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  In her sunny, chilly conservatory now it sounded close to a snarl, an accusation, as it had live, at the time. He meant, did he, that she might theorize and talk tactics to them, but he might have to do it – set out to kill someone as a pre-selected ‘priority?’ Mr Nitty-Gritty was quizzing Madam Backroom Thinktank and Command Vehicle. Sergeant Nitty-Gritty.

  ‘This is warfare between two firms,’ she’d replied. ‘We are a third party, present to protect the interests and lives of the public.’ This didn’t seem like an answer to what he’d asked, and she’d realized at the time that it didn’t. A vital part of management and political practice was the skill at reshaping a tricky query into something easier to deal with. She’d wanted to guide things on to more favourable ground: some safe, trite waffle, something non-hecklable.

  But he hadn’t looked the type who fancied being guided. ‘Protect the public by knocking over Stanton?’ he’d asked.

  ‘We must adjust to whatever is happening on the day between those two firms. We shouldn’t get into the kind of narrow, constricting, set attitude that will probably characterize OR, as I’ve said.’

  ‘Yes, but when you call for Stanton to be “removed” – this might be regarded by some as a deliberately imprecise term, surely, and—’

  ‘As I’ve said, our source names four other OR people who’ll be at the confrontation: three men, one woman,’ she replied. ‘They will appear captioned in sequence on the screen. I don’t think I need to give detailed backgrounds. They will all be armed, two with machine pistols, two have done time. In other words they are what one would expect in this standard scramble to extend a firm’s sales patch. We can leave it at that, I feel.’

  End of meeting. It sounded as though she was shaken by the questions and had abandoned the session in a panicked rush. She’d brought the four’s biogs and should have read them out; had intended reading them out. They could be as significant as Stanton’s and Byfort’s. Instead, she’d gone for rapid withdrawal, hasty closure. It was a while ago and she couldn’t altogether recall her state of mind then. But she recognized, of course, that the questions went some way towards the truth: recognized it now and had recognized it then. Awkward? An invitation to a killing? Perhaps. She considered she’d had things at least halfway right: the police would be the third party, not a main contender in the battle, Esther’s task to put an end to that violence by suppressing both sides. But Wilcox was correct, wasn’t he, to suggest she required the first stage in their operation to be the wipe-out of Stanton, on his own account, and because the disintegration of decapitated Opal Render would follow?

  Then Esther’s platoon could turn everything against Pasque Uno. The classic, acute danger from being caught in the middle would disappear. The defeat of both firms should mean safety for law-abiding people on the streets and peace in at least that corner of the city. Yes. Perhaps it was the crude directness of Wilcox’s language that had rattled her badly – the ‘snuffing out’, the ‘knocking over’. Probably, they hadn’t sounded suitable for an official wish-list. No. She wanted Stanton ‘removed’, ‘neutralized’, ‘negatived’, or in that CIA code, offered ‘extreme prejudice’. Superfluous to state how. Too much information. Wiser not to overdo the detail, or to gloat about a scheduled execution.

  Esther stopped the tape, ran it back to where the Wilcox questions had begun and listened again. Then she switched off once more. Although she couldn’t remember exactly how she’d felt at the time, she knew his interruption had troubled her badly. Forcing a premature end to the session like that must have made her appear weak and wrong-footed. She had been weak and wrong-footed. She could recall the look of shock on some of the faces there.

  A couple of hours after the briefing she’d gone alone in civilian clothes to the Mondial-Trave junction. She parked in a side street and did a sort of slow inspection on foot. It was her way of trying to counter the Wilcox hint that she lived and talked in a woolly, evasive, theorizing, HQ realm, whereas the people she’d been addressing had to prepare themselves for some very real rough stuff here, either giving it or taking it or both, body armour on, helmet chinstraps tight. She wanted to prove that this, also, was her realm: the streets, the buildings, shops, businesses, pavements, kerbs and gutters. Prove? Who to? Well, to herself. Nobody else knew she’d made the little, self-comforting, but – she’d admit – basically meaningless, possibly ludicrous, trip. And not many would understand her thinking if they did know about the visit.

  It was true that she wouldn’t be with her people and among the bullets when the fighting began. Superintendents planned and briefed but as a rule didn’t get physically into gun play. She would be what was called ‘Gold’ – the highest level of authority during an incident – but she’d be in the Command Vehicle, keeping in touch by electronics and radio. There was a joke about the appalling London riots in 2011. A constable, in this story, grew so scared by the violence and burning that he turned and ran to another district, finishing up tearful and broken in a shop doorway. After a while he heard a stern voice say: ‘Get back to your duties, lad.’

  Too ashamed to look up he replied: ‘I can’t, can’t, sergeant, it’s too terrible.’

  The voice said: ‘It’s not your sergeant speaking, lad, it’s your superintendent.’

  ‘My God,’ he said, ‘I didn’t realize I’d run that far.’

  Esther’s command vehicle wouldn’t be all that distant from the action, but nor would it be actually in it.

  So, Wilcox had a point, and it wasn’t a point Esther liked very much. She needed to counter it, and should have at the briefing session. She hadn’t known how, though, and so, hoist the drawbridge to impose a sudden ending to the session: talk him down, silence him, devise an escape.

  She loitered near one of the ex-warehouses, now an apartment block, and enjoyed feeling dwarfed by it, her rank and importance of no account. This towering bricks and mortar job couldn’t be more substantial and actual, could it? There was underground parking and for a while she watched the cars entering and leaving, that busyness another glimpse of ordinary, workaday life – perhaps off to the supermarket, or to fetch kids at the end of the school day. Routines. Reassuring routines: or this was how she’d regarded them.

  The old, modelled alderman couldn’t be ‘actual’ in that sense, of course. He was a piece of municipal art, a replica. He looked stony solid though and had a printed, enduring, capitalized name on a plaque: ‘RICHARD ROBERT LAUCENSTON, 1847–1899’. Perhaps she was standing where the carts used to stand in his time, loading or unloading. She felt herself to be part of a continuing, checkable, worthwhile community history. She could manage an inner glow.

  But not for long. Even at the time, and certainly today on her lounger, she decided her reactions there were absolute bullshit. She just happened to be a cop posted to these parts for a while and had next to no connection with its history. In any case, she knew it was barmy to believe she could get herself further into the blood and guts of a coming hairy operation by strolling near some statue. Yet she’d permitted herself the limited spell of fantasizing. She needed that. And sod Wilcox.

  She’d considered it best not to mention this snatched, woman-of-the-people sojourn to Gerald. He’d regard her as nuts and would tell her so, more than once. And he’d see this dreamy stuff as a preposterous attempt by her to get into the imaginative world that he, as an artiste, would claim as exclusively his and his bassoon’s. Her job, he would argue, was in the banal and workaday, and should stay stuck in the banal and workaday.

  And perhaps he would be right. There was something lunatic, and something perverse, about coming here. Wilcox and those damn see-all, scare-all glasses had shoved her reasoning askew. The police presence at Mondial-Trave was supposed to be secret. This location had been named confidentially by an informant. She’d ordered hidden cameras into place to record who might be showing a special interest in this corner spot and the nearby streets. And now, look at her – yes, she thought, look at her, the mad, maund
ering bitch – here she was, strolling very visibly, flagrantly, about, more or less proclaiming that the police had this area marked and watched. All right, she was in civilians clothes. But anyone in either of the firms would recognize her. Of course they would. It was a basic of their careers to identify top law people, however they were dressed.

  She could excuse herself a little with the argument that both firms had already done their inspections by Vauxhall and Mazda, so the risk of her getting spotted now was not serious. No? She imagined the people on the cameras here, in one of the flats and a store room above the mini-market in Trave, amazed to see her in daylight and taking her time. She glanced up to a window on the fourth floor of one of the apartment blocks in case she could glimpse the photographer. No. These people knew how to stay out of sight. She ought to learn from them. She gave a sort of token wave and smile towards the window, anyway. Hello there, lads, lasses. OK, I shouldn’t be here. You’re right. But I am. I needed a refresher – a cosying up to the real and actual. Soft and pathetic, isn’t it?

  THIRTEEN

  Ralph finished that unhurried but edgy tour of the club and sat down again behind the bar. His recollections still gave him the gripes, but maybe not quite so badly now. After all, here he indisputably was, in his own club, at its, as it were, nerve centre, and as well protected as anyone could be in his kind of immense, brilliantly developing, shoot-first occupation. He felt that a stranger observing the present scene would sense a holy aptness: the generous spread and fitments of the club itself, and he, its proprietor, very much at the strategic nub – alert, capable and, at this time of day, on bottled water only, to fend off dehydration.

  With all his usual fine, spontaneous, warm friendliness he smiled to welcome a group of members just arrived. This fucking lot were exactly the squalid, dud, hoi polloi sort he’d joyfully kick out, and keep out permanently, the moment he’d got The Monty’s social, intellectual, tailoring and odorous tone up a milli-fraction to Athenaeum level.

  It would be a true kindness to give this crew and similar the everlasting heave-ho because they’d feel pathetically crude and alien in the new classy atmosphere, like sneeze-snot on caviar. Soon, Ralph wanted to see the club’s special functions announced in The Times, such as lectures by distinguished business chiefs on Nigerian fiscal policy; or a professor from some very valid university discussing with screen illustrations ancient monastery manuscripts where later writing in Latin had been put over the original to cut stationery costs for monks.

  But, until then, he believed in limited, though proper, landlordly politeness to most members, regardless of sleaze level and ‘Dearest Mother o’ mine’ vermilion wrist tattoos; though, obviously, not to that drunken arsehole who berserked and opened unfriendly fire on William Blake. Afterwards, clamouring in his dismal style for forgiveness, he’d argued that the damage was ‘only to the beard of someone starkers on all fours.’ Only! He’d had the neck to emphasize that word. The dim, disrespectful prick couldn’t see the wider significance, the artistic, literary, mythological oomph behind that beard, very much a typical part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a complete work, and, also, therefore, so meaningful on the custom-made, metal-hanging rampart with its Blakean decor.

  It had been an attack not just on a beard but on a whole life system. It was Hunnish. It made Ralph think of a notorious air raid on a defenceless town in the Spanish civil war – Guernica. The artist, Picasso, had done a pretty weird picture of it, but he undoubtedly meant well. And he would condemn, also, the blitzing of another work of art, the William Blake at The Monty. Although Ralph didn’t object to the occasional, well-judged use of slang, what that cretin with the gun in the club referred slightingly to as ‘starkers’ was, in fact, the naked primitive state for all humanity pre-garments; and ‘on all fours’ – as he’d contemptuously said – because knees hadn’t really got going in those early days, enabling people to stand and walk. The song, Knees Up Mother Brown (Knees Up, Knees Up, Never Get The Breeze Up), couldn’t have been composed in that period, ‘up’ being beyond the range of knees then. The development of human knees would have a terrific amount to do with that great but controversial discovery, ‘survival of the fittest.’ The word ‘fittest’ there referred partly and importantly to knees.

  It had to be admitted, though, that not just this slob but most of The Monty membership would miss the full significance of the Blake pictures. Ralph saw these people as tied to painfully narrow, miserably basic attitudes, unable to deal with symbolism and/or overtones. ‘You bloody what?’ they’d reply if Ralph spoke of somebody or something having an emblematic quality. They understood about guns, bullets, morning-after pills, tattoos, farcically grandiose wreaths for slaughtered turf-war colleagues, shivs, grievous bodily harm, girls and/or boys, probation, menaces, money, more money, substances, sweeteners, defence lawyers, plea bargaining, finks, and that was it.

  On the other hand, and very much on the other hand, Ralph had come across a phrase that fitted himself exactly – ‘renaissance man.’ This referred to history, renaissance meaning rebirth, and indicating a time when all sorts of knowledge became available again after a long, very dud period. Ralph took the words ‘renaissance man’ to mean someone with plenty of culture from many directions – knowing poetry, music, painting, algebra. You name it, the renaissance man had it. He might even take in funk and country.

  Although Ralph would not expect to find many renaissance men among Monty memberships, yes, he did think of himself as in this category. And he realized that the true renaissance man could never be content with the culture he already had but must ceaselessly try to expand. He saw his bond with the William Blake as a definite part of the Ember renaissance man profile. But he did not intend the montage to be for ever The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Expand! Seek new horizons! This was why he had become interested in the Dickens film poster from Hull. As he’d already realized, that Great Expectations illustration would have a practical meaning for people in the club, because most of them possessed their own great expectations, imagining that one day they’d have something so brilliant that even a grasping, two-timing fence would feel he had to give a decent price. But, at the same time, this move into something different from the Blake would show that Ralph had an appetite for worthwhile creative works, never mind where they came from. Ralph felt sorry for most Monty people with their utterly unspiritual existence, but not sorry enough to put up with their company if he didn’t have to. For the present, he fucking well did have to, or The Monty would go under.

  However, Ralph would prefer to reminisce than involve himself in anything beyond basic pleasantries with a bunch like this loutish group now buying drinks. But it irritated him to find that his recollection of what happened straight after the Vauxhall sightseeing expedition had faded. Somewhere, he’d read how occasionally the memory could apply a humane touch and blur unpleasant flashbacks, or even edit them out altogether. Ralph didn’t want that kind of deceptive, soft-soap tenderness, though, thanks very much. He despised people who were ‘in denial’, as it was known – clinging to a pathetic, self-fooling pretence that what had taken place hadn’t, and therefore couldn’t have any effect on now. Ralph would prefer absolute accuracy, no matter how agonizing. He, Ralph Ember, could take it. This unflinching attitude he regarded as the essence of manliness. And he saw himself as a devoted, resourceful custodian of such manliness.

  Not long ago he’d been reading about the Great War of 1914–18 and came across a proclamation by Britain’s top soldier, Earl Haig, in April 1918, when things looked very dark: ‘With our backs to the wall we must fight on to the end.’ Ralph had noted that ‘must’: no option existed; resistance was natural, inevitable. This was the kind of bold, face-up-to-it attitude Ralph admired. He aimed to find why he had ever come to be called ‘Panicking Ralph’ or, so much sickeningly worse, ‘Panicking Ralphy’. When he’d achieved this he felt sure he could show that those stinking names arose from foul, malevolent, slanderous misrepresentati
on, based almost certainly on envy.

  Some envy of himself he could accept as harmless and inevitable. It might become excessive, though, and lead to vindictiveness. A quest – that’s what Ralph was on: a mission to reclaim his dignity, yes, his genuine staunch, unique selfhood from twisted, lying creeps; and from those who delightedly passed on the behind-his-back scoffing to him, such as Assistant Chief Fuckface Iles.

  FOURTEEN

  To some extent Ember understood why sections of his recall should be misty. They had to do with his thinking then, his attitudes, ideas, brain-stuff, rather than actual events, and they were bound to be a bit woolly and vague so long afterwards. However, some moves following the Vauxhall ride he could certainly remember well and exactly.

  First: he’d decided he must return very soon to the Mondial-Trave location, though entirely alone this time; an unaccompanied, private, excursion in his Volvo, not the Vauxhall.

  Second: at this spot he’d witnessed something – through, as it happened, two panes of glass – witnessed something he certainly did not feel at all unclear about. How could he? No blurring of this was possible.

  But what he couldn’t fully explain to himself was why he’d chosen to make such an urgent, personal revisit to that patch when only recently he’d taken two very good pathfinder scans of it with Gladhand and the others.

  ‘Very good scans.’ Were they really this, he’d wondered. That’s what the intention had been, certainly. But did these motorized exercises get his concentrated, eager attention? Maybe not. That vicious jerk, Quentin Stayley, had hugely enraged him, and so perhaps distracted Ralph from a thorough inspection of the likely battle terrain. He needed a fresh look at that parcel of ground, undistracted by bloody Quent.

  Ralph, seated at the Monty bar, found his mind uncontrollably jumping about. It would amble off, dwelling on the miserable hints and insults that had come from Quent Stayley in the Vauxhall. But those chewy, wandering recollections would suddenly get interrupted by other recollections much more precise and sharp. It was as though they came at him like capital letters on a vivid red banner with white lettering, terse, emphatic, anxious messages he’d seemed to see, momentarily re-running questions he’d put to himself on that second survey trip, that unaccompanied, second survey trip to Mondial-Trave. So, he had two very different kind of memories of the journeys into that elected battle region. They could be labelled ‘Vauxhall’ and ‘Solo’.