The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: Miller has been gathering material to use against Bakker and create a scandal. He’s tasked DC Frank Holland with delivering the bad news. Bakker has been expecting this for some time.
London.
1974. December.
The two men moved through the house silently, Bakker leading them through to the kitchen. A heavy anticipation hung in the air. Bakker had known that Holland was in with Miller, had been having meetings with him for months, and was most likely part of whatever was going on at the Joint Council. There he was, in Bakker’s house, and Holland was capable of just about anything, as his record showed.
Lauren must have been upstairs with the children. Hopefully she’d stay there, rather than venture down to greet him home from work. Or perhaps Holland would be relying on her presence; after all, Bakker knew what was about to happen. There would be a recording of him and Shaw, and, while he’d put an end to it before anything had happened, it would not look good. The recording could be edited judiciously to make it look worse than it was; though it was bad enough no matter how it was presented. Shaw astride Bakker, his hands on her breasts. It had been a moment of weakness, of being distracted. He’d caught himself in time for his own conscience, but not soon enough to avoid being compromised.
And now Holland was here to deliver an ultimatum. To blackmail him into backing off. Perhaps it was better this way: a humiliation was preferable to a beheading, and Callihan’s fate was fresh in Bakker’s mind as he closed the heavy wooden door.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked. The urge to be polite was hard to shake. It introduced a small fragment of normalcy to what was otherwise distinctly abnormal.
“Yeah,” Holland said, “just whip me up a cocktail. Christ, Bakker.” He orbited the room, as if looking for something, then pointed to the radio-cassette player. “Does that work?”
Bakker pulled a stool out from beneath the counter and perched on its edge, arms crossed. “It does. Why are you here, Frank?”
“Got something to show you.” Holland was twitchy, apparently nervous, which was unusual for a man so often convinced of his own self. He examined the radio for a moment, then turned to face Bakker. “You do know they’ve got you, right? On tape.”
Shifting his posture, Bakker nodded. “I am aware of this, yes. I don’t know who exactly ‘they’ are, of course.” Interesting that Holland was cutting straight to the chase. Also there was something about his turn of phrase.
Holland reached into his jacket and pulled out a cassette case. Flipping it open, he slid out the cassette and turned it over in his hand. He pressed a metal lever to open the radio’s deck and loaded it, then clicked down on the play button and leaned against the cabinet, looking down at the floor.
In the quiet there was only the background hum of the boiler and the gentle, almost imperceptible whirring of the tape in the machine.
“Here’s the thing,” Holland said, lifting his eyes to meet Bakker’s. “You’ve got them, too.”
A voice came from the radio. “Anyone home, Miller?”
It was Holland’s voice.
There was silence for a moment, then another, different voice. “Lots to think about, Frank.” It was Miller. “I trust that all made sense. With the new government there are going to be changes, like we’ve been talking about—”
Holland pressed his finger lightly on the fast-forward button and the tape squealed for a couple of seconds.
“—we need to know who we can trust. Who is a proper patriot. We all know there’s been an incursion into the civil service, into government, in the Met. We’re doing something about all of that. We’ve got the right people in power at last. But we need the right people on the ground, too. We need to know about Clarke, Kaminski, Chakraborty—”
Another squeal, Holland continuing to stare Bakker right between the eyes as he held the button, not blinking or averting his gaze. As he listened, Bakker’s entire understanding of his evening crumbled to pieces.
The recording of Miller’s voice continued. “I’m gathering evidence, and I think we’ll be able to make a move on Bakker sooner rather than later. But he’s clever. We need a back up plan. That’s where you come in.” Squeal. “That’s why we need to use our own initiative and the skills we have available to us. We need you to seduce him, Caitlin.” The recording shifted to a woman’s voice: Caitlin Shaw. “What?”
He stopped and ejected the tape, placed it on the counter.
The two men stared at each other for a long time; long enough for the boiler to shut off, having successfully heated the house. Bakker felt a rush of blood and was glad to be half-sat on the stool.
Holland, usually so full of bluster and rarely shy to offer an opinion, stood silently. The man was waiting for Bakker’s response, he realised.
“What exactly is this, Frank?”
Wiping a hand along the edge of his jaw, Holland grinned ruefully. “This is me saving your arse, Bakker.” He grimaced. “Or fucking my own. We’ll see, I suppose?”
“How did you get this?”
Holland smiled. “I’ve been wearing a wire into meetings for a while. Borrowed it from the locker room. Benefit of bigger budgets and more gear is that nobody notices when something goes missing.”
The big question, then. “Why?”
“Something wasn’t right. I thought it was you at first. That’s what Miller was counting on. But he forgot something.”
Bakker took a deep breath, waiting for the punchline. “And what was that?”
“That I’m a fucking good detective.” He reached into his jacket again and took out another tape. “I have a whole stack of these.” He loaded it into the radio and hit play.
From the tinny speakers came Miller’s voice again. “Maxwell? Fuck Nigel Maxwell. Come on, he’s a useful fool. He’s a pawn, right? Or, rather, he’s a mouth. Earth First are the muscle. They’re not the brains—” The tape squealed. “—me. Others. Lord Hutchinson, you already know. I think you’re a real asset, Holland. We want you to be a big part of this.”
Holland stopped the tape. “You get the idea.”
There was firm evidence of a blackmail attempt, and of the involvement of others. Bakker ran the chances of arrest and conviction through his head. “Is it enough?”
A wide grin spread across Holland’s face. He looked happier than Bakker could remember ever seeing him. In fact, it might have been the first time. “All these tapes together? It’s enough, believe me. Enough to bring Miller down, at least. And to get the ball rolling. To point some juicy fingers at the people he’s working with.” He nodded at Bakker. “I’m hoping you’ve got something that can give it a boost.”
The man wanted information. That was fair enough, but it could still be a trap, just as easily as it could be a genuine attempt to help. Bakker would have to be careful.
“What about the video of me?”
“Yeah, they’ve got that,” Holland said. “You showed some serious restraint there. Can’t say I’d have done the same. But look - it’s enough to cause you some hassle. But you know what? A little bit of office sexy time isn’t nearly as bad as conspiracy to control and manipulate the government and Joint Council. You’ve got the edge.”
Holland placed several more cassettes onto the kitchen counter. “This is everything I’ve got,” he continued. “I have copies as well. I’m giving you all of this as a gesture of my intentions. I’m implicated in all of this, so it’s going to be difficult for me.” He shrugged. “I know you think I’m an arsehole, Bakker. That’s fine. But I’m not a wanker.”
Bakker crossed the kitchen and took two shot glasses from a cupboard. “And what do you want?”
“I want in,” Holland said. “Whatever you’ve got going on. And I want to be there when you nail this son of a bitch to the wall.”
Lifting a bottle of port from a shelf, Bakker poured them a glass each. “How about that drink now?”
“Never say no to that,” Holland said.
Bakker took a gentle sip. “I appreciate what you’ve done here, Frank. I need to tread carefully. There are a lot of factions, and a lot of livelihoods riding on this. It’s not a decision I can make on my own.”
“Fair,” Holland said. “Slowly does it, I get that. So what can you tell me? How deep does this go?”
The new evidence shifted the conversation entirely. They had leverage, damn it. For the first time they weren’t on the back foot. “Alright,” he said, at last. “Let me tell you about what really happened with John Callihan.”
Thank you for reading!
Well, I hope that was nice and unexpected. More on the chapter down in the author notes.
As an early heads-up, I have a couple of in-person events coming up in May, so if you happen to live in East Anglia and can make it to Norwich or Halesworth do keep an eye out for further detail. I’ll be talking a lot about my writing and publishing route and how this newsletter has been something of an escape from the churn of social media. More info on those closer to the time.
A couple of very pleasant surprises this week relating to my book No Adults Allowed. Amazon don’t tell authors when their books receive reviews, so I’d missed that one had been posted from Australia way back in January:
That in turn led me down a rabbit hole to Goodreads, where the book had another couple of decent reviews1. Publishing No Adults Allowed was very much about learning the process and wanting to have a physical edition of the story, so I haven’t promoted it extensively, which makes it all the more surprising to find that people are actually reading it.
Thanks!
Meanwhile, my reading this week was mostly about AI, which increasingly is feeling like another tech bubble just waiting to go pop.
’s anecdote from SXSW is particularly interesting:
I was fortunate enough to attend SXSW about ten years ago, right when excitement for the internet was peaking, the possibilities seemed endless and the innovators and entrepreneurs still seemed to be interested in empowering creatives and individuals. A couple of years later we hit 2016 and it became apparent that the internet, and social media in particular, had a deeply problematic side. Those early days of optimism and excitement seem from a different era entirely: the tech world is so cynical and anti-consumer now. Is it too far to say that it’s anti-human? A bit hyperbolic, perhaps.
Ed Zitron also had thoughts, in his usual embittered-but-well-researched kind of way. The assumption in 2022 and even 2023 was that we were at the start of something that would continue to rapidly advance. The leap to ChatGPT and MidJourney seemed so sudden and enormous that we assumed similar leaps would continue to arrive. That may not be the case.
A friend linked me to an older article from December by Cory ‘Enshittification’ Doctorow2, which compares the current AI bubble to previous tech bubbles, and wonders…what will be left after the inevitable pop?
And on a different note entirely, yesterday I enjoyed finding this piece from
:
It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, so I’ll probably return to it sooner rather than later.
OK, let’s talk about this week’s chapter.
Author notes
This moment has been coming for a while. For it to work, the story had to emphasise the worst elements of Holland’s personality, so that it would be believable that he’d betray his colleagues. At the same time, this unexpected double-cross had to ring true as well, which required inserting just enough nuance into his characterisation that it would ring true.
Hence all those little moments of Holland being a good detective, a good cop, despite being a bad person. We’ve seen him be a racist and a misogynist, but we’ve also seen him make sure that his personal views don’t interfere with his work. He’s not a nice person, but we also caught a glimpse of him helping Clarke with the trauma of Callihan’s death. It’s been fun treading that line.
Where it gets especially interesting - and tricky - is in chapters that are told from Holland’s narrative POV. They had to be honest and not cheat what was going on, without contradicting the twist in today’s chapter. Leaning heavily into unreliable narrator territory, this meant choosing very carefully what was happening with his inner thoughts.
I think — I hope — that it all hangs together on a re-read. If someone were to go and read Triverse again from the beginning, Holland’s character would make sense. The chapters in which he’s meeting with Miller would still work, with this new context. There are hints in those scenes that Holland is playing both sides, which will now be more obvious in retrospect. If there were little quirks in the narration that didn’t quite make sense at the time, now they should.
It’s a fun storytelling technique to play with. I still vividly remember learning about unreliable narrators at school and finding the idea fascinating. All of fiction storytelling could be described as lying in order to get at the truth, and that’s never more true than with dodgy narrators.
It’s something I tried years back in my second novel, The Mechanical Crown, in which the main villain is right under the reader’s noses for a very long time. That was very much a grandiose tale, so it was fun to return to the technique for something more grounded.
Anyway, let me know what you thought of the chapter, and the revelations around Holland’s allegiances.
Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash
I have to admit to entirely forgetting that Goodreads existed.
I’m assuming this is Cory’s preferred way of being introduced.
Very pleased with the plot twist.
I'll confess to being from Australia. 😁