by Ivo Stourton
09:45 HOURS
THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER
2035 (REAL WORLD)
THE RADIO SAID that there had been more disturbances in the small hours in London. There were bins and cars set alight in Tottenham, and groups of rioters had emptied some of the stores. A shop selling high-end trainers had been looted and fired on Camden High Street. The flames were still going in the morning. “I can’t leave you alone for five minutes,” Oates said to the city. He called Lori.
“Did the kids get off for school alright?”
“Fine. Mike’s a little rattled.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s the job? Will you be able to pick them up this evening?”
“We’ll see.”
“They’d like it if you picked them up.”
“I’d like to be able to do it.”
“What do you want for supper?”
“Oh, don’t worry about me.”
“It’s no bother, I’m going to the shops now.”
“I’ll probably just get something out.”
“It’s not good for you, you know. Eating all that junk.”
“I know.”
“Well, what time will you be back?”
It was amazing how they could both feel these confrontations coming. They neither of them wanted the conflict, but every step they tried to take to avoid it seemed to hasten the clash. He felt as if they were not two people in a conversation, but two drivers late at night who swerved to avoid one another in the same direction. He fought to hold on to kindness.
“I’ll be back when I’m back my love. As soon as I can.”
“Okay.”
“Okay then. I love you.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
“End call,” he said, but she was already gone from the line.
As he drove in the grey morning, Oates thought of a time just after he and Lori had moved in together. One of the things he loved about his wife; despite the fact she was neat as hospital corners to look at, she liked to eat her dinner in bed, and didn’t care if you got crumbs on the mattress or ketchup on the spread. He’d never been with a girl who would let you eat in bed.
Oates had bought a pallet of microwave lasagna from the cash and carry, and they lived off it for about a month. It was an Indian summer and they slept with the windows open and the street noise.
When October came they had to close the windows and the curtains for warmth. The first night with the sash up and the drapes closed she said she couldn’t sleep with the smell of lasagna hanging in the room. She had got up to take the two empty microwave dishes back to the kitchen, and Oates had leapt naked from the bed and blocked her way. He told her that he couldn’t let her take out the dishes, because if she got to cleaning up their bedroom she would eventually leave him. “I’m a slob and I can’t change! You have to stay a slob too,” he howled, and she was laughing so much she could barely hold the trays, and he chased her around the bed.
She leapt on the mattress and flanked him with a springy quickstep, landing lithe at the door. Before she made her escape she turned and grinned at him, and kicked up a naked heel. “If you change you’ll leave me,” he shouted breathless from the floor, and the neighbours banged on the adjoining wall and told them to shut up.
Coming back into London he noticed a curious thing. The traffic should have been flowing into the city, but the red taillights ahead of him were few and free moving. It was the other side of the road that was busy. People were leaving London. He passed one spot where the traffic had slowed to a halt on the other side of the crash barrier, and saw a kid with his duvet drawing finger faces in the condensation on the back passenger window. More than anything, Oates wanted to get back to his family. But the body of Prudence Egwu lay between them like a fallen tree across the road. There was no way round but to clear it.
FELIX MINOR WAS bent. His conviction had left dirty fingerprints over every case he had ever handled. Minor had been caught out in a big purge of the Met following one of their periodic institutional scandals. This one concerned the distribution of goods at police auctions. Under pressure from the government to crack down on the assets of convicted criminals, the Met had increased the seizure and subsequent resale to the public of paintings, cars, boats, clothes, furniture and houses belonging to gang lords laid low. The officers in charge of such auctions could not bid for the items themselves, but they did administer the timing and advertisement of the sales.
It had become a perk of the job after resolving a big case to arrange an auction at very short notice and at an inaccessible venue, tipping off a few favoured dealers in advance. These stooges would scoop the loot for a song, and split the profits with the team of officers who had recovered it.
The arrangement had all the makings of a mass corruption, being a grey practice underpinned by a corresponding sense of entitlement. Such systems unravelled when the balance between greed and prudence shifted decisively to the former, and so it was when a journalist’s land registry search revealed that the multi-million pound house of a drug boss had been sold for the inexplicable sum of £100,000 to a property magnate with links to New Scotland Yard. The Met had appraised the officers involved with the dispassion of a surgeon observing a soldier’s poisoned limb, and Minor had found himself just below the amputation line.
The experience had embittered him, trapped as he was between the knowledge of his own guilt on the one hand, and the knowledge of everyone else’s on the other. He had deserved his punishment, but there were those above him who had deserved more, and who had been spared. Because of this, he was unable either to sustain himself with the knowledge of his innocence, or to embrace repentance, and the shrapnel from his crimes stayed buried in his bones, slowly poisoning the blood.
Oates felt the reflection of this paradox in himself – Minor had been his governor once or twice in his early days on the service, and he was no better or worse than most. He had liked the older man. Nevertheless, Oates felt a strong condemnatory reflex towards him now, precisely because his sin was one which Oates himself might have committed.
The things that happened to policemen in prison had happened to Minor, and now he haunted the pubs in Soho. He occupied a space between the forces of crime and the forces of the law, and belonging to neither he talked to both.
Oates left his many-miled Ford in police parking at St James’s and walked up towards Piccadilly Circus. Night and day haggled over central London long into the morning, and the city was still dimly lit beneath the pavement sky. As he came up Lower Regent Street he saw the statue of Anteros framed against the giant electronic billboards on the other side of the square.
It was his favourite statue in London. It had originally been built to commemorate the great philanthropist Lord Shaftsbury, and so the sculptor had chosen Anteros, the god of selfless love. But poor Anteros just didn’t have the brand recognition of his elder brother Eros, god of mad desire. They were twins and they looked identical, so people started calling the figure Eros. When the burghers of London found out that their stiff-collared Victorian hero was being commemorated by the naked boy-god of lust, they re-christened the statue again, calling it ‘The Angel of Christian Charity’. But you didn’t go to Soho for Christian charity, and Eros stuck. Wasn’t that London all over, mixing up love and lust, then getting embarrassed about the whole thing and trying to conceal it with some posh sounding name?
Even Eros was having a tough time of it these days; the god of desire was reduced to a tiny black silouette against the famous billboards on the other side of the circus. The face of the Nottingham Biosciences model, twenty foot wide from ear to ear, bulged in projected 3D from the surface of the largest hoarding. The flawless young girl mouthed their slogan, “Don’t fear the reaper”. Oates spat on the pavement and trudged on through the curtain of rain, the tourists and the cars and the buildings staying out of his way.
There were a couple of pubs Minor was known to frequent, and Oates had decided to begin by
looking in at the Moor’s Head. It was open twenty-four hours, and was a good bet this early in the day. Away from the main tourist drag, the streets narrowed and cobbled up. The shops began to specialise, and to conceal rather than display their wares. In the cafés there were a few stragglers from the nightclubs, drinking coffee and resenting the day. The second hand book barrows on D’Arblay Street smelt sweetly of damp paper.
The vices of the whores and the dealer on the corner of St Peter’s Street seemed quaint beside the chain restaurants and clothes shops looming on Oxford Street, and the monstrous dome of the Great Spa out on the ringroad. Their sins were like the disobedience of children playing in a warzone. They had enough respect to stop hawking as Oates walked past in his uniform, and he nodded to them. The people in the Great Spa paid for their own security, but these people were under his protection or none. This was old London, hoarding itself against the future in the dank little alleys.
The Moor’s Head was dingier inside than the grey morning. Oates clocked three large men at the bar, their backs a wall of black leather. A tramp sat beside the door, nursing the half of bitter that stood between him and the cold outside. The pub had a wooden partition to separate the saloon bar from the back of the house. He knew better than to ask after Minor, and went round to look for himself. The door in the partition was set low, and Oates had to stoop. Minor sat at a wooden table beside a lead-latticed window in the snug. The diamond-shaped panes of glass were old enough to be thick at the bottom, and steamed by the radiator beneath the windowsill. On the sill itself there was a sheaf of flyers for West End shows, strip clubs and warehouse parties, all of them long passed. From somewhere round the corner came the sound of a quizz machine gobbling change.
“Can I get you a drink, Felix?”
“Get you a drink, he says.”
“What’s that you’re drinking?” Oates said, motioning to the tumbler of brown liquid on the table in front of him.
“Fruit squash. I’ve given up the booze for Lent.” He grinned up at Oates.
“How about a whisky?”
For a few moments Minor was silent, and Oates thought he might tell him to piss off. Then he shrugged, and shouted, “Horace!” The barman came to the side of the saloon bar, turning a clean pint glass against a dirty cloth. Minor stuck his finger in the air above the table and waved it around three times. “And for my esteemed guest, Horace.”
The smell of whisky made Oates feel nauseous. He hadn’t eaten since he left home. On the stack of flyers there was a laminated menu, and he picked it up. When he moved the menu it left a darker outline of itself against the coloured leaflets, where the sun had bleached them.
“If it’s breakfast you’re wanting I’d go somewhere else. For a copper the spit’s the best thing in the food.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your company? Or maybe you just want to chat over old times, eh?”
Minor gazed up at him. Drink had dug the intelligence from his brown eyes and a wet cunning had welled up to replace it. Perhaps it had been a mistake to visit the old man. The whiff of disgrace still clung to him, and a handshake made you want to wipe your hand on your trousers. It was so unusual for a senior officer to seek Minor out that he must guess Oates was badly in need of his help. He should have sent Bhupinder, or even rung the pub’s old phone, but the moments of powerlessness in St Margaret’s had goaded him into taking action himself. It was another little defeat at the hands of the spa, and of its mistress.
“Can I sit?”
“You’re drinking aren’t you?”
It was too late to dissimulate. His only chance was to be straight with Minor and to try to pay whatever price he wanted for his help. Even if he had something to trade, Oates knew the pleasure of having him in his thrall might be so extreme that Minor would simply refuse to tell him anything.
“I was hoping you might be able to help me with something.”
“Oh yes?”
“An old case you worked.”
“See now, this is embarrassing. I’d love to help, but they’ve asked me to leave the service.”
“Come on Felix. I’m asking you as a favour.”
If Oates had hoped the direct approach would shame him into helping, he was mistaken. Minor was inoculated against shame, or rather he felt it so consistently that a little variation in the dose made no difference. He was not however insensible to his own pleasure, and he was grinning now.
“I know how you’re asking me.”
“So what do you say?”
“Must be a real emergency.”
“It won’t take a minute.”
“If it’s an emergency maybe you could deputise me.”
“I could get it out of the files. But it’d be quicker coming from you.”
“I’d not be sure of that.”
He was about to offer Minor a smoke when he remembered he still had the old-fashioned pack of Pall Mall. The former policeman was sure to notice, and the last thing he wanted was for Minor to catch the whiff of big money. He thought about trying to bum one off him, but decided against it. The frustrated need for a cigarette made him aware of his big hands, and he laid them on the table.
“So this is your favourite haunt now is it?”
“It’s the same as anywhere else.”
“A little dingy if you ask me.”
“You’re the one doing the asking.”
At that moment Horace loomed above their table, and set down their drinks. Minor was given a single dram of whisky, and Oates was given a pink concoction in a cocktail glass, with a maraschino cherry fastened to the rim, and a faded paper umbrella part submerged in the surface. He heard laughter behind him, and when he turned around the three big men at the bar were grinning at him over their shoulders like a set of dingy gargoyles built to guard the pumps. Minor cackled and slapped his thighs.
Oates popped the truncheon from the panel on his leg. He brought it out beneath the table, and pressed the button on the side to extend the sleek, heavy length of it. As it slid into position, it gave an oiled click like a dislocated finger popping back into place. He set the truncheon down on the table beside the glass.
“Drink it,” he said to the barman.
One of the men sitting at the bar went to rise from his seat.
“You sit down,” Oates said mildly. The man at the bar hesitated for a few seconds, his buttocks quivering in mid-air, before settling back with a creak onto the stool. He obeyed not because Oates willed him to, but because he could sense Oates willing him to defy the order, to furnish the spark to ignite the moment into the conflagration of battle. Horace tried to laugh, and went to turn away from the table.
“Is that not what you wanted then? I’ll get you another.”
“I said drink it.”
Horace licked his lips. He looked to the man who had almost risen, but his hopes of salvation were dashed by the sound of the man’s arse settling back into its foundations. He stared at Oates for a few seconds, and gritted his teeth. With a look of hatred he grabbed the stem of the glass. He made to chuck it back.
“Sip it.”
“What?”
“Don’t down it. Sip it.”
The barman raised the glass to his lip, and sipped. The slurp sounded loud in the silence of the bar. Oates risked a glance at Minor, and saw his eyes shining with the reflected light of another’s humiliation. They waited in silence as Horace drained the glass. Oates stood up.
“Now eat the cherry.”
Quickly now, his eyes on the ground, the barman obeyed and dabbled for the bright little fruit with his dirty fingers. He popped it in his mouth and munched once before swallowing.
“Now stay still.”
Oates took the little cocktail umbrella from the glass, and lifted it towards Horace’s eye. The barman flinched away at first, but Oates put out a hand to his shoulder and patted him, like a groom reassuring a skittish horse. He popped the umbrella up with thumb and forefinge
r, and brought the pointed tip closer to the watery swell of the barman’s eyeball. Horace had astigmatism, and the bloodshot belly of the eye protruded, pregnant with jelly.
“Don’t blink and you’ll be alright,” Oates said.
Tightening his grip on Horace’s shoulder, he brought the tiny wooden point of the cocktail stick just up to the downward brush of the blinking lash, and then thrust forward to lodge it behind the barman’s filthy ear. He heard one of the men at the bar exhale.
“You’re going to wear that umbrella for the rest of the day. I might swing by here before closing. I’ve got some errands to run. If I come in here and you don’t have that umbrella behind your ear, I’m going to break your wanking arm here and here.” He tapped Horace’s right elbow and forearm with the point of his baton,.“And not a man in this room will see a thing. Will you, my new friends? Now, I’ll have a whisky same as my old colleague here. And you can treat yourself too.”
“That’s real police, that’s real police now,” Minor said, wiping the tears from the corner of his eye.
“I’ll have you out of here old man,” the barman said.
“Have another cherry, Horace! It’s on the Inspector. You’re alright Oates, I always said you were alright.”
As Oates sat back down, Minor clapped him awkwardly on his armoured shoulder. All his former antagonism was gone, he was expansive. He asked what Oates wanted to know, and Oates told him, omitting any mention of the murder, the Great Spa or anything else likely to pique Minor’s interest. Minor was so elated by the confrontation that he didn’t even ask.
“I remember that Prudence Egwu. He asked us and asked us to find his bloody brother. In the end he lodged a complaint, not a general one mind, a personal one against me and the officer in charge. He was mad, but they have to investigate the complaints, even the mad ones. And he had the money to keep it going.”
“What happened?”