The Happier Dead (26 page)

There was the photo album. There was Prudence Egwu’s recent treatment, and his last minute arrival at the spa. There was Chris’s testimony damning Ali Farooz, and there was Ali’s confession. Ali Farooz, the man his head told him must be guilty, who his gut insisted must be innocent. The escape from conscience. The stories of the men and women who had woken up with someone else’s voice. The search for eternal youth. Above all there was Superintendent John Yates, the jovial PR, and the white witch Miranda, presiding over her eternal summer.

He waited for the satisfaction, the joy that by rights should have followed this revelation. He waited like a groom at the altar; happy, expectant, then anxious, then joking with himself to hide the anxiousness. All through the longest day of his life, he had been tracking this solution. He had bullied, he had fought, he had threatened and bribed and calculated, he had killed, all that a killer might be brought to justice. Yet as he waited, he felt only the sordidness of the truth. The case, which had seemed to him different, was really just like any other. At the heart of it was money and selfishness. Oates felt terribly tired, and the urge to get back to his family filled him once again. He would see this thing through, but he needed to be with them, and not just to protect them. He needed their protection too.

“Listen, I’m sorry,” he said as he turned to go.

“For what?” she said.

“For shooting your friend. For killing him.”

“I didn’t know him that well. He’d just come down from Manchester.”

“The manager upstairs said he was a nice lad.”

“He was. Do you mind if we get on now? This is going to be a really big night for us. Nottingham are going to remember this one.”

C
ARLOS ESCORTED
O
ATES
back the way they had come. The journey seemed much shorter now he knew he was headed for the fresh air. At the old tube platform, he was shown to a water butt with a pump to clean the shit off his boots.

In the club the evening’s entertainments had begun. A pre-op transsexual was dancing on the stage in front of a crowd of baying men and women in suits. The dancer was stumbling around to an aggressive rock track, drunk or simulating drunkenness, pausing to take deep swigs from a bottle of tequila he held in his hand. Skin pulled taut across his skinny sternum rose in the swell of the fake breasts, and his penis swung wildly as he danced. At the climax of the act, he squatted on the bottle to pick it up with his anus. The audience roared with approbation and disgust. He pulled it out from between his buttocks, drank a shot from the bottle, and spat it into the faces of the audience arrayed around the front of the stage.

“People pay for that?” Oates had to shout into the ear of his host to make himself heard above the uproar.

“People pay to be shocked. They pay to feel anything.”

Flo was greeting guests at the door. She had restored her hair and make-up. When she clocked Oates she stuck her chin in the air and straightened her back, quivering a little.

“I’m sorry for frightening you,” Oates said.

At the words of apology, she melted.

“You didn’t frighten me, dearie.”

“I was out of order.”

“There’s worse than wig-pullers out there, I can tell you. But thank you.”

Oates smiled and put out his hand. She profferred her own and Oates kissed it on the knuckle.

“You mind yourself out there, officer. It’s all going off. They’re going to tear down the town,” she said.

Outside the club, there was a small huddle of people hoping to be let in, the girls shivering in short skirts, the men acting nonchalant as if queuing outside was all part of the plan. The bouncer lifted the hook on a velvet rope for Oates as he left. Aside from the would-be clubbers, the street was empty though the buildings echoed with distant chanting. The damp wind blowing down from the West End carried the faint smell of peardrop boiled sweets, and it took Oates a moment to make the appropriate association – it was the aftertaste of tear gas.

He went back to his car, and was relieved to find it unmolested. He turned the key to start the heater and sat back in the front seat. He listened to the police chatter on his earpiece, trying to construct in his mind the clear path home. Trafalgar Square was properly sealed off now, and the Strand itself was closed at the Blackfriars end. Piccadilly Circus and Soho were swamped, with reports of glass fronts shattering all the way down to the Ritz, and the looters handing out truffles and champagne hampers from the ground floor of Fortnum & Mason to their compatriots in the street.

Oates could imagine the wild joy of the scene; even he, a policeman, could feel the thrill as the status quo tottered beneath the weight of temptation and privation. He believed that you should work for what you wanted, and that the law did more to protect the weak than the strong, but he felt the frustration of being constrained by that philosophy to an average life. Money had become an abstract ideal, and expensive goods the stuff of religious reverence. Even as the significance of riches increased, they were lifted away above the heads of Londoners, above the grasping hands even of those willing to stand on the bodies of others to reach them.

Those young men and women smashing their way into the stores must feel the way King Henry’s soldiers had felt, breaking into the monasteries to reclaim the gold and jewels in the gorgeous crosses and kicking the monks up the arse. The trouble was you couldn’t burn down the church without killing the people sheltering inside, and he thought of Mr Prendegast and his wife sitting with their lovely Asian neighbours and the strangers from downstairs, terrified in the darkness.

The disturbances spread all the way up to Marble Arch, where a police cordon bulged with the pressure of the riot. Outside of that, there were pockets of isolated trouble throughout the city, but the main areas of conflict were in Hackney, Tottenham, Brixton and Kingston. The Kingston riots had taken the police by surprise, and there wasn’t the weight of officers there to engage the offenders. The water cannons and the horses were all deployed in the east.

Through the sporadic bursts in his earpiece, Oates heard the names of some streets he recognised – not his own street, but near enough to fill his mind with the image of masked men beating on the door of his flat, with Mike, Harry and Lori hiding together in an upstairs bedroom. He tried again to call his wife, but the call wouldn’t go through; too many people ringing at once, the air thronged with the thwarted signals as every Londoner tried to contact their loved ones.

It took him ten minutes to assemble the new mental map of the city, with little images of the fires and barricades superimposed above the monuments and tube stations. He was about to drive off when his earpiece bleeped on the police frequency. It was Bhupinder calling from outside the spa.

“You need to get back here now, boss. Things are looking pretty bad out front. There’s more and more people coming, and they’re trying to get in to the spa. Some of the news people have got stuck and they want to get back to London for the riots, and we’ve had word from central that some of the troublemakers from the east might come out this way because they’ve blocked out the High Street.”

“Alright. I’m on my way back now. I’ll be an hour. Hour and a half tops. Can you keep everything under control until then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, yeah.”

H
E TRAVELLED ALONG
the empty Strand, and took Waterloo Bridge across the river. Lambeth Palace Road was open, and although he saw a fire engine tearing along the other side with siren wailing, he also saw a couple jogging on their way around Archbishop’s Park, and a family taking photographs of the police gathering on the north side of the river. There across the dark water was the Palace of Westminster, silent and peaceful in the night, and the face of Big Ben glowing like a second moon in the starless sky.

On Prince of Wales Drive along Battersea Park, the peace almost made him doubt the chaos he had seen in the West End. The lights were on in many of the big Georgian houses along the park. The screens of televisions appeared through the windows, some of them showing the riots on the rolling news, others films or football. He saw a family sitting down to dinner in their front room, curtains open.

He slowed the car, and felt himself begin to calm down. Perhaps it really was coming down worst in the east of the city. In the park itself, a low mist clung to the ground. There wasn’t a soul in sight on the long paths lined with lamps, or on the AstroTurf hockey pitch shining under the floodlights. Even the bare branches of the trees were motionless. The lights at the end of the drive turned red as Oates approached, and he pulled to a stop at the deserted crossroads. He waited there with the engine running in the silence. Then from a distance, but approaching rapidly in the still night, he heard the beating of hooves.

The traffic lights turned green, but he did not move. A police horse with no rider came galloping down the Albert Bridge Road. It was saddled, stirrups jangling, and the plastic visor to protect its eyes had been yanked across its face, so it ran half blind. Its neck dipped and rose with each stride as if it were moving through water. Oates was afraid as he saw it coming that it would break its own legs on the concrete in its headlong dash. Its tail was on fire, a terror it could never outrun. It passed so close to Oates’s car that he could see the swell of the veins in its neck, and the sheen of sweat on its flanks. The heat and light, the sudden frenzy of trailing sparks imprinted itself for a moment on his retina, and then receded into the London night. Having passed him at the crossroads, the horse ran on towards Clapham. Oates put his car in gear, and drove on down towards Putney Hill.

20:30 HOURS

THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER

2035 (REAL WORLD)

H
E FOUND THEM
sitting in the kitchen with their bags packed. Mike was playing games on his phone, Harry was sat holding the naked action figure which he liked to carry round with him when they were at home.

“Dad!” Mike said, and ran over to clasp his knees.

“Lori, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re here now,” she said. “We knew you would be. Didn’t we Harry?”

Harry nodded.

“Come on then boys. Who’s for an adventure?”

Mike cheered. Lori kissed him on the mouth, and as she did so Oates realised she would smell the alcohol on his breath. He pulled away from her and said, “Quickly, let’s get them in the car.”

She didn’t move, and reluctantly he stopped and looked at her. Without saying anything she nodded, and handed him one of the cases from the floor. She pushed past him into their bedroom, and as she passed she brushed her fingers over the broad shoulders of his body armour, and he knew then he was forgiven without even asking. It was that as well as seeing Mike and Harry that made him certain he had made the right choice in coming home.

“Where are we going?” she said when they were sat in the car.

“Somewhere safe. I’ve got to finish this job I’m on.”

“Oh, Rob, no.”

“It’s alright, it won’t take long. It’s at that spa, Avalon. They’ve got lots of police and security guards there, and I can bring you in with me and park you in a room whilst I finish things off.”

“Will it be safe?”

“They’ve got politicians in there, captains of industry, all sorts of top brass. You’ll be safe.”

Lori nodded to herself.

They floated along the highway in the darkness, the lights turning the pages of the shadows as they passed beneath them. As they drove in the darkness with the wet road glistening under the tyres, the journey started to feel more like a destiny to Oates. The low metal barriers on either side of the three lanes ran him on towards a fate immense and inevitable. He recognised the feeling, and tried to fight against it – if he went into the spa with the smell of destiny still on him, he was likely to act like a character in the legend of his life rather than a policeman doing his job. The dramatic action was always the wrong one to take, the portentous thing the wrong one to say. To ground himself he looked into the back seat, where the boys were now curled up asleep.

“I was thinking,” he said, “that maybe after Christmas we could go away for a bit. Just you and me.”

“Where would we go?”

“We could go back to Spain. You always liked Spain.”

“I liked Spain when I was twenty years old.”

She looked out of the window. Her breath created a pulse of condensation on the glass. Oates felt the pressure of his foot increase on the accelerator as the car drifted on.

“Besides, what would we do with the kids?” she said.

“They could stay with your mum. You know she’d be happy.”

“She can’t be chasing after Mike.”

“She’s always asking.”

She turned to look at their sons in the back, and Oates could tell from the expression on her face that she was hoping to find them awake, and so to avoid the conversation. But they were both sound asleep. Finding no refuge she stared ahead and frowned.

“They’re out cold,” he said.

“I don’t know. I’d have to see about work.”

“You’ve got days saved up.”

“I’d have to see.”

“Only I think we need to talk about some things.” It wasn’t until he said it that he realised his conversation had been heading towards this point. It worried him a little, how he found himself more and more doing the things he realised he was already doing.

“I started thinking about her again,” he said. “About Anna.”

“Were you alright?”

“I was in the end.”

“Good. My poor love.”

“We never talk about her, you know.”

Lori said nothing.

“I miss her,” Oates said. “I miss remembering her.”

“When she was here she made me happy. Now she’s gone she can only make me sad. Why remember her? It can’t do her any good, and it doesn’t do us any good either.”

“You have to remember people. Otherwise it’s like they weren’t here at all.”