Rupert Thomson - Soft

‘Dodds?’

Lambert was standing too close to the camera. The sides of his face sloped away into the darkness. He looked like a fish. Or a plane.

‘Are you there, Dodds?’

‘What is it?’

‘I’d like a word with you. A chat.’

‘There are three of you.’

‘Well, I’d hardly come down here alone, would I. Not to this neck of the woods.’ Lambert smiled, which looked awful, horrific. His mouth bent backwards at the corners. No chin. ‘I just want to have a little chat with you,’ he was saying. ‘Show you a video.’

‘What video?’

Lambert held up a cassette. ‘I thought you might be interested. I thought it might help.’

Barker stood back, thinking.

‘It’d be nice if you let us in now,’ Lambert said. ‘We’re getting wet out here.’

Barker pressed the entry buzzer and watched the top of the men’s heads as they passed beneath the camera’s steady gaze. Then just darkness, the crackle of the rain. He had about a minute and a half before they knocked on the door. He walked into the kitchen and opened the drawer where he kept his cutlery. He didn’t like the kind of people who used knives. Still, this was no time to get precious. He heard three pairs of feet on the stairs. He went to the front door, the knife in his left sleeve, its blade lying flush against the inside of his wrist. Though he had known something like this was going to happen, he hadn’t bothered to prepare for it. He wondered how bad it was going to be.

When he opened the door, Lambert was staring at the floor. Two men stood behind him, running their hands through their hair, shaking the water off their coats.

‘Sorry to keep you standing outside like that.’ Barker listened to his voice. He didn’t sound sorry. ‘I have to be careful.’

‘Don’t we all, Barker,’ Lambert said.

The three men moved past him, into the flat.

‘The lounge is on your left,’ Barker said, closing the door.

He followed them into the room. They were already sitting down, Lambert in the armchair by the gas fire, the other two on the sofa. All three seemed oddly comfortable, at home. They were staring into the fire, as if it had been lit, and Barker could suddenly imagine winter — the curtains drawn, a row of small mauve flames.

‘Anyone fancy a beer?’ he said.

Lambert looked up, but didn’t say anything. The other two didn’t react at all.

Barker fetched himself a beer from the kitchen. When he returned to the lounge, nothing had changed. The air smelled strongly of wet cloth.

‘So what’s the video?’ he said. ‘New release?’

Lambert leaned forwards, his elbows on his knees. ‘We have a problem,’ he said.

Barker waited.

‘It’s been two weeks and nothing’s happened. Two weeks since you received the envelope —’

‘I’m working on it.’ Barker lifted the beer bottle to his mouth and drank. It occurred to him that he was holding a weapon in his hand. He wondered if it had occurred to Lambert.

‘You read the material?’

‘Of course.’

‘There was talk of urgency, if I remember rightly.’

Barker nodded.

‘Two weeks,’ and Lambert looked up and a gap opened between his hands.

‘There was also talk of being discreet,’ Barker said, ‘if I remember rightly.’

He sensed something flash through Lambert, invisible but lethal, like electricity in water: the suspicion that he was being taken too lightly, that he was being mocked. In future, Lambert would be easier to remember. For the first time Barker was worried. He knew what kind of situation he was in. Usually you only saw a man like Lambert once. Twice was almost unheard of. And certainly there would never be a third encounter.

‘She went up north,’ he said, in his own defence. ‘It took me by surprise.’

On Saturday morning he had followed Glade to Victoria Coach Station, of all places, and he had stood in the queue while she paid for a ticket to Blackburn. When he tried to buy a ticket for the same bus, they told him it was full. There would be another bus in two hours’ time, they said — but that was no use to him, of course, no use whatsoever. He had been forced to watch from the shadows as the bus lurched past him, the girl out of reach, maybe for ever, her face sealed behind a sheet of tinted glass.

‘Is she back now?’ Lambert asked.

Barker nodded. ‘She came back yesterday.’

‘You’ve got twenty-four hours.’

Lambert rose out of his chair and walked over to the video. At the same moment, one of the men on the sofa took out a pearl-handled penknife, opened the blade and started carving something into the surface of Barker’s coffee table.

‘Zero, isn’t it,’ Lambert said, ‘for videos?’

‘Not on that machine,’ Barker said. ‘It’s eight on that machine.’

‘Old, is it?’

Barker nodded.

‘You ought to modernise,’ Lambert said, ‘update yourself.’

He pushed the cassette into the slot, then picked up the video remote. When he was sitting on his chair again, he held it out in front of him and pressed 8. The man who wasn’t carving the table loosened his coat and leaned his head back, his eyes fixed on the TV.

The screen flickered, flared white, then a room appeared. Yellow-and-orange-striped paper on the walls. No carpet, just bare boards. Half of a window visible. There seemed to be a council estate outside; Barker could just make out a block of flats, some dusty trees. Sitting on the floor, with both hands chained to a radiator, was a man of about forty. Black side-whiskers, a squashy nose. He reminded Barker of one of the men who worked in the salvage yard on Tower Bridge Road. The sound quality was poor, but Barker could still hear the man’s voice. Pleading.

‘… there’s no need for this … no fucking need …’

Probably it was not for him to say.

A second man stepped into the picture. He was dressed in jeans and a grey sweatshirt, and he wore a visor over his face, the kind of visor welders wear. Barker heard a sudden roaring sound, controlled but fierce. At first he couldn’t make any sense of it. Then he saw the man’s hand holding a blowtorch, the cone of hot blue flame.

‘Funny thing is, his name’s Burns,’ Lambert said. ‘He’s from —’ He paused and looked across at the man who was carving Barker’s table. ‘Where’s he from?’

‘Aberdeen,’ the man said without looking up.

Barker watched Burns adjust the flame until it was small and sharp. The roar it was making had intensified. The man chained to the radiator was shaking his head from side to side like a dog with a jersey. He was still talking, but it didn’t sound like language any more. And now Burns leaned down, aiming the tip of the flame at the man’s right hand. The skin seemed to shrink. Then it blackened and began to bubble. The man was screaming, his face twisting away from the camera. A vein stood out on his neck, thick as a middle finger. Barker thought of Bruce Springsteen. He was all right, Bruce Springsteen. That song about it being dark on the edge of town, that was a good song. Sometimes, as the man screamed, he ran out of breath. His mouth still hung open, though. Drool spilling from the corners, spilling down his chin.

‘He used to be a snooker player,’ Lambert said. ‘Quite good, he was. Quite well known.’ He spoke to the man with the penknife again. ‘Beat Hurricane Higgins once, didn’t he?’

The man nodded. Then, bending low, he blew some loose wood shavings off the table. So far he had completed three characters: a 2, a 4 and an H.

In the video the Scotsman was facing the camera, asking what he was supposed to do next. Should he do an eye, for instance? Barker didn’t hear the answer.

Two hands reached into the picture and began to undo the man’s trousers. The man was shouting in a high-pitched voice that no longer seemed to belong to him. Somebody was explaining that this wasn’t torture, it was punishment, and that, because it was punishment, there was no way round it. It had to be gone through, had to be endured. Barker had the feeling that it was Lambert who was doing the talking. The voice had the same anonymous sound to it, the same instantly forgettable quality. By now, the man’s trousers and underpants had been removed. His T-shirt was pulled up into his armpits, revealing a pot belly and a thin dark trail of hair. The camera closed in slowly until the man’s head filled the screen.