Something Coming Through

24. Ease Up

Mangala | 27 July

Sergeant Mikkel Madsen was waiting for Vic when he came into the squad room. ‘You have a bounce in your step, Investigator Gayle. Would I be correct in thinking that the trial went in our favour?’

‘Man’s been sent off to make fertiliser for the next fifteen years.’

Vic had been in court for most of the day, giving evidence in the morning, staying on to hear the jury’s verdict. It had been a simple domestic murder. Two men had been cohabiting with a woman, all three of them shiners, and one of the men had decided to make the relationship more exclusive by strangling the other. He’d left the body wrapped in a length of carpet in the back garden of their house, and after a couple of weeks a neighbour had complained about an invasion of scrabs, little armoured scavengers as pestilent as rats. Vic had taken the call after a city health inspector had discovered the body; the prime suspect had confessed after a brief interrogation. An open-and-shut case that shouldn’t even have gone to trial, but the defence lawyer had argued that the doer’s confession was invalid because he had been undergoing cold turkey for his shine addiction, and the woman in the triangular relationship, initially a witness for the prosecution, had changed her testimony just before the initial hearing, had flat-out denied seeing anything, said that she had no idea how the dead man had managed to roll himself up in that carpet, but he was always doing weird shit like that. And because the scrabs had destroyed any forensic evidence there might have been, in the end it had come down to Vic’s word against hers.

‘For a change,’ he told Mikkel, ‘twelve upstanding citizens chose to believe the police.’

‘You do look persuasive in that suit,’ Mikkel said. He was a tall skinny man with pockmarked cheeks and a bushy moustache, fifteen years in the Norwegian police force and recently widowed when he’d won the lottery and come up. He took a noisy sip from his mug of coffee. ‘Remind me. How many cases do you have outstanding?’

‘Are you trying to take down my good feeling already? Have a heart.’

‘I don’t want you thinking that putting away the doer in a squalid little domestic is the highlight of your career. Especially as you have…How many open cases?’

‘You know how many there are, and you know I’m working them.’

‘Would I be wrong if I said sixteen?’

‘I have a warrant out on one. Issued it last week.’

‘But it stays open unless the doer turns up. Are you comfortable that the friends and relatives of sixteen victims are still waiting for justice?’

‘If I promise to feel bad, will you get off my case?’

‘I remember when the Jackaroo first announced their little gift,’ Mikkel said. ‘A lot of people said that it was a brand-new start. A chance to build fifteen different utopias on fifteen different worlds. A chance to redeem ourselves. But after all the fine talk about how we were going to do better, how we were going to realise the true potential of the human race, and so on, what did we get? It turns out that we brought every kind of human foolishness with us, and invented new ways to fuck up. Shine, meq, all the other new drugs. New ways of killing addicts slowly, while dealers and manufacturers kill each other quickly. Not to mention innocent bystanders.’

‘If this is about the anti-drugs initiative,’ Vic said, ‘the case I just put away definitely counts.’

‘We lead by example, Investigator Gayle. You look like a lawyer in that suit. Almost respectable. You up on the stand, me in the jury box? I’d believe everything you said. But like all of us you need to do better. Where is your apprentice, by the way? He hasn’t been in all day. He should have been in court with you, learning how to put a bad guy away. But clearly not.’

Vic, who had no idea where Skip was or what he was up to, said, ‘I’m keeping him busy. Helping him learn new skills, giving him a thorough grounding in custom and practice.’

‘I hear,’ Mikkel said, ‘that he thinks he has a new lead in the Redway case.’

‘Yeah. A possible link with the people who smuggled themselves inside that shipping container. Drug enforcement checked the waste tank of its toilet, found what was left of a bunch of torn-up papers. They weren’t exactly in the best condition, as you can imagine, but the techs were able to piece together a few fragments. Turns out they were drawings of an Elder Culture site. According to the kid, these drawings resemble the layout of Site 326, one of the Elder Culture sites licensed to Cal McBride’s company, Sky Edge Holdings. His former company, because Danny Drury is in charge of it now.’

Skip had called Vic that morning, talking a mile a minute. Vic had been forced to hang up on him because the trial had been about to start and he’d been in the middle of a conversation with the prosecution lawyer, but he believed that he’d caught the gist.

‘That’s what the kid told me,’ Mikkel said. ‘But I’m not hearing any actual evidence of any kind of link with the Redway thing.’

‘I admit it’s a stretch,’ Vic said. ‘But the drawing connects the people in the shipping container with that site, and Sky Edge Holdings. And Skip thinks Redway and his associate, David Parsons, were connected to the stowaways. That’s why, he thinks, Redway and Parsons were out by the shuttle terminal when they were jumped, and Redway was zapped in the head.’

‘But you don’t know who these stowaways are,’ Mikkel said.

‘Not yet.’

‘Or who killed Redway.’

‘We’re pretty sure it was either McBride or Drury. Both of them claim to have been elsewhere when Redway was killed. We checked their alibis, and both have holes, but yeah, so far we don’t have anything that puts either one at the scene. Which is why I told Skip to concentrate on finding the friend of the dead guy, David Parsons. He was there when his friend was killed, and maybe he can tell us something about these stowaways, too. There’s a watch notice out on him, and Skip has been checking out hotels and motels, flop houses and the like.’

‘That’s not all he has been checking,’ Mikkel said. ‘It seems that when he went over to the land-registry department to take a copy of that excavation licence, he found out that two other parties had also requested copies. A biologist who works for a company in France, and the British consulate. I see that this is news to you.’

That must have been the part that Vic had hung up on. He said, starting to get a bad feeling, ‘I’ve been out of the loop, what with being in court most of the day.’

‘The kid went to look for this biologist,’ Mikkel said, ‘but her place is closed up. Her neighbours think she’s gone on one of her field trips. So then he went to the British consulate, wanting to know why they were interested in that licence, if they’d taken a copy on behalf of Redway and Parsons.’

‘Oh man.’

‘Exactly. The consul called City Hall, City Hall called the seventh floor, seventh floor called the captain, and she tore a strip off the kid.’

‘What can I say? He’s young and eager, this is his first case—’

‘You’re his partner. I don’t want to have to step between the two of you.’

‘I appreciate your tact, sergeant.’

‘But if you cannot control your apprentice’s wayward tendencies and teach him how we put down murders, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Tell me about the kid. Is he getting laid on a regular basis?’

‘I’ve seen his partner. And since the kid isn’t a damn fool, I’d say yes.’

Vic had met her just once, soon after Skip had started work in violent crimes. She’d come in one evening to collect the boy detective for a concert they were going to. Classical music, out in the park. A knockout blonde with an athletic figure, unselfconscious in a clingy grey dress, telling Vic, after Skip had introduced them, to look after her man.

‘If that department is taken care of, show your apprentice how we relax around here. Take him somewhere convivial, engage in some male bonding over a drink or three, and explain to him that he should ease up on this whodunnit. It has been three days now, he has no hard proof that his two suspects had anything to do with it, and the only witness is missing. Probably buried by now somewhere in the back country. He should keep it active, follow up any new leads that present themselves, but meanwhile other cases are stacking up. Tell him all that,’ Mikkel said, ‘and then tattoo the chain of command on the insides of his fucking eyelids.’