His heart’s thumping as he opens the message. ‘sorry about your friend,’ it says. ‘but how you think I could help you?’
Raf writes: ‘Does glow have an organic precursor or not?’
This time the reply takes less than a minute to arrive. Fitch is still online. ‘meaningless question. any alkaloid can be made from laboratory chemicals without pestling shrubs. just an issue of whether the yield from known methods large enough to make it cost-effective. for glow, it ain’t.’
Raf: ‘Are Lacebark here because of glow? Why would they need to come all the way to London for that?’
Fitch: ‘maybe they heard about that big UKG night in Elephant & Castle next week.’
Raf: ‘If they’re looking for you, wouldn’t it be dangerous for you to talk to me? You don’t know who I am.’
Fitch: ‘doesn’t matter who you are!! even if you could make Lotophage turn over their IP records, I access the site through a proxy. I could be right behind you on the sofa typing this on a laptop. no way you could trace me.’
After Raf instinctively turns to look, he feels like an idiot. ‘Are you Burmese?’
Fitch: ‘why all these questions about glow? you buy drugs?’
Raf: ‘Sometimes. Why?’
Fitch: ‘the government say when you buy drugs you funding terrorism.’
Raf: ‘Was it you that sent me that video on Sunday? Are you Horologium Florae?’
For the next twenty minutes Raf sits there refreshing his Lotophage inbox and reading a long news story about a vet who nearly died after she induced vomiting in a dog that had eaten rat poison without knowing that the zinc phosphide in the rat poison had turned into phosphine gas upon contact with the water and hydrochloric acid in the dog’s stomach. But Fitch stays silent. Raf is excited, but when he looks back over the exchange, he realises Fitch didn’t say anything to confirm he’d ever even heard of Lacebark before Raf started asking questions. If you set aside that reference to Elephant and Castle, Fitch still might very well be a college student in Wisconsin.
He gets dressed, fills up Rose’s water bowl, and leaves the flat. The sky is a mess of sagging aeroplane contrails, and by this stage of the spring the street lamps come on long before the sun is down, hanging around awkwardly like guests early to a party. When he gets to the Burmese restaurant, it’s the same waiter as usual, but one of the Maneki Neko cats seems to have run away. Raf wasn’t actually planning to eat here but when he smells the food it occurs to him that he’s ravenous.
‘I’ll just have the same curry I had last time,’ he says after he’s been seated. ‘And sticky rice, and some of those stir-fried beans, and a beer. But I need to speak to Ko first.’
‘Ko cooking,’ says the waiter.
‘Just for a minute. Please.’
The waiter purses his lips. ‘OK.’
Raf gets up again and follows him around the counter to the kitchen. Ko is torturing something in a wok flame while a second chef is peeling a butternut squash faster than a normal person can shuck the foil off an Easter egg. The waiter says something in Burmese, and Ko looks up. ‘Yes?’
‘Can I talk to you?’ Raf says. ‘Outside?’
The second chef takes over the wok and Raf goes with Ko out to the alley at the back of the kitchen, a bit surprised that this didn’t take more persuasion. Empty drums of cooking oil are piled against the wall beside the wheelie bins and three canisters of butane lie around like circus animals inside a locked metal cage. Ko takes out a packet of cigarettes and lights one. ‘So?’ he says.
‘Last time I was here you said you could sell me some glow,’ Raf says. ‘I need to know where you’re getting it from.’
Ko blows out a smoke ring. ‘Want to see something?’
‘OK.’
After pausing to balance his cigarette on the edge of a wheelie bin, Ko takes something dark out of his pocket and holds it out at chest level. As Raf looks down to see what it is, his forearms are grabbed from behind, and Ko flips the black hood neatly over his head.
Before he has any idea what’s happening, Raf feels something tightening around his wrists, and he’s hauled sideways down the alley. He struggles as hard as he can, and shouts for help, but then his feet are off the ground, and four hands lower him on to the floor of what must be a van because he can feel the vibration of the idling engine through the rubber mat on which his cheek now comes to rest. The doors slam and the van drives off. They’ve got him.
The inside of the hood smells of damp socks, and the loop around Raf’s wrists feels as if it might be one of those cheap plastic zip ties with ratchets at the ends. He is fucking terrified. Sitting there already in his head is a proposition, one that has substantial mass but that he doesn’t yet know how to approach or interpret, like a non-Euclidean cadmium sculpture that just appears in your kitchen one morning, and the proposition is that he is going to die tonight. Ten days trying to find out what happened to Theo and now he’ll see for himself up close. Perhaps it took Lacebark a few hours to be absolutely sure that their facial-recognition system hadn’t registered a false positive after all, and by that time he’d left the training facility, so they had to snatch him at their next opportunity. Or perhaps it was his message to Fitch. ‘Lacebark killed my friend. I don’t know what they’re going to do next, but I want to stop them.’ He might as well have filled out an application form to get kidnapped and interrogated.
Isaac will take good care of Rose.
He can hear a scooter engine, and dance-hall burping from someone’s car stereo, so they must be out in traffic now, and he wonders if he can work out where they’re going by paying attention to the turns they make, but he decides there’s no way his vestibular gyroscope is sensitive enough. Then brusque hands are under his armpits again as he’s pulled into a different position — a more comfortable one, in fact, sitting up against the side of the van with his knees half bent.
‘Ko?’ he says.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ko says.
‘What do you mean, “don’t worry”?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Ko says again.
‘Ko, do you work for Lacebark?’
Ko doesn’t reply.
After ten minutes — or maybe five, or maybe fifteen — Raf feels the van pulling up to a kerb. As Ko helps him down out of the back, he can hear a dog barking, which is odd, because that means they must still be out in the open, whereas both the Lacebark warehouses he’s seen have sliding garage doors so that vans can drive inside, out of sight, before they unload. But then Ko prods him impatiently in the back, and he walks a few steps forward, nearly tripping on the threshold of what feels like a front door. Behind him, he hears the van drive off.
‘Stairs,’ warns Ko, and puts his hand on Raf’s shoulder to guide him. Awkwardly, Raf makes his way up three flights. On the first landing he can smell bacon frying, and he begins to consider the possibility that, for the second time in one day, he has entered what he expected to be a sterile Lacebark dungeon and has found himself instead inside a block of flats — except that, to judge by the creaking yield of the wooden stair treads under his feet, this block of flats seems to be genuine.
Ko knocks at a door and shouts something in Burmese. The door opens, and once Raf has shuffled through, Ko finally pulls the hood from his head.
The first thing Raf sees is Cherish standing there with her hand on the shoulder of an emaciated Burmese guy in a wheelchair.