Tom Graham - Life on Mars - Borstal Slags

Up in A-Division, Sam found all the desks empty, all the phones unmanned. Everybody – Chris, Ray, a motley assortment of blokes from the department, and even Annie – was clustered together on one side of the room. What had attracted them was a huge white contraption, about which a rep in a pinstriped suit fussed and tinkered.

‘What’s all this?’ Sam asked.

‘A new gadget, ordered in on trial,’ said Annie. And then, looking intently at him, she frowned and added, ‘You all right, Sam?’

‘Bad night’s sleep, that’s all,’ he smiled. Her eyes were bright and clear, her skin was gently flushed around the cheeks, her hair was glossy. Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all, seeing as she’s supposed to be dead.

I’m just a copper. I don’t understand these things. Annie’s alive. We’re all alive. That’ll do for me – and to hell with the crazy bloody nightmares!

‘They want to start sticking these new machines in the offices all over, Boss,’ put in Ray, speaking without taking the fag from his gob. ‘Not that the Guv’s too keen on it.’

He nodded towards Gene’s office, where the man himself was visible as a brooding, lurking shape behind frosted glass.

‘I’m sure your guv’nor will change his tune when he sees what this little beauty can do,’ said the rep. With a knowing smile, he pressed a button and the cumbersome device clanked and juddered, emitting a sudden sweep of light.

‘Look out Boss, the bloody Martians have landed!’ grinned Chris, turning to Sam.

‘Not Martians, sir,’ grinned the rep proudly. ‘ The future .’

‘The future’s not always such a great place to be,’ put in Sam.

The rep turned that oily smile towards him: ‘Ahh – there speaks a man who’s stuck in the past. But let me see if I can bring you up to date, sir. Look.’

The machine slowly disgorged a sheet of paper that reeked of chemicals. The rep swept up the sheet and flourished it proudly.

‘See for yourselves, gentlemen, madam. Look at the quality of that reproduction. Pristine. Beautiful. Reliable. No more mucking about with messy old carbon paper or wasting time typing up duplicates. The Xerox 914 is the automated office secretary you’ve always dreamt of!’

‘She’s not the stuff of my dreams,’ sniggered Chris. ‘Secretaries are supposed to have – well, you know – a right ol’ set o’ melons.’

‘In the ideal world, Chris, yes,’ said Ray, and he smirked across at Annie. ‘But we don’t live in an ideal world. Do we, luv.’

‘Not so long as it’s got dopes like you in it,’ Annie glowered back. Ignoring sniggers and jeers from the boys she added, ‘And I’m nobody’s flamin’ secretary.’

‘ This office secretary doesn’t need lunch breaks,’ the rep went on. ‘Or holidays. And she won’t go and get married, leaving you all in the lurch.’ He pressed the button again. The Xerox noisily and laboriously delivered another copy. ‘It’s a lovely model this, the 914 – but who knows, if you get on with it well enough then you might like to think about upgrading to one of our cutting-edge machines that actually makes copies in colour .’

‘Colour?’ exclaimed Chris. ‘No way, give over!’

The rep nodded proudly. ‘Full-colour copying at the touch of a button, right here in your office.’

Chris whistled through his teeth, genuinely impressed: ‘It’s Buck Rogers, ain’t it.’

Mutely, the staff of CID stood watching the copies emerging one by one from the Xerox machine. They seemed almost hypnotized. Ray puffed smoke. Chris audibly chewed on his bubble gum.

‘This ain’t a church, it ain’t a library, and it ain’t a bloody undertaker’s!’ Gene’s voice boomed out from the doorway of his office. Everybody jumped. ‘It’s too quiet in here! I want noise! I want activity! I want typewriters clacking and phones going ding-a-ling! Move it, move it! Mush, mush, you dogs!’

The gaggle of gawpers broke up at once as people bustled back to their desks. Gene gave the Xerox machine and its unctuous rep a sour look, muttered something about not wanting Robbie the Bloody Robot in his department, and vanished back into his office, slamming the door behind him.

All thoughts of the vastness of the cosmos, and the terrible truths of ultimate reality, were pushed from Sam’s mind. Mercifully.

‘You got a moment, Boss?’ Annie called to Sam.

‘For you, as many moments as you like.’

Ray made smoochy kiss-kiss noises, but Sam ignored him.

‘What is it, Annie?’

‘I’ve been having a look at that letter you left for me, the one found on that lad who nicked the lorry,’ said Annie, laying out a mass of paperwork on her desk. ‘It was addressed to “Derek”, signed “Andy”, and sent from Friar’s Brook borstal – we know because it’s been stamped at the top, presumably to show it’s been read by a member of staff and officially sanctioned. So I checked the Home Office files.’ She plucked a sheet of paper from the array. ‘Now – turns out there’s a lad serving time at Friar’s Brook borstal by the name of Andrew Coren. He’s been in trouble on and off since he was a nipper – him and his brother Derek.’

‘Andy and Derek,’ mused Sam, nodding. ‘Well spotted. Okay, so that would explain the names in the letter. What’s Andy Coren in for?’

‘Breaking and entering, handling stolen goods,’ said Annie. ‘Not for the first time, neither. And, what’s more, seems like he’s a bit of a slippery fish. He’s twice escaped from open borstal, so they stuck him in Friar’s Brook. Tighter security, apparently.’

‘A name was mentioned to me last Friday. There’s a young lad in the cells called Barton. He’s done time in Friar’s Brook. He’s absolutely terrified we’re going to send him back there. He gave me the name McClintock. Did you come across that name at all?’

‘Don’t think so,’ said Annie, leafing through the names of inmates she’d compiled. ‘No McClintock amongst this lot. Do you think it’s important?’

‘I have no idea. Maybe this lad McClintock’s been released – maybe he doesn’t even exist.’ He waved that line of enquiry away. ‘Let’s not get sidetracked by red herrings. Let’s stick to what we know. Andy Coren’s banged up in Friar’s Brook. He sends a perfectly innocent letter to his brother Derek, and Derek violently steals a truck loaded with old fridges, making off with it like it’s gold bullion. At the same time, we’ve got an unidentified white male fished out of the crushing machine at the same junkyard where Derek stole the lorry.’ He sighed. ‘Bits and pieces. And they seem somehow connected – but I can’t see a pattern.’

‘Neither can I,’ said Annie. ‘And I don’t know if I’m complicating things by mentioning this, Sam, but there was a suicide recently at Friar’s Brook. One of the inmates, a lad called Tunning. He hanged himself.’

‘When was this?’

‘Two weeks ago. I came across it looking for Andy Coren. And a month before that there was a lad died in the kitchens. Some sort of faulty cooker went off on his face.’

Sam looked at the arrays of papers on Annie’s desk and sighed: ‘If we’re not careful here, Annie, we could get seriously bogged down in data . And data isn’t the same thing as information .’

‘That’s true, but we can’t afford to ignore details. If there is something weird going on here, and it’s being concealed, then it might only be those seemingly unrelated details that’ll reveal it to us.’

‘Can I leave this with you, Annie? This needs some careful thinking about. It’s all too Sherlock Holmes for the likes of some round here.’