by Ivo Stourton
“No, Inspector. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that.”
“He knew he was going to die. The boy. I found a card in his pocket, dated today, saying he was going to die.” Oates hadn’t meant to say anything further. Vocalising what he had seen on the card, it sounded unreal. He was acutely aware that if he had heard someone else saying it, he would think they had cracked. Chris, however, merely nodded and looked thoughtful.
“Well, if something like that happened to me, I would assume it was a message. Have you taken life before? Do you feel guilty?”
He did feel guilty, horribly guilty, and tired. Not just for the boy in the shopping mall, but for a lifetime of violence. He had killed six men that he knew of, maybe more he didn’t, tracers fired in the night that might have punctured some frightened stranger on the other side of the shifting line. At the time each one had seemed, not justified exactly, but normal. In the course of something he should be doing. The thing was, though, that over time his views of what was normal, of what was right had changed, but the deaths had stayed the same. The dead never changed, they just hung around at the edge of your conscience, waiting for a gap to open up so they could come in and trash the place. Oates stood up to leave, and Chris came around the desk to shake his hand.
As their flesh touched, Oates felt the urge to crush his fingers, to slam his face into the desk, and there was another problem. His taste for violence hadn’t gone away, it was his capacity to deal with the after effects that had worn out. He was like an alcoholic with a damaged liver. All of these thoughts coalesced around the man opposite as their hands clasped.
“Something I’ve always wondered,” Oates said, not letting go of his hand. “How do you act like you do, if you really believe in God and the Bible and all that stuff?”
“What do you mean?”
“Stealing. Lying. Just making money, even.”
“This may be difficult for you to believe, Inspector, but I have devoted a great deal of thought to that very question. Jesus is no fan of monopolies. It does us no good. We would have taken this technology, and we would have opened up the market. Lowered prices, democratised the process, maybe even brought the Treatment within reach of the average consumer. And my conscience tells me that is something God would approve of.”
Somewhere at the edge of perception, there was a scent that made Oates’s soft palate tense up. He felt the pressure of the other man’s proximity, and remembered Casey telling him the new-young smelt different.
“So you would have given it away for free?”
“No, not for free. But cheaper than our rivals.”
The two men gazed at one another. Chris’s eyes were open and honest, and he did not look away.
Oates had encountered the same guileless sincerity in professional criminals. When he had first joined the police, he had conducted himself under a false premise; that other human beings are basically similar to you. He thought of criminals as people who had buried the guilt which their crimes would have inspired in Oates had he committed them. If something was buried, it could be dug up, and he had considered that process of excavation to be part of the job.
Later, he had to accept that some people were simply incapable of recognising their own guilt. It had driven him mad, as a young officer. He had longed for the moment of catharsis, when the impact of remorse finally broke through upon the conscience of the perpetrator. He carried the suffering of the victims of the crimes he investigated inside himself, and he wanted to pass the knowledge of that suffering on to the criminals. But some of them refused to accept it, so slowly it built up inside him, silting up the channels of his faith in man.
Chris was the same. The truth of his nature sat between them like a bill in a restaurant, and if he wasn’t going to pick it up, Oates would have to. He could never force Chris to see himself as he really was. You could drag him by his hair and his chin to the mirror, and he would see only a victim of brutality. It was Oates’s consciousness of that sense of victimhood thirsting for justification which helped him to rein in the anger that had threatened to overwhelm him. He let go of Chris’s hand.
“You’ll be hearing from us about the break-in,” he said, turning aside to pick up his raincoat.
“I understand. ‘As you sow, so shall ye reap.’ Listen, Inspector, I don’t know your first name.”
“Oates is fine.”
“Well, Oates, would you do something for me?”
He went to rummage in one of the drawers of his desk. Oates waited in front of his chair, his coat folded over his arm. Chris thrust something into his hand.
“Take this. I’ll pray for you.”
It was a leaflet for The Church of the Present Resurrection. Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die – John 11:26. It was conceived as a genuine act of charity, and in that assumption it became an act of violence. Chris Rajaram wielded his sincerity like a bludgeon.
Oates crushed the leaflet in his fist, and a memory came back to him – the leaflet he had removed from under his windshield that morning. He dropped the scrunched up ball of paper on the floor, and as he left he felt the pitying gaze of the criminal upon him. Some of that pity might even be justified, for Chris seemed more content in his abominable certainty than was Oates in his torment of doubt. He was shaking with rage.
The receptionist wished him a pleasant evening on the way out. The lobby television showed a shot of a street with a car burning. Figures in hoods stood at one end, and figures in helmets at the other. A banner ran underneath them in yellow, with the words ‘Unconfirmed reports of a second fatal shooting by police in East London’. Oates wondered briefly what could have happened, before realising the story was about him. He stopped and stared at the television. Seeing the words on the screen brought the reality home to Oates more firmly than the actual experience had done. It gave him the sick dream-lurch of realising you are naked at the important meeting, that your teeth are falling in to the sink.
As he stood in the lift, he looked at the first of the articles Chris had retrieved from the cabinet. It was a printout from a medical website detailing the case history of a young Norwegian woman, Astrid L., who had been struck on the head by shrapnel during an air-raid in 1941. When she awoke from a brief coma, she spoke her native language with a heavy German accent, and she found herself being shunned by her own people as a German spy. The second was a newspaper clipping about a Hindi-speaking boy from an Indian slum in the 1990s who had suffered from severe migraines, and had awoken one morning to discover that he spoke only English, despite never having learned it. A local sadhu had proclaimed him the reincarnation of a famous American scientist. He shuffled quickly through the other pages, and they were all the same.
He could see why Chris had thought Hector was playing him – the last article was printed out from a website called www.talesoftheunexplained.com. But it wasn’t in Hector’s interest to have cheated his employer. The boy Oates had met would just have wanted to get the exchange over with as fast as possible. If the wild stories really did represent a part of the research which Prudence Egwu had managed to reconstruct from his brother’s work, what did it mean? Had the famous scientist been a crank? He could have checked the articles against the rest of the contents of the file of course, if he had still had it.
The carpark beneath the offices of United Sciences was in the basement of the building, and so focused was he on thinking about the case, he didn’t see the man sitting in the passenger seat of his car until he was fishing the keys from his pocket. The man was waiting for him. The light above the rear view mirror was switched on, but the angle of illumination gave no more than an impression of the contours of his features, lighting the nose and wrinkled forehead and poking black holes for the eyes. Oates took out his gun, and pointed it at the man through the windshield. The man raised his gloved hands, and put them on the dashboard in front of him. He drummed his fingers once, but otherwise remained quite still. Oates walked around the car keeping him covered
through the glass, and with one hand he opened the passenger side door.
“Get out.”
His voice rang oddly loud on the bare concrete walls. The man swung his legs over the seat of the car and stood up, taking the opportunity to stretch out his back. In the harsh fluorescent lights he looked not only older than Oates, but old. His vertebrae cracked. Oates heard laughter, and looked up to see a young couple twenty metres away, loading presents into the boot of their car.
“Turn around.”
The man put his hands on the roof of the car and spread his legs without being asked. In a holster at his side was a police issue handgun. Oates took it out, and found that the safety was on, with a round in the chamber. He tucked it into the waistband of his own trousers, and searched the stranger’s pockets. In a little leather folder in the inside breast was a police ID. Oates spun him round and held the picture beside his face. He was so utterly without expression in the flesh that the resemblance between him and the formal photograph was almost comical.
“Eustace Morrison, Internal Investigations. You didn’t wait for us at the shooting.”
“I was in the middle of a murder enquiry.”
The young man loading his car dropped a parcel, and the woman shrieked again with laughter. The man looked over at them with the camouflage of a friendly smile on his lips.
“Could we speak in your car, Detective Chief Inspector?”
Oates nodded and Morrison stubbed out his smile like a cigarette as he sat back down in the passenger seat. Oates walked around the car and let himself in. He pulled the gun out of his waistband before sitting down. The two men sat beside one another, staring forwards.
“You’re here to arrest me for leaving the scene of the shooting?”
“No.”
“Alright.”
Oates gave him back his weapon. Morrison checked the round was still in the chamber and the safety on, and popped it back into his holster.
“We’re aware of your investigation. In fact, it has crossed over into another investigation we’ve been conducting for some time. Specifically the disappearance of Capability Egwu, and the involvement in that case of Superintendent John Yates.”
“John?” He checked the rearview mirror. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“You know a good deal more than you think.”
Oates laughed out loud. From the midst of his confusion, to be told he knew more than he thought by this arrogant stranger was too much. Morrison showed no surprise at his laughter. Oates had the feeling there was nothing on the earth that would surprise this man.
“It was Yates who deleted the photograph of Capability Egwu from the police file on the case,” Morrison said. “Someone has gone through a similar process with respect to images of Capability Egwu stored on the internet, with the passport agency, with Cambridge University and anywhere he worked where he might have had an identity card.”
He spoke so quietly that Oates found himself leaning in towards him. Up close, he smelled slightly of peppermint.
“We assumed that Capability Egwu had disappeared with the connivance of both Nottingham,” Morrison continued, “or possibly rogue elements within Nottingham, and of senior figures in the Metropolitan Police. The attempts to expunge his image would suggest that he underwent some degree of reconstructive surgery.”
“Do you have any photographs of him at all?”
“We have some from our own files.”
“Why would he have wanted to disappear?”
“According to the profiles we prepared on him, Capability Egwu had a paranoid fear of being controlled.”
“It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you,” Oates said, and sat back in his seat.
Morrison ignored him. “There is tremendous interest in keeping the proprietary technology connected with the Treatment in Britain. Anything which could lead to that technology being transported abroad comes within our purview. We advised Capability to think of himself as part of the heritage of our country. We asked him to keep us informed of his movements. He failed to do so on a number of occasions, and we were in the process of considering how to proceed.”
“And he got away from you?”
“We were unable to locate him, although we are fairly certain he remains in the country. When we failed to locate Mr Egwu himself, we shifted our attentions to the task of trying to reconstruct his research.”
Whilst they were speaking, Oates was trying to fathom what it was that gave a man who actually looked old so much more authority than the new-young, even the most senior among them. Chris and Miranda were both of them the heads of international organisations. Everything in their manners and the way they were treated by others trumpeted their dominance. And yet in conversing with them, Oates never doubted the supremacy of his own will. By contrast, he felt himself being overmastered by the investigator.
The difference in effect could be partly explained by the residual significance of appearance. Oates was old enough to remember when most important men had looked like the one beside him, and those who looked young were green on the inside too. But that was not the whole story. Morrison had the stillness of absolute power. Oates intuited he could have arranged for the Treatment had he wanted it. It was the implied choice which lent him the extra authority. Here was a man who was comfortable with his own decay, with the fact of his own death, moment by moment. The others bore the scars of their fears on their flawless faces – they were terrified of their mortality. That was why Oates could look down on them.
Morrison reached into the footwell, and when he came back up he was holding a toy motorcycle in brightly coloured plastic, the spokes picked out in shiny metallic paint. Mike must have left it there on the way to or from school. Morrison handled it with what in another man might have passed for absent-mindedness.
“You’re not just in internal investigations, are you?”
“You were a soldier, I believe, before you were a policeman.”
“So you’re what? A spy?”
“I am a civil servant. The boy you shot was a member of the Mortal Reformers.”
“Yes.”
“The girl who stole the documents from you is known to us. We believe she lives and operates from the slums in the Underground tunnels beneath the Strand. We want you to attempt to retrieve those pages.”
“I just killed her friend and almost shot her in the back,” Oates said. “Why would she talk to me?”
“Because the Mortal Reformers will know that Hector sent out a sample of his materials, and will infer that you collected it from the offices of United Sciences. We believe they have been watching Hector for some time.”
Oates thought back to his walk down Haggerston Road, and the smoke-filled car with the three figures.
“The Mortal Reformers are as keen to secure the research and all copies of the research as we are.”
“What do they want with it?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“If I’m going to negotiate with them, I need to know what they want.”
“We don’t know what they want to do with it. We assume they intend to use it as a bargaining chip. They have a number of demands and some key operatives in custody.”
“The boy, he was carrying a card. It said he was going to die today.”
“That frightened you, did it?”
The two men stayed staring straight ahead.
“The agents of the Mortal Reformers fill out those cards whenever they go on active service. It helps them to create an air of mystery, which in turn helps them recruit among the real-young. If he’d survived today’s mission, he would have thrown the card away, and filled out another one tomorrow. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s a simple enough trick, but we only figured it out ourselves the first time we caught one alive.”
“What happens if I tell you to put that toy down and get the hell out of my car?”
“We’re not mobsters, Detective Chief Inspector. But you shot a boy in front
of an early evening crowd of shoppers in the midst of social unrest. If you feel unable to cooperate with us, you must expect that the findings of the report into the shooting will be unsympathetic, and will most likely indicate prosecution to be in the public interest.”
He spoke with the candour of a doctor taking pains not to patronise a patient. He had the air of a man who has spent his life doing things he does not enjoy, not by compulsion but by choice. There was a wedding ring on the hand that fretted with the toy motorcycle, but something told Oates that this was a piece of camouflage no more real than the smile he had assumed for the couple loading their presents. He had the feeling that he was glimpsing an alternative destiny, looking at the kind of man he might have become without children.
“It’s up to you, Detective Chief Inspector. I won’t insult you by trying to pressure you further. You know the context, you know the consequences. I’ve left an earpiece in the glove compartment if you need to contact me.” Morrison made to leave the car, but stopped himself. “Oh, and of course, we need to take a copy of the pages.”
“What pages?” Oates asked.
“The pages you collected from the offices of United Sciences.”
“No.”
“As I said, we need to take a copy.”
“You don’t get anything until I know what’s waiting for me at the other end.”
Morrison leant forward in his seat, and squinted up at the lights overhead. Oates tightened the grip on the gun in his hand.
“Alright,” he said at length, and opened the door. The greasy breeze running down from the street passed into the car, and Oates was grateful for the cold.
“One more thing,” Oates said.
“What is it?”
“What did you give Grape? What did you do to her, what did you offer her to set me up?”
“Excuse me?”
“No one knew I was going to see Hector except Grape. The Mortal Reformers were there already, I get that. But you weren’t. So why did she tell you?”
“Ah, I see. We did not speak to Grape. Grape does not exist.”