Outside he heard the sound of a car, high and snarling. It made him think of kids doing handbrake turns in a supermarket car park back home. He’d been one of those kids, actually. Never very good at it, but you had to show willing. If this was nostalgia, he was bad at it. He contemplated the end of Mancreu, newly real, while whoever it was roared around and around outside, mowing the lawn or cutting down a hedge in an endless grinding whine, and then they slowed down and he could speak, but realised that he didn’t know what to say.
He didn’t have to. Inoue was looking over his shoulder, and when he followed her gaze he saw a line of quad bikes, expensive toys for bored footballers on their estates along the A13 out of London to the coast, and on them a line of grubby men with scarves on their faces. An actual masked gang. When they had his attention – his, in particular – they revved their engines again and roared away, leaving Madame Duclos’s dead, fat dog on the bonnet of his car.
The Sergeant ran outside and realised that he was waving his arms and shouting ‘Oi!’ and that this was not, on the face of it, the best response. An authoritative military bark would be more to the point, a ‘Halt or I’ll open fire!’ though he did not know whether he would. He did have a weapon – since Shola’s death he had quietly added a small side arm to his kit, in a discreet holster which sat directly against his leg and could be accessed through the open-ended pocket on his right side – but getting it would require that he stopped running and if he stopped running they would be out of range. He shouted ‘Oi!’ again and knew that he really had to stop doing that because it made him sound like an old fart waving a newspaper, but at this moment that was probably all he was. The dust choked him, and then the enemy had retreated, tactical objective achieved. ‘Fuckers! It’s just a bloody dog! And it’s not even a proper dog, just an old lady’s floor-ornament. It never did anything to you!’
No. No, the dog was not the sinner here. This message was for him, and maybe for Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He went back to see.
The dog lay in its own blood in an indentation on the bonnet of the Land Rover. They had opened it like a hog and thrown it, dying. The landing must have been agonising, though briefly. Had they known that he had once carried a man with a wound like this to safety behind the iron frame of a derelict Russian bus? Had they imagined that he would go into some sort of particular shock on seeing the tableau? Or was this just an average bit of brutality, lacking that greater understanding? Vile enough, in any case.
Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage. She was brandishing a camera and he realised she must have used it to record footage of the gang’s departure. He wondered if she could now run it through some sort of computer the way they did on television and tell him who he was looking for, and knew she couldn’t. The assembled male and female members of the vulcanology department (they had a smoking mountain printed in white on their maroon hoodies) were carrying fence posts and looking meaningfully at the row of Hilux 4×4s to let him know they were in if he wanted to give chase. He pictured himself leading a posse of affronted eggheads across the wilds, their righteous fury ebbing as they rode to an uncertain reception, and concluded that the list of great British military follies did not need, even in the name of canine justice and international brotherhood, the addition of the Charge of the Mancreu Irregular Xenobiological Infantry and their non-commissioned officer.
Instead, he approached the corpse with a view to removing it. He couldn’t work out how. If he just embraced it he could get it off the car, but then he’d have nowhere to put it short of dumping it on the dirt and he’d get covered in blood and viscera into the bargain. He stood there with his arms wide, then stepped back again and grunted.
A moment later the dog was being rolled onto a pallet and whisked away. Of all people, Ichiro the genius, weeping, had emptied a stationery trolley and pressed himself into service as mortician’s porter. Inoue shouted something after him in Japanese, by its tone both shocked and approving, then turned.
‘Will she want it back? The old lady?’ There was anger in her voice, and she was peering at him, seeking the fury he had already controlled. It’s on a chain, he wanted to tell her. Because I’m not a proper copper. My real skills aren’t about keeping the peace.
He could feel them waking in him, all the same. Not the battlefield, not yet – if the fight at Shola’s place hadn’t done that, this wasn’t going to. Just that same questing curiosity which saw the land and the people and took a little bit of them away so as to deliver intuitions and warnings. Hypervigilance, that was the word. The curious gift of perception granted to the very abused, the endangered, and the pursued. In war, the soldiers from hard corners – from ganglands and sink estates, from bad families and badly run care homes – they had a touch with traps and deceptions. They could see a thing out of place, spot a liar even when he was speaking a language they didn’t know. They saw through walls. The best of them could hone and grow the skill within themselves, and an NCO who got one of those, or better yet, who was one, he could keep his boys alive when everyone else was going home in boxes. The Sergeant’s gift in that regard was limited, found late and small, but he had a sight of a different sort, born of another sort of trouble. It was less immediate and more haunting: a sense of narrative which was part empathy and part strategy, which told him when something was coming down and when it was overdue. His boys said he could hear the enemy whispering to one another from ten miles away, that he could smell the mortars before they were fired. They called him a warlock, but from the inside it was more like flirting than magic. He watched the smoke and the mountainsides, the faces of local people and the way they held their shoulders, knew when they wanted to dance or disappear, knew what that meant even when they didn’t. He read the world, and in exchange he got a few hours’ grace before the sky fell on him.
He had thought himself fully engaged with that faculty, here on Mancreu. He realised now that it had been idling in him, pooling at his feet, and that he had been ignoring it.
He made a circuit of the horizon with his eyes, but knew he didn’t need to, knew that if there was more to this it would already have happened. There would be no second attack. There would not even – though he would assume he was at risk all the same – be a landmine waiting for him along the road. This didn’t have that flavour. It was a come-on, a taunt. Notice me.
Well, all right. I will. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.
He was raging inside. It was old anger as well as new, a long way down in a sealed chamber, and on the whole everyone would be better off if it stayed there. At the same time he was in the grip of Mancreu’s end, the deep, dark brown taste of doom and gallows celebration. It was in all of them, in Beneseffe and the crab fishers and in the NatProMan troops. It had been in Shola, it was in Dirac and it must be in him, too. They were all a little bit mad and getting more so, and most of all the ones who appeared to be holding it together. Inoue and her friends had it, with their admirable, ridiculous makeshift pikes and their readiness to do battle with thugs. The Witch had it.
The boy had it in spades.
But beyond that there was something else: a watchful something which seemed to squat just out of sight and which plucked at all his old familiar fear. I am observed… No. More than that: I am targeted. His hands twitched, remembering the burning pain of the tomato sap, feeling the thing wriggling under his skin. Something diffuse, yet close, a monster waiting in the closet. Thugs at Shola’s table. Madame Duclos’s dog. Notice me. It had a stink of bad endings about it, and his every instinct said to get out from under or strike hard, and strike first, but it was so ubiquitous, so faint and yet so present, that he had no idea how to do either. Devil’s footsteps on my spine.