“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
v
s 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 fuck 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.
One other thing about guns: their beauty. As I flicked past the photos, diagrams and illustrations Dr Jauhari used to show the evolution of guns over the ages and the differences between pistols, rifles, machine guns and sub-machine guns, it grew on me how beautiful an object a gun—any gun—is. Some are more beautiful than others, of course, depending on the sleekness of their finish, the curvature of the handle, the thickness of the hammer and a dozen other factors. But just being guns makes them all beautiful. That things so small, so pleasing to the eye, so friendly to the touch—so passive—can contain such force is breathtaking. Then the way they hang just off the body, cradled tenderly like babies, sleeping—till the moment they erupt and carry beauty to another level. No beauty without violence, without death.
Our mole came through eventually. Naz brought the report over to my flat one evening.
“When we ask the Council for permission to use the space,” he said as he handed it to me, “we’ll have to decide what type of licence to apply for. We could…”
“Later,” I said. I took the report and closed the door on him.
It had come in a sealed, unmarked envelope. As I opened this I felt that tingling spreading outwards from the base of my spine. The pages were flaky and the text badly aligned; it had been Xeroxed in a hurry. The language it was written in was clear, which surprised me. I’d expected it to be full of police terminology—people “proceeding” instead of moving, “perpetrators” instead of people and with every noun and action prefaced by “alleged”. In fact, it was stark and straightforward:
The killers,
it said,
parked their car beside the Green Man public bar, stepped out and opened fire with Uzi sub-machine guns. The victim got onto his bicycle and tried to ride away, but turned too sharply into Belinda Road and fell onto the tarmac as the front wheel twisted under him.
I pictured the front wheel twisting and him going down. He must have known then that it was all up. He’d got up again, the report said, and taken two or three more steps down Belinda Road while the killers fired on him some more. Then he’d gone down a final time. He’d been dead by the time the ambulance arrived.
There were pages of detailed diagrams. They showed the layout of the area in which the shooting had happened: the phone box, the street, kerb, bollard, even a puddle into which some of the victim’s blood had flowed. They showed his position first as he stood in the phone box, then as he tried to escape, then as he fell, got up and fell again. They showed the killers’ positions as they parked their car and walked towards him, firing. The three men were drawn in outline with numbers inside the outlines, like you get in children’s colouring books. There were arrows indicating movement and direction.
The longer I stared at these pictures, the more intense the tingling in my upper body grew. It had moved into my brain, like when you eat too much monosodium glutamate in a Chinese restaurant. My whole head was tingling. The diagrams seemed to be taking on more and more significance. They became maps for finding buried treasure, then instructions for assembling pieces of furniture, then military plans, the outline of a whole winter’s arduous and multi-pronged advance across mountains and plains. I drifted off into these plains, these mountains, floating alongside the generals and foot soldiers and cooks and elephants. When I looked up from the diagrams again, Naz was there, standing in front of my sofa with another man.
“When did you come in?” I asked him. “Who’s this?”
“This man’s a doctor,” said Naz. “I’ve been here for the last hour and a half.”
I tried to ask him what he meant by that, but the words were taking a long time to form. The other man opened a bag and took a pen or torch out.
“You were just sitting here,” said Naz. “You’d gone completely vacant. You didn’t notice me, or hear me. I waved my hand in front of your face and you didn’t even move your eyes.”
“How long ago was this?” the doctor asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“The whole last hour and a half,” Naz told him. “Until just now, when you came in.”
“Has he experienced any kind of trauma recently?” the doctor asked. He switched his torch-pen on. “What’s his name?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Send this man away.”
“Keep your head still,” the doctor said.
“No,” I said. “Send this man away, Naz, now. Get off my property or I’ll have you arrested.”
“I can’t help you if you won’t let me help you,” he said.
I looked past his ear and thought I saw another cat fall off the roof. I told this man:
“I’m ordering you to leave my property this instant.”
He stood still for a while. Naz did too. The three of us were static for several moments—and while we were I didn’t mind this doctor being here. I’d even have let him stay if he’d only behaved himself and not moved. Eventually, though, he turned to Naz and motioned with his eyes towards the door, then slipped his torch-pen back into his bag and left. Naz saw him out. I heard the two men murmuring together as I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I washed it in cold water and didn’t dry it straight away, but let it drip while I stared at the crack on the wall. I watched the crack as I listened to the doctor walking down the stairs.