‘Shit,’ said Wally, ‘he’s brought fucking Bram with him. And where’s Pez?’
‘Nils!’ said Montgomery as the tall man reached the table. ‘How’s things?’
‘Good to see you, Seb,’ said Nils, smiling as he shook Montgomery’s hand. He had a very slight accent, and Strike, remembering that the owner of North Grove Art Collective was Dutch, guessed he was looking at him. ‘And you, Wally. Hey, Tim!’ he continued as the tall, balding young man re-emerged from the pub carrying three pints.
‘Nils, hi,’ said Tim, setting down the drinks and shaking hands. ‘Hi Bram.’
The boy ignored Tim.
‘Wally?’ he said in a high treble voice, looking excited. ‘Wally?’
‘What?’ said Wally.
‘Play the game, bwah!’
‘Yeah,’ said Wally, with a forced laugh. ‘Very good.’
‘I watch you on YouTube!’
‘Yeah?’ said Wally, without enthusiasm. He turned to Nils. ‘Pez not coming?’
‘No, he had something to do,’ said Nils. ‘Or someone,’ he added. Wally and Seb laughed, but Tim remained po-faced.
Barclay returned with zero-alcohol beer for himself and Strike. The two detectives now made intermittent, mumbled small talk as they continued to listen to the far louder conversation of the group they were observing. Seb’s mobile lay on the table beside his beer, whereas the others’ phones were out of sight. Strike was keeping an eye on Anomie’s Twitter feed, which was still inactive. When Nils went to fetch drinks for himself, Bram remained behind, constantly squealing Drek catchphrases, impervious to Wally’s increasingly obvious irritation.
‘Drek is lonelik and borkled! You is all smugliks! Play the game, bwah!’
‘He loves Drek,’ said Nils unnecessarily on arrival back at the table, handing Bram a Coke before folding his gigantic legs beneath the table. ‘So… I think we should toast, yes? To Edie – and to Josh’s recovery.’
None of the three younger men appeared to have expected a toast. Indeed, the balding Tim blushed, as though somebody had said something unspeakably offensive. However, all three drank, before Montgomery said:
‘How’s Josh doing, Nils, have you heard?’
‘Yeah, I spoke to Katya last night. She sends all of you her love. She was in tears. So, he’s paralysed all down the left side’ – Nils demonstrated on his own body – ‘and has no sensation on his right. The spinal cord isn’t severed, but seriously damaged. It’s got a name, his condition. A syndrome.’
‘Shit,’ said Montgomery.
‘Bloody awful,’ said Tim.
‘But there’s a chance it will improve,’ continued Nils. ‘Katya says there’s a chance.’
Nils’s son, who’d remained seated only long enough to down his Coke in one, stood up again, looking around for something to do. He saw a pigeon pecking at a few crumbs of crisps on a free table and ran at it, arms windmilling. Once it had flown away, Bram spotted the Cavalier King Charles spaniel asleep under the table and strode boldly over to the owners.
‘Can I stroke your dog?’ he asked loudly.
‘I’m afraid he’s asleep,’ said the elderly female owner, but Bram ignored her. He fell to his knees and began fussing at the dog, which woke with a start, growled and snapped. A minor commotion ensued, in which the elderly couple, doubtless afraid their dog would be blamed for taking a chunk out of the boy, tried to restrain it while attempting to persuade Bram to leave it alone, a feat that proved beyond their power. Nils sat enjoying his beer, apparently as oblivious to the commotion behind him as Bram had been to Wally’s displeasure at his non-stop Drek impressions. The four men were still talking but Strike and Barclay couldn’t hear what they were saying, because the elderly couple, who’d decided to leave, were making a lot of noise about it. The barking dog was now held tightly in the husband’s arms; Bram, who was as tall as the old man, kept trying to stroke it even while the old man kept turning to and fro, and all the while the elderly woman kept repeating, ‘No, dear, please don’t. Please don ’t, dear.’
When finally the dog-owners had left, the grinning Bram returned to the table and said ‘Smugliks is gone’ to Wally, who ignored him. Seb was talking in a low voice; the other three men’s attention was fixed on him and Strike could only just make out what was being said.
‘… at work,’ he said. ‘So I called them back, obviously, and I said I was happy to help and all that, you know, but I’d rather not do it at the office. So, yeah, they said that was OK and they came round the flat Saturday morning.’
‘How long did they talk to you for?’ asked Tim.
‘’Bout an hour.’
‘Can I have something to eat? Nils?… Nils?… Nils, can I have something to—?’
If Seb hadn’t stopped talking at Bram’s interruption, Strike had a hunch his father would have ignored him indefinitely. Nils pulled a crumpled note out of his pocket and gave it to his son, who scampered off into the pub.
‘So, yeah,’ Seb resumed, ‘basically they told me Edie – this is fucking insane, but – they said Edie thought I was Anomie.’
‘Thought you were Anomie?’ said Nils, looking surprised.
‘Yeah, that fan who made that game online,’ said Seb. ‘That multi-player game. You remember. Josh and Edie hated it.’
‘I didn’t know they called themselves “Anomie”,’ said Nils. ‘That’s strange.’
‘Who the hell did she tell that to, that you were Anomie?’ asked Tim.
‘They didn’t say. So after that they asked me a ton of questions about my social media accounts—’
‘She wasn’t stabbed on social fuckin’ media,’ said Wally. ‘I dunno why they’re so fixated on that.’
‘It’s that neo-Nazi group, isn’t it?’ said Seb. ‘They probably think Anomie’s one of them.’
‘So,’ said Tim, who looked anxious, ‘did they take away your phone or your hard drive or—?’
‘No, thank Christ,’ said Seb. ‘Not that – you know what I mean. Nobody wants the police going through their hard drive, do they?’
All three men shook their heads and Tim laughed.
‘No, they asked a load of questions, I showed them my Twitter account and logged on in front of them to prove it was me, I showed them my Instagram page, and I told them, that’s it, that’s all I do on social media.’
‘Didn’t they ask you where you was when they were—?’ began Wally.
‘Yeah,’ said Seb. ‘They did.’
‘Christ, did they?’ said Tim.
Bram now reappeared, accompanied by a barman, who was holding a bag of crisps.
‘Nils,’ said the latter, ‘I’ve told you: we can’t sell to under-eighteens in the pub.’
‘He only wants crisps,’ said Nils.
‘An adult needs to buy them for him,’ said the barman, putting the crisps and change down on the table and walking away, his exasperation showing this was a conversation that had been had before. Bram wriggled back onto the bench, opened his crisps and ate for a while in silence.
‘So did you give ’em, like, your alibi?’
‘“Alibi”,’ repeated Seb, with a little snort, as though he could defuse the word by laughing at it. ‘Yeah, I told them I was meeting some mates, but I got the pub wrong.’