“I know what you mean,” he agreed benignly, wishing he could say something more constructive that might make everything ok. He wished more than anything that he could fix this for both of them, for all of them, because it was doubtful any of them deserved to be here. What could you do that meant you did? Perhaps people trafficking, selling girls into slavery once they’d paid you everything they had for a chance of a life beyond what they knew, deducting their hopes, dreams and dignity on top of everything else. Perhaps that meant you deserved to be stored in a rotting shed, not knowing what was going to happen next.
22
Gordon went to work straight away. The lawyer had been despatched to get on with his end of things, though it had to be noted, he didn’t look too confident in it.
He talked a good fight. Gordon would concede that. But “John Smith”? What kind of alias was that? Not much of a one for thinking on his feet, this stuffed suit, going on that basis. Setting that aside, it had been fun being Jackie Chan, even if he didn’t have the fight skills or the legendary tuxedo. It would be hard to find one to fit really if he was totally honest with himself, which with regard to things like his weight, personal appearance or personal hygiene, he seldom was.
Denial was indeed, not just a river in Egypt. In Gordon’s case it was an all-encompassing life style choice. Things could get on top of you. That was just a fact of life. It was something he’d learned from his mother. He’d stopped going to see her after a while; after the madness had fully kicked in.
Keeping his head down was key. He’d done his research on the matter, after visiting various security conferences, having hacked their systems and gained entry as a delegate. The irony appealed to him and far outweighed his distaste at having to be in a room with other people.
It was only when the hits got big that your head was effectively above the parapet and had a price on it, though as it happened that was what had made him bigger in the first place, performing a bit of an audacious hack on a Russian database he thought might have evidence of the moon landings being faked. It seemed a long time ago now. Other hackers had tried similar things of course, usually in the US, and been well and truly busted. Gordon thought he would have a go at Russian government files, figuring that they would probably have an idea of what was going on with their main rivals during the cold war and that their files might not be as secure as those of the CIA or NASA, that he’d be less likely to be caught and, if caught, less likely to be deported, the UK government being less inclined to suck up to the Russians. The thought that it would be a lot more hard core if he was deported did not escape him though. Another factor was his ability to speak and more importantly read Russian.
In the event, he’d managed to turf up nothing. Or so he’d thought at the time.
Late one night, the following November, there had been a knock at the door. That was how he’d come to know Oleg Karpov. It would be the first and last time they would meet at his flat.
The Lithuanian had explained very calmly in heavily accented English that he was well aware Gordon had been keen to access the databases concerned. He did look like a spy, not that Gordon had seen any outside the realms of his extensive pirated film collection but this must be what they looked like he assured himself; the kind of person you wouldn’t notice in the passing. Other than the man’s undoubted weight issues there was nothing to mark him out, and this probably helped in the sense that people tended to underestimate the obese, giving him the edge in terms of surprise if need be.
Gordon’s mind ran riot, imagining worse case scenarios involving Polonium sandwiches and Siberian salt mines. Karpov was “connected to” the security services he said and threw Gordon by saying he admired his work, a compliment he could not take lightly as he wrestled to stay in control of his bowels and retain some façade of composure. He felt like a duck in the water; all calm and tranquillity on the surface as the feet manically paddled to keep everything in order.
He’d always known his reach would exceed his grasp one day but nonetheless he’d kept on pushing through. It was an admirable quality, he’d told himself. But how many times had he been lectured on the dangers of hubris without it sinking in to any degree?
When Karpov made him an offer, logic dictated he was unable to refuse. The Lithuanian had, he explained, the contacts and knowledge concerning the use of certain facilities that might be useful to “a young man starting out in the information technology field.”
At first he wondered what the old guy was on about. What did he see as the point to helping him out? What was Karpov to gain from this? And more importantly what did this guy know about computer systems? Karpov must have sensed the doubt in the younger man and humoured him by explaining in more depth. This would also be the first and last time this happened.
It seemed Karpov had the contacts and wherewithal to arrange access to certain networks inside Mother Russia and the former Soviet Union at large; bot nets that could be used to do one’s bidding from the safety afforded by what was left of the iron curtain. These were Gordon’s to do with as he pleased, within reason, in exchange for the odd “favour” now and again and a certain cut, fifty percent it would transpire, of Gordon’s take.
“Cut of what?” his younger more naive self had asked.
“Whatever you like.” Karpov had replied. “We in our organisation pride ourselves on encouraging creativity. Think about it. If you have the power to be protected from view, what would you do? Think perhaps, of being the invisible man for the day. You have an entire network of other people’s computers at your disposal without even their knowledge of such a thing. Thousands of them and no chance of being caught. You can crash web-sites. You can go more or less undetected wherever you like with impunity and you have a degree of protection from a country who, let’s face it, are not known for their handing over of those who breach certain security networks or their willingness to divulge information to banks, security agencies or, really anybody in the west. What do you do? Your only limit is your imagination. As I say, we will, of course call in certain favours, as will Mother Russia. Naturally nothing too insidious. I doubt you’d mind that. You are not, from what my information suggests, given to strong convictions either moral or political.
Gordon shook his head begrudgingly as he felt a chill in the room.
The old man smiled. Knowing he’d got his point across and clearly knowing his new associate was aware they owned him now, he attempted to lighten the mood, accentuate the positive. “So what’s it going to be?” he asked. “You’re the invisible man. What do you do?”
“Probably spy on girls,” Gordon replied, only semi-consciously.
Karpov laughed. “Girls can be provided,” he boomed with a dismissive swoosh of the hand, “if that sweetens the deal for you.”
And that had been how Gordon managed to not only evade dying from polonium poisoning, but also not die a virgin.
This particular favour was nothing to him. As he set to work, he wondered who would take over the running of the girls Oleg despatched on a regular basis.
They were the kind of human contact he could not do without.
23
Doc Brown was enjoying the stress in some ways, he said, as he made his way down to the business end of the mortuary. A friend of his had recently died on the golf course, a month after retiring at fifty five from a lucrative but stress inducing position in the banking sector. Apparently the sudden lack of exertion and regular doses of adrenaline had forced the man’s heart into a state of abject confusion, whereby it really didn’t know what to expect at any given moment. Being suddenly let off the hook in such a way had forced his heart to go the other way and simply shut down.
Jones thought the closer the Doc got to retirement himself the more he seemed to drift in and out of stories and theories on life. He seemed wistful but less stressed out generally, with the notion of retirement adding a spring to his step whenever the subject was broached. He reminded her of her granddad. Same sense of mischief.
Same hairline too.
“So what do you know Detective?” he asked as they arrived at the slab, or rather stainless steel wash down surface as they all were in this day and age.
“Oh this and that,” she replied, noncommittally.
“I bet,” he said, raising an eyebrow in a way he must have spent time practising. “I was referring specifically to our John Doe here and his particular brand of maxillofacial surgery.”
Jones regarded the victims face. “Not much if I’m honest Doc. Busy morning all told.”
“You and me both. Someone’s intent on keeping heaven stocked up with fresh souls.”
“Full Metal Jacket?”
“Indeed. A bit before your time though I would imagine.”
“Before I was born,” she confirmed, “But a classic nonetheless.”
The doctor frowned hard at this, as though making some kind of mental note. “Can’t go wrong with an ageing classic though,” he suggested with a wink.
She wondered why it was ok when he did such things but gave her the dry heave when Campbell did the same. She supposed because one of them clearly didn’t mean it.
“Well, a cursory examination of his face may allow you to overlook the fairly minor seeming well healed scarring around our victim’s lower jaw.” Brown produced some x-rays taken at different angles to the victim’s skull. The Jaw showed several solid white patches. He pointed these out with his pen. “Titanium mini-plates.” He picked out the various points on the victim’s face, relating them in turn back to the relevant x-ray. “Holding everything together. Not just the lower mandible, but his left cheekbone as well.”
“Hazard of the job?” Jones suggested, wanting to suggest something useful in some desire to prove that she was a good pupil.
“And what job would you suppose that to be?” he asked, raising both eyebrows in a demonstration of just how craggy a forehead could become.
“Drug dealing scumbag? Or maybe I’ll hedge my bets and go for generic organised crime scumbag. Then again, there have been a lot of drug related goings on around these parts of late.”
“Perhaps if I was to tell you that these injuries were not sustained by a baseball bat to the face but rather by a blast. A bat would be unlikely to create such damage. Look at the number of plates.”
“Bank robber? Safe cracker? Generic scumbag who sustained multiple baseball bat blows to the face?”
Brown laughed. “The wrong kind of damage.” He pointed at the x-ray. “You see the size of some of the fractures; tiny. There’s been a fairly evenly distributed trauma to the side of the skull. With a bat you would probably find bigger fractures at a specific, or indeed, as you suggested, several specific points. This kind of injury is more commonly found with the kind of specific shock trauma associated with a blast.”
“Wouldn’t there be more markings on the face? Scarring say?”
“You’d be surprised. I’d say he wasn’t directly exposed to the blast, wasn’t sitting in a bank vault when they blew the bloody doors off so to speak.”
“Don’t they tend to pack explosives round safe doors, forcing the blast sideways? That might shield your would be safe cracker from the blast to a degree but create a shock wave.”
Brown laughed again, like an indulgent parent. “It might, but it didn’t in this case.” He paused, allowing her to think about this and probably knowing what was coming next.
“How do you know that?”
“Because this is the kind of specialised thing they deal with at University Hospitals Birmingham. This is very precise, not the kind of thing your parochial surgeon can knock up in an afternoon. You have to go to the place where they do this kind of reconstruction. It’s the kind of surgery that generally results from a tour of duty with her majesty’s armed forces and the associated evils of warfare. It began with trench warfare on the likes of the Somme. Soldiers’ heads were very suddenly the most exposed part, presumably as they popped them up in attempts to discover what precisely was going on in no-man’s-land. Facial trauma became a much more common thing. Traditionally they used scaffold structures on the outside of the skull to support the healing bones. More recently these have been inserted as pins and plates and yet more recently again they started using a version of the original technique in Iraq and Afghanistan, where injuries sustained often involve large amounts of skin. The structures are more malleable, easier to work with. Everything comes full circle in the end.”
“So you think he was a soldier?” Jones asked, trying to absorb this and highlight the important information.
“I did.” Brown replied, “Until I phoned University Hospitals Birmingham and had it confirmed about five minutes before you arrived.” He handed her a printout with the deceased’s details; name, age, rank and back story. “He was a Sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers. IED blast. He was sitting in a Landrover when it happened. They aren’t the most heavily armoured things but as luck would have it he was shielded from the worst excesses of the blast by a colleague who by all accounts wasn’t so lucky. I imagine you’ll want to contact the family etcetera, make sure he’s our man, but I’d say the chances of those x-rays matching anyone else quite so perfectly are pretty slim.”
She made her way back to the station with a sense of grim resignation. She would doubtless have to deal with a bereaved family now, a job she generally liked to try to avoid, given the gut and heart wrenching nature of dealing with another human being’s most primal emotions. It wasn’t natural, forcing people together in such a way at such a time. She might luck out and find that he had no family but cursed herself for having such a thought. Who was she to wish that on anyone? Why had they given such credence to Campbell’s theory? Some people did just get murdered. That was the one thing culture tended to like to gloss over, a fact society liked to try to ignore because perhaps it was more convenient that way. Better that we should believe our actions lead to something deserved, so we all stay in line. Morality and even religion, for all its faults, were very good controls, rules for the masses, but the fact was, bad things happened to good people too.
She tried to shake the doubt off. Campbell’s theories, though she hated to admit it, had a habit of being close to the mark. She would keep an open mind as always, in an effort to counter balance his dim view of human nature. Chances were though, the victim was involved in something he shouldn’t have been. And if Campbell was right? How had a soldier, already badly injured but having come through the worst of it, gone so far off the rails as to wind up in all of this?
How did society allow this to happen? Was it the result of post-traumatic stress or some kind of anger he’d come back from a war zone with along with his injuries? Who knew? Thousands of young people she supposed.
She stopped for a fag outside the station before entering. Really she felt she could do with a vodka to go along with it but gone were the days when she could handle an afternoon on anything other than soft drinks. Maybe it was less about ageing than the intensity of the job. Her afternoons seemed to be very full.
“You alright hair?” was what Campbell greeted her with when she walked back into the incident room.
She chose to pretend she had ignored this, surreptitiously checking her appearance with the mirror app on her phone to avoid doing anything that would imply he’d caused her anything more than a second’s instinctive annoyance, and found nothing amiss. She looked in his direction and found he was looking up at her from his chair expectantly, like a dog looking forward to a game of fetch.
“What?” was all she could come up with, though she injected as much scorn as she possibly could into that one word.
“Just, you’ve been spending so much time with the boss lately.” He looked conspiratorially at DS McKay who continued to act as though he was alone in the room, determined not to play ball. “Me and John here thought we should christen you hair.”
“I see.” she answered, thinking anything but. “I’ve not been spending that much time with him.”
“Oh I d
on’t know hair. I think you’re maybe protesting a wee bit too much.”
“Ok,” she shrugged, playing along on the basis he just might shut the fuck up quicker. “What does that have to do with my hair?”
“Not hair,” he boomed, nudging a still seemingly oblivious McKay in an effort at boisterous solidarity. “H A R E as in Burke and. A regular pair of resurrectionists you two.”
“Oh I see.” She replied. “Well I hope you didn’t spend all morning on that one.”
“No concern of yours if I did,” Campbell huffed. “You’re not my boss yet lassie.” Looking for one last chance of back up from McKay, which was consistently absent, he returned to his paper.
“No,” she agreed, before making herself a cup of tea without offering one, just to make the point. “Not yet.”
********************
Davie wasn’t having the best of mornings. First of all the Bobcat had started playing up again, hydraulic problem or something, which meant he couldn’t reply on its loader to do the donkey work and would have to start carting bales to bed up the cows by hand. Colin had buggered off with the quad bike, taking that option out of the game too, so it was all down to muscle, the old fashioned way. His dad said it would do him good. About time he did some exercise that didn’t involve pulling levers, pushing throttles or lifting pints.
To be fair he wasn’t in the best condition these days, should never have jacked in the rugby this year but they’d dropped him from the first team and even though he knew he was taking a hacksaw to his nose just to piss off his face he still had his pride to think about.
Looking at his dad’s belly was enough to remind him that you really did need to keep active. Even then you probably couldn’t rely on exercise too much. You probably needed to cut out the chocolate biccies at eleven o’clock too, judging by the way the fat ginger yin’s gut was starting to stretch at the poppers on his boiler suit. Surely the old boy should just go for a bigger size and stop kidding himself, trying to hold it all together with a big belt he’d brought back from a trip to California many moons ago when he was still young and not out of touch the way he was now.
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