Tigerman

11. Complications

THE SERGEANT SHOWERED and went into the comms office, found that Kershaw had indeed called, several times. He thought for a while, then lifted the phone and called back.

‘What’s the news, Jed?’ he asked, when the operator connected him. ‘I’ve been hearing helicopters all night.’

‘Your typical batshit insane Mancreu,’ Kershaw snapped. ‘While you were fucking three Bolivian pole-dancers in a hayloft, some jackass hillman went postal on a patrol. Roughed them up pretty good. You okay?’

‘Aside from being roused from my beauty sleep. Big chap, was he, this jackass?’

‘Oh, ha ha.’

‘I was only going to observe, between Bolivians as it were, that we in the British Army give our fellows guns and train them in this thing called combat, and we tend to think of one bloke attacking a full patrol of – what, eight? – as a bit of an error on his part. We tend to expect the patrol to cut such a fucking idiot into thin strips and bring him home to us for close inspection of the parts.’

‘They were a man short.’

‘Oh, well, if it was only seven to one, that explains it.’

‘Yeah, I guess it was a lot like the War of Independence, huh?’

‘Yes, I’ll tell the Queen, she loves your little japes. Here, hang on.’ He yawned loudly. ‘Did you say he roughed them up? As in, with his hands?’

‘Hands and feet. One of them has a heelmark on his ribs.’

I’ll be sure and burn the boots first. The Sergeant let a little more disdain creep into his voice. ‘He was unarmed? Against professional soldiers?’

‘I know, I know.’

‘No, you don’t, Jed. This is one of those moments where you sort of need to be a soldier. It can’t be done.’

‘You did it,’ Kershaw objected.

The Sergeant’s heart nearly fell out of his mouth. He means Shola! Shola’s café. Not tonight! Talk!

‘That was entirely different. Five amateurs, and I got bloody lucky with the custard. Even so, I ought to be dead. It was a bloody stupid thing I did, Jed, and I honestly don’t know why except there was a child present and I thought he was next. This isn’t that. You’re talking about a fully armed, trained patrol. They’re pulling your pisser. One bloke? Nine foot tall with green skin, was he? Warned them not to make him angry?’

Kershaw paused. ‘Yeah, something like that.’

Too close to the truth. Careful. The Sergeant filled the silence with a more plausible slander. ‘Probably got into a fight with one another and it turned nasty.’

‘Lester… I’m a little bit freaking out here. I have a guy in the hospital they’re telling me was force-fed a railroad spike.’

‘Fuck.’ Because it was the only thing to say.

‘Yeah.’ Kershaw sighed. ‘This island… What the hell do you want, anyway?’

‘You called me. I assume you needed my superior military knowledge.’

‘I’m up to my neck in superior military knowledge over here, asshat. Pardon me if I was a little bit worried about the old British washout who lives on his own. Why the fuck didn’t you answer your phone?’

‘Went out to buy dinner. Had a glass of beer. Just woke up.’

‘You were asleep? Asleep but hearing helicopters?’

‘It was a very large glass.’

He let Kershaw bitch at him a little more, fostering the notion of chummy, earthy Lester Ferris, a bit vague and a bit hapless, serving out his time. After a few more exchanges Kershaw transparently wanted to get rid of him, reassured and aggravated in just the right measure, and the Sergeant hung on just long enough to appear a bit needy. Then he went to his bedroom and lay down. His bones hurt. His muscles ached. He realised his ears were ringing. On the other hand: full of win. From SNAFU to Mission Accomplished by dint of having balls of steel. Very nice.

So score one for the world, he told himself. Score one for kitchens and cats and woolly hats and village green cricket and score bugger all and piss off for men in offices and men in caves making war on one another by selling smack to kids in Liverpool or New York, for the sake of things none of the rest of us give a shit about.

At some point, he slept, and was grateful.

The Sergeant woke late and realised he was stuck to the Consul’s linen. His left forearm was bleeding all along to the elbow, sluggish, grazed, and painful. The sheet was solidly glued to his shoulders where he had been burned above the armour, and he had bruises everywhere. His throat was sore as hell.

‘You are an idiot,’ the Witch said unsympathetically.

She stood at the foot of his bed, a leather bag hanging on a strap across her chest. It pressed her shirt against the centreline of her body, emphasising her curves. He realised that the last time he had seen her she had been naked and gasping, and belatedly averted his eyes.

She leaned away from the bag, hauled it onto the foot of the bed, and rummaged. ‘Don’t move. You’re a mess.’

‘As well as an idiot.’

She shrugged. ‘I said, don’t move. If you pull that off it will hurt more. For longer. Tcha!’ This last in disgust, because he had turned to examine his shoulders and the movement had wrenched a wad of fabric away from his flesh. He grunted.

She stomped up the side of the bed and put her hand flat on his chest below his chin. When he did not lean back she pushed him, not with her arm but with her body’s weight, so that if he wanted to remain half-upright he must effectively carry her. His stomach muscles gave up the fight immediately, strain spiking from his pelvis to his ribs.

She nodded approval. ‘No hernia.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘You’re not screaming.’

She removed a pair of scissors from the bag. The Consul’s linen would suffer, but there was an entire room devoted to it upstairs and none of it would last much longer anyway. She began to cut.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Your little friend came and got me. Said you’d come on a grassfire and tried to put it out. Did it not occur to you to call for assistance? I see you also fell on…’ she peered at his back, ‘…a dressed-stone wall. From a height of not less than five feet. Congratulations on not being paralysed. No, please do not tell me why it was important that you take on the inferno by yourself. If you tell me I am reasonably certain I will find that “idiot” does not do you justice. Do not answer me unless I say so. It is unwise to annoy or surprise the person who is cutting around the place where your skin is glued to your sheet.’

The scissor blades snipped. He kept silent, listening to the boy’s lies in his mind, turning them over. They were good.

‘Can you feel that?’ the Witch demanded. ‘You can answer.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it painful?’

‘Itchy.’

‘And here?’

He hissed discomfort.

‘You’re very lucky.’ She daubed. A welcome cold spread along his scapula and down his spine.

After an hour of more or less painful ministrations she pronounced him shipshape, at least to the extent that was possible for an idiot. He thanked her and asked how the clarinet was going and she said it was going well. He went upstairs and brought her the sheet music, a little shyly. She took it with thanks, but regarded him with an uncertain expression. She was sensing a shift in his perception of her, could not entirely place it but knew it was a respectful one and did not inquire as to the reason. Perhaps she assumed someone had informed him of her relations with White Raoul.

‘Light exercise is fine,’ she said. ‘More than that and you’ll split something and bleed. The burns are extremely minor but they will be annoying. Don’t pick at them. Don’t get them dirty. Don’t sunbathe. I’ve left you a salve for the bruising, which you should apply morning and evening. You’re nodding! Don’t nod: listen! I cannot count, even on both hands, the number of injuries you have which could’ve been much worse, so don’t do whatever you did last night ever again or you’ll probably die. That’s a medical recommendation, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘You’re an idiot. Tell me there was at least a puppy in a tree.’

‘Just grass. My fault. Having my annual fag. Cigarette. Dropped it in the wrong place.’

He offered her tea, but she had business elsewhere, so he sat on the low red-brick wall and watched her depart. She had a workmanlike stride which spoke of important things to do. He still found her admirable, but his lust had evaporated. He liked her, and he respected the scrivener – insofar as he knew him at all – and he would not for worlds interfere with what they had, which was something he had heard about but never tasted and which he felt the world ought to respect more than it did. The world respected nothing, and in most cases that was fine because not much was worth respect the way some people believed. But love of the sort that uplifted he regarded with something close to religious fervour. The love of family. The love which builds.

He moved his shoulders cautiously, felt the slickness of her creams between his skin and the bandages.

A little while later he realised that he was not alone.

‘Well done with the car,’ he said. ‘And the story. That was sharp.’

The boy sat down. As always when they were close together, the Sergeant felt conscious of his own bigness.

‘It was okay?’

The Sergeant contemplated last night’s events. ‘Yes. It was good work.’

‘You are not arrested.’

‘No. I think… the longer I am not arrested, the less likely it is that I will be. Or killed. I suppose that’s the other thing.’

The small head came up fiercely. ‘They had better not!’

‘You’ll sort them out for me, Tigerboy?’ Something flickered in the boy’s face. The question was suddenly unfunny. There were plenty of places where someone his age would be quite old enough to do that. The best guerrilla fighters and commandos in many wars were children this age: small, quick, and desperately loyal. And ruthless, with the clarity of childhood. There were warlords not much older.

‘Joking,’ the Sergeant said quietly. ‘In bad taste, I s’pose. Sorry.’

The boy hung his head. ‘I should have known what was in the cave.’

‘No.’

‘Yes! I totally screwed up.’ Pride. If the car was his own good work, then the cave was also his, with what that entailed. No day without night. No glory without responsibility.

‘All right,’ the Sergeant agreed. ‘Yes. We should have done more work up front. We were sloppy and we screwed up. You and me both. But we didn’t die and, fingers crossed, we got away with it. We just have to be smart. It’s like…’ He cast around. ‘It’s like after a bank robbery in the movies. They always get away clean and then someone buys a new car when they shouldn’t.’

‘Yes. That is dumb.’

‘It is. So we go through it. Tell me what you saw last night.’

The boy shrugged. ‘You went into the cave. A few minutes later there was a huge bang, and smoke. I vamoose! Watch from a little way. You – Tigerman – come out. Look strange and scary. (Great mask!) They follow you, very angry. You run. I take the car and dump it where you will find it. Then I re-moose. I go home, erase the video footage.’ Oh, yes. The boy’s video. ‘Which is a shame, because it is the shizzle. Simpson Bruckheimer himself has no shizzle like this shizzle.’

‘Erase how?’

‘Tell the computer to write stuff over – random numbers again and again. Takes a long time. Better-than-DoD-standard.’ This last had the feel of a direct quote from the manual. ‘I was careful all the time. I looked up high for the eyes in the sky! But there was cloud, like this way then that, all the time. I think they can see one minute in every five.’

Let us devoutly hope.

The Sergeant nodded and fell silent. He did not know how to ask his next question, but he did not have the option to put it aside. It had become his habit when talking to the boy. He avoided the things which might cause friction between them, treating their friendship like something very fragile because precious things were, to his mind, always so. But not this one, not today.

‘How did you find out about the cave?’

The boy looked away. ‘It is known.’

‘By who?’

‘Many people. It is not a secret. And in the past it has absolutely been a clubhouse.’

‘Have you been there?’

‘I? No.’

‘Who, then?’

‘Some people.’

‘What people?’

‘Some people that I know.’

They glared at one another. Finally the Sergeant said: ‘Have you spoken to any of these people recently? About the cave?’

‘You wish to know if someone lied?’

‘No.’ Although now that you say it I’m worried about it. Who? And why?

The boy scowled for a moment, and then he brightened. ‘You worry that this person will give us away!’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘She would not.’ With absolute certainty.

She, the Sergeant heard. Not anonymous people any more. One person. A woman who would never, ever give him away. Someone who for whatever reason would not, could not change her allegiances. Someone bound to him to the point of destruction. Squadmate, family, lover, debtor.

Family.

He nodded acceptance, and made sure it was respectful. They had clashed, and they were still friends. It was only polite to acknowledge it.

The boy saw that his debrief was over. He nodded in return.

‘I am going to the lake,’ he said carelessly.

‘Have fun.’

‘There will be good water.’

‘I’m not allowed to swim. The Witch said.’

The boy nodded acceptance of this overriding command.

‘But,’ the Sergeant added, ‘I might eat later. Maybe at the café. Kswah swah.’

Laughter. ‘Kswah swah.’ Then: ‘Will you burn the suit?’

The Sergeant nodded. ‘I should.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

The boy seemed to concede this, then shook his head. ‘But you may need it. To prove that you are helping. And if you find it then your DNA can be on it when they test. It is natural. Your fingerprints, the same.’

The Sergeant recognised this as special pleading, and he mistrusted how much he wanted to agree. He did not relish the idea of destroying the suit – it was something they had done together – but it was evidence that could hang him. But then again, yes: what the boy said was true. He might need, down the line, to produce some sort of coup to demonstrate his commitment to good order on Mancreu and to the search for the terrorist in the funny outfit. Assuming such a search ever took place.

‘There is a burn bag,’ he said at last. The boy blinked at him owlishly. He never said, ‘I do not know what that means.’ He just waited until you said it another way. ‘A metal container for the storage of sensitive documents. It is a diplomatic bag, but it has a small bomb inside it. If the wrong combination is used, the contents of the bag are destroyed.’

The boy nodded. ‘The suit goes in the bag.’

‘And then at least only London can find it.’

‘And you are London. In all Mancreu, only you are London.’

True. He would keep the suit, for now. If things got hot, he could always destroy it later. He tried not to feel glad at this decision. It was perfectly rational.

He waited until the boy had gone before he moved the suit. He wasn’t sure why; it wasn’t as if they would somehow be overcome by it and rush out again to foil a bank robbery, but he could not shake the feeling that it was a temptation, somehow, that he should not extend. When he picked the pieces up in his hands, he felt like a man engaged in an illicit affair with someone else’s wife.

He put the whole suit in the burn bag and put the burn bag in the armoury. As soon as he closed the door he remembered the photograph of Shola he had found in the cave. Theoretically there might be fingerprints on it. He might even be able to lift them with talc. Tomorrow. It would have to be tomorrow. He was exhausted, which was natural, and he was aching. A nap would be ideal.

He took ibuprofen, drank Coca-Cola from the cellar, and kept moving. Movement would help, and he needed to be seen. By now, whatever NatProMan was doing about last night was in motion. If the whole thing had been identified as weird bullshit from a crew of fish-thieving East European wideboys then the business would be shelved. If not, investigators would be on the way. He owed London a report, so he went into the house and fired off an advisory: NatProMan pissed off about something, no military threat apparent, no details yet available at this end. He made it somewhat less informal, but the sense was that knickers were in a twist for no discernible reason and there was nothing to see here. He’d have to revise that later, but for now it was nicely in character.

He glanced at himself in the mirror. In character. When had he started thinking of Lester Ferris as a role to inhabit? He had known, in Iraq, a young man who had realised belatedly that the army life was not for him. The kid had been from some shithole, signed up half-drunk and was now seeing real bullets and bombs and wishing he hadn’t. So he pretended to be mad.

It was simple enough. He went on patrol in a Mickey Mouse hat he’d got from somewhere, and he carried his gun like a swagger stick. He’d never seen M*A*S*H, so he didn’t realise he was travelling a well-worn path. And after each patrol he’d push it a bit further until they had to take notice. They’d put him in a secure hospital cell indefinitely, and he’d carried on the game for weeks and months and faked a suicide attempt and bitten an orderly and finally he’d broken down and explained that he was faking it, he just wanted so very much to go home. And the doctors told him: ‘It’s okay. You’re going home, and no one’s going to punish you.’ But he deserved to be punished, he said. He’d faked it. ‘Yeah,’ the doctors said. ‘We always knew you thought you were faking it. But that’s the thing: you never were. It was real, and now you’re better.’ Which was about the most disturbing fucking idea the Sergeant had ever heard, until he came here and it was just life, and then he had the really disturbing idea that everyone in the world was carrying on this way all the time.

Mancreu turned everyone into a psychologist. And a lunatic, as well.

Well, that sort of thing got worse the more you thought about it. So he made a list of all the things he ought to do, would normally do. Pretend last night never happened: what would today ordinarily be about?

Well, yes: he would investigate the business of the dog, and he would give due consideration to how Mancreu’s new motoring enthusiasts could best be brought to consider their actions in a responsible and adult light. Somewhere in the back of his mind, sharp teeth flashed and something growled: like the light of burning quad bikes. He pushed the thought away. It was not exactly un-sergeantly, but it tasted of the mask and of those soldiers who couldn’t ever put the battlefield away. He thought of his war on tomatoes, and shook his head.

Second – always hidden, always present – came the matter of the boy’s parentage. Inoue’s work said the end was coming, and that meant he could no longer afford to dawdle, which, as he looked at himself in this exhausted clarity, was what he had been doing for months. On the other hand, Inoue had also given him a lead. And so had the boy: the unnamed woman who knew about the cave. To an average copper in an average situation that would surely scream ‘tart’, but here and now, not so much. The Protectorate forces were like American GIs during the Second World War: they had food and access, and they were exciting. When they had first arrived, both the men and the women of NatProMan had been the subject of intense local interest. So the boy’s family member – he did not say ‘mother’, did not prejudge, because it could be a sister or an aunt or even a grandmother – was probably lively, attractive, and might be single. She was still here. She might be a familiar face. Between the records at the Chapelle Sainte Roseline and that, he could narrow it down to a manageable number. Even if some of his working assumptions were wrong, it might work. He was not too proud to accept a bit of luck.

And not unrelatedly there was Shola, and that almost made everything else make sense. Five days. Five days ago we were laughing. Of course there was a dead dog on the bonnet of his vehicle. Of course there was a gang who wanted his attention, and a Ukrainian unit smuggling industrial quantities of drugs. Why not, if Shola could be slaughtered in his own house by men who would not say why? If there was still a distance being preserved between himself and the boy, then Shola was part of the bridge. Perhaps it was a fair enough price of admission, at that: If you cannot answer this, how can you protect me? If you will not answer this, how can I trust you? The boy would never put it that way, perhaps would never even think it, and yet it was written in him, in how he spoke. You didn’t judge that sort of thing and you didn’t choose it. Those calculations took place in the engine room of a person, grimy and irreducible. Something more is needed.

It was needed in any case: here he was, Shola’s friend, who had put on a fancy-dress outfit to avenge some torn comic books and an adolescent’s pride, who had blown up some big drug smuggler’s hoard on a whim, but somehow couldn’t do much for a murder he himself had witnessed, whose perpetrators he had in custody to question at his pleasure. He had learned a new phrase in his comic book studies: Bizarro World. It was the place where everything was wrong. He found himself wondering how you’d know for sure you were there.

Well, that was sergeanting, for sure. Something more was always needed, and your job was to get up and deliver it. Advance to meet the enemy.

He drew breath. Fair enough. He had a real direction of his own, something which came from who he was rather than the masquerade of last night. That was NatProMan business, after all, and he didn’t get involved in that.

For the rest he could talk to Dirac and get some perspective. Dirac was crazy, but his craziness was the right sort, the sort which let him keep being Dirac even when the world didn’t want him to. That was where to start.

He went to see the Frenchman and laid it out, and Dirac listened. They were sitting on the balcony of the townhouse where he lived, which was a proper wrought-iron thing more suited to a lovestruck Juliet than a brace of hoary soldiers. There was a pot of Turkish coffee on the table, mellow and sweet. Dirac wore a bathing suit and a towelling bathrobe, and when he moved there was always a possibility that his genitals would peep out of the suit next to his thigh. The Sergeant chose on the whole to avoid these occasional appearances and had therefore positioned himself a little way back from the cheap marble-topped coffee table and directly across it. The round white stone concealed Dirac’s body from navel to knee, which still meant that the bulk of his broad chest, with its profane, nautical and religious tattoos, was visible when the robe gaped. There were flowers all around the balcony in lead planters. It seemed surprising that Dirac should be a good gardener.

He knew how to listen, though, with the attentiveness of a man who has listened to briefings in order to stay alive. He listened now to everything the Sergeant knew about Shola’s death, and about the dog gang and whether they might be related, and even about Pechorin’s fish, because in the story of Lester Ferris the harmless washout that was still an open case. There was no mention of the boy because that was something else, and not within Dirac’s particular competences.

When it was done, Dirac sighed.

‘Okay, Lester, you got two problems.’

‘Two?’

‘Yeah. Your third one is taking care of itself. The Ukrainian asshole is in hospital. Someone beat the crap out of him last night.’

‘That was him? The patrol and all the helicopters?’

‘Bien sûr. Pechorin is very unhappy, he is deep in shit for reasons I do not want to know, he has cosmetic surgery on his nose. That will do?’

The Sergeant nodded. And then some.

‘So then there is the gang and Shola. The dog, that’s sick. Okay? That is fucking sick. But it’s kids, it’s idiots. Okay? Professionals, they would kill you, and they would do it between the Xeno Station and Beauville, where there is no help and you would disappear for ever. Right?’

‘I’d do it that way.’

‘Me too. Also it’s what those Pathan bastards would do, and they are the fucking world leaders in making you wish you were somewhere else. They come from a part of the world with death in the fucking title, you know that? The Hindu Kush?’

‘Yes.’

‘And so we are professionals and they are artists and we agree that this dog thing is amateur. It’s someone who watches too much Tarantino, although I hear Tarantino likes Balzac so maybe he’s not so bad. But okay: you will find those guys if you look for them. The issue is supply. You get what I’m saying? And it is in both your problems.’

‘The guns and the bikes.’

‘Yes. There is a supply of new shit. Overseas shit. Where is it coming from? Who on Mancreu has any money to import shit? Us. Us, and maybe a criminal who deals with us.’

‘Bad Jack.’

‘No. I don’t think so. I think there’s no Jack.’ He scowled. ‘Mauvais Jacques. And the new Mancreu Demon, too. It’s bullshit. This island is going crazy. You know what I saw the other day? I saw a boat come from the Fleet and land on the shore. With people in it, and they got off. They had a fucking picnic on the beach.’

The Sergeant stared at him. ‘Fleet people?’

‘Fleet people, fucking casual. Like tourists. They came onto the island for a cheese and wine party. I choose to believe I was drunk and misunderstood.’ Because if he had not been drunk, he would technically have witnessed a breaching of Mancreu’s tangled covenant. The shore was a barrier between the world which was denied and the world which could never be acknowledged. The Fleet did not touch the shore. Not ever. It was how the boy made his money, by running errands and trading luxuries between land and sea. Dirac belched. ‘It’s all coming apart. So fine, the world’s coming to an end, okay? But Bad Jack? No. Who says so?’

The Sergeant had decided he would lie about that. The boy did not belong in this discussion, not even with Dirac. ‘One of the killers. “Shola worked for Bad Jack.” Like that was the end of that.’

‘Then go back and ask him more. Offer him a deal.’

‘I did.’

‘What terms?’

‘Just a deal.’

‘You have to be specific. If you are not specific it’s just a noise you make because you want something. It’s only tempting when you lay it out, point by point. I will give you this, this, this and this, but you must give me this. It is a price comparison, like shopping. And you encourage that he haggle. Once he haggles, he has accepted the principle: he will cut a deal.’

Dirac said this with the surprising certainty of one who knows, and the Sergeant found that he had raised his eyebrows at the Frenchman in what could only be a ‘how the hell do you know?’ expression. Dirac rubbed his eyes with his fingers and blew air through his cheeks. ‘After the Africa thing, they sent this Italian, you remember? I thought, “Great, he will laugh and talk about racing cars and girls and we will get drunk.” But the guy was like a laser. He’s inside the door and he’s asking me when I decided, who did I talk to, like he already knows everything. He’s asking exactly the right questions, the ones you either tell the truth or you tell a big lie, one they can check. And he has a deal. All the stuff they were worried about – that I took money, that I planned to do this, that I’m a partisan, pahpahpah: it wasn’t true. But this deal he is offering, it’s good enough that I seriously have to think about taking it and I’m not even guilty. Okay? My commander already offered me a deal, like you did: some deal, whatever, we work out the details between us. You say yes to that, you basically admit everything already. But with this guy… nom de Dieu. Him I want to say yes to. The way he puts it on the table, I want to say yes.’

‘And did you?’

A shrug. ‘They took it off the table again when they realised I hadn’t done anything. Threw me to the military system, but I’m such a hero by then I get medals and lunch with the President, whatever. I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I was just angry. But you see? You have to have a deal. You can’t get him to do it, he will make up a deal he can turn down or one you cannot offer. Tell him, “For this, you get that.” You find out about where the guns come from, he gets a room with a bathtub and a view, better food, whatever. He’s not smart, Lester, or he wouldn’t be a low-rent killer on an island the Americans are going to incinerate. That’s not a growth sector.’

Let us hope.

They finished the coffee, arguing lightly about whether the Foreign Legion, the Royal Green Jackets, or the Rhodesian Light Infantry-as-was were the toughest bastards in the game. Somewhere in the house a phone rang, with an actual bell. Dirac ignored it, and the caller gave up. A moment later he or she tried again, and then again, and finally Dirac growled that something must actually be happening and stamped away. ‘There’s cognac,’ he said, pointing. ‘It’s fucking awful, but when you’ve said that it’s not that bad.’

Cognac on top of pain pills, caffeine, burn salves and unknown topical analgesics did not seem like a brilliant idea, so the Sergeant poured one for Dirac and splashed some water into his own glass, then took the lid off a small bottle of vodka and laid it on the table where the Frenchman would see it. In the event, Dirac didn’t see it, because he didn’t come out again.

‘Lester,’ he called from inside the house, ‘I am completely wrong. Please bring the cognac and come and watch television.’

The Sergeant ducked through a low door and found himself in the sitting room. The television was a new one on a spindly glass table. Dirac had turned a chair around by the small dining table and was sitting astride it like Christine Keeler. The remote was in his hand, dangling down so slackly that for a moment the Sergeant thought he might have had a stroke, and the cry had been some garbled plea for help. The Frenchman was staring at the screen, and he had the sound off, either because he couldn’t stand the commentary or because he simply hadn’t thought to turn it on yet. With a feeling of extreme fatigue, the Sergeant turned to look.

Someone else, evidently, had had a camera at the cave. And not just one – they must have been everywhere. It didn’t really look as if it mattered very much that the boy had deleted his YouTube-ready revenge footage, because this was better, so much better, and it was already on just about every channel in the world. ‘Anonymous footage’, the caption said, ‘sent to our offices in Sana’a.’ There was a parenthesis afterwards, to let you know that was in Yemen.

The first shot showed Tigerman as a shadowed figure picking his way like a heron between the trucks. Then he went inside and the picture switched over to grainy reddish-brown, some kind of enhanced view. The figure stood eerily still; a fleshy darkness wrapped him and he was gone.

Inside the cave, the Ukrainians didn’t yet know he was there. Then the head appeared, ghastly arachnoid fur and parasite mouth, apparently out of thin air. They fired, and a moment later Tigerman slithered into the room. The screen went white and he was gone again, only to reappear a moment later in the air as the cave exploded in flames, and then vanish again into the supernatural dark of the tunnel. You couldn’t see how it was possible, only that he did it, and he seemed almost disinterested, as if the whole thing was somehow a side issue.

He was replaced by a breathy anchorman with perfect teeth.

Dirac thumbed the remote and rewound the clip, sucking air between his teeth. They watched the whole thing again.

‘He’s good,’ Dirac muttered. ‘I mean, he’s a fucking lunatic, but we knew that from the hat, right? But that there,’ he paused the playback, ‘that could be free running or it could be Systema, that shit they teach Spetsnaz.’

‘Russians and Ukrainians,’ the Sergeant said, almost automatically.

‘For sure,’ Dirac muttered, ‘because those assholes do not live without complicating things. Connerie de merde! He blew them up and stamped on them. That is some shit.’

Yes, the Sergeant thought, it’s a Shit Creek tsunami, is what it is. Paddles are no longer the issue. But what worried him was what would come after the initial high tide. Inevitably, on the heels of the outcry, there would be a proper investigation conducted by someone who knew how to do the job.

It occurred to him to run; to go and pack and just disappear. There was nothing to stop him. There would be wars to fight in, some of them pretty close by, and no questions asked. He might even get rich. Otherwise, he could turn himself in, just walk into Kershaw’s office and explain everything, or throw himself on London’s mercy and await instructions. They’d ship him out immediately and patch things up. He wasn’t sure what would happen after that.

But he’d lose the boy, for ever. It did not seem likely that an adoption committee would look kindly on his desire to formalise a criminal partnership which had caused what would almost certainly be an international incident.

He could also stay here and stick to his programme. He could carry on being Lester Ferris. Chase petty villainies and – at the right moment – drop in on Kershaw and be absolutely amazed at what all had been going on. ‘Jesus, Jed, I thought you said it was a storm in a teacup! But that looks almost professional. And what the fuck is all that in the bundles? Is that heroin?’ He wondered if anyone would follow the other end of the thing, the drugs end. They must, surely, even if only as a show of willingness. At least some of the focus must head away from him, onto Pechorin and the others. Then again, Dirac had mentioned Spetsnaz. Would others make the same assumption? That would send them off down more blind alleys for a good long time. He could nudge them. A friendly word at the right time. It was plausible. And there was the distant possibility, if he were caught, that his silence would be purchased on the topic of the drugs with leniency.

So far, at least, he had not been caught. There was no hue and cry for Lester Ferris. Dirac had not been asked ‘Have you seen him?’ And there was a good chance he would not be. He was not about to repeat his outing as Tigerman, and if he returned to the scene of the crime he would do so legitimately, as an adviser. Meanwhile they must make do with evidence from the night before, evidence which was even now fading into the landscape or had been burned in the cave, the video footage notwithstanding. If he could hold the line, there was a solid chance he would walk away. He had beaten far worse odds and seen off far more unpleasant consequences. In those cases he had been fighting for his country.

There were problems with that: if he had left DNA traces and they found them; if the video footage included an image of him in the car before he put on his mask; if the satellites had been looking that way and the cloud cover had not been enough; if the footage was enough to use some sort of biometric recognition; if Pechorin had somehow recognised him. In any of these cases, he would be shat upon from a great height. Dismissal, disavowal, prison, even a quiet vanishing. Retribution in kind from the Ukrainians, up to and including murder, because this was Mancreu and something like that could happen easily enough.

All this, as he stood in Dirac’s sitting room and watched himself, over and over again.

The question was whether what he stood to gain here was worth the risk. And that was no question at all.