Chase the Morning

Chapter Two

The office next morning pulled me sharply back. Everything seemed solid and familiar, everything was bright and sunlit and unmysterious, from the squeak of the fake-mosaic tiles under my shoes to the sweet smile from Judy behind the switchboard. This morning, too, it was nicely flavoured with sympathy.

‘Hallo, Steve – how’s the arm?’

‘Oh, it’s okay, thanks. Settling down.’

There was nothing mysterious about these corridors, all light-flooding windows and cool daffodil-yellow walls, no dark corners, no strange atmospheres. After last night they felt businesslike, bracing, reassuring. The only smells in the conditioned air were fresh polish and coffee and the warm tang that surrounds VDUs and other office electronics, with an acetonal whiff of nail varnish and menthol cigarettes as I passed the typists’ room; clean and calm and predictable, all of it. Strange, perhaps, that so many exotic commodities should pass through these offices, in a manner of speaking, and yet leave never a trace behind. Cinnamon, manganese, copra, alligator pepper, sapphires; we handled them by the tonne as readily as sheet steel or crude oil. All the trade goods of the world, and yet none ever came within miles of this place; I’d only ever seen them on rare visits to docks and airports. Only their legal identities passed through my hands, in notes of shipment and bills of lading and Customs inventories that left nothing in the air but the faint dry taint of toner ink. When I opened the door of my own office I smelt it; but there was also Clare’s flowery perfume, and the girl herself shuffling little sheaves of documents on her immaculate desk.

‘Steve! Hallo! I wasn’t expecting you so soon! How’s your poor arm? It isn’t anything serious, is it? I mean, slipping in the rain like that? You might really have hurt yourself!’

I’d woken late, exhausted, with my arm swollen and stiff; I’d had to phone in with some sort of excuse. Yet now it seemed more like the truth; I could almost see it happening. A slip, a gash – far more likely than a knife in the hands of some weird dockland thug. Far easier to believe; I was close to believing it myself. ‘It’s not too bad, thanks. Bit stiff.’

‘You’re sure?’ I was a little startled. Her intense blue eyes were very wide and concerned. She half rose. ‘Look, just sit down a moment and I’ll get the First Aid box –’

I grinned, rather uneasily. All this concern, it wasn’t the sort of thing I was used to. ‘Give you half a chance and you’ll have me swathed up like King Tut!’ Of course, she’d been the office first-aider since that course last year. She must be itching to find some use for it; she’d had nothing better so far than Barry cutting his thumb on the cap of a whisky bottle. That would account for it. ‘No thanks, love, I, er, got it seen to. Any calls?’

I was allowed to pass on to my desk with a small sheaf of mail, a circular from the Brazilian Aduana, and instructions to sit down and take it easy. Dave Oshukwe was at his desk already, head down over his terminal, rattling keys; he lifted a limp brown hand to me, leaving a comet of expensive cigarette smoke in the air, but thankfully didn’t look up. I settled down in my armchair, flicked on my terminal and settled back to let it warm up and log on. The firm leather upholstery of the chair enveloped me and bore up my sore arm, the chrome of the recline lever cool beneath my fingers. I touched the wood of the desk, solid under glassy layers of polish and varnish. I ran a finger along the terminal casing, mirror-smooth and clean and dustless, and felt the faint shiver of the current beneath. This – this was what it was all about.

I’d been half off my head last night. Hallucinating, almost. Sick and dizzy from that stab, no doubt about it, half drunk and unhappy; seeing everything through a haze. Small wonder I’d cast a romantic aura round places that were shabby or just plain squalid, over people – well, good-hearted enough, okay, but underprivileged, uneducated, simple, rough. Or since we were forgetting the euphemisms, downright crude and backward. I’d turned something utterly ordinary into a strange, feverish experience. That was the truth beneath the dream. All this was real. This was every day, this was my life. Here was Clare with a cup of coffee, just like every day; only for once she hadn’t tried to slip me sweeteners instead of sugar. ‘You need building up!’ she said. ‘If you’ve lost a whole lot of blood like that –’

‘Hey, don’t I get any?’ demanded Dave.

Clare sniffed. ‘Yours is coming. Steve’s hurt himself!’

‘Oh yah, I heard.’ He peered around his terminal. ‘How’s you, me old massa? Can’t be too bad, he’s still upright, enney? Not on crutches or in a bathchair or anything!’

‘Can’t you see how pale he is?’ Clare protested, so fervently it took me aback.

Dave crowed. ‘Me you’re asking that? All you palefaces look alike to me –’ He ducked as Clare swiped at his ear. ‘Okay, okay, maybe he does look a bit green! That’s usual – good night out, was it, Steve? Wasser name then?’ Dave’s real accent came from a very upmarket school, better than mine, but he would try to sound like an East End kid.

‘Come on, Dave, I cut my arm, that’s all.’ I turned to Clare, still fussing over me, trying to find out what sort of bandage I had on and getting my eyes full of long blonde hair. ‘Better get him some coffee too, love, or he’ll be impossible all morning. Instead of just improbable. Oh, and ask Barry if he’s spoken to Rosenblum’s yet …’

It gave me an excuse to get rid of her. I needed it. Clare in this mother-hen mode unnerved me. By the time she got back I could be comfortably sunk in my work, much too busy to let things get personal again. ‘And you, Dave, anything turned up on this Kenya container mess yet?’

He lounged over to the printer and ripped off the protruding form. ‘Just sorting it out when you came in, boss. Been sitting up a branch siding near the airport, getting mouldy. They’re scrubbing it out now, with apologies. I’ve slapped on demurrages up to today, but told them to hang on to it till we see if there’s some kind of return load we can get.’

‘From Kenya? Should be, for a refrigerated container. That’s well done, Dave.’ I typed for some listings on my terminal, and peered down them. ‘I’ll get on to Hamilton, for a start, and see if he wants an extra half-tonne of red snapper this week. Meanwhile, could you get me those roughs on the German veg oil contract? And all that EEC crap about shipping it –’

The phone buzzed before I could pick it up. ‘Barry for you,’ said Clare, ‘about the Rosenblum’s business – urgent!’

Yes, this was real life all right.

And yet, as the day wore on, I found it wasn’t quite the same. I sank myself into my work, determined not to be distracted, not to let myself maunder over weird wonderings about last night; I kept Dave and Clare too busy chasing this way and that to chaff or cluck over me. It seemed to get results. I managed to wrap up everything that could be settled that day in little more than half the normal time. And yet it left me less at ease, less satisfied than ever.

‘Not feverish or anything, are we?’ enquired Barry, perching elegantly on the edge of my desk and flicking through a sheaf of forms as if pulling the petals off a rose. He tapped his long blunt nose. ‘I mean, you know as well as I do how bloody important every one of these contracts is, Steve. I’d far rather you took your time and went through them with your usual sharpened toothcomb than – well, skated over something significant.’

I grinned. ‘Can’t win, can I? You’ve been after me for years to speed up contracts – then today I hit one lucky streak and suddenly you’re flagging me down! They’re all right, Barry. Don’t worry about it.’

He plucked a few more petals and ran a hand over his greying yellow curls. ‘If you’re really happy about them –’

‘I’m happy. Dave’s done his usual great job, and Clare too. And you’ve been through them yourself, or you wouldn’t be sitting here asking! Go on, Mr Managing Director, sir, get your pinstriped arse off my desk! I’m happy!’

But I wasn’t. Not about the contracts I’d processed; about those I was confident. I might be twenty years younger than Barry, but I knew my job. I just wasn’t enjoying it as much as usual. I hadn’t wanted to go into every twist and turn of the business behind each bit of shipping, the way I normally did; I’d missed the old urge to linger and learn about every commodity we shipped, from foodstuffs to fine arts, an urge that had picked me up a lot of very useful background knowledge. I was suddenly more impatient of the whole sticky web of formalities, anxious to be rid of it. And Barry, being the canny businessman he was, had scented something of that. But as well as being a boss you could joke with, he was also sensible enough not to harass his staff. ‘All right, my precocious infant! I’ll go polish Bill Rouse’s desk instead, see if Accounts can catch the speed bug too and push these through in record time. Probably kill all our regular clients – the shock, you know. Er – I’d suggest you push off home straightaway and rest that arm, but if you can hang on another half-hour or so – just in case anything crops up – you know how it is …’

‘Sure. No problem, Barry.’ I wouldn’t have gone home, anyway; something told me I wouldn’t be any happier there than here. I was getting fed up with this haunting half-memory that trailed dissatisfaction shadow-fashion at my heels. I’d had a hellish, frightening time last night; serve me right for meddling with low-life. But the more I tried to think about it, the less I could remember – hardly anything now, anything clear. Faces and places were nameless blurs. As if that haze was like a conjuror’s veil, lifting to reveal emptiness; as if I really had dreamed the whole thing up, from scratch. So then why was it turning my own ordinary life upside down, my own carefully tailored slimfit Armani existence – the life I knew I could handle?

I badly wanted time to settle down and think – to remember, so I could comfortably forget. But here was Clare, bringing me one more cup of sugary coffee and hovering distractingly again. As a distraction she had natural advantages. Normally I never let them bother me; I made a point of treating her as the competent secretary she was and not as some brainless dolly. Not that she looked like one, exactly; if she fitted any stereotype, it might have been a milkmaid in a butter commercial. Her hair and eyes set you thinking of cornfields and summer skies, and the rest went with them, her slightly blunt, sensual features, all cream and freckles, her slender but heavy-breasted shape, her unselfconscious charm, bubbly but sincere. Most of the time I enjoyed it without letting it get to me, though when you are trying to think hard about something – or even harder not to – that hair on the back of your neck, that breast negligently brushing your shoulder could be damnably irritating. Now and again, naturally, it kindled fantasies, but I wasn’t stupid enough to muddy office waters, chasing a casual affair. And what other kind made sense?

That struck a tiny spark. I’d stepped back from something last night – hadn’t I? That girl – what was her name, then? What did she look like? I could hardly remember. As if I had conjured her up out of nothing, right enough; as if the whole crazy night were that kind of dream, vivid enough to jar you awake, yet impossible to hold onto, draining out of the memory and leaving only its emotions behind, like a hollow impression. I should have been relieved to think that; I wasn’t. To think you could have some vivid, shocking, living experience, something strong enough to leave such nagging echoes – and yet find the details melting away like morning frost …

What was solid? What wouldn’t melt?

My fist clenched tight around my cup. Unwisely; a fierce red rocket of pain soared up my arm and burst into a glittering blossom – an image, sharp, sparkling, alive. There she was! Katjka, her teeth sunk in the wound, myself shivering with agony, only half hearing Myrko and Jyp calmly discussing –

Discussing a ship. And its cargo. Commodities. Goods. But the damndest ones a man ever heard of. And I had this business at my fingertips.

My fingertips. I had an idea daft enough to match. But after all, why not? There’d be no harm in it. Computers can’t laugh at you. Idly, laughing at myself, I reached over to the keyboard and tapped in a call to the freight and docking databases. It might be amusing, at least, to see what they made of a query for the Iskander.

I hadn’t a second to laugh. There it was, right in front of my nose, an entry in the usual file-card form, complete with a location code for dock and wharf. But what an entry!

I was still staring at it open-mouthed when Dave came over.

‘What’s this, then? Still working –’ He stared at the monitor. ‘Well, bugger me! Where’d you get that from? It’s brill!’ He straightened up as somebody came in the door. ‘Hey, Barry! Clare! Come look at this!’

Barry’s beak cut out the light as he leaned over above us. He stared for a moment, then began to chuckle. ‘Very good, Dave, very good! I say, wouldn’t it be marvellous if there was some way we could actually slip that into the database?’

Dave flapped his hands. ‘Hey, I didn’t have anything to do with that! Steve got it –’

Barry stared. Evidently he didn’t think me capable of inventing it. ‘You mean it actually was in the database? My God, nowhere’s safe from those hackers these days. Next thing it’ll be a virus program, mark my words –’

Clare bit gently on a knuckle and giggled. I wasn’t fooled; she was generally thinking hard when she did that. ‘It has to be a fake – hasn’t it? I mean, five hundred tons – what kind of displacement’s that for a merchant ship! And what’s Conqueror Root? And a-a merhorse?’

‘Might be a mistranslation,’ I ventured, having had some time to think about it. ‘For hippopotamus – or walrus – you know what happens when somebody sits down with a dictionary.’

‘Might be,’ agreed a baffled Barry. ‘How come you called this up, Steve, anyhow?’

I shrugged. ‘Just overheard the name of the ship then other day – you know, pub gossip …’

I caught a very odd look from Clare, as if she’d sensed a wrong note somewhere. ‘Well, there’s one way to find out,’ she said practically, going to my shelves and taking down one of the disc binders. ‘Why don’t we see if this Iskander’s in Lloyd’s Register?’ She put a hand on my shoulder as she leaned over me to slip the iridescent disc into the CD-Rom unit, and let it rest there. I typed in my query as soon as the menu came up on screen, and the unit purred for only a fraction of a second before the answer came.

‘Not a bleeding sausage,’ Dave said regretfully.

I pondered, carefully ignoring that light touch. ‘Yes – but this is just the annual Register; it doesn’t include back issues, old entries, historical ones … I’m going to try their main database.’

It took quite a lot longer to get through, and five full minutes to access my query. We were about to give up, when suddenly the answer popped up on the screen. We stared; it wasn’t at all in their usual detailed form.

Barry cackled wildly. ‘1868? And what’s this Huy Brazeal registry? A misprint for somewhere in Brazil, I suppose. Honestly, I wonder if they haven’t started trading in certain substances down there! Or it really is hackers. There’s nothing else?’

‘I could go down and look up the actual 1868 lists,’ suggested Clare thoughtfully.

Barry snorted. ‘Well, not on the firm’s time you don’t! As of now I for one give up! We don’t chase wild geese, we ship ’em livestock – eh, Steve? I just dropped in to say everything’s in hand, you should push off now and get some rest. See you tomorrow!’ He took one last look at the screen, then shook his head and grunted derisively. ‘Hackers!’

But I wasn’t so sure. As I drove home that night through a thin weeping drizzle I glanced uneasily at the turn-off for Danube Street. But there was no sunset banner to tempt me seaward; the sky was overcast, a featureless dome of gloomy grey cloud, and the louring buildings were wrapped in shadow, sullen and forbidding. It looked both sinister and depressingly ordinary, and thoroughly damped any desire I had to turn that way and test the truth of my strange experiences. To find they were just some kind of lunatic dream, or an overlay on ordinary things – or to find they were real and still there … I didn’t know which alternative scared me more. Inwardly I kicked myself for ever looking up all that nonsense from the files; now Clare and Dave and Barry must be wondering if I was some kind of nut. Come to that, I was wondering myself. I’d do better to go home and get some sleep.

It was as well I did, because I was shot out of God knows what dream at about four-thirty in the morning by the shrill braying of the phone. With a head like a carpentry shop – eyes full of glue, mouth of sawdust and the sawblade screeching across my brain – I struggled to make out what Barry was squawking about.

‘Broken into, dammit! And smashed about! Badly, they say – the cops, yes! No, not yet, I’m on my way down there this minute – I want you and Rouse and Bailey and Gemma too – get hold of ’em, will you? And don’t take no for an answer – this could be really fucking serious, lad!’

But it wasn’t, though no wonder the cops thought so. So did I, the moment I walked in the door, and Gemma – our brass-bound and case-hardened head of Transshipment – actually burst into tears. Somebody had gone through both inner and outer back doors, shattering their central panels of wood and wired glass without opening them, and so bypassed our rather basic alarm system. There was an ominous stink in the air, a real pig-farm stench. Every office door in the place was open, and through them spilled filing cabinets and bookcases like so many prostrate corpses, strewn around with the ripped and mangled remains of the papers and books they had held. Even the beautiful Victorian bookcase in Barry’s office had been thrown down, shattering a coffee-table, and its collection of antique atlases and traveller’s tales ripped to shreds.

‘Lovely books they were, too!’ said the CID sergeant sadly, when the department heads gathered there a few hours later. ‘Worth a bob, too, any idiot could see that. And yet you’re sure none of them were nicked?’

‘None!’ said Barry between his teeth. ‘Just bloody ruined like this!’ And he hurled the shreds of a heavy old binding at the wall.

The sergeant clicked his tongue sympathetically. ‘But nothing else gone – just like all the other offices. Didn’t even touch your whisky bottles. Yet they wiped out every bit of paperwork in the place!’ You could practically see the wheels working behind his eyes. ‘Shipping business, eh? Import-export … a high-pressure field is it? Kind of cutthroat competition? Lot of competitors?’

Barry shrugged. ‘Not so many. And I know most of them – we do lunch, play squash, that sort of thing. Always friendly. We’re fixers, expediters, there’s plenty of elbow-room; sometimes we put business each other’s way. You’re not suggesting …’

‘Well, sir – I mean, all your files destroyed, all your records – even the bloody phone-books! That’s bound to hold up your trading a bit, isn’t It? Could even –’

Barry guffawed. ‘Put us out of business? Not a chance! Paper’s just one way we keep our records – and a pretty obsolete way at that. Everything that matters passes through the computer system; that gets stored on discs, discs are automatically backed up to hard disk and hard disk onto tape streamers, all day, every day. And the streamer cartridges go into that little safe over there; fireproof, the lot. Three different levels of media – and not one of ’em’s been touched, in any office. All we’ve got to do is print it back out again.’

The sergeant’s face clouded over. ‘I see … and your competitors would know about this system?’

‘Oh, they all work much the same way,’ Gemma remarked. ‘Not always as secure, perhaps, but that, let us face it, is their own look-out. If they really had wanted to hurt us they’d know a hundred better ways. In fact, officer, losing the papers is causing us far less trouble than all this absolutely disgusting smearing they’ve done all over the actual computers –’

‘Ah yes, miss,’ said the sergeant, his face resolutely rigid. ‘Very nasty, that – unhygienic and all. As if it really did hit the fan … Well, you should be able to get it cleaned up soon enough; the photographers will be through with it any time –’

‘Photographers?’ demanded Rouse. ‘Good God, man, my terminal looks like the wall of a Lime Street lavatory! What’ll a photograph of that tell you?’

The CID man met him with a superior smirk. ‘Maybe quite a lot, sir. You see, it’s not random, er, smearing; there’s definitely patterns in it. Not writing or anything, but … well, signs, I suppose, though we don’t know what they mean yet. In fact, I’d like everyone to have another look at them, all the staff, before you clean them off; they might mean something to somebody, you never know. There’s one in particular, too, that has … something else. We might start with that one – fourth door in on the left.’

All the heads turned in one direction – towards me. ‘It would appear to be your week, Steve,’ sighed Barry. ‘Shall we go? And Gemma love, will you tell Judy to let the cleaners know they can start soon?’

We crowded into my office. Dave was already there, sitting on the overturned filing cabinet and chain-smoking to drown the stink, unsuccessfully. With assorted mutterings of disgust we all crowded round the sergeant as he gingerly turned my terminal this way and that. ‘No suggestions? Ah well. How about this, then?’

The police had warned us not to touch the terminals, and we’d needed no discouraging; I hadn’t looked closely at what dangled there. Even now it just seemed like more filth, a patch of matted feathers stuck together with something revolting, right in the centre of the screen. I looked at him and shook my head.

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one they favoured with that. And it’s not more crap, that stuff; apparently it’s blood, quite fresh. But mixed into a paste with something – some kind of flour, the boys think. Labs should tell us more.’

We stared at the ugly thing in uneasy silence, thinking each other’s thoughts. Blood? Where from? What? Or whom? Then a new voice, soft and tentative, broke into our thoughts.

‘Sah? ’scuse me, sah?’ Smiles of relief broke out, and we turned away thankfully. This was the head of our cleaners, a plump cheerful creature in her fifties, all calm and motherly good nature. She seemed like the living antidote to the upheaval around us.

‘Oh, Mrs Macksie,’ began Barry distractedly. ‘So very sorry we’ve had to drag you and the girls in! But you see

‘Ah, thass’ all right, sah!’ she said sympathetically. ‘It’s terrible, ain’t it? But we clean it up orright, you see! Now wheah you want us to –’ She stopped, or rather she choked; I thought at first it was Dave’s overpriced gaspers, then that she was having a heart attack. Her eyes bulged; she made no sound but a strange little croak, one hand clutched at her coat. The other she made as if to lift, then let it fall limply. I stared at her like all the rest; but when I met her eyes it was as if a curtain had been drawn behind them.

Clare touched her arm, and she flinched. ‘Mrs Macksie! Are you feeling all right?’

‘What’s the matter, love?’ The CID man spoke softly; but it was a demand all the same. She turned her hooded eyes away, but he persisted. ‘Seen something? Something you recognize? Somebody left a mark of some sort – somebody you know? Want to tell us about it, then?’ Patently that was the last thing she wanted. ‘C’mon, love!’ His voice was taking on just that slight warning edge. ‘You know you’ll have to, sooner or later –’

Barry caught his eye warningly, but too late. She glared up at the policeman, and her jaw set like a rat-trap. ‘What you talkin’ about?’ she demanded. ‘You tellin’ me to my face I done this? I had anythin’ to do with whoevah done this?’

Barry spread his arms. ‘Mrs Macksie, of course not – everyone knows you here, but –’

‘I’m not havin’ anybody tellin’ me I done a thing like this,’ she said obstinately, a little shrill. ‘I’m a respectable woman, my husband was a lay preacher and I’m a deaconess! How long I’ve worked for you now? Five yeah, that’s how long! I’m not standin’ for this boy heah tellin’ me I’ve anythin’ to do with jus’ plain filthy things like obeah –’ She’d said too much. She positively tried to snap the word off, but we’d all heard it. She snorted with annoyance, then turned on her heel and stalked out. She might have looked funny on her plump little partridge legs, but she was too much in earnest. I caught Clare’s eye quickly; she nodded, and hurried after the indignant woman.

‘Obi-what?’ demanded the policeman, of nobody in particular. We all looked at each other, and shrugged. He turned to Dave. ‘Now, sir, I don’t suppose you could – with maybe something of a similar background –’

‘No I fucking well can’t!’ snarled Dave, shedding his usual cool with startling speed. ‘Background? Jesus, you were born nearer her than I was – why don’t you bloody know? She’s Trinidadian, and I’m from Nigeria. I’m an Ibo – a Biafran, if that means anything to you! What’s common about that?’

‘Nothing at all, Dave,’ I said wryly. ‘So slip back into lounge-lizard mode as usual, please, and go ask her. She does have a soft spot for you, after all, though there’s no accounting for tastes.’

‘It’s the letters after my name,’ he said cheerfully, his flash of temper gone as fast as it had come. He lit another cigarette. ‘Mad keen on education, all these West Indians are – worse than the Scots. Okay, I’ll ask.’

But when he appeared a few minutes later he was looking a little ruffled. ‘She’ll tell,’ he said. ‘I think maybe Clare persuaded her, more than me. And – well, could be we do have something like this back home, though not by that name. But city folk, educated classes – it’s not something we’d ever run into. Strictly for the hicks in the stix – straight down from the trees, as you might say, sergeant, eh? Juju, that’s what they call it.’ He grimaced. ‘That word – my old man’d have a fit if he’d heard me use it. Wash-your-mouth-with-soap stuff.’

‘Juju?’ Barry frowned. ‘But isn’t that –’

He was interrupted by the return of Mrs Macksie, leaning on Clare’s arm. She launched into a speech like a diver off a high board. ‘I want you, sah, to understand – about all this I know nothin’ – nothin’ at all. But there was a time I see something of the sort befoah. When my late husband he was a medical orderly back home in Trinidad, the Lord’s work call us to missions often. There was a bad time then, on other island far away; all kinds of folk comin’ away in feah of their lives – to Jamaica, Trinidad, anywhere they could, Cuba even. We see a lot of them round missions, we get to know their lives. Poor folk, bittah folk with bad blood an’ scores to pay; Things went on – She squirmed, as if the very thought made her uncomfortable. ‘Devil’s work. Obeah. Ouanga, they call it in their fear. We war against it as we could with love, but theah’s some too steeped in darkness to see the light. Theah we see things done … like this. Never so bad, though, even then. The signs I doan’ remember, not at first, not till I see that …’

She drew a deep shaky breath and pointed at the nasty speck of blood and feathers on my screen. ‘That … You want to know what obeah is? That theah’s obeah. You take that and you burn it.’

‘I’ll be glad to,’ said Barry, a little shakily. ‘But what is it?’

‘It’s bad – you need to know more? Okay. It’s called a cigle don-Pedro, and I don’ know what that mean any more’n you and I don’t ever want to know. Sometimes the Mazanxa use it, sometime the Zobop or the Vlinblindingue. Use it with signs like these, and for nothin’ good. An’ thass’ all I’m telling you, ‘cause thass’ all I know.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ said the policeman hastily. ‘Am I to understand –’

Ignoring him, she turned to Barry. ‘And now, sah, if you’ll kindly excuse me, there’s a heap of work heah, and I’m getting all behind.’ With serene calm she turned and walked out again. The CID man gaped after her, but he didn’t try to stop her. He turned to Dave instead.

‘What the hell was all that about? Was she trying to tell me this was done by these – what the hell did she call them? These refugee types? Where were they refugees from, anyhow?’

‘That’s the kicker,’ said Dave with ghoulish relish. ‘You ask me – it looks like we got turned over by some of those West Indian yobs from out South Street way.’

‘West Indian?’ blinked Barry. ‘Why so?’

‘Well, I can’t see there being that many Haiitians in town – can you?’

‘Haiitians?’

‘You heard the lady. That’s where the refugees were coming from. Happy little Haiiti. And obeah’s just the local name for practices no respectable Trinidadian would be caught dead in – if you’ll pardon the expression. But down thataway they’re a lot more common.’

The CID man shut his notebook with a snap, and twanged a rubber band into place around it. ‘Good as computers, that, for me … Yes. Well, it’s a lead, I suppose. Don’t suppose we’ve been treading on any West Indian toes lately, have we, sir? No Race Relations Board cases?’

Everyone laughed. Of course we hadn’t; we were a respectable company, and our business was international. Our standards were high, but an unusual or exotic background was a positive plus; we hired people from all over, and discriminated on just about everything except race. It said something for our good sense, if not so much for our social conscience. The only employee who’d been caught up in any fracas at all recently seemed to be me. And no way was I about to mention that, not something I couldn’t be sure had even happened. Even if it had, those huge thugs weren’t West Indian, anyhow.

They’d been burglars, though. Or something illicit, anyhow, something they cared enough about to spill out lives. Some motive that wasn’t immediately obvious … any more than it was here, either. The police were visibly writing the whole thing off as the work of drunks, druggies or kids, who had just happened to descend on us, found nothing worth stealing and wrecked the place out of spite. They’d keep their ear to the ground, but …

I couldn’t accept that. The unease that was dogging me grew stronger, darker, clutched hard at my heels. It lurked there behind my thoughts, all through the rest of the day that should have banished it, hectic but reassuring. A kind of minor spring filled the office as the air grew sharp and piny with disinfectant, then heady and flowery with scented polish, and at last cool, clean and neutral as the air conditioning took hold; in the background phones trilled cheerfully and printers chattered and whizzed like bright insects, restoring our records to hard copy. Normality burst out like an impatient seedling, stiffened and blossomed into the status quo, sunflower-bright. The smooth speed of it was awesome, like watching a time-lapse film; we had an efficient business here, and a committed workforce. It should have reassured me. It didn’t.

Two break-ins that wouldn’t go away, both strangely motiveless – and with one other obvious connection, namely me. Not one little bit did I like that idea, and I couldn’t make sense of it. Suppose I really had been followed, that night – but I’d got to my car, and away. No other car had followed me out of Tampere Street, not even Danube Street. They might have caught the number, but somehow I didn’t see them using the police computer to trace me. And then they’d have had to follow me not only home, but to the office next day; and why bother? Why hit the office, when they could have got to me personally at home? No, it was a daft idea; but daft or not, it was getting under my skin. If I could find some way of distinguishing the two incidents, some reasonable explanation for one or the other …

First things first. Modus operandi. The office raid must have been a swift and well-planned affair, to do so much damage without attracting attention. Not so the other; in fact, it could hardly have been sloppier. What were the raiders up to, muscling up to the front door like that on the flimsiest of pretexts? Why would anyone want to break into a warehouse that way – with a murder added, and out on the open street, when with an ounce more planning they could have kept everything behind closed doors? Because they wanted their victim to be found outside? As if – almost as if they were trying to establish beyond all doubt that it was a burglary. And ruthlessly enough to snuff out a life for corroborative evidence.

Now that rang a bell. I’d come across cases like that; where somebody was trying to use the break-in somehow … to account for something. Something that wasn’t there, and should have been. Or something that was, and shouldn’t –

‘Jesus, yes!’

I couldn’t help exclaiming aloud. A chill wind of certainty blew through me. I’d found my motive.

Across the newly gleaming desks Dave, deep in checking his recovered records, looked up startled. ‘Whazzat?’

‘Nothing.’ I wanted to be up and running. But I forced myself to be calm, act natural; and yet there might not be much time. If I really hadn’t dreamed up the whole thing … ‘Just getting worked up about this raid again. So bloody senseless. Or so it seems. But sometimes there’s a hidden motive to these things.’

‘Gotcha.’ Dave leaned back and tapped his cigarette packet. To my relief he’d run out. ‘Damn! Like that tonne of hash they had to sneak out of a wool shipment before it came out of bond, and explain the hole it left – so they staged a break-in –’

‘That’s it. Couldn’t be the same here, of course. Not a lot of pot you could slip in with bills of lading.’

‘Maybe we should try it!’ grinned Dave, rummaging in his blazer pocket. ‘Give ol’ Gemma a blast! Ah –’ He popped the cellophane off another black and gold packet.

I stood up. ‘If you’re going to light up more of those coffin-nails, I’m off! It’s late, and you’ve probably done me in already today. Never heard of secondary inhalation? If I get cancer, I’ll sue.’

‘Go ahead, man! I’ll claim I was driven to it by a brutal boss who slunk off early and left me up to here in it. Literally!’

‘That’s no way to talk about Barry!’ I said reprovingly. The banter covered up my departure nicely, and my injured arm gave me a good enough reason for leaving before the others, even on this embattled evening. The wince as Clare helped me on with my anorak was quite genuine.

‘Oh, sorry – Steve, look, be sensible for once.’ Those clear eyes were weighing me up with an expression I couldn’t fathom, almost as if she could see right through the frantic unease I was hiding. And dammit, she was nibbling at that finger again. ‘Let me drive you home. Go on –’

That was the last thing I wanted. ‘Don’t fuss! Just a bit tired, that’s all – same as you. You get out of this, too. Tomorrow’s soon enough.’

Judy’s good night was even more sympathetic than before. But once through the door I had to stop myself running for the car.

I headed home, chafing at the tail end of the rush-hour traffic; I took some absurd risks lane-hopping, because home wasn’t where I was going, and I might already be too late. I had to tell Jyp, and fast; but I’d already let one night slip by. By the time I turned into Danube Street the sun had already sunk behind the high buildings, and I was racing into a gulf of shadow. It had never looked more mundane; and behind the rooftops there were no masts to be seen. I writhed with doubt; but I drove on.

My tyres rumbled like urgent drums across the cobbles, echoing off the grime-crusted walls. I turned into Tampere Street, where what looked like the same filthy paper was still blowing about, but this time I didn’t park. I thought I’d worked out which way the docks ought to be, but it turned out not to be so simple; a one-way street sent me careering off like a pinball through a maze of featureless back streets, and I was as lost as I had been on foot. Every so often as I passed a narrow turning I’d glimpse something at the far end; then I’d turn down the next one and find it dog-legged around and away in the wrong direction. Or I’d slow down, reverse back and into the actual turning, only to find the glimmer of light that suggested open water was a reflection from a boarded-up window, or that the flash of red that looked so much like the tavern signboard was a forgotten poster flapping ragged from a wall. When at last one such alley spat me out into the wider street I’d glimpsed, it turned out to be Danube Street again, much further along past Tampere Street. And there beneath a glaring orange streetlamp hung a gleaming new brown and white tourist sign, that I’d have seen the first night if only I’d kept on going – <<< HARBOURSIDE

Somehow or other the sight of it only made my heart sink more. But I turned the way it pointed, and drove on. Until, quite unexpectedly, there were no more grim walls ahead, and Danube Street opened out onto a neat little roundabout with bright lights and bushes growing in concrete tubs, and blue parking signs in all directions. And beyond it, flanked by a row of buildings whose scrubbed stone and brick and new paint positively blazed in the last rays of the falling sun, was a dock pool, empty of ships and hung with the same white chains you find on suburban gardens. I pulled in beside them, at a vacant parking meter, and clambered slowly out of the car. I looked down the pool, to where it opened out onto the sunset sea; but the waters were empty. There was not a ship in sight, and the only warehouse I could see was marked with a pink neon disco sign across its upper storey. The seawind was tainted with dust from a scaffold-shrouded building behind me, and the spicy staleness emanating from an Indian restaurant nearby. I’d found only what I’d set out to look for, that night; and it seemed almost like a mockery, a judgement.

Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find. What had I found before? Hallucination? Delusion? In my mind I couldn’t be sure it had ever existed; in my memory it was already clouded. And yet all my feelings shouted that it was there somewhere, that I had to find my way back to it before it was too late. I thrashed frantically against the doubts that ensnared me. But what could I do? I was a child again, and lost. I was shut out.