“Where are you, you bastards!” Derek spins around, waving the dagger at each of the buildings surrounding the yard. “Show yourselves! WHERE ARE YOU!”
His shouts are deadened by rain.
Joanna: “Jesus, Mr Thorpe, take it easy! We don’t know what security they might have, you can’t let them know you’re here! Look, they’re definitely broadcasting from somewhere on this industrial estate, so you need to start searching. Their webcast finishes in thirteen minutes so you’d better get a move on, there’s dozens of offices and warehouses here.”
Rainwater sprays off his Duckback coat as he strides across the yard. Outside a visitor’s entrance, covered with steel mesh, stands an old noticeboard which he runs his eyes over. Behind smeared glass is a printed list of all the companies that were once based on the estate, years ago. Manufacturers of computer components, cosmetic products, tyres, furniture... accountants, lawyers, estate agents, software developers...
“There they are!”
Joanna: “Eh? Where?”
Derek raises the dagger and stabs it through the glass, sending spiderweb cracks across it. The steel tip sinks into one specific sign.
Right Hook Boxing Gym
Units 5 and 6, First Floor
Building E7
Joanna: “What, you think... because of...”
He yanks the blade free. The entire pane of glass tumbles out with a crash, as he goes storming across the rain-lashed yard towards the building with the E7 sign outside.
Derek eye-flicks the webcast to the corner of his Vades™ and rummages in the rucksack for the bolt-cutters. There’s an iron shutter in front of him, padlocked at the bottom. He lets out something like a growl as he pushes the bolt-cutters together, snapping the padlock. Wrenches it off, flings it across the yard, grabs the door and heaves. It rattles upwards, squealing with rust.
Total darkness inside. A waft of rot.
Derek’s about to dig out his hand-held torch when the Vades™, detecting low light ahead, automatically switch on their inbuilt spotlights. Dust motes twinkle in their beams. The sound of rain on his coat cuts off as he steps inside.
He looks around, sending twin circles of light swooping through the enormous warehouse. The walls are pastel red brick, with a hundred stains and marks, as well as faded old health and safety signs. Wide lamps dangle on chains from the high ceiling, with dead neon tubes inside. Geometric shapes on the floor suggest industrial machinery once chugged away in here. There are three large, rusted boilers affixed to the wall, pipes snaking out of them. From high above, rain rattles against the roof. Beads of water drip steadily downwards, pooling on concrete.
Otherwise all Derek can see is open space, with litter scattered across the floor. He’s breathing in dust, grease, mould, the tang of iron.
He lets the bolt-cutters fall. Pulls the combat knife free from his coat’s inner pocket.
Joanna: “Mr Thorpe, look, we just need to record some evidence, you don’t need that, surely?”
Her voice is as hushed as if she was standing beside him.
Joanna: “We don’t need to hurt anyone, okay? I know you’re angry, Mr Thorpe, but you can’t – ”
“Don’t worry, Joanna,” he says softly. “I wouldn’t harm a fly.”
Joanna: “How can you say that? That knife is bloody lethal! And all the other stuff in your bag, you look like you’re ready to start a war with these people!”
“I suppose I must look kind of scary.”
Joanna: “Ahh… wait, I get it. You wouldn’t harm a fly, but you might scare the shit out of one, right? If they need a little persuading? Very clever, Mr Thorpe. Is this a manoeuvre from one of your books? A character pretends to be a psycho-killer or something, in order to get the bad guys to confess their sins, am I right?”
“I’ll definitely be sending you a copy of ‘Deadly Vendetta’ when this is all over, Joanna. I think you’re going to love it.”
Joanna: “So this is all for effect! You’re going to come across as a crazy fan ready to kill someone, to get them to confess what they’ve done. Ha! Brilliant! You should have let me know from the start, Mr Thorpe, I’d have been happy with that as a plan.”
Derek treads through the debris, heading deeper into the warehouse. He knows what’s running through her mind. She’s too smart not to work it out, now that he’s just shot down all her suspicions about him.
Joanna: “Wait. Does that mean... you didn’t murder AB Foster after all?”
“I write about killers, Joanna. That doesn’t make me one.”
Joanna: “In that case, why are you so sure these new books are fake? What if we walk in on the real AB Foster?”
“I didn’t say she was still alive.”
He picks his way through the darkness, adding “You can’t murder what wasn’t alive to start with.”
He can almost hear the wheels turning in her head, miles away in her nice safe warm little office in Farringdon. He finds that he’s almost urging her on, like he’d be disappointed if she didn’t figure it out. If she’s half the detective she thinks she is...
Joanna: “Oh God. You didn’t have to kill AB Foster. You just...”
“I just what?”
Joanna: “...stopped being her.”
Derek smiles with one half of his mouth. “Top marks, Ms O’Donnell. I thought you’d get there in the end.”
In the beams from his Vades™, he spots an interior door at the far end of the open area. He makes his way towards it, still gripping the combat dagger.
Joanna: “Bloody hellfire, that means – YOU wrote the Box Clever books! The first ones! AB Foster was your, what’s the word, your pseudonym... but hang on, you hated the indie writers! You were constantly slagging them all off. And then you went and became one?”
“Temporary,” he mutters. “Just to earn money. Just quick, commercial crap. That’s all it was.”
Derek has run this argument around the inside of his head a thousand times since he first got the idea, back in 2013. Hating those stupid amateur failures flooding the world with their garbage. Hating the way some of them were making proper money out of it. Hating the rejection letters from publishing houses telling him they were no longer looking for new material. Hating the final demand notices arriving alongside the rejections.
So he forced himself to give it a try. Writing under a false identity, of course, some made-up name reminiscent of other big literary successes. ‘AB Foster’ was perfect. She sounded like a warm caring woman, like a foster parent, like everyone’s kindly aunt.
He almost didn’t care what rubbish he churned out, as long as it sold. The Young Adult market was one of the most lucrative. But the thought of writing a single word about vampires or paranormal romance or any other crap like that made him retch. At least he could do something vaguely close to the detective thrillers he loved, something rational and intelligent. So he created Box Clever, a character who looked like a fighter but acted like a professor.
“I wrote ‘Shadow’s Challenge’ in two weeks,” says Derek, “it was never meant to be a big deal.”
Joanna: “But it was a huge deal! Why didn’t you reveal yourself, when it started selling tons of copies? You could have got a contract with any publisher in the world.”
“They’re not mine, Joanna. I wrote them but they’re not my books. I wanted my thrillers to be the ones that took off, not this kick-bollock-and-scramble stuff I was churning out for kids. I kept her independent and small, only releasing eBooks because...” Derek grimaces. Bad taste in his mouth. “...I didn’t want to be competing against myself. When my real books made it big.”
His voice echoes around the huge, hollow space he’s walking through.
Derek remembers how weighed down his own hands felt, writing the second novel. Like there were a pair of Box Clever’s favourite dumbbells strapped to his wrists as he typed out the words. It was twenty times harder than the first one. But it sold twenty times as well. Series of eBooks always did, it seemed, a
nd that’s what it was now: a series that he was committed to.
AB Foster the breakthrough success. AB Foster the indie champion. The cheques for her arrived a lot more frequently than the rejection letters for him.
Joanna: “So you had to start making AB Foster more and more real, didn’t you? Oh, I get it now... that’s why she’s a recluse, and disabled, and an agoraphobic... so there’d be no chance of anybody ever meeting her in person. That way, all you had to do was send emails as her, and go online as her...”
AB Foster: “...and I fully expect that, once the format has bedded in, there’ll be opportunities for older works to be given the ieBook treatment. Perhaps even some of the classics.”
He pauses as he gets to the open doorway. There’s a short hallway with a flight of stairs on the other side, but he isn’t looking at that, and neither is Joanna, he suspects. Both are watching the webcast. The simulation of AB Foster, pretending to be the woman that Derek invented.
Crown: “Surely you can’t be serious? You’d auto the classics? To do what, share funny videos of cats with Dickens characters? You think readers will want tweets from Anna Karenina? Relationship status updates from Romeo and Juliet? Surely the last thing classic literature needs – ”
AB Foster: “Oh, those are marvellous ideas, John! I knew you’d see the potential. That’s precisely the sort of interactivity that really engages young people today. There’s so many opportunities for ieBooks to bring all those old stories up to date.”
Joanna: “My God, Mr Thorpe, she’s... no wonder you hate her. That’s meant to be you.”
Derek feels like ripping the Vades™ off his face. But he doesn’t want to cut off Joanna’s voice. Not now he’s standing alone in this vacant shell of a building.
He’s never talked about this to anyone before.
“My writing just stopped,” he hears himself say. “Once she became popular, that was all I had time to do...”
Joanna: “Write the Box Clever books?”
“Be her. Just be AB Foster every day, you know? Responding to fan-mail, and promoting the eBooks, and getting interviewed for blogs and magazines and the sodding Guardian... that was my whole life. For years! I didn’t have a choice. She was paying the bills, nothing else was. I had to make her seem real. She had thousands of fans, they had to believe she was a living person. That’s why I bought the cottage.”
Joanna: “Ah – in Cornwall? Near St Buryan?”
Derek nods, he knew she’d get it, knew she’d work it out, she’s a professional, a detective, she understands his kind as much as he understands hers.
“I had to misdirect her fans somewhere far away from me. Even if they found it they’d never be able to get in, there was security, but it would have looked authentic.”
Derek closes his eyes and remembers...
...standing alone in the field, beneath the night sky...
...the skin on his face drawn tight, his eyes hurting...
He swallows with difficulty. “Sometimes I used to go down there and just... watch the place. It was perfect for her. Like you could walk in and find her there, at her desk, in her wheelchair, writing away, happy and smiling like... like she is now. And once I even...”
He stops himself from saying, once I even saw her through the window.
He stops himself from saying, once I even heard her voice, from inside the cottage.
He stops himself from saying, once I even went down there with enough Molotov cocktails to burn the whole place to the ground.
“All I did,” he goes on, “day after day, was write like her, talk like her, and basically organise her career. I had to buy her her own auto, before I even got one for myself. I didn’t really need it but she did, there was – ”
Joanna: “You bought her an auto? When? When was this?”
“After a couple of years... 2015, early 2016. It was the only way to manage all the ways she was appearing online, and keep all her conversations with fans going. There was way too much for me to keep track of, so most of it ended up being autoed. I thought that would let me get back to writing real books, but...”
He stops himself from saying, but I’d forgotten how to write anything else.
Joanna: “And then when the IIR laws kicked in...”
Derek nods again. He’s leaning heavily against the doorframe. Empty warehouse behind and stairwell ahead, unable to move from that in-between space. “Had to shut down her auto. Illegal to have more than one. That’s when she... that’s when I had to stop.”
He can still remember the excitement, the relief, when he realised he had no choice but to kill off AB Foster. People were up in arms about the International Internet Regulations forcing them to be honest online, because now the only way to get internet access was through your auto, letting that verify your identity. But Derek welcomed it. No more leaving anonymous posts on forums, or using fake names to write one-star reviews, but he didn’t care about those now. He only cared about AB Foster’s death.
It was easy to start the rumour. It went viral in days. That there had been a fire in AB Foster’s cottage, that the whole place had burned to the ground. That she had been alone, unable to get her wheelchair out in time. That this much-loved author of a much-loved series was, tragically, no longer with us.
What surprised him was how many counter-rumours erupted. Journalists stated their ‘sources’ said she was simply taking a break from self-publishing. They said a ‘close friend of AB Foster’s’ told them she was recovering from an addiction to medication. A thousand claims, but all with the same result. ‘Box Clever and the Dragon’s Eye’, the book that had taken Derek so long to grind out the year before, was the sixth and final one of the series.
“But of course the eBooks kept selling,” says Derek. “Vanishing only made her more famous. So the money kept rolling in and I couldn’t get my hands on a single bastard penny of it!”
Joanna: “Of course... you had the bank accounts in her name, managed by her auto. And you couldn’t claim ownership of that without admitting you’d been running a false online identity. Five years in jail, forfeiture of earnings... Jesus.”
She understands, as he knew she would. It’s only been a couple of years since Dedupe 2020, the coordinated international effort to detect and erase duplicated autos. What all the civil liberty activists called ‘the purge’. Nowadays, most people are happy that all the spam has gone, all the scams have stopped, all the liars and swindlers and fakers can’t cause problems anymore. But at the time there had been protests and riots. So many people arrested, even more hit with crippling fines.
After the Dedupe, it was impossible for Derek to claim the earnings pouring into AB Foster’s account, without losing everything. Hundreds of thousands of pounds. Probably into the millions by now. His money!
“So this is how I know she’s a fake,” he says. “Someone’s impersonating her, thinking she was once a real person. They’re copying her and they’re copying the books as well, just rehashed versions of everything I wrote, all dressed up with videos and music and now this stupid simulated-character bullshit... all just distractions to hide the fact that they’re stealing the originals. Stealing her and stealing me!”
Derek pulls himself away from the doorframe, straightening his back. “So don’t worry, Joanna, you’re not working for a murderer. I just want to take back what’s mine.”
Joanna: “Mr Thorpe – I think I know what’s going on.”
He tightens his grip on the combat knife and strides up the stairs.
Joanna: “This is what I’ve been looking for, something like this.”
The light-beams from his Vades™ sweep past cracked plaster and concrete steps, up to the first floor landing.
Joanna: “It’s not... Mr Thorpe, there’s no point you going all psycho, I can tell you now...”
The bloodrush is louder in his ears than her voice, or the voices of John Crown and AB Foster, or his rapid footsteps as he charges down a dusty hallway, reaches a clos
ed interior door marked RIGHT HOOK BOXING GYM, hurls it open, charges in with lights blazing and the dagger held out, as if ready to stab some thieving money-grabbing copyright-stealing bastard right through the heart.
And he staggers to a halt as he realises...
Joanna: “...that there’s nobody here.”
He’s standing in another derelict, empty area. Along one wall is a grimy window beaded with rain, looking out over the central yard of the industrial estate. Along another is a row of narrow steel lockers, their rectangular doors all hanging open. As with the warehouse, marks on the floor suggest heavy equipment once took up most of the space, long since removed. In one corner are racks of circular weights, barbells and dumbbells. Three punchbags hang suspended from the ceiling, casting looming shadows when he sweeps his lights past them. There are a few blue rubber mats on the floor, grey with dust. At the far end are two full-size boxing rings: square canvas platforms surrounded by sagging ropes.
Derek catches his breath. Lowers the dagger. Scours the abandoned gym with his headlights.
“You said this was the place!” he shouts. “You said the broadcast was coming from here!”
Joanna: “Er, no Mr Thorpe, I said it was coming from somewhere on this estate, it was you who decided it was in here, but I think – ”
“You stupid Irish bitch, you’ve screwed this whole thing up!”
Joanna: “Will you shut your face for one minute, for crying out loud? I think you got it right! Look around the place, see if you can find any kind of machinery or computer equipment. Quickly! Do it!”
Startled, Derek shuffles into the gym. He feels sick as a dog, they’ve wasted too much time, the webcast ends in a few minutes and he’s stumbling around inside this smelly broken-down old shithole like the stupidest moron in the –
Joanna: “There! To your left! Up inside the boxing ring!”
The light-beams sweep across the nearest of the two boxing rings – and the sparkle of metal catches Derek’s eye. The blue canvas floor of the ring is about waist height, and there’s something right in the centre of it. He squints inside his Vades™, which automatically activates their built-in zoom function, bringing it into focus.
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