‘This is a fifty-three-foot High Cube, the biggest can we use,’ Barry Moon said. ‘But it isn’t my idea of luxury accommodation.’
Skip said, ‘The shuttle’s hold is pressurised, right? They could have got out, walked around.’
‘Yeah, but it’s freezing cold. Like forty below zero. The refrig units that transport perishables are warmer. Only the passenger accommodation is heated. And there are CCTV cameras so the crew can keep an eye on the cargo, make sure it doesn’t shift. If I was riding this can, I would have stayed inside the whole trip.’
Vic said, ‘Did you find any personal belongings?’
‘Your friends took some stuff. Old clothes mostly. Whatever else they found, you should ask them. They took DNA samples from me and Finn, too. Like we were criminals.’
‘That was just to eliminate any contamination,’ Skip said.
‘They downloaded video from the security cameras, too,’ Barry Moon said.
‘And I bet they won’t find anything,’ Vic said. ‘Because it’s a funny thing about all the cameras here, they never seem to see anything. Like the people in the Terminal Authority, they don’t notice the clandestine shit that goes back with legitimate cargos.’
‘That’s Customs’ department, not mine,’ the security manager said.
‘We’re really only interested in these stowaways,’ Skip told him, shooting a look at Vic. ‘You’ve never had an incident like this before?’
‘This is the first we found.’
Vic said, ‘Are you certain? Because we’re going to check the records anyway.’
‘These people were loaded onto the shuttle at Earth,’ Barry Moon said. ‘You want to find out how they got on board without being detected, you should go back there.’
Outside, after Skip had soothed the security manager, as they were walking towards their cars, Vic told him that it was interesting, but he couldn’t see any connection with Redway and Parsons.
‘You have the two guys riding here on tickets,’ Skip said. ‘One is killed just outside the terminal. And now we find that three people smuggled themselves up here in a shipping container. On the same shuttle. So I reckon it would be a bit weird if there wasn’t some kind of link. I should ask the guys in drug enforcement, see what they think.’
‘Not much, probably,’ Vic said. ‘I mean, what crime has been committed here? I don’t think we even have a statute about what I suppose you’d have to call illegal aliens. If anyone knows anything about this, it’s that security manager, so-called.’
Skip said, ‘You were riding that bloke pretty hard. What was that about?’
‘The woman who had the job before him was involved with a gang smuggling vintage wines. She took bribes to look the other way. You think your friend Barry Moon doesn’t know what’s going on in his yard?’
‘It doesn’t mean he had anything to do with this. And he called it in.’
‘The Mickey Mouse cop called it in. And I bet the people who rode inside that can knew this place is porous. Knew they had a good chance of getting through.’
‘I’m wondering exactly how they got out,’ Skip said. ‘Was it through the gate, or through a hole in the fence? And who was waiting for them on the other side?’
Vic said, ‘You want to hear my advice?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘No, you don’t. My advice, make a note, stick it in the case file, move on. This is down to drug enforcement and Customs, and they won’t thank you for trying to get inside their thing. But if you attach a note to the file, you’re covered if there’s any link to the murder. Meanwhile, you still have the friend of the dead guy in the wind. That’s what you should be working. This foolishness, it’s a distraction.’
‘Even so, I have a feeling about it,’ Skip said, meeting Vic’s gaze with a stubborn look, a muscle knotted at the hinge of his jaw.
Later, Vic would think that this was the moment when he lost his authority. The moment he made an assertion that would quickly be proven wrong, and Skip decided that he knew better. Looking back, he wished he’d cut the kid more slack.
But all he said at the time was, ‘Stick to what you know. Don’t make up stories to cover what you don’t.’
23. The Chapel
Norfolk | 9 July
The airboat was fast and surprisingly quiet, cutting through the mist that hung over the water, passing the headland of the island and a clutch of half-drowned roofless houses, entering a channel between stands of tall reeds. A maze of gravel shoals, mudbanks and salt marsh where there’d once been open water, created by shifts in tides and currents that had transported material eroded from the flooded margins of the coast and deposited it here.
Henry Harris perched in the chair in front of the airboat’s fan, using a lever to steer the little craft. Sandra Hamilton, on the bench seat with Chloe and Jack Baines, called out directions to him and told Chloe about the drug business.
‘It’s a small-time operation. They grow Cthulhu’s claw out here, process it at the shrimp farm, send it on to their bosses in London. We’re going out to the centre of their plantations.’
It was an old sea fort, Sandra said, built in the Second World War to defend the east coast from German mine-laying aircraft. It had been decommissioned in the late 1950s, and sold to an eccentric property developer. He had rented it to a series of pirate radio stations in the 1960s and 70s, and later it had been used as a film set, the location for a reality TV programme, and a platform for servers of a website that enabled peer-to-peer sharing of every kind of data. After the death of its owner in the first decade of the new century the government had seized it in lieu of payment of inheritance tax; it was now rented to a group of Flemish nuns, Les Recluses Missionaires, a renegade contemplative order which had quit Belgium during the civil war.
There had been eight of them once; now there were only two, Sandra said. ‘Or at least, that’s what our friend would like the authorities to believe.’
Chloe said, ‘Two sisters. You didn’t look very far for your cover story, Mr Baines. Do they really see sea devils?’
Baines shrugged. He was hunched at one end of the bench, handcuffed to its handrest.
‘Mr Baines and his wife are the caretakers of the sea fort,’ Sandra said. ‘But their real business is growing patches of Cthulhu’s claw in various spots in the marsh.’
Baines started to say something, then thought better of it. Chloe felt a little sorry for him.
She said, ‘Sahar Chauhan was their cook, wasn’t he?’
Sandra said, ‘He lost his wife, got a bad gambling habit, lost his job. The people who run the London end of this thing bought his debt and sent him out here to cook shine. Call it a kind of apprenticeship. He passed with flying colours, and was sent to Mangala. Probably to help out with their meq business. You can manufacture shine here, because Cthulhu’s claw grows in saltwater marshes, but to synthesise meq you need fresh biochine blood and a skilled biochemist. Isn’t that right, Mr Baines?’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with it,’ Jack Baines said.
‘Of course not,’ Sandra said. ‘You just grow a psychotropic alien plant, and smuggle cigarettes on the side.’
‘Sahar must be a hell of a chemist,’ Chloe said.
She remembered a TED talk that Daniel Rosenblaum had once given. He’d argued that human consciousness could be enlarged and transformed by alien drugs. Many users would be killed, yes, but evolution was neither kind nor cruel. Individual fates did not figure in it. According to Daniel, those who survived the new psychotrophs would become the first astronauts of a new kind of inner space, and their explorations would slowly but surely turn humanity into something beyond ordinary imagination. Chloe had never taken Daniel’s ideas seriously. The man came up with this wicked mad stuff because he liked to provoke — liked being the maverick, the outsider, a wizard conjuring outrageous theories. If ideas about the Jackaroo and the Elder Cultures don’t seem crazy, he liked to say, they can’t be right. But now she wondered if Fahad Chauhan’s visionary pictures might have been inspired by something glimpsed when he’d used some kind of drug supplied by his father. Something new and even weirder than shine or meq. And she also wondered if she had become involved in a turf war between Sahar’s employers and Ada Morange. It was not a good thought.