‘You’ve got twenty-four hours.’
Lambert rose out of his chair and walked over to the video. At the same moment, one of the men on the sofa took out a pearl-handled penknife, opened the blade and started carving something into the surface of Barker’s coffee table.
‘Zero, isn’t it,’ Lambert said, ‘for videos?’
‘Not on that machine,’ Barker said. ‘It’s eight on that machine.’
‘Old, is it?’
Barker nodded.
‘You ought to modernise,’ Lambert said, ‘update yourself.’
He pushed the cassette into the slot, then picked up the video remote. When he was sitting on his chair again, he held it out in front of him and pressed 8. The man who wasn’t carving the table loosened his coat and leaned his head back, his eyes fixed on the TV.
The screen flickered, flared white, then a room appeared. Yellow-and-orange-striped paper on the walls. No carpet, just bare boards. Half of a window visible. There seemed to be a council estate outside; Barker could just make out a block of flats, some dusty trees. Sitting on the floor, with both hands chained to a radiator, was a man of about forty. Black side-whiskers, a squashy nose. He reminded Barker of one of the men who worked in the salvage yard on Tower Bridge Road. The sound quality was poor, but Barker could still hear the man’s voice. Pleading.
‘… there’s no need for this … no fucking need …’
Probably it was not for him to say.
A second man stepped into the picture. He was dressed in jeans and a grey sweatshirt, and he wore a visor over his face, the kind of visor welders wear. Barker heard a sudden roaring sound, controlled but fierce. At first he couldn’t make any sense of it. Then he saw the man’s hand holding a blowtorch, the cone of hot blue flame.
‘Funny thing is, his name’s Burns,’ Lambert said. ‘He’s from —’ He paused and looked across at the man who was carving Barker’s table. ‘Where’s he from?’
‘Aberdeen,’ the man said without looking up.
Barker watched Burns adjust the flame until it was small and sharp. The roar it was making had intensified. The man chained to the radiator was shaking his head from side to side like a dog with a jersey. He was still talking, but it didn’t sound like language any more. And now Burns leaned down, aiming the tip of the flame at the man’s right hand. The skin seemed to shrink. Then it blackened and began to bubble. The man was screaming, his face twisting away from the camera. A vein stood out on his neck, thick as a middle finger. Barker thought of Bruce Springsteen. He was all right, Bruce Springsteen. That song about it being dark on the edge of town, that was a good song. Sometimes, as the man screamed, he ran out of breath. His mouth still hung open, though. Drool spilling from the corners, spilling down his chin.
‘He used to be a snooker player,’ Lambert said. ‘Quite good, he was. Quite well known.’ He spoke to the man with the penknife again. ‘Beat Hurricane Higgins once, didn’t he?’
The man nodded. Then, bending low, he blew some loose wood shavings off the table. So far he had completed three characters: a 2, a 4 and an H.
In the video the Scotsman was facing the camera, asking what he was supposed to do next. Should he do an eye, for instance? Barker didn’t hear the answer.
Two hands reached into the picture and began to undo the man’s trousers. The man was shouting in a high-pitched voice that no longer seemed to belong to him. Somebody was explaining that this wasn’t torture, it was punishment, and that, because it was punishment, there was no way round it. It had to be gone through, had to be endured. Barker had the feeling that it was Lambert who was doing the talking. The voice had the same anonymous sound to it, the same instantly forgettable quality. By now, the man’s trousers and underpants had been removed. His T-shirt was pulled up into his armpits, revealing a pot belly and a thin dark trail of hair. The camera closed in slowly until the man’s head filled the screen.
‘We thought it might be a bit unpleasant to show the whole thing in detail,’ Lambert explained. ‘A bit,’ and he paused, ‘gratuitous.’
The man’s agony was such that his face seemed to have changed shape. Once, he passed out, his chin sinking down on to his chest. He was still chained to the radiator. One hand burned black, a tendon showing …
Then, suddenly, they were looking at a man with a bushy seventies hairstyle. He was standing in an office with his trousers round his ankles. A girl with no top on was kneeling in front of him. He was holding his dick in his right hand and she was licking it. ‘Yes,’ she was saying when she could get a word in, ‘oh yes. Give it to me. Yes.’
Lambert stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We must have used an old tape.’ He pressed STOP and switched off the TV. Walking over to the video, he bent down and pressed EJECT. The tape slid out.
‘Did you kill him?’ Barker wanted to know.
‘Oh no.’ Lambert seemed put out by the idea, almost offended. ‘He won’t be fucking anyone in a hurry, though.’ He fitted the tape back into its case and closed the lid. ‘He won’t be playing snooker either.’
Barker watched as the two men rose from the sofa and filed out of the room. He heard the front door open. Lambert tucked the tape into his coat pocket.
‘This time tomorrow,’ he said.
Twenty minutes later Barker carried his coffee table down the stairs and out on to the pavement. The rain was still falling steadily. The street shiny, empty.
He walked to the corner and threw the table into a skip. He knew it wouldn’t be long before it caught somebody’s eye. It wouldn’t be long before they noticed the carved inscription either. 24 HRS. He wondered what they’d make of it.
19 Hrs
It was four in the morning before the rain slowed down. Barker lay on his back with his head turned towards the window. Light from the streetlamp slanted across the top half of the bed, across his hands. He had dreamed about Jill, who was also, somehow, the girl in the photograph. He had seen her on the video entryphone, on that grainy screen, night lapping at the edges of her face. Her skin so white, there could have been a lightbulb glowing behind the thin shade of her skull. She spoke to him — or, rather, her mouth moved — but her voice was lost in a storm of interference. He rolled on to his side, his eyes still open. His weights glinted in the corner of the room. The carpet looked dark-grey.
He had lied to Lambert, of course. In all sorts of ways. Since first setting eyes on Glade Spencer in the tube station, he’d had countless opportunities to do what had been asked of him; if he’d done nothing, he could only think it was because he was waiting for his own version of the instructions to reveal itself. Almost a week ago, for instance, on Tuesday, he had sat behind her on the top deck of the night bus. It was one-thirty in the morning and she was on her way home from the restaurant where she worked. There had been a moment when she took hold of her hair in both hands and dropped it behind her shoulders. In one gleaming torrent it splashed over the chrome rail that ran along the back of the seat and hung in the air in front of him, just inches from his knees. As the bus swung round a corner, he reached out to steady himself and a few strands brushed the back of his right hand. He had touched her, and she hadn’t even noticed. He had come that close. But still he had done nothing.
On Thursday he had followed her to a party in Covent Garden. From where he was standing, in the doorway of the building opposite, he could hear the music — the bass notes, anyway. He stared up at the open windows, then at the sky beyond. Stars showed like moth-holes in the darkness. Once or twice a half-smoked cigarette came somersaulting down into the street. He stood in that doorway until his knees and hip-bones ached. At last she stepped on to the pavement with two other girls. A kind of damage. She kissed them both and waved, then walked off in the opposite direction, westwards, into Soho. She was wearing a mini-dress. At first Barker thought it was silver, but when he drew closer he realised that it was made from bits of mirror-glass. It reflected a shattered version of everything around her. She waited at a set of traffic-lights and he watched her change from green to red. Later, on Bayswater Road, she stopped in front of a hotel’s neon sign, spinning slowly, drunkenly, in the orange light. She seemed to be admiring the effect. Once, a man shouted at her from the window of his car. In the shadows Barker tensed — but Glade didn’t seem to notice. She had a curiously absent quality, which gave her the appearance of being alone, even when she was standing on a busy street; it should have made his job easier — after all, he only had to take that absence to its logical conclusion — and yet she existed in a place so much her own that he could find no way of approaching her. Though he had touched her, she remained untouchable. Still, if there was any trouble, he was ready to step in. He would be the stranger who just happened to be passing. When she turned to thank him, he’d be gone.