Tigerman

  She shook her head to let him know it was all right, then blessed him. Her finger rested solidly on his forehead for a moment, dry and hard. Satisfied, she went back inside. He touched the short list of names in his breast pocket. Something attempted, something achieved. Something actually according to plan. Simple enough.

  He wasn’t used to the feeling; recently everything had gone the other way. He found he approved of it very much.

  His good mood carried him into Beauville with renewed energy. He told Beneseffe the fish issue had taken care of itself for the meanwhile, and Beneseffe grinned and said yes, he’d heard something about that, couldn’t happen to a nicer person. The Sergeant bought a sandwich and a fizzy drink and walked along the harbour front in the sun. He asked after the names on his list. One of them was gone, they knew for sure, left with his parents in the first days. The other two they weren’t sure about, they’d ask around. He checked with the schoolhouse, too, but no joy. All the educational records, the schoolmistress said, were in storage at Brighton House. He realised he should have known this, could have known if he’d thought to check. It occurred to him that if the boy was in there he might have short-circuited his investigation and saved himself a lot of shoe leather by sitting down like a clerk and going through the records one by one. There couldn’t be more than a few thousand in the right age range. It would have taken – assuming one photo every twenty seconds, which was pessimistic – about twenty hours at the outside.

  Well, he would start tonight. If one of the names in his pocket was the boy, good. If not, there was still a good chance that by the end of the week he would have his man.

  More progress. Part of him was almost alarmed, but he knew it happened this way sometimes, knew that when it did you had to ride the wave and choose your options well to keep it under your feet. It looked like a sudden turn for the better because humans saw what was in front of them, didn’t look at the time spent getting to a certain point. This was not a day of success, it was the success of many days, the pay-off of effort.

  He went to the prison to lay down a deal.

  He chose the man in cell two because he had been easy to talk to. It didn’t matter if he had lied, he was interested in dialogue. The golden hour was past, he’d have regained some of his vinegar, but the Sergeant had more to work with now, had a magic word to open doors. He let it set the tone as the marine on duty pulled the door closed.

  ‘I want to know more about Bad Jack,’ he said. ‘For information relating to Jack, I will release you. I will put you on a boat. I will assume that you are just what you say you are, a man who got in over his head. That you fired into the air. But I want to know,’ the door shut with a very final clunk, ‘everything.’ The marine must have heard. Well, if Kershaw didn’t know about Mancreu’s apparent crime kingpin already, he would know now.

  ‘There is not Bad Jack,’ the herder said.

  ‘Oh, but there is.’

  ‘No. It is not real. Everyone knows this. What is Jack? A silly story for children.’

  ‘I hear Jack’s real enough. I hear he runs the island. I hear the man you killed worked for Jack, so that means Jack doesn’t like you.’

  ‘He did not work for Jack because there is not Jack.’

  ‘I think those nice guns you had – those very foreign guns – I think they came from Jack’s opposition. Tell me they didn’t.’

  ‘There is not Jack.’

  The Sergeant nodded. ‘Perfect. Then lie to me. Tell me a lie about Jack. Tell me a fairy story.’ The man stared at him. ‘Go on. It’s all right. Make something up. Jack comes from the moon. Jack can fly. I don’t care. For a lie about Jack, I will arrange a nicer cell. One lie, about a man who isn’t real.’

  And now he saw fear. ‘There is not Jack.’

  ‘If there’s no Jack, then lie to me.’

  The man closed his eyes and turned away.

  ‘No Jack.’

  ‘No Jack?’

  ‘No Jack.’

  The Sergeant took a map from his pocket and laid it out, and then he came around the table hard and fast as if he was in a bar fight. He captured the herder’s arm and shoved one shoulder hard into his chest, took the man’s centre and locked his elbow against the joint. He held the helpless hand over the map. ‘Where in particular is there no Jack?’

  The man flinched away. The Sergeant wrestled with him, hauled him back. Was this abuse? If he’d been interrogating a prisoner of war, certainly. But this was a civilian matter. He was not physically harming this man. He was manhandling him, which was probably illegal in Britain, the Sergeant didn’t know, but they weren’t in Britain and the governments of the world had quite deliberately made ‘legal’ disappear on Mancreu. It wasn’t wrong, he was pretty sure about that. It was nasty, but not wicked.

  He looked down at the herder’s hand. Hovering and twitching over the map, unwillingly giving up secrets. The prisoner’s aversion to the paper was strong. He did not want to touch it. But there were some places he did not want to touch more than others. The Beauville shanty. The harbour.

  ‘No Jack!’ the man was shouting. ‘No Jack! No Jack, no Jack!’ And the marine was opening the door, though he clearly did not know what he was going to do now that it was open, now that he could see what was and was not happening.

  The Sergeant let go. ‘Deal on the table,’ he said. ‘I know about Jack. You’ve just confirmed it, haven’t you? But I want to know who he deals with and who doesn’t like him. I want it all. Because I want to know who killed Shola and why, and I don’t mean you and your friends, I mean who paid for it. For that information, I will let you go. I will arrange travel. Passports, even.’ He wished he could ask about caves and heroin and NatProMan soldiers dealing dirty, but he didn’t dare and probably this poor sod would know nothing about it. And if he did, the Sergeant himself understood too little to tell a lie from the truth. Don’t ask questions whose answers you won’t understand, DI Burroughs had said. Well, fine, but you’ve got to start somewhere, Lester Ferris wanted to object now. What did you do when you had the middle but neither end, and nothing to reel them in with?

  The herder was staring at him in dismay, and at the marine as if to say ‘Help me.’ The Sergeant sighed and went out. With the others he made the same offer, simple and clear, and saw them understand it, saw them try to pretend they didn’t, and turn away. Outside in the corridor, he found he was incredibly angry with them all for being so stupid, so stubborn. He shouted, an explosion of noise without shape because no curse could adequately express how stupid all this was, how very much it was in his way.

  The marine, evidently unsettled by this evidence of passion, followed close behind him all the way to the outer door, as if concerned he might steal the plastic spoons or the ancient, stinking coffee machine.

  Being in Beauville and with a moment to spare, it was natural that he should call in on Kershaw and talk shop. Today, of course, shop for Kershaw would be the Tigerman footage, and the Sergeant took care to be genuine in his expression of sympathy.

  ‘All right, Jed?’

  ‘Go away, Lester.’

  ‘I gather some of your lads got beaten up by a sex pervert last night.’

  ‘Seen from space, your entire country looks like a gusset.’

  ‘Be that as it may, Jed, I understand this pervert actually flashed them his man-parts. I do hope they’re not so traumatised by this terrible experience that they’ll never save the free world again.’

  ‘They were Ukrainians, Lester, I’m sure they’ve seen scarier things than a sex pervert’s genitals.’

  ‘You mean he actually was a sex pervert?’

  Kershaw stopped and appeared to consider this. ‘God, I wish. That would actually be terrific. I would love that. And do you see how insane that is? I am fallen far, Lester, when I find that I am wishing, in my official capacity as chief civilian authority in theatre of the NATO and Allied Protection Force on Mancreu, for sex perverts. I don’t suppose anyone’s actually saying that
, out there?’

  ‘No idea. I’ve been out and about. I saw the telly at Dirac’s place earlier. Bloody weird.’

  ‘You think? Back in the US, we get guys who can fly and breathe under water and beat up heavily armed soldiers all the time!’ Kershaw scowled. ‘You tell me, Lester. You took down those guys from Shola’s. What was this?’

  ‘Commando,’ the Sergeant said smartly. ‘Dirac said Russian. I thought maybe Chinese, what with all that rolling and that, but he says Spetsnaz. I gather he’s a bit of a connoisseur of your international ethnic fisticuffs. Was that stuff in the background really what I think it was?’

  ‘If you think it was a boatload of fucking heroin bricks made from processed opium, then you think what I think but I don’t know yet. There’s a guy coming. An investigator. That side is all his problem.’

  ‘Top dog, I imagine.’

  ‘Arno. Dirac knows him.’

  He’s asking exactly the right questions, the Sergeant recalled, the ones where you either tell the truth or you tell a big lie, one they can check. ‘Sounds ideal,’ he said, thinking: well, shit.

  ‘Lester, I have to ask: have you ever had any hint of anything like this on Mancreu?’

  ‘Like what? Commandos? Well, there must be a few out there.’ He nodded at the sea. ‘And if that’s really about a city’s worth of heroin in the video, that’s got to be Fleet crap, hasn’t it? Cheeky sods, bringing it onshore. Maybe they were trying to cut someone out of the supply line and he got cross.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s weird.’

  ‘Weird, Jed, I have definitely seen on this island. Someone threw a dead dog at me the other day, you know. I’m still a bit cross about that. The culprit will feel the pointy end of my boot shortly.’

  ‘You know who it was?’

  ‘I’m bloody going to!’

  Kershaw hesitated. ‘Be careful out there, Lester. If this is Fleet stuff, fine, everyone ought to be very polite. But if it’s something else . . . you remember you were saying when Shola died that maybe the next thing Mancreu was going to do to itself was crazy insane shit with a body count?’

  ‘Is someone dead?’

  ‘No. But they could have been.’

  ‘And if he’s a commando, if he’d wanted it that way, they would have been.’

  Kershaw nodded. ‘I guess that’s true. I gotta work, Lester. This is not the only shit in my shitbox today.’

  ‘I came by to offer my informal assistance. Lester Ferris in his off hours, not the Consul or what have you. Or just beer. I understand beer works wonders.’

  Kershaw hesitated. ‘Thanks, man. Actually – are you busy this evening? I have a thing. I was going to ask you anyway. Unofficially official or whatever. You know what, sometimes I have no idea.’

  ‘You can record me as present or absent. At your service, anyway.’

  ‘I’ll call you later. Take care, Lester.’

  ‘I’m a bit concerned about you, Jed. If you think Britain looks like a gusset, your girlfriends have been giving you a very strange idea of what sex is all these years.’

  ‘Seen from space, Lester. Space. The place where British people do not go because the British space programme is, what, two guys with a really long stick?’

  ‘In that way, Jed, it is very much like US healthcare.’

  ‘Go now, Lester. Tell the Queen I said hi.’

  ‘See you later, Jed.’

  The Sergeant let himself out, past the grinning assistant who had no doubt been listening to the whole thing on Kershaw’s intercom. He tipped the man a salute and received a careful wave in acknowledgement, and then went back to Brighton House to dig out the school records. As with his visit to the docks and the chapel, his conversation with Kershaw had been all according to plan. Not perfect – not with Dirac’s Italian inquisitor on his way to Mancreu – but within the parameters he had set for the encounter.

  Recalling the conversation he wondered, twitchily, whether he should try to banter like that with the boy. With Kershaw it was easy because the stakes were low. If either one of them overstepped, the matter could easily be resolved because the friendship was convenient and ultimately time-limited. It would not survive their departure from the island. But with the boy he wanted something more than that and he had no idea where he might transgress in some awful way. Or just come across as trying too hard. Adults who wanted to be cool, the Sergeant recalled, were painfully uncool.

  He would have to think about it.

  The school records proved to be at the back of the stack of boxes that had been piled very neatly in the east wing, sealed in plastic to keep out moisture and possibly rats. It was hard to see why – the boxes and indeed the rats would cease to exist soon enough. If this paper had been wanted, it would by now be in a new home somewhere. The Sergeant had very rarely known a bureaucracy let go of so much information, and he suspected darkly that some of the Mancreu records must contain references to long-ago British behaviour under the Mandate in Occupied Palestine, or in Malaysia or Kenya, which was now considered discreditable. The evil baby would be lost with a great deal of murky bathwater, and that would be that: a shipping error, valuable historical accounts alas gone for ever. He idly considered a trawl through the most obscure boxes for whatever it was Whitehall wanted to forget, and looked at himself, startled, in the fractured window glass. He was a sergeant, not a troublemaker.

  He hauled what he needed out of the pile, wishing someone had bothered to digitise all this at some point in the last two decades, but they hadn’t. Mancreu before the Discharge Clouds had existed in a sort of perpetual 1989, so hardcopy it was – nearly sixty boxes of it. He pulled at the plastic wrap with his fingers and found it surprisingly tough. He vaguely remembered a girl who had worked at a post office somewhere in Germany telling him – it had been a come-on, he realised in retrospect, and he had utterly failed to notice – that industrial cling wrap was really good for tying the wrists during sex. He tried to claw through it, then gave up and went back down the corridor for a Stanley knife.

  The phone rang just as he gave up on the Stanley knife and realised that the weather-stained carving knife in the galley kitchen at this end of the house (‘We use it for barbecues,’ the Consul had told him) would do just as well, and he nearly took his own eye out lifting the receiver to his head.

  ‘Jed?’

  It wasn’t. Inoue’s laughter bubbled at him. ‘I’m going to hang up now,’ she said happily.

  ‘What? No, I—’

  ‘Bye bye!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but she was gone. He stared at the phone, put the receiver back in its cradle, bewildered. Had he really upset her? No one really called him other than Kershaw.

  The phone rang again. He picked it up. ‘Dr Inoue?’

  ‘No,’ she said gruffly, ‘this is Jedediah Sibelius Kershaw. I want you to come to dinner. We talked about it earlier.’

  ‘I’m sorry about before. he just calls me more than other people, is all.’

  ‘Lester! What the hell are you talking about?’ Inoue continued, in character. ‘I want you to come and eat with me. We’re all going out for dinner. I told you about this when you came by today. That Japanese scientist, Kaiko Inoue, will be there, too. You’re going to sit next to her so she doesn’t have to discuss Pan-Arab Nationalism with that idiot from the Working Group whose name she cannot remember but who has too much nose hair.’

  He went with it. It seemed the only thing to do. He didn’t want her to hang up again. ‘Oh, right, Jed, thank you.’

  ‘It’s a horrible nose, Lester, so don’t even think about being late. And wear something smart. Do you have medals?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do. Shall I put them on?’

  She sobered abruptly, and her voice became Inoue’s, strained and uncertain. He had never heard uncertainty in her before, and it did not suit. ‘I was going to tell you “yes”. But maybe . . . I think you should not. This will be a . . . well, I think it will be a strange occasion. Kershaw will a
nnounce the disposition of NatProMan and the Mancreu Project. In the wake of my recent findings. You understand?’

  The finding, in particular, that another Cloud was coming. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And it may be that I must say something, publicly. I would like to have you there as my friend, but you probably should not be the British Brevet-Consul, in case I am embarrassing. Is that possible?’

  It was. The outgoing Consul had foreseen the possibility of unofficial appearances, and a suit had arrived and hung in the cupboard ever since, unworn. It was still his size, he supposed. He had stayed in trim.

  ‘I’m sure you could never be embarrassing,’ he said, somewhat awkwardly, and held his breath in case this was the wrong thing.

  She laughed again. ‘Oh, yes, I can. Did you know that there are different ways of speaking Japanese for men and women? Women’s Japanese is supposed to be gentle and submissive. But English has no such division, so I am unchained. Vee-eeery dangerous.’ She chortled wickedly. He tried to imagine her demure and mousy, and failed. ‘But will you come?’

  ‘Of course.’ He felt a curious twitch in his stomach. He had been friends with few women in his life. It was like what he felt about the boy, a frantic awareness of fragility and a sense of making his way in the fog. ‘Just me. Lester Ferris. No Consul, no Sergeant.’ No Tigerman, he almost said, and then wondered whether he had been quite so angry about the boy’s beating in part because someone had thrown a dead dog on his car in front of Inoue, and whether he should say he was looking into that, which he would, as soon as he had time. For an island with no future, Mancreu had a great deal of present.

  Inoue apparently decided that enough had been said which was serious or alarming, because she dropped back into her Kershaw voice. ‘Good! The doctor says she’ll send a car at eight and you’re to call her Kaiko or you’re walking home!’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Jumping Jehosaphat, Lester!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘This is Jed Kershaw, Lester. You don’t call me “ma’am”.’