Proximity

by Jem Tugwell

  ‘Really?’ The central premise of iMe is that it’s meant to be impossible. I would love to be able to choose to go off-grid when I fancied a drink or chocolate.

  ‘That’s what an old magazine said. But it isn’t that simple now. Without iMe there is no money, so he must still be connected somehow.’

  To get all iMe’s convenience of health, security, and not needing keys or passwords, the government managed your life. No way to have one without the other.

  ‘And?’

  ‘There are large holes in his signal history. In fact, the history trace is more gaps than signal. Look.’ She found the history data and threw it on the wall as a new page. ‘This is the last twelve months.’ The wall showed a horizontal white line for periods of no signal, with sporadic green spikes. It looked like a heart monitor flat-lining, spiking as the defibrillator tried to restart a heart. ‘Each green spike is where he has a signal and is connected, and then it’s off again. I think he can turn it on when he needs it.’

  That sounds perfect to me. Maybe this was perfect for the case as well – the breakthrough we needed. ‘Maybe he can make others go off-grid as well.’

  Zoe nodded, swiped left on the wall to get back our case overview and threw a photo of Esteban onto the wall.

  ‘We’ll go and see him right after the morning briefing with Bhatt.’

  I moved Esteban’s picture under the ‘Possible Suspects’ heading, right next to Art Walker.

  18

  DI Clive Lussac

  Zoe and I were back at PCU for the 6am briefing with Bhatt. Zoe’s hair looked like it resented having been dried in a hurry, and the lack of sleep was encouraging all my negativity. I could feel a band of tingling pressure starting at my temples and spreading across my forehead, like the inside of my brain was touching my skull.

  ‘Can you bring the case up, Zoe?’ I said.

  She nodded and duplicated our case wall onto Bhatt’s office wall.

  Thankfully, we had much more to show her than before.

  ‘We’re looking for links between Alan Kane and Karina Morgan, and also for other possible suspects,’ I said. ‘Zoe?’

  ‘So far the only link between Alan and Karina is membership of the same gym. Alan stopped going three years ago, but Karina’s membership is still active, and she goes regularly. Her medical and health records show she’s in line with the Model Citizen exercise directive.’ Zoe threw a report of Karina’s deviations to Model onto the wall.

  God, she is a good girl. Green bars everywhere on the report. Only the fat and calorie sections had a small amber tip showing that she was within her FU allowance.

  ‘She spent most of her FUs on crisps.’

  Bhatt frowned in disapproval. ‘Don’t call them that. Did they go to the gym together?’

  ‘Sorry, ma’am… Alan Kane’s gym membership lapsed when he got divorced. He and Karina were never in the gym at the same time, and there is no data showing any physical proximity.’

  ‘Right, keep looking for links. What else?’

  Zoe swiped the wall back to show the case overview with its pictures of Karina, Alan and the possible suspects. ‘Esteban Jimenez,’ Zoe said.

  ‘Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. One of iMe’s two founding fathers.’

  I was surprised again that Bhatt had information that would help us and hadn’t mentioned it. ‘You know him? Until yesterday, we thought iMe was all Art.’

  ‘iMe is all Art,’ Bhatt said.

  ‘But not originally?’

  ‘No. What’s he up to now?’

  ‘Show that trace you had yesterday, Zoe.’

  Zoe tapped Esteban’s image on the wall, touched her fingertips together then and spread them. The image expanded to match her finger movements and opened a full page on Esteban. She had a lot more data on him now and talked Bhatt through the graph of the sporadic signal over the years.

  ‘It’s not conclusive yet,’ I said. ‘Show the overlays.’

  Zoe moved her hands and Bhatt, and I watched the wall as it followed Zoe’s actions. She selected Kane and Karina, Esteban, Art and the other iMe staff. The wall redrew again to show a series of dates along the top, with each of the names she had selected down the left side. Each person had a signal line running horizontally across the page. Karina’s line was green until the 23rd of April before it ended. Alan Kane’s was similar but went further until he disappeared.

  ‘You can see Karina, and Alan’s signals just stopped,’ I said. ‘All the iMe staff have signals for the whole period.’ I pointed at the solid straight lines. Esteban’s signal line had big gaps in it during both disappearances. ‘You can see that Esteban doesn’t have a signal.’

  ‘So, we don’t know where he was?’ Bhatt asked.

  ‘Zoe and I are going to try and find him straight after this, ma’am. Zoe found an old contact entry.’

  ‘Good, he seems to know how to cheat the system he designed.’

  ‘Can you put up the next one, Zoe?’

  The wall redrew again, this time showing a map of Berkshire. Two green dots pulsed a slow and steady beat.

  ‘This is the night Karina went missing from her home in Datchet – a minute before her signal went.’

  Zoe’s hand followed my commentary and hovered over the first dot. Karina’s name popped up next to it.

  ‘The other dot is Emma Bailey. At this scale, the map shows her at home in Egham.’

  I nodded, and Zoe spread her fingers to zoom the map out, so we could see West London and out as far as Swindon. Now we had green dots for everyone on our possible suspects list. No one’s signal was anywhere near Karina’s home. Everyone had an alibi.

  Everyone except Esteban.

  ‘Given that everyone else has a signal that proves they weren’t near Karina or Alan, then it must be Esteban,’ Bhatt said, excited that we had a breakthrough.

  ‘It looks that way,’ I said. ‘But there’s a complication.’

  Zoe did another finger dance in front of her face, and the wall displayed another map.

  ‘This one is from immediately before Alan Kane’s signal stopped.’

  Kane’s signal showed on the map of Hounslow.

  ‘Again, no one is near Kane’s home in Hounslow. Still no signal for Esteban.’

  ‘So? What’s the complication?’ Bhatt said, a tint of exasperation in her voice.

  I pointed at Art’s signal. It showed that he was in his Mayfair flat. ‘This looks like Art is at home alone, having a quiet night in, but…’ Despite Bhatt’s impatience, I couldn’t resist a little dramatic pause. I nodded at Zoe to do the reveal.

  ‘When I checked the detail of Art’s signal, it showed as encrypted.’

  Bhatt nodded in understanding. Christ, she knows.

  ‘You knew about encrypted signals and didn’t tell us? It would have been useful.’

  She held that annoying finger up again to stop me. ‘Careful, Clive. Of course I knew. You know the other departments I run.’

  ‘But these people could be being taken by someone with an encrypted signal.’

  Bhatt gave a derisive snort. ‘You need an authority signed by the home secretary to encrypt your signal. It’s not going to be someone that trusted. It can’t be Art.’

  ‘But we don’t know where he was. The signal data we have only tells us where he was before the encryption.’ The next bit made me mad. ‘And apparently, only he can approve a signal trace on someone encrypted.’

  ***

  After the briefing, I was still trying to understand why Bhatt hadn’t told us about encrypted signals. We were back at our case wall. DS Martin Adams and Freya Murray were the only serving PCU officers left other than Zoe and myself. Adams had a bad back and was off sick, and Murray had been loaned to Cyber. I knew Cyber was the key department now, but Bhatt’s refusal to give us Murray back made things harder. Is she protecting Art somehow? It made no sense to dump it all on Zoe and me, but Bhatt said she had no choice. Last week’s cyber-attack ha
d raised the terror threat to imminent, and it was always the prime minister’s priority. All available resources were committed elsewhere.

  ‘We need to find Esteban. What was that contact you found, Zoe?’

  ‘It’s from an ancient WhatsApp account.’

  ‘Christ, can we still use that?’ No one had used WhatsApp or Facebook or any of the old social media sites for years. Too much catfishing, too many trolls, too many encrypted messages between terrorists. They had all been replaced by the little blue TrueMe app which was always on the iMe screen and guaranteed the identity of the person you were talking to. Schools took kids to the Museum of Technology to learn about the demise of the old unregulated social media sites and to laugh at all the old ‘smart’ phones.

  ‘There’s a way to use it. I know someone in the police cyber-crime labs. They’re sending me a special version of the app we can use on iMe.’

  ***

  The wait for the app was frustrating, but after an hour, Zoe had a version of WhatsApp on her HUD. She threw her display onto the wall so I could see as well. The app looked a bit like a cut-down version of the old WhatsApp screen with a blank discussion area on the right, and room for chats down the left-hand side. Only one name showed: Esteban Jimenez. I wasn’t sure that we could really contact him this way. If we couldn’t, we would have to go to all the places his signal had shown up. They were scattered around the south of England and it would take a lot of time to go to all of them. I hoped the app would shortcut the search.

  ‘Tell him we need to see him straight away,’ I said to Zoe.

  She tapped his name on the screen and said: ‘Mr Jimenez, this is DI Clive Lussac from PCU. We urgently need to talk to you. Please can you contact me immediately.’ The words were converted to text and appeared in the app window as she spoke. Except my name, which showed as Clive Lissa. Voice recognition always got it wrong. Zoe corrected it and raised her eyebrows to check the message was OK to go. I nodded, and she pressed send.

  We both watched the app and hoped. It had been hacked together in a rush and provided no feedback on whether the message had been delivered or read.

  We both gasped when the words ‘Talk or Meet?’ appeared in response to our message.

  ‘Tell him, meet,’ I said, and we waited again.

  Our eyes were locked on our HUDs, oblivious to the rest of the world.

  ‘Come at 10am,’ came the reply, followed by the location details for a lay-by on a road near Salisbury. He must have known exactly where we were, as the meeting time was perfect if we left in the next ten minutes.

  Zoe went off to use the toilet while I connected with an available police car and told it to pick us up.

  Minutes later she burst back into the room with enough momentum to thump the door into the wall. The handle sent a few pink flecks of plaster floating onto the floor.

  I span to face her, startled by the noise.

  ‘Karina’s signal’s back on,’ she panted.

  19

  DI Clive Lussac

  ‘How do you know her signal’s back, Zoe?’ I asked.

  ‘I got iMe Tech Support to monitor it and tell me if it came back on.’

  ‘That’s great.’ I was impressed with Zoe, but why hadn’t I thought of that? ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I literally just got the alert. I’ll check now.’

  ‘Share your HUD,’ I told her, feeling the relief. We’ve found her – no, iMe found her.

  My screen blanked and showed Zoe’s HUD. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her hands moving around. I focused on the screen as menus and search boxes came up, like I was watching someone else playing a computer game. I held my breath as the HUD drew a map of Windsor Great Park. In the centre, a dot showed us Karina’s location.

  ‘Fuck.’ I staggered back and grabbed for a desk to stop me falling. ‘Fuck.’

  Karina’s signal glowed a sickening red.

  Red and green were the colours of people’s tracking signals. Green for go and red for stop, like the traffic lights. Someone had stopped Karina.

  ‘Check the history,’ I said.

  Zoe threw a graph on her HUD. Karina’s flat ‘No Signal’ line drew along from the left and then jumped vertically as the signal strength returned to 100% and settled there. A red, unwavering line.

  Zoe gasped, and I stared.

  Of course, people still died unnaturally. There was the occasional, simple to solve, domestic or gang killing. Most were early checkouts: desperate, messy suicides, or euthanised OAPs in their care home beds. Now I was getting divorced from Mary, would I end up some old, lonely man and go the same way?

  I shook the thought aside. Nothing we found about Karina hinted she was suicidal, or even depressed. This didn’t feel like a suicide. We had a murder to solve.

  ‘We need to get to Karina. Use that app to postpone Esteban.’

  ‘Sure, Boss.’

  Because forensics were automated, and we always knew who was present at the time of death, we had nothing to do at a crime scene. Mostly we didn’t bother to go and simply waited for the report. This was different. This felt like the old days.

  I went to the cupboards at the back of the office to hunt for my crime scene bag.

  I had a vague recollection of putting it in a cardboard box when we last moved offices. I searched and couldn’t find it. I stood and looked around. Mary always joked that I did ‘man’ looking. She was right, so I went back through the cupboards more carefully this time. At the bottom of the first one, behind a box, I saw the dusty corner of a bag. I reached in and dragged it out. My old bag looked sad and neglected. I opened it up, but all it contained were old silicone gloves that had fused together into a gooey mess.

  ‘Esteban replied, Boss.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said he can see her red signal.’

  ‘He seems to know everything. We’ll get to him later.’ We could reuse the car I had arranged for the trip to Esteban.

  ‘Let’s get to Karina.’

  ***

  In the car, we watched the preliminary drone camera footage from Karina’s location in the Great Park. The high elevation images showed the tops of the trees, the glittering lake and the Totem Pole in the distance. The car slowed, signalled to the on-coming traffic to stop, and turned right into Wick Road. The local Uniform had one car parked on the left, and our car reversed us into the only other space. We got out, and I flexed the grumbling muscles around my knee, trying to shift a nagging ache. It was another bright spring morning, but in the shade of the tall oaks on both sides of the road, I shivered.

  ‘In there, sir.’ The PC who had been on guard pointed the way. ‘The forensic scan is nearly done, and we’ve enforced a no-fly zone for press drones.’

  I nodded my thanks as we set off past a group of onlookers and their dogs. A collie shook, splattering the mud and water from the lake over their owner’s legs. The small metal gate resisted on its rusting hinges as we went into the park and past the two green and white posts with the by-laws telling you what you could and couldn’t do on the king’s land. My mind jumped off at a tangent as I wondered if they had written a ‘no dead bodies’ rule.

  Most of this part of Windsor Great Park was grass areas punctuated by individual tall trees, and the dappled sunshine moved with the trees’ branches. Nice place for a walk, but I could see little shelter for a body.

  The exception was the clump of dense green ahead of us, which provided a natural screen to hide an electricity sub-station from the road. On the park side, the sub-station hid behind a wooden fence, grey and green with age and mildew.

  We ducked under a canopy of branches. In the open, the air was clean and fresh, but here, where Karina’s body lay on a bed of russet leaves left over from the autumn, it was damp with the smell of earth.

  We needed to wait a few metres back until the forensic scan finished. The large drone we had seen the images from rested quietly on the grass. A matte black thug of a thing, it squatted
on five long, crane-like legs. Its circular body was nearly a metre across and about 500mm deep. Evenly spaced around the edge, six propellers faced the sky. The loading hatch in the top of the drone was open, waiting for the return of its micro-drones.

  Zoe fidgeted as she waited, her feet rustling the leaves.

  ‘Karina looks peaceful,’ she said.

  It looked like the leaves had been kicked into a mound. A low organic altar for Karina’s body to rest on. Her hands were folded onto her lap, and she held a single, yellow daffodil that matched the print on the cotton of her dress.

  ‘Is this where the signal came back on?’ I wanted to double check.

  ‘Yep. She didn’t move after it restarted.’

  Karina looked peaceful, except for the six micro-drones buzzing around her like angry wasps. Their flight pattern looked random, but their imaging cameras would provide a perfect 3D model of the scene that we could ‘walk’ around and examine later.

  The drones all stopped moving at the same time, hovered, then headed off to map the surrounding area. Their departure meant that the preliminary forensic report was ready. When it messaged in, I brought it up on my HUD, then threw it at Zoe’s. The first line told us what we feared.

  ‘Case Classification: Murder.’

  I read on.

  ‘Cause of Death: Exsanguination – body drained of blood.’

  I flicked through the images in the report, looking at small puncture marks in each major vein and artery. The innocent little holes didn’t look like fatal wounds, but from the cause of death, each must have dangled a cannula and tubes to let her heart pump out her blood. I hoped Karina wasn’t conscious when it started.

  Zoe’s face had washed-out to a pale grey-white. Despite the coolness of the shade, sweat shone on her brow.

  ‘You OK, Zoe?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep.’ The croaky sound said she wasn’t. ‘She can’t be dead.’

  Her denial was understandable. This was the first murder in ten years with no proximity data from iMe at the time of death or immediately prior to it. I tried to stay calm. I tried to think like the policeman I used to be. I couldn’t stop the frisson of excitement flowing through me.