The Inspector stands outside the station, in a circle of emptiness that belongs only to her. All around, the many minions she has summoned do their work, oblivious to the fact that it is pointless: that their quarry set them on the scent and now has salted the trail with aniseed and pepper so that the hounds are confounded. She is momentarily bereft of direction. If the Witness is so compromised, to whom should she report? In theory, yes: to the people directly – but short of standing on a box at Speaker’s Corner and shouting with all the other prophets, how should she reach them if not through the System? The Public Sphere itself gets news through the same machine that watches and records. She would be mad to assume she can broadcast her findings by that route. Perhaps she can. But she cannot plan based upon that premise any more. She had assumed there might be a threat to her, personally, but not to information. You can always get information out these days – except if you can’t.
Scrupulous justice and security of self. These are the meaning of the System to her. Not to her, to everyone under its Aegis.
I don’t even have a shield.
She takes two steps away from the scene before realising that she is actually leaving, that she is not shifting her position but walking away, and then she just keeps going. Everything is wrong and nothing is right and there is too much noise here.
Fugue. Not Break’s musical one, but the other kind, the psychological drift. She has seen it before as an aspect of the flow state, but here for the first time she experiences it arising from horror, and understands it as an aspect of defence. It is not dysfunction at all, but a kind of madness that will protect her from going mad.
She walks, one foot in front of the other, towards the bright lights of Oxford Street. Behind her, the Witness explains that the Inspector requires some time to consider the case, and that is fine.
*
The night air is very cold. The streets are fairly empty, though that will change towards the shopping area, gaudy with the approach of Christmas. The department stores will not be open this late, but the boutiques will, some of them, and the coffee shops and hot-desk sites that cater to business visitors from other time zones not yet orientated to GMT. There will be somewhere to buy a Union Jack, if that’s your pleasure, or a bowler hat made of false felt, or a thong with a beefeater on it. There will be cheap, random gifts for your children, if you have forgotten that tomorrow is a special day.
The Witness has been compromised, and she cannot know to what extent. Oliver Smith is dead, and Lönnrot is invisible. Hunter was right and something is wrong and it must be fixed.
Greece shall be torn no longer.
She should be exhausted, and there is lactic acid in her muscles, not just in the feet and legs but all the way up her core and into her shoulders. Stress and effort to the point of failure. And yet she feels in some way light.
FIRESPINE.
Lönnrot’s message, and if the obviously proximate word is a little much so, call it oracular instead.
Smith is dead. The Witness is compromised to a significant degree, and therefore by definition also the System as a whole, the two being inseparable. If the machine is not an honest broker then the System is – for the time being and to a greater or lesser extent – not a perfect state at all, but a perfect prison: a Panopticon in which the condemned must assume they are watched at all times and in all places, and act in line with the will of an arbitrary power. That power may counterfeit the action of justice in most cases, but justice incomplete is not justice, it is the anticipation of wrong. The System has as many eyes as it needs, and the Witness does not blink. It is distributed, intimate, internalised and perfect.
Why, then, is she walking rather than running? Why is she moving at all? If things are so bad – so dark and desperate – why, in this hour when heaven is falling, is she going shopping? Because shopping, certainly, is what she now intends, as she rounds the corner into the garish celebration of Oxford Circus. Not that she knows yet what she is shopping for, only that she has decided to shop, and in that decision is something unbending and determined.
If the System is truly compromised, then she has no hope. Yet hope is rising in her, and something steelier that she has never really had to deploy until now and did not know that she possessed – something in many ways unfashionable for an Inspector of the Witness: defiance.
This, she realises – this, right this moment – is her great case. It is the case every investigator should pray for, it is The One. Here, in the balance, is everything she cares about, and it is to be won or lost in her choices and her wit. Here for the first time she matches herself against an adversary who can destroy not only the local but the absolute meaning of her work.
She was appointed to this task. If she cannot track Lönnrot – if Lönnrot is invisible and Smith may be eaten by an impossible shark; if the Witness may blink, after all, and Hunter can elude the inquisition of the machine – it seems that her opponents also do not dare erase her, or care to – and nor can they ignore the process of her investigation, or position some collaborator to the task. They are new, then, or few in numbers, or bounded and constrained in some fundamental way. Such being so, they can be defeated, uncovered and excised, and the System can be fixed.
What did Hunter want? What did Smith want so badly from Hunter? What does Lönnrot want now, and why is Smith so very awfully dead? What is a Fire Judge? Who are they all, these people with their strange, unworldly concerns? Was the business of living not complicated enough?
What if the System cannot be fixed?
And what if it can, but can then once again be compromised, and so on and on and on so that one might never truly be sure whether one lived in heaven or hell? By definition: hell.
She stops for a moment between a barrow selling caramelised nuts and another with a heady vat of mulled red wine, cheap and acid before it was boiled and rank now with sawdust cinnamon. In the narrow space between them, a modest little coffee truck. She touches her terminal to the point of sale, then walks away again, drinking coffee and following her feet. She finishes the cup too soon on purpose, letting the last swallow burn her throat. She knows now why she’s here.
She needs to buy a doll’s house.
*
Carrying herself now with a calm she believes could last her whole life, but which she knows from experience is strangely temporary, the Inspector enters a grimly merry concession on three floors, the first decked in patriotic bunting. It is only a few minutes from her front door. She walks past it on off days and loathes the frontage, the generic portcullis shirts and red letterbox purses, the saucy key rings with smirking bikini girls driving buses. Once, though, needing a properly vile London-flavoured gift for a colleague from Manchester, she had forced herself to go inside – ultimately emerging that time with Tower Bridge chocolates in a moulded plastic presentational tray – and seen the upper floor, full of slightly higher-quality guilt gifts for wives and neglected offspring. She picks her way between Dick Van Dyke postcards and the silver-plate letter openers. A girl in a company T-shirt beckons her forwards, smile fixed, and throws a polystyrene aeroplane in a loop around her head.
‘Two for one,’ the girl says encouragingly as Neith goes by.
Up one flight and follow the arrows, and she is standing in the doll aisle, taking in the array. Purple plastic and pink plastic and fuchsia plastic vie for the title of Most Disgusting Shade, and the staringly exaggerated eyes of minidolls glower from the racks. She is able to discount immediately anything that is too small and anything that does not afford full access to the interior. Also unsuitable are those models with network access and cameras built in. At last, she calls a harried sales assistant over and gives him a list of specifications, which the man duly works his way through until he is able to propose two options. The plain white wooden one which she would actually like to give someone – if she knew any children – is frustratingly twice as expensive as the hideous Fashion TV Studio Plus! which doubles as a make-up station and occasi
onally speaks to you in a trilling faux-Italian accent about the importance of looking your best.
‘I’ll take that one,’ she says, pointing, and at the same time picks up some light paper, a box of soft pencils and a hard steel clipboard debossed with the head of Oliver Cromwell on a spike. The sales assistant is very keen to sell her a lucite one instead, but the Mohs scale of hardness awards acrylic glass no more than a four, as against steel’s five or six, so the Inspector demurs, wishing the shop’s inventory stretched to products in tungsten carbide.
She finds a deserted chain cafe and buys something to eat that comes in a non-recyclable bento box and tastes barely biological itself. Not important; it’s fuel and she’s starving, regretting both Jonathan Jones and his gnocchi.
Putting the doll’s house together takes longer than she had expected, and is made more rather than less difficult by the fact that she does not require the interior floors. After getting almost all the way there she has to go back and remove the voice box, and discreetly stamp on it until it stops talking. All the same, a little less than half an hour later she is the proud owner of a tabletop television studio comprised of two side walls and a greenscreen/cosmetics mirror at the back, this last having round, frosted lightbulbs around it in a pattern which the accompanying leaflet claims is ‘industry standard’. She considers the angles in the cafe and adds the studio’s half-roof (with scale model Fresnel lamps which actually illuminate the stage below) and rests the clipboard in the space where the stage should be. She sharpens the pencils and gathers some stationery, and sits, recognising that she has created in effect a miniature version of Hunter’s house for her own use: a space into which the Witness – with all its thousand eyes – cannot look. Instinctively, she feels dirty and ashamed. She wonders if she should apologise to the machine, and how it would tag that action. Uncommon politeness? Or something it should flag for the attention of Pippa Keene? Or both?
Instead, she asks the Witness how many times her own activities have been accessed by citizens since the beginning of her investigation. Too many. How many in the city? Again. How many from within the Witness or associated bodies? Only a few – Smith among them. She wants to ask for a deep dive analysis using Smith as a hub, but she can trust neither the answer nor the indulgence of those at whom her query would be aimed. She has to assume that any such direct question will be detected.
Under normal circumstances, Neith’s adversaries would face a similar limitation. Too many flags in a cluster would reveal the precise areas they do not wish examined. If there is a shadowy organisation of Fire Judges, say, dogging her footsteps, and the chiefs of that organisation were foolish enough to set up a query on its own name, she could in theory search the metadata to reveal them. Except that relies upon a mechanism she already knows can be blinded.
On the other hand, if she accepts Smith as her enemy and Hunter’s deliberate – well, if not murderer, at least torturer, and by extension the Fire Judges likewise; and if she assumes on the basis that Smith worked there that the Turnpike Trust is some sort of shell: then the Fire Judges are having a very bad morning. There are constables climbing all over their offices and asking questions and locking things, and Neith has a brief window in which she might gain the upper hand. If Turnpike itself is a red herring, the Fire Judges must still have woken to a tumultuous dawn. Either they killed Smith (in which case they hated him, for surely a simple assassination would have done the job) or someone else hates him and by extension them, and that cannot be reassuring either.
In every hypothesis, she must hope for confusion in the enemy camp. The alternative is paralysis. She must act now, and she must gather her strength.
She takes care to put her terminal glasses in her pocket, and writes a single sentence as a test.
Her hand guides the pencil. The letters are strange, because she rarely has to write by hand. The most recent experience she has of writing belongs to Berihun Bekele. Bekele was taught to write in the strict style of mid-century British pedagogy, and his fingers are longer than hers, his skeleton and muscles filled with different tensions. She has an urge to form her capitals more precisely than she normally does, a twitching irritation at their clumsiness that straddles the ghost muttering of his consciousness and her own.
All the same, she writes, and no one can see it.
A little while later she grips the doll’s house by its handle, and heads out into the street. She takes a night tram, sitting behind the curl of the rear stairs on the upper deck, looking backwards along the track, feeling everything wrong slip away into the red glow of the rear lights. For the first time in her own memory of herself, she is singing, something wordless and complex that cycles endlessly around itself. Perhaps it is an instinctive camouflage, or a warning to anyone boarding the tram that she’s not looking to share the view. It is almost 4 a.m., and she is going to visit a friend.
*
The flat is in a modern building, very white and sheer and not what she was expecting. She walks up four floors and along a pale, honey-carpeted corridor to find the door she is looking for. It is high-gloss black, the number printed hugely under the lacquer and repeating itself up and down the panel in regressing indigo and blue shadows. She knocks rather than ringing the bell, and then waits, because it’s the middle of the night.
A woman’s voice, clear and confident, speaks through the door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Neith. Mielikki.’
A pause. ‘Inspector Neith?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry to come so late.’
The door opens immediately, and a tiny figure in a vastly oversized towelling bathrobe peers up at her, perfect pale olive skin and black hair with a reddish tint.
‘You are welcome in this house,’ she says, very firmly. ‘You are welcome and you must come in! I am Maria like the Magdalene! And you’ – the woman breaks off and throws her arms around the Inspector, almost lifting her off her feet across the threshold and unexpectedly imparting for a moment the sensation of a small, muscular bosom beneath the robe – ‘you are my Ronald’s daytime wife! Yes?’ A huge smile. ‘You are the bad Inspector who always makes a mess of his schedule. Ronald! Ronald! Mielikki Neith is here! Put on your clothes, I will make tea. Camomile,’ she adds to Neith, ‘but trust me, you will like it. In, in, in, come in!’
Mielikki Neith does as she is told, and as she hangs up her coat on the strange many-armed stand in a perfect alcove just inside the door, she turns again and finds Tubman, who evidently does possess after all an actual first name, staring blearily at her from the bedroom doorway.
‘Inspector?’ Tubman says.
‘No,’ she replies. ‘This is unofficial, Tub. Ronald. Not work. Just happened to be passing.’
His eyebrows twitch. ‘Oh. Right.’
‘I came to show you this,’ she says, lifting the doll’s house. ‘I think I’m going to start collecting.’
‘Oh. Well, let’s …’ he shrugs, ‘let’s have a look, then.’
*
‘Ronald never brings anyone home from work,’ Maria complains as she pours a reedy-looking yellow tisane – Neith declines, privately, to call it tea – into printed basalt-resin cups and sets them down. ‘“No, no, Maria, they are very rough men and women, they are too coarse for you, you are very sophisticated and my work will bore you.” Assface,’ she adds to her husband, without rancour.
‘She came to a pub meet once,’ Tubman recalls, sipping and smacking his lips with every evidence of pleasure. ‘Hated it.’
‘Oh, because of the awful, awful beer!’ Maria snaps. ‘The people were splendid!’
The kitchen is the same as the front door and the hallway: a sublime iteration of London’s new style, all extruded surfaces, but arranged in a way Neith has never seen before so as to make something both practical and cosy – some Venezuelan understanding of Danish hygge which fits perfectly into the System’s mode.
‘You were right,’ Neith says hastily, ‘the camomile is lovely.’
Maria sm
iles immediately. ‘You are a nice lady. Not an assface at all.’ Her nails are perfect, Neith notices, rich dark red and very round. The arms emerging from the towelling sleeves are narrow but very muscular. The woman follows the line of her gaze. ‘Surgery,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes you have to waggle things about. Ronald, the lady came to show you something! Pay attention!’ But the imperiousness is softened, Neith sees now, by the light touch as she passes behind her husband, the squeeze that is both benediction and need. They are in step, these two, and she has no need of Oliver Smith’s kinesic assistant to tell her so.
‘Yes,’ Neith says. ‘I just thought I needed a hobby.’
Tub’s expression as Neith lifts the Fashion TV Studio Plus! on to the table gives her to understand that this is the kind of behaviour he has come to expect from the world, and he is almost relieved to find that she is as insane in her own measured, careful way as everyone else.
For God’s sake, Tub, sit down and look.
He does. She closes her eyes for a moment, then hears his voice jaunty and clear as usual.
‘I love what you’ve done with the place. Oh, look, there’s a black leather sofa for when they do those late-night chat shows where someone’s discovered Jesus and someone else is drunk. Did you buy that extra?’
‘Ronald,’ Maria says. ‘Be nice.’
‘I am, darling, believe you me.’
‘There is no such thing,’ Neith growls.
‘No, here,’ he says, fat finger tapping on the paper. She sees her own handwriting first, the shape of the letters fractionally off because of the awkward angle:
TUBMAN – I THINK THE WITNESS IS COMPROMISED AND I DON’T KNOW HOW BADLY. I NEED TO INVESTIGATE WITHOUT ALERTING THE OPPOSITION. HELP.
Under it, Tubman has written:
GO PUBLIC.
‘That’s the make-up counter,’ she says aloud. ‘Look, there are little cans of spray and everything. Oh, one of them’s fallen down.’