False Value (Rivers of London 8)

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to all those cubicle dwellers who, in all their vast and multifaceted variety, labour thanklessly under the lash of insensate management to ensure that all the vital things in our lives do the things we expect them to do or, at the very least, don’t spontaneously explode at an awkward moment.

  FALSE VALUE

  BEN AARONOVITCH

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Part One

  1. January: Some Swans are White

  2. December: Relative Changes in Likeliness

  3. January: Some Sheep are Black

  4. December: Changes in a State of Mind

  5. January: Some Cats are Grey

  6. December: Changes in Relative Charge

  Part Two

  7. No More Soap Opera

  8. All You Lose is the Emotion of Pride

  9. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

  10. There is Now

  Part Three

  11. Still Alive Out There . . . Good

  12. I’m Not in the Business

  13. I am the Business

  14. Perfect Organism

  15. A Strange Game

  Part Four

  16. Nice Job Breaking it, Hero

  17. I Don’t Belong to Anyone Any More

  18. An Extension of that Quality

  19. The Loot Box

  20. Don’t Get Distracted by the Subtext

  Technical Note

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  By Ben Aaronovitch:

  Copyright

  Part One

  The Jacquard

  I am often reminded of certain spirits & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbow in one shape now, & the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalizing are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes; like the types I have found for them in the world of Fiction.

  Letter from Ada Lovelace to mathematician Augustus De Morgan, 27 November 1840

  1

  January: Some Swans are White

  My final interview at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation was with the company’s head of security himself – Tyrel Johnson. Mid-fifties, one of those big men who by dint of clean living and regular exercise have failed to go to fat and instead compacted down to the tensile strength of teak. Light-skinned, with short grey hair and dressed in a bespoke navy pinstripe suit with a lemon cotton shirt and no tie.

  Since everybody else in the building dressed in varying degrees of slacker-casual, wearing a suit made a statement – I was glad I’d worn mine.

  Judging by the pastel-coloured walls, the spindly stainless-steel furniture and the words Ask me about my poetry painted along one wall in MS Comic Sans, I was guessing that Mr Johnson hadn’t decorated his office himself.

  I was stuck on the low-slung banana-yellow sofa while he was perched on the edge of his desk – arms folded. Working without notes, I noticed.

  ‘Peter Grant.’ He spoke with a West Indian accent, apparently Trinidadian although I can’t tell them apart. ‘Twenty-eight years old, Londoner, plenty of GCSEs, three C-grade A levels but you didn’t go on to further education, worked for Tesco, a couple of small retailers, something called Spinnaker Office Services – what was that?’

  ‘Office cleaning.’

  ‘So you know your way around a mop?’ He smiled.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ I said, manfully resisting the urge to add ‘sir’ to the end of every sentence. Tyrel Johnson had stopped being a copper the year I was born, but obviously there were some things that never leave you.

  I realised that I might have to come to terms with that myself.

  ‘Two years as a PCSO . . . then you joined the Metropolitan Police and managed a whole six years before leaving.’ He nodded as if this made perfect sense to him – I wish it did to me.

  ‘Following probation you went into Specialist, Organised and Economic Crime Command,’ said Johnson. ‘Doing what exactly?’

  It had been agreed that it would be counterproductive all round if I was to mention the Special Assessment Unit, otherwise known as ‘The Folly’, also known as ‘Oh God, not them’. That there was a section of the Met that dealt with weird shit was quite widely known within the police; that it had officers who were trained in magic was not exactly a secret, but definitely something nobody wanted to talk about. Especially at a job interview.

  ‘Operation Fairground,’ I said.

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Nigerian counterfeiting gangs.’

  ‘Undercover?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Interviews, statements, follow-ups – you know – leg work.’

  ‘Why don’t we just get down to the main event?’ said Johnson. ‘Why did you leave the police?’

  Being ex-job, Johnson was bound to still have contacts in the Met – he would have checked my name out as soon as my CV was shortlisted. Still, the fact that I was even having this interview indicated that he didn’t know everything.

  ‘There was a death in custody,’ I said. ‘I was put on suspension.’

  He leaned forward slightly for emphasis.

  ‘Tell me, son,’ he said. ‘Were you responsible?’

  I looked him in the eyes.

  ‘I should have seen it coming, and I didn’t act fast enough to stop it,’ I said – it’s so much easier to lie when you’re telling the truth.

  He nodded.

  ‘There always has to be someone to blame,’ he said. ‘You didn’t try to stick it out?’

  ‘I was encouraged to move on,’ I said. ‘Somebody had to go, but they didn’t want a fuss.’ I didn’t say who ‘they’ were, but that didn’t seem to bother Johnson, who nodded sagely.

  ‘What do you think about computers?’ he asked, showing that the interview trick of suddenly changing the subject was also something that never leaves you when you exit the Job.

  It’s always ‘the Job’, with a capital letter, as if once you’re in it you can’t imagine doing anything else.

  Just be yourself, Beverley had said when I was dressing that morning.

  ‘I once played Red Dead Redemption for twenty-four hours solid,’ I said.

  Johnson’s eyes narrowed, but there was amusement in the set of his mouth. It faded a little.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, son. All things being equal you’d normally be a bit overqualified for this job,’ he said. ‘But I have a problem.’

  ‘Sir?’ I tried to keep an expression of bland interest on my face.

  ‘Someone in the workforce is up to no good,’ he said, and I relaxed. ‘I can feel them scuttling around like a rat. I don’t have the time to chase them so what I need is a rat-catcher, someone I can trust to do the job properly.’

  ‘I worked Oxford Street,’ I said. ‘Rat-catching’s my speciality.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘You’ll do – when can you start?’

  ‘Right now,’ I said.

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ said Johnson. ‘We have to navigate you through HR first, so Monday will be fine. Nice and early.’

  He straightened up off his desk and I jumped to my feet. He held out his hand – it was like shaking hands with a tree.

  ‘Just so we’re clear,’ he said, not letting go of my hand. ‘No matter what anyone else thinks – including the Uber-hobbit himself – you work for me
and only me. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ he said and walked me out of the building.

  Johnson had made a point of calling the human resources department ‘HR’ rather than its official internal company name, the Magrathean Ape-Descended Life Form Utilisation Service, just as he called the department I had just joined ‘Security’ rather than the Vogon Enforcement Arm.

  That, and the fact that employees were officially referred to as ‘mice’, didn’t stop the Magrathean Ape-Descended Life Form Utilisation Service sending me a twelve-page contract by email and snail-mail and a non-disclosure agreement that was worse than the Official Secrets Act. My mum warned me that the company didn’t have a very good reputation amongst cleaning staff.

  ‘Den hat for deal witt ein den nor dae pay betteh,’ she told me.

  Den nor dae pay betteh was Mum-speak for below minimum wage.

  My mum also wanted to know whether I was attending pre-natal classes with Beverley and making sure she ate properly. Eating properly by Mum’s definition meant Beverley consuming her own weight in rice every day so I lied and said she was. When I asked Beverley about any cravings, she told me not so far.

  ‘I can pretend,’ she said just after Christmas. ‘If it makes you feel better.’

  Beverley Brook lived south of Wimbledon Common, in both sides of a semi on, appropriately enough, Beverley Avenue. The walls between the two halves had been knocked through and the rooms converted, but you could still feel the ghosts of the right-hand kitchen in the way the floor texture changed under your feet when you moved around the master bedroom’s en suite bathroom. There had been a few changes since I moved in permanently, mostly involving storage space and encouraging Beverley to use it for her clothes – with mixed results.

  We slept on the ground floor because Beverley was the goddess of the river Beverley Brook, which ran along the bottom of her garden, and she liked to have swift access to her watercourse in times of need.

  Beverley was five months gone by then – an event marked by her borrowing a slightly larger wetsuit from one of her sisters to accommodate the bump. She’d also taken to working on her dissertation, ‘The Environmental Benefits of Waterway Reversion’, while sitting in a straight-backed chair at the kitchen table.

  That evening I sat at the other end and went through the contract, most of which seemed to be concerned with detailing the many and varied ways the Serious Cybernetics Corporation could fire me without compensation. It was hard work, and I kept on being distracted by the beauty of Beverley’s eyes as they flicked from laptop screen to notebook, and her slim brown fingers as they held a highlighter pen poised over the textbooks open in front of her.

  ‘What?’ she asked, looking up at me.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, and I watched as she bent to check something in one of the books and her locks fell over her shoulders to reveal the smooth curve of the back of her neck.

  ‘Stop staring at me,’ said Beverley without looking up. ‘And get on with your contract.’

  I sighed and went back to decrypting the fact that not only was I to be on a twelve-month probation, but that the management reserved the right to extend that probation indefinitely if I failed to meet a series of loosely defined performance criteria. It was all very depressing, and borderline legal, but it wasn’t as if I had any choice.

  I hadn’t had a job, as opposed to ‘the Job’, for over eight years. The last being a stint stacking shelves in the Stockwell Kwiksave which had ended when the company went bust. The best that can be said about shelf stacking is that it’s not working as a cleaner.

  I signed the contract in the indicated boxes and stuck it back in the envelope provided.

  Parking being what it was around Old Street roundabout, there was no way I was going to drive from Bev’s. Instead I got the 57 from Holland Avenue and hit the Northern Line at South Wimbledon, where I squeezed myself into an imaginary gap between two large white men. A morning commute on the Northern Line is frequently grim but that morning the atmosphere was strange and I swear I felt a tingle of vestigium. Nothing professionally worrying, just a whiff of glitter and stardust. A middle-aged woman a couple of armpits down the carriage from me said, ‘It’s a godawful small affair,’ and burst into tears. As the train pulled out I thought I heard a man’s voice say, ‘To the girl with the mousy hair,’ but the noise of the train drowned it out. By the time we got to Colliers Wood, nobody was singing but I’d picked up enough of a nearby conversation to learn that David Bowie was dead.

  In case I hadn’t twigged that the Man Who Fell to Earth was brown bread, the newly mounted poster facing out through the glass windows of the SCC’s main entrance, and the teenaged intern handing out black armbands to all the arriving mice, would have been a clue.

  The poster was of Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase with a red lightning bolt running across his face, and had been placed just under the large friendly letters that spelt out don’t panic across the window.

  At no point did anyone suggest that wearing an armband was compulsory, but I noticed that none of the mice, not even the ones in death metal sweatshirts, refused one.

  The Serious Cybernetics Corporation’s atrium was fitted with a line of card-activated entrance gates. Unlike most corporate offices, the barriers here were head-high and made of bullet-resistant Perspex – a level of security I’d only ever seen at New Scotland Yard and the Empress State Building. Every mouse had an RFID chip built into their brightly coloured ID card and had to tap in at the barrier. Three whole paragraphs of my employment contract detailed exactly what penalties I would suffer should I lose or allow someone else to use my card. Since I hadn’t actually received one yet, I dutifully reported to the long bright blue reception desk, where a young and incredibly skinny white woman with an Eastern European accent smiled at me and handed me my brand-new ID card and lanyard.

  Then she handed me a towel.

  It was a fluffy orange bathroom towel.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s your first day towel,’ said the receptionist. ‘You wrap it around your head.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘It shows you’re a newbie,’ she said. ‘Then everyone will know to be friendly.’

  I gave the towel a cautious sniff – it was clean and fluffy and smelt of fabric conditioner.

  ‘Can I keep the towel afterwards?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I wrapped the towel around my head and fastened it like a turban.

  ‘How do I look?’

  The receptionist nodded her head.

  ‘Very nice,’ she said.

  I asked how long I was supposed to keep it on, and she told me the whole first day.

  ‘Well, at least it will muffle the tracking device,’ I said, but that just got me a blank look.

  Past the barriers was a short corridor with two sets of lifts on the left and access to the main stairwell on the right. Beyond them it widened out into an open atrium four storeys high. This, I’d been told by Johnson, was the Cage where the mice could hang out, mingle and chill. You could hear the air quotes around ‘chill’ when he said it.

  From the point of view of us Vogons it was also home to the storage lockers where everyone, including me, was supposed to stash any outside electronic devices while at work. The lockers were the standard metal cubes with electronic locks keyed to the RFID in our ID cards. The doors were randomly painted as a single square of one of the colours of the rainbow, with a number stencilled on in white or black – whichever contrasted best. You were not supposed to have a personal locker, but instead pick the first one available. Because the lock was keyed to your ID card, the locker sprang open automatically when you left the building. Long-term storage was forbidden.

  Now, personally, if I was managing a building full of
poorly socialised technophiliacs I would have gone for personal lockers and mechanical locks. When I asked Johnson about this, he said he’d made that very same suggestion his second week on the job, but management said no.

  Any employee could check out a flip phone for use within the building. These were simple digital mobile phones which were restricted to internal calls only. They were officially called babelphones – all calls to and from the outside were routed through the company switchboard and logged. But the majority of the mice didn’t bother, because they spent most of their working hours logged into the company intranet – where they were much easier to contact.

  The rest of the Cage was painted in bright pastel blues, oranges and pinks and was arrayed with tables, blobby sofas, beanbags and a table-tennis table. Vending machines lined the walls and there was a genuine human-sized hamster wheel in one corner, with a bright blue cable leading to an enormous plasma screen TV. Apart from a couple of guys who’d obviously pulled an all-nighter and then crashed on the sofas, the mice ignored the delights of the Cage and headed for their work assignments with the same grim determination as commuters on Waterloo Bridge.

  The Serious Cybernetics Corporation prided itself on its lack of conformity and so the mice dressed with deliberate variety, although there were definite tribes. Skinny black jeans and a death metal sweatshirt, with or without a denim waistcoat, was one. Cargo pants, high tops, braces and check shirts were another – often with a floppy emo hairstyle that I thought had gone out of fashion when I was six. Lots of leggings in bright colours with luridly striped jumpers were favoured, but not exclusively, by the women. From my initial survey it was two thirds male and 95 per cent white. I did catch sight of a couple of reassuringly dark faces amongst the crowd. One of them, a short skinny black guy with a retro-Afro and a Grateful Dead T-shirt caught my eye and gave me the nod – I nodded back.

  It was a good thing I had a towel wrapped around my head or I would have really stood out.

  The Serious Cybernetics Corporation actually occupied two separate buildings. The entrance, the Cage, and most of the administration were part of a speculative office development on the corner of Tabernacle Street and Epworth Street that had gone bust in 2009. When celebrity entrepreneur Terrence Skinner made his surprise migration from Silicon Valley to Silicon Roundabout he snapped it up cheap – well, by an oligarch’s definition of cheap.