Tigerman

6. Dog

TO HIS ALARM, the Matter of the Missing Dog was more complex than it first appeared. After a visit to the very ordinary old lady to whom the animal belonged, it technically became the Matter of the Kidnapped Dog because someone had been seen by two witnesses actually lifting the animal into the back of a flatbed truck, and he was forced to revise his opinion regarding the likely seriousness of the situation. The first witness he was inclined to dismiss – a housebound old geezer who must have been bored and drunk since before the Sergeant was born – but the second was a sensible young woman who was only visiting Mancreu to help her family move to her home in Botswana. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that she would make up such a tale, or that if she did it would tally with that of the old man.

If the dog had been of a combative breed he might have suspected a fighting ring, but Madame Duclos’s pet was evidently not of that sort. She showed him a photograph. The animal was fat to the point of shapeless, like a lumpy brown quilt dumped on the sofa. Even its ears were fat. With her permission, he retained the photograph. As he left, she took his hand and said ‘please’.

Why on Earth did people keep dogs? He could feel the dryness of her skin. She chopped her own wood, this old woman.

‘Please,’ she said again.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he told her. ‘I’ll try.’

‘Of course you will,’ she said. ‘The English love dogs.’

He nodded assent.

She peered at him and tutted with the unerring instinct of grandmothers for unspoken reservations, then half-sang, half-muttered something which might have been an island lament or a dinner call for the dog as she ushered him to the door.

The Duclos house was in an old white-stone quarter which seemed entirely inhabited by old people who dedicated their lives to making things pretty. There were window boxes and vines everywhere along the narrow streets, and as he walked he found that it was unusually densely populated for Beauville in these days. Here three wrinkled men played cards at a white iron table; there a bent old lady swept dust from her step. There were empty houses, but not many. He nodded to the card-players and offered them a respectful bonsalum in Moitié. It was almost the only local word he could say with confidence, even now. Every speaker seemed to have his or her own version of the dialect, and each believed it was a solemn duty to instruct this uncouth foreigner in the beautiful tongue.

They waved back, bonsalum avoumem, so he switched to English and asked them whether there’d been some sort of joint decision to stay as long as possible. They shrugged amiably. No, they said. It was just that when someone here decided to Leave, they invited someone who was staying a little longer and whose home was not as nice to come and live in their house. Someone old, of course, because the young people might ruin it.

‘But that will happen anyway, in the end,’ the Sergeant observed.

‘That’s no reason to invite it,’ the dealer said. ‘Young people,’ and this clearly included the Sergeant himself, ‘young people never understand. The last days are no less important than the others just because they are near to the end.’ He nodded at his friends. ‘Should we stop living today just because death is no longer a stranger? Should we go naked because our clothes no longer fit as well as they did?’

‘I should say not!’ said the woman with the broom. ‘No one wants to see your horrible bottom!’

‘Then you oughtn’t be peering in at my window!’ the dealer retorted. The sweeper shook her fist in mock fury and cackled.

The Sergeant realised that there was another Mancreu here which he had not known about, a Mancreu of the very old. It was easy to think of the island as one place with various parts dangling off it, but in truth it was layer upon layer, and each of them as real as the others.

‘Will you all Leave together?’ he asked.

The card-players shrugged. ‘If we live that long,’ the dealer said. ‘And when we leave, we will leave the houses as they should be. Perhaps houses have souls and we will meet them again one day. Or perhaps they will just go into this burning with dignity. Your man Kershaw, thought so. He came here when he first arrived and he tried to pretend he saw only bricks. But he cried a little when he realised the houses would die. He’s a decent man.’

The Sergeant reassessed them all once more. Old and watchful. The whole street was filled with old, watchful men and women. He tried his luck. ‘Anyone seen this dog?’

They shook their heads. ‘But it can’t have gone far,’ one of the players muttered, to general agreement.

The dealer dealt a fresh hand, and the Sergeant took the gentle hint and moved away down the perfect, empty street. A moment later, he heard the man’s voice raised in his direction once more.

‘Hey, Sergeant!’ he called.

‘No,’ the Sergeant shouted back, ‘I don’t want to see your horrible bottom, either!’

This rated a huge laugh from the card-players, and snorting approval from the sweeper. The dealer shushed them all. ‘You didn’t ask about the fish!’ he complained.

The Sergeant shook his head. For a moment, the statement made no sense. What fish? But yes, it had been on his list the day of Shola’s death: Beneseffe’s stolen catch. He hadn’t asked them about it, primarily because he had completely forgotten, but even had he remembered there was no earthly reason to suppose that they would know anything. Except, he realised, that they knew everything. They were one of the last stations in what had once been the great Mancreu gossip network, and their art had been refined rather than diluted by their proximity to one another, and their loneliness. So they knew – from who could say what messengers – that he was looking for stolen fish. This was no doubt how the boy got some of his uncanny information: he talked to someone who watered plants and sat by the roadside, someone who chatted and watched, and he traded time for knowledge.

Tomorrow, the Sergeant thought, he would come back here and ask about the boy, if he still needed to. He would bring a picture. He might even explain why. He thought they would understand, and surely they would respect his desire to know whether such a thing was possible before he offered it.

In the meantime, he raised his hands in surrender. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now I’m asking. Who took the fish?’

‘The Ukrainians,’ the dealer said, waving him away. ‘Pechorin has a brother on a factory ship. They come by every few months and buy whatever he can steal. You can sell a big tuna for hundreds of thousands of dollars in Japan. He’s not a bad man, maybe, but that’s a lot of money.’

It would turn out to be true, the Sergeant knew. He’d never prove it, and if he did there’d be nothing he could do about it. But it would be true, and that was something. Perhaps the fishermen who had been robbed would go into business with Pechorin. It might be easier all round.

That cheered him, but by the time he reached the Portmaster’s office he was frowning again. He had walked and talked, called in at a petrol station, a tabac and a greengrocer, and he had made inquiries. For his trouble, he had no more information about Madame Duclos’s missing dog – but he had been asked about three more.

Beneseffe politely expressed his pleasure at the Sergeant’s presence in his office, and then smiled much more genuinely at the idea that the fish-theft might be a profitable business opportunity.

‘I’ll put the word out,’ he said. ‘Good catch, Lester. Good timing.’

‘Been a bit twitchy, has it?’

‘Twitchy. Exactly. A lot of sharp knives on the docks. A lot of young men with large balls.’

‘Balls and knives don’t go well together.’

‘No. They do not.’

‘Speaking of twitchy, what do you hear about missing dogs?’ Beneseffe looked completely blank. ‘Never mind. Or guns? Imported guns?’

The Portmaster winced. ‘Shola.’

‘Yes.’

‘I have been thinking since it happened. There are many boats which might bring in guns. Fewer now, but still enough. And no Customs authority any more. But who, and when, and why, and how to find out… I don’t know. I would just ask, but now they would know why. They would be ashamed.’

‘Maybe that would help.’

Beneseffe sighed. ‘Yes. If it was you, Lester, you would be ashamed and you would tell me. But not everyone is you.’

‘Ask anyway. Please.’

‘Of course.’

They drank a cup of tea on the wooden veranda in front of the office – the Sergeant, very much against his instinct, with his back to the street. When his spine itched and tingled in this position, he took comfort in the dirty reflective surface of the windows and in the knowledge that Beneseffe’s wide smile was being read all the way from the chandler’s stall to the harbour gate as a sign and an omen of peace. The British Sergeant has done his job. Say that much: say he, at least, understands obligation.

Their tea was interrupted – though it had come, in real terms, to its natural end and was now just a matter of the last of the pot – by the sound of a large engine, and then a gleeful barrage of obnoxious hooting. The Sergeant, glancing in the glass, saw the image of a Toyota Hilux 4×4 stopped at the kerb, the driver’s door opening to reveal a dark-haired elegant woman with violently orange fingernails.

‘Hey, Beneseffe! Hullo, Lester!’ Inoue said, dropping down from the driver’s seat. It was a long way for a person of less than average height, but the brief moment of free fall did nothing to ruffle her. Beneseffe waved a greeting.

‘Doctor,’ the Sergeant replied. She frowned at him.

‘We have discussed this, Lester. We have agreed that we will be informal.’

That made him smile. ‘I recall you telling me I was going to be informal, certainly.’

‘And are you so amazingly rude that you will argue with me?’ Perfect fingers spread on her chest – the nails were like spots of sherbet against her shirt – and her face took on an expression of cartoonish shock. ‘Me? A senior scientist and de facto diplomatic representative of a major power?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Mmph. Practise! And practise also answering your phone!’

The Sergeant belatedly took out his handset and inserted the battery. A moment later it chirruped and informed him that he had a message. Inoue rolled her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Meh. I have business here. The Portmaster has impounded my equipment out of malice. Even now the finest Japanese technology is getting covered in fish scales and salt water in his wretched hovel and soon millions of dollars of sophisticated hardware will be nothing more than dust.’

Beneseffe sighed. ‘It’s not impounded,’ he said. ‘It’s just not unloaded. There’s a backlog.’

‘Piracy!’

He rummaged, produced a clipboard. ‘Sign, please.’

Inoue scribbled on it.

‘She writes obscenities in Japanese,’ Beneseffe confided woefully to the Sergeant. ‘It’s worse than dealing with your boy.’

‘He’s not my boy,’ the Sergeant said. Not yet. And: I thought you didn’t know him. But if the Portmaster was silent on that topic it was in obedience to his own obligations, and those were to be respected – at least while there was still time to look elsewhere.

Beneseffe snorted and made a gesture of resignation. The world was insane, and it was particularly vindictive towards Portmasters who were just trying to get along. He took the tea tray and retreated to his office. ‘It was nice to see you both,’ he said firmly, and shut the door.

Inoue took the Sergeant’s arm and clamped it firmly in hers. She was muscular and bony. He felt, to his confused embarrassment, what might be a fraction of one breast against his upper arm. If Inoue was conscious of this proximity, she gave no sign. ‘You are very hard to find, Lester.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Pfah.’ She smiled. There were tiny lines around her eyes, and he realised she was older than he had thought: his age, rather than ten years younger. He had assumed she was a prodigy. Well, she was: an academic powerhouse, the boy had affirmed after a sequence of nested Internet searches which apparently told him everything he wanted to know. A top-banana brain! But not an alien. Just regular brilliant. He wondered what it must be like to be regular brilliant, if she noticed how slowly everyone else thought.

He looked over at her, saw concern tighten her lips. They were a sort of silvered purple. He didn’t think she was wearing any make-up; that was just the colour of her mouth. He had never spotted it before, but he hadn’t met all that many Japanese women and didn’t generally make a habit of staring at their lips. He didn’t generally make a habit of staring at Inoue’s, actually. He wondered if she had noticed and decided that she hadn’t.

‘I would actually be grateful if you would visit with us today,’ Inoue said. ‘We have a little situation I think maybe it would be good for you to come and see. In confidence.’

‘I can come now,’ he offered, ‘if that would be good.’

‘That would be ideal.’

It would take him out of Beauville, and he would see how the world looked to someone who wasn’t the boy, which might be a good idea. He felt a flash of guilt, and put it aside. It was sensible, not wicked. He had responsibilities and it was the grown-up thing to do.

‘I was sorry about your friend,’ Inoue added abruptly. ‘Shola. I liked him. He was a rogue.’

‘Yes,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Yes, he was.’ It was like a toast. Perhaps it was the accompaniment to that brief exchange at the funeral, long delayed.

Inoue decided that he would drive her to the Xeno Centre. Someone else would drive her car. That was what interns were for. The Sergeant, who hewed to a similar understanding regarding corporals, nodded gravely and opened the door for her.

She climbed into the Land Rover and he was immediately conscious of how crappy it must seem, how messy and battered, and how it stank of fuel. He climbed in and was about to apologise when Inoue amazed him by putting her small feet up on the dashboard, pressing herself into the seatback. ‘VROOOM VROOM!’ she yelled, and when he looked at her in absolute amazement she cracked up, her feet pat-patting on the plastic, and made urgent gestures with her hands: let’s go!

He took the Land Rover up out of Beauville and over the Iron Bridge towards the lowest of the passes which would afford them access to the far side of the island and the Xeno Centre. It was a spectacular drive, and the Sergeant reserved it in his off-duty hours for moments of significance. He had no desire to come here one day, between the old volcano and the plunging gorge of Mancreu’s white Lucretia River, and feel that he had seen it all before. To be jaded by this view would be an admission of something wretched he could not name. Inoue was appropriately silent, but in a companionable way, and they passed the first half hour in mutual appreciation of the world all around. Finally, as the Land Rover ducked down into the treeline and the view was obscured by pines, she glanced over at him.

‘What boy?’

For a moment, the Sergeant did not understand.

‘The Portmaster said I was worse than your boy.’

He grunted. ‘There’s a local kid, he hangs around. We’re friends.’ He was wary of discussing the friendship with an outsider, a female.

‘The one who was at Shola’s, when it happened.’ There was almost no discernible pause as she decided how to say it. He nodded assent, finding that her inquiry had not felt like an intrusion.

‘Smart kid,’ Inoue said, sucking air between her teeth. Not poor kid, he noticed. It was an expression of respect rather than pity, which was exactly right, and his reservations faded abruptly away. She would get it. She had a perfect ear for the way things were done. The way they had to be done.

‘Yes. Very.’

‘Do you have children of your own at home?’

‘Never found anyone. Or no one ever found me, maybe. I’ve moved around. Perhaps the right girl was out there and she kept turning up after I’d gone. Married someone else. I’m thinking…’ Jesus, was he going to say it aloud, to Inoue? When he hadn’t even asked the boy? It seemed so. ‘I’m thinking I might try to take him with me, when it’s time. I can’t offer him… Well, I don’t know what I can offer him. A home. A place. A friend.’ It seemed like very little. Probably there were richer people, couples, who would take a prodigy like the boy, get him into Cambridge or Yale, pay his way. And maybe an American passport was a better thing than a British one. You couldn’t become president if you weren’t US born, of course, but you could be a state governor, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or you could found an Internet company and become a billionaire. Or both. Why not? He tumbled down into himself, brooding. ‘I suppose it won’t work out,’ he muttered. ‘But you’ve got to try, haven’t you?’

Inoue, staring straight out into the wilderness, nodded once.

‘Trouble is, I don’t even know if he’s got family. I can’t find out who he is. I mean, I ask him and he sort of waves it off. He doesn’t think he’ll ever leave. And I don’t want to say, you know, “come with me” and have him run for the hills because he’s got a mum on a farm in the shanty. Which he might.’

Still with her eyes towards the horizon, Inoue said: ‘Describe him to me.’

The Sergeant shrugged, both hands on the wheel. ‘You saw him at the funeral.’ But not close up, he realised, and she’d hardly have taken special notice. ‘Dark hair, high cheeks, green and brown eyes. Mid-brown skin. Thin. Twelve years old, maybe more. Very bright – I mean, much more than I can really get to grips with.’

‘Hands?’

‘Long fingers, dirty nails, not too much in the way of calluses.’

‘Long fingers, like crazy long? Or just narrow?’

‘Narrow.’

‘No arachnodactyly. Okay. When he walks, does he look a little like Charlie Chaplin?’

The Sergeant had never thought of it, but there was a particular amble the boy had sometimes, like a sailor’s swagger or, yes, like Charlie Chaplin. ‘Yes. Why?’

‘Hip structure. Keep going. Epicanthic folds?’

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘This!’ She touched the corner of her eye, the line of the skin.

‘Yes. A little.’

She nodded. ‘When he speaks Moitié he sounds equally happy with French and Arabic words?’

‘It all comes out the same. Not French or Arabic or anything. Just Moitié. When he speaks English—’

She tutted. ‘Everyone here speaks English like the movies.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well. For the record, race is a superstition derived from the clinal distribution of characteristics. But Mancreu is not big and it is not homogeneous and if I had to guess I would say one of his parents was from a mountain family – old island people, that’s why his Moitié sounds that way, so integrated – and the other maybe a more recent arrival. And almost all of the mountain people – even when they move to Beauville – they christen their children at the Chapelle Sainte Roseline by the river, because Sainte Roseline has governance over evil spirits. And mountain people always have a lot of evil spirits.’ She grinned. ‘My grandmother is from the mountains. You would not believe how many ghosts you can get in a very small house.’

He stared at her. She raised her eyebrows briefly: Over to you. Go and make it happen, or don’t. He wondered if she dealt with all problems in the same way, this rapid reduction to a hinge point, and whether she ever found the clarity made things more difficult rather than less.

‘Thank you, Kaiko,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome, Lester,’ she replied.

She spent the next hour pointing out strange mutations. Twice, she stopped him and plucked a small sample of plant life. Nothing on Mancreu, the Sergeant began to realise, was quite the way it should be any more. They passed through an abandoned farm and she stopped him again to look at wheat, then took some of that, too. She wore stiff gloves made out of something space-aged and shiny. ‘Impenetrable to parasites,’ she said sternly. ‘You should get some.’ He sighed – of course, that story would be well known by now – and nodded.

Inoue softened her reproach with a smile, then bent to peer at another growth. He realised that she was talking to herself, proposing and dismissing courses of action, and felt flattered. He was seeing her in her most professional self. It was intimate – this was what made her Inoue – and it was oddly familiar. She saw things which were out of place and gathered them together in her mind to understand what made them so. It was not unlike what he had done in half a dozen bad places, reading the valleys and the weather and the movement of sheep: soothsaying with bullets. He found himself watching her skill with professional appreciation as they made their slow progress across the island. On the fourth and final stop he even started to spot things for her. She smiled again, with approval.

Then they arrived.

The Xenobiology Centre was a cluster of white geodesic domes and extremely engineered circular housing, fast to assemble and durable, but easy to pack up and transport. It bloomed from the rubble and grey sandy soil about three miles from the boundary fence of the old chemical plant, its back against the foothills. The white material was spotless, so that the whole facility looked eerily new and fungal. They had even landscaped it, with small trees and a gravel drive with parking.

Inoue’s team parted in front of her without fuss. They did not ask why she was bringing a clumping great sergeant into their hideaway. They didn’t ask anything at all, which as always suggested to him that they knew their jobs very well and were very professional people. They nodded to Inoue and to the Sergeant and got on with what they were doing, although in one case that seemed to involve drinking Coke and playing some sort of game involving elves. Inoue tutted. ‘Ichiro,’ she growled out of the side of her mouth. ‘A genius. I cannot come up with enough jobs to keep him busy, so I permitted the other interns to assign him their extra work.’

‘But he’s not working,’ the Sergeant said.

‘No,’ Inoue sighed. ‘He established a trading floor for basic tasks and cornered the market in coffee-making futures, and then the espresso machine very mysteriously broke down. So he is a task billionaire. He has calculated that if the others do all his chores and nothing else for seven thousand years, they will be free of the debt. And now he only works when something scientifically interesting is going on.’ She glanced at him. ‘Does this happen with soldiers?’

The Sergeant had been thinking of the boy, and wondering if he and Ichiro knew one another, and if they did, which of them acknowledged the other as the master. Or perhaps they were mortal foes. He shrugged. ‘Something like it, yes.’

‘And what do you do?’

‘I let it be known that I do not approve.’

Ichiro grinned at them, overhearing. He tapped the screen, and the elves were replaced by rows upon rows of data. He took his feet off the desk and leaned in, fascinated. Inoue nodded. ‘So long as the others have time for their academic work, I just keep him in information,’ she said, ‘and he is easy to live with. Come.’

Inoue led the way to the central desk, a round mica bench covered in paper and computer terminals which always made the Sergeant think of King Arthur, and leaned down over a keyboard. He kept his eyes to the front, looking over her back at a framed picture of a marmot on the wall so as not to appear interested in her bottom. It was small and well defined.

‘Lester,’ she said, drawing his gaze downwards to the screen.

On it was something he recognised as a false-colour image, a scan of some sort to which the computer was adding tints to differentiate shapes which otherwise would be indistinct. In his world that usually meant a night-vision camera, and a covert operation. This was different, all branches and fronds, blue and purple at the edges and angry red at the centre. He realised he was looking at the Mancreu Cauldron, a resonance image of the volcanic well from which the Discharge Clouds came, and there was really only one reason why she would show him that.

‘There’s a plume building, Lester,’ she said. ‘A very big one. I think they will finish this. I think this will frighten them.’

Around them the room was quiet. He wasn’t sure if it was quieter than it had been or if he was imagining it because it ought to be that way. He nodded, and then it occurred to him that he could ask her the big question about that, and she might actually know the answer, might tell him.

‘Will it work? Blowing up the island?’

‘No,’ Inoue replied. ‘It will scour the surface and if we are lucky a tectonic shift will seal the vents. But the bacteria will survive. That’s what they do. They already live in an extreme environment. They are protean. And it is possible that the vents will not seal and the bacteria will get into the sea. Again. So far they have not done well there, but that can change. If the chambers discharge directly into the ocean floor, for example, over time… And the radioactivity will increase the likelihood of mutation. It is a very bad plan.’ She sighed. ‘Waiting and learning would be much better. But you can’t tell governments that, it is not a good soundbite. And they don’t like it when science doesn’t give them what they have decided it should say. They have a sort of… a tame team, here somewhere, who tell them stories they do like. I may… I may have to say something anyway, although it will make me not popular.’

She moved her hand through the air. In someone else it would have been a vague motion, but Inoue’s most unconsidered gestures were precise, so her fingers traced a sharp little arc, twisting like wingfeathers. ‘Lester, when this gets out it will be bad. The island people believe they are ready to hear this, but they are not. And I think they will need you, but I think you are not ready either. Are you?’

He ought to say yes, of course, but he needed to find out about El Hierro. And the boy, the evacuation plan: that wasn’t done, either, not halfway done. And there were places on Mancreu he still hadn’t seen. He should run the Lucretia River path again in the sun, it was amazing. He’d have to find ways to stay in touch with people. With Beneseffe and even Kershaw. With Inoue.

Outside he heard the sound of a car, high and snarling. It made him think of kids doing handbrake turns in a supermarket car park back home. He’d been one of those kids, actually. Never very good at it, but you had to show willing. If this was nostalgia, he was bad at it. He contemplated the end of Mancreu, newly real, while whoever it was roared around and around outside, mowing the lawn or cutting down a hedge in an endless grinding whine, and then they slowed down and he could speak, but realised that he didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t have to. Inoue was looking over his shoulder, and when he followed her gaze he saw a line of quad bikes, expensive toys for bored footballers on their estates along the A13 out of London to the coast, and on them a line of grubby men with scarves on their faces. An actual masked gang. When they had his attention – his, in particular – they revved their engines again and roared away, leaving Madame Duclos’s dead, fat dog on the bonnet of his car.

The Sergeant ran outside and realised that he was waving his arms and shouting ‘Oi!’ and that this was not, on the face of it, the best response. An authoritative military bark would be more to the point, a ‘Halt or I’ll open fire!’ though he did not know whether he would. He did have a weapon – since Shola’s death he had quietly added a small side arm to his kit, in a discreet holster which sat directly against his leg and could be accessed through the open-ended pocket on his right side – but getting it would require that he stopped running and if he stopped running they would be out of range. He shouted ‘Oi!’ again and knew that he really had to stop doing that because it made him sound like an old fart waving a newspaper, but at this moment that was probably all he was. The dust choked him, and then the enemy had retreated, tactical objective achieved. ‘Fuckers! It’s just a bloody dog! And it’s not even a proper dog, just an old lady’s floor-ornament. It never did anything to you!’

No. No, the dog was not the sinner here. This message was for him, and maybe for Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He went back to see.

The dog lay in its own blood in an indentation on the bonnet of the Land Rover. They had opened it like a hog and thrown it, dying. The landing must have been agonising, though briefly. Had they known that he had once carried a man with a wound like this to safety behind the iron frame of a derelict Russian bus? Had they imagined that he would go into some sort of particular shock on seeing the tableau? Or was this just an average bit of brutality, lacking that greater understanding? Vile enough, in any case.

Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage. She was brandishing a camera and he realised she must have used it to record footage of the gang’s departure. He wondered if she could now run it through some sort of computer the way they did on television and tell him who he was looking for, and knew she couldn’t. The assembled male and female members of the vulcanology department (they had a smoking mountain printed in white on their maroon hoodies) were carrying fence posts and looking meaningfully at the row of Hilux 4×4s to let him know they were in if he wanted to give chase. He pictured himself leading a posse of affronted eggheads across the wilds, their righteous fury ebbing as they rode to an uncertain reception, and concluded that the list of great British military follies did not need, even in the name of canine justice and international brotherhood, the addition of the Charge of the Mancreu Irregular Xenobiological Infantry and their non-commissioned officer.

Instead, he approached the corpse with a view to removing it. He couldn’t work out how. If he just embraced it he could get it off the car, but then he’d have nowhere to put it short of dumping it on the dirt and he’d get covered in blood and viscera into the bargain. He stood there with his arms wide, then stepped back again and grunted.

A moment later the dog was being rolled onto a pallet and whisked away. Of all people, Ichiro the genius, weeping, had emptied a stationery trolley and pressed himself into service as mortician’s porter. Inoue shouted something after him in Japanese, by its tone both shocked and approving, then turned.

‘Will she want it back? The old lady?’ There was anger in her voice, and she was peering at him, seeking the fury he had already controlled. It’s on a chain, he wanted to tell her. Because I’m not a proper copper. My real skills aren’t about keeping the peace.

He could feel them waking in him, all the same. Not the battlefield, not yet – if the fight at Shola’s place hadn’t done that, this wasn’t going to. Just that same questing curiosity which saw the land and the people and took a little bit of them away so as to deliver intuitions and warnings. Hypervigilance, that was the word. The curious gift of perception granted to the very abused, the endangered, and the pursued. In war, the soldiers from hard corners – from ganglands and sink estates, from bad families and badly run care homes – they had a touch with traps and deceptions. They could see a thing out of place, spot a liar even when he was speaking a language they didn’t know. They saw through walls. The best of them could hone and grow the skill within themselves, and an NCO who got one of those, or better yet, who was one, he could keep his boys alive when everyone else was going home in boxes. The Sergeant’s gift in that regard was limited, found late and small, but he had a sight of a different sort, born of another sort of trouble. It was less immediate and more haunting: a sense of narrative which was part empathy and part strategy, which told him when something was coming down and when it was overdue. His boys said he could hear the enemy whispering to one another from ten miles away, that he could smell the mortars before they were fired. They called him a warlock, but from the inside it was more like flirting than magic. He watched the smoke and the mountainsides, the faces of local people and the way they held their shoulders, knew when they wanted to dance or disappear, knew what that meant even when they didn’t. He read the world, and in exchange he got a few hours’ grace before the sky fell on him.

He had thought himself fully engaged with that faculty, here on Mancreu. He realised now that it had been idling in him, pooling at his feet, and that he had been ignoring it.

He made a circuit of the horizon with his eyes, but knew he didn’t need to, knew that if there was more to this it would already have happened. There would be no second attack. There would not even – though he would assume he was at risk all the same – be a landmine waiting for him along the road. This didn’t have that flavour. It was a come-on, a taunt. Notice me.

Well, all right. I will. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

He was raging inside. It was old anger as well as new, a long way down in a sealed chamber, and on the whole everyone would be better off if it stayed there. At the same time he was in the grip of Mancreu’s end, the deep, dark brown taste of doom and gallows celebration. It was in all of them, in Beneseffe and the crab fishers and in the NatProMan troops. It had been in Shola, it was in Dirac and it must be in him, too. They were all a little bit mad and getting more so, and most of all the ones who appeared to be holding it together. Inoue and her friends had it, with their admirable, ridiculous makeshift pikes and their readiness to do battle with thugs. The Witch had it.

The boy had it in spades.

But beyond that there was something else: a watchful something which seemed to squat just out of sight and which plucked at all his old familiar fear. I am observed… No. More than that: I am targeted. His hands twitched, remembering the burning pain of the tomato sap, feeling the thing wriggling under his skin. Something diffuse, yet close, a monster waiting in the closet. Thugs at Shola’s table. Madame Duclos’s dog. Notice me. It had a stink of bad endings about it, and his every instinct said to get out from under or strike hard, and strike first, but it was so ubiquitous, so faint and yet so present, that he had no idea how to do either. Devil’s footsteps on my spine.

Inoue touched him on the shoulder and he lurched away from her, hands almost coming up in a fighter’s guard, but he restrained the impulse and waved away his own reaction with a sharp ‘Sorry’. A moment later he was running to the Xeno Centre to do what he should have done five minutes ago: he called Jed Kershaw and told him he’d been the victim of a direct and possibly politically motivated minor assault on the property of the UN-sanctioned Japanese scientific mission. If Kershaw had any assets which might reasonably be brought to bear on the situation – any American satellites or high-altitude drones doing atmospheric research or weather balloons which just happened to have a camera pointing at the ground – now would be the time for that happy accident to be shared with the mother country in the name of brotherly love and the avoidance of a Total Goatfuck. He saw Inoue watching from the doorway and realised that she was seeing him as he had earlier seen her, doing something that actually came naturally, that was his strength. She smiled in recognition of the same truth, then took her cue from him and went to boss her swots in whatever direction she felt best.

Kershaw told him to stay the fuck where he was. A rapid reaction force arrived twenty minutes later and secured the perimeter while insisting that everyone sit tight and await reinforcements. Privately the Sergeant found this was a little bit funny and a perfect example of what happened when you put a civilian in charge of military personnel.

The full force took four hours to arrive, by which time it was getting dark, so the drive back across the island was a stern, halogen-lit convoy with the Sergeant’s bloodied Land Rover occupying a slightly off-centre position in the traffic. The Sergeant wasn’t allowed to travel in it in case the vehicle was marked out for follow-up attack. According to NatProMan’s standard operating procedure, the possible object of guerrilla activity – there had never actually been any before – was to be protected both by ‘direct target obscuration’, which meant ‘getting in the way’, and deception. He told Kershaw’s myrmidons that no formal escort was necessary. The officer in charge, who was all the blond, muscular things a Pennsylvania Dutch quarterback should be, told him that he knew that – of course he did – but that Jed Kershaw had been pretty agitated and would the Sergeant consent this one time to being treated like he was made of glass? Because just between the officer and the Sergeant, who was a pro and that’s why the officer could lay it out like this and not screw around – it would sure as hell make life that much easier.

Having used a similar form of words himself from time to time, the Sergeant recognised this as soldier-to-VIP speak for ‘get your fucking arse in the car and quit pretending you’re bulletproof so we can all go home’, and so he did, wondering greatly at a universe in which he could be on the receiving end of such polite flannel. They made their way rapidly along the boring coastal route, outriders ahead ushering the few other cars off the road. The searchlights scoured the countryside around, making a small circle of effective daylight two hundred metres across and a penumbra beyond it of mottled day and dark which was almost harder to resolve than ordinary night. Mancreu looked, by this scorching illumination, all the more desolate and sorrowful: the stark actinic glare picked out old farm equipment, crumbling houses and rusted automobiles, jagged trees and lonely, deserted livestock. Nothing happened to justify the extreme caution, and they arrived at Brighton House in an hour with no more serious injury than a foggy motion sickness which came from rounding corners at speed. The Sergeant politely but firmly declined a NatProMan guard and invoked his status as Brevet-Consul of a friendly nation to make the rejection stick. The cavalcade rolled away, reluctantly extinguishing the big lights as they headed down towards the town.

The Sergeant let himself in, and the first thing he saw was the boy, sitting in livid silence on the bed in which he had slept, with his back to the door.