Slow Horses полностью

It turned out there’d been a partial witness to the abduction; from her bedroom window, a woman had seen some lads ‘rough-housing’—her word—at the end of the lane opposite, then they’d all bundled into the back of a white van, a Ford, and headed east. She’d thought nothing of it at the time, but the news reports stirred her memory, so she took her snippet of information to the local cops. There were traffic lights in the direction the van had gone; over-hanging cameras monitored the junction. A partial number plate had been captured. This fragment was swiftly disseminated the length and breadth of the country; every force in the land matched it against recorded sightings of white Ford vans on motorways, in city centres, on garage forecourts. After that, it was only a matter of time. But it was a peculiar stroke of luck that broke the case wide open and brought armed-response cops bursting into Hassan’s cellar; it seemed that a local homeless man had.

Hassan opened his eyes. Darkness stared back. He closed them again. Armed-response cops burst in. He opened them. No they didn’t.

He hadn’t known time could crawl so slowly.

And hadn’t known this, either: that fear could take you away from yourself. Not simply out of time, but out of your body. Sitting in a hood and jumpsuit, like a patient in a surrealist’s waiting room, his grasp on the here-and-now slipped away, and that shrill voice at the back of his mind popped up, the one that delivered all his best riffs. Shaky, but recognizably his own, and trying to pretend none of this was happening; or that it had happened, but was now safely over; was now, moreover, material for the most scrotum-tightening stand-up routine ever. All those other hostages—the ones who’d spent years chained to radiators—they wrote their books, they made their documentaries, they hosted radio shows. But how many of them took it open-mic?

‘Let me tell you about my hood.’

Pause.

‘No, really. My hood.’

And then they’d get it, his audience; they’d get that he meant hood, the thing they’d put on his head. Not his ‘hood, where you couldn’t leave your car out overnight.

But that was as far as the shrill voice got. Because it wasn’t over. The stink was too foul for it to be over: the vomit, the shit, the piss; everything that fear had shifted out of its way when making space inside him. He was here. He didn’t have an audience. He’d never had an audience; every open-mic night at the Student U he’d been there, head full of material, stomach full of knots, but he’d never dared take the stage.

Funny thing was, he’d thought that had been fear. His dread of making a tit of himself in front of beered-up fellow students—he’d thought that had been fear. Like stubbing your toe on a railway sleeper, and hopping on the spot with the pain. Not seeing the train bearing down on you.

One minute, walking home. Next, bunged into a cellar, holding a newspaper for the camera.

Now that was fear.

And this, too was fear: We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web.

He liked the internet. He liked the way it brought people closer. His generation had thrown its arms around the globe, tweeting and blogging to its heart’s content, and when you were chatting online with a user called PartyDog, you didn’t know if they were a boy or a girl let alone black or white, Muslim or atheist, young or old, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it? …

Except that Hassan had once read about some toerag who’d seen a woman collapse in the street, and instead of trying to help, like a normal person—or hurrying past, like a normal person—he’d pissed on her, actually pissed on her, and filmed himself on his phone doing it, then posted it on the web for other toerags to laugh at. It was as if the internet validated certain actions … For a tiny moment it felt good to have something to blame for all this, even if what he was blaming was the internet, which could never be made to care.

And then that tiny moment too became another chip knocked off a block that was rapidly growing smaller; and the awareness that the moment had passed occupied the moment that followed it, and also the moment after that, and in neither of those moments, nor in any of those that came after it, did armed-response cops burst into the cellar, and find Hassan safe and sound.

The kitchen wasn’t anywhere you’d want to cook a meal. On the other hand, it wasn’t anywhere a meal had been cooked; its surfaces piled with takeaway containers and plastic cutlery, with greasy brown paper bags and pizza boxes, with empty soft drink bottles and discarded cigarette packets. Ashtrays had been made of anything that didn’t move. The lino curled at the corners, and a blackened patch by the back door suggested a small fire in the past.