On this particular day I requested another change to be implemented. I called Frank and Annie out to the warehouse and asked them:
“Is there any way that you could make the blue liquid not gush out?”
“Well, of course,” said Frank. “We just don’t make it gush. We de-activate the trigger.”
“Yes, but then the liquid would stay in the reservoir, right?” I said.
He nodded yes. I told him:
“That’s no good. I want it so that it disappears from the reservoir, then doesn’t reappear again. Just disappears.”
Annie and Frank looked at one another. Then Annie said, sheepishly:
“But that’s impossible.”
“I know,” I said, “but that’s the…I mean, isn’t there some way you could make it happen?”
There was another pause, then Frank replied:
“Not really, no.”
“I want it to go up,” I said, “even if it’s harder-hard, I mean. Disappear upwards. Become sky.”
They both thought about this for a while. Then Frank said:
“We could make the liquid travel upwards. In a tube, for example. We could lead a tube up from the holding tank towards the ceiling. We could even feed it through the roof and have it all sprayed upwards in a fine mist. But that’s…”
“I like that,” I said. “Try it. Try some other things along those lines too. See what you can come up with.”
Driving back to Brixton that day, I decided to detour past the original tyre shop. I was alone, driving my Fiesta. As I approached the railway bridge just before the shop, I noticed that the traffic in front of me was being held up. Some cars were turning round and heading back in the direction I’d just come from. I understood why when I was twenty or so feet from the traffic lights beside the bridge: there was a police cordon beyond them, demarcated by a line of yellow-and-black tape. It was the same type of tape they’d used to demarcate the siege zone two months before the accident-only that had been a hundred or so yards away, beyond the tyre shop. This new zone started near the phone box I’d called Marc Daubenay from, and ran down Coldharbour Lane, which was empty save for policemen standing and walking around.
I drove up to the tape and, ignoring a traffic officer’s signal to turn round, pulled my Fiesta to one side, stepped out and walked up to him.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“Incident,” he answered. “If you’d like to turn round and go back to the next intersection…”
“What type of incident?” I asked.
“Shooting,” he said. “Please go back to your car and…”
“Who was shot?” I asked.
“A man,” he said. “We don’t hand information out to onlookers. If you’d please return to your car and proceed back up to the next intersection…”
The small radio on his shoulder crackled, and a voice said something I couldn’t pick up. I peered beyond him. There were two police motorbikes standing in the middle of the street, plus several cars: three normal white police cars, a white police van, one of those special red cars and an unmarked metallic blue car with a magnetized light mounted on its roof. Two men in white boiler suits were walking down the middle of the road.
“You have to go back,” the traffic policeman told me. “You can’t leave your car there. You’ll have to detour via Camberwell or the centre of Brixton.”
“Detour,” I said. “Yes, of course.”
I snatched one more look across his shoulder, then got back into my car and drove off. When I walked into my flat, I heard Naz’s voice on my answering machine, leaving a message. I picked my phone up.
“It’s me,” I said. “The real me. I’ve just walked in.”
“I was just leaving you a message about Frank and Annie’s idea. They’ve devised this idea for the liquid. You requested…”
“Listen,” I said. “I’d like to find out about something.”
“Oh yes?” Naz said.
“There’s been some kind of incident on Coldharbour Lane,” I told him. “A shooting. I should like to know what happened.”
“I’ll see what I can learn,” Naz said.
He called back an hour later. Someone had indeed been shot. Details were vague, but it seemed to be drugs-related. It had happened outside Movement Cars. A black man in his thirties. He’d been on a bicycle, and two more black men had pulled up in a car and shot him. He’d died on the spot. Did I want to know more?
“Do you know more?” I asked Naz.
“Not yet,” he said. “But I can keep up to date on information as it comes out. Would you like that?”
I pictured the black man dying beside his bicycle outside the phone box I’d called Daubenay from the day the Settlement came through. I pictured the two other black men shooting him from their car. Had they stayed inside their car? I didn’t know. I remembered a man wheeling a coke machine into the cab office as the box’s display counted down the seconds. Movement Cars. Airports, Stations, Light, Removals.
“Hello?” Naz’s voice broke in.
“Yes,” I told him. “Keep me up to date. And Naz?”
“Yes?”
“I’d like you to procure the area once the police are done with it.”
“Procure it?” he repeated.
“Hire it. Obtain permission to use it.”
“What for?” Naz asked.
“A re-enactment,” I said.
11
FORENSIC PROCEDURE is an art form, nothing less. No, I’ll go further: it’s higher, more refined, than any art form. Why? Because it’s real. Take just one aspect of it-say the diagrams: with all their outlines, arrows and shaded blocks they look like abstract paintings, avant-garde ones from the last century-dances of shapes and flows as delicate and skilful as the markings on butterflies’ wings. But they’re not abstract at all. They’re records of atrocities. Each line, each figure, every angle-the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable violence, darkly screaming from the silence of white paper: something has happened here, someone has died.
“It’s just like cricket,” I told Naz one day.
“In what sense?” he asked.
“Each time the ball’s been past,” I said, “and the white lines are still zinging where it hit, and the seam’s left a mark, and…”
“I don’t follow,” he said.
“It…well, it just is,” I told him. “Each ball is like a crime, a murder. And then they do it again, and again and again, and the commentator has to commentate, or he’ll die too.”
“He’ll die?” Naz asked. “Why?”
“He…whatever,” I said. “I’ve got to get out here.”
We were in a taxi going past King’s Cross. Naz was on his way to meet someone who knew a policeman working in forensics. I was going to the British Library to read about forensic procedure. I’d done this for days now, while I waited for Naz to lay the ground for the re-enactment of this black man’s death. I think I’d have gone mad otherwise, so strong was my compulsion to re-enact it. We couldn’t re-enact it properly until we’d got our hands on the report about it-the report written by the police forensic team who were dealing with the case. Naz trawled through all the contacts in his database to try to find a way of getting access to this and, while he did, I staved off my hunger for it by devouring every book about forensics I could find.
I read textbooks for students, general introductions meant for members of the public, papers delivered by experts at top-level conferences. I read the handbook every professional forensic investigator in the country has to learn by rote, and learnt it by rote too. It was laid out in paragraphs headed by numbers, then by capital letters, then by roman numerals, then by lower-case letters as they indented further and further from the left-hand margin. Each indentation corresponded to a step or half-step in the chain of actions you must follow when you conduct a forensic search. The whole process is extremely formaclass="underline" you don’t just go ahead and do it-you do it slowly, breaking down your movements into phases that have sections and sub-sections, each one governed by rigorous rules. You even wear special suits when you do it, like Japanese people wearing kimonos as they perform the tea ceremony.