On the wall immediately behind the blood spatter there was an area of damage, a roughly circular area, just below Tillman’s head height, where something had smashed into the plaster hard enough to leave an impact crater. Someone’s fist, or the back of someone’s head.
Now that he could see how narrow and restricted a space this was, he marvelled all over again at the skill the unknown girl had shown. To take down two armed opponents, when one of them is already pointing a gun at you … that’s something of a challenge even when you’ve got all the free space you could wish for. In this small bedroom, where the battlefield included the splayed body of the woman she’d come to rescue, it was only a hair’s breadth short of a miracle.
But she had one advantage over them. She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Something brightly coloured caught Tillman’s gaze, tucked right up under the bed where it would have been invisible from most angles. He knelt and retrieved it. It was a torn corner of glossy paper, showing part of a photograph, the curve of a woman’s breast and part of her shoulder.
Not just helplessness. Her disguise had gone further than that. Knowing she was dealing with — what? Ascetics? Misogynists? Religious zealots? All of the above seemed to fit the bill — she’d armoured herself in unrighteousness and carried her Taser into the room behind the makeshift screen of a pornographic magazine.
So where had she gotten it? Tillman looked around, found the rest of the skin-mag where it had fallen or been thrown behind a chest of drawers. Bush League. Hot amazon action. Mandy and Celeste get dirty with toys — and boys! There was no price sticker, nothing to provide a clue as to the magazine’s origin.
He backtracked into the hall, flicking the flashlight around the floor. After a few moments he found a wrinkled skein of torn shrink-wrap. At one corner was a green label, smearily printed with the words US hardcore: only £3.99.
Paydirt. So to speak. This was a local product, snatched up to meet the needs of the occasion.
Tillman found the shop around the corner in Fynes Street. It called itself a newsagents, confectioner’s and tobacconist’s, but it was also a general store in a half-hearted way, boasting a single shelf unit stacked with tins of baked beans, Green Giant sweetcorn, Vesta curry sauces, digestive biscuits and bottles of washing-up liquid old enough to have wept fluorescent green tears a third of the way down their plastic sides. One wall, behind the counter, was stacked high with cigarettes. The wall opposite was a magazine rack, whose top two shelves were a cornucopia of T&A. A closed-circuit camera on a jointed steel arm leaned down from the ceiling at a crazy angle. The angle was because the housing was loose and the supposedly tamper-proof unit had slid halfway out of it — but it looked as though the camera was in the grip of a voyeuristic impulse, coming in close to ogle the porn.
Between the cigarettes and the magazines sat a bored, flabby man with thick glasses and a pock-scarred, glassy-eyed face. He was slumped in on himself as though he was cowering away from his own cash register. Then Tillman realised that both the man’s expression and his posture had the same explanation. He was watching a tiny portable TV, an antique model shaped like a rectangular telescope. The TV spoke in waves of murmured static, but presumably there were words or music of some kind underneath.
‘You sell this?’ Tillman asked the man. He held up the magazine and the man leaned forward to peer at it. He kept looking for a lot longer than seemed necessary, first taking in the cover image and then — judging by the movements of his eyes — reading not just the title but also the rest of the copy.
‘Could be,’ he said at last. ‘We sell a lot of ’em.’
‘Mostly to men, though,’ Tillman said. ‘Right?’
The man switched his gaze from the passionately entwined amazons to Tillman’s face.
‘Of course to men,’ he said. ‘I don’t sell to kids, do I? Are you from the council?’
‘No, I’m not. Were you working here last night?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Until midnight?’
‘We’re open all hours. It says so on the sign.’
‘Well, last night you sold this to a woman. A young woman.’
The man blinked and his Adam’s apple bobbed a little. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Her. All right, yeah. I remember now.’
‘What do you remember?’ Tillman asked.
‘Sour-faced little madam, wasn’t she.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I tried to have a bit of a laugh with her. I can’t remember what I said, but something harmless, you know. Something a bit light-hearted. And she give me a look like I was something under her shoe.’
‘Kids of today, eh?’ Tillman said, stony-faced. ‘So does that thing work?’ he nodded up towards the camera, and the shopkeeper followed his gaze.
‘Yeah, it works.’
‘And it was working last night?’
‘It’s on all the time. It’s on a loop.’
‘I’d like to take a look at the tape.’
The man looked scandalised. ‘I can’t do that. My customers value their privacy.’
‘Is that why they buy their porn in a sweet shop? What if I told you she was underage?’
A flicker of uncertainty crossed the man’s face, but he rallied quickly. ‘I asked her to show ID,’ he said. ‘It looked good enough to me.’
‘And that’s on the tape too, is it?’ Tillman asked.
‘It … I … yes … I think, that might have been on another occasion, when she …’ the man floundered, looking for a safe haven to sail his white lie into.
‘I’m not from the council,’ Tillman said. ‘And I don’t care what you sold her. I’m just her social worker and I want to make sure it was actually her. Show me the tape, I’m on my way.’
‘It’s digital,’ the man said. ‘On a disc. I don’t understand it myself. I’ll have to get our Kevin.’
Tillman nodded. ‘Good call,’ he said.
The screen on the portable TV was about three inches square and the picture was every bit as good as the sound. It offered a glimpse into a fragile, beleaguered world, canted slightly off the true and periodically overwhelmed by waves of interference like pixellated blizzards.
The slight, speechless teenager who answered — or more usually failed to answer — to ‘our Kevin’ messed with the controls on the TV, the playback machine, the TV again. The picture swam into and out of focus, but after a while it was obvious that sharpening it up any further would just add more contrast rather than more detail. They fast-forwarded through the previous day’s footage, telescoping twelve hours of lived time into a couple of minutes of jerky stop-motion. The man with the bottle-glass spectacles seemed to have been on duty for the whole of that time, apart from a couple of toilet breaks lasting four or five frames each, during which his part was played by our Kevin.
‘There,’ the man said at last, jabbing his stubby index finger at the screen.
Kevin froze the image, but he froze it between frames, so that the girl danced in and out of the shop’s entrance, her foot over the threshold, then back, then over it again. The boy swore to himself a little, pressing PLAY and PAUSE alternately until the image stabilised.
But the resolution was so bad that freezing the picture just removed one layer of information. Tillman reached past Kevin and hit PLAY again, watching the whole short sequence through from start to finish. You could tell more about the girl while she was in motion. There was a care and an economy in her movements, the tightness of a coiled spring, or of a dancer waiting for her cue.
He rewound to the beginning, watched again as the girl entered the shop, picked up the magazine — after a quick, detached scan of the top shelf — and presented it to the man at the counter.