Fourth Horseman (4 page)

For the next couple of days Dad immersed himself in the study, feverishly clearing out all the debris that had gathered there over the last ten years and making a clear space for the launch of his new venture. Alex and I hovered in the wings, carrying out rubbish, helping to move tables and desks from one part of the house to the other as Dad tried to decide what the best arrangement would be. We begged for a go on the new computer but Dad said no. Finally and categorically no. We could use his old computer but the new one—and the study as well for that matter—was completely out of bounds to us and there were to be no exceptions. This job was too important.

We didn’t ask Dad how much the government was paying him, but we had the impression that it was a princely wage. He talked about building a chalet in the garden when the mortgage was paid off so he could have a proper study outside in peace and quiet and not be in everybody’s way. He put in an order to one of the office supply companies and another courier arrived the next day with four huge boxes. There was a new swivel chair and a smart red filing cabinet. There were thirty reams of paper, a half-dozen printer cartridges, bulk wrapped jotter pads and a gross of ballpoint pens. There was every kind of file, folder and storage box under the sun, in all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Are we opening a shop, Dad?’ Alex asked.

‘Help yourselves,’ said Dad, and we did. We were the best supplied students in our school when we started back for the new year the following week. But it didn’t do Alex any good. In fact, it might have been one of the reasons that he got into trouble.

I
COULDN’T THINK OF
who else to call on as my ‘appropriate adult’. Attiya Malik kept coming into my head, but I knew that she would probably be called in to be with Javed, and I doubted that we could share her. We knew loads of people in the area, but I couldn’t think of anyone who would be just right. Our nearest neighbours were the Davidsons and I had known them all my life, but they were getting on and they both had medical conditions which wouldn’t respond particularly well to the stress of being called into the police station. Mum’s parents had moved to Ireland a few years ago, and Dad’s were in their house in Spain, where they spent at least half of every year.

‘I can’t think of anyone,’ I told the sergeant.

‘There must be someone,’ he said.

‘I know there must,’ I said. ‘I just can’t think of anyone.’

‘We’ll have to appoint someone for you then,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘There are a couple of people on call,’ he said. ‘Social workers. We’ll get one to come in.’

‘A social worker?’ I didn’t like the sound of it. Social workers dealt with neglected kids from council estates, not nice middle-class people like me.

‘Unless you can come up with someone else for us.’

I racked my brains, but no one came to mind.

‘We’ll find someone suitable,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile you’ll have to wait out there.’ It was a sign to my keeper that the session was over. She led me back out into the corridor and along to another room.

A juvenile detention room, it was called. To me, when PC Courtney had gone and locked the door behind her, it felt like a cell. It felt like prison.

There was nothing in the room except a table and a couple of hard plastic chairs. Sounds from other parts of the building echoed indistinctly through the bare walls. I hated the place but I realized that it was a relief to be alone; to have a chance for the first time that dreadful morning to think. I sat down on a chair and sprawled across the table. My head felt heavy and I rested it on my arms. I wanted to sleep, but I knew it would be a long, long time before I could expect to get that kind of release.

T
HEY SAY THAT EVERY
cloud has a silver lining, but I never knew what that meant until Alex got beaten up on the way home from school.

Mum was at home again for a couple of weeks that September because the summer season had ended and there was a break before the team embarked on the first of that year’s winter tours. Dad was practically invisible, working frenetically on the squirrel genomes, living in the stuffy study during daylight hours, emerging only for coffee or the odd weekend cricket match. Alex and I were about three weeks into the term, when he came home black and blue.

Normally we cycled together, but that day his class had been on a trip to an archaeological dig so he’d come home late, on his own. At first he insisted that he had come off his bike. Mum didn’t believe it. She wasn’t exactly a forensics expert but she did know a lot about injuries and she was as sure as she could be that Alex’s hadn’t come from a fall. Eventually he admitted that he’d been in a fight, but he said he didn’t know the boys who had done it. He said they had jumped him from the side of the road when he was taking the short cut through the back streets. But he refused to tell anyone exactly where it had happened and he wouldn’t let Dad call the police. He stayed at home for a couple of days hoping that the bruises would disappear, but of course they just got blacker. On the third day he came down to breakfast with the local newspaper under his arm.

‘I want to learn martial arts,’ he said.

‘What, karate and stuff?’ I said.

‘Sounds like a good idea,’ said Mum. Alex wasn’t all that short but he was as skinny as a whippet and I knew Mum worried about him. She was always trying to feed him, a tactic which backfired consistently because of Alex’s contrary temperament.

‘Not karate,’ he said. ‘Aikido.’ He showed us a newspaper ad in the paper. The classes were on Saturday mornings at a hall on our side of the town. A new beginners’ session was due to start that week.

‘Go for it,’ said Dad. ‘Even if you never need to use it you can’t go wrong with that kind of thing. It’ll give you great confidence.’

It gave Alex a lot more than that. The aikido class led to him meeting the best friend he had made in his life so far. Javed Malik was the silver lining to that dark cloud. They were the same age and roughly the same height and weight, which is why they were put together as partners in the first class. They clicked instantly, and after the second class they exchanged telephone numbers and arranged to meet during the week. Javed went to a different school but he lived on our side of town and he had a bike as well, so it was easy for the two of them to get together. Alex went to Javed’s house first and discovered that they had more than aikido in common. Javed’s bedroom walls were papered with posters of cricketers, and he was one of the county’s best batsmen in his age group. The next time they met up, Javed came to our house, and for a few weeks that autumn he practically moved in.

We were lucky to live where we did, even though we sometimes grumbled about it being too far from town. My mum’s mother had been born in the house and handed it over to my parents when they married, on the condition that they took out a mortgage on it so Mum’s parents could buy a house in Ireland. If we’d had to buy it from scratch it would have been way out of our league, not only because the house was large and very desirable, but because it stood on three and a half acres of gardens, orchards and paddocks. We had been given a pony when I was small by Dad’s nutcase of a sister, who lived in Scotland. The pony was beautiful to look at and not at all bad for a young child to ride, but it was practically impossible to catch. Faced with that constant frustration, my ‘horsy’ phase was very short, and we passed the pony on to a nearby riding school for peanuts. He is still there, as far as I knew, and is still practically impossible to catch. As soon as he was gone Mum had his paddock ploughed, re-seeded and rolled into a cricket pitch. From the time I was eight and Alex was six we had been playing family cricket matches.

During the summer we had bigger matches, involving as many friends and neighbours as we could muster, and once a year we had a huge, chaotic match between Mum’s team and Dad’s team, which was known as the Family Row. Mum invited her old cricketing mates, and Dad had found a few handy players among his friends and colleagues as well. There was no limit to the number of people who could play, so we invited friends, cousins, neighbours, school-friends—anyone who would come. The only real rule of the Family Row was that neither side was allowed to win, so it was a real fun occasion. It went on for two days, and in the evenings we had parties. It was one of the highlights of every summer.

When Javed first saw our pitch he looked as if all his birthdays had come at once. We’d had some rain and the outfield was a bit soggy, but we played a short match just so he could have a taste of it. Mum was well impressed with his batting. She told me later that she could see him going a long, long way. There was room for improvement in his technique, she said, but his strength was that he watched the ball right on to the face of the bat. She didn’t say any more. She was, as ever, tactful about the accident that had broken my elbow, and the reason it had happened. But I did ask Javed once, a while later, what his secret was and he told me with no hesitation.

‘The first part is waiting,’ he said. ‘My father told me there’s only one ball in a game of cricket and that’s the one you’re facing. It doesn’t matter what has happened in the past. The ball that’s coming at you won’t be like the last one or the next one, so you don’t predict. You wait and see, and you don’t make any decisions until it has left the bowler’s hand. If you can, you even wait until it has hit the pitch. Then you decide what to do.’

‘No one can think that fast,’ I said.

‘That’s the other bit of the secret,’ he said. ‘Don’t think. Act. If you start thinking you’ve had it, because you’re right, no one can think that fast.’

I thought about it and I had to admit it made some sort of sense. The best catches I ever took were ones that came too fast for me to think about.

‘But how do you stop yourself thinking?’ I said.

Javed shrugged. ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m learning aikido.’

T
HAT ROOM, OR CELL
, was strangely peaceful. It felt like a refuge from the madness. There were too many things in my mind that I didn’t want to think about. The lab and all that went on there, the squirrels, dead and living, my father in hospital, my brother in custody, and beyond all that the perilous state the world was in. Over every thought and feeling loomed the dreadful figures of the horsemen, colouring everything else that had happened and might happen. It was all too much. It was only the thought of Javed that comforted me. I don’t know why I trusted him as much as I did. I’d always liked him but it wasn’t until this morning that I had developed such a huge respect for him. I would accept his judgement now without question. After all, he was the one who had figured out what was going on. He was the one who could think around corners. He had advised me to say nothing, and that was what I would do, at least for the moment. And I would wait, like a batsman at the crease, for the next ball to arrive.

I
T WAS NEARLY A
year after Alex met Javed when Dad and I saw the first of the riders. It was early the following summer, and it was the day the squirrels arrived.

Dad had been in great spirits since he started on the new research. He had devised a programme that compared the squirrel genomes with the human one, which had already been analysed and recorded. A huge percentage of human genes are shared with other animal species, but Dad wasn’t interested in those. Any gene sequence that was the same in both human and squirrel genomes was discarded, so all that was left at the end were the genes that were peculiar to the squirrels. He then ran the red and the grey side by side through the programme, and it eliminated all the squirrel genes that they had in common. What was left at the end was the differences. There was still a phenomenal amount of information there for him to analyse, but it was a lot easier to manage in its reduced state.

His only worry was that for nearly a year after he started work there was no concrete evidence of an actual lab for him to use for the practical side of the project. He found it very hard to get in touch with Mr Davenport, who didn’t appear to have a regular office but operated on a system of perpetually changing mobile phone numbers. Whenever he did succeed in contacting him he was always given the same story: it was progressing well and there was no need to worry about it. No matter how hard Dad pressed him, Davenport refused to give any details about where the lab would be, and Dad eventually came to believe that there never would be a lab, and that the whole project would disappear as suddenly and as finally as the flat-worm one. But he was wrong. One day, out of the blue, Davenport arrived in a Mercedes and took Dad away to see the new complex. When he came back we were all amazed and delighted to learn that it was only about four miles away. Dad had been afraid that it might be in another county somewhere and that he’d be faced with logistical problems about Alex and me. As it was, with the lab so close, he could still be here when we came home from school, and if he needed to put in more hours he could start early in the mornings or go back to work in the evenings. As far as Mr Davenport was concerned it was entirely up to him. He had confidence in Dad’s integrity and no one was counting the hours he put in. What most people wouldn’t give for a boss like that, eh? That’s what we thought too.

The only time I ever met him was the day he came to take Dad to the lab. When they came back Dad was beaming all over his face. It was clear he very much liked what he had seen. He went to get some paperwork from his study and Mr Davenport sat down with Alex and me in the kitchen. I can see his face now in my mind’s eye and it still gives me the shivers. He was tall and heavily built and he had thinning hair, pepper and salt. He had sunglasses that he never took off, so I couldn’t say what colour his eyes were. He had jowls, I remember, like a bulldog. I didn’t like him. He frightened me, and Alex as well, I think, telling us how important it was that nobody, not even our best friends, should get to hear about what Dad was doing, and he went on and on about animal rights activists and how dangerous they could be. He spoke to us as if we were mentally deficient, but it was clear that he was doing his best to be nice. It didn’t work, though. We just felt threatened.