Lydia has been left alone in the interview room for almost an hour. She wishes she’d brought a book: she resists the temptation to use her scroll or glasses because the police will be watching her activity. Although she’s (almost) sure she isn’t guilty, she feels guilty and is worried this will make her act guilty. She knows they’ve got all kinds of bioanalytics and body-language readers, and that stuff isn’t evidence but it can strongly influence an investigation. So she sits and does nothing. Then she worries that will be interpreted as guilty.
Suddenly she knows Madison is walking down the corridor outside the interview room. Can’t hear her thoughts, of course, but there’s a buzz at the edge of Lydia’s skull that tells her Madison is very close and conversing with somebody—possibly her own translator but more likely a police one, since the cops wouldn’t trust anything they were told by a suspect’s employee. When Lydia was at LSTL they took a careers module that included a visit from some cops, inviting them to consider a career in police translation. Fuck that, if she wanted to be a cop she could’ve stayed in Halifax.
Bloody hell though—they took Lydia’s accusation seriously. Lydia’s not sure she takes her own accusation seriously.
The door of the interview room opens and Lydia jumps—but it’s just a desk sergeant bringing her a burrito. When Lydia’s alone again the sense of Madison’s presence has faded. She must have been taken to a room farther away, out of Lydia’s range. While Lydia eats her burrito she imagines Madison in one of the other interview rooms, breaking down under questioning, unable to bear up against the guilt, confessing in tears or whatever their equivalent is (she’s pretty sure she never saw Fitz cry). She imagines the cops commending her for supplying this vital lead, the embassy thanking her for identifying the culprit before she killed again …
Then Rollo returns with a cop she hasn’t seen before. Alinn enters behind them. Lydia shoots Alinn a questioning glance and receives an uneasy one in return. She senses they have not come to tell her Madison has confessed and she is free to go.
The new cop—a middle-aged guy in a uniform, chunkily built and handsome, with an incongruously boyish fringe—introduces himself as Inspector Sturges, warmly shakes Lydia’s hand and sits down. The others also take seats around the table. Lydia wonders what it signifies that a more senior officer has turned up. Probably nothing good.
“I’d like to make clear,” says Sturges, “how grateful the NYPD is for your cooperation in this matter. I know this must have been a deeply traumatic day for you, and Lieutenant Rollo here tells me you’ve been nothing but helpful.”
Lydia glances at Rollo: she finds it hard to imagine him saying that, but she’s not about to contradict Sturges. “Well yeah,” she replies. “I want you to find who killed him, of course I do.”
“Of course.” Sturges removes a scroll from his pocket and unfurls it. “You recently visited the UK, is that correct?”
“Yes. That’s where I’m from.”
Sturges smiles. “Who did you have contact with, while you were there?”
“My mum. My brother. The woman who lives in my old room. Some people in a club. What does this have to do with—”
“Did you speak to a man named Mark Jankovic?”
Lydia shakes her head. “Was he that lad who hassled me on the tram?”
Sturges looks around the table. “What’s a tram?”
“Like a bus but—I think you call them trolleys?”
Sturges brings up a picture on his scroll of a young man holding a bottle of beer and leering at the camera. “This is Mark Jankovic.”
“Oh! You mean Jank.”
“Right. Then you did meet him.”
“He’s a mate of my brother’s. No one calls him Mark, that’s what confused me.”
“Gotcha. What’d you talk about?”
“I spoke to him for like two minutes—I don’t know him, I don’t like him, he’s just—”
“Did he ask you about work?”
Lydia wonders where this is going. “Yeah…”
“And what did he want to know?”
“He didn’t so much ask me about my work as imply I was a, what’s the word, a sort of live-in prostitute? Courtesan, is that what I mean? Or is it concubine?”
Sturges raises his eyebrows. Alinn suppresses a laugh.
“And what did you tell him?” Rollo says, entirely impassive.
“That I wasn’t.”
“You tell him anything else?” asks Sturges.
“I told him he was a fucking idiot, and that was pretty much the end of the conversation.”
“And he didn’t give you anything to take back to New York with you?”
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
“No, and I wouldn’t have taken it if he had, I’d have probably caught something off it.”
“Did you give him anything?”
“No.”
“Did he put you in touch with anyone?”
“No.”
“Why is this relevant?” says Alinn.
“Were you aware,” says Sturges, still focusing on Lydia, “that Mr. Jankovic is a member of an organization known as Illogic Alliance?”
“Known as what?”
Sturges repeats the name of the organization more slowly, leaving more of a gap between the two words.
“That’s a terrible name,” Lydia says. “When you say it out loud it sounds like Illogical Irons. Or Illogical Lions?”
“I think the Lions thing is deliberate,” says Alinn, “like a symbol of power.”
Lydia wrinkles her nose. “Really? It’s not very good.”
“They’re a pressure group campaigning against Logi influence,” says Sturges. “You didn’t know Mr. Jankovic was a member?”
“No, but I’m not surprised.”
“My client will not answer any more questions along these lines,” says Alinn, “unless you explain what this has to do with the murder of Fitzwilliam.”
“It’s a line of inquiry we’re pursuing,” says Sturges, “and we’re not saying Ms. Southwell led anyone to Fitzwilliam consciously or deliberately, we just think it’s coincidental that she made this trip so soon before his death. She may have … inspired someone to seek out Fitzwilliam as a target.”
“Inspired?” says Lydia. “Like I’m a murderer’s muse?”
“Do you have a recording of this conversation with Mr. Jankovic?”
“Probably. But nobody would involve Jank in something like this anyway, he’s an idiot and I’m willing to testify to that in court.”
“These people you met in the club, who were they?”
“Just some cleanskin kids.”
“Cleanskin?”
“No tattoos or piercings.” Lydia brings up one of the pictures she took of herself with the cleanskins on her glasses and pings it over to Alinn, who checks it and pings it to Sturges, who asks their names. Lydia noted all their first names, but of the surnames she caught only Hari’s: Dessai. Sturges tells Rollo to run a check.
“Did you talk to them about your work?” Sturges asks Lydia.
“They were interested,” says Lydia stiffly. “If you live in Halifax you don’t meet a lot of people who work in New York.”
“Do you recall the conversation,” says Rollo, “or were you drunk then as well?”
Sturges holds up a hand to Rollo and says quietly but firmly, “Just run that check, please.”
“I do remember the conversation,” Lydia says, stopping herself from addressing the part about her being drunk.
“And?”
“They mostly wanted to know what it was like living here, and what sort of events I go to. They weren’t really interested in Fitz. William. I hardly mentioned him.”
“Did you have any contact with them after leaving the club?”
“Yes, I took one of them back to a hotel and had sex with him.”
Rollo suddenly looks up from his scroll.
“No need to look so surprised,” Lydia says. “You think he must have had an ulterior motive for shagging me?”
“Why go to a hotel?” says Sturges.
“Neither of us had any privacy at home. For the sex, I mean,” she adds hastily.
“Did you and he talk any further about work?”
“A little bit—no sensitive information though. They do train us in this stuff at school, you know.”
“I’m aware.”
“He was just sort of interested in what it’s like to have someone else’s voice in your head.”
“What sort of view did he take on that? Did he think it was bad, impure, degrading?”
Good grief, says a voice in Lydia’s head: it sounds like Fitz’s. “No, he just thought it was a bit … odd.”
“And since the hotel, have you had any contact—” Sturges stops because Rollo’s brought something to his attention. “Huh,” he says. “That’s interesting.” He looks up at Lydia. “Were you aware Mr. Dessai arrived in New York yesterday evening?”
The NYPD swiftly throw everything into searching for Hari. All they know at the moment is he was on a hopper that landed at LaGuardia just after 9:00 P.M. yesterday. He traveled on his own passport and the scan at control confirms it was him … and then he dropped off the radar, which is suspicious in itself. They’ve got bots trawling footage from every cam in the city, looking for where he went next.
When Lydia gets to talk to Alinn privately again, she asks what all this means for her.
“It means they have another credible suspect,” Alinn replies, “which is very good. He’s connected to you, which is less good. The inspector seems prepared to believe you didn’t lead him here deliberately, but we’ll have to watch that.”
“I just … can’t believe Hari would do this,” says Lydia, fully aware of how lame it sounds. She likes to think she’s a good judge of people. But who doesn’t? Maybe it was all a plot on Hari’s part. Maybe he knew she was in town, followed her to the club, zeroed in on her. She tries to remember if he spoke to her first or if she spoke to him. Maybe he scraped her scroll while she was taking a shower at the hotel. Maybe he copied her DNA from one of her hairs and used it to fool the systems at the residence. Maybe it’s all been constructed to set her up.
“Seems strange he didn’t tell you he was coming.”
“I know it does.”
“You said he’s a cybersecurity patcher,” Alinn replies. “Good enough to cover his tracks?”
“I didn’t ask him for a demonstration. He wasn’t a hard case though, you know. He seemed more the type who gets robbed straight off the hopper than the type who commits an undetected murder within hours of landing.”
“Well, Sturges says you can go.”
This takes Lydia by surprise. “As in, leave the police station?”
Alinn nods. “They’ve swept the residence top to bottom and haven’t found a weapon, so they can’t charge you.”
“And I can go back there?”
“The forensics team have capped the whole ground floor of the house and the immediate area, so they shouldn’t need access again.”
Lydia hadn’t anticipated this but it makes sense: things at the actual location can decay or be tampered with. Better to have a comprehensive, frozen-in-time model, and refer to that.
“I’m afraid they’ve already confiscated your passport, and you won’t be allowed to leave Manhattan.”
Lydia laughs shortly. “Where else would I go?”