He waves at the girl winding her watch. ‘Hey, is this any good?’ She shrugs. He turns it over to look at the blurb. ‘The most consequential contribution to postmodern critical theory since Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus,’ declares someone at Penn State University. He opens it at random but it looks like gibberish. So, instead, he sits down on the arm of the sofa with Isaac’s laptop to check his email, because he’s waiting for a contract extension from the Polish 3D modelling company, and he finds that it hasn’t arrived yet, but he does have a message from someone calling themselves ‘Horologium Florae’. The body of the message is empty apart from a link to a YouTube video which was posted last night and so far has only four views. Raf watches it twice and then calls Isaac over to watch it a third time.
There’s no audio track, and because the video is shot at night on a mobile phone camera it’s churning and cindery, but you can still recognise the grid of white blobs that trembles in the background as a five-storey council block with a fluorescent security light over every front door. Closer at hand, a van is parked beside one of those communal lawns that Raf has always found so pointless, and two men stand on the lawn dressed just like the Lacebark soldiers he saw on Wednesday near his flat, except that they both wear anti-pollution masks over their mouths and one of them has a small plastic tank strapped to his back with a hose leading from the bottom of the tank to a long nozzle. For a while he just walks back and forth to move the nozzle over different patches of grass, diligent as a stag beetle, presumably spraying a liquid that doesn’t show up on camera. The other man, who has no tank or nozzle, might be a lookout. Twice the whole screen goes black as the person with the mobile phone ducks out of sight behind a wall or maybe a car, but in all other respects it’s pretty boring to watch. Then, at seventy-two seconds, five foxes rip into view so fast they look like corrupted sectors in the video file. Raf has to pause it just to count them. And what happens after that is impossible to follow, a riffle shuffle of melty and almost abstract frames, but it ends with three foxes dead on the ground and both Lacebark men stumbling back towards the van, silenced pistols drawn, foreheads painted with blood, one clutching his leg and the other his throat.
‘Christ! Have you ever seen a fox attack like that?’ says Isaac.
‘No.’ To Raf there’s something especially creepy about silent amateur footage like this, when the camera becomes your own two lidless eyes forced up against a thick glass wall, so it’s all happening right there in front of you but you can’t hear and you can’t intervene and you can’t turn away.
‘I think foxes can get rabies, though.’
‘Yeah, but rabid foxes don’t run in packs.’
‘Normal foxes don’t either,’ says Raf. ‘I’ve never seen more than two at a time.’
‘We should send this to Animals Do the Funniest Things.’
‘What do you think the Lacebark guy is spraying?’
‘It’s got to be pesticide or herbicide.’
‘Lacebark didn’t come to London to do covert gardening. Except, oh, look up “Horologium Florae”.’
Isaac types and clicks. ‘ “The flower clock. .”?’ he reads. ‘?“Invention of the Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist Carl Linnaeus. . A garden plan that can tell the time of day using plants that open or close their flowers at particular times. . From Tragopogon pratensis, the meadow salsify, also known as Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon or showy goat’s-beard” — showy goat’s-beard, that is brilliant! — “which flowers at 3 a.m., to Hemerocallis lilio. .” — um, sorry — “lilioasphodelus, the lemon day lily, which flowers at nearly 9 p.m.” Anyway, Carl Linnaeus died in 1778. So I’m not sure how helpful this is.’ Isaac sniffs the air. ‘Dumplings!’ He rushes back to the kitchen.
Raf stays there on the sofa, a sudden darkness settling over him. He’s been delaying it since his conversation with Martin, but at some point tonight he has to tell Isaac that he’s almost sure Theo is dead.
Day 10
11.08 a.m.
The five old men in the corner look as if their game of cards has been going on for so long that even if they’ve been playing for penny stakes their total wins and losses could bring down the international banking system. Like copper on rooftops, the tattoos on their forearms have discoloured with age, in this case black to dark blue. Raf and Fourpetal are the only other customers in the café, which is no surprise — there’s almost nothing this side of the main road but warehouses and car parks and other null zones. The problem is, Raf does not find this a good place to sit by the window staking out the freight depot Martin told them about, because it’s so much the sort of café he’d normally come to with a hangover or a serotonin deficit that all the departments of his brain capable of concentrating on anything serious even for a second automatically shut down for maintenance as soon as he got through the door half an hour ago and smelled the eggs scrambling. Still, he’s doing his best.
The old depot, a long building of weathered brown brick, is tall enough for about two storeys, but Raf assumes it’s just one giant open space inside, and around it is a high fence topped with barbed wire and a lot of conspicuous security cameras. On the other side it rubs up against a stretch of railway viaduct that now only carries overground passenger trains but must once have been connected to some sidings here. So far, the most dramatic thing that has happened is that two white vans have driven inside and three white vans have driven out.
The waiter comes over and asks if they want anything else. He’s a startlingly pretty boy of nineteen or twenty with a black quiff and eyes so big and liquid that in his irises you can see the same subtle rainbows that swim in the film of grease on a puddle.
‘Another coffee,’ says Fourpetal.
‘What’s salep?’ says Raf, looking at the laminated menu.
‘Orchid tea,’ says the waiter. ‘It’s really sweet.’
‘Has it got any caffeine?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll have one of those.’
‘Are you Turkish?’ says Fourpetal.
‘We’re Serbian.’
As the waiter goes back to the counter, Raf passes Lacunosities to Fourpetal. ‘Apparently Lacebark are really into this book but I don’t understand how that can be.’
Fourpetal flips through it. ‘Well, the IDF read Tschumi on deconstruction. All the young generals are mad for this kind of thing now — supplementing their tactical manuals with postmodern conceptual schemes.’
‘We should read it to see if there are any clues about how Lacebark operate.’
‘Yes, perhaps one of us should, but why me?’
‘You went to university.’
Fourpetal harrumphs. At that moment a man in a black suit walks out of the depot’s side entrance and carries on past the gate. ‘Do you recognise him?’ says Raf.
‘I haven’t seen his cock yet, if that’s what you mean. But he could still be with Lacebark.’
Fourpetal throws down a tenner for the drinks and they hurry out of the café. It’s one of those May mornings when you can stand in the sun and it might already be summer but the slightest breeze will peel all the warmth from your skin. Hanging back at a cautious distance like they did with the Burmese DJs, they follow the man as he turns left at the self-storage facility on the corner. Doing this kind of thing with Fourpetal has started to feel surprisingly normal.