Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

She’ll have to get herself a little insurance first. Pick up a few choice items from one of her weapons caches. Wouldn’t do to fall prey to her own children. That would be too ironic.

Dr Westfield rolls out of her nest and drops to the supply room floor. Sadly, no one’s come to visit since Kris and her friend. No one to see the excellent job she’s done cleaning away the evidence. But that’s probably just as well: they might wonder about the two jars, resting against the back wall, full of preserving fluid and body parts. She likes to take them down from their shelf and dance around the room with them. Hold them up to the light and watch as it flickers and dances between the strings of flesh. Pop open the lids and…

She stops, one hand on the lid, one on the cool plastic container. She just had to open them. Her case files should have been locked tight. Passwords. Encryption.

The jar drops from her hands. It hits the concrete floor and bounces, spilling eyes and testicles and ovaries in an explosion of bitter-smelling liquid. Bouncing back up from the floor, it spins, spraying out the last of the preserving fluid, before sinking back to dance and skitter to a halt at her feet.

She shouldn’t have been able to just open up the Harbinger files. She’d erased all open versions when that Network bastard came snooping. Everything else was hidden. Stored. Compressed. Booby-trapped. The only way those files would be accessible was if someone had unlocked and disarmed them. And she sure as hell didn’t do it.

Someone has been tampering with her work. Someone has been meddling.

Someone is going to pay .

The front door bleeped at him, and Will put down his keyboard and stretched. The twinges were back, but he only had a couple of blockers left and wasn’t going to waste them. Instead he took another sip of wine and slouched through to the hall to pay the DinoPizza delivery girl for his twelve-inch Cheat-Meat feast.

He stuffed a slice into his mouth, settled back on the couch and pulled the terminal closer. Hacking into the government network didn’t take long-their security was a joke. If he weren’t in the habit of using it to sneak into other, more suspicious, systems he would have said something. The main Bluecoat computers weren’t any better, and he spent a couple of minutes skimming their arrest records to see if any names would leap out at him. They didn’t. So he pushed on-through the firewall surrounding their personnel files-and called up Detective Sergeant Josephine Cameron’s record.

Most of it he’d seen before, but he read through it again: commendations, verbal warnings, an impressive enough arrest list. Three applications for transfer to the Network. He’d not seen those in her public file. No wonder she’d jumped at the chance to act as liaison officer, it was a back door into the service for her. Three or four knock-backs weren’t unusual; the Network liked to make sure new agents really wanted to be there.

Her disciplinary record wasn’t too bad-the most recent entry was over two years old, so it looked as if she’d learned to play the game. Politics: the bane of law enforcement agencies everywhere. It wasn’t enough to be good at your job, you also had to be sensitive to the machinations of your sup eriors.

Will took another bite of pizza. It was getting cold, the cloned pepperoni greasy, the cheese beginning to congeal.

He moved on to her personal details: address, mother’s maiden name, height, weight and home number. He punched it into the phone and settled back on the couch, only remembering at the last minute she wouldn’t be able to see anything because he’d killed the camera.

‘Damn.’ Never mind, it was too late to do anything about it now.

It rang and rang and rang and rang. In the end the answerphone clicked on and he was confronted with a pre-recorded DS Cameron telling him that she wasn’t able to come to the phone right now, but if he felt like it, and didn’t expect an answer anytime soon, he could leave a message after the beep. Will hung up.

He washed a chunk of pizza crust down with a mouthful of wine. Just because no one wanted to talk to him, it didn’t mean he couldn’t find out what happened today. If Jo had submitted any paperwork it would be filed on the Bluecoat mainframe. He dragged the case reference out of her day log and went hunting.

He was almost there when the doorbell went. Twice in one evening, something of a record.

Cursing, he shut the screen down, slipped the keyboard back under the coffee table, then answered the door.

He barely recognized the woman on his doorstep. There was no sign of the trademark eye-melters she normally wore, instead DS Cameron was clad in sombre blues and greys. Freed from its usual asymmetric bun, her hair hung round her face like a mourning veil, hiding her eyes, curling in round her cheeks in tight, black curls. There was a lot more of it than he’d suspected.

He smiled at her. ‘Hi.’

She didn’t say anything.

Will tried again. ‘You OK?’

‘Can I come in?’ Jo’s voice was thick and a little slurred. Not much, not falling-down-pissed-as-a-fart, just enough to let Will know that she’d been drinking.

‘Em…Yeah, of course.’

She followed him through to the lounge. ‘Got your address out the files.’

Will frowned. ‘My address is in the public files?’

She shook her head and a small smile flickered across her lips. ‘Nope.’

So she’d been up to the same thing he had.

‘You want something to drink? Got some cold pizza I could reheat.’

‘Drink’s good.’

He popped a couple of tumblers out of the cleaner and onto the countertop; somehow Will got the feeling this wasn’t an occasion for wine. A generous glug of whisky was accompanied by the briefest splash of water.

Jo took a deep sip and rolled it around her mouth. Her eyes were pink and swollen, just like Brian’s had been.

They sat side by side on the settee making stilted small talk. The weather, Will’s bruises, the view from his apartment…When the change of subject came, Jo’s voice faltered.

‘We found Jillian Kilgour,’ she said into her glass.

Will settled back and waited for her to tell it, but she didn’t. Instead she bit down on her bottom lip and her shoulders started to tremble. There was no noise at first, just a gentle rocking back and forth and then the tears started. They balled up in the corners of her eyes like tiny fists and rolled down her coffee-coloured cheeks. Then she dragged in a ragged breath and bit down again. Will placed his glass on the coffee table and put his arms round her shoulders.

‘It’s OK,’ he said as she buried her face in the crook of his neck. ‘It’s OK.’

He held her until she had no tears left.

The mess is all cleaned away, mopped and polished until there is no sign of spilled preserving fluid or body parts.

Broken glass and bees. Filling the storeroom with their incessant, sharp-edged buzzing.

Someone has been in her files.

Some bastard has been interfering with her work.

For a moment she comes close to exploding; it would feel very good to start smashing things. But she can’t do that. The storeroom’s internal sensors will notice that much destruction, someone will be sent down to investigate. She can do nothing to draw attention to herself. Nothing.

So she sits on the edge of a pile of surgical gowns and seethes. Someone has hacked into her Harbinger files. Someone has been rifling though her research. Someone…

She stops and looks at the monster reflected in the polished steel of the central unit. Only one person has ever managed to get into her files. A long purple scar winds its way across the left-hand side of his face. He wears a dark-blue suit.