Revenger

39

Down in the cellar Carver heard the explosion, the screams, the shouts of panic and the scurrying feet desperately rushing to get away. In the cold light of the camping lantern he could see Chrystal sitting weeping with Ajay Panu’s bear-like arm around her shoulder. Paula Miklosko was looking a little more conscious of what was going on around her, though she was still a long way from being fully alert. Maninder Panu was sitting alone, staring into the darkness of the basement, as if his circuits had simply overloaded under the strain of what had happened since the riot first began. Barely fifteen minutes had gone by, but it might as well have been a lifetime.

Carver crouched on his haunches beside him. ‘Where’s the control-box for the CCTV?’ he asked.

Maninder said nothing. Carver repeated the question. Still no response.

‘In the back office,’ said Ajay. ‘Across the storeroom there’s a door with a glass panel. Through that’s the office. The box is in there. It’s connected to the computer. Why do you need it?’

Carver didn’t answer the question. He just asked, ‘What’s the password?’

Maninder paused.

‘It’s all right,’ said Carver. ‘I don’t want your money… or your porn.’

Ajay gave a tired smile. ‘It’s “prosperity”,’ he said. ‘Ironic, innit?’

‘At least it wasn’t “peace”.’ Carver saw the black torch lying on the floor in front of Ajay and Chrystal, picked it up and said, ‘Right, I’m going now. I can’t be certain it’s completely safe up top, so don’t move from here till the police find you.’ He nodded at Paula Miklosko. ‘Make sure she gets seen by a doctor as soon as possible. I made a mess of your shop. Sorry about that. About tonight… I wasn’t here. If anyone asks, you defended yourselves with a bit of help from a bloke called Snoopy. You were heroes. He was a hero. The people who attacked you were murderous filth. You’ll probably get medals. You deserve to. But I wasn’t here. Is that understood?’

They nodded at him wordlessly and Carver turned to go.

‘Excuse me,’ called out Maninder, ‘but you never even told us your name.’

‘I know,’ said Carver.

Maninder nodded. ‘Well, thank you, anyway. We owe you our lives.’

‘You’re welcome.’

He went back up the stairs, the torch in one hand, the shotgun in the other, and slipped through the damaged door to the storeroom. Inside it was deserted apart from a small group of the dead and dying strewn by the scorched hole where the door to the shop had once been. As the torch-beam swept the room, Carver heard a rustling sound and shone the light in its direction, catching a shadowy figure staggering, doubled-over in pain, as it fled through the back door. One of the blast-victims made a feeble attempt to lift a hand in supplication and gasped, ‘Help me.’ Carver knew there was absolutely nothing he could do. He turned the torch off, then stopped for a moment and listened for any other signs of movement or hostile action, but the only sounds to be heard were coughs, wheezes and gurgles coming from the supermarket, making it sound like a hospital ward filled with consumptives and lung-cancer patients. Carver would check it out in due course, but first there was work to be done.

Even without the torchlight he could see the outline of the office entrance. He slipped through it, closed the door behind him, and turned the torch back on to find little trace of the carnage elsewhere, just the usual paperwork of a small business. There were box-files on shelves; plastic trays filled with invoices and correspondence; more papers strewn chaotically across a desk; a mug containing half a dozen pens and pencils; and a Dell PC next to a black box whose facia was covered with buttons like a domestic satellite receiver. Carver pressed the ‘on’ button on the computer and was not entirely surprised to see that it worked. It struck him that the air-blast had worked a bit like a neutron bomb: killing human beings but leaving property largely intact.

Two minutes later the entire CCTV feed for the past twelve hours had been deleted. He sprayed the computer keyboard with screen-cleaner fluid from a pump-spray bottle standing next to the Dell, then wiped it down with his handkerchief. Carver looked up to establish the position of the door so that he could find it again in the dark. Then he turned off the torch and repeated the cleaning process.

He had one more use for the cleaner fluid, so he put it in his jacket pocket, and it was then that he realized the head cam was already there. Carver took the camera out. The ‘record’ light was on, a glaring red dot in the darkness. It must have been running all the while, capturing the sounds, if not the images, of the supermarket battle. What was more, the head cam’s owner had been wearing and presumably using it when Carver and Schultz had gone to rescue Paula Miklosko. So their faces would be on it, too. Carver’s immediate instinct was to go straight back to the computer and delete all the head cam’s video files, just as he’d done with the CCTV. Then he stopped. There was evidence against him on here, true, but there might also be evidence against other people, evidence he could use. He turned the camera off. For now, at any rate, its contents were staying put.

Carver, however, had to get going. And that meant doing something he’d been putting off for the few minutes he’d been in the office. He had to go back into the shop and see for himself the havoc that his homemade bomb had wreaked.