Clown Town полностью

Being in London was a reminder of bad times. The streets were full of homeless soldiers. We wind them up and point them, but we don’t always bring them back afterwards—Christ, even Kipling recognised this. It’s not a new problem, it’s an old story. They had come home after Belfast, the four of them, accustoming themselves to a new existence; one in which danger was less overt, but car ignitions couldn’t be fired without the engines being checked first. As for their memories—of what they’d done, whose evil they’d helped facilitate—these had seethed unchecked. Pitchfork had been a nightmare made flesh; raping, murdering, but protected from justice by virtue of being a Service asset. The Troubles might be over, and the operation put to bed, but that didn’t mean sleep came easily. So in the end they’d made new vows, leaving CC out of it because he was too straight, too narrow, too good, to be included, and she and Al and Daisy had hunted down the beast in his Cumbrian fastness. As the previous evening’s events had reminded her, this was not something she would ever raise a toast to. But nor was it something she’d regret, or if she did, that would only be on account of what Daisy went through as a result, years afterwards, when she dropped off all their maps.

It was Al who’d found her, after months of searching. Avril had done her part, ruling avenues out. Daisy wasn’t using a credit card, wasn’t on an electoral roll. Driving licence, medical records, council tax; none of the usual snags had checked her fall. The more she looked, the more Avril feared that one of two scenarios were in play; either Daisy had deliberately taken on a new identity, shedding her old existence like a peeled eggshell, or, more frighteningly, had no plan, no design; had simply lost her hold on the everyday. In which case she could be anywhere—lost in the gaps that appear between stable lives—and would be impossible to find, because every gaze would pass through her.

But not Al’s. He found her in a settlement on London’s western edge; a reservation erected in the liminal space under a flyover, between two slip roads. There were caravans, and a heartbreaking attempt at homesteading had been made, with wire fencing marking out territories. A pair of cars, looking like collateral damage from a hot rod movie, were parked nose to tail, and from the rear window of one a pole extruded, a flag tied to it, though it hung too limply to be identified. There were dogs, because there were always dogs, and the air tasted of metal and ancient barbecue.

That same night, they’d gone to fetch her home, CC too, because it would have been a crime not to include him. It had been a straightforward affair, complicated slightly by the dogs. The encampment numbered eleven hostiles, not counting children, because on enemy territory every warm body is a hostile. The men were in their thirties or forties, allowing for some rough journeys, and had made the fundamental error of assuming that CC and Al were what they appeared to be, and Avril herself their harmless accessory. That had been the last occasion on which she had used a handgun, and while she regretted shooting two dogs, she did not regret it very much, not after opening the caravan where Daisy had been kept. They had taken cash with them, all they could rustle together, in case that proved the simplest solution, and in the end Al had tucked a ton into the shirt pocket of the camp leader as he lay on the ground, nursing a leg that wouldn’t ever work properly again. And then they had brought Daisy back into the world.

In the years since, the old Daisy had poked her head round the door, but she still had long stretches of silence. Her voice, like her frame, was frailer than before, like a dandelion being blown. But she had taken young Sid Baker down in a single fluid movement, and dandelions don’t do that.

CC was in his car now, starting up the engine. And there was Al, watching from a different corner: Oh you big hunk of man. He would still put himself between them and the slightest danger, she knew. Danger, these days, was younger and faster than him, but that wouldn’t stop him. Even if Daisy weren’t here, he’d act the same.

The car pulled away. She checked her phone: The tracker was transmitting. That CC hadn’t noticed them showed how distracted he was, which in turn suggested that whatever his meeting with Taverner had been about, it hadn’t included a mindfulness break. Daisy had appeared now too, on the corner behind Al, and as the pair crossed the road towards her, Avril had the sense they say comes with your last moments; not so much that she saw her life flashing before her eyes, but more that she felt it behind her, all its pent-up force propelling her into whatever would happen next.