Tigerman

12. Inquiries

THE SERGEANT HAD been going to the Chapelle Sainte Roseline before he saw Tigerman on the news, and there was no reason to change his plans. In fact, there was every reason to stick to them. He mentioned his destination in passing as he bade farewell to Dirac, so that anyone who asked would know Lester Ferris was off on one of his daft detective projects, but the Frenchman was muttering, ‘Parkour? Silat? Ba Gua? Or, how is it called, that Indian stuff?’ and looking things up on what was apparently an achingly slow Internet connection, and might not entirely have heard. That was fine, too. Dirac would remember being told, would know it had been somewhere ridiculous and unrelated.

The Sergeant drove gratefully, letting the shock of the video footage wash away and taking solace in his decision to stick it out. Part of him yammered questions to which he had no answers, but the mountainsides were empty and endless, and the air was surprisingly cold. Whose footage was it? Why had they released it and was there more? Was he the target, or was Pechorin? Or NatProMan? Or the drug lords, assuming these were different people?

Away on the opposite mountainside was a figure, a shepherd or a hunter. Instinct told him it was a woman; something in the movement was female. She seemed at this distance quite unconcerned. Good for you, he thought. Live your way. Live and wander and do whatever you like. He inhaled, tasted pine, woodsmoke and rain, and when he looked again she was gone, she’d ducked into the trees. There was a limit, he had always found, to the number of times you could chase the same worries round your head. If you let them run, they wore themselves out, and then you could make your choices in the quiet. It helped to be a thousand feet higher than everything you were frightened of, alone in a landscape older than empires.

When the road dipped again, he regretfully turned the air conditioner back on, feeling mild claustrophobia.

Sainte Roseline was a proud stone building held in the crook of a small river. The waters rolled and gurgled from the foot of the mountain to the western shore without ever joining the hasty torrent beneath the Iron Bridge, content to take their time. The same patience hung over the old chapel itself, as if time within the cemetery gates was honeyed and heavy. Bees buzzed and flowers grew up tall around cracked old headstones. The graves here were not tended in the formal sense; the Mancreu people who interred their dead here saw no shame in life springing up from the site of burial. They did not mistake the corpse for the person. But the pathways were well trodden and small gifts rested on some of the stones: miniatures of whisky, sweets, and cigarettes. Somewhere there was a groundsman whose job was to wait a respectable time, then come along and see that these bounties were consumed or taken away, lest their continued presence serve as a reminder of decay.

The Sergeant parked the Land Rover at a respectable distance and walked along the path to the chapel doors, then let himself in.

The interior was dark and golden, beams and a peaked ceiling following the line of the roof. High windows streamed sunlight down towards the altar and the small pulpit. There was a font made of stone close by the entrance so that the mountain folk could anoint themselves as they entered and – so long as they were modest about it – take home a little blessed water for better protection of their homes from whatever kobolds might beset them. Over the altar there was a painting on board of Sainte Roseline being assumed into Heaven. She was petite and pretty, and her face was full of a childlike joy. Looking closer, he realised with a jolt that she was flanked by tigers. The nearer one scowled at him out of the image, and he felt the imprint of its silhouette across his chest, remembered the scent of musk and fur. White Raoul’s work, he would swear. He wondered what it had replaced, and why. Had the old piece been stolen? Or shipped out to save it from the coming fire? And, more importantly, when? He had heard nothing, but then he might not. This was a private place. He scented paint, and reached out hesitantly to touch the board.

There was a sound behind him: a polite scraping of feet. He turned.

The woman in front of him was short and spare to the point of scrawny. The bones in her hips poked at her grey wool gown, and her face was covered in an orthodox veil. A nun of some sort. She prostrated herself, full length, and kissed the stone at the foot of the altar, then rose and met his gaze. She did not speak. He realised that she did not need to. Her presence here was inevitable, while his was surprising. Logic told her he must be seeking something, be it absolution or something more tangible, and he would explain himself.

He cleared his throat, feeling large and intrusive. ‘My name’s Ferris. I’m the British… well, I’m everything, actually.’ She nodded. Of course, she knew that. His uniform with its flag would tell her what he was, and she could not but know, even here, that there was only one of him. ‘I’m looking for – we’d call them the parish records.’ Her inquiring expression did not fade. ‘Births. Christenings. Deaths. In a ledger. Like a big book. Exactly like, I mean. It is a book. But they call it a ledger, I don’t know why, never thought about it.’ He blathered, and she listened politely. When he ran dry, she nodded, and gestured to a table against the back wall. He saw Bibles. ‘Not, um, religious ones. Not the Book of Kings, or what have you.’ He was relatively sure that was the one where everyone begat everyone else. ‘For local people.’

She nodded again, and then patiently plucked at his hand and drew him over to the table. Her fingers were long and dry, the nails plain and carefully cut. He caught an embarrassing mouthful of her scent, her hair warm beneath the hood of her office. Even nuns were also women, and women sweated just as men did. She had a reassuring odour, like a warm dog or an old vicarage cushion, but beneath it was a whisper of startling femininity that he tried not to notice.

At the table she took the top Bible and opened it. Blue-black leather covers clopped gently against the wood, and the paper rustled. Bible stock, they called it, thin as ricepaper but strong. She turned to the last pages and tapped again, and he realised she had understood him perfectly. Old Bibles had a section at the rear for the keeping of family records. The family Bible wasn’t just a book of God’s truth, it was about where you came from in a more ordinary sense, and who you were because of it. His family had had one, until his father burned it when his mother died and cut them off from memory. Burned it where? The Sergeant wondered now. Not at home. Not on the electric fire. In a bin in the garden, perhaps, or perhaps he’d imagined the whole thing and his sister had it, always had, in some neglected corner of her house.

‘I’m looking for a boy,’ he said. ‘There’s… he might need my help. Later. When it all… happens.’ Are you his mother? If I could see your face, I might know. You might be the right age. You’ve got the same colour eyes. He wondered how many women on Mancreu might fit that description. He could hardly ask them all.

She picked up a pen and wrote on a yellow notepad. Her writing was unjoined and simple.

How old is he?

‘About twelve. Between that and fourteen, anyway. I don’t know, I’ve never asked.’

Name?

More unasked questions. ‘He once told me it was Robin. But I think that was a Batman joke. He’s very clever – proper clever. I mean the way some people are and you look at them and you know the sky’s the limit if they can just get on their feet, get on the ladder. One day he’s going to be a lawyer or a businessman or something, I’m sure. Or a cardinal,’ he added, in deference to her habit, and thought he heard a gentle snort, though whether this indicated scepticism or a general dislike of cardinals he couldn’t say. ‘A prime minister of somewhere. If he just gets the chance, you know. I… I can help with that. Not much, but I can give him a place to start.’ What was it with confessing this plan to random women? He might as well announce it in the paper. But her eyes smiled.

You think he is here?

Her fingers sketched the Bibles, the chapel.

‘It’s all I’ve got. I need to know who he is.’

Ask him.

Well, yes. But. ‘I’m… I don’t want to bother him. I don’t think he thinks of the island as coming to an end.’ She waited. She did it perfectly, without impatience: a silence which was his to break. Waited. Waited. Waited. He sighed. ‘And… to be honest, I’m… I’m afraid.’ Yes, she thought that was a poor answer, and really so did he. All the same, it was true. That counted for a lot.

She nodded. She opened two more Bibles, and laid them out. Boys’ names, families. The right ages. He copied them down.

‘He has someone who looks after him. Someone he trusts, who knows the old smugglers’ paths. You don’t know who that might be?’

She shook her head. He wondered if she would lie. She must have guessed, because she frowned at him, and snorted again.

‘I saw a woman, on the way,’ he said abruptly. ‘Walking in the fields. Is it a good life out here?’

Yes.

‘Do you know who she was? On the mountainside?’ He wanted to know something about this place. He had spent too much time in the port, he thought, had ignored the rest of the island and now he wondered if the rest of the island wasn’t much more important.

She dances in the water, the nun wrote. She is content. She put down her pencil gently. Interview concluded.

She dances in the water. Perhaps that was as good as life got, after all.

The nun walked him out to the Land Rover and stared at the dent, with its bloody scratches. He sighed. ‘Some lads threw a dead dog at my car. Kids on bikes. I haven’t told the old lady yet, the one whose dog it is. Christ, she’ll know by now.’ He heard the blasphemy hang in the air. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’

She shook her head to let him know it was all right, then blessed him. Her finger rested solidly on his forehead for a moment, dry and hard. Satisfied, she went back inside. He touched the short list of names in his breast pocket. Something attempted, something achieved. Something actually according to plan. Simple enough.

He wasn’t used to the feeling; recently everything had gone the other way. He found he approved of it very much.

His good mood carried him into Beauville with renewed energy. He told Beneseffe the fish issue had taken care of itself for the meanwhile, and Beneseffe grinned and said yes, he’d heard something about that, couldn’t happen to a nicer person. The Sergeant bought a sandwich and a fizzy drink and walked along the harbour front in the sun. He asked after the names on his list. One of them was gone, they knew for sure, left with his parents in the first days. The other two they weren’t sure about, they’d ask around. He checked with the schoolhouse, too, but no joy. All the educational records, the schoolmistress said, were in storage at Brighton House. He realised he should have known this, could have known if he’d thought to check. It occurred to him that if the boy was in there he might have short-circuited his investigation and saved himself a lot of shoe leather by sitting down like a clerk and going through the records one by one. There couldn’t be more than a few thousand in the right age range. It would have taken – assuming one photo every twenty seconds, which was pessimistic – about twenty hours at the outside.

Well, he would start tonight. If one of the names in his pocket was the boy, good. If not, there was still a good chance that by the end of the week he would have his man.

More progress. Part of him was almost alarmed, but he knew it happened this way sometimes, knew that when it did you had to ride the wave and choose your options well to keep it under your feet. It looked like a sudden turn for the better because humans saw what was in front of them, didn’t look at the time spent getting to a certain point. This was not a day of success, it was the success of many days, the pay-off of effort.

He went to the prison to lay down a deal.

He chose the man in cell two because he had been easy to talk to. It didn’t matter if he had lied, he was interested in dialogue. The golden hour was past, he’d have regained some of his vinegar, but the Sergeant had more to work with now, had a magic word to open doors. He let it set the tone as the marine on duty pulled the door closed.

‘I want to know more about Bad Jack,’ he said. ‘For information relating to Jack, I will release you. I will put you on a boat. I will assume that you are just what you say you are, a man who got in over his head. That you fired into the air. But I want to know,’ the door shut with a very final clunk, ‘everything.’ The marine must have heard. Well, if Kershaw didn’t know about Mancreu’s apparent crime kingpin already, he would know now.

‘There is not Bad Jack,’ the herder said.

‘Oh, but there is.’

‘No. It is not real. Everyone knows this. What is Jack? A silly story for children.’

‘I hear Jack’s real enough. I hear he runs the island. I hear the man you killed worked for Jack, so that means Jack doesn’t like you.’

‘He did not work for Jack because there is not Jack.’

‘I think those nice guns you had – those very foreign guns – I think they came from Jack’s opposition. Tell me they didn’t.’

‘There is not Jack.’

The Sergeant nodded. ‘Perfect. Then lie to me. Tell me a lie about Jack. Tell me a fairy story.’ The man stared at him. ‘Go on. It’s all right. Make something up. Jack comes from the moon. Jack can fly. I don’t care. For a lie about Jack, I will arrange a nicer cell. One lie, about a man who isn’t real.’

And now he saw fear. ‘There is not Jack.’

‘If there’s no Jack, then lie to me.’

The man closed his eyes and turned away.

‘No Jack.’

‘No Jack?’

‘No Jack.’

The Sergeant took a map from his pocket and laid it out, and then he came around the table hard and fast as if he was in a bar fight. He captured the herder’s arm and shoved one shoulder hard into his chest, took the man’s centre and locked his elbow against the joint. He held the helpless hand over the map. ‘Where in particular is there no Jack?’

The man flinched away. The Sergeant wrestled with him, hauled him back. Was this abuse? If he’d been interrogating a prisoner of war, certainly. But this was a civilian matter. He was not physically harming this man. He was manhandling him, which was probably illegal in Britain, the Sergeant didn’t know, but they weren’t in Britain and the governments of the world had quite deliberately made ‘legal’ disappear on Mancreu. It wasn’t wrong, he was pretty sure about that. It was nasty, but not wicked.

He looked down at the herder’s hand. Hovering and twitching over the map, unwillingly giving up secrets. The prisoner’s aversion to the paper was strong. He did not want to touch it. But there were some places he did not want to touch more than others. The Beauville shanty. The harbour.

‘No Jack!’ the man was shouting. ‘No Jack! No Jack, no Jack!’ And the marine was opening the door, though he clearly did not know what he was going to do now that it was open, now that he could see what was and was not happening.

The Sergeant let go. ‘Deal on the table,’ he said. ‘I know about Jack. You’ve just confirmed it, haven’t you? But I want to know who he deals with and who doesn’t like him. I want it all. Because I want to know who killed Shola and why, and I don’t mean you and your friends, I mean who paid for it. For that information, I will let you go. I will arrange travel. Passports, even.’ He wished he could ask about caves and heroin and NatProMan soldiers dealing dirty, but he didn’t dare and probably this poor sod would know nothing about it. And if he did, the Sergeant himself understood too little to tell a lie from the truth. Don’t ask questions whose answers you won’t understand, DI Burroughs had said. Well, fine, but you’ve got to start somewhere, Lester Ferris wanted to object now. What did you do when you had the middle but neither end, and nothing to reel them in with?

The herder was staring at him in dismay, and at the marine as if to say ‘Help me.’ The Sergeant sighed and went out. With the others he made the same offer, simple and clear, and saw them understand it, saw them try to pretend they didn’t, and turn away. Outside in the corridor, he found he was incredibly angry with them all for being so stupid, so stubborn. He shouted, an explosion of noise without shape because no curse could adequately express how stupid all this was, how very much it was in his way.

The marine, evidently unsettled by this evidence of passion, followed close behind him all the way to the outer door, as if concerned he might steal the plastic spoons or the ancient, stinking coffee machine.

Being in Beauville and with a moment to spare, it was natural that he should call in on Kershaw and talk shop. Today, of course, shop for Kershaw would be the Tigerman footage, and the Sergeant took care to be genuine in his expression of sympathy.

‘All right, Jed?’

‘Go away, Lester.’

‘I gather some of your lads got beaten up by a sex pervert last night.’

‘Seen from space, your entire country looks like a gusset.’

‘Be that as it may, Jed, I understand this pervert actually flashed them his man-parts. I do hope they’re not so traumatised by this terrible experience that they’ll never save the free world again.’

‘They were Ukrainians, Lester, I’m sure they’ve seen scarier things than a sex pervert’s genitals.’

‘You mean he actually was a sex pervert?’

Kershaw stopped and appeared to consider this. ‘God, I wish. That would actually be terrific. I would love that. And do you see how insane that is? I am fallen far, Lester, when I find that I am wishing, in my official capacity as chief civilian authority in theatre of the NATO and Allied Protection Force on Mancreu, for sex perverts. I don’t suppose anyone’s actually saying that, out there?’

‘No idea. I’ve been out and about. I saw the telly at Dirac’s place earlier. Bloody weird.’

‘You think? Back in the US, we get guys who can fly and breathe under water and beat up heavily armed soldiers all the time!’ Kershaw scowled. ‘You tell me, Lester. You took down those guys from Shola’s. What was this?’

‘Commando,’ the Sergeant said smartly. ‘Dirac said Russian. I thought maybe Chinese, what with all that rolling and that, but he says Spetsnaz. I gather he’s a bit of a connoisseur of your international ethnic fisticuffs. Was that stuff in the background really what I think it was?’

‘If you think it was a boatload of fucking heroin bricks made from processed opium, then you think what I think but I don’t know yet. There’s a guy coming. An investigator. That side is all his problem.’

‘Top dog, I imagine.’

‘Arno. Dirac knows him.’

He’s asking exactly the right questions, the Sergeant recalled, the ones where you either tell the truth or you tell a big lie, one they can check. ‘Sounds ideal,’ he said, thinking: well, shit.

‘Lester, I have to ask: have you ever had any hint of anything like this on Mancreu?’

‘Like what? Commandos? Well, there must be a few out there.’ He nodded at the sea. ‘And if that’s really about a city’s worth of heroin in the video, that’s got to be Fleet crap, hasn’t it? Cheeky sods, bringing it onshore. Maybe they were trying to cut someone out of the supply line and he got cross.’

‘Yeah, but it’s weird.’

‘Weird, Jed, I have definitely seen on this island. Someone threw a dead dog at me the other day, you know. I’m still a bit cross about that. The culprit will feel the pointy end of my boot shortly.’

‘You know who it was?’

‘I’m bloody going to!’

Kershaw hesitated. ‘Be careful out there, Lester. If this is Fleet stuff, fine, everyone ought to be very polite. But if it’s something else… you remember you were saying when Shola died that maybe the next thing Mancreu was going to do to itself was crazy insane shit with a body count?’

‘Is someone dead?’

‘No. But they could have been.’

‘And if he’s a commando, if he’d wanted it that way, they would have been.’

Kershaw nodded. ‘I guess that’s true. I gotta work, Lester. This is not the only shit in my shitbox today.’

‘I came by to offer my informal assistance. Lester Ferris in his off hours, not the Consul or what have you. Or just beer. I understand beer works wonders.’

Kershaw hesitated. ‘Thanks, man. Actually – are you busy this evening? I have a thing. I was going to ask you anyway. Unofficially official or whatever. You know what, sometimes I have no idea.’

‘You can record me as present or absent. At your service, anyway.’

‘I’ll call you later. Take care, Lester.’

‘I’m a bit concerned about you, Jed. If you think Britain looks like a gusset, your girlfriends have been giving you a very strange idea of what sex is all these years.’

‘Seen from space, Lester. Space. The place where British people do not go because the British space programme is, what, two guys with a really long stick?’

‘In that way, Jed, it is very much like US healthcare.’

‘Go now, Lester. Tell the Queen I said hi.’

‘See you later, Jed.’

The Sergeant let himself out, past the grinning assistant who had no doubt been listening to the whole thing on Kershaw’s intercom. He tipped the man a salute and received a careful wave in acknowledgement, and then went back to Brighton House to dig out the school records. As with his visit to the docks and the chapel, his conversation with Kershaw had been all according to plan. Not perfect – not with Dirac’s Italian inquisitor on his way to Mancreu – but within the parameters he had set for the encounter.

Recalling the conversation he wondered, twitchily, whether he should try to banter like that with the boy. With Kershaw it was easy because the stakes were low. If either one of them overstepped, the matter could easily be resolved because the friendship was convenient and ultimately time-limited. It would not survive their departure from the island. But with the boy he wanted something more than that and he had no idea where he might transgress in some awful way. Or just come across as trying too hard. Adults who wanted to be cool, the Sergeant recalled, were painfully uncool.

He would have to think about it.

The school records proved to be at the back of the stack of boxes that had been piled very neatly in the east wing, sealed in plastic to keep out moisture and possibly rats. It was hard to see why – the boxes and indeed the rats would cease to exist soon enough. If this paper had been wanted, it would by now be in a new home somewhere. The Sergeant had very rarely known a bureaucracy let go of so much information, and he suspected darkly that some of the Mancreu records must contain references to long-ago British behaviour under the Mandate in Occupied Palestine, or in Malaysia or Kenya, which was now considered discreditable. The evil baby would be lost with a great deal of murky bathwater, and that would be that: a shipping error, valuable historical accounts alas gone for ever. He idly considered a trawl through the most obscure boxes for whatever it was Whitehall wanted to forget, and looked at himself, startled, in the fractured window glass. He was a sergeant, not a troublemaker.

He hauled what he needed out of the pile, wishing someone had bothered to digitise all this at some point in the last two decades, but they hadn’t. Mancreu before the Discharge Clouds had existed in a sort of perpetual 1989, so hardcopy it was – nearly sixty boxes of it. He pulled at the plastic wrap with his fingers and found it surprisingly tough. He vaguely remembered a girl who had worked at a post office somewhere in Germany telling him – it had been a come-on, he realised in retrospect, and he had utterly failed to notice – that industrial cling wrap was really good for tying the wrists during sex. He tried to claw through it, then gave up and went back down the corridor for a Stanley knife.

The phone rang just as he gave up on the Stanley knife and realised that the weather-stained carving knife in the galley kitchen at this end of the house (‘We use it for barbecues,’ the Consul had told him) would do just as well, and he nearly took his own eye out lifting the receiver to his head.

‘Jed?’

It wasn’t. Inoue’s laughter bubbled at him. ‘I’m going to hang up now,’ she said happily.

‘What? No, I—’

‘Bye bye!’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but she was gone. He stared at the phone, put the receiver back in its cradle, bewildered. Had he really upset her? No one really called him other than Kershaw.

The phone rang again. He picked it up. ‘Dr Inoue?’

‘No,’ she said gruffly, ‘this is Jedediah Sibelius Kershaw. I want you to come to dinner. We talked about it earlier.’

‘I’m sorry about before. he just calls me more than other people, is all.’

‘Lester! What the hell are you talking about?’ Inoue continued, in character. ‘I want you to come and eat with me. We’re all going out for dinner. I told you about this when you came by today. That Japanese scientist, Kaiko Inoue, will be there, too. You’re going to sit next to her so she doesn’t have to discuss Pan-Arab Nationalism with that idiot from the Working Group whose name she cannot remember but who has too much nose hair.’

He went with it. It seemed the only thing to do. He didn’t want her to hang up again. ‘Oh, right, Jed, thank you.’

‘It’s a horrible nose, Lester, so don’t even think about being late. And wear something smart. Do you have medals?’

‘Yes, I suppose I do. Shall I put them on?’

She sobered abruptly, and her voice became Inoue’s, strained and uncertain. He had never heard uncertainty in her before, and it did not suit. ‘I was going to tell you “yes”. But maybe… I think you should not. This will be a… well, I think it will be a strange occasion. Kershaw will announce the disposition of NatProMan and the Mancreu Project. In the wake of my recent findings. You understand?’

The finding, in particular, that another Cloud was coming. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And it may be that I must say something, publicly. I would like to have you there as my friend, but you probably should not be the British Brevet-Consul, in case I am embarrassing. Is that possible?’

It was. The outgoing Consul had foreseen the possibility of unofficial appearances, and a suit had arrived and hung in the cupboard ever since, unworn. It was still his size, he supposed. He had stayed in trim.

‘I’m sure you could never be embarrassing,’ he said, somewhat awkwardly, and held his breath in case this was the wrong thing.

She laughed again. ‘Oh, yes, I can. Did you know that there are different ways of speaking Japanese for men and women? Women’s Japanese is supposed to be gentle and submissive. But English has no such division, so I am unchained. Vee-eeery dangerous.’ She chortled wickedly. He tried to imagine her demure and mousy, and failed. ‘But will you come?’

‘Of course.’ He felt a curious twitch in his stomach. He had been friends with few women in his life. It was like what he felt about the boy, a frantic awareness of fragility and a sense of making his way in the fog. ‘Just me. Lester Ferris. No Consul, no Sergeant.’ No Tigerman, he almost said, and then wondered whether he had been quite so angry about the boy’s beating in part because someone had thrown a dead dog on his car in front of Inoue, and whether he should say he was looking into that, which he would, as soon as he had time. For an island with no future, Mancreu had a great deal of present.

Inoue apparently decided that enough had been said which was serious or alarming, because she dropped back into her Kershaw voice. ‘Good! The doctor says she’ll send a car at eight and you’re to call her Kaiko or you’re walking home!’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Jumping Jehosaphat, Lester!’

‘Sorry.’

‘This is Jed Kershaw, Lester. You don’t call me “ma’am”.’

‘In point of fact, Jed, I’ve been calling you “ma’am” since day one.’

‘Never mind that now!’ It was actually rather a good impression of Kershaw’s bluster. ‘And when you talk to her, you say “Kaiko”. In fact, say it now so that you don’t forget.’ She made a basso chuffing which he was fairly sure was a giggle. Was it possible she was talking through a cardboard tube?

Gamely, he said: ‘“Kaiko.”’

‘Again!’

‘“Kaiko.”’

‘Practise, Lester. Dr Inoue was quite specific, and it’s a long walk.’

‘All right,’ he said, and she chuffed again and rang off.

He looked at his watch, bemused. He had just enough time to open one box and look randomly through a few files, but not enough to find the one containing the records he wanted specifically, and somehow it would be admitting defeat to begin as if he had already been let down.

He put the knife on the sideboard, ready for the morning.

Not wishing to treat his half-arrangement with the boy with disrespect, the Sergeant went down to the café to leave a note, and, finding his friend already there, hastily ordered tea and made his excuses. The boy listened, then grinned hugely.

‘You have a date!’ he said. ‘With the xeno lady! That is hot.’

The Sergeant shook his head. ‘It’s not like that.’

‘It so is.’

‘It’s not! She wants a friendly face, is all. She’s worried about something.’

‘She has many friends at the xeno station,’ the boy said, ‘but she calls you. This is totally hot adult dating (meet area girls now!)’

When the Sergeant continued to protest, the boy enlisted the help of Tom from behind the bar. Tom listened carefully to the sequence of events, and grinned. ‘I don’t know, Lester,’ he said lightly, ‘I think maybe the kid has a point.’

‘Not on my best day,’ the Sergeant said, smiling back.

‘Oh! So you would tap that?’ the boy demanded.

The Sergeant, who had never really thought about it, was about to say ‘no’ but found he couldn’t. It had always seemed such an impossibility that he might be attractive to Kaiko Inoue that he had never actively asked himself whether she was attractive to him. Now that he came to consider it, however – now that he came to wonder about what might happen between them if such a thing ever came to pass – he had to acknowledge that she was more than a little captivating.

‘The situation does not arise,’ he muttered, and realised he was blushing.

‘Ooooo-ooooh!’ cried the boy happily. ‘Barracuda!’ And then, in deference to the possibility that the Sergeant was too old for this reference, ‘Na na na na na na na na na NA NAAAAH! Oooo-oooh! Barracuda! Like in Charlie’s Angels.’

The Sergeant stayed for a little longer, threatening everyone with terrible violence, and then took his wounded dignity back to Brighton House, trying to think about everything except Kaiko Inoue in his bed.