by Tom McCarthy
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. They should continue. When they’ve done three hours replace them with the third team. Keep rotating them.”
“For how long?” he asked.
“Indefinitely,” I said. “Round the clock. And Naz?”
“Yes?”
“When you leave here yourself, have someone you trust stay and supervise, so no one does a pianist on us.”
“But he won’t be able to supervise it indefinitely,” Naz said.
A good point. I thought about it for a moment, then told him:
“So select several people, and have them work in shifts just like the re-enactors. Rotate them as well.”
I went back five times over the next two weeks to watch the liquid blue explosion and the events leading up to it being re-enacted. In some of the sessions I was pretty analytical, concentrating on several things simultaneously. They were short enough to do that. So three minutes in I’d pay particular attention to what happened just after the oldest boy pushed aside the middling boy’s hand—how the middling boy turned aside to confront the youngest one. Or I’d watch for the car’s route. Its tyres left markings on the warehouse floor; as the sequence was repeated it drove back over its own tracks—sometimes slightly to the left or right, sometimes more or less exactly covering a previous set. On my third visit I had an idea:
“I’d like the car’s route to be changed,” I told the driver re-enactor.
“How do you mean?” he asked. He looked very tired.
“Instead of reversing out this way when you go to take up your position at the end of every sequence,” I said, “I want you to drive the car on forwards, and turn round, and leave along there, and then turn round the other way to come back in.”
“So I’d be doing a figure of eight?” he asked.
“Exactly,” I said.
The change was implemented. Over the following hours and days the car deposited across the floor an eight—a thick black line of run-together turrets and plateaux out of whose edges individuated lines and corners slightly rose, records of the wildest routes. Just to the right of this a large, sticky patch made by the repeated gushing of hundreds of litres of blue liquid stained the floor. I sketched small parts of line and patch in detail, and pressed sheets of paper straight onto them to make prints, which I then stuck to the walls of my flat. If I stared at them for long enough they took on shapes: birds, buildings or the interlocked sections of space stations—and my whole mood would slide from analytical to dreamy. The same slide happened at the re-enactment scene itself. One minute I’d be really concentrating on an aspect of the sequence and the next I’d let the movements mesmerize me, like a bird charmed by a snake: the Fiesta slowly rolling through its well-worn eight, the tyre floating on the boy’s knee to the workshop, his hand pushing the hand of the other boy away, the gliding clamps, the gushing blue—monotonous, hypnotic, endlessly repeating.
In these moments the episode’s sounds took on the aspect of a lullaby. The re-enactors’ voices echoed off the corrugated ceiling; above this, low-flying aeroplanes passed by, whistling and groaning as they left for or arrived from who knows where. The exploding liquid made a rushing, then a trickling sound. The fan hummed from before the beginning of each run-through to after the end. Other sounds emerged from the scene’s edges, from beneath its surfaces—sounds hidden in the enclave where the scraping of the middling boy’s foot met the rustle of the youngest one’s Michelin Man suit, or where the gush of liquid met the roof’s vibrations. Occasionally these sounds seemed to become voices, speaking words and phrases I never quite managed to make out.
I spent a lot of time there, watching. I also spent a lot of time sitting in my living room staring at the sketches and prints, or lying in my bath thinking about the re-enactment, knowing that it was continuing, constantly, on a loop. Sometimes I really concentrated on each moment, each manoeuvre; but sometimes I thought of other matters altogether. For a couple of days I returned to the study of my building, keeping the whole place in on mode for two ten-hour stretches with only two hours’ break between them. Then I drove back out to Heathrow and watched the tyre sequence through fifteen times.
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 formal: 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.
Patterns are important. You move through the crime area in a particular pattern that the head investigator chooses in advance. It could be that he tells you to move forward in straight lanes, like competition swimmers. Or he might cut up the area by laying a grid across it and assigning each investigator one of the grid’s zones. Or he might order a spiral search. Me, if I were a head investigator, I’d plump for a figure of eight, and have each of my people crawl round the same area in an endlessly repeating circuit, unearthing the same evidence, the same prints, marks and tracings again and again and again, recording them as though afresh each time.
Patterns are everywhere in forensic investigations. Investigators have to find and recognize the imprints made by, for example, trainers, fingers and tyres. So with tyres you get ribbed patterns, with two pairs of jagged lines; you get aggressive ribbed ones—the same as ribbed but with prongs sticking from the corners of the lines; then you get cross bar—hexagonal blocks with inverted vs in them (my Fiesta’s tyres were cross bar); directional—a brick pattern, like two adjoining walls seen from a corner; block—same as directional but all cubistic—and curvilineal, which show a gridded net bending and twisting out of shape. Trainers leave hundreds of types of pattern. Fingerprints are the most complicated: the variations in the whorls and deltas found in them are infinite—no two are ever the same.
Well, all these patterns have to be recorded. Captured, like I’d captured the mark beneath the motorbike that day. You capture fingerprints by sprinkling powder over them, blowing lightly across this to remove the powder not stuck to the miniature wet ridges that the finger’s touch has left, then pressing tape onto the remaining powder and removing it again: the pattern sticks to it. Shoe and tyre prints are captured by pouring plaster into the mould the rubber promontories have cut in the earth or mud, letting it set and then lifting it away again, turning space hollowed out by action into solid matter. If the prints are made by wet shoes or by tyres on concrete, then you have to sketch. You’re supposed to make constant sketches as a matter of course, in order to record the dimensions of furniture, doors, windows and so on, and the distances between objects and bodies to entrances and exits, just like I had both when I’d first remembered my building and after the re-enactments had begun.
You’re supposed to constantly photograph too, like Annie had when we’d been setting my building up. You have to take four types of photographs: close-ups of individual items of evidence, medium-distance ones to record the relative positions of closely related items, long-distance ones that include a landmark to establish the crime scene’s location and, finally, ones from other observation points—although it strikes me that the third and fourth types are more or less the same. If I were interested in photos, which I’m not, I’d want to take aerial ones too: first from a crane, then from a circling blimp—one high enough to enable the viewer to make out among the crime scene’s larger patterns images and shapes that maverick archaeologists will claim in years to come were put there to guide the spaceships of a master race of aliens down to earth.
Each day, as soon as I got turfed out of the library, I phoned Naz, to see how his efforts were progressing. He’d hooked up with this person on the police force and bribed him a lot of money to make us a copy of the forensic report on this particular shooting.
“So where is it, then?” I asked him after a week.
“Expected end of next week,” Naz said.
“End of next week! That’s an eternity away. Can’t our man get us a sneak preview?”
“That is a sneak preview,” Naz told me. “It hasn’t been written yet.”
“What the fu
ck do I pay taxes for?” I asked.
“Oh,” said Naz, “Matthew Younger’s been looking for you.”
“Fuck him,” I said, and hung up.
The next day I went back to the library. I’d read all there was to read about crime-scene searches, so I started reading about guns. I pored over a report by one Dr M. Jauhari, M.Sc., Ph.D., F.A.F.Sc. and Director of the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Calcutta. At least he was in 1971, when the report was published. Dr Jauhari explained that a firearm functions like a heat engine, converting the chemical energy stored in the propellant into the kinetic energy of the bullet. By way of illustration he compared and contrasted the workings of a firearm with the workings of the internal combustion engine. In the latter, vaporized gasoline is compressed in the cylinder by the piston; then the spark plug fires the gasoline charge, converting it into expanded gas; the pressure resulting from this gas’s expansion in turn results in the pressure which drives the piston. That’s how a combustion engine works, or how it worked in 1971. A firearm, Dr Jauhari explained, is similar: the primer, the propellant, the chamber and the bullet correspond to the spark plug, the gasoline, the cylinder and the piston—only instead of returning to its starting point and firing off again, the bullet continues right on out into the air. An engine is like a single shot that endlessly repeats itself.
Dr Jauhari was thorough. Before describing types of guns he sketched their function:
A firearm,
he wrote,
provides a means by which a missile can be hurled from considerable distances with considerable velocity. Its capability to deliver a death blow to a human being even at long ranges of firing makes it a weapon of choice for homicidal purposes. It is occasionally found to get involved in suicidal and accidental shootings also.
People never stop to think about these basic facts when they watch wars and cop shows on the television. People take too much for granted. Each time a gun is fired the whole history of engineering comes into play. Of politics, too: war, assassination, revolution, terror. Guns aren’t just history’s props and agents: they’re history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past.
