But Eve had always found it easy to lose herself in work, taking joy from the efficient discharge of her duties. Now her gaze fell upon a chromed-steel rack that dangled from the ceiling on a pulley-and-chain arrangement. It was currently festooned with tinsel and saucepans, but it was clearly destined for a higher purpose—one that involved overly needy merchant bankers who failed to live up to Rupert’s exacting requirements.
“I’ll have one of those, too,” she declared. “And as many meat hooks as it’ll take.”
* * *
Meanwhile, in a sparsely furnished cubicle in a cheap office in Clapham, an operational asset known to senior management as ABLE ARCHER was reading her latest work assignment with increasing displeasure. “What the—” fucking fuck, she continued silently, biting her cheek in disgust, hyper-aware of her manager breathing stertorously as he leaned over the back of her chair—“whatting what is this about?” Her voice cracked and Bill retreated a half step. “I’m on a zero-hours contract and they seriously expect me to get by on two half-day shifts next week? What is this? Is it some kind of punishment for not brushing my teeth last Tuesday? I mean, what the hell?”
“Don’t blame me, Darling, I don’t hand out trial dates!” Bill’s nasal whine rose to a tooth-grinding pitch. “There’s not much call for escorts this month, that’s all! Computer says you’re blocked from doing foot work in preparation for some other job that hasn’t come through, so I can’t reassign you. Otherwise I could put you back on the stands for Saturday’s Millwall friendly. So, eh, two mornings on prisoner transport between Wandsworth nick and the courts is all you’re getting until the other job turns up.”
“But that’s—” Wendy did the numbers—“fuck, I’ll be relying on Universal Credit.” She shook her head in dismay. At £10 per hour the two half shifts would pay her a measly £100, about a quarter of the weekly rent on her bedsit. UC would kick in eventually, but the money would take at least six weeks to come through, and the rent was due in just over a fortnight. Never mind food, heat, her phone … “I need at least two whole days’ extra work to make ends meet, otherwise I’m fucked.”
“Language, Darling.” Bill invariably had a fit of the vapors whenever a woman used strong language in his presence: just another of the ways he pissed Wendy off without even trying.
“You know that’s not my fucking name!” Not that complaining yet again would make him stop. He only Darling’d her because he knew it annoyed, and he could get away with it. She bounced to her feet. “Fuck, I’d be better off turning tricks on the harborfront in Portsmouth.” She unclipped her rentacop tie, loosened her collar, and turned on her heel. “If you’ve got no fucking work for me until Thursday I’m fucking out of here.”
“Not so fast, Wendy Deere. Got a moment?”
Wendy froze. Bill recovered first: “Mister Gibson, sir? Sorry, I didn’t see you.”
Gibson actually wore the company uniform as if he meant it, unlike Bill, who occupied his uniform like a hermit crab living in an abandoned Coke can. Aside from the lack of police insignia, Gibson was the spitting image of Wendy’s old Chief Inspector—which made her jaw muscles clench and her hands instinctively curl for other reasons. But that was unfair to Gibson. He’d never been a cop. He’d left the army to pursue a career in HiveCo Services management, and he ran her (and Bill’s) division reasonably fairly, which was more than she could say for Chief Inspector Barrett.
“Of course you didn’t see me,” he agreed. He looked at Wendy. “Deere, Bill’s missing your job because it came through to my desk. Come up to my office and we’ll discuss it.” To Bill, he added, “You’ll need to find someone else for the prison transport. I’m pulling Wendy off your roster indefinitely.”
“But there’s a level three prisoner due up in front of the beak on Tuesday and Darling’s my only certificated escort for level threes!” Bill whined. “Where am I going to—”
Gibson waved Wendy towards the door with something suspiciously close to a wink. She hot-footed it to the stairwell, despite the impulse to eavesdrop on Gibson, who seemed set to tear Bill a new one. Halfway up the stairs she remembered her clip-on tie. This had better pay more than a tenner an hour, she thought, ducking into the toilet to smarten up before she stepped into management country.
Her grandboss had an office with a door of its own, although his name card fitted neatly inside a slot as impersonal as the label on a filing cabinet. Wendy knocked just in case, then let herself in and sat in the visitor’s chair, leaving the door ajar. A minute or so later Gibson entered. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you,” he said, sliding into the much nicer office chair behind the desk.
Wendy shrugged, thought of a sarcastic response, then reconsidered her position and asked, “What do you want?”
Gibson fixed her with a stare that probably terrified hung-over second lieutenants, but bored Wendy. More bloody male posturing. “Bill gets away with it because he’s a superannuated bouncer. What’s your excuse, Detective Constable Deere?”
Wendy crossed her arms. “Ex-DC,” she griped, “who does not play well with assholes. I’ve been having a really bad month so far. Can we get to the point so I can hand in my notice and go look for a real job—one that pays my rent on time?”
Gibson’s brows furrowed. “Really?” he asked, mirroring her crossed arms. It was so transparent she nearly laughed.
“Yes, really. You heard Bill giving me ten hours this week? Last week it was fourteen, and I’m on a zero-hours contract, no side-hustles allowed. Seriously, I’m living on cat food and lentils—”
“—Would a raise change your mind about quitting? Say, to fifty an hour?”
Gibson’s offer caught her by surprise. Wendy blinked. “Is that some kind of joke? Because it’s not funny.”
Gibson looked displeased. “It’s not meant to be. Someone fucked with your personnel file and assigned you the wrong—lower—grade. Your basic hourly rate—you’ve been getting a tenner an hour for rentabody work, haven’t you? You should have been on twenty-two fifty. And because of the non-compete clause, you should have been getting ten-fifty an hour as a retainer while you’re on-call for up to forty hours a week.”
“But—” Utterly gobsmacked, Wendy stared across the table. “What’s the catch?” she demanded, barely able to credit her own ears.
“The catch is, you’re being regraded. You’ll be reporting directly to me, as a Field Investigator (Transhuman). No more Bill. Your hours for detection and retrieval assignments booked through HiveCo Security will be paid at fifty an hour.” He slid a contract towards her. “You need to sign here and here.”
Wendy’s eyes slitted as she stared at the paper. Hang on a moment. “You said they fucked up my contract,” she muttered to herself. Louder: “So this is HR’s fault. I want this backdated.”
Gibson straightened. “I don’t have the authority to backdate the regrading—it’s a promotion,” he pointed out. “I can recommend that they take it to payroll and do something about it, but—”
“That’s perfectly all right.” Wendy took the contract in hand and smiled, starting to stand. “You don’t have to pay me and I don’t have to work here any more.”
Gibson surrendered. “All right! I’ll see if I can shake something loose. I don’t think I can make backdating the promotion fly, but you were supposed to be on a higher grade plus retainer all along, so you’re due a bunch of hours you haven’t been paid for…”
Wendy nodded. “Six months,” she said. She sat down again, calculating rapidly. Twenty hours a week for six months at a tenner an hour for sitting around with her thumb up her ass added up to five large—enough to pay off her credit card and keep the student loan company from repossessing the furniture. And that was before taking into account her worked hours at nearly double her previous pay grade. “That’s my minimum if you want me to stay. Not budging on that.” She leaned forward and began to read the contract. “This is sweet.” She read some more. “Still looking for the catch.” She
glanced up. “Where is it buried?”
Gibson watched her. “It depends on what you mean by a catch,” he said slowly. “Really, it was probably just an HR cock-up—unless someone had the knives out for you. You were pegged as a level two transhuman and former trainee constable, hence the rentabody jobs and the prisoner transports. But you’re not, are you? You graduated from Hendon Police College and made detective, in addition to being a level three-plus. Incidentally, why did you leave the force?”
“I had a polite disagreement with Chief Inspector Grabby Hands.” Chief Inspector Barrett. “It was him or me, and he had rank. Do you need me to draw you a diagram?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.” Gibson nodded to himself, as if confirming a suspicion. He seemed indecently satisfied, but she was damned if she could see why. “Their loss, our gain, and incidentally you may have exposed an issue between HR and the Met which will have to be dealt with—but that’s not your problem. Leave it to me. It’ll make it easier to get your pay backdated, though,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
“What exactly is it you want me to do?” Wendy leaned forward. “You said something about transhuman field investigations…”
“Well spotted.” Gibson cracked a smile. “We’re bidding for a Home Office contract to supply thief-taking services to the Bench. They’re outsourcing stuff these days, as you’ve probably noticed, and this is a time of cuts. What are the Met down to—sixty percent of their 2010 budget in just five years? It’s austerity inherited from the previous government, but the New Management sees no reason to reverse it. They’re outsourcing certain tasks to the private sector—specialities where they lack a history of institutional coverage.”
“By specialities you mean transhuman crime?” She sat up, small print forgotten.
“Yes, Deere, and you’re both a detective and a transhuman. They’ve already brought back the Bloody Code, is it any surprise that they’re bringing back the old thief-takers, too? But this time they’re imposing modern management practices: nobody wants to see a Jonathan Wilde with superpowers.”
She filed the name for later, planning a Wikipedia attack once she got her head around where this discussion was heading. “You’re going to be billing them a lot more than fifty an hour for me,” she stated.
Gibson nodded. “Yes. And they’ll pay, too.” He raised a finger. “But don’t imagine you can get in on the business as a freelancer. They’re only talking to big outsourcing agencies: G4S, Serco, and us. Still, fifty an hour plus twenty-one seventy when you’re on standby is only a starting salary. Transhumans are all unique, and if you can deliver the goods I can recommend a raise in due course.”
“Well…” At a loss for words, Wendy picked up the contract. The gear train of the dismal engine propelling her seemingly inexorable descent into poverty had seized: she was in a state of barely controlled shock. “I—I need to think about this.”
“Take your time.” He smiled at her. “Go home, read it carefully, and come back tomorrow morning. I’ll talk you through it. There’s a nondisclosure agreement and an exclusivity clause once you sign on, just so you know what to expect. I’ll see if I can sort out your back pay in the meantime. How does that sound?”
“How long do you think it’ll be before I’m needed?” she asked.
“No time at all, we’ve already got a contract pending. Starts tomorrow.”
“Can you tell me anything about it?” She leaned forward. “The first forty-eight hours are golden…”
“Signature first, then nondisclosure agreement. I can’t brief you ahead of time.”
Wendy tried again. “Can you give me a clue what this is about? Just a silhouette, sir?”
“There’s a transhuman thief. You’re a transhuman thief-taker.” He shrugged. “There may also be some stolen goods that need retrieving. That’s what thief-takers traditionally did, wasn’t it? That and dragging the perps down to the Old Bailey for sentencing before they danced the Tyburn Tango.”
“I don’t think they’d invented the tango in the eighteenth century, sir.”
“Mm-hmm, possibly not. Anyway, that’s all for tomorrow. My office, nine o’clock.”
* * *
Three heroes and a famous fool marched out of the changing room in Hamleys, collected their unnaturally obliging escort from Store Security, and followed him through the keypad-locked door into the back offices.
“Does my butt look big in this?” Robin hissed through tightly pursed lips.
“Your cape covers your ass: I don’t see what you’re so upset about,” grumped the Bat. “Look at me, I look like a latex fetish show model.” He stumbled badly, catching his heel on the hem of his cape—it trailed along the floor behind him—and the store detective caught his elbow just in time to save him from a nasty tumble.
“Easy does it, sir.”
“Thanks.” The Bat drew himself up to his full one-eighty centimeters and draped the cape over one arm with exaggerated dignity, like a dowager managing the unwieldy train of her gown. “I’ll take it from here.”
Once behind the magic curtain they entered the wondrous water-stained world of retail management. Toys and color gave way to faded gray carpet tiles, noticeboards on white partition walls, and battered staff lockers.
Retail real estate on Regent Street was among the most expensive in Europe, far too costly to waste on stockrooms and non-essential offices that could be moved off-site. But some functions were business-critical and had to be housed above the sales floor. Among these was the strong room where locked cash drawers were taken and checked, then prepared for bank transfer via armored car. Over 90 percent of the store’s receipts came by electronic payment these days, but that still left a million pounds in cash to process over the pre-Christmas season. On a busy Saturday like today, the strong room might have up to a hundred thousand pounds in notes and coin on hand by close of business—and soon, if Imp had his way, some of it would be in his hands.
A fine joke, he thought.
“Who’s in charge of the strong room?” he asked the store detective, giving just a little extra push to loosen his tongue.
“One of the audit team leaders,” their escort blabbed happily. “Probably Bob or Alice, but it’s the weekend so it’s anybody’s guess who’s on. They’ll be watched by an assistant manager and two security guards as they count each trolley in, and the trolley team has two shop staff and two guards whenever they’re out on the floor. It’s quite labor-intensive, you can see why they’re so eager to go fully contactless, it’ll make my job easier, too—”
“Can you get past the guards if I shut down the managers?” the Bat asked Robin, hanging back behind Imp and his hapless victim.
“Sure, if I’ve got enough space to work in.” Game Boy glowered at the Black Panther: “You up for a home run, Princess?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Del sneered back at him.
“Welp. Whatever I can grab, I grab, then it’s over to you.”
The Bat’s frown deepened. “I thought the plan was for Dear Leader to sweet-talk us all the way down—”
“Yes, but you know what they say about plans: Always have a backup, right? And that goes double for one of Imp’s capers.”
They were out of time. Ahead of them, the store detective stopped at an almost aggressively anonymous door, distinguished from the others on this corridor by the presence of a mirrored glass window, a suspiciously robust frame, and another keypad. Their escort pressed a discreet buzzer, then paused. “Who are you again?” he asked, looking mildly puzzled.
“We’re the cash collection team you were expecting from HiveCo,” Imp said smoothly.
“Oh, right. It’s cash collection,” the detective spoke into an entryphone. “They’re early today.”
“We thought you might be near to your floor capacity,” Imp explained.
A buzzer sounded and the reinforced door of the strong room swung open.
The room was fronted by a battered desk. One wall was cover
ed by a row of filing cabinets, and at the back of the room stood an enormous safe. Camera bubbles protruded from every corner of the ceiling, electronic mushrooms dripping the mold spores of money. The air was heavy with the stale smell of recirculated bank notes battling it out with a nostril-stinging brew of cleaning fluids. A tired-looking woman sat at the front desk, feeding bundles of loose twenty-pound notes through a counting and binding machine. She looked up. “Hey, Ralph, what’s with the fancy dress—”
“I’m not sure, Amy, they didn’t—”
Imp flourished a corner-clipped Albanian passport at Amy: “We’re your scheduled cash escort from HiveCo, ma’am.” He pushed hard, radiating an oppressive aura of beneficence and sincerity. “We’re dressed like members of staff from the DC and Marvel tie-in concessions instead of being in uniform because we had a tip-off. A gang are reported to be planning a robbery between here and the van, so we’re using a new stealthy transport protocol.” To the store detective: “You’ve done an excellent job! But you’re overdue for your coffee break. Why don’t you go and put your feet up for a while? You’ve certainly earned it!”
“Gosh.” Amy, the audit manager, wilted visibly under the strain of reconciling Imp’s narrative with her expectations. “Nobody told me … but I suppose…”
Her assistant’s head nodded like a lucky cat, but the guard to the left of the vault began to stand. Unlike the others, he had some resistance to Imp’s mind manipulation. “Hey—”
The Bat stepped up beside the Joker, nostrils flaring. “Don’t you worry about anything,” Doc intoned, frowning as he tamped his emotional state down into a concentrated bolus of apathy and shoved it at the troublemaker. “I’ve got it all covered.” He laid a hand on the Joker’s pin-striped shoulder as he continued: “You can relax. In fact, you want to relax. You’re really tired, it’s been a long day, and you slept badly last night. We’ve got your back, and you can rely on Robin and the Bat to take care of it from here.”
Dead Lies Dreaming Page 2