Rain ran down the windowpanes, distorting the outline of the Armadillo across the river. The Finnieston Crane was almost obscured by it. Distant tenements, standing atop the hill that rose above Partick, where he lived, were a depressing rust-red blur, almost subsumed, somehow, by the sky.
A hush of anticipation fell across the gathering when the DCS strode in. He was followed by a bespectacled younger man in plain clothes, with hair that grew down almost to his collar. He was carrying a large cardboard box stencilled with the logo ‘iCom’. Both installed themselves behind a desk that sat below the whiteboard on the end wall, and the box was placed on top of it. The DCS removed his chequered hat and laid it on the table in front of him. He had a thick head of silvered hair, and a shiny, shaven, well-defined jawline. About the same age as himself, Brodie reckoned. But today there was something different about him.
And as if reading his thoughts, the DCS said, ‘How many of you have noticed a change in my appearance today?’
Tiny called out, ‘You’re wearing glasses, sir.’ He’d always had an eye for detail that Brodie envied.
‘Correct, Thomson. And yet, not.’ There was a moment’s puzzled silence. ‘They are not glasses.’ He raised a hand to one of the legs and removed them from his face, leaving the elements that curl around the ear in place. ‘Believe it or not, the legs of a pair of spectacles are called temples. In these iCom units, the temples detach from the ends that loop around your ear, and reattach magnetically. You can take them off like this, or you can swivel them up on to your forehead.’ He placed the glasses back on his nose, then pushed them up into his hairline to demonstrate. ‘If I ask my iCom to darken the lenses, then I look like I’m wearing sunglasses.’ He adopted a commanding tone. ‘iCom, shade my lenses.’ They instantly turned dark as he dropped them over his eyes again. ‘There. Now I look cool, right?’
‘Poser,’ somebody said in a stage whisper, which drew laughter from around the room. The DCS grinned, anxious to show that he, too, had a sense of humour.
Raising a hand to his right ear, he said, ‘The piece that goes in and around your ear on each side translates sound into silent vibration that your brain then retranslates into sound. It’s very sharp, very clear, and no one can hear it but you.’ He ran his index finger from the back of his ear around the curved end of his jaw below it. ‘You probably can’t even see this, because it’s flesh-coloured and will adapt to the tone of your skin, whatever that might be. But it picks up the vibration from your jaw as you speak and sends it as a voice signal across the police 15G network. So you will be in constant two-way communication with whoever you call.’ He pushed the glasses back into his hairline. ‘Bring the glasses into play, and they provide an augmented reality VR screen that allows you to receive video calls, surf the internet, or interpret the world around you. Facial recognition is instant. Everything functions on voice command.’ He smiled. ‘But here’s the beauty of it: you can still see everything that’s going on beyond the lenses. It’s just a matter of jumping focus. You get used to it very quickly.’
‘What about two-way video?’ someone said.
The DCS turned to the younger man standing impatiently beside him. ‘This is DI Victor Graham from IT. Our hacker in chief.’ The hacker in chief seemed less than impressed by his monicker. ‘He can explain it better than me.’
Graham removed his own glasses and ran a delicate finger around the outside edge of the lenses. ‘There are eight tiny cameras built into the rims,’ he said. ‘They scan your face and reinterpret the digital information to send a faithful video rendering of your likeness to the other party.’ He replaced his glasses. ‘Make no mistake, the processing power of these iCom sets is enormous, powered by miniature cells built into the end pieces.’ He touched the angled joints where the legs were hinged to the frames. ‘You’ll get about ninety-six hours of uninterrupted use without having to recharge.’
The DCS stepped in again. ‘Now here’s a really interesting feature...’ he smiled, ‘which should appeal to our friend, DI Brodie.’
Heads turned towards Brodie, and he felt the colour rising on his cheeks.
‘Software in the iCom will allow officers to view video and scan it to determine whether or not it is genuine.’
Graham said, ‘The process is lighting-fast, and the software is generations ahead of the competition. It’s foolproof.’
The DCS grinned. ‘So you’ll all be able to tell whether the actress in your porn videos is real or not.’ Which brought a ripple of laughter around the room. ‘Just a pity it wasn’t available last week when Brodie fucked up the case against Jack Stalker. Bastard wouldn’t have walked free, then, eh?’
Brodie clenched his jaw.
‘Okay, I’m going to hand you over to DI Graham here to provide a full briefing and issue you with your individual iComs. Any queries, direct them to him. Lose the fucking thing and you’ll answer to me.’
He picked up his hat to set squarely on his head and marched briskly out of the room.
DI Graham waited until he was gone. ‘And me,’ he said. ‘These things come out of my budget, and they cost a fucking fortune.’
Chapter Three
An air-conditioning fan rattled and whirred behind the rusted grill in the ceiling. Rain thundered on a skylight that spilled bruised daylight into the waiting room. The sound of the large-screen television fixed high up on the far wall was only just audible above it. Discoloured plastic chairs stood lined up against three walls, facing a low square table in the centre of the room. The table groaned with grubby, dog-eared magazines, and Brodie imagined them to be contaminated by the invisible bacterial and viral infections carried by all of the sick patients who had handled them.
The walls of the room had not been painted in years, and were stained with damp and scarred by the backs of chairs. It was empty when Brodie first entered, dripping rainwater on the floor after a perilous ride through flooded streets in the open electric taxi boat he had caught at one of the temporary south-side jetties. Private boats for hire clustered around all the jetties like so many feeding fish.
He was always depressed by the rain-streaked sandstone tenements that lined the streets. They stood between the gap sites like the few remaining rotten teeth in a sad smile. Abandoned like the tower blocks and the newer social housing. Shop windows had been boarded up long ago, and were almost obscured by graffiti. The Citizens Theatre in Gorbals Street had been forced to close its doors permanently after almost a hundred years of productions on the stage of what had once been known as the Royal Princess’s Theatre. All the drama these days played out on water in the streets around it.
For a while he had sat on his own in the waiting room, feeling the air thicken with humidity, before an elderly man in a flat cap and dripping grey raincoat pushed open the door and took a seat against the far wall. After the briefest nod of acknowledgement, he had begun amusing himself by stamping on the cockroaches scuttling across the tiles. The hardy German variety of the insect that infested the city had moved indoors to survive the falling temperatures which had come unexpectedly with climate change. The little bastards were hard to kill. Brodie watched, fascinated, for a while, before finding himself drawn by a familiar jingle interrupting a succession of annoying infomercials on the television. The equally irritating jingle was the one adopted by the Eco Party to herald its endless political party broadcasts ahead of the imminent election.
The incumbent Scottish Democratic Party, led by the charismatic Sally Mack, was well ahead in the polls. The SDP, unlike the EP, did not seem to feel the need to constantly badger the electorate for their votes. Which imbued them, somehow, with a reassuring sense of self-confidence, even superiority. The Scottish Tories had long since faded into oblivion, leaving the Ecologists as the only genuine opposition. But there was a sense of desperation in their floundering campaign as election day approached.