Dispossession (27 page)

“No, stop,” I said, laughing now. “I don’t,”
careful, they’re listening,
“I can’t see me doing
that, somehow, can you? Truly? You would, maybe. Not me. You look after, look
after Elle-même,” hoping that neither of my auditors would quite catch that, or
work it out if they did, “and I’ll be along soon. Is the club open?”

“It will be by now, yes. Lee’s looking after it. Why?”

“If you’re worried, lock the fire door and ask him to watch
out for anyone trying to come up.”

“I’m not scared,” she said fiercely, as I’d been sure she
would; untruthfully, I thought. “I’m not locking myself in like some cowering
bloody rabbit in a hutch.”

“Okay,” I said equably. “It’s your choice. But I’ll tell you
this much, I’m scared for you. So take care, yes? Don’t answer the door without
the chain on.”

“Yes sir, no sir. Don’t give me orders.”

“Hey,” I said.

“What?”

“Did you promise to obey me? When we got married, I mean? I
bet you did. Church wedding and all. To keep your parents happy. I bet you didn’t
change a word of the service, did you...?”

By then, I was talking into empty space; she’d blown a loud
raspberry down the phone, and hung up on me.

Dean was at my elbow again. I swapped the phone for a
replenished glass of gin, and did it grinning.

“One more question, Mr Deverill. This may sound foolish, but
I do have a reason. What kind of bacon do you eat for breakfast?”

“Woodall’s,” he said instantly. “Best in the country. Why?”

“Just narrowing things down a bit,” I said vaguely.
Actually, just checking on the score: it didn’t after all tell me anything I
didn’t know already, but that was one for Suzie, she’d called it exactly.

o0o

Two for Suzie, because she was right, I didn’t want to eat
with these people. I thought I ought to stay for lunch, regardless. I might
learn something.

No doubt they were thinking the same, thinking me vulnerable
where in fact I was only ignorant. There was so little they could learn from me
that they might possibly want to know, I felt smugly safe and unconcerned.

Until, through in the dining-room and following my host’s
example, picking up the cutlet bones in my fingers to suck off the last shreds
of meat, I happened to glance out of the window into the stable yard.

Happened to see a four-square van roll slowly past and out
of sight.

White it was, with a logo writ large across the side.

SCIMITAR SECURITY
, it
said.

There must, I suppose, have been a pudding. Add that to the
list, the many lists of things I can’t remember.

There must I suppose have been conversation, ditto; I may
even have made a contribution to it, ditto ditto.

Perhaps I was overdoing the shocked-and-stunned effect.
Perhaps I should have been better prepared. I knew, after all, that Deverill
worked with SUSI, that Scimitar was his security of choice; and I’d seen
earlier that he worked largely from home, that the heart of his organisation
was here. No surprise, then, or it shouldn’t have been, to see a Scimitar van
making a collection or a delivery or both. Important papers, money—anyone
working as close as he did to the fringes of the law would work significantly
in cash, and need significant amounts of it—anything crucial to the running of
his various businesses might have been carried to and fro under professional
guard, and quite reasonably so. No need for this touch of chill under my
collar, the hand of Fate exhibiting its exceedingly poor circulation. No need
even to react, let alone overreact the way I undoubtedly was. I knew that, I
told myself that even as I did it.

But it was only a couple of hours since my mother and Suzie
between them had named the bad guys in this story, since I’d found that name
threaded deeper and further through the weave than even they knew. And now here
they were, or some troops of theirs, right outside the house and probably
inside by now, just a corridor’s length away from me. It was no great wonder if
my cutlery skittered on the china, as my mind skittered from blind fear,
this is a trap and they’ve come for me
, to
wannabe detective,
I must find out who’s driving
that van and what they’re doing here.

And back, and to and fro like a hot potato tossed from hand
to hand, and each hand blistering.

Uncertain and afraid, of course I did nothing, neither
started asking questions nor made a desperate bid for freedom; and so happened
neither was necessary, because Dean—my good friend Dean, who winked at me and
saved my life and so forth—came in and did good work again, gave me an answer
and an opportunity.

Came in and went to Deverill, spoke to him but didn’t
whisper, didn’t bother to hide what was happening.

“They’ve brought that girl,” he said. “The one who was so
fancy with the bulldozer?”

Deverill glanced at his watch, and nodded: a man whose
empire ticked its heartbeat on his wrist, and clearly kept excellent time.

“I’ll come now,” he said. Touched his napkin to his lips and
rose from the table, with a gesture to me,
stay
there
, as I shifted uneasily. “Finish your coffee, Jonty. More in the
pot, if you want it. Talk to Dot, keep her company. I’ve some business to see
to, but I’ll be back.”

I didn’t much want to talk to Dot, I wanted to go with him;
but lacking the chance of that, at least there was one question I could ask,
anyone would ask in the circumstances.

“What bulldozer, Mrs—uh, Ms Tuck? Do you know what they’re
talking about?”

“Mrs Tuck,” she said comfortably. “I’m too old to go Msing,”
with the air of someone who had made the same pun many times before, and still
enjoyed the opportunity. I gave her the smile she was looking for, she
chuckled, and then she said, “Yes, of course I know. No secrets from me, Vernon
told you that. And this was no secret anyway, it was particularly public and
embarrassing.”

“What was it?”

“Do you know—I’m sorry, do you
remember
—about
the Leavenhall Bypass, all the fuss there was?”

I nodded. That had begun before Christmas, long before the
first rip in my sense of continuity, and had been very much in my bailiwick. I’d
defended a couple of students charged under the Criminal Justice Act, landed
lucky with some sympathetic magistrates, and got them off in defiance of the
evidence. That was early days in the protest, but Luke had been involved later;
so yes, I was well up to speed there. Or thought I was.

Didn’t know about the bulldozer, though. That must have come
later, after the first trees were felled, falling itself into the pit of my
absent memory and not the sort of detail Luke would have thought to share.

“There was excellent security on site, of course,” Mrs Tuck
told me. “The protestors had been encamped there for months, everyone knew the
dangers of sabotage. There was a double fence topped with razor wire, there
were dogs, there were guards on constant patrol twenty-four hours a day. All
the vehicles, all the plant was immobilised every night as a matter of routine.

“What no one thought of, what no one recognised as a danger
was that the protestors might import plant of their own. One night, this girl
drove up in a bulldozer she’d stolen from council roadworks five miles away.
She’d locked herself into the cab, and the men on duty simply had no way to get
at her, without taking considerable risks with their own lives. They couldn’t
even power up the plant that was there, and drive it to safety; as a matter of
course, the keys and various internal components were not kept on-site. For
security, you understand?”

I nodded. I understood, and my heart sang. Basically, what
she was telling me was that Vernon and all his money, all his hired muscle had
been taken to the cleaners, by some radicalised slip of a girl.

“She tore the site apart,” Mrs Tuck said. “She destroyed the
guards’ own vehicles first, so that when they finally decided to go for help,
they had to go on foot. Communications had already been severed; she’d knocked
down a few telegraph poles en route, and their mobile phones didn’t work in the
valley. Out of range of any transmitter, or else they were in a radio shadow, I
forget.

“At any rate, by the time the police arrived, the site had
been totally wrecked. She’d destroyed the fence, smashed all the Portakabins
and overturned or otherwise damaged most of the plant. Also, of course, by then
all the other protestors had come to join the party; they were busy tearing
apart whatever she’d left in one piece.

“And the girl herself was gone. Her bulldozer was the only
vehicle left viable, but it didn’t carry a single fingerprint; they’d wiped
every square inch of it, to be certain.

“That didn’t help her in the end, though,” added with a
touch of satisfaction. “It’s taken a long time, and cost Vernon a considerable
amount of money; but they’ve found her at last, and brought her in.”

Brought her in for what? I didn’t ask; I only walked to the
big bay window, hoping to see for myself.

And saw, and saw far more than ever I’d hoped or dreamed to
see.

o0o

Out of the angle of the bay, I could see the van parked in
the furthest corner of the yard, nose to the wall. Dean and Deverill stood a
few metres away, relaxed and easy, talking to a couple of men in Scimitar
uniforms: the drivers, presumably. The bringers-in.

One of the men moved eventually, going to the rear door of
the van and unlocking it, working the big bar handle and folding the door back
flat against its hinges.

Inside, I could see a narrow corridor that seemed to be
walled with doors like a public toilet, divided into separate cubicles. Only
one use I knew for such a design, which was to transport prisoners to court or
around the country: the police had them, so did all the major security firms
who’d bid for contracts in the great free-for-all, the open and competitive
market that had been declared in the prison supply service. The sight of it
brought my mind back to the other context in which I knew the name of Scimitar:
my only memory of the company from before my accident, but a significant one in
my life.

Little Marlon Thomas, famously deceased, putting his name
and mine in all the papers:
Dead drunk
had
been their favourite line. Nothing too surprising in that, teenagers will drink
more than they can handle, especially hard-seeming street kids like Marlon. The
inquest verdict had been death due to lack of care, on account of its happening
when he’d just been sent down for armed robbery and he really shouldn’t have
been able to get his hands on a litre bottle of vodka, but again he was hardly
the first to manage that.

No, what made Marlon’s death stick so particularly in the
memory, what had made it such a good story for the media was that it had happened,
he had died between court and prison, on a forty-minute drive.

Locked in a cubicle in the back of a van he’d been, all
alone with his bottle; and he was the first juvenile to die that way, under the
charge of a private firm.

The firm, of course, had been Scimitar Security. Very
possibly this was the very same van he’d died in, now apparently on private
hire to Deverill.

o0o

The man climbed up inside, and I couldn’t see him for a
minute. No one else was trying to; they stood heads together, talking, betraying
no interest at all.

Then there was a shadow moving inside the van, a figure, two
figures coming forward; and a girl stood blinking in the doorway, with the man
behind her.

She was half-turning, one foot reaching down to find the
stirrup that would make a step to help her to ground, when he pushed her and
she fell.

She fell hard, with a yelp of shock that I could see but not
hear through the double glazing, that I could see cut off when she hit the
ground. Actually, I think perhaps I’d yelped myself, and cut it off equally
abruptly.

It was only a drop of three or four feet, and she shouldn’t
have landed so awkwardly on one shoulder; but she rolled and writhed, and I saw
how her hands were held behind her back, in a tie or more likely in cuffs.
Kidnapping and assault
, I thought,
so far
; and I wondered if Deverill knew what he
was doing, that he was handing a propaganda weapon to his opponents.

Then I stopped wondering anything so stupid, remembering who
this man was and certain at least of that one thing, that he knew exactly what
he was doing.

Right now, he still wasn’t paying any attention. He stood
with his back to the girl, giving instructions to Dean that seemed from his
gestures to be about some other matter entirely. The man in the van stood still
also, framed in the doorway, a threatening shadow but no more, no worse than
that; and the girl lay for a moment to gather her strength, and then struggled
up onto her knees.

I wanted to applaud. And then I wanted to shout, I wanted to
get out there and tell them to leave her alone, I wanted to take her home.

I
knew
this girl.

o0o

At least, for a moment I thought I knew her, the first true
sight of her I had with her face in sunlight. She was young, of course, very
early twenties, young enough that I could comfortably think of her as a girl.
Her hair was dark and strange, shaved at the sides and long at the back, narrow
plaits interwoven with raven’s feathers and held together in a ponytail that
fell to her waist; her nose and ears and eyebrows were pierced with silver
rings. It was a face, a look, that seen once you don’t easily forget, and I
could understand how Deverill’s men had tracked her down with no name or
address to work from, only a description from a hectic situation in the dark.

Then at last my inefficient, my lackadaisical memory placed
her where I had seen her: not in sunlight, no, but in hard wind and cold
shadows, in the sound of rain drumming on aluminium, in Luke’s Airstream over
in the Lakes’ airstream. So no, I didn’t know her after all. We’d only been
briefly in the same place, she arriving and I leaving, she helping me to leave
by that arrival; and even so I still felt responsible somehow, I still wanted
to dash out there and save her. She was too young to face Deverill in his
anger...