Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(30)
“Even so.”
Mr Pasquinel looked toward the windows again. “This is not efficient,” he said finally. “Sending people away when there’s still work to be done.”
“We will cope, Donatien,” Grigorijs said. “Go away. Have a rest. When you come back you’ll be more efficient.”
2.
THE SNOW WHICH blanketed Western Europe had come and mostly gone in England. From the train, he could see fields half-flooded with meltwater, little rivers swollen almost to overflowing, with narrow boats bobbing at their moorings. He wondered what would happen if those rivers did break their banks; would the boats slip away and drift across the waterlogged fields, or would they follow the channels still flowing beneath the surface?
The day was grey and cold, the trees and hedges like scribbles against the clouds. At one point, the train passed alongside some kind of industrial plant – all blocky concrete silos and angled conveyors and modular sheds – which turned out, judging by the trucks parked at one end of the complex, to be a cement works.
The train stopped often, at little stations, first in Essex, then in Suffolk. The station car parks were full of vehicles left for the day by commuters, and beyond them Mr Pasquinel could see little villages, small groups of old houses with newer estates grafted on to them, the square towers of Saxon churches rising above the rooftops. A spit of rain dabbed at the windows.
Almost an hour and a half out of London, Mr Pasquinel took his rucksack down from the overhead rack and left the train at a station which seemed to sit all alone out in the countryside. He was the only passenger to alight from the train, and as it pulled away out of sight around a curve in the track he could see no one on the opposite platform. No staff. No one. He turned the collar of his waterproof jacket up against the wind, shouldered his rucksack, and left the station.
The station did in fact serve a village, but for some reason it had been built almost two miles from the nearest houses. Mr Pasquinel did not turn towards the village, however. He set out along the road, occasionally stepping up onto the banked verge when a car passed by.
After a mile or so, he came to a little graveyard with an iron gate. He stepped inside and found himself among perhaps fifty gravestones, most of them dating from the middle of the previous century, some of them more recent. None of them dated from the years of the Xian Flu, and he found that momentarily confusing, until he remembered that by the time the pandemic had reached outlying areas such as this the victims were being taken to isolation centres and then to hurriedly-built crematoria.
A moss-covered wall ran along the back of the graveyard, broken down in a couple of places. He clambered over tumbled stones into a little wood carpeted with snowdrops and stubborn patches of ice. On the other side of the wood was another wall, this one even more dilapidated. He stepped over it, and there he was, in the churchyard of St John’s.
Mr Pasquinel knew his hobby had, in the past, been the subject of much innocent humour among his staff and co-workers, but he didn’t mind. No one had ever been cruel about it, and even if they had, it wasn’t in his nature to take offence. Life was too short.
The church dated from 1346, just before the Black Death had reached England, although it was obvious that the Victorians had given it a thorough makeover. It was stout and no-nonsense, its walls covered with cemented flints the size of his fist, its tower and walls crennelated. Mr Pasquinel walked slowly around it with his phone held in front of him, taking photographs. There was a graveyard here, too, these stones far older than on the other side of the wood. They were mostly covered in moss, their inscriptions all but erased by wind and frost. He could make out a few dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on some stones, the name Hezekiah on another. On one side of the graveyard, where a stone wall separated it from the road, was a line of eight stones all bearing the same surname, their dates fifteen, twenty, thirty years apart. An entire lineage spanning more than a century. Mr Pasquinel took more photographs.
Returning to the church, he stepped into the porch and tried the door, but it was locked. He went back outside and walked around the graveyard for a while longer, then he sat down on a bench and contemplated his holiday, far from home and the cares of work. Let his colleagues make their jokes; Mr Pasquinel never felt as at peace as he did when he sat in an English churchyard.
After fifteen minutes or so, he heard brittle undergrowth being crunched underfoot in the wood, and a few moments later a young man dressed in hiking gear and walking with a cane negotiated the broken-down wall and stepped into the churchyard.
The newcomer’s interests seemed similar to Mr Pasquinel’s. He took photographs of the church, examined the gravestones, took more photographs. Eventually he came over and sat on the bench and put his leg out in front of him, as if it pained him.
They sat there like that for a little while. A car passed by on the other side of the wall, the hiss of its hydrogen-cell engine fading away into silence as it drove away.
Finally, the newcomer said, “I understand this parish is where the last wild wolf in England was killed.”
“Yes,” Mr Pasquinel said. “I remember reading that somewhere.”
RUDI LEANED BACK and looked into the sky. It was perfectly possible for a drone the size of his hand, hovering a kilometre above them, to hear everything they were saying. You could go mad trying to cover every eventuality of surveillance. “Shall we have a look inside?” he asked.