As Lydia leaves the embassy she’s very aware the police haven’t yet agreed not to arrest her. She figures they won’t want to rock that particular boat while everything’s still so delicate, but keeps an alert running on the feeds so if talks break down and the cops decide she’d make a useful bargaining chip, she’ll be warned and can try to get back to the embassy before they catch up with her.
Alone, Lydia takes a diplomatic car to the residence. If she does have to make another dash for sanctuary, at least she might get to drive at high speed through Manhattan again. This thought cheers her up.
Lydia arrives at the residence before the people she’s agreed to meet because she wants to see everything for herself one more time. She half hopes to find Madison in the study: she has no reason to believe she’ll be here but who knows, maybe she was sent to fetch some significant evidence. But the house is empty. She steps inside and looks up at the canvas, which right now shows a field of stars. She wonders who was last here to make it look like that. Maybe it’s the default?
The doorbell rings. Lydia glances through the study window and sees Rollo standing on the doorstep with Dion. Lydia glances up and down the street and it seems like it’s just the two of them. There’s one police car in front of the house: she tells her glasses to run a comparison of the street with other images from the past few months, and all the cars currently out there seem to belong to residents.
Lydia releases the catch on the door, opens it and greets them.
“I was surprised to hear from you,” says Rollo.
“I’m sure you were.”
“I hear you’re involved in some serious allegations against the department.”
“This isn’t about that,” says Lydia, neither confirming nor denying this. She turns to Dion. “I’m afraid Madison’s not here yet—but thanks for coming.”
“Sure,” says Dion with a flicker of a smile. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Are you OK?” Rollo asks Lydia, with genuine concern: she told him about her injury but not the circumstances.
“Minor head trauma,” Lydia replies. “Doctor said I should give it a rest for a few days.” She’d kept her lies simple when arranging the meeting, telling Rollo that Madison requested it and as Lydia wasn’t fit and all the translators at the embassy were busy, Madison had asked Dion to attend. Lydia tried not to be too insistent on this point, to avoid arousing suspicion, while also making clear that Madison would expect Dion to be here and Rollo’s cooperation would be noted and appreciated, which would go a long way at this sensitive time. She also dangled the carrot that this information would help resolve the increasingly tense situation between the embassy and the NYPD. She’s just hoping no one questions what she’s doing here, given she isn’t in a fit state to translate.
“And Madison has new information about the case?” asks Rollo.
Lydia looks for a reaction from Dion, but doesn’t see one and doesn’t want to stare. “She does, yeah. I think, er, one of the embassy staff might be a suspect? But I’m not sure. Shall we wait for her in the study?” She gestures for them to go first, because she wants to watch Dion’s reaction when she walks in—and yes, Dion does glance at the canvas for a moment, then stands with her back to it.
“Sorry she’s late,” says Lydia. “There’s a hell of a lot going on today.”
Dion remains silent and looks towards the window.
Lydia steels herself. “When you were here last time, you didn’t mention you were Fitz’s translator before me.”
Dion takes a moment to realize she’s being addressed. “Oh. Yes.”
“See, I didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t know you didn’t know that.”
“I had to go looking in the personnel files at the embassy. Seems like an obvious thing to mention when you meet someone for the first time, that they used to do your job.”
“I assumed you knew,” Dion says. “Didn’t Fitzwilliam ever mention me?”
“Sometimes,” says Lydia. “But never by name, it was always ‘your predecessor.’ He said you quit because you burnt out, yeah?”
Dion nods uneasily. “The work was taking its toll.”
“But you can manage the police stuff?”
“Yeah, it’s less full-on, y’know. Sometimes whole days can go by without—”
“So it was your choice to leave?”
“Yeah.” Dion’s eyes dart to the door and back. Rollo has sensed the edginess of this conversation but doesn’t understand it.
As Lydia hoped, the canvas has changed. She gestures at it. “Funny, I never saw it look like that in all the time I lived here.”
Dion turns to look. The image on the canvas is that same pastoral scene that was there when Madison repaired it. “Right.”
“Except once. When we fixed it after it got hit by the bullets that missed Fitz. Which means it looked like that when he died. And if you look at his staff page on the embassy site, there’s a picture of him in his office, and you can see the canvas behind him, and it looks like that again. That picture’s been on the site since before I started here, so I thought—maybe it’s an image he associated with that time? But then I realized the image didn’t necessarily come from him, because he wouldn’t have been alone. He never droned photos, he always got other people to take them. So there was someone else in the room, behind the camera.”
“So?” says Dion—a question to which she knows the answer.
Lydia takes a step closer to Dion. “You took the picture.”
Dion blinks. “I don’t remember.”
“You did, I checked the metadata—Dion Dalton. And it makes sense.” Lydia glances at Rollo, who’s watching all this unfold in puzzlement, then she turns back to Dion, confident she has her predecessor on the ropes—
And then the front door opens.
“Who the fuck’s that?” says Lydia, turning in the direction of the noise.
“Madison?” says Rollo.
“Oh. Yes, probably,” says Lydia, wondering if she should try to maintain her ruse or press ahead with her accusation—of course it depends who’s actually out there—
And then, to Lydia’s amazement, Madison walks into the study.
“Hello, ma’am,” Rollo says to Madison. “Ms. Southwell told us you wanted to meet here?”
Dion translates Madison’s reply: “You’ve been misinformed. I came here to collect some documents. You shouldn’t be here at all, given the delicacy of the present situation. None of you,” she adds, ensuring Lydia is included.
“My apologies, ma’am.” Rollo looks to Lydia. “So that was bullshit, what you told us?”
“Well—” Lydia says. “About her wanting to meet you, yeah, but the other stuff—”
“In fact, we’ve been looking for this woman,” Dion continues, translating for Madison, pointing at Lydia. “She absconded from our embassy after we discovered evidence she killed Fitzwilliam.”
“What?” Lydia turns to look at Madison. “What are you talking about? You didn’t—” But then she realizes what’s happening and turns to Dion. “No—that’s not what she just said. You’re lying. You killed him. I was literally just about to say—”
“Dion has an alibi,” says Rollo. “We checked her out because of her connection with the victim—she might’ve known how to get past security and he might put his guard down with her. But she was on duty at the station when it happened, we got witnesses and records.”
“And these witnesses would be your colleagues? They’re in on this. They fixed the records at the station just like they fixed the records here. They’re covering for her.”
“That’s a very serious accusation.”
“You need to arrest her now,” says Dion calmly to Rollo. “You’ll make the situation a lot worse if you let her go.” Suddenly she’s in control. She can tell everyone whatever she wants. Lydia tries to speak to Madison, tell her what’s really happening—but nothing comes out and it feels like her brain’s being flossed with barbed wire.
“OK,” says Rollo, pulling a length of cuff tape from his belt. “Face the wall and put your hands behind your back.”
“You’re arresting me just because she said so?” asks Lydia.
“If Madison says there’s evidence—”
“I don’t mean Madison”—Lydia points at Dion—“her! She’s lying! That’s not what Madison said!”
Rollo loses patience and shoves Lydia’s shoulder, turning her against the wall. “Hands out. Now.”
Lydia turns her head and sees Madison, still standing in the doorway, staring back at her, tilting her head a little to one side. What does she think is happening? What if she does think Lydia killed Fitz? What if she has found something?
Rollo wraps the tape around Lydia’s wrists. From the corner of her eye Lydia sees Dion moving across the room, towards the door. She’s probably “explaining” to Madison what’s happening and then she’ll make some excuse for leaving. If Dion walks out of the residence, that’s it—she’ll skip town while Lydia’s being questioned and no one will see her again—
Then Madison puts out an arm, blocking the doorway. Dion tries to duck—
And Madison blocks her with the other arm. To her relief Lydia realizes Madison knows Dion’s been lying to her. She’s going to be saved after all—
Then Dion draws a gun and points it at Madison. Madison slowly withdraws her arms from their position across the door—
But Rollo reacts quick, drawing his own gun and shouting for Dion to drop hers.
Dion does not drop her gun. Instead she swings it around and points it at Lydia.
There was a split second just now when Dion’s gun wasn’t pointing at anyone, and if Rollo had fired at that moment and taken her down, no one would have got hurt. But he missed his chance and now Lydia’s at her mercy.
“He’ll shoot you the moment you shoot me,” Lydia says. “You can’t get out of here.”
Dion doesn’t answer. Lydia considers the very real possibility that Dion just wants to kill her, and isn’t thinking any further than that.
“You didn’t want to quit this job, did you?” says Lydia. “Fitz made you leave.”
Dion keeps pointing the gun. She nods.
“Why?”
Dion bites her lip. “I intruded.”
Lydia tries to remember if this is something she was taught at LSTL and has forgotten. “Intruded?”
“I … found I could go deeper into his mind. Where he didn’t want me to go.”
“That’s not possible.”
“They don’t tell you it’s possible at the school because they don’t want you to do it—only a few of us can.”
“Oh my god. They said you were one of the most talented translators they’d ever had.”
Dion smiles. “Did they?” The smile quickly collapses. “I tried to resist, but I kept getting occasional glimpses, just by accident and … I had to know more, I got obsessed with what was in his mind, it was driving me insane. I knew how to get in and out without him noticing—”
“And then one day … he noticed?”
“I said something he’d only ever thought, and he was … pretty shocked. He said he wouldn’t tell anyone I did it, as long as I quit the agency…”
“And you went from there to the police.” Lydia glances at Rollo, whose gun is still aimed at Dion. “Did you know she can do this?”
“I…,” he says. “No.”
“Has she ever used it in police work?”
“That would be illegal.”
“Yes it would—has she?”
“I … know she’s been used sometimes on … special cases—but no, I don’t know anything about that, I swear.”
Lydia turns back to Dion. “So why’d you kill him?”
The coldness leaves Dion’s expression, and all of a sudden she just looks tired and sad. “I … I needed his voice back.”
This makes no sense to Lydia. “OK…”
“I wanted Fitz to take me back—let me work for him again. Their voices—his voice especially—it’s the only real truth and I didn’t know how much it was holding me up until it was gone. People are just … impossible.”
“And he said you couldn’t come back?”
“He said yes, or he’d see, or something like that … But I could tell he was lying, he was scared of me. I don’t—I don’t know what came over me … I remember the moment I shot him, but before that it’s all hazy…”
Lydia nods. “You were drunk.”
“I don’t get drunk. It’s one of my skills.”
“You were jealous of me, then? If you can’t have his voice no one can?”
Dion’s manner has completely changed now. She’s pleading. “After it happened, I went to the station and I was going to just confess. I told Sturges and he said he could make it OK and all I had to do was keep quiet about it—”
Rollo looks alarmed. “Sturges?”
“He said I was too valuable to the department, he couldn’t let me go down—said he’d protect me—”
“You know what they did to Fitz?”
“I didn’t know they’d do that, or they’d turn it into this whole thing about the game … I thought they’d just pin it on someone else. And then it all started unraveling.…”
Lydia quells her anger and says, “I understand.” If she was talking to a Logi she’d never get away with saying this, because she’s saying it like it’s OK and she sympathizes. In fact she finds what Dion has done unforgivable on every level—in terms of the act itself, what it enabled and what it put her through. A Logi would be able to taste the contempt, the hatred. Really, Lydia’s just saying this because she wants Dion to put the gun down.
Dion nods, then starts to raise the gun to her own head. In this moment Lydia’s only thought is whether Dion has said enough, in the presence of a police officer, for the case to be considered closed and herself to be cleared and Sturges to go down. That’s all she cares about, not that Dion is about to kill herself. Later she’ll feel a little bad about this, but in the moment she just wants this to be over.
The gun doesn’t quite reach Dion’s head before it falls from her hand. Her nerve has failed. Rollo swiftly kicks the gun away and orders Dion to turn so he can tape her hands.
Lydia looks up at Madison and tries to say thank you, but can’t.