Kingfisher

Power and Conflict

Acelmouth was less than an hour away from London on the train, and that could only ever mean one thing. And at a glance the city seemed to be precisely what its rail connections implied, with Tonbridge on one side and Redhill on the other and 18 Castle Gardens typical of the detached piles that made up most of its suburbs. But even a casual observer would start to notice certain irregularities.

Despite being thirty miles inland, the city had somehow managed in its heydey to be an important shipping port, and miles of abandoned docks still rusted along the edges of the Bough Lake, graffiti-ridden testaments to the bizarre ingenuity of nineteenth-century Aceltonians. This industrial heritage had rendered it loosely polycentric, and there were a few attempts at a city centre, connected by an adipose tissue of depressingly proper suburbs. Most residents of Acelmouth were ferociously middle-class and ferociously Tory, repudiating the eccentricity of the city, and they did all they could to drag their hometown as far into London's shadow as the Thameslink maximum line speed would allow.

And so there were always cranes hard at work in Acelmouth, turning abandoned factories into hair salons and hiding the scars of deindustrialisation. Exclusive waterfront homes spread slowly through the docklands, like red tendrils of infection reaching out across the skin from an untreated septic wound. But something of its old spirit had not yet been fully crushed in the gears of unending development. Every so often, there would still be a street corner where an old red brick factory still stood, its windows smashed and its steel rotting but the lingering memory of a real community still burnt into its broken form.

The last workers' terraces had been demolished in the eighties, dealing a serious blow to the city's character, and its centres were all plastic clones of one another, filled with shopping districts given artificial names like postmodern pubs—"The Point," "The Crossing Place," "The Signifier." But even now, the city seemed a little apart from the London dormitory towns it increasingly resembled. It had its own identity and a dissenting minority willing to fight for it. So while each rush-hour train carried away a little of the city's soul, England's capital feeding on it like a black hole consuming a star, Acelmouth remained a fading anomaly, its individuality waning but stubbornly refusing to die.

On the fringes of its easternmost centre—the one that housed The Point and the city's only nightclub—there were two teenagers were walking along the street, one of them Toby d'Arcy and the other an insincere-looking boy in a fedora.

'Honestly Michael, like, things with Rachel are actually real shit,' said Toby. Though he stringently denied the accusation, Toby really did seem to think that putting special emphasis on the word shit made him sound philosophical and wise. It didn't help that he only half-pronounced the t.

His dress sense did nothing to make the denial any more convincing. He was taller than Michael and anyone else in their group of friends, and despite eating whatever the fuck he wanted, he was nearly as thin as Claire. This was how he justified his clothes: if Toby was to be believed, nowhere in Acelmouth, London or the entire south-east of England sold anything that fit him other than flared jeans and anime t-shirts. His family's fiscal situation made this claimed predicament even less plausible. Toby's grandfather was the Baron d'Arcy of Tonbridge, but this tenuous aristocratic link was surprisingly irrelevant to his family's wealth. His mother and father had met at a biotechnology conference: the former, somewhere along the line an illegitimate descendent of Catherine Parr, had made her money in genetically modified food crops, and the latter had owned many of the farms that used her seeds. The d'Arcys were now one of the wealthiest families in England.

'Oh yeah?' Michael was far more interested than he should have been. After all, Rachel and Toby's relationship was central to the friendship group, and Toby was his closest friend. More importantly, Michael was eager to be distracted from his own relationship and the murder plans associated therewith. 'What's going on?' he asked, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.