Chase the Morning

But I wasn’t so sure. As I drove home that night through a thin weeping drizzle I glanced uneasily at the turn-off for Danube Street. But there was no sunset banner to tempt me seaward; the sky was overcast, a featureless dome of gloomy grey cloud, and the louring buildings were wrapped in shadow, sullen and forbidding. It looked both sinister and depressingly ordinary, and thoroughly damped any desire I had to turn that way and test the truth of my strange experiences. To find they were just some kind of lunatic dream, or an overlay on ordinary things – or to find they were real and still there … I didn’t know which alternative scared me more. Inwardly I kicked myself for ever looking up all that nonsense from the files; now Clare and Dave and Barry must be wondering if I was some kind of nut. Come to that, I was wondering myself. I’d do better to go home and get some sleep.

It was as well I did, because I was shot out of God knows what dream at about four-thirty in the morning by the shrill braying of the phone. With a head like a carpentry shop – eyes full of glue, mouth of sawdust and the sawblade screeching across my brain – I struggled to make out what Barry was squawking about.

‘Broken into, dammit! And smashed about! Badly, they say – the cops, yes! No, not yet, I’m on my way down there this minute – I want you and Rouse and Bailey and Gemma too – get hold of ’em, will you? And don’t take no for an answer – this could be really fucking serious, lad!’

But it wasn’t, though no wonder the cops thought so. So did I, the moment I walked in the door, and Gemma – our brass-bound and case-hardened head of Transshipment – actually burst into tears. Somebody had gone through both inner and outer back doors, shattering their central panels of wood and wired glass without opening them, and so bypassed our rather basic alarm system. There was an ominous stink in the air, a real pig-farm stench. Every office door in the place was open, and through them spilled filing cabinets and bookcases like so many prostrate corpses, strewn around with the ripped and mangled remains of the papers and books they had held. Even the beautiful Victorian bookcase in Barry’s office had been thrown down, shattering a coffee-table, and its collection of antique atlases and traveller’s tales ripped to shreds.

‘Lovely books they were, too!’ said the CID sergeant sadly, when the department heads gathered there a few hours later. ‘Worth a bob, too, any idiot could see that. And yet you’re sure none of them were nicked?’

‘None!’ said Barry between his teeth. ‘Just bloody ruined like this!’ And he hurled the shreds of a heavy old binding at the wall.

The sergeant clicked his tongue sympathetically. ‘But nothing else gone – just like all the other offices. Didn’t even touch your whisky bottles. Yet they wiped out every bit of paperwork in the place!’ You could practically see the wheels working behind his eyes. ‘Shipping business, eh? Import-export … a high-pressure field is it? Kind of cutthroat competition? Lot of competitors?’

Barry shrugged. ‘Not so many. And I know most of them – we do lunch, play squash, that sort of thing. Always friendly. We’re fixers, expediters, there’s plenty of elbow-room; sometimes we put business each other’s way. You’re not suggesting …’

‘Well, sir – I mean, all your files destroyed, all your records – even the bloody phone-books! That’s bound to hold up your trading a bit, isn’t It? Could even –’

Barry guffawed. ‘Put us out of business? Not a chance! Paper’s just one way we keep our records – and a pretty obsolete way at that. Everything that matters passes through the computer system; that gets stored on discs, discs are automatically backed up to hard disk and hard disk onto tape streamers, all day, every day. And the streamer cartridges go into that little safe over there; fireproof, the lot. Three different levels of media – and not one of ’em’s been touched, in any office. All we’ve got to do is print it back out again.’

The sergeant’s face clouded over. ‘I see … and your competitors would know about this system?’

‘Oh, they all work much the same way,’ Gemma remarked. ‘Not always as secure, perhaps, but that, let us face it, is their own look-out. If they really had wanted to hurt us they’d know a hundred better ways. In fact, officer, losing the papers is causing us far less trouble than all this absolutely disgusting smearing they’ve done all over the actual computers –’

‘Ah yes, miss,’ said the sergeant, his face resolutely rigid. ‘Very nasty, that – unhygienic and all. As if it really did hit the fan … Well, you should be able to get it cleaned up soon enough; the photographers will be through with it any time –’

‘Photographers?’ demanded Rouse. ‘Good God, man, my terminal looks like the wall of a Lime Street lavatory! What’ll a photograph of that tell you?’