Tigerman (27 page)

Yes,
the Sergeant thought,
it’s a Shit Creek tsunami, is what it is. Paddles are no longer the issue.
But what worried him was what would come after the initial high tide. Inevitably, on the heels of the outcry, there would be a proper investigation conducted by someone who knew how to do the job.

It occurred to him to run; to go and pack and just disappear. There was nothing to stop him. There would be wars to fight in, some of them pretty close by, and no questions asked. He might even get rich. Otherwise, he could turn himself in, just walk into Kershaw’s office and explain everything, or throw himself on London’s mercy and await instructions. They’d ship him out immediately and patch things up. He wasn’t sure what would happen after that.

But he’d lose the boy, for ever. It did not seem likely that an adoption committee would look kindly on his desire to formalise a criminal partnership which had caused what would almost certainly be an international incident.

He could also stay here and stick to his programme. He could carry on being Lester Ferris. Chase petty villainies and – at the right moment – drop in on Kershaw and be absolutely amazed at what all had been going on. ‘Jesus, Jed, I thought you said it was a storm in a teacup! But that looks almost professional. And what the fuck is all that in the bundles? Is that heroin?’ He wondered if anyone would follow the other end of the thing, the drugs end. They must, surely, even if only as a show of willingness. At least some of the focus must head away from him, onto Pechorin and the others. Then again, Dirac had mentioned Spetsnaz. Would others make the same assumption? That would send them off down more blind alleys for a good long time. He could nudge them. A friendly word at the right time. It was plausible. And there was the distant possibility, if he were caught, that his silence would be purchased on the topic of the drugs with leniency.

So far, at least, he had not been caught. There was no hue and cry for Lester Ferris. Dirac had not been asked ‘Have you seen him?’ And there was a good chance he would not be. He was not about to repeat his outing as Tigerman, and if he returned to the scene of the crime he would do so legitimately, as an adviser. Meanwhile they must make do with evidence from the night before, evidence which was even now fading into the landscape or had been burned in the cave, the video footage notwithstanding. If he could hold the line, there was a solid chance he would walk away. He had beaten far worse odds and seen off far more unpleasant consequences. In those cases he had been fighting for his country.

There were problems with that: if he had left DNA traces and they found them; if the video footage included an image of him in the car before he put on his mask; if the satellites had been looking that way and the cloud cover had not been enough; if the footage was enough to use some sort of biometric recognition; if Pechorin had somehow recognised him. In any of these cases, he would be shat upon from a great height. Dismissal, disavowal, prison, even a quiet vanishing. Retribution in kind from the Ukrainians, up to and including murder, because this was Mancreu and something like that could happen easily enough.

All this, as he stood in Dirac’s sitting room and watched himself, over and over again.

The question was whether what he stood to gain here was worth the risk. And that was no question at all.

THE SERGEANT HAD
been going to the Chapelle Sainte Roseline before he saw Tigerman on the news, and there was no reason to change his plans. In fact, there was every reason to stick to them. He mentioned his destination in passing as he bade farewell to Dirac, so that anyone who asked would know Lester Ferris was off on one of his daft detective projects, but the Frenchman was muttering, ‘Parkour? Silat? Ba Gua? Or, how is it called, that Indian stuff?’ and looking things up on what was apparently an achingly slow Internet connection, and might not entirely have heard. That was fine, too. Dirac would remember being told, would know it had been somewhere ridiculous and unrelated.

The Sergeant drove gratefully, letting the shock of the video footage wash away and taking solace in his decision to stick it out. Part of him yammered questions to which he had no answers, but the mountainsides were empty and endless, and the air was surprisingly cold. Whose footage was it? Why had they released it and was there more? Was he the target, or was Pechorin? Or NatProMan? Or the drug lords, assuming these were different people?

Away on the opposite mountainside was a figure, a shepherd or a hunter. Instinct told him it was a woman; something in the movement was female. She seemed at this distance quite unconcerned.
Good for you,
he thought.
Live your way. Live and wander and do whatever you like
. He inhaled, tasted pine, woodsmoke and rain, and when he looked again she was gone, she’d ducked into the trees. There was a limit, he had always found, to the number of times you could chase the same worries round your head. If you let them run, they wore themselves out, and then you could make your choices in the quiet. It helped to be a thousand feet higher than everything you were frightened of, alone in a landscape older than empires.

When the road dipped again, he regretfully turned the air conditioner back on, feeling mild claustrophobia.

Sainte Roseline was a proud stone building held in the crook of a small river. The waters rolled and gurgled from the foot of the mountain to the western shore without ever joining the hasty torrent beneath the Iron Bridge, content to take their time. The same patience hung over the old chapel itself, as if time within the cemetery gates was honeyed and heavy. Bees buzzed and flowers grew up tall around cracked old headstones. The graves here were not tended in the formal sense; the Mancreu people who interred their dead here saw no shame in life springing up from the site of burial. They did not mistake the corpse for the person. But the pathways were well trodden and small gifts rested on some of the stones: miniatures of whisky, sweets, and cigarettes. Somewhere there was a groundsman whose job was to wait a respectable time, then come along and see that these bounties were consumed or taken away, lest their continued presence serve as a reminder of decay.

The Sergeant parked the Land Rover at a respectable distance and walked along the path to the chapel doors, then let himself in.

The interior was dark and golden, beams and a peaked ceiling following the line of the roof. High windows streamed sunlight down towards the altar and the small pulpit. There was a font made of stone close by the entrance so that the mountain folk could anoint themselves as they entered and – so long as they were modest about it – take home a little blessed water for better protection of their homes from whatever kobolds might beset them. Over the altar there was a painting on board of Sainte Roseline being assumed into Heaven. She was petite and pretty, and her face was full of a childlike joy. Looking closer, he realised with a jolt that she was flanked by tigers. The nearer one scowled at him out of the image, and he felt the imprint of its silhouette across his chest, remembered the scent of musk and fur. White Raoul’s work, he would swear. He wondered what it had replaced, and why. Had the old piece been stolen? Or shipped out to save it from the coming fire? And, more importantly, when? He had heard nothing, but then he might not. This was a private place. He scented paint, and reached out hesitantly to touch the board.

There was a sound behind him: a polite scraping of feet. He turned.

The woman in front of him was short and spare to the point of scrawny. The bones in her hips poked at her grey wool gown, and her face was covered in an orthodox veil. A nun of some sort. She prostrated herself, full length, and kissed the stone at the foot of the altar, then rose and met his gaze. She did not speak. He realised that she did not need to. Her presence here was inevitable, while his was surprising. Logic told her he must be seeking something, be it absolution or something more tangible, and he would explain himself.

He cleared his throat, feeling large and intrusive. ‘My name’s Ferris. I’m the British . . . well, I’m everything, actually.’ She nodded. Of course, she knew that. His uniform with its flag would tell her what he was, and she could not but know, even here, that there was only one of him. ‘I’m looking for – we’d call them the parish records.’ Her inquiring expression did not fade. ‘Births. Christenings. Deaths. In a ledger. Like a big book. Exactly like, I mean. It
is
a book. But they call it a ledger, I don’t know why, never thought about it.’ He blathered, and she listened politely. When he ran dry, she nodded, and gestured to a table against the back wall. He saw Bibles. ‘Not, um, religious ones. Not the Book of Kings, or what have you.’ He was relatively sure that was the one where everyone begat everyone else. ‘For local people.’

She nodded again, and then patiently plucked at his hand and drew him over to the table. Her fingers were long and dry, the nails plain and carefully cut. He caught an embarrassing mouthful of her scent, her hair warm beneath the hood of her office. Even nuns were also women, and women sweated just as men did. She had a reassuring odour, like a warm dog or an old vicarage cushion, but beneath it was a whisper of startling femininity that he tried not to notice.

At the table she took the top Bible and opened it. Blue-black leather covers clopped gently against the wood, and the paper rustled. Bible stock, they called it, thin as ricepaper but strong. She turned to the last pages and tapped again, and he realised she had understood him perfectly. Old Bibles had a section at the rear for the keeping of family records. The family Bible wasn’t just a book of God’s truth, it was about where you came from in a more ordinary sense, and who you were because of it. His family had had one, until his father burned it when his mother died and cut them off from memory. Burned it where? The Sergeant wondered now. Not at home. Not on the electric fire. In a bin in the garden, perhaps, or perhaps he’d imagined the whole thing and his sister had it, always had, in some neglected corner of her house.

‘I’m looking for a boy,’ he said. ‘There’s . . . he might need my help. Later. When it all . . . happens.’
Are you his mother? If I could see your face, I might know. You might be the right age. You’ve got the same colour eyes.
He wondered how many women on Mancreu might fit that description. He could hardly ask them all.

She picked up a pen and wrote on a yellow notepad. Her writing was unjoined and simple.

How old is he?

‘About twelve. Between that and fourteen, anyway. I don’t know, I’ve never asked.’

Name?

More unasked questions. ‘He once told me it was Robin. But I think that was a Batman joke. He’s very clever – proper clever. I mean the way some people are and you look at them and you know the sky’s the limit if they can just get on their feet, get on the ladder. One day he’s going to be a lawyer or a businessman or something, I’m sure. Or a cardinal,’ he added, in deference to her habit, and thought he heard a gentle snort, though whether this indicated scepticism or a general dislike of cardinals he couldn’t say. ‘A prime minister of somewhere. If he just gets the chance, you know. I . . . I can help with that. Not much, but I can give him a place to start.’ What was it with confessing this plan to random women? He might as well announce it in the paper. But her eyes smiled.

You think he is here?

Her fingers sketched the Bibles, the chapel.

‘It’s all I’ve got. I need to know who he is.’

Ask him.

Well, yes. But. ‘I’m . . . I don’t want to bother him. I don’t think he thinks of the island as coming to an end.’ She waited. She did it perfectly, without impatience: a silence which was his to break. Waited. Waited. Waited. He sighed. ‘And . . . to be honest, I’m . . . I’m afraid.’ Yes, she thought that was a poor answer, and really so did he. All the same, it was true. That counted for a lot.

She nodded. She opened two more Bibles, and laid them out. Boys’ names, families. The right ages. He copied them down.

‘He has someone who looks after him. Someone he trusts, who knows the old smugglers’ paths. You don’t know who that might be?’

She shook her head. He wondered if she would lie. She must have guessed, because she frowned at him, and snorted again.

‘I saw a woman, on the way,’ he said abruptly. ‘Walking in the fields. Is it a good life out here?’

Yes.

‘Do you know who she was? On the mountainside?’ He wanted to know something about this place. He had spent too much time in the port, he thought, had ignored the rest of the island and now he wondered if the rest of the island wasn’t much more important.

She dances in the water
, the nun wrote.
She is content
. She put down her pencil gently. Interview concluded.

She dances in the water.
Perhaps that was as good as life got, after all.

The nun walked him out to the Land Rover and stared at the dent, with its bloody scratches. He sighed. ‘Some lads threw a dead dog at my car. Kids on bikes. I haven’t told the old lady yet, the one whose dog it is. Christ, she’ll know by now.’ He heard the blasphemy hang in the air. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’

She shook her head to let him know it was all right, then blessed him. Her finger rested solidly on his forehead for a moment, dry and hard. Satisfied, she went back inside. He touched the short list of names in his breast pocket. Something attempted, something achieved. Something actually according to plan. Simple enough.

He wasn’t used to the feeling; recently everything had gone the other way. He found he approved of it very much.

His good mood carried him into Beauville with renewed energy. He told Beneseffe the fish issue had taken care of itself for the meanwhile, and Beneseffe grinned and said yes, he’d heard something about that, couldn’t happen to a nicer person. The Sergeant bought a sandwich and a fizzy drink and walked along the harbour front in the sun. He asked after the names on his list. One of them was gone, they knew for sure, left with his parents in the first days. The other two they weren’t sure about, they’d ask around. He checked with the schoolhouse, too, but no joy. All the educational records, the schoolmistress said, were in storage at Brighton House. He realised he should have known this, could have known if he’d thought to check. It occurred to him that if the boy was in there he might have short-circuited his investigation and saved himself a lot of shoe leather by sitting down like a clerk and going through the records one by one. There couldn’t be more than a few thousand in the right age range. It would have taken – assuming one photo every twenty seconds, which was pessimistic – about twenty hours at the outside.