But what if it wasn’t as simple as that, Lamb wanted to know? (Important corollary: Lamb didn’t want to know—Lamb couldn’t care less. Lamb had just hit on another way of wasting a slow horse’s time.) What if these torch-happy kids weren’t just lighting up their stolen rides; what if they were experimenting with ways of blowing cars up—calculating blast radiuses; measuring the potential damage varying payloads could deliver? So here was Marcus, whose role in life had been kicking down doors, retooling himself as an analyst; staring at a screen which broke down five years’ worth of vehicular arson by make, location, accelerant used, and a dozen other variables . . . There was always the possibility Lamb had a point—anyone who found the notion too high-concept just had to turn the TV on, and watch footage of the onesie-clad forensics crew picking through Westacres’ ashes. But either way, this wasn’t the part of the process Marcus should have been involved in. He should be the one they called when they had a suspect holed up in a towerblock with hostages. The one they decked out in Kevlar and dropped down a chimney: Merry Christmas, assholes.
Control, alt, delete.
The radiator gurgled noisily, interrupting his chain of thought, but at least it meant heat was moving around the building, which meant someone was paying bills. Marcus wasn’t. Marcus was accumulating a drawerful of red letters: final demands for electricity and gas. Cassie was talking about taking the kids, going to her mother’s “for a bit,” and that was even without knowing about the unpaid bills—her repossessed car had been the final straw.
“You said you’d got it under control.”
His gambling, she meant.
“You said you’d drawn a line, walked away. No more money down the drain. You promised, Marcus.”
And he’d meant it, too, but how did you stop money disappearing once it had decided to go? It was even less responsive to persuasion than Cassie.
He thought: I’ve turned into one of those men worth more dead than alive. More of us than you’d think. It’s not just the Jihadi Johns out there in the scrublands, living off camel meat and sleeping in holes but with a million-dollar price tag on their heads: it’s the rest of us too. Us poor working saps in debt to our eyeballs, a never-ending mortgage, and bills papering the walls; barely enough spare cash for a cup of coffee, but shouldering game-changing amounts of life insurance. I could keel over right here right now, and the death-in-service payout would solve all my problems. The house would be free and clear; money left over to see the kids through university. Best thing all round, except for being dead. But that’s going to happen sooner or later, so why not here at my desk? . . . He should raise that as a joke with Cassie, except she might not laugh. And no amount of Kevlar offered protection from a woman’s disappointment.
The slamming of a keyboard roused him from his reverie. Shirley was having hardware issues, and resolving them in her traditional manner.
“. . . You got an AFM later?” he asked.
“Who needs to know?” she snarled.
“Nobody at all,” said Marcus, and tapped at his own keyboard randomly for a moment, as if by altering the rows of figures on his screen, he might also change the facts he was confronted with: not simply the half-a-decade’s worth of destroyed cars, but his own dwindling net worth; the sums snapping at his heels growing ever larger, ever more vicious, and his ability to outpace them weakening by the day.
If he was going to walk to the village he’d need his wellingtons. Yesterday, he’d had to return home before he’d got fifty yards—a soft-shoe shuffle back down the drive; slippers jettisoned into the bin, soaked and useless. Well, a moment of absent-mindedness, and there’d been no witnesses. This was one of the advantages of living in semi-isolation, though you could never be certain there were no stoats watching.
“Know what I mean by stoats?”
River rarely forgot anything. David Cartwright had taught him well.
“You see a stoat, you pretend you haven’t,” River said.
“Except you never see a stoat.”
“You never see them,” River agreed. “But you know they’re there.”
Because the signs they left were legion. The bent grasses where they’d knelt; the lopped-off branch that had obscured their view. Cigarette ends in a tidy heap. Don’t have the boy picking up old fag ends, Rose had scolded. But it was best the boy was taught to be on his guard, because once the stoats had you in their sights it was the devil’s own job shaking them off.
A good morning for training, then. Besides, all boys like splashing in puddles so—one welly on; the other angled for entry—he bellowed for River to come join him for a walk. But even as his words went crashing through the empty house, he noticed their falsity: that was not the voice he’d had when River had been a boy. And River’s boyhood was over; the days of teaching him about stoats and bogeymen, the myths and legends of Spook Street, had been gone longer than Rose . . .
David Cartwright shook his head. An old man’s fancy—a memory rising to the surface, like a bubble from a frog. He lowered his foot into the second welly, chuckling. The boy ever learned he had these moments of inattention, he’d never hear the end of it. Besides, stoats weren’t what they used to be. These days they used drones and satellite imagery; they planted tiny cameras in your house. Your every movement charted.
Wellington on, he stood up straight. Little bit of exercise, that was the ticket. It was true, there’d been times lately when he’d worried he’d come adrift. He’d doze off of an afternoon, forgivable lapse in an old codger, and come to in a panic: the fire seething in the grate, lamplight softly glowing; everything as it ought to be, but still that knocking in his chest: what had happened while he’d slept? Walls had been known to fall. Things had emerged from under bridges. It was a relief when the world he woke to was the same as the one he’d left.
But that wasn’t always the case, was it? Sometimes the world did shift on its axis. Just two days ago, there’d been a suicide bomber in a British shopping centre—what did they call it? A flash mob . . . The blackest of black jokes; a flash mob ignited, and all those young lives destroyed. For a moment, standing by his own front door, David Cartwright felt it as a personal loss, something he could have prevented. And then that loss shifted shape, and Rose was telling him to be sure to wear his Barbour, not that dreadful old raincoat. And to carry his umbrella, just in case.
Keys in pocket. Wellingtons on feet. What was it he’d been thinking about, some dreadful thing or other? It slid past him like smoke, nothing he could get a grip on. Tucking himself into his raincoat—the Barbour made him feel he was pretending to be country folk—and leaving his umbrella hanging like a bat on its hook, he let himself out the door.
In the office above Marcus and Shirley’s heads, other fingers tapped away: their movements fluid, the keyboard imaginary, the notes they followed apparently random but always searching for the melody beneath; a tune that would echo, build and repeat itself for thirty minutes or so, its themes at first withheld, sometimes stumbling, but ultimately laid bare. And while this happened, nothing else did. That was its lure for Jason Kevin Coe; the clean white page it opened in his mind, temporarily erasing the nightmares scribbled there.