People in Season (21 page)

The mutters of agreement grow loud and more panicked questions work their way to the surface.

‘We were through this at the start of the day,’ Dylan shouts over them, exhausted. ‘It’s just procedure,’ he says, and repeats with the supplement, ‘It’s just procedure for someone tested positive as UPD.’

A deathly silence falls over the office as the result of Joanne’s scan sinks in, and someone makes a desperate request for comfort, ‘It just doesn’t make sense, does it?’

Not wanting the dissipating crowd to be left with that as the final note on the subject, malleable as they are in their shock, Ava weakly slams her hand down on a desk in an attempt to unite them under her flag once more. ‘We’ll get this sorted out. Something must have gone wrong. She can’t be, she just can’t be UPD. If she is–’ her hand shoots up to her mouth to cover a sob, cutting off the end of her sentence. Somebody consoles her and offers a tissue to wipe away her spoilt make-up, and she thanks them as she walks away to take her seat, the one now vacated, the one that has been waiting for her throughout all the drama. The seat behind the editor’s desk.

Detectives always return to the scene of a crime. The sombre fact, all the truer for Dylan Wong, is that a good investigator never leaves an unsolved case behind.

Once, when his wife was pregnant, in a conjunction of events, he had been assigned to the murder of a five year old child, a contrast which instilled the need for resolution with desperate urgency. The child was found at the back of a fruit picking warehouse, wrapped in an oily sack, cut from its privates up to its neck in a surgical attack. The most horrifying thing was how slow the ordeal must have lasted, how long the child would have been alive, confused, scared and suffering, as the perpetrator knelt over the boy, ignoring the cries he made. Nobody was ever convicted for the crime. Dylan had never managed to put the mystery to rest and, so far as he was concerned, the child remained laying there, listless, waiting for the case to be solved. It was one of the reasons he never left homicide and why fourteen months after the arrest and prosecution of Joanne Victoria, he has yet to push through his transfer papers. Having access to the case histories allowed him a ritual he needs. Without Dylan, these unsolved cases, these people that once existed, were just lines of code in a computer that represented absolutely nothing. It was only in his reading of them that there was any meaning to it all. On the late shift, he would sit in the empty office, manning the phones where murders were reported, studying
the old files. The child was on top of the stack. Cut by a skillet knife that left a flake of salmon skin in the wound and dumped in a sack stinking of fish, a pock faced scumbag in Smithfield, a fish monger, had been Dylan’s number one suspect. He’d questioned the man relentlessly and called him into the station on three separate occasions for interview. He’d canvassed the neighbourhood for weeks, begging for something other than grudging suspicion from the locals, only to get nothing in return. And once a month in all the years since, Dylan would visit the fish shop to order fillets of pomfret for his family. Steamed whole with ginger and spring onion and bathed in a specially mixed soy sauce, the recipe had travelled from Hong Kong with his grandmother. It stank up the house for days. They hated fish, Dylan most of all, but it was a routine he forced on his wife and child under the guise of keeping some cultural tradition alive in his home. Really, it was a reminder to himself of the boy who would never have peace. Most of all, Dylan needed an excuse to visit the monger. Once a month, he needed to see there was absolutely no guilt in the guilty man’s blotchy face, that the only justice in the universe was that created by a collection of individuals who served to protect people from each other and that he, Dylan Wong, was one of these men who worked to uphold the law. When he didn’t do his job well enough there was no karmic balance to make up for it.

With this in mind, sitting among the empty desks of the homicide office, Dylan has put the boy’s file aside and is scrolling through ChatterFive’s articles. He had never been one for keeping up with the news, but since the arrest of Joanne, he’s read every piece the media conglomerate has published. Have so many months really passed? He wouldn’t have thought his wife would let him dig his heels on the transfer this long. He supposed time was meaningless to them. They were just existing together as their boy grew older, surprised once in a while by an event like Christmas or another Halloween. On the website tonight is a summation of the court case that led to its disgraced editor’s downfall. He revisits the circumstances of it as often as he revisits the fish monger.

When the urgency of Joanne’s cry for help dissipated, Ava had took to the editor’s chair, leaving the words of her broken speech to linger in the minds of the staff. The firemen and Garda remained on hand to oversee the remaining hours of processing, though their jokes had dried up and they felt for the first time that their presence was justified. Dylan remained too. He was as conflicted as ever regarding the reasons for it. One by one, the journalists took their turns in the social agent’s hot seat and in time came out relieved, if a little agitated as they returned to their slots feeling violated but happy that it hadn’t been any worse. Four hours went by. When it was finished no other UPD were found – Joanne was the only one. The Garda dribbled out of the newsroom with an idle word of permission from the detective. The firemen had left of their own accord an hour before. Agent Myers met Dylan with an exhausted look, who doggedly stood to meet him.

‘Long day,’ Agent Myers said. ‘I could use a drink. What do you think?’

‘The day’s not over for me,’ Dylan answered. ‘I have to head to the station.’

Joanne was waiting in a cell. He was going to leave the social agent with that. What little cordiality that had grown between them over the days previous was gone now, extinguished by the reality of the situation. Dylan would have been happy never to see the man again, but Agent Myers, he seemed intent on drawing out their goodbyes. When Dylan was in the elevator, his back to office, he could barely hold up his arm to wave farewell. Escaping wasn’t so easy. When he heard his name being called, he was forced to face the social agent. ‘Dylan,’ Agent Myers said, and showing a flare for dramatics, bowed to the detective, holding an imaginary top hat in his hand as he bent over. He was a grateful performer, thanking his audience from the bottom of his heart. Then, like curtains falling from either side of a stage, the elevator doors closed over Dylan’s view of the man. He would never forget the sight.

Ava was true to her word. Before there had even been wind of a trial in the death of Agent Mullen, she had united the ChatterFive organisation behind their fallen editor, both in their office and within their community pages, outrage directed at the idea that Joanne might be UPD and that there must have been a mistake in the scan. In regards to Francis Mullen’s death – a social agent presented to the public as a fumbling, clumsy, though good natured type – their coverage compared it to that of a man who crossed the street without looking both ways first. He certainly didn’t deserve to die, but it was his own lack of mindfulness that brought it on him. A tragedy, and one that could happen to any of us, something accidental and completely separate to the possible plots against his life. How did the readership react to this line? The editor of a leading media outlet had been found to be UPD. The woman whose articles that brought all these reforms to the fore was now being dissected by them. Either they had all been fooled by her, or she was the victim of a grievous mistake. As such, the argument initiated with the death of Agent Mullen and the arrest of Joanne was reduced to a binary issue which had but two possible answers. Was Joanne really UPD? Without a doubt, her naysayers insisted. And how could anybody be shocked by that? Over pints in pubs across Ireland there were grunts that anybody at the top is likely untouched, and before allowing themselves to think any further about it, glasses would be clinked and the drinks guzzled down. The UPD reform was already in place, after all, and was clearly doing the job it was meant for.

‘What if she isn’t UPD and still murdered him? Or if she is UPD and didn’t? What if nobody in the newsroom killed him? What if Detective Wong was UPD and was framing her? What if the miserable drip of a social agent killed himself? He didn’t seem like the happiest guy to me. And they called it a murder because why? A second glass of wine was in the room? Why wasn’t Ava questioned more? Why weren’t any of us after the scans? And why am the only one asking these things?’

Barry Danger hollered the flurry of questions from his desk over the course of a long Monday. The cubicle he occupied had shrunk since Joanne’s removal, and under the influence of the stand-in editor, he was starting to feel the walls close in on him. Once, his anarchic attitude was indulged, now it was being suffocated. During Joanne’s rule, his colleagues would cautiously welcome his dissent, knowing that his staunch contrariness was a valuable reminder that however flat their screens might be, at the very least, it was a three-dimensional world they were reporting on. Not so under Ava’s supervision. There was a battle to be fought, their editor’s name to be cleared. His questions, asked with no small amount of obnoxious glee, was an attack from within. The embittered journalists around him pretended not to hear, and Ava O’Dwyer, who quietly approached his work space, stopped at the bobblehead on his cubicle wall and flicked it over with a finely manicured nail.

‘We are not writing a political science thesis, Mr. Danger. Save the multiple angle shots for a retrospective ten years from now. We have a very simple mission and thoughts counter to it are for our competitors to express, not us.’

Barry, obstinate in his refusal to acknowledge the shift in atmosphere since Joanne’s departure, cackled and asked, ‘Isn’t that what got us into this mess in the first place?’

It was the last dispute any of them heard from the Englishman. Within the week, he handed in his resignation and moved back to London, wearily giving up on the plague ridden community he had been a part of for so long, choosing instead to hope his own people would find a better route through the existential mire. There were problems with the world and they were only being dealt with one at a time, issues chosen not by an informed population but in knee jerk reactions just as likely to cause more grief. As ever, in seeing this, he had no qualms about describing it as the burden it was. The last article he submitted to ChatterFive’s newsdesk was a satirical piece which carried the title – Damned If You Do – and covered a long series of pets he had as a child, that try as he might, kept on dying, one dead dog piled atop another in the mass grave his garden had become. Worse still, despite all of his best efforts, each one died in pain, riddled with disease that played out over extended years. There is no good death, he concluded. The article ended with the question of why he would put himself through the suffering of replacing the animals full in the knowledge that having his heart broken was inevitable, and suggested that he didn’t have a choice in the matter, and that trapped as he was, all he could do was laugh. Ava refused to publish it, citing numerous spelling errors as an extra irritant heaped onto her day. In his final hope to have it read by the local public, he posted it himself in the ChatterFive community where it was lost in a bonfire of inflammatory reactions to the trial of Joanne Victoria that was set to begin within a matter of weeks.

She was of course, as Ava demonstrated, being judged in the press long before her court date. It was a dress rehearsal for the main event. Since ChatterFive became a beacon of support for Joanne it was inevitable that other media outlets came to vilify her. Given that other newsrooms were full of people who had known her, worked with her, been fired by her, there was plenty of fuel for the fire, and though most people who read and watched the analysis of the woman agreed with the ugly portrait, ChatterFive sustained a growth in numbers from its support of her. There was an opinion in the community that the loyalty the organisation had to their commander and chief was admirable enough to reward it with their own loyalty to the brand. She was a bully, yes. What news editor in the world wasn’t? It was what the job called for. And most of all, in ChatterFive’s denouncement of the system that was punishing their editor for a crime she didn’t commit, there was a rally point for all those who disagreed with the belief in the UPD reforms. The unspoken understanding was that people were afraid: the woman who had broken the stories that led to the reforms so many years ago was now on trial, and if she was untouched, anyone could be. As such, they continued to follow the issue through the Ava-tinted glasses ChatterFive had adopted since she took the editor’s chair. The set goal their substitute editor had set for them was to get Joanne a second scan. In agreement with her defence attorney’s advice, no element of the actual murder case was concentrated on in their articles at all. The details of Francis Mullen’s death were secondary, and not without reason. In Joanne’s words, spoken then by Ava, the public could only concentrate on one point at a time. The more detail they attempted to add to her defence, the less outrage could be provoked. She was not UPD. All the fervour that stirred was used to this end – if Joanne got a second scan, the case would fall through and she could go home a free woman.

Dylan Wong’s chief had fumed when he heard that she’d actually have it granted. If she proved to be clear on the second scan, the entire system would be shown up as a shambles, and worse, for his department, there would still be a murder to solve. Luckily for the tetchy man, when she finally got the scan it only confirmed what they were already told – the woman was untouched, incapable of empathising with all the grief she caused. Deflated from this, Ava’s PR campaign could not regain its momentum. The public court had reached its verdict. Now there was but the formality of a trial.

Murder was the charge. There were no discussions of whether she should be trialled as a moral agent with full faculties and by extension, subject to standard acts of punishment and reform. That had been decided the day she was proven UPD. Though she had been listed as untouched and banned from working in certain areas of society, she was not treated as an insane person who’s guilt would be excusable. The UPD hold a unique place in Irish law, somewhere in a hopeless desert between the polar ends of sane and insane. When an untouched was found to be guilty of a particular crime, rehabilitation was not considered possible. If it was decided that Joanne had murdered the social agent, she would be sent to Inishvickillane, the closed facility for violent UPD, with no chance of remand or bail. A life sentence, for all intents and purposes, stranded with the vicious anathema of Ireland.

On the first day of the trial, though she appeared stern behind square rimmed glasses, she dressed in light silks with rounded collars, the pastel shades of her outfit chosen to give her a motherly air. Her legal team insisted that she not look upset by the proceedings as it might be interpreted as an attempt at emotional manipulation of public perception. When this was read as cold and indeed, untouched, a woman unfazed by the stranglehold of a countries law gripping her throat, she was told that maybe she should look down at the ground more, be humble, let a single tear fall for the social agent who died so young. And this in turn was read how they originally expected. There was no hope of being able to control how she was seen once the scarlet letters were draped around her neck.