‘Not now, Alan,’ says Donna. Alan has a particular fondness for her.
Chris pulls up a chair, and Donna does the same.
‘What a look you have on your face, Detective Chief Inspector,’ says Ibrahim. ‘You seem quite troubled.’
‘We need to have a very serious conversation,’ says Chris. ‘Wait, you’re Mike Waghorn!’
‘Guilty as charged,’ says Mike Waghorn, offering his wrists for mock handcuffs.
‘How do you know this lo–’ starts Chris. ‘No, don’t worry, of course you know them.’
Ron reluctantly reaches for a Jaffa cake.
‘You ever done any TV, Chris?’ says Mike. ‘You’ve really got the bone structure for it.’
‘I … uh … no, I haven’t,’ says Chris.
‘Leave it with me,’ says Mike.
‘Uh … sure,’ says Chris, as he takes off his jacket and hangs it over the back of his chair. ‘Really?’
Mike nods. ‘Great hair.’
Chris snaps back to the matter at hand. ‘We need to have a serious conversation.’
‘A serious conversation about what, Chris?’ says Elizabeth. ‘We have seven and a half minutes.’
‘You’re investigating the death of Bethany Waites,’ says Donna.
‘We’re dipping our toe in, yes,’ says Elizabeth. ‘With your help.’
Chris looks around each of them in turn. ‘Been making enquiries into Heather Garbutt too?’
‘Not really,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Minor enquiries. She’s in jail you know.’
‘Nothing else you want to tell me?’ asks Chris.
‘Nothing else to tell,’ says Ibrahim.
‘For goodness’ sake, Chris,’ says Elizabeth, ‘why do I feel we’re being told off? I can practically hear Conversational French on the stairway, and I guarantee you won’t want to keep them waiting.’
Chris takes a moment. Composes himself.
‘At six this morning,’ says Chris, ‘Heather Garbutt was found dead in her cell.’
The gang share shocked looks. Pauline puts her hand on Mike’s arm.
‘There was a note,’ says Chris. ‘In one of the drawers of her desk.’
‘Suicide?’ says Joyce. ‘Why would she –’
Donna looks down at her notebook.
‘It reads,’ says Donna, ‘THEY ARE GOING TO KILL ME. ONLY CONNIE JOHNSON CAN HELP ME NOW.’
‘I’m afraid that our systems show there’s no fault in your area, so there’s not a great deal I can do.’
Viktor Illyich nods. ‘I understand, I understand, but still the television, it isn’t working. So you see the position in which I find myself.’
The young man on the other end of the line is beginning to sound exasperated, and has clearly had enough of this intellectual cut and thrust.
‘I’m trying to tell you, Mr Ill … Mr Ill …’
‘Illyich,’ says Viktor Illyich.
‘Yes, as you say,’ says the voice. ‘I’m trying to tell you that, as far as our system can tell, it is working. And so I wouldn’t be able to send an engineer to you today.’
‘Not today, then?’ says Viktor. ‘No TV today?’
But
‘Not today, sir, no. If you log in to your Virgin Media app –’
‘I don’t have the app,’ says Viktor. ‘I don’t work for Virgin Media, you see. I pay you to do the work.’
‘Understood, understood,’ says the voice. ‘You can do it online too. Log in to your account, find the “Book an engineer” page and choose the next date that is convenient for you.’
‘OK, the next date convenient for me is today,’ says Viktor. He looks across his terrace. From his penthouse you can see the swimming pool suspended between two buildings. It caused quite a stir when they unveiled it. A swimming pool floating a hundred feet up in the air? Viktor doesn’t use it much. Currently the only person in the pool is a Saudi princess. She is taking a picture of herself. No one really swims, it is too cold.
‘As we’ve discussed, sir,’ says the voice, ‘today is impossible.’
‘“Impossible” is a big word,’ says Viktor, lifting his legs onto his sofa and settling in. When Viktor worked for the KGB, they had a nickname for him. ‘The Bullet’. If you wanted to question someone, the basic protocol was always to send in two operatives. ‘Good cop, bad cop,’ they called it in Great Britain. Usually they would get what they needed. Sometimes there was torture, though Viktor never approved. Torture got you nowhere. Sure, people would talk, but you had no way of knowing if it was the truth. Most people would talk to keep their teeth, their fingernails, to avoid the electrodes.
‘Well, yes, I understand that …’
But sometimes people wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t crack, whatever you did to them. However you tried to break them. And on those occasions a call would go out to Moscow. Send for the Bullet. Viktor just had a way. He had a manner about him.
‘I am an old man,’ says Viktor. ‘I live alone.’ He pours himself a brandy.
‘I can quite appreciate that, sir, but it doesn’t –’
‘And computers? I don’t understand them so much.’ Viktor was the first man in Russia to hack into the IBM mainframe computers in the Pentagon.
‘The system is simple: I can guide you through it if you have your computer there?’
