Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 22

'Maybe. But that wasn't the reason I didn't do anything. The reason was that at that moment I was on his side. At that moment I was more than half shifter myself. '

Seeing Jaz smile at this, Charles instantly tensed.

'Don't do your psychoa.n.a.lyis bit on me, Jaz, all right? Just don't. I really don't need it now.'

'I was only smiling because...'

'I know why you were smiling. You've been insinuating it ever since I first met you. I do this work because deep down I'm a shifter myself: that's your theory, isn't it? I'm some kind of a shifter voyeur who likes to watch.'

'There's nothing particularly unusual about that Charles. It's like poachers and gamekeepers. It's like me and the ...'

Charles wouldn't let her finish.

'Listen, Jaz. Shifters kill people all right? They shot poor old Burkitt in the face. They killed fifty people in Clifton. Fifty. Adults and children. They killed and they raped and they maimed!'

He'd jumped up from the sofa and was pacing back and forth across the little room. She had never seen him so agitated.

'And what's more...' He was almost shouting now. 'And what's more, they killed my own mother and father!'

He turned to face her, his jaw jutting angrily, his face blotchy.

Jazamine gave an incredulous laugh.

'Your mother and father? What are you talking about Charles? How could shifters have killed them? It was a joyrider in a car! And it was years ago, long before shifters were even heard of.'

Of course Charles knew this was true, but he was oddly startled by it all the same, startled and somehow deflated.

'Well... well, I mean he was like a shifter, then,' he muttered. 'He was some idiot who thought he was the only one in the world that mattered. Some idiot who thought the lines on the road weren't meant for him.'

'But you're confusing things, Charles, you're getting things tangled up in your mind. That joyrider wasn't a shifter for one thing and, for another, as you've often said yourself, not all of those who really are shifters are killers. Most aren't. The great majority of them aren't. Tammy wasn't a killer, for example, was she? You really mustn't mix everything that upsets you into one big scary lump.'

'Don't do that therapist thing. Don't try and make me...'

'I'm not "doing that therapist thing"!' Now Jaz was standing too. 'And I'm not trying to make you do anything. I'm trying to have a relationship with you, that's all. I'm telling you how I see you and how I see the world. I'm sorry if me having my own viewpoint is unacceptable to you, but if so, perhaps you'd better go back to living on your own and staring into these f.u.c.king mirrors!'

She couldn't know it, but she was repeating almost word for word what Charles' previous girlfriend had said on the day she left.

'Yes, and what exactly do you think it is I'm trying to make you do?' she added after a moment. 'Swallow some slip? Do a shift? You seem to be doing a good job of going down that road all by yourself, wouldn't you say, without any help from me? You're the one that stole the stuff and hid it in your drawer, remember? Or did I somehow make you do that too with one short conversation at a party and one single interview in an office? Am I that powerful? Are you that paranoid?'

'No, but you...'

'And now I come to think of it, why did you steal them anyway? If I try and make sense of why you do things, you accuse me of psychoa.n.a.lysing and manipulating you, but you never offer me any other explanations of your own, do you? Never. So what am I supposed to think? '

'I took the seeds because... I'm not sure. That's one of those hard questions you ask me that I don't seem to be able to answer.'

'Charles, if you do things that could cost you your livelihood and get you sent to prison, you do at least need to have an explanation for them. That's a reasonable expectation, don't you agree?'

Later, as they lay side by side in silence in his darkened bedroom, not touching or talking, not close in any way except in terms of literal s.p.a.ce, Charles thought again about the train and the station. It wasn't his memory, he realised now, it was a switch to another Charles Bowen, one of the Charles one-trillion-and-ones, one of the Charleses who'd gone ahead and swallowed a seed after that long night at the beginning of the Thurston Meadows investigation.

And as he lay there, straining to recover the particular mood, or feeling, or flavour, of that little fragment of a life being led in another universe, a second fragment came to him.

'I had it the wrong way round,' the other Charles murmured.

He hadn't reached the station yet. He was still on the train with a little way to go, looking out of the window at birch trees and bracken and sandy heath.

'It wasn't the part of me that was trying to get out that was the problem. It was the part of me that was trying to hold it in.'

He looked at his watch. The station was only five minutes away now. There'd be a short taxi ride after that, and then he'd be there.

But where? Charles the Charles in the dark beside Jazamine - was still trying to work that out when another memory came pushing up into his conscious mind. It wasn't a switch this time. It wasn't even from long ago. It was a straightforward memory of something he himself had done only a few hours previously, but somehow managed to push out of his mind, like the seeds in the sock drawer.

Jaz had commented on how long the meeting had gone on, but in fact it had ended punctually. He'd been late because he hadn't come straight back. After leaving that hotel in the city centre, he'd driven all the way out to Britannia House and the office which his section would very soon be leaving.

The place had been empty and he'd crossed the open plan office in almost complete darkness. Reaching his little Perspex cubicle, he'd turned on his desk lamp and his computer and then opened up the national database which Special Cases Units across the country had gradually built up over the last few years from interviews with shifters. On the Perspex screens around him, superimposed over empty desks and blank computer monitors, his own ghostly reflections stooped over their own ghostly keyboards.

When he'd finished copying the database, he'd opened a newspaper archive that his section used for reference purposes, so as to be able to compare the accounts shifters gave of other timelines with this one, and to try and identify the points of divergence. This too he'd copied, and his ghostly reflections did the same.

Then he'd gone to the 'Chart', the tentative cla.s.sification of the different timelines which the section had begun to a.s.semble, which showed the putative branching off points of the different universes from the one that he then inhabited. It was a kind of tree, a rough map of Igga. Only when he'd finished copying that and had slipped the data stick into his briefcase a flagrant contravention of the Official Secrets Act which could easily get him ten years in prison did he shut down the computer and head for home.

Chapter 17.

In the white-tiled room, a police officer called Marley tossed down the morning's edition of The Daily Mail.

'Seen this, Carl?'

The headline read 'HE'S NO SON OF MINE' and below it was a picture of Carl's mother, teeth in and sober, with an expression of tragic indignation on her face.

Carl pushed the paper away wearily. Two different prison officers had already gleefully shown it to him. It had been the same a week ago when Shane Wheeler had made himself 5,000 by providing another newspaper with the pretext to print a story called 'THE MONSTER I CALLED MY FRIEND.' Carl had once been an obscure outsider even in the marginal world of Thurston Meadows, but now everyone in Britain knew his name.

'Got a cigarette, mate?'

He had lost two stone in weight and had a long half-healed gash on his face from an attack by another prisoner with a piece of gla.s.s.

'A cigarette, Carl? Well, if you're a very good boy you may get one later. We'll have to see.'

Marley was sitting across the desk with another detective called Kadinsky. Behind them stood a tall, grey, posh-looking man Carl hadn't met before.

'Let's talk about Burkitt, Carl,' said the tall man. 'He was once your social worker but you say you've never been to his house?'

'No, like I keep saying, mate, I don't even know where he lived. Why would I? The deskies don't tell you that sort of thing. I don't think they're even allowed to.'

'You're absolutely sure that you've never been to his house?' the tall man persisted.

'No, I never been there. What's the point of asking me over and over again?'

'Well, you've changed your story before now, Carl, over the Steven McIntosh case.'

'Slug, you mean? I told you that wasn't me.'

Marley sighed.

'I know you told us that, but what James here is saying is that you originally told us you didn't know anything about it, and then you changed your mind.'

'So to get this absolutely straight,' the tall man said. 'You've never been to Burkitt's house?'

'No, mate.'

'And you don't know where it is?'

'No, I've got no idea.'

'You're absolutely sure about that?'

'Yeah, I'm f.u.c.king sure. How many times have I got to...'

'You see Carl,' purred the tall man, 'we have some new information that we need you to comment on.'

Carl's mouth was suddenly very dry. Marley smiled grimly.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Like how do you explain the fact that forensics have picked up one of your hairs at Mr Burkitt's house?'

'Or that, stuck to the unappetising goo at the bottom of your mother's dustbin,' the tall man said, 'we found the torn and scrumpled corner of Mr Burkitt's visiting card?'

Carl was trembling.

'How should I f.u.c.king know? It must have been Erik, trying to f.u.c.king frame me.'

'That would have been very clever of him. He'd also have had to copy your shoeprints onto the floor of Mr Burkitt's house, and your fingerprints onto the door handle. And then of course there's the record we have of you crossing the Thurston Meadows Line in a van about an hour before the murder took place, along with two men who we now know to have been shifters. Not to mention the two sightings by the residents of Canterbury Close of a man answering to your description.'

Carl pressed his face into his hands and rocked slowly in his seat.

'I didn't mean to do it,' he said at last, his mouth so dry that he could hardly form the words. 'They made me. They didn't give me no choice.'

He felt as if millions of people were watching him, staring in at him through their TV screens from living rooms up and down Britain. They were shaking their heads, they were clucking their tongues, they were calling him heartless, cowardly and cruel. He tried to think of one single person who would say anything different and the only one he could think of was the man he'd shot.

'You're basically rather a kind person,' he remembered Cyril Burkitt saying. 'You hate the idea of killing me so much that you refuse to even let yourself think about it. And unfortunately that's what makes it possible.'

'Mr Burkitt understood,' Carl muttered.

'He understood what?' asked the tall man.

'He understood why I did it.'

'So you did shoot him, Carl?' the tall men asked coldly. 'That's what you're now saying? Can you please just confirm for the tape that yet again you are changing your story and admitting to the murder of your former social worker?'

'Yeah I did shoot him, mate, but... but you've got to understand I didn't want to do it. I liked the old geezer. But they made me. Even he understood that.'

'No one makes you do a murder...' began Marley, but the tall man raised a hand to get him to stop.

'Who made you do it, Carl?' he asked, standing close to Carl and leaning down into his face. The stench of his halitosis seemed only to emphasise the extent of his contempt. 'Who made you do it? Don't just say Erik. Don't just talk about a bunker and some kind of lava lamp. Believe me, it's in your interest to tell us more, and you'll be coming back to this room, day after day after day, until you've told us everything you know.'

Charles was in the back of a silver car with a swooping hawk logo, whooping and wailing through the Bristol streets at 70 mph. A new shifter had been picked up in Thurston Meadows, something needed to be done about it, and Charles and his two colleagues were the 'something'. They were the SIS. They were the people charged with taking slip out of circulation, tracking down shifter activity, and rooting out the alien cults that proliferated, like mushrooms in some dark cellar, in the hidden worlds of the Social Inclusion Zones. And, since one of their most important functions was to be seen to be attending to these things, they were expected to follow up these calls as loudly and conspicuously as possible.

The driver, a former military policeman, was well aware of this requirement and he played his part to the full, providing brake-screeching corners and noisy bursts of acceleration as they rushed across the city. As a matter fact, he was absolutely loving it, and so was the burly nurse beside him in mirror gla.s.ses, who'd been transferred to the SIS from a hospital for the criminally insane. Both men maintained an elaborately nonchalant poise as the traffic scurried out of their way, their limbs loose, their expressions so casual as to be almost bored.

At the Thurston Meadows Line, heavily armed paratroopers opened the barrier as the car approached and waved it through. The nurse gave a loose, lazy wave of thanks, and the paras waved back in like manner: tough, laconic heroes at the front line of a conflict between light and darkness, acknowledging their common purpose. Then the military policeman stepped on the accelerator again and the silver car leapt forward with a roar and a cloud of smoke, shooting past the field hospital that had been set up on the corner of Meadow Way and Asphodel Avenue, zipping round a column of armoured cars parked along b.u.t.tercup Drove and rushing headlong towards the new watchtowers at the entrance to the Central Square.

'Another day, another f.u.c.king Zone,' observed the nurse with a theatrical sigh.

Meanwhile a warm sun was shining, clouds of cherry blossom were bursting forth and new green flesh was unfolding itself everywhere into the creamy air. Indifferent to the agitation in the human world, the planet had been spinning through s.p.a.ce, just as it always did, and spring had come round again. It had come round here and in countless other worlds, in each one according to a minutely different pattern, so that if all the parallel worlds could be brought together, there would be no separate leaves or blades of gra.s.s but only a green haze.

A little cringing creature was weeping in the corner of a cell. His name was Damian and he said he was seventeen years old.

'I haven't swallowed nothing, mate!' he sobbed. 'You've got to believe me, man, I haven't f.u.c.king swallowed nothing! I used my last slip getting here! Don't shove nothing down my throat mate please, please, I'm f.u.c.king begging you.'

'There's an easy way of doing this and there's a hard way, Damian,' said the military policeman.

'We need him on a table face down,' the nurse told an excited audience of half-a-dozen policemen and paratroopers. 'We need his head well below his stomach.'

'Best use the table in the interview room there,' called out the DSI custody sergeant.

'And I'll need this bucket half-filled with water.'

A policeman hurried to oblige.

'Please!' shrieked Damian. 'Please! I ain't got no f.u.c.king slip in me! Why don't you f.u.c.king believe me?'

But they all got hold of him and dragged him through to the interview room , where the nurse opened up his black bag with a little flourish, put on his plastic gloves and broke open one of his sterilised packs of gastric lavage tubes, funnels, and wedges for forcing open reluctant mouths.

'Come on Damian, let's get this over with,' said the Custody Sergeant as they forced the boy onto the table.