Shooting in the Dark

emissary, and she is my handmaiden.
    Listen. The rulers and the priests would do nothing. They never do anything. Their function is to invent platitudes, to make us forget our responsibilities. They want us to work and to create capital and to believe that our duty is to serve them, and not our maker.
    Actually, they are insane. We are ruled over, both on the material and the spiritual planes, by lunatics.
    That is why I have had no choice in my life but to become the watchman. That is why I have to watch the woman and her sister with no eyes.
    And when I have watched enough. When I am absolutely certain.
    Why, then, the hand of the Lord will be with me.
     

4
     
    Geordie was watching Janet watching the television with their baby daughter, Echo, on her lap. Echo had been changed and fed and she was burping and farting gently, talking to herself and the world in some primitive language nobody had ever bothered to translate. Janet was not looking at Echo. Her hands were running over the child, and Geordie thought there must be a kind of communication going on between them. But Janet’s conscious mind was taken up with whatever was spewing out of the television.
    Janet had had ten hours’ sleep through the night while Geordie carried Echo around the flat. As long as she was being carried, Echo slept. But every time Geordie laid her down on the couch or in her cradle, she’d open her eyes and her mouth and her lungs and scream until he picked her up again. The result was that Geordie hadn’t shaved or got around to washing his face or teeth yet. The inside of his mouth felt like shit. Janet had had a shower and changed into fresh clothes and she looked wonderful, like one of those impossible women in the posh magazines.
    How did it happen? That was what Geordie was forever trying to work out in his mind. One day, when he was still a child, his mother had run off with a guy and left Geordie alone, and from that point everything had been a downhill slide. They’d taken him into what they called ‘care’, carted him off to an orphanage. For a while Geordie thought his elder brother would come and rescue him from that place, but his brother had signed up on a boat and was somewhere in South America. After he escaped from the orphanage, there’d been a period on the streets, then a spell in gaol. Finally he’d ended up in York and Sam had plucked him out of the gutter and found him somewhere to live and trained him up in detective work.
    The downhill slide had ended there, and since Sam came along he’d been on an up. First Celia had become a friend, and then Marie and JD and Janet, and now there was Echo.
    So how did it happen?
    Geordie thought it was an important question. Because the answer was that Sam Turner came along and offered a helping hand. That’s what happened that made the difference. Just that. Nothing else. It all depended on one man.
    Geordie thought that if it was possible for one man to turn his life around, to stop him being kicked from pillar to post and starving to death, then it was probably the same with governments and countries. They should put it on the TV, and in magazines, videos, tell people that they could help each other out, not be fighting each other all the time. Cut out the way people are always competing with each other, shove a bit of co-operation in there instead.
    When he said these things to people, even to Janet, they’d nod and shake their heads and say he was naive. And Geordie would say, ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’
    Janet flicked the television off with the handset and put Echo over her shoulder. ‘I’m gonna take her for a walk,’ she said. ‘You should get some sleep.’
    ‘No, I’m going in to work,’ he said. ‘I talked to Celia on the phone. JD’s coming in, there’s a new case with a couple of sisters, one of them’s blind. And Sam’s not much good with only one hand.’
    Janet shook her head. ‘You’ll be shattered.’
    ‘I’m always shattered,’ he said. ‘Just like you. I’m getting used to it now.’
    Geordie and Janet both had six months’ leave from their jobs, so they could get used to being a family with a baby, do all the bonding work. But they took it in turns to keep their hands in; Geordie at the Sam Turner Detective Agency, and Janet at the bookshop.
    ‘D’you think we’re workaholics?’ Geordie asked.
    ‘No. I think we like the work we do, that’s number one. It’s good having Echo and I wouldn’t want to live