by Mason, Simon
The boy moved his lips, blinked once and stopped breathing.
‘No,’ Singh said, uselessly. He put his fingers on the chest of the boy’s soaked shirt and felt the gunshot wounds slippery under his touch, and looked around, still talking into his radio, issuing instructions and giving directions. Beyond the room was a short corridor between padlocked units, at the end of it an open door. From above came the noise of something being knocked over, a clatter immediately stifled. Wind, Jones would have said.
With a thud of boots Jones ran in swearing.
‘Occlude the wound,’ Singh said.
Jones stared, white-faced and astonished. ‘It’s too late.’
‘Do it anyway. Assist the paramedics when they get here.’
Leaving Jones crouching indecisively over the boy, Singh ran down the corridor and through the door at the far end to the bottom of an unlit metal staircase, and went up two steps at a time to the level above. There, the whole of the upper storey lay before him, dark and disorganized, its low ceiling supported on iron girders, empty spaces filled here and there with incomplete breeze-block partitions and piles of building materials. A prickling smell came off it of wet plaster and rust. Weak light shone through in torn patches from broken skylights.
Everything was silent; nothing moved as Singh swept his flashlight over cracked concrete and gleaming puddles.
He waited.
Nothing. No sound. No movement.
Quietly, he crept as per the police manual round the perimeter, cocking and uncocking his head, scanning the debris around him, and took up a strategic position in the corner of the building. From there he began to sweep across the warehouse with his flashlight once more, and someone hiding behind a rack of old ridge tiles leaped up and blundered into him, and he fell sideways, his torch skittering across the floor. Then he was on his feet running, dodging girders and rubble looming at him out of the darkness, chasing in and out of the shadows after a bulky figure hunched and hooded, their footsteps echoing in the emptiness. Doglegging around a girder, the other man skidded and fell and Singh tumbled over him, grabbing wildly at nothing. Up again, they ran the other way, the man gasping and groaning, Singh silent, elbows pumping. He caught him by a pile of used tarpaulins, got a blow in the face and after a brief struggle they came apart and stood facing each other in a dusty beam of moonlight, panting and swaying.
The man was taller than Singh by a head, and broader. In his hand something metal glinted. He swung it up and round, and Singh skipped backwards, keeping his distance. Some memory came to him then, not of the police manual but of viraha yudhan from martial-arts classes in Lucknow when he was a boy. It was a vision of sudden clarity: he could see the orange dust of the ground, the flawless blue of the sky. It loosened him, he felt his body relax, and as the man reared upwards and lunged forward, he spilled sideways light-footed and finger-punched twice him in the armpit. He yanked the man’s head round by his hood and chopped down with his elbow on the side of his neck.
The man lay at his feet, still.
Singh closed his eyes briefly, saw again the orange ground, the blue sky, heard the silence of his teacher. He murmured the required phrase Waheguru ji ki fateh – Victory belongs to God – and turned anxiously towards the staircase as he heard the noise of the ambulance arriving outside, in time for the man at his feet but too late for the boy downstairs.
3
Next morning’s media was dominated by news of the murder of a sixteen-year-old schoolboy shot dead on East Field industrial estate. For the present his identity was withheld for legal reasons. A man named as Martin Magee was in police custody, having been apprehended at the scene of the crime by serving patrolmen on the City Squad night shift. The city’s chief constable, a quiet-faced man with a reputation for implacable efficiency, appeared on television in a hat overflowing with gold braid, to express disgust at the crime. In interviews, Detective Inspector Dowell, in charge of the investigation, praised the diligence of the two patrolmen who had made the arrest and assured the city’s public that justice would swiftly follow. Although no formal charges had been brought yet, a gun had been retrieved from the scene of the crime, and there was a witness – Dowell said – who had seen the suspect dragging the boy into the lock-up moments before the police arrived. Dowell would not be drawn on the boy’s reasons for being at the estate; nor would he comment on the rumours that he had been found wearing the uniform of the Marsh Academy at Five Mile and that he’d had with him his school bag and violin case. These rumours spread quickly, however, and a widespread sense of outrage grew, together with bewilderment as to what a boy, dressed for school and carrying his school things, could possibly be doing in a disused building on a semi-derelict industrial estate at two o’clock in the morning.
Given that it was the second killing of a juvenile in Five Mile in two months, in fact the second killing of a student from Marsh Academy, the media coverage was extensive and intense; many commentators took the opportunity to ask what had become of a place where this sort of thing could happen not once, but twice, where violence was so intimately part of daily life and where security forces seemed unable to prevent it breaking out.
All day such stories dominated the media, overshadowing other overnight news in the city: an armed robbery at a corner shop in Strawberry Hill; a small pile-up on the ring road; a break-in at Jamal’s in Five Mile; and suspected arson at a house at Tick Hill.
Back at the police centre in Cornwallis Way, Singh sat outside Interview Room 3, waiting to be summoned by Inspector Dowell to be told his role in the forthcoming investigation. As usual, by personal preference, he was in uniform, crisp and correct, complete with Detective Inspector insignia – though, as a result of the recent disciplinary action against him, he was not currently performing a Detective Inspector’s duties. Temporarily, he was a ‘patrolman’ again. As he thought of it, he stiffened his posture and concentrated on the dossier on his lap. Marked Homicide: Classified, it was open to an official school photograph of a Year Eleven boy in Marsh Academy uniform. The boy had wet-looking light-brown hair brushed flat across his scalp and black-framed glasses with thick lenses that magnified his pupils to the size of squash balls. His uniform was neat but shabby in places and looked too tight for comfort. His expression was self-contained, his mouth set, his eyes deadpan. His lack of smile was unnerving. He didn’t look as if he had chosen not to smile – he looked as if smiling was something he knew nothing about.
Singh stared at the photograph. The boy’s hands were visible at the bottom of the picture. They weren’t relaxed but clenched, holding on tightly to the neck of a violin.
He closed the dossier and sat there, rigidly upright, thinking. The name of the boy in the photograph, currently protected, was Pyotor Gimpel. The school had provided the police with a copy of a statement of special educational needs issued in recognition of Pyotor’s autism spectrum disorder. The rest of the school report was strikingly bare. Pyotor had been gifted at music and mathematics, average or poor in other academic subjects. His disciplinary record was impeccable. His social circle was described as ‘nil’. There had been no connection between him and Martin Magee, nor any possibility of one.
Waiting for Dowell on his plastic seat in the overlit corridor, Singh thought of these things. But what he thought of most of all was the photograph, and the impassive expression on Pyotor’s face. He could not get it out of his mind. It was exactly the same expression he had seen himself in the lock-up the previous night as the boy lay dying at his feet.
4
Jamal’s convenience store stood in a row of shops along Bulwarks Lane, a long, shabby, busy road running eastwards through Five Mile from the edge of the Marsh fields by the Academy almost as far as the ring road and the car plant. Like everything in Five Mile, it did its job and no more. At the shops there were three bus stops, a pelican crossing and a taxi rank. There was litter, cracked concrete, a savoury smell of petrol fumes and deep-fried food, and the shops themselves, sitting as if squashed unde
r a line of first-floor flats with grimy windows: a mini-supermarket, newsagent’s, launderette, hairdresser’s, bakery, kebab and burger places, and, round the corner, O’Malley’s bar. They did their jobs too, without any fuss.
At Jamal’s, chipboard panelling covered one of the two front windows, a shiny metal plate the other. There was a new split in the door, pinned with metal brackets. Garvie glanced at them idly and moved on.
‘Third break-in in a month, yeah?’ Khalid said. ‘Like a vendetta, know what I mean?’ He looked at Garvie sourly. ‘Abbu’s still on crutches, got all these attacks going on; I ask myself, what’s the point?’
Garvie said nothing. He watched Khalid getting his Rizlas from a shelf above the counter. Since his father broke his leg, Khalid had run the shop, and the strain was showing. He was nineteen, thin-faced, bent-nosed, with bruise-like shadows under his eyes. He had developed a nervous tremor, Garvie noticed, in his left hand.
The shop was even untidier than before. The racks of sweets at the till – packs of gum, chocolate bars, penny chews in green-and-yellow wrappers – were mixed up and overflowing. Garvie whistled to himself. He glanced at the headlines in the Saturday evening newspapers. Fear in Five Mile. Schoolkid Gunned Down. Murder Academy.
‘Bad news about the Gimp,’ he said.
Khalid shrugged. ‘Didn’t know him.’
‘Second murder in two months, man. That’s tough.’
Khalid shrugged again, as if to say he had his own problems, and Garvie put down the Rizlas.
Khalid sneered. ‘That it, yeah? No baccy to put in it or nothing?’
‘Got all I need, thanks.’
‘Not baccy you’re smoking these days. I know.’
Garvie put the money on the counter and Khalid cracked down the change. His phone rang and he looked at it, scowling. He went down the shop to the far end, and disappeared through a door plastered with posters for ice cream and hairspray. ‘Nah,’ he was saying. ‘I need them, like, really big. Like megalocks. You got-mega locks? … Why? Why? ’Cause I got, like, mega-burglars kicking down my doors, that’s why.’
Garvie turned to Sajid, Khalid’s younger brother, thirteen years old, sitting in his basketball kit at the end of the counter with Jamal’s laptop. White T-shirt, navy shorts: Marsh Academy colours. Sajid played point guard for school, and took his basketball seriously: a match every Saturday morning and fitness drills twice a week. A pity he wasn’t taller. Alone at the counter, staring at the screen, he looked younger than he was, vulnerable. Rumour was, his brother gave him a hard time.
‘Twenty pence,’ Garvie said, holding up the pack of Rizlas.
‘So?’
‘Mark-up, say, twelve per cent.’
Sajid shrugged.
‘Do the maths. Cost to your brother is 88% of retail price: 17.6 pence. Margin 2.4 pence a pack. On a box of two hundred and twenty packs, a profit of five pounds twenty eight. Takes, say, a month to sell a box. Seventeen pence a day. Yeah, your brother’s right.’
‘Right about what?’
‘Crap money on Rizlas. What’s the point? Why doesn’t he pack it in and sing in a boy band instead?’
Sajid clicked his tongue. Concentrated.
They heard Khalid come back into the shop, still talking on his phone as he stacked shelves down one of the aisles. ‘I don’t know what you talking about, man,’ they heard him say. Then: ‘A grand!’
Garvie went on, conversationally. ‘I’ll tell you why, Sajid. Look at the rest of the stuff here. High-price booze and cigs, high-turnover soft drinks, all the food and that. Factor in the long hours, the number of greedy punters like me. What do you reckon?’
Sajid ignored him.
Hidden in the background, Khalid hissed, ‘What? He’s got to be having a laugh, innit?’
Garvie said, ‘Open fifteen hours a day seven days a week fifty-two weeks of the year, sale made every five minutes, each sale three items at an average price of three quid. Same mark-up. You’re clearing a profit of, what, seventy grand. Seventy thousand seven hundred and sixty-one pounds and sixty pence, if you want to be exact. That boy band’ll have to wait.’
Still Sajid ignored him. As he leaned forward, peering at his screen, the neckband of his T-shirt slid down to reveal two long bruises round the side of his neck. After a moment he self-consciously pulled his T-shirt up, glanced round at Garvie, who was still watching him.
Garvie nodded at the laptop. ‘Ring of Valor?’
Sajid nodded.
‘Can’t beat WoW, eh? Old games are the best.’
Sajid shrugged.
‘You like playing the arenas?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who do you play with?’
Sajid glanced nervously down the aisles. ‘Not really playing with anyone,’ he said as Khalid came towards them, still talking on the phone.
‘Nah, man, it’s got to be a mix-up. I’m telling you, I didn’t get no message. Listen. Listen! I’m not being funny nor nothing, but you got to talk to him. It’s just like not happening, all right?’ He stamped up the aisle to the counter where Garvie stood. ‘You still here? What you doing now, nicking stuff?’
Garvie put the Rizlas in his pocket. ‘Just chilling.’
‘Why do people think it’s all right come in, hang out here, buy nothing, crowd up my shop?’
He snarled at Sajid in Urdu, and the boy slid away from the laptop at once and went into the back room, Khalid shouting after him. ‘How many times I got to tell you, spending all your time on that games shit!’
‘Three times in a month,’ he said to Garvie. ‘Yeah, well, don’t worry about me. I got protection.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yeah. Getting it anyway. I’ll introduce you when it arrives. Name of Genghis. Know what I mean? On a big chain and everything.’
‘OK then.’
‘Then we’ll see.’
‘OK. No need to get worked up, man.’
‘No need to get …? All these burglars, right? All these bandits, yeah?’ He shouted after Garvie, who was already going out of the door. ‘All these wasters coming in here, not buying nothing, just nicking stuff!’
The broken door swung. Khalid’s phone rang again, and he hurried towards the back room, talking angrily. ‘Nah, man!’ he shouted. ‘I told you! I want it in and out, three days tops.’
5
Garvie strolled along Bulwarks Lane across Pollard Way and turned into Old Ditch Road, heading for the kiddies’ playground. Shredded blossoms torn off cherry trees by the recent winds lay like party-coloured fish-flakes in the gutters. It had rained before, would rain again, but now the sky was momentarily clear, last of the light fading in an ugly pink glow as Garvie went through the park gate and across the damp grass.
As usual, the others were already there.
‘What you got for us tonight, big shot?’
Garvie put down the Rizlas, all twenty pence worth.
‘That it?’
He produced a smallish package wrapped in foil and put that down too, and Smudge grinned.
‘Knew you’d come through in the end.’
The sun went down, the sky flared up and turned dark, and they sat on the miniature roundabout and tiny swings, passing round the smokables, talking, inevitably, about the murder – specifically about Pyotor Gimpel, whose name, so scrupulously guarded by the police, was nevertheless already known to everyone in Five Mile.
‘I don’t get it,’ Smudge said. ‘First Chloe, now the Gimp. What’s going on? Like suddenly Five Mile’s the murder capital of the world. See the paddy wagons down by the taxi rank? All the cops in the country seem to have moved in.’
The police presence in the estate was unnervingly conspicuous, cruisers and Black Marias parked on every corner. Murders of school kids were rare. The murder of a school kid like Pyotor Gimpel was freakish. Five Mile was in a state of shock.
‘The Gimp?’ Smudge said. ‘Give me a break. Why should anyone want to shoot the Gimp. Sherlock?’
; ‘Why wouldn’t someone want to shoot him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, what do you know about him?’
Smudge pondered. ‘Don’t know nothing about him. Except he was weird.’
Felix fixed him with one of his thin-faced, long-suffering looks. ‘Statemented, Smudge. On the spectrum. He couldn’t help it.’
‘That’s what I’m saying. Not weird like deliberately. Just a weirdo, you know, officially.’ With effort he imposed on his potato face an expression of casual insight.
Felix shook his head sadly. ‘There are all sorts of weirdos, Smudge, and some of them don’t even know they’re weird.’
‘True enough,’ Smudge said, his expression loosening until he looked almost normal. ‘Take Garv, for example. All right, it’s a fair point. Come on, what do we actually know about the Gimp? Speak up.’
Garvie, sitting smoking on a dwarf-sized rocking horse, ignored them. The others pooled information about the Gimp the same way they pooled cigarettes and vodka: bits and pieces picked up here and there. None of them knew him personally; he wasn’t that sort of boy. Although he was one of theirs – part of the common scene – he was a loner. They were used to him, they’d seen him around every day, but they knew almost nothing about him.
‘He played the violin,’ Smudge said. ‘That’s pretty weird. I mean, who plays the violin nowadays except people in museums?’
It was one obvious aspect of the Gimp’s oddity. Another was his unsettling neatness. By choice he wore full school uniform, his shirt always tucked in, his wet-looking hair always brushed down flat, always wearing a tie, though he didn’t have to, looking like a boy from the past in an old photograph. He was small for his age, but his clothes always looked too tight, as if he had outgrown them. In the mornings when he arrived and at breaks he used to sit alone on a bench by Bottom Gate, always the same spot, with his violin case on his lap, impassive and uselessly alert, as if waiting for a bus. Tiger had seen him taking random pictures with his phone; so had Smudge. He spoke seldom, with a quiet, slurry Polish accent. Generally he was silent and immobile. Felix had several times seen him delicately eating an apple from a brown paper bag. No one had ever seen him with a friend. He was quiet, lonely, inoffensive, weird.
