Alex Hargreaves understands it all.
He leaves the house and goes to Paula Adonor’s flat to take what he can of Crane’s work; he is interrupted in this by her daughter.
She panics and starts to make a noise. He has taken a knife from the kitchen drawer. He kills the girl. Stabs her, pierces her flesh with the sharp steel just as Vernon Crane has pierced his mind.
In this way Crane has his revenge upon Paula Adonor, the spell Crane wove, the trap he laid for her after she rejected him is finally sprung.
He strips the girl naked and takes her dead body into the bedroom, throws it onto the bed. He leaves the flat, forgetting to lock the door behind him, hurries down to the car.
Then he drives and as he drives, he listens to the compilation’s restless, relentless incantation.
Yes. He sees how it all works out. He drives through the night to Castleford to seek out Howard and confront him with the fact that it is not the case that he dropped Crane off at the Cottage door and that he knows, murderer that he is, that Howard too is a murderer, that Howard stopped the car somewhere out by the side of the road that night and murdered Crane, buried him.
He holds the knife to Howard’s throat as he drives, tells him, take me there, take me there and Howard understands where. They turn off the road, drive through dark fields to the old quarry as the dawn begins to break, the quarry filled with basalt and shale and blasted shards of rock and twisted iron, with trees growing flintily from the soil and he understands yes somehow Crane has mapped this, the sounds he heard, the field recordings, the scream, the imprint of this moment, of his own death transmitted back in time somehow, captured onto the tape.
He takes Howard’s car keys, then demands to know where Crane is buried.
Howard gestures to the tree.
Alex Hargreaves begins to dig, the sun up, the first rays catching the shard of green projecting from his left eye and channelling wave after wave of shattered light back into his brain, clawing the earth with his hand until he touches bone and scrabbles around it, finds a forearm, a hand, the old kit bag, rotted almost all away, falling apart beneath his fingers, the tapes all scattered and the box, inside, in a plastic ziplock, miraculously preserved, the final part of Crane’s work unearthed.
Yes, yes. He sees it all now. How they moved into the house, how Vernon Crane was there waiting for him, how he became Crane’s instrument, exacted his revenge, exposed his killer, murdered his lover’s child, brought to light his last work, has himself been condemned so that Crane could return to the world.
And in this way the story of Vernon Crane finally has its resolution.
His knock,
distinctive, the one he always used,
three sharp raps and a four rapid little taps.
They all know it.
Any moment, this moment, can be the moment.
Nothing for years, then, suddenly,
Vernon! His mother says.
She approaches the flat, her mind on other things, on new possibilities, on Nick Skilling strangely, on Nick of all people. To be touched, to be gazed upon, to be held, caressed, cherished, it has been a while. Of all people Nick. She almost laughs out loud but then sees the blood on the landing outside her front door, then on the door itself, the unlocked door shifting slightly in its frame.
Cursed.
She pushes the door open. The curtains are still drawn and the flat is dark, the coffee table is broken, there are papers everywhere, a chair overturned, one of Louise’s t-shirts dark with blood balled up on the floor.
Her legs move mechanically, she wants to call out for her daughter but all her faculties, except for the power of locomotion, have deserted her. She shrinks away inside herself, softening layers accreting between her and what she knows she will see around the corner, in the hall, in one of the bedrooms.
You dropped your guard; never drop your guard, eternal and absolute vigilance. She can hear mocking voices crowding inside her, your little moment of irresponsibility, your sad little night of passion and now your daughter. Expect no sympathy, personal responsibility, Paula. Why didn’t you take her with you, why didn’t you ring home? Haven’t you learned that an untroubled moment is a luxury you cannot afford?
Joolzy shifts about on Paula Adonor’s lumpy old sofa, she’s not going to take this with her is she? He’s said he’ll drive the van down there, just give him the nod. He made a mistake coming on to her a few years ago at a meeting when Harvey was still alive. Hadn’t been part of his plan, just sort of happened. She shut him down quickly and he maintained a respectful distance for a while, but of course Lee’s accident presented the perfect opportunity for him to get closer, allowing him not just to feed information back through the whole court process, but given she was already involved in local groups coordinating against Cathedral and Stonebridge’s interest in the area there was that too. And now the Curector thing, Paula Adonor’s complicated life; the gift that just keeps giving.
She knocked him back but is going to shag this Nick Skilling. No accounting for taste.
He reaches in with a tissue and catches some of the drool hanging from Lee’s lips, rolls the tissue around, bins it. Just a very, very unfortunate set of circumstances. Same age as his boy. He wouldn’t let or encourage his child to go off to demonstrations though, no matter how old he was, certainly not knowing what he knows. Bad decision, and decisions have consequences.
You alright there, Lee? He asks quietly, rubs his shaven head, feels the long scar like the seam in a tennis ball running around and down over his ear.
You alright, mate? He asks. He looks alright for the moment, fresh pad on, strapped in nice and tight, he’s so thin, withered away to almost nothing, he used to be strong, flexible, a good runner. A nice family, hard-working, respectable, the daughter’s gone off the rails now, understandable, maybe she’ll settle down, maybe not. Got herself a girlfriend, looks more like a boy, tremendous stamina though, self-discipline, very alert. She’d make a good cop. Which reminds him. He puts a warning on Louise’s phone so that when she gets within five hundred meters of the flat it’ll buzz him.
Joolzy goes and gets the shoebox out from under the bed where she’s stashed it, spreads the contents out on the table. A lot of junk as far as he can see, still everything has value to someone, and he gets his Tablet, takes a few photos, starts to scan the pages of V. C. 96 1–5, shouldn’t take him too long.
What time is it? He pops out down to Resolution Way and nips up to the meeting, gets the details of the protest, gotta be a face-to-face communiqué, they won’t broadcast it. A good 40% of those present are spies, either police or corporate, at least two of whom work for Cathedral and don’t even know each other. Standard. The guy giving the speech, the one with the radio show, is particularly effective, he thinks, very good at his job, the last person anyone would ever suspect was part of USG’s Housing Monitor service and the source for half the young activists he’s just seen trucked off down to Thanet under and Imminent Threat Relocation Order.
And there’s Louise.
Ten o’clock, yeah? He says to her. Don’t be late!
9.55, she sets off up Resolution Way as the crowd from The Enclave head for London Bridge, some taking the Overground, others buses and bikes, a few of the more audacious ones using fake passes on the Soft Rail hub that has attached itself to the half occupied block of new builds beside the station; a wildcat demo, everyone arriving at different times, different modes of transport. Sexy, but she has to go back. Mum doesn’t want her out around civil disorder and riot police. She’s fine with that, Lewis understands, she wants to give her Mum piece of mind, Laura will be over later. She will do some packing.
She plugs her earphones in; one thing about listening to all those old CDs as she digitised them was that at least she got introduced to some really good Eighties pop.
As she approaches the flats her mind drifts, she imagines another world, the world she will live in, the better future that is coming, that they will create, all of them together. In that better world no one will go hungry or unloved, no one will face old age with fear or see their life consumed by the drudgery of work, be trapped by tradition, be consigned to a role not of their own choosing, the pace of life will slow, there will be time for play and contemplation, to explore the world and each other, all forms of life, all species, space, everything will fall into the embrace of a humanity liberated at last, free from struggle and united as one world, into its finer nature.
I know this world can be paradise
.
The block is quiet and distantly she realises, lost in warm abstractions that have caused her heart to flutter against her ribs, that she is the only one in the whole block tonight, a small figure, climbing the dim stairs, everything paused quietly in the moonlight, her shadow trailing almost reluctantly behind her.
The future, the future, there is everything to fight for, everything to win, and she will stake her claim to it. They will, all of them, her generation.
The streets are full of kids, taking over the night
She is lost in thought as she opens the door to the flat and steps into the hall, nodding to herself.
Maybe she was afraid before
She’s about to call out to Joolzy when she sense something is wrong, pauses, take her earphones out. She has the feeling, overwhelming, that someone she doesn’t know is in the flat with her now.
But she’s not afraid anymore
.
Vernon! His mother says, instinctively.
Vernon?
But it can’t be, won’t be, she forgot, seeing him there on the
screen, that the mortgage people were coming round
got so wrapped up in it all,
it’s hard for her to disentangle herself,
so entangled with
through the frosted glass of the door she sees a shape, his
height,
the past, with memory
his colouring, the lineaments of his face distorted with age.
entanglement and overlap
puts one hand up to the lock, the other on the doorknob,
opens it.
she’s dizzy, trying to readjust
to this world in which it isn’t, can’t be, won’t be
it is
him
her son.
Her daughter.
All that life has left for her.
There are papers scattered everywhere in the living room. Vernon’s work.
She should have just given it to him, to Alex Hargreaves, she should have trusted her instinct.
Her pride, her pride this is what she is being punished for.
She stands in the doorway. In a moment she will step around into the corridor, push open the bedroom door and see that her daughter is dead, but at the moment, just for this moment she is still alive, perhaps curled up, sleeping, and there is some other explanation for this.
Click,
spark,
a blue and white turret flickering in the Zippo’s grill.
The rags ignite, the boy’s arm, jacket, legs, head go up in a burst of bright, cleansing flame that begins to race out across the floor, and with a sudden, extraordinary concentrated flash the directional sprinklers in the ceiling, walls and floor drench him, coming in from all directions, a tremendous millisecond burst of chemically treated water, dousing the fire so completely and with such pressure that for a second the Gopher lifts off the floor and is suspended in the centre of the room as though in an amniotic sack, his charred hair and beard, clothing singed, eyes closed.
The security guards scramble up onto their feet and are lunging for the Gopher a second later as the backup sprinklers send a high-pressure jet of anti-flammable foam at them and they all go down again, covered head to toe, rolling about and sliding everywhere, pinning the stunned Gopher to the floor, one repeatedly Tasering him though he seems too shell shocked to offer any real defence.
Well. Johannes does also own a considerable number of shares in the company, German of course, that engineers these sprinkler systems and he is pleased to see that they work, excellent results, even if USG’s manpower has proven somewhat less reliable. He will send off an email about this later.
The guards and the Gopher thrash about on the floor, in the water and foam, at his feet.
Johannes reflects that under these circumstances a person might normally laugh, the speed with which the sprinklers extinguished the flaming Gopher, the numerous pratfalls and slapstick with the foam.
Yes he suspects that other people might see some comedy in this.
He turns away, takes a few steps toward the window. The Shmee Jacobin can be restored.
So, he has yet to get his hands on the works of Vernon Crane, but it is only a matter of time, and this incident at least, his failure to find any humour it, will be something for him to discuss with Calvert.
Now, where is Nastya? He gazes out of the window, over the city. Smoothes out his jawline. Wallace Stevens. Ah yes. Some rummaging and his brain has returned the answer. The Idea of Order at Key West. He had to study that. Blessed rage for order.
A couple of police drones go past, somewhere over in East London there seems to be a fire burning.
In all the excitement he has not noticed that his phone has been buzzing insistently in his pocket. He taps it and there is his PA Beatriz looking worried. She always looks worried. He takes this as a good sign: that she is taking her job seriously.
We have traced Crane she says. He is still alive.
Bad news potentially, a complicating factor at least.
Do you have a lock on him? He asks. There is a long pause.
Well. He has changed his name, assumed a different identity, of course. Well, the PA says. She pauses, reluctant to give him the news.
On what could such reluctance be based? In an instant he knows, of course, he knows.
He has asked the question before he has consciously had time to formulate it.
Is it Connaught?
In The Enclave Joolzy has a bit of a chat, scopes the place out, plenty of undercovers, good coverage, and then on the way back, jogging around the fence they have put up around the side of the estate, he spots an unfamiliar car, pauses, IDs the number plate on his phone, sees it belongs to Alex Hargreaves.