Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘All right, man, give me a minute,’ Ian replied.

  So Sid had to wait on the doorstep as a cool wind sent the thin drizzle splatting against his leather jacket. Finally the lock turned green, and Sid pushed the door open.

  He might have guessed. Ian had a girl in the flat – a tall, skinny lass in her early twenties. She was standing in the lounge as he barged in, worming her feet into trainers. And the whinge he had ready shrivelled up and died in embarrassment.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t know,’ he muttered to Ian, who was standing with her, dressed in a towelling robe. Sid hated the impression he must be giving her, like he was Ian’s dad instead of a real grownup.

  ‘It’s okay, man,’ Ian said. ‘This is Joyce.’

  ‘Hiya, pet,’ she said, smiling.

  Another girl came out of the darkened bedroom, doing up her lumberjack shirt.

  ‘And this is Sammi,’ Ian said.

  Now Sid really was coming off like an old-time dad: dumbstruck, and, yes, just a tiny bit jealous. When he risked a glance at Ian he saw the proud gleam in his partner’s eye, and knew Ian was quietly content about all of this, that it added neatly to the reputation of the station’s grade-A superstud.

  ‘Hello,’ Sid said like a true nerd.

  Sammi wasn’t anything like as chipper as Joyce. She just gave Sid a sulky look from behind her chaotic strands of hair and reached for a coat that was lying on the lounge floor. Police instinct told him that grouch wasn’t because he’d interrupted, but more like resentment he hadn’t arrived earlier.

  Ian kissed Joyce, who responded keenly. ‘I’ll call you,’ he told Sammi. Her lip curled up in sullen animosity, and she pushed her way out of the lounge. Joyce gave Ian a last kiss as Sammi’s boots stomped down the stairs. ‘I’ll talk to her,’ she promised, and hurried out.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Sid asked.

  Ian grinned lecherously. ‘Aye, man; what do you think?’

  ‘I think Sammi wasn’t very happy.’ And this wasn’t the conversation he’d ever wanted, let alone tonight.

  ‘Aye, well, it was her first time. You know what they get like.’

  ‘First . . . ?’ Sid spluttered.

  ‘In a threebie, man, in a threebie.’

  ‘Ah. Oh, right.’ And no, I’ve no idea.

  ‘Beer?’

  Of all people, police shouldn’t drink and drive. But the auto could take him home easily enough, just slowly, carefully avoiding the cars on manual. ‘Sure.’

  Ian opened the fridge, and produced a couple of bottles. Sid took his, and slumped down in his usual place.

  ‘I can’t believe we screwed up last night so bad,’ Sid said.

  ‘Last Mile is a stone-age maze. The traders like it that way, they rip and burn any new smartdust the city applies. It was always going to be dodgy, man.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ he sighed. ‘I just thought we were owed some luck. It’s not asking for much. We’ve had bugger-all so far.’

  ‘So nothing from the zone theatre this evening, then?’

  ‘No. And tomorrow I’m going to be facing O’Rouke.’

  ‘He can’t dump it all on you. He put you in charge of the investigation.’

  Sid knew what Ian was thinking, that the investigation would go on – politically it had to – but O’Rouke would appoint one of his cronies to head it up, prove to the people he had to answer to that he was faithfully doing all he could. That Sid was the one who’d screwed up. ‘No! No other bugger would step up and take it, that’s what happened.’ Though now he was wondering if they’d been quietly warned off.

  ‘But they won’t close it. Not a murdered North and all this alien monster bollocks.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Sid took a deep swig from the bottle. ‘So what fallout have we got from our Mr Sherman and his merry men?’

  Ian gave him an uncomfortable grimace. ‘Aye, well, you might have been right about Boz making you. None of them have used their original e-i access codes since the exchange last night.’

  ‘Oh crap on it.’

  ‘Except Jede. He stood in the middle of Monument at two o’clock this afternoon, and made three calls, all to petty criminals we’ve got on the police database. Nothing criminal mentioned in the calls, but he made them using a new e-i access code.’

  ‘Where we could see him, and check the local transnet cells?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘So they know we’re on them, and they want to find out who we are.’

  ‘Looks like he was setting bait for us, boss, aye.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘If they suspect we’re on them, we’re going to need more than the surveillance routines we have been running.’

  Sid took another swig. ‘Aye, I know.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘It was a B North that we hauled out of the Tyne, the socks prove that. It was a Newcastle gang that dumped him in the Tyne, which to my mind confirms some kind of dark corporate involvement. My old contact tells me something big is going down, so whatever this corporate shit is, it’s still going on.’

  ‘Man, it’s too big for us,’ Ian said softly. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve got to know when to quit.’

  ‘Yeah,. I suppose.’ He still couldn’t get over the A Norths. Aldred and Augustine himself had looked him in the eye and said they wanted the killer found. Why would they do that if they were the ones responsible? Trouble was, he just didn’t know enough about their family, and how they really regarded each other. Murdering your own clone brother had to be the last taboo, surely? But then he’d been in the police long enough to see some pretty sick stuff go down, and not just in the GSWs.

  ‘You can’t decide tonight,’ Ian said. ‘We need to know how the backtrack plays out. You never know . . .’

  ‘Oh, I do. I really do.’ Sid finished his beer. ‘See you in the morning.’

  Tuesday 12th March 2143

  It ended on Rothbury Terrace in Heaton. Sid stood in the zone, with his legs vanishing into the bright greenery of Heaton Park. That gave him a perfect viewpoint of the taxi reversing into the street as the virtual simulation wound steadily backwards. Here the macromesh was intact, and the vehicle licence code had remained the same for the whole time they’d observed it – there was no mistake, no shady grey margin of error. Now Sid towered over the neat road, hands on hips as he watched the driver get out and walk the funny backward walk into a house at the west end of Rothbury Terrace.

  ‘Pause it.’

  ‘That’s where he lives,’ Dedra Foyster said.

  Sid glanced over at the window, seeing Ian staring out at the virtual with a professionally blank face. Seeing Chloe Healy and Jenson San at the back of the control room; both in smart dark suits, saying nothing, but channelling their boss’s anger very efficiently.

  Tellingly, Aldred 2North wasn’t present. And if his support was being taken away . . .

  ‘Do we know how long the taxi was parked here?’ Sid pointed down at the offending citycab.

  Dedra and Lorelle went into a huddle, hands fluttering within their keyspace.

  ‘Seven hours, boss,’ Dedra said with an apologetic shrug.

  ‘Uh huh.’ So Sid had just seen the driver begin his shift, the driver who was clean, with a taxi that was correctly licensed. A legitimate taxi they’d watched pick up and drop customers for five hours. A taxi that hadn’t collected a corpse from anywhere, nor delivered one to Elswick Wharf. The last of two hundred and seven taxis. Their final chance to develop a proper lead. ‘Looks like we’ve been crapped on from heaven itself,’ he muttered.

  ‘Detective Hurst, can we have a word,’ Jenson San said.

  Sid wanted to say no, a petulant, childish, pathetic: No. Because he knew exactly what this talk would be, so really what was the point?

  ‘Take a break,’ he told his team. ‘We’ll review after lunch.’

  The simulation winked off, leaving him in the blank zone theatre by himself. He watched everybody file out of the contr
ol room, several shooting defeated glances his way. Ian hesitated, but Sid inclined his head, and his partner was gone.

  Chloe Healy and Jenson San came into the theatre.

  ‘You fucked up,’ Jenson San snapped.

  ‘Speak to me like that again, and you’ll wake up in hospital you little brown-nose bastard.’

  ‘All right boys!’ Chloe said, holding her hands up at both of them. ‘The backtrack didn’t work. Sid, why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. We know a taxi was used to carry the body, the bloody thing is still sitting in the forensics lab. It had to drive down to Elswick Wharf somehow.’

  ‘Your team was sloppy,’ Jenson San said. ‘They missed it. It’s that simple – you missed the damn thing!’

  ‘So you agree the virtual was the right way to progress the investigation, then?’ Sid asked snidely. He was furious and frustrated, and needed to vent somehow. It would only be a minor assault charge anyway.

  ‘Under proper leadership, it probably would have been.’

  ‘Get me the people I want and we’ll run it again.’

  ‘You’re blaming your people now?’ Jenson San asked smugly.

  Sid felt his hand closing up into a fist.

  ‘We’re not running it again,’ Chloe said firmly. ‘This investigation needs a different approach. Sid, go and prepare a summary. O’Rouke wants it by the end of the day shift. We need to see how to move forward from this.’

  Sid wanted to say something, have some answer that would vindicate him and his team. Truth was, he’d still do it all the same. He’d followed procedure perfectly. There was no new angle, unless you counted Sherman – which they’d also blown out there in the wretched muddle that was Last Mile. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll get onto it.’ Because there was nothing else left. The murderer had won, had outsmarted him and his entire team.

  He left the theatre and walked down the corridor to the lifts. Nobody in the corridor looked at him. Ian and Eva weren’t waiting. The lift doors slid shut. His hand paused over the buttons, finger pointing at the third floor.

  ‘Fuck this!’

  He jabbed the button for the underground garage, level two. No way was he going to give that little turd Jenson San the satisfaction. Besides, they were wrong. His team hadn’t made mistakes. They were good people, devoting weeks to one task because they’d been enthused, convinced that the taxi backtrack was the one thing that could crack the case wide open. He’d known it, too, manoeuvring Elston to get the theatre up and running again no matter what it cost him with O’Rouke. I’m right, crap on it. I am!

  *

  Sid parked his car on Water Street, just down from the iron railway bridge, relic of centuries gone by. There probably hadn’t been a train pass across it for a hundred years. Yet the city continued to maintain it, a precious heritage of iron and rust-worn rivets, with twenty layers of paint sun-bleached to a pastel blue and pocked with burst blisters dribbling iron flake mucus down the graffiti-grimed sides. Thick stone supports on either side of the road were still sound despite the webbing of cracks and crumbling cement joins, not even three metres high, with arched pedestrian walkways on either side reeking of urine and dog faeces.

  He got out of the car and turned his jacket collar up against the breeze. Newcastle’s cloudless sky was a bright translucent turquoise, with the horizon frosted by a pale haze as the weather prepared to shift out of winter into a short wet spring. Rainwater was still trickling along the gutter, down the sharp slope of Water Street towards the Tyne. He stood with his back to the bridge and studied the construction site above Elswick Wharf. It was two months now since they’d hauled the North out of the river and found the little alley where the taxi had parked to dump him. Now that the snow and ice constricting the scaffolding and gantry beams had melted away, automata had resumed work on the luxury apartment block. A couple of cement lorries were parked outside waiting, while another was backed into the alley which the taxi had used, fat manky hoses plugged into its pumps so it could feed its load up to the gridwork which was soon to be the fifth floor.

  After two months in the theatre zone, Sid knew the area by heart, the businesses occupying every yard and shed, the roads, the line of the riverbank. The theatre virtual had a gloss that was lacking out here in reality. Here the buildings were shabbier, the colours dull, the strips of grass yellow and flattened from the snow that had covered them for the last four months. Even so, it was the same. And they’d covered it all.

  ‘So how the fuck did you do it?’ Sid asked the bleak, semi-forgotten district.

  He started walking, heading along Railway Terrace, with the stone embankment wall on one side topped by a dishevelled wilderness of bushes and trees, and the dilapidated railings of the company yards on the other. Under another antique railway bridge on Dunn Street, just as decrepit as the last one, but with broad curving steps on one side that led up to Cuttings Garden. Along Railway Street which had the rear entrances to another row of small companies huddled in their tumbledown frame and panel buildings, a refuge for the machines and electronics and crafts of previous generations. Behind them, further downslope, he could make out the curving roof of the City Arts Arena, which was covered in scaffolding and automata as it underwent a full refurbishment, bringing it up to the latest venue standards. He walked the length of Railway Street, hunched against the damp air, until he came to Plummer Street, then he doubled back, walking along the side of the A695 dual carriageway that was the Scotswood Road. Traffic here was a monotonous buzz of fuel-cell vehicles, churning up a mist-like spray that beaded his leather jacket as he trudged along the crumbling tarmac pavement. The Fortin singletown loomed up on his right, a drab carbon cliff inset with blank silvered windows that emitted no light. On his side of the road were the garage showrooms and the big stores of semi-industrial products, the refrigeration units and power cells and automata and engineering tools and retail fittings that a city like Newcastle bought in quantity. A prosperous stretch of road then, shielding the motorist’s eye from the grungy old-style industry that occupied the slope behind it.

  Sid had no idea what he was doing, other than confronting his enemy. This was where he’d been defeated, here among the decaying tarmac and obsolete buildings. Somehow they’d been utilized to fool and mock him. Secret tunnels. Microgateways. Something! There had to be something here they’d all missed. His ridiculous, doomed, observation in Last Mile on Sunday night had triggered the conviction: not everything is on the map.

  He reached the Peperelli scooter showroom. There was a narrow alley between it and the Kiano car showroom next door, leading back down to Water Street. He glanced down it, seeing the washed-blue bridge. Footpath only – no way you could drive a taxi down there. He plodded onwards, past the glass windows sheltering the cheap cars imported from Taiyuan, one of the Unified Chinese Worlds. Between the showroom and the U-Fix budget DIY store next door was a little lane at right angles to the A695, a lane that led round to the compound at the back of the Kiano showroom, and the U-Fix loading bay. Sid hesitated, and slowly walked down towards the ivy-swamped chain-link mesh that sealed off the compound from Cuttings Garden. His e-i sent out a ping, but the damp tarmac below his feet didn’t have any smartdust, wasn’t part of the city macromesh. Sid pressed his face against the wobbly chain-link mesh, peering through the ivy and thorny strands of bramble on the other side.

  They’d never checked it back in January. Never seen that under a metre of snow it was a blank wilderness. Never seen this end of Cuttings Garden from the Water Street Bridge to the Regal bioil station at the end had been cleared of plants and benches and paths and ponds and the visitor information centre. Never saw it had been bulldozed flat in preparation for development.

  Never queried it during two hundred and seven taxi backtracks because on the simulation the template from the city planning office still showed it as Cuttings Garden, the sweet little urban greenland amenity. And if the template said so . . .

  Sid shoved his fingers through the
mesh, and pulled hard. The whole fence swayed back, and one of the wooden posts lifted off the ground. It was rotten, broken off at ground level. Those thick gnarly strands of ivy that wove through the mesh were just about all that held the fence in place now.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Sid growled. He rattled the fence again, feeling his heart pound furiously as the mesh bobbed about limply. ‘You smart, smart bastards. Oh that was good. That was so very good.’

  Wednesday 13th March 2143

  Sid didn’t need the alarm clock to wake up. He’d been lying on the bed with his eyes open since at least six o’clock, shifting from his back to his side, trying not to pull the duvet about too much. In truth, he hadn’t slept much at all that night. His mind was too busy, too excited. He hadn’t got back home until after midnight, and even when he did sneak into bed he couldn’t resist playing the small visual file over and over through his iris smartcells. Just to make absolutely sure. It had taken hours of data mining to secure the final proof he was going to need to confront O’Rouke with, and he wasn’t about to assign anyone else to the task. Abner or Dedra could probably have found the data and run the image filters in less than an hour. Sid didn’t want them involved. He was the one O’Rouke had set up. Now he’d put it together. Today was the day Sid Hurst turned it all around. And that felt wonderful.

  He watched the luminous figures on the clock head towards seven o’clock, and reached over to switch the alarm off. The movement was too big. Jacinta groaned and stirred. Those enchanting green eyes peered at him as if confused by what she saw.

  ‘What time did you get in?’ she asked.

  ‘Late. Sorry.’

  ‘How bad is it? You look happy. Did you find the taxi?’

  ‘It’s good. I’ve cracked the case.’

  She shuffled up onto her elbows. ‘The backtrack worked?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Hey, have a little faith.’ He leaned over and kissed her.

  ‘Sid!’ It wasn’t exactly a protest. They kissed again, moving closer as blood heated. Hands pushed impatiently at the duvet, shoving it down. He started unbuttoning her PJs, slower now, heady with promise. Jacinta’s chortle was enthusiastic and amazingly dirty.