Description: 1 January: Some Swans are White My final interview at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation was with the company''s head of security himself-Tyrel Johnson. Mid-fifties, one of those big men who by dint of clean living and regular exercise have failed to go to fat and instead compacted down to the tensile strength of teak. Light skinned, with short gray hair and dressed in a bespoke navy pinstripe suit with a lemon cotton shirt and no tie. Since everybody else in the building dressed in varying degrees of slacker-casual, wearing a suit made a statement-I was glad I''d worn mine. Judging by the pastel-colored walls, the spindly stainless steel furniture and the words Ask me about my poetry painted along one wall in MS Comic Sans, I was guessing that Mr. Johnson hadn''t decorated his office himself. I was stuck on the low-slung banana yellow sofa while he was perched on the edge of his desk-arms folded. Working without notes, I noticed. "Peter Grant." He spoke with a West Indian accent, apparently Trinidadian although I can''t tell them apart. "Twenty-eight years old, Londoner, plenty of GCSEs, three C grade A levels but you didn''t go on to further education, worked for Tesco, a couple of small retailers, something called Spinnaker Office Services-what was that?" "Office cleaning." "So you know your way around a mop?" He smiled. "Unfortunately," I said, manfully resisting the urge to add "sir" to the end of every sentence. Tyrel Johnson had stopped being a copper the year I was born, but obviously there were some things that never leave you. I realized that I might have to come to terms with that myself. "Two years as a PCSO . . . then you joined the Metropolitan Police and managed a whole six years before leaving." He nodded as if this made perfect sense to him-I wish it did to me. "Following probation you went into Specialist, Organized and Economic Crime Command," said Johnson. "Doing what exactly?" It had been agreed that it would be counterproductive all round if I was to mention the Special Assessment Unit, otherwise known as "The Folly," also known as "Oh God, not them." That there was a section of the Met that dealt with weird shit was quite widely known within the police; that it had officers who were trained in magic was not exactly a secret, but definitely something nobody wanted to talk about. Especially at a job interview. "Operation Fairground," I said. "Never heard of it." "Nigerian counterfeiting gangs." "Undercover?" "No," I said. "Interviews, statements, follow-ups-you know-leg work." "Why don''t we just get down to the main event?" said Johnson. "Why did you leave the police?" Being ex-job, Johnson was bound to still have contacts in the Met-he would have checked my name out as soon as my CV was shortlisted. Still, the fact that I was even having this interview indicated that he didn''t know everything. "There was a death in custody," I said. "I was put on suspension." He leaned forward slightly for emphasis. "Tell me, son," he said. "Were you responsible?" I looked him in the eyes. "I should have seen it coming, and I didn''t act fast enough to stop it," I said-it''s so much easier to lie when you''re telling the truth. He nodded. "There always has to be someone to blame," he said. "You didn''t try and stick it out?" "I was encouraged to move on," I said. "Somebody had to go, but they didn''t want a fuss." I didn''t say who "they" were, but that didn''t seem to bother Johnson, who nodded sagely. "What do you think about computers?" he asked, showing that the interview trick of suddenly changing the subject was also something that never leaves you when you exit the Job. It''s always "the Job," with a capital letter, as if once you''re in it you can''t imagine doing anything else. Just be yourself, Beverley had said when I was dressing that morning. "I once played Red Dead Redemption for twenty-four hours solid," I said. Johnson''s eyes narrowed, but there was amusement in the set of his mouth. It faded a little. "I''ll be honest with you, son. All things being equal you''d normally be a bit overqualified for this job," he said. "But I have a problem." "Sir?" I tried to keep an expression of bland interest on my face. "Someone in the workforce is up to no good," he said, and I relaxed. "I can feel them scuttling around like a rat. I don''t have the time to chase them so I what I need is a rat-catcher, someone I can trust to do the job properly." "I worked Oxford Street," I said. "Rat-catching''s my specialty." "Yes," he said slowly. "You''ll do-when can you start?" "Right now," I said. "Chance would be a fine thing," said Johnson. "We have to navigate you through HR first, so Monday will be fine. Nice and early." He straightened up off his desk and I jumped to my feet. He held out his hand-it was like shaking hands with a tree. "Just so we''re clear," he said, not letting go of my hand. "No matter what anyone else thinks-including the Uber-hobbit himself-you work for me and only me. Understand?" "Yes, sir," I said. "Good," he said and walked me out of the building. Johnson had made a point of calling the human resources department HR rather than its official internal company name, the Magrathean Ape-Descended Life Form Utilization Service, just as he called the department I had just joined Security rather than the Vogon Enforcement Arm. That, and the fact that employees were officially referred to as "mice," didn''t stop the Magrathean Ape-Descended Life Form Utilization Service sending me a twelve-page contract by e-mail and snail-mail and a non-disclosure agreement that was worse than the Official Secrets Act. My mum warned me that the company didn''t have a very good reputation among cleaning staff. "Den hat for deal witt ein den nor dae pay betteh," she told me. Den nor dae pay betteh, was Mum-speak for below minimum wage. My mum also wanted to know whether I was attending pre-natal classes with Beverley and making sure she ate properly. Eating properly by Mum''s definition meant Beverley consuming her own weight in rice every day so I lied and said she was. When I asked Beverley about any cravings, she told me not so far. "I can pretend," she said just after Christmas. "If it makes you feel better." Beverley Brook lived south of Wimbledon Common, in both sides of a semi on, appropriately enough, Beverley Avenue. The walls between the two halves had been knocked through and the rooms converted, but you could still feel the ghosts of the right-hand kitchen in the way the floor texture changed under your feet when you moved around the master bedroom''s en suite bathroom. There had been a few changes since I moved in permanently, mostly involving storage space and encouraging Beverley to use it for her clothes-with mixed results. We slept on the ground floor because Beverley was the goddess of the river Beverley Brook, which ran along the bottom of her garden, and she liked to have swift access to her watercourse in times of need. Beverley was five months gone by then-an event marked by her borrowing a slightly larger wetsuit from one of her sisters to accommodate the bump. She''d also taken to working on her dissertation, "The Environmental Benefits of Waterway Reversion," while sitting in a straight-backed chair at the kitchen table. That evening I sat at the other end and went through the contract, most of which seemed to be concerned with detailing the many and varied ways the Serious Cybernetics Corporation could fire me without compensation. It was hard work, and I kept on being distracted by the beauty of Beverley''s eyes as they flicked from laptop screen to notebook, and her slim brown fingers as they held a highlighter pen poised over the textbooks open in front of her. "What?" she asked, looking up at me. "Nothing," I said. "Okay," she said, and I watched as she bent to check something in one of the books and her locks fell over her shoulders to reveal the smooth curve of the back of her neck. "Stop staring at me," said Beverley without looking up. "And get on with your contract." I sighed and went back to decrypting the fact that not only was I to be on a twelve-month probation, but that the management reserved the right to extend that probation indefinitely if I failed to meet a series of loosely defined performance criteria. It was all very depressing, and borderline legal, but it wasn''t as if I had any choice.

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