Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

‘Quick,’ the boy said. ‘Another!’

They launched all seven, a flickering procession of lights climbing ever upwards in a small, attenuated flock, the first one dwindling from view but not extinguished as the last took flight. The lanterns were fragile but tenacious, heading off over that vast ocean towards an unknown end, and by their simple, purposeful ascent and their warm yellow light, they turned the mind to the indefinable colour of the evening and the sound of the wind, to the scale of the world.

‘How far will they go?’ the Sergeant asked.

The boy shrugged. ‘Long way. Sometimes they go up and catch a thermal. Hundreds of miles, then. I have seen them burn and fall, and sometimes they are forced down. But I have never seen one come down at the end of its flight. They are always too far.’

The man and the boy watched as the lanterns winked away in the gathering dark, and then, when the last of the lights they were following might or might not have been the running lights of a ship or an aircraft, or a star, they went inside.

The next morning the boy was gone, as usual fading into the air like some sort of sprite, and leaving only a blanket on the spare bed and an unwashed coffee cup in his wake. The Sergeant tossed the blanket over a window ledge to air and scrubbed the cup, enjoying his own exasperation at the chore. As he worked, it occurred to him that he should start small. Shola’s murder was too big to understand, too important for him to take on. He should by rights pass it to someone with experience but there was no one like that so it would have to be him, after all, and yet he had no real idea where to go from here. He was baulked.

So he would begin with the lost dog. It was a small problem, but no doubt it mattered to the owner, and that would tell. It would get him started. At the same time, he would uncover what he could about the boy’s parentage. Two small things would be done, both needful to someone, and in the simplicity of these distractions his mind might turn up some new avenue by which he could approach Shola’s death.

As he made his way to the car, he found himself smiling. The lanterns had indeed been ‘zed oh em gee’.

TO HIS ALARM, the Matter of the Missing Dog was more complex than it first appeared. After a visit to the very ordinary old lady to whom the animal belonged, it technically became the Matter of the Kidnapped Dog because someone had been seen by two witnesses actually lifting the animal into the back of a flatbed truck, and he was forced to revise his opinion regarding the likely seriousness of the situation. The first witness he was inclined to dismiss – a housebound old geezer who must have been bored and drunk since before the Sergeant was born – but the second was a sensible young woman who was only visiting Mancreu to help her family move to her home in Botswana. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that she would make up such a tale, or that if she did it would tally with that of the old man.

If the dog had been of a combative breed he might have suspected a fighting ring, but Madame Duclos’s pet was evidently not of that sort. She showed him a photograph. The animal was fat to the point of shapeless, like a lumpy brown quilt dumped on the sofa. Even its ears were fat. With her permission, he retained the photograph. As he left, she took his hand and said ‘please’.

Why on Earth did people keep dogs? He could feel the dryness of her skin. She chopped her own wood, this old woman.

‘Please,’ she said again.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he told her. ‘I’ll try.’

‘Of course you will,’ she said. ‘The English love dogs.’

He nodded assent.

She peered at him and tutted with the unerring instinct of grandmothers for unspoken reservations, then half-sang, half-muttered something which might have been an island lament or a dinner call for the dog as she ushered him to the door.

The Duclos house was in an old white-stone quarter which seemed entirely inhabited by old people who dedicated their lives to making things pretty. There were window boxes and vines everywhere along the narrow streets, and as he walked he found that it was unusually densely populated for Beauville in these days. Here three wrinkled men played cards at a white iron table; there a bent old lady swept dust from her step. There were empty houses, but not many. He nodded to the card-players and offered them a respectful bonsalum in Moitié. It was almost the only local word he could say with confidence, even now. Every speaker seemed to have his or her own version of the dialect, and each believed it was a solemn duty to instruct this uncouth foreigner in the beautiful tongue.

They waved back, bonsalum avoumem , so he switched to English and asked them whether there’d been some sort of joint decision to stay as long as possible. They shrugged amiably. No, they said. It was just that when someone here decided to Leave, they invited someone who was staying a little longer and whose home was not as nice to come and live in their house. Someone old, of course, because the young people might ruin it.

‘But that will happen anyway, in the end,’ the Sergeant observed.

‘That’s no reason to invite it,’ the dealer said. ‘Young people,’ and this clearly included the Sergeant himself, ‘young people never understand. The last days are no less important than the others just because they are near to the end.’ He nodded at his friends. ‘Should we stop living today just because death is no longer a stranger? Should we go naked because our clothes no longer fit as well as they did?’

‘I should say not!’ said the woman with the broom. ‘No one wants to see your horrible bottom!’

‘Then you oughtn’t be peering in at my window!’ the dealer retorted. The sweeper shook her fist in mock fury and cackled.

The Sergeant realised that there was another Mancreu here which he had not known about, a Mancreu of the very old. It was easy to think of the island as one place with various parts dangling off it, but in truth it was layer upon layer, and each of them as real as the others.

‘Will you all Leave together?’ he asked.

The card-players shrugged. ‘If we live that long,’ the dealer said. ‘And when we leave, we will leave the houses as they should be. Perhaps houses have souls and we will meet them again one day. Or perhaps they will just go into this burning with dignity. Your man Kershaw, thought so. He came here when he first arrived and he tried to pretend he saw only bricks. But he cried a little when he realised the houses would die. He’s a decent man.’

The Sergeant reassessed them all once more. Old and watchful. The whole street was filled with old, watchful men and women. He tried his luck. ‘Anyone seen this dog?’

They shook their heads. ‘But it can’t have gone far,’ one of the players muttered, to general agreement.

The dealer dealt a fresh hand, and the Sergeant took the gentle hint and moved away down the perfect, empty street. A moment later, he heard the man’s voice raised in his direction once more.

‘Hey, Sergeant!’ he called.

‘No,’ the Sergeant shouted back, ‘I don’t want to see your horrible bottom, either!’

This rated a huge laugh from the card-players, and snorting approval from the sweeper. The dealer shushed them all. ‘You didn’t ask about the fish!’ he complained.

The Sergeant shook his head. For a moment, the statement made no sense. What fish? But yes, it had been on his list the day of Shola’s death: Beneseffe’s stolen catch. He hadn’t asked them about it, primarily because he had completely forgotten, but even had he remembered there was no earthly reason to suppose that they would know anything. Except, he realised, that they knew everything. They were one of the last stations in what had once been the great Mancreu gossip network, and their art had been refined rather than diluted by their proximity to one another, and their loneliness. So they knew – from who could say what messengers – that he was looking for stolen fish. This was no doubt how the boy got some of his uncanny information: he talked to someone who watered plants and sat by the roadside, someone who chatted and watched, and he traded time for knowledge.