Tigerman

5. ZOMG

HE STRUGGLED THROUGH the next morning because there were things to do, things which couldn’t wait a day however awful he felt. He got up. It wasn’t pleasant. He ate some soup, wished he hadn’t. It swilled around in his stomach as if he was a hollow plastic sack. He knew better than to add bread. It would swell and make him feel bloated and leaden.

The weather was stubbornly ordinary. The natural world was remorseless about human death and just rolled on. Some people took solace in that, in the continuance of a greater cycle, but the Sergeant had found that he did not. Death was bad, and that was all. It was not a mercy, not a release, not a victory, and there was no more joy in a man becoming food for worms than in a chicken becoming food for a man.

He waited for the soup to recede, then took himself out for a run. He pushed himself through the blinding headache and on until he felt the jelly in his legs fade and the poisons in his blood bubble out through his skin. He stank. Tainted sweat fell from his body onto the track, and he wondered if it would make any difference to the cocktail of slurry and strangeness under the island. Booze metabolites and skin, salt and water, filtering down through endless layers of sand and rock to a weird melting pot somewhere down below. He showered, and midway through, as the water spiralled away down the plughole, he abruptly found the notion enormously alarming. He was giving up tiny parts of his physical self to be assimilated by what was under the island, would become part of an alien thing so dangerous that only total war could be contemplated, an annihilation so fierce it would take the stone and the sea with it. He retched, but nothing emerged from him. He allowed himself two ibuprofen tablets from supplies, logged them, and chased them with more water and a sachet of electrolyte salts intended for treating severe diarrhoea. Finally he added a multivitamin and a single bit of crispbread from the larder to settle his stomach. The mixture was sickly, but he knew it would work.

Dressed and dry, he took himself out to the car. He had prisoners to talk to: Kershaw was keeping them for him.

Beauville did have a prison – an old red Victorian box with narrow, barred windows and a high wall – but it had been commandeered by NatProMan to house its overspill, and was now full of administrators, soldiers and a considerable stock of weapons. Serious criminals – of which there had not been many – had been transferred to prisons in the Scandinavian countries where the crime rate was actually dropping so fast that the prison infrastructure industry was having trouble staying afloat. Denmark had been a net importer of criminals since 2011.

It had been understood that the island wasn’t going to last long enough for the lack of a prison to be a problem. Except that it had, so the Sergeant, five months into his role as Brevet-Consul, had persuaded Jed Kershaw to fix up an empty wooden building at the far end of the waterfront which had once been a fish-packing plant. The jail wasn’t secure by any modern standard, but the refrigeration units were big enough to serve as cells and you could lock them. A team of engineers had drilled holes in the sides so that the prisoners did not suffocate, and had turned off the cooling system so they did not freeze. Until yesterday it had housed only a few serial brawlers and an aged flasher.

The boy was sitting on a low wall with his knapsack, waiting. When he slipped down from his perch and walked across the cracked stone to the Sergeant’s position, he did so with such an air of formality that the Sergeant briefly saw him dressed in a lawyer’s wig and gown: five feet tall and making the case for the prosecution, or even pronouncing sentence. He had gathered the straps of the bag in his left hand and carried it like a briefcase.

The Sergeant had been aware that this was coming, that the boy would inevitably wish to confront Shola’s killers or at least to confront the tangible fact of them. He had decided that he would not argue. Perhaps he should, but in his mind it simply would not be fair – not comprehensible, either to himself or, he felt sure, to the boy – to claim now, when it was safe, that the matter was too grown up, too serious for him to handle. It might have been possible before Shola’s blood had spattered his face. Not after.

The men had been separated and held incommunicado. They had been given water to drink and basic medical attention and food. Yesterday, the Sergeant judged, would have been the perfect time to talk to them, but today would do. And the boy would be an added oddness, an unbalancing factor. They might believe Shola had been his father.

Which raised the question of whether he had been, but the Sergeant pushed this to one side.

‘I’ll get you in,’ he told the boy, ‘but you don’t talk and you do what I say, all right?’

The boy nodded. His lips formed words but there was no breath in them. After a moment, the Sergeant turned to him firmly, made him spread his arms in a T-shape, and frisked him. No knife. No razorblade. No bomb, no gun. No vial of some appalling gas or germ sneaked from a Fleet repository in exchange for a particularly impressive bit of local contraband.

‘Sorry,’ the Sergeant said.

‘No,’ the boy replied. ‘You are so right. I would waste these badmashes in two ticks of a lamb’s arsehole. For Shola, I totally would.’

The Sergeant nodded. ‘I know you would,’ he said.

‘Whatever,’ the boy growled. ‘Emote later. Right now: Voight-Kampff FTW.’

With this perplexing battle-cry, he turned and went inside.

A Canadian marine wearing NatProMan tour ribbons shepherded them with casual courtesy. The Sergeant wondered how it must have felt to a crew of Mancreu hardcases to be herded down these antiseptic steps. The whole place smelled tartly of phenols. In his childhood that same odour had meant cough pastilles, sugar-coated and blackcurrant-flavoured. One winter he’d had flu: the real thing, hot and bloody awful, and no one had realised until he collapsed on the doormat at home. He had walked back from school, eaten half a dozen of those pastilles one after another, his mouth turning itself inside out, demanding more and more to cut the nausea and the confusion. The whole city had been coming and going in his eyes, grey with rain and red with brakelights, then dark. He’d had a cassette-player Walkman clipped to his belt: the size of a brick, with flimsy headphones. Music copied from an LP, his mother’s, his father’s, a friend’s. It didn’t matter so long as it drowned out the world while he walked, coat soaked through, fever poaching him in his clothes.

The boy shivered. The Sergeant reached out and checked his forehead. It was quite cool.

‘Sir?’ the marine said.

‘I’m a sergeant,’ he responded automatically. ‘I work for a living.’

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ the marine said, and whatever query he had been mustering went away. The Sergeant waited. The marine waited, too, politely but not without a measure of confusion.

After they had all stood in front of the door for a while, the Sergeant realised there was nothing to wait for. Always before in his professional life, whenever he had visited prisoners, there had been a form of words. The custodian of any detention facility had given some sort of warning about proper and improper questions, and the limitations of lawful conduct. But not on Mancreu. Not here. You did what you wanted as long as you were in charge. That was the whole point. He could kill these men: Jed Kershaw might be cross with him, but probably wouldn’t be. No one would seriously object, and if they did, there was no law to prosecute him. Everyone on the island walked within bounds out of sheer habit, respected property and persons and decency because they knew those things were important. But there was no constraint any more, just what you did. He wondered if the men, knowing that, had drawn fearful conclusions from the abattoir tiles and the drains in the floor.

The boy nodded to him, and they went into the first cell.

The man inside was a hillman with a wide face. He positively strutted in his cuffs.

The Sergeant asked his first question. The man nodded like a celebrity, smiled. He had been paid by the Americans to murder the barman, and the whores. Yes. Paid millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account. Hundreds of millions. He would be out of here soon.

The Sergeant asked who would get him out.

The President, the man said. Of the United States. He would personally order it, but of course the order would be disguised. All the same, that was just how it would be.

And what, the Sergeant asked, would happen then?

The man would buy a helicopter and a skyscraper and he would live in Switzerland. He would have a big house by the sea, he had seen pictures of it. If the Sergeant wanted a job, he could apply. The Sergeant looked like the right sort of man. Dependable, not ambitious.

The boy stepped in, briefly, to observe that Switzerland was not known for its sea coast.

The man jerked back and for a moment he seemed appalled. His mouth stretched wide as if he was going to vomit. Then he shuddered and rolled his head on his neck (things went pop inside him, bones and gristle). He sighed and shook his finger. Children were a trial, he said. They knew nothing of the world. If the Sergeant would take the boy out, it might be better, and they could speak as men, discuss the details of his future employment.

They moved on to the second cell. The occupant was mousy, so the Sergeant asked his questions quietly. That was in the lessons he had had. It was a crude form of something called kinesic interview. You took your cues from the subject. If you were lucky, it helped. Usually – according to the learned DI Burroughs – you were not lucky.

The man said he was a herder. He had driven the car because he was paid to, and then he was told he was coming in. He had come in because he was made to. Yes, he had carried a gun. Everyone had a gun. He had fired high and wide because otherwise he would not be paid and he was afraid he might also be shot. He still was not sure that would not have happened, after. He was sorry for what had been done by the others. Very sorry. For all his life he would be sorry for the barman and the pretty girls.

It was plausible. It could also be so much shit. No way to know, not really. The Sergeant’s gut told him it was probably shit.

The next cell was a slightly different shape, a little closer and tighter – which also made it darker – and the prisoner lay on his bed and did not get up. He was not seriously injured. His face expressed a kind of distant uncaring. He looked at them briefly, flinched a little when he saw the boy, then seemed to accept his inevitability and turned away, in dismissal or despair the Sergeant could not say.

‘Don’t know anything,’ the man muttered as he stared at the wall, from which position no inducement short of physical force could move him.

In the fourth cell, on the off chance, the Sergeant changed tack and did a certain amount of shouting. The man in the fourth cell had a missing toe and looked to be in pain – not horrible pain but misery pain – so shouting was particularly unpleasant for him. He wept. The boy shouted too, got right down beside him and shouted high and long into his face. The man protested and objected and demanded more of whatever they were giving him for the toe. That and strong drink.

‘Why?’ the Sergeant repeated. ‘You came into my friend’s bar and gunned him down. Why?’ And then he was shouting quite genuinely, screaming into the prisoner’s face over and over: ‘WHY? WHY? WHY?’

He pulled himself back sharply, swallowed. He wished for a chain of command, for men in authority above him to hold him back. He wished for laws to make his limits plain. He wanted very much to beat the murder out of all of them, to bruise them and bludgeon them and let out the fury in his chest. Line them up like fucking tomatoes and cut them down, over and over and over, these bastards who had done this bloody, brutal thing on his doorstep, who had come into his special place, his town, his island and killed his friend, made the boy so bleakly and irretrievably unhappy. Made the boy grow up.

He glanced across at his friend, afraid he would see fear or shock, but the boy looked quite impressed, even encouraging. Well, yes. All he had done was shout. Shouting was fair enough. He turned his gaze back to the prisoner.

But his monstering seemed to have achieved nothing at all. The man stared at them and then, after a moment, he suddenly shouted back, screamed that his foot was rotting and burning and hurting and he wanted more, more, MORE MORE MORE. It was like an echo. The man began to wail then, like an infant. More, more, more. Perhaps he was an addict already and this had just sharpened his need. (More, more, MORE!)

Useless.

The last cell was bigger, and the man in the bed was unconscious. His eyes were burned. It was all treatable, but that kind of medical care was expensive and no one cared. The Sergeant shrugged and made a note to request it. Maybe the man would open up when he saw the world again. Or maybe he’d be able to look a jury in the eye and see their verdict. Whatever. On the scale of things here, the ships and the NatProMan deployment, it wasn’t that much money. Maybe they’d save this man’s vision only for him to be acquitted or just released and that would be Shola’s memorial: an almost miraculous gift to one of his murderers. That was the world sometimes, and Mancreu, especially. Kswah swah.

He went in again, cell by cell, repeated his lines. Then he had the boy try in Moitié, listened to the ebb and flow and heard the story in cell two expand a little. ‘I was on the high road by the river. There were men, they offered me money. They had bags. I thought these bags contained contraband for sale. I thought we would sell it. At the bar we got out. It is a good place to sell, a bar, everyone knows this. Then they took out guns. I also must carry a gun. I fire into the air. I know no names. I know nothing. I am bystander. I wished only to make a little money to take a ship. To go away before the end. I have no family.’

The Sergeant slipped himself into the discussion, made the man tell it in reverse. It’s hard to lie in reverse. The story bent a little, acquired details, but did not change. He didn’t know if that was because it was a simple lie, or because it was true.

Then he photographed them one by one, and they made this hard or not hard, each according to his lights.

When the interrogators came out into the fresh air, a light mist had settled over the ocean and the fishing boats and even the Black Fleet seemed to be suspended somewhere between the water and the sky. The horizon line had vanished entirely from east to west, and sea and cloud had melded into a purpled canvas so that the Arlington Bride – a Swiss-owned, Wilmington-registered cargo hauler which had been one of the first to arrive when Mancreu was extralegalised – appeared to be hovering over the automated lighthouse at the end of the pier. The boy sighed deeply.

‘I know,’ the Sergeant said. ‘They didn’t give us anything.’

‘No,’ the boy replied.

‘They will. We’ll get there.’

‘Maybe.’ He had dropped directly into the dejected funk which was the flipside of his manic highs. The Sergeant wasn’t sure if this was the sort of thing which would be considered an actual sickness or just a part of being however old he was. Probably it depended where you were. In France, he knew, they used a different manual for psychological medicine. They might well say no. In America, everything was diagnosable, probably even positive traits could be treated if you wanted to get rid of them. Then, too, the boy had real things to be sad about. He had lost a friend, and the interrogation which had promised an explanation of sorts had failed to deliver. Instinct told the Sergeant to keep his friend moving forwards, to avoid letting him dwell on the bad things. There was time for that, but you wanted momentum to get you through it, so that you could grieve without ceasing to function. Sorrow was something you did best if you did it while other things were happening, or it could freeze you in place.

‘We will get there. But maybe we’ll have to poke around a bit. I’ve got a few things to look into otherwise, too.’ He needed it to be true. He had seen the boy’s face in the café after the fight, the look which said Lester Ferris was an actual superstar. He didn’t need it to be that way all the time, but the more distant it became the more conscious he was of a kind of pain.

‘Yes,’ the boy said dully, meaning ‘no’.

So the Sergeant told him about the tiger.

It was a strange story and he told it haltingly, and he probably oversold the part about being very drunk, because the boy’s lips twitched in puritanical disdain. All the same, when he got to the good bit, about scratching the huge head, the boy’s eyes were very wide. The Sergeant had to break off and swear, repeatedly, to the truth of it. He swore several different appalling oaths, each bringing doom and despair on him in different ways if he was lying in the smallest particular, but what finally persuaded his audience was how the story ended, without resolution.

‘Real life has no understanding of proper structure,’ the boy said, ‘which is why news stories are always made of little lies.’ This pleased the Sergeant very much because it was a brief flicker of the boy’s usual self, like a familiar face in a crowd.

He saw a way forward, considered briefly, and then jumped. ‘It might speed things up with my other stuff if I had some help,’ he said. ‘I mean: usually, in a p’lice context,’ and bless DI Burroughs for this bit of coppering nonsense, ‘usually these sorts of matters would be dealt with by an investigation team, so it’s hardly surprising I’m struggling a bit with the caseload all by myself.’

The boy nodded in a worldly, serious way. Of course. Anyone of consequence knew that about policing. There might be less educated persons who would disagree, his manner said, but we need not concern ourselves with them at present.

Deep breath. ‘So what I was thinking was that you could come along. Help out. Unofficially deputised into the Mancreu Investigatory Force, as it were. Only if you want. I know you’ve got things to do, I don’t mean to say you haven’t. But if you did want to, well, there’s always things I can’t get to and which you might be ideally placed for, being familiar with the local environment and so on.’ He trailed off, looking at the impossible flying ships.

After a moment, he heard the boy say tentatively: ‘Fight crime?’

‘Well, yes. I mean, any actual fighting – and there won’t be any – but if there was, then that would be my part. You’d be my eyes and ears. Make sure I didn’t miss anything. Use that brain of yours.’

The boy seemed to expand, the damp rag of his depression becoming a sort of balloon.

‘Fight crime!’

‘In a strictly auxiliary capacity,’ the Sergeant said hastily.

‘Taking the law to the mean streets of the city!’

‘Well—’

‘Yes! You will need me. I am your kid partner. I will crack wise. I will rock it Gangnam Style!’

‘I don’t want you getting in trouble. You’re a minor.’

‘Yes! Pretty weird kid partner, otherwise.’ The Sergeant saw teeth, and knew he was being teased.

‘You wouldn’t be my partner. That’s—’ He choked down insane and discarded against regulations, wondering what he’d got himself into. ‘Not something I’m allowed to do.’

‘Of course! I am not with you. We are in the same place at the same time. If anything happens, I shall run away. I am a civilian.’

‘Yes.’

‘But when danger strikes: I am off the books and off the hook!’

‘No!’

‘Excellent! Just like that: deny, deny, deny! Sometimes justice must wear a mask!’

‘No masks. No adventure. Just police work. It can be boring, I won’t lie to you. But…’ He hesitated. ‘You’d be with me. We could talk.’ He dried up again. ‘About stuff.’

The boy nodded solemnly. ‘Go places, talk about stuff. Find a box of matches, get a DNA sample, hairs from victim’s pullover. Investigate! Unassuming sergeant for fallen empire by day! Foolhardy boy companion! And it will be hard work. Gather evidence, data, follow leads. Good men fighting to protect and serve in a town where there is no law!’ The Sergeant winced. That was a bit on the nose. ‘But then, later… when the moon is in the sky and the evildoer thinks he is safe… Tigerman strikes!’

‘Tiger-what what?’

The boy leaned back away from him, waved his hands to indicate the bigness of this idea. ‘Tigerman! You are Tigerman!’ Huge circles. ‘Hero of Mancreu!’

‘I am not. I’m just doing a job of work.’ And I’m probably not supposed to do that.

‘For now! But you were chosen by the tiger at Shola’s grave! There is no justice, there’s just us! When it is necessary…’ The boy waved his arms again, now in a gesture which was either movie kung fu or the tricky business of changing costumes in a phone box. ‘When it is necessary: Tigerman!’ He made a whoomf noise in his cheeks. ‘Famous victory!’

‘Well, as long as you understand there will be no actual Tigerman.’

Whoomf. Hand gestures, definitely pulling open a shirt this time. ‘Tigerman!’

‘My name’s Lester. You can’t have a hero called Lester.’

‘Tigerman,’ the boy said fervently. ‘Full of win.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Win. Full of. Also: famous victory.’

‘No.’

‘Yes!’

‘No!’

But the Sergeant was losing his grip on seriousness. It was funny. Joyful. And he wanted, had wanted for so long, to be a hero for this boy. Not a broken-down old fart. A cool person. The sort of person you’d hope would be your dad.

Whoomf. ‘Tigerman!’

They stared at one another without blinking.

‘No,’ the Sergeant said, just as the boy said ‘Yes!’ with equal vigour. The man scowled, the boy grinned, and that was that. Each had said his piece, the other knew where he stood, and now they would leave the matter to the world. Kswah swah.

They shook on it.

The day had been so weighty and the outcome so momentous that the boy decided a special entertainment was now called for, saying only in tones of great import and mystery that it would be ‘hunnerten pro cent zed oh em gee’. The Sergeant recognised the over-revved ‘one hundred and ten per cent’ and the ‘oh my god’ parts, but the ‘z’ quite defeated him. ‘Zombie’ was the only thing he could come up with and it seemed unlikely, unless ‘zombie’ had now acquired an additional meaning of ‘excellent’. Thinking about it, he decided that this was possible, but that he would be quite happy never knowing for sure. He agreed that he would be home at seven to receive his visitor, and they parted.

‘What the fuck, Lester? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking you personally, I’m asking you as a stand-in for God. But that being the case: “what”, “the”, “fuck”? Shola was like a pillar of the world. Why would anyone just kill the guy? Fucking assholes!’

Jed Kershaw had his hands in the air for emphasis. He was a little man, and he used his hands a lot, held them high over his head and waggled his fingers. The Sergeant had initially found this odd. It made Kershaw look like a small, circular wizard casting spells which never worked, or that puppet show his sister had told him about where the puppets took off all their clothes until they finally were just hands again. But you got used to it, and the temptation to talk up into Kershaw’s palm faded away until the American was just another bit of life on the island.

Kershaw would have rejected this idea because Mancreu drove him crazy. He was forever shouting at his staff and down the phone, demanding that the place work properly, behave itself with something like sanity, function in some way which made sense, because he was the bridge between the world where things did make sense and the small circle in this blue ocean where they didn’t have to. But what really drove Jed Kershaw crazy, he said, what was going to kill him if this whole situation wasn’t resolved pretty fucking soon now, any day now, was how British Mancreu was, and maybe also at the same time if this was possible – he wasn’t sure – how French.

Kershaw had long ago realised, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying – which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you – while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you’d have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he’d come to the conclusion that they didn’t do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. British soldiers, for example, gave entire reports to their commanders by the way they said ‘good morning, sir’ and then had to spend half an hour telling them the detail, which was why the Brits always looked bored in briefings. They could sense the trajectory of the conversation, knew the bad news was coming now and the good news now and that there was a question on the end which needed thinking about. With a bit of work they could deduce the question, too, but they always waited politely for it to be asked so that no one felt rushed.

Originally – when he had believed it was some sort of snobbish post-colonial joke – this all had made Kershaw dislike the Brits, but now apparently he sort of admired it. His brother Gabe was a literature professor at Brown, and when Kershaw brought this up with him Gabe had nodded and said, yeah, absolutely, but you had to read T. S. Eliot to understand. So Jed Kershaw had bought The Waste Land from Amazon dot com and read it here in Mancreu. The Waste Land was a fucking terrifying document of gasping psychological trauma, and it was plenty relevant to the island, but the important point about it was that Eliot was trying to make use of something called an ‘objective correlative’, which was an external reference point everyone would understand in the same way without fear of misapprehension. Kershaw found this revealing, he said, because it was very British. Only a British poet – and, for Kershaw’s purposes, Eliot was one – would imagine that the gap between people living in the same street was so fucking enormous that you had to read the entire body of English-language poetry from 1500 to the present day in order to have a background which would allow you to communicate something as simple as ‘your dog is pissing on my lawn’ and be reliably understood. Only a Brit could be so appalled by the staggering complexities of meaning which could be found in the word ‘piss’ that he felt it was necessary to read Paradise Lost and The Mayor of Casterbridge in order to be certain he wasn’t getting the wrong end of the stick. And for sure, only a Brit would imagine that adding a huge raft of literary imagery to the sea of human emotion and history which was English would clarify the situation in any fucking way at all. All the same, there was something glorious in that complexity, in the fact that Brit communication took place in the gaps between words and in the various different ways of agreeing which meant ‘no’. But none of that made Mancreu any easier for Jed Kershaw to deal with, and he suspected but could not prove that this was because the island was also French. ‘And the French are worse, Lester, because they do all this same crap and they fucking improvise, too.’

The Sergeant took his time responding to Jed Kershaw’s question. What the fuck, indeed. ‘Well, apparently, five guys from the hills, Jed. And for no reason at all that I can get them to acknowledge.’

‘Assholes!’

‘Yes. And amateurs, too.’

‘So what are we talking about? Money? Girls? Boys? What?’

‘They won’t say. Or maybe there isn’t anything. Maybe this is next.’

‘What “next”? What do you mean, “this is next”?’

‘Maybe this is what happens after a certain point, Jed. With an island that doesn’t know if it’s coming or going. Maybe people just start getting together and killing one another.’

Kershaw stared at him. ‘Fuck, Lester.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Fuck, Lester, that is a nihilistic fucking notion.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’re saying maybe they just, what, they got together in the backwoods somewhere and decided to do a murder? Get in the car, go somewhere, spray the place with bullets, because, hey, what the hell, it’s the end of the world?’

‘It’s just a possibility.’

‘So, what, we’ve gone from leaving parties to… what? Everybody goes nuts and starts killing everybody like it’s the fucking nutbar apocalypse?’

‘I don’t say it’s likely, sir.’

‘You’re saying “sir” a great deal, Lester. I recognise professional sir-ing when I hear it. Do you have some British psychological-trauma profile which says this is going to happen?’

‘No, sir, not that I’m aware of.’

‘Then Jesus, Lester! Do not scare me like that. Jesus.’ He looked up. ‘The next words out of your mouth better not include “sir”, Lester.’

‘All right, Mr Kershaw, I shall bear that in mind.’

‘Jed.’

‘Jed. Yes, sir.’

Kershaw glowered, then grinned. ‘You are fucking with me just now, Lester, in a manner you no doubt believe is comradely joshing.’

‘If you say so, Jed.’

‘I do, Lester.’

And after that they talked, but nothing more was actually said. The Sergeant excused himself before Jed Kershaw had to find an excuse to get away, and Kershaw looked gratefully after him as he went downstairs. In the street, the Sergeant glanced around for the boy but could not see him. He felt a little sad, but stiffened his spine and reminded himself that they were doing something hunnerten pro cent ZOMG later, and that this was apparently good. In any case, the boy had other aspects to his life that were his own.

He looked around once more and got into his car.

The town of Beauville was surprisingly beautiful as he drove back to Brighton House, like a strong-jawed choir mistress allowing the day to see her softer side. The hard, industrial region of Mancreu was away on the south coast, the ferroconcrete slab housing of the 70s chemical men who had come to refine and combine and produce plastics.

But here in the north, Beauville looked alive and even bustling. Along the harbour front, a few of the very oldest buildings still remained, low-ceilinged and achingly pretty, smelling of three hundred years of tobacco and drink, and traced with cracks from earthquakes and battering gales. In a ring around them loomed gawky colonial townhouses and stores; wooden crossbeams taken from ships bore witness to the ongoing settlement by mariners and merchants. The outer circle was a kind of loose net of tracks, farms, warehouses and fisher huts, slowly giving way to the back country. Mancreu was a fisher island first, a tenuous farmland second, and everything revolved around the town where produce could be bought and sold. A small number of people lived out on the mountainsides, herders and weavers for the most part, and a very few bandits who were mostly bandits by inheritance rather than vocation. The Sergeant peered out that way now, thinking of the men who had killed Shola, wondering if they were from some such raggedy clan. He had thought those men had been among the first to Leave, taking their twentieth-century bolt-action rifles and their few belongings and heading off for some other place where they could quietly waste away. But then, this crew had carried proper weapons. Militia guns, not shepherd’s companions.

A real policeman, he thought, would follow those guns somehow, track them backwards. Or he might draw inferences from their make and model, from their presence at all. How unlikely was it that that gear was in private hands on the island? Not very. North Africa and Yemen both overflowed with Kalashnikovs. So did large parts of South-East Asia. Mancreu was surrounded by a ring of cheap, durable guns. Surrounded, but at a distance, and something of the British ethos regarding firearms had prevailed here for a long while. He had been right a moment ago: Mancreu bandits carried guns which would not have been out of place at Gallipoli or Ypres, and used them largely for shooting glass bottles and sheep belonging to other people, and only very occasionally for a stick-up. Certainly, they did not spree.

Things did not fit. He was keeping count of them in his mind, but they were all so hazy, so very tenuous. He might be being foolish. After all, Shola had been his friend. He very much wanted the death to mean something. And the boy needed it to mean something, needed this bleak introduction to messy, ketchup mortality to be more than just the consequence of a jostling in the marketplace. It dawned on him that he needed to do something else for a few hours. He could knock his head against what had happened until he bled, and he would still not understand it. He would miss the truth if it was offered to him because he was starting to have ideas about what it should look like and he would ignore anything which looked different. He had to step back.

And then, too, the rest of Mancreu’s perpetual crisis had not ground to a halt merely because Shola had died. It felt that way, or it felt that it should be that way, but he had lost enough friends to know better. The silence you feel belongs to you. To everyone else, it’s just another day.

He went home by way of the hospital. The other survivors of the shooting knew no more than he did, and he found himself apologising. They told him not to, and he returned to Brighton House pensive and took refuge for a while in the coarse yellowy pages of his book.

The boy arrived at a quarter after the hour bearing a huge sack almost as high as himself, and demanded that they go out onto the terrace facing the sea. The sack shortly resolved itself into a paper bag full of further paper bags, white and ribbed with wire. These, being unfurled, became cylinders nearly five feet in height and two across.

‘Thai lanterns!’ the boy said. ‘Hunnerten pro cent! In many places a bit illegal because of fires. But here, not. Also we send them out there.’ He pointed to the blue water beyond the terrace wall. The wind was blowing over the house and out to the horizon, and the distinction between sea and sky was indistinct.

‘Send them?’ the Sergeant said, and then wondered a little nervously why his first question had not been about the fires.

For answer, the boy produced a stretch of grubby cloth and bundled it up into a ball the size of his fist. He stuffed the rag into a cradle beneath the lantern. ‘Hold! We must inflate.’

The Sergeant held the lantern at top and bottom, beginning to understand, and the boy ignited the ball. Hot air billowed up, and the paper crinkled and swelled.

‘Wait until it really wants to go,’ the boy said.

They waited, and presently the lantern rose in their hands until the boy was on tiptoe. ‘Now!’ he said.

The lantern lifted slowly, turning from the last brush of their fingers and wobbling as a light breeze buffeted it towards the house. The Sergeant winced. Then it went higher and suddenly seemed to get the idea, floating proudly away over the dark, oily sea beneath the cliff. After a moment more its reflection was visible in the water, a twin glow hanging in another sky.

‘Quick,’ the boy said. ‘Another!’

They launched all seven, a flickering procession of lights climbing ever upwards in a small, attenuated flock, the first one dwindling from view but not extinguished as the last took flight. The lanterns were fragile but tenacious, heading off over that vast ocean towards an unknown end, and by their simple, purposeful ascent and their warm yellow light, they turned the mind to the indefinable colour of the evening and the sound of the wind, to the scale of the world.

‘How far will they go?’ the Sergeant asked.

The boy shrugged. ‘Long way. Sometimes they go up and catch a thermal. Hundreds of miles, then. I have seen them burn and fall, and sometimes they are forced down. But I have never seen one come down at the end of its flight. They are always too far.’

The man and the boy watched as the lanterns winked away in the gathering dark, and then, when the last of the lights they were following might or might not have been the running lights of a ship or an aircraft, or a star, they went inside.

The next morning the boy was gone, as usual fading into the air like some sort of sprite, and leaving only a blanket on the spare bed and an unwashed coffee cup in his wake. The Sergeant tossed the blanket over a window ledge to air and scrubbed the cup, enjoying his own exasperation at the chore. As he worked, it occurred to him that he should start small. Shola’s murder was too big to understand, too important for him to take on. He should by rights pass it to someone with experience but there was no one like that so it would have to be him, after all, and yet he had no real idea where to go from here. He was baulked.

So he would begin with the lost dog. It was a small problem, but no doubt it mattered to the owner, and that would tell. It would get him started. At the same time, he would uncover what he could about the boy’s parentage. Two small things would be done, both needful to someone, and in the simplicity of these distractions his mind might turn up some new avenue by which he could approach Shola’s death.

As he made his way to the car, he found himself smiling. The lanterns had indeed been ‘zed oh em gee’.