The Age of Scorpio

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.

F*ck 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.

‘F*ck 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.’

‘Seriously though, I could sit here exchanging crude sexual insults with you all day, but I don’t want to get all buddy movie with you; I just want to expedite getting this information.’

‘Act and talk less like a wanker then,’ she suggested.

‘Please, will you answer my questions?’ he asked, mildly exasperated.

‘Such a pain having to deal with us little people, isn’t it? Answer me first. What’s going to happen?’

Du Bois looked at her for a while, trying to decide how much to tell her.

‘D notice,’ he finally said. ‘Nothing goes out on the news; a cover story will be found for the locals. It’ll become an urban myth.’

‘It’ll go out on the Internet,’ Mossa said.

No, it won’t, du Bois thought. The Circle had the resources to police even that. He shrugged.

Mossa pointed at the nine pictures on the phone. ‘These kids weren’t terrorists.’

Du Bois didn’t answer.

‘Look. You’ve got everything on the files, obviously, but that’s not what you want. You’re looking for a little bit of local info, right?’

Du Bois nodded.

‘This wasn’t a terrorist incident?’

‘It seems unlikely.’

‘Then what?’

‘Drugs lab explosion,’ he told her, failing to sound even remotely sincere.

‘With deco? Hazmat? Techies from some agency I’ve never even heard of? You want to insult my intelligence, you can go and f*ck yourself.’ She turned back to her laptop.

‘You know I’m not going to tell you, right? If it’s any consolation, the ongoing investigation is going to have nothing to do with you,’ he said impatiently. Reasoning with people is such a chore, du Bois thought.

Mossa turned back to face him. ‘Fine. Level with me. Is this something I have to worry about?’

Du Bois gave this some thought.

‘Yes. However, it’s not something you can do anything about. Feel better?’

Mossa studied him for a moment.

‘That I believe. They’re a group of goths, or emos, or whatever unhappy white kids like to call themselves these days. They set themselves up as some sort of club of hedonists. Sex, drugs, ropey music, that sort of thing.’

‘A cult?’ du Bois asked.

‘Wouldn’t know, wouldn’t be surprised if they dabbled in that sort of thing, but I think their focus was on exterminating rational thought and getting laid. Though they were into the vampire thing.’ Du Bois raised an eyebrow. ‘Bloodletting.’

‘Why?’ he asked, mystified.

Mossa shrugged. ‘Fun?’

Du Bois wondered if that was how this had happened. Something in the blood, a sensitive enough mind would act like a beacon.

‘Is that significant?’ Mossa asked, watching du Bois’s reactions.

‘Why your interest?’ du Bois countered, ignoring her question.

‘Minor-league dealing. We were getting close to arresting one of the weaker ones, getting them to turn over and give us someone bigger. Vice caught just the slightest whiff of specialised prostitution.’

‘Specialised?’

‘Maybe the bloodletting,’ Mossa said, shrugging.

Du Bois reached down and touched the centre of his phone screen. The central picture expanded to fill the screen. The girl in the picture was not just attractive, she was beautiful, the sort of beauty that could stop a room and make people either desire or hate her. She was slender, pale, with high cheekbones, dark eyes. Her dyed-black hair was a travesty. Even through the surveillance picture he could see a sadness that was more than a subcultural affectation. This was an unhappy, isolated and lonely girl, and he thought he knew why.

Mossa knew her. ‘Natalie Luckwicke, twenty-one, from Bradford. She may be vice’s whiff of prostitution. Rumour has it that she does tricks for some of the better-paying and weirder johns in the area.’

Clear all that shit off her face and she could command a high price, du Bois thought. He tried to imagine what she would look like now, but he had no real frame of reference. It could be her. It could be any of a thousand girls her age.

‘Pimp?’ du Bois asked, still studying the picture as he downloaded all the information he could find about her.

‘Nothing so prosaic. Just a friend who knows people, can make the right introductions, that sort of thing. A real sleazy piece of shit called William Arbogast. Mid-level dealer to Portsmouth’s great and good, has fingers in some dodgy Internet sites as well.’

He was already downloading all the information on Arbogast. He quickly went through blinds and holding companies, found his connection to online porn sites and did a search through them with tightly defined parameters, found what he was looking for and cleaned up the image. Even with the wig, the make-up and the bad camera work, it was Natalie Luckwicke he saw in his mind’s eye. He didn’t like seeing her this way. Mossa watched him clench his fist. He cut the feed off.

‘Thank you,’ he said. Mossa just nodded. Du Bois turned and headed for the door.

‘Tell me something.’ Du Bois stopped. ‘Who do you work for?’ When he turned to look at her, Mossa was surprised to see that he was smiling. There wasn’t much humour in the smile.

‘Would you believe the druids?’

Mossa frowned. ‘You’re not funny.’ She went back to the laptop even as all the information on the Pretoria Road incident was being wiped from that computer and every other computer, regardless of security, all over the world.

Du Bois forwarded everything he had found out to Control. The question was, could she have survived an incursion, even one as small-scale as this?

King Jeremy stared at the manticore through the bars of its cage. It, or rather she, had the body of a red lion, rows of shark-like teeth and a scorpion tail that could fire its sting and quickly regrow it. The bat-like wings had been the most difficult. They allowed it to glide but not fly. It was of little use in the arena but he liked to remain true to the designs in the Shattered Skies Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

It was the face he liked the most though. She had been a model once, before she became graft meat. She had made the mistake of laughing at him at some party. It had been a matter of dropping something in her drink and programming her to kidnap herself. No way to trace it back to him. Beautiful face, monstrous body – difficult to imagine how he could be more like God, Jeremy mused. It was the misery on her face he liked. The desperately-trying-to-work-out-what-had-happened-to-herself. It wasn’t just her flesh he’d violated; it was everything she knew about reality. Pretty young women weren’t turned into monsters and forced to fight in an arena in her world. Bitch wasn’t laughing now, he thought.

Jeremy realised that he couldn’t remember her name any more. He shrugged and looked back at the monitor. He still found it easier to use high-spec monitors than do it entirely in his head. The situation in Portsmouth was very interesting and pointed towards more of the lost tech, as they had started calling it because it sounded cooler than super tech or alien tech. They still had no idea what it was or where it came from, though much of it seemed to be very old.

Jeremy had first heard rumours in the darker parts of the black market that dealt in technology far in advance of what people thought possible. Jeremy had been in his second year at MIT. Hacking, various data crimes and all-out electronic theft had not enabled him to afford the sort of prices that the lost tech commanded. They had, however, provided him with more than enough money to hire military contractors, as mercenaries were called these days, to hit one of the deals and steal the item.

Despite the multiple electronic blinds and go-betweens he had put between himself and the contractors, it had been the most frightening thing that Jeremy had ever done, but he’d hit the jackpot. As far as he could tell, what they had stolen was some sort of miniature nano-machine factory capable – assuming enough energy and raw materials – of producing the tiny machines that could create just about anything and alter matter at its molecular level. He’d named it Cornucopia after the magic item on the final level of Pagan Earth.

Once he had worked out how to use it, he no longer had to rely on contractors. King Jeremy could augment and hardwire the skills he required to mimic most of the characters he played in games. He had done this and then taken out the contractors just to be on the safe side. Since then he had got hold of more of the lost tech. Some of it was spectacularly advanced software, some biotech, but most of it was hardware. He had bought some, though rarely for money; most of the rest he had killed and stolen for, or arranged proxies to do so. In one spectacular case, an entire nanite-slaved battalion of the Chinese army had done his dirty work on a mountain plateau in Tibet.

Then through a series of games he had designed himself to psychometrically and intellectually test other gamers, he had recruited the rest of the Do As You Please Clan.

He was reading a blog about some emo kid with hallucinogenic blood on some vampire wannabe’s blog. As he watched, the words started to disappear.

‘What the f*ck?’ he muttered to himself. He had set his systems to automatically save any information he came across on the Portsmouth situation. It was a minor AI search routine. Not only was the search routine violated, but when he checked his own internal systems he saw the scant information he did have being eaten.

‘No, no, no, no!’ The amount of time it had taken to violate his security, security far in advanced of what modern technology was supposed to be capable of, had been so small it had been difficult to measure. Only someone with access to lost tech would be able to do this, and they would either have to have better lost tech or be more skilled at utilising it than Jeremy was. He had been aware that other groups had access to the powerful technology but had always tried to avoid them unless he was stealing from them. Even then he tried to pick on people on the lower echelons, for example the ultra-rich who had just stumbled on the technology or poorer countries’ black science programmes that had found the technology purely by chance.

King Jeremy stared at the monitor, which was swiftly becoming a focus for his rage. The sounds of heavy metal and simulated warfare came from the other room. Dracimus was playing a first-person shooter. This acted as Jeremy’s soundtrack as he tore the monitor off the table, flung it across the room and reduced the rest of his immediate surroundings to so much destroyed junk.

Seething, he headed towards the pleasure dome – what they called the main area of the Boston warehouse. They had used Cornucopia to terraform, as they liked to term it, the warehouse.

When King Jeremy had found himself capable of redesigning flesh, he had kept his basic look but got rid of his imperfections, made himself more handsome and a lot more athletic, aping the look of characters he saw in films, games and comics. The irony – that he now looked like the high-school alpha males he hated – was lost on him.

Dracimus was gaming old-style. There was little challenge in gaming now, when you could control the characters with your mind. Besides, they had the capabilities to make the real world like their games if they so chose. At the moment Dracimus was using an old-fashioned controller on one of the intermediate levels on the hardest setting of the Wild Boys FPS. He was playing the hacked game at lightning speed, slumped in his shorts in the middle of their massive line of sofas. The future war played out on the cinema-sized screen that took up one of the warehouse walls.

Dracimus, if anything, looked more like a high-school jock than Jeremy, if the jock had a serious steroid problem. He acted like one as well. What Dracimus wanted he had to have, immediately.

Baron Albedo was asleep, entwined with three of his latest sex zombies. After all, nano-technology was better than Rohypnol. His face was still white from burying it in the small mountain of synthetic cocaine on the table in front of him.

Inflictor Doorstep – King Jeremy had no idea where the name had come from – was looking more and more demonic. His skin had taken on a grey cast and was starting to look more like armour plate. His eyes were black-and-red spirals. He was rendering down one of the sex zombies he had broken. Feeding the woman head first into Cornucopia, something he liked doing. Inflictor Doorstep even scared Jeremy a little.

‘We’ve just been hacked.’ That even got Inflictor’s attention. ‘We’re going to England.’

Another night on the street. Despite the warmth during the day, Beth had spent most of the night awake, shivering in her sleeping bag and staring at graffiti. Someone had painted the words THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED on the wall opposite. Beth had no idea what it meant but had initially thought it a little profound. Now it was just irritating her.

She was going to go back tomorrow. Hitch to London and get a train home. She had no idea what she was going to tell her dad. She could not see her sister as a terrorist. It would have been too much like hard work. Even with Talia’s near-suicidal taste in men, Beth still couldn’t see her even getting involved with that. On the other hand, Talia hadn’t visited her in prison, and a lot could have changed in the years since she had last seen her sister. Maybe she had been unknowingly sharing digs with a bomb-maker, but even that sounded far-fetched. On the other hand, Beth thought, someone had to share digs with terrorists. You just never think it will happen to someone you know. Her dad was going to have to be happy with what little she could give him. Maybe she should tell him to get in contact with the police.

Every time Beth felt herself falling asleep, the same question echoed around her head. Who’s to blame? She hadn’t liked Talia, but she was family. Beth couldn’t accept the pure bad luck of Talia being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone had to know more about this than she did. Talia had always been the tragic social butterfly on the alternative scene. Everyone had known her in Bradford. It would have involved a radical change of personality for her not to want to be the centre of attention in Portsmouth as well. If nothing else, someone would know what she had been doing in the run-up to this.

In the early hours of the morning Beth got up and found a place to hide her kitbag. She took an old picture of Talia, the Balisong knife and her brass knuckles, and started to wander.

It hadn’t been difficult. The clothes might have changed a little, same with the hairstyles, but all subcultures had their uniforms. She spotted them on a wide street called Elm Grove. Followed them into a narrow street with what looked like some kind of clock tower at the bottom of it where it intersected with another road. Beth was pretty sure she wasn’t too far from the sea.

The pub was in the middle of the street. It was called the Colonial Arms and had a late licence. She had heard the bustle and noise as soon as she turned into the street. It had a paved beer garden packed with people.

Inside it was warm and seemed to Beth to be full of light, though the atmosphere was strangely subdued. She wondered if it had anything to do with the terrorist incident. Had these people lost friends? The pub was made up of two large wooden-floored rooms and a smaller area up some steps set back from the bar. The bar was close to the door and it was standing room only. Beth had to push her way to the bar to order a pint of bitter with her scarce cash.

She got some looks on the way in but she had on her leather, her combat trousers and her army-surplus boots. She wore the uniform even if it was an older variant. The bouncers had sized her up on the way in as well. Wondering if she was going to be trouble. Beth hoped not but she was pleased they hadn’t searched her.

She took stock of the place and then started showing the photograph around, asking people if they had seen Talia. Beth started with the goth/emo crowd and got negatives. She was pretty sure some of them were lying because they didn’t want to get involved but she wasn’t going to push it yet.

Eventually she spoke to someone who at least admitted to having seen her. This led to Beth cornering another girl in the bathroom. Beth had put a leather-clad arm in the girl’s way and asked her to look closely at the picture. The frightened girl had tried to bluster her way out of it, but Beth had just stared at her. Finally she had given her a name. Jaime. Beth had got her to describe this Jaime. He was in tonight. He was here every night. Where was he sitting? How many people were with him? Finally she’d let the girl go.

Beth found him quickly. She had intended watching him for a bit before going to speak to him. He had a narrow pockmarked face, long lank hair pulled back into a ponytail. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She reckoned he was a bit older than the majority of those in the pub, probably of an age with her. He was at a table with a couple of cronies and several girls a few years younger. He had minor-league dealer written all over him.

Beth sighed when he saw the girl from the toilet rush over to Jaime and point at her. He said something harsh to her and the girl backed away. Then he looked over at Beth. She sighed and headed over to his table. He glared at her all the way over.

‘You looking for me?’ he shouted over the din of the music and people talking. Beth nodded and showed him the picture.

‘You know her.’ She made sure that it didn’t sound like a question. Jaime barely glanced at it.

‘She’s dead,’ he told her. Nice, Beth thought. People were starting to listen now. One of the girls at the table, a pretty young goth who had the look of a nice middle-class girl slumming – Beth knew the type – was trying very hard not to look at the photo.

‘I know. I’m her sister.’

‘So?’ She was getting hard stares from the two guys with Jaime.

‘Look, I’m just trying to find out about her. Speak to someone who knew her. It’s been a long time.’

‘Bit late now, isn’t it? Should’ve picked up the phone.’

‘I’ve been away,’ she told him evenly, hoping he got the message. He did, and looked at her with renewed interest, maybe a bit more caution.

‘That supposed to impress me?’

‘I’m not trying to impress you. Look, if not you then point me in the direction of one of her friends, and I’ll get out of your hair.’ As she said ‘friends’ one of Jaime’s cronies, an ugly skinhead with blue biro tattoos, glanced over at the girl. Beth tried not to let on that she’d noticed.

‘Why don’t we go and talk about this outside? A bit quieter. Hear ourselves think, like. Delicate stuff this.’ Suddenly he was all smiles. Here we go. Beth sighed.

They’d come out of the pub and headed down towards the sea but turned off into a parking bay underneath some flats. Beth couldn’t help but think that the little block of flats looked like a nice place to live. She couldn’t even be bothered to ask Jaime why he needed his two mates for their private little chat. Reaching into a pocket she turned to face the three of them. As she did, he was on her, grabbing her leather jacket and slamming her against the wall. Something about it made her think that he was used to trying to intimidate women – there was a rehearsed familiarity to his actions.

‘You’re one ugly—’ he managed to get out. There wasn’t much power in the headbutt but she’d placed it correctly and nobody likes getting hit in the nose. Jaime grabbed his nose instinctively. Beth pushed him back to give herself room and kicked him in the knee, hard. There was a crack and he screamed and went down. The ugly skinhead moved faster than the guy in the shell suit. He grabbed for her, but his momentum brought him onto Beth’s hook. His nose exploded and he staggered back holding his face. The brass knuckles came away bloody. She hit him again, a fast jab to the side of the head just to discourage him from any more involvement. He sat down hard on the ground.

The click of the switchblade opening was unmistakable. Beth turned to look at the guy in the shell suit. Jaime tried getting up. Beth helped him back to the ground with the sole of her boot. It wasn’t the first time she’d had a blade pulled on her. Most of the time it was just a threat. Shell suit looked like it was just a threat, like he was used to showing people the blade and getting what he wanted. Problem was, it could be difficult to be sure.

‘Come on then,’ she said and gave him the hard stare. Even if he went for her she was pretty sure she could take him. He looked like a long streak of piss to Beth.

Shell suit looked at skinhead and Jaime and started backing away. If he left there was always the chance he’d come back with friends, but she didn’t think he would tell anyone. When you’re a guy you don’t expect to see your mates knocked down by a girl, particularly if you think you’re a hard man.

Beth had to smile as he turned and tried to walk away casually. She turned back to the other two. Skinhead was trying to get up. His eyes couldn’t focus. Beth was a little worried that she had hit him too hard but didn’t think he would bother her any time soon.

‘You f*cking ugly bi—’ Jaime started. Beth kicked him in the ribs, very hard.

On the doors she remembered working with another bouncer called Thomas, who had been a member of the infamous Derby Lunatic Fighters football firm in the early 80s. He had once told her that if you wanted to know something and someone wouldn’t tell you, then all you had to do was let the tip of your knife touch the lens of their eye. You had to be very careful not to puncture it, though Thomas had been of the opinion that scratching it was okay. That way, every time they opened their eyes they’d think of you.

The Balisong knife opened easily in her hand as she knelt down by Jaime. He tried to get up so Beth punched him in the ribs, the same place she had kicked him. He yelled and she grabbed his face. Seeing the blade of the knife heading towards one of his eyes, Jaime closed them.

‘Open your f*cking eye or I’ll put it out,’ she snapped. He seemed to believe her. Resting the tip of the blade against the lens of the eye was harder than Thomas had led her to believe. He kept blinking, but she was pretty sure that he got the point.

‘Stop being a prick and tell me about my sister,’ she demanded.

‘What do you want to know?’ he asked desperately. That stopped her. What did she want to know? What she had been doing for six years? Had she grown up? Was she happy? Or was she still destructive and miserable? What was it about Beth that Talia had hated so much when all she had wanted was to be her older sister?

‘What happened to her?’ she asked.

‘We don’t know,’ he finally managed. ‘Nobody does. Some kind of terrorist bomb, but there’s nothing in the papers. What, you don’t think that I . . .’

Beth took the blade away from his eye and sat down on the ground. What the f*ck am I doing? she asked herself. This was a good way to get put back in prison.

‘What was she to you?’ she finally asked. ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ she added.

‘We saw each other for a while, you know?’

Yep, you’re just about a big enough sleazebag for her to be interested in you.

‘But she was just using me, you know? Because I had gear and she liked it.’

She hadn’t changed, Beth thought.

Jaime had been in love with her, he said. Beth felt more embarrassed than anything else when he started crying. ‘I miss her, I really miss her,’ he wailed.

Brilliant.

‘Who did she hang out with?’ she asked, wondering why she was bothering.

‘That goth bunch. They were weirdos. I mean they all are, but they were dead cliquey. Called themselves the Black Mirror or something wanky like that. They said they were like hedonists, like Burroughs – exterminate all rational thought, drugs, orgies, all sorts. Modelled themselves on the Hellfire Club, read de Sade. They all went up in the house.’ Then he really started to cry, sobs racking his body.

She believed him. It sounded exactly like the sort of bullshit that Talia would get involved in.

‘Was she doing a lot of gear?’ she asked. Jaime nodded. ‘What?’

‘Pretty much everything and as much as she could get.’

Beth grabbed him by his hoodie. ‘From you?’ she demanded, the threat back in her voice.

‘Not after I found her messing with H. I went mental at her.’ He started sobbing again. ‘That’s when she called me a small-minded little man and left.’

‘Where were they getting the money from?’

‘I don’t know.’ Beth shook him. ‘Really, I don’t know!’

‘What’s going on down there?’ The owner of the voice sounded like he had been building up the courage to shout for some time. ‘I’m calling the police!’

Beth got up and headed back to the street.

Head down, hands in the pockets of her leather jacket, she walked up the little street. It had started to rain and the lights from the pub reflected off the wet tarmac. It was kicking-out time. Few people spared her a look. If they had seen her leave with Jaime they would have assumed she was buying from him. Only the girl from the toilets who had grassed her up was staring at her. There was no sign of shell suit.

‘Excuse me?’ the question sounded like it was the third or forth time it had been said and Beth had only just noticed it. She looked round to see the pretty little goth who had been sitting with Jaime.

‘Yeah?’ Beth was glancing around, eager to get away in case the police turned up.

‘You don’t look like her.’ Beth turned back to fix her with an angry glare, and the girl shrank back. Beth was sick of the comparison.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

‘Talia was my friend,’ the girl said. She looked like she was about to cry. Talia didn’t have friends, Beth thought, just people she could use.

‘You got any money?’ Beth asked. The girl seemed taken aback.

‘A little.’

‘Buy me a kebab and we can have a bit of a chat.’

‘You’re just like her,’ the girl said, smiling. Beth clenched her fists. No, I’m just skint.

It had been a bit of a walk to where Elm Grove curved round onto another road with a theatre on the corner. It was lined with shops, closed pubs and open junk-food shops. Beth was tucking into the kebab before it occurred to her to ask for the girl’s name.

‘Leticia.’

‘Really?’ Beth asked sceptically.

‘Well, it’s really Maude.’

‘Maude’s a nice name.’ This time it was Maude looking sceptical. ‘Okay, it’s really not.’

Beth couldn’t believe how good the kebab was. She had been hungrier than she thought. Maude was picking at pitta bread with some salad in it.

‘Were you part of this Black Mirror?’ Beth asked.

‘They were considering me.’ Beth rolled her eyes. Arseholes. ‘But they scared me a little bit as well. Talia was the nicest of them – she was really friendly.’ Beth was surprised to hear this. Perhaps she had grown up a bit since she had last seen her.

‘She didn’t have anything to do with terrorists, did she?’ Beth asked. Maude just laughed and shook her head. ‘Were they making drugs in the house or anything?’ Maude shook her head and looked sad again. Beth was worried that she was going to cry again. Her make-up was smeared enough as it was.

What are you doing here? Beth asked herself. You’re not going to learn anything good about Talia. What you need to do is think of something to tell Dad that isn’t going to break his heart.

‘How did you become friends?’ The question just popped into her head. She just hoped that it didn’t bring more tears. Maude seemed to be struggling with an answer.

‘Well, I’d known her to say hi to ever since I came here for uni, but . . . well, she helped me through a difficult time.’ Maude wouldn’t look at her. She seemed embarrassed about something. This was sounding less and less like the Talia Beth had known.

‘What?’ Beth asked and then groaned inwardly as she saw tears start to well again. It’s a wonder she has any eyeliner left.

Suddenly Maude looked up at her. ‘How much do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘Go on.’

‘I got into something well over my head.’ Her face crumpled.

‘Look, don’t cry; just tell me.’

‘Well, he said it was upmarket stuff – tasteful clients who would pay a lot of money, you know, help me get through my course a little less in debt. But then when I saw him and he was old and fat and wanted to do . . . things . . . It wasn’t like the films, you know, champagne and a few Js.’

Beth stared at her. ‘You were turning tricks?’

‘Just one. I couldn’t handle it. But Talia . . . she helped me deal—’

‘Was Talia?’ Beth asked despite herself. She knew the answer but it wasn’t real until someone else told her it was. Maude nodded.

‘It was horrible, but she really looked after me,’ she managed through the sobs and the gulping for air.

‘Did she get you into it?’

Maude looked stricken. She probably hadn’t thought about it like that.

‘She introduced me to William, but only after I asked about it.’

And how did you know to ask? Beth wondered.

‘She did porn as well, didn’t she?’ Maude looked guilty but nodded.

She actually thinks she’s betraying Talia. ‘Who’s William?’ In her mind Beth was screaming Go home to herself.