‘I don’t know if it was because his clothes were drenched,’ Macbeth said, ‘but the blood covered all of him. All his shirt and trousers. And lying there on the tarmac with his arms down and slightly to the side, he reminded me of the traffic light. Stop now. Don’t walk.’
They went on in silence, past the entrance to the garage under police HQ. Only unit leaders and higher-ranking officers had parking spots there. Banquo turned into the car park at the rear of the building. He stopped and switched off the engine. The rain beat down on the car roof.
‘I understand,’ Banquo said.
‘What do you understand?’
‘Duff knew that if you arrested Sweno, hauled him before a greedy judge in the country’s most corrupt town, how long would he have got? Two years? Maximum three? Full acquittal? And I understand you.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. What would Duff have got if Sweno’s lackey had taken the stand against him? Twenty years? Twenty-five? In the force we take care of our own. No one else does. And even more importantly, another police scandal would do so much harm just as we have a chief commissioner who’s beginning to give the public back some faith in law and order. You have to see the bigger picture. And sometimes cruelty is on the side of the good, Macbeth.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Don’t give it another thought, my friend.’
The water streaming down the windscreen had distorted the police headquarters building in front of them. They didn’t move, as though what had been said had to be digested before they could get out.
‘Duff should be grateful to you,’ Banquo said. ‘If you hadn’t done that he would’ve had to do it himself, both of you knew that. But now you’ve both got something on each other. A balance of terror. That’s what allows people to sleep at night.’
‘Duff and I are not the US and the Soviet Union.’
‘No? What are you actually? You were inseparable at police college, but now you barely talk. What happened?’
Macbeth shrugged. ‘Nothing much. We were probably an odd couple anyway. He’s a Duff. His family had property once, and that kind of thing lingers. Language, upper-class manners. At the orphanage it isolated and exposed him, then he seemed to gravitate towards me. We became a duo you didn’t mess with, but at college you could see he was drawn to his own sort. He was released into the jungle like a tame lion. Duff studied at university, found himself an upper-class girl and got married. Children. We drifted apart.’
‘Or did you just get sick of him behaving like the selfish, arrogant bastard he is?’
‘People often get the wrong idea about Duff. At police college he and I swore we would get the big bad boys. Duff really wants to change this town, Banquo.’
‘Was that why you saved his skin?’
‘Duff’s competent and hard-working. He has a good chance of getting Organised Crime, everyone knows that. So why should one mistake in the heat of battle stop the career of a man who can do something good for us all?’
‘Because it’s not like you to kill a defenceless man in that way.’
Macbeth shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ve changed.’
‘People don’t change. But I see now you saw it simply as your soldier’s duty. You, Duff and I are fighting on the same side in this war. You’ve cut short the lives of two Norse Riders so that they can’t continue to cut short the lives of our children with their poison. But you don’t perform your duty by choice. I know what it costs you when you start seeing your dead enemies in traffic lights. You’re a better man than me, Macbeth.’
Macbeth smirked. ‘You see more clearly than me in the mists of battle, old man, so it’s some solace to me that I have your forgiveness.’
Banquo shook his head. ‘I don’t see better than anyone else. I’m just a chatterbox with doubt as my sole guide.’
‘Doubt, yes. Does it eat you up sometimes?’
‘No,’ Banquo answered, staring through the windscreen. ‘Not sometimes. All the time.’
Macbeth and Banquo walked from the car park up to the staff entrance at the rear of HQ, a two-hundred-year-old stone building in the centre of District 3 East. In its time the building had been a prison, and there was talk of executions and mumblings of torture. Many of those who worked late also claimed they felt an inexplicably cold draught running through the offices and heard distant screams. Banquo had said to Macbeth it was only the somewhat eccentric caretaker, who turned down the heating at five on the dot every day, and his screams when he saw someone leaving their desk without turning off the lamp.
Macbeth noticed two Asiatic-looking women shivering on the pavement among the unemployed men, looking around as if they were waiting for someone. The town’s prostitutes used to gather in Thrift Street behind the National Railway Network offices until the council chased them out a few years ago, and now the market had split into two: those attractive enough to work the casinos, and those forced to endure the hard conditions of the streets, who felt safer wall to wall with the law. Moreover, when the police, after periodic pressure from politicians or the press, ‘cleaned’ the ‘sex filth’ off the streets with mass arrests, it was convenient for all sides if the clear-up was brief and quick. Soon everything would be back to normal, and you couldn’t rule out the possibility that some of the girls’ punters came from police HQ anyway. But Macbeth had politely declined the girls’ offers for so long that they left him in peace. So when he saw the two women moving towards him and Banquo he assumed they were new to the area. And he would have remembered them. Even by the relatively low standard of these streets their appearance did not make a favourable impression. Now it was Macbeth’s experience that it was difficult to put a precise age on Asiatic women, but whatever theirs was, they must have been through hard times. It was in their eyes. They were the cold, inscrutable kind that don’t let you see in, that only reflect their surroundings and themselves. They were stooped and dressed in cheap coats, but there was something else that caught his attention, something which didn’t add up, the disfiguration of their faces. One opened her mouth and revealed a line of dirty, brown, neglected teeth.
‘Sorry, ladies,’ Macbeth said cheerfully before she managed to speak. ‘We’d have liked to say yes, but I’ve got a frighteningly jealous wife and him there, he’s got a terrible VD rash.’
Banquo mumbled something and shook his head.
‘Macbeth,’ said one of them in a staccato accent and squeaky doll-like voice at variance with her hard eyes.
‘Banquo,’ said the other woman — identical accent, identical voice.
Macbeth stopped. Both women had combed their long raven-black hair over their faces, probably to conceal them, but they couldn’t hide the big un-Asiatic fiery-red noses hanging over their mouths like glass glowing beneath the glass-blower’s pipe.
‘You know our names,’ he said. ‘So how can we help you, ladies?’
They didn’t answer. Just nodded towards a house on the other side of the street. And there, from the shadows of an archway, a third person stepped into the daylight. The contrast to the two others couldn’t have been greater. This woman — if it was a woman — was as tall and broad-shouldered as a bouncer and dressed in a tight leopardskin-print outfit that emphasised her female curves the way a swindler emphasises the false benefits of his product. But Macbeth knew what she was selling, at least what she used to sell. And the false benefits. Everything about her was extreme: her height, width, bulging breasts, the claw-like red nails that bent around her strong fingers, the wide-open eyes, the theatrical make-up, boots up to her thighs with stiletto heels. To him the only shock was that she hadn’t changed. All the years had passed without apparently leaving a mark on her.