The things that happened next to Mr Snatch all became a bit of a blur as
he wasn’t really concentrating, but was thinking of how he could get back and
save that poor girl from freezing to death all alone in a chilly park not half
a mile from where he had thrown her out into the night just a few short hours
before.
In so far as it is worth anything, he was, at least, thinking of such
things for her sake and not simply because of the awful impression of
negligence that it might leave in the press, and what that might do to both his
share prices and his own personal standing as a recognised humanitarian.
So it was that the next few places he was spirited to and from didn’t
really make all that much impression upon him, apart from feeling a deep sense
of sadness when he realised that Olive had not survived her night in the cold.
Other than that, the various events that were to unfold because of the simple
catalyst or trigger of a poor girl flung out into a cold, dark night by a
wicked businessman who thought no more for her welfare than he might for that
of a discarded cigarette butt or sweet wrapper didn’t really register all that
much with him at all.
Oh, he got the gist clearly enough. The people had finally had enough of
him and his kind. There’d been a trial and he’d been given a minimal sentence
and didn’t even serve one day of it, and somehow the money due to be paid out
as compensation to her loved ones had never actually been paid because she
didn’t appear to have any loved ones, at least none who were of an age to protest loudly enough about it, and certainly not any legitimate ones once the
lawyers had sorted out the gold-diggers.
There had been a scandal, there had been rage and, for the time-being at
least, he had had to cede control of his companies to other people before wrestling it back through a series of brilliant boardroom manoeuvres which would have
made one or two of those Sunday evening television serials seem understated and
conservative, but, for a while at least, his life had gone on pretty much as
before.
But then things had started to get ugly, and the barbarians had started
gathering at the gates, and the resentment and the bitterness had started to
grow and grow, and, whilst the breakdown of society started slowly at first, before too long it was
escalating as the rage born out of the bitterness of the “have-nots” against
the opulence and decadence of the “haves” turned into an all-out war.
And, as is the nature of wars, they begat other conflicts, and, before
very much longer, without the stabilising influence of all those financial
priorities to keep the needs and priorities and the self-interests of all of
those various governments in check, things continued to get worse and worse,
and, eventually and perhaps inevitably, the threat of total Armageddon once more
lay over the heads of humanity.
Mr Snatch watched it all with a growing sense of horror and shame, and
wondered about its inevitability, and wondered whether one callous act and the
fate of one girl really could have caused all of this to unfold, and he
realised that he knew enough about the way the numbers worked to know that
of course it could.
If you were to roll back time to the very beginnings of the Earth and
roll the dice again, there was precious little reason to suppose that you’d get
human beings at the end, once you rolled time forwards again. Equally, each
roll of the dice at any particular moment could change the entire course of
future history and there was no reason at all to suppose that Olive’s cold and
lonely death wouldn’t cause the very outcome that he was witnessing.
Eventually he was brought to a place where a lonely figure who resembled Mr Snatch
himself just a little, and so was most probably his son, or his grandson,
scrambled his way into a shelter in order to try and ride out the end of the
world, and for some inexplicable reason seemed to imagine that surviving the
coming holocaust was somehow far more important that preventing it from
happening in the first place.
Before he could intervene, Mr Snatch was
shifted once again by the strange forces that were manipulating him, and that
is why, later still, he found himself standing upon a barren grey plain out of
which, in the far distance, there jutted a ramshackle iron ivory tower from
which a thin trail of smoke could just be made out, poking its tiny finger up
into the cloud-filled sky.
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