The Administration Series (243 page)

The notes didn't specify the agency behind the watch on the teacher. That left a variety of clandestine divisions inside and outside Int-Sec as candidates. Without a higher-level access code there was no way of finding out which one, and Toreth didn't feel like attracting attention by digging for the information.

To hide his interest, he pulled Plaice's file, then those of three more teachers at random. Thankfully, they were all unexceptionably loyal Administration citizens. He logged the visit to the school as following up an anonymous tip-off about anti-Administration sentiment: no IIP to be filed and no specific mention of McVade.

After he closed the report he sat and stared at the blank screen, biting his thumbnail. This was exactly what he'd worried about: that digging at any part of the case would turn up unpleasantness that was better left buried.

The I&I canteen had been one of the last parts of the building to reopen after the revolt. While it was closed, Toreth had got into the habit of making sandwiches, or at least of throwing an assortment of junk from the fridge into a box with a couple of pieces of bread. Mornings weren't his best time for culinary inspiration, or anything else, but on most days he'd surprised himself by opening the box at lunchtime and discovering a largely edible meal.

It was easy enough when he had Warrick's miraculously well-stocked fridge at his disposal. However, Toreth hadn't felt comfortable with the idea of rifling Jen's fridge, so he'd been forced back to the canteen. As he queued, he noticed that they had taken the opportunity of prolonged closure to hike prices yet again. Probably they hoped no one would spot the difference.

"Toreth!"

Chevril cut into the queue beside him, ignoring the muttered comments from the gaggle of admins behind.

"Elena not packed your lunch?" Toreth asked.

"Yes. Full of low-fat stuff." Chevril patted his stomach. "I ate it, and now I've come over for a bacon sandwich, if there's any left. How're you? Keeping busy?"

"Weren't you here yesterday?" Toreth asked.

Chevril shook his head. "Up north, doing work that should be done by a bloody junior if I had one. I got back late last night — after eleven, because the train timetables are still haywire. Elena was livid. So what happened here?"

"Didn't Kel tell you?"

"I've got better things to do with my time than track your every move." Chevril grinned, unabashed. "But now you mention it, he said you'd been out of the office all day and no one knew why. I thought if Sara hadn't told even him, then it must be something good."

Sara was clearly getting paranoid about letting
any
information about him out. Of course, telling Chevril's admin was tantamount to taking out an advert in the division newsletter.

"Sorry to disappoint you, but it's nothing exciting," Toreth said. "Warrick's brother got himself badly smashed up in a car accident. Warrick wanted me to go over to the hospital with him."

It was, he realised, a perfect opening for a corporate toyboy joke, probably involving handholding. Instead, Chevril shrugged. "Good for you. No point having family crisis leave days in the contract if you don't use them when you get a chance."

He isn't my fucking family, Toreth thought irritably, then wondered how Sara
had
booked the leave. Surely she wouldn't do that to him?

"Getting anywhere with your missing girl?" Chevril asked.

"Nowhere at all. And Tillotson's demanding results on one hand, and threatening to take my pool investigators away with the other. Usual brilliant management logic — if the investigation's taking too long, you can speed it up by cutting the team."

He made the mistake of pausing for breath, which left a conversational crack into which Chevril slammed his new favourite crowbar.

"If you've
got
a team to cut, unlike some people . . . "

Toreth sighed silently and resigned himself to another round of Chevril's current top complaint: the hopelessness of trying to replace a team with no decent investigators to choose from. Chevril seemed to be surprised by how much work Sedanioni and the rest had done for him, and by how much he had to do now. Chev had been unlucky, as usual — Kel was the only survivor of his regular team.

Toreth tuned him out, waiting for his turn to bitch while no one listened. If he could be bothered. In an odd way, he realised, he almost enjoyed the pressure from Tillotson for results. Cases had been so few in the weeks after the revolt that it felt good to have a reason to moan about the head of section's impossible demands. It was about the only thing in his life that felt normal — like the good old days.

That evening, Toreth found himself missing his own flat more than he had for a long time. Although Kate's house wasn't small, it was surprisingly hard to find somewhere private in it. There was always someone around — one of the adults or, more irritatingly, Valeria. Tomorrow night, he decided, he'd sleep back at Warrick's flat, whether Warrick was there or not. Needing to be closer to work would be a perfectly acceptable reason.

Not long after Toreth arrived at the house, Dillian went to the hospital, which was something of a relief. In her place arrived Philadelphia Wintergreen.

Toreth had never met Valeria's mother before. After the years of wondering vaguely what she looked like — although admittedly never enough to pull her security file — she proved to be a mild disappointment.

Certainly the woman was not as impressive as her name. Ten years older than Toreth, she wasn't ugly but she was extremely serious. Granted, part of that might be due to a day spent at her husband's bedside (or was that tankside?), but Toreth suspected it was a permanent condition. Her straight mouth and grey-blue eyes had no evidence of laughter lines around them. She even had serious hair, a uniform brown in a sharp-edged bob. On reflection, she was exactly the kind of earnest, solid type that Toreth could imagine Tarin marrying.

It came as no surprise at all to find out that she was an official at the Department of Education, and an ex-teacher.

One thing that did interest him was how much she knew about Tarin's resister connections. When Warrick introduced her to Toreth she seemed wary, but as he had no reference for her usual reaction to strangers it wasn't conclusive. Curiosity piqued, Toreth made two coffees and took them through to her in the living room. She didn't look welcoming, but as he'd expected she didn't object as he sat down beside her.

"I'm sorry about Marriot," he said when he'd handed her a mug.

"Are you?" Her voice didn't waver, and she was examining him with curiosity. "I didn't think you knew him."

"Not well at all," he admitted readily. "We were both here for New Year, about three years ago. If you haven't heard the story from someone else already, he called me a psychopathic Administration torturer — behind my back, but within earshot."

She stared at him and he smiled, trying to look a little self-deprecating.

"I thought two out of three wasn't bad, for someone who'd barely spoken to me. He'd already given his opinions about Administration reform at lunch. Warrick was a hell of a lot more surprised than I was when Dilly called him about the crash. From what I heard that New Year I'd say he's been damn lucky so far."

Her surprise had vanished behind a wary mask. "I didn't think the roads were so dangerous."

"You know what I mean." He set the cup down. "There's a reason I'm telling you all this. There
will
be an investigation into the accident, even if it's only by the transport safety people. They'll be working on the records and the vehicles already. If anything suspicious turns up, Justice will get involved. Maybe I&I. And in a case like this, the first place either of them will start looking for a culprit is at the victim's family and friends."

"Friends?" she asked drily. "That seems like an inappropriate word."

"Friendship's overrated. Most murder victims are killed by someone they know. And if Tarin had any friends who thought the way he did, it's not a healthy circle to be moving in. Advocating comprehensive reform of the Administration isn't something
I'd
put down on an application for life insurance."

Now she looked bewildered. "But the revolt, the change of Administration . . . ?"

"Might make less difference than you think. Who knows what the hell counts as a political crime these days? Anyway, what I need to know is if Justice turn this accident into an investigation and start looking hard at Marriot's associates, will they find anything?"

She shook her head, but it wasn't disagreement. Rather, she was fighting the instinct not to tell him. He wished he'd taken the time to change out of his uniform before he talked to her. At the school it had been an asset — here it was an enormous liability.

Not that Philly looked to be the kind of woman who'd forget who she was talking to.

"Ms Wintergreen, I don't go looking for extra cases. Even if sometimes I have to try very hard not to see them." A little exaggeration wouldn't hurt. "In the past I've heard more than enough from your husband to have him taken in for interrogation."

She didn't even blink. "So why didn't you?"

"Because he's Warrick's brother. Half-brother. Mud sticks, and you don't get mud any thicker than an arrest for anti-Administration resistance."

"From the sound of it, you already think you've heard enough to make up your mind about him."

"Yes. But is it
just
him?"

"We had some friends he's still in contact with who weren't unsympathetic. And . . . I don't disagree with him." She gave him a challenging look. "I doubt any moderately intelligent, right-thinking person
could
disagree that there are fundamental problems with the Administration. If there weren't, we wouldn't have had mobs on the street."

Once she decided to go, he had to admire her for going all out. Toreth shrugged. "I don't care, as long as agreeing was all you did."

Her defiance damped down a little. "In my younger days, perhaps, I had a few more radical ideas. But it became too dangerous. There were too many arrests — whenever any plans were made, the Administration always seemed to be ahead of us. I felt sure, in the end, that someone was betraying us."

"There are a few intelligent, right-thinking people who admire the Administration and aren't so keen on anarchy."

She didn't react to the dig. "After Valeria was born, I decided it was too dangerous to stay involved. Tarin agreed with me at first, but he . . . he changed his mind. The others talked him round." She shook her head. "It doesn't surprise me that Kate has gone. For a long time I thought that she encouraged him in his views."

And then some. "I don't know anything about that. But what you're saying is that he's tied in and tied in deep."

"Yes."

"That's what I thought."

"And now what?"

"I don't know." He was tempted to suggest she consider joining Kate on a one-way holiday out of the Administration. But Kate had escaped with the connivance of Citizen Surveillance. Without that kind of help, fleeing the Administration was an admission of guilt that was tantamount to a confession. "If you happen to know anyone who might have any evidence they'd like to get rid of, now is a good time to suggest it to them. Apart from that, I promise I'll do what I can for him."

That caught her by surprise. "Why?"

Jesus, obviously Valeria had inherited that question from both sides of the family. "For Warrick. And for me." Forestalling her question, he added, "Because mud sticks."

All the talk of mud at least gave Toreth an idea for finding some peace and quiet. Upstairs, the bathroom was empty and Toreth ran himself a deep, hot bath, which he felt he deserved. He even found a bottle of masculine-scented bath salts and tipped in a generous dose. If they were Tarin's he wouldn't be needing it for a while.

The hot water felt wonderful, the bath deep enough to get at least an illusion of buoyancy. He settled back to think over what he'd found so far. The conversation with Ms Plaice had confirmed that the stranger outside the school had been there more than once. Four or five sightings, at least two coinciding with Tarin collecting his daughter from the school. Not conclusive, but suggestive.

Warrick's identification of the man as the Citizen Surveillance agent had upped the stakes. Was he tidying up loose ends from Kate's undercover operation? According to Warrick's account of their meeting the man had been helpful enough, but that could have been a first-stage response and this the rather more final cover-up.

The unofficial killing of resisters was much like the unofficial annex deaths at I&I, only without the complication of a trial. If citizens were too well connected or difficult to arrest for other reasons, then a quiet accident helped the Administration run smoothly. It was a shame, Toreth thought uneasily, that Warrick wouldn't look at it in the same light. If he became convinced there was foul play involved, then he'd be out for blood

A Citizen Surveillance connection gave him another focus — Kate. If Kate wasn't dead, then she might be behind the attempted murder. Still working for Int-Sec, or even on the run, she could see it as a necessary step towards tidying up the remains of her old life. Since she'd raised Tarin as a tool for Int-Sec to use in monitoring resistance groups, she'd probably not lose much sleep over eliminating him.

He wondered how she felt about Warrick, who knew more than anyone about the circumstances of her escape. She'd always seemed very fond of her younger son, for what very little that meant.

There was the picture in the living room downstairs to consider: Kate, Jen, Warrick and Dillian. If it was Kate behind the killing, then she might be thinking as much of her family as of herself, assuming she gave a fuck about any of them. Could Kate know that Tarin and Warrick were reconciling? That would give her an incentive to act now, before they grew too close.

Killing Tarin now would go a long way towards shielding Warrick and the others from taint by association. There could be no subsequent arrest and interrogation, no trial, no messily public execution or reeducation, no chance that he could say something to suggest Warrick or Dillian had ever expressed anti-Administration sentiments. If Kate wanted to protect her other children, then if Tarin died the danger would be over.