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She gathered some of them around her. A few weans, four years old or so, had begun to snivel. You hadn’t foreseen that, Beezer. Crying kids hadn’t been part of the plan. What did you think? She’d be alone in the classroom and you’d just do your stuff and walk away? What does it matter, you don’t have to harm the kids. You just do the thing and go.
    Yeh. Now.
    He took a couple of quick strides forward. ‘Indra,’ he said. ‘I fucking know you, you bitch.’
    â€˜We’ve never met,’ she said.
    â€˜I know your name, I watched you, I saw you coming and going, all airs and graces and floating along the street like your shite didn’t stink, what do you think you are, eh? Some fucking rajah’s bint? Eh? Look at the clothes. You don’t belong here.’
    â€˜Go, please please go –’
    â€˜Scared, right? I’ve got you scared. Scared and running, pishing your knickers. You pishing, Indra? Hiss hiss.’
    Reach, find, remove, fire. He realized he had the tiny gun in his hand. He didn’t remember taking it out.
    Kids were screaming.
    â€˜Put that gun away,’ she said.
    â€˜Aw, fuck you.’
    He fired at a range of four feet directly into her forehead. She made a weird sound, as if her breath had all been sucked back into her throat, then she slipped to the floor and lay on her side. Little kids were sprayed with her blood and brain-soup and bone fragments. He wanted to linger, say something to calm them down, explain why he’d had to shoot the woman, and how he was sorry they witnessed it, but some things had to be done, he had a duty.
    They’d thank him one day. Some of them anyway.
    He rushed from the room. A man appeared at the end of the corridor. He was big and bearded, and wore a white turban.
    A raghead, Bobby thought. This school was crawling with these fuckers.
    The man shouted. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing?’
    Bobby fired a shot that hit the man in his chest.
    The man slumped against the wall and said, ‘Oh no, oh no.’
    Bobby raced down the corridor, crossed the kitchen, left the building the way he’d entered it, and skidded across the yard to the trees. Then he was moving quickly beneath a sky the colour of cold volcanic ash. He was running, and the motorway roared and spat damp spray nearby.
    When he’d run as far as Scotland Street he remembered he was still carrying his shoes. He sat on the pavement and put them on and he thought: You’re a prince, Beezer. A national hero. He didn’t feel the rain now. He didn’t feel his sodden feet inside the chunky shoes. He was running a Union Jack up the flagpole of his imagination, then saluting it with great dignity; and the brass bands in his head played patriotic marches.

6
    Perlman drove his battered Mondeo east along Edinburgh Road, past housing estates that had been built in the mid-1950s and early ’60s to accommodate the mass exodus of people from the doomed slums of the old city. These communities, Cranhill, Easterhouse, Barlanark, were once considered part of a great utopian experiment in living. But entire blocks of flats had decayed, some in the space of less than twenty years, while others lay gutted and abandoned. So much for the dark, wacky craft of social engineering, Perlman thought.
    He smoked one blue Silk Cut after another.
    The idea of seeing Miriam after four months brought him pleasure, but also tension. He pictured her as he’d last seen her: black-veiled and sad-eyed at Colin’s funeral, and yet in some way above her grief, as if an inner grace prevented her from a public display of loss. She’d floated over her sorrow – assuming sorrow was what she felt. Who could say?
    She’d told Perlman last December she’d known for years of her husband’s philandering; so maybe her love for him had died long before his death. The revelations that came later, the murderous secrets