PROLOGUE

London

October 1945

The man caught a glimpse of his reflection in a shop window as he walked away from Victoria railway station. At first he did not recognise the face, nor the body below it. The shoulders were too narrow for the suit hanging about him like a shroud. ‘Demob suit,' they called it. They had handed him some cash too – he remembered shoving it in a pocket. One of the pockets. He couldn't remember which one. Lingering for another second or two, he thought perhaps a shroud would have been a more appropriate fit. Might have hung a bit better on his body. He had avoided mirrors during the long journey home, not that he was home, not really. He couldn't face home. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. Couldn't face the wanting in the eyes of others, the wanting for him to be himself again, the man they had known so long ago. But that old self had perished, and now he was looking at the reflection of a wraith that turned out to be him. Alive. Against all odds.

Blimey, he was tired. Bone tired. Getting up from the seat, walking 12through the carriage to the door, stepping off the train and then the effort of making his way along the platform to the street – it had demanded too much of his legs, his wounded body. Perambulation had taken it out of him. He had to find somewhere to lie down, to rest his head because his bones couldn't bear the weight of it any more. Heads were heavy old things, sitting there on top of your shoulders. He thought of his mates – they'd laughed, once, when he said they could all save themselves a lot of bother if they just lay down in a grave together like spoons in a cutlery drawer – all big heads and nothing much in the way of a body each, no more than very long spoon handles. Then the laughing hurt their caved-in chests and distended stomachs, so they stopped. He wanted to gentle the pictures in his mind, let the memories settle into the past, banish them, make them go away and the ghosts disappear.

Passing a street of four-storey mansions – grand residences that should have been white, but London's soot, smog and war had rendered them grey and lifeless, though in truth it was a miracle they were still standing – he made his way to the narrow mews flanking the semicircular sweep behind those too-big houses where gentry lived. He remembered the number of the house he was looking for. Number fifteen, a house that, cross fingers, was still empty; mothballed for the duration and not yet opened up. He was sure he could gain entry via the mews. There was a means to do it, a way to get in.

He wasn't sure how he managed – perhaps luck had remained with him, because it was a blimmin' miracle he was alive at all – but soon he was at the top of steps leading down to the kitchen door. The servants' and tradesman's entrance. He remembered coming to the house with his dad when he was a boy, to see his dad's employer. This was the door his dad had knocked on. 13

No one was about today – lucky for him, it was a quiet area. Quiet for London, anyway. Taking a penknife from the pocket of his overcoat, he slipped the smaller of two blades into the lock and jiggled it around. He knew how to work a lock – he had mastered the craft as a nipper, until his dad caught him and gave him a clip round the ear for his trouble, telling him he wasn't having a criminal in his house, and if he found out his boy was carrying on like that again, he would take him to the police station himself. ‘See how being put away suits you, son.' He never fiddled a lock again – until today.

Easy. The door could have done with some oil on the hinges, squealing as he closed it behind him, but who was around to hear? They were all away, safe in the country, settling back into being normal. He wouldn't ever be normal again – he knew that. He'd seen what war could do even when he was a child. He only had to look at his dad.

Back stairs. He knew there were back stairs. There were always back stairs in a gaff like this, for the servants to move silently in and out of rooms in those days before two wars, when the sort of people who lived upstairs had lots of servants. Bloody servants were likely all dead. Hitler bombed the workers first. That's what his mum had told him in a letter. It was a note received a long time ago, before his own terror began. She told him they had bombed the docks and all them back-to-back houses in the East End at the same time. Their old house had gone – lucky his mum and dad moved out of there when they had the chance, when he and his brother were still boys. Moved up in the world, his mum and dad. Out of the East End and into the suburbs.

He staggered up three flights, into a corridor of old servants' quarters. Cast-iron bed frames with the mattresses rolled up and 14blankets stacked with pillows on top. All blue ticking and no covers. It was a wonder the mice hadn't had them, or the moths. Mind you, too cold for moths. He stared at the bedding. Soon sort that out, soon lay my bones down. He rolled out a mattress and pillow, all but fell onto the bed and pulled a blanket across his body. The sleep of the dead beckoned like a soft hand taking his, while a voice whispered in his now half-conscious mind, ‘Rest now. Put your head on the pillow. Sleep, my dear big brother, sleep.'

She had always come to him, his sister. Every day when he buried another mate, another bag of bones to be laid to rest, or not, because he was sure even the dead didn't rest in that place. There was something coming for all of them. If it wasn't a bayonet in the gut, it was malaria. Dysentery. Beriberi. Cholera. But now he could settle. He was away from all that.

‘Tenko! Tenko! Tenko!'

The man opened his eyes wide and screamed as the machete pressed into his back.

‘Hold on, mister. Hold on. You alright?'

He turned and stared at the girl before him as he shimmied away, his back to the wall.

‘Don't be scared, mister. I only poked you with my finger – thought it was time you woke up. You've been spark out for hours and hours. I've brought you a cuppa. Bit weak. We don't have much here.'

‘Who are you?' The man struggled to move again, to even breathe, the weight of blankets almost too much for his frame.

‘Might ask you the same question.' The girl held the cup of tea. ‘You was shivering, so we put more blankets on you. Looked like you were all in.' She reached forward to lift his head, but stopped 15when he flinched. ‘Alright, just try to sit up on your own.' Still the man struggled, so with care, making sure he could see her hand as she moved towards him and slipped it under his head, she put the cup to his lips. ‘Here, get this down you. We've made a fire downstairs, in the kitchen. Blimmin' big house, this, so we're keeping to the kitchen and a couple of other rooms; bedding down there to keep warm when it's really cold.'

The man sipped the weak tea. ‘I asked you once – who are you?'

‘Me and my mates, we found out the place was empty and we moved in – why not? The people what own it don't need it, do they? If they did, they'd be here, living in the house. A lot of the toffs left these big houses and got out of London, you know, when the bombs came. And if the place isn't in use and you can find your way in, there's laws to protect you. Squatter's rights and all that. If you can get through the door or a window what someone's left ajar, you might as well stay. Looks like you thought the same. It's cold in this place though, but not as nippy as some of them barracks the Yanks left behind – homeless people have moved into them too.' She looked at him as if he didn't quite grasp the situation. ‘There's tons of homeless now, everywhere. They reckon there's a couple hundred thousand without a roof over their heads. Not just people like us, but whole families and children, and men and women with nowhere to go, on account of all the houses bombed.'

He sipped more tea. ‘Don't you and your mates have family to take you in? You're a bit young to be dossing down here.'

The girl shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, we sort of had people. Anyway, we were called up and now it's, you know, hard to go back.'

‘You were too young for the services – stop telling me porky pies.'

The girl shook her head. ‘No I'm not, mister. It's not a lie. We 16was all called up, and it was for special work in case of the invasion. Besides, I've told you too much now. I can't talk about it any more. There's four of us, altogether – me, I'm Mary, then there's the others.'

‘All living here?'

She shrugged. ‘And now there's you. Five.'

He took a deep breath and sat up. ‘I can manage.' With shaking hands, he took the cup from the girl and sipped more tea.

‘What's a tenko? You were shouting it out in your sleep.'

The man flinched again. ‘A word I picked up in the army.'

‘Funny word, that. Where did you hear it?'

‘A long way away, love. A very long way away.'

She stared at him. ‘There's something else, mister whatever-your-name-is. We can't let you go now. You've got to stay in this house, because you know we're living here, and you know my name.'

‘Look, Mary, there's going to be plenty of people knowing you're here soon enough, and I'm not one for telling tales.' He drained the cup. ‘Anyway, what've you been up to? You in trouble?'

‘It's not what we've been up to, mister. It's what some people think we've been up to.'

The man shook his head and lay back on the pillow, his eyes closing once again, as if he could fight sleep no longer. The girl caught the cup before it crashed to the floor. As she came to her feet, a boy, about the same age, no more than sixteen years old, opened the door.

‘Do you know who he is?'

She shrugged. ‘He didn't say. Poor old sod looks like death though – I mean, none of us is carrying weight, but let's face it, none of us has seen anyone as thin as him. He's like a bag of bones wrapped in brown paper. He's a soldier though.'

‘Got a wallet on him? Identification card?' 17

‘If he has, it's inside his jacket and it's wrapped tight under that overcoat. You can see he's wearing one of them cheap demob suits they hand out to soldiers when they get out of the army. We'll have to wait until he's slept a bit more, then I'll find out.'

‘Archie's gone out again to get some nosh.'

‘Hope he's careful.'

The boy rolled his eyes. ‘Archie could get in and out of the market and no one would know he's been in there.'

The girl named Mary laughed. ‘And lucky for us them posh people what own this place left a lot of tinned stuff in the pantry.'

‘It was probably the servants' food. The gentry eat well, don't they? But tinned is alright by me. Food is food.'

‘Come on, Jim, let's go back downstairs,' said Mary. ‘And don't forget to turn off them lights again. We don't want the coppers coming.'

‘Never mind looking for us – they could be after him.'

‘Tenko! Tenko! Tenko!'

The boy named Jim jumped backwards. ‘Blimey, what's he screaming now?'

‘He did that when I tried to wake him up. It's something from the army, he said. Not the British army and that's a fact. Come on, let's leave him to it. I reckon he'll have gone to meet his maker by the time we come back in here again, and then we'll have to work out what to do with his body – not that there's much of it to do anything with.'

Another man, not fifteen miles away, worked in the large suburban garden of his new house at the edge of a well-to-do town in the county of Kent. Shrubs had been trimmed for the winter, and rose bushes were covered with cotton gauze to protect their fragile forms from the 18nighttime frosts that would surely come. A new black motor car was parked in what the estate agents had referred to as a ‘driveway.' He suspected the neighbours would think him absurd if they witnessed his vain attempts to break cold, hard earth with a spade time and again. They might wonder why he had not left such a task to the gardener, for surely a man in his position would not soil his very clever hands on a job better suited to a labourer. In the new year he would be taking up the position of senior lecturer in the physics department of University College. He was too young for the role of esteemed professor, but with research credentials that would far outshine a number of his geriatric fellow academics. Yet he had no pride in his stellar curriculum vitae.

This man was digging for absolution. Yes, it was absolution he craved, having decided that backbreaking physical exertion was the antidote to what ailed him. He wanted to exhaust himself, to push every muscle, bone, nerve and fibre in his body to its limit. Physical struggle was the only means by which he might begin to pour oil on the troubled waters of his soul. He had to wear himself to the bone, perhaps halt the torment in his mind and stop himself asking how an opportunity – a very golden opportunity that brought him an enviable status with remuneration to match – had betrayed him. No, it had not been pure ambition or a desire for laurels, though he thought in years to come some might brand it so. Indeed, there were those who were doubtless already coming to such a conclusion, not that they knew what he had done, because his part of the crime – and yes, it was a crime, no two ways about it – had been committed behind very heavy closed doors. He had not done it for the money or the opportunity to cross an ocean and work alongside others just like him, scientists who were the best in their field. In truth, 19it was pure curiosity, the same sense of wonder he had displayed since boyhood, conducting experiments with test tubes and Bunsen burners, pressing forward while asking those very big questions: Why does that added to this make steam? What will happen if I shake the two together? And what will be the outcome when I add more flame, or more sulphur? Will it work as I think it might? He knew even in childhood that an ability to take a simple scientific enquiry then dig and dig and dig until he found the answer would become his lifelong quest – and he would do it time and time again. He often wondered why his calculating mind would spin in expanding and contracting circles until he came to the point where a new truth was revealed. What was it his mother called him, years ago? ‘You're my little "why" boy. Always why this and why that.' She had ruffled his hair, smiling, as if she were reading the title of a children's book. ‘My Little Why Boy.'

The role for which only the finest minds were recruited promised a depth of human enquiry that would push against the laws of the universe, and he could not resist joining the quest to see if it could be done, to answer so many what-ifs and whys. He had stood alongside the most accomplished men – and women – scientists of the same stripe, ‘why' people who wanted to break through the boundaries of exploration, pressing on to find out if they might achieve the impossible. And they had done it. They had taken the tiniest, most minuscule element, an almost invisible measure of energy, a mere speck – and created hell on earth with it. They had blended elements to create a power the planet had never known before, and with it rent a chasm in the soul of mankind. Man. Kind. He shook his head. He was a man with not a bone of kindness in him, perhaps not even a soul – he understood that now. And he knew he would never 20forgive himself for the small part he had played in a very serious game. ‘Why?' had become the dangerous question, rewarding him with nothing but despair.

Each time he looked at his wife – the woman would bear their first child in a matter of months – he understood that he might as well have signed their death warrants. The lid on Pandora's box had been pried open, was hanging on shattered hinges and could never be shut tight again. The devils he had conspired to release would one day slaughter everyone he loved. Of that he had no doubt.

He was thirty-six years of age, born five years before an Austrian archduke named Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in a country most Britons might never have found on a map. Now, in the silence of his English-wintered garden, as he struggled with all that had come to pass through his childhood and this second terrible world war, he remembered a poem written by a man named Wilfred Owen, a soldier of the Great War. The words had come to him time and again over the past several months: Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all?

The man lifted his spade high and bounced it against the cold solid earth as he fell to his knees and wept. His clever, curious mind and limitless imagination had swept him into the future, and it terrified him. No god worth his salt would ever forgive him for what he had done.