The Baby And The Brandy (Ben Bracken 1) (18 page)

‘Do you know what I have done here?’ I ask.

Before I can answer, another voice replies. A robotic male, and it comes from the phone itself.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ it says, amiably. It’s kind of freaky.

‘That’s just Siri,’ Jack says. ‘You must have accidentally pushed the home button for too long. Just press it again to get out.’

‘Who’s Siri?’ I ask, regarding the phone with suspicion. The world has obviously changed a little since my last attempt at freedom, or at least parts of it have.

‘It’s a voice recognition command system for iPhone. You just tell Siri what you want.’

‘Umm, like what?’

Jack drops down from the counter and takes the phone. He presses the home button and it beeps. ‘Siri, where am I?’ he says.

After a second, which I assume to be the phone working it’s magic, the robot voice speaks. ‘Blantyre Drive. In Worsley, Greater Manchester.’

‘Thank you’ Jack says.

‘Don’t mention it,’ Siri replies.

‘Jesus’, I say. ‘That’s impressive. Weird, but impressive.’

Lightning strikes in my mind, blazing a rapid trail of eureka across my cerebellum.

I grab the blank phone, number 3, and activate this Siri character. ‘Where was I on Thursday night?’ I ask.

The screen blinks to a calendar page for the month of October, that is also entirely blank.

‘I have no appointments entered’, Siri replies. Fantastic. It’s no help yet, but that’s very encouraging. Let’s see what secrets on this phone Siri can betray. It’s like playing ‘Open Sesame’ with a robot adversary.

‘Who did I last call?’

‘079775550981’ Siri answers. The number is on the screen, and I type it into phone 1, since I have no pen or paper handy.

‘When did I call?’

‘Call took place Monday October 24th at 23.42.’ The night of his disappearance. This is fantastic. All call logs have been erased, but Siri’s individual memory hasn’t been wiped. The evidence has been removed, but Siri has remembered, the spy in the camp.

I think of anything else to ask. But I can’t. While I think, Siri handily offers suggestions.

‘Would you like me to place a call to the number, or send the number a message?’

Siri, you genius.

‘Send a message, please.’

‘What would you like it to say?’

I speak loud and clear, enunciating every word. ‘I’m still here.’

‘Should I send the message?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘No problem.’

A little tinny whoosh through the phone speakers, and the message has been sent. All in all, that was really something. And that should be enough to tease out whoever Royston spoke to that night, and I feel one step closer to answers.

I notice the other phone is on however. Phone 1. The keypad is up, the mobile number I just typed in on the screen. But this phone already has that number entered into it, and has been assigned to a contact - the name of whom appears in faint lettering below the number. The name is Nigel.

‘Jack, remind me who Nigel was again?’ I ask.

‘That’s a bloke dad had round here a couple of times, mainly in his office. He said he was a colleague at Quaycrest.’

A colleague at a fake company? And so another suspect emerges. Who is Nigel? What does he know about Royston’s murder, considering he spoke to him just before his disappearance?

And with that, Phone 3 beeps, announcing the arrival of a text message - a reply from Nigel himself. I look at it without delay. It is one word, that hits me immediately, and raises all manner of curiosity. In block capitals: ‘EXPLAIN’.

17

I move my thoughts through to Royston’s office, and ask for a little time alone with the computer. I don’t have my laptop with me, and would easily prefer to use that, but I want to follow something up. Something that’s been nagging me. I walk into the beautifully furnished, wood-clad office, and sit at the desk chair. Letting the setting sink into me, trying to let the room itself seep into my senses and reveal it’s inner workings. I try to imagine what the dead man used to do in here.

I have the inkling and the hankering for an ally. I don’t mean a pal on the frontline, or someone who can back me up in a given situation. I mean someone on the other side of the legal looking glass. Perhaps someone in law enforcement. It’s risky, but with trust and a relationship based on equal benefits, I feel it may be doable. It will be entirely on my terms. No names shared, only a way to reach each other to swap intel.

Information has always been my friend, and has saved me far more times in heated moments than any bullet has. What I’ve learned in the last 48 hours is that being a one man band can only get me so far. And I would really like a man on the other side to feed me information gathered by police networks with their sophisticated infrastructures and algorithms - all designed for both surveillance and gathering sensitive material, but equally all presently unavailable to me.

I can’t clean this country up if my primary intelligence source is Google.

But I think I have the right man for the job. It will take a degree of sensitivity in approach, but it would be worth a go.

I fire up the computer, and on it comes. I can imagine, in another lifetime, spending plenty of time in this office, this man-cave. It has that solitude to it that I am attracted to on a lot of subconscious levels. Dark wood shelves, dim lamps and the smell of books. A little womb away from the hurdy-gurdy.

The computer reveals itself to be empty. Nothing on it at all. It’s a dated PC, which I’m grateful for, because even I know how to access the C drive and double click on My Computer. But nothing is there. Nothing at all. Has it been wiped?

It has internet explorer however, and I try to get that going. It’s slow, but there is a connection. I don’t want to log into anything of any note here, because eventually, the Berg will go down. And when it does, the police will most likely crack down on everyone and anyone who ever had anything to do with them, and Royston’s computers will be seized. Last thing I want is for my login details for banking or twitter to appear, and leave digital breadcrumbs. I might as well take a picture of myself with the webcam and leave it as the screen saver.

The MSN home news page loads in the explorer window, and I find a search engine box. And I type the name in from the earlier newspaper article. Jeremiah Salix. Up pops unsurprisingly very little, save for that same newspaper article. Lots of haphazard occasions where the name Salix, and the name Jeremiah appear independently to one another. I scroll down, and eventually see an occasion where the two words do meet next to each other. I click the link, and I’m given a simple web page with text and a picture. The picture at the top is of a wheelchair basketball team, the text below it being the roster. It appears this Jeremiah Salix is the shooting guard of the Tameside Tomahawks, in the North West Regional Wheelchair Basketball Association. There’s a league table too, and it appears they are doing quite well. He’s also the coach, it seems, of Stockport Royals, a youth team. I click through to them, opening the page in a new window. Scrolling down, I see a fixture list - as luck would have it, they are playing tonight, at Reddish Vale Basketball Centre. That’s south of the city, about 10 miles out. I look back at the first page, and find a team photo at the bottom. Correlating the listed names and the seating arrangement in the picture, I see my man. Jeremiah. Sitting there in a bright yellow basketball shirt, thick dark hair curling across the top of an unshaven face. His expression serious.

I bet he’d like a crack at who put him in that chair.

I shut down the computer, and think about turning the office upside down, searching for clues as to Royston’s murderer’s identity. But all I’m going to find is further evidence that this office is fake. No meat on the bones whatsoever. Nothing, just something to save face with.

I head out of the office, back to the kitchen. Jack is there, still drinking his tea. In fact, he has barely moved since the moment we got back. I’ll try to break him out of this funk.

‘Jack, can you think of anything about this Nigel character? Anything at all? I ask.’

‘Not really’, he replies, distantly. ‘I met him once or twice, but it was, like, for a split second.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing interesting. Stockily built. Bald. Extremely ordinary. He had a nice car, though. Whenever he was here, they just went through to the office.’

‘How did he seem with your dad? Were they comfortable with each other, or was there any tension?’

‘I only saw them together for a second, but I didn’t pick up anything wrong. There wasn’t like a hierarchy between them. They had the same demeanor as I did when I would go round to my friends on a homework assignment.’

‘Merry collusion.’

‘Something like that, yeah.’

‘I’m going to text him, see what happens.’

Jack actually turns to look at me now, as if previously he may have objected - but this time he resigns, as if I’ve done so much damage, what harm could more do?

‘You got a problem with that?’ I ask.

‘Nope.’

‘OK, then.’

I take phone 3 from the counter-top, and bring up the message strand. It’s nice, another neat innovation that shows me precisely what’s been said by whom.

Beneath ‘EXPLAIN’, I type: ‘You tell me’. I press send, and wait.

The response is almost immediate, announced by a buzz of vibrate. ‘I’m on my way over.’

That’s not what I want yet. In time, a face to face will be right, but not now. ‘Don’t. Not the time.’

I hope that works, and the next response reveals that it has. ‘Have it your way’.

I don’t really know what that means, but then again, maybe I’m not supposed to. After all, I’m not actually the ghost of a dead gangster, regardless of what this Nigel believes. I go on the offensive. ‘I want answers’.

A response doesn’t come quickly. Five minutes pass, and I half expect the doorbell to ring, and Nigel to come crashing in, only to see that his friend hasn’t come back from the dead. Eventually, the phone buzzes. ‘None of this went how I hoped. I can promise you that.’

Fantastic. He knows. And it’s shedding a little light onto what happened that night. The questions about Nigel are mounting, his importance in our crude investigation rising higher with every passing moment. I decide that on the offensive is the manner in which to proceed, as it has obviously caught Nigel off guard, and is making him open up. ‘Not good enough.’

The response is quick as a flash this time. ‘You pushed it. You made it turn out the way to has. It was your conduct that sealed it. It was your own fault.’

More advancements. This is the right direction. I’m even close to a disclosure here. If I press a personal button, I might just get it. I take a deep breath on this one. ‘Betrayal. From you. One of my close friends.’

Again, the response is damn-near immediate, and it froths with so much rage that the words leap out of the screen. ‘Yeah? How did that bullet feel, you fucking prick...’

Wow. And this weeks new entry, straight in at number one on the Royston Brooker murder suspects Hot 100, is Short-Fuse Nigel, with his stunning, stinging ballad, ‘Confessions’.

I look up at Jack. He is looking out of the window, still gazing. He might even be asleep, for all I know. I’m not going to reveal this to him. Not yet. That text might send him into another rampage, and before I know it, we are off on another cross-town revenge quest.

On the phone, I type: ‘Tomorrow morning, 10am. Piccadilly Gardens. Nice and public. Let’s talk it through.’

And another appointment is set in my ever-busying social calendar. I need to see where Jack’s head is at.

‘Jack, I’m gonna take these phones and documents with me, is that ok?’ I ask.

‘Whatever, Ben,’ he says. He’s hurting. This battle is taking it’s toll on him - the strikes to his life, or at least the life he knew, taking body blows that are leaving him groggy and jaded.

‘And tonight?’ I venture.

‘You go alone’, he says. ‘You go do what you’ve got to do. I just... don’t know anymore.’

I pause, and hope that he looks up at me, but he doesn’t. Defeated.

‘I’m on your side, pal. I promise you that. I’ll call you in the morning. A night off might do you good. I’m gonna borrow the car too. Is that ok?’

He doesn’t respond, so I leave him to it, grabbing the car keys off the counter. He’s got all night to dwell and obsess, but I don’t. Yet again, I’ve got shit to do, and I want to be as ready for it as possible. Tonight could define a lot of things, and I want to start as I mean to carry on.

18

I can hear the
squeak squeak
shuffle of sneakers on hardwood. It’s a reassuring sound - as opposed to the smell of the disabled toilet cubicle in which I’m standing. I don’t think they are used very often and they are seemingly cleaned even less.

I am at the basketball centre, hiding. I have been at the centre a while, and even caught a bit of the game. It was of quite a good standard, actually. I used to play a little on Bastion, and enjoyed head to heads with our American comrades whenever they came to town. I’d always felt I was a bit handy at basketball, but this lot here in this Stockport suburb would've smashed me and all my army buddies into the paint.

I’d seen Jeremiah immediately, and recognized that sadness in his eyes, which everyone who has had something stripped away from them wears like an unwanted badge. We know our own. I reason that the disabled toilets are the best place to get a private moment with him.

I am wearing the best clothes I now have, namely the jeans and shirt, and hide behind the door of the bathroom, clutching the light cord. Waiting. My speech rehearsed. I hope the man has access to those networks that would interest me, and I hope that what I can offer him in return will be of use. I think that, considering he’s about to come into contact with someone who has been in very recent face-to-face contact with the Berg, the summit and it’s guardians, and is willing to share that very info, he will be both very popular and valuable to the police. Most definitely.

I realize that being here is a gamble and there are no guarantees, but he’s the best hope for the kind of ally that I want to recruit. It has crossed my mind that he may, in fact, no longer be a policeman, but my instinct believes otherwise. The police are known for looking after their own, and have been so low on numbers for such a long time that I am sure they will have done what they could to keep hold of an officer in need. The fact that, in the newspaper piece, he was already talking about the Berg so soon after he had regained consciousness, suggests the birth of a grudge that he was prepared to carry forward. An itch that I know for a fact, since the Berg are very much at large, he is yet to scratch. If what happened to him was as defining as it seems, I am hoping he has angled his career along the very avenues that would see him in the best possible position to bring the Berg down. And now, with 8 further years of career progression, he should be in a decent enough position to help me.