9. Now
A police officer ran towards the Range Rover waving at du Bois to stop. He understood the necessity for a cordon and supposed that the self-important look the policeman had on his face made him feel he was part of this. Du Bois had to remind himself that this would go more smoothly if he was a little patient and not too rude.
‘Turn this round now!’ the florid-faced and fleshy policeman demanded when du Bois rolled the window down. He sighed and handed the officer his warrant card. The officer stared at it. ‘Right, you stay here, I’ll have to check this.’ The policeman turned away with the card.
Fuck it, du Bois thought. ‘Excuse me, lowly paid civil servant.’ The police officer turned around. It took a moment for the anger to come as he processed what du Bois had said. ‘Please imagine, if that’s not beyond you, that the card in your hand just has the words “Yes, I can” written on it. It is not for you to check that, question me, or even talk to me. You are here only because it is more cost-effective than training a monkey to do your job. A job, that despite its simplicity – keeping the people who are not allowed in, out, and letting the ones who are allowed in, in – you are still somehow managing to screw up.’
The officer’s face seemed to lumber through increasingly severe stages of fury. He opened his mouth to retort but du Bois got in there first.
‘If someone is to question me it will be the highest-ranked monkey on the scene, do you understand me? Or should I have your extended family murdered for emphasis?’
The policeman snapped his mouth shut. In his heart he knew that the threat was idle but there was something about the casual delivery that made him believe that du Bois was capable of this. Du Bois reached out of the four-by-four, took his warrant card back and drove towards the inflatable hazardous-material isolation tent. He glanced at the near-identical rows of terraced housing on either side of the road. He was already not enjoying being in Portsmouth.
The hazardous-material suit was largely an affectation but appearances had to be kept.
‘Brilliant,’ du Bois muttered to himself. He was looking at a surprisingly small pile of rubble where a house used to be. The houses on either side looked as if they had chunks bitten out of them as well. The whole lot was underneath a large hermetically sealed tent. The place was crawling with scientists and technicians in similar yellow plastic suits. Most of them, however, were only engaged in spraying the area down with steam hoses and various chemicals.
Professor Franklin Kinick was a distinguished-looking, rake-thin man whose prominent nose and bushy white eyebrows made him look like a bird of prey wearing a hazmat suit. The professor worked for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, near Salisbury. Professor Kinick wasn’t looking at the hive of decontamination industry going on around him; instead he was looking at du Bois as if he was something to be studied in a lab.
‘So imagine my surprise when I was asked to drive all the way down from Wiltshire and bring some very particular instruments designed to measure some very particular things? Particular things that don’t tend to be used in a counter-terrorism investigation. And then report all my findings to you, when, despite my clearances, I don’t even know your organisation or rank,’ the scientist finished.
Du Bois turned to him, smiling.
‘How much would you like to know, Professor?’
Kinick just looked at him. Du Bois knew that Kinick, who was probably more than a little curious and whose nose was more than a little out of joint, had been at this game long enough not to push the issue. He had narrowly avoided the purge in the late 80s. Kinick held du Bois’s gaze. He was convinced that he was looking at some kind of shadowy intelligence-operative cowboy.
‘Well, we found lots of interesting stuff. Pretty much traces of the entire electromagnetic radiation spectrum, dust, energetic charged subatomic particles, beta and gamma radiation. In fact, do you know where we would be most likely to find all these things at this level?’
‘Deep space?’
‘Yes. You don’t seem very surprised.’
There was more than a little anger in Kinick’s voice. Du Bois had heard this before. This was people trying to cope with having their world view radically changed in a moment.
‘Pick an explanation you like and hold on to it for dear life,’ du Bois suggested. Not that it’ll matter, he thought. On the other hand they were so close to the end that at least Kinick wouldn’t be reprogrammed or assassinated, the latter being a lot less resource intensive.
‘Want to know something else interesting?’ the professor asked.
No, du Bois thought sarcastically. Please keep all the interesting information from me. He tried to suppress his annoyance.
‘As far as we can tell, there is a lot of the house missing, and if there were people here then I can’t find any trace of them at all. It’s as if it all just disappeared.’
‘How much material?’
‘Initial estimates put it at about seventy-five per cent.’
Du Bois nodded. Kinick noted that again there was not much in the way of surprise. Du Bois turned to leave but at the last moment he swung back to Kinick.
‘You won’t listen to me, but if I were you, enquiring mind or not, I’d try not to dwell on what you’ve seen here too much.’
Kinick said nothing. He just watched du Bois head for the tent’s airlock.
DC Nazo Mossa was not good at concentrating when there was a lot of background noise. This made her singularly badly equipped to work at Kingston Crescent, the main police station in Portsmouth, or indeed any other police station. The mobile command centre that they had set up had been even worse, so she had found an empty house up for rent and had quietly broken in.
As du Bois reviewed the second-generation Senegalese émigré’s file, this small crime was enough to endear her to him a little. He minimised her personnel record on his phone and brought up the narcotics and vice file she was looking at on her laptop as he entered the house. Mossa was a solid-looking, athletic black woman, her cornrowed hair tied back into a ponytail. She was sitting at a table in the front room. She looked up as he entered, recognising du Bois as the arsehole who had given PC Danes such a hard time.
‘Fuck off, you rude bastard. I’m busy,’ she told him, looking away.
‘I don’t care,’ du Bois said, his face wrinkling in a look of mock confusion. With a thought the screen on his phone displayed nine photographs of the inhabitants of the destroyed house and their most regular visitors, all of whom the drugs and vice squads had under occasional surveillance. Most of them were dressed in black, were pale and wore too much make-up. He placed his phone down on the table next to DC Mossa. She glanced over at it but went back to work.
‘Who are these people?’
Frowning, DC Mossa looked back at the phone and then her own laptop.
‘Did you just hack our systems?’ she demanded angrily.
‘Hacking suggests a degree of effort,’ he told her. ‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, which is unusual, but this is going to go my way. How easy or hard do you want to make this on yourself?’
Mossa stared at him.
‘You’ve got a small penis, haven’t you?’ she finally said.
‘Nice,’ du Bois said, smiling.
‘You like that?’
Du Bois nodded. ‘But isn’t that just something that people with windsock-like vaginas say?’
DC Mossa stared at him with mock confusion.
‘Oh I get it. I insulted your manhood, therefore I must be some kind of crazy slut. That’s really clever.’