I looked up from my green tea and she was there, standing in the doorway of Marek’s Café with long fair hair plastered to her head by the rain. A puddle formed beneath the hem of her dripping coat as she folded her futile umbrella. Her eyes flickered around the dim light of the café searching, searching.
You might say I was surprised. It isn’t often the woman of your dreams walks into your life.
I mean that literally, I’d never seen her before but I’d been dreaming about her for two weeks. I knew that face, knew how the corners of her mouth creased when she smiled, how she pulled her fingers through her hair and tucked it behind her ears when it fell before her eyes.
She took two paces into the café, pulled the fingers of her left hand through her dripping hair and tucked it behind her ear. Her face turned towards me in the shadowy alcove at the back. Two seconds, then she marched up and stood facing down at me over the table.
“You’re Erica Fallon.”
I nodded. She pulled out the chair and sat. Marek appeared at her shoulder. “Espresso,” she said without looking up. “They say you’re good at finding people.” Her gaze held me with an intensity that might have been intimidating, from anyone else.
I steadied my breathing. “Who have you lost?”
“My brother.”
“When did you last see him.”
“Fifty-seven, but I don’t remember it.”
“Twenty-three years ago.” The sea was where it was supposed to be, the bio-war was at its height. “You must have been very young.”
“They thought six when they found me.”
Marek ghosted silently to the table and placed the small cup before her.
“CM-2057-phi-kappa?” I tapped my phone to pay.
She grimaced and nodded. That was one of the nastier of the weapons deployed in the war, went straight to the brain. Ninety-eight percent of infected adults died. Survivors, mostly kids, suffered total amnesia.
“They found me on a street corner. No idea where I came from, so they gave me a name and put me in an orphanage.”
“So what is it?”
“What?”
“Your name.”
The briefest of smiles flashed across her face, creasing the corners of her mouth. “Rosemary Baker.”
That jarred. It didn’t sound right. “And your brother was with you?”
“No.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
Her fingers stroked the handle of her cup. “Not much. He’s about six years older than me.”
“Does he have a name?”
She sipped her espresso. “Everything else I know is… unreliable, more likely to mislead you, like it has me.”
A brother she couldn’t remember, no evidence he ever existed. Her story was like something from a spin dream.
“I know that look,” she said. “You have a healthy scepticism, Erica. But put aside your preconceptions.” She took out her phone and flipped me five hundred picos. A generous fee. “That’s for trying. Double if you succeed.” She downed the remainder of her coffee.
I sipped my tea as Rosemary Baker raised her umbrella and ventured back into the downpour. When I’d finished I slipped her espresso cup into my bag, buttoned my trench coat tight and jammed my fedora hard on my head ready for the rain and wind. I stepped out under the clear blues skies of a crisp November day, just as it had been when I’d arrived at Marek’s an hour before.
Rosemary Baker’s story sounded like a spin dream, but it was my dream she’d walked out of. I paced slowly along the pavement, took out my phone and called Colette. It went straight to voicemail. Again.
“You said it would wear off in a day, Colette. It’s been two weeks. Call me.”
I hung up, stopped walking and opened my bag. There was no espresso cup.
I worried about Colette. I worried about me. I should have refused that little pink pill. No matter how much I’d drunk, no matter how persuasive she had been. One night when illusion overlapped and blended seamlessly with reality. It all felt real, every touch… In the morning she’d gone, but she’d left her bag of little pink pills.
A figure wrapped in a tattered blanket huddled in the doorway of the empty shop opposite my place, sheltering from the downpour. I looked up, the sky was still a clear blue.
“Weather, hey? Doesn’t that butterfly effect drive you crazy?” He was sitting on the step, squinting against the bright sunshine.
I closed my eyes a moment. I wasn’t going to lose my mind. I refused to go crazy.
“Hi, Gordon.” I crouched down to his level. He peered at me from under a grubby forehead. The dirt and whiskers couldn’t hide the sallow skin, the thin flesh over gaunt cheekbones. “When did you last eat?”
“Spare a pico, Erica? I’ll get a sandwich.” Big brown puppy eyes stared at me.
“If I give you crypto, you’ll buy spin. Wait here I’ll fetch you something.”
Gordon was a living warning against spin. Supposedly it isn’t addictive, but some people get so caught up in the illusions that they lose track of reality. He spent his days hanging around these streets looking for his real life.
I fetched him half a quiche and an apple I found in the kitchen of my flat above my office. Then I spent another afternoon searching for information on spin. I found nothing new. Plenty on the effects with repeated use: digestive problems, liver damage, psychosis. The dreams were common enough for a few days. Spin flashbacks — waking illusions — could happen for up to forty-eight hours, but this was two weeks later and a figure from my dreams had walked into my life.
It seemed a stupid, pointless thing to do but I ran a search on the name “Rosemary Baker.” I got a hit, with a photograph. It was her.
It tied up with what she’d said: found in fifty-seven, raised in an overcrowded orphanage in Enfield. Did well at school and went on to study biomedical sciences at Swansea University until the storm of seventy-two washed the campus away. Unemployed since then, like half the country. She had an address in Wapping, the wrong side of the flood wall: wet feet every time a high tide overtopped the Thames Barrier. No arrests or convictions, but plenty of shady dealings went on outside the flood wall.
Harris picked up the phone on the first ring. Detective Inspector Harris of the Metropolitan Police — we’d had a thing for a while a couple of years back, until something he told me that he shouldn’t have, leaked. He never said he blamed me but the undercurrent of mistrust broke us apart. He did have the decency to apologise later when one of his DCs was arrested for corruption. We were friends after that, and I wasn’t above tweaking his conscience to get a favour out of him.
“Hey, Erica, what’s up?”
“Ever come across a Rosemary Baker? Lives outside the wall in Wapping.” I flipped him the address and the photo. He said he’d see what he could find and get back to me.
An hour later I was puzzling over the espresso cup that had reappeared in my bag. I took a swab from its rim and fed it to my DNA sequencer — low budget model intended for genealogy enthusiasts and paternity checks. It showed me a green light and started doing its thing. Something to match against if I found the brother, unless this was just another part of the dream. If it was, I’d dreamed I’d taken on a case for Rosemary Baker, so I might as well dream solving it.
I’d just settled back into my chair when the office door flew open. Two men, the first a little on the short side, thin, weasel face, receding hair. The hang of his cheap business suit hinted at something hard and heavy on his left shoulder. The second was even more on the short side, but wearing a well-cut suit in finely woven wool, grey with a subtle pattern of fine stripes. He strolled past his companion and took his hands out of his pockets to sit in the chair facing me.
“It’s polite to knock,” I said. My right hand found the handle of the drawer that held my Glock, I took another look at weasel-face and clasped my hands together in plain sight on top of the desk.
“I apologise for my associate’s poor manners, Ms Fallon. But I need your assistance.” His voice was smooth with a hint of an accent I couldn’t place: Russian, east European, maybe.
“And you are?”
“Frank Wilson, perhaps you’ve heard of me?”
Everyone in East London had heard of Frank Wilson. Some ended up wishing they hadn’t, some ended up washed up by the tides. “What can I do for you, Mr Wilson?”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a hard-copy image and placed it on the desk. “I’m looking for this woman.”
I picked it up, and made a show of studying it. “Does she have a name?”
“Rosemary Baker. Word is she’s been asking about you. You will let me know if you see her.”
“What’s she done?”
“She provides a service. I require her to continue providing that service.”
Weasel-face stood by the door, hands clasped in front of him, looking at the wall above my head.
“I’ll bear it in mind, Mr Wilson,” I offered him the image back.
“Keep it, familiarise yourself with that face.” He stood and headed for the door, turning back in the doorway. “Your co-operation will be appreciated, Ms Fallon.” He closed the door gently behind him. He didn’t need to mention what might happen if I didn’t co-operate.
I let out a long breath and headed upstairs to the flat, into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. Frank Wilson’s visit might have been another illusion, but I didn’t like the idea of even the illusion of what he might do.
I refused to go crazy, but I had to act as if it was all real until I could figure out what was.
Noises from outside crept in through the window and around the half-open bathroom door. Muffled thuds, a crack of something hard hitting something else hard. A cry of pain confirmed my suspicions.
Frank Wilson looked on with arms folded as his minion kicked seven colours of shit out of Gordon. “What the hell!” I shouted and shoved him aside. “Leave him alone, he’s harmless.” Minion squared up to me.
“Leave the lady to look after her pet, Elphick,” Wilson said. “Just tell him to mind his own business, Ms Fallon.”
They stepped into the shiny, nearly new Maxwell all-terrain vehicle parked by the curb and the car sped off with the rising hum of a high powered motor.
“Gordon?” I crouched down beside him. He opened one eye, the other was already beginning to swell up.
“Keep away from Vidmar, Erica.” He climbed unsteadily to his feet.
“Who’s Vidmar?”
His eyes scanned the street behind me. “Is Alice alright?”
Vidmar, Alice, spin dreams. “Come in, let’s have a look at your injuries.”
He followed meekly enough, I shoved him into the bathroom to take a shower and I dug out some old clothes that Harris had left behind. The sleeves and legs were too short but otherwise loose on Gordon’s emaciated frame. As I stuffed his own filthy rags into the bin, an ancient, dog-eared paperback fell from his coat pocket: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
He cleaned up surprisingly well, even with the wild tangle on head and chin he might have been a good-looking guy once, but spin, life on the street, and Wilson’s goon, Elphick, had taken their toll. I dabbed antiseptic on the cut eye and the swollen lip.
“We should get you to a hospital,” I murmured as he flinched at the little pressure I applied to the rising bruise on his ribs.
He sat, a blank expression on his face, eyes defocussed.
“You need to lay off the spin, Gordon.”
“The pinks are ok,” he said, “they don’t make you sick.”
Some things you can’t fix. He had to sort his own life out, I had to get on with mine. I ushered him out, then went into the bathroom to set everything in order. The bathroom cabinet was open. My heart skipped a beat while I rummaged. Colette’s bag was still there, five little pink pills in it. There had been six.
I was sitting at a kitchen table flipping through a news feed. Oak beams above, stone walls, flag floors. I knew this house, it used to be my grandmother’s.
Lewis stood by the counter making coffee, his back to me. His crutches were leaning against the wall in the corner. He could stand unaided now, soon he’d be able to walk without them and climb stairs so we could move back into the upstairs bedroom. My own injury had been less serious, I had only a faint scar from the entry wound above my left hip.
He passed me a coffee. “Is Alice up yet?” he said, “She’ll want one.”
Before I could answer she was there at the kitchen door in her dressing gown. Alice, wearing Rosemary Baker’s face.
I started at the sound of my alarm. I opened my eyes and I was lying in my bed in my flat. One of those dreams again. I could see where the elements came from: Gordon had talked about Alice, and there was the book. The book explained where I got the guy’s name: Lewis, from Lewis Carroll.
Trouble was, I’d dreamed about Rosemary Baker before I’d seen her, though I’d never had a name until she came into Marek’s — if that had really happened. Rain or sun, cup or no cup, real or dream, I must have seen her, met her somewhere, sometime before, that I couldn’t recall.
I called a car to take me to the orphanage in Enfield. It was still there, no longer overcrowded, there wasn’t such a ready supply of orphans since the war. The manager was an old guy, been there since it was set up thirty years before. The row of ancient steel filing cabinets behind him might have been a hundred years older.
“CM-2057-phi-kappa,” I said. “Did you get a lot of kids with no memories?”
“That was a bad year, we were stretched. Three to every room built for one.”
“Many you couldn’t identify?”
“Some. Most of the younger ones were found at home, or had a phone or some kind of ID, but there were a few wanderers.”
“Rosemary Baker?”
“Yes, I remember her. Bright girl.”
“She thinks she had an older brother. Was there a boy found anywhere near at the same time, another CM-2057?”
“If there was, he wouldn’t have come here. We were at full stretch. Have you checked with the registrar?”
“Their data got scrubbed, human viruses weren’t the only weapons used in the war. ”
“We kept all our records on paper, just in case.”
“Do you have her file?” I glanced at the filing cabinets against the back wall. “I’d like to see the admission record.
He stood and opened the top drawer of the first cabinet, leafed through for a few moments. “Here.” He pulled out a manila folder and opened it, passing me the top sheet.
“Found clutching a stuffed toy rabbit on the corner of Rosemary Avenue and Baker street.” I looked up at him.
“When there’s no memory, no clue to identity, we’d give them a name relating to where they were found, or something they had with them.”
I guess she was lucky they didn’t call her Rosemary Rabbit. “If someone else were found in this area, where might they have been taken?”
“What age?”
“About twelve.”
“Millwall Park. There was an establishment there for children of secondary school age.”
I groaned. “Isle of Dogs.”
He gave me a sympathetic grimace. Isle of Dogs, outside the flood wall.
I stood in my oldest boots at the top of the steps at Limehouse station, where the Victorian railway viaduct formed the core of the flood wall, and watched the tide easing back towards the old Thames watercourse. I’d have about six hours before it came in again. The orphanage at Millwall Park was a good hour’s walk away. Rosemary Baker’s flat lay much closer. She wouldn’t be there, not if Frank Wilson was looking for her, but I figured I might learn something.
The flat was on the top floor of a three storey block. All the others were empty, windows broken or blanked off with plywood. Her front door hung on broken hinges. Inside, drawers and cupboards had been tipped onto the floor, an old sofa lay upside down with the fabric slashed and stuffing pulled out. Books were strewn below an empty shelf. They were mostly on chemistry and other sciencey things – The Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics, Theories of Quantum Consciousness. Not my idea of light bedtime reading. A power cable snaked in through a hole in the living room window to a heavy duty domestic battery on the wall, bigger than a small flat would need. An output cable led back out through the window to the flat below.
An old mechanical lock held the door of the downstairs flat. I fumbled through my purse and pockets looking for something thin and stiff enough to slip into the crack to ease the lock open. In the end a swift kick with a sturdy boot sufficed. Inside was darkness but for thin slivers of light leaking around the boards over the windows. I hit the light switch and stark white light flooded the room.
Empty workbenches lined the walls, circles and rectangles free of dust told of objects recently removed, blotches and rings stained the wooden surface. Boxes and pieces of glassware rested on a rack of steel shelving and a gas cylinder with rubber hoses attached stood in the corner. My phone rang while I was studying a whiteboard above the workbench: DI Harris.
“Hi Joe.” My eyes scanned the whiteboard. Letters and numbers joined by lines. “Anything on Rosemary Baker?”
“Erica, I can’t say. She’s tied up in an ongoing investigation.”
“Into Frank Wilson?”
During Harris’s silent response I began to make sense of the board; a list of chemical formulae, some crossed through, one with a question mark after.
Finally, he spoke “What do you know?”
“Red Lion,” I said. “Four pm, be prepared to trade.” I hung up and took a photo of the whiteboard.
Time was pressing, I had to beat the tide to Millwall Park.
The Isle of Dogs, a peninsula wrapped on three sides by a meander of the Thames, is crossed at its neck by a maze of old abandoned skyscrapers and malls, all built around a complex of even older abandoned docks: Canary Wharf. The riverbank path past the complex was only a couple of centimetres underwater, rusted railings marked the edge. I kept my hair tucked under the collar of my coat, my fedora pulled low, as I strode along trying not to look like a woman walking alone. The sound of the wind howling between the old towers of Canary Wharf gave me the creeps, and every noise made me want to look around to see whether I was being watched.
I breathed easier once I’d left the towers behind. A few people still hung on, scratching a living on the higher points of the Isle of Dogs. Outside the mainstream, in more than one sense.
The orphanage had partially collapsed where the tidal currents had undermined the foundations. What remained of the ground floor was two feet deep in detritus. I had to fight my way over a heap of chairs and tables that the tide had jammed against the main door, then wade through the mud to the stairway. The ooze sucked at my boots as I clambered up onto the concrete steps. Upstairs, dark streaks on the walls marked where the roof had leaked. Left of the stairway the rooms held beds patterned with mould, drawers and wardrobes with their laminated surfaces peeling from damp chipboard. The other way the passageway carried on a few metres before ending in open sky. I stood at the end looking down on the rubble. To my left, one outside wall was standing, and part of the floor. Lined up against the far wall, a bank of steel filing cabinets. I took a ginger step over the abyss onto the hanging floor.
The steel drawers bore laminated labels with the year, dividers inside separated the files by month. I pulled all the files for October and November 2057, seven in all. They were beyond the tide’s reach, but the rain had soaked them.
I spread the damp papers across my office floor, heating on to dry them out. The printed parts were mostly still legible but the handwriting in the boxes was smudged and faded. Staring at them longer wasn’t going to make the writing clearer. Once they were dry I could run them through the multi-spectral scanner, but for now, I was late for my date with DI Harris.
He was waiting, a pint of some obscure ale before him already half gone, a G&T waiting for me.
“I need to know, what’s your interest in Rosemary Baker?” That was his greeting.
I could have told him about meeting her in a spin dream, and got a lecture in return. “I’ve been told I have to find her.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“If I do find her, she’ll need protection. So will I.”
“From Frank Wilson?”
That could have been a lucky guess. “From Frank Wilson. Now, your turn. What put you onto Rosemary Baker?”
He flicked me an image. “Colette Smith.”
Colette. Two weeks since she’d brought those little pink pills. “What’s the story?”
“We picked her up a couple of weeks ago selling spin. Said she got it from Baker.”
“Where is she now?”
“Somewhere safe.” His emphatic tone said not to push that.
Two weeks, and no word. She could have got a message to me, told me she was in trouble.
“Surprises me Baker would be selling.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Seems out of character.” Lame answer, Harris’s raised eyebrow said he thought so too. “She’s a client. I can’t tell you more.”
“You can’t tell me she’s Wilson’s chemist? We’re not all stupid in the Met, Erica. Background in biochemistry. It surprises me she’d be selling to Colette Smith. I’d have thought Wilson would have a tight grip on distribution. Best guess is she was raising some funds to help her run.”
That was possible, or maybe the money would help her find her brother, if any of that was real. I flicked him the photo of the whiteboard from the lab. “What do you make of this?”
He studied it for a good minute, taking a long sip of his beer. “Spin,” he said. “The top one is the common formulation, been on the market for four, five years. It was never a priority for us.”
“What about the others?”
“This one.” He pointed to the last one crossed out. “When these little pink pills hit the market about a month ago we started getting pressure from the commissioner’s office. Find the source and cut it off. ”
“Why? It’s just spin. Crazy people having crazy visions.”
“The original formula was self-limiting – after the high you’d be pretty sick for a couple of days. Keep taking them and you’d be seriously ill. Those side-effects are gone with the new formulation. Take as much as you want until you turn totally psychotic. People are getting killed losing track of where they are, what they’re doing because they’re lost in these illusions of different lives.”
I took a sip of my G&T. Gordon, he was always high, the side-effects, the sickness wouldn’t stop him until it killed him.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said, “but keep away from Canary Wharf. We know Wilson’s operation is based there. When we go in it’ll be hard and heavy.”
Back in the office, the documents were dry enough for the multi-spectral scanner. A basic model scanning only a hundred different frequencies of light. Still, it revealed enough for me to eliminate three of the seven files as girls, two more were found too far from Enfield, another was three weeks before Rosemary Baker.
The name on the last one was washed out. A street name, might have been Osak… or Drah… or some variant. The notes field was mostly washed out too, just a hint of a word. Squinting hard I could almost make it say Carol. Found by or with someone called Carol was my best guess.
They named the orphans for where they were found or what they carried. I pulled up a map of Enfield and let my eyes follow roads, looking for names, waiting for something to gel. Nothing did.
It had been a long day. I went upstairs to the flat. Reheated bean chilli, and turned the lights low and collapsed in an armchair with a G&T. My heavy eyelids slid down.
Six in Metropolitan Police uniforms lowered the coffin slowly into the grave. The celebrant’s words barely penetrated my dizziness. A hand on my arm supported me. Her face hidden behind a dark veil.
“… and we take comfort from the knowledge that, though Detective Inspector Lewis Drake is lost to us in this world, he lives yet across countless alternative existences of quantum reality.” The celebrant closed her eyes and bowed her head.
“What use is that to me?” I murmured. I heard the bitterness in my own voice.
A gentle crowd, not too close, but each waited their turn to offer their condolences.
“We’ll never forget what you and Lewis did,” Harris said, taking my hand. “We can sleep easier knowing Vidmar is gone.” The lady in the veil led me away to a long black car with a human driver. Once we were sat inside, she lifted the veil. Rosemary, or Alice. “You know it’s true what the celebrant said.”
“I know. I’ve seen it. The implicitin has been a comfort, but I’m afraid. When it wears off, he’ll be lost to me forever.”
“You can’t take any more, Erica. You’re not compatible. You saw what it did to Lewis.”
“It’s funny how he always finds me. Except…”
“Except?”
“I keep getting these random flashes. Like there’s a version of me that’s looking for him. She’s… I’ve taken something that’s like implicitin, but it’s sporadic, she sees only one world at a time.”
I woke in darkness, my neck stiff from sleeping in the chair. If nothing else, spin had given me a vivid imagination, picking up on things I’d seen and heard. Vidmar, Gordon had mentioned, Rosemary Baker and Harris both figured in the dream. Quantum reality came from the books I’d seen in Rosemary Baker’s flat. Implicitin no doubt was my devious subconscious constructing a name from the Latin implicatus, meaning entangled. Entangled as in quantum theory. I’d been an attentive student in my school days.
I was wondering what had woken me when I heard the noise again. A creaking of the floorboard on the landing. I groped in the darkness to find my bag on the coffee table. Reassuringly heavy with the weight of the Glock in it. I edged towards the living room door opening the bag as I went. Lights of a car on the road outside cast a shadow on the ceiling, the scattered light illuminated the door. It opened, and a shadowy figure stepped in to the room.
The Glock was at his neck in an instant. “Don’t move!” I hissed. The light from outside lit the bony cheeks, black and missing teeth, swollen eye, scab on the split lip,
“What the fuck, Gordon!” I stepped back, slipped the gun back into the bag.
“Ssssh!” he whispered. He glanced at the window. “Vidmar’s coming for you.”
“Who the hell is Vidmar?” The lights outside went out. I leaned over to look: Frank Wilson’s ATV, four people got out, guns in hand.
“Kitchen.” I pointed and followed. The back window opened onto the rain-sodden flat roof of an extension. Gordon climbed out as the door downstairs crashed open. We were down the drainpipe and over the garden fence before the kitchen light came on behind us.
Gordon jogged along the alleyway behind the terrace, keeping to the shadows. He moved with a precision and purpose I would never have expected from him.
In the shadow of a recessed gateway I took out my phone and summoned a car. Any car, just to get the hell out of there. A gunshot ricocheted from the brickwork above my head. Gordon pushed me back against the gate. My bag fell from my hand and the Glock spilled out and skittered to the middle of the alleyway.
Before I could react, Gordon had dived down onto it, picking it up and rolling into the gateway on the opposite side. A volley of shots hit the brickwork, raining fragments down on us.
“When I start shooting,” he said, “run.”
He put his finger to his lips as I opened my mouth to object, then he turned and fired back down the alley. Once. Twice.
I ran, waiting for a bullet to hit me between the shoulder blades. twenty metres to the end of alley, it felt like miles. Two more shots rang out behind me, the Glock. Gordon was keeping them down. Something had changed in him. All I could think of was the pink pill missing from my bathroom cabinet.
I ducked around the corner at the end of the alley and flattened against the wall, gasping for breath. A car approached, slowing, like they do when they’re homing on a waiting client. It stopped at the kerb and the door popped open. I didn’t stop to think about the fact that the interior light hadn’t come on like it should, until I was inside with the door closing behind me.
“So glad you could join us, Ms Fallon.”
The light came on. Frank Wilson, and a gun.
They put a bag over my head, tied my hands behind my back and threw me in the boot of the ATV. After a few minutes slow driving we stopped and I heard the rumbling of the Pitsea street gate sliding back on its rollers. Pitsea street: one of only four openings in the flood wall between the Tower of London and the river Lea. After the gate, the tyres splashed through the dips and hollows in the road that the tide had already filled. Soon after, the floor beneath me tilted back as the car climbed a shallow slope that could only be the road that led up to the Canary Wharf complex, the ground between the old buildings was a raised platform, the roof over the maze of malls and car parks that stretched under and between the buildings. So far only the highest spring tides rose high enough to cover it.
The car stopped at the top of the ramp. I’d expected it to head deeper into Canary Wharf, to be dragged out and taken to some hideout in one of the towers. The boot opened and hands grabbed my arms and pulled me out. The hood was pulled from my head. We were on Westferry Circus overlooking the Thames. Below, at the bottom of the flight of concrete steps the moonlight picked out the water lapping over the riverside path, the edge marked by the line of rusty railings.
“Where is Rosemary Baker?” Frank Wilson’s voice quiet and calm.
“No idea.”
Two of them frogmarched me down the concrete steps into the freezing ankle-deep water. We splashed across to the railings where they zip-tied my wrists to the top rail. Lights moved on the river, a green point followed by rows of white lights: a boat heading upstream on the tide. The low hum of its motor carried across the still water.
Wilson came towards me, his fancy suit tucked into a pair of wellingtons. My feet were beginning to go numb from the cold water swirling over them. It was already creeping higher up my ankles.
“Let’s try again. Where is Rosemary Baker.”
“I don’t know.” I said.
“Why did you meet her in Marek’s café.”
I shrugged. “I was having lunch. She came in and sat down.”
“Why? What did she want.”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
He reached up and grabbed my chin with his hand, squeezing, pushing my head up so I had to look down my nose to see him as he hissed at me: “I will decide what concerns me.” He glanced past me, and his eyes went wide.
He let me go and stepped back. “Elphick will be waiting on the steps when you’re ready to talk.” He turned and half-ran, half-waded towards, the steps.
I heard the noise first, the surging sound of rushing water from my right. The moonlight picked out the white horses of the wave’s crest breaking over the path. The wake of the boat speeding upstream behind us. It lifted me from my feet, soaked me up to the chest and rushed over the path, catching Wilson and flinging him down.
I couldn’t stop myself laughing as he clambered dripping up the steps. He said something to Elphick and walked away into the shadow of an abandoned hotel. My laughter died down as the cold and dark set in. Elphick sat on the steps, watching me.
The water crept higher, to my knees, and I began to shiver uncontrollably. I pulled and twisted my hands trying to break free, but the ties were too tight.
I sagged against my restraints as the water crept up my thighs. “Would you tell him?” a voice said close by, “if you knew?”
I peered into the darkness, the wind drove invisible waves splashing into me, the bright moon was lost behind thick clouds.
Her long dark hair whipped by the wind was silhouetted against the lights on the south bank.
“Colette? How did you get here?”
“Wilson’s got someone in the Met. His thugs came to the safe house.”
“I mean, I didn’t see them bring you.”
“They tied us up together… OK, I see.”
“Spin dreams. I’m delirious. This is a spin dream.” I squeezed my eyes shut.
“They aren’t dreams, Erica.”
I opened my eyes to a moonlit, flat calm, and I was alone.
I passed out for a while, or time passed in a haze, but as the water crept up to my armpits I was ready to panic. The cold had penetrated to my bones but the fear, the adrenaline brought me back to full alertness. The electric whine of an outboard on the river cut out, leaving just the gentle lapping of ripples on the water. High on the concrete steps, Elphick sat engrossed in his phone.
“Elphick!” I tried to shout but it came out as a muffled croak. I wanted to tell him, tell him anything to buy a little time.
“Don’t bother,” said Colette. “Doesn’t matter what you tell them. I spun them a story last night and they left me to drown.”
I turned to face her, and saw only the lights on the south bank.
Again I heard the whine of motors on the river. If a boat passed close enough I could call for help. I twisted to look but there were no navigation lights, just flickering shadows of waves: waves that came closer, rippling over the water. Just in time I realised and took a desperate breath as the water washed over my face. Four, five times the waves came washing over me. Then the water settled again. I lifted my head high as I could and coughed and spluttered.
Elphick was standing now, peering into the darkness of the river.
I started when something brushed against my hand.
“Quiet!” a voice whispered behind me. Cold metal pressed against my forearm, then down between my wrists, and the tie parted.
“Stay here until it starts,” the voice whispered.
“What starts?”
My question was answered by searchlights from above sweeping down over the steps and around Westferry Circus. Stealth helicopters. Shadows moved on the upper level, helmeted and armoured figures moving in from the south, then the night erupted with the sounds of automatic gunfire. This was what Harris had said, they were going in — hard and heavy.
“Now,” my rescuer said, and pushed me towards the steps. I swam as well as my frozen arms and legs would allow. One of the helicopter searchlights found us momentarily as we climbed the steps and I saw his face for the first time.
“Gordon?”
“No time to explain, we have to get into cover.” He grabbed my hand and half-pulled me scrambling up the steps. He dropped down at the top and pulled me down beside him. The gunfire was moving away towards the Canary Wharf complex. He peered over the top step.
“To the left,” he said. “Take cover behind the pillars of the hotel.” He had a gun in his hand. A Glock, I was pretty sure it was my Glock.
“Go.” His hand on my arm encouraged me.
I pulled myself up and ran, keeping low. Forty, fifty metres. At the pillar I turned to see him rise and follow. A searchlight caught him.
“Halt! Drop your weapon.”
A figure in black police tactical assault gear, emerged from the darkness, rifle raised.
Gordon placed the Glock on the ground and kicked it away, then straightened and raised his arms. The gun came to rest a metre from where I hid.
Gordon turned to face the armoured officer. “Detective Inspector Lewis Drake, undercover. Check with Superintendent Donahue.”
The armoured officer took a few steps closer, keeping Gordon covered, speaking softly into the microphone of his headset. I was still paralysed by Gordon’s words. Lewis Drake. The name from my dream, the man with crutches. The man I lived with. The hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, the straggled hair, and beard — all the scars of living on the street, the poisoning of impure spin, had changed him so much I hadn’t recognised him.
In my distracted daze I didn’t notice the door of the old hotel ease open until the gunshot struck the officer full in the face. The second hit Gordon in the chest as he turned.
I threw myself to the ground and picked up the Glock and fired at the shadows by the door, and I kept firing until the magazine was empty.
Harris went to fetch me tea while his colleague, DI Baxter, read back my statement to confirm the details. I recognised her from the dream of the funeral. Maybe I’d met her before, but that was irrelevant. I slumped down in the chair and closed my eyes. I’d tried to keep it simple, leaving out any talk of spin, of other realities, of Rosemary Baker. I didn’t have to pretend too hard to be confused and uncertain of exactly what had happened.
Harris came back in with the tea and I hauled myself upright again.
“I need to clarify a couple of details.” He sat down, elbows on the table between us. “You said Colette Smith was there, tied to the railings near you.”
“It was dark, I thought it was her.”
Harris and Baxter glanced at each other.
“The thing is,” Baxter said. “This mornings tide… Pathology say she’d been in the water about twelve hours. Marks on her wrist suggest she was tied, perhaps to the same railing, the night before.”
Spin dreams, but they weren’t dreams. I knew that now. I reached for my tea. Tepid. Stewed. “Anything else?”
“Rosemary Baker.” He grimaced. “I have to ask you again. Do you have any idea where she is, or how we can get in touch with her.”
I shook my head.
“I thought you might like to know, we got a DNA match from Frank Wilson’s body. He came from Slovenia ten years ago, real name Franc Vidmar.”
“Your homeless friend.” Baxter added. “His name was Gordon Carroll, Superintendent Donahue says he has never heard of a Lewis Drake, and there is no record of that name anywhere.”
“Spin dreams,” Harris said.
Lewis Drake. A name I’d never heard before Gordon uttered it, except in a spin dream. A dream of his funeral. It wasn’t a dream
She was waiting in the alcove at the back of Marek’s café.
“Hello Rosemary,” I said. “Or is it Alice?”
“Neither. I have to become someone else.”
Marek appeared with a tray, Espresso for her, green tea for me. Of course she knew that’s what I drank.
A swab from Gordon’s old clothes in the bin had been enough for the sequencer. It had found the match with Rosemary’s sample from the espresso cup. While it was working I’d studied the map of Enfield again. I knew before the sequencer had finished. I knew before it started; the map, the DNA, they were just confirmation.
“They found you on the corner of Rosemary Avenue and Baker street,” I said. “He was on Gordon Road, with a book by Lewis Carroll, so they called him Gordon Carroll. But in other worlds they found you together on Drake street. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They named you Lewis and Alice Drake. But you know all that. Why couldn’t you find him yourself?”
“Since I found the formula for implicitin I knew too much that was only true in other realities. It’s taking me time to integrate it all. I came to you because he nearly always finds you.”
“Implicitin. That’s the pinks. You were using Frank Wilson, making spin while he provided what you needed for your research.”
“Close. The pinks were a step in the right direction, but like spin, you catch only glimpses of your alternates’ lives. With implicitin, I am one person, living many lives. I see, feel, remember it all.”
That was why she had to disappear. The scale of the Canary Wharf operation was way beyond a simple drugs bust. They knew what she was looking for, knew what she’d found, and they were afraid.
“The pinks were enough for Gordon to see his life as Lewis Drake. I saw a life that I shared with him, but he’d been hurt. Another where he died. What’s the story?”
“There are so many stories, Erica. Every possible past, every possible future.”
“No happy endings.”
“Sometime there are. But it doesn’t matter how hard you try, sometimes it turns out badly.”
Like for Lewis, for Colette.
I took my time with the tea, watched her walk out into a crisp November afternoon. When I left, the sun was still shining. A petite figure with long dark hair sat hunched on my doorstep.
“Colette?”
She looked up. Her eyes were red raw. “Do you still have those pinks?”
“I was going to flush them.”
“Good,” she said.
I offered her a hand up and opened the door. All I could think was that there was another world where she was gone.
Rehabilitated former software developer who now spends his time playing guitar badly and writing science fiction. David lives in West Sussex with his wife, two cats and a varying subset of his four adult children.