‘Look,’ I said calmly. ‘I’m not Home Office. You can search me if you like. There’s no need to worry. I’ll give you a fair price, in cash.’ I retrieved my C-note from his podgy fingers. ‘Otherwise I can try somewhere else.’ I shrugged and started towards the open door.
‘Patience, sir,’ he said. ‘It is a virtue. I have just the equipment that you require. Only I must be careful. Come this way.’
He led me into the back of the shop which was stacked high with boxes of Nicam stereo televisions, discrecorders, portable karaoke players, and Reality Approximation equipment. Shifting several boxes out of the way, he said, ‘We don’t keep sat-phones in the front of the shop, for obvious reasons. You want a digital unit?’
I said that I thought I did.
He nodded and pulled out another box. ‘Digital is best. I show you a good one. Only four thousand dollars.’ He ripped open the box and tugged away at the ozone-friendly polystyrene packaging to reveal what looked like a small attaché case. For a moment he caressed it with his hand, before springing open the locks and folding the case open.
‘Just like James Bond, eh?’ He giggled, folding up a satellite dish that was about the size of a dinner plate. ‘It works off the Injupitersat. One dedicated channel with a band-width that’s five times the size of a normal portable phone. That gives you an extra-high-quality line. Focusing on the satellite is done automatically with the computer’s own built-in compass, so you don’t have to fuck about with books of astronomical tables or any shit like that. All you have to do is key the satellite’s number, which you see on the handset, and then the normal international code plus whatever number it is that you want to call. Its one and only limitation is that you can’t use it below ground level. In a house is fine, but don’t expect to get through if you’re sitting in some kind of basement.’
‘I’ll take it,’ I said, and counted out forty-odd bills.
‘You won’t regret it,’ he said. ‘The CIA use this model, so it must be good.’
I looked at the country of origin. It had been made in Japan.
‘Well that figures,’ I said.
He folded the dish away, closed the case and held it out to me.
‘Real pigskin too,’ he said, stroking the case with his hand again. ‘And it weighs less than two kilos. Anything else you would like?’
I handed him another couple of bills.
‘Just your silence.’
11
Jake had not slept very well. Her T-shirt was wet with perspiration and her neck ached as if she had been standing on her head. She used the bathroom and then did a few gentle yoga exercises to try and move some blood up to her cortex. Ten minutes later, feeling slightly better, she put on her dressing gown and took the lift down to the ground floor where she collected the morning’s post from her mailbox and carried it back upstairs to the top flat. She examined it without much interest: a couple of utility bills; and several pieces of junk mail trying to interest her in everything from a special mortgage so that she could live in Docklands, to sponsoring a Russian child. But as well as these other items, there was also a Jiffy bag which looked as though it might be interesting.
Back inside her flat Jake placed the parcel under the spectroscope on the hall table and while she waited for the electronic signal to tell her that it contained no explosives she searched the kitchen for something that might constitute breakfast. Finally she found just enough coffee to make a small espresso and a few bran biscuits on which she spread the remains of a jar of chocolate spread.
Back in the hall, the spectroscope sounded like a small air-conditioning system. It had been a routine piece of equipment for all senior police personnel since the early years of the new century, when the IRA had conducted a letter bomb campaign aimed at mainland police and their families. Mostly it had been a case of fingers and hands being blown off, but on one notorious occasion two children had been killed. Their deaths had been one of the factors which had persuaded the Government to introduce punitive coma.
When the all-clear signal sounded, Jake wiped her fingers clean of chocolate spread, tore the padded envelope open and then withdrew the contents. It was several seconds before she realised that the gynaecology spread for the benefit of the camera was putatively her own; and several more seconds before she stopped trying to account for how someone had been able to take such pictures without her knowledge and guessed that they were photo-composites. Instinctively she laid the pictures down and put on a pair of cellophane gloves before re-handling what might turn out to be forensic evidence.
Not that she would have cared for them ever to have been produced in court or held in some police file. Fakes or not, there was no escaping the fact that they were good fakes, of the kind that were appearing increasingly often in the tabloid newspapers.
Probably produced by a computer, she thought. The sort of thing that would entertain many of her male colleagues. The type of evidence some pervert might think to make copies of, for the general locker-room titillation of the lads at the Yard. Jake knew that there were many of her male colleagues who were jealous of her success and who might welcome the sight of photographs which would certainly embarrass her. Fakes or not, pictures which showed a chief inspector pushing a vibrator up her own vagina, and licking another woman’s genitals, were nothing less than explosive.
She was surprised to discover that it was Wittgenstein who had sent them. She was sure it was he because there was a compliments slip on which he had typed ‘yours bloodily’. He would surely have known that Jake’s duty as a police officer would require her to have the photographs tested in the laboratory; and, as a corollary, that this would cause her acute embarrassment. Jake swore fluently for several seconds and for one brief moment she felt hatred for him. Somehow she had supposed he would be different. A fly buzzed on the window pane, and hardly bothering to even look, Jake killed it without a moment’s hesitation.
Jake had the morning off, her first in several weeks. She bought some groceries, failed to get into her local hairdresser, and went to see Doctor Blackwell at her clinic in Chelsea.
Her eyes closed, naked, standing to attention before the doctor, Jake found her thoughts returning to the photographs now in her shoulder bag. Her original irritation had given way to a curiosity that Wittgenstein should have been sexually interested in her. This was something unique in her experience as a detective. The subject might almost have been worthy of a paper. She wondered what she would have done if instead of Doctor Blackwell, her therapeutic nude encounter had been with Wittgenstein. She felt herself blush as she lay down on the couch and waited for the Doctor to begin the session.
‘Sleeping all right?’
‘Not particularly...’
‘Nightmares?’
‘No.’
‘Sleeping with anyone?’
‘Not that I can remember.’
‘Hostility to men?’
Jake swallowed. ‘There was a tramp on Westminster Bridge. He asked me for money, but I thought he was going to try and rob me. I almost hoped he would, so that I could have shot him.’
‘You were carrying a gun?’
‘I always carry a gun.’
‘Have you ever used it?’