False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  No. Because the batteries were only there to power the microprocessors, which in turn were “sacrificed” to drive the drones. That stage of the manufacturing process must have taken place out of Barry’s sight. As did the pickups.

  “Every time they finished a batch,” said Guleed, “they stacked them on those wooden racks we found and left them there overnight. In the morning they were gone.” She picked up her corn on the cob and pointed it at me. “What does that suggest to you?”

  “Somebody else came during the night and magicked them,” I said.

  “Is that a real term—‘magicked?’” asked Guleed.

  “And it’s spelt with a ‘k,’ too,” I said. “But the technical term is actually ‘enchanted.’ Only the trouble with that word is that everyone starts thinking glass slippers and spinning wheels.”

  Guleed explained that Kent Police had, after a great deal of moaning, started looking at CCTV footage from the surrounding roads to see if they could spot a van coming in to make the pickup. There were no council CCTV cameras covering the High Street and, quelle surprise, all of the privately owned cameras that might have had the Print Shop in view were inoperable or didn’t keep their image data for more than a week.

  We weren’t going to catch them that way.

  “This is getting really messy,” I said. “There’s too many things going on we don’t know about.”

  “How unusual is that for us—seriously?” said Guleed.

  As a security measure we left Nando’s separately, but I was passing through the Old Street underpass when someone called my name—it was Leo Hoyt. He’d been behind me.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  I told him Nando’s, in case he was following me. But if he was he didn’t give anything away.

  As we walked back to the SCC I asked if he liked tentacle porn, and he said he could take it in small doses but he preferred his fantasies to be vaguely human.

  “That’s just speciesist, that is,” I said.

  “Yeah, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “What with you being sensitive about that sort of thing.”

  I considered asking what that was supposed to mean. But I wanted him distracted, not focused on me. So I made a thing about making him agree that whatever was on the next illicit USB, he would be the one to scan it. He said fine, whatever, but diverted back on to my investigation into William Lloyd’s little breakdown.

  I didn’t blame him—it was the most interesting thing that had happened recently—but still . . . I also noticed him watching as I stashed my outside phone in a locker. To keep him happy, I asked if he wanted to sit in while I interviewed some of the mice who’d known William Lloyd and used that as an excuse to find out where Terrence Skinner was currently located. Johnson informed me that Mr. Skinner was currently in the south of France “on business.” Scheduled to return two days hence.

  “Do you need to get in touch?” he asked, but I said it could wait.

  I started carrying out the interviews as cover, but didn’t learn anything that Belgravia hadn’t got from their initial investigation. I also noticed Leo Hoyt casually passing by the meeting room I was using—he waved when I caught him looking the second time. Coincidence? I should fucking cocoa.

  I was wondering if I could make use of his suspicious nature by getting him to bring me a drink when I got an outside call on my babelphone.

  “Peter,” said Stacy. “Is that you?”

  I thought the switchboard must have routed her through to me by mistake, but when I offered to switch her to Johnson she said no.

  “I wanted you,” she said, and there was a reluctant pause. And with personalities like Stacy’s that’s never a good sign.

  “I need a favor,” she said, and there was definite strain.

  “Sure,” I said, with a completely false confidence.

  “Only Tyrel can’t know,” she said. “Can I trust you on that?”

  You can trust me, I thought, but really you shouldn’t.

  “Sure.”

  Stacy filled me in and it was every bit as awful as I thought it was going to be. I found Leo and asked if he could cover for me.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Family emergency,” I said, and patted my stomach.

  He waved me away and I headed for Kingston as fast as Transport for London could take me.

  * * *

  —

  Kingston nick is one of those functional 1960s nicks, a big steel-framed concrete office block set edgewise to the road so that it presents a cheery windowless façade to the general public. It also stands next to the Hogsmill River path and boasts a sad strip of gravelly faux Zen garden which isn’t fooling anybody—especially any passing Buddhists.

  I’d spent the journey in trying to think of something convincing I could say to prize Oliver out of custody. He’d been picked up during a stop and search and had been, allegedly, found carrying an illegal bladed weapon—Stacy hadn’t specified what kind.

  Getting him out shouldn’t be too hard—it was getting him out without a pending court case that was going to be a trick. Kingston didn’t have the same reputation as some nicks that shall remain nameless, so it was entirely possible that Oliver had actually been carrying a knife when he was searched. And that was the problem. Police don’t like knives—getting shot is a remote possibility, whatever the tabloids say. But getting stabbed? When you’re a response officer, that can happen ten minutes into your shift while you were still wondering where you were going to stop for refs. One minute you’re thinking coffee and bacon sandwich, and the next you’re lying in casualty with the word “perforated” being written down on the clipboard at the end of the bed.

  Face that sort of tension for a couple of years and you start to have views on the subject.

  I still didn’t have a plan beyond claiming I wanted to recruit him as an informant. Which, by the way, is a terrible plan. Not least because the use of CHIS, or Covert Human Intelligence Sources, is tightly regulated.

  I needn’t have worried, because as I crossed the bridge I ran into Stacy and Oliver leaving the station in the company of somebody I recognized.

  He was a tall, handsome white man in an old-fashioned Armani suit in black wool, with a mass of chestnut hair that fell below his shoulders. He was shaking hands with Oliver and Stacy, but turned as I approached and gave me a big friendly smile.

  And with that smile came a rush of sensations—cricket and beer, bicycles and evensong, the clink of a pianoforte and smell of clean upholstery. His name was Emanuel Hogsmill and he was, among other things, the genius loci of the river we were standing next to.

  “Peter,” he said, holding out his hand. “How nice to see you.”

  I shook hands to be polite, but my first question was what he thought he was doing.

  “Just a little bit of legal business,” he said. “Beverley asked me to have a look at the case.”

  I looked over at Oliver and Stacy, who both had that stunned expression people get when their local river god has been making themselves charming. It wears off. And often, if you’re lucky, overexposure renders you immune.

  But sometimes it doesn’t.

  “How is Beverley?” he asked. “You must come up to the Spring Court after the twins have sprung. If you don’t present them, the Old Man will be most put out.”

  Extended families, I thought, the same the world over.

  I said I’d be sure to tell Beverley.

  “I won’t keep you any longer. Give my regards to your lady,” he said and, after saying good-bye to Stacy and Oliver, headed down the river path in the direction of the Thames.

  “You had him as a lawyer?” I asked Stacy when the glamour had worn off a bit.

  “You know how it is, Peter,” said Stacy. “When you’re on the job you hate the twisty fuckers, but when you�
�re facing a panel suddenly they’re the best thing since sliced bread.”

  “So he got you a caution?”

  “Nah,” she said. “Charges dropped. They even had the arresting officer come in and apologize.” She frowned to signal her disapproval. “That wouldn’t have happened in my day.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  And, to test how deep the glamour had been, I asked if she remembered his name.

  “Of course. It was Hogsmeade,” said Stacy. “Emanuel Hogsmeade—no, wait, that’s Harry Potter, isn’t it? Hogsmill. I remember now because it’s the same as the river. I suppose his family must be local.”

  “Oh, definitely local,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  “Well, he is a solicitor,” said Beverley.

  “I looked him up,” I said. “He was articled in 1876.”

  “That explains why he’s so good at it, then, don’t it?” Beverley leaned back in the sofa and lifted a foot into the air. “You promised.”

  I sat down on the pouf, grabbed her foot and dug my thumb into the smooth skin of the arch. Beverley gave a happy groan and flexed her perfect toes, although I noticed that she’d got hard skin on her heels just like the rest of us common mortals.

  “And you promised,” I said, meaning that she wouldn’t use her “natural persuasiveness” to mess with the criminal justice system.

  “I didn’t, though, did I?” she said. “I merely asked a legal acquaintance to take an interest. For all you know he did it with charm and legal acumen.”

  “Even so—”

  “There,” said Beverley suddenly. “Harder, there, harder, oh yes.”

  “Even so,” I said, although Beverley had her eyes closed. “It’s not right.”

  “Peter,” she said. “It’s an ecosystem, a network of patronage and intersectional power relationships. If Oliver had been a proper Oliver with double-barrelled parents and a serious melanin deficiency, chances are he wouldn’t have been stopped in the first place and probably would have been let off with a caution in the second.”

  Not with his record, I thought. But that was probably me missing the point.

  “No parent’s going to let their child get mulched by the legal system, are they?” she said. “Not if they can do something about it. Well, Oliver is lucky—he has Stacy and Tyrel. And now he has me.”

  “Doesn’t make it right,” I said.

  “It is what it is,” said Beverley, and presented me with her other foot.

  * * *

  —

  Later I dreamed that the Bulge was singing to me in two-part disharmony, only for me to wake up and realize it was my phone.

  I grabbed it and answered and a familiar American voice said, “Hi, can I speak to Detective Constable Peter Grant?”

  “Speaking,” I said cheerily, and wondered what the hell was going on.

  “My name is Kimberley Reynolds from the FBI,” she said. “I’m not sure if you remember, but we worked together on the Gallagher case a few years back.”

  “Of course—Agent Reynolds. How can I help you?”

  “I’m making an official request for assistance from the Special Assessment Unit,” she said.

  Which meant she must have gone through the official liaison at the NCA before she phoned me. Which explained the text from Silver which simply said “Call me.” So Skinner had gone officially official. And, from what Reynolds had told me about her place in the FBI hierarchy, this meant the shit was falling from quite a height.

  “What’s the nature of the request?” I asked.

  “The current status of an American citizen, and whether they’re currently engaged in illegal activities.”

  “Are these illegal activities of a special nature?”

  “We believe so.”

  “What’s the individual’s name?”

  “Terrence Skinner,” said Reynolds. “The tech entrepreneur—have you heard of him?”

  “I believe I have,” I said. “I thought he was Australian.”

  “Naturalized in 2007,” said Reynolds. “Is he the subject of an investigation?”

  “He’s certainly a person of interest,” I said. “I think we should continue this conversation from a secure location.”

  “Well, don’t dawdle,” said Reynolds. “You’re going to want to hear this.”

  * * *

  —

  Driving through London at four in the morning is always eerily quick. Your London commuter brain is telling you hours, but you do the trip in less than thirty minutes. I crossed Waterloo Bridge with low clouds and drizzle turning the floodlights of the South Bank and Westminster orange and green under a sullen red sky.

  The brand new vehicle gate on Bedford Place had an equally new intercom entry box bolted next to it at convenient van driver’s height, but it currently had a plastic bag taped over it to show it was inoperative. I got out and used the key and drove in.

  To my surprise, the building materials had been cleared out of the rear courtyard and the Portakabin moved to allow easier access to the new loading ramp leading down to the basement. There was even room in the garage between the Jag and a brand new modified Sprinter. Although I noticed the van hadn’t been painted yet.

  As I climbed the spiral stairs to the Tech Cave, I checked to see if Molly was watching me from an upper window. Nightingale swears she actually does sleep, but I’ve never seen any proof.

  I flipped the master power switch as soon as I was inside and pulled a Coke out of the fridge to serve as a coffee substitute while I waited for my PC to boot up. As soon as Skype was running, Reynolds’s call flashed up.

  “What was all that about?” I asked when I saw her face.

  “Skinner’s been connected to another case,” she said.

  At 10:15 on a Monday morning in August 2015, one Anthony Lane walked into the offices of an obscure tech start-up in San Jose carrying a concealed handgun. He talked his way past the receptionist before using the threat of force to gain access to the secure area at the rear and then, once he was in, opened fire. One person was killed instantly, two others were wounded and Lane himself was shot eight times in the back by a responding police officer. The attack barely made the news, being just one of several hundred to several thousand—depending on where you set the parameters—of active shooter incidents so far that year.

  “It wasn’t on my list,” said Reynolds, “because the perp was dead.”

  Agent Reynolds, in her capacity as special agent in charge of weird shit at the FBI, had spent a hefty chunk of the last two years interviewing surviving shooters to see if there was a supernatural explanation for the increasing number of mass shootings in the US. The survey had yielded a grand total of one possible possession by a bear spirit. But because the project was ongoing, it gave her official permission to stick her nose into any case that vaguely matched the criteria.

  “So what caught your attention about this one?” I asked.

  “Your friend Terrence Skinner bought the company,” said Reynolds. Because this was a semi-official contact, she was calling me from her cubicle in FBI HQ. I got an impression of dimmed lights and hush; it was after eleven in Washington DC. “Canned all the surviving staff, liquidated their property assets and closed them down. Now, why would he do that?”

  “Because they had something he wanted?”

  “I sent you some crime scene photographs. Have you got them yet?”

  I found them in the inbox of the e-mail account I keep just for this purpose. They had that oversaturated look that crime scene pictures always have, the blood splashes being a particularly lurid red. But fortunately the bodies had already been taken away. Instead the floor was scattered with yellow evidence markers. The room was obviously a lab or a workshop with workbenches along one wall, storage racks at the back and an easy to clean blue and green til
e floor. Water had washed in from the far end of the room, diluting the blood pools at the edges, and there were scatters of broken green glass littering the floor. Managing that scene must have been a laugh, I thought.

  “Go forward a couple,” said Reynolds, and picked up a white and blue coffee mug with FBI written in big yellow letters on the side.

  I clicked forward and didn’t need to be told when to stop—a close-up of the racks at the back revealed a clear plastic shield, pockmarked with what I assumed were bullet impacts, and behind the shield a dense cube of brass and steel gears—the Mary Engine.

  “And a week after Skinner buys up the company, somebody tries to ‘carjack’ him.”

  Which Reynolds thought unlikely, given that carjacking, like most car crime, is a crime of opportunity. To her it seemed much more like a deliberate but botched murder attempt.

  “The perp walked up to the car, a Tesla Model S, at an intersection and fired three times through the closed driver’s side window,” she said.

  All three shots miraculously missed, and Skinner’s compulsive flooring of his accelerator and the Tesla’s mad acceleration meant he shot out into the intersection before his attacker could adjust their aim. Ironically he narrowly missed being T-boned by a semi, which would have finished the job nicely.

  While Reynolds had been giving her opinion on the carjacking, I’d been clicking through the pictures looking for a closer view of the rest of the shelving. When I found it I zoomed in—luckily the images were high-resolution, so I got more than just a pixelated blur. There was more broken glass on the tops of the shelves and remains of what must have been glass jars the size and shape of a demijohn. I knew this because (a) two of them had survived the shooting intact and (b) I’d seen identical jars in a cellar under a house in Chesham.

  They were the Rose Jars—where ghosts could be imprisoned and kept for years.

  “You’re going to tell me that Andy Lane was shooting at the equipment, not the people,” I said.

  “Spoiler,” said Reynolds. “I re-interviewed the surviving witnesses and they agreed that Anthony Lane opened fire at the Mary Engine and the jars on the rack. Before you ask, they were both interns and didn’t know where the items had come from.”