Great North Road

  ‘Aye, it’s a nice house, pet, and it’s in our budget.’ The icon was unfolding with geometric precision.

  Taxi twenty-two was the one that’d dumped the body at Elswick Wharf.

  Monday 21st January 2143

  The 22.27 hours Sunday night virtual was centred on Water Street, with the Tyne bordering one side of the theatre, and Scotswood Road the other. Sid stood amid the dilapidated structures on the east of Water Street, looking over the network of small roads that laced the old buildings and shabby industrial sheds together as the land fell down to the water. The layout across the slope wasn’t that complicated, hardly a maze. Running right through the middle was an old rail embankment, which was now Cuttings Garden Park, a slash of green amid the urban darkness, a relief for the local residents which included a petting zoo for kids who never got out of the city.

  The locale where his legs vanished into the virtual was where the gang’s byteheads had done their worst. None of the meshes facing Water Street was active, they’d ripped them apart. The road’s smartdust macromesh had been pulsed to death. The AI running the virtual had painted over the outlines with library images from the city’s planning department, showing the façade of the buildings in a quiltwork of seasons from bright high summer to grey autumn, wet surfaces, dry panels baking in sunlight, slush, mud, ice . . . Nothing from the actual weekend survived.

  It was slightly better from halfway up the slope, beyond the dividing line which was the A695 Scotswood Road. Even there, magnifying the image scale made the sensor failures even more prominent. Sid looked down on the six-lane carriageway that was Scotswood Road. Directly below him was the AI construct of the junction with Dunn Street, cutting through the line of car showrooms which lined the south side of the major road. On the eastbound carriageway, just appearing on the image recorded by the mesh of smartcells coating the Citroën showroom’s front wall, was the taxi. It was a dark blue verging on black, and absolutely identical to all the other citycabs.

  Last night, once they’d established this was the one, Abner, Ralph, Reannha and Eva had run pattern-match programs from the best mesh images they had. There was nothing on the vehicle: no mud-splash, no dint, no scuff that distinguished it from any other. The team had also gone over the route several times, constantly freezing the virtual image in an attempt to actually see the driver. But, as a quick call to Tilly Lewis at Northern Forensics confirmed, the windshield and side windows were all coated in a one-way privacy film. Nobody got to see in, nor did the door open at any time.

  ‘And they changed licence code how many times?’ Sid asked.

  ‘Four,’ Eva confirmed. She was standing next to him, giving the taxi a pensive stare. ‘Each time at a junction they’d disabled.’

  ‘So, they knew which junctions had been taken out.’

  ‘Absolutely, boss. Most times, he’d wait until another taxi was in the junction. This was meticulous planning.’ She pointed down at the taxi. ‘From where he is now he hangs a U-turn at the Park Road junction and goes right back into the centre of town. Every turn, every nasty bend, every awkward junction: this bastard takes it. It took him forty-eight minutes from this moment until he vanishes into the GSW area.’

  ‘Not bad for city traffic,’ Ian commented from inside the zone theatre control centre.

  Sid gave him a grin through the glass. ‘Aye, man; not bad.’ He gazed down at the dowdy riverside area again. ‘All right,’ he said, very aware of Ralph Stevens standing beside Ian, watching dispassionately. ‘This part we have to get perfect. We have to find out where this taxi came from, because that’s our murder site. The bastards ripped half of this district’s meshes in case we ever did this, so we’re going to show them just how much better we are. Let’s see.’ He turned and glanced down at the little alley next to the building site where the taxi had parked to get rid of the body. ‘To get here it had to either come down Water Street, Monarch Road, or Skinnerburn Road. It’s practically at the intersection of those three. So, where did it turn onto them? Dedra, our entry perimeter is from Redheugh Bridge, right along Scotwood Road to its junction with Armstrong Drive. We’ll start with the two hours leading up to this moment.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Dedra murmured.

  Sid jabbed his finger back into the image of the taxi. ‘I want every taxi that drove in. I don’t care what colour it is, what its licence code is. Start with the assumption that it’s false. Only when we clear it visually and with data confirmation does it get taken out of the zone.’

  The projection started to shift, shrinking so the area he’d designated could fit in. All the licensed citycab taxis were highlighted with neon-blue graphic tags.

  ‘Ari, you join me and Eva in here; we’re going to coordinate visual observation alongside Dedra’s digital trackers. Ian, set up in Office2, I had it cleared out first thing. I want to investigate every taxi we find. Check with the owner, the management company, the driver, and the fare – confirm what we’re seeing in here, even if it’s just a ride down the 695.’

  ‘That’s going to take a lot of work, boss.’

  ‘I’m going to call O’Rouke, get him to assign us some extra detectives for a couple of days.’

  He caught Ian’s muted grin through the glass and knew exactly what his deputy was thinking: rather you than me.

  Ian was right of course. O’Rouke ranted for several minutes before finally, grudgingly, agreeing to transfer even more of the detectives he couldn’t spare to Sid’s team on a temporary basis.

  By lunchtime Office2 was full of detectives making calls to check the route of every taxi that passed through the simulation in the zone theatre. Fifteen of them arrived to take their place at the zone consoles: a bunch of low-grade, poor-performance sickie kings which O’Rouke had managed to offload from other investigation teams, who appreciated being rid of all the deadwood. But the job Sid had given them wasn’t difficult, and with Ian riding them hard they only had to make a few calls to substantiate what each vehicle’s official log was claiming.

  When Vance Elston made his secure call at four o’clock that afternoon, Sid was able to report they’d identified two hundred and seven taxis as being in the area between 20.30 and 22.27 that night.

  ‘What about earlier?’ Elston asked immediately.

  Sid glanced over at Ralph; they were both in his small side office with the seals active. ‘We believe the two-hour timeframe is reasonable. If you have a body in the boot, you don’t want to hang around. They will have driven from the murder scene to the river as quickly as they could without drawing attention to themselves.’

  ‘They probably weren’t parked up just to throw off our timeline, either,’ Ralph said. ‘That opens a window for random discovery.’

  Elston snorted. ‘Did the detectives tell you that?’

  ‘It’s logical, and I agree with it.’

  ‘We have a new team checking out the legitimacy of each taxi,’ Sid said. ‘So we’ll start with those we can’t account for first. If we still haven’t identified it after we’ve visually reviewed all two hundred and seven in the zone we’ll go back to earlier that evening and begin again.’

  ‘How long is this going to take?’ Elston asked.

  ‘Realistically we can thoroughly backtrack four to five taxis per day. They’re going to be driving all across the city. It takes time to do it properly, and we can’t afford to miss a stop.’

  ‘Fifty days!’ Elston exclaimed. ‘I cannot accept that timescale.’

  ‘It’ll only take fifty days if it’s the very last one we review,’ Sid countered. ‘Probability says it’ll be about two to three weeks maximum before we hit on it.’

  ‘I remember you saying if we don’t catch them in five days we never will.’

  ‘Aye, that’s in a normal investigation,’ Sid said. ‘So far, this doesn’t qualify as normal on any level.’

  ‘Damn, I was hoping for something a little more encouraging once you’d confirmed the taxi.’

  ‘There’s still foren
sics; they’re going through what was left of the taxi. But whoever fireballed it knew what they were doing. Given what we’ve seen, the way the bodydump team wiped out road macromesh and ripped the wall-mounted smartdust, I want to get the city’s Gang Task Force to start pressuring their informants, see if anyone knows anything. If this is your alien, he definitely had help from the locals.’

  ‘We need to keep this investigation secure.’

  ‘It is. In fact bringing in the task force as an alternative line of investigation will help reinforce the carjacking line. That’s exactly the kind of crime low-level gangs perform.’

  ‘It’s logical,’ Ralph said. ‘And it could well produce a decent result. We need to open as many lines of enquiry as we can.’

  ‘Are you going native on me?’ Elston asked.

  ‘I’m pushing any angle that will uncover what the hell happened last weekend.’

  ‘Okay,’ Elston said. ‘It has my blessing. And I can even contribute another line of attack for you. It’s been agreed that all the A 2Norths will undergo genetic testing. If one of them is a fraud, they won’t be able to hide it much longer.’

  ‘That’s grand,’ Sid said. Off the top of his head he could think of half a dozen ways for an imposter to get round that test, especially if one of the other North families was involved. Samples weren’t hard to substitute if you had a couple of hours’ warning. ‘I’ve got Trose Secure working on whoever ripped the smartdust meshes; they’re about the best in the game. If I can pull in some byteheads for interrogation, we might develop some additional leads into the gang which did this. There was so much activity on Saturday and Sunday that someone somewhere has to be exposed.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’d like to keep on some of the extra detectives we had assigned to the case today to cover that aspect.’

  ‘It’s your investigation,’ Elston said. ‘Just do it. I’m not here to hold your hand.’

  ‘I’m telling you because I want to be able to call on you in case I get crapped on by O’Rouke over this. I’ve soaked up another fifteen detectives from the station, there’s barely anyone left to cover a mugging in this city, let alone anything serious.’

  ‘Ralph, cover him,’ Elston said. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not today,’ Sid admitted. ‘This is the legwork phase that every case has to plough through. It’s boring but essential.’

  ‘I know everything about good preparation, thank you. Keep the updates coming, and call me the second you get a break.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ralph said, but he was already talking to a dead screen.

  Sid shook his head in dismay. ‘Thanks,’ he said to Ralph.

  ‘If I didn’t think you were doing a good job, I wouldn’t support you.’

  ‘Aye.’ Sid reached up and tried to work some of the kinks out of his shoulder muscles. Spending half the day stooped over the zone projection hadn’t helped his posture, but spotting the taxis had been critical. It was the one thing he wasn’t prepared to delegate.

  ‘You do understand we can’t let it take fifty days,’ Ralph said.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  Monday 28th January 2143

  The seven o’clock buzz of the alarm clock dragged Sid out of a pleasant dream. He groaned in tired frustration and managed to hit the snooze button before Jacinta could stop him. Whatever the dream was, his fickle memory had chucked it by the time he flopped back onto the mattress.

  ‘You’ll have to get them ready this morning,’ Jacinta said. She sounded in pain.

  His grid loyally opened out, filling his vision with icons and basic text. Nobody had spotted a taxi picking up the North’s corpse yet. Must program a longer gap between waking up and the grid coming on. ‘I know.’

  She’d pulled a late shift on Sunday. Good money; but an emergency procedure meant she hadn’t got to bed until four.

  He told his e-i to mute the grid, and lay there until she started snoring again, then carefully got out of bed. Will and Zara were both stirring. He managed to get them up and into the bathroom without making too much noise. They’d grown used to Mum coming home late and needing to sleep, so they went downstairs quietly, carrying a pile of school clothes from the airing cupboard.

  ‘Well done,’ he told them both as they got dressed in front of the old Rayburn cooker in the kitchen. It was a thermo-store model, with a thick black collector slab of phase-change material mounted on the south-facing wall outside where it soaked up heat all summer long. That heat then radiated slowly and constantly into the ovens and hotplates, keeping them warm so they only needed a small electrical boost to bring them up to cooking temperature. It also made the kitchen the warmest room to be in first thing on a winter’s morning.

  Sid flicked on the Rayburn’s quick-boost function and poached some eggs for breakfast.

  ‘Have you both finished your homework?’ he asked as they sat down to eat.

  ‘You asked that last night,’ Will complained. ‘I told you I filed mine on Friday. The school network confirmed and certified. I’m in the clear.’

  ‘I’m not checking up on you,’ Sid said. ‘Just concerned, that’s all.’

  ‘I read all my book, Daddy,’ Zara said earnestly. ‘I like the pony princess stories.’

  Will pulled a face but didn’t jeer. Sid gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Well done, pet.’ Zara was a keen reader, but he couldn’t wait for her to get on to more interesting stuff. The teachers all said how important it was to support her at this stage; too many kids went for the easy option of zone interactives as soon as they’d covered the basics.

  ‘So can we have a puppy if we get the new house?’ Will asked as he cut up some toast. ‘It’s easy big enough.’

  ‘A puppy is a lot of work you know,’ Sid said. He’d sneaked off on Friday afternoon to visit the house in Jesmond. Ian and Eva had covered for him, loading Ralph down with file after file for review. It wasn’t hard – the investigation was amassing a phenomenal amount of data. His initial estimate of backtracking three or four taxis each day had proved somewhat optimistic. On Thursday they’d managed just two. The route one had taken through town was absurdly convoluted, then the fare had been driven out to Morpeth, which required a whole new batch of mesh files to follow. Ralph was there in the office and zone theatre with them; he understood. Elston was less forgiving.

  ‘I’ll walk it, Daddy,’ Zara promised solemnly. ‘Every day.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘See what?’ Jacinta asked. She came into the kitchen, wrapped in a big towelling robe, her hair wild. A hand covered a big yawn.

  ‘You should be asleep,’ Sid scolded.

  ‘I want to say goodbye to everyone,’ she said, and put her arms around Will and Zara, squeezing lovingly. ‘Now: see what?’

  ‘If we get a puppy.’

  ‘Only in the new house, Mum,’ Zara said.

  ‘Oh.’ Jacinta gave Sid an interested look. ‘Really?’

  ‘I thought we might put in an offer,’ Sid said. ‘I went over our finances last night. We can probably afford it – if we get a decent price for this one.’

  ‘Aye pet, are you sure?’ Jacinta sat down hard, and reached for the pot of tea.

  Sid looked round the table. ‘We all liked it, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes!’ the kids yelled.

  Jacinta sipped some tea, combing a hand back through her hair. ‘Blimey.’

  ‘Can’t live here for ever,’ Sid said, and gripped her free hand. ‘Let’s go for it. Call the estate agent, make an offer.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Go for fifteen per cent under the asking price.’

  ‘It’s down as offers in excess of.’

  ‘And if the vendor does get offered more, they’ll be very happy. Until then, there’s our offer for them to consider.’

  ‘Fifteen per cent?’ She sounded uncertain.

  ‘They haven’t had a serious offer yet, and it’s been on the market for six weeks.’

  ‘Aye, but n
obody buys at Christmas.’

  ‘Do you want to try for the house or not?’

  ‘Okay.’ She squeezed his hand back. ‘I’ll call the agent later this morning. Hell, we’ll have to get this house valued. And I’m telling you now nobody is coming to view, not even on virtual, until it’s been cleaned up. And—’

  ‘Finish your tea,’ Sid told her.

  *

  When Sid walked into Office3 at eight thirty, Tilly Lewis was there waiting for him. As soon as the door seal turned blue she handed over a thick folder of hard copy, and three memory chips.

  ‘Final forensics report on the burn-out taxi,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’ Sid took her though into his side office, and secured it. ‘So what have we got?’ he asked as he loaded one of the chips into the secure Office3 network, downloading the data into their dedicated memory.

  ‘Everything got burned badly in the fire.’

  ‘Aye man, that’s it?’

  ‘You saw it. Someone set off a fireball in that taxi, there must have been ten litres of bioil used. We’re good, but we can’t work miracles.’

  ‘Okay, what about the vehicle’s network? Did you manage to recover any of the software fixes?’

  ‘Ah, that’s still ongoing. The components had to go to a specialist company in London. They use quantum electron analysis to read the processor circuitry directly. They usually work on aerospace networks, recovering data after a plane crash, so this shouldn’t be a stretch for them. But it’s not going to be quick.’

  ‘Right. Thanks Tilly.’

  ‘There was something. Not the taxi itself. You remember the bundle of clothes in the boot?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Never bundle clothes if you want them to burn properly. Cloth makes a good insulator, the core of the bundle was intact.’ She reached forwards and flicked through the hard copy. ‘The shirt had five cuts on the left breast corresponding to the pattern on the body you hauled out of the Tyne, the surrounding area was drenched with blood. Same with the suit: matching cut pattern, and an equivalent large bloodstain.’