Silver was confident because, in her experience, tech types were particularly attracted to conspiracy theories.
“They all want to think they’re on a watch list,” she said. “It makes them feel important.”
I failed to point out that we were engaged in a conspiracy of state-sponsored disinformation, because I reckoned Silver was already aware of the irony and nobody likes a clever clogs.
Toward the end of our first briefing I’d asked Silver how long the operation was going to take.
“The whole operation or your undercover part?”
“My undercover part.”
She asked whether I had a previous engagement.
“In three months,” I said. “I’m going on parental leave come hell or high water. And I literally mean high water.”
* * *
—
Sometimes when I put my ear against the Bulge and closed my eyes I’d swear I could hear the twins singing. Beverley rolled her eyes when I told her that.
“You know, I thought you were going to go all starry-eyed,” she said. “But you’re even worse than I thought you would be.”
“You don’t think they’re going to be ‘special’?” I asked—meaning leaning more toward her side of the family, the River Goddess side, than mine, the common as muck side.
“What I know,” she said, “is that they’re enormous now and they’re going to be even bigger before I pop.”
This was normal for twins or, more precisely, normal for a certain value of normal that wasn’t satisfactory for someone who was a) actually experiencing it and b) had discovered the word epistemology and was wondering on, exactly, what basis that normality had been defined.
Up until the second trimester I’d thought epistemology was something to do with allergies, so that shows you what I knew about it.
Still, I thought they were singing. Although to be honest, it was probably more of a hum.
We’d talked about their “specialness” back when they were a theoretical twinkle in Beverley’s eye and the practical day to day was a comfortable distance in the future. A theoretical distance at that. Only one of Beverley’s sisters had had kids of her own and they’d turned out mostly ordinary. Well, ordinary posh, anyway. So that wasn’t much help.
I’d even asked my mum about it, in as roundabout a fashion as I could manage, but all she said was, all man e pekin special to e mama ein e papa.
Also unhelpful.
One of the twins kicked me in the ear, so I turned to that spot and kissed it.
“Don’t,” said Beverley. “That tickles. And in any case it encourages them.”
“Really?”
Beverley pushed herself up against her pillows, the better to stare down at me and shake her head sadly.
“You would have been a terrible scientist,” she said. “You’ve got no objectivity at all.”
“It’s hard to be objective about this.”
I kissed the Bulge for the last time and crawled up the bed to lie by Beverley’s side. She took my hand, interlaced her fingers in mine and placed it on her belly. There was a last push against my hand and then they were still.
“Is it going to be dangerous?” she asked.
“Nah,” I said. “It’s not Trident or drugs. It’s white-collar crime.”
“White-collar magic crime,” said Beverley.
“It’s still intelligence gathering,” I said. “There’s not going to be any rough stuff.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said. “And be careful.”
Part Two
The Colossus
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
—William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Act I, Scene II)
7
No More Soap Opera
IT’S WEIRD WATCHING an investigation from the wrong side of the blue and white tape. Johnson had asked me to monitor this and it was like watching a particularly well-researched TV show. I found myself nodding approvingly at the way everyone entered the crime scene via the single line of approach with their masks and goggles in place.
Bad for audience identification in TV dramas, but vital for avoiding cross-contamination in real life.
It was also theater. The suspect had been led away from the scene in handcuffs, there were eyewitnesses and internal CCTV showing the attack. The police didn’t need source-level forensics to put him at the scene and the only inceptive evidence required to put him away was the knife and the gun—and they were already bagged and tagged.
The mice had all been cleared out and sent home, the suspect had been whisked off and Skinner and the wounded bodyguard had retired to one of the conference rooms. But not before her ballistic vest—and, presumably, the bullet—had been politely but firmly taken away.
She hadn’t liked that, I’d noticed, but she had been sensible enough not to withhold evidence.
I suspected the whole Silent Witness routine was more about the police imposing themselves on the company and having a good sniff around. There was a tall woman in a noddy suit who might have been Silver, but I couldn’t tell with the mask and goggles.
“Do you know any of this lot?” asked Johnson when he joined me later.
“Some of them,” I said. “That’s DI Stephanopoulos.”
Even in an anonymous noddy suit there was no mistaking the set of her shoulders or the slight limp that was the legacy of a gunshot wound.
“The Stephanopoulos?” said Johnson. “I’ve heard of her.”
“If she’s here then it means DCI Seawoll is the SIO,” I said.
“I’ve heard of him too,” said Johnson.
“Who was the suspect?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“His name was William Lloyd,” said Johnson. “Software engineer is what it says in his folder. I don’t think I met him more than once.”
That was unusual. Johnson had retained the copper’s habit of getting to know everyone by sight—just in case you have to arrest them later.
“How come?”
“He worked upstairs in Bambleweeny,” he said. “Looked at his personnel file. He’s from Harborne.”
“Where’s that?”
“Birmingham,” said Johnson. “Went to Cambridge, lasted a year before dropping out to work for various game companies. Good references from all of them. No security flags or criminal record.”
I remembered the way he’d burst into tears when I’d restrained him. He’d been full of fury and tension when he attacked, but it had drained away the instant it was done.
“Did you get a look at the weapons?” asked Johnson. “They wouldn’t let me get close.”
“A knife and an improvised firearm,” I said. “They both looked like they were made out of plastic.”
“Any idea where they might have come from?”
“Do we have any 3-D printers on the premises?”
Johnson frowned.
“Not that I know of,” he said.
“In Bambleweeny?”
Johnson said nothing. His own exclusion from Bambleweeny had to rankle something rotten. Policing is about ownership—officers are expected to take ownership of a problem and thus be responsible for the outcomes. It didn’t matter if that was a dipping in Covent Garden, an attempted murder in Old Street or maintaining the security at the headquarters of a tech start-up. Being made responsible without proper ownership is the sort of thing that causes dissatisfaction among the rank and file. Although I admit closing half the canteens in London probably ranks higher.
“Have they said what they want from you?” asked Johnson.
“When they’ve finished faffing about, they want me to g
o down to Belgravia to give a statement,” I said.
“Not a problem,” said Johnson. “One thing about Mr. Skinner is that when it comes to legal he’s got your back.”
* * *
—
I was interviewed by a young Somali DS in an expensive green and gold hijab and a beautifully tailored navy-blue suit that I knew for a fact had been conjured out of a backstreet tailor’s in Hong Kong. I knew this because her name was Sahra Guleed and we’d been colleagues for over three years. I was dying to ask how her visit to see her fiancé’s family had gone, but unfortunately Terrence Skinner wasn’t about to let one of his employees speak to the po po without an expensive lawyer present. So the catch-up was going to have to wait.
Guleed put enough bite into it to make it convincing, but my role was pretty clear-cut—quick-thinking savior of the day. Don’t thank me, ma’am, just doing my job. We were done in less than an hour and at the end Guleed shook my hand and thanked me for my co-operation without a hint of irony. I deliberately dawdled in the corridor on the way out so that the expensive lawyer could pass out of earshot.
“This is getting confusing,” said Guleed quietly. “I heard you were reinstated, I go on holiday and when I get back they tell me you’d left the job.”
“That was part of my cover,” I said. “So I could apply for the job at SCC.”
“So you’re undercover?”
“Yes.”
“As yourself?”
“It saves on having to memorize stuff,” I said. “I’m sure Nightingale will arrange a briefing as soon as he can.”
Silver and Nightingale read in Guleed’s bosses DCI Seawoll and DI Stephanopoulos on the details of the Terrence Skinner case—something I was glad to get out of. I’d worked with them before and the pair had a very clear idea about the distinction between what they considered honest coppering and what we were doing on behalf of the NCA.
I provided a more informal briefing for Guleed in the upstairs lounge at the Folly where the cakes and coffee were free, although there was still a faint smell of cement around the place and some patches on the restored staircase that needed snagging.
“I really missed this place,” said Guleed as she picked out a second slice of Citrus Madeira cake. “The canteen at AB just doesn’t have the same ambience.”
She asked after Beverley and the Bulge and we caught up on her sisters and her trip to Hong Kong to meet the “potentials,” as she referred to her fiancé’s family.
I asked what they were like.
“Strangely familiar,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you about how big extended families work.”
“What do they think about Michael converting?”
“We glossed over that bit.”
“And the melanin part?”
Guleed shrugged. “They don’t have much choice in the matter, do they?” she said, which was my cue not to press too hard.
“And did they strike you as particularly magical?” I asked.
“You mean where did Michael pick up his legendary swordsmanship?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Not his mum and dad, but I got the impression there were some uncles and aunties who were practiced. I didn’t meet them, though.”
Molly came gliding in with a silver tray and coffee service. Dressed in a viciously starched black and white Edwardian maid’s uniform, she let her straight black hair cascade down her back all the way to the waist. Pale-skinned, she had a narrow face with sharp features and black, almond-shaped eyes. She would have looked like something from Downton Abbey but only if they’d had a Halloween special directed by Guillermo del Toro.
Noiselessly she placed two cups of Turkish coffee, plus sugar and accoutrements, on the table before us. As she swept out I realized that her sister Foxglove had sneaked in and was sitting cross-legged on a nearby overstuffed leather armchair and peering at us over the top of her A2 sketchpad.
Guleed said “Hi,” but Foxglove remained focused on her sketch.
“Ignore her,” I said. “She won’t say hello until she’s knocked off a couple of likenesses for her collection.”
While Guleed posed for a picture that would later hang in an art gallery in Gateshead, I read the notes on would-be assassin William Lloyd’s interview. Or, more precisely, his evaluation. Because he remained uncommunicative and was sectioned to the secure mental health facility at Northwick Park.
He claimed that he was asleep when the attack happened. When confronted by the overwhelming evidence of his actions, he said he couldn’t explain it unless he was sleepwalking.
“I woke up with some black guy holding me down,” he said.
“Does that look like the glamour to you?” asked Guleed.
“Or something like it,” I said, because it’s better not to make assumptions. “And he could still be faking it.”
I wondered if I could get Beverley to glamour me and try and replicate that sensation of sleepwalking. But she’d refused such experiments in the past on mental health grounds. And there was a third possibility.
“He could have been sequestrated,” I said.
Guleed shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
“Like what happened to Lesley?” she asked.
PC Lesley May, who’d been at Hendon and Charing Cross with me and had worked with Guleed at Belgravia. Who had picked up an unwanted mental hitchhiker in the form of Mr. Punch—otherwise known as the Spirit of Riot and Rebellion. A “sequestration” that left her physically disfigured and mentally scarred.
Once I’d have called her my best mate, but now . . . wanted for murder was just the start.
“Do you think Nightingale could do an assessment?” asked Guleed.
“I think he’s going to have to,” I said. “And you know Abdul and Jennifer will want to have a look, too.”
And no doubt stick his head in an MRI.
Dr. Jennifer Vaughan and Dr. Abdul Haqq Walid being the Folly’s combination pathologists and medical officers. Both had a keen interest in just what the overuse of magic does to someone’s brain to make it resemble a diseased cauliflower.
Guleed nodded and poured herself another cup of coffee.
“Did he seem weird when you tackled him?”
“Not particularly,” I said. “It reminded me a bit of Leicester Square on a Saturday night. He was shouting, I was shouting, everyone was making a noise.”
“He said something a couple of times that stuck in my mind,” said Guleed.
“Oh yeah?”
“He said ‘It talks to you but nothing is ever logged.’ Mean anything to you?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t ask whether she’d tried to follow up because of course she had.
“Have we had a report on the weapons?” I asked.
“I had to phone up and threaten people this morning to get some answers,” said Guleed. “They think both the gun and the knife were produced on a 3-D printer but they don’t want to say definitely.”
The gun design itself appeared to be the famous “Liberator,” which was intended to be manufactured on a 3-D printer and help bring about the armed citizenry that would return the US to its past glory—when governments were small, men were real men and women were grateful. Only the general consensus was that, even if you got the thing to work, it was more likely to blow your hand off than hit anything.
No more a firearm, said the report, than any other short piece of plastic pipe.
What the report didn’t find was a cartridge. The design, as downloaded from the internet, required a standard pistol cartridge which provided bullet and propellant. Once the round was out of the “barrel”—the forensics team actually put quotes around barrel—the casing should have been left behind. Worse, not only couldn’t they find a casing but there was no trace of any propellant on the weapon.
“Also,” said Guleed
, “they said the thermoplastic used to print the knife wasn’t capable of keeping an edge. At least not one consistent with the injuries inflicted on Ian Cobwright.”
Cobwright being the mouse who’d got sliced.
“Is he okay?”
“Who, Cobwright?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s fine,” said Guleed. “Superficial cut. Your fake boss paid for a private room, flowers, hot and cold running nurses but weirdly no grapes.”
“Speaking of fake bosses,” I said. “Tyrel Johnson has invited me to his house for supper.”
Guleed frowned.
“Don’t get too involved with these people,” she said. “You might have to arrest some of them.”
* * *
—
Tyrel Johnson lived in a 1930s semi in Roehampton that had six bedrooms, two bathrooms and more mock Tudor than an episode of Blackadder II. Given the neighborhood and the rearview over Richmond golf course, it should have been worth at least a couple of million if the A3, in all its dual carriageway’d glory, hadn’t run less than a meter from its front gate. It was also less than two hundred meters from Beverley Brook where she crossed from Wimbledon Common over into Richmond Park. Bev could have swum it in less than five minutes—something that she pointed out when we got caught in traffic on the Kingston bypass. More than once.
Still, we arrived on time and pulled into the neatly paved car park which was all that remained of a large front garden. Bev didn’t approve of that either, although she didn’t say where we would have parked otherwise. A Nissan Leaf was stationed at a charging point next to a Citroën people carrier and a battered black Range Rover. I knew all about the house, all about the cars, and all about the short white woman with the mousey hair who opened the front door to let us in.
Even so, I would have pegged Stacy Carter as Job or ex-Job by the reflex way she scanned Bev and me up and down before smiling and letting us in. It’s something we do automatically to make sure we can give an accurate description later, on the off chance a casual acquaintance goes off the deep end and does something arrestable.
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