They put him in a nine-seater car on the verge of becoming a truck.
Next to him was Edward Witt, face grey, looking a little nauseous. Next to Edward was Faris. The old man smiled limply, shook his head at an idea that Theo didn’t understand, and looked away. The three seats opposite were turned to face them. Three security officers, two men and a woman, sat in silence and watched their passengers. The driver listened to Radio 2. Every fifteen minutes the broadcast was interrupted for traffic news. The traffic was bad. Sometimes they drove up the motorway on the hard shoulder, and no one tried to stop them.
Edward didn’t look at Theo for a very long time, but wrinkled his nose. Theo imagined he smelled. He enjoyed imagining this. The windows were tinted, making the yellow street lights splay across the glass in thin little lines, starburst through a grate. The traffic news remained bad as they reached the M25 toll. Someone had driven off the road somewhere further along. A bus had skidded into a ditch. Maybe children had died; maybe they hadn’t. Maybe it was a miracle on the M25; maybe it was a tragic loss of life. Either way, here was another hit from the 1980s, bringing back that warm, glowing feeling inside.
They stopped briefly at a service station. Everyone got out, so Theo did too. A security man stood by him without rancour. There were six cars in the convoy, men in suits, women in black leather shoes, tinted windows, four police motorcycle escorts. There were no other cars in the service station, and only one pump worked. Markse drank coffee, and didn’t look at Theo. Faces glowed in the white light of mobile phones. A harried woman in laddered beige tights balanced coffee for twelve on a couple of trays, swaying uneasily back through the car park, yellow lights of the twenty-four-hour coffee stop behind her. Two men returned, laughing, bladders relieved, bodies relaxed; one man with his back to the world shouted down a mobile phone, but the wind carried away everything except the anger.
Edward stood next to Theo and swallowed espresso in a single gulp.
“You little shit,” he said at last, not looking at Theo’s face, eyes narrowed on a small gaggle of women huddled together with clipboards. “You’ve no idea what you’ve done, have you?”
Theo shrugged, and they got back in the car.
The sun was rising by the time they reached Newton Bridge, but the smoke hid the brightest of the day. Theo smelled it before he saw the remnants of the town, mortar dust and boiling tar, petrol and timber.
They pulled to one side in a narrow country lane, bouncing through the potholes as two yellow buses drove the opposite way. The windows were grated up; the prisoners inside were chained at the throat and feet. A handprint painted in scarlet pressed against the glass as they passed by.
The convoy waited, then moved on.
They parked in what had once been the car park for the local library, and did not pay. The noise of the bulldozers made it hard to hear the words that Markse spoke as Theo was pulled gently by the arm into the lee of a pale blue-grey wall. Sometimes rifle fire pitted out, to be met by machine gun; if there were voices raised, they were lost in the din. Theo stood, shivering in the morning cold, breath steaming, one side of his face dry and hot from the growing flames rising off the former town hall, the other chilled and cracked by the winter air. Faris, Witt, three or four more he didn’t recognise, stood next to him, and none of them moved. One was a woman, in a smart beige trouser suit. She held Faris’s hand, and if you knew she was his daughter, then it was impossible to see anything else in her face, and Theo was relieved that it was Faris’s daughter who was going to die today, and he couldn’t see Lucy in the line.
People milled on mobile phones, and somewhere behind, another burst of gunfire, louder, broke across the slow hill of Newton Bridge. A truck on caterpillar tracks rode over the gentle mound where the pub had been; someone shouted, “Clear!” and another wall burst, rubble and flame and far off the sound of a woman calling for something lost. On the other side of the car park was a low stream, rushing down towards the bottom of the hill, all white foam and mossy rocks, a babbling brook you might even have called it, a playful spout of the river that had once fed the mill. Theo watched the water. A group of men in dark blue fatigues, assault rifles in hand, jogged briskly by, and the sun rose higher, burning away the mist, and somewhere a little too near for comfort the whoosh of a flame-thrower spat and a man burned alive screaming screaming that sound screaming but all the screams did was let in the flame that burned out his lungs and that was the end of the screaming and
Another car pulled up, flanked either side by heavy four-by-fours. It stopped fifty yards from where Theo stood, and no one got out, and shapes moved behind the glass, and nothing else happened.
Theo’s teeth chattered in the cold, and he wondered if the others were as cold as he was, and they probably were, but no one said a thing.
Footsteps.
A marching line of soldiers, weapons at the ready
a cluster of prisoners in between.
One woman helped another walk. Queen Bess could probably have walked by herself, but Bea hooked one arm under her elbow anyway, like a father escorting a bride to a reluctant altar. Both were coated in white dust; the side of Bea’s face and hair was matted to a thick black-crimson mortar with blood. Bess saw the wall, and stumbled, and Bea caught her and held her tight, and they kept walking, and joined the line in front of the empty library.
Theo looked at them, and they stared dead ahead and did not meet his eye.
After a little while Edward fell down, and Theo helped him up, and Edward clung to Theo’s arm and whispered, “All I did was ask. I just asked. I thought—I only asked.”
Theo nodded, and kept a grip on the crook of his elbow, and behind them something went whoosh, and the town burned, and a bulldozer crawled over the remnants of the patties’ little world and all things considered it died so easily, so easily, it died and
Theo closed his eyes and time is
shivering in the winter cold time is
The click of a safety coming off a gun.
Theo opened his eyes. Thought he would be able to keep them shut, was surprised to discover that he couldn’t. Thought he saw someone move behind the glass of the parked vehicle opposite. Saw, but didn’t entirely understand, a man in blue raise a pistol, and shoot Faris in the face. Faris fell.
Ching ching ching! £36,000 for cold-blooded murder, minus £2000 for not making your victim suffer needlessly, now what was the value of Faris’s life, he had been on the patty line but wasn’t currently a burden on the financial system, were there any health problems were there
about £92,000, Theo concludes before the body hits the floor. A deposit on a two-bedroom flat in Denmark Hill.
The man stepped past Faris’s body, wandered down the line, back once, up once, down again, picked a target, levelled the gun at Bea’s head, listened for an order only he could hear, shot Bea between the eyes. Stepped briskly past Edward, levelled the gun at Theo’s head.
Waited, listening for an order.
Theo stared into the barrel, and was briefly confused but not scared, and was surprised that he wasn’t afraid.
“Bang,” said the soldier, repeating words heard through an earpiece. “Lucy is dead.”
Then he nodded, turned to the queen of the patties, and shot her in the face and twice in the chest when she hit the ground.
Edward cried, and Theo waited and the man listened for instructions and nodded at something unheard and barked, “Right you lot. Let’s get them buried.”
They dug a pit in a field on the edge of town where sometimes cabbages were grown. Theo didn’t feel the pit was deep enough—the crows would get the bodies in no time, a strong rain would wash the soil away—but the work warmed him up and the guards seemed happy enough, so he and Edward Witt picked up Bea. Edward lifted her by the feet, Theo under the arms. Her body swung awkwardly in the middle, hinging at the hips, bum bumping along the ground. That made Theo more upset than her blood on his hands, her broken skull and ruptured eyes, staring. A woman like Bea shouldn’t have her backside dragged through dirt, she should be carried properly, he struggled to lift her, to haul her higher, but Edward didn’t seem to understand, didn’t seem to get why this was important, was just shaking and crying without making a sound, his silk suit ruined, spit flecking his mouth with every ragged exhale.