‘So I’m not screaming in a wilderness?’
‘You’re crying in a room filled with people like me, people who thought they’d go crazy with grief.’
A pause that lengthened, a stillness as the swathed figure lay inert and immersed. Finally, it spoke again. ‘I didn’t even go to their funerals, you know?’
‘Yes, I did know.’
‘Freddie, Hugh … my friends. None of their funerals. All gone.’ The eye was closed, dry. Kemp went to sit in an easy chair bordered by a vase of orchids. A presumption to intrude, but to hesitate, wait for an invitation, was to solicit outright rejection. This way, there was less chance of second thoughts, of energy remaining to request his departure. Commitment made. He hated hospitals. They reminded him of his mother’s cancer, of the stench of senility and incontinence that clung to his father in those final years. Places that smelt of mortality and misery. The eyelid raised. ‘Why do you think he allowed me to live?’
‘I’d be lying if I tried to answer.’
‘Lie, then. Doesn’t everyone when it comes to race?’
‘Perhaps you were an oversight, your survival was unintentional. Perhaps he engineered it – out of arrogance, callousness, or a desire for a witness to carry the details, spread the word.’
‘And the word is what?’
‘Terror.’
‘Terror.’ She repeated it slowly, almost inaudible. ‘That’s a political term.’
‘A possible angle. They didn’t rob you, take jewellery, do it for card PIN numbers.’
‘No, they did it for kicks.’
‘Unusually high stakes.’ And rare for crack-dealers or genuine addicts to offload precious stocks, valuable rocks, onto unwilling recipients. ‘My guess is a deeper motive.’
She nestled inactive on the pillow. ‘You’re Home Office – MI5 – whatever. You can do better than guesswork. Who are they?’
‘We’re pursuing inquiries.’ Standard euphemism, conventional brush-off. Yet pursuit described the Security Service’s actions. It was their hunt, their responsibility, a politically tinged crime: as planned, directed, as the slaying of undercover cops, the shooting of asylum-seeking Africans – which went beyond assault and murder, that was deflected to Thames House and on to the Maria Johanna. Hot potato, burning issue. The computer-generated E-fit composite of a Jamaican black first encountered by Sophie outside her house, again as her husband and friends suffered and died around her, was the opener. From there, police camera footage of the roadways surrounding southwest London had been analysed, a time-model match for the Mercedes found, its waypoints logged and wound back until pictures emerged of it leaving the landside of a Heathrow terminal. A3, M25, M4, airport. Her road was a simple cut-through, avoiding the traffic-calming and one-way measures of Wandsworth; he had returned to cut her to pieces. But he was marked, picked out while he carried a bag through Arrivals, identified in earlier frames on other cameras proffering his passport following an overnight from LA. The Feds would retrace from there, search records and passenger manifests. For now, it was enough. They had a face, a fly-in, a route history. Advantage Kemp. He would not waste it.
Sophie might have been in a sarcophagus, dead but for the frenzied exhaustion, the deep-smouldering anguish which emanated through the bandages. ‘We were just the start.’ Blank, bald statement.
‘Doesn’t have to be.’ He shook his head. ‘Everyone’s behind you, everyone cares, everyone’s determined to put an end to it.’
‘They’ll fail. You’ll fail. It’s been coming for years. The aggression, the lip, the surliness, the threats. We’re under siege, and what’s ever been done about it?’
‘Things change.’
‘Only the number of bodies, the scale of shootings, the excuses dreamt by politicians.’
‘I’m no politico.’
‘Then you’ll go ignored – like me, my family, like every Londoner who’s had to sell up, move out.’
‘I understand …’
‘You don’t.’ She cut him off, struggling to an elbow. ‘Why did we ever have to be exposed to them, why did British decency have to be torn up and thrown away, why did we have to tolerate their ganja, their guns?’
‘Societies develop.’
‘So – this is progress?’ The head rotated to observe the room. ‘When have I heard an MP say enough is enough, or admit to the blanket crime-wave or mention once that whites might feel aggrieved, angry?’
‘I can’t answer.’
‘That’s what I thought. I’ll be blamed soon. If this happened to me, I deserved it, provoked it, shouldn’t have been white, middle class, shouldn’t have lived there, been called Sophie. Sophie…’
There was moisture-free crying, understated rasps coming from the patient’s throat. Kemp bowed his head, ashamed at having disturbed the equilibrium, for not being medical staff, swamped by the sadness of it all and by memories of Emmy. Sophie’s void was his. And she was right. He would fail. And she was right. It was just the start.
An Irish medic popped his head around the door. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine, doctor.’ Composure regained. She had bitten to the bone the finger of a black paramedic who tended her after the massacre; she had screamed whenever a West Indian nurse approached. White personnel were assigned, Afro-Saxons banished. Post-traumatic stress could be unpredictable. She was looking at him again. ‘I’m told I have to find a purpose.’
Don’t we all, thought Kemp. Don’t we all.
CHAPTER 8
St Clair was waiting for him in a hospital office, privacy guaranteed by a detective from Special Branch on door duty. He would have cased the room, rifled the drawers, read any documents. Now he was lodged in an armchair, a corpulent man trapped within a larger man’s body. Perfectly content, dangerously avuncular. ‘Well?’
‘Depressing.’ Kemp sat up on a desk. ‘Deeply.’
Fat lips pursed, fleshy Reichsmarschall-sized fingers joining below them to indicate engagement. ‘Not a pretty sight, I’ll agree. Nothing’s very pretty at the moment.’
‘We’ve got a trail.’
‘That’s something. Let’s hope the Jamaica takes us deeper into the plot. How do you suggest we find him?’
‘Yardies would attack Sophie and her guests for one of two reasons – turf war or issues of disrespect. We can discount both.’
