Revenger

40

Carver had been in bus-stations attacked by suicide bombers. He’d seen hospitals hit by air-raids, and the burned-out remnants of an Iraqi tank regiment, blown to smithereens on the road from Baghdad to Kuwait. But there was something uniquely hellish about this. The corpses lay thick on the supermarket floor, a gruesomely vile and pointless slaughter that resembled a circle of hell as the blue-grey gloom and deep-black shadows were pierced by the flickering light of the flames and the sulphurous orange glow of the street lamps outside.

It disgusted Carver that he had been reduced to doing this. It shamed him that he had had the perverted skill to wreak such havoc. It angered him, too, for what choice had he had? He and the others would have died otherwise, of that there was no doubt. And for what?

Carver had known men who had killed for vast profits, or out of political or religious conviction. There were no excuses or moral justifications for their acts, but he could at least follow the calculations of those who thought their ends were important enough to justify such violent means. He could understand how suicide bombers believed that their self-destruction was in a great and worthy cause, even if he disagreed with them. But what had these people died for? Free fucking groceries.

Something caught Carver’s eye — a movement by the window. He stepped back into the shadow and stood motionless and silent as the slight figure of a girl appeared at the far side of the crashed garbage truck, peered in and then hesitated, not daring to come any further. From the size of her Carver guessed she must be around eleven or twelve. There was no sound in the room beyond the hacking and burbling of the rioters’ breaths, the occasional pathetic attempt at a call for help, and the fearful weeping of the dying. Some of the bodies were moving. Others were holding out hands in desperate supplication. Carver hoped to God that the girl would not understand what she was looking at; that the meaning of it would somehow pass her by.

She said something, but her voice was very faint, and Carver could not make out what it was. She straightened herself up and tried again, more loudly this time. ‘Ricky?’ and then again, ‘Ricky! Are you there? Mum says you gotta come home. You got school tomorrow.’

There was no reply. The girl stood there uncertainly, not sure what to do next. Then a barely audible whimper came from somewhere at the back of the room, an expression of pain unrelated to anything she had said. The girl must have recognized the voice as her brother’s, for she cried out, ‘Ricky!’ Carver could hear the relief, but also the mounting terror. She had still not taken a single step further into the shop. ‘Come on, Ricky, come home… please! Mum’ll kill ya if you don’t.’

There was another moan: the same voice as before, from the same place. Then the girl sniffed and cried out, ‘I don’t understand… I don’t know what to do!’

Every professional instinct told Carver to ignore the child. What mattered now was to avoid detection. The last thing he should do was to make himself identifiable. But as a human being, as a man, he simply could not stand by and ignore the girl’s distress. He’d brought the shotgun with him, just in case that last cartridge was needed for self-defence. Now he switched the gun to his left hand, held it casually down by his side and stepped out of the gloom. The girl gave a little squeal of alarm as she saw him loom up in front of her.

‘Don’t worry,’ Carver said. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

She looked at him. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘Go home and tell your mum she needs to call an ambulance. Your brother Ricky needs an ambulance. Soon as possible.’

‘Where is he? I want to see him!’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Carver said. ‘Just go and get an ambulance. That’s what Ricky needs.’

She didn’t move.

‘Please, just go,’ Carver insisted. ‘I’ll look after your brother.’

‘Why? Are you a doctor?’

Carver said nothing. The girl was trying to decide what to do. There was nothing more he could say now to help her make up her mind. He got a feeling she was about to turn and go but then there was another cry from the same direction as the previous ones.

‘Ricky! I’m coming!’ the girl shouted. She took a pace or two into the shop but then stopped. The bodies carpeted the floor of the shop so thickly that it was impossible to pick a clear path through them. At least half were still alive, though the number of survivors was diminishing with every minute that passed. Carver sighed to himself and gave a shake of the head; he could not believe what he was about to do.

‘Here, I’ll help you,’ he said and held out his right hand to her. The girl took it and let him guide her through the carnage.

‘Watch out,’ he said, seeing her about to tread on a twitching, outstretched hand.

The girl said, ‘Sorry,’ as she kicked into another body, cutting the end of the word short as she realized the body was dead. He was close enough to see her eyes now, and the bows on the ribbons that held her braids in place, close enough to see the look on her face as she suddenly gasped, ‘Ricky…’

There in front of them, slumped on the floor with his back up against a shelf, was a teenage boy, no more than fourteen, wearing an Adidas tracksuit over a Chelsea shirt. His eyes were still open, filled with fear and incomprehension, and there were small bubbles of foaming blood at the corners of his mouth as his lungs fought against the liquid filling them from within. The girl sat down next to her brother, taking his hand in hers and leaning her head against his shoulder. ‘I’m here, Ricky,’ she said. ‘I’m here…’

The boy was going to die for sure. But as Carver stepped away from the two kids and began spraying screen-cleaner all over the Mossberg he realized that there was something he could do to put right some of the wrong that he had been forced to do here. This riot had not been a spontaneous event. Someone had planned it. They’d brought a man in to act as the commander on the ground — that scrawny, grey-haired guy with the unexpectedly upmarket accent — and Carver was forced to admit that his old friend Schultz must have played some kind of a role in it too. Schultz had known things were going to kick off in Netherton Street, but he’d thought they’d be safe in the pub. That was why he’d been so astonished to see the mob come streaming in through the door, and that was surely the meaning of his final words: ‘It wasn’t meant to be like this.’

Outside, Carver could hear the sound of people coming to investigate. A woman started screaming. He put the gun down on the floor, in among the bodies. If any of his prints were still recoverable, which he doubted, they’d take days or even weeks to process, and he’d be long gone. There was a baseball cap, lying on the floor, blown from a rioter’s head. Carver picked it up and jammed it on, pulling the peak down over his eyes. He grabbed a scarf that had got wedged into one of the display units, and wrapped it round his face.

As he straightened up, his mind turned back to the implications of what Schultz had said. The riot was meant to be controlled and contained. It was intended to remind the public of the lawlessness of modern Britain.

Carver knew exactly who would want to give them a reminder like that.

The question was: how could he prove it?

Then he looked out of the window and got his answer.