Chapter 4.04
Tufty’s living room looked much bigger without the folding dining table dominating the middle of it.
Well, maybe not much bigger, but slightly bigger.
Instead, the table was shrunk down and stuffed into one corner – doing double-duty as a shelf, with a big Lego Barad-d?r perched on top, along with a bunch of fist-thick hardback fantasy novels.
Making enough space for the coffee table, where Roberta had spread her bribery/apology feast: sourdough bread, four different cheeses, two patés, a jar of gherkins, one of pickled shallots, a tub of olives, a tub of artichoke hearts, a tub of sundried tomatoes, a pack of wholegrain crackers, and a bottle of dark-and-spicy Zinfandel.
While the Chardonnay got a quick chill in the freezer.
Keen to be seen as a generous host, Tufty had contributed a tub of low-fat spread and a couple of wine glasses.
Still sitting in his jammies as he spread a dollop of melty gorgonzola on a ‘buttered’ biscuit.
‘A toast!’ Raising his wine. ‘To Acting DCI Beattie – may his bum fall off, and his bits burn in the eternal flames of Muspelheim.’
No idea.
But she clinked glasses anyway. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
Mmmm . . . Not a bad bit of Zinfandel. Should think so too, given how much it cost.
They got stuck into the cheese and paté.
‘You were right, by the way.’ She helped herself to the tub of pickled artichokes.
‘I was?’ The wee loon shrank back on the couch. ‘OK: who are you and what have you done with Ex-Detective Inspector Roberta Steel?’
‘Oh ha. Ha. Ha-ha-ha. My poor sides.’ Withering look. ‘You can’t always be there to do these DDDs for me, so I need to learn how to do them myself.’
His mouth pinched. ‘Is this going to be like one of those things where I try to teach my dad how to work Facebook, and everyone ends up crying and throwing things?’
‘Don’t be a snudge.’ Licking her fingers clean, then producing her phone. ‘Take Sir Norman Fiddly Fordyce. I could’ve done a digital deep dive myself, right?’
‘Yeah, but it’ll be much quicker if I just do it.’ Stuffing in some truffled brie. ‘What do you want to know?’ He whipped out his own phone.
‘Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it. They’re going to arrest the bastard in . . .’ Roberta checked her watch, ‘five minutes? Ish?’
‘What, just in time for the news?’ More brie, talking with his mouth full: ‘Let me guess. Helicopters and SWAT teams? Camera crew following their every move? Cos apparently we has learned nothing from that Cliff Richard fiasco.’
She raised her glass again. ‘Bingo!’
‘Numpties. The world is full of frudging numpties.’ Tufty poked at his phone’s screen.
‘Right: let’s find Sir Norman Fordyce. Nor-man For-dyce.
Norman. Normy. The Normster. Abnormal Norman the Mormon longshoreman .
. .’ A nod. ‘I’m in.’ Crunching on a gherkin.
‘OK, we’ve got an official Bluesky, an official Twitter – cos we is not calling it “X” – a LinkedIn, and Facebook.
’ Skim, scroll, poke. Frown. ‘Looks like they’re all corporate wingwang stuff.
Probably gets his comms team to post everything, cos it’s obvs blandaraaaaaaaaaama. ’
More poking and scrolling as Tufty sipped red wine and munched on an olive. Then cheese. Then paté. Then a fancy pickled onion.
Until finally: ‘Ooh! But we does has what looks like a personal Instagram account, what he do run himself.’ Scroll, scroll, scroll.
‘Which am mostly pictures of him and his lunch, and breakfast, and dinner, and “Totes amazeballs, doesn’t I has a spanktastic life!”’ Tufty handed the phone to Roberta.
‘See, that’s the easy bit of a triple-D.
’ Pointing as she worked her way through a huge, long reel of fancy-pants dishes in fancy-pants restaurants and hotels.
‘You does search for their name, find a account that fits – keeping an clever eye out for catfishers, cos scammers is sneaky – and there’s always links and co-promotional posts from their other accounts.
Sometimes they do also list them in their bio, which makes it even easier. ’
Bloody Sir Norman Dingley Bum-Lice was obsessed with food.
The whole thing was nothing but plates and plates and plates of the stuff.
Most of it was high-end cuisine, with the occasional state banquet and ambassadorial reception thrown in, rubber-chicken industry dinners rubbing shoulders with the odd ‘dirty’ street-food treat.
And each picture was always accompanied by a wee chunk of self-indulgent blah: ‘OH MY GOD, THE RED MULLET WITH CHERRIES AT LA PERGOLA IS TO DIE FOR!’
Tufty scoffed some Mull Cheddar. ‘As DDDs go, this am the equivalent of paddling about in the shallow end of the pool. With your armbands on.’
Next up were a bunch of shots from a tasting menu, taken at some swanky restaurant on a wee island off the west coast of Scotland. Then a mac-n’-cheese shack in Maine where everything came with lobster. Sushi in Melbourne. A South Africa braai of Antelope ribs and buffalo steak . . .
‘The real challenge is finding the ones what am unofficial. The secret little Truth Social account for posting all that stuff you’re not allowed to say without getting cancelled. Or the Twitter account you only use to sockpuppet your rivals, or call women who disagree with you whores.’
Fresh fish in the Norwegian Fjords. Escargots, steak tartare, and crème br?lée in Paris. Moules-frites in Brussels. Schnitzel and Kartoffelpuffer in Berlin . . .
She frowned at the screen. ‘Why are there no boobs?’ Scroll, scroll, scroll. ‘Do you think he wanks-off to photos of crispy duck and pasta primavera?’
‘And to swim in those deeper waters, you need custom algorithms and cross-platform pattern matching.’
She stopped scrolling at a series from Raffles in Singapore, featuring a whole suckling pig and a cornucopia of other delicious-looking things.
Then a feast of crab in a fiery red sauce, from a shack by the coast. Then cocktails on an idyllic palm-treed beach.
All with their own boastful little caption.
Hmmmm . . .
Tufty went in for another gherkin. ‘Because people don’t just have unique fingerprints – how we use language am also—’
‘Aye, Tufters? See these photos on his food-fetish Instawhatsit? It says when they were posted, but is there any way to tell when they were taken?’
‘Yuparoonie: in the image’s metadata.’
The clock on Tufty’s phone ticked over to 18:00.
She handed it back. ‘Six o’clock. Want to watch the fireworks?’
‘Suppose.’ He pulled up his shoulders. ‘I mean, might as well, right?’ Rummaging down the back of the couch, he dug out the doofer and turned on the big-flatscreen-monster TV, which set the attached soundbar, speakers, and subwoofer buzzing into life.
Bet it was a real treat living downstairs when Tufty was watching Star Trek/Wars/Gate/Ship Troopers.
He poked away at the remote, until BBC news appeared onscreen, where a perky blonde newsreader – doable, in a curly-and-curvy weather-girl-who’s-been-promoted kind of way – was already cranking through the headlines: ‘. . . New Horizons insist the best way to deter small-boat crossings is for the Royal Navy to sink them.’ Pause.
‘Economists predict a global downturn, as US Presid—’
The mute icon appeared and the telly’s sound disappeared.
Tufty speared a sundried tomato. ‘Unless you want to know what the Clementine Cretin’s done now? The Kafkaesque Kumquat. The Tangerine Taint. The—’
‘All right, Oscar Wilde, we get the picture.’
They cheese-and-wined as the silent headlines passed, then a story about a member of the shadow cabinet being suspended for making AI porn of female MPs.
Then one about the collapse of a hedge-fund that wiped billions off pension funds.
And then the screen filled with an aerial shot of Fordyce House. It was Acting DCI Wanky-Beardy Arsehole-Beattie’s time to shine.
Should’ve done the dunt for the lunchtime news instead, because the sun was already low in the sky, painting the trees and rhododendron bushes with fire and honey. But that was October for you: be dark before Reporting Scotland and the weather had finished.
Tufty waved the remote. ‘Want me to turn it up?’
‘Nah. It’ll just be the same old frunch as usual.’ Idle speculation, press-release bollocks, suspicions, and gossip. She pointed at his phone. ‘Tell me about this metadata.’
A phalanx of police vehicles wheeched into shot – going single-file on the narrow road, lights flashing and flickering.
‘Right.’ He sooked his fingers clean and prodded his mobile back to life. ‘Every electronic device what takes photos leaves a stamp on the image it does save. It’s like: think of an invisible barcode, hidden in the file, and some devices leave heaps of info, and some leave not-so-heaps.’
The lead OSU van slithered to a halt on the gravel drive, and out scrambled a whole squad of thugs, followed by a second team from the other van.
And there were still patrol cars and Dog Units to come . . .
How could Pine sign off on Operation Impending Disaster? She must’ve been pissed as a shart to let Beattie talk her into deploying this many officers to arrest one man. On live TV. With the world watching.
Roberta shook her head and focussed on Tufty again. ‘OK. Do your forensic-metadata thing on the Singapore photos. Here.’ Taking his phone and scrolling through to those crispy suckling-pig pics, before handing it back.
‘Erms . . . Okeydoodles . . .’ Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. ‘And we open the image in the Scootchy app . . .’ Fiddle, fiddle. ‘What do you want to know?’
Why did no bugger ever listen?
‘When was it taken?’
The first OSU team got into position, and their biggest thug lumbered up to the front door – carrying the Big Red Door Key – while the second team legged it around the back.