[b]Wallington, London[/b]

Ray Newman’s head pounded and his temples dampened as he passed through into the small living room of James Oldfield’s childhood home. Newman had really tied it on last night. He’d spent most of the morning throwing up and had made little time to iron out the several sizes too small suit that clung to his body. It was a wonder he’d managed to make it to the memorial service that morning at all. Even seeing people move intensified his nausea and he stood with his back against the wall of the room to steady himself for a moment. Paul Winters nodded to him with a knowing smile from across the room. Unlike Ray he’d known when to call it a night and looked in far better shape than Newman this morning. As Ray moved to place a hand on his face he saw the form of a slight, grey-haired woman moving towards him. It was Oldfield’s mum. She placed a gentle hand on Ray’s side and smiled at him.

“Thank you for coming, Raymond. It means a lot to me.”

Alice Oldfield was young, far too young to be the mother of a dead son, and despite her grey hair there was still a youthfulness to her features. It was unnerving how much she looked like Oldfield. As far as Ray knew Oldfield’s parents had divorced when James was in his teens and his father lived off in Spain with a pretty young wife. Newman had thought he might have been here this morning. He’d thought wrong.

Ray smiled back at Alice feebly as he felt another wave of nausea sweep over him. “There’s no need to thank me. James was my partner, ma’am. It’s the least I could do in the circumstances.”

“Still, I’m sure what happened hasn’t been easy on you,” Alice said as she pushed a strand of grey hair behind her small ears. “Do you have family about you? A wife, children, things like that?”

Ray felt his cheeks redden with embarrassment and he shook his head as he stared down at the ground. “I’m afraid my wife and I separated some time ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Alice sighed. “A man should have people around him in times like these. It’s not good to be on your own. You know, James spoke of you often. He said you were a good man, Raymond, and that he learned a lot from you. You’re always welcome here. Don’t hesitate to stop by if you ever need someone to talk to or a cup of tea.”

Even through his nausea and embarrassment Newman felt his chest swell with pride at the thought Oldfield had thought him a good man. Ray wasn’t even sure whether [i]he[/i] thought he was a good man or not. He’d lost his wife, his children wanted nothing to do with him, and he’d never seen a suspect he didn’t think he could punch the truth out of. James Oldfield had been [i]natural[/i] police, the kind of guy the used tell stories about, over-prepared and always informed. He put Newman to shame. It was why Ray felt so guilty at the fact he was the one still left standing and not James. If Oldfield were stood in a room full of Ray’s loved ones, few and far between as they were, he’d be consoling them instead of them consoling him, he’d have found the words to make this seem alright. Yet here Ray was still steaming and sweating through his cheap suit from the night before.

Newman looked to Alice and was taken aback by the strength the mousy woman was showing. He cleared his throat and tried to put his feelings into words as best he could. “I feel like this conversation should be happening the other way around.”

“Nonsense,” Alice said with a gentle smile. “That person that pulled that trigger may have robbed my son from me but I refuse to let them take the happy memories I have of James. He was an inquisitive child, an excellent, diligent student, and a better man. If he were here he wouldn’t want me to cry or weep for him. He’d want me to keep living my life and that’s what I intend to do. What better way to get back at the people that took him from me?”

Newman stared at the picture of James Oldfield in his uniform at the front of the room. Scattered around it were flowers and other pictures of him. It mad Ray sick to his stomach that whoever had gunned James down was still walking around on the streets somewhere. They’d killed a policeman and gotten away with it. What was happening to this country that such a thing could happen? That the police, the government, that [i]everyone[/i] wasn’t tearing the whole damn country apart looking for his killers. It was because they were coloureds. Ray knew that. Campbell was too soft on them and it trickled down into every home, every police station, and every school in the entire country.

Ray shook his head grimly as his silent vow found voice. “I’ll find the coloureds that did this, I promise you that much, and when I do I’ll make them hurt for it.”

He had expected a smile from Alice Oldfield, perhaps even a hug, but the second his sentence had left his mouth Alice’s face had contorted into a look of disgust that cut Newman to the quick. 

“I am [i]not[/i] comfortable with that word, Raymond, and neither was my son,” Alice said with a scornful shake of the head. “James did not believe in “us and them” and I won’t have you profaning his memory by speaking like that in my home. If you have any respect for what James stood for you’ll remove that word from your vernacular this second.”

Around the room heads had begun to turn in their direction and Ray could feel eyes boring into him as he took Alice’s words in. She was wrong. At least, Ray [i]thought[/i] she was wrong. He thought back to that night in Brixton and remembered his discussion with James. A burnt out car on a council estate, probably burnt out to draw them there, and still Oldfield wouldn’t finger the coloureds until he had them bang to rights. If he’d listened to Ray and not trusted those animals to act civilly maybe he’d still be alive. Yet there was something there, a nagging thought at the back of Ray’s mind, as he thought about Oldfield. He thought highly of James. More so than he did Winters or any of his other colleagues. Maybe even more so than anyone else he’d known. How could someone right about everything else be wrong on this? What if… what if James wasn’t wrong?

Ray shook his head slightly and banished the thought from his mind as he glanced towards Alice. “I’m sorry… I spoke out of turn, I should have known better than to… I just… The [i]person[/i] that killed James is still out there and there’s nothing I can do about it. They’ve put me on administrative leave and… I don’t know what to do with myself at the moment. I can’t remember a time before I was just… the uniform.”

After several seconds of silence Alice looked at Newman as if she could see through. At once Ray felt like she saw him, the real him, beneath all of this. She sighed sympathetically and stood against the wall with him. “Why did you become a police officer?”

“To help people.”

Alice gestured to the people around the room. “You don’t need a uniform to do that, Raymond. James helped people long before he put that uniform on and I’m certain he would have continued to long after he’d taken it off too. You can [i]still[/i] help people.”

Given that Ray could barely look after himself the notion of his being able to help other people seemed alien to him. He looked to Oldfield’s mother tentatively as he asked. “Where do I start?”

“Why don’t you start with yourself?” Alice said with a gentle smile. “I’d hoped this service might grant the people closest to James some closure, that it might help them move on, but I can see that it’s not enough for you.”

Again it felt like Alice’s frosty blue eyes saw into him. Newman felt like they were the only two people in the room as she spoke to him in a tone so gentle, so tender that it was almost hypnotic. He was a grown man, the best part of a decade older than Alice, but he could feel her mothering him as she might have mothered James once. He wanted to be strong enough not to need her support and guidance but in truth he needed it more than anything. He felt his nausea clearing as she spoke and his shaking hands felt stilled by words.

“Go back there, Raymond, go back to where they took my son from me and make your peace. Don’t let my son’s death be in vain.”

[center][b]*****[/b][/center]
[b]Brixton, London[/b]

Keenan Gayle climbed the final few stairs of Moorlands Estate with Simone’s small hand clutched tightly to his. Keenan was covered in dried paint and dust from the afternoon’s work and his muscles ached but he sensed relief but a few paces away as they reached the top of the stairs. His daughter swung a lunchbox bearing a unicorn around by her side and it smacked her father’s legs with each step they took but Keenan was too tired to complain. All he wanted to do was rest. As they turned the final corner to their home Keenan stopped dead in his tracks as he spotted a portly middle-aged man in his doorway adjusting the locks on the door to their flat. He tugged his daughter behind him and approached the man cautiously whilst trying not to alert his attention.

When he was within a metre of him Gayle barked at him in a voice that forced the portly man to jump. “What the fuck’s going on?”

From beside him Simone looked up at him with disapproving eyes. “Dad.”

“Sorry,” Keenan sighed. “Who are you? What are you doing in my house?”

The man shouted into the flat and another man appeared. He was tall, standing six foot four at the very least, but impossibly thin. He wore a grey suit and a long black trench coat over it that reached almost halfway down his calves. His short black hair formed a quiff at the front of his head and his sharp features and inquisitorial eyes put Keenan ill at ease. 

The skinny man reached for a clipboard and scanned it whilst cliking his tongue as he took in the details. “Mr. Gayle, I presume?”

Keenan nodded. “Yes, now tell me what you’re doing to my house?”

The man shook his pointed head without looking up from the clipboard. “This is not your house, Mr. Gayle, this house belongs to Lambeth Council and now that Mr. Clarke is deceased it will go to another tenant that needs it.”

It was unnerving to hear Errol referred to as Mr. Clarke. Errol had never been Mr. Clarke to Keenan or Simone, he’d never even been Mr. Clarke to his postman, he’d been “Uncle Errol” to everyone. The police had still yet to visit Keenan about Errol’s murder and he’d not heard a peep about any investigation into it. Yet here the council were trying to take their home away from them. If he wasn’t so exhausted he would have been inclined to lay hands on the man in the trench coat for his condescension.

“We need it,” Keenan mumbled as he tried to get his head around what was happening. “This is our home.”

“Was your name on the tenant’s agreement, Mr. Gayle?”

Keenan didn’t even know what a tenant’s agreement was and he was too tired to pretend. Instead he shook his head and tried to appeal to the man’s sense of fairness. “We’ve lived here for years and where I could I gave money to Errol here and there, he was like a grandfather to my daughter and a father to me. You can’t just come and take our home away from us. That’s not right.”

The tall man sighed as he placed the clipboard beneath the armpit of his trench coat and signaled to the locksmith to begin working again. “This home ceased to belong to Mr. Clarke the moment he illegally sublet the property to you, Mr. Gayle, so I’d be thankful for the time you did have in it if I were you.”

“What are you talking about?” Keenan spluttered as his eyes widened. He placed his hand in the doorway to Errol’s flat to stop the locksmith from resuming his work. “Where are we meant to live?”

The tall man frowned and placed one of his pale hands on Keenan’s arm to remove it. “Go to the housing office at the council building and they’ll place you on a waiting list for social housing. Given your daughter’s age I can’t imagine you’ll have to wait very long for a home. Six months, seven perhaps, eight or nine at the very worst.”

“This isn’t right,” Keenan said as he stood his ground. “This is our home.”

The tall man’s grip was vice-like as he pried Keenan’s arm away from the doorway with ease. Despite his slender frame there was a strength to the man that made Keenan seem like a gnat. “No, Mr. Gayle, it’s not. The sooner you get your head around that, the better for both you and your daughter, I’m afraid. As of this morning this home belongs to Lambeth Council again. Am I understood?”

He wanted to fight it. He wanted to throw down with the tall man, the locksmith, and whoever else they sent to take their home away from them but he knew this was the beginning of the end. There was no way back. The home was gone. No matter how many times he pleaded with him, no matter how he begged, the flat Errol Clarke had lived in since the day he’d arrived from Jamaica was gone. Losing his temper would only make things worse. Keenan had Simone to think about. The last thing she needed was to lose him too.

Keenan stepped back, shot his daughter an unconvincing smile, and then looked towards the council official with eyes like an open wound. 

“What are we meant to do, man? Where are we meant to go? This is all we have.”

A heavy sigh escaped from the tall man’s lips and he rubbed his brow with one of his pale hands. He gestured towards the locksmith to stop working again and scribbled something on his clipboard impatiently before looking up at Keenan with a sympathetic expression that sat uncomfortable amongst his pointed features.

“Look, I’ll give you a night, okay? That should give you enough time to get your things together and find somewhere to stay for the time being. This time tomorrow I’m going to come back and I expect both you and your daughter to be long gone. Alright?”

Keenan nodded by way of thanks and the man took a glance towards the watch on his wrist. He gathered his things in silence and then moved from the doorway of Errol Clarke and Keenan Gayle’s flat. As he passed Keenan he glanced down at Simone and stopped in his tracks. 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he muttered before nodding curtly and disappearing down the stairway of Moorlands Estate.

[center][b]*****[/b][/center]
[b]Cape Town, South Africa[/b]

Lieutenant Woolgar Donovan knelt for a moment to catch his breath. He was thirty-seven years of age and despite being in exceptional physical shape his insides were that of a man twice his age. He’d smoked heavily as a boy growing up in Sheffield. Eight generations of Donovans had worked in the steel industry in Sheffield but the Troubles had put an end to that. Woolgar was the last of them. He had taken no wife, fathered no children, and had resigned himself to that fact. If his blackened lungs didn’t kill him he was sure stepping on a mine would do. He’d volunteered for the Army at thirty-two, much older than the average volunteer, because he’d hoped in what few years he had left he’d find adventure. He’d found more adventure than he could handle in South Africa. They all had.

Donovan’s once pale white face was tanned brown and caked in dirt. His once platinum blonde hair was thick with the dirt too and looked more brown than blonde in this light. He was strong, stronger than he had any right to be given the state of his insides, and to his surprise he’d taken to leadership more naturally than he’d ever imagined he might do. His platoon looked to him for instruction at all times and did so without grumbling. Woolgar was almost ten years older than the eldest man in his platoon and at times he found it hard to relate to them. Some had wives back at home, some children, and all of them wanted to see Britain’s shores again. There were times when the Lieutenant wasn’t sure whether he did. Yet here he was helming a platoon of home-sick men, responsible each of their wellbeing, and returning them home to their families in one piece.

A familiar voice called out to Woolgar from amidst a row of shacks.

“Lieutenant.”

Nick Marsh, a young corporal from Norfolk, stood in the doorway of one of the shacks and gestured to Woolgar to take a look inside. Donovan stood up, brushed his hands clean off dust, and approached the shack whilst gesturing to the rest of his men to stay there.

The first thing Woolgar noticed as Marsh pulled the shack door aside was the stench. It almost was strong enough to knock him from his feet. Death. It was a smell he’d been familiar with even before coming to South Africa. An old man on Woolgar’s childhood road had died and been left unfound to rot in his home for weeks. When the ambulance had finally come the whole street had stunk of death for days. This was far worse than that. Whatever died inside had been able to roast in the South African sun all day long. Tears brought on by the smell trickled down Donovan’s cheeks and he wiped them away with the sleeve of his uniform. The dirt cake on them parted to reveal the pale skin beneath.

He muttered to Marsh to follow him inside and shut the door behind them. There were flies everywhere. The men covered their mouths with their sleeves and waved their hands in front of them to clear a way through until the source of the smell came into sight.

“Fuck,” Donovan muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Dangling from hooks in the corner of the shack were bodies. Their hands and feet had been cut off and the skin had been flayed from their flesh but they definitely were bodies. It was almost hard to tell from looking at them. The way they hung together made it hard to count them but Donovan made out at least six of them. From behind him Woolgar heard Marsh retching and felt the splatter of his sick splash against the back of his boots.

On the wall of the shack smeared in blood with a phrase that made Woolgar’s blood run cold.

Marsh wiped his mouth and then pointed up at it. “What is that?”

“Mulungus out.”

Marsh fought back another retch and then looked to Woolgar with a confused look. “Mulungus?”

“Whites,” Donovan muttered despondently as he prepared to call it in. “Whites out.”

[center][b]*****[/b][/center]
[b]The Strand, London[/b]

A nervous smile appeared on Joyce Campbell’s face as she spotted Thomas Moore waiting in the Savoy’s restaurant. He was handsome, even more than he’d been during their time at Oxford, and as well-turned out as any man Joyce had ever seen. He’d always been vain. His grey-flecked blonde hair was coifed to the side in such a way as to make him devil may care but Joyce knew better than that. Tom would have taken hours preparing for this. She imagined him stood in front of a mirror combing his hair back and forth and her smile grew somewhat. It was then that Moore spotted her and beamed in her direction as he stood up from his seat. Joyce returned his smile and approached the table timidly before taking the seat that Moore had pulled out. As she did so Moore had rested his hand familiarly on the small of her back to guide her into her seat. Once they were seated Moore poured glasses of champagne for the both of them.

“I must say, I was shocked when I received your call this afternoon. You have been less than receptive to my representations over the years.”

Tom had written Joyce more letters than she could count in the years after their tryst at Oxford. She had never returned them. They had come fewer and further between once Moore had married but on occasion they would still arrive. Once Fraser had come Prime Minister they had come to a halt. She thought of husband and the true reason she was with Thomas tonight as she gulped down a mouthful of champagne.

“Things have been very complicated, Tom. Between Fraser’s career and the children I didn’t have much time in my life for much else. Even if I [i]did[/i] yearn for something more… There was no way I could have acted on those feelings.”

One of Moore’s eyebrows lifted with intrigued. “What changed?”

For all his vanity the Home Secretary was still a sharp, incisive man. Joyce couldn’t tell whether Moore really wanted to know or whether he was mining for information. It wasn’t enough that Joyce had agreed to meet him after all these years. He had to hear her ram the knife into Fraser’s back time and time again, to rub his adversary’s face in the mud even without his knowing, before he could be content. She took another mouthful of champagne and shrugged her shoulders.

“The children are off at boarding school and Fraser is more interested in his work than he is me. He hasn’t so much as looked in my direction in months. He’s been distant since he entered Downing Street and at first I put that down to the pressure’s that came with the job. Recently though I’ve started to wonder if… if the whole thing, everything we’ve built together, has been one big lie. If he sought me out because I was pretty and from a respectable family. If he knew even then that he’d need a piece of arm candy for him to drag with him to the top.”

Moore sneered.

“I hope you’ll forgive my saying so, Joyce, but the man is a fool. He’s [i]always[/i] been a fool. He was a fool at Oxford and is even more of one in Downing Street. That he would have such a beauty in his life and neglect it speaks to that. You deserve better than him. You always have done.”

The Home Secretary reached across the table and laid his hand on top of Joyce’s with a smile. Joyce felt a flicker of guilt as he rubbed his thumb against the side of her hand and pulled her hand back with a coy look.

“You know I can’t leave him. The children… I couldn’t put them through that in front of the entire country.”

“You don’t need to. Fraser won’t be Prime Minister forever, Joyce. Eventually he’ll be summoned to the Palace and be given his marching orders by King William. All political careers are doomed to fail in the end. You know that better than I do. When that day comes you and the children can be free of him. You can have what you [i]really[/i] want.”

Moore had no idea what she really wanted. He’d never had any idea what she wanted. More than anything Joyce wanted a Britain free from of all forms of tyranny and she’d do whatever it took to get that – even if that meant defiling her body and her marriage in doing so. Moore could never understand that, he came from old money and was chummy with the Palace, and if he did know he’d have turned Joyce in without a second’s thought. He was a monarchist, he’d been one since before their days at Oxford, and to him the King was Britain. Joyce had made Fraser in her image, made him everything that Moore could never be, and together they would tear the Palace down. Together they’d create the Britain they wanted.

First she needed to get through the night. Moore ordered food for the pair of them and they reminisced about their time at Oxford, spoke very briefly about Moore’s wife Daphne, before things quieted somewhat whilst they ate.  

“The food is exquisite.”

“I knew you’d like it. You remember when I tried to make duck l’Orange for us all those years ago?”

“How could I forget? You burned the poor bird to cinders.”

A nostalgic smile crossed Moore’s face. “Those were good times, were they not?”

In truth Joyce could barely remember them. They felt so long ago that she had to strain to remember the months she’d spent with Moore. She had been a different person then, a girl, and sat before Moore this evening was a woman. She’d married, had children, and built a life for herself since then. She thought of them as she glanced down at her emptied plate with a despondent look. She knew what was coming, what this night was building too, and try as she might she couldn’t withstand this farce much longer. 

Again Moore smiled at her from across the table. “Is something wrong?”

“Take me upstairs,” Joyce muttered as she reached across the table and placed her hand on top of his. “Take me upstairs and make me feel wanted again, Tom.”