Border Princes

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Good afternoon, sorry to bother you. My name is Dean Simms of Glazed Over, and I’m in your area this afternoon to introduce a remarkable domestic opportunity. Now, it’s available for a limited period only, and exclusively, to a few, specially selected households.’

  ‘Are you selling?’ the woman asked. ‘Are you windows?’

  ‘I’m just here to talk about a remarkable domestic opportunity.’

  ‘I don’t want sodding windows,’ scowled the woman, and started to shut the door again. ‘Are you blind? We’ve got replacement windows back and front.’

  ‘Let me just leave you with a leaflet,’ Dean said, smiling. He reached into his unzipped case and squeezed the soft lump inside. ‘Just a leaflet, Mrs Menzies?’ He loved this bit.

  ‘A leaflet?’ she asked, slightly blank.

  Dean’s grin broadened. He made a gentle sweep with his hand. ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,’ he said.

  ‘Come in,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh, that’s so got to be our man,’ said Jack. He and James were walking briskly, side by side, along the pavement from the space where they’d left the SUV. Over a box hedge, they could see a young, suited man chatting to a homeowner in a front doorway.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked James.

  ‘Ruin his day and queer his pitch,’ replied Jack. They arrived at the gate. ‘Excuse me,’ Jack called pleasantly.

  The woman in the doorway squinted at them from her doorway. The young man in the suit who had been talking to her turned slowly. He eyed Jack and James warily.

  ‘I don’t want to cause a scene,’ said Jack, ‘but could we have a quiet word?’

  ‘A quiet word?’ asked the woman.

  ‘With your friend here?’ Jack indicated.

  The young man looked from James to Jack quickly, weighed his options, and then bolted. He vaulted the front garden wall and began to run away down the street.

  ‘Oi!’ cried the woman.

  ‘Sorry to trouble you!’ Jack called back to her as he and James gave chase. The young man in the suit was really moving. Head back, arms pumping, sprinting like a maniac.

  James was leading Jack by three or four yards. ‘Go left!’ he yelled as they passed the turning to some backyard garages.

  Coat flying, Jack broke left up the unmade track. James kept on, flying after their quarry. Left at the next corner, James willed, just turn left and you’ll run smack into Jack.

  The young man in the suit turned right and took off across the road.

  ‘Damn!’ James barked, and continued to pound after him, crossing the street diagonally behind a slow-moving car. He was force to halt sharply in the middle of the road to let another car go by the other way. By the time James had reached the far side and begun to pick up speed again, the young man in the suit was leaving him behind. James tried to up his pace, but the young man was putting increasing distance between them.

  Jack ran out of the garage standing and back onto the street at the top. No sign of their quarry. Still running, he turned right and, in a moment or two, caught sight of James up head of him, running flat out away from him down the tree-lined avenue.

  ‘James!’

  James didn’t appear to hear him. Much further away, with a good thirty-yard lead on James already, Jack could see the young man in the suit, leaning as he turned left again.

  Jack crossed the road, edging between the cars parked under the trees, his feet slipping on wet leaves, and set off down a left-hand street running parallel to their target’s flight path. If the young man in the suit doubled back, Jack would nab him around the next corner.

  A man walking a dog frowned at Jack as Jack bombed past.

  ‘Afternoon!’ Jack called. Twenty yards to the corner, then right. He jinked around two men carrying an old bath out to a skip. He reached the corner, and skidded around it.

  Jack’s intercept prediction had almost been bang on. Left to his own devices, the young man in the suit would have doubled back again, and run headlong into Jack coming the other way.

  But the young man in the suit hadn’t made it that far. A few yards in from the opposite street corner, James had him pressed against the wall in an arm-lock.

  Jack trotted up, breathing hard. The young man was struggling and mouthing off.

  ‘Be still!’ James told him. He looked around at Jack. ‘Got him,’ he said.

  ‘How?’ asked Jack

  ‘I ran like a bastard and caught up with him,’ said James. ‘How do you think? Be still, I said!’

  ‘Last time I saw you pair, he had thirty yards on you,’ said Jack, panting.

  ‘All in the finish,’ James replied. ‘He went off too early. Soon as he began to flag, I had him. It’s pacing, Jack, pacing.’

  ‘My ass it is. He was flying.’

  ‘Are you going to help?’ James asked. The young man in the suit was struggling harder.

  ‘Get your hands off me! Get your filthy hands off me! I know my rights! Police brutality!’

  ‘Turn him round,’ Jack instructed. James manhandled the wriggling young man around to face him. The young man was sweaty and flushed, sucking painful breaths in after his exertions.

  ‘You think we’re police?’ Jack asked him.

  ‘Get your hands off me!’ the young man replied.

  ‘Do you think we’re the police?’ Jack asked him again, more slowly and deliberately this time.

  ‘Y-yes?’

  ‘Boy,’ smiled Jack. ‘This is going to be fun.’

  They walked back to the SUV.

  ‘OK,’ Jack admitted. ‘Not so much fun as I’d hoped. Or success.’

  ‘You sure we should have let him go?’ asked James.

  ‘I’m telling you, that wasn’t our guy.’

  James pursed his lips. ‘Unless, of course, he was, and he just hypnotised us the way he hypnotises his other victims, and we fell for it. Did you consider that?’

  ‘Come on, that moron couldn’t have hypnotised a... a...’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Something that gets hypnotised very easily,’ Jack replied, fishing the carkeys out of his coat.

  ‘So you’re certain it wasn’t the man we’re looking for?’

  ‘You saw him as well as I did,’ said Jack, slightly plaintively, ‘You heard him. He was just a chancer, trying to case likely-looking homes by pretending to be doing a consumer survey. No cover story is that believably lame.’

  ‘I suppose. He did seem scared.’

  ‘Too right he was scared. Petty housebreaker, messing with me. Shame though, I thought he was the one.’ Jack blip-blipped the key fob to unlock the SUV and they got in.

  ‘Did he hit you?’ Jack asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘While he was struggling? Did he catch you?’

  ‘What? Why?’ James replied.

  ‘Your nose is bleeding a little there.’

  ‘Huh? Oh, yeah, I think he did.’

  It wasn’t yet three o’clock. Even with the secret, that was good going. Once you had them, you had to ease them in the direction you wanted them to go in, very gently. Some visits, that was slow going. Dean imagined it was a bit like steering a punt, although he’d never actually done that. He’d seen it on telly, however. Some fly-on-the-wall about arsehole toffs, punting.

  Sometimes, during a visit, they resisted, due to inhibitions he didn’t yet understand. Sometimes, he had to apply quite a lot of effort to get them moving the way he wanted them to go. Occasionally, there was nothing to get a purchase on, nothing but soft mud when he sank his punting pole in, so to speak.

  Dean thought he ought to write a seminar. He could train people to use the secret, and he’d heard there was really big money in sales training. Not that he was about to give the secret away to anyone, of course. It was his.

  Dean came out of number eight, and said goodbye to Mrs Menzies. She seemed very pleased with her imaginary loft insulation and replacement windows. Dean was certainl
y very pleased with the eight hundred and sixty-six not-imaginary-at-all pounds he’d been given by Mrs Menzies. He’d made sure to collect up all his bits of paper, all the forms he’d had her sign, here and here and here. They were only mail-away coupons and inserts from magazines, but the client always saw pukka, press-hard-you’re-making-four-copies contract blanks. He tried not to ever leave any behind, but if he did, no one would give them a second look.

  He walked down the street, whistling. He waited to cross back to his vehicle, and allowed some traffic to go by. A couple of saloon cars, a hatchback, then a monster black 4x4, a Porsche Cayenne or a Range Rover. It had gone past before he’d got a proper eyeful. Tasty. That’s what he wanted next. A really nice ride like that. Yes sir.

  He unlocked his own vehicle. It’d do the trick for the time being. No one ever looked at it.

  Dean sat down, and flipped through his sheaf of electoral roll printout. Time for one more, then he’d call it a day.

  The park would be closing soon. The sign at the wrought-iron gates advertised that they would be locked at nightfall in winter. Another half an hour. The white-gold sun was slipping behind the empty trees, and long dark shadows were running out across the grass like ploughed furrows. There was a slight autumnal haze, a softness in the light, and a smell of leaves decaying.

  People were walking dogs. A few kids were playing, most of them on their way home from school, laden with knapsacks. A golden retriever chased energetically across the grass, hunting down a frisbee. Its owner shouted the dog’s name. Leaves fluttered as it snatched up the red plastic disk and turned with it in its mouth.

  Mr Dine sat on the top of the War Memorial, basking in the last of the sun. He was secure. No one could see him up there. He was out of sight to anyone passing by on the ground, and to anyone looking on from a distance. Besides, no one would expect a person to be up there. The Council had never bothered fencing the War Memorial with railings, because it was patently unclimbable.

  He’d crashed, predictably, then switched to recovery mode. A warm glow that wasn’t the sunlight suffused him. He could hear the distant, constant hum of traffic.

  The upload had restarted about an hour earlier. Not an alert, just a routine data review. He sat listening to its melodious chunter. Key link-strands had not yet been clarified and restored to satisfaction. There was still some concern, expressed via the upload, that the Principal’s status might yet be compromised and unsafe. A possibility of damage. Mr Dine was to monitor this carefully in the coming hours.

  Mr Dine opened his hand and looked at the livid burn the adversarial object had left on the flesh of his palm. The wound was repairing, but it had gone through to the bone in places.

  ‘You’re joking! And?’ asked Gwen.

  ‘Well,’ said James, ‘he went off down Brunswick Way like he had an Exocet up his jacksie, and Jack and I went after him. This is the third time in one afternoon, bear in mind. I was not in the mood for another sprint. Anyway, he gets past me and Jack rugby tackles him on a traffic island.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He’s only a Jehovah’s Witness, isn’t he?’

  ‘No!’ Gwen exclaimed with a snort. ‘Not really?’

  ‘I swear. He starts trying to club Jack off him with a rolled up copy of The Watchtower.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Gwen asked, raising her wine glass.

  ‘We apologised,’ James grinned.

  ‘But he’d run. Why had he run?’

  ‘Apparently, two of his colleagues had been duffed up by youths in that area recently, and he thought we were out to get him.’

  ‘Poor bugger.’

  ‘Yeah. To make things worse, Jack sends him on his way with a cheery “Next time I see Jehovah, I’ll put in a good word for you”.’

  The waiter brought the bill over. Gwen waved it to her.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said James.

  ‘I invited you out, remember. My treat.’

  She gave the waiter her card. ‘Did Jack really say that?’

  James nodded. He sipped the last of his wine and laughed to himself. ‘He’s a menace.’

  ‘So, you never got him, then?’

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ James said, sitting forward again and shaking his head. ‘We’re back on it tomorrow. Jack’s quite fired up now, a matter of principle, I think.’

  ‘Captain Jack always gets his man,’ said Gwen.

  ‘Well, Captain Jack was off his stroke this afternoon. Zero for three. First the oik casing houses, then the window cleaner who thought we were wanting words about a pliant hausfrau he’d dallied with. Then, the Jehovah’s Witness.’ James counted them out on his fingers. ‘We were up and down Pontcanna all afternoon like a fiddler’s elbow.’

  ‘I thought that was in and out?’

  ‘You’re right. What’s up and down?’

  ‘A whore’s drawers?’

  ‘Thank you. I haven’t run so far in years. My calves are like toffee apples.’

  ‘What, crispy and sweet?’ Gwen asked, smiling to the waiter as she punched her PIN into the reader he offered her.

  ‘No, baked hard and round and... OK, not toffee apples. Either way, I’m totally exhausted.’

  ‘Not totally, I hope,’ she winked. She took her card and the tear-off strip from the waiter. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Not totally, I suppose,’ James said. ‘Well, you paid for all this, and very nice it was too, but weren’t we supposed to be talking?’

  ‘We were talking.’

  ‘I told you all about running around Pontcanna like a nong. We didn’t talk about... talky stuff.’

  ‘The night’s still young,’ she said.

  James helped her on with her coat. They thanked the girl working the restaurant’s front of house, and went out into the clear, chilly night. Fairy-light stars and an elegantly simple waxing moon stood out in the glassy blackness over the Bay.

  ‘I paid extra for that,’ Gwen said.

  They walked along the Quay, hand in hand. The restaurants and bars were throbbing with music and bodies.

  ‘You wanted to consult me, I believe,’ James said.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Consult away.’

  Gwen leant on the railing. The oxide tang of the water was sharp.

  ‘Rhys and I have been together for a long time. We’re like socks that get rolled up together and dumped in the wash, week in, week out, just because we match. Never mind the holes that need darning.’

  ‘But you match?’

  She nodded. ‘Always have. Never mind the holes. You can live with holes. That’s why God made shoes. To hide the holes in your socks.’

  ‘Can I ask, at this point, what shoes are representing in this elaborate analogy?’

  Gwen chuckled. ‘Bugger only knows. Daily life? I didn’t really think that one through.’

  James looked pensive. ‘And – just so I’m clear, you understand – are you saying you only wash your socks once a week?’

  She cuffed him on the sleeve. ‘I’m being serious.’

  ‘So am I,’ James replied earnestly. ‘Living with a woman who only washes her socks once a week, that could have long-term consequences.’

  She looked up at him. ‘Long-term? This is my point, you see? There’s only one reason I’m even considering breaking Rhys’s heart, and that’s us. You and me. It’s not a road I’m even going to think of going down unless there’s you and me at the end of it.’

  ‘I see. I thought you were tired of him?’

  ‘I don’t know what I am, as far as Rhys goes. Settled. Inert. Static. I’m being selfish, I know. I bloody know that, but I also know I want more. However, I don’t want to hurt him over nothing. I’d only do it if it was truly important.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And for all I know, this may just be a bit of fun to you. A laugh. A fling. That’s fine. I’d understand. But that’s why I have to consult you. I’d like to know where you stand.’

  ‘OK,’ James said. There was a pa
use.

  ‘No rush, no pressure.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘In your own time,’ she added.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Bearing in mind I paid for dinner and this whole romantic seaview.’

  He looked very solemn. ‘So... whether you dump Rhys or not depends on whether I see a future for us? Or not?’

  ‘In a nutshell,’ she said.

  ‘You like to put people on the spot?’

  ‘It’s in my nature as a policewoman.’

  ‘Gwen,’ he said softly. ‘We’ve had a great time, this week. Despite everything.’

  ‘We have.’

  ‘I don’t know how to say this,’ he began.

  Her face fell. ‘It’s OK. Just say it. Just say it, James, so I can hear it.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he whispered.

  ‘Right. That’s all right, that’s—’

  He hushed her with a finger on her lips.

  ‘I’m really, truly sorry, but you’re going to have to break Rhys’s heart.’

  They caught a cab from the rank on the Quay. They sat as far away from one other as they possibly could on the back seat. Too close, they’d become volatile elements, intermix and explode. They didn’t even look at each other as the street-lamps strobed by overhead.

  ‘Keep the change,’ James told the driver, the cab’s engine purring hot gas into the night cool.

  ‘Really, mister?’

  ‘Oh yeah, really.’

  ‘Have a nice night,’ the cabbie called as he pulled away.

  Gwen laughed as James failed to get his key in the lock at the fourth attempt.

  ‘Not a good omen,’ she giggled.

  ‘Shush, my hands are shaking.’

  ‘Nervous?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The door opened and they blundered inside, wrapped around one another. The deep kisses felt like the first they’d ever shared. It was weird, charged, startling.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘hang on a sec.’ Pulling open the last few buttons of his shirt and ditching it, he headed into the kitchen. She heard the fridge door thump open, followed by a clink of glasses.

  James reappeared with a bottle of Moët and two crystal flutes.

  ‘I came by earlier, and put this in the fridge,’ he said. ‘In case... just in case we had something to celebrate tonight.’