Eric was small and immaculate, exactly as Danny remembered. His short black hair seemed naturally to fall into a neat side-parted style. It also appeared to be freshly cut, just as it had been last time. He was dressed in black again, a black polo-neck, black trousers - smart, not jeans - and black trainers. He took a drink of beer and scowled at his half-full glass as he placed it solidly back on the bar. He held on to it very firmly, like it was something structural, a peg. To Danny, that grasp seemed exaggeratedly male, part of a ritual of belonging, but overdone.
"Aaagh! Too cold for my damn tooth. I'm up for an excavation job in two days, an overnighter. Get the old road-breaker in there.
Cor, that doesn't half hurt."
"That's how I found you. From the waiting lists."
Eric's dispute with Bradlee back at the industrial estate hadn't stopped the fire, but it had accomplished something. It had left Danny with a favourable impression. He wasn't entirely sure that he liked Eric, but he was certain that he needed some kind of help if he was going to do battle with Frank.
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It had taken him most of the afternoon to track Eric down, using skills he hadn't used for a while, not since he'd taught Frank how to hack -
bad idea. He didn't know Eric's surname, but he did know he was due for a wisdom tooth removal. He'd turned up on the list for the Middlesex Hospital, along with a phone number.
"I'm glad you agreed to see me," said Danny. We're not supposed to meet up."
"We're not supposed to burn down offices, either."
Danny looked along the bar, at the row of middle-aged men with nothing at home worth going back to, sitting on their tall barstools either side of Eric, sometimes talking to each other but most of the time not bothering. At least four of them had heard what Eric said, and ignored it.
Other men sat at tables away from the bar, behind Danny, and women sat separately at tables to his right. The Rose & Crown was busy. Half a dozen children, aged between three and six, ran sorties through the adults, causing mayhem but managing to escape before they picked up blame.
From time to time they buzzed in to dock with their mothers, like aircraft back to the carrier.
More rarely, they landed on their fathers at the tables behind Danny's back.
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"Don't worry," said Eric, watching Danny's eyes move around. "I've been here a few times before. People keep themselves to themselves. You can talk. I might have turned you down except that Dan, he's not letting me go.
He's put the strong-arm on me. How about you?"
"Yes, he's pushing me around, too."
"He's worse than Bradlee. You know, I tried pinning Frank down on the Net to one country, and I know what I'm doing but I couldn't do it. He's here in London, he's in Australia, in China, all at the same time, exactly the same time. Then I remembered you said he was an artificial intelligence, until Bradlee bullied you out of the idea."
‖It's true." And for the second time, not counting his failed attempt with Bradlee, Danny found himself explaining the full story of Frank, from conception to maturity, or at least adolescence. Eric gasped at the news that Frank was responsible for the spate of accidents a few days ago.
"The bastard! And where did he get his name?"
―Like Mary Shelley’s creation, Frankenstein! I gave it to him."
Danny was beginning to regret his choice of venue. He'd always been curious about the The
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Rose & Crown, so close by; yet so culturally distant. It was a traditional North London pub with hanging baskets outside, already in bloom, and etched windows - one with a traditional crack where a stone had been thrown. He'd seen Eric, with his East End accent, even if it missed the grammar, as a rare entry ticket into this closed community. But it was even more of a place for locals than he'd imagined, for people born around here who spoke the accent, not rich arrivistes like himself. His baggy shirt was too flamboyant, his swept-back beach-bum hair out of place amongst the number twos. Eric fitted in easily at the bar, but Danny felt like he had a neon sign attached to his head flashing the word 'Intruder'.
Yet at the same time he found the place fascinating. It was a glorious time-machine, old-fashioned, outdated. The last time it had been decorated the guys in white overalls probably wore Doc Marten's and listened to Slade on their paint-spattered radio, so long ago that Doc Marten's had come back into fashion and gone out again. The upholstery was finished at the edges with rivets, very quaint, even the wood panelling on the walls looked dated rather than timeless. Nothing was torn, and nothing lacked a nail or paint, but all the fixtures and fittings had the furniture equivalent of senility. There was a
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distinct musty smell, weakened by heavy cigarette smoke and the odours of so many people. He tried to think back to when he'd last been in a bar that sold one white and one red and didn't offer food. The pub had to be roughly the same age as his own home, built around 1830, but once it had reached the 1970s, it had stayed there.
This district had originally been built for rich people, some houses still had a second staircase joining the basement to the top floor, built for the servants. But in the early 1900s the rich had moved out and the place had become a notorious slum. Then in the Seventies it started to become fashionable once more. House prices had risen so fast that the next generation of locals could no longer afford to live here. In a sense, this pub was a memorial to them.
The music was loud, easy American rock from the landlord's stereo above the bar, battling against Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody on the big-bass Wurlitzer-style jukebox in the pool room at the back. A TV hanging from the ceiling showed Manchester United playing Liverpool, so here in Arsenal-territory nobody watched. At least the commentary was turned down low.
"Eric, I need your help to destroy Frank."
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"Count me in," said Eric, without hesitation. "What's the plan?"
"I haven't got one, yet."
A small dog, a Jack Russell, sat on its haunches a yard from Danny's feet, looking up at him. Oh my God, thought Danny, I should have known there'd be dogs here.
"That's the landlord's dog," said Eric.
"Hello, Bishop! Don't worry, she's scatty but harmless."
The dog ignored his call and carried on staring at Danny.
"You know the landlord?"
"A bit."
"Strange name for a dog."
"He goes in for strange names. Look at the way she's sitting. She looks just like that dog on the HMV label."
Danny tried to work out what was wrong with the landlord's music system. The same song had been playing for ages. It wasn't especially memorable, some West-coast American pop played by middle-aged session musicians, with a female singer, rousing chorus, strings in the background and a few clever changes of key. He listened more carefully, waiting for the sudden jump that showed the CD was looping - losing its way and picking up the track somewhere earlier.
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Was that it? Yes it was. A very long loop, about twenty-five seconds. Everybody in the pub had been listening to exactly the same twenty-five seconds of music for at least the last fifteen minutes, probably more. The beginning and end of the loop were almost perfect matches, so nobody had noticed.
"The CD's looping," he told Eric.
"What was that Moorhen place all about?
I got hold of their records at Companies House, main business - software, electronics and manufacturing. That's nice and specific, isn't it?
They're not listed anywhere, no mention of them in any directories or on the Internet. Yet that was a big place. What's going on there?"
"I don't know, but they write good software."
This was an odd place to be having their discussion, very public yet at the same time very private, because it was unlikely that anybody listening had a clue what they were talking about, any more than Danny would have understood a bar conversation about fishing tackle or Arsenal's defensive strategy.
"Tell me, Eric, what was your role that night?"
"You mean at Moorhen? Keep an eye on you."
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"Watch what I did on the computer?"
"That's right."
"If I'd done something slippery, would you have known?"
"At the speed you work? Probably not."
"So?"
Eric grinned broadly. "Frank didn't know that, did he? And we've all got to make a living somehow." He took a slow drink from his pint glass, allowing the liquid to warm up through his mouth, and once again placed it very firmly on the bar. His strange hold on his drink made Danny self-conscious about the way he held his own. He put his bottle of Stella on the bar where he could let go of it. He was also aware that he was the only male in the place drinking from a bottle rather than a pint glass.
The dog hadn't moved. Now it began to bark, single short yaps about five seconds apart.
"Don't you like dogs?" asked Eric.
"I er… I wouldn't mind them, but they've got something against me. They don't like my smell."
"She can smell your fear. If you weren't scared, she wouldn't bother you."
Like anybody who was troubled by dogs, Danny hated that statement, on this occasion as on all the previous ones. It was a pointless
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opinion that circulated in society like a virus. The only way to forgive it was to realise that it was released automatically by some kind of internal tape machine, without being thought through.
What was he supposed to do, consciously change his smell to deceive the dog's nose?
But on this occasion it was also mildly inspirational.
"A machine couldn't do that," he mumbled.
"Do what?
"See through a deception. Not easily, anyway."
Perhaps there was an angle there for attacking Frank, though not a clear one.
"If you say so."
Well you should know, thought Danny, you've already managed the deception.
Now he knew what was happening to the music, it made it intensely irritating to listen to, especially with the added aggravation of a yapping dog. "Can we tell somebody about the music?"
Eric brushed his short hair with his hand, not changing its perfection. "Oi, Tel!" he yelled over the bar. "Your CD's stuck."
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The landlord looked in Eric's direction, made a fist and banged the CD player hard on top, jumping the laser off its loop.
"What do you do, Eric?" asked Danny. "I mean on the computing side."
"Mechanicals, robotic body parts."
"Professionally?"
"I make a living."
Bishop carried on yapping. The CD laser had jumped backwards, not forwards, and was looping again. The women to Danny's right laughed loudly, not giving a damn whether anybody found the sound abrasive or not, and now, gradually, almost imperceptibly, in the slow and subtle manner of an arriving dawn chorus, they began to sing, sometimes together and sometimes individually, and not always following the same song.
"I have to go," said Danny. If he stayed any longer he felt his ears might cry. And still the damn dog wouldn't shut up. "I'm working tomorrow, seven o'clock flight. I'd better get home." He'd got Eric's cooperation, which was all he needed for now.
"Whatever you say," said Eric, looking unimpressed.
"I'll call you when I've got some idea how to fight Frank."
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"Make it soon."
That sounded sincere. Danny rushed for the exit, with Bishop in pursuit, keeping her distance but now barking non-stop. She stopped at the doorway. As Danny closed the door behind him, he could hear that from somewhere a karaoke microphone had arrived, connected to yet another separate sound system. One of the women held it to her lips and sang a plaintive Irish love-song, above the jukebox and the TV
and the landlord's own stereo and the rattle of the pool table and the two slot-machines chattering to each other, above Bishop yapping in the doorway, the landlord yelling his dog to be quiet, and above whatever else the rest of the women were singing.
He wondered to himself if all that noise would stop when he walked fifty yards away, and everybody would burst out laughing. He hoped that would happen. It would be sad to think that it wouldn't.