It was plausible. It could also be so much shit. No way to know, not really. The Sergeant’s gut told him it was probably shit.
The next cell was a slightly different shape, a little closer and tighter – which also made it darker – and the prisoner lay on his bed and did not get up. He was not seriously injured. His face expressed a kind of distant uncaring. He looked at them briefly, flinched a little when he saw the boy, then seemed to accept his inevitability and turned away, in dismissal or despair the Sergeant could not say.
‘Don’t know anything,’ the man muttered as he stared at the wall, from which position no inducement short of physical force could move him.
In the fourth cell, on the off chance, the Sergeant changed tack and did a certain amount of shouting. The man in the fourth cell had a missing toe and looked to be in pain – not horrible pain but misery pain – so shouting was particularly unpleasant for him. He wept. The boy shouted too, got right down beside him and shouted high and long into his face. The man protested and objected and demanded more of whatever they were giving him for the toe. That and strong drink.
‘Why?’ the Sergeant repeated. ‘You came into my friend’s bar and gunned him down. Why?’ And then he was shouting quite genuinely, screaming into the prisoner’s face over and over: ‘WHY? WHY? WHY?’
He pulled himself back sharply, swallowed. He wished for a chain of command, for men in authority above him to hold him back. He wished for laws to make his limits plain. He wanted very much to beat the murder out of all of them, to bruise them and bludgeon them and let out the fury in his chest. Line them up like fucking tomatoes and cut them down, over and over and over, these bastards who had done this bloody, brutal thing on his doorstep, who had come into his special place, his town, his island and killed his friend, made the boy so bleakly and irretrievably unhappy. Made the boy grow up.
He glanced across at his friend, afraid he would see fear or shock, but the boy looked quite impressed, even encouraging. Well, yes. All he had done was shout. Shouting was fair enough. He turned his gaze back to the prisoner.
But his monstering seemed to have achieved nothing at all. The man stared at them and then, after a moment, he suddenly shouted back, screamed that his foot was rotting and burning and hurting and he wanted more, more, MORE MORE MORE. It was like an echo. The man began to wail then, like an infant. More, more, more. Perhaps he was an addict already and this had just sharpened his need. (More, more, MORE!)
Useless.
The last cell was bigger, and the man in the bed was unconscious. His eyes were burned. It was all treatable, but that kind of medical care was expensive and no one cared. The Sergeant shrugged and made a note to request it. Maybe the man would open up when he saw the world again. Or maybe he’d be able to look a jury in the eye and see their verdict. Whatever. On the scale of things here, the ships and the NatProMan deployment, it wasn’t that much money. Maybe they’d save this man’s vision only for him to be acquitted or just released and that would be Shola’s memoriaclass="underline" an almost miraculous gift to one of his murderers. That was the world sometimes, and Mancreu, especially. Kswah swah.
He went in again, cell by cell, repeated his lines. Then he had the boy try in Moitié, listened to the ebb and flow and heard the story in cell two expand a little. ‘I was on the high road by the river. There were men, they offered me money. They had bags. I thought these bags contained contraband for sale. I thought we would sell it. At the bar we got out. It is a good place to sell, a bar, everyone knows this. Then they took out guns. I also must carry a gun. I fire into the air. I know no names. I know nothing. I am bystander. I wished only to make a little money to take a ship. To go away before the end. I have no family.’
The Sergeant slipped himself into the discussion, made the man tell it in reverse. It’s hard to lie in reverse. The story bent a little, acquired details, but did not change. He didn’t know if that was because it was a simple lie, or because it was true.
Then he photographed them one by one, and they made this hard or not hard, each according to his lights.
When the interrogators came out into the fresh air, a light mist had settled over the ocean and the fishing boats and even the Black Fleet seemed to be suspended somewhere between the water and the sky. The horizon line had vanished entirely from east to west, and sea and cloud had melded into a purpled canvas so that the Arlington Bride – a Swiss-owned, Wilmington-registered cargo hauler which had been one of the first to arrive when Mancreu was extralegalised – appeared to be hovering over the automated lighthouse at the end of the pier. The boy sighed deeply.
‘I know,’ the Sergeant said. ‘They didn’t give us anything.’
‘No,’ the boy replied.
‘They will. We’ll get there.’
‘Maybe.’ He had dropped directly into the dejected funk which was the flipside of his manic highs. The Sergeant wasn’t sure if this was the sort of thing which would be considered an actual sickness or just a part of being however old he was. Probably it depended where you were. In France, he knew, they used a different manual for psychological medicine. They might well say no. In America, everything was diagnosable, probably even positive traits could be treated if you wanted to get rid of them. Then, too, the boy had real things to be sad about. He had lost a friend, and the interrogation which had promised an explanation of sorts had failed to deliver. Instinct told the Sergeant to keep his friend moving forwards, to avoid letting him dwell on the bad things. There was time for that, but you wanted momentum to get you through it, so that you could grieve without ceasing to function. Sorrow was something you did best if you did it while other things were happening, or it could freeze you in place.
‘We will get there. But maybe we’ll have to poke around a bit. I’ve got a few things to look into otherwise, too.’ He needed it to be true. He had seen the boy’s face in the café after the fight, the look which said Lester Ferris was an actual superstar. He didn’t need it to be that way all the time, but the more distant it became the more conscious he was of a kind of pain.
‘Yes,’ the boy said dully, meaning ‘no’.
So the Sergeant told him about the tiger.
It was a strange story and he told it haltingly, and he probably oversold the part about being very drunk, because the boy’s lips twitched in puritanical disdain. All the same, when he got to the good bit, about scratching the huge head, the boy’s eyes were very wide. The Sergeant had to break off and swear, repeatedly, to the truth of it. He swore several different appalling oaths, each bringing doom and despair on him in different ways if he was lying in the smallest particular, but what finally persuaded his audience was how the story ended, without resolution.
‘Real life has no understanding of proper structure,’ the boy said, ‘which is why news stories are always made of little lies.’ This pleased the Sergeant very much because it was a brief flicker of the boy’s usual self, like a familiar face in a crowd.
He saw a way forward, considered briefly, and then jumped. ‘It might speed things up with my other stuff if I had some help,’ he said. ‘I mean: usually, in a p’lice context,’ and bless DI Burroughs for this bit of coppering nonsense, ‘usually these sorts of matters would be dealt with by an investigation team, so it’s hardly surprising I’m struggling a bit with the caseload all by myself.’