The Turning Tide (21 page)

Wilma nodded at the second door. ‘It’s through there.’

‘Ta,’ Erykah said. So this is where it all goes down, she thought. A few cardboard boxes sat on the kind of stacking chairs you might see in a school assembly hall. She rifled through the contents. A few old photos and awards, nothing interesting. A framed page from the bestseller list when his book cracked the top ten.

At the bottom was a little wooden box. She picked it up and opened the catch. Inside was a snub-nosed gun nestled in the velvet box lining. It looked old, ornate letters H and S embossed in the grip.

Erykah took the pistol out of the box and felt its weight in her hand. Engraved on the side of the barrel was
C. G. Haenel Suhl Schmeisser’s Patent
. Was it the Major’s? Or his father’s? Did it work? It had been a long time since she had seen anything like this in real life.

Grayson had always carried a pistol tucked under the front waistband of his jeans. A Hechler and Koch .45 semi-automatic. It had been smaller than she thought guns would be. And matte black – not a cowboy gun. When she said so she was afraid he would be offended, but he laughed. ‘I carry a piece,’ he said, ‘for protection only. I don’t need to go round advertising the fact I could use it, y’know?’

The clattering typewriter next door was still going, the rat-a-tat like a machine gun. She slid open the top drawer of the desk – a few old issues of
Jane’s Defence Weekly
and a mouldering apple core. The other drawers were empty.

Job done, but best to hand off in person
, she wrote. She taped the note to the cover of the Cyrillic journal filched from Schofield’s office and left it in the middle of the desk.

: 18 :

‘Erykah?’ A voice called from the front room. ‘Erykah?’ More urgent now. ‘Those – those men are back again.’ Her husband darted upstairs as fast as a cockroach caught when the lights came on.

Not even home for two minutes and Rab needed babysitting. ‘Sorry, Rab, I’ll take care of it,’ she said.

Erykah shepherded Seminole Billy and Buster back to the kitchen. ‘Smells good in here,’ Buster said. ‘Like curry goat or something.’

‘Just some food I picked up,’ Erykah said. ‘Thought I’d treat myself to a takeaway.’

‘Is cooking not among your many talents?’ Seminole Billy said.

Erykah smiled. ‘What my mother couldn’t teach me about cookery would fill a library.’ She pulled an array of containers from a carrier bag and spread them on the table. ‘I was in London today running errands anyway.’ She glanced at the pair, but no response. So they wouldn’t admit they had followed her. ‘Jerk chicken, rice and peas, veg patties. There’s more here than Rab and I could finish on our own,’ she said. Not that Rab was the intended diner. She had bought twice as much as she needed, expecting she might have company before too long. ‘Please, help yourselves.’

Buster heaved himself down into a dining chair. He picked up a foil bag with patties inside and sniffed deeply, poked at the chicken with a plastic fork. ‘Not bad,’ he said. He proffered the bag at his partner. ‘Having some?’

Seminole Billy waved his hand, his silver-charmed bracelets swinging. ‘I’m good, thanks. If it was fried chicken, then maybe.’

She could see the mark on his hand more clearly now. Definitely a tattoo, between his thumb and forefinger. A faded letter B that might once have been black, but now was blurred and blue-grey. ‘Prison?’ she said.

‘Sorry?’ Billy said.

She pointed at his hand. ‘Did you get that in prison?’

Billy’s face twisted in a smile and he rubbed the spot on his hand absently. ‘No, my stepdad did that,’ he said. ‘Held me down and did it with a permanent marker and a sharpened bicycle spoke.’ He held Erykah’s gaze as he said it, and when she shivered his eyes sparkled like someone sipping an especially fine dram.

‘Is the B for Billy?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The B’s for bastard.’

‘That’s horrible,’ she said.

‘You ever have a stepdad?’

Erykah shook her head. Rainbow had done a lot of things, but she never brought her men, whoever they were, home. It had never occurred to Erykah that that might have been on purpose, or even a good thing. At the time all she had wanted was a normal family and a normal mother, like in television and books. A father, or in lieu of that, a father figure. Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a good idea after all.

‘Beers, guys?’ Erykah stood up quickly and gestured at the enormous stainless steel American-style fridge. ‘I put a few Red Stripes in the freezer for speed but they might not be cold yet.’

‘I’ll wait,’ Buster said and tore into a fat, juicy chicken thigh.

Seminole Billy shook his head. ‘You got a mineral water?’ Erykah brought him a bottle. It was a glass one, all the writing in French. He cracked the twist cap and poured some into a tumbler. ‘I hear you’re doing a little work for the Major now.’

‘He’s asked me to look into a couple of things.’

‘Yeah? Like what?’

Erykah pursed her lips. She didn’t want to be more specific until it was clear what they did or did not know. ‘Going on a charm offensive. The usual.’

‘Good,’ Seminole Billy said. ‘Cos we got a favour to ask.’

Erykah retrieved a can of beer from the freezer for herself and popped the tab. She slid into the seat opposite Buster. ‘Go on.’

‘I understand you might have a talent for breaking into things,’ he said. ‘And for spotting when you’ve been spotted.’

Erykah took a swig of her beer. So they had seen her back at the university, then. ‘I don’t know about breaking in. Getting in isn’t the same as breaking in, now is it?’

‘Gaining access by fraud,’ Billy said. ‘Whatever semantics you want to use.’

‘Am I being lectured on the nuances of breaking and entering by – no offence – you guys?’

‘None taken,’ Billy said. ‘Only an observation. A door was locked; you got in. Nice one.’

‘I talked the key off of someone,’ she said. ‘It’s not breaking in if he gave it to me.’

‘What’s that got to do with the price of peas in Tobago?’ Buster said. ‘I bet you didn’t tell him who you really are.’

‘Obviously not. But it’s not breaking in,’ she said. ‘Technically.’

‘Oh, now that’s an ethical conundrum,’ Buster said. His brow creased as he thought aloud. ‘Trust gained by fraudulent means is not consent.’

‘That’s still different from taking it by force,’ Erykah said.

‘Maybe,’ Buster said. ‘You have to consider, security can never protect against all motivated individuals. Even if you can’t pick a lock, for instance, you can always kick in a door. Locks are not force-proof; they’re there to keep honest people honest.’

Billy turned to his colleague. ‘I get that, but if that’s the case then why not leave everything unlocked as a sign of trust?’ he asked. ‘Like people do out in the country.’

‘Well, how I see it’s like this,’ Buster said. He wiped the crumbs from his face with a paper napkin and leaned back from the table, stretching his long body. ‘An unlocked door is representative of nothing but an unused lock. If folks out in the country want to make a statement about their willingness to keep their belongings unsecured and how much they trust people, then they should remove the lock from the door.’

‘How you see it?’ Erykah raised her eyebrows. She hadn’t heard Buster say more than a sentence or two, much less anything like this.

‘Yeah.’ He paused, gazing at the ceiling like a man working out the meaning of life from the vantage point of a bed in a cell. ‘Few people would dream of getting rid of locks, because the lock itself is symbolic. It’s all about signalling public and private spaces in society. If you have a lock to it, it’s yours. You own it. Like in the joint, you don’t get a key to your cell. That’s the punishment. You have no more private space.’

‘Also to keep you in,’ Erykah said.

‘Sure, that too,’ Buster said. ‘But it’s a kind of a – what’s the phrase Hobbes used? A social contract.’

Erykah smiled. ‘Hobbes? Isn’t that a bit—’

‘Esoteric for a con?’ Buster said. ‘You’re not the only one who read their way out of the estate, yeah? With that much time on my hands I read every book I could get,’ he said. ‘Technically nowhere is unbreakable, not even prison. And people on the inside outnumber the guards, so what keeps us in? We’re conditioned to accept punishment. Especially if you’re, you know, black. We stand where they tell us to stand.’ Buster looked back at his plate. ‘Breaking in and out has nothing to do with the locks themselves. It’s a message about something else. Power.’

‘You got a point,’ Seminole Billy had to concur. He speared a piece of chicken with a plastic fork. ‘Not to mention, you don’t get less time in the lockup if you hit a house with a shitty lock.’ He popped the food in his mouth, chewed briefly, then swallowed. ‘You know, this chicken isn’t too bad. For England.’

Erykah considered. What if Peter hadn’t been there, or hadn’t given her the key? She shook her head. ‘Anyway, houses are a bad analogy. It’s a personal crime, breaking into a home. The individual has no moral responsibility to treat an office in the same way they treat a house.’

‘Well, whatever,’ Seminole Billy said. ‘If you want to chat about what-ifs all day, then we can stay here and do nothing until the police find out about us. Then we’ll have all the time in the world for talking.’ He crossed his left boot over his right knee. The tops of the boots might have been polished, but underneath the soles were scratched and old, the heels pocked and worn. He turned to Erykah. ‘Point is, what we need is for you to find someone for us online. Can you do that?’

‘Maybe,’ Erykah said. ‘Who is it?’

‘Remember the tweet at your press conference?’ Seminole Billy said. Erykah nodded. The Media Mouse story was not something she was going to forget in a hurry. ‘Them.’

‘I thought someone already figured that out?’ Erykah said. ‘Some blogger said it was a setup from inside the
SLU
to drum up publicity. Sock puppets, I think he called it.’

Billy and Buster exchanged glances. ‘What, that washed up ex-novelist trying to restyle himself as some kind of investigative journalist?’ Billy sneered. ‘He’s about as likely to stumble over a real story as Buster here is to pass for Jeremy Paxman.’

‘True.’ She read the blog post herself and while the guy seemed to think his evidence was a lock, he was missing a lot – like IP addresses and email receipts. Even the tabloids qualified his claims as “only a theory”. All he had was a wild imagination and a lot of conjecture. ‘What happens when I find them? We’re talking about probably some kid here, some online troll who—’

‘We’re paying you to put up and shut up.’ Billy said. ‘What they did and what happens next is not your concern.’

‘The Major never mentioned anything about hacking.’

‘And you never mentioned your computer science degree, so we’re even.’

‘I didn’t graduate,’ Erykah shrugged. ‘I spend a bit of time online but it’s not what you would call my base skill set.’ She could see they weren’t convinced. ‘I mean, we get some trolls leaving nasty comments on the club website, but it‘s a piece of piss to track them down.’

‘See? You’re already more of an expert than any of us.’

She took a deep swig at the can. The beer tasted good, very good. It had been a long day.

‘I thought you might need some inspiration,’ Seminole Billy said. ‘Which is why we brought a little financial incentive. Let’s call it a down payment. For services to be rendered.’

She was glad they had mentioned money. ‘How much?’ Erykah asked. ‘Is it, like, I’m-going-to-buy-a-car money, or are we talking, I’m-going-to-buy-an-island money?’

Seminole Billy considered. ‘Middle of that. Let’s call it you’re-going-to-buy-a-yacht money.’

Erykah stroked the condensation on the side of the beer can with one long finger. ‘That sounds lowball to me. An extra zero on that would buy a whole lot of silence.’

‘You’re not dealing with the Major now. If I wanted to guarantee your silence,’ Seminole Billy lowered his gaze to the level of her face, ‘that wouldn’t cost me nothing.’

Erykah gulped. ‘Yacht money is perfect,’ she said.

‘Good,’ Seminole Billy said, and flashed the corner of a fat envelope tucked inside his leather jacket. ‘And we need a positive ID, not a shortlist of candidates. I don’t do interviews.’

‘No, no, clearly not,’ Erykah said. She stole a look down at Seminole Billy’s boots. He slid the envelope onto the table. Erykah did not pick it up, did not open it. Counting the money would be something she did later, after they were gone.

‘Any way you can lure them?’ Buster asked.

‘Maybe,’ Erykah said. She pulled a tablet out of her bag. ‘First thing is getting someone in a conversation. Getting them to let their guard down. I’ll have to make a new account so it doesn’t come back to me.’ She started tapping away. ‘Done.’

‘Is that it?’ Billy asked.

‘No, that’s just the start. I need some time to think this through. I have to figure out where they are, then who they are. I assume the tabloids have already tried.’ Her fingers flew as she downloaded a generic webcam face shot from a random person on the Web, then uploaded it to the new account. Every secret identity needs a face. She followed the first twenty accounts Twitter suggested, mainly football players and television presenters. ‘Whoever is doing this would spot a journalist a mile off. You have to ingratiate. Establish a relationship.’ She filled in a short bio to complete the profile.
MSc history & romcom lover. Coventry. Will work for G&T’s!!

‘You need some followers, so you don’t look too new.’ Erykah navigated to a page that claimed to sell Twitter followers for money. Best to choose a modest number, and an odd one – tapping in her card number from memory, it was only moments before she had 127 followers. Good.

Billy and Buster watched over her shoulder as she worked. Erykah scrolled back in the accounts she was following to tweets from a few weeks earlier. She retweeted those old messages, to give the impression the account had been live for longer. She sent a couple of tweets of her own complaining about having to write an essay. Then she followed Media Mouse and tapped out a message complimenting the tweeter for their success.

‘Jesus, woman, are you baiting a hook or setting up a dating profile?’ Billy said.

‘Be patient. The trap has to look like it isn’t a trap,’ she said. ‘If Media Mouse is being cautious, they probably won’t reply to an account with no details.’

‘So how long is it gonna take?’ Buster asked.

‘How long is a piece of string? All depends on if they’re still active on the site and looking at their replies or not. No way to tell unless you send them something.’ She typed another message, asking if Media Mouse could follow her back.

‘And then?’

‘And then, I try to get something out of them. An email, maybe, where I can use the headers to trace back to a location. Or maybe they click on a link and I get the
ISP
. It could be days though. For now we wait.’ Seminole Billy looked unconvinced. ‘Trust me, it’s the rare person who can stay away from making a repeat performance once they’ve had a taste of media interest,’ Erykah said. ‘Especially if they’re now famous – or at least, Internet famous. Tens of thousands of followers wanting to know what comes next? It’s only a matter of time before they bite.’

Seminole Billy nodded, satisfied. She talked the talk even if he didn’t know exactly what the talk meant.

Erykah paused. Can you ask mercenary thugs if they would please leave now? She had taken the job, what else did they want? Was this some kind of test to see how she would react?

‘Didn’t you say something about a beer in the freezer?’ Buster finally asked.

‘Oh! Right. Sure,’ Erykah said. Nervous sweat had soaked through her jeans, and she could feel them sticking to her thighs. ‘Here you are.’ Billy helped himself to another water.