‘Who is it then?’ asked the killers in stereo but by then Badass was already walking back to his portacabin ‘I do not know and I do not care’ he said over one of his shoulders.

‘But . . .’ said killers/idiots.

‘Don’t ‘but’ me’ said Badass, ‘You’ve produced a narrative anomaly – a so-called orphan event. An irrelevance.’

‘It’s a corpse’ said one of the blokes, calling after the Badass but still looking down. ‘What should we do with it?’

‘I don’t care. That’s your problem Idiots. You’ve killed the wrong guy’.

*

Whether it was some unfortunate error of Google maps or a human map-reader error, or an understandable error of communication or a slip of the tongue or a typographical error or just one of those things that happened sometimes in Endland back then no one could say for sure and anyway each Idiot secretly blamed the other, suspecting his colleague was in fact the true fuck up of the team, and therefore cause of all malfunctions.

In silence, without really thinking, they drove the car to the top floor of a car park in the edge of the town, a familiar place on top of a hill where as younger blokes coming up they had sometimes bought drugs or booze or girlfriends to make love in a car or where on more Lonely Nites © they had thrown stones at bottles together or listened in to private conversations belonging to other people using a kind of hand-made radio scanner. For them the location was a home of sorts; a multi-storey sanctuary, a charmed hiding place, far above the town.

‘We’ve killed someone’ said one as they sat there rolling another spliff.

‘It’s not the first time’ said the other, ‘remember that guy we killed in Derby. Or that one in Kurdistan’.

‘He made a terrible sound and we faced prosecution for some kind of noise pollution’.

‘Yes. I remember.’

Lighting the spliff and affecting the wide-eyed far away look he had seen sometimes on YoTube.

‘That was so different tho. That fool had it coming. This guy last night was all like Mistaken Identity, an Innocent Man. With kids or hobbies or’.

‘Shit. It’s just like the Badass said, he has no place in the narrative. We have to get rid of him, otherwise the structure will not hold’.

The second idiot was not a complete expert in narrative theory and made confused speculation concerning sub-plots, U-turns, arcs, beats and deep revelations but every time he went back to look in the boot at the sad tangle of dead flesh, the stench of mortality and bloody clothing he had to admit they were in trouble.