Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (3 page)

‘Hello darling!’ Fran’s tone with Charles was simultaneously maternal and slightly flirtatious. It was a combination he enjoyed. ‘Rees is off on his honeymoon, isn’t he? Ted and Rami are still tied up with that investigation down in Exeter. Mike and James are over at Lockleaze dealing with a new case that came in over the weekend, Judy’s on the way to look at a missing person case in Swindon which looks as if it might be suspicious, and I’m not going to be here for long either because I’ve just been told by our dear leader to pack my bags and drive down to Dorset to deal with a triple disappearance in some posh boarding school. It looks like you’ve got the whole place to yourself.’

‘Well I am
not
going out today,’ Charles said. ‘Roger has promised me at least two uninterrupted office days to catch up on my paperwork from the past three weeks.’

The two of them glanced across at their boss Roger in his Perspex box beside the water cooler. He was busy on the phone, making conciliatory gestures in the air and pulling regretful facial expressions of the utmost sincerity. It was his characteristic look, his characteristic stance.

‘I must have worked seventy hours at least last week,’ Charles said as he glanced through his e-mails, ‘and the week before. More than that probably.’

‘Well that’s ridiculous.’

‘It is, isn’t it? I went to a party at the weekend and I realised it was the first time I’d really done anything social for months.’

‘It’s terrible the way that slave driver exploits your goodwill,’ Fran said, smiling and looking past Charles’ shoulder. ‘It’s absolutely terrible.’

Roger had come up behind him.

‘Charles, I
know
how busy you are,’ he said. ‘And I know we’re going to have to do something about our staffing levels, but I’m afraid something’s cropped up and I’m going to have to ask you for your help.’

His face was set to maximum sincerity and regretfulness.

‘Here we go!’ sighed Fran.

‘I’ve just got off the phone with the DSI liaison people,’ Roger said, ‘and they’ve picked up two new cases in the Thurston Meadows Zone. You
know
I wouldn’t ask you if I had any other option, but I’m afraid I just haven’t got a choice. Could you possibly nip over to Thurston Meadows and do just an initial assessment? I know it’s a pain but it shouldn’t take you
too
long and with any luck you should be able to get back to your desk by mid-afternoon.’

Fran snorted.

‘Last time you told me I’d be back by mid-afternoon,’ she said, ‘I was out of the office for three weeks solid.’

Roger kept his eyes on Charles.

‘Sorry, Charles, but I just don’t have another alternative.’

Charles sighed. He was genuinely disappointed that his quiet day had been spoiled, but at the same time there was a certain buzz to be had from the endless pressure, the case papers skip-read with a phone propped under his chin, the snatched sandwiches, the car journeys back and forth across the West Country. There was a kind of satisfaction in managing to deal with all this and yet somehow remaining calm and in control. In fact it was something of an addictive drug. His workload was far heavier than Fran’s or anyone else’s but he knew this was because he let it be. He had no home life to protect, no one outside of work to nag him for a share of his time. This had
become
his life.

‘Okay, give me the papers. But you definitely owe me for this Roger.’

~*~

An hour later he was waiting in his car to go through one of the checkpoints into Thurston Meadows. There were three other drivers ahead of him. In front of the checkpoint was a large sign:

‘Let’s tackle this together!’ Charles repeated to himself, testing out the words, and moving forward to third place in the queue.

He tried it again, this time in a deep, thespian baritone: ‘Let’s
tackle
this together!’

He was attempting a Jamaican version – ‘Let we tackle dis togeder’ – when the final car in front of him moved off and it was his turn to hand his ID up to the officer on duty.

The plump, middle-aged policeman swiped the card through a reader.

‘Immigration Service, eh?’ he observed with a sly smile. ‘Is this normal immigration work or is this something to do with the… er… unidentified prisoners?’

‘Sorry. No comment,’ Charles said shortly. He hated the cosy indiscreetness that was indulged in by so many of the people he worked with. He hated the little winks and nods, the hints and code words. If a thing was confidential, it was confidential and that was that.

‘Of course,’ said the officer, ‘quite correct. Welcome back to the Meadows, Mr Bowen.’

Charles rolled forward across the Line.

~*~

‘These are not “sink estates”,’ the Secretary of State for Social Inclusion had recently declared in Parliament, ‘and they are not “dreg” estates. This government has spent more than any other government in history on ensuring that the areas designated as Social Inclusion Zones are
decent dwelling places
for human beings: fellow-citizens in our society who find themselves for whatever reason,
outside of
the economy…’

Charles hadn’t been here for a while, but he’d visited Thurston Meadows several times before over the years – this was one of the largest of Bristol’s SI Zones – and it was true that this wasn’t on the face of it such an unattractive place. Trees and shrubs screened off homes from the main roads, there were community centres and well-equipped playgrounds, and the modern houses and flats had attractive and playful features like clock-towers and weather-vanes, painted in cheerful nursery colours.

But Charles wasn’t thinking about all that now. He was busy. He was already at work. As he headed towards the administration building he was glancing round with a professional eye, looking out for clues. And it wasn’t long before he spotted one. On a wooden fence surrounding a row of back-yards, a familiar name was painted in white, pink and yellow:

‘DUNNER’

‘
Yes!
’ he whispered, and a little shiver ran along his spine.

There was more in the same style a few yards further on:

‘FRIJA’

‘WOD’

‘TEW’

And then, in day-glo pink: ‘
IGGA’

Two young boys noticed him looking in their direction and grinned at him, defiantly, or so it seemed to him, like pictures he’d seen of children back in the time of the Irish Troubles, grinning at British soldiers who their dads might later kill.

But never mind that. Look what was ahead, just one block further on! The clincher! A branching tree, two storeys high, had been sprayed in gold on the end of a block of flats. Over the image, in blood-red letters a metre high, were daubed the words that he himself had muttered just two nights previously as he looked out over the city from Susan’s back yard, mistakenly thinking he was alone:

‘Endless Worlds!’

He passed what he guessed to be a children’s home of some kind, set back from the road a little way with a DSI sign in front of it reading ‘
Asphodel Way Assessment Unit
’. A very large Asian woman in jeans and tee-shirt was waddling slowly out from the building to a parked car, followed by a very slight, and startlingly beautiful teenaged girl with straight blonde hair. The girl glanced in his direction. She struck him as quite lovely and quite empty. He imagined that, in a few years’ time, men would give anything to try and reach that emptiness inside her – they would tear out their own souls – but they’d always fail.

And then, as he drove on by, a strange conviction suddenly came to him that for her there wouldn’t
be
‘a few years’ time’. She wouldn’t be here. The deep well was already opening up in front of her into which, very soon, she would disappear forever.

~*~

In a carpeted airlock inside the entrance, Charles swiped his ID through a reader and waited for clearance.

‘Welcome to Thurston Meadows Central Administration,’ said a recorded female voice: deep, sonorous, and with a faint Caribbean accent. ‘May we remind you that the DSI and its partner agencies are committed to combating racism, sexism, homophobia and discrimination in all its forms and our staff will assertively challenge any use of offensive or discriminatory language.’

The inner door slid open and he was admitted to the Official Visitors’ Reception Area, tastefully decorated with a beige carpet and pale pine furnishings. There was a separate reception area for Zone Residents.

‘Hi, I’m Charles Bowen from the Immigration Service,’ he told the receptionist. ‘I have an appointment with Mrs Richards, the Executive Director.’

He picked up a magazine, turned to ‘24 Sex Tricks that will Wow Your Man in Bed!’ and waited for a secretary to finish whatever job she was in the middle of doing and come down to fetch him. But as it turned out, he hadn’t even got to sex trick number 3 when the Executive Director herself was there to greet him in person. She was brisk, smartly dressed, with elegant short grey hair, and Charles knew perfectly well that someone like her wouldn’t in the normal way of things have even
considered
making time to come downstairs to meet a minor official like himself.

So this was interesting. It meant she was scared.

‘Mr Bowen? I’m Janet Richards.
So
good of you to have got here so early.’

‘Not a problem. Best to strike while the iron is hot with cases like these.’

Charles had met the Executive Directors of other Inclusion Zones, and he felt he was beginning to understand the way they saw the world. They were the heads of government of their own miniature empires and everything within their designated Zones came under their control. They were generously paid for this responsibility, at least by public service standards, but in exchange for power and status they had to make a Faustian bargain:
they had to keep the lid on things.
If a Thurston Meadows child was battered to death by a parent, then, unless she could find someone else to blame, Mrs Richards would be held responsible; if crime, or drugs, or violence seeped out from the Zone into the wider city, she could be the sacrificial victim. The whole point of the Zones was to hold everything in, to keep all that was distressing, unruly and uncouth hidden away behind the Line.

‘As you’ll have gathered,’ she said, ushering Charles into a spacious office fitted with pale, polished furniture, ‘we picked up two young men last night who sound like your sort of cases.’

‘Mrs Richards…’

‘Oh, call me Janet, please…’

‘Janet. I’d be pleased to talk later but my first priority has got to be to interview these two men you’ve got in detention. These people have a way of disappearing.’

‘Yes of course, I’ll take you down to the police wing myself. Ah, here’s your coffee. Did you want to drink it first? It would perhaps be an opportunity very briefly to…’

‘I’ll take it with me if you don’t mind.’

‘Yes, yes of course.’

She led him along a corridor and into a lift.

‘We’ve never had any hint of this sort of thing before,’ she said, as they dropped back down to the ground floor. ‘It’s all been completely out of the blue.’

‘Well actually,’ Charles said, as they emerged from the lift and headed along another corridor, ‘for future reference, the signs were there to be seen. Have you not noticed the graffitti?
Dunner
?
Wod
?
Igga
?
Endless Worlds?
That big golden tree? You can see it from the car park of this building.’

Her voice became several degrees cooler.

‘The tree? Well yes, we noticed it of course but I suppose we felt that a lot of young people have cottoned onto that tree thing nowadays. A sort of cult. Not necessarily evidence of actual… um…’

‘In fact research suggests that the appearance of tree graffiti is a pretty reliable indicator,’ Charles said.

‘As you’ll have no doubt read in the recent circular,’ he couldn’t help adding, for no real reason except to observe the effect it had on her.

Charles knew from previous experience that DSI people – or ‘deskies’, as they were known by the inhabitants of the Zones – had elevated buck-passing almost to an art form, a kind of dance, and he knew that, within this dance, memos and government circulars played a vital role, like the ribbons around a maypole. Deskies received more information than they could possibly hope to take in – the government fretted constantly about the Zones and could never leave them alone – yet whole careers might hang on whether or not they had read a particular document, and whether or not they in turn had passed it on to others beneath them.

‘Tree graffiti,’ Charles innocently added, ‘and indeed Dunner cult slogans in general…’

Janet Richards pursed her lips and said nothing. She was in a deep hole and she knew it, but shifters had only recently been officially recognised as a genuine problem, as opposed to a mere rumour, and there were still many public officials who questioned whether these troublesome intruders really were what they claimed to be. Doubtless she’d tossed the Home Office circular on warning signs into her ‘not urgent’ tray and given her attention instead to DSI(D) 023/9 (the new target figures for prosecutions of Zone-based drug traffickers), or DSI(P) 032/7 (the requirement to cut in half the number of burglaries committed by Zone residents in non-Zone areas), or DSI(C) 045/3 which was about increasing the number of Zone children on ‘maltreated children lists’. (Or was that
reducing
the numbers? Did more on the list mean that more children were being maltreated, or did it mean that the system was detecting maltreatment more efficiently? The instructions kept changing! The definition of progress was constantly being revised!)