Hereford hadn’t changed much in the three years since Sebastian left. It wasn’t quite as storybook as Ross, but the place was not without its charms; the core of the town was mostly Georgian and Victorian architecture, with timber-framed houses and medieval churches scattered here and there. Out toward the edges, the historical character faded away into the same bleak, broken-down industrial wasteland one found throughout Britain.
A few shops and restaurants had closed over the years; a handful of others took their place, but not enough to fill the empty spaces. And there seemed to be more slots and bookies than Sebastian remembered.
Their visit to the police station was short and unfruitful. According to the desk sergeant, Brandon Tyler’s release was “in accordance with standard procedure” — as was their failure to inform Julia he’d been set loose. Wherever Sebastian went, police were all more or less the same: they put most of their effort into the bits of their job that were easy, and did their best to ignore anything that happened to be difficult. As far as the coppers were concerned, their responsibility to Julia Moran ended when they’d referred her to social services.
Julia had told them she’d spoken to a social worker named Alice McCarthy, and that lead took them to High Town.
Weaving through the square’s midday foot traffic, Sebastian said, “You’re certain we’ll find her here?”
“Alice posts a photo of her lunch most days,” Jay replied, scanning the faces around them. “Nearly all of them are geotagged to within a half-mile of this square. She’s a creature of habit.”
“Most people are.” The brush-off at the police station had left an agitated itch under Sebastian’s skin. He kept his hands in his pockets, one thumb tracing the edge of the folded hunting knife he carried.
Jay caught his mood, if not the reason for it. “Are we going to run into anyone you know?”
Sebastian shook his head. “So long as we stay out of the pubs, we’ll be fine.” Across the square, he caught a glimpse of the face Jay had shown him on his phone. “There she is.”
Alice McCarthy was somewhere in her twenties, small and pretty with big, bright eyes; she’d just stepped out the door of a coffee shop, a massive travel mug steaming gently in her hand.
Sebastian jogged a little to catch up. “Ms. McCarthy?” he called out.
McCarthy hesitated, those big eyes taking on a wary look — not an unreasonable reaction to the approach of two strange men, even in public. Sebastian drew to a halt at a careful distance; Jay took his cue from Sebastian and stopped next to him.
“My name’s Sebastian Moran,” he offered. A full name might, at the very least, put them on more equal footing.
Recognition flickered across McCarthy’s face. “Moran?”
Sebastian nodded. “Julia’s cousin. She told me she spoke to you a few days ago.”
McCarthy glanced away, biting her lip; the hand that wasn’t holding her coffee wrapped around the strap of her purse, twisting it.
“I’m not here to cause any trouble.” Sebastian raised both hands. “I’m just worried about what happened.”
“Mr. Tyler’s release was out of our hands,” McCarthy said, defensive. “There wasn’t anything we could do about it.”
“But there are programmes for people like Julia,” Sebastian replied. “Shelters. So why didn’t—?”
McCarthy relaxed a little. “It’s not that simple,” she said with a quiet sigh. “There’s only so many resources to go around, and Ms. Moran was assessed low risk—”
“By who?” Jay asked sharply.
It was clearly an uncomfortable question. “AlgoDV,” McCarthy said. “It’s this AI tool we’ve been trialling, to assess domestic violence cases. It didn’t raise any red flags, so we sent Ms. Moran home.”
Jay looked both intrigued and horrified. “There’s no way an algorithm gets to decide—”
“Of course not!” McCarthy winced at her own outburst, glancing around quickly, and lowered her voice. “Listen, it’s — I handle cases all over the county. There’s too much work and not enough of us to do it. It’s just not possible to second-guess every assessment AlgoDV makes.” Her mouth tightened into an apologetic little smile. “For what it’s worth, I wrote the council about what happened to Ms. Moran. But at this point, that’s all I can really do.”
Jay still looked to be turning the problem over in his head. “But—”
“We understand,” Sebastian interrupted, with a sidelong glance at Jay. “Thank you.”
McCarthy nodded and hurried away down the pavement.
Sebastian took a slow breath and strode in the opposite direction, ducking down a narrow side street. He needed a smoke, badly.
Light, quick footsteps across the flagstones preceded Jay’s appearance at his elbow. “So,” he said. “You satisfied?”
“No,” Sebastian replied.
“Me, neither.”
Herefordshire Council was headquartered in a functionalist, brick-and-glass office building which shared a neighbourhood with several warehouses and at least one car dealership. Its doors closed to the public at 1700 hours; by the time Sebastian pulled up around 1900, the building looked to be completely empty.
Jay had his laptop open in the passenger seat. “Looks like it’s just the one camera,” he reported; peering out the window, Sebastian could just spot the camera in question, mounted in the foyer to watch the front doors. “Unsecured, too. It’s recording, not monitored. I’ll switch it back on once you’re out.”
Sebastian stepped out of the car and fitted his earpiece into place; ever since Jay’s had become surprisingly necessary during their trip to Marbella, he’d started keeping it on him wherever they went. The information they wanted was, technically speaking, a matter of public record. But Freedom of Information requests took forever to process, and whatever documents they received that way would be scrubbed of anything that might be considered personal information or a trade secret. For full, unredacted access, they’d have to go straight to the source.
The building’s front doors were featureless: no handles, no push bars. Infrared sensors mounted above them confirmed the doors were automatic; whenever the sensors detected a change in temperature — the approach of a warm human body, for instance — they sent a signal instructing the doors to open. Outside business hours, the doors’ outer sensors were switched off so they wouldn’t let anyone into the building. For fire safety, however, the inner sensors stayed on; anyone inside the building had to be able to leave.
While closed, the doors weren’t perfectly flush with each other — there was a thin gap, lined with plastic weather stripping to keep the wind and elements out. Sebastian drew his knife and cut away a section of plastic, leaving a small gap of open air.
Then he lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, drawing as much smoke into his lungs as possible. He blew the smoke through the gap he’d made in the doorway, aiming it upward toward the door’s inner sensor.
With a click, the doors swung open. Sebastian flicked the cigarette aside and strode into the building.
A sign in the foyer displayed the building’s office directory. As Sebastian approached, Jay’s voice piped up in his ear: “I’ve pulled the contracts register off the council website. AlgoDV was licensed from a company called Thinkt by the Community Support division.”
According to the directory, Community Support’s office was on the first floor. Sebastian took the stairs — the lifts would be locked down — and followed the signs through pale, grey-carpeted halls. His first order of business was to plug one of Jay’s flash drives into a rear port of the nearest computer, where it wouldn’t be seen. When the staffer assigned to that particular machine logged in tomorrow, Jay would have access to anything networked through it.
“Excuse me,” said a woman’s voice, from behind Sebastian. “What are you doing?”
Sebastian suppressed a sigh as he turned around. It was just his luck to run into the only civil servant in the entire country who worked past 5 p.m.
When caught someplace one wasn’t supposed to be, the simplest lies were usually the best; Sebastian usually claimed to be working late on another floor and in search of a functioning stapler. One look at the woman in front of him killed that plan: she was somewhere approaching sixty, wearing a crisply-pressed blouse and peering suspiciously through horn-rimmed glasses. Odds were she’d worked here for twenty or thirty years and knew everyone in the building. There’d be no convincing her he belonged here.
His only other option depended entirely on whether he’d emptied out this jacket since his last job. He reached into the inside pocket and, to his immense relief, found he hadn’t.
Sebastian pulled out a dark leather wallet. “Eric Hayes,” he said, flashing the wallet’s contents before tucking it away again. “I’m an investigator with the Serious Fraud Office.”
The wallet contained a generic photo ID and looked enough like a warrant card to pass muster in most situations. Nobody ever saw a special investigator’s badge often enough to know what they really looked like — and the bigger the lie, the less likely any honest citizen was to doubt it.
While the woman managed to maintain her composure, her eyes widened a little. “I see,” she said carefully. “We weren’t told you’d be coming by—”
“That would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?” Sebastian offered a wry smile, hoping to put her a little more at ease. “I was supposed to be here this afternoon, but traffic out of London was a nightmare. Lucky for me you’re here — I thought everyone would’ve gone home by now.”
“Most everyone has. I just had some work to finish up.” The woman smiled in return, although there was a strained edge to it. “Is there anything I can help you with, Mr. Hayes?”
“Yes, actually.” Sebastian knew an opportunity when he saw one. “Do you think you could print off some files for me? I need anything you can find on the AlgoDV trial programme.”
It occurred to Jay that only Sebastian Moran could break into an office building after hours and walk out a few minutes later with a massive stack of papers somebody had voluntarily printed off for him and some freshly-made tea in a lidded paper cup.
Jay spent a few hours before bed going through the pile of reports and proposals and memos by hand, sequestered in the guest room where nobody would ask any awkward questions. By the time he turned in for the night he could see the shape of the whole scheme; he’d have to wait until morning for access to the council’s network, which would fill in the remaining details.
Moran got up at his usual obscene hour. Jay stayed in bed, drifting in and out to the sound of Julia and Patience getting ready for the day. Once it was late enough in the morning that someone had surely logged into the compromised machine, Jay dragged himself out of the guest room and set up his laptop on the dining table.
Sure enough, he had access to the council offices’ network.
While Jay scanned through every email and file he could find, he was dimly aware of Moran going through the papers at the other end of the table. He more or less lost track of time until Moran’s voice cut through his concentration: “Anything, yet?”
The clock on the taskbar told Jay it was well into the afternoon. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes with both hands; now that he’d been distracted, the fact that he’d sat unmoving in the same position for hours was catching up with him all at once.
“Well,” he said, “someone keeps stealing Keith’s lunch out of the fridge and Emily is trying to fob her old sofa off on anyone who’ll take it out of her house. Oh, and everyone’s speculating about someone from the SFO coming by the office last night. Nothing gets the rumour mill going like the word ‘fraud.’” He levelled a dark look at Moran. “You couldn’t pick a less dramatic cover?”
Moran shook his head. “Most other covers wouldn’t be allowed to take documents without a warrant.”
From across the house came the sound of the front door swinging open. Patience was home from school; she paused at the threshold of the dining room, taking in the sight of Moran and Jay with the laptop and papers scattered all over the table. “What are you doing?”
“Crime,” Jay replied absently, rolling his neck to ease the pain of hunching over his laptop for hours.
Moran coughed and gave Jay a sharp look.
“Cool,” Patience said, unconcerned. She disappeared back down the hall to her room, presumably to change out of her uniform.
Moran was looking over the papers again. Something about him put Jay in mind of an under-stimulated zoo animal, pacing endlessly around his cage. He doubted Moran was getting much out of the exercise; the man was far from an idiot, but his training probably hadn’t involved forensic accounting or deciphering corporate nonsense.
Jay’s suspicions were confirmed when Moran let the pitch deck he’d been reading fall to the table with a dismissive sigh. “So they sent Julia home without any protection because this AlgoDV program made the wrong decision?”
It was just wrong enough that Jay couldn’t let it go. “Something like AlgoDV doesn’t really make ‘decisions,’” he said. “These models are trained on existing data — all they do is generate an output that’s a likely statistical match to the input.”
“So it’s just … what?” Moran ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Calculating averages?”
“Sort of. Thing is, though, any biases in the training data tend to get reproduced in the model. So if AlgoDV was trained on historical domestic violence cases, and in those case files it turned out, say, immigrant women were disproportionately considered ‘low risk,’ then AlgoDV would also consider them ‘low risk.’ But because it’s a computerised system they can claim it’s objective, even when it’s not.”
“And the council wouldn’t think to check for something like that?”
“Even if they could understand what they were looking at, or afford to hire someone who can, companies like Thinkt can just say their tools’ algorithms are trade secrets. Which means nobody outside the company is allowed to crack them open.”
Moran looked horrified in a way Jay wasn’t sure he’d seen before. “Why even buy this thing in the first place?”
Jay shrugged. “It’s cheaper than hiring enough social workers to handle the same caseload. And social workers tend to do inconvenient things like unionise and file complaints.” He sighed and massaged the back of his neck. “Basically, AlgoDV is an accountability sink. If no human being is responsible for what happens to people like Julia, then nobody has to take the blame.”
Restless energy pushed Moran to his feet. “Back in a few,” he muttered. He passed Patience as she came the other way down the hall; Jay heard front door open and close again.
“He’s going to the field down the road,” Patience explained on her way to the kitchen. “Mum doesn’t want him smoking round the house. I guess she thought it’d be a bad influence on me.”
Jay considered the implications. “He’s been here a lot, then.”
“Since I was a kid, yeah.” Patience dug through the cupboards and swiped a packet of crisps, tearing it open. “He was stationed in Hereford for a while. Used to drive down on weekends and holidays — when he weren’t deployed, anyway.” She popped a crisp into her mouth and chewed contemplatively. “He seemed … lonely.”
It was a ludicrous thought; Moran had plenty of friends. More than Jay, by far.
Although … none of them seemed to come round his place. There was rarely a time when Jay wanted to meet up but Moran already had plans. And the night Julia called, Jay had been the only one there for Sebastian while he was scared and vulnerable and frantic with worry.
What did that say about Sebastian’s life before Jay came along?
“So, like,” Patience said around a mouthful of half-chewed potato, “are you a hacker or something?”
It was only about a minute’s walk from Julia’s house down to the field. Sebastian had never figured out who owned it, and nobody ever came to tell him off for smoking out here.
He crossed to the far side, where a small copse of trees overhung the faded, moss-covered fence. Careful not to lean too heavily against the rail, he lit up and waited for the nicotine to do its work.
Every one of his instincts was screaming at him to find the threat to those he loved and put a bullet in its head. But Brandon Tyler had done that job for him, leaving Sebastian to circle and snarl with no outlet for all the fear and rage roiling inside him.
This was not how he wanted Jay to meet his family.
God, even the idea of having someone to bring home to the family would’ve been utterly alien just a year ago. The prospect of introducing Jay to his parents was still laughable, even if Sebastian had been on speaking terms with them. But … he wanted Jay to see him. Know him. And he’d have liked a chance for that to happen without this awful thing hanging over them all.
But like it or not, Jay was here. Even though he had no reason to care about anything that happened to Julia, or Patience.
Why?
The cigarette burned down to the filter, and Sebastian ground it out against the fencepost.
Jay was where Sebastian had left him, sifting through the council’s files on his laptop. Patience, however, had stolen Sebastian’s seat and was now flipping through the papers he’d left behind on the table.
Sebastian cleared his throat.
Jay didn’t look away from his screen. “It was her idea,” he said, unconcerned. “I found the letter Alice McCarthy wrote, by the way. It ended up with Robert Wallis, one of the councillors. Didn’t go any further than that.”
“He buried it,” Sebastian surmised.
“Or just didn’t pay it any attention.”
Sebastian glanced at the papers in Patience’s hands. “I remember that name.”
Patience flipped back a few pages. “Yeah, here. Robert Wallis is cabinet member for ‘community assets and services.’ His name is on a lot of the contract paperwork.”
“There was something odd about that, too …” Jay clicked back through the many, many windows open on his screen. “Here, on the contracts register. It says ‘awarded directly.’ Nearly every other contract says either ‘quote’ or ‘open tender.’”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Sebastian said. “What do you have on Wallis?”
“Hold on.” Jay pulled something up on his laptop and turned the screen toward Sebastian. Wallis had a page of his own on the council’s website; the man looked to be somewhere in his fifties, gaunt and hawklike. The flat lighting and direct angle of the photograph did him no favours.
“Elected 2007,” Sebastian said, skimming the details on the page. “Held his seat ever since, and a cabinet member for most of that time.”
Jay spun the laptop back. “I’ll take a look at his files. Might be something we can — huh.”
“That was quick,” Sebastian observed.
“Recent search history: ‘serious fraud office,’ ‘serious fraud office bribery,’ ‘definition of bribery’ …” Jay raised an eyebrow. “Someone’s nervous.”
All those rumours Jay had mentioned must have rattled Wallis’ cage. “So Thinkt has a pet councillor,” Sebastian said, “and it’s Wallis.”
Jay clicked through a few more of Wallis’ files. “Looks like the AlgoDV trial is up soon,” he noted. “There’s a cabinet session next week — Wallis is planning to recommend a full contract.”
“Any opposition?”
“Not really. Seems to be over most of the other councillors’ heads.”
“Wait,” Patience broke in, brow furrowed. “So this thing nearly got Mum killed, and they’re just going to keep using it?”
“Seems like,” Jay admitted.
“Can’t we get in touch with the council?” Patience asked, with growing worry. “Get them to vote against it?”
“Maybe,” Sebastian said, “if we had more time. This close to the vote, though …”
“Then there’s something else we can do, right?” Patience’s hopeful expression cracked Sebastian’s heart open. “We can’t just let this happen.”
Sebastian’s throat closed up at the thought of shattering that hope. Instinctively, he looked to Jay.
Jay was already looking back. “We’ll take care of it,” he said; his eyes didn’t leave Sebastian’s.
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