The boy shrugged, not his usual lazy lift of the shoulders but a hunching dismissal. ‘So you have solved a dead dog. Very good! Very excellent! When it is dropped on you, you do so very good work!’ The voice was shrill, quavering. ‘And in all this where is your friend? Where is my friend? He is still dead! And there are men in jail and you still know nothing! And when you should be looking, where are you? When I am looking, where are you? You are nowhere, except you are not nowhere you are somewhere, but Shola is really nowhere because he is dead and you don’t do anything about it. Which is fine. It is all fine. It is only Mancreu. We understand. Not important for the Brevet-Consul.’ He turned, face in shadow, eyes glaring. ‘Fine. But I thought maybe for your friends. I was wrong.’
‘You weren’t.’
‘I was. Totally. Funny me, ha ha. Ai can haz stupidz.’
‘I just have other things too. The only way I can do what I do is if people let me. I don’t have anything to back me up. And they let me because I don’t just do what suits me. I try to do what needs doing. And Shola… that does need doing. But it’s not the only thing. I’m sorry. I’ll keep after it, you know I will. He was my friend. And so are you.’
‘Yes! There are so many other things. So I have been helping, while you were so importantly somewhere not here. I have solved your fish case for you. Your thief is Pechorin, from NatProMan.’
The Sergeant sighed. Too late, then, to tell the boy not to go near the Ukrainians. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard that, too. The card-players told me, in the old town.’
‘Good. So now you find out about Shola.’
‘Yes. Of course. I’ll…’ But he still did not know what he would do. ‘I’ll chase the weapons. Get names on the men, see if I can find out who hired them. If someone did. I’ll get there, in time.’ And now’s not the time to explain that we may not have very much. Your island is dying, we may never know who murdered your friend: come and be my son. He pushed on. ‘I can interrogate them again. I won’t stop, I promise. Even if you weren’t asking. If you didn’t talk to me any more. I wouldn’t stop. But I’d be…’ a little part of the full truth, now ‘…less. I’d be less than I am. And I want to be more.’
The boy seemed to find this funny, somehow darkly amusing, and shook his head. They sat together in silence for a while, and the wind blew around the edges of the house and in through an open window in the other room. It grew noticeably cold. The Sergeant found himself speaking again. He hoped he knew what he was doing, and suspected he didn’t.
‘I don’t know how to be what you need. I want to. But that sort of thing I always… well, I asked Shola. He was good with people. He was a good man. Me, I’ve… got no practice. I’m used to having instructions. I’m not like you. I don’t… I don’t have the habit of it yet, the natural way of doing it without orders. But I’ll get there. I’ll learn’ – and here inspiration struck – ‘I’ll learn to be a bit like him. Shola didn’t work for anyone.’
The boy jerked away, and his face reflected absolute horror. It must be a flashback, the Sergeant thought, full Dolby surround sound with all the trimmings, and yes, oh, yes, he knew about those. He moved forward, hands out to receive a faint or fend off an attack. The boy opened his mouth and made a high keening sound like the first flurry of bagpipes when the piper settles them under his arm. He stopped, eyes wide, and then made the noise again and again until it tailed away into a gasping cough, then flung himself on the Sergeant and clung to him, and the older man realised abruptly that this noise was grief, and maybe even shame.
The Sergeant sat for a moment with his elbows at shoulder height and his hands in the air, as if someone notionally friendly had him at gunpoint and it would all be sorted out in a moment. Then, with great caution, he lowered his nearer arm and put it around the boy’s back and wrapped the other across so that he could clasp his own wrist and complete the circle in a hug. He rocked gently, and made wordless noises of encouragement. From the boy came back squalls of sorrow and remorse. Shola’s death, the Sergeant gathered, was somehow all to be laid at the boy’s small feet. Shola had been coming to rescue him. They had killed Shola because Shola had told them to leave the boy. The boy had done nothing to help. He had watched Shola die and done nothing. What sort of hero would let that happen? The Sergeant had been like lightning. He had been a god. He had been a warrior. He had been like Batman, but a thousand times better because Batman was ultra wealthy and the Sergeant was just an ordinary person. The boy had done nothing. The whole affair was his fault. The boy was bad.
This flood of self-despite was at the same time quite alarmingly foreign to the Sergeant and entirely familiar. True, he had no direct experience with the violent woes and self-reproaches of children. On the other hand, he was a sergeant, and the commonality in the roles of NCOs and parents was too obvious to dwell upon. He knew how very destructive that simple, unadorned ‘bad’ could be, how it could embrace a whole person from birth to this very present and condemn every aspect of him entire. Where a more nuanced description could be examined and faulted, something so broad was resilient. It was a tar pit. You couldn’t argue it away, because reasoning gave it an undue status as something reasonable. Each attempt to unpick the nest of accusations would draw you deeper in. Your empathy was misunderstanding, evidence of your pure heart’s inability to comprehend the enormity you confronted. Your effort spent on a creature so vile was a waste of kindness needed elsewhere, and this itself was a fresh crime to be registered against the villain. Your subsequent distress and ultimate frustration were read as justified anger at the perpetrator of such sins.
You did not defuse this kind of madness by treating with it upon its own terms. You answered the embracing fear, not the question. For the moment, he waited, honouring the grief. He waited until the storm had died, until the tide had risen to its highest and ebbed and the boy had noticed that no denials or affirmations had been forthcoming, and some part of him had begun to feel instinctively that his confessor must render judgement or lose his position.
‘You’re getting snot on my shirt,’ the Sergeant said to the top of the boy’s head. Translation: the worst thing you are capable of is covering a dirty shirt in mucus.
Silence.
‘I don’t mind,’ he continued. ‘I’m not saying I mind. I just felt, you know, I should say something in case you end up glued to my armpit.’ Translation: cry as long as you need to. I’m here. But the world is still the world, and you haven’t changed.
Silence.
‘And you didn’t shoot him yourself, did you? And you didn’t hire those men to shoot him. So all this is sort of by proximity. I’m not saying you’re wrong. You may be right. At the moment I just don’t see how, is all.’
He didn’t push. He let the tiny, shuddering thing in his arms subside, and realised from the residual tension that there was something left, that the boy had a final charge against himself, and that it was the most serious, the most vile.
‘I did not tell you,’ the boy said at last, stepping out of the embrace to stand in some invisible dock. ‘I have obstructed the investigation and the course of your inquiries and the execution of your duty.’ He was calmer now. Miserable.
‘How so?’ Very neutral, because there was just a chance.
‘Shola worked for Bad Jack,’ the boy said.
The Sergeant opened his mouth to say ‘Bad Jack?’ and shut it again in the awareness that he would sound like a fool. He moved through a chain of response and counter-response in his head, looking for a place to enter the conversation which would be neither condescending nor credulous: if I say this, he will say that. It was hard. He wondered whether it was hard because it was hard, or because he was getting old and couldn’t remember being a boy.