But the greatest defilements had been reserved for the things Aitken Mustafa May loved the most: the photographs of his children, who seemed to be many and by different women; the Mercedes paperweight, property of a proud new owner; the bronze figurines and ancient ceramic pots; or the jacket of his brand-new dark-blue lightweight suit by Aquascutum, parts of which were still draped over the back of his chair; or the illuminated Koran, desecrated by heaves so powerful they had sliced through the table it was lying on; or the picture of Julie, taken, I imagined, by the same photographer who had posed them on the sunlit log, but here she was to be seen in a bathing suit, standing on the deck of what was supposed to be a Caribbean cruiser, leaning into the camera with her smile. And the discreet trophies of his other life, such as the brass shell case cut down to make a flower vase and the silver-plated armoured personnel carrier inscribed to him from a grateful but anonymous buyer, both flattened.
I retraced my footprints down the corridor. The kitchen door was still open, but I passed it without a look. My gaze was fixed straight ahead of me, where a different door, this time of steel, barred my advance. A bunch of keys hung from the keyhole, and as I made to turn the key that was already in the lock, I noticed the keys to Aitken May's Mercedes nestling among them. I dropped the bunch into my pocket, stepped over the steel threshold, and, by the daylight coming through the open doorway behind me, saw that the corridor was now brick-lined and that sandbags filled the boarded windows. I remembered the outside aspect of the house and knew I was in the second freight car. I was still making this discovery when I went blind.
Struggling for sanity, I concluded that the steel door behind me had swung shut, either of its own free will or because somebody had pushed it, and that I would therefore do best to search for a light switch, though I doubted whether any electrical system could have survived so much destruction. But I remembered the answering machine and took heart. And my optimism was rewarded, for, feeling my way along the brickwork, I discovered to my joy the line of an external electrical wire. Returning the gun to my waistband—for what could I shoot in pitch darkness?—I followed the wire's path with my fingertips, and suddenly there before me in glorious Technicolour was a bulbous green light switch, not six inches from my eyes.
I was in an indoor firing range. It ran the distance of the buildings, perhaps a hundred feet. At its end, under stark downlights, stood man-sized targets of unabashed racist implication: grinning Negroid or Asiatic ogres clutching submachine guns across their chests, one knee lifted as they cleared whatever they had just bayonetted, their uniforms dappled green and ochre, their steel helmets tipped saucily awry to suggest a lack of discipline. The place where I stood was the firing area: there were sandbags to stand or kneel behind, and metal forks to rest your firearm, and telescopes if you wished to study the target, and armchairs if you didn't.
And just a few yards beyond the firing area, hauled into the centre of the range and obstructing it for any serious-minded user, stood an armourer's workbench with blood on it. And round the feet of the workbench and on the floor, more blood. Which accounted for the smell I had been noticing but had attributed to gun oil and old cordite fumes. But it wasn't either of these things. It was blood. Slaughterhouse blood. And this tunnel was where the slaughter had taken place, this soundproofed bunker devoted to the profitable entertainments of destruction. This was where the victims had been dragged, one shoeless, one without his jacket, and a third—as I now feared from the sight of the brown cotton overall hanging from a nail above a row of workman's tools—without his storeman's overalls. This was where they had been cut up at leisure, in the seclusion of this artificial silence, before being carried by men in plain shoes or track shoes through the kitchen and across the pile of sawdust to whatever it was that had two wheels and was waiting for them.
Oh, and on the way someone had stopped to paint a tree. Tree as in Forest. Tree as in blood.
