A Thousand Cuts (24 page)

‘No,’ Lucia said. ‘You don’t need to tell me why. But you could tell me who.’

‘Who. Who what?’

‘Who it is that Travis can count on to be such a good friend to his cause.’

Cole shook his head. ‘I told you before, Lucia: don’t be naive.’ He moved behind the desk.

‘Come on, Guv. What am I going to do with it if you tell me?’

Cole sighed. He rubbed his head again. ‘Then why do you need to know, Lucia? Why do you always need to know?’

Lucia almost laughed. She almost reminded the DCI what she did, what they both did. She resisted. She said instead, ‘Elliot Samson’s father told me that the school was changing status. He mentioned a government scheme, private funding, more autonomy. He said it was one of the first.’

Cole shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

‘There’s a lot of money involved in that sort of thing, I would imagine. A lot of commercial interests.’

‘Probably. Possibly. Who the hell knows?’

‘I don’t suppose a public prosecution would look particularly good, would it? Chances are it would scare a few people the government wouldn’t want to see scared.’

Cole sat down. He picked up one of the sheets of paper on his desk and peered under the Post-it note that was attached to it.

‘Or is it more straightforward than that? Is it closer to home? The superintendent,’ Lucia said. ‘Your boss. I notice he’s on the school’s board of governors.’

Cole looked at Lucia without raising his head. ‘Careful, Lucia.’

‘I doubt he’d be too keen to be dragged into all of this, would he? I expect he would rather we left Mr Travis and his school well alone.’

Cole put down the paperwork he was holding. ‘For an officer who has just mouthed her way into a suspension, Detective Inspector May, you seem remarkably reluctant to shut the fuck up.’

Lucia glared. She bit down on the retort that was wrestling for control of her tongue. Cole exhaled into the silence and returned his attention to his desk.

‘So what happens now?’ Lucia said at last.

‘There’ll be a hearing. You’ll be reprimanded. Demoted maybe, at least for a while. You’ll be advised to request a transfer.’

‘A transfer? To where?’ Lucia narrowed her eyes. ‘Advised by whom?’

‘To anywhere you like that’s not CID. By the disciplinary board. By your colleagues probably. By me.’

‘By you,’ Lucia echoed. ‘And if I don’t?’

Cole’s lips curled into a humourless smile. ‘Then I expect that you will be transferred anyway.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘I can and I will. What’s the big deal, Lucia? You and I both know it’d be doing you a favour.’

‘A favour? In what way would it be doing me a favour?’

Cole reclined in his seat. He gestured with a nod towards the door. ‘Before. Just now. What was going on out there?’

Lucia folded her arms. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

‘Watch your tone, Inspector.’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. But I’d be interested in hearing what you think you saw. Sir.’

For a moment it seemed that Cole would not answer. He was glowering at Lucia and almost as she returned his stare she could see the skin on his face reddening.

‘I saw trouble where before there was calm,’ he said. ‘I saw disruption and discord where before the officers in this department would have counted their colleagues as their closest friends. That’s what I saw, Inspector.’

‘Before. You mean before I joined.’

‘Yes, Lucia. Before you joined.’

Lucia bobbed her head. ‘And that’s what you saw. That’s all you saw.’

The DCI nodded.

Lucia pulled herself upright. ‘You’ve spoken to Travis from what I understand,’ she said. ‘The two of you must have found you had plenty to discuss. You must have found yourselves getting along like sergeant majors at a reunion.’

‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ said Cole.

Lucia was on her way to the door. She stopped and turned before she answered. ‘Nothing that will worry you, Chief Inspector. It just seems to me that you and Travis have in common a certain way of seeing things.’ She made to move away and then checked herself again. ‘Although, thinking about it, maybe seeing isn’t quite the right word.’

 

Harry called out to Lucia as she strode from her desk towards the exit. She glanced towards him and half raised her hand but she did not slow. Walter said something as she passed his chair but Lucia ignored him. When she reached the door to the stairwell, she swung it harder than she had expected to. The handle hammered into the already cracked plaster and the sound of wood and glass and metal trembling fled down the stairs and into the depths of the building.

Lucia followed.

As she stepped on to the street she barely noticed the heat. She passed a newsagent, then turned back and went inside. From the stooped Bangladeshi man behind the counter, she bought twenty Marlboro reds and a box of matches and did not wait for her change. She found a bench. It was coated with graffiti and bird muck - like every bench in London, so it seemed - and smeared at one end with something that was probably but not necessarily banana. Lucia sat down anyway. The bench faced the road. Almost immediately a bus pulled up to the kerb. Its doors opened and the driver looked at Lucia and Lucia looked at the driver and the doors closed and the bus pulled away. Lucia took out a cigarette and with her third match managed to light it.

She smoked. Three buses later, she was still smoking. Four or five filters lay at her feet, two of them at least still smouldering. After using it to light another cigarette, she threw the one she was holding to the floor. The first drag of the new cigarette tasted even worse than the last one of the old. Each lungful, in fact, marked a steady decline; Lucia took no pleasure, no relief from what she was doing. She inhaled a second time, coaxing the flame towards the filter, but she drew too hard and she gagged. She coughed. She leant forwards and she retched. She was sick, and her sick splattered across her shoes and swamped the cigarette butts on the ground. Another bus pulled up but did not stop long enough even to open its doors. Lucia spat. She sat upright, wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She had tears in her eyes and though it was the shock of throwing up that had summoned them, she found herself unable to halt their flow. She buried her head in the crook of her elbow. She cleared her throat and spat again. The packet of cigarettes was clutched in her hand, she realised. It was squashed now, from where she had gripped it as a reflex to her stomach muscles contracting. She cast the packet on to the bench, into the banana, and stood up.

For some time Lucia walked. She realised she was drifting towards the school so she took a left and then another and found herself on the borders of Finsbury Park. It was a weekday, not yet lunchtime, and the sun was barely discernible, yet the grass was strewn with blankets and bodies and barbecues ready to be fired up. Lucia found a spot away from the crowd and lay back. She could taste tar and vomit. Her throat felt as though she had just woken up from sleeping all night with her mouth open. She craved water but now she had stopped moving the thought of getting to her feet once again and heading off in search of some filled her with lethargy. It was London and it was summer, Lucia reasoned; it would have to rain eventually. When it did, she would still be lying here. She would part her lips and angle her face to the sky and let the raindrops hit her face and run into her mouth.

But in the end she could not wait. She got to her feet, allowed a moment of dizziness to pass, then wandered towards the gates of the park. In a Sainsbury’s Local she queued to buy some water. Even before she had left the shop she had drained half the bottle and immediately regretted having done so. The water, so cold it was barely fluid, made her head pound and her stomach ache. She was hungry, she realised. She had not eaten since yesterday evening and it was now almost . . . what? She asked a passer-by. Four. It was gone four. She should go home, she told herself. Except that she did not want to go home. Not to her flat, at least. Instead she walked again, and found a cafe she knew well, and sat by the window picking at a piece of chocolate cake and staring at the building opposite.

She drank tea. Three mugs of it, until the light outside began to fade and the owner of the cafe started to sweep up around her. When the cafe owner left so did Lucia. She lingered though, huddled in the doorway, pacing the length of the block and back again, leaning with one heel raised against the wall of the office block next door. All the time she watched the building opposite. The lights on the third floor were still off. The curtains were not yet drawn. There was no one at the entrance or visible in the stairwell. So Lucia waited, turned away, then turned back and checked again.

It was late when finally he came home. At first she was not sure it was him but when he dropped his keys and cursed and bent on to the balls of his feet to pick them up, she knew. Before she could reconsider she crossed the road. She stopped between two cars, just shy of the kerb. She said, hey, and the sound caught in her throat. She said it louder. And the figure in front of her turned and stepped out of the shadow towards her.

It will all be forgotten.
Won’t it? No one will remember. No one really cares. Even now, it is in the newspapers, but people buy the newspapers why? For the same reason they watch movies or read a novel. To be entertained. It is entertainment. They read the stories and they gasp and they tut - tut tut tut - but nothing is real to them. Not really real. They look at the pictures, the pictures of him, and they shudder and they say, just look at his eyes, you can tell, can’t you, it is all in the eyes. And they will tut again and turn the page and move on to a story about fox-hunting or tax increases or a celebrity taking drugs. But if it were really real to them, they would not be entertained. If they cared, they would not turn the page. They could not. If what was in the newspapers seemed real, they would not buy the newspapers at all. They would lie awake at night, like I do. They would weep, like I do. They would despair, like I do. They would despair.

Even you. Why are you here? You do not care. Maybe you think you care but you do not. You are here because it is your job. Would you be here if it were not your job? And the questions you ask. Why do you ask them? How will what I tell you change things? It will not. Felix is dead. Felix was murdered. My son is gone and soon I will be the only person in the world who still remembers that he lived at all. He died in vain, Inspector. That is the phrase, is it not? He died in vain and that is the hardest thing of all for me to accept.

Do you know what Felix survived? You do not. I do not blame you for not knowing because how could you know? Even Felix did not know. He was not yet a baby and already he was as close to death as I am to you, here, now, in this room. Children that would have become his friends were dying. His relatives were dying: his aunt, my sister; his uncle, my brother; his grandmother and grandfather. His father, who did not even know he was a father, was dying. They died for no reason, just like Felix. They died because someone told them, believe in this God, He will save you. But it was the wrong God. Someone else, someone who had a gun and who had friends who had guns, decided it was the wrong God. And the real God, they said, was angry. The real God was vengeful. The real God, it turned out, was a devil.

But Felix survived. I survived, which means Felix survived. We came to England. We came to London. The Greatest City in the World. In London, they told us, only the old die. Only the sick die and usually not even then. Nobody dies for no reason. Nobody dies for a God that does not exist. There are no guns, they said. Not even the police have guns. To die from being shot, in London. Ha! Not unless a bullet finds its way over from Africa. So we felt safe. We thought we were being saved. We thought coming to England would save us.

He wanted to be a waiter. In a restaurant. That was his ambition. I laughed when he told me and he asked me why did I laugh? I stopped laughing. I said, Felix, you will be a waiter. You will be a waiter if that is what you choose to be. You could be a doctor too, you should consider becoming a doctor, but if you decide to become a waiter I will love you just the same. He told me he would think about it. He said, waiters get tips, Mother. Doctors do not get tips, do they? I had to agree with him. I had to say, no, Felix, they do not. He said, yesterday I was watching at the window and I saw a man in a restaurant give a waitress paper money. He folded it and he put it in her pocket, just here, in the pocket on her shirt. So on the whole I think I would rather be a waiter. But I will think about it. If you want me to think about it, I will. That is what he said.

He worked hard. He tried to work hard but his imagination interfered. He would dream. He would listen to a teacher and not know later at which point he had stopped listening. He would stare at the page of a book and come to a word and that word would carry him off, to somewhere other than the end of the sentence. He told me this. His teachers got angry with him and then they got angry at me so I spoke to Felix and that is what he told me. He said, Mother, what can I do? I want to learn. I know it is important that I learn. But I have so much thinking to do. I try to hold it off but sometimes I cannot stop it. It swallows me up, like it is thirsty and I am a glass of water. What can I do?

I could not get angry with him. How could I have got angry with him? I think, Inspector, that he would not have been a waiter. He would not have been a doctor either. He would have written stories or sung songs or painted pictures. He would have made something beautiful. He was beautiful already and everything he did was beautiful but others would have seen it just like I did. They would have seen it too.

Because they did not see it. Before he died, they did not see it. Felix was not popular. Partly it was because he dreamt so, I think, but mainly it was because he came from Africa. He was British, English, a Londoner, but he came from Africa. So the teachers complained about his attitude and the children, the other children, they complained about the colour of his skin. Even black children, Inspector. Especially black children. They said Felix was too black. They called him Africa as though the word itself were an insult. They beat him sometimes. They beat him and laughed and said, if it hurts so much then why don’t you ever bruise, why do we never see a bruise?