“H
E’S BEEN SET
up,” Amanda told me. We were sitting in the village cafe. I’d got to know her by mending the wifi on her iPad. “Are you good with these things?” she’d asked me. I’d done my best. All part of my helpful personality. I’d created the air of someone “taking time out,” renting a mobile home on a nearby farm. Maybe I’d had a breakdown. Maybe I was writing a book of country walks. Maybe I was a reclusive millionaire.
I liked Amanda. She was fun. She was comfortable being comfortably in her late thirties. She was pushing a cake around her plate. “Being pregnant is great,” she enthused. “Everyone goes on and on about the eating, but there are so many other advantages. There’s not bothering to dye my hair”—she pointed to the fetching flecks of grey—“and then there’s the farting. It’s blissful. I’m like a whoopee cushion, and no-one every suspects it’s me because I’m a pregnant woman. We’re like saints.”
As I said, I liked her. I even told her my real name. After all, it didn’t matter anymore.
We’d bump into each other, for a gossip and a natter. She didn’t find me threatening. “Frankly, if you were wanting to have an affair with me when I look like I’ve swallowed the Hindenburg, well, good luck to you.” And I think she was also a bit bored. “Being this pregnant—well, I’m waiting for a really important, painful kettle to boil.”
Fairly soon we were talking about Ray’s problems. “Basically,” said Amanda, “They hired Ray because they were looking for someone to blame. They knew all this was going to come out. Sodobus will let him try and deal with it. Then they’ll say the problem is with the job he’s done of it, not with whatever they’ve been up to. Then they’ll fire him very nicely. If we can just cling on till we get a juicy settlement out of them, it’ll probably be okay, but I’m applying for jobs that start about a week after I’ve squeezed this one out.” She patted her bump and then slurped at her decaf coffee.
Amanda’s suspicions had been proved grimly correct. Within a fortnight of joining, Ray had noticed the few competent members of his team were ‘rotated’ out to other tendrils of the Sodobus spider, replaced with gawky interns or the kind of PR women who set feminism back about four hundred years. On the other side of the fence, he’d always laughed at posh, dim blondes running events. Now he had an office full of them. Was there a collective noun for them—An Activia? A Pimms? There was one dismal product launch where the entire gaggle had all worn the same t-shirt and Ray had been confronted by half a dozen identical blondes with the same hair, height and make-up, all drinking the sparkling water meant for the journalists while talking excitedly about their next skiing holiday. Ray had never been on a skiing holiday and felt a bitter resentment that people who worked for him could somehow afford them while his idea of luxury was to get the Jamie Oliver meal deal at Boots.
S
UCH WAS THE
personal misery of Ray Richardson the morning I turned up chugging outside his office. I was fine with him ignoring me. I’d see him again later. That was all part of the plan. Ray was a good man. It had taken a while to find one. And I wasn’t going to let him go.
S
HALL
I
TELL
you what Ray did that morning? He endured a lot of pointless meetings, he wondered about the drone buzzing past his window, and he blamed it on the blonde petting zoo they’d replaced his marketing department with.
He flung open the glass door to his glass office. “Who did that?” he said, waving behind him at the helicopter. Of course, it had now gone, so his bemused team looked up to see Captain Angry pointing at the empty sky.
W
HEN
R
AY
R
ICHARDSON
left the building at lunchtime the helicopter was still circling. “Sod you,” he snarled to it. He looked again at the text on the banner, and tried futilely zapping the QR code as it zipped close to him. His cameraphone clicked and then connected to the wifi zone at the nearby coffee shop in order to bring up a web page. Eventually the browser admitted defeat, ‘Page not found.’
“Stuff your granny and your dad,” growled Ray. Trust his team to launch an awful social media campaign and then not bother to build the website to go with it. He stalked off to Boots to get his meal deal, and the helicopter drowsed past him as Ray neatly sidestepped a chugger. Ray hated chuggers.
“Have a great day,” I said, smiling to myself.
A
T SOME POINT
that night, while Ray was asleep, he received an email. It moved swiftly from his unread to his read items and he knew nothing about it until two days later when he was going through his post.
T
HE NEXT DAY
the helicopter was back and so was I, chugging away. Mostly I was watching the electronic billboard dominating the plaza. Ray’s predecessor had launched it as an exercise in ‘Profile Raising Through Living Social Media.’ It rotated various Sodobus adverts and occasionally fed through some tweets (the tweets were carefully screened after it had first gone live and been swiftly spammed by people delighted at the idea of putting swearwords up on a digital display). Today the screen appeared to be slowly playing through a series of extraordinarily bland mission statements that someone in Internal Comms had fed through to it.
‘Sodobus: Together is better’ went alongside a picture of a tiny child smiling at a well somewhere in Africa. Ray found this objectionable for quite a few reasons. Sodobus’s only interest in Africa was in ‘Law Enforcement Protective Equipment Upsales.’ Also, the photo of the child at the well had nothing to do with Sodobus. It was from an online photography site. It still had the watermark slapped through the centre of it.
I watched the billboard, and I imagined Ray, up in his office, opening his post. It was 11am. From what I’d learned of his routine, he’d be getting to it about now.
H
E’D OPEN THE
envelope. A set of black and white photographs would slide out, along with an eBay invoice. The top picture was a reasonably innocuous black and white photograph nearly a century old. It was of three pretty girls, perhaps about twelve, dancing around their smiling mother in sailor outfits.
The next few photographs saw the dancing continue, but with less clothes. After a while the dancing stopped, but the activity didn’t. And all the while the mother continued to smile. And then she helped out. He would stare at the pictures with a horrified fascination. From lettering in the background, he could guess the studio was in Germany, and the clothing scattered everywhere suggested the 1930s. As did the swastika. Historically, the prints were probably fascinating... if you liked collecting vintage child pornography.
Perhaps someone would come in to ask him an inane question, probably about the building being on fire or something. He would hastily slap the photos face-down on his glass desk, praying they weren’t reflected somehow.
When they’d gone, he’d examine the eBay delivery slip, and then stumblingly check the Gmail on his phone. He’d find the original email showing that he’d ordered the photos and then notice with horror that it had been read. The original listing seemed innocent enough, but if you read it knowing what it really contained, then the wording was laden: ‘A series of intimate family portraits... revealing childhood passions... experimental studio prints... will arouse more than academic interest... a peep into Weimar home life...’
Ray would sit back in his chair and work out if there was a way he could possibly claim that he’d bought Nazi child porn by accident. And then he’d realise that no one would believe him. Especially not his wife.
He could send a furious email to the eBay seller, but that would involve engaging with them. Perhaps he could complain to eBay. But that would be bolting the stable door after the horse was on fire. He’d been set up and he was in a corner.
I knew exactly what he’d do. He’d curse (“Granny’s tits”), he’d stuff the photos into a cross-shredder, maybe post them abroad, and then he’d go outside for a proper cup of coffee and a think. I checked my watch. 11.20am. He’d be due out about now. I hoped.
‘S
ODOBUS:
A F
RIENDLY
Eye’ said the billboard against a picture of a young woman walking alone down a rainy street at night. There was no sign of Ray. I felt a moment’s worry that it had all gone wrong—but no. There he was. He stalked past me, his face screwed up with fury.
“Excuse me, sir, do you have a moment—” He ducked aside from my over-eager chugging, but somehow failed to avoid having a flyer pressed into his hand.
I watched him go. He wandered into the coffee shop. The queue was long, long enough for him to calm down a bit, long enough for him to glance idly at the flyer he’d been handed, and then to run pelting back from the shop.
W
HICH WAS WHEN
Ray Richardson met me properly.
He was waving a picture of a teenage Nazi’s vagina in my face.
“
What the sodding granny fuck?
” he was screaming at me. And waving around his arms. It was a risk I’d been prepared to take. Despite the fact that I was a chugger, people were stopping to almost notice the scene. After all, it’s cheering to see a charity mugger being threatened with violence by anyone. And the thing about Ray Richardson was that, even after a few months in PR, he was still a solidly-built piece of engineering.
“Is this man bothering you?” a few people asked.
“Lay off him, mugger,” said someone else.
Ray bristled even more at this. Because, obviously a black man punching a white man only happens for one reason. His expensive suit was because drugs or crime or something, obviously.
“It’s fine,” I said loudly. “The guy really doesn’t fancy giving money to cats, that’s all.” I laughed, breaking the tension. A few people scowled, but the tension went out of the scene. Ray realised that overt aggression wasn’t winning him prizes and instead stood there, concentrating his simmering rage into a look that boiled the piss in my kidneys.
When the small sort-of crowd had got back to ignoring me and wandered away, Ray leaned forward, forcing a pleasant smile onto his face. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your new best friend,” I told him. “First of all, I’m not blackmailing you. Not really. Actually, I kind of work for you.”
“Your granny you do,” said Rick.
I produced a flask from my tabard. “Fancy a coffee? This is really good.”
I
N THE CENTRE
of the plaza, two people drank coffee on a bench carefully designed to be comfortable to sit on for only ten minutes and absolute agony to try and sleep on. A small remote-controlled helicopter weaved overhead. A billboard flickered. ‘Sodobus: Every Child Taken Care Of,’ against a stock photo of a teddy bear abandoned in a puddle.
“W
HAT DO YOU
want?” Ray’s opening gambit was defused by the coffee. It really was very good.
“I want to know if I can trust you,” I said to him. “I’ve recently discovered that I’m employed by your company, at arm’s length. As... well, I guess you could say a cleaning contractor. And I need to be absolutely certain you know nothing about me.”
“Sunshine, I can assure you I know sod all about you and what goes on here.” His face narrowed in suspicion. “Why are you doing this to me? What do you do for me? Is this another plot to trip me up?”
“I kill people.”
“Bugger my Uncle Ted.” Ray had had enough. He gave me a look of disgust and stood up. “I don’t believe you,” he said firmly. His expression told me he probably did. “You expect me to believe any of this?” he restated, just to make sure I knew he didn’t believe me. “I mean,” he went on, “let me assure you, this isn’t Ghana, and we’re not an oil company. We don’t go around bumping off people. I mean, why would we? There are so many easier and more effective ways. I don’t believe you.”
I listed a few of the people I’d disposed of. “But they don’t matter. This is about something else. Something bigger. The cat in the room.”
Ray finished his coffee, laughing. “This is like a mumbled YouTube conspiracy. You seriously expect me to believe that Sodobus paid you to assassinate Henry Jarman?”
I smiled. “Well, sort of. I wasn’t actually going to kill him—thing is, he was so mental he actually committed suicide to prove he was relevant. And so that his followers would start releasing the Jarman Manifesto.”
By now the Jarman Manifesto had become quite famous. It had been published for months, tweet by tweet and blog by blog, each one spreading out. Some of it was bonkers, some of it had been turned into cat .gifs, but a lot of it made sense.
A lot of Jarman’s more recent posts had been about how governments couldn’t help taking control of the internet, and that perhaps, rather than fighting this, a middle ground had to be found whereby each country’s internet access was effectively placed under the notional control of a charitable trust. An unassailable organisation that existed purely to protect the freedom of access to that information, and would guarantee that the pipes couldn’t be hacked into, spied upon, censored or filtered. The late Henry Jarman made much of the fact that students at Chinese Universities had the fastest internet access in the world, yet had no idea what a 1989 photograph of a boy standing in front of a tank had to do with them.
The late Henry Jarman wanted these charities to operate outside governments, to be unassailable forces for internet good. To be ‘vast cuddly Stephen Frys.’ On our side and talking to each other. Organisations that were, like the internet, hard to filter, block or divert.
It was a good idea. It was contentious, but what had made it immediately popular was that the government had immediately denounced it as nonsense. If Henry Jarman had been alive, people would have called it the bonkers ramblings of someone who no longer got invited onto
Question Time
. But, because he was dead, he was suddenly accorded a lot more respect and sympathy. The leader of the opposition said it “certainly raised interesting questions.” Several bodies had stepped forward to offer to model this foundation. Which would, naturally, be called The Jarman Freedom Foundation.