by Ivo Stourton
Christ, not more bloody politics. Oates advanced towards the computer to shut it off. Carlos was still hanging back by the entrance. Oates was striding forward, reaching out for the switch, when the ground beneath him disappeared. He felt his weight shift instictively as his front foot came down on air, but it was too late. His momentum carried him forward, his arms flailed at the large greasy cloth that had been stretched over the hole in the floor, and in a panic he felt his whole big body plummet down into darkness.
WHEN HE CAME to, the first thing he saw was Carlos’s face grinning down at him through the hatch in the roof. That suggested he had been only briefly stunned. He did a quick inventory of his limbs. He must have landed well, everything worked without too much complaint. He heard the sound of something skidding across the floor beside him, and turned his head. He was eye to toe with a steel-capped boot. Looking past it, he saw someone stoop to pick up the gun the boot had just kicked away from him. He could still hear the politics coming faintly from the speakers in the room above. Booby-trapping something you’d want to touch, that was a proper paramilitary trick. He chided himself for a lapse in his instincts.
The boots belonged to a tough looking woman in her thirties carrying a sawn off shotgun. There were a couple of other men in the room similarly armed. This was more like it. Oates actually felt grateful. He might have to come after some of these people one day if they kept going the way they were going. And if he made it out alive, of course. He didn’t need the extra guilt of thinking they were all like Carlos and the kid he had shot in the mall.
The room into which he had fallen contained, in addition to the heavies, a bare mattress with faded stains, and a series of crates. Taking up almost the whole of one wall was an ancient map of the tunnels marked as the property of the Metropolitan Water Authority. Over the old blue ink of the pipe system, later hands had drawn in more pipes and conduits in red and black and green ink, crossing out some of the old tunnels, here and there scrawling words and dimensions and tidal timings in twenty different scripts. The whole thing looked like the art project of some particularly gifted primary school class.
In front of the map stood the girl who had stolen the file from him. She was wearing a grubby white vest and tracksuit bottoms, and towelling dry her wet hair.
“This the bloke from the New Change?” the tough looking woman said to the girl.
“That’s him. He shot Dwayne.”
“You’re Lara, right?” Oates said to the woman.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“A man came to talk to me. After the shooting. He said he was in internal investigations, but I think he was a spook. He seemed to think I might be able to get that file back off you.”
One of the blokes holding a shotgun laughed at this, but Lara didn’t.
“He reckoned you were going to use it as a bargaining chip,” Oates said.
“Just goes to show,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“They’re all about the bargaining.”
“Then why did you let me come down?”
“Hector sent a few pages from the file over to United before we got to you. We want them. We thought you might have them.”
Oates heard a click behind him. He knew what it was without having to turn around. It could have been the hammers on one of the shotguns, but his money was on Carlos’s pistol.
“There’s no need for that,” he said.
He stood up gingerly. His left ankle protested at his weight, and the knock to his head had rattled his brains. He pulled the pages from his pocket, and handed them to Lara. She took them, read through them briefly, and then removed a lighter from her pocket. She set fire to the corner and, when they were going, laid them down on the stone floor to burn out. As the fire died down, she looked quizzically at Oates.
“You don’t seem that bothered.”
“I’m not. I’m not here for the research. I’m trying to find out who killed Prudence Egwu.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“It wasn’t us if that’s what you were thinking. I’d be speaking to your spook.”
“What was in his research?”
“Right. Like I’d tell you.”
“I think it might help me to understand why he died,” Oates said. “I brought you what you wanted. Help me.”
“Help you, yeah? Do you reckon we should snitch?” She addressed this to the other heavies.
“You hate Nottingham, right?” Oates asked.
She didn’t contradict him.
“So help me to hurt them. If someone at Nottingham was involved with Prudence Egwu’s death, I won’t let them get away.”
She looked around the circle. No one made any sign. She shrugged, and turned back to Oates.
“It was a process called MRT. Memory Replacement Therapy. About how to forget who you are. Capability Egwu was trying to find a way. You go to sleep one day as one guy, and you wake up in the morning as some new guy. He used to meet with the Mortal Reformers, did you know that? He helped us to campaign for inheritance tax changes, sentencing changes, all that stuff. Back at the beginning. I think he hated what he was.”
“I don’t understand, forget? Forget what?”
Lara walked up to him, and took his hands in hers. She looked up into his face, and spoke very softly. In part, she was addressing him as if he was an idiot, a child. But in the physical contact, there was an intimacy which existed alongside the mockery, a connection of his own disgust with hers.
“Forget who you are. Forget what you’ve done. If this thing had worked, they would have been able to escape it all. They wouldn’t have to pay for anything anymore, not even in their souls. They’d get to live and do terrible things and get rich, and then at the end they’d pay to be someone young and new, with a clean conscience. With no memory of the things they’ve done. They wouldn’t have to live with themselves. That’s the last check left, that’s the only thing keeping any last shred of fairness in this world. If Nottingham or anyone else had managed to put together Capability’s research, that would be gone. Do you understand? That’s why we were willing to kill you for it. That’s why your spook wants it.”
“But if what you’re saying is true… why would Nottingham kill Prudence? Why wouldn’t they just take what he had? It doesn’t make any sense…”
And in that instant, he knew who had killed Prudence Egwu. It was like the light coming on in a room through which he had been groping his way, trying to identify the objects by touch, trying not to hurt himself in the dark. The intensity of illumination dazzled him, but as his mind cleared he saw all the facts of the case, sitting just where he had encountered them in the dark.
There was the photo album. There was Prudence Egwu’s recent treatment, and his last minute arrival at the spa. There was Chris’s testimony damning Ali Farooz, and there was Ali’s confession. Ali Farooz, the man his head told him must be guilty, who his gut insisted must be innocent. The escape from conscience. The stories of the men and women who had woken up with someone else’s voice. The search for eternal youth. Above all there was Superintendent John Yates, the jovial PR, and the white witch Miranda, presiding over her eternal summer.
He waited for the satisfaction, the joy that by rights should have followed this revelation. He waited like a groom at the altar; happy, expectant, then anxious, then joking with himself to hide the anxiousness. All through the longest day of his life, he had been tracking this solution. He had bullied, he had fought, he had threatened and bribed and calculated, he had killed, all that a killer might be brought to justice. Yet as he waited, he felt only the sordidness of the truth. The case, which had seemed to him different, was really just like any other. At the heart of it was money and selfishness. Oates felt terribly tired, and the urge to get back to his family filled him once again. He would see this thing through, but he needed to be with them, and not just to protect them. He needed their protection too.
; “Listen, I’m sorry,” he said as he turned to go.
“For what?” she said.
“For shooting your friend. For killing him.”
“I didn’t know him that well. He’d just come down from Manchester.”
“The manager upstairs said he was a nice lad.”
“He was. Do you mind if we get on now? This is going to be a really big night for us. Nottingham are going to remember this one.”
CARLOS ESCORTED OATES back the way they had come. The journey seemed much shorter now he knew he was headed for the fresh air. At the old tube platform, he was shown to a water butt with a pump to clean the shit off his boots.
In the club the evening’s entertainments had begun. A pre-op transsexual was dancing on the stage in front of a crowd of baying men and women in suits. The dancer was stumbling around to an aggressive rock track, drunk or simulating drunkenness, pausing to take deep swigs from a bottle of tequila he held in his hand. Skin pulled taut across his skinny sternum rose in the swell of the fake breasts, and his penis swung wildly as he danced. At the climax of the act, he squatted on the bottle to pick it up with his anus. The audience roared with approbation and disgust. He pulled it out from between his buttocks, drank a shot from the bottle, and spat it into the faces of the audience arrayed around the front of the stage.
“People pay for that?” Oates had to shout into the ear of his host to make himself heard above the uproar.
“People pay to be shocked. They pay to feel anything.”
Flo was greeting guests at the door. She had restored her hair and make-up. When she clocked Oates she stuck her chin in the air and straightened her back, quivering a little.
“I’m sorry for frightening you,” Oates said.
At the words of apology, she melted.
“You didn’t frighten me, dearie.”
“I was out of order.”
“There’s worse than wig-pullers out there, I can tell you. But thank you.”
Oates smiled and put out his hand. She profferred her own and Oates kissed it on the knuckle.
“You mind yourself out there, officer. It’s all going off. They’re going to tear down the town,” she said.
Outside the club, there was a small huddle of people hoping to be let in, the girls shivering in short skirts, the men acting nonchalant as if queuing outside was all part of the plan. The bouncer lifted the hook on a velvet rope for Oates as he left. Aside from the would-be clubbers, the street was empty though the buildings echoed with distant chanting. The damp wind blowing down from the West End carried the faint smell of peardrop boiled sweets, and it took Oates a moment to make the appropriate association – it was the aftertaste of tear gas.
He went back to his car, and was relieved to find it unmolested. He turned the key to start the heater and sat back in the front seat. He listened to the police chatter on his earpiece, trying to construct in his mind the clear path home. Trafalgar Square was properly sealed off now, and the Strand itself was closed at the Blackfriars end. Piccadilly Circus and Soho were swamped, with reports of glass fronts shattering all the way down to the Ritz, and the looters handing out truffles and champagne hampers from the ground floor of Fortnum & Mason to their compatriots in the street.
Oates could imagine the wild joy of the scene; even he, a policeman, could feel the thrill as the status quo tottered beneath the weight of temptation and privation. He believed that you should work for what you wanted, and that the law did more to protect the weak than the strong, but he felt the frustration of being constrained by that philosophy to an average life. Money had become an abstract ideal, and expensive goods the stuff of religious reverence. Even as the significance of riches increased, they were lifted away above the heads of Londoners, above the grasping hands even of those willing to stand on the bodies of others to reach them.
Those young men and women smashing their way into the stores must feel the way King Henry’s soldiers had felt, breaking into the monasteries to reclaim the gold and jewels in the gorgeous crosses and kicking the monks up the arse. The trouble was you couldn’t burn down the church without killing the people sheltering inside, and he thought of Mr Prendegast and his wife sitting with their lovely Asian neighbours and the strangers from downstairs, terrified in the darkness.
The disturbances spread all the way up to Marble Arch, where a police cordon bulged with the pressure of the riot. Outside of that, there were pockets of isolated trouble throughout the city, but the main areas of conflict were in Hackney, Tottenham, Brixton and Kingston. The Kingston riots had taken the police by surprise, and there wasn’t the weight of officers there to engage the offenders. The water cannons and the horses were all deployed in the east.
Through the sporadic bursts in his earpiece, Oates heard the names of some streets he recognised – not his own street, but near enough to fill his mind with the image of masked men beating on the door of his flat, with Mike, Harry and Lori hiding together in an upstairs bedroom. He tried again to call his wife, but the call wouldn’t go through; too many people ringing at once, the air thronged with the thwarted signals as every Londoner tried to contact their loved ones.
It took him ten minutes to assemble the new mental map of the city, with little images of the fires and barricades superimposed above the monuments and tube stations. He was about to drive off when his earpiece bleeped on the police frequency. It was Bhupinder calling from outside the spa.
“You need to get back here now, boss. Things are looking pretty bad out front. There’s more and more people coming, and they’re trying to get in to the spa. Some of the news people have got stuck and they want to get back to London for the riots, and we’ve had word from central that some of the troublemakers from the east might come out this way because they’ve blocked out the High Street.”
“Alright. I’m on my way back now. I’ll be an hour. Hour and a half tops. Can you keep everything under control until then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, yeah.”
HE TRAVELLED ALONG the empty Strand, and took Waterloo Bridge across the river. Lambeth Palace Road was open, and although he saw a fire engine tearing along the other side with siren wailing, he also saw a couple jogging on their way around Archbishop’s Park, and a family taking photographs of the police gathering on the north side of the river. There across the dark water was the Palace of Westminster, silent and peaceful in the night, and the face of Big Ben glowing like a second moon in the starless sky.
On Prince of Wales Drive along Battersea Park, the peace almost made him doubt the chaos he had seen in the West End. The lights were on in many of the big Georgian houses along the park. The screens of televisions appeared through the windows, some of them showing the riots on the rolling news, others films or football. He saw a family sitting down to dinner in their front room, curtains open.
He slowed the car, and felt himself begin to calm down. Perhaps it really was coming down worst in the east of the city. In the park itself, a low mist clung to the ground. There wasn’t a soul in sight on the long paths lined with lamps, or on the AstroTurf hockey pitch shining under the floodlights. Even the bare branches of the trees were motionless. The lights at the end of the drive turned red as Oates approached, and he pulled to a stop at the deserted crossroads. He waited there with the engine running in the silence. Then from a distance, but approaching rapidly in the still night, he heard the beating of hooves.
The traffic lights turned green, but he did not move. A police horse with no rider came galloping down the Albert Bridge Road. It was saddled, stirrups jangling, and the plastic visor to protect its eyes had been yanked across its face, so it ran half blind. Its neck dipped and rose with each stride as if it were moving through water. Oates was afraid as he saw it coming that it would break its own legs on the concrete in its headlong dash. Its tail was on fire, a terror it could never outrun. It passed so close to Oates’s car that he could see the swell of the veins in its neck, and the sheen of sweat on its flanks. The heat and
light, the sudden frenzy of trailing sparks imprinted itself for a moment on his retina, and then receded into the London night. Having passed him at the crossroads, the horse ran on towards Clapham. Oates put his car in gear, and drove on down towards Putney Hill.
20:30 HOURS
THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER
2035 (REAL WORLD)
HE FOUND THEM sitting in the kitchen with their bags packed. Mike was playing games on his phone, Harry was sat holding the naked action figure which he liked to carry round with him when they were at home.
“Dad!” Mike said, and ran over to clasp his knees.
“Lori, I’m so sorry.”
“You’re here now,” she said. “We knew you would be. Didn’t we Harry?”
Harry nodded.
“Come on then boys. Who’s for an adventure?”
Mike cheered. Lori kissed him on the mouth, and as she did so Oates realised she would smell the alcohol on his breath. He pulled away from her and said, “Quickly, let’s get them in the car.”