grateful I’ve got so much chasing round to do. I’m too busy sorting out football kit, and nagging them about homework, and running a taxi service, to worry about bringing work home with me.”
“Maybe me and Sophie should have a few more kids,” Holland said.
Kitson drained her wineglass. “My shout…”
While Kitson was at the bar, Holland thought about the way Susan Jago had fought to protect her brother; to defend him, even in the face of the sickening evidence. He wondered what Jago’s mother would think about what her son had done. He’d confronted the parents of those who had committed the most shocking acts and knew that in most cases they never stopped loving their children. They couldn’t, any more than he could conceive of not feeling as he did now about his daughter, no matter what she did. For the families-especially the parents-of those who killed or abused, faith could be destroyed. But love, he knew now, was unconditional. When your children did such things, you did not stop loving them. You simply began hating yourself.
Kitson was coming back to the table with the drinks and she smiled as he caught her eye. Holland thought suddenly that she looked quite sexy. Asked himself what the hell he was thinking about…
“What were you doing,” Kitson asked sometime later, “in 1991?”
Holland did the math. “I was sixteen, so I suppose I was going out a lot. I can remember coming back late from parties or clubs a couple of times and sitting up watching the bombing on TV. What about you?”
“I was just finishing college,” Kitson said. “We were all dead against it, obviously. Not as much as with the last one, but there were still plenty of protests. We thought it was all about oil.”
A cheer went up as someone hit the jackpot on the fruit machine in the corner. Holland leaned forward, spoke up to make himself heard above the rhythmic chink and clatter of the payout. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a copper or a killer, does it?” He swallowed a mouthful of beer. “How well do we really know anybody?”
Kitson raised her eyebrows. “Bloody hell…”
Holland reddened slightly. He hadn’t meant it to sound so stupidly portentous. “I never had you down as a lefty, that’s all,” he said.
“Watford Polytechnic was hardly Kent State.”
Holland laughed, though he didn’t understand the reference. “Even so…”
“And I never had you down as someone who takes such a lot of the job home with him.” She smiled, nodding toward Holland’s glass. “Speaking of which…”
“What?”
“If you do want to have any more kids, you’d best finish that, go home, and get down to it…”
“You look wankered, mate,” Spike said.
Thorne grinned and swayed to one side, waving a young woman past as if he were a bullfighter. “I feel wankered,” he said. “Bladdered, fucked, off my tits…”
“How many of those have you had?”
Thorne had just about got used to the taste of Carlsberg Special Brew, but he hadn’t been prepared for the kick. It was somewhere past chucking-out time and he’d been drinking steadily since he’d left the London Lift. Since he’d said good-bye to Holland and Brigstocke and begun trying to walk off the memory of what he’d seen on that videotape.
“Not enough.” Thorne could feel the weight of the cans in his rucksack. “Plenty more, though…”
Walking hadn’t done the trick, so he’d gone straight into the nearest Tesco Metro and handed over a quarter of his weekly money in exchange for eight cans.
“You should save a couple,” Caroline said.
He’d met up with Spike and Caroline on Bedford Street and they’d walked aimlessly around Covent Garden ever since. Thorne had announced that he wanted to go to sleep an hour before, that he had to get back to his theater, but somehow he never quite kept going in any one direction and it seemed stupid to doss down anywhere while there was still a can open.
“Have one!” Thorne tried to reach behind into the rucksack, his arm flailing.
“I keep telling you, I don’t want one,” Spike said. “I’ll take one off you to sell, mind you…”
“You can piss off,” Thorne said.
Caroline pulled a face. “That stuff tastes fucking horrible…”
“I don’t understand why you two don’t drink.” Thorne held up the gold-and-red can and read the writing; the By Royal Appointment. “If it’s good enough for the Danish court…”
“Prefer to save our money, like,” Spike said. “Spend it on the good stuff.”
Caroline took Thorne’s arm and hooked her own around it as they walked. “I’ll have a vodka, mind you, if there’s one on offer.”
“I bet fuck-all gets done in Denmark,” Thorne said.
Spike cackled.
“Be nice to get dressed up one night, wouldn’t it?” Caroline reached out her other arm and drew Spike toward her. “Go out somewhere and dance, and drink vodka and tonic or a few cocktails…”
Spike leaned over to kiss her and Thorne pulled away from them.
He whistled. “Give her a snog, for Christ’s sake, and tell her you love her.” He was aware of how he sounded: the words not slurred exactly, but slow and singsong; emphasized oddly, like he was speaking through a machine. “Go on, put your arms round her…”
Put your arms round them… Give the fuckers a cuddle.
Thorne stopped dead and shut his eyes. The can slipped out of his hand on to the pavement. “Fuck…”
Caroline and Spike walked over.
“We need to get you bedded down,” Caroline said.
Thorne looked down at the thick, golden liquid running away across the curb. He pushed the toe of his boot into it. His stomach lurched as he watched it spread and darken, leaking from the wound and staining the sand.
“I want to go to sleep,” he said.
Spike pushed him forward. “I thought you boozers were supposed to have some kind of tolerance…”
Sleep hung around, but refused to settle. Instead, thoughts collided inside his thick head like oversize bumper cars moving at half speed…
Atrocious was a meaningless, fucked-up word. A crappy meal could be atrocious, yes, or a shit football team or a bad movie. Atrocious didn’t come close to describing the thing itself: the atrocity. That’s what they were calling it. Brigstocke and the rest of them. Not murder. An atrocity. All about the context, apparently…
There were rats in the skip around the corner. He could hear them digging into the bin bags. Chewing through Styrofoam for crusts, and wrappers slick with kebab fat.
He’d probably seen things as bad in Surbiton semis and Hackney tower blocks, or at least the aftermath of such things. He’d certainly known of worse-of acts that had left a greater number dead-happening in that war and in others. He’d watched them on the news. Weren’t those things atrocities, too?
He belched up Special Brew, tasting it a second time. Moaning. Biting down into each sour-sweet bubble.
Why was what he’d seen on that piece-of-shit tape any worse than when a bomb fell through the red cross daubed on a hospital roof? These were not civilians, were they? This was soldiers killing soldiers. Yet somehow it was worse. You knew perfectly well that things went wrong, that machines went wrong, and that people fucked up. But this wasn’t fucking up; this was basic bloody horror. This was inhuman behavior from those who’d been there-who were supposed to have been there-in defense of humanity.
He shifted, driving an elbow into the rucksack behind him and pulling at the frayed edge of the sleeping bag. He could smell himself on the warm air that rose up from inside.
If anything, what he’d seen on that tape, what had happened at the end, was more terrible than the executions themselves. But whoever was behind the camera hadn’t filmed the actual shootings. There was no way, from seeing the tape, of knowing if each of the four soldiers had done his bit.
If each one of ours had killed one of theirs… He hoped it hadn’t been the case. Hoped that one soldier, or at worst two, had done all the killing. He pictured one of the soldiers lining up the prisoners and trying to kill as many as he could with one shot. If those heavy heads were close enough together, if all those ducks were in a row, would the bullet pass straight through one and into the next? Through two or three maybe…?
