“That’s awful.”

  “Yup. Not the worst thing the Communists ever did, either.” He got up and started to rummage among a pile of old cardboard folders. “Your Dutch is pretty good; how’s your German?”

  “A bit rusty. It used to be better. Why?”

  Wim pulled a folder from the bottom of the pile; the rest toppled over. He came over to Michael holding it out. “You can have that to read. It’s not the original; I’ve got that in a safe deposit box. And the film’s in another one.”

  Michael opened the folder and took out a couple of hundred pages of photocopies. The top sheet said Der Unbekannte Mann. “You found the script?”

  “At a film memorabilia auction in Deventer, would you believe. I was there looking for something else. You can hang on to that; I’ve got a couple of other copies.”

  Jo came back into the living room. “Is the afternoon matinee over? We should be going before Thijs starts tearing his hair out.”

  Wim looked at her. “Get some burner phones,” he told her. “Then send someone over here with the number of one of them and I’ll call you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t come here again until this is over; if we have to meet I’ll think of somewhere.”

  “Do you think you can help?”

  “I will certainly give it thought.” He turned to Michael and put out his hand. “Good to meet you.”

  Wim’s palm was uneven with callus. “Thank you, and you.”

  Wim walked them to the front door, but as Jo went out to the car he put a hand on Michael’s arm and stopped him. “You should get out of this right now, you know,” he said quietly.

  “I would if I thought there was somewhere I could go,” Michael said. “I’m afraid I don’t know who I can trust at the moment.”

  Wim sucked his teeth. “Remember I told you Thijs and I had a row about some things?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, one of the things was what we should do about the Essence.”

  “That sounds like a fairly fundamental disagreement,” Michael said. “Considering it seems to occupy a large part of your lives.”

  Wim looked sourly at him. “He and the others are completely blissed-out by it. They think it needs to be kept secret so they can spend the rest of their lives studying it. I think we should be warning everybody about it as loudly as we can.”

  “You think it’s that dangerous?”

  “I think it’s worse than that,” Wim told him. “I think it doesn’t even know we’re here. And if it did, it wouldn’t care.”

  Standing on the path, Michael looked up at the crack in the front of the house. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Earthquake.”

  Michael looked at him, but there was no indication that he was joking. “Earthquake,” he said.

  Wim nodded. “We have the dubious fortune to be sitting on quite a large natural gas deposit here.” He stepped outside and stood beside Michael and looked at the house. “So someone started extracting it, and we started to get earthquakes.” He shrugged. “We’re still waiting for the government to sort out compensation.”

  “Good lord.”

  “It’s been quite the scandal over here. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it, though.”

  That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he should have heard of it, if only in passing. It was another black hole in his memory, and he had no way of knowing how many more of them there were.

  Eight

  He thought about what Wim had said all the way back to the house. Jo detoured through a number of little towns on the way and stopped off at a mobile phone shop in each of them, and by the time they got back they had half a dozen burner phones, each one preloaded with fifty euros of credit, the sort of thing you used to plan a drug deal or a murder and then dropped down a mineshaft.

  Thijs was grumpy and didn’t do much more than grunt hello when they got back. Anton had turned up while they were away, and the two of them took themselves into the study at the back of the house and shut the door. For want of anything else to do, Michael made a couple of omelettes and he and Jo ate in the kitchen.

  “Who’s Sofi?” he asked.

  Jo looked at him. “Why?”

  “Wim said this was her house.”

  She nodded, remembering. “Thijs’s wife. She died last year.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? You didn’t know her.”

  He shrugged. “I’m still sorry.”

  She looked at him for a while. “I was only given a sketchy background for you, but it said your wife died too.”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, wondering as he said it if it was, really. It occurred to him that he had been trying very hard, ever since he regained himself at the hospital, not to think about it. “Her name was Christina. She was diagnosed with a brain tumour last year but by then it was already inoperable. So, rounds of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and they didn’t work, and, yes, she died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? You didn’t know her.”

  Jo reached out and punched him on the arm, a little more forcefully than necessary. “And that’s why you had your breakdown.”

  “I’ve always assumed so. I can’t remember. I remember going back to work and trying to carry on in the days after she died, but then everything gets confused. The next thing I remember properly is being in the hospital.”

  “What was it like? The hospital?”

  He shrugged. “It was all right, I suppose. A bit run down, but isn’t everything these days? Everyone was very kind.”

  “I’d never even heard of it before,” she said. “It comes under the local hospital Trust but it’s not part of it. Weird kind of setup. Feels a bit like an NHS version of The Prisoner.”

  “Best not to think too much about it. They got me back on my feet; I suppose that’s the important thing.”

  “And you haven’t had any relapses? Moments of absence? Giddy spells?” He looked at her and she shrugged. “I’m still your social worker, technically.”

  He smiled. “I’ve felt a bit odd a couple of times, but just for a few moments. The medication seems to be working.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I was meaning to talk to you about that. Could you let me have a couple of pills? One of each?”

  “Why?”

  “I know somebody who can test them for me, see what they are. I’d like to get you another supply, just in case; you can’t exactly get a repeat prescription right now and I’d rather not wait till the last minute.”

  Michael laid down his fork. “I’ve got a month’s supply,” he said. “If this isn’t over by then, medication is going to be the least of my problems.”

  “It might not be your only problem, but it won’t be the least of them, I promise you; there might be withdrawal symptoms, you might relapse, anything. It’s just a worst-case scenario, that’s all.”

  He thought about it, then he took the bottles out of his pocket – he didn’t let them out of his sight now – and put one blue pill and one red pill on the table. Jo wrapped them in a clean piece of kitchen paper, made a neat little parcel, and buttoned them in her shirt pocket.

  “Who are you, actually?” he asked. When she raised an eyebrow, he added, “One minute you’re my social worker, the next you’re running all over the Netherlands and you’ve got chemists at your beck and call analysing drugs for you.”

  “He’s not at my beck and call,” she said. “We were at school together.” She finished her omelette and dabbed her lips with another piece of kitchen paper. “Okay. I’m Dutch on my mother’s side, born here, spent my first few years living here. My dad was posted back to his company’s head office in Leicester for a while, then they sent him back here when I was thirteen. Dad died when I was eighteen and I decided to go back to the UK to university, which was probably a mistake but it’s too late to whine about that now. Mum stayed here and I’m not going to tell you where she lives because it’s none of your business.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked primly at him. “Your turn now. Can you tell me what you were doing in Amsterdam?”

  He shook his head. “Official Secrets Act, remember?”

  “You said something about national security, though.”

  “I might have exaggerated a little, but I still can’t tell you. How did you know I was coming?”

  She thought about answering for a moment, then said, “One of the French got in touch with us and said Brossard was going to do something; I guess maybe their conscience got the better of them, although they didn’t give us a lot of warning.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Brossard was on the warpath and he was going to snatch an Englishman in Amsterdam the following day, basically.”

  “And they knew my name?”

  “Oh yeah. Name, the flight you were coming on, the hotel where you were staying. Had a description of you, too. And they had my name. And before you ask, no, I wasn’t planted on you. I’m part of a pool of social workers and we’re assigned clients at random. I’m as pissed off about this as you are.”

  He doubted it was even possible to be as pissed off as he was. “It’s a hell of a coincidence, Jo.”

  “Yes,” she said wearily. “Yes, it is.”

  Anton finally left around six, and shortly afterward Thijs took the car and drove off without telling them where he was going.

  “I’m going to need to build some bridges,” Jo said when they heard the car drive away.

  “You’re going to need to tell him what we’re going to do,” Michael told her.

  “He probably knows already; I wouldn’t put it past Wim to phone him and gloat while we were driving back. I love Wim to death but he can be such a bellend sometimes.”

  “Where do you think he’s gone?”

  “Hospital, to see Anneke.” She glanced at him. “She’s got a brain tumour.”

  He thought of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, huge ticking machines, doctors, nurses, the smell of hospitals. “Ah,” he said.

  “Whatever else this is about, I’m never going to forgive Brossard for putting him through this right now,” she said.

  “Brossard probably doesn’t know.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  Later that evening, someone turned up to take the number of one of the burner phones to Wim. Jo didn’t let them into the house. After that, there was nothing practical to do; everything depended on Wim and whatever resources he could get together.

  Jo went into the living room and watched television. Michael drifted from room to room, looking out of windows, waiting for the sound of black SUVs screeching to a stop outside and large numbers of big men running towards the house.

  He sat drinking a cup of tea while looking at the little pile of mobile phone boxes on one of the worktops. It would only take a couple of minutes to set up one of the burners and text Martine, and then all this would be over. He would probably never find out what it was all about, but was that really such a bad thing? Most people went through their whole lives in ignorance of the hidden machineries of the world, and it didn’t seem to make them particularly unhappy. The majority of them, he thought, would actually rather not know.

  Still, he left the phones in their boxes. If someone in London had alerted the French that he was coming to Amsterdam, making contact would probably be a mistake. He couldn’t think of any circumstances in which they would want him to be kidnapped by a gang of French conspiracists, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. The thought made him feel very alone.

  He took the folder Wim had given to him into the study, made himself comfortable in an armchair under a floor lamp, and took out the photocopy of the film script. Der Unbekannte Mann. The next page had an address in Berlin – he assumed in the East, he didn’t know the city – and the one after that, it seemed to be an insert typed on a different machine, was a list of cast and crew.

  He sat and read down the names. Hannelore Huber as Marthe Braun, Matthias Weber as Josef ‘Joe’ Becker. He thought of Weber, ‘The German Bogart’, his ratty face under that ridiculous fedora. Did people in mid-1960s East Berlin really dress like 1930s American detectives? He wondered how Weber had felt seeing Huber’s name above his on the cast list.

  The next page opened Pankow, 1950. The audience, if there had ever been one, would have been seeing the office of Joe Becker’s detective agency. Weber got almost a page of sub-Chandler voice-over, mostly scene-setting – it was a hot Berlin summer, there was a sense of violence hanging over the city, that kind of thing. Joe had a part-time secretary, Liselotte, whose purpose seemed chiefly to be, by reminding Joe that numerous bills were overdue, to inform the audience that his agency was not a great success, although Joe didn’t seem outwardly bothered. They exchanged tough-guy banter.

  To escape from his financial straits, Joe went to a bar – it was just called bar in the script, and Michael assumed that Lorenz Bohrer, who was listed as director, screenwriter and originator of the story, had intended to come up with a name later – where he had a run-in with two former Volkspolizei colleagues which ended with him being beaten up in an alleyway. It was all rather familiar and clunky. Joe and Liselotte and the two Vopos were stereotypes, the dialogue was excruciating. Michael had a dark thought that if the Essence was responsible for the film crew’s disappearance, it had at least spared East German cinema audiences from seeing the film.

  He wondered how the film would have gone down. Wasn’t American cinema regarded as decadent in the DDR? He couldn’t remember. Would it have made a difference if it was an East German imitation of an American film? 1965 was four years after the Berlin Wall went up, but the film itself was set a decade and a half earlier, when Germany had still only just begun its long march towards postwar reconstruction. Did it even matter?

  He looked up from the page and saw Jo standing in the doorway. “Is it any good?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “No, it’s terrible.”

  “I got a text from Thijs. Anneke’s had a turn for the worse so he’s staying at the hospital tonight. They’re going to give her a scan in the morning.”

  There came a point where scans were less a diagnostic tool and more a way of reassuring the patient and their relatives that the doctors were still trying, against all the odds. “Okay.”

  “If I turn in, can I trust you not to do a runner?”

  He smiled sadly. “Where would I go?”

  She looked at him for a few moments without speaking. “We’ll get this sorted out, Michael.”

  It seemed a rash promise to make, considering, but he said, “Yes, I’m sure we will. How’s Thijs?”

  “Hard to tell, from a text. At least he’s talking to us.” She shrugged. “Okay. There’s some booze in one of the kitchen cupboards, if you fancy a nightcap. See you tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Goodnight, Jo.”

  After she’d gone upstairs, he went into the kitchen and checked the cupboards, eventually finding several half-full bottles of Scotch and gin and vodka, along with one lonely unopened bottle of Pernod. He stood looking at them for a little while, then closed the cupboard and went over to the back door and stood on the step.

  There was no indication from upstairs that, if she had heard him open the door, Jo was going to do anything to stop him walking down the garden and going over the fence, but he stayed where he was, listening to the night and thinking about the footage Wim had shown him, the blind spot outlined by a curved razor-line of light dancing along the beach as it overtook Weber and Huber and came for the rest of the film crew.

  Wim was right; if the Essence could do that, somebody should be warning the world about it. But how did you go about doing so? You couldn’t show the tennis ball to everybody, and if you posted the footage online all you’d get would be hordes of ‘experts’ examining it minutely and trying to outdo each other in coming up with clues to prove it was fake. It could only make things worse. And anyway, how was anybody supposed to defend themselves against it?

  On the other hand, Brossard and Stilwell at least claimed connections with their respective governments. Did that mean the authorities already knew and were taking it seriously? Was there some obscure and obsessively concealed department within SIS charged with combing the world in search of artifacts, fearful of winding up on the wrong side of an Artifact Gap?

  He sighed, suddenly nostalgic for the days when his biggest concern had been getting downstairs to the hospital’s dining room before the breakfast sausages dried out. That felt like a very long time ago, and he experienced a momentary wave of vertigo, a need to shout and break things. He reached out to the doorframe to steady himself, but the feeling had passed before he touched it. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, tried to concentrate on the ground beneath his feet the way Bob had taught him. “It’s probably just mumbo-jumbo, old son,” Bob had said, “but it’ll take your mind off things until you feel better.”

  And he did feel better, after a few moments, but he couldn’t kid himself any more. He might be coping, after a fashion, but he was still some way from being well.

  He woke the next morning with a vague feeling that he’d had a terrible nightmare about hospitals. He shaved and showered and took his pills and went downstairs to make some toast and a cup of tea. He looked out of the windows, but he couldn’t see the car.

  He’d almost finished breakfast when Jo came into the kitchen and made a beeline for the coffeemaker.

  “Any word from Thijs?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “What are we going to do if he doesn’t come back?”

  “No thinking now, Michael,” she told him. “Coffee now. Thinking later.”