“Him. Richard Haighman. I’m astounded. I would never have guessed—”
“Are you saying you served with that Richard Haighman?” Sarah-Kelly stared at him from six inches’ range. He could feel the force like a hot lamp.
“We served together in Oban, he left before you arrived. We were good friends, that’s what I can’t get over. Are you certain this list can be trusted?”
“Oh absolutely, Lawrence,” Sarah-Kelly said. “Believe me when I say only guilty bastards get onto this list. Banner was determined our process would be meticulous. To qualify for arrest requires at least three independent witness statements with high corroboration.” She added pointedly: “There’s hundreds on file with just one or two statements.”
Lawrence surprised himself by the smooth manner in which he continued. By sheer will-power, he had driven back the panic and now found himself rising on a swell of confidence.
“We served on different barges, I had no idea he was involved in atrocities up in Oban. Do you think people commit mass-murder and yell about it? It says here he’s wanted in connection with the shelling of Brent Cross. Jesus! Who’d have thought he would get involved in something as crass as that?”
Donald said: “The interesting thing is, I met Haighman in the Central Enclave on the day of the Bloomsbury Massacre. He recognised our family name and spoke very highly of you. He implied you would have approved of the Bloomsbury Massacre.”
Was that all they had to go on? Lawrence’s response verged on caustic.
“I can’t answer for what other people say about me, Donald.”
Sarah-Kelly slowly retracted back to her seat.
“What did you do on those patrol barges?” she asked.
“We patrolled a sector allocated to us in the flotilla’s responsibility, which is to say, the sea between the island of Tiree and Malin Head. The exact sector varied from patrol to patrol. Some were busy and some were dead.”
“Looking for what?”
“Pirates.”
“What about folk trying to cross the sea?”
“You mean tramp schooners and steamers?”
“No. I mean homeless folk looking for a place to live; they build a boat and cross the sea.”
“You mean surplus?”
“Don’t use that word. They’re people.”
“I’m sorry. It’s the word I am accustomed to using. When we found people we picked them up and took them back to Oban for despatch.”
How smoothly the lies came now.
“What do you mean, ‘despatch’?” Donald asked.
“Freighters came in and took them away south.”
“To where?”
Lawrence raised his arms, growing exasperated.
“I never needed to know. I think they were released in Glasgow.”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t recall.”
“What’s a ‘brush’?” Sarah-Kelly asked.
Lawrence almost dropped into flippancy. In some quarters a ‘brush’ was slang for a woman’s pudenda.
“In the context of barge patrols? It means the interception of a boat or raft loaded with people.”
“Why did you do it?”
“It’s what I was paid to do. If the people reached our client’s land they would trespass. We picked them up and put them on a boat to the nearest open city—a free ride. We never charged them a gram of gold for our service.”
“What I meant was, why were you a dedicated glory officer? It’s a dull life. You’re intellectually inclined, Lawrence, not a dullard.”
Lawrence froze. A split in time and space opened back to The Captain’s walled garden, facing exactly the same question two weeks previously. What kept him going all those years? When he refocused on the pair of them, their attention was as fixed rigid on his face as if he was a window into the afterlife.
“Job security.”
“That’s a load of cock,” Sarah-Kelly said. “You have a big mind, Lawrence. That was what impressed me—all those theories about the sovereigns having arranged the Glorious Resolution to save the beauty of Nature from the Fatted Masses. I must admit it was you that first got me thinking about the way the world is. So why would this brain waste its life on a tippy old barge trying to catch folk just looking for a home? What a waste of time! You weren’t allowed into this precious wilderness you protected, so why bother? Did you really have nothing better to do with your life than—?”
Lawrence’s jaw moved, chewing words he could not articulate. What did drive him? Just craving for promotion? No, it went deeper than that. It was recognition of the alternative—the appalling exposure of the whole world to public knowledge and public use, the forests swept away, the landscapes sliced by public highways jammed with the repugnant Fatted Masses, the skies roaring with airliners, beautiful coasts scabbed by hotels—and for what? An ideal that postured as égalité but was only cowardice. A slovenly expedience by which the common became as deserving as the excellent, because no one had the guts to say it was not. However, to express this anguish proved beyond him.
“What interested us,” Donald said, “is this question: what was in it for you? No matter how much surplus you... prevented… you could never enjoy Krossington’s wilderness. So what was the point of it all?”
Lawrence collapsed into a pit of defeat, quite suddenly and without understanding why it had happened. He clawed mentally, trying to muster some semblance of coherence, every passing second scoring his soul deeper as the chance to deceive them slipped away forever. They were asking the wrong question. He knew with perfect clarity why he had done all these things. What he could no longer understand was how he had done them. How had he pulled the triggers? How had he ordered others to pull the triggers—and gone on giving orders for years on end? Looking back now, it was an utter mystery. He had lied to them and they knew he had lied to them. Now he spoke the direct truth as he saw it, without caring about consequences.
“I was driven by a sense of duty built by continuous immersion in the artificial society of a glory trust. When I left that society, I left that person behind. He no longer exists.”
The words left a peculiar hollowness, as if they had
