Tigerman

13. Dinner

THE CAR ARRIVED on the dot of eight, and the Sergeant stepped into it with a feeling of being on the outside looking in. Until now, insofar as he had been in this situation at all, he had been the driver, not the passenger, waiting patiently with a book while someone very influential tried to find his other shoe. He found he was imagining what he must look like to the polite young man behind the wheel, and worried initially that he must look very posh and snotty, then abruptly, in a veering inversion, that by trying to look less so he was denigrating the importance of the event which was consuming the driver’s evening. Was it perhaps more disrespectful to assert that they were on the same social level than it was to accept that they weren’t? The Brevet-Consul was a mucketymuck, but the Sergeant was a working man, and this was a temporary assignment. Except that, he supposed, it would never entirely go away.

It occurred to him, with a sense of wonder, that it would almost certainly help in getting a job after the army.

He didn’t say anything at all while he thought about this, and when he came to himself the car was slowing outside the NatProMan admin block, the red-brick misery which had once been Mancreu’s house of detention. It was lit from below by two floodlights which somehow served only to make it darker and more Gothic.

Wonderful.

He walked to the door and it opened as if God or some sort of technological whizzbang was involved, but this was Mancreu so it was neither, just a respectful NatProMan soldier in flunkie mode.

‘Thank you,’ the Sergeant said, and saw the kid’s eyes flicker in surprised acknowledgement. He went on in.

The old prison had been largely modernised for the use of prisoners, so the majority of the cells were drab little cubicles which had readily become storage rooms and offices. The main hall, however, had been preserved – for historical authenticity or more likely because the triple-height open-plan room with its cages along the side walls was too expensive to remodel. Kershaw greeted him at the double doors and ushered him inside, and the Sergeant stopped for a moment on the threshold in utter amazement.

The hall had been transformed. It was still wrapped in shadows, still echoing and bleak. But along the middle was a banqueting table laid for forty, and the cooking was being done on gas burners in the cells. At one end, another, larger cell held a military jazz band, the drummer a striking marine corporal with her head shaved and the island of Mancreu tattooed onto her scalp. The music was slow and edgy and made him think of Shola’s wake, the combination of sorrow and celebration, and the building vanished into its own darkness, so that the ceiling was invisible and the walls seemed to go up and up for ever.

‘I hear you’re making an announcement, Jed,’ the Sergeant said.

‘Yeah,’ Kershaw replied. ‘You were on the list, anyway. Inoue just called you first. You get that, right?’

‘It’s nice to be a plus one. I can pretend I’m an ordinary bloke.’

‘I thought you were an ordinary bloke.’

‘Oh, I am. But they’ve given me all these hats, haven’t they?’

Kershaw nodded like a man who understood hats. ‘This is going to be an epic party, Lester. I’m glad you’re here.’ He smiled and – to the Sergeant’s amazement – actually leaned forward and hugged him, then dashed away to greet someone else. The Sergeant stared after him in bemusement.

He felt a hand on his arm.

‘Did he just hug you, Lester?’

‘Yes, Kaiko, he did.’

‘Was it weird?’

‘It was, a little bit.’

‘You need practice.’ She hugged him too, fiercely, and slipped away again before he could register that it was happening. His memory reported: Slender. Strong. Soft in interesting places. Smells good. More, please.

‘Come on,’ Kaiko Inoue said, ‘we’re over here. By the way, this is when you tell me how well dressed I am.’

He smiled and stepped back to give her proper consideration, and then found he was genuinely staring. Inoue was wearing a black dress, long and flowing and with a collar which fastened at the neck. She wore earrings made of tumbling gold and red links which rippled as she turned her head. Her arms were bare and narrow and surprisingly muscular.

‘You look great,’ he said honestly. She grinned.

‘Thank you.’

There was a mirror standing in the corner of the room, and he could see himself reflected in it beside her. To his amazement, he did not look absurd. The suit was a good fit and he filled it the right way, with weight in the shoulder and chest, not much in the tummy. There was a whisper of grey at his temples – when did that happen? He looked like a grown-up, like the people he had guarded when they came to visit in Iraq and Bosnia. The two of them together were formidable. People of consequence, that was the expression.

Inoue followed his gaze, and made an approving snort, then took his arm again and led him to their places. Someone had spent a longish while, he thought, writing everyone’s name in cool copperplate script on the little white cards at each setting. Inoue’s card was in Japanese as well as English.

Even with all the places occupied, the room felt huge and echoing. When the band paused between songs the Sergeant felt an eerie moment of vertigo, reminded somehow that the sky beyond the shingle roof was a bottomless abyss and that he and the building itself were held on the ground by a blessing of physics he did not understand.

The gathering had become, if not raucous, at least relaxed. The first course was done and enough wine had been drunk and enough fluff had been talked that the diners had lost their initial sense of awkwardness. The tinny chatter of the guests dipped as everyone realised they were suddenly that much more audible, their voices bouncing off the brick walls and echoing in the detention cells. Now they hunkered down and made exaggerated gestures of furtiveness to one another to conceal a genuine embarrassment in the quiet.

They were a mixed bag – NatProMan staff, foreign officials and quasi-officials, and one or two the Sergeant did not recognise who must be regional bureaucrats or factfinders passing through. He hoped very much that the thin-faced man at the far end was not Arno the investigator. His eyes were unsettlingly sharp. As if responding to the thought, the man turned in his seat and waved a graceful hand, his lips curling up in a faint, cordial smile.

It’s him. I know it is. The Sergeant nodded back, bluff and a bit clumsy. Well, that was of a piece with who he was supposed to be, after all. He retreated from the penetrating gaze and hid behind his neighbour.

Jed Kershaw tapped on his glass with a knife. A high, pleasing bell-sound rang out, and he seemed happily surprised and did it a couple more times, then got a rhythm going. He tapped the glass, then stamped, then slapped his hand on the table. A moment later, to the Sergeant’s absolute amazement, he added vocals, doowahbopping and tchakachahing, and people began to clap along. When the head of financial affairs began tapping her spoon and fork together he encouraged her mightily like the conductor of an orchestra, and slowly a few others made impromptu instruments and were inducted into the fellowship. A Croatian officer with NatProMan insignia proved to have a very elegant bass voice, and a moment later the thing had become a rendition of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s ‘Heartattack and Vine’ before collapsing into a mess of laughter.

‘Did you know he could do that?’ Inoue asked behind her hand.

‘I really did not,’ the Sergeant said. She shook her head in wonderment, and they shared a moment of complicit bewilderment. Jed Kershaw, bluesman.

Kershaw waved for calm, and banged the glass again. The meeting came happily to order.

‘Okay,’ Kershaw said. ‘Okay, okay. Welcome, everybody. I hope you’re having a good time. I’m having a great time. I kinda love this island, actually. I really do. It drives me insane. But in this business you’re pretty much gonna go insane somewhere, so it might as well be here.’ Laughter. ‘It’s been a helluva week at Kershaw Towers.’ More laughter, Kershaw’s right hand waving to indicate the building, recognising the ugliness of the place, the pompousness of naming it for himself, and a little bit of pride in his ugly domain. ‘We had… what did we have? We had stolen fish. Yeah, don’t think I didn’t hear about that. We had guys in hospital because a demon came out of the sky and beat the shit out of them – or they got in a fight with one another over a pretty girl and someone else faked up some weird film, it’s very hard to tell. Thank God, that’s not my job, I have Colonel Arno here for that.’ And yes, the thin-faced Arno nodded languidly. Kershaw bobbed his head as if reading an imaginary list. ‘Someone threw a dead dog at Lester and Kaiko, which was bad for them but really sucked for the dog. How’s that coming, Lester? Bad guys on quad bikes who are mean to puppies. We do not approve of bad guys who are mean to puppies, do we?’ He referred the question to the table, as if the Sergeant might otherwise say that he rather did. The room booed firmly, and Kershaw raised his eyebrows.

‘We’re pursuing lines of inquiry,’ the Sergeant responded. ‘We anticipate movement shortly.’

‘I love how he says “we”,’ Kershaw told the table. ‘And I love that he’s not kicking down doors and yelling. He’s so polite, even when he’s pissed. And do not mistake, my friends, he is pissed. An Englishman assaulted with a dog? In front of a lady? Beshrew me! Fol-de-rol and hey, nonny noo, there’s going to be crumpets toasted over this frightful racket, right, Lester?’

‘I have no idea what any of that means, Jed,’ the Sergeant said primly, to general delight.

Kershaw grinned. ‘So, actually it’s been pretty much an ordinary week on Mancreu – assuming the devil did not actually send a minion up out of hell to torment my Ukrainian contingent. They’re fine, by the way.

‘Except one thing is a little bit different. You know how it’s always the quiet ones? Just when I was leaving the office the other night, I got a report on my desk. Dr Inoue, couldn’t you have waited until ten minutes later? I was going to play some golf, and I missed my tee-time!’ Laughter, but a little strained. Everyone here knew what Inoue’s reports were about. ‘Yeah. So, this report. It’s not the same as the last one, or the one before. It says we have… maybe another three weeks before the next Cloud, and it’s going to be a big one. So I was lining up a big civil-protection effort for everyone who’s still here.

‘But we may not be doing that after all. We may be leaving. On receiving this report, the higher-ups have gotten a little windy. Yes, they have. And they are saying right now that they may push the button on this island. The final evacuation. We should get word before the weekend. So if there’s anything you want to see here, do here, do it this week. If there’s someone you’ve been thinking of asking on a date, I suggest you do that too, because there’s a good chance we’re all going on to our next assignments.

‘Hence this party. This isn’t a Leaving. That’s not who we are. This is not our home. When we came here we knew it was temporary. But it’s something. It’s the beginning of goodbye. So eat. Drink. Celebrate Mancreu. If you have business unfinished here, get it done. Because I’m pretty sure the clock is ticking.’ Silence, sombre and contemplative. ‘And if you do not eat this food that I have personally made, I will come to your house and hide the leftovers in your curtain rails!’ Laughter and applause, on cue, but from the chest rather than the gut.

As Kershaw went to sit down, Kaiko Inoue got to her feet. She seemed unwilling, compelled. She’s got to explain, the Sergeant thought. Bit harsh, to make her read the notice of death to the relatives before the patient’s dead. He shot a glance down the table at Kershaw, annoyed.

But Kershaw was looking uncertain and a bit nervous. His face, turned to Inoue, seemed to be asking her to sit down again, to stay quiet. Inoue was looking down at the table. She glanced at the Sergeant, and he smiled reflexively: be brave. She smiled back in gratitude. And then raised her head.

‘I must object,’ said Kaiko Inoue.

Oh.

Kershaw slumped slowly down, chubby hand holding his mouth as if he was receiving news of a death. Thirty-eight guests stared at Inoue, along with the military waiters and the band.

‘I must object,’ she said again. ‘I understand the logic. It is quite easily understandable. It is absolutely sure that we will have a Cloud again soon. The wind might take it anywhere. And each Cloud increases the likelihood of the Mancreu bacterium finding a home in another environment, if it has not done so already.

‘But I must object most strongly. This is not the right answer. Destroying this island is not the right answer. It is wasteful and foolish. Even if we burn the rock to the waterline, if we kill every plant and animal, if we dig deep down into the caldera and fuse the rocks to the mantle. Even then, we will not sterilise this place. Some small piece of ejecta will fall into the sea. Something will survive. And we will have ruined a beautiful thing for the sake of a security which we cannot have.’ She sighed. ‘I have said this in my report. I have made it very clear. And now I say it to you, in the hope that you will pay attention. What is contemplated here is not science. It is like trying to knock the moon out of the sky with a rock. It is childish fear, not grown-up action. It may make things worse. And for sure: it – will – not – help.’ She bowed her head. ‘Thank you for your attention.’

Kershaw nodded slowly to her, winced a bit, and stood again. ‘I’m going to say two things. The first is that Doctor Inoue’s concerns are well documented and I’m told they have been factored into the decision-making process, but that they are considered too sensitive for public dissemination and are covered under the Mancreu Confidentiality Resolution.’ He shrugged. You all know what that means. The Sergeant found himself wondering about his unsolved case, those stolen papers from Inoue’s office. Did whoever had them know about the MCR? Or care? Probably not. But for sure they’d burned the draft or stuffed it in a mattress, because if not, well, where was it? The time had passed for a dramatic revelation. Had really passed, now.

Kershaw held up his hand sternly. ‘The second thing… is that it’s time for the pulled pork sandwiches, made to my grandfather’s own special recipe, which is even more secret than that! And for those of you who don’t eat the meat of the pig I’ve adapted it for goat, which is surprisingly good. And for those of you who eat no meat of any kind, God help me, there are yams. Gentlemen and ladies: bring it on!’

From the wings, huge silver plates of sticky pork – and goat, and indeed yams – and fresh bread emerged, bowls of mustard and pickles, and about a hundred bottles of wine. The band struck up. Inoue took the Sergeant’s hand.

‘Thank you.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘I did. And I could not have done, without a friend.’ She smiled. Around them, the party had picked up again, as if nothing had been said. Or perhaps because it had been. There was a desperation now which lent it an edge, a sense of urgency. Inoue pursed her lips. ‘It is very loud, Lester. Is there somewhere quieter? I need to clear my head.’

‘There’s a roof terrace,’ he remembered. ‘Well, there’s a roof, and some chairs.’

He stood, and – because the food smelled good – he gathered them a plate of sandwich materials. After a moment of consideration, Inoue scooped up the wine glasses, and they scurried away, to speculative glances from their nearer neighbours.

The rooftop was cool but not cold, though the sea breeze could raise goosebumps on your skin. The Sergeant took off his jacket and hung it around Inoue’s shoulders. She smiled thanks, then shrugged into it and sat pensively looking out at the wide night-time sea. He knew she would talk when she wanted to, so he sat and set about building her a spectacular sandwich – food being in his experience the best cure for post-patrol funk, which he reckoned was close enough. Then he hesitated: Inoue was a small person. His usual strategy with sandwiches was to layer on as much as possible, but this might not be the best method here. He looked over at her mouth, bobbed his head to get a better view. Silvery lips quirked in a smile.

‘Are you actually measuring my bite, Lester?’

‘Well…’

‘That is…’ She flapped her arms. ‘That is ridiculous! You are a totally ridiculous man!’ She leaned over her knees and pecked him on the cheek. Her scent came with her, a curious mixture of fruit and tea and something deep which was surprisingly like coffee. ‘I am not a tiny person. I can perfectly well eat a normal sandwich. Tcha, you are putting too much pickle. Give it to me, or Kershaw will think you are a barbarian.’ She began combining the ingredients with practised proficiency. The Sergeant wondered how often Kershaw had made this dish, and for whom. The ghost of her cheek was still lingering on his face. He wondered if they were assuming, in the main hall, that he and Inoue had come up here to kiss. He watched her fingers, deft and sure. She grinned at him, then lifted the sandwich to her mouth and took a defiant bite. A surprisingly large chunk disappeared from the bread. She raised her eyebrows and passed the rest across.

‘Mmm! Pulled pork, pickle, red wine. Very good. And Lester Ferris to talk to. Also good. Then we will enjoy the view.’

They ate, passing the makings of the sandwiches back and forth. Occasionally, fleetingly, he felt her nails graze the back of his hand as he yielded the pork platter, and vice versa when he took it back. The contact was not unpleasant, and neither of them shied from it. They ate, and then as Inoue had predicted – ordained? – they sat and looked out over the waterfront and the rooftops of Beauville. The old prison looked down on some fine colonial townhouses, narrow and elegant, and from one cluster of old streets in particular came a warm filigree light and the sound of bustle and chatter. The street of the card-players, the Sergeant realised, its inhabitants sitting out with some disreputable grappa and defying the world to move them. No doubt the old women were out, too, gamely chastising their husbands and peering in the candlelight at one another’s perfect white steps for spots of grease and dirt. It sounded as if someone – he suspected it was the street sweeper in her scarf – was playing the accordion. If the right song came along, he wondered if he should ask Inoue to dance.

Over the bay, a gull and another bird got into an argument. The outrage of the parties was so recognisable that both the Sergeant and the doctor laughed aloud. The mirth cracked the moment slightly, brought them back to themselves.

‘Tomorrow, I’d like to ask you about—’ He gestured vaguely over his shoulder. About the end of the island.

‘We shall have breakfast,’ she agreed.

‘People will talk,’ he said automatically, and then couldn’t believe he had.

Inoue grinned a feral smile. ‘Indeed, they will.’ She stood up and shrugged off his coat. For one moment he thought she was going to step onto his lap and kiss him. She had that look of intent, a wicked quirk in her lips. But then she looked over his shoulder and her expression changed and she said, quite inappropriately: ‘Oh! What the fuck?’

He stared at her for a second and then turned sharply in his chair, the bruises on his back yowling in protest.

Out above the Bay of the Cupped Hands, a single line of flame, narrow as a wire, was drawn across the water and the sky. For a moment he thought the world had gone mad and the destruction of the island had started, that they were all going to be sacrificed, that they were somehow infected and must be burned away. But there was only one trail, rising leisurely from somewhere in the mist. They watched it plot a bright curve in the darkness and then fall, seeming to increase in certainty and velocity as it neared the land. It was casual, effortless, even elegant. The sound reached them at last, a high wailing roar from the first moments of the launch, and then the impact flash as it reached its target and detonated. The Sergeant wrapped Kaiko Inoue in his arms and dropped to the floor, and the pulled pork sandwich and two glasses of wine flew over them as the shockwave hit. The chairs skittered away along the roof like brushwood in a gale. There was a huge, appalling noise, and then silence.

Half a mile away, the building which had housed Shola’s murderers was ash.

Civilians would have run around, but these people walked. They had procedures, and they’d been down this road before. There were people here, technically, who were not military, but there was no one who didn’t know about crisis. The Sergeant didn’t know where Inoue had seen this before, but he knew that she had, knew it from the way she moved and how she checked the compass points, the sky. Together they went back downstairs.

In the main hall Kershaw was standing on a table shouting into his encrypted cellphone that he needed more information and he needed it about a fucking hour ago before some asshole blew up a part of his city – HIS fucking city – with a fucking (are you kidding me?) fucking (what the fuck?) Exocet FUCKING missile. In between expletives he was fending off two members of his close-protection team, who were absolutely determined that he should be evacuated but appeared not to know where to – because, the Sergeant suspected, the fallback location if the landside ones were compromised was out in the Fleet, and the Fleet was the source of the problem. But even this little drama was oddly restrained. In a full-on emergency they’d have carried him, knocked him out. They were drily amused to be swatted as they tried to get him to a more secure room, and Kershaw was shouting not because he was frightened but because shouting was what he did. If he’d been quiet the Sergeant would have demanded a side arm from one of the waiter-marines, and he’d have bloody got one. But as long as Jed was being profane and a little ridiculous, things were not at that point. This was an incident, not a war.

Kershaw’s wildly wandering eye fell on the Sergeant. ‘Lester! (I’ll call you back, but get me some – yes, I will call you back and you will take the call or I will – yes – get me some answers because I cannot begin to fucking express – right. Then I won’t fucking express it, just find the fuck out. Yes. I. Will. Call. You. Back.) Lester! I need someone who is not an asshole and you’re it! Jesus Christ,’ Kershaw added to anyone near enough to hear, ‘that has to be one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever said.’

‘Here, Jed.’ The Sergeant let go of Inoue’s arm, glanced an apology. She waved him away. Go. There is work for you here. Also for me. She began gathering the few lost-looking people into one place. He could hear her gently assessing skills and resilience. Disaster-relief 101. And Japan seemed to attract more than its share of horrors.

‘Do you know what that was?’ Kershaw demanded.

‘One missile, surface-to-surface, maybe laser-guided from the ground, maybe fly-by-wire. Not huge, very deliberate.’

‘What did it hit?’

The Sergeant sucked air between his teeth.

‘The refrigeration plant.’

‘Where the fuck did it come from?’

The Sergeant tutted, apologising in advance. ‘The bay,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Fleet. Couldn’t see. Jed, one more thing: I’ve heard rumours of Fleet people coming shoreside for fun. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it until this.’

Kershaw stared at him for fully a count of ten, then nodded and shut his eyes. His lips moved. For a moment, the Sergeant thought he was praying, then realised he was rehearsing possibilities, seeing politics in his head. It got quiet in the room as the word spread. The Fleet. Because if partying on the shore was a technical transgression, blowing up the shore was something else again.

‘Colonel Arno,’ Kershaw said at last. ‘Consider your investigation expanded to include this matter.’ Arno was still sitting, dark eyes taking in the whole scene. The Sergeant wondered how much he had learned just watching all this, and thought: quite a lot. The Italian inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Work with Lester, please,’ Kershaw added.

Shoulder to shoulder with the man he most wanted to avoid, the X-ray Italian and all his myrmidons. Oh, thank you, Jed. On the other hand, he’d wanted to insert himself into the investigation, hadn’t he? And now here he was.

He traced Kershaw’s logic in his head. If Shola’s killers were in turn killed, then whoever killed them was involved in whatever Shola was involved in, and that too-loud action, contemptuous of the norms and whatever laws or conventions remained in place, implied urgency or alarm. Two things had changed on Mancreu in the last twenty-four hours to provoke the response: Inoue’s report and the footage of Tigerman at the cave. Of the two, the news story about drug smugglers and superheroes seemed the more likely to provoke fear in some red-lit covert battlebridge, which meant Arno and the Sergeant were investigating the same case from opposite ends.

‘Lester, I’m formally requesting the assistance of the United Kingdom’s representative, whose expertise and familiarity with local investigations may be of use to NatProMan at this time.’

The Sergeant’s instinct was to say ‘of course’ but this would constitute concluding a foreign alliance, even if only a temporary one, so he said, ‘I’ll talk to London right away,’ and tried to make his personal agreement clear by waggling his eyebrows. At the same time, he continued analysing the moment, because he couldn’t afford to let them get far enough ahead of him that he made a mistake. He was vulnerable because he had more information than they did about Tigerman and the cave. There was another strand of connection joining Pechorin and the heroin with Shola: the photograph, probably for target identification, that he had found last night. But what sort of target? Had Shola been a middleman, a smuggler, or victim as example? The connection was solid, anyway, one way or another. And there was one more possible contributing factor to the missile attack: the Sergeant had himself made it seem that the prisoners were talking about Jack. The marine had overheard that part of the discussion, would have reported it, which meant it was in the military system. He’d told Dirac the same lie, and anyone from Kershaw’s staff might have known about it, and relayed that to a contact in the Fleet.

The Sergeant felt a breath of air at his back. ‘I’m going to the impact site,’ Colonel Arno said. ‘We can talk on the way.’

‘I suppose you’ll need to call in some experts?’ the Sergeant suggested.

Arno shook his head. ‘Not call in. By now they are already there. Something explodes while we are investigating, they will want to know what it is. You mind if I call you Lester?’ He pronounced it ‘Lay-stair’. ‘And you call me Arno. It’s better, between allies in different chains of command. Nobody is confused.’ And no doubt it makes everyone feel relaxed and careless. He could see Inoue ahead of him, escorted by two marines and a mini-squad of co-opted administrators for whom she had found work. She nodded regally as he waved, and then they were in the street and he could smell burning brickdust and the aftermath of high explosive.

‘Do you have any ideas?’ the Sergeant asked. ‘About this?’

Arno shrugged. ‘I only just arrived,’ he said, ‘and I was supposed to investigate a guy in a costume blowing up opium.’

The Sergeant glanced sideways. ‘Dirac said you could see through walls.’

Arno barked a laugh. ‘I like that guy. I was sure there was something about him, but the more I looked, the more he was just this annoying Frenchman. You know him well?’ And yes, there was the laser vision: if you are like Dirac, then maybe what you are tells me about him. And vice versa.

The Sergeant stuck to his question as they passed into the street. ‘You didn’t come here without a briefing. You know who the players are. You probably know better than I do because your job is to understand more about that lot.’ He waved out at the sea. ‘So what in God’s name could induce them to blow up a bloody building?’

Arno shrugged. ‘Secrets. Politics. Government shit, intelligence operations. If it’s that, we may not get anywhere. What I can do stops at the water. I could know exactly inside a week and then that’s it. Strongly worded note of protest to the embassy of whatever. But you assume too much already, you know?’

‘I do?’

‘Sure. Suppose I’m a drug smuggler, I take a small boat and a shoulder-launched missile, fire it at the shore and use it to set off a car bomb, maybe.’

‘I saw it. It wasn’t like that.’

‘And probably you’re right. But now you’re remembering and you’ve already decided what you saw. When you remember things you also change them, each time you remember more what you think happened. Most likely we get over there and there’s one centre to the explosion, the chemical trace is right for military ordnance that is too large to be launched that way. Then it’s the Fleet. And if it is, that means something but we don’t know what until we dig. Dig like investigate, not with shovels. But this is very loud for guys like that, very stupid.’

‘Mancreu can do that to you. It makes you crazy. The more you think it doesn’t the more it does.’

Arno clicked his tongue. ‘Yes. I can see that.’ It was all the Sergeant could do not to twitch.

They were getting close to the explosion. He could feel the heat of the fire. NatProMan vehicles were arriving, military firefighters. There was a helicopter in the air and the sound reassured him, which made him want to shake his head in wonderment. ‘All right,’ he said instead. ‘Turn it around. Never mind who. Why?’

Arno shrugged. ‘Two reasons I can think of—’

Two?

‘—either someone in the prison knew something and someone didn’t want them to tell, or no one in the prison knew anything and someone wants us to think that they did.’

The Sergeant turned that around a few times, and made a mental note not to try to think ahead of this man. Bluff him, yes, that might work. Hide from him. But not deceive him directly, not outfox him, any more than you followed a tribesman into his own canyons. Lies are his hill country.

‘But you,’ Arno said, ‘you’re already investigating this Tiger Man?’ He hesitated a little bit over the name. Some insane part of the Sergeant was irritated by the separation of the title into two words. For God’s sake, you lot, it’s not Tiger Man, that’s not how you say it. Like you don’t say Mars Bar as if the bar actually comes from Mars. It’s Tigerman. One word. And he’s gone. Mission accomplished and he’s not coming back.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I was holding the men who were killed. For the murder of a local, a café owner. I thought there was someone behind them.’ But you knew that. You must have read my file, too.

‘Shola Girard. He was your friend.’

‘Yes. I mean, Shola knew everyone, but I liked him. We boxed together.’

‘You know the island, Lester.’ Lay-stair. ‘So: you have a theory?’

‘More than one,’ the Sergeant heard himself saying. They had reached Mountbatten Street, where the refrigeration plant had stood. There was just nothing there: a perfect piece of explosive surgery. The empty cannery next door was almost undamaged. The firefighters were sluicing it anyway, keeping the fire contained, but there wasn’t even much of that. Shola’s murderers were deleted. Gone.

Over on the other side of the notional cordon created by two support vehicles were three figures. One of them hailed Arno. The Italian waved them to come around to a side street. He looked at the Sergeant and made an inviting face. ‘Theories?’

The Sergeant shrugged. Disengage. Step away slowly. ‘Just thoughts, really. Obvious ones, I suppose.’

‘That’s good. Start with what is apparent. And keep me honest.’

‘Well, what you said. But also, there was a burglary at the Xenobiology Institute. Months ago. Not much taken.’

‘You think it is related?’

‘Probably not.’ Not to Tigerman, for sure. Anything else – how would I know? ‘But Kaiko’s – Dr Inoue’s – report is the other thing that happened today.’ And now you’re going to wonder why I brought up something irrelevant and you’ll have to consider the possibility it’s because I didn’t want to talk about the thing we’re supposed to investigate until I had time to get my story straight.

But Arno seemed to approve. ‘Good. That is good. That is obvious but hard to see. All this,’ he gestured at the destruction, ‘this could be very distracting. If someone wished to focus our eyes on drugs and madmen and away from Inoue and… whatever.’

‘What would they hide behind something like this?’

‘Exactly, Lester.’ Somehow this time he got the pronunciation quite right. ‘I think I will enjoy our relationship very much.’ He slapped the Sergeant on the arm, and trotted off to meet his team as they reached the crossroads.

The Sergeant looked after him, and then up at the misty midnight sky. He wanted very much to be back at Kershaw’s banquet, eating pulled pork with Kaiko Inoue. But Inoue was somewhere else now, doing competent Inoue things, and there were things he had to do too, duties and cares to be discharged.

For a moment he did not move, caught in the conflicting flow of events and priorities. He stared up at the Beauville night, the misty blue coloured now with orange flame and artificial light, and then he felt himself turn and begin to move, and knew that the night was far from over and the day beyond it would be just as full.

He did what sergeants do, but it felt heavier somehow, and slower.