The London Project (Portal Book 1)

by Mark J Maxwell

‘No,’ Rick said, ‘but we picked the audio off a video she uploaded to the global web before she disappeared.’

  ‘Which came up with zilch also,’ Ed said. ‘Maybe she stayed indoors or wore a balaclava the whole time. It’s been cold recently.’

  Louisa tried not to let Ed’s facetiousness get to her. She turned back to Rick. ‘What about forensics?’

  Rick motioned towards the console screen and the forensics report opened up on the wall. ‘They found nothing of note in the immediate area surrounding the body. The girl’s shift was high-grade cotton, but without any labels or marks indicating the manufacturer. They found some third party fibres on it and have uploaded their analysis to the case file for potential future comparisons. That’s about it.’

  They still hadn’t established how Claire got onto the railway tracks. Sergeant Jansen had uploaded the scan of the railway’s confines but it hadn’t revealed any gaps. Louisa moved to Rick’s side. ‘Bring up the map of the crime scene with sense strip overlays.’

  Rick obliged and a satellite map appeared on his console screen. It was overlaid with a mesh of thin red lines. They represented Portal’s sense strip grid and, as a rule, followed the same pattern as the streets, although a few did enter into buildings and open areas. Louisa studied the mesh, looking for the smallest unbroken border around the crime scene. She drew a rough circle on the screen with her finger. ‘There. We’ll use it as our sense perimeter. Remove all the other strips.’

  The perimeter started on the service gate’s road, rounded St. Pancras Station, continued along a second road on the other side of the tracks, traversed the tracks at a level crossing and finally ran across a rail bridge before completing the circle.

  ‘Now show their effective ranges,’ Louisa said.

  Thick pink bars snaked around the map on top of the red lines. The area they stained pink was an indication of the effective ranges of the sense strips. The strips were originally created by Portal as a means of generating topological navigation paths for their first generation of self-driving cars. Each strip emitted low-energy laser micro pulses which allowed Portal to produce a true three-dimensional representation of not only geographical characteristics, but also transient features, such as other cars and pedestrians. The detail it produced was impressive. It was normally quite difficult to distinguish the sense footage from reality unless you were very close to a rendered object. Faces in particular highlighted the imperfections. If you looked closely you could see the minute triangular flat surfaces which made up the digitised features.

  Portal initially described the strips as ‘unobtrusive environment awareness devices’ and they were a key reason why Portal won the service contract for the London Project. The news media in turn had dubbed them ‘CCTV on steroids’. At first they’d been mounted atop tall poles throughout the city but these had quickly been vandalised by pro-privacy protestors. Now they were miniaturised and installed into streetlights, traffic lights, and even street signage. Walking along a London street you never could tell where the strips were, and once they were out of sight people soon forgot about them.

  It was clear from looking at the map that the roads and the crossings had good coverage. The main exception was the railway tracks themselves, which were untouched by the pink overlay. The high hedge and fence on either side formed an effective shield against the strips resulting in what the MET called a dead zone.

  ‘What about the rail bridge?’ Louisa asked. ‘Could someone pass underneath without being seen?’

  ‘No,’ Ed said, ‘the strip on the bridge has enough spill-over to cover nearly six feet of track on either side.’

  ‘Right then, let’s find out how she got in.’ Louisa sat at the second Portal console. She set CADET to work detailing every person who passed through or near the perimeter over the last twenty-four hours. On the first run-through CADET listed all the people identified via the terminals they carried or from their biometrics. Just under five hundred matches were returned. Rick, Louisa, and Ed discounted all of them within half an hour. Then CADET moved onto the more troublesome identifications: pedestrians with low-percentile biometric matches, and people travelling in vehicles. The pedestrians were manually scrutinised in turn from the sense footage. The vehicles took longer as, although the driver could be identified from their terminal, passengers were another matter. It took time to backtrack the cars to where they started their journey so all their passengers could be determined.

  Two hours later, they finished with the last vehicle, a taxi capsule ferrying a couple of French tourists to St Pancras for the train journey back to Paris. Rick was slumped at his console, looking as dejected as Louisa felt with their lack of success. New detectives were trained in the art of filtering the often-overwhelming volume of data CADET could provide when it started churning away within a case file. In contrast, Claire’s case file was positively barren. Rick was in his mid-twenties and had only been a detective for a few years. It may have been the first case he had worked on where the victim didn’t have a Portal profile.

  ‘Could there be a gap in the perimeter?’ Rick asked. ‘One she slipped through?’

  ‘The sense perimeter we established around the crime scene is solid,’ Ed said. ‘Claire didn’t pass through it.’

  ‘She had to have got there somehow,’ Louisa said. ‘She didn’t just fall from the sky.’

  ‘What if she jumped from a train?’ Rick said. ‘She was right beside the tracks, after all.’

  ‘Every train arriving at or leaving from a London station is equipped with a strip,’ Ed said in an offhand manner. ‘The passengers were all included in the CADET results and I discounted them.’

  Rick’s face coloured. ‘They are internal facing scans only though, right?’

  ‘Yes, of course, but as such, all passengers on the train would have been scanned.’

  ‘Not if she was clinging to the outside. Or even on the roof.’

  ‘Okay,’ Louisa said, nipping the conversation in the bud before it flared into a full-on argument. ‘Let’s expand the perimeter by five-hundred metres and see what it gets us.’

  Rick gave a giant groan. He knew what was coming. It would take hours for them to run through all the matches. When the perimeter radius was enlarged the result set increased dramatically.

  Sure enough, when Ed changed the parameters CADET came up with over three thousand matches.

  Rick leaned back and stretched. ‘I think we’re done now, aren’t we?’

  He knew better than to suggest it had been a waste of time. Louisa wasn’t in the mood. It had taken over five hours to sort through all the matches. There was no sign of Claire Harris anywhere in the vicinity of the railway line in the past twenty-four hours.

  How the hell did she get there? It was laughable. With all the technology at their disposal they couldn’t find out how a half-naked fifteen-year-old girl had got onto some railway tracks. No witnesses had been found apart from the two boys. It was unlikely any train had passed by while she was lying there. The trains had stopped running around nine the previous evening and the first train out of St Pancras hadn’t left the station by the time the BTP had stopped all services.

  Throughout the day Louisa’s thoughts had drifted to Baz Waters and how he had managed to evade the sense strips. Could Claire have been screened from the strips in the same way? It seemed implausible. There had been nothing on her face. Even if she did manage to disguise herself they’d still have a record from the sense strips of someone crossing the perimeter apart from Sam and James. As it was, they had nothing tangible to work with.

  ‘I have other work so I need to go now,’ Ed said.

  ‘Okay, tha—’ Ed’s window disappeared before Louisa could finish.

  ‘Weirdo,’ Rick muttered.

  ‘Hey.’ Louisa gave Rick a hard look. ‘He’s not weird. He’s a little eccentric, that’s all.’

  Rick shook his head but said nothing.

  ‘Let’s come at this from a different angle,�
�� Louisa said. ‘If we can establish her movements from when she arrived in London we can target anyone she came into contact with. It seems we can’t rely on Portal so we’ll have to do it the old fashioned way.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Talk to people. If she stayed off the grid there’s a good chance she was living on the streets. I want you to circulate her picture around all the shelters and food distribution centres within five miles of St Pancras. If she was homeless it’s possible someone will recognise her.’

  ‘You want me to stick up posters? Maybe I should go door-to-door while I’m at it.’

  Louisa wasn’t angered by his mocking tone. There was no malice in it. He just doesn’t like the feeling of being powerless. Unlike Rick, Louisa had been trained at a time when it had been acceptable to throw manpower at a difficult case. Letter drops, public meetings, organised searches and yes, door-to-door enquiries.

  MET policy now regarded such actions as a waste of time and resources. ‘One SIU officer can do the job of a hundred constables on the beat’—the words of the Lord Mayor when he announced the plan to halve the number of officers serving in the MET. Now Louisa couldn’t request enough officers to canvas a neighbourhood even if she wanted to.

  ‘Just do it,’ Louisa said.

  Rick muttered something inaudible and left the room. Louisa stared up at the photo of Claire Harris in her school uniform. The poster idea was a long shot, but to be honest she wasn’t sure what else to do. Perhaps Bill’s post mortem would throw up something.

  Louisa had informed Greater Manchester that Claire had been found. They’d have let her parents know by now. God knows what they must be going through. Louisa couldn’t imagine how she’d feel if Jess went missing and turned up dead. She’d never be able to rest until she found out what had happened to her daughter.

  Louisa tried not to dwell on it. It was dangerous to overly invest in a case. Your objectivity suffered. It became hard to view the case’s minutiae in the cool detachment that facilitated picking out patterns in the evidence. But there was something about Claire Harris she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Bill Harper had felt it too. An innocence, perhaps. It continued to touch everyone around her, even in death.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Hello dear,’ Mary said. ‘I’ll check if Doctor Harper is free.’ She picked up her desk phone handset.

  Louisa smiled. Mary was Bill Harper’s septuagenarian receptionist. She always called her ‘dear’ and Louisa suspected if the Prime Minister walked in she’d still receive a ‘dear’ like everyone else.

  The phone wasn’t the only museum exhibit in the room. A CRT monitor sat on Mary’s desk, and a computer tower was wedged underneath, its cooling fan whirring away noisily. In the corner a filing cabinet had a bulky laser printer set on top.

  She hadn’t bothered to send Mary a meeting request because it would likely never get acknowledged. Sure enough, Mary’s terminal peeked out from under a stack of folders on her desk. Louisa wondered if Mary even bothered to look at it most days.

  Benoit Walsh, Portal’s outspoken CEO, would have branded her a ‘technology denier’. One of those Portal haters who wanted to undo all the good work of the last five years and revert the UK to its pre-Portal days of widespread unemployment and massive budget deficits. Louisa thought his view was a little extreme. Mary was simply someone who was happy to work the way she always had, sure in the knowledge that when she filed a report she knew exactly where it was and how to retrieve it. It wasn’t stored away in the ether where you only had Portal’s word it existed at all.

  Louisa found Bill hunched over a terminal in the corner of his lab. Various pieces of medical diagnostic equipment were spread out on long wooden benches that ran around the edges of the narrow room. A set of double doors behind Bill led through to the theatre.

  Bill’s face was a mask of concentration as he typed at a glacial pace using two fingers, one on each hand. He at least seemed to have made the leap to full Portal integration. The absence of a computer nearby indicated he was using the terminal to update his work directly on the NHS Subnet. A report Mary was no doubt downloading, printing, and filing next door.

  ‘Take a seat, Louisa,’ he said, not taking is eyes off the screen. ‘I’m nearly finished here.’

  Louisa pulled out a high stool from under one of the wooden benches. After a few minutes Bill sat up straight, a strained expression on his face as he arched his back and twisted his neck to one side, then relaxed back into his chair.

  ‘Do you like being a detective, Louisa?’ Bill asked.

  Louisa blinked, caught off guard by the question. ‘Yeah,’ she said after considering it for a second. ‘I do.’

  Bill nodded, as if expecting the response. ‘Well I love my job. Most days anyway. A lot of people would think I’m crazy, right? Working with dead bodies all day. Cutting them open and poking around their insides. Not everyone’s idea of a dream job, that’s for sure.’ He pulled open a desk drawer and took out a half-full bottle of Bushmills and two glasses.

  Louisa eyed the bottle disapprovingly.

  ‘I get enough of those looks from my ex.’ Bill filled each glass with two fingers of the amber liquid and offered one to Louisa.

  She thought about it, sorely tempted, then shook her head. ‘Not for me, thanks.’ She was weary enough as she was—a drink would put her to sleep, and the hosting of a media briefing on Claire’s case was still hanging over her head.

  Bill shrugged, poured the contents of her glass into his and took a large swig. ‘“Every cadaver wants to tell you its story.” That’s what my old pathology professor used to say. Rather a macabre turn of phrase, we all thought. But he asserted that imprinted in all of us, in our blood and tissue, is written how we’ve lived our lives and ultimately our deaths. You simply need to learn how to decipher the information. In many instances the cause of death is blatantly obvious: gunshot wounds, stabbings, car accidents. Those autopsies are generally little more than an exercise in rubber stamping.’ Bill smiled, his eyes brightening. ‘Then every so often you come across the unknowns. Cases with no prior medical history. Unexpected deaths with no obvious cause. That’s when the fun starts.’ His smile faded. ‘But sometimes the victim’s story is best left undiscovered.’ He took another sip.

  At the rate Bill was downing the booze Louisa suspected she’d have a limited window of opportunity to extract the details from him. He was already getting maudlin. ‘What happened to the girl, Bill?’

  ‘Up until two months ago—nothing special. She was underweight and somewhat malnourished, so she likely suffered a period where her diet wasn’t up to scratch. Apart from that she was in relatively good health.’ He drained the remained of his glass and reached for the bottle again.

  ‘And then?’

  Bill poured himself another generous measure. ‘Her life became an unrelenting cycle of pain and suffering. Blunt force trauma caused extensive haematoma to the subcutaneous tissue on over eighty percent of her body. Internally it resulted in contusions to the kidneys, liver, and spleen. The circular burns were chemical in origin. An extremely corrosive acid was applied to the skin and allowed to burn through to the subcutis before being neutralised with an alkaline. The lacerations were inflicted in stages throughout the entire period. I stand by my earlier hypothesis that they were inflicted surgically and afterwards expertly cleaned and sutured.’

  ‘So whoever inflicted them didn’t want her to die. At least not from those wounds.’

  Bill nodded. ‘Taken as a whole the injuries weren’t life threatening, but I’d suggest the purpose was to inflict pain rather than to kill. I can only imagine her death, when it finally came, was a blessed relief.’

  ‘The cause of death?’

  ‘She suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage.’

  ‘You’re not saying she died of natural causes, are you?’

  ‘Under normal circumstances a stroke would be exactly that, but in this case…’ Bill set his glass down. ‘T
here’s something I want you to see.’

  He pushed open the doors to the theatre. Inside Louisa could see a table of polished steel with slightly raised sides. A corpse lay on it, covered by a white sheet. The door swung shut and the resulting draught caught the edge of the sheet, billowing it upwards to reveal Claire’s body. A stitched Y-incision ran the length of her torso. The dried blood had been washed away leaving the mottled bruising and contusions that formed an abstract patina across her skin.

  The door swung closed, hiding Claire from sight, before opening again. It continued to swing back and forth—flap…flap…flap. Louisa was reminded of a drawing sketched in the corner of a book where, as the corners were flipped, a character would dance or juggle. Bill’s words repeated in her head—flap…lacerations…flap…haematoma…flap…haemorrhage. She closed her eyes to dispel the flickering vision of the girl’s face but it stubbornly remained, hanging before her.

  A loud thump made her start violently. She instinctively jerked back from the sound. When she opened her eyes she felt as though she was falling off the stool and grabbed the edge of the bench to steady herself.

  Bill raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you all right, Louisa?’

  ‘Yeah I’m— Jesus Christ, Bill!’

  There was a large glass jar on the bench before her. Inside, suspended by string in a clear liquid, was a human brain.

  ‘Sorry,’ Bill said, not entirely convincingly.

  Louisa took some slow, deep breaths to steady her nerves. Her heart felt as though it was about to burst through her chest.

  Bill appeared oblivious to her discomfort. ‘Now, at first glance, the brain looks completely normal, if you discount the dark region on the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere where the haemorrhage took place.’ He lifted the jar to show the underside of the brain. ‘Do you see this point of discolouration?’ He pointed at the brain stem where a small black mark was visible. ‘I originally thought it might be a tumour, so I ordered a MRI scan.’