By the time they had paid their bill and walked out to the car park, the sun was pummelling its way through the overcast sky. Ten or twenty wasps swayed by an overflowing bin, alighting on ketchup-smeared paper to feed. The two Turks got back in the cab, drove up to the roundabout and took the A414 for Chipping Ongar. Peering through the windscreen, Mustafa still found the monochrome fields and shaved copses lush and unsettling. He regretted the two sausages, the two rashers of bacon, the two fried eggs, the two grilled tomatoes, the two axe heads of fried potato mush, the two bits of toast. His belly gurgled like a nearly empty fuel tank.
Dave Rudman was sitting at the drop-leaf table in the tiny front room of the cottage reading yesterday's paper. There was an article on the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, rubbishing the proposals for the arty sculptures that might be poised there. The paper editorialized that this prime position should only be afforded to the image of a mighty national hero. Gary — Fucker Finch dressed as 'enry the Eighth … pigeons shitting on his doublet … Fighting Fathers banner in his bronze-bloody-hands … Dave had a biro in his hand and annotated the newspaper, scrawling in the blank linchets between rips of text and photos: EMPTY, I'VE HAD ENOUGH, TAKING THE PLUNGE.
Then he heard a cab come grunting down the lane and squeal to a halt. Can't be a mate — they'd've called …An' it's too far for a fare … The small crystalline facts he had ignored tinkled and shattered. He knew who it was even before he saw their hot cheeks pumped up with blood. It was me they were looking for all along … Looking at Ali Baba's. . Looking at Phyl's work. . it was them as called Mum and Dad in all… Dave was forced to conclude that I wanted this to 'appen, and, more defiantly, I was justified — why should I pay that cunt back, why? I was off my bleedin' rocker … Yet there were also his own words, echoing around the M25, all the way from the hackneyed past: You never owe a Turk. Never.
Over the foam shoulder pads of the Turks the wheatfield swelled, the ashes shimmered, the crows circled and the clouds — impacted upon by incomparably many puffs of causation — arranged themselves into greyish-blond sweeps of cirrus, cumulus blobs of tip-tilt nose and receding chin. In the core of it all was a ragged hole through which the Skip Tracer intoned, 'Juss don't go borrowing on me, son — don't do that. The vig'll kill you.'
Dave made to shut the door and the lead Turk stuck his foot in it. He knew they were only there to put the frighteners on him, smack me about a bit … so why am I reaching for Fred's gun? Why? P'raps I've simply 'ad enuff? Through the crack between the door and its hinge Mustafa saw Dave grab the shotgun. He ducked back, leaving Rifak exposed as the ex-cabbie levelled twin barrels at his gut. 'Get the fuck ahtuv-' Dave began to say. He didn't finish because the Turk threw himself forward, knocking the gun aside, and grabbed for his throat.
For a while there was a mercilessly inefficient struggle, neither one gaining an advantage — so that when Rifak did manage to get hold of the shotgun, it was with that element of shocked surprise with which a younger brother wrests a toy from his older sibling. Still in the giddy grip of his accomplishment, Rifak pulled both triggers — really just to see what might happen — and smoky flame tore a big chunk out of Dave's middle. Such a big chunk that for the moments before he fell a visible notch could be seen in Dave's side between his hip and his ribcage. Then he did fall, and, despite the liberal scarlet splashes, streaks and even blobs that rendered a chair, the newspaper, his cigarette packet and lighter, and one of Phyllis's darning mushrooms objects at once challenging and messy, Dave nevertheless found himself to be lunging up fresh blood.
Mustafa began the clean-up while the shotgun's report still echoed through the environs like the angry slamming of a giant car door. A quarter mile off Fred Redmond's sleep was perturbed by the after-echo. He stirred, thinking, Eye sware vat man puts vat byrdskara on urlia an urlia evri bluddë mawnin. The flock of crows lifted off from the ash plantation — oily rags flapping in the thickening sunlight. Mustafa calmly snapped on rubber gloves, took the shotgun from the stunned Rifak, wiped it down with a shirt-tail pulled from his crocodile-skin belt, kneeled and, taking the dying man's hands carefully in his own, arranged everything so that Dave held the trigger guard and the stock, while the gory muzzle was rammed in his chest cavity. Straightening up, Mustafa turned to Rifak. 'I tellya one fing,' he said in cockney, 'I'm not goin' dahn fer vis one, you div. They come lookin' — I'm pointin'. Now get in the fucking cab.'
As the Fairway pulled off up the lane with Mustafa driving, he adjusted the rearview mirror, so that he could check that the ex-cabbie truly was dying.
Dave was — and his entire life was passing before him. Not the significant or profound parts of it — his mother's love, Carl's birth, getting his badge, a priceless fuck — but the prosaica: the flicked spout of a milk carton; cash-point queues; the sweet rack in a video-rental outlet; a television programme about Flemish canals; warped furniture piled in front of a matchbox terraced house in Erith; the dirty 'tester' on a hospital wall; the loose chain on his moped when he was a Knowledge Boy; the name plaque reading JONCKHEERE on the bodywork of a coach juddering at a traffic light; the Hammersmith roundabout; a computer-generated phone call telling him he'd won a prize; a rolled-up ball of silver paper — but most of all, the fares. The fares, the endless succession of fares — their cropped faces in the mirror: male, female, old, young, white, brown, yellow, black (although it had to be conceded far fewer of these); their eyes wary, hesitant, bored, angry, screwed up with laughter, closed in a gob-stopping snog; their skin stretched and slack, lined and scored; their mouths purse-lipped, clenched, half open, sour goo on their mulish teeth. The fares, picking their noses, dabbing at their eyes and peering at him with self-satisfaction, confident in their own small nugget of Knowledge, which he, groaning, was forced to extract from them: Where to, guv? Where to, luv? Where to …? Where to …? Where to …?
Death itself Dave Rudman remained in ignorance of — he was a tourist, standing beside a large monument, staring bemusedly at the map that showed its location. True, as a dark crescent eclipsed his view of the sun, so he struggled to avoid unconsciousness, backpedalling into the present. His heart stopped, his legs pushed feebly against the doorjamb, his hands convulsed and his hips jerked — yet he couldn't hang on and expired like that, in quizzical pain.
The funeral was held at Willingale, a quiet little village a few miles away, deeper into the fastness of north Essex. Willingale — if it was remarked upon at all — was known for its two churches, which stood adjacent to one another, in a single churchyard overlooked by a sentinel yew and many massy beeches. One of these churches was Gothic enough — it had flinty walls and stepped buttresses that mounted to a castellated tower; the other, older edifice was a plain stone barn, with a shingled roof topped off by the characteristic vernacular campanile of Essex — a clapboard hutch rising to a tapered point. The yarn thereabouts was that the second church had been built by a wealthy lady who had fallen out with her sister over who took precedence in the pews of the first. The locals — credulous peasants that they were — had got it quite wrong; as anyone with the slightest architectural knowledge could have told them — and frequently had — Willingale's two churches were separated from one another by two hundred years in time, if only a hundred or so yards in space.