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  As a rule, Prithy ignored the human race and all its vagaries, but this spur of human detritus fascinated him. He went about his daily travails, his curiosity about the woman’s stoic lack of movement poking him insistently, like the finger of an elderly relative who needs the toilet. Battered by the elements, her hair was a festering mop smeared across her grey-white face, whilst her eyes remained fixed on the sea. As he worked away at his latest construction – a particularly fine plank complete with nails made a lintel, a smashed Victorian balustrade became a wall – she did not stir. He could not afford to pause, to stop was to admit defeat before it became inevitable and yet her embittered eyes drew him to her like sodden garnets.

  ‘When will it stop?’ asked the woman through a jawbone that was almost atrophied with cold.

  Prithy pulled the carcass of a sack across the face of the four uneven stakes he had sunk into the ground and adorned his ceiling with a chandelier of seaweed and sea urchins. He stole a glance at the woman’s toes, nails bloodied and blue, at her legs, mud-ingrained and starkly thin, at her torso, barely decent between the rips and tears in her swimming costume. He had not spoken with a human being for so long that words, when they came, felt like white-hot Alphabetti Spaghetti on his tongue.

  ‘When will what stop?’

  ‘The horror.’

  He looked out at the sea as a burst of sunshine wove a tiny coruscating carpet which was instantly erased by the wind, at the seagulls, muzzled by the pitiless gale, at the surf, emulsifying the beach with alternating tenderness and rage. He saw it every night and every day and at last she had provided a name for it.

  ‘I bought a train ticket to the sea but I lost it.’ The woman opened her hand to evidence emptiness.

  ‘I sat on the train and I thought, I want to change into my swimming costume but if I go to the toilet to put it on, I will lose my place. So I decided to leave all of my things on the seat, my purse and my coat and my umbrella and my bag with my sandwiches in it. I always cut the crusts off because that’s the way my son likes them, the one I didn’t kill.

  ‘I looked at the man sitting beside me on the train, he had gentle hands and a lovely scarf and a cap which matched his eyes and I could see that he wouldn’t mind looking after my things and I asked him and he didn’t mind. So I went into the toilet and changed into my swimming costume but I couldn’t remember where I had been sitting. I walked up and down the train and I was sure that it had been just beside the toilet but the man and my things had all gone. So I was fucked, completely fucked, again. I went into the toilet and had a good cry and I washed my hands again and again until the room became a paper bag that someone had just burst with their fists and I heard someone screaming my name and I recognised the voice because it was mine. So I walked up and down the train again, shouting abuse at everything and everyone and then I realised I had left my clothes in the toilet. When I went back the toilet door was locked, then I saw the man with the scarf and the hat and he was dressed in my clothes, so I picked up his wallet and I threw it out of the train window. He got angry and grabbed my arm really, really hard and the ticket collector asked me for my ticket and I told him, “of course I don’t have a ticket now you tremendous fucking moron, where am I going to put a ticket, all I have left is this stupid fucking swimming costume?” And at the next station he threw me off the train and a British Transport Policeman tried to arrest me and I headbutted him and climbed over a fence with barbed wire on it and I expected him to follow me but he didn’t follow me. So I had to walk to the sea in bare feet and it was miles and miles and there was a field and a cow with the face of a frosted angel and a farmer waving a gun who wore a wreath of fire and here I am a mermaid sitting on a rock.’

  ‘And now you have found the sea,’ said Prithy.

  ‘And now I have found the sea because this is where I belong. I had a swimming lesson which I didn’t enjoy because I don’t like water and I don’t like exercise. I floundered about for an hour, unable to swim in any direction other than down but I thought, this should be enough for the purpose of being a mermaid but then I arrived here and saw the sea and I realised it’s far bigger than Kentish Town swimming baths. So I sat on this rock and looked out because that is what mermaids do and a ship came by and I wanted to lure it to its destruction but I didn’t know how so I threw a stone at it but it didn’t seem to notice.’

  It was raining so heavily now that the raindrops were forcing Prithy down into an involuntary stoop.

  ‘Would you like to come and sit in my…’ he had never had to find a name for the structures he built, to do so would have allowed them to become visible to the waves.

  ‘Castle,’ offered the woman, walking past him and crouching down through the inadequate doorway. Prithy followed and sat down next to her on a corrugated metal sheet which he had adorned with the bodies of three dead eels and the top shell of a crab.

  To say that the makeshift hut offered protection from the ardour of the storm would have been as deluded as the two minds that huddled within it, behind faces distorted with the effort of existence, but it was, at least, a different kind of discomfort. They sat, shoulders touching, each tethered so precariously to reality that one more raindrop might have cut them loose, to float off into oblivion.

  ‘You don’t look like a mermaid.’

  ‘How many mermaids do you know?’

  ‘One, I know one and you don’t look like her.’

  She studied the seaweed above her head that played with the back of her neck, at the rag doll who sat beside her, arms of shattered porcelain, eyes so sunken they echoed when he blinked. They were the eyes of her dog on the day when he died, eyes that knew more than any man what it was to exist a millisecond before existence began.

  ‘What happens when the tide comes in? Won’t this, won’t we, shatter? Won’t your castle be destroyed?’ asked the woman.

  Prithy moved his toe against hers. It felt like touching a dying plant.

  ‘Today might be different.’

  Chapter 27

  HM Prison Belmarsh, which housed the most dangerous criminals in the UK, was renowned for its uniquely penal ‘Close Supervision Centre’ – a specially contained unit for inmates with dangerous and severe personality disorders. Inside this prison within a prison, the governor had recently constructed the ‘Really Very Close Supervision Centre’, a prison within a prison within a prison and inside this, sat Hosiah Regolith Two Swords – the psychotic axe-wielding homicidal maniac’s psychotic axe wielding homicidal maniac. Every shit Two Swords shat was interrogated, every sneeze was dissected, every morsel Two Swords munched had already been masticated by the governor’s hand-picked crew of elite prison commandos – his ‘impenetrable wall of steel’ as the governor liked to call them. ‘This man,’ Governor Tatty Francis told the assembled world’s media, ‘this treacherous, savage, wild, vicious man is going nowhere,’ and nowhere was exactly where Two Swords went for the first 342 days, 12 hours and 13 seconds of his sentence.

  ‘He’s fucking escaped, how can he have fucking escaped?’ squawked Governor Francis into the face of Craig Pestle, the commanding commando of the evidently penetrable wall of steel. ‘Escaped where?’

  ‘I just mean,’ croaked Pestle, swallowing back the tears, ‘I just mean that he isn’t in his cell any more, which led me to deduce, to reach the conclusion that…’

  ‘What about the motion detectors, what about the infrared alarms, what about the CCTV, what does the CCTV show?’ yodeled Governor Francis.

  ‘It shows…’ stammered Pestle, ‘it shows him being there and then him not being there and now it shows…’

  ‘What does it show now?’ shrieked Governor Francis.

  ‘It shows him still not being there,’ winced Pestle.

  ‘What about your crack team?’ howled Governor Francis. ‘Seven men, who have had the finest training in the art of the observation and containment of dangerous felons that money can buy. They are supposed to have eyes on him 24–7, to track his
every move, to map his every gesture, seven men who cannot be bought, who can withstand any form of physical assault, men who are unassailable, unimpeachable. What happened to them?’

  ‘He had a migraine and had to have a bit of a lie down,’ replied Pestle.

  ‘He,’ roared Governor Francis, ‘what about the other six?’

  ‘Well, Tony’s on long-term sick at the moment with varicose veins, Simon has gone off prisons and is training to become a ballet dancer, the three lads from work experience didn’t turn up and Terry helps his wife with their weekly big shop in Tesco on a Tuesday morning.’

  Governor Francis took in this explanation as Stalin might have greeted the news that a team of NKVD officers had failed to interrogate a political dissident because they ‘weren’t really feeling up for it’.

  ‘That still doesn’t explain how Two Swords could have escaped from the most secure interior and exterior encasement unit in Western Europe,’ retched Governor Francis. ‘Has anyone been in his cell to verify this apart from you?’

  ‘No,’ sniveled Pestle, ‘no one.’

  ‘So what does that lead you to conclude, you fucking moron?’ honked Governor Francis.

  ‘It leads me to conclude that Two Swords must have surreptitiously enticed me into his cell, ripped my face off with his teeth in order to use it as a disguise and that I am in fact Hosiah Regolith Two Swords,’ said Hosiah Regolith Two Swords, discarding Pestle’s severed face which he had been gripping by its trailing sinews and grabbing Governor Francis by the throat.

  ‘Oh,’ snorkeled Governor Francis.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Two Swords, preparing to eat his second breakfast of the day.

  *

  ‘I don’t do prison escapes, not with my back, not even if I was directly outside the prison where it was happening,’ said M, from directly outside the prison where it was happening.

  ‘Think about your career trajectory,’ pleaded Inspector Thrace, ‘you need to acquire some forward momentum and own the moment.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about career trajectories you shitbaking, arselicking, cuntsandwich,’ said M between spadefuls of fried egg and a ladle of coffee that was darker than the blank-eyed heart of the universe, ‘I’m hardly going to make Commissioner of the Metropolitan police anytime soon. You know that I have breakfast between 9am and 11am every day, how am I going to take on enough fuel to make it through to lunch? Look at your watch you pigfucking piss-shredder, 10.55am, 5 minutes and three plates of full English to go.’

  ‘You are, as it were, our man on the spot, M. This is your chance to save lives,’ pleaded Thrace.

  ‘Lives,’ choked M, ‘don’t make me upchuck on my shirt you, fercockt momzer, I don’t care if Two Swords himself comes in this cafe, sits down opposite me and demands my car keys, until Big Ben strikes clean-plate-o’clock in three minutes time I am not a policeman.’

  M went to the toilet, gently popped his police issue radio transmitter into the piss-filled urinal and returned to his table to find Hosiah Regolith Two Swords sitting opposite him. ‘Give me your car keys,’ demanded Two Swords, holding out a hand branded with the hallmarks of a thousand years of quietus. M pointed at the time, Two Swords was about to speak again but M leaned over, placed his finger across Two Swords’ lips and nodded at the clock again.

  The two men sat in silence until the time was exactly 11am.

  ‘No,’ said M.

  ‘I’m not a man who understands the word no,’ replied Two Swords, rippling a giant pectoral in M’s direction.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said M beckoning over the waitress, ‘this man does not know the meaning of the word no – do you have a dictionary in this fine establishment?’

  Two Swords grasped M’s car keys in his grandiose mitt but his hand was quickly swallowed up by M’s leather-gloved paw.

  In an instant both men had grabbed the other by the throat – M’s neck was the size of the average woman’s waist but Two Swords’ graffitied hand was up to the challenge.

  ‘I would hate for the two of us to fall out over this after our relationship had begun so positively,’ said M, who was surprised to find that his attempt to wring the life out of Two Swords’ muscle-wracked neck was making not the slightest impression on his adversary’s ability to breathe. It was a neck that had survived two public executions by hanging in the USA and in honesty it was partial to a bit of a squeeze. For the first time in M’s life he sucked the bitter cough sweet of equality. It was not a taste he intended to become accustomed to.

  ‘I wouldn’t normally share my breakfast but given that you have been on a prison diet…’ said M, letting go of Two Sword’s hand, picking up a plate piled high with half eaten fried eggs and baked beans and smashing it into the side of Two Swords’ head with murderous force.

  ‘I perfectly understand and appreciate your generosity,’ said Two Swords, stabbing M’s car keys into the hand that had just delivered the breakfast and twisting them.

  ‘Then you won’t mind me suggesting that you add a little of this excellent home-made gentleman’s relish provided gratis by this purveyor of the finest in traditional British cuisine to your already delicious petit dejeuner,’ replied M, grabbing Two Swords by the hair, ramming a yellow plastic condiment dispenser up his right nostril and crushing it until projectile mustard bounced off Two Swords’ frontal lobe and back down and out of his left nostril.

  Two Swords wrenched his head backwards, leaving a bounteous quantity of scalp and slaughter percolating between M’s fingers, and removing the double razor-bladed shank he had assembled in prison from his jacket pocket, he ran over to the table opposite and held it against the throat of a seven-year-old girl.

  ‘As much as I was enjoying our tête-à-tête,’ said Two Swords, ‘it has been so very long since I have experienced the sights and sounds of old London town and I thought I might just take a little promenade in your lovely police car.’ He dragged the struggling child by her arm towards the door of the cafe. ‘I’m sure you are aware of how much of a butterfingers I can be with people and sharp objects, officer, we both know that at some stage this sweet little skull,’ he gripped the girl’s face between his fingers, ‘will have to come off – beheadings are just so moreish.’

  Two Swords pirouetted triumphantly and was halfway out of the door before it was closed in his face by a fully-grown Kevlar-clad walrus.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said M.

  ‘I’m afraid I must demur,’ replied Two Swords, removing the shank from the girl’s neck where it left two angry tram lines across the full length of her throat and slashing it across M’s Brobdingnagian stomach. When M saw the child’s blood-pearled neck, he felt suddenly defective. His brain received the news that his belly had been julienned with knee-juddering uncertainty and sent him scuttering backwards.

  Dragging the girl by the wrist, Two Swords exited the cafe. He forced the girl into the front seat of the police car which was parked outside, turned the key in the ignition and leaned over to tune in the radio whilst maintaining the pressure of the shank against the girl’s throat.

  ‘Nee naar nee naar nee naar – dat the sound a da poleece,’ said the disembodied leather-gloved hand which had appeared from the back seat of the car and now held a penknife against Two Swords’ jugular vein.

  ‘Dear me officer, we are persistent, aren’t we losing rather a lot of blood, what with having our prodigious tummy all unzipped?’ rasped Two Swords.

  ‘Stab vest, fuck pig,’ replied M, ‘not a scratch.’

  Two Swords paused. He seemed to be luxuriating in the moment.

  ‘We appear to have arrived at something of a Mexican standoff, officer. I intend to kill this child – it is my purpose and one I have fulfilled excellently so many times before. I fear your attempt to save her will be as dull as the blade of your little knife.’

  ‘If you harm her it will be the end of you, piss lake,’ said M, pressing the point of the knife into Two Swords’ neck until blood began to pool under his skin. />
  ‘This is my calling, to divest, to dispatch, I am love, the true face of love. My victims are smitten with me, I see it in their eyes before lights out. I complete them, I fill them, I possess them. It cannot end, not with you, with something like you, not in here, like this. My end will be beauteous, it will be torrential, I will unleash an ungovernable concupiscence for violence upon the planet.’

  M breathed out through his nose and watched the window blemish and clear.

  ‘If you let her live,’ said M, ‘if this one child survives, you’ll get another chance, you know they can’t hold you – I’ll fucking help you escape myself, just let this one child…’

  ‘You can’t save her, you can’t save anyone, you can only destroy,’ sneered Two Swords. ‘To protect you have to believe, I’ve seen your eyes, they don’t believe in anything or anyone, they have forgotten how, they have deserted you.’

  Another pause but the silence was exhausting.

  ‘Why is this child so important to you, officer? Why is saving any child important to you?’

  The question. M awaited his own answer with nervous anticipation. He pointed his mouth at it and jumped.

  ‘Because she has not been vandalised like you and I have,’ replied M, ‘because there are still parts of her that have not been desecrated by the stench of humanity.’

  Why save this child and not his own? M asked himself as the knife teetered between his fingers. But he knew why – this was his trajectory – his father had pushed him off a snowy mountainside in a sled with no brakes. The accumulating chicanes, the sinuous masses of those whose lives M had destroyed as he careered through his sorry version of existence, did not slow him down, he doubted that even the death of his remaining son would cause his deceleration.

  ‘Children are nothing more than grainy images – defective recordings of generations passed,’ said Two Swords. ‘They are ruined before they are born. Put down your knife and stop fighting.’ He sensed that M was beaten, that he had finally overpowered him as he did everyone. He was magnificent, he was imperious. He turned to M and smiled, gently stroking M’s hand and removing M’s knife from his throat.