Down into Darkness (34 page)

Stella placed some files on his desk: a drop in the ocean. She said, ‘It's lousy luck.'

Collier looked at her. ‘Are you enjoying this, Stella?'

‘No, Boss, I'm not enjoying it. People are dying.'

‘What's the pattern here? He'll stop or he'll make a mistake and get caught: isn't that what we're relying on? A mistake.'

‘A mistake would help.'

‘Or else he's never caught. He just becomes history.' Collier lit a cigarette. ‘Like me.'

Candice Morgan had flown back from her girls-only funtime break and was sitting in the relatives' room wondering if her husband was going to come back to her from the operating theatre dead or alive. She had asked the question a number of times, and no one seemed eager to give her a straightforward answer.

Morgan had been on the table for five hours while surgeons removed a haematoma cluster from his brain. The knife wounds had been cleaned and stitched with little attention
to cosmetic effect; surgery took precedence. The cut to his face went from the left point of the jaw, across the mouth and nose, up the right-hand cheek, to snag the corner of the eye and then into the hairline. Given that the surgeons had scalped Morgan and trepanned him, it seemed less a disfigurement than a grace note.

A nurse looked in to let Candice know that the operation was still in progress. Candice asked, ‘Is he going to die?' Half an hour later a different face asked if she would like a drink. Candice asked, ‘Is he going to die?' When the surgeons were finally done with Morgan, a consultant came to see Candice to let her know that the operation had, so far as they could tell, been successful and that her husband was not dead. ‘Yes,' Candice said, ‘but is he
going
to die?'

When Ricardo had realized that the face he'd seen in the rear-view mirror that night close by Wormwood Scrubs was Bowman's, his thoughts first turned to blackmail.

You want a large piece of my action, you bastard? No, I'll have a large piece of yours.

The problem with this idea, and Ricardo knew it, was that it would require nerve that he suspected he didn't have; it might also require muscle he
knew
he didn't have. He thought of Sekker and people like Sekker: he'd met such people before; they were a special breed; they lacked qualities that most people took for granted – a conscience, for example, or regret, or pity. Most of all they lacked imagination. They were people who could nail a man's hands to a chair and chat to him through his screams. He decided to cut his losses and move on. Harefield was rich pickings, but the world was full of people who knew how to steal without knowing what to do next, people in need of a middle man, a match-maker.

It was early afternoon, and the view from the eleventh floor of Block B was of a flawless blue sky warped by rolling
scarves of pollution. A flock of gulls cruised by on their way to the garbage dump. Ricardo sat with Tina over a Pat's Pizza and made plans; he'd heard that there were some unlikely areas opening up. The Midlands. Nottingham, he told her, was a real frontier town.

Tina put the TV on and watched a love story in which things kept going wrong. Ricardo lay back in his chair, eyes closed, but he wasn't sleeping; he was planning. He might not have the balls to front Bowman, he thought, but there were other ways to make the man's life complicated.

In his mind's eye Ricardo could see a little bomb with a very long fuse.

Maxine Hewitt and Sue Chapman were sitting in a dimly lit room watching CCTV footage. They had the lights down because the tape quality was poor. They watched citizens going about their business, observed, recorded, unaware.

All those lives, Maxine thought, all those connections.

‘It's crap,' Sue observed. ‘You couldn't ID anyone from this. Kids in hoodies steaming a shop, you're looking at a blur with something blurry inside it.'

People walking their dogs, people shopping, couples hand in hand,
Big Issue
hawkers, Gideon Woolf crossing the road at a run, his long hair flying, the tails of his long coat flying, just beating a black Freelander as it switched lanes.

Ricardo said, ‘Don't tell Stella where we're going.'

‘I can get in touch, though?'

‘Oh, yeah. Yeah, I want you to get in touch. Definitely.'

‘It was a long time. I hadn't seen Stell for a long time.'

‘The thing is,' Ricardo said, ‘I'm going to fuck him up.'

‘Sekker?'

‘Sekker's boss.'

‘Okay,' Tina said. ‘Good. How?'

‘It's complicated.'

Tina nodded. ‘Okay.' A thought occurred to her. ‘Will he know it was you?'

‘No. This is a long-range thing. It's a hands-off thing. We'll be gone.'

‘To Nottingham.'

‘Somewhere.'

‘Nottingham sounds good.'

The movie was on its way to a happy ending, bad luck reversed, all obstacles overcome, the lovers steadily but surely advancing to limitless joy.

‘Stella's part of it,' Ricardo said. ‘Some information I need to give her. Maybe you could do that.'

‘Okay. I'll tell her. What is it?'

‘Later,' Ricardo said. ‘I haven't got it all straight yet.'

Delaney said, ‘What's Stanley Bowman doing on your crimeboard?'

Stella told him. She said, ‘Neil Morgan and Stanley Bowman – two off your Rich List, am I right?'

‘Two of fifty.'

‘But these two are connected.'

Delaney laughed. ‘They're all connected. Money connects them. Influence connects them. Friends in high places connects them. They're connections themselves.'

‘So what is it, exactly, that connects Bowman and Morgan?'

‘Who knows?'

‘Not me,' Stella said, ‘but I'd like to,' and she looked at him.

‘I can try.'

He was opening a bottle of white wine. She fetched some glasses and put olives in a dish: olives and wine, the evening sacrament. The first long sip tasted wonderful, cold and crisp, the aftertaste of gooseberry.

He said, ‘So what do you think?' as if the question had only just been asked, as if it were fresh in both their minds.

Which it was.

Stella put down her glass and crossed to him. She held his hands to her breasts, as if she were swearing an oath. ‘I have to sell Vigo Street first.'

‘No, you don't. We'll sell this, buy somewhere, the money from Vigo Street can come along later.'

Stella nodded. She said, ‘Yes. Okay. When?'

‘Whenever you like.'

They kissed. They clinked glasses. She felt elated and completely lost.

Candice Morgan sat at her husband's bedside and watched the heart monitor throw its little loops. She had spent some time with the consultant after Morgan had returned from theatre; she had asked whether he was going to die. The consultant had said he thought not. In fact, he was pretty sure of it.

The pay-to-view TV was showing a news broadcast in which chaos played side by side with disaster. Candice watched without watching, her mind elsewhere. She was thinking,
Don't die. Please don't die
.

The room was warm, and Candice dozed for a while. The TV threw flicker-frames on the wall, and the sound of sirens floated up from the street. After ten minutes or so, she woke and looked across at the bed. Morgan lay on his back, utterly still, the monitor ticking and blipping. Candice stared at him, nothing in her face of softness or concern.

Don't die,
you bastard
.

Silent Wolf in the rain-lashed alleyways, in the dark dead ends. His principal adversary was Ironjaw, a cyborg made almost invincible by radical surgery. Research had shown that Ironjaw was almost as popular as Silent Wolf with the kids who played the game, and the game-makers were already developing an Ironjaw spin-off.

James and Stevie Turner sat side by side on their grandparents' sofa and took Silent Wolf through another adventure. The swirl of his coat, his snarl, the glint of a street lamp on the blade of his knife… Desperadoes and lowlifes came at him out of the shadows and were sent straight to hell. James was well on the way to Level 8, where Silent Wolf stood on the edge of Ironjaw's Badlands Abyss, his death toll in the upper hundreds.

Their grandparents hated the game for its indiscriminate violence, and they hated the fact that James and Stevie played it in every spare moment. They tried confiscating it, but the boys became badly upset; they almost seemed to be suffering withdrawal symptoms, and Stevie's nightmares became more frequent and more distressing. It was difficult enough, trying to cope with their own grief and their daughter's limitless depression, without also having to deal with two boys who rarely spoke, who seemed to have retreated into game-world and the violent streets of an unnamed city.

‘What is it?' the grandfather asked. ‘Why do you like this game so much?'

‘It's him,' James said. ‘It's Silent Wolf.'

*

The grandfather played the game when the boys had gone to bed, but the technology was too fast and too subtle for him. Next day he asked James to coach him, thinking, maybe, that if he could be part of it, he could break into their world, get close to his grandsons and help them.

James talked him through the rules and the moves. Silent Wolf stalked the streets; the weather worsened; the skies darkened; red-eyed killers came at him from every doorway.

Stevie said, ‘And he killed Daddy. Why was that?'

Later, the grandparents talked. They could see what was happening, they could see why the boys were so addicted to the game. It was a necessary fantasy. Because if a cartoon character had killed their father, then, obviously, their father couldn't really be dead.

That night, the grandfather put the game into the player again. He didn't get far, so he cancelled it and watched the title-trailer: slanting rain, a distant lightning strike, Silent Wolf slipping through the crowds on Mean Street, taking an alleyway short-cut. A man emerged from hiding, a cleaver in his hand. Silent Wolf high-kicked; his knife glittered in the light from a bar-room window; the man went down.

It repeated endlessly, balletic and bloody. The grandfather backhanded a tear from his cheek.

The bleachers were up in Byrite, the cage in place, the fighters standing by the gate. Going into that space was like entering a tunnel in a windowless train. Voices swarmed on the walls and crowned over the cage like a firestorm. The fighters jogged on the spot, looking away from each other, looking at the floor. One of them was a white guy with dreadlocks: a Wigger, thick in the chest, his shoulders and biceps a little rockfall that went all the way to his bunched fists. He curled a gobbet of spit on his tongue and blew it down between his feet.

Ricardo was making a book. He and Tina would be gone soon, but there are cage fights all over, and he expected to find this sideline wherever they happened to wind up. Ban cock-fighting, ban badger-baiting, ban dog fights, ban foxhunting and the next blood sport will be man on man in a seven-foot-high cage with no way out. Cage-fighting was covering the map. It was almost respectable: Mike Tyson had flown in to MC some Manchester fights.

There were few rules: no biting, no head-butting, no eye-gouging; that aside, it was go anywhere, do anything. The only other thing banned was avoiding trouble – no pussies in cages. The fighters wore thin leather gloves, so you knew that blood would be drawn, bones would be broken, damage would be done, and deaths were a distinct possibility. For Ricardo, it had all the potential of a growth industry. Set up the contest, charge an entrance fee, take bets on the fights, pay someone with a Super-8 camera to film each bout, then distribute the DVDs through your
CAGE FIGHT KILLERS
website.

The fighters went into the cage along with the referee. The baying from the crowd grew; Ricardo raced up and down between the bleachers taking bets, all of which were going on the Wigger, which wasn't too surprising, since his opponent was slighter, his torso sloping down to a narrow waist. Worst of all, he was a good-looking guy. How could a pretty boy win a cage fight? With a two-man contest, though, you could only come second, and there was money in the purse for the loser.

Ricardo took a bet from Sekker, who was sitting on a ground-level seat close to the door. Sekker grinned. ‘It's an execution, this.'

Ricardo nodded. ‘The Wigger.'

‘He'll kill him, won't he?'

‘Looks like it.'

They were shouting into each other's faces to make themselves heard.

‘So I bet on the other guy, right? Because dreadlocks looks a winner, so he'll go down, won't he?' A pause. ‘
Won't he?
'

Sekker was asking a question that required an answer Ricardo couldn't supply.

‘It's not a fix. Best man wins.'

‘Not a fix?' Sekker looked confused.

‘No. Straight fight.'

Sekker smiled, then he laughed. The laugh couldn't be heard above the din, but it looked infinitely threatening.

He said, ‘Don't shit a shitter,' and handed Ricardo two hundred in low notes. ‘On Pretty Boy.' He added, ‘Catch you later, right?' Ricardo hesitated. ‘
Right?
'

Sekker had turned his attention to the cage before Ricardo had the chance to nod agreement. Pretty Boy stood in the middle waiting for the Wigger, who was making a tour of the cage, smashing his hand against the links, staring his opponent down. A klaxon sounded, and the Wigger charged in, slugging. Pretty Boy turned like a matador, taking a punch on the arm, clubbing down on the Wigger's neck as he went by, making the man stagger. Instead of following up, he stood back like an artist admiring his work.

The Wigger turned and paused. It took him a moment to assess what had happened: to assess it and log it and make an adjustment. So this guy was tricky, okay, but he wouldn't look so smart with his nose all over his pretty face. The Wigger shuffled forward, fists held high, elbows over his midriff. He flicked out a left. If you want to box, we'll box. Think I don't know how to do that?