Nomads

by Dave Hutchinson

  She raised an eyebrow. “How do you know it’s not us?”

  “There’s no beacon. I checked. I’m not stupid, Pep.”

  She sat there on the edge of the sofa, back straight, hands on her knees, and regarded me soberly for a while. Then she said, “Okay, tell me what happened.”

  I gave her the bullet points. My first visit to Dronfield Farm, the weird atmosphere at the house, the Cary Grant-skinned avatar, the visit by Sachs and Richmond, my subsequent return to Dronfield Farm and shameful beating.

  When I’d finished she shook her head. “My, we have been in the wars, haven’t we,” she said, leaving unspoken the fact that she would have torn the avatar’s arm off and clubbed it to bits. She leaned forward, picked up the bottle of scotch, tore off the foil, and twisted out the cork. A delirious smell of whisky mushroomed out and filled the whole flat. She glanced at me. “Sure you won’t have one?” she asked, gesturing with the bottle.

  “No,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Okay.” She poured herself a measure, recorked the bottle, set it back on the table. “So, you have no evidence that the Hallams are…like us.”

  “Nothing I could take into court, no. But there’s something wrong up there. And they’ve got an avatar hassling them; who would bother doing that if they were natives?”

  “If they were in a position to know what it was, they wouldn’t want to attract attention to themselves by getting the police involved,” Pep pointed out. She took a sip of whisky and smiled. “Mm. That’s nice.”

  That had occurred to me as well, but I shook my head. “Trust me, Pep, there’s something dodgy about the Hallams.”

  “Copper’s instinct?” she teased. “Well, maybe you’re right. Regis has a theory.”

  “Oh good.”

  “Don’t be like that, Francesco. You’re the one who took himself off into the wilderness; we haven’t heard from you since…Well, ever. And now all of a sudden you’re beating down our door.”

  “If it’s any comfort, you weren’t easy to find.”

  “Yes, well, that was the whole point, wasn’t it.” She regarded me for a little while, then she said, “Okay, when can you come to London? Regis wants a face-to-face.”

  Where no doubt he had a big house. I spent more time keeping my eye on the financial markets than most police officers, and I thought I could detect certain patterns. Some of the others had been making money the same way I had; a casual observer wouldn’t have spotted it, but I knew what to look for.

  I said, “Give me a couple of days; I’ll have to clear it with my Inspector.”

  “He thinks we picked up a hitch-hiker.”

  “A what?”

  “He thinks someone came with us.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said, although to be honest I had such a basic, entry level grasp of things that it might not only have been possible but perfectly routine.

  “Regis will have to explain it to you,” she said. “I’m just the messenger.”

  “You could have emailed me.”

  “You’d have ignored an email, Francesco.” She took another drink. “I read your report about Dronfield Farm.”

  “You hacked our computer.” All of a sudden my mouth seemed to be bone dry and full of saliva at the same time. “It’s firewalled.”

  “Oh come on, Francesco. Feet of the master and all that.”

  Pep was only a fifth-rate hacker, but I had taught her what little she did know, and she’d be able to go through the craftiest firewall presently available as if it was made of rice paper. Getting into Stockford Police’s server would have been no more difficult for her than going into the newsagents’, taking a magazine down from the shelf, and opening it. And nobody would ever know she’d been there.

  “What about Dronfield Farm?”

  “I had a word with the Hallams,” she said.

  “You did what?”

  She took something from her pocket and skimmed it across the tabletop to me. It was an authentic-looking warrant card in the name of Detective Sergeant Susan Ross, and it had her photo on it. “That’s illegal,” I said. “Unless you really are a Detective Sergeant these days, in which case it’s only a serious breach of procedure.”

  “Francesco,” she chided, and she took another drink. “Really.”

  I scowled. This was why Sachs and Richmond, whoever they were, had been asking about Dronfield Farm – a mysterious and seemingly nonexistent DS wandering about the area could be interpreted in any number of ways, none of them remotely close to the truth. I said, “You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, Pep.”

  “If Regis is right, your little adventures with the local plod are the least of anyone’s problems.”

  “It’s not local plod, Pep. It’s something else.”

  She waved it away and actually said, “Whatever.”

  “All of a sudden we’re causing a footprint, and the fact that they responded so quickly means they’ve been looking for us. And if they’re looking for us it means they know who we are.” I was talking quickly, trying not to look at the bottle of Scotch. “And if they know who we are it means someone has been careless. Or leaky. Or both.”

  “They’re natives, Francesco. Who cares?”

  “It’s not your life they’re digging around in, Pep,” I said seriously. “You can’t just go wandering around pretending to be a member of CID and hope it won’t attract attention.”

  She gave me a level look which suggested she thought I was over-reacting and I should calm down and have a quiet word with myself. After a little while she said, “Cary Grant.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I checked.”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So,” said Pep, “someone else round here must have a Machine.”

  She already knew the answer to that, of course; she just wanted to see what I would say. I said, “I checked that too. The nearest beacon is more than a hundred kilometres away.”

  “Do you know who that is?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t snoop.”

  She laughed. “You’re a policeman, Francesco. Snooping is what you do.”

  “I’m not that kind of policeman. I’d like you to go now, Pep.”

  She thought about that. “Go and see Regis, Francesco. It’s important.”

  “Good to see you and all that, Pep, but please go.”

  She got up and took her coat and bag from the sofa. “Do you want me to take…?” She nodded at the bottle and the glass.

  “Just go, Pep,” I said without looking at her. “Don’t come back.”

  She nodded and put on her coat and went to the door. I heard it open, and close again behind her, and for a few moments I heard her footsteps in the corridor outside, and then she was gone and I was on my own and I sat there in perfect silence for what felt like hours, not a thought in my head.

  “I’m not sure I can authorise this,” John Weller told me the next morning.

  “It’s not as if I’m doing anything useful here, John,” I said.

  He grunted and read my request one last time, then laid it on the desk in front of him. “You’re supposed to be available if the IOPC need to interview you again.”

  “I’ll only be gone a couple of days.”

  He gave me a level look. “Is there something I should know, Frank?”

  “Like what?”

  “You’ve been here three years and as far as I can remember in all that time you’ve not gone much further than Sheffield. Now all of a sudden…” He nodded at the sheet of paper.

  “That’s because I’ve always been busy. Now I’m just spinning my wheels; I don’t see any reason why I can’t go.”

  “I’ll have to notify the IOPC,” he said.

  “Fine. I’m only going to a wedding. I’m not skipping the country.”

  “They’ll say no.”

  “So don’t notify them until tomorrow morning. Lose the paperwork
for a few hours.”

  John had always been straight with me, and I had always been straight with him, apart from the glaring omission of not telling him the whole truth about myself. He said, “‘Lose the paperwork’?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t do anything wrong, John. You know that, I know that. The IOPC probably know that. This is all because Ursula bloody Hinchcliffe’s in a snit about us arresting her little darlings. I’ve had enough of this game.”

  He sucked his teeth. The need to do everything by the book had a brief battle with his annoyance at Ursula Hinchcliffe messing with his officers’ lives.

  “I’ll put it in the post to them this afternoon,” he said finally. “They probably won’t get it till Saturday and they might not see it till Monday. By which time you’ll be back here.” He gave me a look to make sure I understood that this last was an order, not an aspiration.

  “I’ll be back Sunday evening.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And you’ll call me when you get here. Don’t disappoint me, Frank.”

  I had every intention of being back in my flat by about seven on Sunday. Maybe earlier, depending on how things went. “Thank you, John.”

  Seven

  I drove to Leeds, from where I had booked a ticket on the train to York and from there to Edinburgh for my friends’ wedding. Instead of getting on the York train, however, I got on the little local hopper to Sheffield. I bought a ticket on the train and I used cash.

  In Sheffield, I again used cash to buy a single to London, and I was at St Pancras by lunchtime. As a piece of misdirection it was fairly transparent, but I was counting on John sticking to his word and fudging things so Sachs’s people would be unaware of my absence until I was back in Stockford. As far as I could tell, I hadn’t been tailed from the station to Leeds, and my countermeasures included a subroutine that rendered my face, posture and gait hard to see on security cameras. Unless I actually physically bumped into Sachs or Richmond or one of their presumed colleagues, I was as sure as I could be that I’d got away with it.

  I got the Northern Line to Archway station and walked up the hill past the Whittington Hospital and into Highgate village. It was a cool, dry afternoon here on the heights overlooking central London and Highgate was full of tourists.

  Regis lived in a big townhouse on a leafy street off the High Street, a place with a high wall around it and a Regency look to its windows. There was a security box on the wall beside the front gate. I pressed the button and tried not to glare into the camera, and after a few moments there was a click and I was able to push the gate open and step through.

  The front door opened as I reached it, and Pep stood there beaming at me. “Francesco,” she said. “You made it!”

  I pushed past her without saying anything, and found myself in a tiled entrance hall. There were half a dozen doors around the hall, all closed, and a broad stairway leading up to the first floor. Apart from that, and a little antique table bearing a crystal vase full of lilies, it was empty.

  “Where is he?” I said as Pep closed the door behind us.

  “In the study. This way.”

  She led me through one of the doors and along a short corridor to another door, where she stopped and knocked. I didn’t hear an answering voice, but she opened the door and stepped aside to let me through.

  Regis was standing at the window, looking out into the well-tended walled garden beyond. He was tall and straight-shouldered and patrician, and he looked much as I remembered, although the last time I’d seen him his hair had been snow-white, not brown.

  “Francesco,” he said, stepping out from behind his desk and coming towards me with his hand outstretched and a serious expression on his face. “Thank you for coming at such short notice. Have you eaten?”

  “I had something on the train.”

  He looked past me. “Coffee and sandwiches please, Pep. And could you ask Jan Tyrian to join us?”

  “Oh good,” I said. “You invited Doctor Strangelove too.”

  He narrowed his eyes fractionally at me. “You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head, Francesco.”

  “I’ll turn round and go home if you keep talking to me like that, Regis.”

  He smiled. “No you won’t. You came here because you want to know what’s going on; you won’t leave until you at least know that.” And he offered me his hand again.

  “Fuck you, Regis,” I said. But I shook his hand.

  “Sit down,” he said, waving a hand at a comfy-looking sofa that sat with a couple of armchairs around a low table on the other side of the room. Behind them, a wall of shelves was full of the sort of impressively aged-looking books that interior designers source for their clients in order to make them look Serious and Well-Read. Regis had never read a book in his life; not a paper one, anyway.

  He’d done well for himself, but that was probably going to happen wherever he wound up. Regis was that sort of man. He’d been a multi-billionaire when I first met him, and he probably wasn’t far off being a billionaire again. Some people just can’t be satisfied with having enough. They always need to have more.

  I took one of the armchairs and he sat on the sofa and we didn’t make smalltalk because ours was not that sort of relationship. I had worked for him once, and though I hadn’t known it at the time that was my ticket here. He thought that meant I owed him something, but as far as I was concerned I’d only been doing my job and if my payment was a little…unusual, that was his problem. We hadn’t quite agreed to differ about it, so we sat in silence on our respective soft furnishings until the door opened and Jan Tyrian entered the study.

  There was a beat when he spotted me in the armchair, which told me that Regis hadn’t bothered to tell him I was coming. Then he recovered and said, with the barest attempt to hide his insincerity, “Francesco. Good to see you.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “He calls himself ‘Frank’ now,” Pep said, coming into the room with a tray.

  “Oh?” Jan Tyrian looked at me. “That’s…nice.” He went over and sat in the other armchair. He was a dapper little man in a white linen suit, a starched collar, and a red tie. It was as if someone had decided to dress a raptor as Tom Wolfe.

  Pep came over and put the tray on the table. There were cups and a coffee jug and milk and sugar, and a plate piled high with sandwiches. She winked at me and left again.

  Regis said, “Are you in contact with anyone else, Francesc…er, Frank?”

  “I wasn’t in contact with anyone until a couple of days ago, and after I leave here I’d like to go back to not being in contact with anyone.”

  “That may not be possible,” Jan Tyrian said.

  “You let me be the judge of what’s possible and what isn’t.” I looked at Regis. “I was perfectly happy where I was until you sent your pet ninja to mess with my head. She said you wanted to talk to me about something. Fine, talk to me. But once you’re finished, I’m leaving, and I don’t want to see you again. Either of you.”

  “You’d be dead if it weren’t for us,” Jan Tyrian snapped.

  “Technically, I am dead.”

  “Technically, you haven’t been born yet.”

  Regis sighed and raised a hand. “This is all very jolly,” he said, “but could you just not?”

  I looked at them, Regis Colombar and his tame weapons scientist, self-styled saviours of the human race. While Regis’ billions had paid for the Project, and Jan Tyrian’s expertise with nanotechnology had helped make it possible, I personally thought the people we really had to thank were the thousands of techs and researchers who had worked their hearts out to make it a reality, and had wound up being left behind.

  I said, “Did you grass me up to the spooks?”

  Regis raised an eyebrow. “Did I what you to the what?”

  “I had a visit from a couple of people who smelled like Security; did you nudge them in my direction?”

  He shook his head.

  “We had a report of a prowler a week or so ago; the
householder said the intruder looked like Cary Grant. The Security people seemed quite interested in that, and they weren’t particularly subtle about it.”

  Regis and Jan Tyrian exchanged glances. “Nothing to do with me,” said Regis.

  “It must be coincidence,” Jan Tyrian said. “The natives can’t possibly know.” Which I thought was one of the stupider things I had ever heard. It was a miracle we hadn’t been on the front page of every newspaper on Earth for the past century or so. All it would take was one of us to leak and someone in authority to believe them, although admittedly that last was a bit of a stretch.

  The door opened again and Pep stepped into the room. “We have company,” she said.

  Regis scowled and took out his phone, thumbed up an app, looked at it for a few moments. Then he looked at me. “Are these anything to do with you?” He held up the phone. The screen showed a camera feed of the street outside the house. It was full of police vehicles.

  “What should I do?” Pep asked.

  Regis sighed. “You’d better let them in,” he said. “Knowing the neighbours, this is probably on YouTube already.”

  “You must think we’re really stupid,” Sachs told me.

  “Actually, I don’t,” I said. “But I do think there are things you’re better off not knowing.”

  She looked around the room, at Regis and Pep and Jan Tyrian, then returned her gaze to me. It was like a reconstruction of an Agatha Christie country house mystery, Miss Marple gathering the suspects in the drawing room to unmask the murderer, except Sachs was not Miss Marple and we were not murderers.

  “I work for the Home Office,” she told us.

  “Good for you,” Regis said, beaming goodwill at her. “And congratulations on tracking us down; it can’t have been easy.” I was going to have to find out how they’d followed me, at some point, but that wasn’t important right now. There were armed tactical officers in the garden and stationed around the property; there was no point trying to style it out.

  “There was a suicide three years ago,” she said. “In Cardiff. A gentleman named Oxley. Does that ring a bell?” When it was obvious it didn’t, she went on, “Local police dealt with it, there was no sign of foul play, but Mr Oxley had no next of kin and during the investigation of his estate certain items of an… anomalous nature were discovered.” Oh, excellent. They had a Machine. I wondered whether I had known the person it belonged to.