The footage from the diplomatic car that carried Lydia and Fitz back to the residence last night makes for an uneventful eight minutes and seventeen seconds’ viewing, apart from the bit halfway through where Lydia can be seen to wind the window down and scream “ANNE BRONTE COULD KICK EMILY’S ARSE” at Fifth Avenue, before Fitz reaches out an arm and guides her gently back to her seat. Lydia’s feelings when she sees this are a mix of embarrassment and fondness, because Fitz never seemed perturbed when she behaved like that: just accepted it as part of the job. Either he was very tolerant, or she amused him, or maybe he just didn’t have a concept of embarrassment.
At the end of the video they get out of the car. Lydia sees herself fumbling at the door, increasingly frustrated by her inability to open it. Fitz comes around the other side and opens it for her, then guides her out, ensuring she doesn’t step into traffic, not that there is any—the timestamp shows 12:52 A.M. and the street is quiet. This seems to be the last footage of Fitz alive.
“That doesn’t tell us much,” says Rollo.
“It doesn’t tell us anything,” says Alinn.
None of it jogs Lydia’s memory. It could all be a deepfake for all she knows. She’s rarely drawn this much of a blank before. She pushed herself too hard at that conference, and so soon after the festival debacle: Why didn’t she learn? Why didn’t she listen to Fitz? Maybe if she had, he wouldn’t be dead.
Rollo sits back and folds his arms. “In the absence of other data, the only other person in that house—”
“That’s conjecture,” says Alinn. “You don’t know—”
Rollo’s eyes roll behind his glasses. “The only other person we can place at the scene of the murder is you, Lydia.”
Lydia revises her earlier opinion of Rollo: he’s not that friendly after all. But the thing is, he’s right. She has no memory of what happened, no alibi, and the surviving security data doesn’t exonerate her. She has no motive, cannot understand why or how she might have done it, but the simplest explanation is that she killed Fitz, and the worst part is she cannot say for certain that she didn’t.
“This is bad, isn’t it?” Lydia tells Alinn when they finally get a chance to speak alone.
“It’s not great.”
“Oh god.” Lydia buries her face in her hands. She’s barely managed to absorb Fitz’s murder: she can’t believe she might be accused of it.
“But look—it’s all circumstantial at the moment. Forensic data means nothing—you live in the building, you were in and out of that room all the time, plus you found the body. They need a weapon.”
“Where would I get a gun?”
“You could’ve printed one.”
“Seriously? If I was printing off guns, the network would’ve flagged it and the cops would’ve been round like a shot.”
“Embassy properties have privacy privileges.”
Lydia scoffs. “Yeah right, the cops say that but we all know—”
Alinn glares at her, reminding her where she is, and she stops and changes tack.
“The embassy is strict about what you can do with the connection,” Lydia says. “They’d get an alert, and there’d be a download record.”
“In theory, but we seem to be dealing with someone with a real talent for covering their tracks.”
“Which I definitely don’t have—”
“But,” says Alinn, holding up a hand, “what they need is to find the weapon itself, or evidence of you leaving the residence to dispose of it.”
“There isn’t a weapon, I swear—”
“Which means they won’t find one, and they have to find it or they don’t have a case. They’re searching the house for it now.”
“Christ.” So they’ll be going through all her stuff. They’ll find the empty vial in the kitchen bin, but they already know about that anyway.
“They’re leaning on you because you’re all they have. The embassy will be leaning on them, so will the mayor’s office, they need a result. It’s still very early days. Other stuff will come to light.”
“Would they plant a gun? If they really need a result?”
Alinn raises their voice. “Absolutely not,” they say in a performative tone that makes clear they’d give a different answer if they were not in a police station.
“I had no reason to kill him. Why would I kill him? I was happy in my job—in fact I would’ve been fired if it wasn’t for—”
Alinn holds up a hand. “Don’t look for reasons you might’ve done it, that’s their job, don’t do it for them. Look for reasons someone else might want to kill him. Did he have enemies? If we can give them something else to think about—”
“There’s Madison.”
“Who is that?”
“I think she’s like the chief of staff at the embassy or something?”
“OK, great—and?”
“Well, they had a massive argument over him wanting to keep me on and her wanting me to be fired, after that business at the festival.”
“Your history of violence might not be the best thing to bring up.”
Lydia rolls her eyes. “I punched a lad, it’s hardly a ‘history of violence.’ Don’t tell me you’ve never punched anyone.”
“I’m not the one suspected of murder here. So this person from the embassy—”
“Madison, yeah—Fitz told me she was trying to get him removed from his job. And she’d have had access to the residence, and the security—”
“Could she have deleted the street cam too?”
“Dunno, maybe?”
“And you really think she might have killed him?”
This pulls Lydia up short, because she doesn’t, actually. “Well, her campaign to get him fired didn’t come off, so if she got desperate … maybe she secretly had another, more important reason for wanting him out of the way?”
“You want to tell them you think she might be a suspect?”
Lydia doesn’t hold out much hope for this, but she desperately wants the heat off her. “Yeah.”
Alinn nods. “The agency won’t like you pointing the finger at someone from the embassy.”
“They won’t like me being charged with murdering my boss either, so swings and roundabouts.”
“What does that mean?”
“Doesn’t matter.”