Something Coming Through

11. Sleuthing

London | 7 July

‘I have a free day,’ Chloe said. ‘I could sit around here, or in my flat with the curtains drawn, hiding from reporters. Or I could do something useful.’

‘If you want to do something useful, you should rest up for the rerun of the committee hearing,’ Jen said. ‘But I know you won’t.’

‘This can’t wait,’ Chloe said. ‘Not with Chief Inspector Nevers on the case.’

‘We’ve already been over that,’ Jen said. ‘All he wanted was those fragments that Ram took. Now he has them, that should be the end of it.’

‘I don’t think so. He wanted me to know that he was interested in the breakout in Dagenham. Plus his friend saw the flyer, so they know we’re interested in it too. In Fahad Chauhan.’

‘Do you really think this boy is in trouble?’

‘I think he’s hiding from someone. Hence the midnight flit. And then there’s the number the artefact is doing on his head.’

‘Because if he is in trouble,’ Jen said, with relentless patience, ‘wouldn’t it be best to let the police help him?’

‘Not if he’s hiding from the police. And suppose Eddie Ackroyd finds him first?’

They were talking in the sunny kitchen of Jen’s roomy semi-detached house in Finchley, after Jen’s husband had left for his job in the City and Jen’s daughters had been dispatched to school, joining a walking train of children escorted by four parent volunteers. Chloe had spent the night on the sofa. Her flat was being staked out by a small gang of journalists; there’d been a clip on Sky News showing them outside the entrance of the tower block, followed by a twenty-second interview with a bewildered neighbour. Apparently Chloe had always been ‘quiet’. She couldn’t go home, she’d had to switch off her phone because some hacker had outed its number, and her Facebook wall was plastered with messages from journalists offering to treat her side of the story sympathetically and a spew of anonymous threats and insults. She was going to have to ride out this moment of notoriety and hope it passed quickly.

At least she’d been able to put across her side of things in the TV interview. It had been set up in neutral territory, a room in a hotel in Bloomsbury. Daniel’s friend Jim Ford, a man in his sixties Chloe had seen on TV now and then, with snow-white hair and dressed in a vintage Paul Smith suit and a brightly patterned tie, had quickly and charmingly probed her background and established what she wanted to talk about, and then they’d got down to business. Two armchairs facing each other under bright lights, a woman behind a video camera, another woman who’d dusted Chloe’s cheeks and forehead with powder and fastened the microphone beneath the top button of her blouse, Jim Ford with a prop clipboard. It had taken just twenty minutes. Jim Ford and his crew had zoomed off because they needed to edit the footage for the seven o’clock news; Daniel had treated Chloe and Jen to dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, and Jen had taken Chloe back to her house.

Now, in Jen’s kitchen, in the borrowed trouser suit she’d worn to face the committee, her hair wet from Jen’s shower and smelling of Jen’s apple shampoo, Chloe promised that she wouldn’t get into any trouble, or talk to any strange reporters.

‘At least tell me where you’re going,’ Jen said.

‘Spitalfields, to begin with. I thought I’d do a little sleuthing, and ask some old friends for a little help.’

Chloe rode the Tube to Liverpool Street station, where she bought two pay-as-you-go phones from a booth that printed them for her right there. She used one, still warm in her hand, to call Jen and give her the number.

‘Just in case anything comes up at your end. How’s Daniel?’

‘He’s doing interviews. Helena isn’t too happy about it, but you know Daniel.’

‘Has he mentioned anything about my field trip to Norfolk? I know he was going to talk to Ada Morange’s people. Maybe you could ask him if he remembered to mention that the Hazard Police are interested in this thing.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ Jen said, ‘Dr Morange’s security people have reached out to us.’

‘What do they want to know? If you give me their number, I could talk to them directly.’

‘I don’t think you should discuss it over the phone,’ Jen said. ‘You need to come in for a briefing.’

‘I have my own thing to do first,’ Chloe said, adding, when Jen started to object, ‘I’ll call when I’m finished.’

She felt a mixture of excitement and dismay, a sense of things moving out of her control. More than ever, she needed to find out everything she could about Fahad Chauhan, and Eddie Ackroyd and his client. She needed something she could use to prove her worth, to keep herself in the game.

She headed out of the station in the river of rush-hour commuters, trying not to look at the big screen where BBC 24 was replaying a clip of the assassination, dodged through the traffic juddering and honking down Bishopsgate, and cut across Spitalfields Market. She walked fast, head down, trying to blend in, tingling with anxiety and exhilaration. A spy in her own city, a fugitive on an urgent clandestine mission. The game was on, and she had only a small window of independence before Ada Morange’s people started to interfere.

Tonani’s, the café frequented by runners and scouts before most of them had decamped to the Reef, was dismayingly empty. The orange plastic chairs and white tables, and the poster-sized photographs of alien land- and seascapes, were still there, and the owner, Rosa Jenners, still presided over her hissing Gaggia, but where there’d once been a buzzing crowd of people looking for deals, making deals or boasting about deals, there were only a couple of bemused Chinese tourists and a guy Chloe didn’t recognise poking at a tablet. After she had answered the inevitable questions about Richard Lyonds and the Jackaroo avatar, saying that, no, she didn’t think she’d be getting any kind of reward or medal, Chloe asked Rosa if she’d seen Eddie Ackroyd recently.

Rosa, a short, thick-waisted woman, grey hair done up into a bun skewered with a pink and purple robber-worm quill, wanted to know what kind of trouble Eddie had got himself into now.

‘I just need to ask him about something.’

‘Because we had the police in earlier, asking after him.’

‘A tall white guy, Adam Nevers?’

‘No, it was two young men from the Hazard Police. Are you all right, dear?’

Rosa sat Chloe at a table and gave her a mug of builder’s tea fortified with a heaping spoonful of sugar, and Chloe told Rosa that things were moving faster than she’d expected, and explained about her encounter with Eddie at the Dagenham breakout, his boasts about his mysterious client, the clues sent to the LFM wiki board.

‘I was wondering if Eddie knows anything about the whereabouts of this kid who was involved in the breakout,’ she said. ‘And who his client might be. If he has a client. If the story isn’t a weird practical joke.’

‘Eddie lacks the imagination for that kind of thing,’ Rosa said. ‘Fast Eddie, we used to call him. Always on the make, always on the take. This was before you came on the scene, dear. While the UN quarantine was still in force. Everyone in the artefact business was chasing specimens that leaked back to Earth via diplomatic pouches, clandestine loads smuggled amongst licensed material by companies and criminals, souvenirs brought back by UN personnel…Eddie knew how to make the most of his contacts, but he lacked common sense and got himself into trouble with the police several times. He thought he was cleverer than he was and cut too many corners. Went down for it, eventually.’

‘I know he did six months in Wandsworth,’ Chloe said. ‘He used to boast about it, like it was a badge of honour. He still comes in here, doesn’t he?’

‘He has a stall in the Sunday market,’ Rosa said. ‘But I haven’t seen him for a month or more. Maybe he’s moved out to the Reef, like most of the other traders. The market isn’t what it was. Mostly replicas and fakes, or the cheap stuff the Chinese and Indians are importing by the ton from Tian and Naya Loka. And then there’s all the nonsense from the Human Decency League. They set up a stall by the entrance of the market every Sunday and hand out leaflets with pictures of dead meq addicts. They’re petitioning the council to close the market down, although why they bother I don’t know. It’ll die a natural death soon enough.’

Rosa didn’t have Eddie Ackroyd’s phone number or address, and didn’t know anyone who did — he wasn’t exactly blessed with an abundance of friends — but said that if she saw Eddie she’d tell him that Chloe was looking for him, and would ask around about Eddie’s mysterious client, too.

Chloe’s anxiety had been ratcheted up by Rosa’s mention of the police. She was stupidly aware of every CCTV camera as she headed towards her rendezvous with her friend Gail Ann Jones. They met in a tapas place in King’s Cross. Gail Ann was late, as usual, telling Chloe, ‘I called to say I was held up, but you didn’t answer.’

‘I had to buy a new phone,’ Chloe said.

‘My filthy colleagues have been giving you trouble, I bet. A glass of house white,’ Gail Ann added, as the waiter handed her the menu. ‘You aren’t blonde any more. Good move. That trouser suit really isn’t you, though. Not even you in twenty years.’

‘I borrowed it for the nonsense yesterday. Haven’t had the chance to change.’

‘Your wicked ninja episode. Tell me everything you didn’t tell the TV news. Give me something exclusive, and I promise I’ll have your babies.’

Gail Ann was almost exactly Chloe’s age, pale skin emphasised by her trademark red lipstick, dressed in a boiler suit with a swirling brown paisley pattern, a black denim jacket, cherry-red Doc Martens boots, and a red leather satchel — the exact shade of her lipstick — slung over her shoulder. They’d met when Chloe had joined the LFM wiki’s editorial board; Gail Ann, who’d lost her older brother to the bomb, had been one of the founder members. She was a freelance journalist now, selling articles to the glossies and news sites, running a feed about street fashion.

Chloe said that there hadn’t been any new developments about the thing with the avatar, told Gail Ann about Chief Inspector Nevers’s visit to Disruption Theory and his hint that he had an interest in Fahad Chauhan.

‘So this is a real thing,’ Gail Ann said.

‘It always was.’

‘I mean it’s a real story. A kid on the run, his mind altered by some kind of weird alien artefact. You want to save him from the clutches of Eddie Ackroyd and his mysterious client. And now from the police.’

‘You said that you’d dug up more stuff about Fahad.’

‘About his family. Rather a sad story, actually.’

They ordered half a dozen small plates of food. Gail Ann said that she had a friend who was in the genealogy business. Actually a friend of Noah, her on-again off-again boyfriend.

‘He practically lives in the National Archives, knows how to find his way around old newspaper records and so on. And also has serious google-fu. He found that squib in the trade journal.’

‘Then I owe him one.’

‘I owe him one,’ Gail Ann said. ‘And you owe me.’

‘After I catch up with Fahad, I’ll tell you all about it. Cross my heart. What’s this sad story?’

‘To begin with, Fahad’s mother is dead. It happened about five years ago.’

Chloe thought of the little girl, Rana. She said, ‘Did she die in childbirth?’

‘She died in Uxbridge. A traffic accident, apparently. I expect my friend could find out if you need to know,’ Gail Ann said. ‘About a year later, Fahad’s father was declared bankrupt. And either he lost his job with GlaxoSmithKline or he quit, because he moved to Norfolk.’

‘To a little town, Martham,’ Chloe said.

‘You’ve been doing some digging, too.’

‘I didn’t know about the mother, or the bankruptcy. But I did find out something else. The father, Sahar, went up and out to Mangala.’

‘And you think he came back with some kind of alien artefact.’

‘He didn’t come back. It was a one-way ticket sponsored by a property-development company, and he isn’t on any of the passenger lists of flights back to Earth. I was going to look for Fahad’s mother in Martham. Now I guess I’ll be looking for the people who were taking care of him and his kid sister after his father left. As well as trying to find out what his father was doing there, and his connection with this company. I want you to have this,’ Chloe said, and laid the second new phone on the table. ‘In case I need to call you for backup, or some more of Noah’s friend’s google-fu. My new number’s in it.’

‘Ooh, super-secret spy shit.’

‘The press got into my phone,’ Chloe said. ‘This is just in case they get into yours.’

Gail Ann studied her. ‘This has really got under your skin, hasn’t it?’

‘It did cross my mind that the thing that got into Fahad’s head has also got inside mine,’ Chloe confessed. ‘But how could I tell?’

‘Knowing how you get when you decide to chase after something,’ Gail Ann said, ‘I don’t think that it would make much difference.’