seagull and a sleek fuselage reminiscent of a dogfish. Lawrence was more accustomed to the chunky mail planes operated by the glories and the sovereigns. This machine was by comparison an exotic creation of gleaming silver. It descended in a languid spiral over Brent Cross, its great size scaling its speed to the drift of a kite. Just before it dropped from sight below Duddon Hill, it banked and swung its nose at Lawrence, provoking an absurd sensation that he had been spotted. The magnificent machine floated closer, its engines dropping into a kind of primeval snorting. The wings canted into another steep bank only a couple of hundred feet above Lawrence offering a direct view of the cockpit. There was a single pilot, with a profile so uncannily like that of The Captain that it fired an electric thrill of alarm across Lawrence’s chest. Of course, it was just a coincidence. The flying boat glided down out of sight behind the frontier of North Kensington basin. Lawrence wondered how long the pilot would risk his beautiful machine there, once he learned he had descended into an insurrection.
His attention returned to the tempting open gates of Ladbroke fort. It would be a great risk to enter the Central Enclave, but it was the chance of a lifetime, he had to take it. He continued down the hill and joined the flow under the arch through Ladbroke fort.
The warren of lanes in the compressed lower-class quarters of the Central Enclave confounded him. After night fell, he could only feel his way about, bumping into others. Sometimes he came into streets alive with dancing and bands and bars—yet one step off them and all was pitch dark. He blundered about for hours. Later, he was walking for a long time in deep grass, tripping over tree roots. This could only be Hyde Park. Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner was the first land mark he recognised. He walked straight through the unguarded district frontier into Mayfair and up an unlit Park Lane to the district gates of Bloomsbury at Marble Arch. The district frontier was a bubble of sunlight under floodlights. Again, the frontier was unguarded and Lawrence could walk straight through.
The security of the Central Enclave had totally broken down.
Now as he approached his parents’ house his caution rose, his senses intensified. He crouched beside a plane tree at the edge of the gravel and took some minutes to gather in the scene. What baffled him was the large traffic of people in the streets. He judged from the accents that the little groups passing were household servants. This was strange, as the streets would normally be deserted on a Sunday evening. Big tides of servants happened on Saturday morning and Monday morning. This drifting population around him was therefore a mystery, however it was a welcome mystery, as it gave him cover he would not otherwise have had.
Lawrence felt it highly unlikely The Captain had any kind of full-time watch on the parents’ house. It was not possible for a stranger to hang around the streets without getting picked up by a glory patrol. It was far more likely a member of the household staff had been bribed into keeping a watch from the inside. On a Sunday evening most servants would be off-duty in their quarters in the house basement. It should be possible to get in and ‘invigorate’ Father by walking into the library, where he would be reading Galsworthy and listening to Haydn on the heirloom gramophone player, if it still worked.
Lawrence possessed an ace. He could get into his parents’ garden by way
