After the cops have taken Hari away, they want to speak to Lydia—which is fine because she wants to speak to them too. She waits for them in the lobby of Liberty View and checks the local feeds.
@GeezLoueeze17 / Cops telling everyone in Liberty View to stay inside—wanted criminal on the roof! Should I go up there and check it out?? / TR83
@happynesta1010 / Guys just checked my sillcam and saw the suspect in the Fitzwilliam murder walking into Liberty View fifteen minutes ago … coincidence?? / TR90
The latter post has been picked up and spread, and although the cops haven’t announced Hari is in police custody it’s common knowledge. He is the story now.
A small, stout officer arrives and asks Lydia to take her through what happened on the roof.
“First,” Lydia says, “can I just say at no point did he threaten me, and I felt much more intimidated by the other two guys who were with him.”
“Other guys?” says the officer.
Lydia explains about the shiny-jacket guys, and how they ran off when they knew the police were coming. “They were right shady little bastards.”
The officer raises an eyebrow and highlights this last sentence in the live transcript on her scroll. “So Mr. Dessai approached you.”
“Yes, and of course I knew you were looking for him, so I called you straightaway,” Lydia says. She’s at a loss for how she should play this. Her fear is that the cops will pin Fitz’s murder on Hari regardless of whether he did it, and this will look bad for her. So she doesn’t want to push them towards that conclusion, or help them build a case against him, by making him out to be dangerous. However, if he goes down for it—and she reminds herself it’s still possible he’s guilty—it will look even worse for her if she’s been lobbying on his behalf. She knows this seems cold, but she tells herself it’s not her fault if the cops pin it on him.
Ultimately she wants to neither drop him in it nor help him out of it, so she relates the sequence of events as neutrally as possible, omitting any mention of his inebriation. (They’ll find that out for themselves soon enough.) When she reaches the bit about him finding her entirely by accident, the officer pulls her up on it.
“Wait wait wait—he told you he didn’t track you here?”
“Yeah, he saw me over by the periscopes, totally randomly.”
“That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“That’s what I said.”
“So he finds you in a city of ten million people when we couldn’t find him in two days.”
This is interesting: it really does seem like they don’t have her under close surveillance, and she wonders why not. “He also didn’t know you were looking for him.”
This earns her an odd look from the officer. “I find that extremely hard to believe.”
“I’m just telling you what he told me.” It is hard to believe—but that’s what makes it such a weird thing to lie about, especially to her. “He said he was just … seeing the sights.”
“We had everyone looking for him, alerts on every account he’s got, algos plotting likely patterns of behavior from what we knew about him; we hunted down every image we could and fed it into rec—we even had people on the street using their eyes. Only way he could’ve avoided us all that time is if he holed up somewhere indoors, didn’t plug in, didn’t log on and didn’t spend any money. He expects us to believe he was just walking around?”
Lydia shrugs.
The officer shakes her head. “Doesn’t add up.”
She’s right, it doesn’t. So it must add up to something else. But Lydia’s fucked if she knows what it is.
“One last thing, ma’am—why were you here?”
“Sorry?” says Lydia, unprepared for this question and unsure what she should say.
“What brought you here, now?”
“Ms. Southwell,” says another voice from behind Lydia. She turns to see Sturges walking up to her, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up to reveal spiraling tattoos down his arms. He removes his aviators before speaking to her and jabs the air with them for emphasis as he speaks. “I wanted to come down here in person to thank you for finding that guy. You’ve done us a considerable service.”
“Oh,” replies Lydia, “I was just telling your colleague here he came up to me, I didn’t really find him as such.”
“I’ve seen the footage and you handled it like a pro.”
Lydia feels this does not say reassuring things about professionals, but she knows he doesn’t literally mean it: He’s just trying to flatter her to keep her onside, ready for the next time he needs her to cooperate. The ulterior motive behind his genial attitude is pretty blatant—but still, she appreciates someone being nice to her for a change. “Yeah cheers,” she says.
“Let’s hope you don’t have to deal with any more shit over all this. You’ve been through more than enough.”
Lydia nods as if she agrees.
Sturges offers her a ride back to the residence, which she declines, then he leads the other officer away, saying they need to put together a media statement. For a moment Lydia wonders if she ought to tell them about Jene Connor—but it still seems flimsy, tenuous. She doesn’t trust them to follow it up. And she doesn’t want to tell them she’s making her own inquiries, not yet, because they might tell her to stop.