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  ‘We need inside information from after any move by the Cambodian military.’ For all the change in Vasvik’s voice, the fight going on next door could have been on TV. ‘I don’t want to disclose details but if we don’t have clear data then a number of the people we’ve got our eye on will be able to use the confusion of the coup to muddy the waters over their own actions. They’ll get through the reasonable doubt loophole and they’ll walk. We’ll lose the whole case.’

  ‘Don’t you usually?’

  cunt, cunt, cunt screamed the guy next door. Fucking CUNT

  A blow, and someone falling. A broken shriek.

  The baby, wailing.

  Carla came out of the kitchen, as if fired from a gun.

  ‘Dad, what the fuck is he doing to—‘

  ‘I know.’ Erik came to take his daughter’s hands. He looked suddenly very old. ‘It’s, he’s. It happens a lot. There’s nothing you can—‘

  Vasvik stared into the middle distance with no more emotion than a cat.

  Another shriek. A meaty thump. Chris stared around and coughed out a laugh.

  ‘You guys are fucking hysterical, you know that. Erik, with your fucking writing, and the fucking ombudsman here. All going to change the fucking world for the better.’ Suddenly he was yelling himself. ‘Look at yourselves. You’re fucking paralysed, all of you.’

  Something hit the wall, big enough to be a body. Blows followed, regular, spaced. Chanting.

  you cunt, like that? you cunt, like that? you fucking like that cunt?

  He was in motion, and it was like the Saab ride home all over again. Embodied purpose, unstoppable. He went out, along the tiny entry hall, out the front door, left, along to the next door. He kicked it in. Cheap wood splintered in the frame, the door flew back. Slammed into the wall, rebounded. He kicked again and erupted into the space beyond, through the hall and into the lounge.

  They’d heard him come in. The woman was sprawled across the carpet, dressed in a short, moth-eaten, grey towelling robe and moving weakly like an injured soldier trying to crawl to cover. She was bleeding from the mouth. Below the hem of the robe, her thighs were mottled with old bruises. The baby was in a plastic carry chair, marooned atop a cheap entertainment stack near the kitchen door, mouth open wide as if in surprise. The father was turning, garish purple shellsuit bottoms and a red sleeveless T-shirt tight across a boxer’s physique. MEAT THE RICH was inked across his chest in white capitals stretched wide. His eyes were defocused with fury and his fists were clenched. Blood on the knuckles of the right hand.

  ‘You’re making too much noise,’ said Chris.

  ‘What?’ The man blinked. The lack of uniform registered. Maybe the cut of Chris’s clothes too. ‘Fuck are you doing in my house, cunt? You looking for a fucking fight?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Another blink. ‘You fucking what?

  ‘Yeah. I’m looking for a fight.’

  For some reason, the answer seemed to stall the other man. Chris, who’d been worried about the baby, used the moment to take two neat steps sideways and give himself a clear field of fire. The other man gaped as if the executive in front of him had just done a pirouette. Chris cleared the Nemex and pointed the weapon in a single fluid move that he reckoned Louise Hewitt would have been proud of. The man gaped some more.

  ‘Never mind.’

  Bang

  Chris shot as low down the thigh as he trusted himself to hit. The target screamed and collapsed, clutching at his leg. Chris reversed his grip on the gun, stepped in close and clubbed the man hard, sideways across the head. He went down, eyes rolled up. The woman on the floor shrieked and scuttled backwards into a corner.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Chris said absently. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  ‘Chris!’

  Carla stood in the doorway, face ashen. Staring at him.

  ‘It’s okay, he’s not dead.’ Chris thought about it for a moment, then put the Nemex to the man’s knee, just below the first wound, and pulled the trigger. The man jerked with the impact, but didn’t come round. Carla and the other woman’s screams seemed to blend in the wake of the shot. The baby started wailing again. He looked across at the woman, whose left eye was rapidly swelling closed. Thought some more. He placed the Nemex muzzle on the man’s right elbow—

  ‘Chris -don’t.’

  —and pulled the trigger again.

  Carla jerked back as if it was her he’d shot.

  He put the Nemex away and crossed to where the woman was crouched in the corner. He took out his wallet and gave her about half of the cash he was carrying.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, pressing it into her hand. ‘Pay attention, listen. This is for you. Call him an ambulance if you like, but don’t let them take him in. They’ll try to. It’s what they’re paid to do, that’s how they make the big money. Don’t let them. They’ll dress the wounds here if you ask them to. It’s cheaper and it’s all he needs. He’s not in any danger. He won’t die. Do you understand?’

  She just stared at him.

  He sighed and folded her hand around the money. She flinched as he touched her. He sighed again and got up. Looked at the baby. The mess around him. He shook his head and turned away.

  They were all there now. Erik Nyquist, features tight with disgust. Carla, hugged in her father’s arms, face buried in his chest. Vasvik silent and impassive.

  ‘What?’ he asked them. ‘What?’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Landrover jolted over another pothole, hard and too fast. Coins and other dashboard detritus cascaded onto the floor. Chris swayed in the grip of his seatbelt. He glanced across at Carla.

  ‘You want to slow down a bit?’

  She looked back at him, then away. Said nothing. The Landrover bounced again. High beams splashed jerkily across the curve of the unlit street and a ravaged concrete structure that looked as if it might once have been the back end of an arena. Dead street lamps stood at intervals, most of them remarkably intact and upright.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Carla, this is the zones. You really want to have to stop and change a flat tyre around here?’

  She shrugged. ‘You’ve got a gun. I’m sure you can cripple anyone who gives us a hard time.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  They left the curving street and swung left past decayed low-rise housing and steel-shuttered frontages. The usual graffiti leered from the walls, incoherent tribal rage and abstract flashing that looked like stretched purple and white skulls. Carla stared ahead, tight-lipped. Chris felt his post-fight mellowness charring at the edges.

  ‘Hey, perhaps you’d rather he’d beaten her to death while we all sat there and listened to it. Good training for my future in the ombudsmen. Observe, take notes and never, never fucking intervene in anything.’

  No response.

  ‘Your father lives next door to that every fucking day of his life, Carla. And he does nothing. Worse than nothing. He just shakes his fucking head and writes his agonised social commentary and he feeds it to people who’ll never know the realities of the situations he describes, and they all shake their heads and do nothing. And next door, a thug goes on beating his wife to pulp.’

  ‘My father’s a man in his sixties. Did you see the size of that piece of shit?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s why I shot him.’

  ‘That’s no solution!’

  ‘I don’t know - it seemed to slow him down.’

  ‘And what about when he recovers, Chris? When he’s back on his feet and twice as angry as he ever was.’

  ‘You’re saying I should have killed him?’

  ‘This isn’t fucking funny!’

  Chris twisted round to face her. ‘No, you’re right Carla, it isn’t. It’s sick. You’re trying to get me, out of some twisted sense of moral outrage, to quit my job at Shorn and go work for men like Vasvik. And you saw how concerned he was back there. What a moral stand the fucking ombudsmen are prepared to take in the face of injustice.’

&nbs
p; ‘He wasn’t there for that, Chris.’

  ‘Neither was I, Carla. But I did something about it. Just like I’m going to do something in the NAME. Jesus, you think you can go through this life with your pristine ideals, taking notes and trusting some fuckwit UN judge to make everyone play nice. You think—‘

  The Landrover leaned abruptly on its suspension. The road swung away in the high beams, replaced by the cross-hatching of an empty parking area. An abandoned supermarket loomed up ahead, facades smashed in and boarded up in about equal measures. There seemed to be a white tubular metal reindeer riveted to the roof, face turned blankly to greet the shoppers in their cars. Vague, tangled debris that had once presumably been a sleigh trailed from the animal’s rear and spilled down the roof as far as the sagging gutters. For one bizarre moment, the image reversed for Chris and he saw an amorphous tentacled creature dragging the reindeer down to its death.

  Carla braked them to a halt in the middle of the car park.

  For a moment, they both sat staring out at the mall front. Then she turned to look at him.

  ‘What’s happened to you, Chris?’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh, Christ, Carla—‘

  ‘I.’ She gestured convulsively. ‘I don’t. Recognise you any more. I don’t know who you are any more. Who the fuck are you, Chris?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘No, I mean it. You’re angry all the time, furious all the time, and now you carry that gun around with you. When you started at Shorn, you told me about the guns, and you laughed about it. Do you remember that? You made fun of it. You made fun of the whole place, just like you used to at HM. Now you barely laugh at anything. I don’t know how to talk to you any more, I’m scared you’re going to just snap and start yelling at me.’

  ‘Keep on like this,’ he said grimly, ‘and guess what, I’ll probably snap and start yelling at you. And no doubt it’ll be my fucking fault again.’

  She flinched.

  ‘You want to know who I am, Carla?’ He was leaning across the Landrover towards her, in her face. ‘You really want to know? I’m your fucking meal ticket. Just like I always have been. Need new clothes? Need tickets to Norway? Need a handout for Daddy? Need to move out of the city and live somewhere nicer? Hey, that’s okay. Chris has got a good job, he’ll pay for it all. He doesn’t ask much, just keep the car clean and the odd blow job. It’s a fucking bargain, girl!’

  The words seemed to do something coming out. He felt tearing, somewhere indefinable. He felt dizzy, suddenly weak in the numb quiet that swallowed up what he’d said. He propped himself back away from her and sat waiting, not sure what for.

  The silence hummed.

  ‘Get out,’ she said.

  She hadn’t raised her voice. She didn’t look at him. She hit the central locking console and his door cracked open.

  ‘You’d better be sure about—‘

  ‘I warned you before, Chris. You called me a whore once. You don’t get to do it twice. Get out.’

  He looked out at the deserted parking area, the darkness beyond the Landrover’s lights. He smiled thinly.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not. Been coming to this for long enough.’

  He shouldered the door fully open and jumped down. The night air was warm and comfortable, edged with a slight breeze. It was easy enough to forget where you were. He checked he still had the Nemex in its holster, his wallet in the jacket pocket, still thick with cash.

  ‘See you then, Carla.’

  Her head jerked round suddenly. He met her eyes, saw what was in them and ignored it.

  ‘I’ll be at the office. Call me if the bills need paying, huh?’

  ‘Chris—‘

  He slammed the door on it.

  He strode away without looking back, aiming only to get beyond easy hailing distance. Behind him, he heard the Landrover put in gear and moving. He wondered briefly if she’d come after him at kerb-crawl speed across the car park, and what, in that ridiculous scenario, he would do. Then the high beams washed once over him and fled left, away across the white boxed acreage of the parking area. The engine lifted through the gears as she picked up speed.

  He felt a single stab of worry, that she might not be safe getting home on her own. He grimaced and slammed a door on that as well.

  Then she was gone. He turned, finally, to look, and was in time to catch the tail lights of the Landrover disappearing amidst the low-rise huddle of housing on the other side of the car park. A few moments later the engine noise faded into the vehicle-free stillness of night in the zones.

  He stood for a while, trying to get his bearings, geographical and emotional, but it was all utterly unfamiliar. There was nothing recognisable on the skyline in any direction. The supermarket faced him with its wrecked frontages, and he felt a sudden insane desire to lever loose some of the boarding, use the butt of the Nemex to do it, and slip inside, looking for—

  He shivered. The dream marched through his head in neon-lit pulses.

  sudden warm rain of blood

  falling

  He shook his head, hard. Turned his back on the facade. Then he picked an angle across the car park at random and started walking.

  Up on the roof, the tube metal reindeer watched him go through eyes empty of anything except the cool evening wind.

  Saturday night, Sunday morning. The cordoned zones.

  He’d expected trouble, had even, with some of the same twisted joy that had driven his actions at the Brundtland, been looking forward to it. The Nemex was a grab away beneath his jacket. His hands were Shotokan-toughened and itchy with the desire to do damage. Worst-case scenario, his mobile would get him a police escort out, should he really need it.

  Rather coldly, he knew he’d have to be literally fighting for his life before he’d make that call.

  Anything less, he’d never live it down.

  He’d expected trouble, but there was nothing worthy of the name.

  He walked for a while through anonymous, poorly-lit estates, emerging once or twice onto main thoroughfares to take his bearings from scarred and vandalised road signs and then plunging back in, heading what he estimated was east. TV light flickered and glowed in windows, game-show noise escaped through the cheap glazing. Occasionally figures moved within. Outside, he saw children perched on walls in the gloom, sharing cigarettes, two-litre plastic bottles and crudely homemade solvent pipes. The first set he ran across spotted the clothes and came jeering towards him. He drew the Nemex and met their eyes, and they backed off, muttering. He kept the gun where it could be seen after that, and the other groups just watched him pass with bleak calculation. Whispered invective slithered in his wake.

  Eventually, he came out onto a main road that looked as if it might run due east. Between the buildings on his left he thought he could make out the vaulted march of the M40 inrun converging from the north, which suggested he was somewhere near Ealing. Or Greenford, if he’d miscalculated how far out Carla had dumped him. Or Alperton. Or

  Or you’re lost, Chris.

  Fuck it, you don’t really know this part of town, so stop pretending you do. Just keep moving. Pretty soon the sun’s got to come up, and then you’ll damn well know if you ‘re heading east or not.

  Keep moving. It had to be better than thinking.

  He started to see signs of nightlife. Clubs and arcades at intervals along the street, in various stages of turnout. Junk food carry-outs, most of them little more than white-neon-blasted alcoves in the brickwork. The low-intensity stink of cheap meat and stale alcohol, laced once or twice with acid spikes of vomit. Little knots of people in the street, eating and drinking, shouting at each other. Turning to stare at him as he passed.

  It couldn’t be helped. He lengthened his stride, kept the Nemex lowered but clearly in view. Kept to the centre of the street.

  In theory, he could have tried to call a cab. He had landmarks now, identifiable club frontages and, if he was prepared to look hard enough in the gloom, street name plaq
ues. In practice, it was probably a waste of time. The companies his mobile knew numbers for mostly wouldn’t come more than a few hundred metres the wrong side of the cordons, especially at this time of night. And those few that would tended to follow an esoteric driver’s mythology on exactly which streets were safe to pick up from. Get the wrong configuration in this tarot of zone codes, and you could wait all night. Hearing a location they didn’t like -better yet hearing some idiot raving about the comer of Old Something Smudged street, some nameless club and a pink neon rabbit with tits and a top hat - individual drivers were going to chortle grimly, ignore the controller and shelve the fare. There just wasn’t enough zone custom to push things the other way. You went to the zones, you drove. Or you walked home.

  He caught eyes, made no attempt to look away. He remembered Mike’s demeanour on their previous expeditions to the zones, and aped it.

  Be who you are, and fuck ‘em if they don’t like it.

  The gun helped.

  No one wanted to push it any further than a curled lip. No one came close. No one said anything.

  Outside one of the clubs, two crack whores broke his run of luck. They registered the clothes and stumbled across the road towards him like kids wading into cold water on a shingle beach. Their bare legs worked as if badly jointed, their feet were wrenched on ludicrous stiletto heels. They wore push-up bras and black mesh microskirts cinched savagely tight. Their make-up was sweat-streaked and caked, and their eyes looked bruised half shut. One was skinnier than the other, but otherwise the pre-dawn whore’s makeover rendered them uniform, wiped difference away.

  They were all of fourteen years old.

  ‘You want to get sucked?’ asked the skinny one.

  ‘You got a place we can go?’ The other was clearly the brains of the outfit, the forward thinker.

  Chris shook his head. ‘Go home.’

  ‘Don’t be harsh, baby. Just want to do you good.’ The skinny girl amplified her sales pitch with a finger-licking display. She stuck the wet finger inside one cup of her barely necessary bra and rubbed it back and forth with a fixed little smile. Chris flinched.