I nodded. I understood, and my heart sang. Basically, what she was telling me was that Vernon and all his money, all his hired muscle had been taken to the cleaners, by some radicalised slip of a girl.
“She tore the site apart,” Mrs Tuck said. “She destroyed the guards’ own vehicles first, so that when they finally decided to go for help, they had to go on foot. Communications had already been severed; she’d knocked down a few telegraph poles en route, and their mobile phones didn’t work in the valley. Out of range of any transmitter, or else they were in a radio shadow, I forget.
“At any rate, by the time the police arrived, the site had been totally wrecked. She’d destroyed the fence, smashed all the Portakabins and overturned or otherwise damaged most of the plant. Also, of course, by then all the other protestors had come to join the party; they were busy tearing apart whatever she’d left in one piece.
“And the girl herself was gone. Her bulldozer was the only vehicle left viable, but it didn’t carry a single fingerprint; they’d wiped every square inch of it, to be certain.
“That didn’t help her in the end, though,” added with a touch of satisfaction. “It’s taken a long time, and cost Vernon a considerable amount of money; but they’ve found her at last, and brought her in.”
Brought her in for what? I didn’t ask; I only walked to the big bay window, hoping to see for myself.
And saw, and saw far more than ever I’d hoped or dreamed to see.
o0o
Out of the angle of the bay, I could see the van parked in the furthest corner of the yard, nose to the wall. Dean and Deverill stood a few metres away, relaxed and easy, talking to a couple of men in Scimitar uniforms: the drivers, presumably. The bringers-in.
One of the men moved eventually, going to the rear door of the van and unlocking it, working the big bar handle and folding the door back flat against its hinges.
Inside, I could see a narrow corridor that seemed to be walled with doors like a public toilet, divided into separate cubicles. Only one use I knew for such a design, which was to transport prisoners to court or around the country: the police had them, so did all the major security firms who’d bid for contracts in the great free-for-all, the open and competitive market that had been declared in the prison supply service. The sight of it brought my mind back to the other context in which I knew the name of Scimitar: my only memory of the company from before my accident, but a significant one in my life.
Little Marlon Thomas, famously deceased, putting his name and mine in all the papers: Dead drunk had been their favourite line. Nothing too surprising in that, teenagers will drink more than they can handle, especially hard-seeming street kids like Marlon. The inquest verdict had been death due to lack of care, on account of its happening when he’d just been sent down for armed robbery and he really shouldn’t have been able to get his hands on a litre bottle of vodka, but again he was hardly the first to manage that.
No, what made Marlon’s death stick so particularly in the memory, what had made it such a good story for the media was that it had happened, he had died between court and prison, on a forty-minute drive.
Locked in a cubicle in the back of a van he’d been, all alone with his bottle; and he was the first juvenile to die that way, under the charge of a private firm.
The firm, of course, had been Scimitar Security. Very possibly this was the very same van he’d died in, now apparently on private hire to Deverill.
o0o
The man climbed up inside, and I couldn’t see him for a minute. No one else was trying to; they stood heads together, talking, betraying no interest at all.
Then there was a shadow moving inside the van, a figure, two figures coming forward; and a girl stood blinking in the doorway, with the man behind her.
She was half-turning, one foot reaching down to find the stirrup that would make a step to help her to ground, when he pushed her and she fell.
She fell hard, with a yelp of shock that I could see but not hear through the double glazing, that I could see cut off when she hit the ground. Actually, I think perhaps I’d yelped myself, and cut it off equally abruptly.
It was only a drop of three or four feet, and she shouldn’t have landed so awkwardly on one shoulder; but she rolled and writhed, and I saw how her hands were held behind her back, in a tie or more likely in cuffs. Kidnapping and assault, I thought, so far; and I wondered if Deverill knew what he was doing, that he was handing a propaganda weapon to his opponents.
Then I stopped wondering anything so stupid, remembering who this man was and certain at least of that one thing, that he knew exactly what he was doing.
Right now, he still wasn’t paying any attention. He stood with his back to the girl, giving instructions to Dean that seemed from his gestures to be about some other matter entirely. The man in the van stood still also, framed in the doorway, a threatening shadow but no more, no worse than that; and the girl lay for a moment to gather her strength, and then struggled up onto her knees.
I wanted to applaud. And then I wanted to shout, I wanted to get out there and tell them to leave her alone, I wanted to take her home.
I knew this girl.
o0o
At least, for a moment I thought I knew her, the first true sight of her I had with her face in sunlight. She was young, of course, very early twenties, young enough that I could comfortably think of her as a girl. Her hair was dark and strange, shaved at the sides and long at the back, narrow plaits interwoven with raven’s feathers and held together in a ponytail that fell to her waist; her nose and ears and eyebrows were pierced with silver rings. It was a face, a look, that seen once you don’t easily forget, and I could understand how Deverill’s men had tracked her down with no name or address to work from, only a description from a hectic situation in the dark.
Then at last my inefficient, my lackadaisical memory placed her where I had seen her: not in sunlight, no, but in hard wind and cold shadows, in the sound of rain drumming on aluminium, in Luke’s Airstream over in the Lakes’ airstream. So no, I didn’t know her after all. We’d only been briefly in the same place, she arriving and I leaving, she helping me to leave by that arrival; and even so I still felt responsible somehow, I still wanted to dash out there and save her. She was too young to face Deverill in his anger...
Never old enough for that, a weary cynicism, the voice in the back of my head; and no, I didn’t move. Not scared, perhaps, not entirely that. Only wise, perhaps, not to involve myself with something that in reality I knew I couldn’t change. Gestures are futile, and common sense has always been one of my strengths.
But I stood and watched, I felt I owed her that at least, a witness for the world.
o0o
I watched, but Deverill not. He hardly gave a glance in her direction after his first, the glance and the jerk of the head that sent Dean over to attend to her. Seen it all before, I suppose; or else that was part of the punishment, being rendered so insignificant that the man she had so offended couldn’t be bothered even to watch his retribution enacted on her body.
I watched, but Mrs Tuck not either: “I don’t care for that sort of thing,” she said, when I’d muttered or hissed or gasped something that must have sounded to her like an invitation, for God’s sake, have you seen what they’re doing to that kid? “Vernon says that it’s necessary, but I don’t believe that it needs an audience.”
Whether that was directly aimed at me, I wasn’t certain. If so, it missed its mark. I didn’t feel like an audience at all, I felt like a participant, a conspirator, very much a part of the drama for all that I only stood and watched. Maybe that’s universal at such times, maybe that’s just what happens: but I thought it was all being acted out for my benefit, I felt so complicit. I thought that if I wasn’t there, this wouldn’t be happening.
This wouldn’t be happening to her.
o0o
First thing Dean did, he snapped his fingers towards the guy in the van—learned that from Deverill, I tho
ught, very much his master’s man—and asked for something. Demanded it, rather, that’s what his body language said. This is my speciality, I’m in charge here now.
And he got what he wanted, something small and silvery glittering in the air as the man threw it, as Dean’s hand snatched it from its arc.
Dean bent over the girl then, and she flinched away, frightened already: beaten up already, I guess, I thought I could see bruises. But he gripped her arm to hold her, then slid his grip down to her wrist, turning her away from him to see what he was doing; and then I could see also, and all he was doing was taking the handcuffs off her with the key he’d just claimed, and maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all...
I guess that’s what the girl thought also, I saw her turn her face up to find him, looking for mercy, perhaps, looking for hope. Not seeing or else forgetting, as I was trying to forget, how much he was his master’s man under his master’s indifferent eyes.
I almost didn’t see his arm swing, it moved so fast as he lashed her across the mouth with steel, those handcuffs an improvised knuckleduster; but I saw her fall back from the impact, and I saw him kick her in the ribs and stomach; and when he stood back for a moment, when she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees I saw blood running on her face, dripping onto the tarmac.
o0o
Brave girl, stupid girl, even now she seemed to think she could make a fight of it, she could or should resist. She tossed her head to send a spatter of red across Dean’s clean white shirt, where he had taken his jacket off to his work; and she somehow dragged herself up onto her feet and stood swaying, frowning, trying to focus. Trying to stare him down, I suppose, trying to defy him.
Neither her bravery nor her defiance touched Dean, I suppose he only saw her stupidity. One quick pace forward he took, and he kicked her knee with the side of his shoe. Just an office shoe, black and shiny, he wasn’t wearing boots for the better kicking of captives; but her leg twisted abruptly against the joint, and she fell again with a useless flailing of arms, that couldn’t stop her landing sickeningly on her face.
“Come away,” Mrs Tuck said behind me, motherly, concerned. “This isn’t for you.”
But it was, my guilty soul said it was entirely for me; certainly I couldn’t turn and walk away, however much I wanted to. I needed to know, or she needed me to know, or I thought she did. She would if she knew that I was watching.
o0o
Dean’s feet rolled her around the hardstanding for a while, he kicked and she rolled and he kicked again. When she stopped rolling, he stopped kicking. He stood for a moment looking at her stillness, then he went into one of the outbuildings, the former stables that were garages and storehouses now by the look of them. After a minute he came back with a bucket of water in his hand and something else slung across his shoulder, a length of cord or cable.
I was expecting him simply to chuck the water over her, a cold wake-up call from her dreams of agony, back to the real thing again. But no, he stood over her and tipped almost delicately, and the water flowed in a hard spattering stream into her face. Washing the blood away, how kind, and filling her mouth and nose; giving her a choice, kindness personified, that she could choke or drown.
And had to wake to make it: so she woke and choked, her slight body arching with the effort; and turned her face out of the stream, so that then Dean did simply fling the rest of the bucketful across her, soaking and chilling and making her buck again with the shock of it.
He tossed the bucket aside, bent over and seized her by the hair, by that long decorated ponytail; and he dragged her across the tarmac, and she lay slackly in her pain, in his grasp, not fighting him at all any more.
He hauled her back to the van, pulling the handcuffs from his pocket where he had stowed them. With those he fastened her wrists to the van’s rear bumper, so that she lay face-down and her upper body dangling, just off the ground. Just like Jacky Chu, I thought, though the thought sounded quiet and distant in my head, not attention-grabbing. Nothing in the world could have grabbed my attention from this, nothing could shout loud enough to get through.
Dean gripped the fabric of the collarless, sleeveless shirt the girl was wearing, tugged a little to test it and then jerked once, twice and a third time, ripping it roughly down all its seams and tossing the remnants aside.
Half-naked she was now, but there seemed to be nothing directly sexual in that, though no doubt the added humiliation counted for something. Mostly this was for efficacy, I thought; because Dean took the coil from his shoulder then, unwound it—electrical cable it should be, bright orange and heavy as it was, and trying to hold its curves—and swung it through the air for practice, lashed the tarmac a time or two, then doubled it over and lashed her exposed shoulders instead.
She lifted her hanging head and screamed, silent to me this side of the window, and I thought maybe silent to them out there as well, silent even to Dean beside her. I thought maybe she didn’t have the breath to scream with, for all that she had the pain that made it necessary.
o0o
Me, I didn’t have the eyes to watch any more. Still present in my skull they were and not blurring, not weeping; but not making sense to me now, images without meaning. I turned away from those, fought to focus on the room, the woman in the room, the large handbag on the small table beside the woman in the room.
“Er,” I said, “there wouldn’t by any chance be a phone in that bag, would there?”
Phones by the dozen, of course, elsewhere in the house. None in here, or none that I could see, and I was suddenly urgent about this, I wanted it done now.
Wonderful woman, she proved to be all that I hoped she’d be. “Yes, there is,” she said, and produced it, switched it on for me and passed it over.
My fingers were punching buttons already, a number so familiar I never stopped to think; and when a breathy, familiar voice answered at the second ring, I just said what I’d said many times before. “Dulce, it’s Jonty. Come and rescue me.”
“Don’t we always?” she demanded, chuckling. “Where are you?”
And that was where I ground to a halt, because I didn’t know, except in a general sense. And the voice of doom was whispering in the back of my head, they’ll never come this far out of town, forgot that, didn’t you? Taxis don’t like driving miles to pick up a fare...
But these particular taxis I’d been using since I was a student, I thought they’d come if I could only tell them how to find me; and when I asked Mrs Tuck if she could give me directions, she just beckoned imperiously for the phone.
Once she had it, she gave Dulcie crisp and clear instructions; and when she’d finished I bade her farewell, said nice to have met you and like that, and found my way back to the hall and then defiantly out of the front door, to sit on stone steps in sunshine—balanced, it seemed to me, as this adventure had been, between the dark weight of Deverill’s limo on the one side and the crisp, smooth efficiency of what must surely be Mrs Tuck’s Jag on the other—and wait for someone to come and take me away from here.
o0o
When the taxi came, it was Dulcie’s daughter Tina behind the wheel.
Originally, she’d been trained to spell Dulcie at the switchboard. Like any family business, what had been right for the parents was seen as right for the kids also. But when she hit twenty-five, she rebelled; she wanted to drive like her brothers, and if they didn’t give her a car she’d go and find another firm that would.
So she got her car, and started picking me up from parties instead of chatting me up on the phone. She flirted as her mother did, because it was good for business, as her father and her uncles and her brothers no doubt flirted professionally with their regular women clients, as they talked sport and local crime with me; and she drove probably better than they did, knowing that not me but the better half of her fares would be watching with a macho and cynical eye; and I knew just what protection she carried in the car and where she kept it, because she’d asked my advice about what w
as legal and what she’d need to hide. Sensible woman, our Tina.
Today I thought I just might need some of that protection myself, because she was turning the car neatly around on the gravel forecourt when the big front door opened behind me, and out came Dean.
Bouncing on his toes, he was, like a fit man looking forward to a little trouble; and he said, “Running out on us, Jonty?” like a man expecting the answer no, like he was expecting me to say no, no, just taking a little air, Dean, a little post-prandial stroll when the evidence was right there in front of us to call me a coward and a liar.
I looked at him, this grinning, winking buddy of mine, this lifesaver; and I said, “How the hell are you going to stop her talking?”
Dean laughed. “Come on, get with it. We know where to find her, we know where to find her boyfriend and her family. You think she’s going to talk? Believe me, by the time we’ve finished with her she won’t say a bloody word.”
What, they hadn’t even finished yet? God almighty...
“She’ll talk to her friends,” I said. “Not the police, but...” Luke, I thought, she’ll talk to Luke. She’ll tell him everything. People did, if they could only get him to listen.
“By the time we’re finished,” Dean said again, “she won’t have any friends.”
“Why, what do you mean?”
“She’s going to be a good girl,” he said, “she’s going to do exactly what we tell her to. They always do. And I’ll be watching her anyway, making sure.”
“What, then? What are you going to make her do?”
“I’m taking her back to Leavenhall,” he said, “soon as she’s learned to speak nicely to Vern and obey his orders. They’re starting work on stage two of the bypass soon, so her friends are moving back there, they’ve got some more trees to protect.
“And what that bitch is going to do,” he said, “is drive a bulldozer again, we’ve found her a big one; and first she’s going to drive a nice path through all those trees, and then she’s going to trash her mates’ camp, the way she trashed our compound. And they’re going to see her doing it, up there in the cab, all on her own. And I don’t think they’ll be talking to her after that, not after she’s been a traitor and a tree-killer...”
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