Free The Long Room by Francesca Kay

leave those envelopes unopened through the exhausting hours of unremitting work. Rollo Buckingham has also been impatient: Stephen saw him striding into the long room in the morning but Louise saw him too and shooed him off. Attack warnings trump all but Alpha investigations, she will have reminded him. She will not have given him more detail – Rollo is an operative in Department Six, not Department Four; he has no need to know that information. Even in his distracted state, Stephen, watching this exchange from the far end of the room, noted the precise and beautiful cut of Rollo’s suit. He wears his clothes so well. How is it that his jackets fall in a perfect line from shoulder to hem, the waistbands of his trousers neither gape nor pinch and his collars are forever crisp? It was some comfort to see him being dismissed so roundly.
    Stephen breathes out deeply through his mouth. He will help the others to finish off the otiose reports and then he will join Helen. He will tell Louise that these PHOENIX tapes can’t wait a minute longer and it is imperative therefore that he should stay on late.
    But he hasn’t taken Louise’s care for the welfare of her team into account. This has been a very long day, a difficult day, and she wants them to be rewarded. She forbids more work. Shebrushes away Stephen’s earnest protestations; she has squared things with Rollo, she assures him, he is to put all his tapes away until tomorrow. Meanwhile Charlotte and Damian come trailing back, a little wan and deflated. Harriet has sloped off.
    ‘I’m ravenous,’ says Charlotte. ‘And cheesed off. Me and Cecilia were going to meet in the lunch hour to do our Christmas shopping. She’s going away tomorrow. Now I’ll have to do it on my own.’ She does not need to explain Cecilia, they all know she is her flatmate.
    ‘Never mind,’ Louise says soothingly. ‘I’ve got Resources to agree to an extra hour for lunch tomorrow and the overtime. Because it’s nearly Christmas! So you’ll have loads of time, Lottie, to buy even more expensive presents! Now then, it’s late, I’m tired and I can’t face going home and cooking. Anyone want to join me for a cheap and cheerful dinner?’
    ‘Ooh,’ Charlotte says, more happily, ‘that is a great idea. I couldn’t half murder an Indian!’
    ‘Um, well, that would be super but I must just finish off …’ Stephen begins before Louise interrupts him.
    ‘But me no buts, sweetie, I’ve already told you I’ve squared it with your man upstairs. I told him you’d have the whole day to yourself tomorrow. If we leave now, we’ll escape the late list.’
    There’s no escape. Under the circumstances Stephen cannot stay on behind his colleagues. Damian makes his excuses: he has a ticket for Tristan and Isolde and if he dashes will just make it before the curtain rises. Christophine has a family to feed and Solly a wife who will expect him but Greta, Charlotte and Louise, like Stephen, live alone; there will be no one waiting hungrily for their return. Together they lock away the tape-recorders, files and papers, check the cabinets, turn off thelights and leave the long room to walk through thin rain to an Indian restaurant Louise knows near Victoria. Gin is the thing to drink with Indian food, says Greta. She and the other women talk, and Stephen hears them without listening, his thoughts entirely on Helen. Where is she this evening, could she have escaped from PHOENIX , will she remember to eat? Chicken biryani and lamb dhansak; in the rosy glow of the little restaurant grease shines on Charlotte’s lips.

Wednesday
    The morning began badly. After a night of broken sleep and anxious dreams that were hard to tell apart from waking thoughts, Stephen had slept through the screech of his alarm clock and had to rush to get to work. In a dream that seemed to repeat itself with variations on a constant loop like a demonic piece of music, he had been a witness to successive acts of violence and