‘It does make a horrible kind of sense,’ he said. ‘Perce always had a – proprietorial air with Bethany. I could never understand why she laughed it off, so.’
Mark nodded.
‘That’s Perce all over.’
His sleek phone was in his hand, the enormous screen turned towards J-R. It displayed a photograph of a beautiful dark woman with oversized glasses and the words, Vanna P mobile.
‘So are we going to nail him? Shall I call Vanna? Before the borek comes?’
The phone’s screen weaved with hypnotic colours. Suppose Perce and Bethany had cooked up some deal? Chasing Perce, exposing it, would destroy her. What did loyalty look like, in this scenario?
J-R cleared his throat.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve slogged at this for two years – with no life outside work. If I thought for a moment I was selling people’s privacy to some corporation –’
So Mark called the number. He made professional murmurs into the phone, deploying all his easy forcefulness; but even he seemed surprised by the response.
‘Tomorrow morning? Well, I suppose –’
He widened his eyes at J-R who mouthed, Saturday? Mark shrugged, mouthed, Why not? and grinned. J-R threw up his hands and replied out loud.
‘Why not, indeed?’
Mark gave a delight of a smile and engaged his counter-party in brisk arrangements. In the morning they would knock at the door of Mondan’s great electrified headquarters with nothing in their pockets but a USB drive and a passing hope. Krish once said to J-R, Always have a gun taped behind the cistern. A reference to some film. Sorry, Krish, he thought, I have nothing.
Mark ended the call and J-R reached to place a hand on his leg; but there was too much table in the way. Mark looked down, baffled at J-R’s directionless reaching.
‘The tabbouleh is who?’ asked an accented voice.
The waiter. J-R recovered his arm and fussed with his paper napkin. Mark continued to study him.
‘We’re sharing everything,’ he told the waiter.
When the waiter had gone, he leaned eagerly towards J-R.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Are you ready to fuck Sean Perce?’
¶riotbaby
DEMO: All in the West End area: thirty minutes and counting to party time. Get yourself close to any branch of HomeTech in the Oxford Street area. Don’t let their blatant tax evasion take money out of YOUR pocket.
DEMO: Wheelchair sit-in going down NOW at Winstanton Property Services on Albermarle Street. These are the dudes who are evicting tenants with disabilities. Be there.
Thirteen
There are certain things you can walk away from – if you have the nous and the balls:
• Sniff of corruption in your £170m procurement: survive intact, provided you can put up with being named in every article about sleaze for the next six months.
• Members of the public pigspammed after you persuade them to give up their data to a private firm: humiliating but confusing. The media will get bored within a week.
• Breach of email security at your department leads to embarrassing leaks: not good but you should be OK after suffering a ritual disembowelling from John Humphrys.
• Farcical abortive kidnap attempt by deranged riot-girl hacker: borderline. OK if you’re prepared to play the gallery for laughs.
• Filmed being mobbed by buck-naked hippy pigs at a key PR event: rocky. Depends on strength of relationship with Party authorities. In other words, hmm.
• Caught in flagrante with a major supplier to your department (extramarital): fucked. In more than one way.
• These things being cumulative: career pretty much fucked in the arse.
Bethany rubbed her backside. Her only injury from her abduction was a screaming bruise down her right flank, where Dani had shoved her into the plastic chair. The bruising must be an attractive shade of blue by now. She didn’t care to check.
She shifted against the chair’s padding. Being cooped up in this hotel meeting room was like being trapped in the Beiges section of the Dulux catalogue. After this morning’s events the police had triggered DEFCON 5 and commandeered the room as their command centre, and were clearly loving every second.
Official voices bounced around the walls, two conversations cutting across one another. Bethany was trying to keep up with DC Ackroyd but she kept being distracted by DS Raeworth, who was briefing Krish on the other side of the table. It seemed they’d identified this morning’s ringleader and Raeworth was reading out his profile. His telegraphic delivery was hard to ignore in this closed acoustic.
‘Leo Sandberg. Known to us. Masters dropout from Trinity, Cambridge. IT whizz.’
Raeworth’s rhythms of speech reminded her of the shipping forecast. As he spoke he held an ice pack to the back of his head. He’d refused medical attention after his fall and was generally playing the wounded action hero. Bethany wished he – and everyone else – would cool it. Probably she was fooling herself and this was an unmitigated disaster but she liked to hope it wasn’t, thanks very much.
‘Picked up at an anti-capitalist demo last year,’ continued Raeworth. ‘Property damage. Again in November, assaulting a police officer. No evidence – masked. One eviction, verbal warning. Squatting. Tactical had him under occasional observation since the charges fell through.’
‘Observation?’ said Krish. ‘So how come—?’
‘Occasional observation, sir.’
Krish’s BlackBerry cut the conversation short.
‘Ach, hold on a moment.’ He stood to take the call. ‘Oh, you? Well no thanks a bunch for your advice.’
He moved away from the table. Bethany turned her attention back to DC Ackroyd, who was trying to update her on today’s leaked emails. She was finding it impossible to take the information in. Was she still in shock?
‘Sorry, Detective Constable. You were trying to tell me –?’
He gave her a sympathetic smile, the patronising tosser.
‘Our assumption was not correct,’ he said. The police were just as bad at saying I was wrong as politicians. ‘We assumed the emails had been leaked from the department.’
The logic of that statement should presumably be clear. She shook her head as if this would improve her hearing.
‘Well, but they were. These were mails from me, from Procurement colleagues, from my office. The only common link was the department.’
‘Actually, no, Minister.’
He handed her a laser print. She waved it away.
‘Sorry. Reading glasses.’
The policeman shrugged.
‘This erm – communication – between you and Mr Perce, posted by sic_girl at 11:41 today was originally sent on the eighteenth of last month. An email in which you – well –’
‘Yes, all right – so?’
‘It’s sent from your home email address. Gmail.’
That cut through the tofu in her head. She grabbed the paper off him. Oh, shit, yes, she remembered this one. Peter would have read this by now. She had to talk to Peter – but not now. One impossible situation at a time.
‘But then how are they getting them? If you take away the department, there’s no common link. This was sent to Sean’s home email.’ She’d given up with the Mr Perce. ‘Others to his office, to partners in his bid. Where’s the link?’
‘It’s Mondan, Minister. Mr Perce’s personal email is hosted by his firm. All the consortium companies share a mail server – mail.group.mondan.com. Every one of the leaked emails passed through that server. It’s housed in their UK data centre, here in London. It’s the link.’
Bethany glanced across at Krish but he was still on the phone. Christ, she thought, could this tip the balance? Was the department no longer on the hook for the security breach?
Raeworth leaned towards her from the opposite side of the table.
‘We have a court order, Minister,’ he said. ‘We can’t hold back any more. We’re putting a data forensics team inside Mondan. We�
�ll do it with their full cooperation of course. I’ll brief Mr Perce myself tonight.’
Before she could respond, Bethany saw the expression change on Krish’s face. Still listening to his phone, steel set into his jawline. He spoke once more then held the BlackBerry away from his ear, killed the connection and stared at it.
Raeworth was trying to get her attention.
‘Minister?’
She shushed him with a wave of her hand.
‘Krish?’ she said. ‘What is it?’
Krish turned his stare onto her. He looked fit to murder.
‘Well, now. It seems we have a name.’
‘For . . .?’
‘For our blogger. AKA sic_girl. The leaker.’
Both policemen stood. This was becoming more like a tacky cop show by the minute. Bethany moved her weight off the sore side of her arse.
‘We do?’ she said. ‘From where?’
‘From – a source at Parley.’
She let this pass.
‘So . . .? The name?’
‘Leo Sandberg. Known as identikid. Our scuddy wee laddie from this morning. He’s the head of this TakeBackID collective. He’s behind it all.’
Both policemen were on their phones so fast it was like they’d already had them at their ears.
¶riotbaby
PIGWATCH: Horses. Moorgate Tube and area. Avoid.
RIOT TIP: The kids with the breezeblocks in Regent Street: go for the corner of the glass. It breaks more easily than if you hit the centre.
Fourteen
Everyone is shouting. Everything is splashed with red. Dani’s dark-adapted eyes follow the mash by the light of flatscreen animations. They call this place the Flamingo Arms. That was never its name but everybody knows the stencilled birds on the boards out front. It’s round the corner from her flat. From who-she-used-to-be’s flat. She’s working on thinking Terry Salmon. She starts by getting shitfaced.
She makes a rumpus on the dance floor. Her throat hurts from when she murdered her vocal chords before, on the high notes of Sound of the Underground.
Leo was here a while but now he’s gone. He was telling her about some caper. She planned to stick with him but things got choppy and she didn’t see him go.
At some point she dropped some Reebok pills. She counted them to check how many but kept losing count. Then she realised she didn’t know how many had been in the baggie in the first place.
The bar room is dark and hot as Hades. A smell of burning plastic bubbles in from somewhere to devil up the air. Music like food that’s too hot to eat. Wild hormones sweat in her blood. She’s blissed up and on heat, and she couldn’t stop herself if she even wanted. She keeps the backpack strung across her shoulders, holding the contraband by her body.
Best is, they take plastic. When she found this out she bought a Cadbury’s Occasions of coloured drinks with Terry’s card – from Absolut Red Bulls to Zombies. She randoms drinks about the crowd as people slap her back and mouth awright and thumb her up across the hoo-hah.
She and this one guy with Victorian whiskers get gigantic giggles over a thing that happened. She doesn’t know what it was.
Mutton chops, they’re called. Mutton chops.
Oh and oh, she almost forgot: Sam is here! – somewhere. She doesn’t know why he would be but she’s lost track of why she’s even here herself. He’s beautiful in skinny skinny trousers and white pleated shirt, unbuttoned with chaotic genius. He’s fit as the devil’s cock.
Klaxon! She catches sight of him by the bar, talking talking talking, pale down showing through his open buttons.
The beat fades. Stage lights swell. Someone shouts into a mic. Dani makes a hoot as the band reappears. This isn’t the karaoke where dead-eye salarymen do Elvis in the corner of a piss-smelling pub. It’s live. The four musicians cram the tiny stage like polar bears on an ice floe. Dani was squeezed up on that rostrum with them just before. Surely that did happen. A miscreant thought tells her she’ll regret the karaoke in the morning. She downs a blue liquid shot to Shake-and-Vac the thought away.
The big bear guitarist in clown-face has changed from the Slipknot jumpsuit into a music-hall checkered suit. He jacks the amp with a sky-rocket rhooomp! The black-haired girl in slinky leopard-skin rears the neck of her bass before the crowd and rocks a loop – dodackadodo, dodackadodo. Dani loves her surly mischief.
But where’s Sam gone? Dani’s put the two of them down for Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. She better find him. She shouts ‘. . ., . . ., . . .!’ at the goth girl beside her, who nods and shouts back ‘. . .! . . ., . . .!’
Dani burrows into the mosh.
Other stuff happens.
At one point she’s shouting abuse at a size minus-six girl in a silver dress who has something spilled down her. Someone grips Dani’s arm.
Next she’s laughing and introducing a bunch of people she doesn’t know.
‘This is Sam.’
Oh, he’s here again. He smiles. She wants to explain him to these people but it’s hard to get the words.
She stumbles. He holds her up with a hand flat on her stomach. It’s warm. Drums beat inside her, or on the stage. The MC in the red suit does intros. She puts her hand over Sam’s. He says to her, ‘. . .’ and starts to lead her away. She’s telling him, no, when she hears the PA.
‘Next up, can they put the “cheeky” into Elton and Kiki? Please welcome the lovely TERRY THE FISH AND SAMMY C!’
She’s pulling and pulling him to the stage. People clap and whoop and pat her back. She stumbles and there’s a problem with the vodka.
Then she’s puking in the gutter with a calm hand rotating between her shoulder blades. It’s like coming home.
¶riotbaby
PIGWATCH: Ten armoured vans parked on the Embankment west of Hungerford Bridge. Avoid.
Fifteen
‘No, I won’t be,’ said Bethany. ‘Not tonight, babe.’
‘Poor you,’ said the voice on the line.
Peter was sounding oddly faint. She searched the buttons on the hotel phone for something resembling a volume control. Pressed the most likely candidate a few times. Her husband’s voice came back a little stronger.
‘Are you holding up OK?’ he said. ‘The boys are crazy with worry. Though Jake’s feeling a little better.’
Christ. She’d forgotten all about Jake. The vomit.
‘That’s good. But listen—’
‘I’m trying to keep them away from the news but their friends keep Snapchatting.’
‘Petey, hold up. I need to talk to you about—’
‘The look on your face as those kids invaded the stage. I wished I’d been there to just put my arms around you.’
Bethany rubbed her sore eyes.
‘That does sound nice but I’m honestly fine. I wasn’t—’
‘On the TV it looked like you were being shoved or—’
‘No, but Peter listen. I need to tell you—’
‘– and for a while they were saying you’d been kidnapped or something? And then you were fine again? What the hell happened there?’
‘Darling, we need to talk.’
Her BlackBerry buzzed on the hotel-room desk. She switched the receiver to her other ear and reached to turn off the intrusive device.
‘We are talking,’ he said. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘No, come on. You know what I mean. You must have seen. It’s everywhere.’
Some weird property of the phone line: when they both fell silent, it seemed to drop off altogether. A silence like deep space. Then, after aeons had passed, the line clicked back at the sound of Peter’s voice, like the world being taken off pause.
‘This isn’t the time,’ he said.
She bent forward under the weight of his dry, flat tone, elbows to the desk – pressed a fist into her forehead. This? Yes, of course, this: what the hell had she expected?
‘I know,’ she said. ‘IknowIknowIknow. And I will come home, as soon as I can get away from all this, and w
e will talk properly then. But I needed for us to, I don’t know – acknowledge this thing?’
The line clicked silent again.
‘Peter? Are you still there?’
‘OK then,’ he said at last. ‘Here we are, acknowledging this thing. I appreciate you not making any effort to deny it, by the way.’
‘I can’t begin to tell you—’
‘The funny thing is I realise I’ve known for at least a couple of weeks. With hindsight.’
Why, now, did her gut choose to twist? Not at what she’d done, but at the thought she might have been suspected?
‘How do you mean?’ she said.
‘I don’t need to tell you it’s been hard. Since you were elected.’
‘We’ve talked about this. You know how much I appreciate –’
She stopped herself short. She’d mouthed these thanks a million times. Today her appreciation rang more than a little hollow.
‘It’s been worse since your promotion, though,’ he said. ‘It’s like I’ve been married to this tracing-paper version of you. When I actually get to see you, you’re barely present. It’s sapped you, you know?’
‘I haven’t been much of a wife, I know. I know. I’m sorry.’
‘And then the other week, you came back from Cádiz with this – radiance about you.’
‘Darling, don’t.’
‘And I thought, hello. This is something new. You dumped your bags on the doormat with this smile, full of sun. I walked towards this woman – the same woman I first saw across the dinner table at Dan and Laura’s—’
‘Christ, Peter—’
‘– but when your eyes met mine, for this – just this fraction of a second – your face fell. You managed to put it back on again, of course. You gave me that Hi how are you? face. You know? That Great to see you, thank you for your support face. The one you politicians are so good at? You didn’t realise I’d spotted the change. You sometimes forget how well I know you.’
Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Page 27