“The presence of exceptions makes the whole system seem unstable.”
She picked up the receiver, thinking about the end of her shift. Working in “999” wasn’t nearly as exciting as it used to be. They used to deal with the kind of events that people were making movies about and now mostly calling were crazy old people who were becoming more and more paranoid with age, even though the crime rate was approaching zero. “Just one more call,” she thought, “One more.”
“Your name please?” she said.
“助けて!” The answer came with a delay and it was in a language that she did not understand.
“Can you speak English please?” She said.
But the woman at the other end did not fulfil her request, which was unnerving because she seemed genuinely scared.
“Where are you? Where do you live?”
“Reggie Street.” the woman said.
Those were her last words.
The office of Jane Martello was a huge dusty room, which also served as a warehouse for old pieces of evidence. Vincent Cooper, the current CEO of Scotland Yard, did not like to go there, but from time to time he had to, as the older he got, the more it seemed that she was the only person among his colleagues, to whom he could speak without fear of being misunderstood.
“Hello my friend,” he said to her as he entered her office. “I think he might have a huge problem.”
Jane turned her head away from her screen and towards him, looked at him for a moment, and then went back to looking at the screen.
“We do,” she said, “and we’ve had it since last week when stuff started happening.”
“I’m not talking about that.”
“I know what you’re talking about,” she looked at him again just to show him her angry grimace.
“And?”
“And, unlike you, I did my homework. Nobody but she had visited her apartment. There was no one to throw her out the window after she called us. She jumped.”
“Why would someone call 999 before killing themselves? Plus the system registered a suspicion. How are we gonna finish the case workflow-wise if you will?”
“Like I’m the person who decides that.”
They spent the next few minutes in silence.
“Okay,” Vince said, “I agree with you. But, after what happened last week, I think we should be extra cautious. Still, the robbery of the public vault is a real case, so keep on digging into that. And I’ll get someone to come with me to Den’s apartment and try to see if there is anything there.”
“Good luck with that,” Jane said.
Vince spent a second trying to determine if she was being sarcastic
(“You fool! Of course, she was”).
Vince started roaming through the open-office space, looking for someone to whom he could assign the task of researching an alleged murder. While doing so he once again realised, how many of the people he used to work with were gone and how little did he know about the ones who replaced them.”
Most of them were programmers.
When Vince had started working there, the IT department of Scotland Yard was situated in the basement of the building and consisted of three boys supporting a simple document maintenance system. From then on, it grew steadily until it reached the present point where almost everything was IT. Currently the whole workforce of Scotland Yard roughly consisted of a couple of people like himself and Jane, who were in charge of knowing how everything works, about ten interns, who were doing arrests and other “unpleasant” activities which required direct contact with criminals, and about three hundred boffins (that is what they called all techies), most of which spoke only between themselves, had lunch in front of their computers, and were only indirectly related to the process of crime-solving. That last proposition was confirmed by the calmness with which they reacted to certain recent events. In the previous week, there had been a robbery costing millions of pounds and a few injured victims but all they did was involve him in an endless debate about whether the technical issue which facilitated the criminal’s escape was caused by their department or by their system’s vendor.
But Vince couldn’t blame them. This was their part, their job. Yes, someone did get away and that fact surely was giving some of them the creeps, but at the end of the day, they were neither able nor required to solve crimes. They were there just to support the system that did it.
Vince had to examine a lot of new faces before seeing a familiar one. It was Robert Jenkins who used to work as the head of the homicide department, back when the department existed. He remembered him as a brave fellow who knew how to handle stress, so he went to his desk without giving it a second thought.
“Hey Bobby, heard what happened today?”
“No,” Robert turned to him slowly. “What happened?”
“We might have a homicide,” Vince said. “Murder! It’s been how long?”
Robert said nothing.
“About fifteen minutes ago a woman called 999. Five minutes later she was found dead. It’s probably nothing, but it seems to me that you are the man who can confirm that. I want you at the crime scene in one hour-“
“Cut it, Vince,” Robert said. “You know I am just a regular employee now.”
“If you want a raise, that’s not a problem.”
“No, I don’t want a raise,” Robert responded.
Vince thought that he had misheard him at first, but then he looked more carefully at his old colleague. His cheeks were all wrinkled. He wore big glasses and behind them, his eyes looked jaded and tiresome.
“I am sixty-one years old, Vince,” he continued. “I had even quit for a year when you killed my department. I came back just because I have too many friends here. Don’t think that I don’t want to help you, but to deal with corpses? To put myself at risk? I’m sorry but if that is what’s required, I’ll be forced to leave.”
“Alright. Pack up your stuff then,” Vince said and then he walked to the parking lot alone.
Vince got into his car and heard the computerised voice of the custom-design auto system pronounce the address of the incident: it was somewhere in the Asian district as he had suspected - it was the only region where their surveillance system was weak enough to permit any crime at all. The car proceeded to its destination while the speakers were serving him information about the case.
“The victim’s name is Den Lee, about 30 years of age, searching for more exact data. She has been a resident of London for about two years. She lived alone and made her living by selling handcrafted wooden dolls. The so-called “Kokeshi” is a kind of traditional Japanese dolls which originate from the northern part of the country. They are characterised by the use of floral motives and–”
“Next,” Vince said.
“She doesn’t seem to have maintained any social contacts…No data found regarding her Internet usage…’
The computer kept on going, but Vince was no longer listening to it.
The first thing that he saw after he opened the door was his own frightened expression - there was a big antique mirror with a frame made of wrought iron which was standing in the hallway in front of the door so that the first thing that anyone entering the apartment sees is their reflection. He took a look around, realising that the mirror wasn’t by far the only unusually-old object that this place was furnished with - indeed there hardly was a thing there which was less than 50 years old, a fact which was giving it the atmosphere resembling that of those historic house-museums which Vince used to visit as a child, where everything was left untouched after the owner had died. The doors were locked using latches, there was a wooden coat rack next to the mirror and at the end of the hallway (he did not believe it at first) laid a stationary phone. Apparently, this was the device that Den had used to call them.
Seeing that one of the doors in the hallway was opened, Vince presumed that Den Lee went there after making the call and followed her footsteps. The room he entered looked like a living room, but the furniture there was placed randomly across the room as if the person who arranged it cared neither for aesthetics nor for convenience. There were a couple of big cabinets, all of them filled with drawing materials, and centred stood a big desk with different colours of paint poured all over it. There were pieces of cut wood everywhere, some of them roughly shaped in the form of a stylised human body. Upon inspection, Vince noticed that there wasn’t a single finished doll in the apartment.
But he was too occupied to think about that. At the bottom of the room, there were several huge windows, extending from the floor up to the ceiling. One of them was broken. Vince went to take a look through it but quickly turned his head away. He wasn’t sure how much of what he saw was real and how much was complemented by his imagination, what he knew was that he wasn’t looking down again for the world. For the first time, he realised how serious his situation was. What if it was a murder? Then he would be responsible for securing the city and apparently there wasn’t a single person in his team that knew what to do in case of such an event, including himself. So he called Jane:
“Hi Vince, did you reach her apartment?” She sounded somewhat concerned when she answered him, which was unusual for her.
“Yup,” Vince said.
“And?”
“It feels weird,” Vince said, but couldn’t think of any way to finish his sentence.
“Weird? The hell does that mean? Did you find something?”
“No,” Vince said. “I haven’t found anything.”
“Close the case and go home then,” Jane said. “Nothing suspicious, nothing to worry about.”
“But…”
“And stop looking like a scared child.”
An hour later, Vince went back to his office to fill out the reports. It was an easy job, as most of the information was already generated by the system - essentially all he needed to do was hit the “Close” button. And he knew that he had all the reasons to do so. Still, when the time came, he moved his finger and touched the button next to it: “Requires further investigation”.
Vince stood by his front door. Jane had said that she would pick him up in the morning. She hadn’t bothered to tell him where they were going, but he was accustomed to that - his friend was so reluctant to explain herself that often the best way to find out what she had in mind is just to wait for her to act it out. However, when her car shifted to the direction opposite to the city, Vince decided that he could not afford to do so:
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“The Asian District.”
Vince waited for a little to make sure she didn’t intend to say anything else.
“And what are we doing there?”
“Trying to find help.”
She drove in silence until a little before they reached their destination. She had to slow down because a pack of around ten children was running around the street chasing a ball. Jane honked at them several times, but they did not seem to pay any attention to her, so she was forced to stop.
“Do all parents in this neighbourhood think that it’s a good idea to just let their children do whatever they like all day?” she said.
“Apparently,” Vince said, “but look on the bright side, this gives us time to talk about things. Like, for instance, “What the hell are we doing here?”
“Alright,” Jane said. “So yesterday this guy Robert came to me to beg me not to fire him. I tried to get him to help us and he said that he couldn’t, but he knew someone who could.
“And?”
“So after we killed the homicide department our pal Bobby had quit the Yard for a while and had started working part-time at some dry cleaning joint somewhere uptown. There he was often on shift with a boy named Ayer Cadman. Ayer was a silent boy, and so Bobby decided to break the ice with some stories about his past as a policeman.”
“Oh, brother,” Vince remembered how Robert used to ruin all kinds of corporate events and bore everyone to death with his incredibly verbose accounts of mostly trivial police operations. His stories had neither a beginning nor an end, and each of them inevitably reminded him of at least three more.
“Yeah, but it seems that the boy bought it. It asked for more and more of his narratives and demanded an even greater detail. And gradually…You remember those kids from back when we were at school who had no life but knew everything about, say, World War Two?”
“I do.” Vince thought of himself for some reason.
“Well, Ayer was the same type, but with classical forensic science,” Jane said. “And the last thing Bobby told me was that recently he had heard from Ayer again. Apparently, he had moved somewhere around this district to realise his passion.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know there are a lot of illegals here. Low Teks if you will - people who spend their life off the grid, to a certain extent. This, combined with the fact that our coverage in this area is still weak, makes it a perfect platform for all kinds of crime-hunting vigilantes. You remember back in the days when there was this profession called ‘private detective’?”
“Yes, but I don’t follow you,” Vince said.
“Say you live here and someone steals your car, but you don’t want to go to report the theft to the police, for some reason. Well, you have an alternative. You go to Cadman, you give him some money, and if you’re lucky, he finds it for you.”
“And you want us to hire him? Do we at least have any information about him, aside from Bobby’s tall tales?”
“No. No official witnesses, no Internet presence neither private nor business-related. It’s like he operates from another dimension or something.”
Soon they found out that although Ayer Cadman was virtually nonexistent online, amongst the people from this neighbourhood, he was quite famous. All of the people they asked knew who he was and most of them also had a story or two to share: “Ayer? Of course, I know him. I even have a friend who hired him once and-“
At the end of a small street, surrounded from all sides by much taller buildings, which hid it from plain sight, stood a monolithic old house. According to the people, this house functioned as both home and an office for Ayer Cadman, but on it, there weren’t signs accounting for either of those things. Vince and Jane stood by the door, wondering if they should ring at all, but at the end, Vince mumbled something about not going to the end of the city in vain and pressed the single doorbell.
An elderly woman opened the door:
“He is upstairs,” she said before they had a chance to ask her.
They nodded and climbed the stairs in silence, exchanging glances of various expressions, as if they were having some kind of telepathic conversation.
They found themselves in a spacious room with a very high ceiling and very beautiful, albeit run-down, furniture. Newspaper clippings were spread all over the table, as well as on the walls. Vince leant in to read them. They were mainly related to crimes, like last week’s robbery. He noticed that most of the text was crossed out with a black marker. As in Den Lee’s apartment, smart home appliances weren’t being respected - the only electronic he could see was an old tablet which sat on the table gathering dust.
“Mister Cadman!” Vince called.
“Yes, do come in,” someone replied.
It was the voice of a boy.
Ayer Cadman’s appearance wasn’t one that deserved long description: He was around 21 years of age, dressed a little more formally than one would normally dress if he was at home, but not so formal as to make him look like he was at work. His pants were all worn out, his hair shaggy, and he was leaning back in his chair with his arms behind his head. His expression was deadpan, up to the point that neither Vince nor Jane could sense how he felt about them coming. Was he angry that they came without notice? Was he going to talk? Or he would just stare at them without saying a word until they left.
After a while, Ayer looked at each of them from head to toe and nodded.
“Gentlemen. Sit if you want.”
“No thanks,” Vince said. “Ayer Cadman, right? Your reputation precedes you.”
“I can see that,” the boy said. “If it weren’t so you wouldn’t consider hiring me for something as serious as a murder.”
“Alright,” Ayer said. “Can I hear some details about the case?”
“Not until we hear what you already know,” Jane said. “All of it. The other case will be treated as a felony.”
“But I don’t know anything, Mrs-“
“Call me Jane.”
“OK Jane, it’s important to know that I am not some genius mastermind, nor I am trying to look as such - I sometimes even try to shut my mouth and act surprised at what my clients tell me. It is just that sometimes what they tell me is obviously not a secret, and so feigning ignorance makes me look uninformed. That’s why I have the habit of squeezing all the information out of each thing that a person says to me.
“But we haven’t told you anything.”
“One does not speak only with his words, Mrs-“
“Call me Jane.”
“Okay. So, Jane, you would probably agree that by looking at your appearance I can guess your approximate age.
“Probably.”
“And your profession as well.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that.”
“But I haven’t done anything illegal, and nowadays the false flags are very rare. So why are you here then? The next most probable explanation is that you are looking for help. But this is not a standard practice. So to do it you must be in very senior positions, possibly even C-level. That would explain your age too, as most of the people who work with you are pretty young. I admit that my last proposition was a bit fuzzy,” he continued after a while, “so you can easily question its validity. You may, for instance, say “But no one has killed anyone in this city for years” and you will be right. You may say that there is a huge unsolved crime from just a week ago, and your remark will be valid. Still, it is my firm conviction that there is only one kind of crime that can cause such radical alteration of your way of doing things. Only one kind of crime that can lead the leaders of one of the biggest organisations in this city in my humble office. And apparently, at least when it comes to our current situation, I was correct.
“Keep your shirt on,” Jane said. “You just got lucky. Plus, we’re not even sure it’s a real case. In fact, it most likely is nothing. We just need someone to confirm it. And if we like the way you work we may consider extending your trial period.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Ayer said. “I work alone.”
“And we don’t work with contractors,” Jane said. “You will be employed part-time first and full-time later, or you will not work for us at all.”
“Well. Then, I hope you reconsider your policy.”
“I am afraid that is not possible,” Vince said.
“Well, maybe then we will work together at some other time,” Ayer said.
“Ayer, we have a girl lying dead in the morgue, for fuck’s sake,” Jane said. “If you really believe you are any good –as you obviously do– what is your excuse for staying in your room jerking off to your principles instead of helping us?”
“Well if you think that I am any good you would–”
“But we don’t think that. And even if we did, we represent a big powerful organisation with hundreds of employees, which does not make exceptions just because there are workflows and systems that are bigger than any of us. So changing our policy is not an option.”
“I see…” Ayer opened one of the notebooks from his desk and skimmed through a couple of pages. Then he opened another one and marked something in it with his pen.
“Okay, I accept,” He said finally. “I will try to help you, but I don’t want my identity investigated in any way. I don’t one anyone asking me where I went to school, what did I do for a living or if I knew this and that person, and so on. I don’t respond to such questions.”
“Alright,” Vince said. “Be there tomorrow. And I am warning you: there are going to be more rules which you must follow. the Yard is not a place for experiments.” And as soon as he said that, Vince immediately realised that hiring Ayer was itself an experiment and a dangerous one at that. He’d already seen how smart he was, and he knew fairly well that a person does not gain that kind of intelligence by following the rules and doing what they’re told.
“OK, anything else?” Ayer asked.
“Yeah, I have a question,” Jane said. “Where the hell did you learned to talk like that?”
“From books, gentlemen. From these books.”
Up to that point, Jane hadn’t noticed that the whole wall next to Ayer’s desk was filled top to bottom with bookshelves. Historic accounts, novels, textbooks of forensic science…Some of the newer ones, she knew from her college days, the older ones she’d only heard about.
“Please, allow me.” The boy said half-jokingly and pulled out a folder of laminated sheets of paper. It was an article from a magazine which, judging from the looks, was issued before about an eternity. It was titled ‘The Book of Life’. She took it out and opened a random page. It was something about how everything in the world can be deduced using logic. She found it interesting, but a little pretentious. Somewhat like the name of the author - someone named Sherlock Homes.
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