Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

‘You know who it was?’

‘I’m bloody going to!’

Kershaw hesitated. ‘Be careful out there, Lester. If this is Fleet stuff, fine, everyone ought to be very polite. But if it’s something else… you remember you were saying when Shola died that maybe the next thing Mancreu was going to do to itself was crazy insane shit with a body count?’

‘Is someone dead?’

‘No. But they could have been.’

‘And if he’s a commando, if he’d wanted it that way, they would have been.’

Kershaw nodded. ‘I guess that’s true. I gotta work, Lester. This is not the only shit in my shitbox today.’

‘I came by to offer my informal assistance. Lester Ferris in his off hours, not the Consul or what have you. Or just beer. I understand beer works wonders.’

Kershaw hesitated. ‘Thanks, man. Actually – are you busy this evening? I have a thing. I was going to ask you anyway. Unofficially official or whatever. You know what, sometimes I have no idea.’

‘You can record me as present or absent. At your service, anyway.’

‘I’ll call you later. Take care, Lester.’

‘I’m a bit concerned about you, Jed. If you think Britain looks like a gusset, your girlfriends have been giving you a very strange idea of what sex is all these years.’

‘Seen from space, Lester. Space. The place where British people do not go because the British space programme is, what, two guys with a really long stick?’

‘In that way, Jed, it is very much like US healthcare.’

‘Go now, Lester. Tell the Queen I said hi.’

‘See you later, Jed.’

The Sergeant let himself out, past the grinning assistant who had no doubt been listening to the whole thing on Kershaw’s intercom. He tipped the man a salute and received a careful wave in acknowledgement, and then went back to Brighton House to dig out the school records. As with his visit to the docks and the chapel, his conversation with Kershaw had been all according to plan. Not perfect – not with Dirac’s Italian inquisitor on his way to Mancreu – but within the parameters he had set for the encounter.

Recalling the conversation he wondered, twitchily, whether he should try to banter like that with the boy. With Kershaw it was easy because the stakes were low. If either one of them overstepped, the matter could easily be resolved because the friendship was convenient and ultimately time-limited. It would not survive their departure from the island. But with the boy he wanted something more than that and he had no idea where he might transgress in some awful way. Or just come across as trying too hard. Adults who wanted to be cool, the Sergeant recalled, were painfully uncool.

He would have to think about it.

The school records proved to be at the back of the stack of boxes that had been piled very neatly in the east wing, sealed in plastic to keep out moisture and possibly rats. It was hard to see why – the boxes and indeed the rats would cease to exist soon enough. If this paper had been wanted, it would by now be in a new home somewhere. The Sergeant had very rarely known a bureaucracy let go of so much information, and he suspected darkly that some of the Mancreu records must contain references to long-ago British behaviour under the Mandate in Occupied Palestine, or in Malaysia or Kenya, which was now considered discreditable. The evil baby would be lost with a great deal of murky bathwater, and that would be that: a shipping error, valuable historical accounts alas gone for ever. He idly considered a trawl through the most obscure boxes for whatever it was Whitehall wanted to forget, and looked at himself, startled, in the fractured window glass. He was a sergeant, not a troublemaker.

He hauled what he needed out of the pile, wishing someone had bothered to digitise all this at some point in the last two decades, but they hadn’t. Mancreu before the Discharge Clouds had existed in a sort of perpetual 1989, so hardcopy it was – nearly sixty boxes of it. He pulled at the plastic wrap with his fingers and found it surprisingly tough. He vaguely remembered a girl who had worked at a post office somewhere in Germany telling him – it had been a come-on, he realised in retrospect, and he had utterly failed to notice – that industrial cling wrap was really good for tying the wrists during sex. He tried to claw through it, then gave up and went back down the corridor for a Stanley knife.

The phone rang just as he gave up on the Stanley knife and realised that the weather-stained carving knife in the galley kitchen at this end of the house (‘We use it for barbecues,’ the Consul had told him) would do just as well, and he nearly took his own eye out lifting the receiver to his head.

‘Jed?’

It wasn’t. Inoue’s laughter bubbled at him. ‘I’m going to hang up now,’ she said happily.

‘What? No, I—’

‘Bye bye!’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but she was gone. He stared at the phone, put the receiver back in its cradle, bewildered. Had he really upset her? No one really called him other than Kershaw.

The phone rang again. He picked it up. ‘Dr Inoue?’

‘No,’ she said gruffly, ‘this is Jedediah Sibelius Kershaw. I want you to come to dinner. We talked about it earlier.’

‘I’m sorry about before. he just calls me more than other people, is all.’

‘Lester! What the hell are you talking about?’ Inoue continued, in character. ‘I want you to come and eat with me. We’re all going out for dinner. I told you about this when you came by today. That Japanese scientist, Kaiko Inoue, will be there, too. You’re going to sit next to her so she doesn’t have to discuss Pan-Arab Nationalism with that idiot from the Working Group whose name she cannot remember but who has too much nose hair.’

He went with it. It seemed the only thing to do. He didn’t want her to hang up again. ‘Oh, right, Jed, thank you.’

‘It’s a horrible nose, Lester, so don’t even think about being late. And wear something smart. Do you have medals?’

‘Yes, I suppose I do. Shall I put them on?’

She sobered abruptly, and her voice became Inoue’s, strained and uncertain. He had never heard uncertainty in her before, and it did not suit. ‘I was going to tell you “yes”. But maybe… I think you should not. This will be a… well, I think it will be a strange occasion. Kershaw will announce the disposition of NatProMan and the Mancreu Project. In the wake of my recent findings. You understand?’

The finding, in particular, that another Cloud was coming. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And it may be that I must say something, publicly. I would like to have you there as my friend, but you probably should not be the British Brevet-Consul, in case I am embarrassing. Is that possible?’

It was. The outgoing Consul had foreseen the possibility of unofficial appearances, and a suit had arrived and hung in the cupboard ever since, unworn. It was still his size, he supposed. He had stayed in trim.

‘I’m sure you could never be embarrassing,’ he said, somewhat awkwardly, and held his breath in case this was the wrong thing.

She laughed again. ‘Oh, yes, I can. Did you know that there are different ways of speaking Japanese for men and women? Women’s Japanese is supposed to be gentle and submissive. But English has no such division, so I am unchained. Vee-eeery dangerous.’ She chortled wickedly. He tried to imagine her demure and mousy, and failed. ‘But will you come?’

‘Of course.’ He felt a curious twitch in his stomach. He had been friends with few women in his life. It was like what he felt about the boy, a frantic awareness of fragility and a sense of making his way in the fog. ‘Just me. Lester Ferris. No Consul, no Sergeant.’ No Tigerman , he almost said, and then wondered whether he had been quite so angry about the boy’s beating in part because someone had thrown a dead dog on his car in front of Inoue, and whether he should say he was looking into that, which he would, as soon as he had time. For an island with no future, Mancreu had a great deal of present.