False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “He said, ‘But he was helpful,’ and then, ‘Are you sure?’ I think that was a question, but I missed the next bit because he turned away.”

  “Did he turn back?” asked Guleed.

  “No, he put the cellphone away and stood out in the cold for at least ten minutes,” said September.

  She thought he might have texted someone before he came back in and gave September her instructions.

  Skinner fished yet another burner phone from a locked drawer in his desk and handed it to September. She was to wait until it was time for her regular run up the canal and hand the mobile over to Leo Hoyt, who would be waiting for her at Camden Lock.

  It was a good plan. Skinner’s penthouse flat stood right next to Regent’s Canal and the towpath formed a convenient pedestrian shortcut all the way to Camden and as far as the Islington Tunnel in the east. The tunnel was inaccessible to foot traffic but beyond it the canal ran further east—right past Whitmore Road, where Leo Hoyt had been found murdered.

  September Rain frequently went for runs along the towpath when she was off duty. These were carefully noted in the surveillance logs of the team that Silver had watching Skinner, but the budget didn’t stretch to following September when she went jogging.

  “Did you make the rendezvous?” asked Guleed.

  September said that of course she had—in fact she’d had to wait around a bit because she’d done the distance in record time. When Leo Hoyt turned up she handed over the burner phone and then jogged back the way she’d come.

  “How did he seem?” I asked.

  “Pleased with himself,” said September. “I think the boss had offered him Tyrel’s job.”

  I thought of the contents of Leo’s shopping bag—the booze—a celebration perhaps. The route made sense now—Camden Road Overground station to Dalston Kingsland, into the Tesco Local for a celebratory bottle of Hooch Tropical and off home with a skip in his step.

  And a murderous drone zeroing in on the mobile phone Terrence Skinner had given him.

  “And that was the last time you saw him?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see or hear anything else on the towpath when you ran back?”

  “Like people?”

  “Like something else. A drone, or more than one,” I said.

  I was thinking that poor Leo was found less than ten meters from where the Whitmore Bridge crossed Regent’s Canal and that, after dark, you could have as many drones as you like zip along the canal—through the Islington Tunnel—to hover in ambush under that bridge.

  “No,” said September. “A couple of guys on bikes is all.”

  We asked a couple more questions, partly to nail down the timeline but mostly to change the rhythm of the interview.

  “This all seems very innocuous,” said Guleed. “I don’t really understand why any of this would make you run for home. Are you sure you weren’t just homesick?”

  September visibly bristled, as Guleed had intended her to—now she had something to prove.

  “He was waiting for me when I got back, stopped me before I could have a shower to check that I’d handed over the phone,” she said. “He was sweaty and nervous, which wasn’t like him. When he went back to the top floor I followed him up and slipped into the kitchen—fixed myself a smoothie.”

  There must have been something in my expression, because she chuckled.

  “In case he caught me,” she said. “I know, right? As if I was a kid again.”

  And like a kid eavesdropping on her parents, she didn’t understand half of what she heard and was disappointed by what she did.

  “He said, ‘He’s in position, so we can get on with the transaction.’ Then a pause and he asked whether it was necessary.”

  “Whether what was necessary?” asked Guleed.

  “What do you think he was talking about?” said September. “I didn’t know, not then. I didn’t figure it out until the next morning when Bradley called to tell me Leo was dead and even then . . .” She looked away—avoiding eye contact. “I woke Terry up and told him and he sighed. Like it was bad news he was expecting. That’s when I knew.”

  She’d been right. It wasn’t much in the way of evidence. But now we knew what we were looking for—two burner phones, drone sightings, a reason for Terrence Skinner to want someone as innocuous as Leo Hoyt dead—we had a chance to latch on to a line of inquiry. Policing is about moving from the unknown to the known and then further—to the provable.

  So we went back to the conversation.

  “Did you overhear anything else?” I asked.

  “He said ‘It should be ready soon,’”—but she didn’t know what “it” was or how soon “soon” was. The conversation had obviously gone round and round on those points. Was “something” really necessary and “it would be ready soon.” Skinner’s tone had been placating, wheedling.

  “Not his usual billionaire self,” she said.

  “When did you decide to make a run for it?” asked Guleed.

  “I was planning it as soon as I saw his reaction yesterday morning,” she said. “After he went out I gave it half an hour, grabbed my stuff, and got out.”

  “Why did you wait half an hour?” I asked, to cover my surprise. Because, according to Silver, Skinner was still safely tucked up in the penthouse.

  “I wanted to make sure he was clear of the area,” she said.

  “Any idea where he went?” I asked.

  “Why?” said September with a sly smile. “Don’t you have him under surveillance?”

  “We’re the police,” I said. “Not the security services.”

  September shrugged.

  “Same difference,” she said.

  The observation room was right next door to us, but I would have thought that the double course of solid red brick between would have muffled the sound of Silver yelling into her phone more than it did. I did my best to ignore it.

  “So where do you think he went?” I asked.

  September thought he’d gone wherever it was he went whenever he went without her.

  “I wasn’t happy about letting him out of the perimeter, but it was only once or twice a week and I assumed it was a sex thing,” she said, “You can’t argue with clients when it’s a sex thing—they just get stubborn.”

  Guleed was the one wearing the Bluetooth earpiece connected to the observation room, so I assume it was Silver who prompted her to ask how Skinner left the penthouse unobserved.

  “There’s a third exit out through the building next door,” said September.

  * * *

  —

  Silver had already ordered her team to arrest Skinner before me and Guleed were out of the interview room. But it was too late—he was gone.

  Nightingale headed with Silver to the penthouse to cover any Falcon aspect, while I went with Guleed to Belgravia to feed the voracious maw of HOLMES on the off chance that it might reciprocate and spit out something exciting. We were soon generating actions with gay abandon. Mostly this was door to door, or rather mooring to mooring—inquiries along Regent’s Canal asking bemused boat owners and runners whether they’d seen or heard anything in the hours before Leo Hoyt’s murder. This was going to be manpower intensive and I added an action for myself to see if I couldn’t locate the Goddess of the Canal. After all, it was her who had provided me with that first drowned drone down by Skinner’s penthouse.

  Before I could set out to look for her, I got an e-mail from Reynolds containing scans of Anthony Lane’s manifesto—the one he’d had on his person before murdering Branwell Petersen and shooting up his lab in San Jose. Stained with his own blood, parts of it were illegible. But fortunately the FBI labs had managed to bring out the obscured sections and provide a transcript.

  The opening paragraph started A LINE MUST BE DRAWN, all in caps before settling down t
o three or four pages of what would have looked like deranged gibberish—to someone who hadn’t spent just over three years learning magic. With that knowledge, the writing ceased to be gibberish and became merely deranged.

  According to Anthony Lane, God gave the gift of spirit not just to man or living things but to all creation. So that everything—rocks, trees, my dad’s stereo—was imbued with a sort of consciousness. Postmartin has explained to me that such a belief system is called animism and is very widespread, especially in those places where the locals were sensible enough to eat any missionaries before they could open their mouths. My mum, once you’re past her surface Christianity, believes in this stuff. And I personally don’t so much believe in it as have to massage its feet when I go home at night.

  Certain people were selected by God to be custodians of the world. These people were given great gifts, again in capitals—GREAT GIFTS, to DEFEND the natural world order. But MEN had taught themselves to MANIPULATE THE SPIRIT OF THE WORLD and have used that knowledge to USURP the NATURAL ORDER.

  There then followed a long list of calamities that Anthony Lane blamed on those who USURPED THE NATURAL ORDER, including but not limited to the current drought in California, overpopulation, illegal immigration and the opioid addiction crisis in the American Midwest. They were LEECHES who sucked the very spirit from the world.

  At no point did Anthony Lane refer to these LEECHES as practitioners, or even wizards or witches, but it was clear from the third paragraph on that that was who he meant. I wasn’t sure what my exact role in the mis-selling of Fentanyl was supposed to be but I’m sure, if he hadn’t been shot dead, Anthony would have told me. Probably at great length.

  The last half of the manifesto dealt with the imminent arrival of LATE STAGE USURPATION in which the leeches would apply industrial processes to their misuse of the world’s spirit and STRIP-MINE THE VERY SOUL OF THE PLANET.

  Reynolds had noted that analysis of Anthony Lane’s social media accounts had found that these phrases had been frequently used in conversations he’d had with others on Twitter, Facebook and, dating as far back as 2007, LiveJournal. All of the associated accounts had, suspiciously, been closed within a week of the San Jose attack. The FBI’s counter terrorism analysts’ general assessment was that there were more than a hundred active adherents—that was the word the FBI used—adherents to the doctrine of the ASU—Against Spiritual Usurpation. Reynolds said she’d got the impression the Counterterrorism Analysis section hadn’t taken it very seriously.

  While I read it through again, I had two thoughts. One was that magic on an industrial scale was exactly what the Mary Engine was for. And two: “leech” was what Jade had shouted when she tried to stab us up in Gillingham.

  Which was contradictory, weren’t it? Because Jade had been definitely engaged in some late stage usurpation, what with the Print Shop’s mass-producing magical devices. Whoever had demon-trapped Stephen’s flat and set the drones on us at Mrs. Chin’s place had access to the Mary Engine. And presumably the only person with a Mary Engine was Terrence Skinner—current location unknown.

  And if Skinner had known about Stephen, why had he let him run around inside the Serious Cybernetics Corporation?

  This was assuming there was only one Mary Engine—not a safe assumption at all.

  One thing I was fairly certain of was that wherever Skinner had been sneaking off to, that was where he’d stashed the Mary Engine. Silver had a bunch of her officers running down Skinner’s tangle of shell companies looking for properties, Guleed was organizing a CCTV search around the penthouse to see if we could follow Skinner that way, and Nightingale would be canvassing the demi-monde.

  So I decided to see if someone had already done the work for us.

  I went back home and did something I hadn’t done in a long time—I put my uniform back on, including my Metvest. True, it remained as scratchy as ever and as stylish as a church hall disco, but just then nothing could have fitted me better. I was done fucking about in the shadows—it was time to get legal.

  Then, literally armored, I drove over to the Johnson house and rang the bell.

  Stacy answered the door.

  “Fuck off, you fucking cunt,” she said.

  “Did that ever work on you?” I asked.

  “No, but I wasn’t a fucking cunt,” she said. “Was I?”

  “I need to talk to Tyrel,” I said.

  “That’s Mister fucking Johnson to you,” she said, but she hadn’t shut the door in my face. Which meant she was going to let me in, eventually, after she’d had her say.

  “I’m not being funny,” she said. “But it’s Bev I feel sorry for. How she can stand to be around such a lying, duplicitous sack of shit is beyond me.”

  “That reminds me,” I said, and held up a plastic shopping bag.

  She wanted to carry on swearing but she also wanted to know what was in the bag.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the root ginger you liked,” I said.

  “Don’t want it,” she said.

  “It’s not from me,” I said. “It’s from Bev.”

  “Fine,” she said, and held out a hand. “Hand it over.”

  Once she had the bag, she turned on her heel and walked away.

  “Tyrel’s in the living room,” she said over her shoulder.

  Johnson wasn’t happy to see me, either. But at least he didn’t call me a cunt.

  He was lying on the sofa in a pair of blue tracksuit bottoms and a red T-shirt, legs crossed at the ankle, head propped up on a cushion so that he could see the TV.

  “Why are you in uniform?” he asked.

  “I missed it,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “I loved being spat at,” said Johnson. “And the trousers never fit properly.”

  I didn’t tell him that my uniform trousers, along with the shirts, had all been slyly tailored by Molly when I wasn’t looking and fit perfectly.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “I’m on duty,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not,” he said. “So I’ll have a large one. Scotch.”

  I poured him a large one into a cut-glass tumbler and handed it over. Johnson waved me into a chair. I wasn’t used to wearing so much kit and the belt dug into my hip when I sat down. Johnson saw my discomfort and laughed as I adjusted the strap on my pepper spray.

  “You look like a bargain carousel at the pound shop,” he said. “Is this supposed to impress me, or remind me how lucky I am to be out of the Job?”

  “To be honest,” I said, “I have no fucking idea.”

  Johnson rotated his legs off the sofa and sat up.

  “You know that Somali DS, right?”

  “Sahra?” I said. “Sahra Guleed? Worked with her loads of times.”

  “That’s a good interview technique she’s got,” said Johnson. “A bit wasted on me, though.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I didn’t know anything, did I?” he said. “Didn’t know about you, your bloody accomplice or even that Skinner was up to no good. He was a rich man, so of course he was up to no good. But it was a good job so I wasn’t paying proper attention.”

  “That’s not true though, is it?” I said. “I know you know something.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because you’re police.”

  “Ex-police.”

  “Good police,” I said. “Too good not to know something.”

  “What is it you think I know?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “And why should I tell you?”

  “Because then you’ll know I know you’re a good copper and we can get past this and do some good together.”

  “Which will be what?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I said.

&nb
sp; “Actually it was Leo who sniffed it out,” said Johnson. “Boy had a real talent. Sniffed it out and brought it to me and I was wondering what to do with it when you made the whole thing irrelevant.”

  “So what did Leo sniff out?”

  “Skinner has a warehouse down in the Medway Ports,” said Johnson. “Kept it right off the books.”

  19

  The Loot Box

  I’M AN INNER London boy born and bred, so I didn’t grow up among hypermarkets and shopping malls. Industrial parks to me were repurposed warehouses or box sheds crammed together on reclaimed railway land. Gillingham Business Park, on the other hand, was a sort of garden-suburb industrial stroke retail park. Once you turned off the A2 it was a network of tree-lined two-way roads, except instead of rows of identical semis you had huge business concerns instead—retail toward the front, increasingly industrial toward the back.

  We’d already pinpointed the location on Google Maps so it was an easy matter to cruise slowly past, as if we were lost among the maze of identical leafy streets and mini-roundabouts.

  Skinner’s warehouse, like most of the rest of the business park, was what architects and builders call a crinkly tin shed. Basically you slap down a concrete base, assemble a steel portal frame and hang composite insulated panels from it to form the envelope. Bish, bash, bosh. Instant warehouse, factory, retail outlet. You can make them as big or as small as you like—this one was medium, a hundred meters long, thirty wide and two stories high—sandwiched between a Parcelforce depot and an empty lot.

  After a quick drive past, we doubled back and stopped across the road in a car park attached to an ice skating rink. Unlike the rest of the car parks, which were employee only, this one was open to the public so we wouldn’t stand out and get spotted. Well, probably wouldn’t.

  From our position we could see the front of the warehouse. Unlike most of the industrial units, where the staff car park and the entrances were on the long side of the building, Skinner’s warehouse had its main entrance at the narrow end facing the street. There was no visible signage indicating who the building belonged to—obviously if you didn’t know what was there, they weren’t going to tell you. Outside we could see a black Range Rover with illegally tinted windows, a dark blue old model Ford Transit van, an Audi and a VW Polo.