The Happier Dead (14 page)

What he lacked was the time to convince her. Ali was slowly cooking in his warm summer custody, and although Oates had no intention of charging him he needed all the time he could get to question him about his sponsor. Soon he would either have to be released or charged. Whoever the real killer was, they must suspect by now that Ali had been fingered for an Eddy, and they would be trying to get in there with threats and lawyers and counter-offers.

The trouble was he couldn’t ask someone else to follow up on Hector through official channels. One look at Helen Girst’s file, one word in the wrong ear would cast the hulking shadow of her protection machine, and maybe even frighten Hector to ground.

B
ACK IN THE
car he called Grape.

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Ask.”

“I need you to find someone.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s a prostitute.”

“Eeeh, well I never…”

“Pack it in. He works for the Helen Girst Agency, his work name’s Hector. No idea what his real name is. He’s a good-looking boy, I’d say half white half Chinese, about five foot ten, and in for a world of trouble if anyone finds him before me.”

“Cats don’t play fetch. If I start digging around for the police…”

“I don’t want to bust him. I told you, I just want to talk to him.”

“It’s not much to go on.”

“There must be a review on the internet, or a post in the chatrooms, the clubs, something.”

“I tell you what home slice: you tell me why you’re after this dude and I’ll get him for you.”

“He broke into Prudence Egwu’s house last night.”

“And?”

“And he stole some papers.”

“What papers?”

“Question one on my list when I find him.”

“And you want me to find him because he’s one of Madame Girst’s boys, and if you start digging around on the office computer you’re going to piss people off?”

Smart girl,
he thought.

“Call it outsourcing. Maximising resources at a time of budgetary cutbacks.”

“Alright, daddy-oh. But if I do this thing for you, I want an exclusive when everything comes good. You download to me and me alone, deal?”

“Okay.”

Oates heard the sound of Grape spitting.

“Spit shake on it?”

Oates took one of his hands off the wheel, spat in the palm and waved it in the air in front of him.

“I can tell you’re really doing it. That’s rank. I’ll see what I can do. End call.”

13:00 HOURS

THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER

2035 (REAL WORLD)

T
HEY NEVER LET
parents into the school buildings, so despite the cold the kids were lined up in form groups on the wet tarmac of the playground when Oates arrived. Looking at the children he was reminded of the films and photographs of kids he had seen from the Blitz, standing with little bundles of possessions and signs hung around their necks on station platforms.

It had taken him an hour to collect the car and get back out to Putney, and with a little prick of guilt he estimated that about three quarters of those forlorn figures had already been spirited back to the warmth of their homes. That put him and Lori in the bottom quarter for parenting skills. It was an area in which he sensed the school already viewed them as deficient. He felt this more as a slight on Lori than on himself, as in his case they were probably right.

Harry’s form teacher in particular had taken against Oates, largely, he suspected, because he was a policeman, and Mr Prendegast had the look of someone who might have been on a few protest marches in his time. It was the little goatee beard, and the jumpers. Sometimes Oates even wondered if he might once have given Mr Prendegast a sharp knock over the head in the running street battles he had dealt with as a fresh recruit, but Lori told him he was just being paranoid. He hated the idea of his lateness justifying the teacher’s bad opinion. Oates could just imagine him polishing up his prejudices, taking a perverse pleasure in his cold wait as each departing child confirmed his judgment of little Harry Oates’s father.

He parked down the street, and walked along the mesh fencing of the playground, trying to pick Harry’s form from among the depleted huddles of children. When he finally spied him, it was worse than he had thought. Harry was the last boy left from his class, standing there beside Mr Prendegast, who had his arms folded across his parka. The teacher clocked him at an awkward distance, too far for a proper greeting and too close to ignore, so Oates half-raised his hand and jogged the last few paces to his son.

“Sorry to make you wait, Frank.”

Mr Prendegast smiled, and blew ostentatiously into his cupped hands.

“Oh, that’s quite alright, Mr Oates.”

“You’d think the school would make an exception today and let you wait in the gym.”

“Rule are rules, Mr Oates. I’ve had my flu shots this winter so I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“Still, I guess this is an unexpected holiday for you guys.”

“Hardly a holiday. But now that you’ve come for Harry, at least I can start home.”

“I’m sorry. Like I said.”

“That’s quite alright, quite alright. We’re here to help. Anyway, I expect you’re busy today, with everything going on.”

“Not so much for our lot to do. No murders last night.”

“Yet! Thank God. It’s a terrible shame for the city. But what can you expect, when things are like this. For the young, I mean.”

Oates happened to agree, but he wasn’t about to give the man the satisfaction of showing it. Besides which he had the idea that Mr Prendegast’s sympathies would last exactly as long as the riots stayed clear of his street. The moment one of those masked boys got within Molotov-flinging distance of his new electric robocar, he’d be calling for the rubber bullets and the water cannon. Harry was standing between them, not looking up but staring over the playground. The only acknowledgement he had given his father was to take one of his hands, and as he held it Oates noticed how cold his fingers were, and felt another prickle of guilt under his collar. Mr Prendegast must have sensed his weakness, as he pressed the point.

“I’m sure you agree with me, as a parent. You can’t abandon the youth to unemployment and despair, then be surprised when they riot.”

At that moment Mike, who had been playing football at the other side of the playground, flung himself at his father’s thighs and started tugging at his holster.

“Mum says if they come to our house, dad’s going to smash their skulls! Smash, smash, smash!”

Mr Prendegast looked down at the boy with undisguised dislike. Oates wanted to lift him up and kiss him.

“Come on Michael, what did we say about trying to understand other people’s problems?” Mr Prendegast said.

“Smash!”

“I’d best get these two home,” Oates said, lifting his eldest son off his feet with his free arm and turning him upside down. Mike squealed in delighted outrage.

“And I must get back to my wife. She’ll be wondering where I’ve got to. Good luck.”

“And to you. Oh, and if you do run into any trouble this evening…” Oates set Mike back down on his feet, reached inside his coat, and pulled out one of his cards, “just in case you can’t get through to the police.”

Mr Prendegast plucked the proffered card with thumb and forefinger. As he slid it into his top pocket, his expression put Oates in mind of those intrepid Victorian explorers who would force themselves to ingest some foul local delicacy so as not to offend their savage hosts. The two men shook hands, and Oates led his sons back to the car.

“S
HOTGUN.
”

“You went in the front with mum this morning. It should be my turn now.”

“Duh, that’s the rules of shotgun.”

“If you’re going to fight you can both go in the boot.”

Together: “No!”

With the threat of the boot hanging over him, Mike sullenly relinquished his claim to the front seat, and Harry climbed in beside his father. When the doors were shut both boys reached for their seatbelts without being told, and Oates thought,
At least we got something right.
The trip down to the school had presented itself to him as a simple interruption, a chore to be discharged to keep the peace with Lori before he got on with the real business of his day. With the doors of the car closed against the cold, and the car’s old heater breathing musty warmth on him and his children, the trip now seemed a blessing, unasked and unexpected.

Harry was one of those children for whom abstract ideas could take on a kind of epic emotional significance. When his son turned his big-eyed curiosity onto him and asked one of his special questions, Oates felt like a bomb disposal expert faced with a set of identical wires. It was Harry’s accidental viewing of a film on global warming (narrated by an animated polar bear) which had led to the enforced replacement of every light fitting in the house with vastly expensive low-energy bulbs, and it was on Harry’s insistence that the plate of milk-soaked bread was left on the doorstep every night for hedgehogs. There being no such animals in Putney, or at least none sufficiently accommodating to present themselves at their doorstep, it was generally Oates’s job to disturb the saucer of sodden bread after the boys were asleep in a simulation of hungry hedgehoggery.

The conversation they had had about why the man who begged for change outside Putney Hill tube station couldn’t sleep on the camping bed in the TV room was one which still gave him nightmares. And as for explaining where Anna had gone to… well, at least he had been too young to really understand all that. Being that kind of boy, Oates knew Harry would have been worrying about the riots all day, and his son confirmed this by hugging his backpack to his tummy and staring out of the window in silence as they pulled away from the curb.

Mike was more straightforward. With most kids it’s the disruption of routine which really brings a sense of disaster home. You can tell them the world is coming down, or that China has launched nuclear missiles, but it’s not until their tea fails to appear at the appointed hour, or their favourite television program gets interrupted by the news that they start to get nervous. In the playground he had been excited, but his dad coming to pick him up in the middle of the day had begun to worry at him, and instead of babbling about his morning he was playing on his phone.

“What would you boys like for tea?”

“Will you be cooking us tea?”

“No, mum will cook you tea. I’m just wondering what you’d like.”

“Will you be there for tea?”

“Not for tea. But I’ll be back home tonight.”

“Dad, Tony Stancliffe says we’re going to be attacked tonight. He says the rioters will come for everyone with masks on.”

“Why will we have masks on then?”

“Not us! The rioters.”

“Oh, them.”

“You knew that.”

“No one will come by. And if they do we’ll smash them. Right?”

Mike looked up from his phone and caught his eye in the rearview mirror. He smiled and went back to playing. Bhupinder called, but Oates ignored it. He didn’t want to speak about the murder with his children in the car.

Harry, who had been silent all the way home, turned to him when they pulled up outside their house.

“You’ve got something there dad.”

“Where?”

“Just by your ear.”

Oates flipped down the mirrored sunvisor. He spat on his fingers, and rubbed away the spot of Hugo’s blood which had dried on his cheek whilst the boys ran to the front door.

O
ATES LEFT THEM
playing computer games in their bedroom and went to the bathroom. All along the shelf above the toilet was a series of books in combinations of primary colours. Each one was titled
A Beginner’s Guide to…
and then a different theory or artistic movement: psychoanalysis, modernism, romanticism, Plato, Keynes, Shakespeare, psychogeography, jurisprudence. These were Lori’s (as were the celebrity magazines on the cistern). She never spoke about the ideas she had read, and she never read further into them than the little primers. The books were arranged in the order of their publication, and when she had finished one of them she went on to the next, regardless of any disjunct in the subject matter.

When she had first started reading them, shortly after Mike was born, Oates had tried joking with her about them a couple of times, calling her “Professor”, even taking up one of the books and reading sentences aloud in the silly voice of an Austrian academic. She had pretended for a while to find this funny, before exploding at him with a fury that at the time he thought was crazy. After that he tried looking interested and asking her serious questions, but she always declined to answer him.

It had taken years to understand. She had been so angry because Oates had mocked one of the most private things about her
–
a dogged determination to make sense of the world, and a faith that better minds than hers would help. Lori had been to university for two years before dropping out, which was two more years than Oates. It made him quietly proud of her, as she stood in the middle of the chaos of life, building the fire of her knowledge a couple of sticks at a time, so that the ever expanding circle of light pushed back the darkness. He felt that even though they never talked about the books, even though he had no idea what half the words in the titles meant, he and the boys were sitting by that fire with her. He ran his finger along the spines, tracing the journey of his wife’s thoughts over the years with his finger.

When he thought about the people he loved, it was never the whole person that presented themselves for inspection, but rather some emblematic detail which contained his entire conception of the beloved. With Lori it was the little collection of volumes above the toilet, slowly growing.

She would be home soon. A measure of peace restored by the books and by the car journey with his children, he needed only one more thing to think clearly. He went back to the TV room and retrieved the bottle from the back of a drawer in the dresser. In his bedroom he lay on the bed in full uniform and stared at the ceiling with the glass on his chest.