Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(19)

She walked straight through the building and out the other side, onto a bleak, windy plaza between tall buildings. On the other side of the plaza was a main road. She dumped the roses in a litter bin, walked to the side of the road, and hailed a taxi.





THERE WERE MORE police cars at the pension. A line of four of them, parked at the front of the building. Gwen had asked the taxi driver to drop her at a motel she’d noticed on the ring road this morning, and walked the rest of the way. From the embankment the road ran along, she could look down and see the police from a couple of hundred yards away. Again, she kept going as casually as she could. Just an ordinary pedestrian out for a stroll alongside a busy three-carriageway road. Yes, officer, I wanted to take a look at this building site where the industrial park’s going to be. What of it? The pension? Not me, officer. I am not the droid you’re looking for. Nobody raised an alarm, nobody chased her.

Half an hour later, she found a bar and went in and sat in the darkest corner staring at a glass of beer. After a while she took a long, shaky drink.





THIS WAS, ON the face of it, a rich season for conspiracists. On top of the hardy perennials like the death of Princess Di, and the Other Gunman, there was the explosion of the Line train in the Urals, and looming over everything else was the Union with the Community.

Although in truth, the Community had already had its fans, even before it had revealed its existence. Intensely paranoid groups of conspiracy theorists, shunning the internet and its inherent surveillance, meeting – if they met at all – in suburban front rooms and noisy pubs, fans of espionage fiction passing photocopied documents and theories via dead drops. They combed obscure texts in private libraries, parsing them for any mention of a lost land. They were so artless, so extemporaneous, that they had managed to keep their existence out of the eyes of the authorities for decades as they carried on a long distributed conversation about a fabled landscape which had been written over Continental Europe by a family of eighteenth century English landowners. The Community. Its name was spoken in hushed tones, as if its shy inhabitants might be listening. It was a place of wonders, accessible only if one had certain maps. Shangri-La, Utopia, Lyonesse. There were those who theorised that it was the location of Avalon, that Arthur lay sleeping there. Others believed it was the origin of flying saucers, that the Nazis had founded a Fourth Reich there, that Hendrix and Morrison and Elvis still lived there, hugely aged but still hale.

Imagine their disappointment, then, to discover that the Community was dull. The first travellers to return after certain border crossings were opened reported a single Europe-spanning nation which seemed to have been laid out by English landscape gardeners, its people stolid and polite, its society contentedly stalled in an approximation of the 1950s, as if an Ealing comedy had been set in an alternate world. No Hendrix, no Nazis, no flying saucers, no unicorns.

In the wake of what was being spoken of as the Emergence, several Community conspiracists had retooled themselves as media pundits. You saw them most days on the rolling news channels, giving their opinions – and they were, without exception, extremely opinionated – on the latest treaty or arrangement negotiated between the Community’s government and this or that European nation or polity or sovereign state.

Lewis, de facto leader of the little group of Community fans to which Gwen belonged – they shunned the term ‘conspiracist’ in much the same way as they shunned the term ‘nut’ – turned his nose up at these new media stars, the way he turned his nose up at the flood of Community commentators who had suddenly, as if out of nowhere, appeared on social media. Most of them, he opined, were Johnny-come-latelies. The ones who had kept the faith during the long covert years and then suddenly emerged into the spotlight of the news cycle had, he said, betrayed the purity of the Cause.

Here, as on a number of other important points, Gwen’s opinion diverged quite sharply from Lewis’s. Gwen was delighted to discover that the Community really did exist, was reassured that it seemed to be so ordinary, and if somebody wanted to make themselves famous on the back of it, she was fine with that.

In the first heady days of the Emergence, when it seemed as if there was nothing else happening in the world but the discovery that there was a parallel universe and it had been settled by the English, the group had met several times and discussed what the repercussions would be for the world – although what they were really discussing, between the lines, was what the repercussions were for them. In the end, as more and more detail of the Community emerged, the group ceased to meet. There was nothing left to do.

People began to drift off, some no doubt to other conspiracies, others to more mundane concerns. This seemed to provoke a fury in Lewis which expressed itself as a deep and sarcastic politeness. For Gwen, it was simply a matter of work pressure. The Emergence had coincided with a general election in England and a change of government. The MP for whom she worked as a researcher found herself elevated to the post of Junior Minister at the Home Office, and all of a sudden she needed Gwen’s input at all hours of the day and night. It was hard enough to stay on top of the brief as it was, without worrying about parallel worlds, and Gwen had, ever so gently, uncoupled herself from Lewis and his dwindling band of followers.

It turned out that the Home Office was intensely concerned about the Community. The government was being forced to make up policy towards the vast new European neighbour on the hoof. Ironically, Gwen found herself doing more Community research than she had ever done on Lewis’s behalf. Most of it was crushingly dull, but there was the odd titbit of interest. Gwen was involved in organising a state visit of President Ruston and several Community officials, involving a banquet at Windsor Castle for the sake of the news organisations, and a number of quiet meetings with her Minister and others out of the public eye.