Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (8 page)

Whatever he represented, in reality the Black Spirit couldn’t be all the things she, Wells, Sallas or Interpol believed him to be. What was certain, however, was that he did exist, he was out there, and according to Lexington, he was heading this way. Wells having mopped up his spilt jizz and sat down, the bossman was back at the lectern.

‘I know what you’re all thinking, so let me state as clearly as I can that you can’t afford to think it. General Thaba’s delirious remarks may have been cryptic, but remember that he traded his way out on the specific mention of a terrorist threat to the British state. Those were his precise words. “A terrorist threat to the British state.” All he gave us in the end was “the Black Spirit”, the meaning of which should now be frighteningly clear, and “an eye for an eye”, which, the Good Lord’s proprietary claims notwithstanding, is the war cry of those intent upon vengeance. General Mopoza, it is fair to say, falls into that category.

‘As I mentioned earlier, Mopoza has a proven fondness for historically significant dates. Had the late General Thaba been in a clearer frame of mind, he might have mentioned that Sonzola annually celebrates its independence from the British state on September the sixth. That’s this Saturday, ladies and gentlemen.’

‘Well it still sounds like bollocks to me.’

The band had left the stage with no clamour for an encore, only the sound of chairlegs squeaking on the floor as the gathering began to disperse. Wells had circulated briefing packs, the facts and figures padded out with speculatory analysis and a seriously reaching psychological profile which she’d seen before.

Like the Eskimos’ enhanced vocabulary for describing snow, she thought there should be a panoply of terms to distinguish the subtle but significant varieties in tone and nuance of the low grumbling that followed every police briefing. With experience, she had learned to recognise most of them. This one was an unusual blend of ‘it won’t even concern us’ mixed with subtly discordant elements of ‘we’re being fucked about here’ and ‘there’s something they’re not telling us’.

‘I’m not saying I wouldn’t be worried if this Black Spirit bastard showed up on my patch, but what have we really got to go on? This Thaba bloke wanted an exit and he had to give them something, so what better than flinging in a name that’s guaranteed to frighten the horses?’

‘Why are they taking it so seriously? I think either that Wells bloke has been blowing smoke up Lexington’s arse, or they’re not giving us the full picture.’

‘It’s a wild‐
goose chase.’

‘Total wind‐
up.’

‘Ants in their pants all because someone mentioned the Bogeyman.’

‘Understandable caution, really. Keep your eyes and ears open just in case.’

‘Nothing we can do if we don’t bloody know anything.’

Millburn held the door open for her as they exited to the lobby.

‘You’re keepin’ it close to your chest, X. Either that or you were bored into catatonia.’

‘Bit of both.’

‘I’m bettin’ you know more about this heid‐
the‐
baw than that MI5 bloke.’

‘That’s classified.’

Millburn smiled.

‘Don’t suppose it’ll be botherin’ you up there in the People’s Republic. Terrorists are like tourists. First stop London, every bloody time.’

‘You were the one who ran away to the big city.’

‘Aye, but not for career reasons, you understand. You canna get United tickets for love nor money in Newcastle, and London’s got five Premiership teams. That’s five away games, pet.’

Millburn was under the mistaken (but never corrected – she hated anyone thinking she was one of the boys) impression that she wasn’t interested in football, which was why he saw it as a challenge to crowbar it into their every conversation. Tutting and rolling her eyes, she gave him a playful push to send him on his way.

He was one of the good guys, and a very smart cop, but he was wrong about whose doorstep the Black Spirit was more likely to end up on. That was why every force in the country had been represented this morning. London was the last place he’d think of hitting. Armed police all over the shop, public areas evacuated if anyone left so much as a McDonald’s bag lying around. Forget it. Vulnerability was what he sought first and foremost. Look at Strasbourg. He didn’t go near the parliament itself, nor did he need to to make his point. His style was to attack places that no‐
one had thought to attack before, meaning that neither had anyone thought much about defending them. Even in St Petersburg, where he hit the more traditional terrorist target of an army base, he had done it using a civilian passenger train.

The truly scary thing was that they didn’t even know what to be scared of. He could attack anywhere, using any means. There would be no coded warnings, no ‘legitimate targets’. No‐
one knew who he was or what he looked like, and he had never stuck his own head above the parapet. Nonetheless, there was one thing she was determined about, one thing she had sworn to herself back in Brussels and felt even more strongly about now.

If the Black Spirit set foot on her turf, Angelique de Xavia was taking him downtown.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

That had always been a hard one for Ray to answer, even back in the days when each of the aspirational possibilities had its own Fisher‐
Price play‐
figure: fireman, policeman, doctor, soldier, train‐
driver, bus‐
driver, binman, sailor, pilot, spaceman. In retrospect, there had been a distinct leaning towards the public sector in those moulded plastic role‐
models, but this had undoubtedly been less to do with socialistic vocational ideology on the part of the manufacturer and more to do with the greater marketing opportunities afforded by professions associated with a specific vehicle (sold separately). Still, this kind of thing was bound to have a subliminal effect; strictly speaking, even the astronaut was on the public payroll, and these toys were sold in the days well before bus deregulation, back when Brian Souter was probably barring gay Weebles from riding his Dinky Toys double‐
decker.

Ray guessed that many of those Fisher‐
Price product lines had by now succumbed to the toy industry’s most feared affliction – irreversible anachronism – but maybe that was preferable to a modern new range that included IT specialists, call‐
centre drones and burger‐
flippers. The accessory range wouldn’t be a knock‐
out either.

‘Dear Santa, I have been a good boy all year, apart from that time I put the hamster in the washing machine but Mum says that’s okay because I was only trying to get the chewing gum off his fur though she wasn’t happy about that because I’m not supposed to eat chewing gum because you can choke to death on it and it makes you look like a ned. Can I please have a Fisher‐
Price management consultant please and if it’s not too much please can I please have the flipchart and team‐
building equipment kit please.’

The first thing Ray could remember wanting to be was a welder. He was in Primary Three at the time and didn’t have the first idea what a welder did, but that was hardly relevant under the circumstances. It was the long lunchtime (teachers’ payday, last Thursday of the month) and they were playing Colditz. Ray wanted to be on the goodies’ side for a change, but the goodies’ leader, Tommy Dunn – seven‐
year‐
old detached cool personified – had stipulated that you only got on to his team if you wanted to be a welder when you grew up. Tommy’s dad was, if Ray remembered correctly, a consultant maxillofacial surgeon, or possibly a welder.

‘Make it’ was the command by which their playtime world was shaped, a good dozen years before Captain Picard added the stylish but redundant ‘so’.

‘Make it that I’ve dug a tunnel through intae the sewers an’ it comes oot behin’ the kitchen bins,’ Tommy had decreed, before cautioning his fellow captives: ‘An’ make it that I’ve got tae go ahead masel’ an’ yous have tae cover up fur me until I come back an’ say it’s safe.’

The subsequent absence of the welding evangelist had precipitated a discussion between POWs and Jerries as to what they each really wanted to be, something that Ray was instantly aware of never having thought about. It was quite a concept; dizzying and daunting, exciting and intimidating. You could be anything: you simply had to choose what. The possibilities were suddenly endless, but the time for contemplation was more finite. At seven years old, he felt rushed into a decision, hoping as soon as he had committed that it wasn’t binding. Twenty‐
six years later, little had changed.

‘I want to be an astronaut,’ he ventured. He’d liked SF stuff, from The Clangers upwards. If adult careers were being offered like crayons from the teacher’s box, might as well go for the brightest. All of a sudden, his future extended beyond the next Christmas or birthday, and was coloured as never before, with spaceships, teleports, airlocks and moonbases.

‘Astronauts risk their lives, so they do,’ warned Brian Lawrence, recently prospective policeman, lately lost to the welding profession. ‘You could get kill’t. Mind there was a fire in one of the rockets in America, and sure there was that one when the air ran oot, and they nearly died as well. They never died, but nearly, so it just shows you.’

‘Eh, well I don’t want to be an astronaut any more,’ Ray amended. It was an age when the instant climbdown carried no ego penalties; at least a decade off that first shameful resort to the phrase ‘not as such’.

He wasn’t pressed for an alternative, as Tommy Dunn had returned with the news that his tunnel was clear, and the Jerries had acquiesced in his escape scenario (‘Make it that I’ve brung back a gun an’ we’re takin’ wan o’ the Jerries wi’ us as a hostage so’s the other yins cannae touch us until we’re through the tunnel, right?’).

Tommy’s tunnel, as it transpired, no longer emerged by the kitchen bins, but instead led (still via the sewers) into a system of caves, also known as ‘the sheds’. The sheds, Victorian‐
built playground shelters dividing the infants’ area from the Primary Threes, Fours and Fives, lent themselves memorably to children’s willing imaginations, the underfoot conditions and perennially damp walls perhaps tendering subliminal suggestions.

‘Make it that there’s a river runnin’ through the caves, an’ we’re wadin’ through it until it gets too deep an’ then we have to duck under an’ haud oor breaths an’ swim through the dark an’ come up in a big pool except still in a cave, right?’

Ray remembered it as though real, that extended lunchtime seeming to stretch far beyond an hour and a quarter, their adventure in the caves unhindered by the girls bouncing sponge‐
balls against the walls nor by the other boys using the support poles for goalposts. Mainly he remembered the smell of wet stone, incongruously warm, inexplicably comforting; perhaps it was only those things after that, because of that.

‘Make it that I’ve caught up wi’ yous an’ snuck up under the water,’ said Mick Hetherston, having arrived at the sheds and been brought up to date with the state of play.

‘You’d never have caught up – we’ve been in these caves for a whole night noo. You can stay in the sheds, but you’re over there, you’re miles back. You’ve still tae go through an’ up oot the pool, hasn’t he, Raymie?’

‘Aye.’

‘But make it I’m really a British secret agent pretendin’ tae be a Jerry, an’ I was helpin’ yous escape aw the time, an’ that’s how yous were able tae take Bobby hostage back at the castle.’

‘Aye, that’s gallus,’ was the impressed consensus.

‘An’ make it I was a British secret agent tae,’ appealed Bobby, doing the arithmetic and reaching a disturbing conclusion.

‘Naw, then there’d be nae Jerries left. Make it that you escape fae us an’ we have tae hunt you doon.’

‘But I don’t want tae be a Jerry anymair.’

‘It’s ma game, so you have tae.’

‘Och, that’s shite.’

No, Bobby, that’s life. Some suckers were just stuck with their role. Question was, were they better off than those who couldn’t find one? In the space of half an hour, Ray had moved on to a third vocation, though he had at least remained true to his wartime allegiance.

‘I think I want to be a pilot.’

This one wasn’t a pressure decision. Given a little time to get used to the whole idea, he realised that this was a notion that had been knocking around his head for a while. He liked flying. He’d been on an aeroplane six times: to Spain and back, then to Bulgaria and back twice. Coming back wasn’t as much fun. There was still the thrill of takeoff, but after that you were just going home, and your holiday was well and truly over. Taking off on the way out was the greatest feeling in the world. If he was a pilot, he’d get to fly every day, get to feel that amazing take‐
off sensation all the time.

He loved the airport too, loved being there. The check‐
in, the conveyor belts, the departure lounge, and of course, the planes. Everything was modern at the airport: shiny, all plastics, metals and glass; not like school, where everything was old, dull and wooden. When they drove past it on the motorway, he used to fantasise that his parents were about to turn their vehicle towards the car park and surprise him, say the boot was full of secretly packed luggage and they were heading off for a fortnight. When he had kids of his own, he’d told himself, he’d surprise them that way for real.

They also went to the airport to collect relatives, which was exciting because he got to see the planes, but it always left him with a sense of disappointment. The place looked just as fascinating, as space‐
age, but the sense of magic wasn’t there when you knew you weren’t going any further than the arrivals hall. It was like seeing the new toys at someone else’s birthday party. The better they looked, the greater the feeling of missing out.

Airports had never ceased to tantalise him as he got older. They were places for beginnings. There was always a sense of potential about them; of adventures waiting to be had beyond their gleaming corridors, high‐
tech portals to a better place than the one you were used to. In childhood, they were where holidays began, the wrapping paper on a present bigger and better than anything you could get for Christmas, but nonetheless a present only your parents could bestow, and like Christmas, but once a year. In adulthood, admittedly something of a courtesy title in his case, they offered the constant, autonomous possibility of escape, whenever you wanted, and whatever you wanted that to mean: from a spontaneous cheap winter week in Hammamet to, well …