Like A Charm

I fired up my computer.

His name being the same first and last eliminated any confusion about who I was looking for. There was only one Mason Mason in London. I worked backwards through his history. At first, it was very encouraging. He had had psychiatric treatment. He had been brought in many times for various offences, all of them related to his conviction that he was a Recon Marine and London was a battlefield. He built bivouacs in parks. He went to the toilet in public. Occasionally he assaulted passers-by because he thought they were Shi'ite guerrillas or Serbian militia. But generally the police had treated him well. They were usually kind and understanding. They got the mental health professionals involved as often as possible. He received treatment. Reading the transcripts in reverse date order made it seem like they were treating him better and better. Which meant in reality they were tiring of him somewhat. They were actually getting shorter and shorter with him. But they understood. He was nuts. He wasn't a criminal. So, OK.

Then I noticed something.

There was nothing recorded more than three years old. No, that was wrong. I scrolled way back and found there was in fact some very old stuff. Stuff from fourteen years ago. He had been in his late twenties then and in regular trouble for public disorder. Scuffles, fights, wild drunkenness, bodily harm. Some heavy duty stuff, but normal stuff. Not mental stuff.

I heard Cameron's voice in my head: He rarely drinks. He's pretty harmless.

I thought: Two Mason Masons. The old one, and the new one.

With an eleven-year gap between.

I heard Mason's voice in my head, with its impressive American twang: Sir, eleven years in God's own Marine Corps, sir.

I sat still for a minute.

Then I picked up the phone and called the American Embassy, down in Grosvenor Square. I couldn't think of anything else to do. I identified myself as a police officer. They put me through to a military attaché.

'Is it possible for a foreign citizen to serve in your Marine Corps?' I asked.

'You thinking of volunteering?' the guy answered. 'Bored with being a cop?' His voice was a little like Mason's. I wondered whether he had been born in Muncie, Indiana.

'Is it possible?' I asked again.

'Sure it is,' he said. 'At any one time we've got a pretty healthy percentage of foreign nationals in uniform. It's a job, after all, and it gets them citizenship in three years instead of five.'

'Can you check records from there?'

'Is it urgent?'

I thought of Cameron on his way to Muswell Hill. Being shadowed by a Recon Marine with a grudge.

'It's very urgent,' I said.

'Who are we looking for?'

'A guy called Mason.'

'First name?'

'Mason.'

'No, first name.'

'Mason,' I said. 'Both his names are Mason.'

'Hold the line,' he said.

I spent the time working out Cameron's likely route. He would probably walk. Too short a journey to drive, too awkward on the tube. So he would walk. He would walk through Alexandra Park.

'Hello?' the guy at the embassy said.

'Yes?'

'Mason Mason served eleven years in the Marines. Originally a UK citizen. Made the rank of First Sergeant. He was selected for Force Recon and served all over. Beirut, Panama, the Gulf, Kosovo. Received multiple decorations and an honourable discharge just over three years ago. He was a damn fine jarhead. But there's a file note here saying he was just in some kind of trouble. One of the Overseas Veterans' associations just had to bail him out from something.'

'Why did he leave the Marines?'

'He failed a psychiatric evaluation.'

'You get an honourable discharge for that?'

'We kick them out,' the guy said. 'We don't kick them in the teeth.'

I sat there for a moment, undecided. Should I dispatch sector cars? They would be no good in the park. Should I send the woollies on foot? Was I overreacting?

I went on my own, running all the way.

It was late in the year and late in the day and it was already getting dark. I crossed the railway as a train rumbled under the bridge I was on. I watched the road ahead, and the hedges on each side. I didn't see Cameron. I didn't see Mason.

Alexandra Park's iron gates were already closed and locked. This facility closes at dusk, said the sign. I climbed over the gates and ran onwards. The smell of night mist was already in the air. I could hear distant traffic all the way from the North Circular. I could hear starlings roosting somewhere to the south. In Hornsey, maybe. I followed the main path and found nothing. I saw the dark bulk of Alexandra Palace ahead and stood still. Go on or turn back? The streets of Muswell Hill, or the park? Surely the park was the danger zone. The park was where a Recon Marine would do his work. I turned back.

I found Cameron a yard off a side path.

He was half hidden under some low shrubbery. He was on his back. His coat was missing. His jacket was missing. His shirt had been torn off. He was naked from the waist up. He had been ripped open from the sternum to the navel with a sharp blade. Then someone had plunged his hands inside the wound and lifted his stomach out whole and rested it on his chest. Just pulled it out, the whole organ. It was right there on his chest, pale and purple and veined. Like a soft balloon. It had been squeezed and pressed and palpated and arranged until the faint gold gleam of the charm bracelet showed through the thin translucent lining. I saw it quite clearly, in the fading evening light.

I think I was supposed to play the part of the Kosovo wife. I was Cameron's co-conspirator, and I was supposed to recover the jewellery. Or Kelly Key was. But neither of us did. Mason's tableau came to nothing. I didn't try, and Kelly Key never even saw the body.

I didn't report it. I just got out of the park that night and left him there for someone else to find the next morning. And someone else did, of course. It was a big sensation. There was a big funeral. Everyone went. Then there was a big investigation, obviously. I contributed nothing, but even so Mason Mason became the prime suspect. But he disappeared and was never seen again. He's still out there somewhere, a mad Recon Marine blending in with the local population, wherever he is.

And me? I completed my probationary year and now I'm a detective constable down in Tower Hamlets. I've been there a couple of years. My numbers are pretty good. Not quite as good as Ken Cameron's were, but then, I try to live and learn.

STROKE OF LUCK by Mark Billingham

So many things could have been different.

An almost infinite number of them: the flight of the ball; the angle of the bat; the movement of his feet as he skipped down the pitch. The weather, the time, the day of the week, the whatever…

The smallest variance in any one of these things, or in the way that each connected to the other at the crucial moment, and nothing would have happened as it did. An inch another way, or a second, or a step and it would have been a very different story.