Ned Beauman - Glow

‘What? Holding cell?’ The plane slowed to a halt and Martin stood up to get his suitcase down from the locker. ‘How long is that going to take?’

‘Maybe twenty-four hours.’

‘I need to get back to London.’

‘We’ll take care of everything at this end.’

‘No, I’ve got a. . family thing. I really need to get back.’

‘Look, Martin, we didn’t divert the plane because Bezant needed you in Khairpur, all right? We diverted the plane because Bezant needed three trained security guys in Khairpur and you happened to be on the plane with them. But at least you’ll be there to make sure nothing gets ballsed up too badly. Twenty-four hours maximum, then you can go back.’

‘So who’s the guy in the holding cell?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You won’t talk to him, he won’t talk to you.’

‘Is he Pakistani?’

‘He’s Myanmar.’

‘How did he end up in Khairpur?’

‘Apparently there are lots of Muslims from Myanmar in south-east Pakistan. Whoever he is, he has friends there. He was hiding out for a few nights on his way to the coast. The house got raided for something completely unrelated and the police picked him up. Unlucky sod. That’s all I know.’

Even on the short walk to the terminal building the three bodyguards formed a protective triangle around Martin and the pilots. Grateful that in small planes and small airports they didn’t find it necessary to shout at you about your mobile phone every thirty seconds, Martin finally had a chance to call his wife when they were queuing to get their passports checked. She started sobbing again when she heard his voice but after a while he got her to explain it all. ‘The police told me Dylan put up this website where. . Apparently there are these companies in Brazil. . You pay them three hundred pounds and they’ll make a film for you with two girls. And you can have extra girls in it for another hundred pounds each on top of that. You can tell them exactly what you want the girls to do. Dylan commissioned one of the films and then sold downloads on his website. And he sold so many he commissioned three more films. But the police say some of the girls don’t look like they’re eighteen.’

‘But he didn’t make the films?’

‘No, but he was selling them from his own server, so legally—’

‘There’s lots of glossy porn for free on the internet — I don’t understand how he was making any money.’

‘It’s because of what the girls did.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I could only watch about a minute of the video before I. .’

Martin waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. There was something about the long silence on the line, like a redacted memory, that made him recall that grim night at the brothel after the Christmas party, and that blonde girl from Eastern Europe. He knew his wife’s mother would tell her that this never would have happened if the man of the house hadn’t been away on Lacebark trips so often, and perhaps that was right, but then by what mechanism, exactly, would Martin’s presence have imprinted on his stepson a virtuous code of behaviour towards young foreign women? From a business point of view, he had to admit that the boy’s model was pretty shrewd. You could make a lot of money from the arbitrage of sexual dignity. If it was any other type of service for which Dylan had established himself as a middleman or outsourcer he probably would have been nominated for some sort of Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. Martin thought again of that seditious glow under the door. The police would have gone into the boy’s little favela to take away his computer, he realised.

‘You have to come back,’ his wife said. ‘I can’t handle this on my own.’

‘Darling, as soon as I can. Lacebark won’t take me home until this time tomorrow.’

‘Can’t you just get on a commercial flight?’

‘They don’t fly to London from here.’

‘Martin, for God’s sake, our son is in prison! They’re holding him for twenty-four hours and after that he’ll get out on police bail and then something about a magistrate. .’ She broke down. He told her he’d talk to her in the morning and that he loved her and that she should get some sleep.

Outside the terminal, the pilots hailed a taxi to take them to a cheap hotel in town, while Martin and the bodyguards looked around for the van they’d been promised. After several minutes it dawned on them that it had been parked right in front of them all along and the bearded driver had even been waving from the front seat, but they hadn’t taken any notice because they were expecting something in dirty white or perhaps metallic black. Instead, every inch of this van was painted like the world’s gaudiest Victorian fairground carousel in turquoise and red and orange and gold, with a mural on the side of Hercules fighting a lion inside a spiral of butterflies and flowers and Arabic calligraphy, as well as heart-shaped cut-outs over the tail lights and beaded whirligigs on the hubcaps and tinselly fringes hanging from the mudguards and a panelled mosaic across the rear doors. For a moment Martin wondered if one of Lacebark’s local fixers had made a comical error, and then realised that on the roads of southern Pakistan this would be a lot less conspicuous than a well-maintained American SUV. Nonetheless, when all four of them got inside and the driver set off for the highway, he thought they must look as if they were performing in some sort of West End musical about a gay psychedelic pop band touring with their guru. On the narrow barrage bridge over the Indus they dodged past scooters and rickshaws and two-wheeled donkey carts, and the driver remarked in his laboured English that if you watched the water you could often see dolphins, which then led him by word association to a long unsolicited account of the recent triumphs of the Karachi Dolphins cricket team.

After they pulled up to the gate of the police station in Khairpur they were directed around to the car park at the back of the building, and the prisoner was brought out to them in a blindfold and handcuffs by two policemen. He did look as if he might be Burmese, but Martin could still hardly believe that this was the man that Lacebark had gone to all this effort to scoop up. You wouldn’t need three trained security men to hold him captive, you’d just need a length of fishing twine knotted around his ankle. He might have been as young as twenty-five, but he was as shrunken as the Indus, with a rime of red sores on his lips, and he stumbled along as if he were on the point of dropping to his hands and knees. Even so, Martin’s bodyguards jumped down out of the van, took the man from the policemen after a short parley, and loaded him into the back. Then they drove to a hotel around the corner, where Martin, improvising as best he could, pretending it was a creative leadership exercise, dismissed the Pakistani driver and told his bodyguards to organise themselves into eight-hour shifts until Bezant arrived: one resting, one in the hotel keeping Martin safe, and one guarding the magical mystery bus and tending occasionally to the prisoner. It wasn’t until Martin had sat down on the bed that he had a chance to think about how strange it was that at dinner parties he often refused to explain his job to people because he found it so boring and now here he was, apparently participating in some sort of covert operation. Had the scrofulous Burmese guy really committed a crime, he wondered? And if he had, how might its contribution to the net total of human misery compare to Dylan’s porn site if you could analyse them on a spreadsheet? It was probably much worse, Martin guessed, but of course he couldn’t be certain.

For nearly two days they heard nothing from Lacebark. Martin fell asleep around lunchtime on the first afternoon, which didn’t make sense even according to GMT, and woke up at dusk, if you could really call it waking up, to the sound of the fifth call to prayer. He’d read once that some Muslims got over jet lag faster because they were used to going to bed at odd times during Ramadan, but he didn’t find it plausible that a religion with circadian rhythms built into its compulsory schedule of worship could loosen you up in that respect. After sending his current sentry out for kebabs and bottled water, he called his wife and she told him that Dylan had come home with her from the police station, but, predictably, was refusing to get on the phone. She wasn’t crying so much any more but he still felt monstrous when he had to tell her that he didn’t know yet when he’d be back. For the rest of the night he worked on his laptop and napped at random, and the next morning he was so sick of the room that he went out, accompanied, to get a shave from one of the barbers who worked in the square at the end of the street. As he was being towelled off he watched a donkey cart trundle past with a huge cumulus cloud of empty plastic milk jugs lashed behind the driver, but then one cartwheel slotted into a pothole, the cart tipped, a rope broke, and the avalanche buried the donkey up to his cartoonishly perky ears.