Cold water, p.1
Cold Water, page 1
Also by Dave Hutchinson from Solaris
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man
The Fractured Europe Sequence
Europe in Autumn
Europe at Midnight
Europe in Winter
Europe at Dawn
Tales of the Aftermath
Shelter
First published 2022 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-724-6
Copyright © 2022 Dave Hutchinson
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eBook production
by Oxford eBooks Ltd.
www.oxford-ebooks.com
Contents
THE PALM HOUSE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
COLD WATER
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
BRIGADOON
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
About the Author
The Palm House
One
1
In London, if you checked into a boutique hotel, the chances are that it would have been converted out of some seventeenth century pie shop or something, and its dozen or so rooms would be full of odd angles and sloping ceilings and uneven floors and decorated with bits of bric-a-brac carefully sourced by professional designers from high-end junk shops. The last time she’d stayed in London, Carey’s room had had a stuffed pike in a glass case mounted on the wall, its blank bead of an eye regarding the room as it swam eternally through a small forest of fake pondweed. There had been a little brass plaque attached to the case, informing the world that the fish had been caught by Mr MJ Harper at Winwood Pond in Middlesex on June 7 1882, and it had occurred to her that Winwood Pond had probably been filled in and had a business park or a housing estate built on it decades ago and this rather inexpertly-mounted fish might be the only evidence it had ever been there. There had been no restaurant or room service, and breakfast had been a miserable affair involving a choice between cereal or a poached egg on artisanal white toast.
In Poland, your boutique hotels came with four hundred rooms, two conference suites, a business centre, a Michelin-starred restaurant, and a roof terrace. Carey was booked into a black-faced cube fronted with small palm trees near the edge of Gliwice, where the town began to break up into detached houses and fields and little bits of forest. It was called Hotel Barbara, after—according to the two-page bio printed in the lunch menu—a previous hotel on the site. She wasn’t sure what the point was of demolishing a perfectly good hotel and building another one on the same spot, but she supposed that was how you wound up with two conference suites and a Michelin star.
The hotel sat in a few hectares of grounds a little way off the main road into town from the west, and it was half-empty. Gliwice had its share of little museums and architectural attractions, but it wasn’t really a tourist town; most of the people she’d seen at breakfast this morning had been business people, in ones and twos and threes, wearing Nehru jackets and Armani Revival suits and black Jesse Dunn boardroom couture. Jesse Dunn was everywhere in Europe, as ubiquitous as a uniform or a tee shirt with a particularly dull meme. You saw it in Madrid and in Helsinki and the only real variations Carey had ever noticed was a choice of heels.
Breakfast, though, was pretty good, with options to make guests from all over the Continent feel set up for the day, from minimalist Scandi cheese and sliced meat and crispbread to the full bacon, scrambled egg, sausage, hash browns, black pudding and baked beans experience that had been the signature breakfast of the international business traveller for decades. She’d opted for bacon and scrambled egg and toast and coffee, and sat at a table in a corner of the big airy dining room feeling out of place in her jeans and grey sweatshirt and comfortable walking shoes. There had been no time to buy herself local colouration; she’d arrived the previous evening after a four-day train journey from Barcelona and shopping had not been high on her list of priorities.
In the lobby, the business day was just beginning. Groups of business people stood around, briefcased-up, shaking hands with new arrivals as they emerged from the lifts and heading outside as their taxis arrived. Some others sat on the soft furnishings scattered around, consulting pads and phones. The atmosphere was quiet and relaxed; none of them paid her any attention at all. She went into the shop and bought herself a paper guidebook and a map, considered the knickknacks for sale, which seemed to consist mainly of iterations of Gliwice’s coat of arms—fridge magnets, decorative spoons, bookends—and little models of colliery winding gear blazoned with the names of neighbouring towns. BYTOM, ZABRZE, RUDA ŚLĄSKA. Upper Silesia, of which Gliwice had spent the past couple of decades aggressively marketing itself as the business capital, was still a heavily industrialised area, even if a lot of the old coal mines and steelworks were now rusting quietly away behind high security fencing because nobody could afford to pull them down and decontaminate the land, if decontamination was even possible after hundreds of years of industrial poisoning. There were no knickknacks associated with Katowice, Gliwice’s long-time economic rival. Katowice had the nearest international airport, but Gliwice had better imageers. It was a close-run thing.
She waited for a lull in the to-and-fro of the lobby, then she went to the desk and asked one of the receptionists to order her a cab into town. She wasn’t optimistic about getting one in a hurry—the businessfolk seemed to have co-opted every taxi in a ten-mile radius—but the receptionist told her that if she’d like to step outside and wait, one would be along shortly.
So she went out through the big revolving doors and stood to one side of the entrance, a tall Texan woman well into the latter half of middle age, standing outside an hotel in central Europe smelling coal smoke ever so faintly on the breeze and sensing an answering burst of memory in her hindbrain. Her short brown hair was shot through with grey and there was an amused look to her eyes, though she had quite a temper. She was wearing a long black coat whose hem brushed the backs of her ankles, and slung over her shoulder was a scuffed and worn and much-restitched leather knapsack which, when it was new, had been the most expensive thing she possessed.
A city taxi pulled up, detailed with animated adverts for local shops and theatres. Its driver was a brown-haired young man wearing a leather jerkin so voluminous that it looked like it was made from the hide of an entire cow. He leaned over and looked at her through the open passenger-side window. “Tevs?” he called.
“I beg your pardon?” Carey said in Polish.
“Tevs,” he said again. He consulted the little paperscreen stuck to one corner of the windscreen like a post-it note. “Passenger called Tevs.”
She sighed as she got it. In Polish, w was v. She opened a door and got into the back of the cab. “That’s me,” she said. “And it’s not pronounced like that.”
Hotel Barbara was in a part of town that was almost like a village, but within a couple of minutes they were driving past ranks of apartment blocks that must have been here when the Germans pulled out. They looked like they’d been renovated and cleaned up at some point in the past, but years of Silesian pollution had laid a new layer of soot and grime on them. Interspersed with them were taller Soviet-era blocks, periodically tarted up by replacing their cladding and their windows, little shopping centres that were a dozen small stores built around a dusty paved square, bars, and a big entertainment complex for those who were still Luddite enough to want the cinema experience. The streets were lined with sooty trees in the dappled morning sunlight, and there were lots of people out and about. They all looked relatively prosperous, insofar as it was possible to tell from their clothes, but they were almost all white Central Europeans; even now you didn’t get a lot of diversity in Poland outside Warsaw and some of the larger cities up near the Greater German border.
The driver dropped her outside the botanical gardens, a series of massive tessellated glass ziggurats in a big park near the centre of town. There was a sign outside that said PALMIARNIA MIEJSKA, under a banner advertising an arts festival. She went inside, swiped her phone at the front desk to buy a ticket and download a guide, then queued up with half a dozen or so other people to pass through a double set of doors. As she stepped through the second doors, hot humid air slapped her in the face. All around her towered huge primeval-looking plants. She held her phone to her ear and listened to a woman’s voice reciting a rather rickety translation—the definite article missing more often than not—about the history and layout of the Palmiarnia. It was divided into a series of biomes. This first one was subtropical, all palms and somehow carnal
She moved on, through another set of climate-lock doors, to a temperate biome which was really what she could have seen in any forest in the country. The trees were a lot cleaner and healthier, maybe, but it was a bit dull. There were sparrows everywhere, flitting between the trees, hopping around on the path looking for bugs; she wondered if they were part of the exhibit or if they’d got in from outside somehow, maybe through a broken window, and discovered that the place was the Promised Land.
“Well, this is charming,” a voice beside her said in English.
She turned her head, saw a tall casually dressed man a few years older than her. He had a very faint Scandinavian accent and a face like the business end of a tomahawk. “Hello,” she said.
He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, removed one, and said, “I wonder, could I trouble you for a light?”
“You’re not allowed to smoke in here,” she told him, gesturing at a sign.
He deadpanned her. “You could at least make an effort.”
She sighed. “I don’t smoke,” she said, completing the recognition string. “I gave up on New Year’s Eve.”
“There,” he said, returning the cigarette to the pack and the pack to his pocket. “That wasn’t so painful, was it?”
Carey made a rude noise.
He sighed, ever so faintly. “There’s been something of a situation here,” he told her, and only a Coureur would have examined that statement to detect a capital S. “We’d like you to look into it.”
“I don’t work for you any more,” she told him. “You made that very clear.”
He looked around the biome. “And yet here you are.”
“The message made it sound urgent.”
“Not urgent enough to make you fly here. I’ll have to have a chat with whoever sent the signal, work on the wording.”
She looked at him a moment, then started to walk. He paced along beside her, hands in pockets, completely at ease. “Are you offering me my job back?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, I wouldn’t dream of being so insulting, unless you wanted it back; you seem to be doing very well on your own. No, we’d like to engage you as a consultant. How do your people put it? A visiting fireman.”
“Why me? Is everyone else busy or something?”
“We think you have a certain… perspective which would be useful.”
“I don’t do Central Europe any more,” Carey said. Catalunya, where the crash message had caught up with her, was about as close to Hungary as she ever wanted to be again and still be on mainland Europe. Now she was just over five hundred kilometres from Budapest, as the crow flew, and she was starting to get twitchy.
“That wasn’t our fault.”
“I don’t care whose fault it was.” She paused as a young couple with a baby in a stroller went past them. “I can’t go back to Hungary,” she told him. “I’m blown six ways from Sunday there; they’d lift me the moment they realised I was there. And even if I wasn’t blown, I’m still not going back to Hungary.”
“At the moment, that would seem not to be necessary. And if it ever were to become necessary, we have resources in Budapest and elsewhere.”
She remembered someone telling her that the Coureurs in Hungary were good, but a law unto themselves. She put her foot on that memory.
He looked casually around, a man always aware of the possibility of surveillance, and took something from his pocket. “This is not about Hungary,” he said. “It’s about here.”
She looked down at the photograph he was showing her. In it, a young man and woman were leaning together into the shot, arms around each other’s shoulders. They were laughing. In the background was a wall of bodies, the occasional hand gripping a beer glass. In the foreground was a table almost entirely covered in empty bottles and glasses and plates. The look on the woman’s face broke Carey’s heart. She looked so young and trusting and happy. The man was blond and handsome and she had never quite got over the suspicion that he looked like the Devil.
“What’s he got himself mixed up in now?” she asked.
“We were rather hoping you’d agree to find out for us,” he said. “On the face of it, he mostly seems to have got himself dead.”
He gave her a moment for the news to sink in, but she realised she had always been waiting for this. It had always been in her future, and in a way she had been prepared for it for a very long time. “People like us, we don’t make old bones,” he’d told her once, to which she’d replied, “I don’t know about you, matey-boy, but I plan to.”
“I am,” said her contact.
She glanced at him. “That’s a place, not a name.”
He heaved a sigh. “Yes,” he said wearily.
There was a common agreement that the Baltic peoples were batshit crazy. Part of it was obviously because of decades labouring under German rule or Nazi occupation or Soviet occupation or Russian occupation. That sort of thing would bend the psyche of any nation out of shape, although to be fair one could say much the same about any European nation east of what was now the Polish border. Mostly, though, there was something in the national character. You could poke an Englishman or a Frenchwoman and have a reasonable expectation of how they would react. Do the same to a Lithuanian or an Estonian and it was best to be prepared to run, just in case. Czechs wanted to be Western Europeans but kept being tripped up by a long series of increasingly right-wing governments; Poles were generally quite mad; Hungarians were… well, Carey had certain very strong opinions about the Hungarians; and nobody with any sense messed around in the Balkans because rationality had deserted those countries at least two hundred years ago. But the Baltic states, the old lands of the Hanseatic League, were special. One tiptoed there, if one went there at all.
Maksim had once told her it was the sea itself which drove people crazy. “There’s a demon sleeping on the floor of the Baltic,” he’d said, and she’d been just young enough and just smitten enough to find it cute, “and its dreams drive people mad.”
Well, almost thirty years on and it was her holding his photograph and examining her feelings at the news he was dead, not the other way round. Eventually we all reach an age where the only victory left is outliving our lovers and enemies.
“What happened?” she asked, knowing that even asking the question took her into a territory she was unwilling to visit.
“We don’t know,” said Kaunas.
“How can you not know?”
They had moved on through another set of doors into a desert biome, although it was not like the desert Carey was familiar with. The air was hot and dry and the soil was sandy and scattered with cacti and scrub vegetation and there were small lizards dozing on flat rocks or darting across the path, but it was not nearly dangerous enough. A long-ago boyfriend, an Englishman, had once told her that Texas was as inimical to human life as the surface of Mars. More so; Mars didn’t have rattlesnakes.
“The details are confused,” Kaunas said. “We weren’t even aware that he was here. Then, three weeks ago, we got word that he was dead.”
“Three weeks.”
“It took some time for a decision to be made whether to investigate or to leave well alone. Officially, he was involved in a traffic accident just outside town. Unofficially… well, we just don’t know. There’s a feeling that there was more to it, that the authorities and other actors are hiding something. Does it sound credible that he would have been mixed up with something illegal? I mean, outside his activities as a Coureur.”
Clearly, Kaunas knew next to nothing about Maksim, or he wouldn’t have asked. Certainly he didn’t know about Helsinki. “It would have been in character,” she said carefully. “I haven’t seen him in ten years, though. He might have cleaned up his act.” Although, to be fair, there was more chance of Elvis touring again.
