The Secret Hours

by Mick Herron

The stairs were an out-of-tune orchestra of squeaks and whistles, every tread announcing that Peter or the wolf were on their way, unless you’d practised descending, and knew where to put your feet. So almost noiselessly he reached the sitting room, whose doorway was diagonal to the kitchen, and plucked the poker from its stand by the wood-burning stove. Not a great weapon, for all its iconic status in fiction. You needed high ceilings to accommodate your swing.

‘I’ll be away a while, Doll. A few weeks maybe. Possibly longer.’ ‘And you’re telling me this because?’ ‘So you’ll remember, when you start starving to death, why you’re running out of food.’ ‘I managed all right before you turned up.’ ‘We were twenty years younger then. The Queen Mother was managing all right.’

When the past meets the present the present always wins, but the victories are fleeting, mere technical knockouts. The present wins every battle, but the past always wins the war.

She had the feeling that everything about the man, perhaps everything in the room, had been constructed; could, if necessary, be dispensed with at a moment’s notice, only to have a different man leave the room and walk into a different identity that would itself be complete and singular. But she didn’t know why she thought that. On face value, he was just another man, still south of forty. Brinsley Miles. Not his real name, but the one she would know him by.

East was nearer than she had supposed, but then here, more than anywhere else she’d been, east was a matter of crossing a line. At first, that line was imperceptible, Berlin remaining Berlin – the architecture hadn’t changed, nor had the sky. But it was grimier, she slowly noticed, the buildings having a patina of neglect not apparent in the west. She was reminded of a split-screen detergent commercial, a bed sheet, before and after, and soon other differences appeared. Flags and banners hanging from buildings. A mixture of cultural icons – the Velvet Underground’s banana – political statements – the hammer and sickle, the golden crescent – and those which had become a blend of the two: the bearded, bereted Che.

They were passing a vacant space between buildings, where a man whose boots didn’t match was punishing a stray breeze block with a hammer, its head wrapped in tape which came halfway down the handle. This muffled the noise to a subdued doof! doof!, which might have been the point. More likely, the tape was to keep the head from flying off. ‘He’s making Wall,’ said Otis. ‘It looks like he’s smashing one up.’ ‘Yes, but when he’s broken it into bits, he’ll sell the chunks to tourists.’ His voice became comic: roll up, roll up. ‘Get your genuine bits of Berlin Wall. Pieces of history, buy them here.’

‘I think we need coffee,’ said Otis. ‘A lot of coffee.’ Which they took in the same small park, because sometimes days make patterns, laying your footprints ahead of you like tracks in the snow.

‘What did the cabinet contain?’ ‘Records of things that had happened there. Interrogations, punishments. Dates and times and the personnel involved.’ ‘For beatings?’ ‘It’s a national weakness. We keep records the way you English keep apologising. We don’t even notice we’re doing it half the time.’ ‘Neither do we. Sorry.’

‘Miles can be abrasive,’ he explained, as if this were news. ‘A bit of, what’s the best word? A foul-mouthed pig. He was trying this identity on for a joke once, and the wind changed, so he stayed like that.’

when the Wall came down, the future came rushing into Berlin from all directions at once, causing a God-awful pile-up.

This was how spooks were: Regent’s Park was on Google Maps, and had its own website, but if you worked there you pretended it was invisible.