The Glister (4 page)

It was this chain of thought, this sense he had of something collapsing in his mind, that wrong-footed him. It came as a shock, afterward, that he could have done such a thing, but it only shocked him later, when he had become capable of feeling anything more than he had at the scene. At that moment, in his confusion and terror and the horrible emptiness of it all, what he had done seemed not so much the best as the
only
thing to do, his one possible escape. He had just realized that he was too tender a soul, too soft a man to see through the work he had chosen. He had just seen himself as wholly lacking in all the virtues he had thought would come with time and experience, but which, he now knew, were intrinsic, at least in some basic form. A man either
has
courage, good sense, and a certain impenetrability of spirit, or he does not. Morrison did not. He was weak, lacking, frightened. Because he could not do the one thing he most wanted to do— because he could not reach out and bring this boy back to life—he wanted to close his eyes and run away to some safe place where nobody would ever call on him to do anything again. When he thought about it later, he would see that he knew he was making a terrible mistake even as he made it, and he also saw that he had been guilty of nothing more than a moment's fear, a mere hesitation. He hadn't known what to do: it was that straightforward. He wasn't a real policeman, he'd been pushed into the job when Constable Fox had died suddenly, after a fall from his bicycle. It was his employer, Brian Smith, who'd suggested he take the job if it was offered and he'd leapt at the unexpected opportunity, but he'd never been confident of his abilities as a policeman and now, facing his first real test, he was paralyzed with the fear of making some unforgivable error. Of course, he told himself that he was only looking for advice. He told himself that what he was doing was simply a courtesy, a show of respect to the man who had made him a policeman in the first place. He wanted to send out a warning, in case this tragic event had repercussions that had to be dealt with. This was what he told himself; yet he knew in his heart that he was lying. The truth was, he wasn't big enough to deal with a murdered child and he was afraid of what would happen if he called this in all by himself—and so it was that, in his terror of making a mistake, he walked up to the old red telephone box on the outer road and made the worst mistake he could have made. He called Brian Smith.

CONNECTIONS

A
FEW DAYS BEFORE HIS ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY, BRIAN SMITH DEVELOPED
a passion for puzzles of every kind, and jigsaw puzzles in particular. He liked the way they made connections, how a great pile of a thousand or more random pieces could be transformed, simply by matching shapes and colors, into a perfect likeness of the Venetian canal scene or the lush tropical garden depicted on the box. His parents, who didn't think of him as particularly intelligent—or indeed, as especially interesting or likable—soon took to buying him all the puzzles they could find, delighted to provide a distraction that would occupy their charmless and more or less superfluous only child for hours at a time, allowing
them
to get on with the more pleasant aspects of adult life, like drinking, or playing bridge with the Johnstons—a childless, and so wildly fortunate, couple who lived two doors along the street, in one of the quieter districts of the Innertown. It didn't concern them that, on the surface at least, their sturdy, unsmiling son had nothing at all in common with those bright, bookish children who normally delight in logic problems. Nor had they ever been unduly troubled by the fact that, as young Brian progressed dutifully through primary school, his teachers not only described him as below average, lazy, and almost entirely lacking in flair or imagination, but also implied that he was universally disliked by both staff and pupils. The truth was that this did not surprise them in the least.

What those school reports failed to mention explicitly was that their son was suspected of playing a wide range of cruel and humiliating practical jokes on the other children in his year group. Apparently, he was particularly vicious toward female pupils. He would find a way of placing fake blood or real excrement in a girl's satchel, or he would lace another child's black-currant drink with a special dye that turned her urine bright red. He left dead frogs and birds in desks, he sent Valentine's and Christmas cards with cruel messages or captions—never handwritten, always clipped from newspapers and magazines—or he would send photographs of stick-thin children in stripy Belsen pajamas to the fattest person in his class, a pasty, desperate-looking girl called Carol Black. He put drawing pins on chairs and slipped tiny shards of glass or copper wire into apples and toffees. For several months running, he paid special attention to Catherine Bennett, the class beauty, who regularly discovered pools of sour milk, or sticky masses of Cow Gum and horsehair among her belongings. On one occasion—the morning of her tenth birthday, to be precise—she found a sheep's eye and a packet of Love Hearts on her desk when she came back from milk break. Everybody knew who had put them there but, as with all Brian's other little acts of pointless malice, nobody could prove anything and the boy's parents were never informed. Most of the teachers could see that it wouldn't have mattered anyway. As was so often the case, the child's behavior was an all-too-obvious symptom of parental indifference.

Brian's nasty streak had disappeared, however, when he discovered the world of puzzles. Logic games, join the dots, jigsaws, anagrams, crosswords, number sequences—these things provided him, not so much with distraction as with a means of salvation. Solving a puzzle, he could see how
everything
was connected and he was privy to the secret order that underpinned the day-to-day world that had so bewildered him till then. Solving a really
difficult
puzzle would give him a deep, almost physical satisfaction that lingered for hours, or even days afterward; at an age when other boys locked themselves away with a fistful of tissues and a dog-eared copy
of Fiesta,
Brian would go to his room and take out a thousand-piece jigsaw, or some elaborate wooden puzzle that his mother had picked up in a junk shop. There were even times, during his teens, when he seemed to disappear: on rare days out with his parents, or all through the long hours of a school day, it was as if something had been switched off in his head, so it wasn't like being with other people at all, it wasn't even like being present, it was just
nothing
— and Brian was grateful for that, because Brian didn't
like
people. In the puzzles, everything depended on the connections, the logical sequences, the intrinsic order that was always waiting to be discovered; but with people there were no connections, and no logic—or at least, nothing very elegant or interesting. Compared to a number puzzle, or a complicated jigsaw, people were like those dodgem cars at the fair, going round in circles and bumping into one another noisily to no real purpose.

So it was that, during the years when he was lonely and despised, puzzles had saved Brian Smith from the world and kept him true to himself, in spite of everything. Yet now that he is a man, he has no time for puzzles. He still sees the connections between one thing and another, but the links he discovers are larger and more tangibly rewarding than those he once made by constructing a coral reef or the Trooping of the Colour from awkward little pieces of dusty cardboard. Now the connections have everything to do with people and the ordinary, day-to-day world, because people and events are the pieces that make up his puzzles now—and
now
everything is different, because the problems are abstract. There's nothing to hold in your hand, there's no starting point of a number sequence or an anagrammatized word to work with. What he works with now is people, and when you ignore what people feel and want, when you see them as objects in
the fullest
sense of the word, they become the most interesting pieces in the most compelling and elegant puzzle of all.

And the rules of the game are much the same as before. There is only one acceptable solution to any puzzle and Brian Smith's job, pure and simple, is to discover what it is. Join all the dots. Fit all the pieces together. Everything is connected to everything else, so anything is possible. If what you are looking for is pain, you find the patterns that make pain possible; if all you need is love, then love is what you are bound to find, even in the most unlikely or dangerous places. What Brian Smith looks for, what he can see where others see nothing, are the patterns that lead to money. In fact, it is Brian Smith's gift to see, where others do not, that
everything
leads to money. Another man's disaster, another man's hell—in any situation, no matter how terrible, a man can make money, if he will only discover the connections between one thing and another. The proof is there for all to see in the newspapers and on the television every day. War. Terrorist atrocities. Natural disasters. Thousands of people die, or lose their homes, cities are washed away or reduced to ashes, and the cameras fix on that human-interest story, that tragedy, these people stumbling out of the smoke and ashes and into the cameras, that woman sitting alone on her roof in the midst of the flood. Devastated, the newsman says. They always say
devastated,
because
devastated
makes good television. Behind the scenes, though, away from the cameras and the lights, somebody is making money. Somebody who sees the connections while everyone else is distracted by the devastation. Brian Smith finds it fascinating, how the rest of the world seems to miss this obvious fact. Sometimes, in his lighter moments, he talks to his man Jenner about it.

“What do you see?” he'll say, looking up from his paper or his computer screen. “What comes into your mind when you hear the word ‘Africa'?”

Jenner ponders a moment, then shakes his head. He doesn't see much, which is his greatest virtue. Big, quiet, totally serious, he is a man of action, a type that is easier to use than almost any other.

“In your mind's eye,” Smith says. “What pictures do you see?”

Jenner tries. He looks into his tidy, rather spartan memory and scrapes some old news footage together. “Kids,” he says. “Kids and flies. Barren desert. Refugee camps.”

Smith nods. “Exactly,” he says. This is what everybody sees when they think of Africa. This, or some jolly, smiling, infinitely malleable native in a brightly colored print dress. But what Smith sees is money. Every disaster, every civil war, every famine makes somebody rich. You can be one of those smiling, malleable natives, or a stick-thin AIDS-infected refugee lying on a bed of flies in a transit camp. Or you can be rich. As long as one exists, the other is possible for whoever can see the logic. Which is obvious to everyone, of course, even to a man like Jenner. This isn't some special knowledge or insight that Smith alone possesses. The only difference is that he alone, or he alone among his immediate circle of acquaintance, is prepared to place his trust in that logic, because for him, money is an entirely abstract entity. For Brian Smith, only the logic of money exists; everything else is invisible.

Yet it had taken him a while to see that logic, and a while longer to understand that a man could apply it in a place like the headland—and there were times when he regretted the first few years of his adult life, a dull, almost somnambulist period when he had failed to realize his true potential. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, he can see that this error is forgivable. All the time he was growing up, all those wet Saturday afternoons and winter evenings by the dusty lamp in the dining room, he had been rehearsing his gift, making connections, searching out the logic in apparent chaos, but everyone he knew, his parents, his teachers, his classmates, they had all been utterly blind to his peculiar abilities—and that had rubbed off on him. Those others had seen him as just another working stiff, doomed for a deadend office job or some middle-management position at the plant, and for a while he'd been taken in by that sad little scenario. This is how a place like the Innertown works: it holds on to its own, it holds on and draws them under and, mostly, they just let themselves slide, doing all they can to pretend that nothing bad is happening to them, because nothing—
nothing in the world
—is as contagious as the expectation of failure. That's how Brian Smith sees it now, looking back. He had been infected with some local disease. He had been
contaminated
—and his parents were more culpable in this than anyone else. So it is a matter of quiet satisfaction, looking back, to know that it was his parents who got him started on the road to money. It wasn't what they had intended, of course, and if young Brian could have foreseen the fatal accident that killed them both, on the short walk back from the Johnstons' house after a night of sherry and bridge, he would not have wished such a death upon them. Not because he loved or even needed them very much, but because it was too messy, too random. A drunk driver, a couple of tipsy pedestrians, broken glass, blood, a girl screaming. Right outside his house, on the night of his eighteenth birthday. Nobody would wish for chaos on that scale—and yet this event, as random and inelegant as it seemed, had been the making of him. Everything he possessed, everything he had achieved, he owed to that drunk driver, and the Johnstons' insistence, after a last rubber of bridge, that his parents should not put their coats on just yet, but stay awhile and have one for the road.

The life insurance money had surprised him, but that sum, along with what he raised on the house, had given Brian Smith the start he needed. Three months after his parents were buried, he had given up on any idea of working for someone else and started his own business, the Homeland Peninsula Company. To this day, nobody really knows what this Homeland Peninsula Company does but, from almost the first week of trading, Smith prospered. He played the markets to begin with, he made his little pot of money into a bigger pot so that, when he received the second gift of his career—the closure of the plant—he was ready to take advantage. Nobody wanted to take on the job of cleaning up after the Consortium, but Brian Smith saw that money would have to be thrown at this particular problem. It was politics, pure and simple. Nobody out in the wider world cared about the people in the Innertown, or the environment, or the employment opportunities that might be created by attracting new investment to the eastern peninsula, but it was in all their interests to have somebody local— somebody like Brian Smith—make a good show of developing and regenerating the area with the subsidies and grants they made available. That way, they threw a little money at the problem and somebody else took on the responsibility. A fair amount of money did flow into Homeland Peninsula's accounts, not because the Consortium felt guilty or generous, but because the politicians needed to be seen to be doing something. What made Brian Smith rich wasn't Consortium money, it was public money, and the great thing about public money is that it doesn't stay public for long. Nobody checked to see if Homeland Peninsula could deliver a safer, cleaner Innertown; what mattered was that Brian Smith created the illusion of preparedness, the illusion of competence. Most important of all, he was a familiar face. He knew the problem on the ground, he had his finger on the pulse. What the people here needed was somebody they knew, somebody they could trust.