Page 73 of The Quarterlands (Dark Water #4)

Chapter Nineteen

Josiah

When did he and Cam end up on first-name terms?

Josiah mused as he drove into the office.

Once, they’d had a nice, formal relationship.

It had been “Reed” and “Raine”, with a side order of “sir”, but now it was “Cam” and “Joe”…

and he found he liked it. It was almost certainly his fault.

He’d kept Reed, and everyone else, at bay for years, barking at them and freezing them out, because he’d never been able to get over losing Peter.

He wasn’t sure why he was even ruminating like this, except that he was unbelievably tired but also full of nervous anticipation for whatever it was that Reed had found.

He tried not to be too excited. If it turned out to be Tyler’s grocery list instead of the blackmail footage, then all his hopes would be dashed.

He turned on the radio in an attempt to keep himself awake. He usually enjoyed nighttime talk radio; it had kept him company during many sleepless nights since Peter’s death, as well as at stake-outs and on late-night duck journeys in pursuit of a case.

Amanda and Alan weren’t due on for another few hours. Instead, the host was Frankie Lamb, a foul-mouthed, opinionated hothead best suited to the small hours. The callers tended to be equally deranged in their views, as if by expressing them at night, when most people were asleep, nobody would hear.

“Are they having a laugh? So, all in one day, we find out that Josiah Raine has secretly loved indies all along, Alex Lytton is a fucking saint, and Charles – national bloody treasure Charles Lytton – is a lying, scumbag cheat! What the hell? What do you think, callers? What the bloody hell are we to make of what happened today?”

Himesh from Epping wasn’t having any of it. “It’s all a pack of lies. All of it,” he opined. “Raine has been nobbled by the Secret Service.”

Well, that was a new one. Himesh ranted for several minutes but had no coherent argument, so Frankie cut him off abruptly.

A worried-sounding Molly from High Wycombe was next on the line. “I wonder what it can all mean?” she asked anxiously. “Is Josiah on drugs?”

“Apparently, Charles Lytton is the one on drugs.” Frankie chuckled. “What is it with the Lyttons and pharmaceuticals? Alex loves his croc, and now it turns out Charles has been knocking back some kind of muscle juice.”

“They’re a disgrace. The whole bloody lot of them,” said Jean from Maidenhead. “I won’t vote for them again.”

Frankie told her to piss off. “And put the bottle down while you’re at it,” he cackled after her.

The oddly named Slider from St Albans struck a rare note of sanity. “Looks like we was wrong about all of ’em,” he ruminated. “I blame the media. Are they even doing their jobs right?”

Josiah managed a wry smile at that. Not that he entirely agreed.

He’d met many decent journalists who’d worked hard to get their facts straight and spent long hours running the details of his cases past him before publishing.

There was no doubt the media sometimes made his job harder, but they’d also been incredibly useful to him over the years.

He’d lied to them consistently during his fake pursuit of Bram Janssen, and that had bought him time to unmask the true perp in the Emma James case.

A distressed Leanne from Bracknell was up next. “I feel sorry for that poor Lytton boy,” she murmured tearfully. “Poor Alex. What will become of him now? ”

Josiah turned off the radio. What, indeed?

He reached Ghost Eye City, parked his duck outside Inquisitus, and jogged into the SID.

Reed looked terrible. His holotie had long since stopped working and was now a sorry-looking grey blob around his neck.

His eyes were bloodshot, and he had several days’ worth of stubble on his face and dark smudges around his eyes.

Yet somehow, despite that, he appeared energised.

“You cracked it?” Josiah asked eagerly.

“Yes!” Reed’s face lit up. “It was a bitch of a code, but I did it. I’ve sent the key to all my techs, who are busy opening each and every single file and cataloguing the material.”

“Is it the evidence we need?” Josiah could hardly breathe as he asked that question.

“Oh, yeah.” Reed rubbed a weary hand over his eyes. “Brace yourself, Joe. Once you’ve seen this stuff, it’s impossible to unsee it.”

Josiah grabbed a chair and drew it up beside him.

“Ready?” Reed asked, fingers poised.

“As I’ll ever be.”

Reed clicked, and Josiah found himself looking at a nanovid of a room he recognised.

“That’s one of the boardrooms at Tyler Tech.”

“Yeah. This is one of the worst ones I’ve found so far, but we’ve only just started looking. I mean, I hope the others aren’t as bad, frankly.”

A man Josiah knew, a man he’d interviewed in this very building, came into view.

“Jake Harper.”

“Yup,” Reed growled. “And isn’t he a piece of work?”

Josiah saw Alex, wearing a smart business suit, looking too young to endure what happened to him next. He put his hand over his mouth, willing himself not to look away. It was every bit as bad as Alex had hinted. Worse.

“Christ,” he whispered. “Are they all like this?”

“No. Yes. I mean… not the same, but… look. You should see this.” Reed clicked, and Josiah pressed his hand to his mouth again, in surprise this time .

“Solange?” he whispered, leaning forward. It was her. Poor, doomed Solange Alajika, the woman Alex had held faith with all these years.

She was stunningly beautiful, wearing a slinky red dress as she danced, cheek to cheek, with a tall, thin man, whose hands wandered all over her body as they moved in time to the music.

So, this was the real Solange, not the fake that Tyler had rehearsed to take her place.

This was really her, doing the job Tyler had brought her in to do from the outset, the job he said didn’t exist.

“Poor Solange.” She had about her that combination of practicality, resignation, and inner strength that he recognised immediately.

“Oh, yeah, she’s a Quarterlands kid. You can tell.

” He gazed at her sadly. “You can rest easy now, girl.” he told her.

“I’ll see he pays for what he did to you.

” She rested her head on the man’s shoulder, and for a moment, seemed to look straight at him, as if she’d heard him.

“What now?” Reed asked.

Josiah got to his feet, reaching for his holopad. “Catalogue every single vid in these files and make me copies,” he said. Then he put in a call to Esther, ignoring her bleary protests about the hour.

“We’ve got him,” was all he needed to say.

Then he returned home, grabbed a box of chocolates from the kitchen, and ran up the stairs to Alex’s room.

“I don’t have any champagne,” he announced to a barely compos mentis Alex, dumping the chocolates on his bed, “so these will have to do.”

“What’s going on?” Alex asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Reed cracked the code. We have the blackmail footage. It’s all exactly as you said.

” He sat on the side of the bed, gazing at Alex with a combination of triumph and sadness, trying not to think of that footage of him with Harper.

Alex always hated being viewed as broken or damaged, someone to be rescued and fixed, but it was very hard not to view him that way after what he’d just seen.

Alex was immediately awake. “You’re sure? You’ve seen it yourself?” he whispered, his eyes suddenly bright. This was the light at the end of a very long tunnel, and Josiah knew how much it meant to him.

“I’ve seen it – and I saw her,” Josiah told him gently. “You’re right. She was beautiful. I could see the sweetness in her. ”

“Solange?” Alex breathed. He looked overwhelmed. So Josiah left him alone to come to terms with what was almost certainly the beginning of the end of his long journey to seek justice for his friend.

Byrne asked for an adjournment while they compiled the new evidence, which was granted.

Josiah and Reed worked day and night on the blackmail footage to get it into a coherent shape that could be used in court, and then handed it over to her.

She had the complex task of convincing the judge that it was both relevant to the case and admissible in court.

There would be arguments over provenance, and the possibility of it being deep-faked, but truth-marking tech was so good these days Josiah was sure the recordings would be ruled admissable.

HMS would no doubt fight with all his might to prevent the material being shown to the jury, but Josiah trusted Byrne to prevail.

During the hiatus, Esther finally relented and allowed Alex to be with his family at The Orchard.

They were fighting their own battle, and Alex was determined to be by their side.

It was actually touching to see this wounded family finally pulling together and putting on a united front.

Josiah was happy to leave them to it. He had enough on his plate.

He watched from his sofa as Charles tearfully apologised to the nation, then put his gold medal in a box and sent it back to the International Olympic Committee.

Alex and Noah stood on either side of him throughout, supporting him.

He offered to return the paralympic medal as well, although he was at pains to point out that he hadn’t been taking any banned substances when he won that one.

Josiah couldn’t help smiling at that. Poor Charles.

He did love his medals so. There was every likelihood he’d be charged over the duck crash and the subsequent cover-up.

There was even talk that Alex would be charged, too, for lying in court and taking the blame.

At this point, Josiah was sure there was nothing more the system could do to Alex that would hurt him more than he’d already been hurt.

He’d been punished out of all proportion to the crimes he’d committed. He just hoped the courts would agree.