by Phil Brett
She looked at me. She didn’t have the answer, but thanks to her, maybe I was beginning think of one.
30. Bellis perennis
I'd spent the slow bus journey to the Soul Shack thinking about what Sophie had said. Although I wasn’t that sure that she had said that much. She hadn’t provided any names or told me what they were planning. Despite my incessant questioning, she had been insistent that she knew nothing more. Call me an old softie, but I believed her. She was too concerned for my safety not to have told me everything. Heaven’s above, she had even stood and touched my hand as I’d left. For us, that passed for a twenty minute full-on bear hug. She cared. Sophie may despise the sisters and brothers, but I was her brother. That meant something.
It was gone midnight by the time I entered the bar. Whilst hardly Bacchanalian, Soul Shack was full enough for it to take time to find Cole. In keeping with the 1960s/1970s theme of the place, jazz-funk filled the air. Not my favourite genre, but I wasn’t going to argue. Maurice was busy behind the bar, serving a group of teenagers who were squabbling over what drinks were available and demanding to know why he didn’t make a greater effort to break the sanctions and buy some black-market booze. Nowadays, he seemed to spend more time apologising for what he hadn’t got than serving what he did. Two of them had decided to give up on alcohol to take advantage of the relaxed drug laws and were perusing that particular menu.
After negotiating the tables and people chatting, I eventually found her. She looked more like a student than, well, whatever she happened to be at the moment. Lounging back against her chair, her legs stretched underneath the table, she appeared to be enjoying the music. I noted that she was drinking an alcohol-free bottle of beer, which was in keeping with the ethos here, looking as it did, like a bottle of 1970s hair shampoo. Indeed, tasting like it. She motioned with it for me to sit down. How very gracious of her. There was me, thinking I was going to stand. She slid a bottle to me. I grimaced, but figured that I only had myself to blame. We'd needed a drink and had ended up with fake lager. Before we could get down to comparing notes, I took my overcoat off and downed the first glass in one go.
Relishing an imaginary rush of alcohol hitting the back of my throat, before the fake stuff did so, I at least appreciated that it was cold. Ignoring the tang on my tongue, I asked her what she’d been up to.
After pointing out that she hadn’t been up to anything, she took a swig and quickly made it clear that she had been far more productive than I had. ‘I have news on Youssef Ali.’
She had wanted my attention. She got it.
‘We can now be fairly certain that he did not kill himself. Firstly, Ash checked the signature which was supposedly his, but quickly found out that it was written by a copier. Authors used to use them to sign multiple copies of books. Hardly the thing a suicide would do. Then, there’s the trajectory of the bullet. The position of the bullet is slightly away from where it would be if Ali had been holding it. The gun had been wiped clean, and the only fingerprints were a single clean set of Ali's. You would have expected several of his prints. And, the set which is on there is also not quite in the position which it should be. Whilst we cannot be 100% sure, it is enough for us to doubt that it was suicide.’
My reaction was midway between a mumble and a growl. ‘Bloody barbarians! They kill someone simply just to act as decoy. How low can they get?’
Cole remained passive. I got a distinct impression that she didn't see the need to express outrage. She took that for granted. What was important was that we remained focussed. I thought she had something more to say about Ali’s death, but I didn’t have time to ask her what that might be because, rather quickly – indeed, very quickly – she changed subjects. It was one which I found oddly awkward about talking about. She asked what my little sister had said.
I told her (leaving out all the complex sibling rubbish which had accompanied our meeting).
Sipping the almost empty bottle of beer, she thought for a second. Maybe to ponder how we hadn't got around to banning this rank drink. But, no. It was the phrase Sophie used. ‘Blood on our hands? How can it be on ours?’
She took a swig but found that her bottle was empty. Santana was playing on the sound system. She pulled a face. I couldn’t be certain which of the two events the expression was for. When she spoke, she didn’t feel the need to enlighten me. ‘What can they be planning?’ She sighed. ‘Then there’s the question of Terry Walsh. Christ, Pete, we have bodies piling up everywhere.’
‘They’re desperate. Sophie said it herself. They’ve tried armed conflict, cyber-attacks, credit meltdown, blockades, propaganda and assassinations, and yet here we're still here. We are an annoying red rash, and we're spreading. They're terrified of that. Far from weakening, we appear to be in a stronger position, both nationally and internationally.’
She agreed. ‘And it seems obvious to me that there’s more than one person involved in this.’
For a second or two, she was lost in thought. She put the bottle down heavily. ‘Okay, so we know Walsh contacted Olivia. We are pretty certain that, despite that, he was working for them. He then gets himself blown up at the Hackney East explosion.’
‘Bad luck?’
‘I don’t think so. If anything, he was almost lucky. The device was small and would have done minimum damage to the station. There is also the fact that it was in his lunch box. I think it was planted by someone else and intended for him. But, by bad luck, someone else went into his bag. We don’t know why and never will, but they detonated it. Walsh almost lived because he was by the door. No. I think our spy knew he had contacted Olivia and was eliminating him. Walsh had decided to change sides. To come to ours. Maybe he had decided that he didn’t want to be a part of whatever was to happen and was going to tell her everything he knew. So, he had to die.’
That made sense to me. ‘If they are to time the action to coincide with the conference, then they will have to move fast. I spoke to Jackie after meeting my sister; she's going to make a big announcement tomorrow. She wouldn’t tell me what, but she made it plain that it was going to be headline grabbing. My guess is that they will attempt to deflect attention away from it.’
‘So, we need to get ourselves to the fracking centre.’
‘Agreed. I should say that Jackie informed me that Glen has persuaded the NWC to authorise us to be allowed to use any actions which we feel are justified in defence of the revolution.’
Cole looked impressed. I had been too, when I had heard. Impressed, but also just a little concerned.
She lifted the bottle and looked into it. ‘We need to contact that comrade who works there. Er, what’s her name? Janet? Yes, Janet. We need to talk to her again. But there’s the still the question of how blowing up the extraction holes will achieve anything? That’s what we need to understand.’ She got to her feet. ‘But the first thing is to get myself another beer.’
I decided to ask for a different drink. And music, I thought to myself.
31. Oenothera biennis
I had arrived back to the Anchorage in the early hours, chilled to the bone and with a nasty taste on my mouth. With no sign of either Dr Brakus or any of the guests being anywhere but in their beds, I had sat in the lounge and conducted some research. The trouble was, I couldn’t be sure if the questions which I thought required answering really needed to be. A whole scattering of comments, puzzles and unknowns were bothering me. Both Cole and I figured that whatever was going to happen was probably going to happen tomorrow, so I needed to get them in some type of order pretty sharpish.
Obviously unable to bear being separated from my good looks for too long, Cole had rang me almost as soon as I had got in. Foxton had been moved to a nice hotel, where he was staying overnight. Bed, breakfast, and hot and cold armed militia, included. Bale, it seemed, had managed to overcome his embarrassment at incarcerating Foxton and was now fully committed to pinning the murders on the poor boy. Comrades had been co-opted into creating a timeline of his m
ovements. This included, it seems, waking up neighbours of Youssef Ali to see if they recognised him. CCTV, car monitors and everything else were being searched. Bale was making much of the fact that Foxton was deeply unhelpful and apparently antagonistic towards him. If that was a sign of guilt, then I'd be in the frame as well. Foxton, though, also couldn't offer an alibi for either the death of Ali or Harrison. He also claimed to have never heard of Terry, or Thierry, Walsh. Bale appeared to be sold on him being the killer and was waking up half of London to prove it.
Being someone who didn't share the Bale's adulation of his own intellect, I decided to do some checking up on comrade Foxton myself. Pouring some passable coffee and wrapped in a blanket, I looked through every database I could think of. I even managed to hack into the Battersea libraries and had unearthed the world-shattering fact that he had borrowed e-books on a range of subjects from housing policy to anthropology. His major interest, however, had appeared to be fantasy and science fiction novels and the labyrinth of sub-genres which they included. Somehow, I didn’t think liking hobbits was going to crack this case. One thing which we could tell from forensics was that the car window glass displaced at the scene of Olivia Harrison’s murder was not done so by hairy feet.
My next area of search was tracking his life from his birth. Or attempting to. Because of the cyber disruptions, there were now huge gaps. Before, Big Brother could find what ice cream you liked as a primary school kid; now, it was hard to locate what school you went to. What I could piece together was a life that was pretty ordinary. He had left home when he was twenty and had lived in a number of flats in South London. He had been arrested for subversive behaviour in the two major Government crackdowns. Each time, he had spent a few months inside. The police records had been wiped for those. That was a nuisance, but not necessarily suspicious, as such records had been a target for the revolution. I noted that it was equally true for mine, and a few other comrades, including brother Bale himself. Still, it was useful if you were covering your tracks.
Basically, after two hours of using my razor sharp research skills, I had found a large neon zero. I certainly hadn’t found anything supporting Bale's keenness to pin it on him. That view was re-enforced when I received a message from Victoria telling me that Roijin Kemal had gained access to his communication systems and found nothing incriminating. So Kemal was up, too. Cole told me that she was going to have a chat with Asher Joseph; he was also being busy right now. It was all hands to the pumps. An amusing pun, I thought, considering that Youssef Ali was from the water industry.
Was there anyone sleeping tonight? But then, judging from the stillness here, the residents of the Anchorage, bar this one, were doing so. Lucky them.
Victoria sent a second message suggesting – in that way she had of making it sound more like an order, but was so phrased that she could claim it was merely a suggestion – that I might want to contact Janet Kovac at the Fracking centre and see if she knew anything about Foxton. I glanced at the clock. It was 2.33am. Too late to ring her. Or too early?
Rather disconcertingly, at that very moment, a message popped from Victoria telling me to ring Janet now, even if that meant waking her up, because, she reminded me, we were running out of time. I was somewhat startled by Victoria’s ability to read my mind. Still, she had a point. Another message arrived – telling/suggesting/ordering me to check on whether Janet had had any contact with either Youssef Ali or Jack Foxton. ‘Be insistent!’ she wrote. Okay, that one was way past a suggestion. I was now getting rather peed off with her, not least because the reason she had given we had already discussed at Soul Shack. She should remember that I'd been the one sitting opposite her. Sharing the shite drink.
Still, like a good doggy, I did as I was told. It took several rings, but finally I got through. From the groggy sound of utter discombobulation, it was obvious that comrade Janet was not one of us night owls and was sleeping. The outrage! The renegade!
I had to remind her twice who I was and explain why I was phoning in the middle of the night. From sheer self-respect, I refrained from mentioning that Victoria Cole had instructed me to do so. To give Janet her due, whilst being obviously not ecstatic at being woken up at such a time, she didn’t object, merely asking for a few seconds to get up and become fully awake.
After what sounded like after water being thrown onto her face, she announced that she was ready for me. I noted that we were still on voice only, so she wasn’t quite that ready. I asked her if she had ever heard of Jack Foxton. After a few seconds’ thought, she said she hadn’t.
‘He has never had any contact with the extraction site?’ I asked.
‘Not that I’m aware of. Why?’
I didn’t reply, but asked, ‘He hasn’t visited you or been in contact with you or anyone else there?’
‘Like I said, the name doesn’t ring a bell. Describe him to me.’
I did one better and sent a photo which I had found on his gym membership file. I had been quite successful in tracing his keep-fit habits, which really wasn’t that important. No stray running machine had been left at any of the murders, but at least it had provided a picture. Again, after a few seconds’ thought, she again said that he did not look familiar. Again, she asked why I was asking her this. Again, I didn’t answer.
‘Could he have had any contact with anyone else that you might not know about?’
It was a daft question. Of course, he bloody could have. Unless, that is, comrade Janet here had bugged everyone’s phones and computers, how the hell was she going to know? But the woman here was impressive in her patience – I had gotten her out of bed, declined to answer her questions whilst asking dumb ones of my own and yet she didn’t complain. A big red sticker for this comrade! She replied that it was possible. It was about the only answer she could give. I asked her if she could take the picture around and see if anyone recognised him. She agreed to do so.
‘Olivia Harrison had been in contact with you recently. Has there been any other notable comrades who have?’
Inwardly, I cringed at the use of the term ‘notable’ and expected to be challenged on which comrades weren’t notable and weren’t we all supposed to be notables, all leaders. However, she simply asked, ‘Such as?’
I tried again, but without any perceived value judgments. ‘I mean comrades who hold senior positions or are in the public eye.’
I thought I could hear, or at least sense, her shrug. Finally, she replied, ‘Well the main contact was Olivia, but Jackie Payne visited once—’
‘When?’
‘Oh, just after the revolution. It was a part of her workplace visits. She’s rung a few times since about the ecology of extraction.’
‘Anyone else?’ I asked, wondering how any of this helped us.
‘Oh, and of course there’s Glen Bale.’
‘Bale?’ I asked, surprised. ‘Why would he have anything to do with you?’ There was also the “of course” to think about. Was it the norm for Bale to contact every workplace in the British Isles?
‘Oh, he upgraded our cyber security a few months back. We had been attacked several times, which had risked health and safety, so he improved our IT defences. Don’t ask me how, but he did.’
Why, I wondered, hadn’t he seen fit to mention this before? ‘Did he visit there?’
‘Oh, no. It was all ecom. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?’ She laughed, showing amazing good humour at such a ridiculous hour.
I probed deeper into Bale’s contact, but got no further.
To my embarrassment and, no doubt, to her annoyance, I let out a yawn. I was too old to be up at this time. Apologising, I asked her if there were anyone else.
There was a pause, and maybe I was over-tired and dreaming up figures in the dark when there weren't any, but I thought I could hear her breathing change. Her reply in the negative also didn’t sound quite right. She seemed to be thinking about how she answered, rather than what the answer was. So, I asked again. Again, there was a thoughtfu
l pause.
‘You must realise, Janet, that if I am ringing at this time of night, it must be important. You will remember that both comrade Cole and I are looking into the murder of Olivia Harrison and its possible link to further reactionary sabotage.’
She muttered that she knew that.
‘And you will remember that Jackie personally has asked us to do this, and it is sanctioned by both the NWC and the party’s Central Committee. This is about the murder of Olivia Harrison and possibly further deaths. And it very much looks like another well-known comrade, Youssef Ali, has been murdered.’
‘He was murdered?’ she asked, almost in a whisper.
‘Yes. Why? Did you know him?’
‘No, I, er, never met him. The news said it was suicide. It hinted that it was due to personal problems.’
‘Well, it wasn’t. He was murdered. Probably by the same person who killed Olivia. Why, Janet? What do you know?’
The line went silent for a moment or two. Then, she took the plunge. ‘He contacted me a few days ago to ask about the extraction centre. Actually, he rang a few times.’
‘He did?’ I asked, trying not to shout. The last thing I wanted was the arrival of Dr Brakus demanding that I keep the noise down, discussing my need for aggressive levels of noise and then sending me off to bed. ‘What did he want to know?’ I was now all but eating the blanket to muffle my excitement.