Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(57)

“She died,” said Rupert.

“And they couldn’t help her in Europe?” Michael sounded shocked.

Rupert thought of Patricia’s final days, in a private nursing home in Berne that had seemed more like a very expensive hotel than a clinic. None of it had done any good, in the end. They’d had a little over eighteen months; sometimes, in dark moments, he thought it had been the treatments that had killed her, not the cancer.

“How are things here?” he asked.

“Here?” Michael had lifted the lid of the hamper and was rummaging about inside. “Oh, we keep rubbing along, you know.” He sat up holding a bottle of red wine in one hand and a tin of paté in the other. “Are you sure you won’t...? No.” He put the bottle and tin on the floor, bent over again for a glass and a butterknife and a packet of biscuits. “We live in interesting times,” he said.

“Not least because someone stole part of the Community.”

Michael nodded. “Perplexing. Have you, perhaps, heard anything...?”

“It’s as much a mystery to us as it is to you. No one seems to have been hurt, if that’s any help.”

“Yes, the Europeans tell us that. It’s a village called Angworth, by the way. The whole village, all its people, just... transposed.”

“Which makes everyone nervous.”

“It’s certainly concentrated minds.” Michael sat up, closed the lid of the hamper, and began setting out his snack on top. “They sent us the Squire back,” he said, picking with his fingernails at the packaging around the biscuits. “As a token of their goodwill. He’s pretty cheesed off, as you can imagine.”

“Are you also,” Rupert asked, “discussing the Ufa explosion?”

Michael had managed to open the biscuits. He put a finger through the ring-pull of the tin and opened it with one smooth motion. “Why ever would we do that?” he asked.

“You see,” Rupert said, “from a certain point of view – and this is entirely hypothetical – it seems as if there’s tit-for-tat going on.”

Michael twisted the cap off the bottle, poured a little wine into the glass, held it to his nose, and inhaled. “This is excellent, you know,” he said. “Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why we don’t make wine as good as this?”

“No.”

“Well, for one thing it’s cultural, of course. We’re English. Beer drinkers to a man, none of that foreign muck. We don’t have much of a tradition of winemaking.” He poured more wine in his glass, set it on top of the hamper, took a biscuit out of the packet. “But there’s another reason. The soil’s wrong. Oh, we can grow grapes easily enough, and we can make a type of wine, but the soil’s not right. And it’s not right because the Whitton-Whytes didn’t think about that when they created the Community. They provided us with a cornucopia of other natural resources – coal, iron ore and so on – but it never occurred to them to set the right conditions for winemaking.” He trowelled a knifeload of paté onto a biscuit, picked up his glass, and sat back in his seat.

Rupert looked out of the window. The soldiers were patrolling slowly up and down the line of cars. “Who are you at war with?”

“Us?” Michael asked in surprise. “Nobody. We’re everybody’s friend.”

“Amanda and Kenneth Pennington,” said Rupert.

Michael thought about it, shook his head. “I don’t recognise the names.”

Rupert sighed. “Something is happening. In Europe. We don’t know what it is but we’d like it to stop.”

“We being you and him. The Coureur.” Michael took a bite of his biscuit and shook his head again.

“We know about Mundt,” said Rupert. “He was killed by a former English soldier. Whether the English were actually involved, we don’t know. There’s a process they call ‘brainwashing,’ like hypnosis with flashing lights and drugs. It looks as if he wasn’t aware of what he was doing. I don’t understand it, but that’s how it was explained to me.”

Michael sipped some wine. “I don’t recall you being this candid,” he said. “Where is he? This soldier?”

“The European police have him.”

“Hm. They didn’t tell us that. Thank you.” He popped the remains of his biscuit in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “There was a joint decision, by ourselves and the Europeans, not to publicise the killing. There’s a lot of anti-Community sentiment in Europe at the moment – demonstrations, denunciations in some of the wilder little parliaments and assemblies – we didn’t want to inflame that.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Mundt?” Michael shrugged. “You spent time with him; you know what he was like. Civil engineering was a passion. The government of the polity invited a delegation to have a look around, and he decided he wanted to go.” He drank some more wine.

“And you had access to all his research by then and there was no reason not to let him go.”

“Oh, we were keeping a close eye on him. The trouble is, we were expecting him to try to run away, not to get himself killed.” Michael sighed at how wonderful the world would be, if only one could truly take into account all eventualities.