False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  We asked after names but of course they were all online tags – still, Silver’s analysts could have a fun time doing traffic analysis. And one tag did jump out – that of JadeInSecret, who I suspected might be the Jade from the Print Shop’s medication whiteboard. I decided to wait before I asked, because Barry was in full flow.

  Barry was amazed. He’d done group therapy on the NHS and he supposed some of it might have helped, but he’d never felt ‘better’ the way he did after a session. And unlike those sessions in ‘meatspace’, this felt entirely personal.

  ‘It was about me, about what I needed,’ he said.

  I was thinking of William Lloyd’s unrecorded chats at his terminal and started getting a horrible cyberpunky Neuromancer-esque vibe from the whole set-up. So I asked if he had any proof that any other of the chat-room folk were real.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, and then the doorbell rang.

  Maginty stepped into the hallway to deal.

  ‘Are you expecting anyone?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Barry. ‘Is anyone ever expecting anyone?’

  Whatever we were expecting, what we got was a tall, thin white woman with mousy blonde hair cut into a bob to frame a sharp-featured face with startling green eyes. She was wearing a plastic trench coat over a green polo neck jumper and black leggings. She was frowning and rummaging in a baggy burgundy faux leather shoulder bag while Maginty tried, unsuccessfully, to block her advance into the living room.

  Then, with a triumphant grunt, she retrieved an official ID card and waved it at Maginty.

  ‘Julie Hunt,’ she said. ‘Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust. What are you doing with my client?’

  Maginty explained that we were merely taking a statement and there was nothing to be worried about.

  ‘This is a vulnerable individual,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t be interviewed without an appropriate adult.’

  ‘We can formally arrest him if you like,’ said Maginty. ‘Finish this off at a police station.’

  Hunt gave him a bad look and then turned to call to Barry over our heads.

  ‘Barry? Are you okay with this?’

  Barry stared at her in confusion.

  ‘It’s me, Julie Hunt,’ she said. ‘Are you okay with this?’

  ‘We’re talking about the Print Shop,’ he said.

  Julie Hunt perched on the arm of Barry’s chair. I felt Guleed shift her position in response – so that she could intervene quickly if the woman misbehaved.

  ‘As long as you’re cool,’ Hunt said to Barry.

  Barry bobbed his head.

  ‘I’m good, good,’ he said.

  ‘You said you knew that the chat-room people were real,’ said Guleed. ‘How did you know that for certain?’

  ‘Because I met them,’ he said.

  ‘Have you offered your guests tea?’ asked Hunt.

  ‘Tea?’ said Barry.

  ‘Would you like me to make some tea?’

  Barry nodded.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said, and Hunt rose and squeezed past Maginty, heading for the kitchen.

  I asked Barry where the meeting had taken place, and he named a nearby pub whose name caused Maginty to mutter under his breath.

  That bad, I thought.

  ‘And some of them were prods at the Print Shop,’ he said.

  ‘Which ones?’ I asked as casually as I could.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘Jade knew who everyone was – that was sort of her job.’

  ‘Can you remember any of them?’ I said. ‘Perhaps their nicknames?’

  ‘Not really,’ he frowned and then brightened. ‘Why don’t we ask Jade?’ he said and, straightening up, looked over our shoulders and called, ‘Jade! Who was at the Print Shop?’

  A little belated light in my head went ping! But much too late.

  I turned to warn Maginty, just in time for Jade, aka Julie Hunt, to walk up to him and throw a kettle’s worth of boiling water in his face. He floundered backwards yelling as Jade threw the kettle at Guleed’s head. Maginty’s eyes were squeezed shut, so he didn’t see as Jade calmly transferred a kitchen knife from her left hand to her right and stabbed him in the chest.

  The blade boinged off his stab vest in an almost comical way so Jade turned on Guleed, who was lunging to her feet.

  It was the worst kind of police aggro you could think of short of facing down a street full of Millwall supporters after a disappointing showing at the Den. Cramped quarters, one officer down, one distressed and possibly violent male, one armed and definitely violent female and two of you in plain clothes with nothing in the way of pepper spray, extendable batons or stab vests to stand between you and a long lie-down in casualty.

  Barry jumped to his feet and, without getting up, I jammed my leg in front of his shin and, lurching forward, I tried to grab hold of his arm. I was trying to yank him off his feet but instead he just pulled me to mine. Jade stabbed at Guleed’s face. Guleed turned, got both hands on Jade’s knife arm and slammed her shoulder into the woman’s chest in a move that was way more to do with officer safety training than any martial arts her fiancé was teaching her.

  ‘Leech!’ screamed Jade, but Guleed threw her weight backwards, driving the other woman into the door jamb.

  Maginty was shaking and making a low keening noise. I recognised that as the sound you make when you’re desperately trying not to scream. His hands were up by his head, but he’d balled his fists to stop himself from touching the scalded skin of his face.

  ‘You leave her alone!’ yelled Barry, and careened forward.

  There was a horrible crunching, tearing sound and he came staggering back with blood pouring from a deep knife wound in his shoulder.

  Jade stared in horror at the mess it was making of Barry’s new shirt.

  ‘That’s your fault!’ she screamed at Guleed. ‘That’s on you! You c—’

  Guleed had taken the opportunity to slam Jade’s wrist against the wall, causing her to yell and drop the knife. I tracked it as it fell behind the sofa – always keep your eye on the weapon. You don’t want your attacker picking it up and you definitely want to know where it is when people start asking you questions about appropriate levels of force.

  Which was what I applied to Barry’s legs to make him sit down hard on the floor. Guleed herself was a model of self-restraint when she pulled Jade off balance, hooked her knee and dropped her on her back. The woman managed to get a couple of obscenities out before Guleed had her flipped over and pinned her with one knee on her back.

  Barry was plucking at his reddening shirt and I decided to take the risk and aid Maginty. I grabbed his fists in one hand, told him to stay still and conjured a water bomb over his head and let cool water slosh down across his face.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ he said. ‘That feels much better.’

  The skin on his left cheek was already beginning to blister.

  ‘Just don’t touch it, mate,’ I said.

  ‘I’m bleeding,’ said Barry in a quiet voice.

  ‘He’s going to die,’ said Jade. ‘And it’s all your fault.’

  I turned my phone on and called 999.

  ‘Well, that went tits up remarkably fast, didn’t it?’ said Maginty.

  14

  Perfect Organism

  To say that Kent Police were incandescent would be an amusing understatement. Fortunately, since I was still a lowly DC, I tucked myself under the mighty wings of Detective Chief Inspectors Nightingale and Seawoll. Guleed, being a sergeant, had to step up and shoulder her share of the responsibility. I’m sure she bore it with stoic fortitude. I made a mental note to lend her my copy of Marcus Aurelius.

  While she faced the music the following morning, I was safely back at my fake job. With my fake boss and my fake friends.

  �
�Why didn’t you invite us?’ asked Victor at morning snacks.

  ‘Invite you to what?’ I asked.

  ‘To the party in the park,’ he said.

  ‘Because nobody told me about it until it had already started,’ I said, and asked whether Everest had worked out who had been secretly chatting with William Lloyd yet.

  ‘Have not,’ said Everest, gloomily contemplating a peanut butter flavoured Kit Kat. ‘Thank you for reminding me.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it was possible for Deep Thought to be talking to him, was it?’ I asked.

  ‘Who’s Deep Thought?’ asked Everest.

  Shit, shit – of course, Skinner hadn’t told them. I was beginning to lose track of who knew what.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, not trying to hide my dismay. ‘Shit, I shouldn’t have used that name. You didn’t hear it, okay?’

  Victor leaned closer and wiggled his eyebrows.

  ‘Yeah, but what is it?’ he asked.

  ‘A digital personal assistant.’ I lowered my voice. ‘Like Alexa and Siri – only better.’

  ‘Hard to be worse,’ muttered Everest.

  ‘That’s Skinner’s secret project?’ said Victor – he seemed disappointed.

  ‘What were you expecting?’ asked Everest. ‘Starships, electric scooters, a pneumatic transport system?’

  ‘Could it have been Deep Thought talking to him?’ I asked.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ asked Everest.

  I was thinking of Barry and Jade’s chat room and the fanatical violence of Jade’s attack on us in Barry’s flat. Jade wasn’t stupid. She must have known that assaulting three police officers was only going to end one way. Just as William Lloyd must have known, with his plastic machete and one-shot pistol, that he was going to be captured or worse.

  The prisons are full of people with poor impulse control and a lack of foresight. But this was different – these attacks had been more like those undertaken for political or religious motivations, where the perpetrator has convinced themselves that they are less important than the cause they are fighting for.

  ‘Maybe it said something?’ I said. ‘That set him off?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Everest. ‘People do what they want – they only blame machines when it all goes wrong. And the only way an algorithm could access William Lloyd’s terminal would be if someone with SysOp authority gave it access.’

  ‘And who would that be?’

  Everest spread his hands and stared upwards in pious respect.

  ‘Either Skinner or someone with access to the top floor,’ said Victor.

  Skinner was out of the building, so I asked Dennis Yoon and Declan Genzlinger, since they worked on Bambleweeny’s lower floor. But their best bet was that Skinner kept ultimate authority to himself.

  ‘He’s a hands-on kind of guy,’ said Dennis.

  Guleed was equally unhelpful when I went for an early lunch at the safely halal Nando’s on City Road. I reckoned this was far enough past the roundabout that the mice wouldn’t go there, but in any case what could be suspicious about having a cheeky Nando’s?

  ‘Julie Hunt was not helpful,’ said Guleed. She had apparently adopted the ‘no comment’ school of conversation at the start of the interview and stuck to it with frustrating consistency. ‘It was creepy, really,’ said Guleed. ‘It was like a robot.’

  ‘Hold that thought,’ I said. ‘What about our Barry?’

  Barry Collard’s cut had proved deep, but had missed anything vital. Once he was out of the local casualty he’d been escorted to UCH for a brain scan where, much to Dr Walid’s mixed relief and disappointment, there were no signs of hyperthaumaturgical degradation – one of the key signs that someone’s brain has been damaged by using magic.

  I asked whether they’d scanned Julie Hunt, but she’d refused to give permission for further tests and we couldn’t force them without a court order.

  ‘Which we wouldn’t get,’ said Guleed. ‘Nightingale has declared them non-Falcon so we’re moving them out of the new cells and back into a normal custody suite. They’re going to charge Julie Hunt with aggravated assault and obstruction, for the moment.’

  Assaulting a police officer in the execution of their duty always counts as aggravated assault, although I was surprised they weren’t going for actual and/or grievous bodily harm.

  ‘That’s just to keep her banged up while we find out else she’s been up to,’ said Guleed.

  That she’d been up to something, nobody had any doubts about. Especially since Barry continued to sing for his supper.

  ‘Actually quite hard to shut him up,’ said Guleed, who was carefully rearranging her chicken breast pitta to suit some personal but exacting standard. ‘It’s clear that, while the Print Shop didn’t have a manager, Julie “Jade” Hunt was the manager they didn’t have. We’re tracing her background, but it looks like she was getting her instructions over her phone – and there’s no sign of that.’

  They hadn’t traced the other people named on the whiteboard – JC, Solid and Yax – yet. But the feeling was that, given they all cheerfully worked at the Print Shop, they were probably Medway locals.

  ‘Kent Police are working that lead,’ said Guleed. And, picking up her pitta, she took a big bite.

  ‘Do we know what they were making?’ I asked, and then had to wait while Guleed finished chewing and swallowing.

  ‘According to Barry,’ said Guleed, ‘plastic toys.’

  ‘Don’t tell me – great big model dragonflies.’

  ‘Amongst other things.’

  ‘What other things?’

  Guleed wiped her fingers and checked her notes.

  ‘Spider thingies.’

  ‘Oh, great.’

  ‘Plastic guns and plastic bullets,’ said Guleed. ‘Although they didn’t have to assemble those. We showed Barry a picture of the “pistol” William Lloyd fired at Skinner and he gave a positive identification.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘And squiddy things.’

  ‘Squiddy things?’

  ‘That’s what he said. “Squiddy things” with pointy heads and tentacles.’

  ‘How big were the squiddy things?’ I asked and Guleed, whose mouth was full again, held her hands about a metre apart.

  Somebody had done some powerful magic inside the Print Shop. It could have been that person or persons unknown had magically activated what was almost certainly a collection of drones. The dragonflies we knew from South Tottenham. The spiders were obvious. And the squiddy things . . .

  I sighed – people have far too much time on their hands.

  Barry hadn’t seen or experienced anything like what we’d seen that night in South Tottenham.

  ‘He thought they were rubbish toys,’ said Guleed. ‘Even when they put the batteries in, they didn’t work.’

  No. Because the batteries were only there to power the microprocessors, which in turn were ‘sacrificed’ to drive the drones. That stage of the manufacturing process must have taken place out of Barry’s sight. As did the pickups.

  ‘Every time they finished a batch,’ said Guleed, ‘they stacked them on those wooden racks we found and left them there overnight. In the morning they were gone.’ She picked up her corn on the cob and pointed it at me. ‘What does that suggest to you?’

  ‘Somebody else came during the night and magicked them,’ I said.

  ‘Is that a real term – “magicked?”’ asked Guleed.

  ‘And it’s spelt with a “k”, too,’ I said. ‘But the technical term is actually “enchanted”. Only the trouble with that word is that everyone starts thinking glass slippers and spinning wheels.’

  Guleed explained that Kent Police had, after a great deal of moaning, started looking at CCTV footage from the surrounding roads to see if they could spot a van coming in to make the pickup. Ther
e were no council CCTV cameras covering the High Street and, quelle surprise, all of the privately owned cameras that might have had the Print Shop in view were inoperable or didn’t keep their image data for more than a week.

  We weren’t going to catch them that way.

  ‘This is getting really messy,’ I said. ‘There’s too many things going on we don’t know about.’

  ‘How unusual is that for us – seriously?’ said Guleed.

  As a security measure we left Nando’s separately, but I was passing through the Old Street underpass when someone called my name – it was Leo Hoyt. He’d been behind me.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked.

  I told him Nando’s, in case he was following me. But if he was he didn’t give anything away.

  As we walked back to the SCC I asked if he liked tentacle porn, and he said he could take it in small doses but he preferred his fantasies to be vaguely human.

  ‘That’s just speciesist, that is,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘What with you being sensitive about that sort of thing.’

  I considered asking what that was supposed to mean. But I wanted him distracted, not focused on me. So I made a thing about making him agree that whatever was on the next illicit USB, he would be the one to scan it. He said fine, whatever, but diverted back on to my investigation into William Lloyd’s little breakdown.

  I didn’t blame him – it was the most interesting thing that had happened recently – but still . . . I also noticed him watching as I stashed my outside phone in a locker. To keep him happy, I asked if he wanted to sit in while I interviewed some of the mice who’d known William Lloyd and used that as an excuse to find out where Terrence Skinner was currently located. Johnson informed me that Mr Skinner was currently in the south of France ‘on business’. Scheduled to return two days hence.

  ‘Do you need to get in touch?’ he asked, but I said it could wait.

  I started carrying out the interviews as cover, but didn’t learn anything that Belgravia hadn’t got from their initial investigation. I also noticed Leo Hoyt casually passing by the meeting room I was using – he waved when I caught him looking the second time. Coincidence? I should fucking cocoa.