The Happier Dead (16 page)

“And you gave the folders to Chris?”

He shook his head.

“No, no. He broke the deal. I mean the deal was I send him a sample, and he sends me a down payment, then I send him the rest, then he gives me the balance, right? Only I send him the sample and he says I’m taking the piss, like making a big joke on him.”

“What sample did you send him?”

“I don’t know. Some pages from the middle.”

“Give me the files.”

Hector lifted his mattress, and pulled the two manila files from the space between the stained underside and the springs strung across the frame. It was the hiding place which saved him. That was the same place that Mike kept the violent Manga comics which were technically contraband, but which Oates and Lori had decided should fall into the parental blindspot. Oates lived in troubled anticipation of the moment when he looked under there and found something worse. He wasn’t about to arrest a boy with no more gift for subterfuge than his own child. Oates took the files.

“So are you going to arrest me or what?”

“No, I’m not going to arrest you. If you testify against Chris Rajaram when we find him, and with your cooperation so far, we might be able to get around the burglary.”

“I can’t do that!”

“Well if you can’t do that then you go down for burglary.”

“No, no I can’t. If Helen finds out I was going to rip off a client…”

“Oh.”

“Don’t you have witness protection or something?”

“You don’t need witness protection. We’ll talk to Helen. I’ll talk to her myself, alright? I promise. She doesn’t like trouble any more than you. You might not be getting any more work, but you won’t wind up in a ditch either. How does that sound?”

Hector nodded. He stuck out his hand for a comrade’s handclasp, and Oates took it, feeling a little ridiculous.

“Alright then. Don’t do anything stupid like trying to leave London.”

“I won’t.”

“And thank you for your help.”

“Yeah, no worries.”

The landing was cold after the dense fug of Hector’s room. The door at the other end was open a crack, and Oates thought he could make out the glint of an eye watching him from the darkness. He waved, but there was no acknowledgement, and he started back down the stairs. In the kitchen, the young boy was eating a bowl of pasta, his feet swinging several inches off the floor.

W
ITH THE FILES
tucked under his arm, Oates walked back to One New Change, the shopping mall sitting opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, stealing the elegant renaissance reflection to decorate its sheer glass flanks. A cordon of police had formed around the entrance to the mall, round plastic shields clasped to their arms. It was the first real sign he had seen of the police reaction to the disturbances. It reminded him of his own early days on the force, but it was a strange kind of rioting – the traditional targets, the police stations and the public buildings, had been left largely untouched, but the shops were the subject of a furious assault.

Oates looked for a face he knew among the mass of officers, but the accents of the men and the numbers on the shoulders of their boiler suits told him they were from a northern force. They had been bussed in to master the capital, and there was in their manner a brittle excitement that made them laugh and call out bad jokes to one another. In the normal course they were made to feel inferior to their southern cousins, as if the crimes that really mattered all took place in London, and they were enjoying both their authority over the moneyed citizens and the grudging need of their metropolitan colleagues.

Oates knew the dangers of having men on crowd control with something to prove, and he was grateful that Lori and the kids were nowhere near the City, where the majority of the outside forces were concentrated. Their loose line was permeable to men and women stepping out from the offices around St Paul’s, but when a group of poor-looking kids approached, the cordon sealed, and they were turned away with jeers. In this way, the police barrier seemed almost an extension of the policies of the management company that ran the mall, making explicit a principle of exclusion that had previously operated only on the level of frowning staff and overly attentive security men.

The kids moved away down the street, but they did not disperse, and they were making phonecalls in the gloomy afternoon, their cheeks illuminated on one side with the glowing screens. Oates could picture those calls, the voices summoning up the hatred and discontent of the inner city, calling them to war. A couple of police horses stood, their breath steaming white in the darkness.

One or two of the policemen nodded to Oates as he crossed the line. Inside the shopping mall, beneath the blast of warm air which lay in welcome behind the sliding glass doors of the entrance, another world was waiting, as separate in its way from the outside as the summer of the Great Spa from the freezing London suburbs. The shops were decked for Christmas, a rich sparkle to dazzle the eye. The overdose eyes of the billboards rolled slowly in their sockets.

Oates was just looking for signs to the parking bays when he felt someone tugging at his sleeve. He turned around, and saw a girl standing beside him. She looked about fifteen years old, and she was so small that her face was quite upturned when she spoke to him.

“You’re the guy who was looking for Hector, right? Listen, please, I need to talk to you.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a friend. It’s about what Hector gave you. Look, it’s important, can you please just come with me?”

The girl was looking over her shoulder, so palpably agitated that Oates allowed himself to be led by her to an alcove under the escalators. There was a boy of about the same age waiting for them there, and as they drew close he produced a pistol from the inside of his coat. It was a homemade plastic gun, what Oates called a pronta-pistol. Some bent software engineer would be employed to crack the safety codes on a stolen 3D printer, and start knocking out crude weapons. You had to remove the protective casing to do the hack. As a result they often looked like all-year round ski-instructors, these backstreet armourers, because they would get tan lines around their safety goggles from the UV light used to cure the liquid polymer.

A pronta-pistol wouldn’t have the punch to make it through his body armour, even fired point blank. The chambers only held a couple of rounds, and the firing mechanism was prone to snap. Up this close, he’d likely only get one shot in. To slow Oates down he’d have to hit him in the arms or the leg below the knee, and to stop him he’d have to shoot him in the head. Oates was against the wall, tucked away in this little cubby hole off the main drag.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” the girl said, and she was quite calm. Her agitation had been an act. Not so her friend. The snubbed tip of the barrel had a slight quiver in the air, like the raised nose of an animal.

“Not with that you’re not,” Oates said, gesturing to the pistol.

“Give us the papers Hector gave you.”

“What papers?”

“Just give us the fucking papers, man,” the boy said.

No shoppers back here. A stray bullet ought to find a wall to bury itself. A part of his mind felt a kind of abstract pleasure at the speed of this analysis. In the second or so after he saw the gun, he had decided he was going to make this kid wish he’d left it at home.

“These papers?”

“Give us the folder, and we’ll let you walk away.”

“Alright then,” Oates said, “I’ll flip you for it.”

The girl started to protest, but he held up his hand, and with the other reached into his pocket. The boy made a strained noise, and gestured with the gun, but Oates shook his head. He came up with a fifty pence piece, and held it in front of them like a conjurer fixing their attention. The boy glanced at the girl.

Oates tossed the coin in the air and threw his gaze after it, and cried, “Call!” The boy’s eyes followed it involuntarily, and Oates’s arm was already coming in a great swing between them, and it knocked the gun skittering across the ground. The girl grabbed the folder from his hand, and shoved him as hard as she could in the chest. Oates’s body was still turned from the swing, and coming from below the girl’s push was enough to throw his balance. There was a cleaning trolley parked behind him, and he went down, flailing at the air.

She screamed “Run!”, but the boy lunged aside and went on all fours for the sliding gun. The direction of Oates’s swipe had carried the weapon away from the cubby hole and back into the trample of the shoppers’ feet, and now he saw the danger, but all he could do was draw his own gun. He knelt up amid the spilled rubbish and popped it from his thigh pad, but the boy was already on the gun. He picked it up and ran crouched with the gun turned backwards from the wrist, looking over his shoulder. He fired, the shot flying wide over Oates’s head.

Oates steadied the gun and fired twice. The sound sent some people scattering, but some just stood and watched, holding colourful bags of shopping. It was if they thought they were watching the gunfight on TV, with no more danger to themselves than a spilled bag of popcorn. The boy fell forwards, the bullets buried in his back. Oates pulled himself up, staggering a little on his right leg. He felt the war joy surge up in him, the gun in his hand more real than any other single thing in his life.

The girl was running through the atrium and he shouted at her to stop. She sprinted on, parting two shoppers with a shove of her shoulder. She had the papers clutched in her right hand, and they flapped like a bird being held by the legs as she ran. He raised his gun again, but the marble floors were thronged with shoppers, their sense of danger deadened by the calm music and pleasantly familiar brands. For a second he felt his finger quivering on the trigger, but her youth kept her safe. In another second she was gone, and the files with her.

He walked over to the boy lying face down on the marble concourse, his blood pooling silently around him. The spinning lights of the adverts reflected in the crimson puddle. He shoed the gun away from the body. He spun the boy over and saw in his eyes that shocked animal expression which had made Oates an atheist at the age of nineteen in the desert. He reached inside the boy’s pocket, and pulled out his wallet. The wallet was empty except for a single printed business card. It said,
Dwayne Jeffries, born 11 June 2016, died in the cause of Mortal Reform, 21 November 2035.

For a moment he felt as if he was about to be sick, and he stood with his hands on his knees breathing heavily.

M.R. The symbol springing up all over London. The Mortal Reformers.

A spook from counter-terrorism had come in to give a training session on the Mortal Reformers. Oates remembered it particularly because Anna had had one of their posters on her wall. He’d spent the whole session staring at the bloke, thinking about what he’d do to him if he tried to arrest his daughter. Then he’d gone home that evening and made Anna take it down, leading to much talk of fascism, free speech and who was living under whose roof.

Oates wasn’t much interested in politics. It was a hangover from life in the army, where it had been helpful not to inquire too deeply into the motives of those giving the orders. Anna was though. Because of her, and because of what was on her wall, he had listened closely to the briefing.

The spook had given some background to the movement in his lecture. The decision to label the Mortal Reformers a Proscribed Organisation under the Terrorism Act had been a controversial one. He ran through the handful of MPs who had previously been members of the political wing, and had now been dismissed, triggering a rash of byelections. He projected flowcharts showing the party structure, key supporters, sources of support and fundraising.

The core of the movement was a student thinktank that predated the invention of the Treatment, called the Centre for Policy for Inter-Generational Fairness. They weren’t much in thinking up snappy names, but they set out to highlight how increasing longevity screwed over the young. Longer and larger state pensions, more expensive end of life care funded by taxes, and the eldest holding on to jobs and real estate for periods without historical precent, all at a time of rising birth rates and youth immigration. Oates hadn’t ever really considered any of these things, but he could trace their effects into riots and crime he dealt with on the streets. The CPIF had been making some headway and gathering some influential friends in government, right up until the Treatment came along.

The Treatment had exacerbated all the problems which CPIF had sought to combat. It also strengthened the resolve of the powerful to resist any change. When death had been inevitable, the thought of relinquishing some of their privileges had been acceptable. After all, you couldn’t take it with you. With eternal life before them, they saw no reason to give anything up. You still couldn’t take it with you, but what if you didn’t have to go?

As the reform agenda failed, the revolutionary voices within the movement started to get a better hearing. Fringe elements had attached themselves to the CPIF
–
neo-Marxists focused on capital accumulation in the hands of the undying, Malthusian Green extremists obssessed with population explosion, religious fundamentalists decrying the perversion of God’s will. They brought with them a heritage of direct action and protest in contrast to the CPIF’s methods of lobbying and persuasion. The organisation changed its name to the Mortal Reformers. Between the prevailing economic conditions, the support of music heroes, and the atmosphere of wordy political theory, students flocked to them. The more the government tried to shut them down, the more attractive they became to the real-young. Anna had been one of them.

The boy on the ground was about the same age as Anna would have been. The girl who he had been about to shoot had looked like her. But it couldn’t have been Anna, because she had been killed on the road two summers before.

It had been the darkest time of his life. Oates had heard the phrase survivor guilt, but he had never considered before its application. It had never troubled him in the war because they had all lived with the threat of death. Oates knew that if death came for him he would not begrudge his mates their survival, and because he attributed similar sentiments to his comrades, his mourning for them was a clean fellow-feeling. For Anna, he felt only guilt. He looked over the crime scene photographs taken after the accident. The driver had had a heart attack at the wheel, and wasn’t prosecuted.