This Thing of Darkness (17 page)

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

I feel almost breathless with relief.

‘Part time, mind,’ Jackson cautions. ‘Chicago still comes first. The jumping up and down on your head bit still applies, OK?’

‘OK,’ I tell him. But I’m happy, almost shakily so, like a prisoner granted leave to appeal, like a parole applicant hearing the word, ‘Yes.’ If I were the crying sort, I think I’d rush to the Ladies, and do that whole teary, blinky, eye-patting, mascara-renewing thing that other, more ordinary, people do. As it is, I just blink and say, ‘Thank you, thank you.’

‘OK. Now, is there anything else we should know? Anything else at all?’

A truthful answer to that question would technically include a statement to the effect that Cesca Evans is receiving – and rejecting – the sum of £4,000 a month, paid to her by a father whose name she rejects and who, apparently, she never sees.

But technicalities aren’t really my thing. Instead, I say, ‘I think it might be a good idea to watch ships entering or leaving ports in Wales. Also Bristol. Ideally ports in the south-west and Ireland as well.’

‘The
ports
?’

It’s Jackson’s question, but the same enquiry lights Watkins’s face as well.

‘Some ships have the capacity to lay, lift, and repair cable. Most don’t. I think we should watch the ones that do.’

‘Fiona—’

‘The cable is part of this. No one’s stealing survey data just for the fun of it.’

‘Fiona, first things first. You and Rhiannon can go and talk to the cable people. We’ll let you hunt for this climber boy. If and when there’s evidence calling for further action, we’ll take it. Until then, just cool it.’

That’s stupid, I think. We have two dead people. What are they, if not evidence? But I don’t protest and Jackson leads us back to the office.

When we get to the lifts, I start to look for the red lamps, meaning ‘Down’, while my elders and betters are looking for the pale blue of ‘Up’. But Jackson has a second thought about something and points me up to his office with a bass grunt and a jab of his finger.

I go with him. He has door-open and door-closed meetings. I don’t know which this is, but close the door anyway.

‘Fiona. I’ve spoken to Laura. She tells me your work has been first class. Really excellent.’

I nod. Say thank you.

‘And your exam. Seventy-eight per cent. Not quite the best score we’ve ever had, but it’s right up there.’

I nod. I know what this is about now.

‘There are four main areas covered by that exam. Crime. Evidence and Procedure. General Police Duties. And Road Policing.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The areas aren’t completely distinct, so, for example, a question on evidence might also demand knowledge that relates to general police duties. Do you follow me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Nevertheless, the examiners sometimes break down the results for us by subject, so we can see the areas where officers might have strengths or weaknesses. An interesting exercise.’

I’ve run out of ‘sir’s, so I just nod along.

‘Would you like to know your results?’ He picks up a sheet of paper. ‘Crime. You scored a hundred per cent. I’ve never seen that before. Evidence and Procedure, ninety-six per cent. Again, astonishing. Never seen anything close. General Police Duties, not quite so strong, but still: eighty-eight per cent takes some doing.’

He stops.

Looks at me.

I open my hands. What does he want? He told me to pass the exam and I’ve passed his damn exam. I really don’t see that I’ve earned a bollocking. He was trying to give me champagne an hour or two ago.

‘Road Policing. Twenty-eight questions. You scored exactly zero. No marks at all.’

‘I don’t like traffic policing. Sorry.’

‘So you scored zero?’

‘I just thought – if I ever get into trouble, if you ever decide to chuck me out of CID, I
might
be able to cope in uniform, but not in roads, I wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘So you thought if you ballsed up that side of the exam completely enough, you’d be protected. The traffic department would never take someone who had performed that badly.’

I shrug.
I
wouldn’t take me, not if I were a traffic cop.

Jackson drums briefly, then throws the paper away.

‘OK, Fiona. I just needed to know.’

I stand up. I think that’s the end of whatever this thing is. He nods dismissal.

But as I’m at his door, he stops me again.

‘Of course, there might be a flaw in your plan. It’s multiple choice, isn’t it? So if you were just guessing at random, you’d have got a few questions right. And, see, a cynical mind like mine might think you knew all the answers perfectly well, just didn’t put them down on paper. So, if I wanted to bust you down to Roads, I’d probably go ahead and do it anyway.’

I go down after that, but thoughtfully.

The whole Acting Deputy Exhibits Officer nonsense. This promotion to sergeant thing. I realise: Jackson actually needs me to do this. To do the grunt work, to get the promotion. It’s his way of telling me that he needs me to be more than a gifted individual investigator. He’s trying to make a police officer out of me. A proper one.

I have a strange moment of double vision. One half of me wants to be the officer Jackson wants me to become. The other half thinks I’ll achieve that happy state at just about the time I get my first hover-car. The two visions co-exist for a brief moment, like when two soap bubbles join, but still exist as two things, not one.

Then the vision collapses. The bubbles burst.

I pick up the phone and make a call. My first act as Research Officer on Operation Zorro.

25

King Street, London. St James’s Square. A flamingo’s flap from Buckingham Palace.

A grand stucco-fronted townhouse. Window boxes and clipped topiary. A front door so glossily black it might have been stolen from the entrance to hell. I half expect it to be opened by a goat-legged gentleman with a tufted beard and an elegant tail, a low whiff of sulphur on the air behind.

No goat legs, no sulphur.

A receptionist buzzes us in. There’s some messing about with signing in. I do nothing to help, but somebody gives me a plastic badge anyway. I put it in my pocket.

We sit and wait. Cream and blue sofas in a Regency stripe. A clock, antique or a good imitation, sits on a mantelpiece and ticks. The receptionist, who is tiny, sits at a large green-leather desk and looks at a computer screen. On the wall, there’s a photo of a ship with a huge cable carousel at its stern.

White ship, blue waters.

Watkins stabs out emails on her phone.

Findlay and Creamer are here too. They talk together in low voices. A murmurous hush.

I stare at the receptionist, trying to decide if she’s actually doing anything on the computer or just waiting for us to leave.

A young man, my age or a little younger, enters. Blue suit, pink shirt, dark tie, no tail.

‘Four of you? Gosh. Do come up. Was your trip up all right? Did you come by car? No? Quite right, parking’s awful, isn’t it?’

He leads us upstairs into a conference room, big Georgian windows overlooking the street. Mahogany table. Another clock.

There are three more business types in the room, employees of Atlantic Cables.

Coffees. Business cards.

The job titles are meaningless, at least to me.
Strategic Director, Projects
, says one.
Chief Investment Officer
, says another. The young navy blue suit guy is just
Charles Warren, Project Associate
, which I think is private-sector-speak for
Nobody
.

We coppers have no business cards, so we just give names and ranks, like captured servicemen.

James Harding, the strategic director, seems the most senior of this bunch. At any rate it’s he who opens his hands and says, ‘So. How can we help?’

Watkins gives him a brief background, concluding, ‘In short, there have been two suspicious deaths in connection with your cable. We have evidence that your marine surveyor was murdered. We are currently also regarding the death of Derek Moon, your former security guard, as murder. We’re looking for any information you can give us as to why these men were killed.’

For half an hour, thirty minutes ticked out in Regency elegance, Harding gives us fluff.

He deeply regrets any loss of life on the project. He never knew Mr Moon, but understood him to be widely liked by those staff who had met him. Mr Livesey had already done some very useful work. His death struck the whole firm as a tragic accident.

‘Not an accident,’ says Watkins. ‘Murder.’

‘I’d understood it was being treated as suicide.’

Findlay: ‘It was. We obtained new evidence.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that. The family has already had our condolences, but . . .’

Watkins: ‘Mr Harding, they don’t need your condolences. They need your cooperation. Were you ever made aware of any threat to Mr Livesey’s life?’

‘No, certainly not.’

‘Threats to other employees or contractors?’

‘No, none.’

‘Threats of a more general nature? Threats which, with hindsight, could have carried a suggestion of violence?’

‘No.’

‘Can you think of anyone with a motive to kill Mr Livesey?’

‘No.’

‘Or Mr Moon?’

‘No.’

‘Following Mr Moon’s death, you shifted the cable’s intended route from Oxwich Bay in Wales to Highbridge in Somerset. Why?’

Harding, careful now, picks his way through an answer. He says that additional survey data suggested that the Somerset route might be better than first thought. Also that new land-based telecoms investment in that area tilted the balance.

My job, and Creamer’s, is to take notes. I hope Creamer is better than I am, because I keep forgetting to write, preferring to stare at the men opposite. Nice suits, nice shirts, nice manners. And somewhere close, a river running ankle-deep in blood.

I feel the presence of the dead men, Moon and Livesey, quite acutely at times like these. Too acutely, a constant pressure. It’s like those no-pull dog harnesses, which twist the animal around if they start to pull on the lead. The stronger the investigative scent in the room, the more I feel tugged sideways. I know I have to close my eyes, make real contact with the dead, before I can shift my attention elsewhere.

So I do. Close my eyes. Think of that jagged Himalayan rock which split Moon’s skull.

Think of Livesey, swinging from a gallery in a corporate rental.

Think of Sharma sitting, white-faced, by her dead beloved.

The process settles me, and though the dead men still seem more real than the rest, I’m better able to concentrate. Watkins glares a couple of times, but I don’t care. I’ve got my deflector shields up.

When I tune back in, Watkins is saying, ‘Mr Harding, are you telling me that Mr Moon’s death made no difference to your decision to shift the route? We will take a formal written statement later and I should advise you we already have one person on a charge of perverting the course of justice.’

Her question forces Harding into a half-retraction of his earlier comments. This time, he says, ‘There
was
new survey data, yes. And the new investment in Horndean made a difference. But I suppose we also thought . . . Look, you have to realise what we do. When we go live, we will offer the fastest cable across the Atlantic, bar none. That’s our promise to our customers. We will be the fastest cable in operation, full stop. If we don’t live up to that promise, we will either discount our charges by as much as ninety per cent or we will let customers walk away from their contract. If we’re not the fastest, everything we’ve done here will be a waste of time.’

‘So?’

‘The installation which Derek Moon looked after contained some computer equipment. There was survey data there, including a route map. Not all of it, because we didn’t have it then. Just the coastal part of the cable, the part which goes out into the Irish Sea. When Moon died, we felt obliged to reconsider our security arrangements. It struck us that we had been unwise to leave our route maps in a place where they were vulnerable to attack. So we switched the route for technical reasons, yes, but also a security concern.’

One of the things that makes Watkins effective as an interrogator is her lack of gradations. Her freedom from the normal human dance of acknowledgement and response.

‘So you are correcting your previous answer?’ she notes. ‘You are stating that anyone with a desire to steal your route maps might have had a motivation to kill Mr Moon. Correct?’

Harding first of all tries to square his answers up. Make it sound like he was saying the same thing all along. Watkins’s driving insistence soon obliges him to say, ‘OK, well then, yes. OK. In theory. That’s very theoretical.’

‘Moon had the necessary keys or, I don’t know, codes?’

‘Yes, he would have done.’

‘Those route maps. How much value was locked up in them? How much were they worth?’

Harding, happy at finding himself back on safer ground, gives a lengthy answer. I don’t think he’s flannelling, just trying to explain to us how his industry works.

In short: Atlantic Cables expect to spend around three hundred million dollars on laying their cable and commissioning it. The vast bulk of that money will be spent on the physical works itself. Buying cable. Laying it. Digging it in. Plugging it in at both ends. Making sure that all the computer stuff is working right. ‘We’ve already started that work, working west to east, so the New York side of things is already done. The deep Atlantic part is in process now. Then we just hook up the British end and we’re done. We’ll be live in two months.’

Watkins asks about the mapping and Harding says, ‘Yes, that’s important. Those route maps are our intellectual property. Our best effort to find the shortest, fastest path across the ocean. Now I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We’re satisfied that we’re at the limits of current technology.

‘But what if things change? Let’s say, we’ve figured out the best route across ninety per cent or more of the ocean. Three thousand miles or so. But what if new survey data comes along which tells us that we’ve got the very last part wrong? Suppose there’s a route which could take a millisecond, half a millisecond even, off our time? That millisecond would kill us. Somebody could just drop a copycat cable down for the ninety per cent that we’ve already figured out, make a tweak to our configuration on the final stage and
bang!
– our business has disappeared. That’s what we can’t let happen.’

He finishes speaking.

People shift in their seats, or I think they do. I feel Moon and Livesey so strongly now, I want to get up and look for them. It actually bothers me that we are in a clean, nicely lit room, with a shiny mahogany table and a clock ticking on the mantelpiece. I’d prefer to be at the graveside or, better still, with the corpses themselves. It would be harder for Harding to lie if there was a dead man leaking his brains out on the table.

I say, pen poised over my pad and with a bland, even simple, expression on my face, ‘So, Mr Harding, what you are saying is that the loss of your route maps might have threatened your three hundred million dollar business?’

Harding doesn’t like the question, but he’s already impaled by Watkins’s gaze, and he has nowhere to go, so he just says, ‘Yes, correct.’

‘And Derek Moon had access to some portion – some important portion – of those route maps. Correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘So Derek Moon probably didn’t know it, but the future of your three hundred million dollar business lay partly in his hands. Correct?’

Harding’s voice is croaky now, but he manages a ‘Yes, correct.’ I can feel more than see Findlay grinning to my right. Watkins doesn’t grin, she just bulldozes. She rips into the next line of questioning without pause.

‘You selected Ian Livesey for a portion of the survey only? He didn’t handle the whole thing?’

‘No. If you draw a north–south line from Llanelli in South Wales to Barnstaple in Devon, Livesey handled everything west of that, basically the ocean side of that line, until the edge of the continental shelf. We had a local Bristol firm handle the estuary itself. That’s territory they already know very well. We had a large contractor handle the deep ocean. One further firm handled the shallow waters on the New York side.’

‘Why? Why subdivide the assignment like that?’

Harding seeks to fudge the issue, but Watkins chews up people like him without even blunting her blades.

It’s not long before Harding is saying, ‘Yes, OK. Post-Moon, we had to consider security. We didn’t think there was a leak. We weren’t aware of one. We use
highly
encrypted data-storage techniques. Not even my colleagues here—’

‘You are telling me that you divided the assignment so that no one contractor had access to
all
the data? That they couldn’t leak it if they wanted to?’

‘Correct.’ Harding’s voice is tired now. Beaten. He glances sideways at the Nobody in a blue suit, who gets up and fetches water. Harding starts to say, ‘That wasn’t the only reason. There were operational considerations—’, but Watkins isn’t interested.

‘Ian Livesey was an unusual choice of contractor, wasn’t he? A solo operator. Had to charter a boat, because he didn’t own one. No previous experience in the Atlantic south of Ireland.’

Harding resists, but defeat is soon forthcoming. ‘Yes, we thought a one-man band was going to be less leaky than a big firm. And Livesey was a tough guy. An ex-Marine. We thought he couldn’t be bullied or bought.’

‘And when you heard of his death?’

‘We thought, poor guy. I liked him. Anyone who met him—’

‘Don’t patronise me, Mr Harding. When you heard of his death, it must have occurred to you that this was a repeat of the Moon situation.’

‘The thought occurred to us, yes.’

‘And occurred to you, specifically?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you shared that thought with the coroner?’

‘No.’

‘With the Avon and Somerset Constabulary? Or the South Wales Police?’

‘No.’

‘If not you, then any of your colleagues?’

‘No.’

‘So you personally and you collectively chose to withhold evidence from a police investigation into a violent death? Evidence that might have tipped that inquiry into taking seriously the possibility of murder?’

Harding doesn’t answer. How can he? He just opens his hands. I think the gesture is partly admitting the charge. But partly also defending himself. It’s a gesture which says, ‘I’m a senior executive of, and shareholder in, a three-hundred-million-dollar company that uses some pretty fancy technology to service some pretty fancy clients. And you really expect me to run along to a bunch of provincial coppers every time our business hits a little roadbump?’

I arrange my face back into bland ’n’ simple mode and, pen hovering over my pad, say, ‘Sorry, Mr Harding, but Inspector Watkins will want me to have a full record of your answer. She asked, “Did you personally choose to withhold evidence from a police investigation?” Shall I put “Yes” for that?’

I look young for my age, or I’m told I do anyway, and it doesn’t take much to tip my natural accent into a kind of comedy Welsh. The sort of slightly exaggerated sing-song that arouses smiles among London professional types. In any case, my version of Young Welsh Simpleton makes a good foil for Watkins’s bruising directness.

Harding tries to answer, can’t, nods, recovers his voice, says, ‘Yes.’

‘And your colleagues. You collectively as a firm. You chose to withhold evidence from a police investigation? I’ll put “Yes” for that too, shall I?’