The two Burmese DJs. A balding guy who carries a sports bag. And Cherish.
Raf and Fourpetal both drop to a crouch. ‘Fuck! Fuck, that’s her!’ Raf whispers. ‘That’s Cherish!’ He wants to bring her a bunch of flowers. He wants to bring her a flower market.
‘Not bad at all,’ says Fourpetal in an appraisive tone.
Raf realises that their theory about Dickson and the ‘community programme’ must have been completely wrong, that somehow all these people are working together against Lacebark. They’re too far away to make out any conversation, but it’s obvious. He is about to shout to Cherish when Fourpetal adds, ‘So the two of you have only actually met a couple of times — that’s right, isn’t it?’
‘So?’
‘I only ask because, if it should happen that she and I. .’
‘What?’
‘Would you object?’
‘Are you saying, would I mind if you fucked her?’
‘It’s just a question.’
‘When would that ever happen?’
‘It’s just an eventuality.’
Before Raf can make any retort, he sees Cherish take two envelopes out of her bag and pass one to each of the Burmese men. When Raf was a child he used to find it unsettling to overhear his dad make work-related calls on the phone, and that’s what this is like: her demeanour here seems totally estranged from the demeanour of the girl he kissed. And it’s not as if he’s really any expert on body language, but when Fourpetal says, ‘What are we watching? Is this a drug deal?’ Raf shakes his head, because he does know the body language of drug deals, and this doesn’t look to him like a drug deal. In fact, if he had to guess, he’d say she’s handing over some sort of wage or stipend, like when he gets paid for walking the dog. Why would she be doing that? There is something wrong about this scene that hasn’t crystallised yet, and for reasons that aren’t quite conscious, he finds himself thinking back to Wednesday afternoon. Cherish with one foot on the wet tarmac and one foot in the back of the white van. Those two soldiers, each with a gloved hand on her.
The understanding hits him like two darts from a Taser. They weren’t dragging her inside.
They were helping her up.
Raf finds that the only way he can calmly process the knowledge that Cherish might be working for Lacebark is by pretending he’s talking it over with Isaac.
So if it seems so obvious now, Isaac would say, why didn’t you notice at the time?
Because Fourpetal made me afraid of the white vans, Raf would say. But why would they have been helping her into the van?
Chivalry?
No. They were in a hurry.
You’d doubled back to get your umbrella and they didn’t want you to see them.
But they were too slow, Raf would say. And then Cherish realised that there was an ambiguity in what I’d seen that she could exploit. She did a really good job of seeming shaken after I ‘rescued’ her.
So she wasn’t kidnapped from your bed after all.
But in that case, Raf would say, why did Rose insist that someone nasty had been through my front door? When could that have happened, if not that night?
When you were both at the restaurant. The meal was her suggestion, right?
Fuck, yes, and we didn’t leave until she got that text message!
She gave the Lacebark guys time to break into your flat like they broke into Fourpetal’s.
So Cherish was helping Lacebark to investigate me all along?
Well, what’s the alternative? Isaac would ask. That it was just a weird coincidence you ran into this girl again, right outside your flat, four days after the rave in the laundrette?
OK, yeah, that sounds stupid now. But I wanted to marry Cherish before I’d even talked to her. Wouldn’t it be another weird coincidence if the girl who was helping Lacebark to investigate me was also this beauty whom I developed a big crush on as soon as I saw her?
In your whole life, how many girls have you seen at raves that you’ve immediately developed a big crush on?
I don’t know, Raf would say.
Conservatively?
Ten to fifteen thousand. More if it weren’t for the MDMA drought.
So it’s statistically almost inevitable that at least one of them was going to turn out to be working undercover for an American mining company.
Fine, but I still don’t understand why Lacebark would want to investigate me in the first place. I’m nobody.
We were trying to find out what happened to Theo.
But we hadn’t got anywhere. We’d barely even tried. We were no threat to Lacebark. It doesn’t make sense. And I really thought Cherish liked me. .
That’s as far as Raf can get with imaginary Isaac. He feels as desolate as the tennis court. But now the four figures look as if their business is concluded.
‘What do we do?’ says Fourpetal.
‘Follow Cherish,’ suggests Raf.
But the problem is that she seems to be heading off towards the football pitches. If she cuts across diagonally in the approximate direction of the mobile phone mast, they won’t be able to follow her because they’d be right out in the open. They could hurry around the perimeter of the park where there’s some cover, racing two sides of the triangle against a hypotenuse, but that way Cherish could lose them at the other end without even trying.
The Burmese DJs, meanwhile, are just standing there rolling a spliff. Which leaves the guy with the sports bag, who now for the first time turns far enough in their direction that they can see his face. Fourpetal jerks his head. ‘Christ on a bloody cross, you have got to be joking.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Raf tells him. ‘What is it?’
The guy with the sports bag is going to take the same path between the street and the tennis court that they just took, in which case he’ll catch them if they don’t move on fast.
‘It’s him! It actually is.’
‘Who?’
A dragonfly lunges past. ‘I’ve seen that man’s cock,’ says Fourpetal.
‘We really have to get going,’ Raf tells him. Keeping low, they tunnel back through the wild grass, and then break into a sprint when they get to the path between the trees. There’s no hope now of circling back to follow Cherish. Instead, at the other end of the path, they look around for somewhere to hide. After they’ve crossed the road and dropped down panting behind the wall of the churchyard, Raf finally has the chance to ask, ‘What do you mean you’ve seen his cock?’
‘Just what I said. I don’t know him very well but I’ve seen his cock. A few months after I started at Lacebark, long before the email farrago, they put on a big staff Christmas party at a restaurant in Holborn. Afterwards a few of us carried on to a brothel. He was so drunk that at one point he came stumbling out of one of the rooms without his trousers on. He wasn’t in communications so I hadn’t met him before that night.’
‘Is he something to do with Lacebark security?’
‘If he is, he lied about it. I don’t remember exactly what he said he did but I do remember it sounded tedious. Something to do with lithium? And he might have mentioned Pakistan. Not Burma, though.’
The guy whose cock Fourpetal has seen now emerges from between the detached houses and turns left up the rise in the direction of Herne Hill, so Raf and Fourpetal follow him like they followed the Burmese men and Raf explains what he now knows about Cherish.
‘Well, it’s very touching that it’s taken you this long to realise that you can never trust women,’ says Fourpetal when he’s finished.
Raf thinks about his ex-girlfriend and the Brazilian techno DJ. ‘I think I’ve just had bad luck recently.’
After about fifteen minutes’ pursuit they come to a builders’ merchant with a big yard at the front full of pallets of flesh-coloured bricks wrapped in a thick plastic that makes them look to Raf like stacks of human biceps. Beyond that, past a steel fence, there’s a warehouse almost identical to the one that Isaac showed Raf last weekend, and when the guy they’re following goes inside, he remembers that bloodstain he saw on the concrete floor. ‘This must be a Lacebark building,’ he says as they wait half hidden behind a bus shelter. ‘Maybe they have them all over London. Fuck, I wonder what goes on in there.’