Seventy-Two Virgins Read online

  So when he saw what had happened to the hedge, he felt an almost superhuman surge of loyal rage. The desecration was bad enough on its own, the tremendous battlefield aura of aggression and violation that rose from the buzz-sawed stumps. It was insane, in itself, that Price should have felt able to cross the frontier, in broad daylight, and perpetrate this massacre. But the real offence was the insult that made Vie cry, and made Dennis sink to his knees in lamentation. ‘My trees,’ he cried, and his voice rose over Wednesbury like Rachel weeping for her children.

  At the end of the lawn, next to a mound of hacked-off foliage, were the limbs and trunks of the victims, neatly hewn by this psychopath, into even lengths. Propped up, in felt tip, was an amateur advertisement: ‘Logs for sale.’

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Price the Cheese. ‘Law’s been changed, hasn’t it. The council sends you three warnings, and then they are entitled to chop down a vexatious tree.’

  ‘I saw no warnings,’ said Dennis Faulkner.

  ‘Really?’ Price cocked an eyebrow.

  ‘What is this law?’ wailed Vie.

  ‘Check it out. It’s called the High Hedges Act. Labour chap called Stephen Pound. First piece of Labour legislation I’ve agreed with, actually.’

  For many human beings there is something psychologically disabling about an act of violence on this scale. Some will lash out, and let the instant flame of vengeance bloom in their hearts; others find themselves winded, depressed, and full of the loneliness of the victim. So Dennis and Vie made themselves a Baxter’s mushroom-rich cuppasoup and retreated to their bedroom. As he lay in his own narrow cell, adorned with Lord of the Rings posters and a Sunday Times map of the Roman Empire, Dean listened to their defeated murmurs and fed his fury. He knew in his heart that Price had a point. They all knew it secretly, even Vie. But the coffee-coloured semi-detached adolescent saw in the disaster a chance for oneness with his parents.

  He would fight their corner. He would make a great act of atonement for the fact of his difference. He lay and watched the car headlights pass with aqueous mystery across the ceiling. Perhaps he would execute some Godfather-type revenge, and cause Price to wake screaming, his sheets polluted with a gigantic truckle of one of his experimental fromages. Then he had a better idea. Expertly skipping the stair that creaked he went downstairs, equipped himself, and stole like the shadow of a panther into the garden of Price the Cheese.

  In the months that followed his social workers and probation officers would often ask him where he had come by the idea; and though it was of course the classic culmination of neighbour disputes, from Birmingham to Bosnia, he always insisted that it was his own.

  The first warning Price had was the BANG of the frosted glass on the front door, blown in by the heat from the banked bonfire of logs and kerosene-drenched brushwood. Immediately his house began to surrender itself to the flames. The junk mail writhed and was consumed on the mat. The mat offered no resistance. All along the corridor it was a tale of instant, ecstatic capitulation by the pictures and soft furnishings. All Price’s possessions were ready to turn themselves in, without a fight, and might have betrayed their master to perdition, had he not heard the boom, nipped out from under his duvet in his Viyella pyjamas, opened the landing window, and leapt for the now non-existent branches.

  So Price the Cheese fell with an oath, because he had no doubt who had done this to him, and bust his ankle.

  As he stood with his parents watching several thousand gallons of water thud into the Hollyhocks, and as the glare of the last flames died on their aghast faces, Dean knew what to do. He took a snap decision. He would say nothing. It was certainly possible that Dennis would hail him as a hero, and love him forever more for visiting such destruction on his enemy. But as he looked at the soaking, carbonized living room, and as the night air of Wolverhampton was filled with the smell of toasted cheese, he decided not to take the risk.

  As a strategy, it failed. The police came looking and found a jerry can covered with Dean’s fingerprints, in the Faulkner shed. Dean was taken to the living room, and under the gaze of the Queen Mother, his adoptive parents, and two kindly members of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, he burst into tears. His mother said nothing, but it was the words of his father that he kept and nursed, coddling and crooning over them when he wanted to bruise his heart into hatred.

  Poor Dennis had tried so hard, for Vie’s sake, to love the kid with all his heart, but he had never utterly succeeded. ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ he said now, swatting the side of his head as though a mosquito had landed on either ear.

  ‘You stupid little … coon!’

  As soon as the word was out he wanted to choke it back. Vie was furious. Dennis had never said anything like it before, and it was a complete rejection of everything she stood for, what with her work in the Sue Ryder shop and all.

  ‘Dennis!’ she snapped. ‘Oh I’m sorry, my dear,’ said the former lift executive, advancing on Dean.

  One of the policemen scribbled ‘coon’ in his notebook. You never knew how these things would go. But Dean shrank before him, and the ambiguities in his status seemed to fade away.

  There it was, en c/air, decoded. He was a coon, and he was stupid, and he was stupid because he was a coon. And whenever he was subsequently affected by doubt or scruple about what he was doing, he would say ‘stupid coon’ to himself, and immediately the watertight bulkheads in his brain would come crashing down. Which was what Dean did now as he sat in the stifling heat in the back of the ambulance, assisting in a plot that had started to go wrong almost as soon as it began.

  ‘Stupid little coon,’ he said to himself, as though reciting a passage from the Holy Koran, and shut the gates of mercy on mankind.

  ‘The train of death is on its way,’ said Jones. ‘Its riders are steadfast. Nothing will stop them or turn them back.’

  ‘Yeah, all roight then,’ said Dean.

  Jones pulled up outside the Red Lion pub. The Muslim wrinkled his nose at the smell of beer. He could see the boom ahead, painted with red and white chevrons, and the car park beyond it, normally used by MPs, from which he proposed to set out on foot.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  0911 HRS

  Adam Swallow rose and walked towards the driver’s window.

  ‘Are you the guys I am expecting?’ Jones nodded. Adam looked into those eyes and felt a momentary lurch of uncertainty. He hoped to goodness that Benedicte had got this thing right.

  He wondered how the hell he was going to pass this gang off as a TV crew. He looked at Habib, now playing again with his rosary; at Haroun with his expression of a camel about to spit; he saw the kid, blocking the gangway to the back.

  Adam tried to peer into the darkness.

  ‘So, which one of you is the victim?’

  ‘He is behind,’ said Jones, jerking his thumb. ‘He is not very well. Please respect his condition.’

  ‘I didn’t realize he would still need an ambulance?’

  ‘Certainly. We have many supporters in the healthcare services.’

  ‘OK,’ said Adam, and prepared to hand over the car park pass, thinking as he did so that he would ring Benedicte as soon as he could.

  Just as Jones’s hand was about to close on Roger’s plastic card, emblazoned with the Portcullis of Parliament, Adam’s hand twitched, and the pass jerked just out of reach. He couldn’t help it. He had to ask.

  ‘Do you mind telling me what kind of torture it was? Was it in Abu Ghraib?’ he said, naming the notorious jail in Baghdad.

  ‘The Americans did it,’ said Jones.

  ‘The American women did it,’ said Haroun. ‘They did it with the long sweeping brush handle and the dog.’ He mimed, and Adam flinched.

  Without a word, he handed over the plastic pass, and Jones reignited the engine, and drove towards the boom.

  The Yanks would be here any minute.

  ‘Worra you lot on about?’ wailed Dean, and was hit by Haroun.

  The cavalcade n
ow found itself somewhat ahead of schedule as it pulled through Chelsea.

  ‘Bloody Yanks,’ said one Chelsea pensioner, as he sat champing and bemedalled in Ranelagh Gardens. ‘All the gear and no idea.’ Most of his life, post-war, had been dominated by a single controversy: who was the greater general, Monty or Eisenhower, and why did Monty dither at Caen? On this subject he literally bored for Britain.

  POTUS in three minutes, crackled the news in the ears of Joe, Matt and all the other USSS men in Parliament Square.

  More like Patton than Eisenhower, the cavalcade moved in its lightning thrust through London, and the upper air was full of American communications.

  So huge, in fact, was the US Secret Service men’s requirement for bandwidth that yesterday, at Windsor, they had disabled Her Majesty’s TV aerial, and she had been unable to watch Channel Four racing. Conversation at dinner had been strained.

  ‘I jes lurve to watch the horses,’ the President said. ‘Most afternoons I take a nap in the Oval Office, and I whack on that TV and watch a race. Don’t you watch the races, ma’am?’

  ‘Hmmf,’ said the Queen.

  This morning her TV was still on the blink, and so she felt no particular obligation to watch the speech that was about to take place, without her, in Westminster Hall.

  POTUS in two, came the whisper from the smarties on the lapels of the USSS men.

  In the Ops Room at New Scotland Yard the London police were still analysing the implications of the news from Horseferry Road. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Purnell: ‘How many ambulances are there right now in the Westminster area?’

  ‘I don’t know. A hundred. Tops.’

  ‘If all this is true, we’ll find the damn thing in five minutes. Roll the CCTV camera film. Oh, another thing. Your dead traffic warden is meant to have recorded all the details in his Huskie, isn’t he?’

  ‘Ye ssir.’

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for? We’ll be able to find out all about it from the Apcoa computers. There can’t have been that many illegally parked ambulances in Tufton Street.’

  ‘Right, sir. I just wondered, sir, given that the whole thing is about to start in a few minutes, whether we should, you know, tell the Americans?’

  ‘I’ve got 14,000 officers in Central London. We ought to be able to find one rogue ambulance without involving 950 trigger-happy Americans.’

  ‘Righty-ho, sir… But hang on, sir, I’ll have to tell Colonel Bluett we’re raising the alert threshold. What if he wants to know why?’

  ‘Tell Bluett to call me,’ said the ranking British officer. Before they could dial him, Bluett was on the line.

  POTUS in one minute said the headsets.

  The ambulance lolloped down towards the police booth that guarded the Norman Shaw car park. Roger’s open sesame was waved; the tank trap went down; the metal boom went up.

  The fatal machine had penetrated the walls of the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, pregnant with arms. Jones parked it smartly and out of the way, in Bay 20 of the small tarmac yard.

  As he walked towards it, using a spare visitor’s pass from Cameron to clear the turnstile, Adam suddenly felt a fierce flush of righteousness. The logic of the ambulance now seemed obvious to him, and as he looked at the tinted side window, he speculated murderously about the condition of the poor man within.

  He and Cameron had been together in his Holborn flat when, trawling the antiwar websites, he had come across the archive of horror from Abu Ghraib. It wasn’t so much the cruelty that got her, the hooding and beating and killing. It was the female involvement, and the way the whole thing was conducted with the simpering, grinning crassness of pornoloop America.

  ‘Now I understand it,’ Cameron had said, when they looked together at one of the unprintable images, of a naked Iraqi corpse, and a rather pretty Virginia girl brainlessly mugging for the camera. ‘Now I understand how you could become a suicide bomber.’

  Of course, he couldn’t tell Cameron about the stunt that Benedicte had outlined to him, and in which he was collaborating. He knew that she would be prevented by her obligation to Roger, and her instinctive deference towards the office of the President of the United States of America.

  So they had worked out a story about a TV crew; and when the truth emerged, he would of course take the heat, and he knew she would forgive him.

  As he walked towards the van, he wondered how exactly they would bring the injured man in, and what his injuries were. Would he need a wheelchair? Would they use a stretcher?

  He wouldn’t stay to find out, because his plan was to be there in the hall when they entered. He wanted to see the expression on the face of the President.

  No one of importance had resigned, in the wake of the scandal. None of the crack-brained neocons had really been confronted with the full awfulness of their doctrines. Now was the time for a reckoning.

  It would be worth it.

  From the driver’s window, Jones was gesturing at him to stay back.

  ‘Everything all right?’ said Adam.

  ‘Please wait,’ said Jones in a whisper. ‘It is the time of prayer.’ Jones wound up his window again, and Adam nodded, and removed his presence some way.

  He wished Cameron would hurry up.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  0914 HRS

  Now the noise was rising from the square, to mark the imminent Presidential arrival, and the crowd was flagellating itself with posters, denouncing everything American from bombs to powdered baby milk, like distraught mullahs at an ayatollah’s funeral.

  And Cameron’s anxiety was rising with every one of her accelerating steps, as she went down the cloister, her papers clutched to her bosom. Roger watched her go, and so did several others.

  Just then a taxi pulled up outside the Members’ Entrance. The occupant got out, tipped, and was rewarded with a blatant fistful of blank receipts. It was Felix Thomson, who had spent the last few minutes sitting in the back while rubber-gloved officers subjected the taxi to prostatic indignities, scoping and palping for bombs, and gazing with dental mirrors at the undercarriage.

  ‘Ah, Felix,’ said Roger, and they adopted attitudes as transparently insincere as Molotov hailing Ribbentrop.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said Felix, shaking his grey locks.

  ‘And how is Felix this fine morning?’

  ‘Felix is little short of superb,’ said Felix.

  ‘I saw your proprietor the other night,’ said Roger, who knew how to irritate a journalist.

  ‘Ah,’ said Felix, and made a face of holy hypocrisy, like a cardinal discussing the health of the Pope.

  ‘I think I should let you know that he thinks the media are a seething mass of mushy-minded anti-American pinkos, especially on his own papers.’

  ‘You amaze me.

  ‘Not that you’ll be doing any of that anti-American stuff today, not in your sketch.’

  ‘I’d sooner be dead,’ said Felix.

  ‘The usual knockabout?’

  ‘Good, clean fun.’

  ‘Tremendous.’

  Felix had turned to go, fishing for his press gallery pass. Roger Barlow felt temptation welling up. ‘Hey Felix.’

  ‘Yes old man?’

  ‘I wonder whether I could beg a favour off you.’

  ‘Provided it doesn’t mean reporting one of your speeches.’

  ‘No, no, it’s nothing, it’s … Well, you know in newspapers .

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, in newspapers you chaps probably have a pretty good idea in the morning what you are going to put in the paper that day.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have the faintest idea.’

  ‘Not you, I mean the chaps in general. The top chaps, what do you call them, the sub-editors and things, don’t they draw up some kind of list of the main items of the day?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, the newslist, yeah.’

  ‘Right. The newslist.’

  ‘Is this going to take much longer, old boy, because I’ve got an
urgent appointment with a cup of coffee and a jam. doughnut.’

  ‘Absolutely, we’re just coming to the point here now. This newslist: this is something which is presumably accessible to anyone who is in the newspaper.

  ‘Yeah, but . .

  ‘And you are in the newspaper.

  ‘Well, I am on the newspaper.’

  ‘Exactly. You are on it. Is there any way, Felix, that you could have a squint at that newslist for today?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t normally.’

  ‘I know, but if you had a spare second, do you think you could conceivably flip it up, dial it up, download it?’

  ‘Do you mind my asking why?’

  ‘To be perfectly honest, and this is very embarrassing, I want to know if they are doing an article about me.’

  ‘An article about you?’

  ‘Yes, and if they are I promise I won’t make a fuss or do anything about it. I just kind of want to know, because it has been eating me up.

  ‘And what kind of article might this be? Are you making a speech?’

  ‘Well, actually I am making a speech today.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘It’s about water fluoridation, but I don’t expect the article will be about that.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It may well be about something else.’

  ‘Right you are, guy, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for an article about Roger Barlow, not mentioning water fluoridation.’

  Felix went into the press gallery whistling Papageno’s Song, and Roger felt the accustomed sweat of shame and idiocy on his brow. Everywhere people were coming and going as they got ready for the ceremony: reporters, MPs, researchers, security men and camera crews.

  POTUS coming through now.

  The bawling in Parliament Square reached a crescendo. On the roofs of the Cabinet Office, Portcullis House, the Treasury, the Welsh Office, the Foreign Office and all the way down Whitehall, police marksmen lay in the July sunshine, their black weapons soaking up the heat.