by Ivo Stourton
“There’s no Hector here.”
“A young lad. Asian.”
“No Hector, no.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not here to cause trouble. His mum’s sick.”
The eyes assessed him from the bottom of a lake of polluted experience.
“We know he’s staying here. I don’t know what name he’s using.”
The eyes in the crack stared at him for a few seconds, trying to get at the truth in him. The door closed, and he was about to kick it in (he was just listening for the shuffle of the old lady out of the door’s inward swing) when he heard the sound of the chain sliding across.
The entrance hall of the boarding house made good on the threats of the cracked front garden. A patch of mould had grown across the ceiling. It felt colder in the hall than it had outside. Oates could see his breath. The doormat was covered with leaflets advertising pizzas, pawnshops and chances to enter the Treatment lottery. One of the shiny lottery flyers was addressed to an Adrian Chong. Oates heard a sound behind him, and looked up.
A child stood in the doorway to the kitchen. He held a dirty rag against his mouth, and swayed from side to side at the waist whilst watching Oates over the tops of his knuckles. Oates put his own hands up over his face, and concocted a mad grimace before flinging them open. It was something that had never failed to make Harry smile when he was a toddler. The child in the doorway just watched. Then a mother emerged behind, a tall black woman in a towelling robe, holding a steaming wooden spoon in her hand.
“What’s his name then?”
The woman stared at him. The sound of a hiss on a stove came from behind her.
“I’ve got three of my own,” he said.
“Fuck you,” she said.
The child waved at Oates, and he waved back until she pulled the boy back into the kitchen. The old woman reappeared.
“He’s gone out.”
“Well you won’t mind me looking then.”
Oates stepped quickly past her, and caught the boy he recognised as Hector leaning over the banister, listening for their conversation.
“Hello Hector. Or is it Adrian?”
“Does Helen know you’re here? Does your boss know you’re here?”
“No one knows I’m here but you and me. I just want a little chat.”
“You call Helen. You want to speak to me about anything, you call Helen, she’ll make everything straight.”
Oates began to mount the stairs slowly, his hands held out in front of him. Hector cast his eyes back over his shoulder at the safety of his bedroom.
“It’s not illegal. You ask Helen.”
“I’m not here about your private life, Hector.” He sniffed the air. Hector watched him suspiciously. “How long you been in this place then?”
“Two years.”
“Bit of a shithole, isn’t it? No place for kiddies. I saw the little one downstairs.”
Hector’s face softened for a moment. “Liam.”
“Is that right, Liam?”
“Yeah.”
Oates continued his ascent whilst they spoke, until he was close enough to grab Hector through the banisters if he tried to make a run for it. The boy was scared, and his fear made Oates relax.
“The council stick you here?”
“Yeah, they put me here.”
“You got lucky. Single healthy young bloke on the benefit could be on the streets.”
Hector sniffed, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
“Isn’t that right?”
“Maybe. Don’t know.”
“You are on the benefit? Right? You know I can find that out, with a phone call. But you won’t mind that, because you’re declaring your earnings. So you won’t be worried about me calling up your benefits officer. Checking your tax returns. Calling immigration. Checking out the terms of your student visa. You’re here on a student visa, right? Really having a good root round. Because you’ve got nothing to worry about. Isn’t that right?”
Hector looked momentarily panicked. A saver then. A saver keeping together every scrap he could so that the day he left this place, he knew he’d never have to come back.
“We’ve got you on tape from Prudence Egwu’s gaff. There’s a camera on the porch where you took off your mask.”
Hector looked at him in shock, finally understanding why he was getting this visit. He tensed up for a moment, and then his shoulders slumped.
“Okay. It’s in my room.”
Good boy.
Oates followed him up onto the landing, where Hector motioned him towards his bedroom. The moment they opened the door, Oates understood why Hector hadn’t wanted him upstairs. The landing was as cold and damp as the rest of the house, but the door to Hector’s room was fitted with a shiny new brass lock. Up close Oates could see that a new steel frame had been fitted, and the door itself was panelled with metal under the whitewash. If you wanted to break into Hector’s room, you’d be best taking a sledgehammer to the wall.
Inside, the room was cosy and filled with the tiny red lights of electrical equipment, glowing in the teenage dinge like embers spat from a winter fire. The light in the room came from the glow of the computer screen, a fish tank filled with tiny bright blue fish and a length of Christmas lights wound like an electric cornice around the ceiling and down through the fronds of a palm tree sitting under a gro-lamp in the corner. The walls were covered with posters for the same films and bands that the goth kids at Oates’s comprehensive had loved thirty years before. The Venetian mask which Hector had worn during the robbery was mounted above the bed. Blondie played on the stereo, and a stick of incense burned in a holder beside the fish tank. The room smelt of patchouli, dirty clothes and semen.
“You here about Mr Egwu, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh shit! I knew that was trouble, I knew it.” Hector cast himself down on his bed, and held his head in his hands. “Look, I didn’t even know he was dead.”
“You told Casey he was.”
“That was later! I have news alerts set up for all my clients. Sometimes they like to talk to me about stuff in their lives, you know? I didn’t know when I went to his house. All he said to me was he knew the house would be empty last night and I had to go in right away. I said to him, ‘Look, mister, I have clients, you know, I can’t just be running off after you every five minutes’. But he said it had to be then or not at all.”
“Who’s he?”
“Chris Rajaram. I mean that’s why you’re here, right?”
“When did this Chris Rajaram first contact you?”
“I don’t know. Like six months ago. He wanted me to find some stuff in Mr Egwu’s house.”
“What stuff?”
“Some science stuff. It was really hard to find it at first, because he has all these hundreds of files. But I had to look for the ones that talked about the Tithonus Effect, so I looked for that and in the end I found it.”
“What were you supposed to do?”
“Well, first I told them he had this big safe in his study where he kept all his papers. Then I was supposed to break into his safe, but that was super easy because his code is his birthday backwards. Who still does that? Then I was supposed to photograph it, I mean the pages in the files, and send these guys the photographs. Mr Egwu likes me to sleep over sometimes, but he’s a super deep sleeper. Sometimes he snores and I have to go sleep in the guest bedroom anyway, so even if he woke up it would be okay.”
“And how do you know it was Chris Rajaram who wanted you to do this?”
“I didn’t know who it was until last night. I’m not supposed to know. Normally it’s these encrypted instructions on this website. But then last night some guy just called me from a mobile, so I checked him out. He wasn’t even ex-directory, you know?”
“What time last night?”
“12:27.”
“12:27?”
Hector slid his body forward on the bed, the better to access the po
cket of the tight jeans he wore. He disgorged a phone, scrolled quickly down the screen, and offered it face out to Oates. The received call record showed the exact time.
“I’ll need to take that.”
“Okay, sure. I’ve got like three others.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Hey, no! Look, I don’t want any trouble. I work to pay my fees, you know?” Oates rolled his eyes. “I do. You go check, look, look.”
He grabbed Oates by the sleeve and pulled him towards his desk. Sure enough before the computer screen was an open textbook, a notepad filled with cramped handwriting, the wrapper of an energy bar and all the detritus of domestic scholarship. Oates was unsure why it was that Hector thought this proof of his studiousness would help his cause, but his utter conviction that it would was infectious. He stood there nodding in satisfaction over the display.
“Alright, so what happened?”
“When?”
“I mean, you were supposed to photograph the folders, but you stole them.”
“Oh, I forgot the camera. And the one on that phone’s shit, it doesn’t even work anymore. I dropped it in the toilet at this party. I had to get it out with a plastic bag, it was disgusting.”
“And you gave the folders to Chris?”
He shook his head.
“No, no. He broke the deal. I mean the deal was I send him a sample, and he sends me a down payment, then I send him the rest, then he gives me the balance, right? Only I send him the sample and he says I’m taking the piss, like making a big joke on him.”
“What sample did you send him?”
“I don’t know. Some pages from the middle.”
“Give me the files.”
Hector lifted his mattress, and pulled the two manila files from the space between the stained underside and the springs strung across the frame. It was the hiding place which saved him. That was the same place that Mike kept the violent Manga comics which were technically contraband, but which Oates and Lori had decided should fall into the parental blindspot. Oates lived in troubled anticipation of the moment when he looked under there and found something worse. He wasn’t about to arrest a boy with no more gift for subterfuge than his own child. Oates took the files.
“So are you going to arrest me or what?”
“No, I’m not going to arrest you. If you testify against Chris Rajaram when we find him, and with your cooperation so far, we might be able to get around the burglary.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Well if you can’t do that then you go down for burglary.”
“No, no I can’t. If Helen finds out I was going to rip off a client…”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you have witness protection or something?”
“You don’t need witness protection. We’ll talk to Helen. I’ll talk to her myself, alright? I promise. She doesn’t like trouble any more than you. You might not be getting any more work, but you won’t wind up in a ditch either. How does that sound?”
Hector nodded. He stuck out his hand for a comrade’s handclasp, and Oates took it, feeling a little ridiculous.
“Alright then. Don’t do anything stupid like trying to leave London.”
“I won’t.”
“And thank you for your help.”
“Yeah, no worries.”
The landing was cold after the dense fug of Hector’s room. The door at the other end was open a crack, and Oates thought he could make out the glint of an eye watching him from the darkness. He waved, but there was no acknowledgement, and he started back down the stairs. In the kitchen, the young boy was eating a bowl of pasta, his feet swinging several inches off the floor.
WITH THE FILES tucked under his arm, Oates walked back to One New Change, the shopping mall sitting opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, stealing the elegant renaissance reflection to decorate its sheer glass flanks. A cordon of police had formed around the entrance to the mall, round plastic shields clasped to their arms. It was the first real sign he had seen of the police reaction to the disturbances. It reminded him of his own early days on the force, but it was a strange kind of rioting – the traditional targets, the police stations and the public buildings, had been left largely untouched, but the shops were the subject of a furious assault.
Oates looked for a face he knew among the mass of officers, but the accents of the men and the numbers on the shoulders of their boiler suits told him they were from a northern force. They had been bussed in to master the capital, and there was in their manner a brittle excitement that made them laugh and call out bad jokes to one another. In the normal course they were made to feel inferior to their southern cousins, as if the crimes that really mattered all took place in London, and they were enjoying both their authority over the moneyed citizens and the grudging need of their metropolitan colleagues.
Oates knew the dangers of having men on crowd control with something to prove, and he was grateful that Lori and the kids were nowhere near the City, where the majority of the outside forces were concentrated. Their loose line was permeable to men and women stepping out from the offices around St Paul’s, but when a group of poor-looking kids approached, the cordon sealed, and they were turned away with jeers. In this way, the police barrier seemed almost an extension of the policies of the management company that ran the mall, making explicit a principle of exclusion that had previously operated only on the level of frowning staff and overly attentive security men.
The kids moved away down the street, but they did not disperse, and they were making phonecalls in the gloomy afternoon, their cheeks illuminated on one side with the glowing screens. Oates could picture those calls, the voices summoning up the hatred and discontent of the inner city, calling them to war. A couple of police horses stood, their breath steaming white in the darkness.
One or two of the policemen nodded to Oates as he crossed the line. Inside the shopping mall, beneath the blast of warm air which lay in welcome behind the sliding glass doors of the entrance, another world was waiting, as separate in its way from the outside as the summer of the Great Spa from the freezing London suburbs. The shops were decked for Christmas, a rich sparkle to dazzle the eye. The overdose eyes of the billboards rolled slowly in their sockets.
Oates was just looking for signs to the parking bays when he felt someone tugging at his sleeve. He turned around, and saw a girl standing beside him. She looked about fifteen years old, and she was so small that her face was quite upturned when she spoke to him.
“You’re the guy who was looking for Hector, right? Listen, please, I need to talk to you.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a friend. It’s about what Hector gave you. Look, it’s important, can you please just come with me?”
The girl was looking over her shoulder, so palpably agitated that Oates allowed himself to be led by her to an alcove under the escalators. There was a boy of about the same age waiting for them there, and as they drew close he produced a pistol from the inside of his coat. It was a homemade plastic gun, what Oates called a pronta-pistol. Some bent software engineer would be employed to crack the safety codes on a stolen 3D printer, and start knocking out crude weapons. You had to remove the protective casing to do the hack. As a result they often looked like all-year round ski-instructors, these backstreet armourers, because they would get tan lines around their safety goggles from the UV light used to cure the liquid polymer.
A pronta-pistol wouldn’t have the punch to make it through his body armour, even fired point blank. The chambers only held a couple of rounds, and the firing mechanism was prone to snap. Up this close, he’d likely only get one shot in. To slow Oates down he’d have to hit him in the arms or the leg below the knee, and to stop him he’d have to shoot him in the head. Oates was against the wall, tucked away in this little cubby hole off the main drag.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” the girl said, and she was quite calm. Her agitation had been an act. Not so her friend. The snubbed tip
of the barrel had a slight quiver in the air, like the raised nose of an animal.
“Not with that you’re not,” Oates said, gesturing to the pistol.
“Give us the papers Hector gave you.”
“What papers?”
“Just give us the fucking papers, man,” the boy said.
No shoppers back here. A stray bullet ought to find a wall to bury itself. A part of his mind felt a kind of abstract pleasure at the speed of this analysis. In the second or so after he saw the gun, he had decided he was going to make this kid wish he’d left it at home.
“These papers?”
“Give us the folder, and we’ll let you walk away.”
“Alright then,” Oates said, “I’ll flip you for it.”
The girl started to protest, but he held up his hand, and with the other reached into his pocket. The boy made a strained noise, and gestured with the gun, but Oates shook his head. He came up with a fifty pence piece, and held it in front of them like a conjurer fixing their attention. The boy glanced at the girl.
Oates tossed the coin in the air and threw his gaze after it, and cried, “Call!” The boy’s eyes followed it involuntarily, and Oates’s arm was already coming in a great swing between them, and it knocked the gun skittering across the ground. The girl grabbed the folder from his hand, and shoved him as hard as she could in the chest. Oates’s body was still turned from the swing, and coming from below the girl’s push was enough to throw his balance. There was a cleaning trolley parked behind him, and he went down, flailing at the air.
She screamed “Run!”, but the boy lunged aside and went on all fours for the sliding gun. The direction of Oates’s swipe had carried the weapon away from the cubby hole and back into the trample of the shoppers’ feet, and now he saw the danger, but all he could do was draw his own gun. He knelt up amid the spilled rubbish and popped it from his thigh pad, but the boy was already on the gun. He picked it up and ran crouched with the gun turned backwards from the wrist, looking over his shoulder. He fired, the shot flying wide over Oates’s head.
Oates steadied the gun and fired twice. The sound sent some people scattering, but some just stood and watched, holding colourful bags of shopping. It was if they thought they were watching the gunfight on TV, with no more danger to themselves than a spilled bag of popcorn. The boy fell forwards, the bullets buried in his back. Oates pulled himself up, staggering a little on his right leg. He felt the war joy surge up in him, the gun in his hand more real than any other single thing in his life.