“Where are you from?”
Sharma fixed Hume with a gaze, the sort she had perfected on junior soldiers. “Morthern. Like you.”
“Oh really.”
There was a knock on the door. Sharma and Lindleman looked at it alarmed. “Interview suspended,” Sharma said, then giving the time and opening the door, to the stifled laughter of Hume.
DCI Wick stood there. “We have a problem. A problem you both need to come and look at.”
“A ‘send him back to the cell’ problem, or an ‘I can continue with my interview in a second’ type?”
“Cell.”
Uniform escorted Hume away, and Wick waved a hand so Sharma and Lindleman followed him. They walked past the Bunker and through to a room which happened to have a clear view of the front of the police station. Grayling and Maruma were there, as were Green, Atkins, and seemingly everyone else in the station. All looked stunned, but it was the presence of the superintendent which really cast a cloud. Neither of the newcomers needed to be told what to do, it was obvious everyone was looking outside. The pair went to the far end so they could look through and…
A normal car park filled with squad cars and their civilian vehicles. All normal, all fine.
Beyond that a low fence, with the occasional bush.
Beyond that a crowd of people with placards.
“Wait, what?” Lindleman exclaimed.
They peered. There must have been thirty people, men and women, mostly with short hair and scarves over their faces. They held hurriedly made wooden signs with ‘Free St. George’ and ‘Free Speech’ on them, and a chant could be heard on the wind.
“Free St. George! Free Morthern!”
Sharma slowly put her face in her hands, as the rest of the MCU watched two uniformed officers approach the crowd.
“What’s going on here?” Koralova asked as they neared the group.
“You got no right, no right at all!” someone screamed back.
“What’s this about?” Kane asked.
“You blind, can’t you read?”
“That’s why they need the glowing jackets,” someone laughed.
“We always check. This is a protest about our arrest of Rupert Hume?”
“Dunno who the fuck that is love, but you got St. George in there and he ain’t done nowt wrong.”
“Firstly, Rupert or George hasn’t been charged with anything. We needed to question him about several cases, and he refused to co-operate. If he’d answered the questions he could have stayed at home.”
Koralova’s explanation was falling on unhearing ears.
“It’s harassment, you’re harassing a good man, you’re evil, you’re the plod,” a protestor shouted.
“You want him out of the election! We’ll vote for him even if he is in prison!”
“Actually, the Morthern rules bar anyone in an actual prison from standing…”
Kane leaned over to Koralova. “I don’t think they’re paying any attention. We could tell them he’d murdered an alien and they wouldn’t listen…”
“Free St. George! Free Morthern!”
“See?”
“Yeah, fair point.”
Back in the room, the Super turned and began to walk out, and now it was his turn to wave to the DCI. Wick followed and the two huddled in a corner.
“Did we have to arrest this man?” the Super asked.
“We wanted to question him after we received an official complaint about his speech,” Wick explained. “He refused to co-operate, saying he would only answer if we arrested him. We left it. Then he is a suspect in inciting the murder of a woman, so we wanted to question him again. But he refused again. So, this time we really did arrest him.”
“When you say incitement… did he order her killed or something?”
“No. Not directly. But we wanted to get the motives right, and follow up on the hate speech, and, to be brutally honest sir the general public do not get to decide if they speak to us or not. If you won’t answer questions you’re going to get brought here and asked under caution.”
“So, he can simply say ‘no comment’ twenty times, get released, and have a ready-made protest to turn this into a public relations victory?”
Wick scratched his forehead. “I did not anticipate he was creating a trap for us and wanted to be arrested, so he could do this and make it election fodder. I daresay if we go onto social media there’s a thousand ‘like’ things about it. I accept that was a mistake.”
“Right, well,” the Super took a deep breath, “I am ordering you to release Hume and cease investigating him unless he’s caught with a smoking gun. We will not be seen to affect the politics of the election; we will not be seen to chase down a right-wing political figure simply for contentious things they have said. Am I understood?”
“Yes sir. For the record, I think we should treat him like everyone else.”
“For the record, that’s why you’re a DCI.” The superintendent turned and walked out, leaving Wick to look at his team. They were not going to like this. He drifted towards them.
“What did the Super say?” Sharma asked as the four huddled round Wick.
“We are backing off Hume. He is being released now.”
“But we haven’t spoken to him,” Sharma protested.
“And we’re not going to, unless he co-operates without a caution or arrest. It looks like we’re meddling in the election, and the Super isn’t having any of that. He didn’t say it, but he doesn’t want us on the news as the target of a protest.”
“So, we’ve blinked first,” Grayling complained.
“Not we, him,” Wick replied. “And we will go along with it. All take a break, there will be a full briefing soon, when I have got my head around it. Understood?”
“Yes,” they all replied sadly.
“But don’t leave the building yet, no one leaves until the crowd has long dispersed.”
Wick turned and left now, and the detectives huddled. “Well what are we going to do?” Lindleman asked.
Maruma raised a finger, “get coffees and watch what happens next.”
“Why, what will happen next?” Sharma asked.
“This is a PR stunt. Well now Hume is going to walk over to his faithful and give a speech.”
“Oh fuck, you’re right, I bet he will.”
They dived to the coffee machine, made themselves drinks and gathered in front of the window once more.
Down in the custody office Rupert Hume was being given his stuff back. He had an almost supernatural calm, and an almost Buddhist sense of satisfaction, if both of those could be combined with an utter hateful cynicism. When he had collected everything, uniform escorted him out of the door and back onto public property. The officers hung back and did not go all the way, allowing Hume to walk on ahead. At the end of the drive was the crowd of people, and he raised his arms up in celebration as they cheered him. He broke into a huge and genuine grin as the people chanted his nickname over and over, and when he was in the middle of the circle that they’d formed, they cheered him.
“People, people, my friends, my brothers,” he began turning and waving the crowd up to new heights, “today I was attacked by the forces of the establishment. They took me from my home because I dared to speak the truth, kept me in a cell and wanted me to confess to crimes they had made up. The state, the bankers, the establishment, the rich elites, they tried to crush St. George Stevens rather than see him become your mayor, rather than see him victorious, because they know I am right, and I am their enemy. But I am your friend, I am your servant, and I will keep fighting to take Morthern back from the people who damage it! Will you vote for me?”
“Yes!” the crowd cheered.
“Will you persuade others to vote for me?”
“Yes!”
“Then I will never stop until we are all free.”
A round of applause so loud it rolled over to the window and into the ears of the detectives.
“I wonder wha
t he’s saying,” Maruma mused.
“It’ll be on the internet, I am sure I can see people recording it,” Sharma replied.
“In fact,” Lindleman said, “is that a drone? That’s a fucking drone out there getting aerial shots of this.”
“I bet we can’t even shoot a drone down under these conditions,” Sharma sighed, wishing she had a good old-fashioned shotgun. Although she supposed she could just use it on Hume rather than worry about the surrounding bullshit.
Lindleman sighed out loud. “What I’d give for a sniper rifle right now.”
“I knew we got on for a reason,” Sharma told him.
“Meh,” Grayling said, “we could set a pack of hunting tigers on his ass.”
“Well someone’s been reading too much high fantasy,” Lindleman replied. “May I suggest some sci-fi?”
“No.”
Susan was looking down a list of contact details for the major social media companies. Options were limited. Of course, they seemed plentiful, in that you just sent a tweet or a messenger post and used the social media itself to contact the people at the other end. In practice that meant you could be ignored, pushed to one side, forgotten about. Susan had questions, but simply ‘tweeting’ didn’t produce substance, and you only had a limited number of characters. Facebook was much the same; how do you get hold of someone in headquarters to answer questions about how they work? Not through the apps and pages itself.
So, it had been time to go around the houses and look up company information. Where was the headquarters, who were the directors and managers, who represented them in a business environment which she might be able to get hold of? Hadn’t an ex-politician started working at Facebook to manage their image?
Susan eventually found a contact number which was answered.
“Hello, how can I help?”
“I’d like to speak to Steven Hughes, your chief executive please.”
“Okay, and who are you?”
“Susan Edwards, journalist for the Morthern Star newspaper.”
“I’m afraid Mr Hughes doesn’t speak to the media without an appointment.”
“Then I’d like to make one.”
“What we can do for you is put you through to our communications team, who will deal with your request.”
Susan looked at the screen in front of her which listed all the people and their jobs. The CEO had been a longshot, but if it got her through to someone that would be a success. “That will be fine.”
“Putting you through.”
A pause, a ring, and then “hello Gemma here,” came a voice trying to be trendy and cool.
“Hello, I’m Susan Edwards of the Morthern Star, who are you?”
“I’m head of communications for the UK. Is that a band?”
“It’s a newspaper.”
“Oh right, can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m ringing with questions about your policy on hate speech on your media.”
“Okay, well, I can forward you our guidelines on that, we have a very robust document which explains that we don’t tolerate hate speech in any form.”
“Right, so why does it keep appearing?”
“Anything that is reported to us is examined and dealt with, while our algorithms work tirelessly to check content. Obviously with millions of posts each day we have to rely on these two methods.”
“Yes, but in Morthern we have people engaged in relentless racist dog-whistling; they aren’t being thrown off the platform, and they are making serious bank from linking off you.”
“As I said, any post that is reported is checked.”
“But it’s not working.”
“With all due respect, that’s just your opinion. We don’t take political sides, and I will forward you on our material, but that’s all I can do, we won’t comment on specific people or situations.”
Susan nodded. This matched what she’d read from other journalists; social media didn’t care as long as the money kept flowing through.
DCI Wick knew the next meeting would define a long period of time, and he knew he had to pitch it right. The problem he faced was one not really known to the public. There was a feeling that the police just had to go and catch criminals, do their investigations and deal with defence lawyers and get people put in prison. What people did not realise was the extent and number of investigations was defined by an ever-declining budget set by government. He had to give it to the PCC, she had tried to get more money by having a public vote on increasing taxes… to which the public voted no. So, Wick fought his superiors just for the money to hire enough people for enough time to solve all the crimes and he lost every single time. There wasn’t enough.
But coupled to this was pressure from above, and he supposed anyone who’d ever watched a crime drama would have seen an interfering superior, that tended to be great for a narrative. Thing was, they did exist, and they could tell you what to avoid, and public relations disasters like mobs of right-wing protestors really did cause the police to change tac.
Which was why Wick walked into the Bunker and nodded at Grayling, Maruma, Sharma and Lindleman, who all had faces like thunder.
“Hello everyone. I appreciate you are all concerned about what has happened, and the fact we released a man who had not been questioned. I am afraid that we have to change our focus. The laws on hate speech do not intersect cleanly with our ability to prosecute them, as those saying hateful things know the rules and skirt round them. We simply cannot afford, in money, man and woman power, or publicity, to spend time on a hate crimes investigation which will almost certainly fail to bring a conviction. But do not think that’s a failure, because we will instead be spending your time, your hard work, bringing killers to justice. I want all four of you finding who killed Jessica Villiers and stopping them too. Your other investigation will pause while the election continues, but by then I expect a killer in a cell knowing he’s going to prison.” Wick looked at the room. It was a gamble, but he knew Grayling and Maruma would take the death of Villiers personally, and they would bring Sharma and Grayling with them. Risky, because taking this personally was generally bad, but it might refocus them in a way which didn’t see them torn open.
The other four detectives nodded in agreement. Not because they agreed, but because they had talked, and they knew their own dog-whistle when they heard one; Villiers had almost certainly been killed because she had information on Hume. Solve that, get him, forget about immigration speeches and go for the murder charge.
Joseph Lindleman opened his front door and looked down to the floor. There were no shoes, so his husband probably wasn’t home, but he called out anyway. “Rob, you home?”
But there was only silence, so Joseph came in, dumped the empty pizza box on the kitchen table and wondered what to do. He brought the pizza on the way home from the hospital but was so hungry he’d eaten it as he walked. Even though he’d ended a twelve-hour shift and had a full stomach he felt like he needed to do something; he was still hyped up. One option was gaming of course, and he fancied some shooting, so he went in to turn his PC on, preferring to use a mouse when he was alone. As that loaded, he wondered to himself. A thought that had been around for a while. People watch other people play games. They used Twitch and other systems to create a community and people all had fun…
Shooting and community, that’s what he wanted.
But he’d watched it before, chatted before, when his husband had been away solving crimes and the thought he’d had for a while was… why didn’t he stream his own games?
So, he looked around him. He had a PC, very high spec, but did he have a webcam… yes, he did somewhere. There was now the hurried looking around for it, as cupboards were opened… but here it was, so he plugged it in, was pleased the software recognised it and loaded up his account.
Oh shit. Oh shit. He was actually going to do this; he was going to stream on Twitch. To no one of course, one of many thousands blaring out into the darkness, but he already felt a
thrill as he flicked on all the settings and as the system came slowly into life… and as he appeared in a stream on the web. He looked at the mouse. He looked at the screen.
So… play some games, I guess. He moved his way through the settings with the understanding and precision he used at the hospital and was soon playing a game while keeping up a commentary into the microphone and onto the web. Shooting, chatting.
Then he realised: no tagline, nothing to make people click.
He closed his eyes, to clear his mind, and typed something in. ‘This is the precise opposite of esports.’ Then he resumed playing, racking up the kills and keeping the commentary going, trying to just be his doctor self.
After seven minutes and thirty-two seconds of going live, someone appeared in his stream chat and said, “Hi there.”
Joseph grinned, “and we are go!”
Rupert Hume was in a car. He wasn’t driving, because he had supporters to do that, but he was moving through the streets of Morthern on his way to a debate. He knew the way and was following the route by looking out of the windows. What a glorious place he would make once he got rid of all the foreigners. He rubbed his nose, checked the notes he’d written for his speech, and tucked them away. He wouldn’t look at them during the debate. Notes showed weakness, things to be looked at shortly before going public and never after.
He knew the venue was getting close, so he coughed to clear his throat, and was surprised when the car came to a halt slightly before the venue.
“What’s going on?” he demanded to know. Walking could be a weakness too in these situations.
“There’s a group,” the driver called back.
“What do you mean gr…”
Protestors. All the people in the car could see protestors, a large crowd outside the venue’s entrance with signs opposed to St. George. At least one demanded he ‘go back home and never come out again’.
“What should I do?” the driver asked, hoping someone would tell him to plough through the protestors and keep on going.
“Drive on!” Hume shrieked, “I’m not getting out where I’ll be mugged! Keep moving!” The car did indeed drive on, circling past the protestors. “You,” he called to the person next to him, “call the venue and demand those people be moved, and you,” he said to the driver “do a large circuit of the building.”
Gilded Hate Machine Page 14