The world is taking on a rosy glow of bonhomie when Fi—or should that be Dr. Macintosh?—returns to the party. As it happens, you’ve just turned away from your poet to refill your glass, so she heads straight towards you. She’s got a small, dog-eared paperback in one hand. “Sorry, ran into a spot of bother in the kitchen,” she says unapologetically. “Listen, you’re obviously new to all this, and I suddenly remembered I had a book that came in handy when I was getting started. An introductory text.” She pushes it at you with a slightly furtive expression: The penny drops, and you slide it into your jacket pocket and thank her effusively. “No, really, it’s the least I could do. Don’t take it too seriously, but you’d be surprised how far it’ll take you. It does what it says on the can.” She smiles. “I’d better circulate now—we’re beginning to fill up. See you around . . .”
As she turns away, you risk a quick scooby at the book’s cover. On the rebound from the double-take you glare at her receding back—then remember where you are and whose whisky you’re drinking, and force yourself to calm down. The Idiot’s Pocket Guide to International Diplomacy indeed!
What kind of amateur does she take you for?
TOYMAKER: Hostile Takeover
It’s like the punch-line to a knock-knock joke gone wrong:
(Knock-knock)
“Who’s there?”
“I was looking for Mike? Is he in?”
“Please step inside, sir. Do you have some form of ID?”
You are not stupid: You aren’t carrying anything illegal on your person—it’s all in your head. Even your fall-guy phone is only guilty of behaving in a shifty manner. So you do not attempt to flee. Instead, you do as the uniformed gentleman requests and meekly step into the front hall to help him with his enquiries, whereupon you realize that something is very wrong indeed because the walls and ceiling and floor are covered in clear plastic anticontamination sheets, and there’s a scene of crime officer in a bunny suit coming down the stairs. “Will a driving license do?” you ask the cop.
You can see him giving you the quick up and down with his glasses, which is an oh-shit moment. “What’s your name?” he asks.
“John, John Christie,” you volunteer, reaching for your wallet. “Is Mike here? Is there some kind of problem?” You force an expression of worried concern, a little apprehension. Under the circumstances, it comes easily enough.
“A driving license will do. Pass it here, please.” You fumble the card and slide it towards him. Most of the John Christie ID is loaded in your phone, from microcredits to bank accounts—it’s very solid. “Why are you here?”
“I was hoping to see . . . Mike . . .” You slow your spiel as if uncertain, even though any fool can tell that something has gone seriously non-linear here. You make an effort to memorize the dibble’s name-plate: PC BROWN, presumably working for INSPECTOR SCARLET of Rainbow Division. Just your luck you aren’t wearing a lifelogger, or you could stand on your rights a little harder—but no, that might not be a good idea. Every instinct is telling you to disengage. Mike’s obviously in big trouble, which means you won’t be hiring him—that’s for sure. You need to get clear before the cops start focussing on you. A factoid pops out of the Mike Blair file and screams for your attention, and you instantly realize it’s a good one. “He said to drop by if I was ever in Edinburgh.”
PC Brown turns your driving license over in his hand, and you can see some flickering in his glasses. He’s got a contactless reader, online to the DVLA database and then back to CopSpace once they’ve authenticated it. The photograph matches, and the license is genuine. He glances back at you and twitches his head, superimposing a head-up ghost image beside your face. Then he hands the card back. “Where did you meet Mr. . . . ?”
“Mike? It was at the Admiral Duncan, in London, about six months ago. Or maybe eight? Or was it after Pride? Anyway, we, er . . . got to know each other quite well.” You clear your throat. “It’s personal. He invited me to drop round if I was ever in Edinburgh, and I’m here for the next week on business, and I was hoping he didn’t have anything else on for the weekend. Is something wrong?”
Brown’s expression morphs through a whole sequence of emotions as you give him the Big Lie, backed up by some telegraphic wiggling of eyebrows and seasoned with just the tiniest bit of camp. You have not, in fact, ever met Mike (and you hope to hell he’s lying dead in an autopsy room so he can’t contradict you); even if you had, you wouldn’t want to fuck him. On the other hand, the Operation’s files went into quite a lot of detail on the subject of his personal life, and getting off with him after a Pride march in what has long been one of the biggest knocking shops in London is entirely plausible. The Scottish Polis get all red-faced and sweaty at the merest suggestion of locker-room homophobia: It’s amusing to watch the cop switch from investigating-person-of-interest mode to dealing with bereaved significant other in the space of a sentence. (It works even better if there is some latent locker-room homophobia, so you’re careful to lean just a little too close and hold the eye contact a second too long.)
“Is something wrong?” you ask, feigning worry, as he begins to open his mouth. And you know that, really, nothing is wrong. If you were neurotypical and going up against the speech stress analysis he’s watching in his fancy-pants glasses, you’d be in deep doo-doo, getting flustered from all the falsehoods: But you’re not, and the cops’ sexy tech passes the handicap to their side when they get to deal with the likes of you. It’s only if they get you in front of a psych with a PCL-R check-list that you’ve got to start worrying.
“Mr. Christie, John, I’m really sorry.” He takes a deep breath. “Would you like to sit down?” He’s all solicitude, waving you into the spotless kitchen (which is interestingly bereft of forensic turds). “I’m very sorry, but—”
“Oh God,” you say, shoving the “distraught” slider all the way up to eleven. “He’s been in an accident, hasn’t he?”
There’s another cop coming down the staircase, and they’re going into full-on sit-down-and-have-a-cup-of-tea mode, as if they expect you to go into shock. “What makes you think there’s been an accident?” asks Brown, but it’s just a residual autonomic cop reflex—he’s already bought your spiel on outline.
“Mike’s big on water sports,” you say off-hand, then make to look horrified. “Oh God. What’s happened?”
“I’m really sorry.” PC Brown looks sideways at the newcomer, DET SGT GREEN. (Yeah, right, you think.) “Um. There’s been a, a fatality, sir. We’re still trying to ascertain the precise nature of events.” Which means it wasn’t an accident. “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief, sir. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to take a saliva sample.” They’ve already got your fingerprint biometrics off the driving license: This means they’re serious about logging identities.
You nod shakily. “Sure. Oh God.” You hunch up a little and do the weepy thing—not too much of it, you don’t want to ham it up and tip them off. “I can’t believe it.” Which is entirely true. Mikey’s dossier said he’s never been involved in anything serious enough to warrant a hit—that was one of the reasons you were going to interview him. Walking in on a homicide investigation is classic dumb bad luck. Your immediate task is to stop it graduating into a classic fuck-up, which is best done by cooperating with the cops for the time being. There are forms you can serve later to get “John Christie’s” DNA taken off the database once they figure out that he’s an innocent bystander, then you can retire the ID with a “do not recycle” flag.
Brown produces a sample tube and a cotton swab, and invites you to say “Aaagh,” which you do with alacrity. After which it’s all tea and sympathy, minus the tea, and “we’re terribly sorry, you’re free to go, sir,” after they get you to repeat in front of their specs that you haven’t seen Mike for at least half a year. And why should you not be free to go? “John Christie” is simply a contact whose state-issued biometric ID checks out, who has donated a DNA sample for the investigation, and who
is at best an embarrassing distraction from the job in hand.
You leave by the front door and pedal very slowly, being careful to wobble for the cameras until you’re out of sight of the house. There’s been a fatality. Hence all the plastic sheeting and the DNA swab dance routine. We’re still trying to ascertain the precise nature of events. Which means it wasn’t an accident: Accidents don’t call for a detective sergeant to cover the site. Something has gone seriously fucking wrong here, and it looks like you may need to abort the operation, close up shop, and leave town on the schedule you just fed the Polis.
But first, you’ve got a fall-back option.
You bicycle away from the former abode of Michael Blair, your mood very dark. Somehow, all the fun has been sucked out of this venture before it even got started. Number One Client had the supreme bad taste to get himself whacked at a maximally inconvenient time. You’ve still got a job of work to do, but the hotel lost your luggage, and on top of that you’ve got the added vexation of falling within the penumbra of police sousveillance (which will take some work to get disentangled from when it’s time to leave).
Luckily—ironically—you haven’t done anything illegal yet. All you have to do is be John Christie for a week, then switch to another primary ID and stay clean while the paper-work to pull his DNA off the system chugs along. It’s not like you’re a serial killer or anything, is it? But it’s still a nuisance.
So you decide to execute your fall-back plan and visit your Number Two Client.
While you were doing the weepy in front of PC Brown the sun came out and most of the clouds have fucked off to Glasgow. Alas, there’s a brisk breeze blowing. You can die of sunburn and hypothermia during a Scottish summer—simultaneously, with added insomnia on top from the midnight sun. (It goes below the horizon, but it never really gets dark.) Swearing at the weather under your breath, you cycle uphill into the wind for half a kilometre, then pause at a cycle rack to ditch the wheels.
Once you’re clear of the pedal-powered snitch, you can safely reboot the phone and hit the online maps for a route to Number Two Client. Actually, you’re querying for a route to the boutique chocolate shop in Fountainbridge, above which they live and run their business—another way to avoid cropping up in a CopSpace crawl—but no matter. You haven’t memorized this particular route because you expected to be holed up with Mikey-boy for the whole morning and a chunk of the afternoon, but again: no matter. Your candidate for chief operations officer may have drawn the ace of spades, but you’re still holding a card for the CFO. And according to the dossier head office sent you, Vivian works from home.
The Polis know you’re in town, so hiding your trail may actually be a bad idea at this point. Accordingly, you hoof it to the nearest bus-stop and call a micro. While you wait for it, you review what the Operation knows about her (and is willing to stick in a mangled bitmap image file on an off-shore cloud).
Vivian Crolla. Age forty-eight, single, chartered accountant by trade—not so much an adornment to her profession as a butt-nugget dangling from its arse-hairs. She has been investigated by the ACA disciplinary committee three times but escaped unscathed save for a reprimand on the first occasion (now timed-out). She’s been investigated by the Revenue twice (inconclusively). She has come to the attention of the Serious Fraud Office and escaped without receiving as much as a police caution. She’s so slippery, you could skin her and market the hide as a surface for frying pans. And that’s just her public persona.
What the Operation knows about Vivian is enough that if you were with the Polis, you’d be smacking your chops and writing her up for the Procurator Fiscal while mentally drafting the press release. When she was the Gorilla’s banker, she ran the most efficient money-laundering operation ever seen north of Hadrian’s Wall, and if it wasn’t for the ongoing deflationary spiral and a slightly embarrassing problem repatriating her overseas assets while under the nose of the Revenue, she’d be living in a castle in Fife with a helicopter and pilot for the weekly shopping trips to Jenners. As it is, you figure she’s only marking time until she retires in style, at which point she’ll leg it to Palermo, where they have retirement homes stacked to the ceiling with her type of merry widow.
The bus, when it comes, is empty. You hole up in what used to be the driver’s seat, and it moves off silently. It’s a great way to tour the Athens of the North, and you watch entranced as it rolls over the speed pillows and cobble-stones on its way south-east. You’ve bid a fiver for a route divert, and for a miracle there’s no other money-bags aboard to up the ante: It’s going to take you close to Vivian’s front door.
Now, this scene is one you haven’t rehearsed for, and so you’re going to have to play it with a certain delicacy. But it’s not rocket science. You’ve got a handle on Vivian and her history. She’s even worked for the Operation before—unwittingly, at a lower level, but nonetheless. There are strings to pull, but she’s an experienced player, predictable up to a point. That’s why you were leaving her for the second interview.
The bus whines as it crawls up the slope, then totters anaemically along Lothian Road, stopping to pick up and put down the usual losers along the way. You keep yourself buttoned up, avoiding eye contact. (Back home? It’d be a stretch limo with tinted windows all the way. But a start-up job in Scotland calls for the Peoples’ Car and plenty of warm bodies to get lost among.) It rolls slowly past your hotel, then the row of pompous fin-de-siècle bank frontages thrown up a couple of decades since and now half-boarded-over: Then at the big five-way intersection, it hangs a right, and your phone pleeps a set-down alert at you.
One hundred and twenty metres to destination. Fucking bus company. You start walking.
This part of town has an uneasy relationship with affluence. Besides the obligatory state-owned Tesco Local, there’s a weird mix of closed and barricaded shop-fronts, charity stores with windows stuffed full of last decade’s brown leather sofas, and imaginative little boutiques selling up-market tchotchkes. You pass a kebab shop and an Asian jewellery store before you reach the chocolatier and the usual anonymous black door beside it.
There is a buzzer. You mash your thumb on the button for flat 1F2 and wait. And wait. After a minute, you push it again and hold. Just your luck if Vivian’s chosen this lunch-time to go do her shopping. There’s no reply, but the door opens in your face; a young guy slithers past you, earbuds screwed in as tight as his closed face. You catch the door with your toe and a moment later you’re on your way upstairs.
The tenement stairwell is grey and dusty, worn flagstones and black-enamelled cast-iron handrails leading up into the gloom. On the first-floor landing you find three heavy-looking doorways. The tarnished brass name-plate saying CROLLA ASSOCIATES tells you all you need to know, and you push the doorbell beside it. There is, as you expected, no response. You stand, holding your breath.
Well, you’ve come all this way: Why stop here?
There’s a multifunction pen in your pocket. It doesn’t look like anything special, but there are five cartridges and a bunch of complicated springs inside that barrel. And there’s a wallet in your other pocket, and along with the phone and driving license, it contains a couple of other cards. One of which might have raised an eyebrow if the Polis had Dumpster-dived your pockets and thought to peel away the laminated stickers to reveal the intricately etched sheet of fullerene-reinforced plastic within. But even then, it’s not obvious what the etching is, and you’ve got an explanation for how you came by it that would get you off the hook under most circumstances. Except these.
You take thirty seconds to twist and warp some springy bits of steel-tough plastic free from the card, another twenty seconds to swap them in place of the ball-point cartridge, and ten seconds to bump the lock. Then you step inside Vivian Crolla’s apartment.
You let the door slip shut behind you, and in that very instant you realize that something is irrevocably awry.
It’s never entirely quiet in a Scottish tenement flat. The floorboard-c
reaking footfalls of upstairs’ unseen neighbours. The drone of a news channel on next door’s PC. If the windows look out over the front, there’s the interminable road noise of a major thoroughfare (muted, now, by last-century standards, but still present). The faint susurration of Arctic methane flowing through the pipe to the fuel cell: the whir of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
The windows face out back, the neighbours are at work, and you can’t hear the fridge. Is that all? There’s a faint hissing from somewhere.
You glance up. The illumination filtering into the rectangular central hall comes through open doorways, and it has the numinous tint of daylight. You take your picklock card and use its edge to delicately swipe the light switch, leaving no prints.
“Vivian?” you call quietly.
There’s a strong floral stink in the flat, as from one of those fucking air fresheners women like to put in the bathroom to make out that they shit roses.
“Vivian?” you ask again, walking towards the living room. “I got your email. Vivian . . .”
There’s a scrap of paper on the floor. You frown and bend to pick it up. It’s white, overprinted in mostly green ink (with faint yellow and pink tints), approximately six centimetres by twelve in size. You remember its like from your childhood: It’s a foreign bank-note. “The Royal Bank of Scotland plc PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND ONE POUND STERLING, At their head office here in Edinburgh, by order of the board, 30th March 1999.”
Dead words. Dead currency. Dead bank. Broken promise.
Inside the austerely furnished living room, there lies a mattress. It has been cocooned in shrink-wrap plastic, sealed against the elements. The fragile husk of Vivian Crolla forms a mound under the polythene integument, like a pupa bonded to the surface of a leaf. She’s barely one metre fifty in her stockinged feet, grey-haired and thin, as if all the juices of a life unlived have been sucked out of her. She’s neatly dressed in a dark suit and pearl necklace, all present and correct but for a missing shoe and a premature death. There is a rip in the side of the shrink-wrap, a deep gash that plunges into the interior of the mattress, from which irredeemable green-ink promises bleed halfway across the carpet.
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