Finally he paused, considered calling the shrink that Richard had seen, rejected the idea – it would take a minimum of fifteen minutes to restore his thoughts afterwards, to get back in the zone – then changed his mind again, and placed the call.
"Hello. My name's Josh Cumberland. I'm working on behalf of Philip Broomhall."
On the windscreen, her coffee-coloured skin was translucent, the eyes somewhere between nut-brown and honey. She nodded, both smiling and serious.
"I've been expecting someone to call."
"Well, I'm not with the police, but I am investigating on Philip Broomhall's behalf. If you'd like to verify, I'm happy to wait offline."
"But would he accept a call from me? Tell me the name of the agent you're working through."
"You mean Geordie Biggs?"
"All right, Mr Cumberland. Now I don't know where Richard went, nor do I know the specific trigger that set him off. I do know there was an issue to be explored, bullying at school, and the more I think about it, the more relevant it feels."
"That's the kind of thing I hoped you could enlighten me with."
"You could step through the recording of our session, assuming that will be a help."
"Um, yes, please. Transmit via any archiving format you like."
Her eyes seemed to keep growing larger.
"I'd rather meet face to face. There are nuances to pay attention to in the recording, behavioural signals to highlight, that kind of thing."
"OK. You're in Elliptical House, is that right?"
"Not this afternoon. I live in what some people call the smart end of Kilburn."
"I can meet you there." He looked at the side windows, rippling with water but no longer awash, as the storm lessened. "Your place, or a bar?"
"How about a restaurant? Do you like Jamaican food? Later, say at seven?"
"Perfect."
"OK, I'm appending details. There's a red star on the map, highlights the place."
"Works for me."
"Look forward to meeting you."
The attachment pinged and opened as the comm pane closed.
Wow.
Broomhall blamed her, so she would want to deflect that, get Josh on her side. If she was genuine in wanting to help him find Richard, then the rest was irrelevant.
He realised he was staring where her image had been, as if trying to summon her back.
Bad idea. Concentrate.
But she was the first good thing to distract him for a long time.
Browns and oranges dominated the restaurant. Each table bore a bonsai palm tree. Josh smiled as Suzanne Duchesne addressed the staff by their first names, and they responded likewise. A Jamaican waiter called Clyde seated them next to the wall, away from the other diners, giving them a quiet zone.
From her shoulder bag, Suzanne drew a portable screen and unrolled it, spreading it across the table. While they waited for drinks to arrive – some kind of tea – they made small talk: how long she had lived in Kilburn (four years), where he was staying (a budget Travelodge off the M4), and who would win the general election.
"Let's see." Josh looked down at the lifeless screen. "Sharon Caldwell is female, lesbian, an atheist rationalist with two PhDs. Then there's Billy Church, aka Fat Billy, man of the people, beer lover and fight fan, already in office, and he's just announced tax cuts."
"You think there's no contest?"
"I wish there were."
Clyde brought the tea, then left them alone. Breathing in warm scents from the kitchen, Josh watched as Suzanne brought the portable screen to life. Then she tapped her phone, and the unfurled screen showed a room interior, Suzanne sitting at an angle to Richard Broomhall. Josh put his own phone on the table; both handsets winked amber, establishing a sharespace. In the image, she was putting young Richard at ease; in reality, she was tugging down her sleeve which had pulled up, just by centimetres.
Few people would have noticed; but Josh needed only a glimpse to take in the silver scarring.
"You want audio?" Suzanne took out her earbeads. "Or just transcription for now?"
Printed text – her words in red, Richard's in white – scrolled down a side pane.
"Hmm. Can we get rid of both for the moment?"
"All right."
"This will help the automated search." As he tapped his phone, dots sprinkled themselves across Richard's moving image, then lines joined the dots, like moving wire frames. "Improve the motion analysis."
"On CCTV, you mean? Like on the Tube?"
"Uh-huh. My bots can look for subtle things like – see that? The way he rubbed his nose? If that's a habit, we've just increased our chances."
"Interesting." Her polished-chestnut eyes contained golden flecks. "Emphasising process over content. That's close to the way I work, because I'm as interested in his posture and voice tone as in the actual words."
"But if he'd said anything about where he might go, you would have picked it up. And the police have seen this?"
"Yes, so they should have picked up any local references I missed."
When she focused on him, it was like the total universe concentrating its attention; when she looked at the screen, she was absorbed in the images. To Josh, this was extraordinary.
"Here we are." Clyde bore plates of spicy bean stew with rice and bread. "Enjoy, enjoy."
"We will."
"Smells terrific," said Josh.
And the taste burst into his mouth, slowing him right down. Suzanne blanked the screen – now it was the food she concentrated on – and they made little conversation until their plates were mostly empty. She pushed her plate aside just moments before he finished too.
"I don't understand–" he would have liked to enjoy the warm feeling a while longer, but they were here for a reason – "what you mean by process over content. In your work, that is."
"Look at this interaction." She worked her phone, bringing the screen back to life and skipping to a timestamped moment. "Here, we're discussing Richard's reaction to blades."
The words scrolled down the transcript pane.
"See here?" Suzanne slowed the movie down. "That gesture with his left hand, cupped toward his stomach? An unconscious reaction to my question, in parallel to the words he spoke, telling its own story."
Josh frowned. "Gestures like that mean something?"
"Movement and timing are most important. Here, his left hand – under control of his right cerebral hemisphere – indicates he gets an automatic feeling in his stomach at the thought or sight of knives. It's an internal reaction, call it gut feeling, and it's real because every major organ has receptors for neuropeptides, almost like another nervous system."
"Really?"
"When people say something is
heartfelt
, it's often more literal than they think. Figures of speech have to come from somewhere."
Josh had felt his guts roiling in circumstances most people would never know. Visceral feelings were intense; he knew they were real.
"So how does that help you?"
"Everything is mental modelling. Even a black shirt in the open air reflects less light than a white shirt indoors, so something as basic as colour is a neural process."
"Computation," he said.
"Exactly. By using Richard's imagination, I could have got him to focus on the fear-feeling, experience it as a loop… See, you haven't noticed the feeling of your sock on your left foot until I mentioned it, because a constant sensation just fades away. So a gut feeling doesn't literally keep looping around, but while it's strong it feels that way."
"All right." Josh was smiling, still aware of his foot.
"In his imagination, I could've got him to spin the feeling in the opposite way, add some visualisation, and his fear reaction would be gone. Sounds too simple to work, yet it does."
"But you didn't do that."
"No, look. I taught him something else, but not for blades specifically." She flicked through thumbnail stills, then jumped the main pane to another part of the session. "Here, Richard is imagining something, and see how his eyes focus on a point in space? Even though he's seeing a picture in his mind? The entorhinal cortex has a component called the spatiotemporal grid which– Well, I'll save the neurology lecture for later, shall I?"
"If you like." The idea of a later was appealing to Josh. "So what happened next?"
"I taught him to experience the picture differently. Push it off to a different location and imagine it flaring bright, then washing out."
Josh started blinking, very fast.
Gun coming up, half the face exploding and my God he's
just a kid–
"–out now, breathe in, let the feeling out, Josh, that's right, and you're fine now."
"Jesus." He rubbed his face, sweat-slick as if in a sauna. "Sorry."
Clyde started to approach. "Sir? Are you all right?"
"He's fine." Suzanne waved him back. "We're doing OK."
"Shit." Not the language he would normally use over dinner, not with someone like this. "I don't know what happened. Something took me back–"
"You've had counselling, after battlefield trauma."
"I guess that's what you'd call it. Sure."
"And they used similar techniques with you, working successfully almost all of the time, is that right?"
"Sure." He rubbed his mouth. "Most of the time."
"So you had a little resonance of memory, and it's all gone now."
"It… it has gone. I feel OK."
"Good."
"How did you do that?"
"Well." Her smile and gaze hummed with mystery, deep as voodoo. "Call it magic if you like."
Casting some kind of spell, for sure.
Suzanne noted, as they walked, the way Josh cast his attention outward, in what looked like a trained pattern: left-right-left, starting close and extending to the distance. He made a soft humming noise as he spotted something about a building, then continued scanning.
"What did you notice?" she had to ask.
"Huh? Oh, those flats, how the building went from stables to warehouse to homes over the centuries."
"You're kidding." She saw the black iron crosses, part of the supports that held swelling brickwork in place. "I guess the place is old."
"Look how the place used to be mercantile, and before that rural, because the roads follow the natural contours. See?"
"Hmm. Interesting."
So he could overlay mental pictures across reality, make deductions that were not obvious; and if he was the kind of software expert she thought, he could wrap himself in highly abstract, creative visualisations of complex systems she could not imagine. This was not how she had imagined an ex-soldier would be.
"Where is your car?" she asked.
"Not far."
From a tiny motion of his head, she realised it was behind them somewhere, and that his walking her home took him further from the vehicle. It was good that she could read these nuances, because in some ways Josh Cumberland was unknowable, his physicality breathtaking, diverting her from the reason for their meeting.
"Have you thought what's going to happen once you find Richard?"
"Er, taking him home seems like a good idea."
"It wasn't me he was running from."
"No." Josh stopped and scanned in all directions, before turning to her. "I won't take him back into danger."
"I believe the physical danger comes from his school. The home environment is stressful in other ways."
"Yeah, I got that. Doesn't make Broomhall a bad man. I mean, he's money-grabbing and corporate, but I've met worse."
"We agree. He's just different from his son."
"Ah. Right."
Again, he scanned the street. Did he ever stop?
"I'm going to ask you a favour." Her heart, warm in her chest, reminded her of their conversation, the neuropeptide basis of emotion. "Let me help you look for Richard."
Was it for Richard's sake she was asking? Or to spend more time with this man?
Doesn't matter to Richard. We just need to get him back.
"I'll call you," he said.
They walked on, reaching the door to her apartment house too soon. She went inside, stopped in the hallway, and looked back out. Josh gave a little fingertip wave, an informal salute, and slipped away. It felt as if something had been pulled out of her.
Part of her awareness, throughout the meal, had observed the natural matching of their body language, the interlocking rhythm of microgesture, and the subliminal courting dance of pheromones, their effect surfacing in the dilation of eyes, the flaring of nostrils, the inability of either person to look away.
Josh Cumberland.
The name rolled around in her brain, warming her, threatening her equilibrium. Perhaps he was good news, perhaps he was bad; what she could not do was ignore him.
[ ELEVEN ]
A plain budget hotel room at five in the morning. How often had Josh woken up in places like this? Sometimes – when rich corporates paid his expenses – he slept in five-star elegance; other times it was hard soil or rock beneath his sleeping bag, the Brecon Beacons or Tibetan Alps or the expanding Sahara, snow or heat, always different. But like a turtle in its shell, he was always at home, because of the discipline, the routines he carried everywhere.