‘Higher than Wasps.’
‘You’re full of information.’
‘In the modern climate, it would be enough to get me charged at Nuremberg.’
‘Perhaps a little humanity or humility might help.’
‘I leave that to the social workers, probation officers and welfare officials who have to deal with the realities of the black problem every day.’
‘My, you don’t avoid argument.’
‘It comes back to honesty.’
‘Full-circle? Then it comes back to a headless corpse dragged from netting in the Thames.’
‘Do you also blame me for the murder of two white undercover detectives as they sat in a car near a London inner-city sink, or the nine officers mown down in my home town Los Angeles?’
‘Full-circle can be a vicious circle.’
‘White is what has kept your nation democratic, Mr Kemp.’
‘And tyranny comes in small steps, in the acceptance of racist taunts, in stereotyping, in categorizing people on the basis of colour or creed.’
A long silence. ‘You’re wrong. Tyranny comes in a rush. It’s time to drop the prefix and pretence of United from our national titles, Mr Kemp. Things will blow, and sooner than you believe.’ The academic leant back in his chair. ‘There’ll be more than one corpse in the Thames, more than three bodies of civil rights workers found in a levee outside Meridian, Mississippi, in 1964.’ Final comment, interview drawing to conclusion.
Kemp reached for the chocolate. He was far from finished with Duncan Pitt. ‘Not everything is quite so black-and-white, professor.’ He hoped so, he truly hoped so.
* * *
The bar in Park Street was not crowded, the staff filling afternoon dead-time with gossip, glass-wiping and reading paperbacks. A television played semi-mute on the wall, ignored by the respectable soak with the desiccated face who sat nursing a large sherry and reading a broadsheet at a corner table. Kemp ordered a cafetière and positioned himself across the room from the man. He had no intention of entering into discussion, no wish to be bored. Individuals with beards and tinted spectacles were untrustworthy – one of his prejudices, along with short people, fat people, moaning students, vegans, journalists, actors, hunt saboteurs, screaming queers, the French and the senior management of Her Majesty’s Security Service MI5. That was the trouble: the heart preached acceptance, the head espoused a creed of low-level irritation and petty bigotry. Who was he to try and run Duncan Pitt out of town? Even the American-Jewish tourist in his train carriage, wise-cracking with the relentless aggression and crushing self-confidence of the wholly unaware, alighting at Bath station with a punch line that deserved a punch – ‘Bath? Lucky I brought my soap’ – had chafed through his tolerance ceiling. Hell, everyone had their dislikes.
He poured the coffee and relaxed into the caffeine-jolt. A morning spent – probably wasted – travelling to Bristol to interview and scare an unrepentant academic, to perform a favour for St Clair and his mob. He could not help them, could not help himself, but he had accepted the assignment, however minor, with the indecent haste of the lost and desperate. And he was lost, had never belonged since leaving Thames House and being left by Krista. Excitement and purpose vanished the day both strands unravelled from his life, the day he stopped checking under his car for improvised explosives, stopped searching for tails, reaching for an automatic tucked in the waistband at the small of his back. Then Emmy had died, excised from his life as surely as a pair of scissors had been taken to a family photo album, and he had retreated into emotional neutrality, not shifting up, not shifting down, not moving forward, not moving back. Directionless. It showed in his inability to settle down, in the cheap adrenal thrill gained from debating points with Professor Pitt in a quiet annex of Bristol University. The past was always more poignant. Take this city – built on cotton, tobacco and slavery, the great civic and university buildings thrown up on the proceeds of human misery and human trade. You’re becoming a nation of servile masochists … positive discrimination is a passport to hypocrisy … the African receptionist at BBC Broadcasting House could barely speak English – at the BBC! The professor’s sound bites studded his mind. He drained the cup, couldn’t give a fuck. Not long until his next birthday, when he was closer to fifty than forty, closer to adopting a beard, wearing tinted glasses, nursing an elevenses’ sherry in a provincial watering-hole. Shit.
‘We are getting reports …’ the anchorman announced on the screen. Strange how democracy meant the spectrum of intolerance grew. Direct action was always the domain of idle inadequates with skin disorders, too much time, too few friends and too little education. Weirdos tended to clump together. And in each campaigning fanatic, beneath every balaclava, there was a murderously dysfunctional little Pol Pot mutant struggling to get out. Perhaps Professor Pitt had a point – selective morality was a curse, correctness a form of despotism. Tyranny comes in a rush. It would not be long before hotel managers were doused in petrol for failing to install wheelchair ramps, a driver was hanged by rogue cyclists for refusing to convert his vehicle to fuel-cell technology, a pensioner was coshed here in the city of Bristol for smoking and for daring to live off a street called White Ladies Road. The luxury of hate. It kept the watchers, handlers and analysts of his particular domain employed.
With a flick of his thumb, he ejected a digital cassette from the micro-recorder lodged in a breast-pocket. More material for the computer banks and transcription machines. So much for the moral high-ground. ‘And now we return to our main story …’ The news monologue insinuated itself into his consciousness. ‘A uniformed police constable, married with two children, has been ambushed and brutally hacked to death while answering a distress call on London’s Stonebridge Estate …’
CHAPTER 4
A couple, mixed-race, kissed long and deep on the sidewalk. No, that won’t do, won’t do at all, he thought. Mixed-race, mixed-up. They were doing it to provoke. Consider him provoked. There was order to be maintained, to be enforced. Public displays were an affectation, an affront to decency, a step towards coitus, a stage in the spawning of further fatherless litters and a new generation of mulatto youth to claim and pollute the streets. Flotsam to be discarded, then cleared. Side … walk … was for walking upon. This pair were putting it to improper and improvised use, pushing his sensibilities to the limit. He wiped an area of the windscreen with a cuff, framed the image in his mind. Faces, jaws, arms, limbs, hands, movement. A moment recorded, committed. It was part of the picture montage, an element in a sequence that would play on, play out, until the climax. He knew the ending. It would not be happy. Pretty girl, decent reviews. Should run and run. And he would catch. What’s love got to do with it? he asked himself. Nothing, came the reply. One had to stay distant as a critic. Emotional involvement warped judgement, could encourage hesitation. He did not want that, did not want to listen to the tears, the fears, the crying. Victims were so subjective. He would take an overview, decide on merit. This male, this female, were chosen. Eyes turned. Bright eyes. He had been noticed. The young woman whispered in her lover’s ear. No embarrassment, merely confrontational street chic, the jutting chin, angry eyes, mouthed expletives of those who did not care, those who did not care to be spied on. Absurd. They had volunteered, made a shared and witnessed declaration – of ardour, of war – and could hardly take offence. More sinning than sinned against. He gunned the engine and rolled the car away in first. A thrilling encounter. If only they could appreciate the broader tableau, the wider ramifications. He whistled cheerfully between his teeth. Trash had to be bagged, trash had to be canned. He was the refuse collector, he would achieve greatness.
* * *
The USA
‘Hey babe. How you doin’?’
Krista dropped the file stack hard on the desk and glared across. Fletcher Wood was peering at her, straight-faced, warm-eyed above a starched white shirt, mock concern about to burst. His hands rested behind his head.
‘That’s Special Agent babe, to you,’ she retorted. ‘And how do you think?’
‘Ouch, the lady bites.’ He knew her, knew her well, understood that moodiness was not in her genetic profile, had never arisen in her personnel report.
‘Be grateful you’re my favourite person.’
‘I thank God every day. Come here. Hug therapy, California-style. I’ll check for bullet holes.’
She trotted over like a lamb. ‘Thanks, Fletch.’
‘That’s okay.’ He enveloped her and patted her on the back. ‘Just don’t tell my wife.’
They were long-time work partners, long-term friends, the duo with a strategic brief to cover the extreme reaches of race crime. Althouse and Wood. It was a pairing that operated well, a federal bureau team that shared confidences and an office, that had closed down and rolled up militia groups and klaverns, the far out and far right, the lunatic edge and committed establishment sleepers, across the United States. He was cool, black, methodical; she – cool, white, instinctive. Different approaches, complementary results.
She disengaged and walked back to her desk, his gaze following her. ‘How’s the car?’
‘Totalled. Insurance is quibbling over terms and terminology for cross-fire damage.’
‘You were never one for small print.’
‘Or for pedantic assholes in short-sleeved, drip-dry shirts who take their shrivelled peckers and lack of action out on the general public.’
He sighed. ‘Glad I’m not in that line of work.’
She busied herself unbundling the files and finally sat in the pilot chair she had coveted and eventually purloined from along the corridor. Security policy dictated clean and locked desks at the close of day. Until then, in-tray collided with out-tray, memo met with response, in a maelstrom of clippings, print-outs and periodicals. Chaos that had purpose, anarchy that had meaning. Emmy, as a young girl and as a teenager, smiled out from two framed photographs. It was a celebration more than a reminder – of her beauty, her warmth, her potential, of what might have been. Another photograph, Emmy with her father, lay in a top drawer. Krista would often sneak glimpses of it.
‘What do we think?’ she asked reflectively. ‘Homicides of white supremacists both inside the cage and on the road, one of them witnessed by me.’
‘I’m not exactly crying.’
