Ned Beauman - Glow

Rose, meanwhile, is up and yawning. Raf leans down to knuckle her under the chin. ‘All right, girl, what do we know?’ he says to her. ‘Lacebark’s “high-value target” is a Burmese chemist making something shady in his kitchen. That might be glow. Fitch might have something to do with making glow. So Fitch might be a Burmese chemist. Fitch might be Lacebark’s “high-value target”. Bark if you think that makes any sense at all.’ In that case, would Fitch’s written English be quite so good? Would he be quoting French playwrights? Cherish is fluent, but that’s because she moved to America when she was ten.

The only way to get any further is to contact Fitch directly.

But if Fitch is on the run from Lacebark, and he gets a message groping behind his alias, then of course he’s going to suspect Lacebark of sending it. They could have found him through Lotophage just like Raf did. And there’s nothing Raf can put in the message that will prove otherwise. Any collateral he offers for his identity could just be another meticulous Lacebark creation like the plastic fruit outside the ‘greengrocer’. Also, that goes in both directions. Even if Fitch says, ‘Yes, you’re right, I am a Burmese drug chemist, a thousand congratulations for finding me,’ it might still be a ruse. In fact, for all Raf knows, Fitch is a Lacebark operative himself, sitting in an office somewhere with carpal tunnel braces on his wrists, writing well-researched posts to win the trust of some other ‘high-value target’. Raf could ask Fitch to tell him something that only a Burmese drug chemist would know. But for any given datum that only a Burmese drug chemist would know, there will, by definition, be no means for Raf to confirm it.

For a moment he feels frustrated that most of the internet is only mutters in the dark, but then he thinks of Cherish and all her pretence. What difference do screens and keyboards make? You can be skin to scalding skin with a naked human being, you can feel them squirm in what you assume at the time is total abandon, without any inkling of who they really are. And every powder Raf has ever taken at a rave has been white and bitter like rat poison. You learn nothing from the surfaces of things. An anonymous email address, a pill capsule, a padlocked warehouse door, a joyful look in a girl’s eyes — you just have to push blindly through to the space behind them and hope there’s no void there to trap you.

‘Lacebark killed my friend. I don’t know what they’re going to do next, but I want to stop them. Can you help me?’ That’s the message Raf sends to Fitch through the Lotophage private message system. He finishes his whisky. Rose has fallen asleep again in that disconcerting way she sometimes does with her eyes half open and her pupils rolled back like someone having a 3-methylfentanyl overdose. He’s still in his funeral suit and he decides to take a long shower. When he returns in his dressing gown, he finds that Fitch has already replied.

His heart’s thumping as he opens the message. ‘sorry about your friend,’ it says. ‘but how you think I could help you?’

Raf writes: ‘Does glow have an organic precursor or not?’

This time the reply takes less than a minute to arrive. Fitch is still online. ‘meaningless question. any alkaloid can be made from laboratory chemicals without pestling shrubs. just an issue of whether the yield from known methods large enough to make it cost-effective. for glow, it ain’t.’

Raf: ‘Are Lacebark here because of glow? Why would they need to come all the way to London for that?’

Fitch: ‘maybe they heard about that big UKG night in Elephant & Castle next week.’

Raf: ‘If they’re looking for you, wouldn’t it be dangerous for you to talk to me? You don’t know who I am.’

Fitch: ‘doesn’t matter who you are!! even if you could make Lotophage turn over their IP records, I access the site through a proxy. I could be right behind you on the sofa typing this on a laptop. no way you could trace me.’

After Raf instinctively turns to look, he feels like an idiot. ‘Are you Burmese?’

Fitch: ‘why all these questions about glow? you buy drugs?’

Raf: ‘Sometimes. Why?’

Fitch: ‘the government say when you buy drugs you funding terrorism.’

Raf: ‘Was it you that sent me that video on Sunday? Are you Horologium Florae?’

For the next twenty minutes Raf sits there refreshing his Lotophage inbox and reading a long news story about a vet who nearly died after she induced vomiting in a dog that had eaten rat poison without knowing that the zinc phosphide in the rat poison had turned into phosphine gas upon contact with the water and hydrochloric acid in the dog’s stomach. But Fitch stays silent. Raf is excited, but when he looks back over the exchange, he realises Fitch didn’t say anything to confirm he’d ever even heard of Lacebark before Raf started asking questions. If you set aside that reference to Elephant and Castle, Fitch still might very well be a college student in Wisconsin.

He gets dressed, fills up Rose’s water bowl, and leaves the flat. The sky is a mess of sagging aeroplane contrails, and by this stage of the spring the street lamps come on long before the sun is down, hanging around awkwardly like guests early to a party. When he gets to the Burmese restaurant, it’s the same waiter as usual, but one of the Maneki Neko cats seems to have run away. Raf wasn’t actually planning to eat here but when he smells the food it occurs to him that he’s ravenous.

‘I’ll just have the same curry I had last time,’ he says after he’s been seated. ‘And sticky rice, and some of those stir-fried beans, and a beer. But I need to speak to Ko first.’

‘Ko cooking,’ says the waiter.

‘Just for a minute. Please.’

The waiter purses his lips. ‘OK.’

Raf gets up again and follows him around the counter to the kitchen. Ko is torturing something in a wok flame while a second chef is peeling a butternut squash faster than a normal person can shuck the foil off an Easter egg. The waiter says something in Burmese, and Ko looks up. ‘Yes?’

‘Can I talk to you?’ Raf says. ‘Outside?’

The second chef takes over the wok and Raf goes with Ko out to the alley at the back of the kitchen, a bit surprised that this didn’t take more persuasion. Empty drums of cooking oil are piled against the wall beside the wheelie bins and three canisters of butane lie around like circus animals inside a locked metal cage. Ko takes out a packet of cigarettes and lights one. ‘So?’ he says.

‘Last time I was here you said you could sell me some glow,’ Raf says. ‘I need to know where you’re getting it from.’

Ko blows out a smoke ring. ‘Want to see something?’

‘OK.’

After pausing to balance his cigarette on the edge of a wheelie bin, Ko takes something dark out of his pocket and holds it out at chest level. As Raf looks down to see what it is, his forearms are grabbed from behind, and Ko flips the black hood neatly over his head.

Before he has any idea what’s happening, Raf feels something tightening around his wrists, and he’s hauled sideways down the alley. He struggles as hard as he can, and shouts for help, but then his feet are off the ground, and four hands lower him on to the floor of what must be a van because he can feel the vibration of the idling engine through the rubber mat on which his cheek now comes to rest. The doors slam and the van drives off. They’ve got him.

The inside of the hood smells of damp socks, and the loop around Raf’s wrists feels as if it might be one of those cheap plastic zip ties with ratchets at the ends. He is fucking terrified. Sitting there already in his head is a proposition, one that has substantial mass but that he doesn’t yet know how to approach or interpret, like a non-Euclidean cadmium sculpture that just appears in your kitchen one morning, and the proposition is that he is going to die tonight. Ten days trying to find out what happened to Theo and now he’ll see for himself up close. Perhaps it took Lacebark a few hours to be absolutely sure that their facial-recognition system hadn’t registered a false positive after all, and by that time he’d left the training facility, so they had to snatch him at their next opportunity. Or perhaps it was his message to Fitch. ‘Lacebark killed my friend. I don’t know what they’re going to do next, but I want to stop them.’ He might as well have filled out an application form to get kidnapped and interrogated.