'And that,' he said, through clenched teeth, giving the screw a final turn, 'is the end of that.'
He stood back, checking it was straight, using the ceiling and the skirting-board as a guide. It looked ridiculous on the bare wall, a tiny rectangular frame marooned there. It was a picture of his passing-out parade at Hendon back in the eighties and he had been placed at the back and at the far end. He went close and peered at the faces. He'd bumped into some of the guys over the years, watched them get promoted, get married, turn into fathers — grandfathers some of them already. He'd seen them get fat, lose their hair, develop police-diet diabetes. And there he was, the only one who hadn't changed, weighing pretty much what he had then and still with all his hair. He should think himself lucky. People were always telling him so, lucky bastard, still with his own hair. He'd nod, make a joke about it, but in his heart he hated what he saw in the mirror. He hated it because his reflection told him one thing: life, real life, had never touched him.
He put his finger on his face in the photo, seeing quite clearly in black and white the thing that had set him aside all these years. Even back then, when he was only twenty, his eyes'd had that one-track determination, the same anger even then. They weren't the eyes of a killer yet — that part was still to come — but they were the eyes of someone who could think only of revenge and violence. He'd once been given a book for Christmas by Rebecca, his ex-girlfriend. It was a collection of sayings and she'd highlighted one of them for him. He couldn't remember who'd written it, but he'd never forget what it said, though the book was long lost: 'Little, vicious minds abound with anger and revenge, and are incapable of feeling the pleasure of forgiving their enemies.'
'Little and vicious,' he murmured now, looking at his photograph. Little and vicious because he didn't understand the concept of forgiveness, because it was still a word that made no sense to him. He went to the window, put his hand on the pane and stared out, thinking about what he'd come to. The cottage sat on karst land, on a lonely slope leading down to a minor country road, pocked with natural sinkholes and open-cast mines where the Romans had once quarried for lead, the depressions lined with wetland plants like sedge and marsh marigold. Half a mile down the road there was a pig farm and just a few hundred yards past the cottage boundary the furthest edge of the Priddy Circles — four Neolithic circles, scarred by sinkholes, remembered by some for the mysterious rumours of ancient ritual. A strange, remote place to come to understand the violence in him, to try to let this thing stuck inside him all these years dislodge itself and work itself out of his system.
Something in the corner of his eye moved. He didn't do anything, just stood, hearing his own heartbeat thudding. Then he turned slowly towards the television. It was switched off but the room was reflected in it: the open door with the carpeted passageway going back into the house; his face, eyes a little hollow; the windows with the orange ball of the sun going down. From the reflection it was difficult to tell if the movement had been inside the room or in the garden. His nerves on alert, he waited for it to happen again. A minute or more ticked by, and just as he was about to put it down to his imagination, he heard, behind him, a small flurry of clatters, then a crash.
He turned. The photo lay on the floor. Shards of glass everywhere, the frame cracked open, its little screws exposed. After all the work he'd put in it still wouldn't stay on the wall. He went and pushed his fingers into the hole. The Rawlplug had fallen out, taking plaster with it. He looked around at the silent room, at the late sun falling on the floor, at the TV, then back at the photograph. He breathed in and out, in and out, telling himself he was being an idiot. Really an idiot, because the thought that had popped into his head was ridiculous. The thought that the house, inanimate and blank though it was, had somehow found a way to dislike him.
Tig lived in one of the tallest blocks in Bristol, a windswept crumbling tower painted in red and blue on the Hopewell estate. It had views all across the town, but half of the flats weren't occupied: boarded up and vandalized. As she got out of the car she noticed how deserted the place felt. A small black guy passed her, his hands in his pockets, his eyes averted the way they all did round here. But he was the only person she saw as she crossed the car park to the tower.
When Tig opened the door he had the chain on and seemed a bit shaken, as if maybe he'd been asleep. He was rubbing his eye with his knuckles, his compact body worked and toned in a black weightlifter's vest.
'Hi.'
'Hi.'
'I'm sorry it took so long. Had a bad couple of days at work. You OK?'
When he was in jail his cellmate had poured bleach into Tig's eyes. The left had recovered, but in the right he'd developed secondary glaucoma, swelling the eyeball and swivelling the pupil to the side. It was always this eye he rubbed when he was on edge. She waited a minute while he went on digging his knuckle into it. Then she shivered, crossing her arms tightly and looking round at the deserted estate. 'Tig? Can you let me in?'
He hesitated, glanced over his shoulder into the flat. There were piles and piles of belongings crammed into the hallway and she knew he was embarrassed. Fifteen years ago Tig had been done for the attempted murder of an eighty-year-old woman while burgling her house. He'd been a heroin addict in those days, but he was a rare one: he'd cleaned up in jail and since his release he'd founded his own charity offering advice and sanctuary to street people trying to get clean. Through his work he'd developed contacts in the ethnic and refugee groups in the area, and had even, for a while, been felt out by Operation Atrium. An intelligence-led anti-crime operation, Atrium was targeting drugs-trafficking among Jamaican gangs, and white though he was, they'd researched Tig's connections and decided they'd like him as a 'CHIS' — the new word for an informant. The interest didn't last long: they backed off when it came to them loud and clear that if there was one thing you couldn't call Tommy Baines it was a snout. They'd have lost it completely if they'd found out that one of his closest friends was a support-unit sergeant.
She'd met him through the diving. Somehow he'd got the money together to take four of his clients on a basic PADI course where she was finishing her dive master's qualification. Forced together for two days, they'd hit it off. But it wasn't the diving that held them together, it was something less definable than that: a shared sense of being damaged, maybe — and, more important, a sense they were both meeting their debts by acting responsibly. For Flea the responsibility was about work and about Thom, for Tig it was work and his mum.
His mum was a bit dotty — nothing official, but Tig's prison sentence had been the last straw for her. When he'd got out of jail a year ago he'd moved straight in here as her carer and ever since had been dealing with the junk she amassed. Everyone knew it was slowly driving him mad.
'The idea was for me to come out and meet you,' he said now.
'I tried to call — and even if there was somewhere to go in this part of the world, I haven't got any money and, anyway, you said you wanted to talk.' Her nose was running. She wiped it impatiently. 'Look, Tig, for God's sake, I'm cold. I don't care about your mum if that's what's on your mind.'
He studied her for a while and she knew what he was seeing. She looked a mess. He pressed his face into the gap and examined her face, his right eye lagging behind the left. 'You're shaking,' he said. 'What's wrong with you?'