Little Dave didn’t have an answer for that, either. They went up a broad fan of steps to the house and he pulled open the door, oak planks studded with iron bolts, and walked through without looking to see if the two policemen were following.
The hall was as big as a hotel foyer. Wooden crates lined along one wall. Canvas equipment bags and backpacks. Toolboxes and plastic cases. A thin snow of styrofoam packing chips on the red floor tiles.
‘Wait here,’ Little Dave said, and walked off towards an archway at the far end of the hall.
Vic surveyed the supplies. Sleeping bags, tents, boxes of freeze-dried ready meals. He pointed to the stencilling on a small plastic case, said, ‘Know what a pulsed field magnetometer does?’
Skip was looking at a rock spotlit on a pedestal in a recess. A skull-shaped lump of what looked like sandstone finely layered in muted yellows and oranges and greys, like a section through a book.
He said, ‘You reckon this is some kind of artefact?’
‘It’s from a Riverine B site,’ someone else said. A man about Skip’s age, dressed in a blue linen suit, standing in a doorway. ‘Not much left of it after a million years, of course. Mostly rust and carbon strands and what they call differentiated spherules. Perhaps it was once some kind of machine, but who really knows?’
He stepped forward. Tall and tanned, thinning black hair brushed back from a high forehead and caught in a ponytail. His glance sliding off Vic, fixing on Skip.
‘Do forgive the mess. We’re getting ready for a little expedition.’
Skip showed his badge to the man, and introduced Vic. ‘We want to speak to Cal McBride.’
‘I understand you have a warrant. Perhaps I could see it.’
Skip said, ‘And you are?’
‘Danny Drury.’
‘You work for Mr McBride?’
‘Mr McBride doesn’t live here any more.’
Skip glanced at Vic. They’d worked up a rough plan to deal with Cal McBride, but now he wasn’t sure what to do.
Vic said, ‘This is his house, isn’t it?’
‘I fear you’ve been misinformed.’
Drury’s smile projected the kind of arrogant superiority that irritated the fuck out of Vic. He wondered if Skip understood it — that there was a class of English people who never questioned their unearned privilege, believed that it was their God-given right to take the best jobs and all the rest of the good stuff. There had been several of them in the force, back in Birmingham. Straight out of Oxbridge into the promotional fast track.
It didn’t help that Drury was directing most of his attention to the only other white guy in the room.
Skip tried to recover the initiative. ‘You bought this house from Mr McBride?’
‘Not exactly. I suppose you could say I inherited it. A perk of the job.’
‘And your job is what, exactly?’
‘I’m the managing director of Sky Edge Holdings.’
Vic realised what had happened. What Alain fucking Boudin had done to them. He’d given his case file to Skip all right, but hadn’t bothered to tell them that it hadn’t been updated. A little fuck-you for trying to dump the whodunnit on him. Skip hadn’t checked because he didn’t know any better, and Vic hadn’t bothered to check either. Damn.
He said to Drury, ‘You took over McBride’s house and his business. What did he have to say about that?’
‘It is his family’s business. I run it on their behalf.’
‘And how is the meq trade, these days?’
‘Do you really expect me to answer that, investigator?’
‘I’m wondering if this “little expedition” of yours is all about hunting biochines.’
Drury inclined his head. ‘Is this an interrogation? Because if it is, perhaps I should call my lawyer.’
‘Routine questioning,’ Vic said. No point in telling this guy more than he needed to know. ‘When Mr McBride moved out, did he leave a forwarding address?’
‘You’ll probably find him at the folly he’s building near the old Westside fighting pit. Are we finished? Because I really am very busy.’
At the front door, Skip turned to Drury and said, ‘By the way, where were you last night?’
Drury didn’t even blink. ‘The Mayor’s Landing Day Ball at the Hilton. Quite an event. Everyone who is anyone was there. Good day, investigators.’
As they walked up the drive, Skip said, ‘He was ready for me to ask that, wasn’t he? I mean, he didn’t even ask me why I wanted to know.’
‘We’ll make a murder police of you yet, Investigator Williams.’
‘I guess I should have done my homework a little better.’
‘We both fucked up,’ Vic said, and meant it. ‘But it isn’t anything we can’t fix. Drury is an interesting character, isn’t he? That ponytail is straight out of central casting for film villains circa 1990.’
‘I can’t help wondering if he inherited the ray gun along with the house and the meq business.’
‘Something else to ask Cal McBride. I assume you still want to talk to him.’
13. Devil Squid
London | 8 July
The select committee reconvened in the same room, 10:00 a.m. Thursday. It was closed to journalists and members of the public because security was jittery after the assassination of the Jackaroo avatar, but Chloe and the rest of the Disruption Theory crew had to push through a gauntlet of reporters and cameras at the entrance of Freedom Tower. Chloe put her head down and stayed close to Daniel Rosenblaum’s broad back.
The committee chair, Robin Mountjoy, began by reading out a short formal statement thanking Chloe for her intervention two days ago. After that everything went quickly downhill.
Daniel was called to give evidence. Mountjoy peppered his interrogation with secondary questions and snappish asides, asking him to clarify what he meant by algorithms, eidolons, breakouts. When Daniel started to explain about memes, how ideas became infectious and spread from person to person like a catchy tune, Mountjoy looked at him over the top of his gold-rimmed bifocals and said, ‘And these so-called memes originate with the Jackaroo.’
‘Actually, we don’t have any evidence that they do. We know that some of the cults are inspired or driven by algorithms or fragments of intelligences, eidolons, embedded in certain Elder Culture artefacts. That’s a major facet of our work. But we are also interested in the ways in which the presence of the Jackaroo has affected every aspect of our society and culture. Thirteen years after first contact, we still know very little about them. In the absence of hard facts, all kinds of speculations flourish. Theories, rumours, ideas. And some ideas are more attractive than others. They spread quickly and they spread widely. That is what we are trying to map. Ideas which have cultural significance, cultural currency. If they don’t tell us anything about the Jackaroo, they certainly tell us something about ourselves.’
‘So if it wasn’t for the Jackaroo,’ Mountjoy said, ‘these memes wouldn’t exist.’
‘They are our ideas about the Jackaroo,’ Daniel said, with visible impatience. ‘Not their ideas implanted in us. It’s an important distinction. And not exactly hard to grasp, I think.’
‘By withholding information about themselves, the Jackaroo are manipulating us. So in a sense they are generating those ideas, are they not?’
Robin Mountjoy was making a point, trying to show that Daniel and the Disruption Theory crew were wilfully or carelessly ignoring the danger posed by the Jackaroo. Chloe was reminded of the way certain girls at school enjoyed maliciously twisting your words, tried to redefine their meaning, tried to use them against you. One of the other MPs, a slender white-haired woman in a navy-blue trouser suit, took up the theme. Daniel answered with a freezing politeness, insisting that there was no evidence that the Jackaroo were directly intervening in any way. Another MP asked about the value of tracking the popularity of different ideas.