We need to get off the streets, and do some digging. And that will be harder. I can see my afternoon getting busier and busier - if we can stay alive long enough to get anything done, that is.
16
We take a cab, back to Jack’s house, and wallow in a deep silence the whole way there. Even the driver seems oppressed by the boggy atmosphere, and doesn’t attempt any chit-chat. We are at the house in ten minutes, and when we arrive, Jack jumps out immediately and wordlessly, while I am left to pay. He seems to think I deserve it, and I don’t quibble.
I follow Jack as he unlocks the door, and enters, slipping his shoes off as he crosses the threshold. Out of quaint respect for long-buried social niceties, I do the same. I think I’ve really pissed him off, and the last thing I want to do now is sully the floors with dirty footsteps. We pad into the kitchen where Jack, unsure of what else to do perhaps, embarks on that great British tradition, when one can get one’s feet up and really wrap your noggin around something - a cup of tea. I find myself unable to slow down the same way, so when the kettle’s on and the Twinings bags are safely in the pot, I walk to the fridge.
‘Can you show me the safe?’ I ask.
Jack walks over, still taciturn, and gives the fridge a sharp yank from the wall, after which it slides easily along, leaving a gap I can poke my head and shoulders through. The safe is a rugged beauty, black brushed steel, and looks like any secret would happily be at home in there. It also looks as if it could withstand about anything, and I can imagine a nuclear strike detonating right here, wiping Manchester off the face of the planet, leaving nothing behind save for this perfect ebony box in the middle of a gigantic, smoking crater.
Jack sticks his hand through the gap, and I hear gears whirring. Then a clunk, and a creak. He steps back to allow me a peak.
‘The only thing I moved is the gun,’ says Jack. ‘The rest is exactly how he left it.’
I glance around the corner, to see a square opening a couple of feet across, with the contents on three shelves lit by a blue neon LED. There are a fair few things in here, suggesting that Royston was not expecting anything to happen to him anytime soon.
Top shelf - three mobile phones, each the same make of iPhone, a blank space presumably where the handgun used to sit, and some documents. Will need sifting through in detail.
Middle shelf - four five-inch cubes, each containing beautiful little fish in exotic colors. Each cube is separated by a black piece of card, and I nearly smile. Felix’s little side-earner, that started it all. The fish all look fine, save for the one on the end, that’s floating belly-to-the-heavens, it’s eyes milky. Next to the cubes is a little pot of fish flakes and second plastic container full with brine shrimp and red worms.
Bottom shelf - cold hard cash filling the whole shelf, stacked up and along. They all look like fifties, and fast maths suggests there may well be close to a million quid in there. Bloody hell.
I leave the money where it is, and take out everything else, placing it on the kitchen counter top. A hot mug is slid across to me. I turn all three phones on, one at a time, and wait for them to boot up. Opening the lids on the cubes, I sprinkle in some shrimp for the fish, who must be starving. They eagerly smash into the falling crustaceans, like tiny, ornate piranhas. I don’t feed Milky on the end there, poor lad. His ship has sailed. The phones sing to life with that happy little Apple jingle, and all look at me brightly, standing to attention, ready to do my bidding.
I take the first one, while Jack sits on the counter opposite me. He seems growing in agitation, so if a cup of tea helps him settle, I wont be disturbing him.
I look at the screen, and try quickly to navigate the interface. I had seen one of these before, but had never owned one. They looked nice, but never practical for an active lifestyle. An indestructible Nokia was always my preferred choice - one that would also have happily survived that nuclear blast I was thinking about earlier. Thanks to my brief relationship with my Samsung, I get the hang of things pretty quickly. I open up contacts. I figure that it’s only the extremely unlucky who get killed by people they don’t know, by accidents or psychopaths. Royston’s line of work was one tinged with inherent dangers by way of association more than anything else - so that now, as the contact list gives me a modest 70 odd names, it reads like an expansive book of extra suspects. I’m pleased it’s only 70 however - it’s a number I can conceivably tackle, with a bit of time.
I scan the names. Bolt, Brian, Christian, Delores, Eustace, Gloria, Grieg, Happy, Harry... None mean anything to me. More than that, none of the names I am aware of are showing up, like Leonard, Felix, Samson, Michael and so on, but that doesn’t really surprise. Any one of the names in the contact book could be pseudonyms.
I do the same task on the second phone and the third, checking contacts. The second one is far more interesting, in that it contains merely the alphabet. 26 contact entries named only by a single letter. And no email details either, simply mobile numbers. Much more promising.
The third phone’s contact list is blank. Nothing at all. In fact, the whole phone is empty. No pictures, no apps, no calls placed, no nothing. That is extremely interesting.
I risk the wrath of Jack, but I need to ask him.
‘Jack, did your dad know a Delores?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, she was his cousin. My kind-of aunt. Not seen her in a while though,’ Jack replies, while staring out of the bay kitchen windows.
‘And Bolt?’
‘Umm... I think he was a guy he used to go to the football with. A Bolton fan. Yeah, that was right.’
We go through all the names quickly, and Jack knows each one as one of his father’s friends or family members. He can’t identify a couple of them, but the picture is already clear. This first phone is for personal use only - a useful tool when organizing the dualities of the life he had chosen.
That poses the inevitable question of the 26 names on phone 2. Call-signs and pseudonyms of 26 lucky people, who clearly got the special treatment. How best to find out who they are though? And of course, what was that third phone used for, if not for business or personal? That makes me question if there a fourth, that perhaps he had with him when he was taken. I could ask Jack, but all three phones are identical. IPhone 4S in black, 32GB. There’s no separating them. Even the home screen wallpapers are the same.
The phone I’m holding beeps audibly, and a little microphone icon appears. I can’t see any way to exit the screen, so I ask Jack.
‘Do you know what I have done here?’ I ask.
Before I can answer, another voice replies. A robotic male, and it comes from the phone itself.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ it says, amiably. It’s kind of freaky.
‘That’s just Siri,’ Jack says. ‘You must have accidentally pushed the home button for too long. Just press it again to get out.’
‘Who’s Siri?’ I ask, regarding the phone with suspicion. The world has obviously changed a little since my last attempt at freedom, or at least parts of it have.
‘It’s a voice recognition command system for iPhone. You just tell Siri what you want.’
‘Umm, like what?’
Jack drops down from the counter and takes the phone. He presses the home button and it beeps. ‘Siri, where am I?’ he says.
After a second, which I assume to be the phone working it’s magic, the robot voice speaks. ‘Blantyre Drive. In Worsley, Greater Manchester.’
‘Thank you’ Jack says.
‘Don’t mention it,’ Siri replies.
‘Jesus’, I say. ‘That’s impressive. Weird, but impressive.’
Lightning strikes in my mind, blazing a rapid trail of eureka across my cerebellum.
I grab the blank phone, number 3, and activate this Siri character. ‘Where was I on Thursday night?’ I ask.
The screen blinks to a calendar page for the month of October, that is also entirely blank.
‘I have no appointments entered’, Siri replies. Fantastic.
It’s no help yet, but that’s very encouraging. Let’s see what secrets on this phone Siri can betray. It’s like playing ‘Open Sesame’ with a robot adversary.
‘Who did I last call?’
‘079775550981’ Siri answers. The number is on the screen, and I type it into phone 1, since I have no pen or paper handy.
‘When did I call?’
‘Call took place Monday October 24th at 23.42.’ The night of his disappearance. This is fantastic. All call logs have been erased, but Siri’s individual memory hasn’t been wiped. The evidence has been removed, but Siri has remembered, the spy in the camp.
I think of anything else to ask. But I can’t. While I think, Siri handily offers suggestions.
‘Would you like me to place a call to the number, or send the number a message?’
Siri, you genius.
‘Send a message, please.’
‘What would you like it to say?’
I speak loud and clear, enunciating every word. ‘I’m still here.’
‘Should I send the message?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘No problem.’
A little tinny whoosh through the phone speakers, and the message has been sent. All in all, that was really something. And that should be enough to tease out whoever Royston spoke to that night, and I feel one step closer to answers.
I notice the other phone is on however. Phone 1. The keypad is up, the mobile number I just typed in on the screen. But this phone already has that number entered into it, and has been assigned to a contact - the name of whom appears in faint lettering below the number. The name is Nigel.
‘Jack, remind me who Nigel was again?’ I ask.
‘That’s a bloke dad had round here a couple of times, mainly in his office. He said he was a colleague at Quaycrest.’
A colleague at a fake company? And so another suspect emerges. Who is Nigel? What does he know about Royston’s murder, considering he spoke to him just before his disappearance?
And with that, Phone 3 beeps, announcing the arrival of a text message - a reply from Nigel himself. I look at it without delay. It is one word, that hits me immediately, and raises all manner of curiosity. In block capitals: ‘EXPLAIN’.
17
I move my thoughts through to Royston’s office, and ask for a little time alone with the computer. I don’t have my laptop with me, and would easily prefer to use that, but I want to follow something up. Something that’s been nagging me. I walk into the beautifully furnished, wood-clad office, and sit at the desk chair. Letting the setting sink into me, trying to let the room itself seep into my senses and reveal it’s inner workings. I try to imagine what the dead man used to do in here.
I have the inkling and the hankering for an ally. I don’t mean a pal on the frontline, or someone who can back me up in a given situation. I mean someone on the other side of the legal looking glass. Perhaps someone in law enforcement. It’s risky, but with trust and a relationship based on equal benefits, I feel it may be doable. It will be entirely on my terms. No names shared, only a way to reach each other to swap intel.
Information has always been my friend, and has saved me far more times in heated moments than any bullet has. What I’ve learned in the last 48 hours is that being a one man band can only get me so far. And I would really like a man on the other side to feed me information gathered by police networks with their sophisticated infrastructures and algorithms - all designed for both surveillance and gathering sensitive material, but equally all presently unavailable to me.
I can’t clean this country up if my primary intelligence source is Google.
But I think I have the right man for the job. It will take a degree of sensitivity in approach, but it would be worth a go.
I fire up the computer, and on it comes. I can imagine, in another lifetime, spending plenty of time in this office, this man-cave. It has that solitude to it that I am attracted to on a lot of subconscious levels. Dark wood shelves, dim lamps and the smell of books. A little womb away from the hurdy-gurdy.
The computer reveals itself to be empty. Nothing on it at all. It’s a dated PC, which I’m grateful for, because even I know how to access the C drive and double click on My Computer. But nothing is there. Nothing at all. Has it been wiped?
It has internet explorer however, and I try to get that going. It’s slow, but there is a connection. I don’t want to log into anything of any note here, because eventually, the Berg will go down. And when it does, the police will most likely crack down on everyone and anyone who ever had anything to do with them, and Royston’s computers will be seized. Last thing I want is for my login details for banking or twitter to appear, and leave digital breadcrumbs. I might as well take a picture of myself with the webcam and leave it as the screen saver.
The MSN home news page loads in the explorer window, and I find a search engine box. And I type the name in from the earlier newspaper article. Jeremiah Salix. Up pops unsurprisingly very little, save for that same newspaper article. Lots of haphazard occasions where the name Salix, and the name Jeremiah appear independently to one another. I scroll down, and eventually see an occasion where the two words do meet next to each other. I click the link, and I’m given a simple web page with text and a picture. The picture at the top is of a wheelchair basketball team, the text below it being the roster. It appears this Jeremiah Salix is the shooting guard of the Tameside Tomahawks, in the North West Regional Wheelchair Basketball Association. There’s a league table too, and it appears they are doing quite well. He’s also the coach, it seems, of Stockport Royals, a youth team. I click through to them, opening the page in a new window. Scrolling down, I see a fixture list - as luck would have it, they are playing tonight, at Reddish Vale Basketball Centre. That’s south of the city, about 10 miles out. I look back at the first page, and find a team photo at the bottom. Correlating the listed names and the seating arrangement in the picture, I see my man. Jeremiah. Sitting there in a bright yellow basketball shirt, thick dark hair curling across the top of an unshaven face. His expression serious.
I bet he’d like a crack at who put him in that chair.
I shut down the computer, and think about turning the office upside down, searching for clues as to Royston’s murderer’s identity. But all I’m going to find is further evidence that this office is fake. No meat on the bones whatsoever. Nothing, just something to save face with.
I head out of the office, back to the kitchen. Jack is there, still drinking his tea. In fact, he has barely moved since the moment we got back. I’ll try to break him out of this funk.
‘Jack, can you think of anything about this Nigel character? Anything at all? I ask.’
‘Not really’, he replies, distantly. ‘I met him once or twice, but it was, like, for a split second.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing interesting. Stockily built. Bald. Extremely ordinary. He had a nice car, though. Whenever he was here, they just went through to the office.’
‘How did he seem with your dad? Were they comfortable with each other, or was there any tension?’
‘I only saw them together for a second, but I didn’t pick up anything wrong. There wasn’t like a hierarchy between them. They had the same demeanor as I did when I would go round to my friends on a homework assignment.’
‘Merry collusion.’
‘Something like that, yeah.’
‘I’m going to text him, see what happens.’
Jack actually turns to look at me now, as if previously he may have objected - but this time he resigns, as if I’ve done so much damage, what harm could more do?
‘You got a problem with that?’ I ask.
‘Nope.’
‘OK, then.’
I take phone 3 from the counter-top, and bring up the message strand. It’s nice, another neat innovation that shows me precisely what’s been said by whom.
Beneath ‘EXPLAIN’, I type: ‘You tell me’. I press send, and wait.
The respon
se is almost immediate, announced by a buzz of vibrate. ‘I’m on my way over.’
That’s not what I want yet. In time, a face to face will be right, but not now. ‘Don’t. Not the time.’
I hope that works, and the next response reveals that it has. ‘Have it your way’.
I don’t really know what that means, but then again, maybe I’m not supposed to. After all, I’m not actually the ghost of a dead gangster, regardless of what this Nigel believes. I go on the offensive. ‘I want answers’.
A response doesn’t come quickly. Five minutes pass, and I half expect the doorbell to ring, and Nigel to come crashing in, only to see that his friend hasn’t come back from the dead. Eventually, the phone buzzes. ‘None of this went how I hoped. I can promise you that.’
Fantastic. He knows. And it’s shedding a little light onto what happened that night. The questions about Nigel are mounting, his importance in our crude investigation rising higher with every passing moment. I decide that on the offensive is the manner in which to proceed, as it has obviously caught Nigel off guard, and is making him open up. ‘Not good enough.’
The response is quick as a flash this time. ‘You pushed it. You made it turn out the way to has. It was your conduct that sealed it. It was your own fault.’
More advancements. This is the right direction. I’m even close to a disclosure here. If I press a personal button, I might just get it. I take a deep breath on this one. ‘Betrayal. From you. One of my close friends.’
Again, the response is damn-near immediate, and it froths with so much rage that the words leap out of the screen. ‘Yeah? How did that bullet feel, you fucking prick...’
Wow. And this weeks new entry, straight in at number one on the Royston Brooker murder suspects Hot 100, is Short-Fuse Nigel, with his stunning, stinging ballad, ‘Confessions’.
I look up at Jack. He is looking out of the window, still gazing. He might even be asleep, for all I know. I’m not going to reveal this to him. Not yet. That text might send him into another rampage, and before I know it, we are off on another cross-town revenge quest.
The Baby And The Brandy (Ben Bracken 1) Page 14