Gilded Hate Machine Read online

  Susan felt like pointing out she’d been sent to report on a campaign launch party, and that’s what she’d done. No one had told her to do exhaustive critical research and present a take down, but of course she did have a reply to this.

  “I have a lead. I discovered the mayor had the party paid for out of council funds rather than his own campaign pot.”

  Stremp leaned forward, his jowls shaking. “That is a good thing to have found. Why isn’t it in the article?”

  “Because there would be no follow up. Just one thing, slapped aside. If you want criticism to work, you need momentum. An unstoppable crime or a series of blows.” Which, even as she said it, Susan felt was more cynical than she’d ever been before.

  “Wise beyond your years,” Stremp replied in an oily way which actually made Susan feel uncomfortable. “I will print this article, but I expect more confidence from you going forward.” By confidence Susan was sure he meant hatchet jobs.

  “Okay sir.”

  “Your photographer…”

  “Yes?” Susan replied, giving nothing away.

  “Is rather good. Made the mayor look foolish. Saved the article.” Which was the opposite of what Karen had been meant to do wasn’t it?

  “Thanks sir, I’ll pass that on.”

  “Not everyone gets to employ their sister Susan,” ah, he knows, “but I will tolerate it if results are satisfactory.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Atkins sat in a car waiting. He was bored, of course, but it wasn’t the boredom which made one pull out a phone to browse or get lost singing along to the radio. It was the sort of bored which just solidified you into your waiting even more, calcifying you until you ceased to be a detective waiting and became a statue staring out across the ages. But wait here he would, until his target arrived.

  How much time passed before he heard the laughter of young men? Before he finally moved, bones cracking, muscles warming up, turning to see a group of white boys coming down the footpath to where one of them lived. Now Atkins got out and slammed the door.

  The boys turned and did a double take. “It’s the cop!”

  “Hello boys,” Atkins said walking towards them.

  “What do you want? We’re all done, sent home, inn-o-cent,” one stressed the word as if Atkins couldn’t tie his shoelaces.

  “I have some questions,” the detective replied.

  “Yeah? What are they?”

  “Where were you all last night?”

  “In bed officer.” They laughed. “With your mum,” they laughed harder.

  “Any of you got decent alibis for last night? Any of you been out throwing more stones about?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” one replied.

  “Was on the news,” another lad said, “Polish bird got smashed.”

  “And does that have anything to do with you lot?” Atkins asked.

  All groups have an unofficial leader, and in this group, it was the tallest, biggest one with his red hair cut close to his skull. “I know what this is! This is harassment! You reckon we did it and you come here!”

  “This is not harassment.”

  “Nah, nah, we’re not thick. You’ve not got any evidence saying we did it, cos we all nowhere near. We at cinema, check the cameras, you’re outright harassing us!”

  It was at this point Atkins began to realise he was acting outside the bounds of professionalism. That turning up to question unconnected boys when not even on the case was not a good idea; that he was totally on tilt and about to get into a lot of trouble.

  “So, your alibi is the cinema?” he said seizing on a way out.

  “Yeah, check the fucking cameras.”

  “That’s all you had to say,” Akins said as he started to physically back off.

  “Yeah, fuck off pal, don’t harass us, or maybe we’ll report you,” and they resumed their laughter.

  Atkins nodded, turned and headed toward his car. Maybe they were telling the truth, maybe they were lying, but he sure as hell shouldn’t be here and it was best to pretend this hadn’t happened. So, he got in his car and sloped off back to the case he was meant to be working on.

  “Well hello Steve, we have brought you coffee,” Grayling said as she sauntered through the door holding up a cup.

  “I hope that’s not single use plastic,” the SOCO replied.

  “What?”

  “Those cups contain single use plastic. I’d prefer something reusable.”

  “Did you tell Father Christmas to get back up the chimney too?” Grayling replied dumping the cup on the table and letting a little slosh out.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry, thank you.”

  “So, what have you got for us Jobs?” she asked.

  “Oh, don’t bring the nickname out because I’m worried about the environment.”

  “I’m worried about Eastern European women getting smashed. What have you got?”

  Steve, who was sat in an office chair with paperwork in front of him, wheeled the chair back with a firm kick, and made a flourish of picking up a report. “Well, you are not dealing with genius criminals. We found blood on the rock which matches the victim, and we found fingerprints on the rock. Normally this wouldn’t be a vast help, but those fingerprints match someone in our database…so… yeah I know who was holding that rock.”

  “Awesome. Well, I’m pleased I brought you the coffee, you ungrateful sod,” Grayling replied.

  “Your children won’t be because of the damage to the enviro…”

  “Yes, yes, like kids are going to happen,” Grayling turned and walked out, causing Maruma to emerge from one side from where he’d been lurking. “You hear that?”

  “Yes,” he noted.

  “Here’s a thought. If we’ve made a fuss of taking over this case, and we solve it in hours because there’s fingerprints on the weapon, do we look super-efficient or over the top hysterical?”

  “Oh, we’re going to find something,” Maruma noted.

  “And you’re sure of this? So far Atkins could have done this asleep.”

  “There’s a lot of signals in the world. A lot of buzz. We’ll find the pattern.”

  Four people sat round a table. The room was small and empty except for the table, four chairs, with a person on each and enough equipment to record every word said and gesture made. Two of the people were Maruma and Grayling, who sat with pens poised, notebooks out, while a lawyer was doing pretty much the same. The anomaly was a young white male with a shock of blonde hair, who sat slumped back, legs apart, utterly unconcerned.

  “…will be recording everything you say,” Grayling finished.

  “Before you ask any questions,” said a lawyer able to speak in perfect received pronunciation, “my client wishes to make a statement.”

  “Of course.”

  “I…,” the lawyer turned. “I advise against this, I really do.”

  “Just say it,” the youth replied.

  “My client, Thomas Walt, wishes to state that last night he and a group of friends attacked a young woman, and that he picked up a rock and struck her on the head.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Grayling leant forward puzzled, “your client is confessing to the attack?”

  “Yes, yes he is.”

  “Well that’s unusual,” erm, “will he answer questions?”

  “Yeah I will,” Thomas replied.

  “So, can you narrate for me what happened?” Grayling asked.

  “Yeah, me and the N.D’s went out to find some foreign scum. Knew this bitch worked at the old folks’ home, so we waited for her, and when she popped out, I picked up a stone and smacked her head. We kicked her a bit, get the point across yunno. Then we ran off.”

  “Ran?” Grayling checked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Away?”

  “Yeah. Of course. What was your name again?” Thomas asked.

  “DC Grayling.”

  “Right, and where’s he from?” Thomas asked looking at Maruma.

&nbs
p; “Morthern,” Grayling hissed.

  “Why did you attack her?” Maruma asked.

  “So she’d go back. To where she’s from. We don’t want her kind here.”

  Maruma leaned forward now. “You referred to yourself as the N.D. What’s that?”

  Thomas grinned, as if the whole interview had been leading up to this. “We read M.I., we know the P.P., we see them and we wanna get involved and do our bit. So, we formed a group to defend our neighbourhoods against foreigners.”

  Grayling swallowed a snort but still said “defend against foreigners like a Polish care worker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What needs defending?”

  “Our jobs. Our NHS. Our homes.”

  Grayling nodded and replied, “and what’s your job?”

  “Unemployed at the moment.”

  Maruma spoke now, “more acronyms, what do they mean?”

  “What?”

  “You read M.I., what is it?”

  “Morthern.Info, a website.”

  “Right, and P.P?”

  “The Patriot Party, the only politicians who aren’t elitist assholes. They’re like us, workers.”

  Grayling suppressed another smirk.

  “So,” Maruma said, “would you say that these sources inspire you?”

  “Sauces? Like pasta?”

  “The website, the politicians.”

  “Oh right. Yeah well, I watch the news, I’m not a thicko; always got a copy of the papers, shame the topless birds are gone, but I see it. And yeah, M.I. and the P.P. tell it like it is. They’re honest. They know we got too many foreigners.”

  “I have to ask,” Grayling said, “you don’t seem worried you’ve been arrested and will be charged.”

  “I’m not. I’m a soldier in a war. The ‘Neighbourhood Defenders’ will do what we can, and if we have to go to prison, we will be martyrs. All of us will own up, cos we ain’t done anything wrong. I can’t wait to say this in court, there’s a banging reporter now who covers it all, she’ll put us on the front page. The P.P. will know who we are! Morthern.Info will do stories on us! We’ve done it, we’ve acted!” A fleck of spit landed on Grayling’s notepad, and she turned to look at Maruma. There really was a pattern she hadn’t seen, and it really was bigger than just some lads with a rock. Not that she’d ever doubted him.

  “So, what happens now?” Thomas asked.

  “We have more questions, we have to arrest and speak to your fellow ‘defenders’, but I’m a hundred percent sure CPS will charge you and you’re not getting bailed with this level of keenness. Prison for you.”

  “And the front page,” he pointed out.

  Susan and Karen had arrived early and were the first people in the meeting room. They’d watched as a collection of journalists, sub-editors and key staff members of the Morthern Star had entered, sat down and one by one all asked if anyone knew what was going on. This was an emergency meeting everyone had been ordered to return to, but no explanations had been given.

  “Do you think we’re closing?” someone said.

  “What?”

  “Well print media is a dinosaur! Do you think we’re closing?”

  Someone replied, “our dear editor wouldn’t move to online only, he’s a dinosaur too.”

  “Maybe he’s retiring.”

  “Maybe he’s not bothering with online only and closing it all.”

  “We are not, I assure you, losing money.”

  Susan and Karen watched these exchanges silently, but with telling looks to each other. Stremp loved being an editor too much to give it up. Didn’t he?

  The arrival of the editor was announced by the heavy footsteps of his waddle, and he tramped in and threw himself down in his huge chair in the power position. Then he cast a baleful eye over the table.

  “I have decided I need to be clearer. It is time to stop being subtle.” Which was like a tiger saying it was time to stop being vegan. “I have gathered you here today for a council of war.” Eyes opened, backs stiffened, ears pricked. “I might not have been clear enough. I want your hours bent to breaking the mayor, I want stories on the mayor, I want news and damnable evidence, I want him ruined and in no position to win this election.” Stremp looked triumphantly round the table, but found faces looking back nonplussed. “What’s wrong with you all. Susan, explain the mood.”

  Now surprised, that she’d been asked, Susan replied “you’ve basically wanted us to do that for ages.”

  Stremp smiled in the manner of a spider who’d just found six flies in its web. “None of you have realised why.”

  Now he had the room’s attention and he paused a while before saying, “I plan to take a leave of absence from being editor, when I win the mayoral election.” Jaws actually dropped. “I will be standing for Mayor of Morthern.”

  “You’re right,” Susan agreed, “none of us expected to hear that.”

  “I intend to use the paper as my weapon to win this war. Before any of you start complaining about morality, Susan has discovered the mayor is using council funds in his campaign, so fair’s fair. We, the Morthern Star, are going to destroy this man and then I, your editor, will become the mayor.”

  A man at the back raised a hand. “Then we’ll have a new editor?”

  “There will be one during the election, who will be permanent when I win.”

  Minds whirled; ideas clicked. That sounded like a good idea actually.

  “Now get out there and get working. I know the mayor is corrupt, I just know it. You will all prove it.” For some reason he felt the need to add “or die trying.”

  Two

  Maruma was sat at his desk, a workspace devoid of toy animals. At least that’s what he told himself, but it was clear the Funko Pop of the alien from Alien was simply his version. It was sat looking at the computer screen, as Maruma was also doing. He had three cans of zero sugar drink lined up, and a packet of biscuits ready for a deep dive. He should probably have added that level of preparation to his pens, because he had just one with an unknown ink capacity. Still, he had a computer too and he was keen to get started and see what he was missing.

  When Maruma said he heard a lot of noise and wondered what the pattern was, he wasn’t being some airy hippy. What he meant was that living in society gave you feedback. Case in point: the Morthern.Info account. This was a website, but it was mostly a set of accounts across social media, linked together to cover the same reports. The brand was simple: provide news about Morthern in accessible chunks at a faster speed than any newspaper. So, here’s the thing; once Maruma looked at it, he realised he’d heard of it. He’d read the odd article, seen the odd retweet, comments on Facebook. But only a little, and although he’d heard of it, he’d never really read it, not deeply, not to what it actually said.

  Little by little, Morthern.Info had percolated into everyone’s head, or at least those who used modern media, but until you sat and read it for a few hours you didn’t consciously notice what it was making you think. Because as he sat there and filtered the noise away to find the pattern behind it, he came to a terrible realisation. He was helped by seeing what Thomas the unrepentant racist attacker had seen too.

  There would be a story about rising house prices, but there would be a comment about a social housing project for immigrants. There would be news of an assault, but only if the perpetrator was anything other than white and Morthern born. Job losses would be blamed on foreign governments, job shortages blamed on immigrant labour, problem people would always be dark skinned or thick accented, the health service being stretched beyond breaking point by new arrivals. The whole of Morthern.Info was a curving mechanism to get you to think immigrants were causing chaos. But it never said that in so many words, it just worked on your head ceaselessly. Clearly Thomas was an extreme, but there was no reason why thousands of M.I. readers weren’t slowly being converted.

  Maruma leaned back and picked a biscuit out with the robotic precision of a man who didn’t need to look. This
was the pattern. This was out in the world. A poison passed even faster than through the air. The game had a new expansion.

  Howard Welb was in bed. It wasn’t early or late, but it didn’t have to be. Welb was perfectly able to run his business from his bed at all hours of the day, thanks to the fact he had a laptop and a wi-fi surely powerful enough to speak to a satellite all on its own. So, he was propped up on one of his many pillows, loose t-shirt round a stomach fighting to stay modest, reaching out into the world through its screens. Around him was a large house, filled with stuff. He had a flat screen 4k TV in his bedroom, living room and playroom, he had all three gaming consoles, he had a kettle he could turn on and off through his phone, and lights the same. He even had three cars, not that he went out that much, but sometimes the world needed a visit. He loved his toys and he could afford them, because the web paid.

  Because when Howard Welb reached into the world it was under the guise of Monty T, newshound from Morthern.Info. A one-man band who’d mastered getting people to read his social media, and the social media companies to pay him advertising revenue.

  But Monty was hungry, and he hadn’t yet got a robot, dog or girlfriend to bring him food, so he put the laptop aside, sighed at having to get out of bed, and wandered through the house in tiger slippers. If you put Maruma’s conclusions to him, Monty would have laughed and agreed. People didn’t think they were racist. Sure, they would be, but they didn’t believe it, so you couldn’t go ‘send all the Indians back’, you had to tickle people round to it, and boy could he tickle. Satan didn’t just show up with a contract and ask you to suck that cock, he took you to dinner, brought you presents and gave you enough back rubs so that you asked yourself. Not that he saw himself as Satan, he saw himself as a rich media mogul who could play people like an octopus pimping on the keys.

  He’d now reached his kitchen, and he opened the fridge door. What a shame, he thought, that the common man could not organise his life enough to have champagne permanently chilling in it. However, he was a mogul, that was their life and he was making damn sure to live it. He was after food, so he opened a bread box without pausing to wonder why he’d paid seventy pounds for one shaped like a Klingon’s head, and pulled out his favourite: olive infused bread.