None of it mattered, and the Sergeant doubted it ever would again, because what mattered was down there in the threshing sea, and gone for ever.
By morning the storm had blown itself out.
The Sergeant was transferred to the custody of Jed Kershaw, who said ‘Fuck, Lester’ a very great deal. They emptied one of the storage rooms in the old prison and it became his cell. There was still a coffee machine in the corner, but it had no plug.
Out in the Bay of the Cupped Hands, a line of orange lobster buoys marked the shortest route to the land, and each of them sported a small, kludged-together signal relay by which the Tigerfall signal – it already had a name – had been transmitted to the boy’s computers and onwards to the wider web. The Internet took this technical knowledge as a sign that the boy had belonged to its citizenry, and caught fire.
People came to visit. There were things they needed to say. Marie, who had been Shola’s girl and his someday-maybe wife, came and said thank you, because at least he had tried to find out something and no one else had. The Sergeant said, ‘Jack did,’ and then felt like a fool. She nodded without saying anything.
Beneseffe came and brought fruit.
Kathy Hasp came and talked about what was happening in the world. There was a lot of it, and mostly his fault. But there wasn’t going to be a war with China, so that was good.
Kershaw came back with a man from the embassy in Sana’a and they said a lot of formal things about lawyers. The Sergeant didn’t listen. Kershaw said ‘Fuck, Lester’ again.
Dirac came and said nothing at all. When he left, he kissed the Sergeant lightly on the crown, and his cheeks were wet.
‘You are kind of the biggest asshole in the world,’ Pechorin suggested.
‘Not even close.’
‘That’s true.’ Silence. ‘You did kick the shit out of me. And you exploded my nose.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I get over it. You ever find out who killed your barman friend?’
‘The Fleet.’
‘Sure. Everything is the Fleet. But you know who?’
‘No.’
‘Was Belgians.’
‘Why?’
‘Fuck do I know why. Maybe politics. Maybe just being Belgian. Is closure. You feel better now?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
The Sergeant slept and dreamed fitfully about Madame Duclos, sitting alone in her little house without her dog. He pestered the nursing staff to let her know what had happened, but they were evasive. They seemed to believe it must be some sort of code. Finally Arno’s man, Guillaume, came and told him she had been evacuated during the rioting and the house was gone. He agreed that the Sergeant could write her a letter, so long as he, Guillaume, could read and photograph it before it was sealed.
‘It won’t be very interesting,’ the Sergeant said.
Guillaume politely disagreed.
Arno visited him then, and asked him a series of quiet questions which the Sergeant answered quite frankly. Arno shook his head.
‘I should have seen this,’ he said.
‘You saw me instead,’ Lester told him.
Arno sighed and nodded.
The story all came out. Inoue’s report was headline news. The island did not burn. Not that day, and not that week.
On the fourth day of the hiatus, a Discharge Cloud wreathed the island in mist, and when it was gone the plants were all in flower.
A week later the boy’s YouTube channel was hacked, and a new slogan was added:
Tigerman Make Famous Victory, Full Of Win.
Because they had never recovered the body, a few people took this as a sign that the boy was alive somewhere.
The Sergeant was not one of them.
Some time later, Mancreu was reprieved.
The ships of the Black Fleet vanished. Even the names turned out never to have been registered in the places they were thought to have come from.
White Raoul never spoke to the Sergeant again. The Witch came once to see him in his hospital bed. She tried hard to make him smile, but her face was lined and fraught, and he thought he had exceeded the capacity of her compassion.
He was shipped home.
He had expected Africa to be cold and official in her anger. He had pictured her as an aloof sort of person, tight lips and steel-grey hair. Instead she shouted, her voice cracking and then descending into a hiss, as if he were an unfaithful husband caught in the sack with a girl from the post office.
‘You bastard!’ she began. ‘You stupid bastard! I will ruin you! I will take everything you have, and I will cover it in shit.’
Beside her sat a man in a suit who had identified himself as being from the Press Office. He didn’t say whose, as if there was only one, and perhaps there was. He seemed to be waiting for his moment, and to be in no doubt that it would come.
Africa was still talking. ‘You’re a traitor! You’re an actual traitor to the Crown! I’d send you to a court martial but they can’t have you shot any more and I can! I can make you go away for ever. I’ll send you to Morocco and they can cut your tiny fucking balls off in a hole somewhere and make you crawl on your hands and knees across broken glass.’ She ran down suddenly, because she couldn’t actually hit him and that was almost the only thing she had left. ‘Were you at least sleeping with him?’ she demanded. ‘Was that what this was about?’
‘I wanted him to be my son,’ Lester said.
Africa laughed sharply and turned away. He thought she might be hiding tears, because anyone so angry must surely have them ready. ‘Well, no one will believe that, at least,’ she said. ‘You’re going to prison and everyone will think you’re a pervert.’
The man from the Press Office cleared his throat. ‘They will believe it,’ he said.
She stared at him.
‘They will believe it,’ the man clarified. ‘They already do. And we will encourage that belief. This may be a pig but right now it’s got lipstick on it and it’s our pig. We will not be pointing out that it stinks. Nor that it is something of a surprise to us to find that we own a pig. We will march it in triumph through the streets of the town, we will detail the painstaking care required to raise such an exemplary animal, and if we’re very lucky by the time it goes back to the wallow everyone will think this was something glorious we did on purpose.’
‘What do you mean, “march it through town”? Which town?’
The mild man frowned. ‘Any fucking town which will take us, Laura, and believe me, we are already fortunate that there is more than one. But specifically: tomorrow at three p.m. at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace. The Prime Minister will be attending a talk by a French lepidopterist to emphasise his devotion to science, and he will by complete chance encounter Lester Ferris, sergeant, newly retired and the man of the hour, who has a lifelong fondness for the insects of the British hedgerow. There will be a brief and quite spontaneous greeting, a handshake, and everyone will go home feeling good about themselves. Do I make myself clear, Lester, or do I need to get someone in your chain of command in here with my hand up their arse to puppet some orders?’
‘No,’ Lester said.
‘And you,’ the man told Africa, ‘don’t piss about. I’m saving your job and the honour of your service, insofar as it still has any in the eyes of the general public at this time. Do not even think about screwing this up or I will fall upon you with great fury and the weight of mountains. I don’t see that I can make myself any clearer.’