Noam Webster, keeper of the skulls, runs his hands up and down the row of crania lined up on the shelf. His fingers tap the parietal bone of one, linger on the orbital plate of another, jump past two more and touch down on the zygomatic arches of a third: his little warm-up, loosening the ivories, prodding them into attentiveness while he decides which tune to play, which key to play in. Lucy Diamond, standing just behind him, scours them with her eyes. Their shapes and sizes are so variant that it’s hard to see them – and Webster, and her – as belonging to one species. Some have bulging frontals, others flat ones – straight-up, windscreen-slanted … some temporal lines are raised, others regressed … sutures each scrawl their eccentric signature, their wavering graph-curves, on calvarial parchment. Plus, each one is damaged – chipped, indented, notched, trepanned, depressed – in its own way …
‘The thing with high-velocity impact – say, when a bullet travels through a skull, especially when dispatched from up close, what we might call the “execution scenario” …’ Pinching the sphenoids of the skull on which it’s currently resting between thumb and little finger, Webster’s right hand lifts it; the fore and middle fingers of his left, meanwhile, turn into a gun’s barrel jammed against the occipital bone. ‘The skull’s so fragile,’ he continues, ‘that, as soon as the bullet’ – his cocked thumb-hammer crooks in simulated pin-strike – ‘enters it, it starts to splinter, with the lines of fracture spreading out in all directions, in proliferating branches, like a railway network sprawling over a whole territory – to the point that there’s no territory any more: it’s all just fracture network. When the splinter lines run up against each other, they remake the skull in their own image, as a set of void channels, of fissures; at which point the skull disintegrates. This process takes place with extraordinary speed. It sometimes runs its course, entry to disintegration, more quickly than the bullet travels: the cracks tear around the cranium’s circumference so fast they beat the bullet to the other side. By the time it arrives at the frontal plate, there is no frontal plate there any more, hence nothing left for it to exit through. Which poses certain challenges to subsequent investigators …’
‘I see,’ says Diamond, trying from the off to strike a balance in her tone between receptive and imperious. This is her first solo outing since being upgraded to full Pantarey staff member (Associate Technology Officer, ATO: she’s just handed him her card). Last time she visited Forensis, it was as Phocan’s sidekick; now, she has to signal brief-command, client entitlement. She informs Webster: ‘But in this case, it’s not a bullet. It’s a rapier. The character’s already got a model of her uncle’s staved-in skull, and when she finds the rapier that did it, she’s able to …’
‘What’s a rapier?’ Webster asks.
‘It’s a long, hand-held weapon for close-quarter combat. In this film, they’re full of energy. They glow.’
‘Like a lightsaber.’
‘Kind of. But it’s solid, made of martensite. Maybe the closest approximation would be a samurai sword – one infused with plutonium or some like form of radiation.’
Tokyo: Chofu. Images of dogwood spray in Jindai Botanical Gardens spread round Diamond’s own cranium, of ume flowers, whose long filaments, extending radially from deep-red central stigma to wave laden anthers at incoming airborne traffic while bright petals fanned open around them, seemed to duplicate in softer form the satellites that she and Phocan were helping JAXA to configure. Their hosts took them, one afternoon, to visit the Yoshihara swordsmith workshop: endless rhythmic hammering and bashing of the smelted tamahagane, breathing of the wood-fires, rasping of the bellows, fire-spark blossom drifting through the air, about the floor … Even when drawn out into billets in which the katana’s final shape could be discerned in embryonic form, the steel still held within its body molten pockets, hot as planetary mantle. Charge. From the Creston’s high windows she’d look out over the night-time city, its unquenchable illumination, the magmatic neon flows, and see a unit – like a battery-pack or memory plug-in of unspeakable complexity – continually recharging. And the people … She read on the plane an article describing Fukushima’s aftermath: whole populations radio-iodinised, buzzing with enough isotopic discharge to work Geiger counters up into a frenzy. If the Yoshihara visit stuck with her it was, perhaps, because the precious, volatile bars plucked from the furnace seemed to reify that sense of chargedness – that, and the way bandanaed and kimonoed swordsmiths held them up for reverential scrutiny, or passed them on between themselves, from tong to tong, or laid them out to cool, polished and dusted them, less artisanal than ceremonial, forensic …
‘This,’ Webster has set the skull down now and moved to a computer, ‘is a PBR, made with our latest toy, a Faro laser scanner, of one of these specimens – the third one from the right, to be precise. We could provide you and your movie people, Double Zero, with …’
‘It’s Degree Zero,’ she corrects him.
‘… Degree Zero, with this very scan, or one much like it. It’s made with the same flyover method we use with the Pitt Rivers and British Museums, digitising ethnographic artefacts.’
‘Artefacts as in …?’
‘Statues, fetishes or handmade bowls, what have you …’ he tells her without taking his eyes from the screen or fingers from the glide-pad, moving about which they spin the radiant green cranium around, enabling multiple flyovers, each from a new angle, of its wound-crater, a detailed survey of its pleats and ridges.
‘This is more or less exactly what the character does,’ Diamond says.
‘She has a Faro scanner too?’
‘Version 20.0,’ Diamond smiles back, ‘with screen-independent holographic render … Hey, what’s that?’
She can’t help herself slipping back into ingénue mode: the printouts covering the wall behind the monitor are too intriguing. They seem to depict a kind of urban grid: an irregular one, with arrows indicating various jagging trajectories across it.
‘What’s …? Oh, that: Sarajevo,’ answers Webster. ‘Twenty-eighth June 1914. It’s the route that Archduke Ferdinand’s car took across the city. Collaboration with the History Department at UCL. Apparently, the century since the assassination has produced a thousand theories as to why the anarchist Princip did it, or why this particular event sparked off the biggest tinderbox in human history – but no one’s ever thought to carry out a basic time-and-motion study.’
‘And …?’
‘And what?’
‘And what has it revealed?’
‘It has revealed,’ Webster proudly announces, ‘that it all boils down to a three-point turn.’
‘A three-point turn – like in a car?’
‘Indeed: not like but actually in a car. The Archduke’s motorcade, driving down Appel Quay, here’ – he’s over at the wall now, pointing out the road in question – ‘turns right toward Franz Josef Street so as to deviate from the back-up route to which it has, as a precaution, switched (a bomb has been thrown earlier, and hit a secondary car; the pages of the speech Franz Ferdinand reads just prior to his assassination are flecked with blood) – a double-deviation, back to its initially announced route. Which isn’t very safe, given the day’s threat level. So, when the security implications of this dawn on the Archduke’s bodyguards, they decide to switch back a second time; which re-rerouting necessitates a three-point turn. Now, think of three-point turns: what do they all, no matter how swiftly or deftly they’re executed, entail?’
Diamond thinks back to her driving test: angles and distances, protocols and sequences, mirror-signal-manoeuvre … ‘Toggling between forward and reverse?’ she tries.
‘Well, yes … But that dictates another basic quality: that every three-point turn contains, at – as – its pivot-point, a static moment. Here in Appel Quay, this moment takes place right by where Princip is standing. So, naturally, he pulls his pistol out and offs his sitting-duck duke quarry.’
‘What are the chances?’ Diamond murmurs.
‘Chance,’ says Webster, ‘is a can of worms this project has pried open. The more you look at it, the more you start to see a sort of correspondence – of symmetry almost – not only in the layout of the streets, the doubled routes, the switchbacks and retracings and so on, but also in the larger field of the event’s contingencies. Take just one sample area, for example: the lead actors’ titles. On one side, you’ve got Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke; on the other, Princip, the anarchist. Archduke, like princip, means ‘prince’ – from arc or arche: prime authority, but also curve plotted in space; and dux, or leader, plotter of a route. The Archduke’s people plot a route through space; the anarchists launch their counterplot, a plot against arch order, against structure. But their plotting is defective – as you might expect: they don’t believe in arcs or arches, that’s the whole point. But – here’s the twist, which perhaps isn’t such a twist after all – an arc comes to their aid: a double-arc, embodied in a three-point turn. It’s like a kind of doubling-up, a folding. And the street towards which the Archduke is heading doubles his own name, halfway at least: Franz Josef is his uncle, who’s dispatched him off to Sarajevo – like a double, to die in his place.’
‘So are you saying …?’ Diamond begins; but Webster cuts her off:
‘I’m not saying anything. Just tracing out a set of lines; a fracture network. That’s all I do. I have a hat in this ring, too.’
‘Professionally?’ she asks.
‘Titularly. Staying within the same interrogation boundaries, names and their meanings: arc comes from the Greek arkheion, house’ – he opens up his hand to indicate their environs – ‘of records. In Ancient Athens, they had archons, magistrates, guardians and interpreters of the public archive; through their collective analyses and deliberations, the archons oversaw the workings of democracy and justice.’ He pauses for a while, then adds: ‘Archives were held in chest or arks, made of acacia wood.’ His finger gently slides down from the diagrams and route maps and swings back towards the skulls as he continues: ‘Arca can mean coffin too …’
Diamond’s middle name is Sky. It was her mother’s maiden name. Her parents were second-wave hippies, early-nineties flower children. In tribute to the tangerine streets and marmalade skies, the plasticine porters with looking-glass ties of the song – as well (she suspects, reading between the lines of the foundation myth they fondly peddled her) as the fact that they were both tripping when they met – they named her Lucy. Are there arches at work there, too, plotting, from base coordinates of nomenclature, the paths and switchbacks, folds and doublings, assignations both fortuitous and unfortunate, even catastrophic, that her life will follow? Or is it something older, routes laid down prior even to that, some vast mechanism as inevitable as the engine movements of open-top motorcars, or newspaper taxis appearing on the shore, waiting to take you away? Here, in Forensis plc’s back office, one of the many darkened rooms that she now seems to spend the lion’s share of her time in, Diamond finds herself struck by a pervasive sense of powerlessness, of freedom from volition. It’s neither a particularly bad feeling nor a good and liberating one – it just is what it is. It comes to her, she shrugs it off and turns to Webster as he says:
‘This is the other thing I meant to show you.’
He’s back beside her at the screen, shutting down the luminous green cranium and popping open in its place a LiDAR file depicting, in equally rotatable projection, a modern urban or suburban living room. The space is illustrated colourfully and schematically, in architect-diagram style. Between orange and yellow blocks and cuboids labelled closet, bench press, TV, and so on, a green human avatar lies stretched out, the circle of its head distended into a long oval seeping red across the floor. Cutting aslant the room, a conic section, also red, depicts a projectile’s flight path, door to facing wall, passing above the backrest of an armchair at whose base the human figure’s feet lie, pivot-points around which it, too, has been doubled, folded out and downward, vertical to horizontal. Diamond recognises the scenario at once: it’s a case Pantarey have taken on for a humanitarian NGO, the shooting of a Guatemalan dissident. They modelled the whole thing two weeks ago back in The Cell, with markered extras moving through various scenarios, the files then being passed to Forensis who, like them, are offering their services pro bono.
‘This is a sneak preview,’ Webster tells her. ‘We’re still working on it. But – spoiler alert – the Policia Nacional’s account is holding up about as well as this politician’s hairstyle.’
‘Trade unionist, I think,’ she corrects him again. ‘How can you tell?’
‘If it had been a random break-in, as they claim, the victim would have moved either towards or away from the point of entry, to confront (if he was feeling feisty) or (if he was minded for self-preservation) flee from his assailant. On top of which, objects and furniture would be displaced. If they’d even wanted to make it look as though it might have been a break-in, they could have knocked over the stereo or bench press, or rifled the closet. But they didn’t. The position of the victim’s feet – hinged round but otherwise unmoved from by the armchair – suggest he had no inkling of his killer’s presence in the house. And then the gunman has chosen the angle most propitious for a straight-up take-out: a clear line of sight, good reference points in the door frame and far wall’s cornice boundary. If I apply all the axes, you can see …’
He clicks a side-bar option, and the depicted room becomes a kind of loom all of whose yarns converge on the shooter’s position, as though its contents and dimensions were being knitted by, from or around this single point, the muzzle of his gun. The geometry’s so clear, so perfect, that it seems to Diamond inconceivable that the space, the living room, could ever have been designed for anything other than this one event; seems that the converging warp-lines were all there already, and the conic section too – not over- but underlay, integral design-key announcing: This is the bullet’s trajectory, and always has been; this is the point at which Plane A is intersected by Line B … If this trade unionist has died, it’s for the simple reason that he drifted into this trajectory, transgressed the plane, the point of intersection – occupied, however transiently, a certain spot within the grid.
‘Their timeline’s off, too,’ Webster’s telling her.
‘Sorry? How do you mean?’
‘The policia’s. From their crime-scene photos that they say were taken two hours after the supposed break-in,’ he pulls up a screen of thumbnail snaps in which the loom’s symmetry and order have been lost, neutralised or at least camouflaged by the actual room’s banal grey surfaces, ‘you can see, through the window, the exact lie of the shadow cast on to the ground by the house’s outer wall. Cross-referencing that with the building’s original architectural plans, which we got hold of, and with Street View, and with easily obtainable sun-tracking tables for Guatemala City on that date, March the fifteenth … Well, you get a time-reading of more than three hours earlier. It’s clear the time code on the photographs is falsified, or at least wrong …’
Now Diamond’s thinking of another room, with freesias, and ume flowers; of a bed, a furnace, stars, a spaceship, Chofu, Sarajevo … In the Creston’s bedroom, on the wall, a line from Basho had been printed: Days and months are travellers of eternity. As thumbnails, blowing up and shrinking, follow one another in quick, flickering procession, she sees once again the pulsing lights, synaptic spectacle of death and continuity, flat screen in which all actions are contemporaneous, replenishing each other endlessly.
‘These people,’ Webster clucks, ‘don’t get it: everything is information. It’s being sensed, being recorded, stored and studied all the time. The entire world’s an arc …’
He’s picked up the skull that he was holding earlier; it’s resting, like a sleeping kitten, in the cradle of his left hand held to his warm stomach while the index finger of his right hand runs and reruns down its suture, like a blind man’s scanning lines of Braille.