Ned Beauman - Glow

By now the climbing gym is starting to empty out, although there are still quite a few parents and nannies watching kids who move over the walls like spiders because of their weight-to-muscle ratios. Martin has been talking for so long that Fourpetal has bought him a box of apple juice from the vending machine. Nearby is a vacuum unit with a sign that says ‘please do not block the chalk eater’, thick foam filters worn away to raggedness like aeolian caves.

‘And what are you doing really?’ says Raf.

‘Technically I’m in personnel. But it’s a kind of counter-intelligence. Bezant has me looking for security leaks.’

‘Isn’t that ironic?’ says Fourpetal.

‘And what were you up to just now?’

‘Mostly I work with Lacebark security men. But also sometimes with the Burmese who Bezant is paying. Those two guys from earlier — they think I’m just another liaison from Lacebark — but actually I’m supposed to tell Bezant whether he can trust them.’

‘What about Cherish?’ says Raf.

‘The girl? Oh, she’s solid,’ says Martin, and Raf’s heart sinks. He’d still been holding out some hope that they might have got everything backwards. If Cherish was working for Lacebark, maybe that was the real reason she didn’t take that nasty fake glow he gave her. If only Raf had been so careful about what he was willing to swallow from a stranger he met in a club. On Friday, after Cherish vanished, he had felt so sure that she was under guard in a white van or a warehouse somewhere, and he realises now that he was probably right about that. He was just wrong about the details.

‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ says Fourpetal, ‘I hoped you might be candid but I never expected you to be this candid.’

Martin kneads his cheek with the heel of his hand. ‘A few weeks ago, Bezant said he wanted to try me on something new. He said I could be good at interrogations. They do a lot of those. I went to a warehouse and inside they had a guy in a cell with a hood over his head. They had all these different ways of disorienting him. They’d keep the lights on for thirty-six hours and then turn them off for four hours and feed him in the dark and then feed him again forty minutes later and then put the lights on for ten hours and then leave them off again for twenty hours without feeding him and then finally feed him again and so on and so on, so he never had any idea how much time had passed or when he was supposed to sleep. And they had the floor of the cell on springs and they blasted him with all these low-frequency sound waves to make him feel sick.’ Raf remembers the speaker cable on the floor of that warehouse. ‘I had to watch while they questioned him. I can’t even make myself talk about what I saw them do. And I don’t know what they wanted from him but I think he’s probably dead now. I never asked to be part of that. I had to tell Bezant I didn’t have the constitution for it. He laughed at me. You know, I’ve heard stories about him from the soldiers. In the Niger Delta there’s a cult called the Egbesu Boys. They fight the oil companies in the name of the local god of war. They say Egbesu gives them special powers. In particular, they like to brag that they can drink battery acid. Well, when Bezant was still down there working for Cantabrian, he once caught this kid who’d shot a few of his men in the swamp. The kid was defiant. He told Bezant all about Egbesu. And apparently Bezant told the kid to “prove it”. He made him drink battery acid. Made him do shots of it like tequila. With lemon and salt.’

The chances that Lacebark are holding Theo alive and well somewhere, the chances that Raf and Isaac will ever see Theo again, seem pitifully small. This inference has been scratching at Raf’s mind for a few days now, and he’s been trying as hard as he can to ignore it, but after Martin’s stories that isn’t going to work any longer. Still, he can put off thinking about it properly for one more hour. ‘Why don’t you go to the papers or something?’ he says.

‘I’m not going to ruin my whole life over it. I have a family. Bezant got Lacebark to pay for a lawyer for Dylan. In the end he only got a referral order.’

‘You still haven’t explained what exactly Lacebark are doing in London,’ says Fourpetal. ‘Is it something to do with the Shan forest Concession?’

‘Yes. Some of the Burmese that Bezant is looking for — the town near there is where they come from. But I think there’s a lot more to it than that. I still haven’t got the whole story. I haven’t been given the clearance.’

‘Probably wise,’ says Fourpetal.

‘All I know is that they have something big planned for the first day of June. I overheard a Fijian guy talking about it. Then of course I had to tell Bezant he was being indiscreet, so he’s gone now.’

‘But what were they asking the guy in the cell about?’

‘They have this software—’

‘ImPressure.’

‘Yes. Mostly, they were just looking for more information to plug into their ImPressure database. They’re still trying to map the “vectors of influence” among the Burmese community in south London. And they keep talking about a book by a guy called “Villepinte”. I don’t know why.’

Could it be because of Lacebark that the Iranian corner shop has started stocking balachaung , Raf thinks? To tempt Burmese people inside and then catch them on security camera so they can be added to the ImPressure database? Obviously one shop couldn’t be much use on its own, but if they’re doing the same with a couple of dozen others they might sweep up some data, although even then it seems to Raf like a silly idea. Meanwhile, the name Villepinte is familiar but he can’t remember why. ‘So what next?’ he says. ‘Should we carry on following those DJs?’

‘You won’t get anywhere. Bezant’s keeping them at a distance.’

‘So we’re at another dead end,’ says Fourpetal.

‘There is one other thing.’ Lacebark’s usual method, Martin explains, is to put up a warehouse in a few hours, use it for a day, and then abandon it like a husk. But there’s an old disused freight depot near the Bricklayers’ Arms junction that he’s seen again and again on logistical documents since he started working in south London for Bezant. He doesn’t know what’s inside, but it must be something that takes up too much space for the normal prefabricated warehouses, and in the last few weeks there’s been more chatter about the location than ever.

‘I get the sense they’re trying to get something finished there by the beginning of June and it’s running behind schedule.’ Martin looks at his watch. ‘Shit, and so am I. I’m meant to be taking Dylan to some Shakespeare.’ He gets up and flexes his shoulders as if to shake off the ichor of the story he’s just been telling: Raf can see that it must have been a relief to confess the worst of it for the first time. ‘Before I go. . The Latvian girl.’

‘What about her?’

‘Was she all right, after I. .’

Fourpetal pauses to consider this. ‘I expect if she takes her vitamins it will grow back eventually.’

6.47 p.m.

When Raf comes into the kitchen, Isaac is bending to put a muffin pan in the oven. ‘What are you making?’

‘ Takoyaki ,’ says Isaac after shutting the oven door. ‘They’re baked octopus dumplings with dashi. I also put in some squid and some cuttlefish. Fumiko gave me the recipe. I’m going on an all-tentacle diet for a week.’

‘Why?’ This doesn’t surprise Raf very much because the only times Isaac bothers to cook anything other than curry or pasta are when he’s making advances in outsider neuroscience. That doomed false false-morel omelette was most likely the first and last omelette ever produced in this kitchen (although you couldn’t absolutely rule out a Burmese omelette with dung beetle grubs at some point in the future). Today, the girl winding a pocket watch at the table by the front door is wearing snakeskin brogues and a poncho that looks like a church bell, and the girl dozing on the futon is wearing pink ballet slippers and about half a wedding dress. As always, they are magnificent.