Hotbed

  ‘Although this is only a practice, Mansel, I already feel some of the joy and fulfilment we’ll all experience on the actual day,’ Ember said.

  ‘Your presence contributes to that joy and fulfilment, Ralph, contributes great and unique. I thank you.’

  ‘I’m proud to participate.’ What’s happened to Turret Brown, you fucking marital sod? But this was not the kind of question that could be asked here. Ralph and Shale sat together in the front pew on the right, as laid down for wedding procedure, Shale nearer the aisle, so he could get out to be alongside Naomi at the altar. Manse and Ralph had been told to arrive at least half an hour before the bride. The vicar said timing was crucial, and placement – that is, where everyone sat or stood. He meant weddings generally, not just Manse’s and the possibility of trouble. Ralph felt pretty certain Manse had not wised him up about that. After all, few vicars agreed to marry anybody divorced, and Manse would hardly want to give this one extra stress after he’d been so helpful. In some ways it struck Ember as vilely insulting and even farcical that Shale could imagine Ralph ordering a hit on a church wedding, whether or not he was best man. Wouldn’t it be barbaric to misuse such a holy and blessed occasion in this fashion? There was a term sometimes applied to Church of England weddings which Ralph especially cherished: the ‘solemnization’ of marriage. That word really caught the seriousness and glory of what took place. How gross to turn a sacred event into an execution yard. Ralph more or less discarded any thought of having Manse riddled during solemnization.

  In any case, there were big impracticalities. Like many churches, St James’s had a lot of wide stone pillars to prop up that huge, vaulted ceiling, and these could make lines of fire difficult. If he did decide to do Manse in that setting, he’d have to hire exceptionally good people from London or Manchester and brief them thoroughly with pictures of Manse. But there could be mistakes because of the very close grouping in a wedding service – what the parson called ‘placement’ – and ricochets off the tough stonework. Ralph certainly did not want the vicar or possibly rector shot. That was sure to niggle many in the city, and the police would have to get serious about nailing those responsible. A priest blasted in his own church must strike some as symbolic of a general decline of behaviour, and they would demand reprisals. Iles himself probably didn’t give a fish’s tit about church things, but even he would feel pressured.

  Then, again, someone at the back of the church during the fusillade might turn holy hero and slam the heavy doors shut, trapping the assailants. Their response, almost certainly, must be to blast off without much thought of where the bullets went, as long as they got out: these would be professional people, with a professional and profound sense of urgency and self-preservation. Ralph desired no massacre, particularly not in a church, but probably not anywhere, nor ruined stained glass depicting saints, possibly haloed.

  Manse said: ‘Me and Naomi chose the service from the Book of Common Prayer, going right back – 1662, not none of the modern ones. We agreed instant on that. I would of bet on it, this agreement. It’s because we are so much in tune with each other. I never had that with Syb, my first. I’d say something and she’d come out with the fucking opposite, just to irritate. As I see it, Ralph, if you got all them couples married by it since 1662, it must be right and strong. This date stuck in my head, because it’s important. Oh, I know not every marriage that used the 1662 lasted and was good. Maybe some of them royals who split up used the 1662. Most probably they did, because it was handed down and historic. But we like it, all the same. This is not something fly-by-night and trendy. It’s tradition, Ralph. It’s Britishness. We want to be part of that.’

  ‘So like you, Manse.’

  Naomi’s mother was shown into the front pew to the left. This officially signalled that the bride had arrived and would soon move up the aisle from the church door, to take her place alongside Mansel in front of the vicar. Even then she’d be able to tell herself nothing was finalized. A rehearsal only. She could still get out. Although she’d know the procedure in advance, the actual moment when she encountered Manse’s face in a sanctified building might come as a foul shock.

  The organist began the Wedding March. Everyone stood. In a few seconds, Manse must take a step out from the pew to greet Naomi. Suppose Ralph, on balance, decided to get Manse finished at his wedding, despite quibbles, this could offer the obvious chance. For several seconds the bridegroom had to be completely solo in the aisle waiting for his bride. Ralph thought it should be pretty straightforward to pick him off then, and no pillar gave protection at this point. Obviously, the architects who designed the nave would not have been thinking mainly about how to protect a bridegroom from gunfire when they sited the pillars. The triumphant organ music might half drown the sound of shots, making it unclear what was happening, and the gunmen could get out and escape before anyone had time to shut the doors or interfere in some other troublesome way. True, that meant the bride would never make it to being a wife, which could lead to difficulties over getting at Manse’s money and other property. Ember saw this as regrettable, yet he felt unable to worry too much about the finances of someone dim enough voluntarily to marry Shale. In any case, the bride might herself get hit – not deliberately, but because she would be lining herself up in the aisle with Manse. Although, clearly, Ralph did not want that, a woman willing to put herself in this situation must surely expect snags.

  Ralph experienced a large, natural gratitude to the vicar for running this rehearsal and showing the possibilities, without knowing it. Although Ralph still considered a church wedding as holy and blessed, and still felt hugely disgusted that Shale might believe him willing to lay on a barrage here, he did see potential opportunities. Ralph began to wonder whether, after all, it was foolishly extravagant and exaggerated to regard the wedding as a sacramental event and to let himself get softened up by this notion. During his Foundation Year at the university, he’d read some history and remembered a quotation from Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher: ‘The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is an imbecility.’ Ralph saw that this might be the kind of uncompromising war he and Manse were destined to fight. Shouldn’t Ralph get preemptive and have Shale done at St James’s? Would it be an imbecility not to?

  Ember glanced back at Naomi, approaching up the aisle on her stepfather’s right arm. Ralph wanted to gauge how long it took her to progress from the door to the spot where she joined Manse. Luckily, Ralph had brought a stopwatch and set it going now, though hidden in his trouser pocket. During nearly all that time Shale was certain to be a beautifully exposed, unmoving, smiling target, his head or chest absolutely still in the sights. The experts Ralph hired would need only an extremely basic briefing, plus pictures of the prat.

  ‘This is your marvellous future, Manse,’ Ember whispered.

  ‘So true, but I’m still scared that miserable bitch, Syb, will get in on the day and ruin everything.’ Manse moved out from the pew.

  And what about Turret, and his future, and present? Another silent question. Ember stopped the watch.

  Chapter Six

  Now and then, Iles would talk like a really heavy thinker, although an Assistant Chief. This could be a fucking pain, of course, but – also of course – Harpur usually put up with it for at least a while because Iles had the big rank and knew how to turn unpleasant with anyone lower who seemed to forget he had the big rank, especially Harpur. And when Iles turned unpleasant it was not a middling or sane thing, as others might turn unpleasant, but a Desmond Iles, crash-ball thing.

  ‘What was it Karl Marx said about this sort of topic, Col?’ he asked.

  ‘Which sort of topic would that be, sir?’ Harpur said.

  ‘This sort, twat.’ Iles was crouched very low, going through the suit pockets, and actually spoke down towards the corpse, rather than up to Harpur, who stood behind him, not needing, not wishing, to get near the victim again. But Harpur heard it all
OK. In any case, along the way, there’d probably be familiar items he’d listened to before from Iles, though not previously while the ACC trawled a body. They both wore white sterile dungarees and face masks. ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s a chapter or two in Marx, Col.’

  Harpur said: ‘Karl came out with quite a bit over the years, sir, no denying. Oh, yes. Statements of rich significance. And extremely famous volumes running to many a page. But I don’t need to tell you.’

  ‘As a youngster I continually had my head stuck in a book,’ Iles replied, easing his fingers right under on the ground, to plumb the trousers’ back pocket. Not even Iles would have the gall to turn him over. ‘That’s how my mother used to describe it – “forever your head stuck in a book, Desmond,” as though a book were the village stocks, or a permanent waver. Not just Marx. I read all sorts, consuming the printed page. Oh, yes, consuming. “Omnivorous”, “voracious” – these are terms that would hardly have been off key for my youthful attitude to reading, the one being a pre-condition of the other, you’ll agree.’

  ‘This is the point about mothers,’ Harpur said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Occasionally they’ll produce a dismal old phrase or two, imagining these are witty and sharp. They’re trying to help. Some mothers are quite interested in their children, regardless.’

  Iles pulled his hand back, empty. Naturally, empty. ‘But I’m certainly not one who has the arrogance to think of himself as precocious when young, Col.’

  Harpur laughed mildly for a while, as at the inane, thunderous modesty of this. ‘Well, I’m afraid I might not be able to believe that, sir.’ Iles often purported to deny his boy-genius status. Harpur constantly had the prolonged, doubting, overwhelmingly smarmy laugh on call, the way petrol stations kept a fire extinguisher prominent. His disbelieving response would be expected. It was compulsory. Contradict me fast, Harpur, you sodding, snide, subordinate jerk.

  ‘I will admit, though, to an early, obsessive fascination with words when written down,’ Iles said.

  The dead man’s mouth was part open. Iles brought a pencil-style torch from somewhere, switched it on and spent a few focused minutes examining and most likely mentally charting teeth, tongue condition and dimensions, fillings, plaque and tonsils, if any. Iles did not make notes. He’d accurately recall everything he thought important.

  Harpur said: ‘Written words are certainly items books can’t do without, and, therefore, if you were/are interested in books, it would follow that you gave/give attention to words, sir.’

  ‘I mean their sequence . . . yes, the way words fall into . . . well, a sequence – their mutual cheek-by-jowling.’ Some of the ACC’s sentences became slightly broken up for a while because of his concentrated mouth delve. ‘You ever get enthralled by printed matter as a kid, Col? Did they encourage . . . did they encourage reading in that school for muggers and the retarded you won an uncontested scholarship to? Myself, I enjoyed . . . I really enjoyed many hours of almost sensual experience noting the way conjoined letters seemed to vie with and complement or compromise one another.’

  ‘You can say that again, sir!’ But, for fuck’s sake, don’t.

  Iles said: ‘An interesting example – take the intriguingly angled z in the word “zoo”. This intrigued me, from my childhood on.’

  ‘Ah, I’ve always thought the zoo z a remarkable z even among other z’s,’ Harpur happily commented. ‘A tremor would go over me whenever I came upon the word “zoo”.’

  ‘The z pushes forever against those damn smug double o’s in “zoo”, exactly as a gloriously sinuous caged panther might push against the bars in an actual, real zoo, you see.’

  ‘Ah.’ Harpur thought this gloriously sinuous panther and the z and smug o’s might be new. He couldn’t immediately recall earlier references to them by Iles, during other long, brain-dazing sessions on the anatomy of words. But Harpur’s memory was often merciful to him and would bury some of Iles’s maddest crap, as cats buried all theirs – domestic cats, anyway: maybe not panthers. The ACC withdrew his torch and wiped it thoroughly on the lower part of Harpur’s left dungaree leg before replacing it in his pocket. Iles loved system, unless it was a system devised by someone else: this he would tend to see as no system at all, but a mess. He put a middle finger into the dead mouth now, apparently to rock one or more teeth as a test of gum hold or overall mandible state. Things told Iles things. There’d be some eventual point to the jabber and search activities. Watch and wait. Things told Iles things, but, of course, he didn’t always or even often tell others what things things told him. Harpur could reciprocate this kind of editing. He said: ‘Obviously, that might have affected your subconscious, sir.’

  ‘What might have, Col?’

  ‘“Zoo”.’

  ‘In what respect, Harpur?’

  ‘Perhaps without realizing it properly – you being comparatively immature at that age – perhaps, you saw yourself as like the bold, vigorous, engagingly sharp-lined zigzag z of “zoo”, or, alternatively, and more likely, the cruelly confined, graceful, padding panther in that actual zoo. You had an urge – possibly deep and undefined – to escape the restrictions of childhood – i.e. the zoo cage bars – and reach your true, fully emerged, unique, panther-quality, Ilesian self, a self we’re all fortunate enough to see and proudly serve under now, sir.’

  ‘And to revere and love, Col?’

  ‘The subconscious is quite a thing,’ Harpur replied. ‘Most agree on that. It’s not like a chin or an elbow – obvious, tangible, able to jut. But it’s there all right. Think of Freud, or The Manchurian Candidate, both versions.’

  ‘For all of you to see and proudly serve under and to revere and love, Col?’

  ‘The panther’s one of the best animal runners there is, and caged it would be really fed up.’

  ‘Also, I’d analyse the progress of a paragraph,’ Iles said. ‘Its strategy of persuasion. Again, not only Karl Marx. Oh, no! Others.’

  ‘Others are a lot.’

  ‘Hegel. Descartes. Longfellow. Plato, naturally. Sartre.’

  ‘Between them, people like that can certainly sum up many aspects of life, although foreign,’ Harpur declared.

  Iles withdrew the finger and made a fanning movement under his nose with that hand: ‘God, he’s been here quite a time, Col.’ The other hand rechecked a side pocket, uselessly, as Harpur knew. ‘Talking of Descartes, “I stink therefore I am, or was.”’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll find anything, sir. The Scenes of Crime people did their search and said he had nothing on him, not even an arm tattoo.’

  ‘But I expect you were here early-birding and cleaned him out for your own slimy get-ahead-Harpur purposes. Right?’ Iles took a lump of the fair, curly hair and pulled the dead man’s head up off the ground, then, with his free hand, loosened the jacket around the shoulders for a squint at any name tag or maker’s label. Harpur knew there wasn’t one. He hadn’t needed that kind of indicator, anyway. He’d recognized the man at first sight on the ground, despite the mutilation: Joachim Bale Frederick Brown. Harpur suspected the ACC recognized him, too – perhaps had already tragically fitted Brown into his theory about Ralph Ember’s need for a spy in Shale’s firm. Iles liked to act dumb now and then. Perhaps he needed to sample, to mock-up, the symptoms of stupidity, empty-headedness and general intellectual blankness that afflicted folk who were so piteously not himself. It reminded Harpur of those children’s tales where a prince dresses down as a pauper and goes out disguised among his subjects to find what things are like for them. Harpur had often heard Iles quote that guru he’d mentioned, Sartre, who said,’Hell is other people,’ though that, apparently, didn’t stop him shagging oodles of them. Naturally, Iles said it in French first, and then generously translated for Harpur. And sometimes Harpur would think, Yes, hell is other people, such as Iles. The ACC didn’t really need anyone to tell him hell was other peop
le, but he needed to chart what exactly made these others so wholeheartedly hellish. Occasionally, therefore, he would pretend to be as half-baked as he thought they were. He wanted to feel like them, be them, temporarily, actorly. Did they know how hellish they were? Did they enjoy it? Iles would not expect these others to be images of him, but it amazed him – perhaps distressed him – that they might not want to be images of him. Also, Iles’s pretence at ignorance meant he could come out eventually with a shock revelation of what he knew. Harpur considered it only kindly to play along. He owed the ACC an occasional minor kindness.

  Iles let the head fall back to the ground. He went to the other end, removed both Brown’s shoes and socks, and methodically eased the toes apart to peer between. He hummed and half sang what Harpur took to be a First World War chorus about packing up your troubles in your old kit bag. He had folded the socks neatly and placed each on top of the shoe from the due foot. ‘And yet, for all this devotion to written words, Col, I’m worryingly sceptical about them, worryingly and worriedly.’

  ‘Is that so, sir?’ Harpur got some fellow feeling into his voice, though not quite a sob.

  ‘If we can’t trust words, Col, what can we trust?’

  ‘Words are useful, sir. That’s from the communicating point of view. They come into their own then. When you think about it, even Morse code, which seems to be only dots and dashes, is actually dots and dashes signifying letters, and letters that go to make words. I don’t know where we’d be without them. For instance, I wouldn’t be able to say “I don’t know where we’d be without them” if we were without them.’

  The foot examination took a while. Iles gave each interface about twenty seconds. Now and then he’d run a finger against the side of a toe, as if tracing a Braille-type message in the wrinkled flesh, on its way to decomposition. ‘What do words actually mean?’ Iles said. ‘Can they – words – always come up to scratch? What we obviously have to ask is, Are they themselves or their opposites? Do we scent chaos, Col?’