In the centre of the room sat a formica-topped kitchen table, its red surface scarred with circular burns and razor-straight slashes. A laptop computer occupied the centre of this table, its lid currently closed. An assortment of cables snaked on top of it like electrical spaghetti, and next to these lay a folded tripod and a digicam about the size of a wallet. Once upon a time, you’d needed a building’s worth of hardware to reach the world, but ‘once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days. Arranged around the table were four mismatched chairs, three of them occupied. The fourth was tilting at a crazy angle, held upright only by the pair of booted feet that were alternately pushing it away then hauling it back. Every other second it seemed the chair would topple, but it never did.
The feet’s owner was saying, ‘We should webcam it.’
‘… Why?’
‘Stick it on the intranet.’Stead of those clips. Let the whole world watch him crap himself start to finish.’
The other two shared a glance.
They were bulldog males, the three of them; different shapes and sizes, but with this much in common: they were bulldog males. You wouldn’t put your hand out to any of them and feel sure you’d get it back. Below them, in the cellar, Hassan Ahmed was calling them Larry, Curly and Moe, and if they’d formed a line-up for him, this was how it would have shaken down:
Larry was tallest, and had the most hair, though this wasn’t a fierce contest: where the other two were shaved to the bone, a mild fuzz covered Larry’s skull, somehow conferring on him an air of authority, as if he were wearing a hat in a room full of bareheaded men. He was thin-faced with restless eyes, which kept checking door and window, as if either might burst open at any moment. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up; he wore black jeans and brand-new trainers. Moe, meanwhile, was the middle-man in every sense: shorter than one, taller than the other, and with a belly a black tee-shirt did nothing to minimize. Unwisely he sported a goatee he stroked constantly, as if checking it remained attached.
As for Curly—the owner of the feet—he seemed to be the stupid one.
Larry told him, ‘We don’t want a webcam.’
‘Why not?’
‘We just don’t.’
‘He’s stinking that room out like a rat inna trap. We should let the world see what they’re like. When they’re not clambering on to buses with rucksacks loaded with Semtex.’
Moe, his tone of voice suggesting this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, said, ‘We set up a webcam, we double the chances of getting caught.’
‘We’re already putting the video clips out there.’
You could spend all day trying to drum simple stuff into Curly’s head, Larry thought, but sooner or later you were going to have to give up. If you wanted him to understand anything more complicated than a two-horse race, you’d either have to draw him a picture or just give him a cigarette and hope he’d forget about it.
But Moe persevered. ‘This stuff on the web, people are going to be trying to find where it’s coming from. There’s ways of hiding our tracks, and we’ve done all that. But we go live—we put a webcam down there, and it’ll be easier for them to trace us.’
‘And it’s the internet,’ Larry said. ‘By the way.’
‘What?’
‘In
‘Same difference.’
Larry looked at Moe again, and an unspoken thought passed between them.
‘Anyway,’ Curly said. ‘Think he’s scared now? He’ll be a steaming pile of chickenshit this time tomorrow.’
This with an air of finality, as if it were the final step in a careful argument.
‘I’m going for a crap,’ he added.
Both chairs hit the floor when he stood.
When he’d gone, Larry lit a cigarette, then tossed the pack to Moe. ‘Do you think he’s up to this?’
‘He’s not as stupid as he pretends to be.’
‘No, well. Cunt can walk and breathe at the same time, he’s obviously not as stupid as he looks.’
‘I said pretends.’
‘I heard.’
On the other side of the kitchen door Curly listened without moving a muscle, until satisfied they’d finished. And then he moved like smoke down the hallway and up the stairs, where he locked himself in the bathroom, and made a quiet call with a phone he shouldn’t have had.
Lamb was at his desk with a folder in front of him—an analysis of congestion charge anomalies, or Twitter feeds, or cash-in-hand real estate purchases in Beeston—but his attention seemed focused on the corkboard on his wall, on which an array of money-off tokens were pinned: the local takeaway pizza place; Costcutter’s price promise on Ginster’s sausage rolls. Catherine watched from the doorway. She’d intended to walk in, add her own report to his pile and leave, but something had snagged her. Lamb didn’t look like the Lamb they all knew and hated. There was something there that hadn’t been there before.
