Nobody’s there to see Lydia get out of the car at the police station except for an actual human cop who escorts her inside, takes a DNA sample from her, then brings her to an interview room and tells her to wait. She sits at the table and checks her feed again, though everyone knows the police can legally intercept all data inside the station, so she’s careful what she looks at.
@MILLIONPAGE / CONFIRMED: Logi “Fitzwilliam” found dead of gunshot wound at home in Manhattan—police investigation in progress / TR94
This story is repeatedly duplicated across every outlet that might conceivably run it, obliterating the junk stories—for now, at least. That picture of herself she saw earlier is proliferating, and is being linked to the clips of her falling off the balcony at the theater. Great.
Lydia checks her personals and then takes her glasses off. She’ll put them back on when the police come to talk to her, but she needs a moment of quiet—and she hears Fitz’s voice in her head telling her that’s a good idea. But of course it’s not him, it’s just her inner monologue again. She wonders how long that’ll take to fade. Maybe not until she’s reassigned to another Logi and has their voice inside her head instead.
That’ll be a shame, when his voice has gone. Maybe after a while she’ll forget what it even sounded like. There are no recordings of it, after all.
Lydia has been here half an hour when someone she’s never met arrives, introduces themselves as her lawyer and scolds her for not wearing her glasses.
“Nothing’s happened while I’ve had my glasses off,” Lydia protests.
“According to you,” the lawyer tells her. “But if you’d kept them on we’d have a record to prove it, wouldn’t we?” The lawyer is slender and elegant with swept-back ash-gray hair, and they’re dressed in a suit of deep purple. They introduce themselves as Alinn and take a seat next to Lydia.
“I’m just giving a statement,” Lydia says: she feels like having a lawyer here makes it seem like she’s got something to hide.
“I know.”
“I haven’t been charged with anything, is what I’m saying.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.” Alinn produces a scroll from their pocket, unfurls it and places it on the table in front of them. It’s a maxiscroll, the size of a coffee-table book. A number of folders appear on the scrollface and Alinn moves them around, hides some, brings others up to the top. “Keep it simple,” they tell Lydia while doing this. “Don’t answer questions you haven’t been asked.”
Lydia wants to ask exactly what this means but Alinn holds up a hand to silence her. A moment later, a plainclothes officer walks in and introduces himself as Lieutenant Rollo. He’s a smallish man, a little older than Lydia, unimposing and friendly, with a neat beard.
“Glasses,” mutters Alinn.
Lydia hurriedly reaches for her glasses and puts them on.
“Those aren’t your agency-issue glasses,” says Alinn quietly but firmly.
“I know, I couldn’t find—”
“Tell me later.”
Rollo sits down opposite Lydia and asks her how she’s doing.
“OK,” says Lydia.
“So you’ve been through something pretty rough, huh.”
Lydia’s about to answer when Alinn holds up their hand again. “Is this being recorded?”
“Yes.”
“Has my client been made aware of that?”
“Yeah, I have,” says Lydia.
Alinn nods and addresses Rollo again. “Could you please proceed with relevant questions, my client’s emotional state is not important.”
“I was just trying to be nice.”
A tight smile from Alinn. “And it was a fine attempt, Lieutenant.”
Rollo shrugs and asks Lydia to go through what happened, which she does, again. Was anyone else in the building? Not that she knew of. Does anyone else have access to the building? Apart from herself and Fitz, just some of the embassy staff. Did she notice anything out of place? Only that the door to the study was open. When Lydia finishes she sees Alinn out the corner of her eye, nodding and making notes, and she feels pleased to have done well so far.
“And when did you last see the deceased alive?” says Rollo.
“Last night.”
“What time?”
“I can’t remember.”
“We don’t need an exact time, just roughly.”
Lydia tries to remember. “We were working last night, you see, at a banquet—”
“Banquet?”
“Yeah, at an academic conference, and you know how it is with my job, and I don’t remember anything much after about nine o’clock—no wait, I remember I was talking to a poet who wouldn’t stop banging on about soil types in his vineyard, and I checked the time and it was nine thirteen, and that’s the last time I was aware of what time it was.”
Alinn is not nodding now.
“And you were there with Mr. Fitzwilliam,” says Rollo.
“Yeah—working, as I say.”
“Do you often use & while working?”
Lydia swallows her first reaction, which probably would have been “What?!?! No!” or something along those lines. She needs to be very, very careful what she says here. (She certainly shouldn’t correct his pronunciation—cops always say “and-amp” whereas users just say “namp.”) She glances at Alinn.
“I fail to see the relevance of that,” Alinn says without looking up.
“Traces of &,” says Rollo, “were found in Ms. Southwell’s system when she arrived at the station today, consistent with having taken the substance early yesterday evening.”
Bollocks. The DNA test. She should have realized it wasn’t just a DNA test. But then, she could hardly have turned it down.
“The relevance isn’t becoming any clearer,” says Alinn.
“It affects her reliability as a witness.”
“I don’t accept that, and truthfully I don’t think you do either, otherwise you wouldn’t be talking to her—please proceed with questions related to the investigation.”
Rollo turns back to Lydia. “Do you remember how you got home?”
“No.” Lydia doesn’t have to look at Alinn to know they’re grimacing. “But we’d have gone back to the residence in a diplomatic car, together, and there’ll be a record of the car and who was in it, won’t there?” This is exactly what Alinn meant by answering questions she hasn’t been asked, isn’t it. Lydia can hear herself and knows she sounds desperate, maybe a little guilty. Why? She hasn’t done anything. Get a fucking grip, Lydia.
Rollo glances to one side, into the middle distance. “Can we check that please, guys?” he says to someone who must be listening, somewhere.
“Why is this necessary?” Alinn asks. “Surely you’ve checked the residence’s security data and you know exactly when they arrived home and who else was there and what time Mr. Fitzwilliam died?”
“Data’s been tampered with,” Rollo says. Lydia can see he’s been putting off telling them this, because he wanted to see if she let slip that she knew anything about it. “Everything from eight p.m. to eight a.m. is gone.”
“What?” says Lydia. “But surely it’s all clouded?”
“Also gone.”
“Is that possible?”
“If you know what you’re doing.”
Lydia wants to tell him she wouldn’t know how to do that, but that would be an answer to a question she hasn’t been asked. “What about street cams?”
“There’s a gap on those too. Same period.”
“Hacked?”
“Presumably.”
“Bloody hell.” Lydia sits back. She wants to ask how they got past Arthur and Martha too, but again she refrains. She’s very aware the simplest answer to that is the killer was already inside the house.
Rollo points at her eyes. “Were you wearing your glasses last night?”
“Not these ones,” says Lydia, sensing she’s losing control of the narrative. “I had my work ones on.”
“Do you have those with you?”
“I don’t know where they are.”
The room is quiet and Lydia can hear Alinn chewing their lip.
“You’ve lost them?” says Rollo.
“They must be in my bag back at the residence.” She meant to get them from her bag at the same time she removed the & but she had other things on her mind. “But I had them on last night, definitely, and I always sync, so it’ll all be in my niche.”
“Can you share that with us?”
Lydia turns to Alinn, who clearly doesn’t want to say yes to this, but also feels it will look bad if they say no. “Go ahead,” Alinn says.
Lydia takes Alinn’s scroll and uses it to access her niche. She never clears out her niche, everything is clouded here—but the most recent video file is easy to access and that’s the one she needs. She opens it and skips to the end.
The last thirty seconds of the video show a view from the edge of a high balcony, at least fifteen floors up. Lydia has never liked heights, and is astonished and sickened that she appears to have stood on this balcony when she was so drunk, and so soon after falling from the one at the theater. Irrationally she worries she might actually have fallen off and forgotten it, before telling herself that if this had happened she would be dead, and if she’d somehow survived she would certainly not have forgotten.
Then the wearer of the glasses leans over the railing at the edge of the balcony—
And the ground starts rushing up towards the camera. Lydia panics. Is she in fact dead, and this is how she finds out about it? Maybe nothing that’s happened since she woke up this morning has actually been real, and it’s all just a flight of fancy as her dying brain burbles through its last moments of consciousness? It would explain why it’s all been so strange and nightmarish. Maybe she’ll look up and the lawyer and the cop will lead her out of this room and on the other side of the door will be the afterlife, whatever form that might take—
Then the glasses hit the ground and the sound that accompanies it is wrong. It’s a light tink, not the sickening wet crunch and hideous cry of pain you’d expect if the glasses were still attached to a person. The picture breaks up and the video stops, and Lydia understands she did not fall off the balcony: the glasses fell off her face. What a relief.
But this relief is short-lived, because this means she has no record of events from this point onward. And she is not a witness, but a suspect, and she has been all along.