The Fat of Fed Beasts

by Guy Ware

  Outside, people were still walking up and down the street, looking for lunch or a dry cleaner. A few had tried to enter the bank, but finding the doors surprisingly barred by the stick or baton one of the gunmen had stuck through the polished aluminium handles, and which was presumably visible through the glass doors, had shaken their heads and walked on. I assumed that the people lying on the floor of the bank, and the people standing over them with guns, were not visible through the glass doors to those frustrated customers, perhaps because of the glare of the bright June sunshine out on the street. I could hear trains rumbling in and out of the station, and traffic in the street. In the corner of the public area another woman began to cry quietly; a man began murmuring rhythmically in what I assumed was prayer.

  Alex now interrupts to ask me if I had thought there might be more than one person in the office or interview room behind the partition wall. He says he means before the gunman went in there, obviously.

  This is a surprise. Alex doesn’t speak much in meetings and never interrupts me. D thinks this is because Alex never listens to anybody else, ever. When I say perhaps it is only D that Alex doesn’t listen to, and that really he – D – is the one who never listens, D says this is only because, if he did, he would quickly realise he could have done the job better himself, and life would be even more teeth-grindingly frustrating than it already is; whereas Alex, he says, doesn’t listen because he genuinely doesn’t give a shit.

  Now D says to Alex, Well, d’uh. There’s a woman with a bullet in her brain. She’s not going to be screaming like that for a minute and a half, is she?

  Theo says D is jumping to conclusions. He points out that I had not said the bullet was in the woman’s brain, but, even if it were, it is still possible that she could have been the one screaming. He says stranger things have happened at sea.

  I know it is precisely because Theo says things like stranger things have happened at sea, amongst other reasons, that D’s actually pretty glad that Theo’s finally going. The other reasons include the fact that D thinks Theo’s departure will create an opportunity for him to be promoted, which promotion he believes to be long overdue, irrespective of the fact that he is the most recent recruit to the team, and only got the job in the first place because I felt obliged to help him out when the dot-com start-up that was going to make him a billionaire went bust. If D thinks he has not made his desires and expectations perfectly clear to the rest of us, not excluding Theo, then he is wrong.

  Alex says, I was just wondering what you thought at the time.

  D sighs, so loud that we cannot pretend not to hear. He says, Christ. As if she isn’t giving us a blow-by-blow of every minuscule thought process she’s ever had.

  Alex ignores him. Only, if there’s just one person, a woman, who’s been shot in the head and was hideously wounded, and she’s screaming in pain and fear of dying, then that’s one thing. So then the gunman goes in, he sees blood and bits of brain stuff up the wall and the woman lying on the floor or slumped over a desk or whatever, and she’s wailing and practically begging him to put her out of her misery, and he does, that’s like one thing, right? That’s going to play out with you and the others in the bank, and even the old man you say isn’t really taking much notice, that’s going to play out one way, yeah?

  D says, And?

  Alex continues to ignore him, talking now to Theo. But if there’s two people? If the woman who’s been shot was a bank employee and she’s talking to a customer, maybe turning down a loan or trying to sell the customer a mortgage or something? And if she was and the customer – and we’re assuming the customer’s another woman from what Rada said about the pitch of the screams – the customer was on the point of signing up to a mortgage deal when the bullet comes through the wall and hits the bank employee right in front of her, and there’s blood and brain and stuff on her as well as on the walls, then that’s different, isn’t it? Then she’s screaming and wailing and whatever because a person’s been shot right in front of her with no warning or context or anything, and she’s traumatised and just hysterical with fear and confusion, and the gunman comes in and shoots her just to shut her up. That’s going to be different, isn’t it? In the first case there’s an element of humanity – of sparing a woman her unbearable pain – which would be pretty horrific and difficult to process for the people in the bank, especially the people without guns who aren’t used to that sort of thing and have probably never heard or seen a person die before. But it’s a whole different order of things from hearing an uninjured but just deeply traumatised woman executed, basically, just for making too much noise. Different in the way it plays out with the other customers and employees and the professor-guy?

  I can see D twitching with impatience. He is staring at Alex in disbelief, his mouth open and his fingers spinning the memory stick. I don’t suppose he even knows that he is doing it. D probably thinks that Alex is trying to suck up here; showing off to impress Theo now that Theo is leaving and his job is going to be available. If D thinks that then it is not surprising that he looks so uptight and confused because, for one, that’s just not the way Alex behaves, or thinks, and two: if Alex is suddenly changing his spots and undergoing some sort of character-transformation, then D will have some competition that he wasn’t expecting. For all that D talks about competition as the spur to innovation and the survival of the fittest, he would obviously prefer not to have to compete himself in any field that is not rigged to demonstrate his own superiority. D is my little brother: I’ve known him all his life.

  Alex has been here longer than D, but that isn’t the point. Alex has been here as long as anyone – as long as me – as long as anyone except Theo, of course, who I suspect has been here from the start, although he never actually says so. Alex has a way of being in a meeting and not being there that is different from D’s way of not being there. Alex follows his own thoughts while hearing just enough to get by without getting angry or impatient.

  But now Alex is saying, Am I right?

  Theo says, You may be. Let’s hear Rada out, shall we?

  I know now that Alex will not say anything more, and I resume reading.

  3

  BY THE TIME I returned to the office I was even later than I’d said, and my back was killing me. I’d been at HQ with the year-end and had told Karen I’d probably have lunch with one or other of the Directors, if any of them were still talking to me. But it was almost three by the time I walked out of the lift and swiped my pass onto the Finance floor.

  Karen looked up from her screen as I approached. The clatter of nails on keyboard stopped a moment later. She said, “Good lunch?”

  “Bad traffic.”

  She laughed, but then said, “Traffic?”

  I shouldn’t have said that. I said, “What have I got?”

  “Other than the Losers’ Group?” – it was my own fault she called it that; I’d said it first, back when HR set it up – “Nothing.”

  “What about Peter’s appraisal?”

  “Uh huh. He came by while you were out and asked me to postpone it.”

  Peter Thomson knew I was a Loser: they all did.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I could put it back to Thursday.”

  Thursday was the 30th of June. We both knew that if she put it back any further, it wouldn’t happen at all. Peter Thomson knew it, too.

  In the office I closed the door. If nothing else, I’d miss the view. In 1961, when I was seven and had no idea what an accountant was, this building had briefly been the tallest in the city. Even now it stuck way up above everything around it, a vast modern stake hammered into the heart of an untidy nineteenth-century suburb. From there I could see right back down the river, past HQ, past the government buildings and the palace, right up to the bridge. I could see most of the route we’d taken, though I couldn’t make out the massive snarl-up that had cost us the best p
art of forty minutes and was the reason I was late. Moody had printed out the route – 7.4 miles, 23 minutes with traffic, she read: which was never going to happen in this city, in the middle of the day – and she was sticking to it. I told her we’d be better off heading south and following the river, but she didn’t listen. In a way, I was glad. It had given us something to talk about on the way back that wasn’t what had just happened.

  Usually I’d feel much worse by this stage. After all the planning, after weeks of meticulous surveillance, of anticipating every risk; after getting into uniform and into role; after the hour of the job itself, when everything would go as planned, and if it didn’t I’d improvise instinctively, fluidly, every nerve alive, every muscle light, and time itself would slow; after all that it’s no surprise that I’d crash, my vision dull and the world grow weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, so to speak. I’d learned to manage the cycle. The money helped, but not as much as I’d thought it would at first, and less each time. What really helped was work: I’d learned to have the next job mapped out before the current one was done. That way I had something to look forward to. This time, though, I just felt numb.

  I was clearing emails when Karen cracked open the door. She didn’t come in, but leaned through to say that DI Jenks was here for the meeting. She pushed the door wide and stepped back to let him through.

  “You can go in. Would you like a coffee, Detective Inspector?”

  Bernie winced at the title. He said, “Three sugars, please.”

  Karen closed the door behind him. He crossed the office and sat in one of the heavy uncomfortable chairs across the desk from me. He was short and overweight and had a beard he had only been growing since he was seconded to Personnel. From the way he kept running his fingers through the sparse reddish whiskers, it was plain that the beard still itched. He did it now, letting his jaw drop open and squeezing his thick lips into a fish’s mouth while he waited for me to speak.

  Pulling myself into role, I said, “Why don’t you just shave?”

  Bernie shrugged. “The coach said it was good to have a hobby.”

  “I think he meant golf, Bernie. Or keeping bees.”

  The force had paid for two sessions of outplacement coaching, part of the package. To help us through the changes we were facing. To help us think about our futures. The coach asked me what my goals were. I said I’d always wanted to get out as early as I could and not have any kids myself. He didn’t get it and I didn’t feel like explaining. He talked about my options and gave me a couple of handouts plus the title of a book he said I might like to look at before we met again. I went home early, drank several large whiskies and re-watched an early series of Homicide: Life on the Streets on DVD. At least I’d managed not to have the kids.

  If Eddie were alive, this wouldn’t have been happening.

  Bernie said, “My dad had this portrait of his grandfather. Great-grandfather, probably: the first one out of the shtetl. The man has this big white beard down to here” – he held his hand out flat, about level with his diaphragm – “that he’d trained into two points, like giant hairy tusks.”

  “Christ, Bernie. You’d look like ZZ Top.”

  “It’d be a disguise.”

  “Except it would be you.”

  When we first talked about what we’d do for money, it was Bernie who joked about robbing banks. But Sutton’s Law – go where the money is – was part of my accountancy course. Alone among my fellow students, I took the time to read the book.

  Karen returned with Bernie’s coffee. She said, “There you go, Detective Inspector.”

  Bernie looked up at her. His wet eyes and scruffy red beard, and that pathetic upward gaze, made him look like the portrait of some unfortunate saint by a school-of painter no one had ever heard of. He said, “Please. I’m on secondment.”

  Karen smiled brightly. “Not for much longer.”

  A secondment implies a job to go back to.

  When she left, Bernie said, “Does she do that on purpose?”

  Karen had just been doing what employees do: judging power, and distancing herself from those without it; finding amusement where she could. I couldn’t blame her. I said, “What was it with the bags, Bernie?”

  Bernie shifted in his chair, spreading his chubby thighs. “I don’t see the problem.”

  “They’re cheap. Shoddy.”

  “It’s not as if they have to take much weight.”

  I let that go: we’d get to the take later, when DC Moody arrived.

  “I’ve always said we do this properly or we don’t do it at all.”

  Bernie sighed. “You have.”

  “So?”

  Bernie held his hands up. “So shoot me.”

  There was a moment where everything stopped and then Bernie dropped his hands again. I could see in his deep sad eyes he wished he hadn’t said that just as much as I did.

  “Next time I’ll get better bags.”

  Mostly Bernie did what I told him, which wasn’t always the case with Moody, though why either of them ever followed my orders wasn’t obvious. Technically, I outranked them both – Moody was only a constable, even if she had made detective; Bernie a DI – but I’d never worn a uniform, and in the force that counted for a lot. They were cops, even if they were poor cops, and wouldn’t be cops for much longer. I was an accountant.

  Before Bernie was seconded to Human Resources, he’d run a serial rape-murder investigation with at least seven victims. I found that hard to believe. Bernie? Running a major incident room, a team of detectives hanging on his orders and working round the clock? I couldn’t see it. He told me the investigation took the best part of three years before he managed to send a man to jail who would subsequently get off on appeal.

  “Did you ever get the real killer?”

  From the way Bernie looked at me, I knew I’d asked another civilian’s question. He said, “He was the real killer.”

  It was always possible.

  We’d met a couple of times before Bernie told me this. You can never tell what anyone is capable of; I can’t, anyway, which perhaps explains why I’m an accountant, not a detective.

  One June evening when I was sixteen, I stacked all my revision notes in a neat pile and walked out into the tiny garden behind our house. It had been a clear day and I could feel the early summer’s heat radiating from the walls and the concrete slab outside the backdoor that served as a patio. My father was watering runner beans, holding the galvanised iron can in both hands. He was a small man, short and thin; at sixteen, I was already a head taller than him. He heard my footsteps on the concrete and set the can down. He straightened up, squinting against the evening sun, fingers pressing into the small of his back to ease the stiffness.

  “Are you ready then?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  He nodded. “Then the best you can do is get a good night’s sleep. That’ll be better than any more reading.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “And you know the best way to get some sleep?”

  I did. “A bit of fresh air and honest toil?”

  He nodded again. He pointed at a spade stuck upright in the thick clay soil. “Those spuds want banking up.” He picked up his can and began watering again. After a moment, he put it down, pulled off the rose and stuck his finger into it, trying to remove a leaf that had been blocking the flow. He asked what I wanted to do, if I could do any job in the world. I had no idea.

  My father was an engineer – a glorified grease monkey, he said – who kept the machines working in the University labs. He said, “At your age, I wanted to be an auctioneer.”

  I was surprised. Dad had always been an engineer; that’s what he was. I said, “What, like at Sotheby’s?”

  He laughed. “Can you see me pontificating about antiques? No: the livestock markets. I used to help your granddad. There
was a chap there, I thought he was the bee’s knees. Talked faster than anyone could hear, I swear, but he really pushed the prices up. We always did well when he was there. And he had a suit, and shoes that shone like morning on a mountain lake, and a car. Leary, the man my father worked for, he had a tractor, of course. He even let me drive it. But nobody we knew had a car.”