Read Online The Long Room by Francesca Kay - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Francesca Kay
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appears above the closing credits of old films?
One of the people Stephen is listening to today runs a taxi firm. It’s his office that is wired and not his cars, although, for all that Stephen knows, there may be tracking devices in them too. The tapes pile up: Saturday evening, Sunday, Monday; the take from Monday night to Tuesday morning arrives in the late afternoon. By then Stephen is dizzy from hours of ringing telephones, radio messages, background chatter. Unfamiliar voices and unfamiliar places: Crossmaglen, Coalisland, Silverstream, Loughgall. How can he make sense of them when he does not know what he is looking for? It’s a labyrinth, or maybe it’s a nightmare party game: a player rings up for a cab, giving his or her current location and desired destination, the controller passes the request to one or more of the drivers on the road, the one who answers fastest wins the job. Round and round the directions go: Lisnadill, Craigavon, Donaghmore, and as they do they get more garbled: calling number three, the controller says, and number three’s reply, through traffic noise, through static, through the fragile wiring of a secret listening device is impossible to hear. As in a bad dream, the player whose task it is to find the hidden key feels a rising sense of panic. These were messages sent yesterday and the day before; current then, in the present tense. Elsewhere, in undisclosed locations, Charlotte, Harriet and Damian will have their ears pressed to voices likewise speaking in the present or the future, whereas for those whom Stephen is struggling to understand, the future then is now the past. And in other unknown places unobtrusive men and women will be loitering in cars, at busstops, at shop windows, in the ditches of country lanes, and all of them on the lookout for something they can only hope that they will recognise if it ever it comes. Stephen is not at all sure that he will. But, if he misses the crucial hint and an ambassador or an MP dies, if a bomb explodes beneath a policeman’s car, a platoon of British soldiers is blown to smithereens of bone, it will be his fault. There will be an inquiry, the tapes that he is scanning now will be re-scanned, his culpable incompetence will be revealed and he, Stephen, Step hen Waddlecock, will have been responsible for the deaths of innocent men.
It’s desperate. But looked at in another way, it’s not. Stephen has been here before, albeit not very often; he has seen other emergencies come and go, in a small way he can claim to have played some part in their success. Or, at any rate, to have been uninvolved so far in any failure. The game goes on – the Chinese whispers, the misunderstandings and the misdirections, the disinformation, the bewildering time lags, the words half-heard, the pauses and the silence – and it seldom comes to a definitive conclusion.
Nor does it today. A few minutes before seven o’clock, by which time the listeners have been working flat out for hours, removing their headphones only to take instructions or when interrupted by operatives or Muriel, a go-between puts his head round the door of the long room to call CUCHULAINN off. A false alarm, he announces, breezily, that’s how it goes, so often. He cannot go into details, obviously, but he can say that the informer seems to have got the wrong end of the stick. Easy to do, of course, blokes can’t be expected to go marching round asking direct questions about bombs. Go-betweens can’t arrange a meeting at the drop of a hat. Thanks most awfully,anyway. You’ve been absolutely brilliant today. Real stars.
The PHOENIX tapes are in Stephen’s in-tray. He saw Muriel deliver them, on her slow, painstaking rounds, distributing her envelopes, stopping to talk to anyone who would take their headphones off for just a minute. Damian is the one she loves the best. Sunday midnight to Monday noon, Monday noon to midnight, Monday midnight to Tuesday morning: it has been a torment to
One of the people Stephen is listening to today runs a taxi firm. It’s his office that is wired and not his cars, although, for all that Stephen knows, there may be tracking devices in them too. The tapes pile up: Saturday evening, Sunday, Monday; the take from Monday night to Tuesday morning arrives in the late afternoon. By then Stephen is dizzy from hours of ringing telephones, radio messages, background chatter. Unfamiliar voices and unfamiliar places: Crossmaglen, Coalisland, Silverstream, Loughgall. How can he make sense of them when he does not know what he is looking for? It’s a labyrinth, or maybe it’s a nightmare party game: a player rings up for a cab, giving his or her current location and desired destination, the controller passes the request to one or more of the drivers on the road, the one who answers fastest wins the job. Round and round the directions go: Lisnadill, Craigavon, Donaghmore, and as they do they get more garbled: calling number three, the controller says, and number three’s reply, through traffic noise, through static, through the fragile wiring of a secret listening device is impossible to hear. As in a bad dream, the player whose task it is to find the hidden key feels a rising sense of panic. These were messages sent yesterday and the day before; current then, in the present tense. Elsewhere, in undisclosed locations, Charlotte, Harriet and Damian will have their ears pressed to voices likewise speaking in the present or the future, whereas for those whom Stephen is struggling to understand, the future then is now the past. And in other unknown places unobtrusive men and women will be loitering in cars, at busstops, at shop windows, in the ditches of country lanes, and all of them on the lookout for something they can only hope that they will recognise if it ever it comes. Stephen is not at all sure that he will. But, if he misses the crucial hint and an ambassador or an MP dies, if a bomb explodes beneath a policeman’s car, a platoon of British soldiers is blown to smithereens of bone, it will be his fault. There will be an inquiry, the tapes that he is scanning now will be re-scanned, his culpable incompetence will be revealed and he, Stephen, Step hen Waddlecock, will have been responsible for the deaths of innocent men.
It’s desperate. But looked at in another way, it’s not. Stephen has been here before, albeit not very often; he has seen other emergencies come and go, in a small way he can claim to have played some part in their success. Or, at any rate, to have been uninvolved so far in any failure. The game goes on – the Chinese whispers, the misunderstandings and the misdirections, the disinformation, the bewildering time lags, the words half-heard, the pauses and the silence – and it seldom comes to a definitive conclusion.
Nor does it today. A few minutes before seven o’clock, by which time the listeners have been working flat out for hours, removing their headphones only to take instructions or when interrupted by operatives or Muriel, a go-between puts his head round the door of the long room to call CUCHULAINN off. A false alarm, he announces, breezily, that’s how it goes, so often. He cannot go into details, obviously, but he can say that the informer seems to have got the wrong end of the stick. Easy to do, of course, blokes can’t be expected to go marching round asking direct questions about bombs. Go-betweens can’t arrange a meeting at the drop of a hat. Thanks most awfully,anyway. You’ve been absolutely brilliant today. Real stars.
The PHOENIX tapes are in Stephen’s in-tray. He saw Muriel deliver them, on her slow, painstaking rounds, distributing her envelopes, stopping to talk to anyone who would take their headphones off for just a minute. Damian is the one she loves the best. Sunday midnight to Monday noon, Monday noon to midnight, Monday midnight to Tuesday morning: it has been a torment to
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