Vasvik stared into the middle distance with no more emotion than a cat.

Another shriek. A meaty thump. Chris stared around and coughed out a laugh.

‘You guys are fucking hysterical, you know that. Erik, with your fucking writing, and the fucking ombudsman here. All going to change the fucking world for the better.’ Suddenly he was yelling himself. ‘Look at yourselves. You’re fucking paralysed, all of you.’

Something hit the wall, big enough to be a body. Blows followed, regular, spaced. Chanting.

you cunt, like that? you cunt, like that? you fucking like that cunt?

He was in motion, and it was like the Saab ride home all over again. Embodied purpose, unstoppable. He went out, along the tiny entry hall, out the front door, left, along to the next door. He kicked it in. Cheap wood splintered in the frame, the door flew back. Slammed into the wall, rebounded. He kicked again and erupted into the space beyond, through the hall and into the lounge.

They’d heard him come in. The woman was sprawled across the carpet, dressed in a short, moth-eaten, grey towelling robe and moving weakly like an injured soldier trying to crawl to cover. She was bleeding from the mouth. Below the hem of the robe, her thighs were mottled with old bruises. The baby was in a plastic carry chair, marooned atop a cheap entertainment stack near the kitchen door, mouth open wide as if in surprise. The father was turning, garish purple shellsuit bottoms and a red sleeveless T-shirt tight across a boxer’s physique. MEAT THE RICH was inked across his chest in white capitals stretched wide. His eyes were defocused with fury and his fists were clenched. Blood on the knuckles of the right hand.

‘You’re making too much noise,’ said Chris.

‘What?’ The man blinked. The lack of uniform registered. Maybe the cut of Chris’s clothes too. ‘Fuck are you doing in my house, cunt? You looking for a fucking fight?’

‘Yeah.’

Another blink. ‘You fucking what?

‘Yeah. I’m looking for a fight.’

For some reason, the answer seemed to stall the other man. Chris, who’d been worried about the baby, used the moment to take two neat steps sideways and give himself a clear field of fire. The other man gaped as if the executive in front of him had just done a pirouette. Chris cleared the Nemex and pointed the weapon in a single fluid move that he reckoned Louise Hewitt would have been proud of. The man gaped some more.

‘Never mind.’

Bang

Chris shot as low down the thigh as he trusted himself to hit. The target screamed and collapsed, clutching at his leg. Chris reversed his grip on the gun, stepped in close and clubbed the man hard, sideways across the head. He went down, eyes rolled up. The woman on the floor shrieked and scuttled backwards into a corner.

‘It’s okay,’ Chris said absently. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

‘Chris!’

Carla stood in the doorway, face ashen. Staring at him.

‘It’s okay, he’s not dead.’ Chris thought about it for a moment, then put the Nemex to the man’s knee, just below the first wound, and pulled the trigger. The man jerked with the impact, but didn’t come round. Carla and the other woman’s screams seemed to blend in the wake of the shot. The baby started wailing again. He looked across at the woman, whose left eye was rapidly swelling closed. Thought some more. He placed the Nemex muzzle on the man’s right elbow—

‘Chris -don’t.’

—and pulled the trigger again.

Carla jerked back as if it was her he’d shot.

He put the Nemex away and crossed to where the woman was crouched in the corner. He took out his wallet and gave her about half of the cash he was carrying.

‘Listen,’ he said, pressing it into her hand. ‘Pay attention, listen. This is for you. Call him an ambulance if you like, but don’t let them take him in. They’ll try to. It’s what they’re paid to do, that’s how they make the big money. Don’t let them. They’ll dress the wounds here if you ask them to. It’s cheaper and it’s all he needs. He’s not in any danger. He won’t die. Do you understand?’

She just stared at him.

He sighed and folded her hand around the money. She flinched as he touched her. He sighed again and got up. Looked at the baby. The mess around him. He shook his head and turned away.

They were all there now. Erik Nyquist, features tight with disgust. Carla, hugged in her father’s arms, face buried in his chest. Vasvik silent and impassive.

‘What?’ he asked them. ‘What?’

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Landrover jolted over another pothole, hard and too fast. Coins and other dashboard detritus cascaded onto the floor. Chris swayed in the grip of his seatbelt. He glanced across at Carla.

‘You want to slow down a bit?’

She looked back at him, then away. Said nothing. The Landrover bounced again. High beams splashed jerkily across the curve of the unlit street and a ravaged concrete structure that looked as if it might once have been the back end of an arena. Dead street lamps stood at intervals, most of them remarkably intact and upright.

‘For Christ’s sake, Carla, this is the zones. You really want to have to stop and change a flat tyre around here?’

She shrugged. ‘You’ve got a gun. I’m sure you can cripple anyone who gives us a hard time.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

They left the curving street and swung left past decayed low-rise housing and steel-shuttered frontages. The usual graffiti leered from the walls, incoherent tribal rage and abstract flashing that looked like stretched purple and white skulls. Carla stared ahead, tight-lipped. Chris felt his post-fight mellowness charring at the edges.

‘Hey, perhaps you’d rather he’d beaten her to death while we all sat there and listened to it. Good training for my future in the ombudsmen. Observe, take notes and never, never fucking intervene in anything.’

No response.

‘Your father lives next door to that every fucking day of his life, Carla. And he does nothing. Worse than nothing. He just shakes his fucking head and writes his agonised social commentary and he feeds it to people who’ll never know the realities of the situations he describes, and they all shake their heads and do nothing. And next door, a thug goes on beating his wife to pulp.’

‘My father’s a man in his sixties. Did you see the size of that piece of shit?’

‘Yeah. That’s why I shot him.’

‘That’s no solution!’

‘I don’t know - it seemed to slow him down.’

‘And what about when he recovers, Chris? When he’s back on his feet and twice as angry as he ever was.’

‘You’re saying I should have killed him?’

‘This isn’t fucking funny!’

Chris twisted round to face her. ‘No, you’re right Carla, it isn’t. It’s sick. You’re trying to get me, out of some twisted sense of moral outrage, to quit my job at Shorn and go work for men like Vasvik. And you saw how concerned he was back there. What a moral stand the fucking ombudsmen are prepared to take in the face of injustice.’

‘He wasn’t there for that, Chris.’

‘Neither was I, Carla. But I did something about it. Just like I’m going to do something in the NAME. Jesus, you think you can go through this life with your pristine ideals, taking notes and trusting some fuckwit UN judge to make everyone play nice. You think—‘

The Landrover leaned abruptly on its suspension. The road swung away in the high beams, replaced by the cross-hatching of an empty parking area. An abandoned supermarket loomed up ahead, facades smashed in and boarded up in about equal measures. There seemed to be a white tubular metal reindeer riveted to the roof, face turned blankly to greet the shoppers in their cars. Vague, tangled debris that had once presumably been a sleigh trailed from the animal’s rear and spilled down the roof as far as the sagging gutters. For one bizarre moment, the image reversed for Chris and he saw an amorphous tentacled creature dragging the reindeer down to its death.