Ned Beauman - Glow

‘Hi, Mark! Will you tell your friend we’re so, so sorry about last night?’ she said. ‘I really hope we weren’t too loud.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Fourpetal.

‘We had a few people over and it got a bit out of hand for a Tuesday.’

‘But what do you mean, “my friend”?’

‘You had a friend staying, right? We could hear someone walking around up there. We knew you were away for a few days so at first we almost thought it might have been a burglar but then they were still there this morning.’

Fourpetal picked up his suitcase and ran.

Outside, the sky was a triple-distilled blue with a few squiggles of cloud like someone testing a ballpoint pen. He only got as far as the building site at the end of the road before his lungs started spitting hot bacon grease, and as he stumbled panting to a halt he tried to put together what must have happened. Donald Flory had told someone at Xujiabang. Someone at Xujiabang had told someone at Lacebark. And someone at Lacebark had started an investigation. Fourpetal had been careful not to give Flory his name or even his nationality — Flory knew only his hotel booking. But if Flory had passed the hotel booking to Lacebark, then of course they could identify Fourpetal, because it was a Lacebark secretary who had booked the room. After that, they would have read through all of his emails, even the ones he’d tried to delete, and they would have found the email that started all this.

They’d murdered Pankhead, and now they were going to murder him too.

Behind him, he heard the crunch of a tyre flattening a discarded soft-drink can. He turned to see a white builder’s van pulling up beside him, and as in a dream he knew at once there was something uncanny here but he couldn’t identify exactly what; a minute ago he’d seen this van, or another like it, parked across the road from his flat, but it wasn’t just that. The side door of the van slid open, and inside were two men dressed all in black, one holding what looked like a plastic toy gun — some sort of Taser? Fourpetal dropped his suitcase and broke into a sprint, but as he rounded the corner on to Crimscott Street the van accelerated too, ready to trap him effortlessly.

Then the van’s tyres squealed, there was a second, louder crunch, and a black man with a satchel strapped across his back was twirling through the air in front of the van like something disgorged intact from empty space.

4.39 p.m.

‘I met that guy!’ says Raf. ‘Morris.’

They’ve now given up treating Fourpetal as a prisoner, although Isaac did tell Hiromi to use her ‘ninja skills’ again if he tried to steal anything else; Raf had worried that might offend her until she replied with a sardonic karate chop.

‘So you got away?’ says Isaac.

‘Well, I don’t know if the accident with the bike was enough to make the Lacebark men turn tail,’ says Fourpetal, ‘or whether it just cost them the initiative, but I kept running, and I didn’t look behind me for a long time, and when I finally did, I couldn’t see the van. I couldn’t go back to my flat, of course, and I couldn’t go back for my suitcase either, but I had my passport in my pocket, so I went to a bank and took out two and a half grand. That’s the most they’d let me have in cash; I haven’t used any of my accounts since. Then I checked into a fleapit under a false name. I’ve been hiding out for nearly a fortnight.’

‘Why don’t you leave London?’ says Isaac.

‘I can’t just fly the coop. Lacebark will eventually catch me. I have to buy myself out of all this for good. When all I had was that email, and no real proof of anything, no details, no documents, no photographs, the best I could really expect to get from Kernon Whitmire was a new job and a bundle of shares, yes? That was a plausible exchange if I could get them to trust me. But now that Lacebark are after me, that’s not enough. I need to find a company that will give me a new name and maybe a new face, otherwise I’ll be as dead as Pankhead by the autumn. I don’t have the resources to disappear on my own. And no one is going to go to those lengths to protect me just for an email they can’t even verify. I need a lot more to bargain with. I need something huge.’

‘So what’s “something huge”?’ says Raf.

‘I’m not sure yet. I’ve been looking into it for three weeks and I haven’t made spectacular progress. Which is to be expected. May I remind you both that I work in PR? All I’ve found out so far is that, as I told you, a lot of Burmese men have been disappearing in south London. We know from the email that this chap Bezant, who runs Lacebark corporate security, he was out in Lacebark’s fragrant Sulaco, and now he’s in London.’

‘I thought Sulaco was the spaceship from Aliens ,’ says Isaac.

‘We also know from the email that he must be handling something “ten times more important than the Xujiabang deal”, if this other chap Harenberg is to be believed, contra Pankhead. That’s got to be why the Burmese men are vanishing. It’s got to be Bezant doing something for Lacebark. So that’s why I’m staying in London. If I can find out what Lacebark are up to here, and I can get real proof, then I can take it to one of Lacebark’s competitors — not Kernon Whitmire, this time — and perhaps I can save my own skin.’

‘Why don’t you just go to the police?’

‘And tell them what? That I’m being stalked by a Fortune 500 company? That I once saw a scary van? Furthermore, I could ask you two the same question. Why don’t you tell the police about your friend Theo?’

‘Theo wouldn’t want the police anywhere near him.’

‘Neither would either of us, to be honest,’ says Isaac.

‘I still don’t understand why you wanted to go to McDonald’s instead of Happy Fried Chicken,’ says Raf.

‘Lacebark have a market capitalisation of about nineteen billion dollars,’ says Fourpetal. ‘McDonald’s have one of about ninety-four billion. My policy, so far as possible, is to confine myself to the premises of multinationals with market caps considerably greater than Lacebark’s. They won’t be bribed or bullied into giving up their security camera tapes. Or cleaning up after an assassination.’

Raf realises this is just the same method that he used to use at school when bigger boys were trying to bully money out of him on the street — hurry into a well-lit, fast-food place and stay there until the boys got bored and wandered off. ‘Before all this started, did you know that Lacebark were. . like this?’

‘Psychopathic, you mean? I’d heard rumours about their business methods. Nothing solid, but rumours. Worse than the old days of United Fruit — that sort of timbre. It might surprise you to know how close I got to all that, working in communications.’ He leans back. ‘Imagine an environmental charity puts out a press release that’s critical of the company. Obviously, you put out a reply. That’s PR. Then you put together a file on the charity so you can respond faster next time. That’s still PR. Then you send someone to a few of the charity’s public events so you can add to the file. That’s still PR. Then you send someone to do some work for the charity so they’ll get into the private events. That’s still PR. Then you send someone to lie their way into the charity’s inner circle. That’s still PR, essentially, but at this point the people you’re using may be ex-secret service, and they clock most of their hours with corporate security. That’s why “Donald Flory from Kernon Whitmire” rang a bell. Recently we sent a girl into Greenpeace who’d spent the previous six months following Flory around, probably based out of one of those white vans, or some analogous chariot of utter anonymity, depending where he lives. Still, if someone had told me they were kidnapping people, killing people. . In Burma, perhaps. But I never would have believed they’d do it in London. Or at their own bloody headquarters.’