Seventy-Two Virgins

‘Check it out. It’s called the High Hedges Act. Labour chap called Stephen Pound. First piece of Labour legislation I’ve agreed with, actually.’

For many human beings there is something psychologically disabling about an act of violence on this scale. Some will lash out, and let the instant flame of vengeance bloom in their hearts; others find themselves winded, depressed, and full of the loneliness of the victim. So Dennis and Vie made themselves a Baxter’s mushroom-rich cuppasoup and retreated to their bedroom. As he lay in his own narrow cell, adorned with Lord of the Rings posters and a Sunday Times map of the Roman Empire, Dean listened to their defeated murmurs and fed his fury. He knew in his heart that Price had a point. They all knew it secretly, even Vie. But the coffee-coloured semi-detached adolescent saw in the disaster a chance for oneness with his parents.

He would fight their corner. He would make a great act of atonement for the fact of his difference. He lay and watched the car headlights pass with aqueous mystery across the ceiling. Perhaps he would execute some Godfather-type revenge, and cause Price to wake screaming, his sheets polluted with a gigantic truckle of one of his experimental fromages. Then he had a better idea. Expertly skipping the stair that creaked he went downstairs, equipped himself, and stole like the shadow of a panther into the garden of Price the Cheese.

In the months that followed his social workers and probation officers would often ask him where he had come by the idea; and though it was of course the classic culmination of neighbour disputes, from Birmingham to Bosnia, he always insisted that it was his own.

The first warning Price had was the BANG of the frosted glass on the front door, blown in by the heat from the banked bonfire of logs and kerosene-drenched brushwood. Immediately his house began to surrender itself to the flames. The junk mail writhed and was consumed on the mat. The mat offered no resistance. All along the corridor it was a tale of instant, ecstatic capitulation by the pictures and soft furnishings. All Price’s possessions were ready to turn themselves in, without a fight, and might have betrayed their master to perdition, had he not heard the boom, nipped out from under his duvet in his Viyella pyjamas, opened the landing window, and leapt for the now non-existent branches.

So Price the Cheese fell with an oath, because he had no doubt who had done this to him, and bust his ankle.

As he stood with his parents watching several thousand gallons of water thud into the Hollyhocks, and as the glare of the last flames died on their aghast faces, Dean knew what to do. He took a snap decision. He would say nothing. It was certainly possible that Dennis would hail him as a hero, and love him forever more for visiting such destruction on his enemy. But as he looked at the soaking, carbonized living room, and as the night air of Wolverhampton was filled with the smell of toasted cheese, he decided not to take the risk.

As a strategy, it failed. The police came looking and found a jerry can covered with Dean’s fingerprints, in the Faulkner shed. Dean was taken to the living room, and under the gaze of the Queen Mother, his adoptive parents, and two kindly members of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, he burst into tears. His mother said nothing, but it was the words of his father that he kept and nursed, coddling and crooning over them when he wanted to bruise his heart into hatred.

Poor Dennis had tried so hard, for Vie’s sake, to love the kid with all his heart, but he had never utterly succeeded. ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ he said now, swatting the side of his head as though a mosquito had landed on either ear.

‘You stupid little… coon!’

As soon as the word was out he wanted to choke it back. Vie was furious. Dennis had never said anything like it before, and it was a complete rejection of everything she stood for, what with her work in the Sue Ryder shop and all.

‘Dennis!’ she snapped. ‘Oh I’m sorry, my dear,’ said the former lift executive, advancing on Dean.

One of the policemen scribbled ‘coon’ in his notebook. You never knew how these things would go. But Dean shrank before him, and the ambiguities in his status seemed to fade away.

There it was, en c/air, decoded. He was a coon, and he was stupid, and he was stupid because he was a coon. And whenever he was subsequently affected by doubt or scruple about what he was doing, he would say ‘stupid coon’ to himself, and immediately the watertight bulkheads in his brain would come crashing down. Which was what Dean did now as he sat in the stifling heat in the back of the ambulance, assisting in a plot that had started to go wrong almost as soon as it began.

‘Stupid little coon,’ he said to himself, as though reciting a passage from the Holy Koran, and shut the gates of mercy on mankind.

‘The train of death is on its way,’ said Jones. ‘Its riders are steadfast. Nothing will stop them or turn them back.’

‘Yeah, all roight then,’ said Dean.

Jones pulled up outside the Red Lion pub. The Muslim wrinkled his nose at the smell of beer. He could see the boom ahead, painted with red and white chevrons, and the car park beyond it, normally used by MPs, from which he proposed to set out on foot.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 0911 HRS

Adam Swallow rose and walked towards the driver’s window.

‘Are you the guys I am expecting?’ Jones nodded. Adam looked into those eyes and felt a momentary lurch of uncertainty. He hoped to goodness that Benedicte had got this thing right.

He wondered how the hell he was going to pass this gang off as a TV crew. He looked at Habib, now playing again with his rosary; at Haroun with his expression of a camel about to spit; he saw the kid, blocking the gangway to the back.

Adam tried to peer into the darkness.

‘So, which one of you is the victim?’

‘He is behind,’ said Jones, jerking his thumb. ‘He is not very well. Please respect his condition.’

‘I didn’t realize he would still need an ambulance?’

‘Certainly. We have many supporters in the healthcare services.’

‘OK,’ said Adam, and prepared to hand over the car park pass, thinking as he did so that he would ring Benedicte as soon as he could.

Just as Jones’s hand was about to close on Roger’s plastic card, emblazoned with the Portcullis of Parliament, Adam’s hand twitched, and the pass jerked just out of reach. He couldn’t help it. He had to ask.

‘Do you mind telling me what kind of torture it was? Was it in Abu Ghraib?’ he said, naming the notorious jail in Baghdad.

‘The Americans did it,’ said Jones.

‘The American women did it,’ said Haroun. ‘They did it with the long sweeping brush handle and the dog.’ He mimed, and Adam flinched.

Without a word, he handed over the plastic pass, and Jones reignited the engine, and drove towards the boom.

The Yanks would be here any minute.

‘Worra you lot on about?’ wailed Dean, and was hit by Haroun.

The cavalcade now found itself somewhat ahead of schedule as it pulled through Chelsea.

‘Bloody Yanks,’ said one Chelsea pensioner, as he sat champing and bemedalled in Ranelagh Gardens. ‘All the gear and no idea.’ Most of his life, post-war, had been dominated by a single controversy: who was the greater general, Monty or Eisenhower, and why did Monty dither at Caen? On this subject he literally bored for Britain.

POTUS in three minutes, crackled the news in the ears of Joe, Matt and all the other USSS men in Parliament Square.

More like Patton than Eisenhower, the cavalcade moved in its lightning thrust through London, and the upper air was full of American communications.

So huge, in fact, was the US Secret Service men’s requirement for bandwidth that yesterday, at Windsor,