The three of them went in at nine p.m. in the apparent hope of dragging Hawkins away from some soiree. To Falconer’s obvious disappointment he found the director still at work, whilst all around him a hundred data entry clerks sorted through swathes of paperwork and wrung the most out of their zero hour contracts.
Hawkins didn’t look well. His expensive suit was sweat-stained and unlaundered. The bags under his eyes had luggage of their own, set in a saggy, stubbly face. This was a man about to reap what Atacom had sown when it underbid all the competition to get the contract. At first he was dismissive, but Falconer showed him a warrant card and made a few pointed threats about extended powers. After that Hawkins placed Atacom’s resources – such as they were – at Falconer’s disposal, and probably promised him the moon on a string as well, given the company’s propensity to write administrative cheques its personnel couldn’t honour.
All for nothing: an exhaustive search failed to turn up Paoli’s name anywhere in the database. No sign that Atacom had found the malefactor a home since Slumside had opened its gates to the masses. Of course, given that those gates never closed, there were plenty of denizens who hadn’t come by official channels, mostly looking to hide in a crowd.
Afterwards, Derwent set about tapping the usual contacts and informants about the estate, taking in small-time dealers and leaning on them, hunting for any mention of a name. She was still in the early stages of this when Nzeogu leapt up with an exclamation and called her over. Moments later they were putting a call in to Falconer.
“How much did you like going to prod Hawkins, Mr Falconer?” Nzeogu asked. At the puzzled response he grinned at Derwent and explained, “Paoli is Atacom, or he was. I was going over their database, and there he is: not a resident – an employee.”
Minutes later, Falconer picked them up and the three of them drove right back to Hawkins’ offices.
*
Hawkins was plainly not overjoyed at their return. “Do you realise just how busy we are here?” he demanded. “I’ve…” He waved a hand about his office, which showed relatively little of the bureaucratic chaos reigning outside his door. “I’ve got the Home Secretary’s office calling on a daily basis asking when I’m going to have Slu— Surreyside working as intended. I’ve got the press waiting to crucify me. I don’t need some conspiracy theorist policeman trying to complicate my life.”
Falconer was having none of it. “Raymond Paoli, Hawkins. I dropped the name before. You knew we were after him. Mind explaining why you didn’t mention he works for you?”
Hawkins twitched. “I have no idea—” and then Falconer had shown him a photo, a blurry shot from someone’s phone of a thin-faced, olive skinned man with a ponytail and a goatee.
“You know him,” Falconer concluded.
“He doesn’t work for us.”
“But he used to, didn’t he?”
Hawkins collapsed into his chair like someone decanting jelly. “Oh God,” he moaned. “Yes, all right? But he was fired, terminated without notice. I’m sorry it’s just … we’ve got enough worry right now without it getting out we had some kind of drug dealer on the payroll.”
“Whatever he’s dealing, it’s not drugs,” Nzeogu put in, thinking of the impossible security camera footage.
“I really have no idea.” Hawkins put his head in his hands. “Security saw him going into Slum— damnit, into Surreyside. He was fraternising, you know. There’s some kind of awful rave club business that goes on there, that we were trying to keep a lid on, but every time we sent the boys in to shut one down, they’d moved somewhere else, and it was because Paoli was just tipping them off. He was a … DJ or a dealer or, well, I didn’t even care, right then. I gave him his marching orders. But, please – I don’t need this to get to the press. They’ve got their teeth into enough of me, right now. I’m having to go before a Parliamentary committee in ten days’ time. I don’t need anything more.”
“So where’s Paoli now?” Falconer wanted to know.
“Oh God, you think I know? Somewhere in Slumside, probably. He had plenty of friends there.” Hawkins didn’t even try to correct himself this time.
Thankfully, by that time Derwent had shaken a little information loose from some of her regular informants.
“There’s going to be a party in Slumside tonight,” she told them. “Paoli’s guest of honour.”
*
Going into Slumside always gave Derwent the impression of a time-lapse film. The estate had officially opened the year before, but some of the work had been so much on the cheap that it was already falling down, while other parts were unfinished and still – equally on the cheap – being put up. Everywhere was the Atacom logo, in various stages of vandalisation. Falconer stared through the armoured glass of the big-ass four by four that was apparently standard issue for Dangerous Government Agents, taking in the graffiti, the squalor, the boarded up windows and gangs of surly adolescents glowering at their little convoy. “How do people live like this?” he demanded, no doubt thinking of his nice house somewhere in rural Berkshire.
Because we force them to, Derwent thought, but it wouldn’t have been a popular opinion even amongst her colleagues, let alone with Mr Home Office here.
They met up with two dozen heavies in Atacom jackets on loan from Hawkins to help corral the crowd and stop Paoli slipping out the fire exit. Falconer had brought half a dozen of his crew as well, all armed, and Derwent was already guessing this would prove to be a poor mix of work ethics.
Surreyside Annex B Village Community Hall, said the sign on the least village-hall-like concrete bunker they had ever seen. The layer of gang signs and crude drawings of genitals had probably improved property prices in the neighbourhood. There was most certainly a community in residence, though. The pulse of the music was rattling Derwent’s fillings and the windows were strobing with lights. The sensory impression was so overwhelming that it was a moment before Derwent identified the screaming from within.
“It’s happening!” she snapped, whilst keeping her mind off just what it might be. In an instant she was off, Nzeogu behind her and the rest left in the dust. In retrospect the Chief Inspector would be right to chew her out over it, but she could hear people in trouble, real I’m-being-murdered trouble, and that sort of thing didn’t wait for the paperwork.
The place was emptying at the seams even as she got close, a tumbling spew of panicking ravers gouting from the nearest door. She was looking at faces, hoping she’d know Paoli if he tried to get past her, but the more she looked, the more world there was. She was staring through the choked doorway and it seemed that there was infinite space and time contained within the room, and loops and tendrils of air moved past one another in a glassy haze, slithering like translucent fish.
Fugitive revellers were pelting past her then, and she was no longer looking for Paoli. Instead her eyes were following the oozing motion of the air before her – no, the air around her. Everywhere she looked, all the spaces were populated and repopulated, a fractal bestiary of insubstantial things only detectable by their edges and outlines. They shuddered and pulsed like jellyfish, not merely packed one against the other but sliding effortlessly through a shared space, respecting no boundaries, not even each others’. She shuddered as their gelatinous borders intersected the party-goers, the walls, her own flesh. They were blind and heedless, and yet she could sense something else, some vaster attention, and with a stab of utter fright knew that by that same medium it could sense her too. She felt as though she was aboard a tiny, tiny boat on an endless roiling sea, and some great maw was rising towards the surface, towards her, faster and faster until it would erupt all about her and—
Nzeogu cannoned into her, startling her from her trance. He was struggling with a skinny goateed guy in a Star Wars T-shirt: Paoli.
“Help me get him out of here!” he yelled. His face was taut, greyish, and she knew he’d seen it, some of it. He was fighting away the implications until he had a quiet room and a full b
ottle and the liberty to shout himself hoarse.
They lurched and manhandled Paoli towards the four-by-four, dragging him through a melee of shrieking ravers and Atacom thugs. Raymond Paoli wasn’t fighting them, but he was putting up one hell of a fight against whatever invisible demons the Ghast resonator had hauled from his mind. Only when Nzeogu slammed him face-first into the car window to cuff him did they get his attention.
“I couldn’t turn it off!” His face was twisted, wild. One eye was pressed to the car, the other swivelled to goggle at Derwent. “It’s too strong, I made it too strong.”
“Raymond Paoli, I am placing you under arrest under suspicion of I don’t know the fuck what. I must warn you, you do not have to say anything—” Derwent started, and then gave up on the formal caution because there was no sign Paoli was listening to her. Let’s just say we said it.
“It’s not fun!” Paoli shrieked suddenly, as though recent events were suddenly catching up with him. “In the lab it was fun, but that was ten per cent. This is seventy! This is too much! You see all the way at seventy!” He convulsed backwards, throwing Nzeogu off him just as the cuffs clicked shut. Right into Derwent’s face he screamed, “They’ll go for one hundred! Nobody wants to see what’s at one hundred! Nobody wants it to see you!” and the last word just went on and became a hideous scream that rose above all the other chaos – a sound beyond anything a human throat should have produced. Derwent recoiled, and then Nzeogu slammed into Paoli again, ramming him against the car.
Paoli never made it, and Nzeogu jarred his shoulder against the bulletproof glass with nothing in his grasp but empty, fear-stinking clothes. In that moment Derwent had the sense of something vast streaming past her – through her. But by then she couldn’t see any of the phantasmal monsters, the spaces around her were limited and measurable and mundane. Falconer had put seven bullets into the resonator and it had given up the ghost, execution accomplishing what simple unplugging had not.
*
Derwent knew Slumside, or she thought she had. On the drive back to the station, with a van-full of bewildered ravers and a box-full of Paoli’s effects, she couldn’t see it the same way. It wasn’t just the hallucinations – they had been hallucinations – brought on by the resonator. It wasn’t just the impossible fate that had overtaken Paoli, which she wasn’t even bothering trying to characterise as an escape because God knew the man hadn’t wanted to go. Even when she could unclog her mind of all of that, she could still see a terrible nervous energy everywhere in Slumside, as though the place was waiting for the storm to break. The locals were out on the streets, skittish and twitchy on corners. Dispatch reports over the radio revealed a rash of petty crimes, lost tempers, property damage. She wondered if word was spreading that Ghasting had gone from a diversion to a death sentence at ‘seventy’.
Everywhere the Atacom logo loured from billboards and hoardings, and beneath them the contractors swarmed like ants, digging and building. Too little too late, surely, because the parliamentary hearings would kick off within the month, and then Hugh Hawkins’ sweaty arse would be hanging in the breeze. She doubted his public pillorying would make conditions any better.
Nzeogu didn’t say a word on the way back. His stare could reasonably be categorised as ‘thousand yard.’ His hands shook like they had the month after he had given up smoking. Back at his desk, he hunched over his keyboard, shaking his head.
“You didn’t see it,” he said, to himself, to Derwent.
“I saw,” she told him shortly. “The resonator thing, it makes you see all kinds of stuff that’s not there.”
“No.” He shivered. “Mother of God, Derwent, it’s there. It’s still there.”
He was shivering, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands as though he could scrub out the image of what they’d witnessed. “Clear and present danger,” he said shakily. “Mother of God.”
“It’s not over,” Falconer told them both. If he had seen anything, he wasn’t saying. Perhaps he had seen it all before. Perhaps he just had no imagination.
“It’s over for Paoli,” Derwent pointed out.
“So he had associates, a supplier or people he supplied. The resonators are still out there. We don’t even know if he was the one constructing them. I don’t want to go online tomorrow and find the instructions up on YouTube.”
Derwent powered up Paoli’s phone. No PIN: he had apparently not trusted his own ability to remember a four digit number in the end, which meant that she didn’t have to employ any ill-gotten skills that she wouldn’t have admitted to possessing. Idly she flicked through whatever apps he had left open, learning more than she wanted about his predilections for pornography before finally locating Facebook.
He had a reminder. He had one event today. Paoli’s final send-off had a Facebook Event devoted to it.
It was proudly announced as a Seventy Party: she got the impression that there were diminishing returns with Ghasting and that Paoli and his fellows had been upping the specs to out-do each other. She scrolled idly down all the vapidly positive acceptances from what looked like half the population of Slumside. And stopped.
“JoMa” had declined the invite, apparently. Like so many people online, she had wanted Paoli to know exactly why he wouldn’t be graced by her company. Her reasons seemed more reasonable than most, though.
This isn’t a toy. I’ve told you it’s too dangerous. Seventy will go beyond.
And it had: Derwent could testify to that, sure enough. So who was JoMa and how did she know so much about it? Have I just found Paoli’s dealer?
JoMa’s avatar was a photo: a pale girl with short dark hair, looking no more than eighteen. Derwent tried to get more details, but her page was locked and there was little to find. Except there was something familiar about that face.
Nzeogu looked over her shoulder and wordlessly called up Falconer’s security camera footage, freezing it towards the end with the wheelchair centre screen.
Maybe it was the same individual, maybe it wasn’t. The similarities were striking, though.
“We should have been looking for her all the time, instead of Paoli,” Derwent growled, and plunged into the morass of Atacom’s files looking for any sign of mobility issues and wheelchairs. That encompassed a whole category of Slumside’s residents, so the search should have been needle and haystack territory. Atacom’s own incompetence came to her rescue, though. She found a dozen separate emailed complaints about a broken lift at Venture Block, Ascension Row, from the resident at Flat 37, one Josephine Mahler.
“You up for another jaunt into Slumside?” she asked.
Nzeogu’s shoulders hunched. “Sure,” he muttered, but he didn’t look at her and he didn’t get up.
Derwent wanted to shout at him that she didn’t exactly fancy it either: that this was their lead, this was what they had to follow up. She didn’t. She accepted that maybe whatever hallucinations he’d endured were worse than hers. After all, he had been holding Paoli when the man had been spirited away. Nzeogu didn’t look like he was ready to go back.
“I’ll go with Falconer,” she told him. “You … see if there’s anything more in Paoli’s things.”
*
The only accurate part of their target address was the word “block”, which gave a suitably at-Her-Majesty’s-Pleasure air. Ascension Row was going to have to wait a hell of a long time for any kind of upturn in its fortunes and the only “venture” involved in Venture Block would be the capitalists who had made off with the public funding.
The lift was not in working order, as advertised. Falconer and Derwent and two of the armed response team dutifully trooped up the stairs, while the rest watched the windows and the fire escape, and probably had a surprise in store for any sudden helicopter rescue from the roof. By this point, Derwent wasn’t sure just what Falconer might end up doing.
“So this Mahler, crippled evil genius you reckon?” Derwent asked as they hit the second storey landing.
“Let’s f
ind out.” Moments later they were going through the chipboard door of Flat 37 like it was papier-mâché.
In that moment, the expression on the face of Josephine Mahler was surely everything Falconer had hoped for. She had barely time to turn halfway from her computer, hands on the rims of her wheels, when the gunmen had her covered and were shouting at her to stay still. Falconer strode in after them with his warrant card out, exclaiming, “Gotcha!”
Mahler really was about eighteen. She wore a T-shirt showing a cube with a heart on it, and the legs inside her jeans were atrophied, stick-thin. She had her hands up but she was shaking her head, horrified. “What are you doing here?” she shouted over the demands of the response squad.
“Did you think we wouldn’t find you?” Falconer asked her, idly twisting her computer round to look at the screen. “Tell me, what was Paoli? Just some underling who liked playing junkie with your tech? Because you know it’s not about the legal highs, don’t you?”
Mahler stared at him. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m here to put a stop to these resonators before anyone else gets vanished. Before one of your friends decides that an army base or Prime Minister’s Question Time needs livening up with a bit of Ghasting. I saw what you did before, Miss Mahler. I saw you wipe out a whole room full of people and then just calmly wheel yourself out of there. So how about you give me some answers?”
For a long moment Mahler said nothing, and Derwent finally realised it was because she was so very, very angry.
“What was I supposed to do?” she hissed at last. “Get up and dance around? Do you seriously think that was something I made happen?”
And Derwent had already been thinking that Falconer – in his need to put a lid on the whole impossible business – had been running too far ahead. Mahler’s reactions were way off for someone who had been caught red-handed.
The Private Life of Elder Things Page 19
