Free Glow by Ned Beauman Page A

over.
    ‘Do you know what this means?’
    ‘No. But read the top. She must have needed me to keep it safe.’
    The guy sighs. ‘So this piece of paper is the only concrete asset you have to show me? This is truly all you have?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    He folds it up. ‘I’ll have to keep it, of course. I’ll get it translated by one of our analysts.’
    ‘No,’ says Raf. ‘I need it back.’
    The guy looks at the note, looks at the front door, looks at Raf – then he jumps to his feet and tries to make a getaway.
    ‘Hey!’ shouts Isaac. And that’s when his flatmate, without even looking up from her knitting, sticks out her slender right leg, and the guy topples forward and smacks his nose on the brass rim of the peephole in the front door.
    ‘Oh, wow, Hiromi!’ says Isaac. ‘Wow! Cheers, darling!’ With help from Raf, who now feels guilty for assuming that Isaac didn’t know the names of his flatmates, he hauls the guy back to the sofa. ‘Let’s tie the cunt up.’
    ‘No, that absolutely, absolutely won’t be necessary,’ says the guy. He hands over the note and then finds a paper napkin in his pocket to wipe a trickle of blood from his upper lip. And he does look defeated, sitting there with a red postmark stamped on the bridge of his nose. So instead Raf and Isaac just stand over him.
    ‘Who are you really?’ says Raf.
    ‘My full name is Mark Edmund Fourpetal.’
    ‘Do you really work for MI6 or whatever?’
    ‘MI6?’ Fourpetal laughs. ‘No. Quite a long way from MI6. I’m in PR.’
    ‘What do you know about the white vans?’
    ‘Not much. They’re kidnapping Burmese men, as I told you last time. I don’t know why. But they have something to do with my former employer. An American firm called Lacebark.’
    ‘Lacebark are a mining company,’ says Raf.
    ‘Yes, but they’re vertically integrated. Everything’s in-house now. Including corporate security.’
    ‘And they’re chasing you?’
    ‘What makes you say that?’
    ‘Outside McDonald’s. That van. You were scared.’
    Fourpetal nods. ‘Yes. Do you know Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy ?’ He gestures at himself. ‘?“What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be made by the passion of fear is here shown with what may be called a mathematical completeness.”?’
    Fourpetal explains that it’s not as if he’d dreamed since boyhood of getting a job in the mining industry. In the school playground when he was eight or nine they’d often pretended to fight the Battle of Orgreave and nobody ever wanted to be the miners. But he hadn’t had any choice. After eleven years in financial PR, Fourpetal had developed a reputation as ‘the most craven, two-faced, back-stabbing little wank stain that’s ever sat in a fucking swivel chair’, in the invigoratingly candid words of one former colleague after a night out in a strip club near Liverpool Street. And you couldn’t build that sort of brand overnight.
    In fact, by a certain metric, he could trace his downfall all the way back to his first job after university, when he found himself working alongside a chinless Northern boy called Drummers who seemed quite likely to get promoted above him in the near future because he spent about ninety hours a week in the office. One day, Fourpetal took Drummers aside and told him that if he really wanted to get himself noticed he should offer their boss a few lines of good coke next time they were all in a bar. Drummers thanked him warmly for the advice, unaware that their boss had taken against drugs with an almost cultic fury ever since an overdose at a New Year’s Eve party had left his horsy niece with permanent brain damage. Soon afterwards, Drummers left the firm. Unfortunately, he did not leave the industry. Instead, he dragged himself, mangled and frostbitten, from the ravine and eight years later was recruited to a senior position at the company where Fourpetal now worked. On his first day, he called