The Man Between. Чарльз Камминг

benefit. Had he written such a scene in one of his novels, it would have been dismissed as a freak coincidence.

      He had reached the south-west corner of the busy intersection between Sussex Gardens and Edgware Road. He was waiting to cross at the lights. A teenage girl beside him was nattering away to a friend about boyfriend trouble. ‘So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like, he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again.’ A stooped old man standing to Carradine’s left was holding an umbrella in his right hand. Water was dripping from the umbrella onto the shoulders of Carradine’s jacket; he could feel droplets of rain on the back of his neck. In the next instant he became aware of shouting on the opposite corner of the street, about twenty metres from where he was standing. A well-built man wearing a motorcycle helmet was raining punches through the passenger door of a black BMW. The driver – a blonde woman in her forties – was being dragged from the vehicle by a second man wearing an identical helmet and torn blue jeans. The woman was screaming and swearing. Carradine thought that he recognised her as a public figure but could not put a name to the face. Her assailant, who was at least six feet tall, was dragging her by the hair shouting, ‘Move, you fucking bitch’, and wielding what looked like a hammer.

      Carradine had the sense of a moment suspended in time. There seemed to be at least twenty people standing within a few feet of the car. None of them moved. The rest of the traffic at the intersection had come to a standstill. A large white Transit van was parked in front of the BMW. The first man opened a side panel in the van and helped his accomplice to drag the woman inside. Carradine was aware of somebody shouting ‘Stop them! Somebody fucking stop them!’ and of the teenage girl beside him muttering ‘Fucking hell, what the fuck is this, this is bad’ as the door of the van slammed shut. The middle-aged man who had been seated on the driver’s side of the BMW now stumbled out of the car, his hair matted with blood, his face bruised and bleeding, hands raised in the air, imploring his attackers to release the woman. Instead, the man in the torn jeans walked back towards him and swung a single, merciless punch that knocked him out cold. Somebody screamed as he slumped to the ground.

      Carradine stepped off the pavement. He had been taking boxing lessons for the past eighteen months: he was tall and fit and wanted to help. He was not sure precisely what he intended to do but recognised that he had to act. Then, as he moved forwards, he saw a pedestrian, standing much closer to the van, approach one of the two assailants. Carradine heard him cry: ‘Stop! Enough!’

      ‘Hey!’ Carradine added his own voice to the confrontation. ‘Let her go!’

      Things then happened very quickly. Carradine felt a hand on his arm, holding him back. He turned to see the girl looking at him, shaking her head, imploring him not to get involved. Carradine would have ignored her had it not been for what came next. A third man suddenly emerged from the Transit van. He was wearing a black balaclava and carrying what looked like a short metal pole. He was much larger than the others, slower in his movements, but went towards the pedestrian and swung the pole first into his knees and then across his shoulders. The pedestrian screamed out in pain and fell onto the street.

      At that moment Carradine’s courage deserted him. The man in the balaclava entered the van via the side door and slammed it shut. His two helmeted accomplices also climbed inside and drove quickly away. By the time Carradine could hear a police siren in the distance, the van was already out of sight, accelerating north along Edgware Road.

      There was a momentary silence. Several onlookers moved towards the middle-aged man who had been knocked out. He was soon surrounded by the very people who, moments earlier, might have defended him against attack and prevented the abduction of his companion. Through the mêlée, Carradine could see a woman kneeling on the damp street, raising the victim’s head onto a balled-up jacket. For every bystander who was talking on their phone – presumably having called the police – there was another filming the scene, most of them as emotionally detached as a group of tourists photographing a sunset. With the traffic still not moving, Carradine walked across the intersection and tried to reach the BMW. His route was blocked. Car horns were sounding in the distance as a police vehicle appeared at the eastern end of Sussex Gardens. Two uniformed officers jogged towards the fallen men. Carradine realised that he could do nothing other than gawp and stare; it was pointless to hang around, just another passer-by rubbernecking the incident. He was beginning to feel the first quiet thuds of shame that he had failed to act when he heard the word ‘Resurrection’ muttered in the crowd. A woman standing next to him said: ‘Did you see who it was? That journalist from the Express, wasn’t it? Whatserface?’ and Carradine found that he could provide the answer.

      ‘Lisa Redmond.’

      ‘That’s right. Poor cow.’

      Carradine walked away. It was clear that activists associated with Resurrection had staged the kidnapping. Redmond was a hate figure for the Left, frequently identified as a potential target for the group. So many right-wing journalists and broadcasters had been attacked around the world that it was a miracle she had not been confronted before. Carradine felt wretched that he had not done more. He had witnessed street brawls in the past but never the nerveless brutality displayed by the men who had taken Redmond. He was not due to meet Mantis for another hour and a half. He thought about cancelling the meeting and going home. Carradine told himself that it would have been rash to try to take on three armed men on his own, but wished that he had acted more decisively; his instinct for survival had been stronger than his desire to help.

      He wandered down Edgware Road in a daze, eventually going into a café and checking the BBC for a report on what had happened. Sure enough it was confirmed that the ‘right-wing columnist’ Lisa Redmond had been kidnapped by activists associated with Resurrection and her husband beaten up in the act of trying to protect her. Carradine opened Twitter. ‘Fucking bitch had it coming’ was the first of several tweets he saw in defence of the attack, most of which carried the now-familiar hashtags #Resurrection #Alt-RightScum #RememberSimakov #ZackCurtisLives and #FuckOtis. The latter was a reference to the first – and most notorious – Resurrection kidnapping, in San Francisco, of Otis Euclidis, a senior editor at Breitbart News who had been seized from outside his hotel shortly before he had been due to make a speech at Berkeley University. The kidnapping of Redmond was merely the latest in a spate of copycat attacks that had taken place in Atlanta, Sydney, Budapest and beyond. Many of the victims had been held for several weeks and then killed. Some of the recovered bodies had been mutilated. Others, including Euclidis, had never been found.

       3

      Carradine’s apprehensiveness in the build-up to the meeting with Mantis had been completely erased by what had happened on Sussex Gardens. Arriving at the address on Lisson Grove, he felt numb and dazed. Mantis buzzed him inside without speaking on the intercom. Carradine walked up six flights of stairs to the third floor, slightly out of breath and sweating from the climb. The landing carpet was stained. There was a faux Dutch oil painting on the wall.

      ‘Kit. Good to see you. Do come in.’ Mantis was standing back from the door, as though wary of being spotted by neighbours. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’

      Carradine was led into a sparsely furnished sitting room. He laid his jacket on the back of a brand-new cream leather sofa wrapped in clear plastic. Sunlight was streaming through the windows. The sight of the plastic made him feel constricted and hot.

      ‘Are you moving in?’ he asked. The flat smelled of old milk and toilet cleaner. There was no indication that Mantis had prepared any food.

      ‘It’s not my place,’ he replied, closing a connecting door into the hall.

      ‘Ah.’

      So what was it? A safe house? If so, why had Mantis arranged to meet on Service territory? Carradine had assumed they were just going to have a friendly lunch. He looked around. Two mobile phones were charging on the floor by the window. There was a vase of plastic flowers on a table in the centre of the room. Two self-assembly stools were positioned in front of a breakfast