Tigerman

3. Murder

THE SERGEANT TURNED the Land Rover slowly around a narrow bend, using the horn. The tyres complained on the surface of the road. Mancreu high heat was ghastly, made hard by the flatiron rocks and the merciless reflected light from the ocean all around. The salt dried the air and the dust coated the skin and mouth, and you could feel you were dying of thirst even when you were drinking. When the cold came it was carried on sea winds from the south, but the warm heart of the mountains and the shelter of the Cupped Hands broke the force of the gale on the lee side. The south side was stripped and gnarled by storms and then battered by rain which fell in continuous streams from the thunderheads. This day was in between, the tail end of a bread-oven month, white caps on the water to the ocean side a warning that the rainy days were coming.

He worried about the boy as he drove, and about what would happen to the remaining civilians when the island was eventually purged. It had bothered him from the beginning, but more and more as time went by and the inevitable end drew closer. He had seen refugee columns and resettlement camps around the world, and he did not care to imagine what the boy would become by living in one. A warlord, in the end, or a corpse. Such places did not admit of middle ways. The joy would be cut from him, for sure.

The Sergeant had a plan to deal with that crisis if – when – it arrived, but he was still working out the detail. There were preparations he had to make, investigations he had been conducting quietly for some time. But he had not actually put the plan into action, and he had not spoken to the boy about it. There were good reasons. Sound reasons.

He braked again to go around another impossible bend, avoiding his own eyes in the mirror. None of these reasons was a lack of resolve on his part, or a lack of personal courage. He was almost sure.

The town and the port spread out below him, the invisible ships surprisingly close to the land. He felt his eyes flick away. Everyone found ways not to see what was in the bays. The Fleet could have painted itself pink or burned to the waterline, and no one would have remarked upon it. People saw the harbour and the horizon and nothing in between. Even the fishermen who went out and zipped in between the big vessels, selling fresh fish and crab, and the traders on junkboats who bought and sold DVDs and Coca-Cola and fresh meat and anything else they could lay hands on – even they had a strange amnesia about which ships they visited. It wasn’t feigned. It was a habit so totally ingrained as to have become part of reality. The enormous ships were a fact of life, and it was a fact that you couldn’t see them.

As with everything else, the boy was an exception. He bartered with the ship captains, argued with them loudly and crudely, demanded – and received – favours, tours, T-shirts, and team hats. He had a Delta Force hat, and a Real Madrid jacket, and a signed copy of something called Transmetropolitan which the Sergeant understood by the jubilation it had entailed to be a major coup. The boy had won them at dice or paid for them with gossip or simply asked for and received them. It seemed the captains admired his cheek, or maybe they were just desperately grateful for someone who acknowledged their existence. It didn’t matter how tough you were, how psychologically motivated. It hurt to be invisible, even if that was the whole point.

Like Diego Garcia, of rendition infamy, Mancreu had been found new uses by democratic governments wishing to avoid the consequences of their own inconvenient liberties, and by corporations seeking relief from the onerous duties of civilisation. The border on the map had been softened and in places entirely cut away, so that a strange zone of legal limbo was created between the breakers and the three-mile limit. In this maritime twilight it was often hard to tell where nations ended and other entities began; where corporate activity shaded into organised crime, spying into a trade in unlawful commodities. Clustered across the Cupped Hands lay a mass of unaffiliated shipping: prisons for deniable detainees and hospitals for unethical procedures; data havens, grey banks, untaxed subsidiaries; floating harems and forced-labour factories, auction houses for contraband goods; torture facilities for hire. So long as it never touched the shore, the business of the Fleet was invisible.

When the storms came in above the southern mountains, the ships drew apart from one another so that covert prows didn’t gouge holes in unacknowledged hulls; so that secret masts didn’t scythe across false-flag decks. When the weather abated, they huddled, so they could share cable television connections to the land and shout news to one another from deck to deck. American intelligence officers and their corporate-side cousins traded Sara Lee brownies with Poles for vodka and Frenchmen for cigarettes. Brits gave up HumInt and lapsang souchong and bought red wine and fresh milk, and sometimes played cricket on a long, lean supertanker moored forever at the northernmost limit of the zone. And all of them traded snippets of information to the Mafia and the Triads in exchange for occasional housekeeping jobs, ex gratia hookers and something to read. And the crooks were good for vanishings, when an interrogation grew heated and a subject expired from his own ignorance. On other deployments the Sergeant had occasionally seen that sort of thing written up by contractors as self-injurious passive psychological attack culminating in asset compromise. But here, on the ships of the Black Fleet, those terms of art were unnecessary. So long as the Fleet kept its activities to the waters of Mancreu, no reports were ever written. Intelligence was sourceless, all analysis was done on site and only the pure information ever emerged. The Rule of Law within the territory of the western democracies was preserved, and the conscience of ministers was notionally clean. Mancreu was a tapestry of questions unasked, because the answers were obvious. It had been going on for so long now that, at least to a global press whose owners sipped Chardonnay with prime ministers, it was no longer distressing.

The Sergeant turned the wheel and felt the beginnings of a skid; the road surface was covered in scree and shale. He allowed the car to drift a little, enjoying the play of the tyres and the tarmac, then straightened up and let his route take him in amongst the narrower streets.

Kershaw – his first stop, out of politeness – was not available, which meant the American was probably receiving information or instructions. The Sergeant left a message at the desk with a promise to come back later. He went over to the harbour and Beneseffe showed him the scene of the great fish theft, which was predictably stinky but otherwise not terribly helpful. A fully staffed crimes unit could have taken fingerprints and statements, worked out who had used the winches and the hauler. It would still have been almost impossible to learn much from the physical evidence because everyone likely to have committed the crime was allowed to use the equipment. It was remotely possible that someone not from the port had sneaked in, known how to work everything, gone off with the fish. But that person would then have to dispose of the fish, and how precisely would a shepherd explain his sudden good fortune? Had they fallen as rain? (And on Mancreu in particular: if they had, would anyone buy them?)

It seemed unlikely that this crime would remain mysterious for very long. There was a limited number of things you could do with four tons of fresh fish.

Pursuant to his other investigation – the one which related to his long-term solution for the boy’s evacuation – the Sergeant asked Beneseffe casually if he knew who his friend’s parents were.

‘Which boy?’ the Portmaster responded.

‘The one who’s always around. Comic books and a big old cellphone. Slim, dark hair. Smart.’

For a moment he thought Beneseffe might actually be able to tell him. There was a flicker of recognition in his face. Perhaps it was common knowledge. That boy who was orphaned in the storm of ’02, whose parents died of a fever, who survived the car crash back in ’09. Perhaps this would be simple. But Beneseffe shook his head. There were a lot of boys on Mancreu, even now. ‘Ask at the schoolhouse,’ he suggested.

‘He doesn’t go to school.’

‘If he doesn’t and he should then they’ll know who he is, won’t they?’ Beneseffe pointed out, his tone implying that if this was detective work he considered it easier than people believed.

And they might know, at that, the Sergeant thought. Absence might be conspicuous. He would ask – but not today. Tomorrow. If he asked too many questions all at once, people would notice. The boy might find out about it indirectly, and that was not part of the plan.

Standing outside in the sunlight, he considered his idea of dropping in on the Witch as if by accident, but felt now that this would amount to an imposition of his presence. She must recognise it for what it was: a loneliness, and an approach. It would be better instead to make overt what was in his mind. Send her flowers. Ask her out. She was quite capable of refusing him with grace and making the matter relatively painless, he knew that. He wondered if she liked to read, as well as to play music. He had books he could lend her. Perhaps they would swap books. Perhaps reading would become an evening together, and between pages of a novel she would undress, and kiss him.

He sighed. He should have made his proposition months ago. It might have been possible. Now there was a fatigue about his desire, as if they had been lovers for too long and the flame was guttering, leaving them with a comfortable friendship and nothing more. His mind offered him visions of her, and his body was keen enough to accept the notion, but more and more they came with the hollow familiarity of repetition, and faded away without heat.

Seagulls landed all around him in a cloud, shrieking. One of the open boats was coming in, the bait high and vile in the air. The Witch was banished. Well, now he could not go and see her. Her skin was muddled in his mind with the smell of drying mackerel. Hardly good kindling.

At a loose end, he went out onto the seafront and sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the dock like a child. The dog? The mugging?

Mancreu shuddered, and he rolled himself hastily away from the water’s edge. He had no desire to take a dip in the diesel-filmed harbour, swallowing seagull shit and oil. He stretched out a hand to steady himself on the cobbles.

The tremor faded.

He settled, resuming his seat, and listened to the sounds behind him in the town. Someone was brushing a broken bottle into a pan, and over on the other side of the Portmaster’s office a lobsterman was chasing a stray lobster along the ground. The Sergeant laughed, but then the man turned and he was wearing a cheap surfing T-shirt, and it was – absurdly – one he had seen before, dozens of times, in Afghanistan. Someone must have donated a crate of them, because the kids all wore them when they went to school.

He sighed. Afghanistan had been a mess. The Americans called it a Total Goatfuck, and they laughed and swore and kept their spirits up by firing huge bombs into the cave systems. Several of the local section commanders had taken to wearing stetsons and sheriff’s badges when they went out in public, and one actually made a temporary drive-in and screened a bunch of cowboy movies dubbed into Pashtun and Farsi. ‘I want them to know where we’re coming from,’ he said. ‘I want them to understand that this is how we do.’ The Afghans watched the movies, some from the makeshift benches in the drive-in and some through field glasses from up in the hills, and there was a great deal of debate over coffee and raisins about whether Rooster Cogburn really did have true grit. Then one morning the projectionist was found with the second reel of High Noon pushed into his open chest.

‘What the fuck did he expect?’ the Sergeant overheard a senior officer say to a visiting member of the general staff. ‘He sent his message, and they sent one back. Their message isn’t a lot more insane than his, it’s just in capital fucking letters!’ And then, to everyone’s surprise and embarrassment, the man wept.

The Brits didn’t talk about Afghanistan being a Total Goatfuck. That didn’t come close to expressing how they felt. They had a sense of having been here before, a sense they got from their regimental histories and from the Afghans themselves, who still recognised the flags they flew and the badges on their shoulders from the wars of a hundred years ago. There were soldiers here whose great-grandfathers had fought the Pashtuns in 1918, and the fathers of those men had fought them before that in 1879, and their fathers in 1840. The Brits shared with the locals a tacit understanding that nothing done here would make any difference, that this was just another layer of bloody patina on the cold, hard soil.

Command gave the Sergeant a new second lieutenant to take care of, a boy called Westcott. He was posh as Royal Doulton and thick as a carthorse. He said the war was going to be ‘an improvement for everyone in the long run’. He let it be known that he liked his men to read, because he felt it improved their chances of ‘getting a good position’ when they got home.

The Sergeant, like many men whose jobs involve a great deal of waiting, enjoyed reading. He carried one paperback wherever he went. He had a small library in his locker and selected something different each time he packed his gear. He had Three Men in a Boat and The Passion and The Hound of the Baskervilles, a few old Eric Frank Russell editions, and a copy of Bleak House for the winter. Westcott said he should invest in an electronic book tablet. They could store thousands of books, Westcott said, and they lasted for weeks between charges. A couple of the soldiers already had them, Westcott said, and really liked them. Progress was what it was all about. When he was out of the army, he was going into business and then later when he knew a thing or two he might stand for Parliament – that was giving back, which a person in Westcott’s position really ought to do.

Two weeks on, Westcott was reading from his gizmo in a ravine when the sky opened white and purple and bullets poured down. The machine had brought the Taliban right to him; it had a cellular connection Westcott had forgotten to switch off, or maybe he couldn’t wait for the latest Grisham and had tried to bloody download it. The Sergeant dragged two men through the howling night and hid them in the stripped carcass of a bus, then went back and found that Westcott had been cut in half. The enemy was a gaggle of boys and an older man, and one of the kids had a box with wires poking out which was their uplink detector. They were dancing and celebrating.

Blue Peter, the Sergeant thought. My Science Project. I’m fighting sticky-backed plastic and cornflakes packets. He was only dimly aware of being injured.

A day later, the whole valley was made of glass. The daisy-cutters weren’t classed as weapons of mass destruction because they weren’t nukes, but they worked just as well by being very big. They were so big they had to be pushed out of the back of carrier planes one by one, down the ramp usually used for tanks and trucks. Each of them was a natural disaster in a box. The air for miles in any direction smelled of oil, hot stone, and charred sheep. The Sergeant sat in the back of a truck with his legs hanging down over the road and watched. Someone had thought it might be a good notion for him to know that the men who had killed Westcott weren’t getting away with it. Privately, he thought that whoever that person was must be new here. Still, it wouldn’t do to be ungrateful. He recited the whole of a poem he knew about a cat. For a while, it seemed to be all he could say. When he found other words, they were jagged and inappropriate, full of a sense of waste.

They sent him to Mancreu. Take a break, Lester. Not long on active for you now, is it? Nearly forty. Well, serve it out. We’ll find something for you.

He watched the waves in the harbour and thought about Beneseffe’s stolen fish. He would be quite content to stay here. Mancreu life – strange and undemanding and disjointed – suited him. He wondered if there were some other abandoned island somewhere without the death warrant hanging over it, a place which needed a sergeant. El Hierro, Shola had said. Maybe El Hierro. Then he felt like a traitor for having the thought, as if he were married to a sick woman and coveted her sister. Well, he would stay as long as he was permitted. But there was nothing wicked in wondering where he would go, after. That was just life. You had to be practical.

There was a presence at his side and the noise of a pocket radio and he recognised, in a brief lull in the breeze, the scent of the boy. His friend smelled of earth today, rather than salt, so the Sergeant guessed he had not been out on his boat. The radio dangled by a lanyard from the boy’s hand, and a breathless northern English voice was detailing Real Madrid’s latest triumph on the football pitch. A famous victory, the voice said, which seemed rather premature. Time would decide whether it was famous or not, and most likely it would be just another game.

The boy politely switched off the radio and the Sergeant got to his feet. They walked along beside the water until they came to a broad stretch of sea wall that was flat and warm, in a part of Beauville which was now mostly deserted. Both sat. The boy said nothing. The sea washed and swooshed. After a moment, the boy reached into his bag and produced something wrapped in greaseproof paper and foil.

They had an arrangement regarding food which was acceptable to both. The Sergeant had a considerable inventory of baked beans and spaghetti hoops at Brighton House which amounted to more than a single person could consume over the space of some years. The boy had made it clear that he regarded baked beans as the highest form of culinary genius, but had a correspondingly low opinion of the spaghetti hoop. As with the continuity of stories and the football of Real Madrid, the matter was akin to a religious one, and no heresies were tolerated. The barbecued bean, for example, was taboo. Alphabet shapes could not move him to a gentler opinion of pasta in sauce.

The Sergeant, meanwhile, had long ago eaten all the tinned produce, all the syrups and ketchups and brines, that he could stand. He wanted nothing so much as fresh food. He loved the dubious Mancreu cheeses and the dry sesame biscuits which went with them. He loved the oily sardines and goat-knuckle stews, the mashed roots and flatbreads which were the island’s staples. He ate whatever was in season and whatever was for sale and thought himself in paradise. Anything so long as he never had to swallow another mouthful from a tin.

They had therefore evolved a practice suited to their likes. The boy would arrive with fruit, cheese, and bread, and the Sergeant would supply baked beans. They would begin by toasting the bread over a pocket gas burner and warming some beans for the boy. Each would make some disparaging face in the direction of his friend’s meal, and then they would sit in loud, masticatory silence for a while, and then speak of whatever might be on their minds.

The Sergeant extended the plate of warmed beans, and the boy took them. He ate one mouthful, and then the next. He seemed to be worried that the heating had been uneven, because he was touching each heaped spoon with the tip of his tongue, like a lizard. The Sergeant took a big bite of cheese and bread.

After a while – it was quite in keeping with the moment, he hoped, not an imposition but a natural thing to do – the Sergeant spoke.

‘Do you have… family?’

The boy shook his head gravely. ‘I am too young.’

A lack of precision could take you to some strange places with a child living on Mancreu, where anything was possible.

‘I mean parents. Brothers and sisters. Uncles, even.’

‘Aunts and cousins and bears, oh my!’ He grinned.

‘Really?’

‘Sure. Of course.’ He made an encompassing gesture. Mancreu life: everyone is family. If you live in the same street or on the same farm, you’re cousins or brothers. An older man is an uncle if he functions as an uncle.

‘Blood family?’

‘Someplace.’

‘But here?’ Who takes care of you apart from me? Who’s missing you, right now? Where are you when you’re not with me? He felt like a jealous husband. Or how he imagined it would be to be one.

The boy shrugged his private shrug, or perhaps it was merely that his mind had wandered, for the next thing he said was that he had heard the British government had captured a flying saucer in the early part of the 1900s, and did the Sergeant know anything about it? Would the Queen know? Or would it be hidden away from everyone, the way the Roswell saucer was at Area 51? The Sergeant answered these questions with the same serious attention he would have given to anything the boy said, as if they were entirely reasonable and not at all preposterous, and after a while longer watching the waves they went back the way they had come – if not together, then two men going in the same direction at the same time.

They ended up, inevitably, at Shola’s. The Sergeant recognised by the boy’s heavy knapsack and his contemplative quiet that there was reading to be done. He had in his own pocket the paperback of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and was finding it entirely engrossing: ‘Jackie Brown, at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.’ He therefore made his way to his own familiar seat, and the boy, without a backward glance, went to the bodyguard’s table, and spread out a sheaf of the work of the great Bendis, the bard of Cleveland. Shola obliged them both with quiet and what provisions they desired, and the common life of Mancreu came and went around them, until the day became the evening and the Sergeant’s left buttock began to ache in a way he could not any longer ignore. Age, he supposed, and bad furniture.

Shola peered at the Sergeant, appearing to read something in his face which was both familiar and a little bit sad. ‘Anaesthetic,’ he offered. ‘Special Mancreu style.’ He produced a bottle from beneath the counter and poured himself a single measure in a little red glass.

The rum was brown and thick, and there were veins like treacle in it. Every September, Shola harvested his small marijuana crop – the plant grew well on the island, at least on the sheltered side – and selected some of the best leaves. He dipped them briefly in boiling water to kill anything living, and pushed a handful into each of twelve bottles of sweet white alcohol. Then he buried the bottles in the mud at the back of his house, and the sun baked the mud and the mud coddled the rum, so that when he dug it up again in July the leaves were beaded with resiny sap. He shook the bottles one by one until the rum was the colour of crude oil, then poured it through a fresh linen cloth, and finally stoppered the finished product again and laid the bottles by for special occasions and dire emergencies. It was quite respectable. Mancreu men had brewed fortified rums for as long as anyone could remember. There were pictures of missionaries drinking them and losing their inhibitions, and stories of Knights Templar finding out about them and mistaking them for Christ’s Blood. The original indigenes had made theirs with a local hallucinogenic root, but no one used that any more because it was addictive and had the unfortunate property of sending you blind and mad. Marijuana was better, and you could sell it to the Black Fleet for Swiss francs. Shola no longer trusted dollars. The Chinese owned the dollar, Shola said. It was only a matter of time.

The Sergeant declined the drink with thanks, though part of him very much wanted to accept. A strange, Victorian spectre dangled over him: the image of a fat, hirsute colonial administrator taking to the local drugs and losing his mind, running naked through the streets. Children laughed and pointed, women smirked. Men sucked air through their teeth as something terrible and a little bit funny happened to his exposed member. People – undefinable people, but including Kershaw, Beneseffe, the Witch, Pechorin, and of course, Kaiko Inoue and even the boy – would think less of him.

Shola shrugged and poured half the glass carefully back into the bottle, then drank the rest. The Sergeant, feeling embarrassed at this evidence of his own prudishness, accepted a bowl of soup instead, and returned his attention to Eddie Coyle.

The men came in as Shola was shifting the café from one mood to another. He had turned on the neon lights and taken the tea kettle off the hob, but he had not closed the shutters. He had gone up to the private rooms to change his workmanish daytime shirt for the extraordinarily ugly red silk one he wore at night. Every day he looked exactly the same. Perhaps he had several sets of each uniform. The Sergeant imagined a daytime closet upstairs filled with vests and aprons and grubby trousers, and opposite it an old wardrobe filled with a row of Casanova blouses, vintage 1974 from Yeah, Baby! of Brick Lane, bought from eBay and shipped by sea to Qatar and then on to Mancreu, vacuum-sealed by Shola’s explicit instruction, lest the damp creep in and they arrive covered in mould.

There were five men, and they arrived as the Sergeant finished his soup. They were local but not familiar, and from his vantage the Sergeant had time to be uncomfortable with their intent faces and their focus. He shifted his weight from the bones of his arse to his feet, and felt the muscles in his stomach tighten as he leaned forward over his empty bowl.

The shooting started.

They weren’t systematic but they made up for it with sheer aggression. They had a shotgun and four Chinese AKs. Two fishermen having dinner before going out for the evening went down first, then the dogmeat seller who always smelled of chum. Two good-time girls at the bar – Isobel and Fleur, or so they had claimed – tried to dive behind it and were hit on the way over. Then Shola.

The Sergeant saw Shola very clearly, because they were on opposing trajectories. The Sergeant was heading out, knees protesting as he hurled himself forward, but protesting in a willing way: fuck, yes, but don’t make a habit of it. He imagined he must look almost horizontal, head forward, muscles straining to keep up with his lunge for the kitchen and the back door. He had a sudden image of the boy’s comic books. Men in those stories ran like this all the time. Heroes did. Towards the action, it must be said, but they were often indestructible and in one way or another well armed. They ran like this to answer a ringing phone, sometimes.

Shola was coming down the main stairs with his barman’s rag over his shoulder, buttoning the awful shirt, the wide smile of welcome vanishing as he saw the guns, replaced by a look of horror as his early customers – his friends, mostly – started to scream. He shouted ‘Stop!’ the way people do when something utterly awful is happening and will continue to happen whatever they say. There was no expectation that it would change anything, but it must be said. The human throat could not keep it inside. People said it to bombs and hurricanes and tsunamis and wildfires. The Sergeant had seen video footage, in 2001, of a woman standing on the street bellowing it at the Twin Towers.

It never made any difference, and no one expected it to. It was the soul’s voice, in hell.

Shola’s soul was inaudible, but between stutters and bangs the men saw him. Perhaps because he was coming forward, all of them reacted. First the AKs punctured him and he jiggled like a hula dancer, arms wide as if snapping his fingers and inviting you to join in. Then the shotgun tore a fistful from his chest and he stopped being Shola and became a dead thing, flying backwards and landing on his own floor.

The Sergeant realised he was kneeling in the kitchen, concealed by the angle of the bar, and staring back into the room. The boy was still sitting where he had been when it all started. His face was spattered with something which must have come from Shola, a strange granular mixture the Sergeant had never seen before. Brain and bile, perhaps. Or Shola’s lunch. The comic book in front of the boy was ruined, piled high with dripping anatomy. The boy was staring straight ahead, quite still. The Sergeant could not decide if he had frozen or if he understood instinctively that movement would kill him.

The killers for their part looked rather surprised to have succeeded so well. They had apparently been expecting some manner of resistance. They kept their weapons trained on the boy. The only question among them appeared to be who would kill him. The Sergeant heard one of them say temoin, witness. For God’s sake, he thought. Leave him alone. Shola’s dead. It’s over.

He peeped in again and saw the point man’s eyes go from alert to cold. The boy would die in a second or two. The decision was made.

He looked down at his hands and found he was holding a metal biscuit tin. He opened it and saw a smattering of yellow grains, smelled Bird’s Custard. What was he doing with it? Ludicrously, this was quite a dangerous object: shake a teaspoon of custard powder in a box and add a flame and the whole thing goes off like a bomb. It has to do with burn rates and surface area. ‘Explosive yield,’ the Sergeant’s demolitions tutor had told him, ‘is bloody complicated, so don’t piss about with it. If you’ve got to improvise, assume you need to be a long way away.’

And then he hadn’t got the tin any more. What had he done with it? He was kneeling in a pile of discarded yellow powder. He heard a gunshot, and almost immediately afterwards he was deaf.

Part of him – the trained-soldier part, a parcel of endlessly drilled responses which required no thought, which often took over in times of crisis – had been expecting a sort of woofing noise. The best he could have hoped for was a loud pop and plenty of light to blind them. He must have got the proportions exactly right, and Shola’s tin must have had a tighter lid than advertised. Expecting? How had he been expecting anything?

He stepped through the kitchen door brandishing a long-handled copper frying pan.

Three men were on the ground, and the biscuit tin was sticking out of the far wall, blown open like a razor-edged sunflower. The two remaining killers were staring blindly, but neither of them had yet started shooting. The boy was under the heavy wooden tabletop. Adolf Hitler, the Sergeant remembered irrelevantly, had once been preserved from death by a tabletop.

He could see how it had happened quite clearly, even as he drove the pan down hard on the arms and hands of the first armed man and felt them break. The tin had flown in, and the man nearest had opened fire. A bullet, red-hot and trailing burning residues, had penetrated the tin, igniting the powder. The explosion – there was nothing else to call it – blasted the tin to pieces, firing the greater part into the wall and a cone of small fragments of hot metal directly at the hapless marksman. The bang had been deafening, which was why the Sergeant could not hear anything. The men in the fire zone would not die, though the closest probably would lose the sight in his right eye.

The second standing man was bringing up his gun. The Sergeant suspected the killer was mostly seeing fuzzy shapes, but he knew he was under attack and he knew what to do about it. A soldier or a militiaman who had seen some sort of combat. The initial attack is blunted, but that doesn’t mean you stop. You keep fighting, because the moment you stop you hand the enemy the initiative. That was right and proper.

The Sergeant’s technical approval did not stop him from batting the gun to one side and shattering the man’s face with the base of the copper pan. The man pulled the trigger as he went down, and one of his friends on the ground shrieked as he lost a toe. Well, such is combat (you murdering prick).

The Sergeant saw movement and turned to find the boy poking another of the men on the floor in the eye with his comic book. Rolled tight, the comic was a stout wooden stick with a series of cookie-cutter edges at each end. The man screamed as his nerves reported the assault, and the boy kicked his gun away. The Sergeant hit the last man in the head, collected a gun and held it on them, counted: yes, five accounted for. His mouth tasted of bile and burning. He glanced out into the street: they had no backup.

Done.

And that was it. Five armed bandits versus a tween and a man having a quiet afternoon, and they’d won.

The boy looked around in wonder.

‘We’re alive!’ he said, and then again, Frankenstein style: ‘I am a-liiiive!’ The Sergeant wondered if this was shock, and thought it was, filtered through the boy’s weird, frenetic brain. ‘We pwn!’ the boy shouted. ‘We are alive and they are teh suxor!’

The Sergeant had only the vaguest idea what this meant. ‘Pwn’ was familiar, although he didn’t think you were supposed to say it out loud. Someone had explained it to him. He realised with a sickly feeling it had been Lieutenant Westcott, browsing his latest ebook in a Panther CLV, somewhere between Farah and Rudbar. Abruptly he was there as well as here. He knew he was remembering but couldn’t find the pause button. The playback just rolled on over the top of the men on the floor, the boy’s jubilant awareness of survival.

‘It’s a typo,’ Westcott had said. ‘They made it into a joke. You start with the simple statement “we won”. If you’re typing in a hurry, it might become “own”. Yes? And if you’re really going for it you might hit the wrong button altogether and get “pwn”. The lexicon is always growing. A lot of these games have chat channels as well as control keys, so that you can trashtalk the opposition. Like sledging’ – because cricket is always the clearest comparison. ‘So the kids type in a hurry because they’re under fire. Mostly war games, of course. The Americans use them to train the marines in teamwork, actually. Very forward-looking.’

The Sergeant had had a brief image of every sitting room in every town in the world becoming a training ground for marines. A wealth of potential recruits. Even more enemies. But there were always more enemies than allies, in video games. It had been that way since Space Invaders, which some people had actually wanted to ban on the grounds that it was wrong to suggest there were some fights you couldn’t win. You can always win, these people insisted, if you just go for it. Nike soldiering. Pep-talk strategy, and never mind the logistics, which will land you high and dry without food or body armour or even bullets. Real soldiers – soldiers like the ones in Hollywood films – could improvise a machine gun with a drainpipe and a bunch of clothespegs.

Like a man improvising a bomb with a tin of custard. He swayed, trying to remember what the real world looked like. The café. The café and Shola’s blood and bone everywhere and the smell of it. That was what it looked like now.

‘We are made from awesome!’ the boy said, hands on hips, hero style. Then memory took hold. In belated panic: ‘Shola?’

The Sergeant, about to indicate the corpse, remembered what it must look like and shook his head. He caught the boy’s arm as he went to see and held him back. The boy’s eyes widened and for a moment he grew stubborn, then limp.

‘Shola?’ he asked again. You have made a mistake. Someone else is dead. It is not our friend.

‘No,’ the Sergeant told him. He had had this conversation before, knew it very well. He looked around. How many corpses? Five? Six? Was anyone still alive? Any of them might be, except Shola. Shola was dead. But the others… He should find out, try to stop the bleeding. He had no idea how to do that. In films, everyone knew those things, but he didn’t and he might make it worse. In the real world, platoons had medics, and ‘don’t fucking touch unless I say’. He looked at the gun and wondered why he wasn’t tempted to pull the trigger, finish the men on the ground. He wanted to want to. A few moments ago, if he’d had this gun, he would have used it without hesitating. Now it was out of the question. Pointless. And it was important to take prisoners. He wished it wasn’t.

‘We beat them,’ the boy protested. ‘We beat them!’

Yes. That much was true. In comics, and in the games the boy played, that meant that the key actors did not die. In the particoloured fantasy world of Superman, winning meant saving your friends. Ergo, Shola could not be dead. Except he was, and that too was bloody obvious and according to convention: when a white soldier goes adventuring, it’s somehow his black friend who gets shot.

‘We did what we could,’ the Sergeant said, hating the words in his mouth. ‘Everything we could. There’s nothing to feel ashamed about.’ This last with great fierceness and certainty because he knew what shame would do later, if not capped now. He reached for something which would make sense. ‘We needed Superman, didn’t we? Only he’s busy. It’s just us.’

The boy nodded in reluctant understanding. ‘We are good. We are not leet. Saving Shola would have been leet.’

Leet, the Sergeant thought, from ‘elite’, often written l33t or even 1337. Meaning: the very best. The most able.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We are not leet.’

‘Perhaps we should practise,’ the boy murmured sadly.

‘Yes,’ the Sergeant agreed. He was rehearsing his choices in his mind, looking for better ones. Evade, counter-attack. There just weren’t any. Not once it started.

He heard a breath, looked down and saw the boy’s mouth open in a perfect O. He jerked back and around, looking for a sixth assassin, but there was nothing. The men on the ground cowered, begged. No threat. No threat. He looked back, abruptly afraid that the boy had been shot and was just now realising, grabbed him and checked him with his hands, moving aside folds of bloody clothing and patting the boy’s arms and legs. ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ His voice was uneven. Unprofessional. He was angry, the way his father had been angry with him when he burned himself on the kettle. ‘Tell me!’ He stopped shyly, worried that he had crossed a line.

‘I am fine,’ the boy said. ‘I am fine! I promise! Sorry. I did not mean to do that. It is okay. I was just seeing.’

‘Seeing what?’

‘Everything,’ the boy said. The Sergeant waited for him to crumple, but he didn’t. Instead he stared back at the room wide-eyed, as if he were visiting a cathedral. Shock looked like that sometimes. Survival became a miracle, the wretched world a heaven. Well. True enough.

Outside, someone was arriving. The cavalry. NatProMan, the Sergeant assumed, because explosions and gunfire would definitely attract Kershaw’s attention. Or perhaps he had called them. He didn’t remember. He looked down and saw the boy looking up, and realised that neither of them would cry unless the other one did first. He wondered what earthly good that was to anybody. Very manly. As much use as pulling the trigger, he supposed, which was to say none at all.

‘We should fight crime,’ the boy said. ‘That is what we should do.’