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 for
mal 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.
7. Bruises
THERE WAS NO way of knowing how long the boy had been sitting there. It was theoretically possible that he had only just arrived, or that he had been, until he heard the key turn in the lock, reading quite cosily in the corner chair – but there was an air of self-mortification about him, a sense that he had selected this posture in the knowledge that it would be uncomfortable, and his long wait with aching muscles was part of the bill which would now come due.
The Sergeant knocked on the doorframe, then cleared his throat. When this elicited no response, he experienced a strange, appalling hallucination or imagining: that the boy had died and was slowly freezing in place owing to rigor mortis. He saw himself realising and leaping up, pounding on the boy’s chest like a madman and giving him mouth-to-mouth – much too late – then carrying the tiny corpse in his arms all the way to Beauville, weeping and weeping and weeping and none of it doing any good. And what was the point of that? What was the point of being a soldier, of being a human being in a world which could work wonders with medicine, if affection – he had almost called it love, but that was a presumption, wasn’t it, because the boy wasn’t his flesh, his son, and while that was something which could be negotiated it hadn’t been negotiated, not yet – what was the point of affection, then, if it didn’t exert any traction on the universe? If it didn’t heal or protect or do anything at all except hurt? In his nightmare he begged the Witch to help him and she did, she duped him and sedated him and while he was asleep she made the dead boy disappear and when he came to himself he thanked her and then they never spoke again.
But when he risked a glance, ridiculously frightened that he would this time turn out to be right, he could see the boy’s chest moving, so that much was good. Still, he knew he was the focus of this frigid rage.
It was new ground. They had never fought before. The Sergeant had never fought in that sense with anyone – and if he had, no one had ever before occupied the strange, vexed, desperate space in his life which now belonged to the boy.
So he advanced, slowly, as if probing for mines with his voice.
‘Sorry I wasn’t around. I had to go over to the Xeno Centre.’
The boy’s face remained firmly turned away. If anything, the ramrod back seemed to grow more disdainful. Instinct told the Sergeant that this was not a bad thing; that it amounted, contrary to appearances, to permission to continue.
‘Inoue wanted to tell me some things. And when we got there, there was a sort of . . . well, an attack, I suppose. A gang.’
No answer. No shift. Did that mean rejection, or interest? Was it possible that the boy himself did not know? The silence stretched.
‘And I suppose technically I solved the dog thing. I mean, they killed him. Threw him on my car. It’s a mess – you should see.’
No, that was a mistake. Too much, too soon. A hiss of affront. He hurried on.
‘But I’ve got a new case now: the masked men. On quad bikes, if you please. Bloody expensive for Mancreu. Can’t be too many, so I expect I can find them.’ A case you can be part of. A real gang case, pow pow pow. And: I’m sure we talked about this. I’m sure I was allowed.
The boy shrugged, not his usual lazy lift of the shoulders but a hunching dismissal. ‘So you have solved a dead dog. Very good! Very excellent! When it is dropped on you, you do so very good work!’ The voice was shrill, quavering. ‘And in all this where is your friend? Where is my friend? He is still dead! And there are men in jail and you still know nothing! And when you should be looking, where are you? When I am looking, where are you? You are nowhere, except you are not nowhere you are somewhere, but Shola is really nowhere because he is dead and you don’t do anything about it. Which is fine. It is all fine. It is only Mancreu. We understand. Not important for the Brevet-Consul.’ He turned, face in shadow, eyes glaring. ‘Fine. But I thought maybe for your friends. I was wrong.’
‘You weren’t.’
‘I was. Totally. Funny me, ha ha. Ai can haz stupidz.’
‘I just have other things too. The only way I can do what I do is if people let me. I don’t have anything to back me up. And they let me because I don’t just do what suits me. I try to do what needs doing. And Shola . . . that does need doing. But it’s not the only thing. I’m sorry. I’ll keep after it, you know I will. He was my friend. And so are you.’
‘Yes! There are so many other things. So I have been helping, while you were so importantly somewhere not here. I have solved your fish case for you. Your thief is Pechorin, from NatProMan.’
The Sergeant sighed. Too late, then, to tell the boy not to go near the Ukrainians. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard that, too. The card-players told me, in the old town.’
‘Good. So now you find out about Shola.’
‘Yes. Of course. I’ll . . .’ But he still did not know what he would do. ‘I’ll chase the weapons. Get names on the men, see if I can find out who hired them. If someone did. I’ll get there, in time.’ And now’s not the time to explain that we may not have very much. Your island is dying, we may never know who murdered your friend: come and be my son. He pushed on. ‘I can interrogate them again. I won’t stop, I promise. Even if you weren’t asking. If you didn’t talk to me any more. I wouldn’t stop. But I’d be . . .’ a little part of the full truth, now ‘. . . less. I’d be less than I am. And I want to be more.’
The boy seemed to find this funny, somehow darkly amusing, and shook his head. They sat together in silence for a while, and the wind blew around the edges of the house and in through an open window in the other room. It grew noticeably cold. The Sergeant found himself speaking again. He hoped he knew what he was doing, and suspected he didn’t.
‘I don’t know how to be what you need. I want to. But that sort of thing I always . . . well, I asked Shola. He was good with people. He was a good man. Me, I’ve . . . got no practice. I’m used to having instructions. I’m not like you. I don’t . . . I don’t have the habit of it yet, the natural way of doing it without orders. But I’ll get there. I’ll learn’ – and here inspiration struck – ‘I’ll learn to be a bit like him. Shola didn’t work for anyone.’
The boy
jerked away, and his face reflected absolute horror. It must be a flashback, the Sergeant thought, full Dolby surround sound with all the trimmings, and yes, oh, yes, he knew about those. He moved forward, hands out to receive a faint or fend off an attack. The boy opened his mouth and made a high keening sound like the first flurry of bagpipes when the piper settles them under his arm. He stopped, eyes wide, and then made the noise again and again until it tailed away into a gasping cough, then flung himself on the Sergeant and clung to him, and the older man realised abruptly that this noise was grief, and maybe even shame.
The Sergeant sat for a moment with his elbows at shoulder height and his hands in the air, as if someone notionally friendly had him at gunpoint and it would all be sorted out in a moment. Then, with great caution, he lowered his nearer arm and put it around the boy’s back and wrapped the other across so that he could clasp his own wrist and complete the circle in a hug. He rocked gently, and made wordless noises of encouragement. From the boy came back squalls of sorrow and remorse. Shola’s death, the Sergeant gathered, was somehow all to be laid at the boy’s small feet. Shola had been coming to rescue him. They had killed Shola because Shola had told them to leave the boy. The boy had done nothing to help. He had watched Shola die and done nothing. What sort of hero would let that happen? The Sergeant had been like lightning. He had been a god. He had been a warrior. He had been like Batman, but a thousand times better because Batman was ultra wealthy and the Sergeant was just an ordinary person. The boy had done nothing. The whole affair was his fault. The boy was bad.
This flood of self-despite was at the same time quite alarmingly foreign to the Sergeant and entirely familiar. True, he had no direct experience with the violent woes and self-reproaches of children. On the other hand, he was a sergeant, and the commonality in the roles of NCOs and parents was too obvious to dwell upon. He knew how very destructive that simple, unadorned ‘bad’ could be, how it could embrace a whole person from birth to this very present and condemn every aspect of him entire. Where a more nuanced description could be examined and faulted, something so broad was resilient. It was a tar pit. You couldn’t argue it away, because reasoning gave it an undue status as something reasonable. Each attempt to unpick the nest of accusations would draw you deeper in. Your empathy was misunderstanding, evidence of your pure heart’s inability to comprehend the enormity you confronted. Your effort spent on a creature so vile was a waste of kindness needed elsewhere, and this itself was a fresh crime to be registered against the villain. Your subsequent distress and ultimate frustration were read as justified anger at the perpetrator of such sins.