Tigerman

15. Fire

THERE WAS A bad feeling in the street, like the hush after someone says something appallingly stupid but just before the first bottle gets broken. The Sergeant walked through Beauville as if it was a place he didn’t know and he had stepped off the plane into a siege or an insurrection. For the first time, his uniform felt less like a public service than a target for a sniper. The NatProMan soldiers could feel it too, and they hunched a little as they worked to clear the rubble of the refrigeration plant. That it had contained mostly murderers was beside the point. They had been islanders, and the marines guarding them had been saved, which made a stark distinction about the value of life.

Hearts and minds, bollocks. It was amazing how often that expression was used to describe what was already gone and could not now be clawed back. Although in fairness no one had ever cared much about what the Mancreux thought. They were small and they had no natural resources, no pressure groups. Their only important export was the Discharge Clouds, which was why everyone was here.

And the Fleet.

He didn’t want to think about the Fleet, but the choice had been taken away from him. You could ignore something which was quiet and distant. You couldn’t keep that up when it was bombing you.

‘Hey, I know you!’

The voice was high and robust, an Australian woman which meant a journalist. And yes, she knew him, from Mali and Iraq. But perhaps she would lose interest if he didn’t seem to hear.

‘Lester! Lester! What is it – Harris? Morris? You can turn around, Lester, I’m just gonna follow you up the street.’

He turned, and there she was: small and blonde and with too many teeth in the lower set, so that her smile looked a bit too much like a ferret.

She stuck out her hand for him to shake, and it was almost as weathered and leathery as his own.

‘Kathy Hasp,’ she reminded him.

‘BBC,’ he replied. She shook her head.

‘Not any more. They closed my office. So now it’s the Post.’ Which Post she didn’t say. Washington? Bangkok? Huffington? Or something else he hadn’t heard of, something that anyone who was anyone would know? ‘So what’s really going on, Lester? You’re a straight shooter.’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. I was having dinner, someone blew up a building.’

‘But a building full of your prisoners, right?’

Not such a chance meeting, after all.

He nodded. ‘Yes. My investigation. It’s been rather swallowed up now.’

‘And how’s that feel?’

‘It’s a relief. I had a murder case. This has gone political. I don’t do political.’

‘Thought you were the Consul. All promoted and wearing a suit.’

‘It’s pro forma. I have a watching brief. Britain has withdrawn from Mancreu.’ Belatedly, he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to say anything. ‘I have a prepared statement.’

She shrugged. ‘Nah, I know what it says. Just wanted to catch up. If you find you’ve got anything you want to say, you know me, right? Fair shake.’ True. She’d been straight with her sources before, mostly.

‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

She grinned. ‘You do that.’

He glanced over at the horizon. He had plenty of opinions about that, for example. About what went on there. It wasn’t his place to have them, but they were there, if he cared to get them out and have a look.

Hasp followed his eyes. ‘You ever ask yourself how this place would work if that lot weren’t out there?’

‘No,’ he muttered.

‘Right old carnival of the bastards, though, isn’t it?’

‘It’s unaligned shipping. You’d have to speak to the Portmaster.’

‘The way I see it, either they’re keeping this place alive or they’re keeping it under the hammer. Should have been sorted out years ago, but somehow it just never quite happens, does it?’

‘No doubt the world community will reach a decision at the appropriate time.’

‘Yeah, I bet they will. Right about now, is what I hear. Now that Dr Inoue’s team are saying it’s gonna be the Big One. Except I also hear she says boiling the place away won’t help.’

‘Dr Inoue is very highly qualified. I’m sure her opinions will be given due weight.’ He was sergeanting now, stone-faced and literal. He could do this all day. Yes, sir. No, sir. ‘The mission will achieve the assigned objective.’ And never mind that the assigned objective is asinine, or that we’ll just have to retreat the day after. He could hear Africa telling him to turn around and walk away, but he didn’t. Something in him needed to hear the lies in his mouth rather than in his head. He knew what the Fleet was. Everyone knew. He just chose not to.

Shola and his killers and the missile; the heroin and Pechorin; the quad bikers and the dog. It all wrapped somehow into the Fleet, maybe more than once. The photograph in the cave, the new guns, and Bad Jack. Round and around and around it went, and he chose not to look too closely because if he did he must, inevitably, see things which were invisible.

I say I’m the police, but I choose not to see because that’s my real job. To look the other way, because it’s expedient. Except that killing Shola isn’t a matter of national security, is it? It’s just a crime like any other, and they can do it because everyone looks the other way. And they can kill the witnesses in my custody, too, because apparently I don’t care. Because a sergeant in the British Army, and a Brevet-Consul, couldn’t be allowed to see what’s under his nose and make a stink. That blindness was the whole point of the island.

A sergeant. A diplomat. Words to hide the same shame, it seemed.

He could hear the tiger’s tread behind him at Shola’s grave, smell its breath. In its box at Brighton House, the mask was waiting for him to produce it, to give it to Arno and buy safety, even promotion. That was the sensible course. But that would mean no more Tigerman, and if the Sergeant couldn’t do anything resembling what was right in this situation, Tigerman could. If it came to it, Tigerman could. That was the point of him. Tigerman wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t even real.

Tigerman could do anything.

Lester Ferris shook his head so vigorously that Kathy Hasp stopped talking and stared at him.

‘Tinnitus,’ he muttered, when she asked if he was okay. ‘It comes and goes.’

He went back to Brighton House and started working through the school files. Life was what was important. Life, and the boy, and whatever would happen at the intersection of the two. There would be a moment – and it was coming very soon, maybe in a matter of days – when he would have to make the offer of adoption, even if he didn’t know whether there were parents to be considered. Even if the mood between them was still strained. And in that connection: perhaps that was why the mood was strained. He had had that experience with a girl once, had waited and waited for the right moment to ask her out and it had never come, and their friendship – which they had both vowed they wanted to preserve above all else – had decayed and faded away, because the central plank of it was that question. There came a time with any unconsummated desire of whatever sort when you simply had to speak up or let it go.

More faces stared up at him, more files in random order. No, no, no, maybe… no. No, no, no.

After an hour, he found the first of his possible names, resting between a baby born the year before and a man in late age. Mustaffe Etienne Gerard was tubby and already showing the barest whisper of a moustache. He was the right age and he had something of the boy about him, his look, his bones, but he was utterly different. In the picture, he had a placid face and wore an oversized hockey shirt saluting a team in St Petersburg.

The Sergeant laid Mustaffe’s file gently in the discard pile, and carried on. To his irritation, his mind threw up accusations and spectres of guilt, as if he had better things to be doing. He didn’t. This was his heart, the thing he needed: Save the boy. At least find out if it can be done. Save one future, make one good thing come out of this.

And: May I not have one good thing which is just for me?

But he had promised the boy he would find Shola’s killers, the men behind the men, and now he was doing nothing about it and time was running out, and to take his mind off that decision he was leafing through government paperwork on thousands of people in the hope of finding out whether the child he was thus swindling was an orphan, because if he was that would make the Sergeant’s own life neater and easier.

That was unfair. This was important, too, and it couldn’t wait much longer, either. And it wasn’t as if he was particularly guilty of ignoring the other stuff. Everyone on Mancreu ignored the Fleet, except the boy himself, and Kershaw. Kershaw couldn’t, because Kershaw was saddled with some sort of role in the Fleet’s world. He was the gatekeeper. Did that mean he was Bad Jack? The Sergeant pictured Kershaw in fatigues: Black Ops Jed; wily and ruthless Evil Jed. Still primed with comic books and parallel worlds, the Sergeant’s imagination awarded the image a goatee and maroon jackboots. Jack Boots.

Absurd.

Beneseffe, then. The Portmaster was ideally placed to smuggle and conceal. He wouldn’t even have to pay himself to turn a blind eye to shipments, he could collect them off the dock and no one would object. He need only be skilled with obfuscatory paperwork.

This was idle. Bad Jack was not the problem. It was Jack’s trading partner or his enemy who was the issue: his unfaithful friend, and surely Jack must have known that would happen, that he would be betrayed. Had Shola himself been Jack? Jack had not retaliated because Jack was dead. Except that perhaps Jack had retaliated. The men who had killed Shola were ash. Maybe that explosion had been Jack declaring war on the Fleet, in which case…

Jack could be my ally. If he is alive. If I was taking the case.

Which the British sergeant never would, however much Lester Ferris might think it was the right thing to do.

A team-up.

It was a staple of the comics world: the moment when a situation so dire emerged that villains and heroes had to fight back to back, each fearing the moment when the other turned on them, each preparing and holding back, until finally both were threatened and must commit fully, come what may.

And it was irrelevant, because he could do nothing about the Fleet, however much he might wish to and whatever he had promised, and the boy understood that. One man could not move the Fleet any more than he could shoot lasers from his eyes. The Red Cross and the International Court couldn’t move the Fleet, couldn’t even get on board.

Perhaps he is waiting for you to do the right thing. Perhaps it has no value if he must ask.

He lost his place in the files, and realised as he went back that he had not looked at any of the pictures in front of him for a while. He had been opening the folders, leafing through the pages, and putting them away. He went back through the discards painstakingly until he was sure he had not missed the crucial one. He worked into the night, only aware of the passage of time because he had to switch on a light, and then another, and finally to bring in a third from another room. The high ceiling and the dark wood devoured illumination. When he grew tired he went to the bathroom and splashed water on himself, then washed his eyes with drops from the first-aid kit. He made a pot of tea and went back to the desk, conjured another hour from himself, and another.

Sometime after midnight, he became aware of a new sound, like geese and thunder, and the smell of woodsmoke touched his face.

He walked to the east windows and looked out towards the bay.

Beauville was burning.

The descent into the port was a delirium splashed in bad colours across the dark. The shanty was scored with the bonfires of abandoned farmsteads and upturned cars, and columns of smoke rose and spread and reflected the flames. Beauville was washed in the light of its own conflagration. Here and there, knots of angry people destroyed the streets through which they had walked all their lives, with special attention paid – it seemed at least to the Sergeant, gazing in mute horror through the windows of the Land Rover – to those places which were particularly beautiful or welcoming. Here a façade painted a hundred years ago with scenes from the lives of fishermen split and boiled; there a small mews, with its absurd front doors like tiny portcullises, crumbled and fell in. Looters brandished their trophies, fought over them like gulls, and then lost interest, letting them drop or adding them to the nearest blaze. Almost every item could have been had at any time over the last months, taken with respect from empty houses left unlocked by those who chose not to destroy what they could not carry away, but now Beauville was delivering judgement on those who had departed and all their worldly effects, declaring them dead and exiled and showing its contempt for anyone too cowardly to see the island to its end.

He drove past the Witch’s house and saw that it, too, was in flames, the solid porch and the high-backed chair from which she had encouraged the scrivener fuelling the blaze. The flowers were strewn all about. Because she was foreign? Or because she was kind? He slowed the car, wondering if he should search for her, but the fire was old. If she had been inside, she was dead now, and no amount of stupidity on his part would change that, even if it did make him feel better. If she was not inside, then entering wasn’t even brave, it was asinine. He cursed. There was gear in the armoury which would help with this: firefighting equipment, oxygen. He should go back and get it, but to turn around now smacked of desertion, so he drove on.

At the next crossroads he chose the harbour road, aiming in part for the scrivener’s shop. Breanne would have gone there, he suspected, if she could. He would go past, see if they were all right. He could offer to put them up at Brighton House. He pulled out his cellphone, slapped the battery in and called the boy, got a synthesised female voice telling him the person he was calling was not available. He left a message: ‘I’m in the car. Beauville’s gone to shit. If you need me, call or go to the house. Bring whoever you want,’ he added after a moment, thinking of the elusive guardian. ‘There’s room for quite a few.’ He wondered if he would come back to find a horde of street children or a family of twenty seeking refuge in what was still technically consular accommodation, and what diplomatic shit that might kick off.

Towards the seafront, where the buildings were closer together, the fires faded as if the riot was saving the best for last. An ugly calm lay over the streets like the anticipation of a beating. Away from the source, the Sergeant heard the sound of the mob as he had from up on the hill, a kind of birdlike laughter on the wind. He realised too that he had been driving through fouled air, that there was ash in his snot, clogging his nostrils with black slime. He blew his nose, then cleared his throat and almost vomited, jerking to open the window and spit nauseating burned rubber stink onto the street. He sluiced water from a bottle in the back seat into his mouth, partially inhaled it and snorted it out, then abandoned his handkerchief to the gutter. And now, standing outside the car, he could smell something else, a grim mix of animal and hair. He looked around and about, then caught it again. That way.

He got back behind the wheel and rolled the Land Rover slowly forward. Let it not be a person, he thought. Let it be a fox or a cow. I don’t really care. But not a person and not anyone I know. And then he felt, when he saw it, that he had brought this on himself, that he had conjured it.

Spartacus. He couldn’t remember the name of the general who had ordered it and that pleased him, but he recalled the rest. Westcott had talked about it endlessly, the moment when savagery had transformed the wobbling Roman Republic into an enduring empire: security at the price of freedom. When Spartacus’s rebellion was defeated, the Via Appia was lined with six thousand crucified slaves as a warning to the world.

From each of the telegraph poles on the road leading down to the waterfront dangled the corpse of a dog, front paws nailed to a coarse crosspiece ripped from a packing crate. Not six thousand. Not even a hundred. But still a manifest monstrosity and an earnest of more.

He got back into the Land Rover, hating the world.

The Portmaster’s office was shuttered, heavy steel blinds chained to the concrete pediment, and the waterfront was almost deserted. The lobstermen had taken their boats to more amenable moorings and the lines of storage shacks along the docks gaped open, corrugated-iron walls bare and so rudimentary that burning them was an empty gesture. Twenty minutes with a hammer and a few bits of wood and the same metal would be in the same position, if anyone cared.

The scrivener’s shingle hung halfway along the waterfront, a single lantern glowing dimly beside the papal writ. The windows were dark, but they always were. White Raoul never drew the curtains. His den was a mystery, a magician’s cave. All along the road was rubble and splatter, dark stains which might be blood, and others – paint, booze, water and piss. This was a battlefield, sure as any Lester Ferris had ever seen.

Rolling the Land Rover onward, the Sergeant was starkly aware of how wide and exposed the promenade was, like a medieval killing ground. He had been driving without lights anyway, and now he stared out into the night, cursing the limits of his eyes and wishing for night vision goggles, for a partner to watch his back. And where was the boy, anyway? The Sergeant tried not to think of him running with the pack, putting Beauville to the torch and screaming like a madman, but if he wasn’t doing that then he might be in trouble, be hiding, be burned. He didn’t seem the type, but no one ever did. This kind of thing came from nowhere and washed you away; it was elemental. Or had that strange parent come for him, whisked him off to some mountainside for safekeeping, and was he even now looking down on the orange pall and wondering where in all that stink and flame was his friend the Sergeant? But if this last, he had only to pick up his phone messages and respond.

Call me. Is that so much to ask?

The Land Rover crunched over something brittle, a vase or a bottle. The noise was shockingly loud and made him jump. He lurched the car one way and then the other to throw off the first shot from a sniper’s rifle in case that same sound excited a response in some lethal watcher on the rooftops, feeling sure there was no sniper, not here, but doing it anyway because you did, you followed your instincts and asked why later, or sooner or later you paid for it.

An improvised explosive device, now. He wouldn’t rule out something like that here, not tonight. A big drum of diesel oil lifted from the harbour. What a fine blaze that would make, if a fellow knew how to rig it – and no doubt some did.

The car jiggled again, this time riding over a long piece of hosepipe. No, not a hose: a cable, and fat as a man’s arm. He stared at it, following the long spaghetti line around in a wide spiral and down to the edge of the water. It was draped in seaweed and muck. In fact… Yes, it was the cable TV connection to the Black Fleet, he realised, ripped up and severed, and for the first time he felt a sense of sympathy with the marauders. Let the Fleet feel something, even if it was just having to fall back on DVDs and movies on highly covert iPads and laptops.

He drove on, feeling the cable squirm under his tyres, and stopped outside the scrivener’s door. He debated whether to hoot, whether to leave the engine running in case he needed to make an escape. But didn’t want to lose the car to some wandering sneak, so he took the keys and went to the door.

She opened it before he could knock. ‘I’m okay.’

He breathed out slowly. ‘I was hoping.’

She didn’t ask how he knew to look for her here. Well, he was supposed to be a detective, and perhaps everyone had known except him. Gossip was like that.

‘Have you seen the boy?’ he asked.

‘No.’ And he saw her face mirror his own worry: If he’s not with me and he’s not with you, then where? But at least she was not the boy’s mother, that was something. The world she could offer was so big. He could not compete with that, wouldn’t try. Johns Hopkins. Ivy League schools. A woman who could open doors. That would be a fine place for the boy. Just not his boy, any more. But it seemed he was spared that moment. He felt a guilty triumph.

‘Your house…’ he began, but she raised a hand.

‘I know. I heard. But it’s fine. You know, it’s just stuff. My clarinet, I suppose, I’ve had it for years, but in the end it’s a thing. It’s not like a violin, like a Stradivarius. Just a decent Yamaha, I can get one on eBay and it’ll be exactly the same. It’s just stuff,’ she said again, and with the repetition it seemed to hurt her a little less. People she had known, probably, had come and destroyed all that they could reach of what she owned. That and her garden, he suspected, hurt more than the material things. She wasn’t a soldier, used to showing up and being shot at.

He cast about, wondering how she would regain her sense of the world. Not by hitting someone or shooting at them, obviously. Not by arresting them. She would want to reconnect, to help. He pursed his lips. ‘I can tell Kershaw to sort out a medicine bag for you, if you like.’

She smiled wanly. ‘Thank you.’

He looked at the road, the residue of conflict on it, then back at her. ‘What happened here?’

‘The crowd came, obviously. Beneseffe and the dockmen stood them down. Well, I say that. It was pretty much a medieval battle. They even had drummers, or near enough. It was… insane.’

‘Raoul?’

‘He wanted to go out and tell them off! I told him no, so he’s angry with me. He’s inside painting a curse, I think, on anyone who burns their own town. On people who smash what’s beautiful. It’s like they can’t bear to see anything good now that they know it’s going to go. Know it properly, I mean. The word’s out on that: that the end is nigh. So now this. If it’s special you smash it before someone else does. I said anyone who does that doesn’t need cursing, and he told me I was a hippy.’ A lovers’ tiff, and a proof of mutual affection. She waved her hand. ‘Do you want to come in?’

But the Sergeant was already running for the Land Rover, because if there was one place in Beauville which was beautiful it was the street of the card-players, with its white steps and trailing flowers.

‘Ferris,’ the Sergeant shouted into his phone, ‘and you know bloody well how to spell it. Now get Jed Kershaw on the phone and tell him it’s the Brevet-Consul of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and I need to know why his lads are sitting in barracks with their thumbs up their arse! I’m not pissing about – this is,’ he groped for the form of words, ‘this is a matter bearing upon the United Kingdom’s willingness to cede sovereign claim to this island to the international protection force.’ The Consul had told him if he ever seriously wanted to get Kershaw’s attention, this was the way to do it. It’ll scare the living shit out of him, the Consul had said, and he’ll be frightfully cross, so don’t do it unless you have to. And for God’s sake, whatever you do don’t imply that you’re actively asserting sovereignty. That could really start some sort of war.

Kershaw came on the line a moment later, and he did indeed sound very pissed off. ‘What the actual fuck, Lester?’

‘Sorry, Jed, I don’t have time to piss about. There’s a bloody riot happening! Get your lads out on the street and do some good!’ He threw the Land Rover around a tight turn and saw the back of the crowd, torches and spars dangling in loose hands. All moving the same way, yes, somehow drawing together again into a mass.

Kershaw snarled at him down the phone. ‘Oh, thank you, Lester! I did notice the fucking riot, but I decided that since NatProMan is specifically charged with exploding the entire island when the time comes, just maybe my guys were not the ideal fucking choice of policing for the streets of Beauville right now, but I’m sorry I didn’t fucking check with you first! And by the way, Sergeant’ – he spat the rank as if it tasted of rot – ‘don’t you ever fucking bring the diplomatic incident with me! You’re a nice guy, Lester, and I’m sure in a bar in Shropshire you’re tougher than shit, but in this world you are a fucking minnow and I am a shark, do you get me? A fucking shark! And this is where I swim. So unless you have the Queen standing behind you in her armour, ready to fucking joust for this shithole, get off my phone and go back to your castle and stay there until you get orders from your boss!’

The Sergeant stopped the Land Rover and stared into the handset. He left the line open and he could hear Kershaw’s breathing. Over on his right was the mob, about five or six minutes from the street of the card-players. He could hear them, no longer like a mad laugh but a sort of sigh, as if the joy had gone out of their destruction but they had a duty to see it through.

‘Good night, Jed,’ he said gently, and hung up. Shouting worked on enlisted men and sometimes on junior officers, but it was never really an answer, just a way to get the discussion started. You drove them off until you could welcome them back, and that made them grateful. But he couldn’t do that here, with Kershaw. The two of them were in balance, each sovereign and neither truly in control.

He put the phone in his pocket and drove the Land Rover around the back of the old market square, then got out and walked the rest of the way.

The white stone gleamed in the orange light of the sky. The vanguard of the mob was arriving, but the street of the card-players was so neat that there was almost nothing to tear up or burn. The window boxes had been raised to the upper floors, the doors were shut. The flags were sheer and perfect. The Sergeant wondered, briefly, if it was all going to be all right.

And then he saw, under the one soft lantern, the dealer sitting at his table with a deck and a bottle, waiting.

The mob saw him at the same moment and surged forward around him, mocking and plucking. A young boxer took one free chair away and smashed it against the road, then when this met with scattered laughter and encouragement, slouched down into the next seat and poured himself a drink. He knocked it back, then threw the glass away, moved to the last free chair and repeated the gesture, staring at the old man.

A door opened, somewhere, and the sweeper came out with her broom and started to sweep up the broken glass.

The card-player gently retrieved his bottle and took a swig, then handed it back before the boxer could object.

For a moment, it seemed to be working. The sheer, brazen normality of it was waking them, bringing them to themselves. A moment more, and they would have names again, and a sense of self. They were tired. The bacchanal was run out, and the dawn was coming. It was cold and the air was blowing dust. It was working.

And then a woman near the sweeper said: ‘You missed a bit here, by me,’ and when the sweeper went to get it she kicked it lightly away.

The sweeper pursued it patiently, but the woman chased and kicked it again, and the sweeper slipped and went down, and the whole street heard the crack as she landed hard on one hip, and the reedy cry which went out of her. Her outstretched hand, reaching for solace and assistance, caught the woman by the ankle.

‘Get off me!’ the woman shrieked at her, and kicked out, and the toe of her shoe clipped the sweeper across the mouth. It was – it all was – an accident.

The dealer shot to his feet and started to speak and the boxer came up with him, drawing back his hand to silence what he assumed would be a furious denunciation with his fist, and the Sergeant shouted: ‘No!’

He stepped into the silence awkwardly, wishing for his full uniform, for something which spoke of what he represented, what he was, but he only had his parade-ground voice, and it would have to be enough.

‘Siddown!’ he barked at the dealer, and the man sank to his chair again. I am obeyed. He knew the mob had registered it, could feel them making space for him. Authority, exercised on their behalf. ‘And you,’ he added more gently to the boxer. ‘That right hand of yours is used to gloves. You hit that old fart with it and you’ll ruin your knuckles for months. Don’t be a twit.’ He turned before the young man could object. He had to keep moving, keep making sense. ‘I’m Lester,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be up at the big house hiding under the carpet, but I’ve got friends down here and I didn’t want them to get hurt so I came. I’ve seen him fight at the gym,’ he added, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘He’s a terror. Faster than you’d believe. Drops his shoulder a bit, mind, but a good coach’ll break that habit. Someone take off their coat for that lady, please, she’s old enough to be my mother and shouldn’t be lying in the cold. You, miss, would you mind stepping back aways?’ This to the woman who had felled her. ‘I think you’ve had a bit of a shock. It’s always hard to be close to something like this, you always feel it’s somehow your fault and it never is.’ Bemused, the woman backed away and was embraced solicitously by those around her. A moment later, the sweeper was covered in a makeshift blanket.

‘Now,’ the Sergeant carried on, ‘we’re all alone out here tonight. Those arseholes,’ he gestured vaguely in the direction of Kershaw’s office, ‘aren’t coming, so we’ve no emergency services. We’d best do it ourselves, hips can be tricky. I need a few strong lads to get this lady into my car and I’ll take her to a doctor. You, sir, you better come along so she’s got a familiar face.’ This last to the dealer, who got unsteadily to his feet, assisted by the boxer.

They were carrying the sweeper down the side street with surpassing gentleness and loading her into the long back of the Land Rover when the Sergeant heard engines, and felt the mood thicken around him. He shook his head. I had them. I bloody did.

But he had lost them now. He pressed the keys into the dealer’s hand. ‘Get in the car. Go to the scrivener’s office and get him and the Witch and get up to Brighton House – she knows where to find the key. If it gets nasty use the red phone in the office and tell the snotty prick on the other end that I’m compromised and the diplomatic premises are under direct threat.’

And before the man could say anything he stepped back and waved cheerily. ‘Off you go, now, sir. I’ll be right behind you. I want to help these folk clean up a bit.’

The dealer got the Land Rover started and went, and the old woman’s eyes locked on the Sergeant’s in mute concern as they pulled away.

Lester Ferris turned, and saw the boys on their quad bikes rolling slowly through the crowd, and with them a kind of bitter recollection of anger. They had work to do. There were things to be broken, statements to be made.

‘English sergeant,’ the leader said from beneath his mask.

‘Shame we got no dogs left,’ said the next.

The Sergeant felt the crowd respond. No dogs left, and someone’s got to be nailed up.

Shit.

There was no retreat from this situation. He was cut off. There would be no help from Kershaw, either, that was clear. And no blather he could muster would soothe them. So he pointed his index finger at the leader and scowled.

‘You’re the toerag who kills broken-down old pups, is it? The limp-dicked, shrivel-sacked little puswad, the best part of whom dried up on a hankie, who thinks nailing a dog to a telegraph pole will make him a hero. Is that right? Is that the fucking size of it? You miserable excuse for a shitheel? Well, then. Well, then. WELL, THEN. Let’s have a bit of fun, you and me. A man-to-man discussion, eh?’ He was walking forward now, and that was pretty unlikely, unlikely enough to stop the momentum, change the game. But it had to be just right. He had to be offensive enough to challenge, but not enough to be dismissed as disrespectful of the game. ‘Or are you a bit too scared of an old geezer for any of that? You can always hide behind your mates. You can have them soften me up a bit first, can’t you? Let them take some of the sting out of it for you.’ And they backed away, bless them, at this ignoble suggestion. Oh, for a few of my lads behind me. We could actually win.

The leader got down off his quad and stretched. He was loose-limbed and fluid, with a dangerous reach. His hands had seen proper work and proper fighting.

And then he produced a long-barrelled revolver from his belt and levelled it.

‘Beat the shit out of him,’ he said simply.

And they did.

The first blow came in low and numbed the Sergeant’s left leg, the second across his back. They had pieces of timber, ungainly but none the less painful and bruising. The third blow knocked him from his feet and he knew that it was all up, that he would almost certainly die on this clean white street, and he rolled into a ball, saving his head as best he could and wondering when the first bone would crack. They were unprofessional and not particularly enthusiastic, but their anger was growing as they struck and quite soon they would start to mean it, and shortly after that he would lose consciousness and then it really would be over, because they would kill him without even really meaning to. It didn’t matter who you were, the human body was just not that tough.

And then he went away, until curiously he smelled fish and bad cigars.

He came to in his own bed, again, expecting to see the Witch or the boy and slightly hoping for Kaiko Inoue. The unexpected smell of fish was gone, but the bad cigars, stale and grim, hung in the air along with a pungent male odour. He opened his eyes and saw a man with a bandaged nose.

‘Holy shit, Ferris, they hardly touched you,’ Pechorin said. ‘When that fat bastard came and got me I thought maybe you’d lose a kidney at least, but look at you. The doctor with the extremely Ukrainian tits out there, who claims to come from Kansas? She says you’re not even going to die a little bit.’

‘Who… came and got you?’

‘Beneseffe,’ Pechorin growled. ‘He and his lobstermen. We had a little conversation about fish this morning. Some opportunities were discussed. Some possible business. They send some local kid round to check me out, I figure they know what’s going on, so I go see them. We make friends. Then a couple of hours ago, “Pavel, Pavel, we have to save Lester” and blah blah, and I say okay, because you will box with me and you’re good when I lose my temper, which is not everyone. The world is not full of people who will decline the opportunity to hit me in the head.’

You have no idea.

‘I like this house,’ Pechorin went on. ‘You got some architecture here. Where I come from there’s some stuff like this but all the wood and paint is gone. You can go visit but the guide will tell you “here used to be very pretty, now it’s shit,” and leave you to imagine the rest. But it’s full of invalids. You got an old lady down the hall, two lobstermen bleeding on the couch. You are the last British colonial hospital all of a sudden. Is this place still a consulate? That’s going to throw some egg.’ He considered this last, shook his head. ‘Whatever. The tits say you should go back to sleep, get your strength. I’m not to wake you, blahblahblah.’

The Sergeant could feel himself slipping into sleep again. ‘I thought you were arrested,’ he murmured.

Pechorin shrugged. ‘I got unarrested. I tell you another time.’ He hesitated. ‘You keep a secret, Lester?’

‘Yes.’ Lots.

‘I don’t want that you think I’m a fuckhead war profiteer drug pusher, okay? Let’s say I maybe had some orders to do what I did. When a government does something it’s not a crime, is politics. Maybe I fight war on terror. Maybe I do good work, get tip-off. Maybe my job, it’s not completely clear. Okay? Like the CIA in Vietnam. I tell myself I’m sending drugs home to hospitals. Maybe it’s only my boss is a fuckhead war profiteer drug pusher and I’m a stooge.’ He shrugged. ‘I do what is necessary. It’s Mancreu. Makes no difference, anyway.’

It does. It does, it does. It does to Shola, and the others. It does to the dogs. To the boy, it does.

He tried to fix Pechorin with an interrogator’s eye: Are you lying? Is this bullshit? Tell me what you know! But the world was brown and warm and then he was gone again.

By late afternoon he had shaken off the Witch’s insistence that he stay in bed and was walking around, complaining with every movement but convinced he was doing himself good, and she averred between curses that he might be, but that he’d be happier if he didn’t. She had no time to chase him, however, because the sweeper’s hip was broken and she was concerned about clotting. One of the lobstermen had an infected cut which required medicines she could not get without crossing Beauville to Kershaw’s building, and the riot was still going, so she had instead to make her best alternative from plants by boiling them in a pan and supplementing the mix with powders from the medical supplies at Brighton House, which were for the most part out of date.

He couldn’t escape the feeling that all this was his fault, that he could have done more – that while Lester Ferris could never have stood alone in front of the gang and faced them down, he was no longer only Lester Ferris and he had in some sense abandoned his post, at great cost to an old woman and he had no idea how many others. He hoped Inoue was out of it, firmly on the far side of the island. He even hoped Kershaw was okay. He was sure Dirac was.

He barely dared to think about the boy. There were so many things that could be wrong. Perhaps he slept in an abandoned house and it had simply burned around him. Perhaps he had defended a dog, or perhaps his trading association with the Fleet had been viewed as treason. It was all equally possible. A father would go out and find him, risks or no, injuries or not. A real father would have no choice, would feel, surely, the tug in his blood and his bones and the need beyond common sense. He would go house to house. He would find the corpse if he must, the living child if he could, but he would be out there.

And, the voice of experience told him, that man would be an idiot. A noble, short-lived idiot, searching a burning town for a child who knew its alleys and its secrets, who was better suited to it than a clumping parent could ever be. More than likely the would-be rescuer would bring the mob to his child’s door, and they would both burn. Nightmares boiled in his mind’s eye, multiple scenarios of doom and folly, and each one grew more grotesque, more self-defeating.

‘Dude! You got ganked!’

The boy stood in the doorway and stared at him, mightily impressed. ‘You got really messed up! That is… that is roarsome!’

When merely ‘awesome’ is not enough.

The boy was still going. ‘This is your Bespin! You failed, but you didn’t die, and you totally kept your integrity—’

And then he could not continue because the Sergeant had wrapped him in a vast embrace, painful and absolute, and was having trouble letting go even as panic gripped him that this was absolutely outside their way of being, this absolute and unequivocal hug so full of worry and dismay. He wrenched his arms open and stepped away.

The boy gazed at him, wide-eyed.

And then hesitantly crossed the space between them for a second, half-hug, resting his head against the Sergeant’s shoulder.

‘It is okay,’ he said, his face very sombre and eerily old. ‘I was fine.’ He stayed there for a moment, and then slipped away. ‘By the way, you have mail. The Italian said to bring this to you.’ From his bag, he produced a slim envelope. ‘Said it would help with your investigation. Check it out! Maybe it will tell us how to beat those badmashes on the bikes! I will make tea!’

He scampered away, and the Sergeant found he could breathe, despite his aching ribs, for the first time in a day. He opened the envelope and glanced at the contents, then stopped and stared.

Not the bike gang, and nothing about Tigerman or Shola’s death.

The boy’s face stared up at him from the file, his birthday, his given name. His parents.

The Sergeant retreated to the study and closed the door. It was not privacy he needed but calm, a sense of constancy. This was the thing. This was the file. The boy’s file. Everything he had wanted to know was here, and yet reading it all would be cheating, of a kind. He did not have to read it all. He would leave the boy his mysteries. He had read the name at the top, had already forgotten it. Saul? Sullah? Simon? It began with an S. Or possibly M, or X, or J. He could check, but he would not. The boy was the boy, complete in himself. It was idle to give him a name beyond that unless he wanted one. The Sergeant needed only the names of his family, and where to find them.

He began to read. He tried to avoid the detail but it was impossible, the truth was buried in the text, so he had to intrude at least that much. Not a problem. He could forget it afterwards, could wait to have it explained and never let it be known that he knew.

The boy’s father had been a longline fisherman from Malé. He had come to the island after a storm and stayed just long enough to fall in love and father a child. Arno had written in the margin that he thought it really had been love. He must have been out gathering information before the riot, or perhaps the investigative team had simply gone on about their business, backed by a few marines and moving carefully to avoid the mob. They must have worked in worse places; in Somalia, at least, and maybe Kashmir or the West Bank. The young sailor, anyway, had gone back to his ship and headed home to acquaint his family with his intent to marry, and had got caught instead on an outgoing line and drowned. It happened, Arno noted, quite a lot. He knew families at home who had suffered by the same thing.

The Sergeant turned the page, and – seeing what was written there – nodded in a kind of acknowledgement. The boy’s mother was alive, of course. She was not a nun, or a bar fly. She was no one he knew. But he knew of her, as everyone did, and he knew that he had been in some way expecting this.

Once upon a time, he thought, only it’s not like that because it’s not fucking funny. And where had he heard that? ‘Throw the stele in the sea and tell him you want to take him away from here and see what he says. Maybe there’s a family for you after all. Leave your victory on this island where it belongs.’

The story went on, relentless.

Once upon a time, White Raoul knew a lover from the mountains, a weaver woman of the old stock. They made no marriage and no contract. She would not have him, because he was a foreigner. He amused her and adored her and perhaps his feelings were reciprocated. But when she conceived a child she told him that Beauville was too modern and too cold a place to raise a daughter and she went home, and would not see him any more. Sandrine was born on the floor of a herder’s cottage, midwifed by a cowman. She visited her father as she grew. He kept a place for her always in his house, and she was famed for her looks. Her father’s fierce protectiveness was misconstrued. He was not guarding her virtue, just his small allotment of time with the child as she grew and changed from month to month and he missed each waystation of her life: her first tooth, her first word, her first love.

Until she too bore a child, to a longline fisherman, and when he died she mourned and healed and in time the boy attended school in Beauville, for the dead father had persuaded her the world beyond the island was worth knowing. She obtained by some haggling an old computer and a solar mat to charge it, and they learned together of the history of Mancreu, and Europe and Africa and more, and together they were angry and impressed and afraid. She studied correspondence courses and prepared for the day she must travel with him to the mainland and enrol them both in some manner of university. It was possible. There were bursaries, charities, husbands and even sugar daddies, and if these failed there was always crime. Her family knew crime.

She was methodical, composing options and plans, laying groundwork. She networked, by phone and by email and later by the new avenues of social media. With the assistance of a passing photographer and a local flautist she created a YouTube slot which picked up thirty thousand views. And she got her wish: scholarships for them both one autumn, with all the trimmings, at an institution in Qatar.

That summer she walked the high passes every day. She took pictures of them, inhaled them, sketched them and sang to them. She slept under the stars, sometimes alone and sometimes in company, drank and danced and visited her mother and her uncles and aunts. She and the boy together toiled over their English and their Arabic both, watching movies and listening to CDs and reading books, so that the way they spoke was a muddle of Scotland and Baltimore, Tikrit and Tunis.

On the last day of her sabbatical, the first Discharge Cloud came. It rolled down along the high valleys, and she was caught in it and changed. She was vibrant and beautiful still, compassionate and energetic. But from moment to moment she forgot almost everything and everyone, living in an endless now which seemed to worry her not at all. Of all things, she remembered most of all the island, the endless smugglers’ paths and narrow goat tracks, the rivers and waterfalls where she swam. She was content and even joyful in her new state. But she never spoke, and she did not know her son.

And he, of course, still knew her.