The police have a lot of questions and Lydia has very few of the answers. All she can tell them is she’s been hearing Fitz’s voice, and based on the few bits of information he managed to give her, she investigated his murder and worked out who did it. Or at least, she thought she had.
“Why didn’t you bring this to us as soon as you found out?” asks Rollo, who’s interviewing her again, but this time on her turf, such as it is—the reception room of the residence.
“At first it didn’t really seem like anything,” Lydia says. “I was just trying to keep busy, I didn’t expect you’d take it seriously—I didn’t really take it seriously myself. But Fitz asked me to, or I thought he had, and it was the least I could do for him.”
“And you really believed his … spirit, or whatever … was speaking to you?”
“I didn’t know what was happening. I’d seen his body, I knew he was dead, but he was speaking to me, and yes it did occur to me I might be going mad but—”
“But you went to the apartment next door because you thought he might be there—that’s what you said, wasn’t it?”
“It was the only answer I could think of, that I’d been mistaken somehow—but I wasn’t, was I? He was dead, and I was hearing his voice.”
“But what I don’t understand is—”
“Excuse me,” says the cop translator, the same one who came with Sturges when he told everyone Lydia had to stay here, the white-haired one who was so slick and professional and who Lydia wished she could be friends with. Lydia has learned her name is Dion. She’s been relating the discussion for Madison’s benefit in case she has anything to contribute.
“Yes?” asks Rollo.
“There’s absolutely no way,” says Dion, speaking on Madison’s behalf, “that Lydia could reasonably have understood where the voice was coming from. None of us knew this was possible, and in her place I would’ve been just as confused.”
Lydia’s surprised by Madison’s intervention, but gratefully accepts it. The police had been reluctant to share any further details about what was in the fish tank in the apartment above Mrs. Kloves’ house, but Madison argued the embassy had the right to know what had happened to the body of one of its citizens, and eventually they told her. Fitz’s head had been preserved in a chemical cocktail, and the equipment wired into his brain was indeed adapted from the rejected translation technology. Someone—presumably the man who’d run from the apartment—had been using it to communicate with Lydia via Fitz, accessing his speech centers and bypassing his cognitive functions, so to Lydia it seemed to be his voice. The grimy, invasive device even boosted it so she could hear him from the other end of the house.
“I’m far more concerned,” Dion continues for Madison, “that someone stole Fitzwilliam’s head from your morgue.”
“We’re conducting a full investigation,” says Rollo.
“I should hope so. Have you checked the rest of his body is still there?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Yes, it’s there.”
“Maybe the guy who had the head was the guy who killed Fitz?” says Lydia.
“We don’t want to jump to conclusions. Yes, he’s a suspect but we don’t have anything connecting him with the actual murder.”
“Nothing except he had the murder victim’s head in a fish tank.”
“Which doesn’t mean he was the murderer—the head was taken long after the murder.”
“But doesn’t it seem obvious he was using me to fit someone else up for the murder? He sent me off on that investigation and manipulated the whole thing—”
“Ah yes,” says Rollo, “we checked out your suspect—Jene Connor, who we also have in the morgue, who did indeed kill herself. The ballistics don’t match, but you say you found a motive?”
“I … think so? She’d uncovered something … or maybe just thought she had, I don’t know. I don’t know.” For a brief moment a few hours ago Lydia thought it all fitted together, and what she’d learned was horrible but at least it made some kind of sense. Now she’s more confused than ever.
Rollo tells Lydia and Madison that’s all the questions they have for now. Dion excuses herself and leaves swiftly: she doesn’t seem even slightly drunk. If that was Lydia she’d have swayed a bit at the very least.
The cops discuss stuff but all Lydia hears is the silence in her mind. She’ll never walk into this house and hear Fitz’s voice again, because he’s really gone this time—in fact he always was. She takes a moment on her own, telling herself how daft this is. He was just her boss. They weren’t friends or anything.
The police eventually leave—all of them. Lydia has got so used to there being a cop stationed on the doorstep, it’s weird to look out and not see one. Like when you walk into your living room the day after you take the Christmas tree down.
So they’ve decided they no longer need to watch the house, says Madison, joining Lydia at the window.
They were never watching the house, Lydia replies. They were watching me. She recalls how there was no cop when she went to investigate the apartment next door.
The feeds don’t have anything about Fitz’s head being stolen.
@Back2life111 / Police activity outside the murder house and next door, new evidence? / TR93
@NOWPUNCHER / BREAKING: ATTACHÉ MURDER WEAPON FOUND IN APARTMENT NEXT DOOR / TR62
And so on and so on. None of them have got it right—though didn’t she see something about his body being stolen from the morgue a couple of days ago? She tries in vain to find it again. She stops looking—if she searches for it too many times, one of the contengines will confect a story about it and get her to click.
At least we’ve explained your ghost situation, says Madison. I thought there had to be a rational explanation.
I thought you might want to apologize.
Madison airily looks out of the window as she says, Apologize? What for?
You basically said I was mad, or lying, or trying to wrap my primitive brain around what was happening to me and came up with some childish explanation.
I didn’t say any of that.
Maybe not in those exact words, but—
You must see how strange your claims seemed to me.
I never said they weren’t strange, I knew they were strange.
If I did cause any offense, I apologize—now come on, I need you to explain this business about a veearr game.
What about it?
I’d like to know what you think you know.
You’re being patronizing again—
I’m not trying to be.
I’ve found things. I have. I don’t know what they all mean but—
You found them through false information. That wasn’t Fitzwilliam telling you those things.
But most of it didn’t come from him. It was just, like, a loose thread I pulled on, and all this stuff came out of it.
Explain it to me, please. All of it.
Lydia’s dubious about this. Madison could well be involved in whatever’s going on, and so telling her what she knows might be a terrible idea. But on the other hand Madison might be able to help Lydia find the truth, and this business is so maddening Lydia is willing to take a few risks if it means getting to the bottom of it. So she tells Madison everything, and to her credit Madison listens, even though it’s clear how badly she wants to pass comment.
Lydia has almost finished when the doorbell rings. Whoever it is, get rid of them, Madison says.
Lydia opens the front door.
“Hi,” says Hari a little weakly. “There aren’t any police still in there, are there?”