Great North Road (60 page)

M
ONDAY,
M
ARCH 11, 2143

Sid didn’t get out of Market Street station until after nine o’clock. When he did it was like fleeing the scene. His fellow detectives had written him off. They nodded as he passed them in corridors; then there’d be the backward looks, the muttering, shaken heads. He could see it all without having to look.

“It’s over.”

“Ah man, did you hear? He’s blown it.”

“O’Rouke is going to fucking crucify him.”

“His fault they’re going to cut overtime for the rest of the year, the stupid turd. Did you hear how much he’s spent? We’re the ones who’ll suffer.”

“Man, they set him up good.”

Monday was a day spent doing two days’ work, checking everything, reviewing, revising. Five hours spent in the zone theater, going meticulously through the backtrack, taking more and more time—as if he was trying to postpone the inevitable, so the whispers went. Not true, he just had to make sure there were no screwups, not now. More hours in Office3, enduring the accusatory silence from what was left of the team.

Their backtrack still hadn’t found the taxi.
Everything
hinged on that. They’d covered all the other lines—the imported freight manifests, the forensics. None of it had produced any kind of lead. There were only three taxis left to check when he finally called it a day, handing over to the night shift. Telling them to call him
the instant
they found one loading up with the North’s body.

The right taxi being in the last three was so statistically implausible as to be impossible. But he wasn’t going to call it off now—might just as well jump into the Tyne himself.

Even though he’d promised Jacinta he’d be home hours ago to help pack, he drove around to Falconar Street and parked at the north end. The door lock on Ian’s flat flashed purple when Sid’s e-i pinged it. He frowned at the small panel, and called Ian direct.

“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 shriveled up and died in embarrassment.

“Sorry, didn’t know,” he muttered to Ian, who was standing with her, dressed in a toweling robe. Sid hated the impression he must be giving her, like he was Ian’s dad instead of a real grown-up.

“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 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 theater 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’s 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 gotten 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 one another. 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.”

T
UESDAY,
M
ARCH 12, 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 backward. Here the macromesh was intact, and the vehicle license code had remained the same for the whole time they’d observed it—there was no mistake, no shady gray 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 channeling 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 207 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 theater by himself. He watched everybody file out of the control 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 theater.

“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 forensic 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 on it.” Because there was nothing else left. The murderer had won, had outsmarted him and his entire team.

He left the theater 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, maneuvering Elston to get the theater 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 meters high, with arched pedestrian walkways on either side, reeking of urine and dog feces.

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 toward 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 that the taxi had used, fat manky hoses plugged into its pumps so it could feed its load up to the gridwork that was soon to be the fifth floor.

After two months in the theater zone, Sid knew the area by heart, the businesses occupying every yard and shed, the roads, the line of the riverbank. The theater virtual had a gloss that was lacking out here in reality. Here the buildings were shabbier, the colors 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.