Shooting in the Dark

in the office, I’m trying him at home.’
    ‘I can’t believe you let him go,’ Angeles said.
    ‘He slashed his wrist,’ Hardwicke explained. ‘They took him to hospital and he broke away from the guards taking him back to the prison, put one of them in hospital with a fractured skull.’
    ‘I want to go to Sam’s house,’ Angeles said to the detectives. ‘I’ll be safe there.’
    Rossiter shook his head. ‘I’ll leave an officer at your front door. When you’re ready to move to Turner’s house he’ll accompany you and stay with you there as well.’ When they got to the door, Rossiter turned. ‘This is not the course of action I would have recommended,’ he said. ‘You’ve already made that clear,’ Angeles told him.
     

54
     
    Sam was up all night, drinking coffee, playing halfremembered songs from a dozen different albums. He didn’t find the one he wanted, got waylaid in a street full of memories. By the time the frozen dawn threw up some light he’d had time to think about it for a while. Played some old Sonny Terry tracks, the volume turned down low, let the blind man take him into a new day.
    Slept in a chair for five hours and woke with a crick in his neck and a sluggish consciousness. There was a lassitude about him that he used to call depression. Outside the light was poor, as though the day couldn’t be bothered to make the effort.
    He browned some toast, thought about going round to Geordie and Janet’s house, play the uncle to Echo, try to recover slivers of his soul from the fragmented night. But that wouldn’t work, he wasn’t the best company with the wind of the old days blowing through his hair.
    He set off towards the office on foot, walking through a world composed of silvery frost crystals, long pale shadows cast by a frigid sun. The people of the city had found scarves and gloves and shiny noses, their faces framed in woollen hats. Sam tried to pick out the drinkers, isolate the lonely, separate the rich from the poor, but most of them had perfect masks. These days you had to dig deep for identity. Sometimes you tunnelled right through to the other side without finding anyone. Bodies without egos. Victims of millennium culture; game-show consciousness.
    At the office door he turned around and walked back along Parliament Street, past Betty’s and Debenhams, past Laura Ashley and the new facades of the banks, the stalls set out for the tourist trade. He bought a copy of the street paper off a middle-aged man with an unfortunate sales technique - Big Issue, sir; Big Issue, madam. Big Issue, sir; Big Issue, madam - and gave it away to another seller on the other side of the street. He’d abandoned reading them years back. Beggars were hustling for the prime sites, their penny whistles and mouth organs only partially effective shields against police harassment.
    The world wasn’t constructed with consciousness, it was fashioned out of fear and greed, and all of its inhabitants were in hiding. They were there on the street, in open view, but each of them was purblind to the predicament of the others. Their buzzword was ‘communication’ but the signals they gave out semaphored only their paralysis of choice. We’re all puppets, he thought, our strings being jerked this way and that by genetic and social patterning. The result was a race of fools, men and women who believed they could manipulate Satan.
    He cut through to Coney Street and walked back towards the library. Upstairs in the reference section he began ploughing through microfiches for the year which marked Angeles Falco’s fifth birthday.
    Headlines activated memories - ‘Nixon Denies All Knowledge of Watergate’; ‘Guildford Pub Bombings’; ‘Arab-Israeli War - tales of treachery and revenge, intrigue and inhumanity in the name of wealth and power. It was one of the years in which Sam Turner had obliterated himself with alcohol, a time in which he had stopped reacting to everything but crises. And more than once a crisis had gone past without him being aware of it.
    The trouble with microfiche is that it’s not a database, you can’t search for a word or a date or anything else. All you can do is plough through page after page of mainly trivial local detail. There was the occasional murder or embezzlement, a couple of mysterious disappearances and a hint of a sexual scandal involving one of the local councillors. There was an almost unbelievable report about an apotemnophiliac - someone who can