by Simon Mason
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Simon Mason
Copyright
Only your actions shall go with you
—Guru Granth
The others were already there, waiting in the darkness, and Garvie Smith went through the park gate and across the slippery grass toward them. Haphazardly arranged on the tiny swings and miniature merry-go-round of the Old Ditch Road kiddies’ playground, dim, low-slung, and damp, Smudge, Felix, Dani, and Tiger raised hands and touched knuckles with him, one by one, and he settled down among them, yawning.
Smudge looked at him. “What you got for us, big shot?”
Garvie shook his head.
“What, not even the Rizlas?”
“Next time.”
“Next time! Might not be a next time, mate. The world’s a strange and uncertain place. Who knows what’s going to happen in the future?”
Garvie looked at him; yawned again. “We all know, Smudge. Nothing, that’s what. And, if we’re not that lucky, maybe a bit less than nothing.”
He took out his Benson & Hedges and offered them around, and Smudge passed him the almost-empty half bottle of Glen’s cheapest and the sherbet lemons, and they sat there smoking, drinking, sucking sweets, and grumbling.
Ten o’clock on a Friday evening in Five Mile. The wind getting up, drizzle, a few smokes, and a bit of banter before the cop car came by to chuck them off.
Half an hour passed.
Smudge had another go. “Come on, Garv, you haven’t said hardly nothing since you got here. Anyone’d think you were fretting about your exams.”
No one who knew anything about him would think Garvie was fretting about his exams; he was not only the boredest but also the laziest boy in the history of Marsh Academy, perhaps of the whole city, or even the whole history of boys anywhere. Slacker Smith, all brain and no energy, the despair of his school. Black-haired, blue-eyed, and sixteen years old, sloppy in slouch jeans, hooded sweatshirt, and broken-down high-tops, he sat on his stamped-metal circus horse with a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his beautiful mouth, rocking gently, breathing out smoke, gazing in quiet boredom across the black grass toward the city lights downtown. The truth was, exams didn’t bother him. What bothered him was the people who talked about them. His mother, for instance. Uncle Len. Miss Perkins, Marsh Academy’s principal enforcer. A few weeks earlier, as a result of some bother with the police, during which, through no fault of his own, he’d missed a good deal of schoolwork, he’d been officially assured that his exams would be deferred—only for the school to decide a few days later that he’d be taking them anyway. He would take his exams as scheduled, Miss Perkins had told him, he would fulfill his potential as required, he would at long last show the world the abilities of a boy with a certified record IQ and famous photographic memory. Only he wouldn’t. He didn’t like Miss Perkins. He didn’t like the world, either, and he wasn’t going to do anything for it. What had it ever done for him?
“So what’s your problem?” Smudge asked.
“Nothing,” Garvie said. “Or a bit less.”
A disturbance came from down Old Ditch Road, a bass bumping noise shaking the ground. After a moment a car appeared alongside the hedge that divided the park from the street and came to a throbbing, brightly lit standstill by the park gate a few meters away, a tall black Cadillac Escalade Platinum with limo tint windows and Lexani wheels in electric egg-yolk yellow, LED headlights pulsing, colored light panels racing like lasers along the roof. It fumed with music for twenty, thirty beats and suddenly fell silent. Transfixed, the boys stared at it as the nearside back window slid down with a thin whine and a face appeared, grinning and blinking. Smudge let out a small burp of fear.
The face looked at Garvie.
“Got a light for me, boy?” A hoarse, whispery voice.
Garvie looked back, puffing smoke, thinking about it. “No,” he said at last.
Smudge stifled a moan.
The back door swung open and a short, skinny guy stepped out and stood there. He was wearing a black leather jacket over an outsize retro tracksuit in turquoise and a Dirty Rat fitted hat, and his glasses flashed in the streetlight as his head bobbed, goldfish eyes blinking big and slow. He was no longer grinning.
“You got a light,” he said, nodding toward Garvie’s cigarette.
Garvie took a long drag on his Benson & Hedges, dropped it, and ground it out with the heel of his shoe.
“No, I haven’t,” he said.
Smudge groped hastily in his pocket for matches and made a few faltering squeaks, but fell silent as more car doors opened and two men in matching vests got out. They were big men, blank-faced behind shades, and they stood in the road as if waiting for instructions.
Blinkie grinned again. He was a fool. Everything about him was idiotic: his gangster outfit, monster chains, gold grills, those enormous, inhuman eyes. His teeth were too big for his mouth. He was the only white man in Five Mile with cornrows. But he was a fool no one laughed at. People were very careful around Blinkie. He was what was commonly known as “a bit psycho.”
The street was quiet for a moment, no sound but a car on the other side of the park. Blinkie looked at his watch.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed, boy?” he said to Garvie.
“Shouldn’t you be in prison?” Garvie said.
Smudge flinched so hard he almost fell off the swings, and Blinkie stopped grinning. He took a step toward Garvie, and one of the men behind him leaned forward and muttered something, and he hesitated and glanced down the road.
He looked back at Garvie. “Know what I like?” he whispered.
Garvie shrugged. “I’m guessing it’s not normal clothes. Or mirrors.”
“Fun,” Blinkie said. “So I’ll be seeing you.”
He slipped back into the car, the door closed with a satisfyingly shushy clunk, the music pumped out again, and the rocking car slid away down Old Ditch Road like a fairground ride.
Garvie got to his feet and sauntered toward the gate after it, and Smudge and Felix called after him, anxious as baby birds.
“What you doing now? Are you insane? What if he comes back?”
“Relax. He’s not coming back.”
“How do you know?”
Garvie reached the gate as the squad car
drew up with its lights turned down low, and he went up to it and tapped on the window.
The window came down and a policeman in a bulletproof turban looked out, and Garvie looked at him in surprise for a moment.
“You’ve just missed them,” he said. “They went that way,” he added.
Detective Inspector Singh made no reaction. He said, “What are you and your friends doing here?”
Garvie said, “What are you doing here, on the night shift? It’s usually Constable Jones here who comes along to move us on.”
Jones, the driver, scowled, but Singh simply asked again, “What are you doing in the park?”
“Swings, mainly. Sometimes we go on the merry-go-round.”
Singh waited patiently.
“Okay, you’ve got me,” Garvie said. “Smoking, drinking, occasionally doing drugs.” He stretched his arms out wide. “Do you want to search me?”
Constable Jones made a move to get out of the car, and Singh put a hand on his arm to stop him.
To Garvie he said, “Go home, Garvie, and tell your friends to go home too.”
The window went up, and the squad car pulled away, and Garvie stood there a moment thoughtfully, before returning to the playground.
“That was lucky,” Smudge said. “Plod turning up just in time to scare Blinkie off. Thought you’d successfully killed yourself, talking like that.”
“You need to check your watch, Smudge. Ten thirty. That’s the time Plod usually turns up.”
“Not always, mate. Not always at this time, neither.”
Garvie shook his head. “Ignore the noise, Smudge. Find the signal.”
“What signal?”
“Plod shows up, what, four times a week? Weekdays it’s half past, Saturdays eleven, Sundays he doesn’t come. That’s a two in three chance of him turning up exactly when he did.”
“Yeah, but … ” Smudge fell silent.
“Also,” Garvie said, “proves I’ve not smoked too much of this.”
“Does it?”
“I know it’s Friday. If all I knew was it wasn’t Sunday, it’d be one in two, wouldn’t it? If I was so out of it I didn’t know what day of the week it was, it’d be three in seven. But I’ve got a clear head, so I get better odds.”
Smudge said warily, “Well, if you put it like that … ”
“Besides,” Garvie said, “I saw the car on the other side of the park before it arrived.”
Nodding, he left them there and walked back to the gate, out into Bulwarks Lane, and along Pilkington Driftway, homeward.
The wind had picked up. Clouds tore themselves to pieces and tossed the bits across the dark sky; wire fences chattered as he went past, litter scudding across the road. The flats at Eastwick Gardens were dim in the darkness. Garvie let himself into the lobby, retrieved the book he’d left under the stairwell, Modern World History Student Book, and went up the stairs to Flat 12, where his mother was preparing to go out for her shift at the hospital. She was an imposing lady from Barbados with a broad face, graying hair clipped into a halo, and a Bajan accent thick as pork pepper pot, and she regarded Garvie mistrustfully.
“You were a long time fetching that book,” she said.
Garvie shrugged. “Felix hadn’t finished with it so I had to wait a bit.”
“Two hours? What was he doing, rewriting it?”
“And then we got caught up discussing the French Revolution and stuff.”
Her mistrustful look grew more mistrusting, but she looked at her watch and went to get her coat, hanging by the door.
“Okay. At least you’re back now. You can do a bit of studying and get to bed at a reasonable time for once.” She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You’re not thinking of going out to the kiddies’ playground, right?”
Garvie returned her stare. “What would I want to go there for? There’s nothing going on there.”
For a moment longer she regarded him with that flat look of disbelief. Then the door closed behind her. Sighing, Garvie drifted into his room, kicked his way through discarded clothing, and lay down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The incident with Blinkie had been a momentary diversion. There was nothing to do at the kiddies’ playground, nothing to do at home.
He sighed again, put his hands behind his head, and focused on the ceiling.
After they left the park, Singh and Jones continued their rounds, the squad car sliding quietly under the streetlights, up and down the hills of Brickfields and Limekilns, through the spacious suburbs of the affluent north, around the highway, back toward town. The city grew quiet, the hours passed slowly, eleven o’clock, twelve, one o’clock, two, as they tracked the frail linkages of lights rippling across the estates, thinning out along the highway, massing in grids around the tower blocks of the deserted business district, as at last they approached the police center downtown and the end of their shift.
A city of light and dark, Detective Inspector Raminder Singh thought to himself, looking out the window as he sat silent and unbending beside the slouching Jones, his posture and appearance as usual absolutely correct from the soles of his regulation boots to the tip of his police-issue turban, thirty-two years old, ambitious, uptight. A checkered city, a city of endless permutations, of luck and chance, where a man could make a life, or fail to. It was the end of a long shift. Jones was grunting and scratching irritably as they slowed to turn into the drive to the fortified entrance.
That was when the call came through.
Jones took it, listening to his headset with disgust. Frowned.
“Where?” he said bitterly into his microphone. “For God’s sake. Next shift can take it. We’re back already. They’ll be here any minute.”
Singh looked at Jones, who openly scowled back at him.
“Alarm going off,” Jones said to him. “East Field industrial estate. Be the wind, night like this.”
Singh said decisively, “We’ll take it. McKendrick can hand over when the others arrive.”
Jones pouted at him, but Singh stared him down and he swung the car around viciously in the road and they went at speed back down Cornwallis Way, heading west toward the highway. Without speaking again, they drove across the flyover onto the road and turned east, the speeding car buffeted by shouldering gusts of wind. Northward the humped darkness of Brickfields slid past, then the pale lots of empty retail parks, then the brighter glow of The Wicker, the city’s fluorescent strip of clubs and casinos. Ahead were the tower blocks of Strawberry Hill streaked into life by the shadows of racing clouds, and the low, dense mass of Limekilns. Impassively Singh watched it all go by. Everywhere the wind-pressed city seemed to bend under wavering lights, as if the whole town swayed underwater.
With a show of petulance, Jones put the siren on.
“It’s going to be a false alarm,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Then we’ll log it and be on our way.”
He switched on the radio channel, and the car prickled with background static.
At the sewage plant they turned south, away from the city into the darkness of farmland, accelerating along an unlit country lane toward the industrial estate. A robotic voice broke in over the radio.
“Hey, you guys. Report just in.”
Singh took up the handset. “Try to remember Airwave Speak, McKendrick.”
“Loosen up, Tango-man. Do you want this information or what?”
Singh bit his lip. “Go ahead, police center.”
There was a snicker at the other end of the line. “Okay, then. Some guy walking his dog just phoned in, says he thinks he heard gunshots.”
“Where?”
“East Field somewhere. Could even be the industrial park. But you know phone-ins. Nights get all the paranoids. Chance of it being true: slim to invisible. I’m just doing my job passing it on. Okay, I’m off. The others are coming in now. Enjoy your field trip, children. Tango, Tango.”
They came to the end of the lane, pulled into the industrial estate t
hrough an open gate in a high wire fence, and went slowly down the pitted, unlit road between decaying warehouses and low-rent storage units. Jones turned off the siren. From up ahead came the squawk of a burglar alarm, the noise flapping in the wind like a far cry from out of a stormy sea.
“Told you,” Jones said.
The warehouse stood before them, dark and shut as if disused and undisturbed for centuries, the alarm echoing emptily from inside.
“Wait,” Singh said, peering through the window. “There.” He pointed the other way along an access road toward a storage unit facility glinting in the darkness, light spilling out of flung-open main doors.
Jones pursed his lips, said nothing.
Singh put his hand on the door handle. “You check the warehouse. I’ll see what’s happening down there.”
Jones hesitated. “You heard what McKendrick said. You strapped?”
“I never carry a weapon.”
Jones shrugged, and they got out together and went in different directions.
Like much of the estate, the storage facility was a beaten piece of industrial architecture from the dawn of time, two stories of moldy brick and iron girders, once a factory, then a warehouse, now the cheapest sort of storage, its ground floor subdivided into a dozen smaller units, the upper floor disused for years, unsafe and prone to water damage.
Singh glanced back at Jones disappearing casually into the shadow side of the warehouse up the road. There was no one to see Singh go into the police-manual crouch. Tense, alert, and rigidly correct, he crept crabwise to the main doors of the storage facility and peered through before swinging inside, cocking his head like an animal tracking a scent. The lobby was bare but for a reception desk used apparently as a bin. Three doors led off it. One was half open, light shining through it, and he slid silently to the side of the doorway and cocked his head again. For a moment he heard nothing; then, faintly, from just the other side of the door, vague noises. A scrape of feet? A hiss of talk? Hairs went up on the back of his neck. Peering through the crack between the door and jamb, he saw nothing. He leaned backward, took a breath, and pounced suddenly through the doorway into a square, brightly lit, whitewashed concrete room. It was empty except for a boy. Dressed very neatly in a school uniform, he was lying on the floor staring impassively up at the ceiling. He still had his glasses on. Next to him was his schoolbag, and next to that an empty violin case, and next to that a handgun. The pool of blood he was lying in had reached the bag and the case but not the gun.