‘Are you all right?’ Becky asked.
Jane nodded. ‘Just forgot how much I hate this shop,’ he said.
‘I haven’t seen Aidan for at least a week,’ Plessey said. His voice was as soporific as the things he collected around him; he sounded as if he were just getting rid of something rich in his mouth: fruit cake or port or blue cheese. Wet sibilants. Contentment.
‘Fielding is dead,’ Jane said. ‘Murdered.’
Plessey didn’t reply. He turned from the water he was boiling on a small gas ring and widened his eyes. Jane could imagine what he might have said, camp, theatricaclass="underline" You don’t say.
‘We haven’t got anybody for it. It was something of a surprise.’
‘No telling how we might behave when we’re thrust into the bear pit, hey?’ Plessey said. ‘The centre cannot hold. Falcons and falconers. Mere anarchy and all that.’ He stirred powdered milk into china cups with a silver spoon. The cups rattled briefly in their saucers as he handed them over. ‘I apologise for the absence of a little something to go with this. Fresh out of brandy snaps and macaroons, I’m afraid. No sugar, either. And there probably won’t be any for a thousand years.’
‘Fielding,’ Jane went on, ‘just before he was killed, he was talking to me about a rumour. Something about a raft. A way out, or forward. Something.’
Plessey tapped his spoon three times on the edge of his cup, placed it in the saucer and took a sip. ‘Not half bad,’ he said.
‘I thought maybe you’d heard something.’
Plessey sipped again, then gazed at Jane as if trying to assess him for trust. Jane felt impatience riddling him. He liked Plessey, but there was always the sense of you being part of his audience. Mention of falcons had made Jane twitchy.
‘Come with me,’ Plessey said.
They put down their cups and saucers and followed him through the shop to a hatch in the floor with an iron ring bolted into it. Plessey lifted the hatch and looked into their faces again. Then he disappeared into shadows.
At the bottom of the shaft was a series of rough cases made out of pallets, wine crates and what looked like banister posts, all held together with pins, braces, staples or twine. There was more stock here for the house owner who liked the vintage look. Wooden grooming sets inlaid with nacre. Glass boxes containing silver earrings and pearl necklaces. A corner filled with old transistor radios and their component parts: valves, connectors, wires, knobs. It was to these that he took them now. A workbench was covered in coils of copper wire and small lengths of planed and sanded wood.
‘What’s this?’ Jane asked.
‘None of the valves work, of course. We’re still struggling with electricity. God knows what’s been going on in East Enders. But I’ve been making crystal radios for the last six months.’
‘Why?’
‘Something to do, for one thing. When you find yourself on your own it’s good to keep busy. But also in the hope of making connections.’
‘You mean you’ve been broadcasting?’
‘God, no, dear boy. I don’t have the face for radio. I’ve been searching, looking for signals.’
‘You made a radio that works?’ asked Becky. She wore an expression almost of disgust, as if he had admitted to messing about in a laboratory and creating a lethal plague.
‘After a fashion. It’s very simple. You wind a coil of insulated wire around a cylinder – in this case, a plastic bottle – and strip away a little of the enamel coating from the loops. Solder a diode to the bottom of the wire. Solder one of the wires from a telephone handset to the diode and the other to the wire at the top of the bottle. Then you clip a grip to the antenna, that long piece of wire there, and clip the other end to one of the bare pieces of wire that we exposed. Then you earth the radio and theoretically, depending on which part of the coil you touch with your alligator grips, you should pick up different signals.’
Jane scanned the workbench. ‘And did you? Pick up different signals?’
‘Well… one, at least.’
‘Show us.’
Plessey sat down on a rug-covered office chair and pulled open a drawer on a heavy desk next to the bench. From it he pulled a shoebox. Inside this was something that resembled an abandoned physics project from school.
‘How do you power it?’
‘That’s the beauty of a crystal radio. You don’t need to power it. That said, there’s a big chest with a duffel bag filled with thousands of dry-cell batteries. I spent the best part of a week going through it, sorting the possibles from the ones that have leaked and then testing them all. I found maybe half a dozen that work. But they won’t last for ever. I’ve been very sparing with my midnight vigils.’
There were no lights to indicate that the radio was on. No frequency display. Plessey handed Jane the receiver and he placed it to his head. He touched a clip to the exposed wire and the soft, crackling nonsense sounds of the cosmos played tinnily through the earpiece.
Jane’s breath caught in his throat. A nothing noise, the voice of the void, but it had been so long since he had heard anything like it that he might well have been listening to his mother saying hello across the years. It had beauty and an immensity, despite the lack of rich amplification. He handed the receiver to Becky.
‘I don’t hear anybody,’ Becky said, and thrust the receiver back at him. Jane felt a stab of irritation. The man had made a radio, a working radio, and she wanted the shipping forecast.
‘Patience, my dear,’ Plessey said, and the performer in him was at the fore again. He moved the rod to a point on the coil that had been marked with blue felt pen, and this time Jane heard a distinct difference. The white noise was reduced. There was a rhythmic sound, a weird, percussive sound that Jane couldn’t identify, until Plessey, at his shoulder, said, ‘That… I think that might be hammers.’
Now that he’d said it, Jane couldn’t understand how he could have heard anything but. After about ten minutes, they heard something else. It sounded like a chair being scraped across a wooden floor.
‘Here we go,’ Plessey said. ‘Bang on schedule.’
Jane had to sit down himself when he heard the voice. It was female. It sounded as though she was from Wales. There was a musical undercurrent to her words. He barely registered what she was saying, he was so tied up in the moment of hearing a voice that wasn’t in the immediate vicinity. But she repeated it:
This is Radio Free UK calling all survivors. If you are out there and you can hear this – I know it’s a long shot, but what can you do? – then please do not give in. There is a way out of this. There is safety. You will find us off the south-east coast. Coordinates as follows: 50°, 54′, 37″N, 0°, 58′, 55″E. The raft exists. There is an escape. We are anchored off Dungeness, Kent. We launch in a week. We can take a hundred people. The raft exists.
The sound of footsteps moving off. The sound of the wind across an open doorway.
‘They repeat the message every quarter of an hour,’ Plessey said, switching off the radio. The disappearance of the sound was a wrench for Jane; he jerked towards the unit as if he was about to try to switch it back on. Plessey didn’t notice. ‘Sometimes it’s the girl you’ve just heard. Other times there’s an older woman, sounds like a newsreader – received pronunciation, you know. And there’s also a chap, sounds as though he’s from the West Country. They’ve never said, but I get the impression they’ve already got a fair-sized group down there.’