by Simon Fay
CHAPTER 22
As the door opens, all the apprehensive eyes that have been awaiting her return are on Ava. They want their suspicions to be confirmed and she hates them for it. The jealous ingrates want Ava O’Dwyer knocked from her pedestal. Every one of them were assuming the same result from her scan. In the style of Barry Danger, she stands dramatically quiet, casts her sights over them and meets their expectations with a scowl.
‘Don’t you people have work to be doing?’
She glares at the baffled detective.
Arriving like an old friend, Agent Myers stands at her side. The collection of heads turn as one, a ripple of switches all set by the same fuse, to the social agent who tested her. He jumps at their attention, as though he’s only just remembered that they’re waiting for him.
‘Don’t worry,’ he reassures the room. ‘She’s clear.’
Nobody lets go of their breath. They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. Slowly, they begin to glance at each other, checking to see if anybody believes what they’re being told and reluctant to voice their own disbelief until somebody else does it first. All they find in each other though, are carefully guarded expressions that reveal little to hide their initial confusion. They’re stuck there, paralysed, waiting for something more to be said. If a single voice among them speaks up in shock, now, before the day goes any further, it could make all the difference. Instead, it’s Agent Myers who moves things forward.
‘Any volunteers for the next slot or will we start going alphabetically?’
A murmur of two conclusions trickle into one another: If Ava is safe, I must be too. And counter to this, If Ava is safe, god only knows what that means for me. Never have their suspicions of the woman been more certain than now when they’ve been revealed to be absolutely groundless. Some try to make themselves invisible by returning to their work while others remain, waiting to see what will happen next. Dylan’s head is pumping with blood, his sight sharpened to a pin.
‘I’ll go,’ Joanne says. ‘It’s not too bad is it sweetie?’
‘No, it’s not,’ Ava assures her. ‘It was interesting actually. You’ll be fine.’
She places a supportive hand on her editor as they cross paths, and Dylan who watches the exchange, sees Ava disappear into Joanne’s office. As he waits for the woman’s results to come back from Agent Myers, Dylan quietly calls for Barry, but finds he has to hiss the name three times before the journalist realises someone is asking for him.
‘Got the whole force in one place,’ Barry says of the collective Garda and firemen scattered about. ‘If I was UPD I’d blow up the whole building. Wouldn’t be a cop left in Dublin.’
Dylan ignores the comment and steps closer to address Barry. He is quite aware that people have clocked his revived interest and are adjusting their attention to hear the exchange.
‘What was that you said about the fire alarm?’
‘I was just having a laugh,’ Barry says, not sure if he’s being accused of something.
‘About what?’ Dylan asks. ‘Something happened recently?’
Barry’s journalist instinct comes to the fore as he hears a suspicious note in detective’s questioning. ‘Yeah. A week ago somebody set off the fire alarm. Caused a bit of a disruption for the whole building. Why? You know something about it that I don’t?’
‘Agent Mullen was here when it happened,’ Dylan mumbles to himself.
Barry nods, not knowing where this is going.
‘You said Ava did it.’
At this, Barry pulls the reigns in on where he’s being led, chuckling like he’s trying to halt a horse. Then, guardedly, he says, ‘I don’t know about that. It’s just a joke. You shouldn’t take everything I say so seriously. Nobody else does.’
Jaw clenched, Dylan begs the man to give him more than that.
‘Alright,’ Barry relents, dropping the character he’s made of himself. ‘Maybe she did. She was my number one suspect anyway. The alarm that was pulled was on the bottom floor. Nobody in our office did it. We were all up here. She was running late, apparently. When we got outside she was already there, having a smoke and buzzing for a chat.’
‘That’s all? No proof?’
‘Oh yeah. Security dusted the place for fingerprints. Had a few detectives in here to work it out,’ Barry’s personality quickly snaps back to its base mode. ‘Come on mate, there’s enough going on here without worrying who pulled a bloody fire alarm. It was forgotten by lunch.’
‘Bollocks,’ Dylan grunts.
‘Does it make a difference?’ Barry raises his arms up and lets them flop to his side. Falling into the chair at his desk, he spins away from Dylan. ‘I don’t know much about your case, but they’re not going to put someone on trial for pulling a fire alarm. The world isn’t that bad a place, well unless,’ he looks at the door of the testing room, ‘unless Ava’d come out of there in handcuffs. Anyway, that would have just been icing on the cake, wouldn’t it?’
Icing on the cake? It was one of the only solid leads he’s gotten in this damned investigation and it’s dangling in front of him in the closing hours of the race to finish it all.
‘Barry,’ Dylan says, trying to lick his lips but finding that his mouth has gone dry.
He wants to tell him he knows who killed the social agent. Barry looks at him quizzically, and realises from the determination on the detective’s face that he knows indeed that the murderer was Ava. But neither of them say it. With no evidence and no other lead to follow, all the man can do is stare it into Barry, and confirm from the mirrored expression that in their midst is a human being who killed another human being. Dylan rests on the desk behind him, sure there’s a solution to all of this somewhere but too exhausted to find it. Between all these good people are pieces to a puzzle that can be solved, but they won’t help him do it. The fact is this it’s easier for them not to. After all, no matter what happens, Agent Mullen won’t be any less dead.
‘Detective Wong,’ a voice calls apologetically.
Dylan ignores it, an idea is solidifying.
‘Detective Wong,’ the voice goes again.
Barry Danger, who has noticed the detective is zoned out, nudges Dylan and nods to the man who’s been calling. Dylan follows his gaze to the Garda and in turn follows the Garda’s sight over to Agent Myers. The social agent is standing at the door of the conference room, his face contorted in a demonstration of concern, skin gone grey as ash. The first thought that occurs to Dylan is that there’s been another murder.
Dylan walks over. ‘What’s up?’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘What?’
‘Well why do you think you’re here?’
Dylan, stubborn, waits for the situation to be explained.
‘To make arrests,’ the social agent says, mirthful.
‘I know that,’ snaps Dylan.
‘So it’s time to do your job.’
He is about to ask exactly what that means when it dawns on him and three words escape his mouth.
‘Oh god no.’
He couldn’t have stopped himself from saying them if he’d tried.
‘Joanne has tested positive. She’s in the higher range. Upper UPD.’
The weight of the entire office is on his back as Agent Myers confirms the bad news. He looks into the room where Joanne is sat, e-smoke dropped to the ground and resting at her feet. Her hands are gently linked in her lap, legs pressed together, head locked straight ahead and in another world. The woman is aware of everything about her, though she’s incapable of thinking or saying anything about it. In a word: catatonic.
‘Is she okay?’ Dylan quietly steps into the conference room and closes the door behind him. ‘Joanne?’
‘I think she’s just in shock,’ Agent Myers says. Correcting the note of sympathy in his voice, he goes on dryly, ‘When a UPD is caught they can become very difficult. If dramatic protests don’t work it’s not unusual for them to fling accusations until they give up, and wel
l, sit like this one, just holding out for the next chance to cast some doubt.’
‘She was difficult?’
‘This one seems to have skipped a stage I suppose,’ Agent Myers wears his half smile, repulsed by the thing that’s taking up a seat. ‘What a UPD does isn’t entirely predictable. Anyway, It’s the end of the road.’
Dylan, who has stood over many dead bodies in his career, is overwhelmed by compassion for this living woman. Like a deer that has struggled in the wild all its life, she has finally found herself in a rusty trap, and too exhausted, she’s laid down, white eyed as she waits for the end.
‘Joanne,’ Dylan kneels at her side. ‘We’re going to be taking you out of the office now. We’re going to have to handcuff you. It’s just the procedure...’ Dylan apologises, wanting to reassure her but not knowing how or even why.
Contempt makes the social agent appear drowsy. ‘Just get her out of here, there’s a lot more people left to scan.’
‘Can I get you to stand up, Joanne? Joanne?’
Joanne’s head jerks in a nod of agreement, and she rises, steadying herself on table. Dylan crouches to pick up her e-smoke but they bump heads as she reaches for it at the same time, her hand snatching and pocketing it before he can get to it. As they go, he tells her to put her hands behind her back and puts her in plastic cuffs – loose, just for show, like he said. Standing at the door, Agent Myers in front of them, Dylan and Joanne both take deep breaths as if a rush of water is going to burst through when it’s opened and they’ll be pulled along with a current they can’t fight. Instead what meets them is a wall of stunned faces. Seeing the monster, they can’t believe it’s real. Still, they leave a wide circle of space around the officers and Joanne – so this is what a UPD looks like. A girl puts her hand over her o-shaped mouth and another makes a small whimpering noise. Good god, is heard. Barry’s face is set in stone. Ava is at the front of the bunch, tearing up.
‘Oh no, Joanne,’ she chokes out a sob that stops her from saying anything else.
One of the Garda leans over to Dylan, ‘You going to say anything?’
‘There’s nothing to say,’ he responds coolly. ‘Let’s just get her out of here.’
After a beat, they move. A puppet in Dylan’s hands, Joanne is led from the door of the conference room to the glass doors of the office she built, an honour guard of aghast faces accompanying her expulsion. As she reaches the exit, it occurs to her for the first time that this doesn’t just mean losing her job, her business, her life as she knows it. It’s a lot worse than any of that.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ she twists in Dylan’s arms to shout at her staff. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong! Not to Agent Mullen, good lord!’ her shout is squeezed into a piercing scream. ‘Don’t just stand there! You have to help me! This is all wrong!’
‘She’s right. This is all wrong,’ Ava suddenly speaks up and begins to step forward until she’s held back by one of the Gards. ‘Joanne we’ll get this sorted out.’
‘Alright let’s go.’ Dylan presses down on Joanne’s arm to hint that she should move forward but finds it has no effect.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ she screams again.
Agent Myers, gloating, says, ‘What’d I tell you?’
‘I don’t understand, it was just a triangle. What was I supposed to feel about it?!’
Dylan moves her more forcefully now, counting the steps to the elevator, hoping he can get her there without having to restrain her more vigorously, but she’s wriggling to pull out of his grip.
‘Ava you have to help me!’
Stunned tears run from Ava’s eyes, leaving black slug trails on her cheeks. ‘I will!’ she says, then quickly changes the statement to include all of the employees. ‘We will Joanne!’
Barry Danger is speechless as he witnesses Ava’s determined resolve.
‘We’ll have you home by the end of the day, Joanne.’ A voice joins Ava’s and some words of support chime in from the others. ‘We’ll get you out of this!’
Joanne doesn’t hear them though. ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she insists again. ‘Why are you taking me away?!’
Feeling the situation getting out of hand, Dylan directs her as best he can but finds he has to shove, hating himself when he does so. As they leave through the door, a group of the emergency workers cram into the elevator with them. Joanne, stood in the middle, her hands tied behind her back, sinks down to the ground, surrounded by cops, a detective, a bureaucrat and four firemen, before being led to a waiting police car. From the car park she looks up to the office windows where she sees the line watch as her head gets pushed into the back seat.
Now, as the cops, the firemen, Dylan and Agent Myers return to the newsroom, Ava has gathered her strength to rally the crowd.
‘We won’t let this go. Anybody who thinks Joanne did anything wrong, even if she is untouched, should... they should leave now,’ she stutters out. ‘She’s not a murderer and every line that comes out of this office has to reflect that. I don’t know what’s going to be happening with the running of this organisation in the meantime, but until a replacement is found I’m going to make sure of it.’
‘Alright, alright,’ Dylan says, ‘that’s enough excitement for now. She hasn’t been accused of anything yet. She’s just going in for questioning.’
‘Ha!’ someone says.
‘Why did she have to be handcuffed?’
The mutters of agreement grow loud and more panicked questions work their way to the surface.
‘We were through this at the start of the day,’ Dylan shouts over them, exhausted. ‘It’s just procedure,’ he says, and repeats with the supplement, ‘It’s just procedure for someone tested positive as UPD.’
A deathly silence falls over the office as the result of Joanne’s scan sinks in, and someone makes a desperate request for comfort, ‘It just doesn’t make sense, does it?’
Not wanting the dissipating crowd to be left with that as the final note on the subject, malleable as they are in their shock, Ava weakly slams her hand down on a desk in an attempt to unite them under her flag once more. ‘We’ll get this sorted out. Something must have gone wrong. She can’t be, she just can’t be UPD. If she is–’ her hand shoots up to her mouth to cover a sob, cutting off the end of her sentence. Somebody consoles her and offers a tissue to wipe away her spoilt make-up, and she thanks them as she walks away to take her seat, the one now vacated, the one that has been waiting for her throughout all the drama. The seat behind the editor’s desk.
CHAPTER 23
Detectives always return to the scene of a crime. The sombre fact, all the truer for Dylan Wong, is that a good investigator never leaves an unsolved case behind.
Once, when his wife was pregnant, in a conjunction of events, he had been assigned to the murder of a five year old child, a contrast which instilled the need for resolution with desperate urgency. The child was found at the back of a fruit picking warehouse, wrapped in an oily sack, cut from its privates up to its neck in a surgical attack. The most horrifying thing was how slow the ordeal must have lasted, how long the child would have been alive, confused, scared and suffering, as the perpetrator knelt over the boy, ignoring the cries he made. Nobody was ever convicted for the crime. Dylan had never managed to put the mystery to rest and, so far as he was concerned, the child remained laying there, listless, waiting for the case to be solved. It was one of the reasons he never left homicide and why fourteen months after the arrest and prosecution of Joanne Victoria, he has yet to push through his transfer papers. Having access to the case histories allowed him a ritual he needs. Without Dylan, these unsolved cases, these people that once existed, were just lines of code in a computer that represented absolutely nothing. It was only in his reading of them that there was any meaning to it all. On the late shift, he would sit in the empty office, manning the phones where murders were reported, studying the old files. The child was on top of the stack. Cut by a skillet knife that left a flake of salm
on skin in the wound and dumped in a sack stinking of fish, a pock faced scumbag in Smithfield, a fish monger, had been Dylan’s number one suspect. He’d questioned the man relentlessly and called him into the station on three separate occasions for interview. He’d canvassed the neighbourhood for weeks, begging for something other than grudging suspicion from the locals, only to get nothing in return. And once a month in all the years since, Dylan would visit the fish shop to order fillets of pomfret for his family. Steamed whole with ginger and spring onion and bathed in a specially mixed soy sauce, the recipe had travelled from Hong Kong with his grandmother. It stank up the house for days. They hated fish, Dylan most of all, but it was a routine he forced on his wife and child under the guise of keeping some cultural tradition alive in his home. Really, it was a reminder to himself of the boy who would never have peace. Most of all, Dylan needed an excuse to visit the monger. Once a month, he needed to see there was absolutely no guilt in the guilty man’s blotchy face, that the only justice in the universe was that created by a collection of individuals who served to protect people from each other and that he, Dylan Wong, was one of these men who worked to uphold the law. When he didn’t do his job well enough there was no karmic balance to make up for it.
With this in mind, sitting among the empty desks of the homicide office, Dylan has put the boy’s file aside and is scrolling through ChatterFive’s articles. He had never been one for keeping up with the news, but since the arrest of Joanne, he’s read every piece the media conglomerate has published. Have so many months really passed? He wouldn’t have thought his wife would let him dig his heels on the transfer this long. He supposed time was meaningless to them. They were just existing together as their boy grew older, surprised once in a while by an event like Christmas or another Halloween. On the website tonight is a summation of the court case that led to its disgraced editor’s downfall. He revisits the circumstances of it as often as he revisits the fish monger.