False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

It was good to see criminal organizations taking health and safety regulations to heart.

  “Landlord wasn’t best pleased by the modifications,” said Maginty. “He blamed homeless squatters and wanted to know what we were doing about it.”

  The answer being “fuck all,” because apart from anything else, such as lack of resources, there was no sign that anyone was squatting.

  “No sleeping bags, no old clothes, no ratty furniture from a skip.”

  I thought of Beverley’s salvaged throne and winced.

  You can get some swish internet cafés with lots of wood trim, but this was even a step down from a faux KFC chicken joint with good Wi-Fi, being essentially a down at heel greasy spoon with a couple of high-capacity lines run in. Squatters probably would have raised the tone slightly.

  In front of the counter where customers had once queued to buy their minutes, plus what was probably truly horrible coffee, two of the round tables had been pushed together and a crude tabletop created by lashing a door-sized slab of laminated chipboard on top. The tabletop was pink and heavily scored in places—and marked with silver blobs that turned out to be solder. On the floor around it were scattered slivers of plastic insulation, bits of wire and more plastic shavings.

  “They were definitely making something,” said Maginty.

  I had a horrible feeling I knew what. But I didn’t want to make assumptions.

  “They weren’t squatting,” I said. “It’s a workshop. So they were coming in every day to work?”

  “Buying coffee on the way in—just like ordinary people,” said Maginty. “Building what, though?”

  I glanced at the whiteboard.

  “You said you had some of the pill bottles,” I said. “Could you trace these people through their prescriptions?”

  “That’s an enormous faff, and you know it,” said Maginty.

  Medical confidentiality being just the start of it.

  “Like I said, I think I know who Baz is. But there’s a problem,” he said. And that problem was money. “There’s no budget for it—I got into huge trouble for ordering the forensics this morning. Some Chief Super I’ve never even heard of phoned me up and gave me a bollocking.”

  “And?”

  “It was a really good bollocking,” said Maginty. “I am now seriously deficient in the bollock area as a consequence.”

  “And?”

  “To paraphrase,” said Maginty. “You want this case, you’re going to have to pay for it.”

  The Folly has financial reserves that are the envy of other operational command units, but we’d eaten a big chunk of it the previous year on Operation Jennifer. And what was left was funding our expansion.

  “Any chance of tracking down this Baz today?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow afternoon at the earliest,” said Maginty. “Even if you do take the case.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  I called Nightingale and Belgravia and then hung around the shop, poking my nose into nooks and crannies, while I waited for someone to show up. I was expecting Guleed, but to my horror got Seawoll instead.

  “Oh joy,” he said as he walked in. “The fucking Medways.” He sniffed. “I don’t know what they’ve been cooking here, but I think it’s past its sell-by date. In my younger days I used to run joint operations against organized crime down here. You used to be able to get a decent fish supper—definitely seen better days.”

  I gave him the tour and explained about the printers, the links to his investigation into the attack at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation, and the fact that Kent weren’t keen to go joint operation with us.

  “With you, you mean,” said Seawoll. “Can’t say as I blame them.”

  But I’ve become wise in the ways of Seawoll wrangling, and so I just waited for him to get there in his own sweet time.

  “When do you think you’ll be finished with all this undercover wank?” he asked.

  I said I didn’t know—Silver had been adamant about not sharing operational details outside of the need to know group.

  “You want to be done with that shit just as quick as you can,” said Seawoll. “You’re one of life’s honest coppers, Peter, and this kind of fucking fakery is not good for you.” And, having delivered that backhanded compliment, he shifted gear. “Get me your liaison.”

  I fetched Maginty, who’d gone outside for a vape.

  “Who’s your boss?” asked Seawoll.

  Maginty gave him the details of the Chief Super who’d bollocked him earlier, which just goes to show that senior officers should think before they throw their weight around. Seawoll got the said Super on the phone, a bit of a miracle given that it was a Sunday evening, and proceeded to explain why it was in his best interest to extend every co-operation to the Metropolitan Police in general and himself in particular. It got quite chummy toward the end and I’m fairly certain they agreed to meet for drinks.

  “God,” said Seawoll when he’d finished. “I remember when he was a DC out of Gravesend CID and still in short trousers . . .”

  He noticed me and Maginty waiting to see if he was going to be indiscreet and changed the subject again.

  “You,” he pointed at me. “Bugger off before you’re seen hanging around with proper official coppers.” He turned to Maginty. “I’m going to send you one of my sergeants to coordinate the TIEs on this bunch of nominals.” He nodded at the list of names on the whiteboard. “Has everyone got that?”

  Me and Maginty indicated that we had, and were told to piss off and get on with it.

  * * *

  —

  The next day I meant to get in early but the Tube system got in the way and I filtered into the Serious Cybernetics Corporation with all the other mice. I said hello to a couple of people I knew, but the adulation for my fearless action had passed. Such, I thought, is the fickle face of fame. Johnson had informed me that he was coming in late, and that me and Leo Hoyt were to hold the fort down until he arrived.

  “I thought we’d do a couple of random locker searches,” said Leo. “If that’s all right with you?”

  Because this was the SCC, the randomness was generated using a pair of percentile dice because, as Everest once explained at great length, no software-driven random number generator was truly random. So we rolled the dice and randomly selected the locker of a guy who Leo had had an eye on for the last week.

  Fortunately for the guy he didn’t have any contraband, so we opened the lockers either side and found a dead rat in a plastic bag in one. Disgusting, but not actually a disciplinary offense. And a suspicious USB stick in another, which was confiscated to be checked. We let the offending owner cool in the Vogon coffee lounge while Leo tested the USB on the standalone PC laptop. Since it had had its wireless connections disabled and was never connected physically to any network—not even the electrical one—it wouldn’t pass on any viruses or other malware.

  It was the same principle as the air gap around Bambleweeny and Deep Thought, but that was two whole stories full of nerds and I wondered how effective that might actually be and how easy it might be to circumvent.

  “Tentacle porn,” said Leo, and showed me some samples so I could confirm.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Something south of six thousand files,” he said.

  And they were going to have to be checked in case some of it featured images of children, which was a dismissible offense. I offered to play rock, paper, scissors but Leo pointed out that since we had the twenty-sided dice, we should use them.

  I lost and sat down for a morning of drawn porn. What struck me about halfway through was that, despite the inventiveness with which the artists strove to find variations on people having sex with tentacles, the repetition became mind-numbing after the first two thousand images. Still, as far as I could tell, none of the humans depicted were illegal
as defined by the Coroners and Justice Act (2009), although by the time I’d finished I personally had lost the will to live.

  I told the mouse whose USB it had been that no action would be taken and she could go back to work. She glared at me and muttered something about “Big Brother” before demanding her USB back.

  “I’ll leave it with the front desk,” I said.

  After two hours of cephalophilia I was strangely ready for one of Victor’s grand theories—this one involving the true reasons for the spread of Christianity.

  “Entirely driven by tech support,” he said.

  In my quest to sample every single vending machine, I’d chosen a pie and mash from SUPERPIE, a Yorkshire-themed Japanese machine which dispensed, as far as I could tell, authentic steak and kidney pies.

  “Not the conquering and occupying and slave taking?” I said, while trying to squeeze tomato ketchup out of the inadequate hole I’d bitten in the sachet.

  “Nah,” said Victor. “That’s all late model Christianity. Back in the Dark Ages . . .”

  “Sub-Roman,” said Everest without looking up.

  He was staring at a spot on the table with a slight frown on his face. This was because, Victor told me, he hadn’t managed to trace who was secretly talking to William Lloyd and was trying to think up an alternative approach.

  “Early Medieval,” said Victor. “Back in the time of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms it was all top-down.”

  According to Victor, the first thing the boys from Rome would do when they tooled over was cozy up to the local kings or chiefs. Forget arduously saving souls one at a time—the emissaries of the Pope calculated that in hierarchical quasi-tribal societies you grab the big man and the rest would be forced into line.

  “And what do they offer these guys?” asked Victor.

  “Salvation and life everlasting?” I said, drawing on some long, boring childhood memories.

  “What? Better than Valhalla?” asked Victor. “Better than feasting, drinking and fighting for all eternity? Better than Elysium?”

  “Political legitimacy?” I asked, remembering Miss Karmargi who’d been my Religious Education teacher at school. An avowed atheist who’d once said that she respected all religions equally—“Which is more than can be said for most religions,” she’d added.

  Victor gave me a sharp look.

  “Close,” he said. “But what they really offered was tech support. Think about it. Not only could these churchmen write, but they could keep books.”

  This was a big plus for a medieval ruler who usually spent most of his days on the edge of bankruptcy, and was still expected to maintain the peace, host major dinners, and hand out bling and favors to his supporters and lesser nobles.

  “The clergy ran the IT support, managed the books, maintained lines of communication internally and externally,” said Victor. “It was the killer application of its day.”

  “Is this important?” said Everest, who had lowered his head until his forehead rested on the table.

  “If the clergy were the original IT support,” said Victor, “doesn’t that mean we’re the new clergy?”

  “Not Peter,” said Everest. “He’s an enforcer.”

  “Ah, but Peter here believes in technology,” said Victor. “That makes him a Knight Templar.”

  After lunch, I took my almost religious devotion to law and order up to the Vogon office, where I used Leo’s access code to access our secure files and went fishing for information about the lift.

  In the old days firms used to hire staff directly to maintain and clean their buildings. Then came the great era of outsourcing, where companies realized that if they turned over these responsibilities to specialist companies they could make savings and, even better, drop payroll numbers.

  In turn, the building maintenance companies likewise cut their costs by subcontracting the labor-intensive portions to companies who could reduce costs further by illegally underpaying their staff. Or more precisely, underpaying the lowest paid members of their staff—mainly the cleaners.

  So once I knew the name of the subcontractor, it was just a matter of having Silver send someone round to ask a few questions. Co-operation and silence guaranteed by threats to inform HM Customs and Excise about the deliberate under-reporting of their wage bill—not to mention the inevitable National Insurance fraud.

  Leo wandered in just as I was closing up the window.

  “What you up to?” he asked.

  I told him I was still hunting Johnson’s rat.

  “Still?” said Leo. “I thought you’d have found him by now.”

  “I’m not even sure he exists,” I said.

  “Can’t help you there,” he said. “Although maybe you’re looking in the wrong place.”

  Looking back, maybe I should have been listening a bit more carefully.

  I traveled home with Stephen who, being a New Yorker, at least knew how to ride the Tube without moaning. We snagged a door alcove at the end of the carriage on the non-platform side so we could have a chat without having to shout past people’s armpits.

  “When are we going to get blueprints?” he asked.

  “Hopefully tomorrow,” I said.

  He wanted to come with me.

  “As insurance,” he said, and didn’t specify whose insurance or against what.

  “I’ve got an in,” I said. “You’ll just get in the way.”

  “Where is this outfit located?”

  “Slough,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  And so the next morning I dropped Stephen off at South Wimbledon and headed off in the opposite direction toward the Medway Ports, picking up Guleed at Chatham. Getting across South London was murderous, but beyond the M25 all the heavy traffic was going in the other direction and I made good time. We rendezvoused with Maginty at the Rainham Contact Point, which looked dispiritingly like a cross between a charity shop and a slightly seedy dentist.

  Conveniently there was an off-license next door in case the despairing members of the Community Safety Unit needed to drink themselves under their desks.

  “We’d wait until we’re off duty,” said Maginty. “Only nobody ever goes off duty anymore.”

  Baz, whose real name was Barry Collard, lived in a surprisingly neat flat above a grim 1950s red-brick shopping arcade in Twydall which, Maginty assured us, was a crime hotspot. Like most high-crime areas, it looked exactly like a low-crime area although some of the shops were a bit ragged around the edges.

  Barry, like many people with a long history of brushing up against the criminal justice system, had acquired an unaccountable reluctance to entertain the police but Maginty managed to talk us in. Although I noticed we weren’t offered a cup of tea. I went in last so I could do a quick Initial Vestigium Assessment while Barry was showing the others inside.

  The flat was sparsely furnished, but while the furniture was cheap it was brand new. The walls had recently been painted, white with a hint of indeterminate pastel in the hallway, a light coffee color in the living room, institutional green in the kitchen. Supernaturally speaking, there was nothing but the normal background hum in any of the rooms.

  Neither were there any books, or even old magazines or newspapers. Nor were there any Blu-rays or DVDs or anywhere to play them. The absence of a TV or any books or photographs made the living room seem cold and unfinished. Although according to Barry’s criminal file—we were still trying to access his medical records—he became agitated around excessive disorder, which could explain the minimalist décor. We didn’t want to pressure him, so Maginty, who was the only one in uniform, loitered unobtrusively by the doorway while Guleed perched a nice unthreatening distance away on the arm of a sofa. I sat on the sofa itself and thought friendly thoughts.

  If you’re a police officer, then you meet a lot of Barrys, if only because ev
eryone else crosses the street to avoid them. White, skinny almost to the point of emaciation, drably dark tattoos boiling out of his collar and down his arms. Small mouth, broken nose, hooded blue eyes with a line of dull silver piercings in his left eyebrow. He wore the habitual expression of suspicious disappointment that is the birthright of those that started behind and were thrown off the bus before they reached the first stop.

  It could have been me if I hadn’t had some breaks in my life.

  Like the flat, his clothes were neat and clean—a red Love Moschino polo shirt, beige cargo pants, a pair of pink fluffy slippers and no socks.

  Behind him a pair of narrow French windows led on to a faux balcony and through them I could see, across the street, the Grade II listed angular witch’s hat shape of the Holy Trinity Church.

  We started as gently as you can when doing a caution plus two. Because of course anything you say can be used in evidence, but let’s not worry about that sort of thing now. And did I mention that you can stop the interview whenever you like?

  Barry frowned when I got to that bit, and I thought he was going to ask us to leave but fortunately he didn’t, because then we’d have had to arrest him and that would have led to paperwork and jurisdictional bollocks.

  Later we’d wish we’d arrested him straight off, but you can’t arrest everyone—there aren’t enough cells to hold them all for a start.

  A proper interview takes time which is why, contrary to what you see on the TV, they don’t get done by anyone above the rank of sergeant. You can spend at least fifteen minutes, as we did, just establishing a common vocabulary. The improvised workshop at the internet café was “the Print Shop,” and all who worked there were production assistants or “prods.”

  “So who ran the Print Shop?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who was in charge?”

  “It didn’t work like that,” said Barry.

  Because every morning they sat down and divvied up the tasks among themselves over coffee.

  “But who set you the tasks?”

  “They came by e-mail as Word documents, didn’t they?” said Barry.