The motorway slid past. They were in Wiltshire now. The video had started, but Barker didn’t even glance at it. Instead, he watched Steve Scully falling, though it wasn’t something he had ever seen. A widening of the space between the eyes. A spreading of the hands, as if for balance. Had Scully realised what was happening? Probably not. He’d been too drunk. The stupid sod hadn’t even known he was about to die. You stupid sod. That’s what Barker thought as he stared down into the yard that night. Then he went inside and called an ambulance.
‘Sandwich, sir?’
Barker blinked. There was a girl standing over him with a paper boat on her head. She had appeared from nowhere, like a magician’s trick. He realised he must have been dozing.
‘What was that?’ he murmured.
‘Would you like a sandwich?’
She was holding a red-and-white-striped cardboard tray and everything on it had been tightly wrapped in cellophane. You didn’t want to touch anything in case you gave it a disease. He sat up slowly, rubbed his eyes.
‘Beer,’ he said. ‘You got a beer?’
In the end the police had to release him. They realised they weren’t going to get anywhere, not unless they beat a false confession out of him. While he was being questioned he noticed that they kept forgetting the name of the deceased. They kept calling him Kelly. They didn’t care about Steve Scully any more than Barker did, but there were forms to be filled in, procedures that had to be observed. Once they had settled on death by misadventure, though, they had no further use for him.
Then the Scullys started.
First it was the bathroom window. An accident, apparently. Some kid with a ball. Barker had the window mended. But when he came home from work three nights later, the window was broken again.
‘Twice in one week,’ said his neighbour, a jittery man in his fifties who lived alone. ‘That’s bad luck, that is. That’s terrible bad luck.’
They both knew luck had nothing to do with it. The old man was frightened, though. Two of the Scully brothers had been linked to what the paper called ‘incidents involving violence and intimidation’, not just locally, but in the south-east too, in places as far away as London, Brighton and Oxford.
During the next month lit cigarettes were pushed through Barker’s letter-box while he was sleeping. If he had bought rugs for the floor, as Jill had wanted, the flat would probably have gone up in flames — and there was no fire-escape. He would have burned to a crisp, the way Les Minty did (though Les only had himself to blame, smoking in bed like that; firemen axed his front door down in the middle of the night, brought him out rolled up in his own hall carpet, already dead). Instead, Barker woke to find half a dozen shallow holes in the lino where it had melted. And, lying by the holes, the speckled, pale-brown butts. Embassy, Regal, Number 6. Scully brands.
Whenever Barker left the building, they would be standing on the concrete pathways, or under the thin starved trees that grew in the shadow of the tower-blocks. They were always there, in numbers, their skin the colour of marzipan in the watery sunshine, their eyes pinned all over him, like badges. They made sure he saw them, no mourning in those numb heads of theirs, just guilt, his guilt, you did it, you killed our Steve. That summer Barker had a job bouncing at a club on Union Street. Most of the time he was paired with Raymond Peacock. Ray wore wraparound sunglasses at night and never went anywhere without his mobile phone. Once, Barker saw Ray walking down Western Approach. A busy road, Western Approach: traffic-jams, pneumatic drills. ‘I can’t hear you, mate,’ Ray was shouting into his phone. ‘I can’t hear you.’ Prat. Still, they worked well enough together. He wasn’t big, Ray, but he had studied martial arts. He could coil himself into a spring and, next thing you knew, the bloke who’d been calling him a cunt was lying flat on his back ten feet away, limbs moving slowly, like a fly that’s just been swatted. Ray would straighten his collar, then take his mobile out and make another call. Three numbers this time. Ambulance. When Barker told Ray about the Scullys, Ray wanted to know where they lived. He’d torch the place, he said. Personal favour. As bouncers, they might have had an understanding, but Barker had never trusted Ray. Ray wasn’t somebody who took sides, Ray sat on the fence and waited for the most exciting offer. In this case, the excuse to burn a building. He wouldn’t be doing it for Barker, whatever he said. He’d be doing it for himself. Because he wanted to. Barker told Ray he wasn’t needed. He had to persuade Ray he could handle people like the Scullys on his own. ‘Sure, Barker.’ Ray backed away with the raised hands of a man surrendering. ‘If that’s the way you want to play it.’
One evening not long afterwards Barker walked in through the front door and saw Jill sitting on the floor in the lounge, her clothes ripped, scratches on her neck.
‘The Scullys,’ he said, half to himself.
She sat with her head bent and her legs folded under her, and her shoulders shook in what was left of her favourite silk blouse. One bra-strap showed, pale-green, making her seem fragile, breakable.
‘It was the Scullys,’ he said, ‘wasn’t it.’
She wouldn’t answer.
He moved to the window and stared out. Areas of concrete, areas of grass. You couldn’t imagine anything had been there before the tower-blocks. You couldn’t imagine all the trees. He had been reading about it in a book he had borrowed from the library. How England used to be. Just trees for miles. He turned back into the room, looked down at Jill. Her shoulderblades still shaking, her black hair drawn across her face.
The next day he found someone who had seen the whole thing. It was the Scully women who had done it. They’d set on Jill in the yard behind the building, four or five of them, like witches. Shouting bitch at her and whore and tart. And nobody helped, of course. Nobody ever does.
‘I’ll sort it out,’ he muttered.
But he could tell by the sound of his voice that he would do nothing of the kind. His anger had deserted him.
At night he felt the bed tremble slightly, as if a train was passing four floors down. He realised that Jill was crying. He faced away from her, pretending to be asleep. He focused on the gap between the curtains, which was wider at the bottom than the top. He stared at the gap until it became a long straight road that crossed dark countryside, disappearing into a distance that seemed untroubled, inviting. During the day he stayed indoors. He watched TV for hours, the volume turned up loud, but all he could hear was the steady buzz of current pouring from the wall. One afternoon, while he was shaving, he noticed a new line on his face. It was deep but fine, like the cut from a razor or a blade of grass. It slanted from his left temple towards the bridge of his nose, then vanished half an inch above his eyebrow, fading abruptly, the way a river fades on a map. Time was spilling through his fingers. How could he stop that happening? In the evening Jill moved around behind him, a ghostly presence at the edge of his vision. Because she was trying to be quiet, she often knocked things over. They no longer talked; they were like two people who had become invisible to one another. Outside, the weather sulked, even though it was June. Clouds filled the sky. Chill air blew through the broken bathroom window, smelling of bacon-rinds and gravy.