4

“WHAT?” I SAY dumbly, like all the people I’ve had to inform of the deaths of loved ones.

“The head of the Circle cult has been murdered, Carlos. We need you to head up the case.”

The second time she says it I can get ahold of it, understanding the words but not believing them. She said “head of the Circle cult” as if I’d needed a clarification, as if I were somehow magically capable of forgetting that man.

As clearly as I see her now, I see Alejandro the day I met him more than thirty years ago. I opened the door to him, ashamed because I knew he would notice my clothes were dirty and that the hallway carpet was covered with filth. The sun was behind him and he towered over me, like he’d been sent by the Greek gods I’d been learning about.

“Ah, good morning, young man.”

“We don’t want to buy anything and we don’t believe in God,” I said, having learned it from my dad before he’d stopped talking.

“Just as well. I’m not selling anything and I’ll never tell you what to believe,” he replied. “My name is Alejandro. You must be Carlos.” His voice was deep and gentle, the kind I wished my father had.

“Do you know my dad?”

“I need to speak to him. It’s very important. Is he at home?”

“He doesn’t talk to anyone. Are you police?”

A laugh. “No.”

“Bailiff?”

“You seem very young to know a word like that.”

I’d learned it from the television. I had it on twenty-four hours a day and not on the children’s channels. I needed to hear other adults and it comforted me. But there had been one vintage show about people who didn’t pay bills and had their stuff taken away, and the idea had taken root in my brain. My dad didn’t get out of bed, so surely he wasn’t paying our bills. I was convinced that one day large men with clipboards and corporate baseball caps would turn up and take everything away. I was too young to realize that no one used clipboards anymore.

“He doesn’t talk to anyone,” I repeated, and started to close the door.

“I need to talk to him about your mummy,” he said, and the door swung back again, letting the sunlight spill over the grime around my feet. “He’ll listen to me. Only five minutes, and then I’ll be gone and I promise I won’t take away any of your stuff.”

“Pinky promise?”

He held out his hand, baby finger extended, and let me interlock my own with his. Satisfied, I stepped aside and let him in.

Inside the house, with the sunlight shining onto his face, it all made sense. Same dark brown eyes, same dark brown hair, same olive skin. He was a long-lost uncle, one I had been wishing for so much, come to sweep us away to his gigantic estate and make everything better.

Oh God, how could I have been so right and so wrong?

There’s a moment when something threatens to surface and I lock it down, shifting into professional mode. No room for that shit right now, not with her watching me.

“Carlos, I know you were close to him, and I know this is hard and that’s why I’m running this by you off the record first. I don’t want this to be the first black mark against you, if you can’t handle it. That wouldn’t be fair.”

I frown at her. Is this some sort of . . . caring? “What are the details?” I ask, wanting to put this back into a framework I can understand.

“He was found in a hotel on the edge of Dartmoor.”

“Dartmoor? What was he doing there?”

“We don’t know.” Another pause. There’s more and it’s bad and I just want her to tell me straight. I can’t make any demands though. It’s the first time she has ever considered my feelings and the only time I don’t want her to. “Carlos, he was hanged, drawn and quartered.”

Automatically I go to activate the icon that’s missing. I’ve heard that phrase before but I can’t place it.

“What have you got from the scene?”

She looks down; at first I think she’s accessing something but she’s retrieving the wineglass, stalling again. “We haven’t had any SOCO access to the scene yet.”

“Why?”

Her lips, thin already, almost disappear as she presses them tight together. After a beat she says, “Lawyers. A fucking army of them. Look, like I said, it’s complicated.”

“Lawyers? How can anyone interfere with a crime scene? That doesn’t make any sense. When was he found?”

“Two days ago.”

“What the actual fuck?”

She holds up a hand. “Spare me. I’m just as pissed off as you are. This is a clusterfuck—there’s no other way to describe it. I’ll fill you in on the details on the way to Devon if you take the case. I just need to know if you can handle this.”

Can I? I don’t want all this shit dredged back up, not now when it feels like everyone else in the world wants to do the same. But the thought of someone else handling this is worse than the stress of doing it myself. I’d only end up obsessing over it even if I turned it down. And I don’t want that black mark either.

“Yes,” I say, with certainty. “It’s mine. I can handle it.”

I have never seen her look so relieved. “Thank fuck for that,” she whispers, and drains the glass.

“Collins could have taken it if I’d said no,” I say, standing a moment after she does. “She’s excellent.”

“She couldn’t.” She scoops her coat from the chair. “You’re the only one the lawyers would agree on. Now get your stuff. We’re leaving.”

It takes only a couple of minutes to pack; I hadn’t fully unpacked from the last case, which had taken me up to Scotland. I travel light anyway. I take the bags of flour and sugar out in my bedroom, not wanting to explain them to Milsom, and hide them under my bed. As I stuff clean underwear into the side pocket of the mini case, my APA comes back online.

I call up the v-keyboard and type in a query for Tia, taking a moment to select privacy mode so Tia won’t give the results through any of the apartment’s speakers for Milsom to hear. “Define: Hanged, drawn and quartered.” It feels like I’m researching something distant and unimportant. I just can’t believe anything about what I’m doing could be related in any way to Alejandro. Surely there’s been some sort of mistake.

No. The Ministry doesn’t make mistakes like this.

“A method of execution used from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries in which the condemned was drawn to the location of the execution on a rudimentary litter pulled by a horse, then hanged without a drop to prevent the neck from being broken. Before death, the condemned was cut down and his genitalia cut off before he was disemboweled. His intestines and heart were burned, major organs removed; then he was beheaded and the body cut into four quarters.”

I sit heavily on the edge of my bed, swallowing down the burning sensation rising from my stomach. Was this really what had been done to him? After steadying myself I call up the keyboard again.

“Was this how they executed murderers?”

“This manner of execution was reserved predominantly for crimes of high treason or spiritual treason.”

“Spiritual treason?”

“Refusing to accept the church sanctioned by the monarch and state. During the 1500s approximately one hundred Catholics were hanged, drawn and quartered in Tyburn, London, after refusing to renounce their faith.”

“You said ‘his’—what happened to the women?”

“They were burned at the stake.”

“Why?”

“To preserve modesty.”

“JeeMuh,” I whisper. They had some fucked-up ideas about modesty back then. Perfectly fine to butcher someone in public, but any hint of seeing a nude woman was obviously improper.

I swipe away the virtual keyboard, not wanting to keep the boss waiting. Before I leave my bedroom I take a moment to compose myself. The start of a case always fires me up, gets my brain fizzing with questions and potential avenues of inquiry. But this time it’s all churned up in a mess of emotion. I need more distance from this but I’m not going to get it. I hold my palm flat in front of my chest, shut my eyes and push my hand down slowly as I breathe out, imagining my core being calmed by the movement. I will learn the details, I will work the case, I will identify the murderer. I’ve never found a puzzle I couldn’t solve. This is no different.

—

MILSOM is waiting in the hallway by the front door, gazing at the wall without seeing it, tiny movements of her eyeballs suggesting she’s reading something. I approach, her eyes flick up to the far top right and then she blinks, seeing me. She looks at my bag, the one given to me when I left the testing center almost twenty years ago, but says nothing. It’s scuffed but still does the job.

“Ready?” she asks, and I nod. We leave as Tia shuts down the heating and the lights and locks the door behind us.

We descend the staircase in silence, the elevator not even given a glance, and emerge into the courtyard outside the apartment block. The wind cuts through my coat and I turn up the collar. A few stubborn leaves are still clinging to the plane trees that edge the perimeter, their fellows now slippery mush collected in the gutters around the car park. I hate November.

“I parked round the corner,” Milsom says. “Your space was taken.”

“I let my neighbor’s daughter park there. It’s safer for her. I don’t need it.”

Milsom stares at me for a moment and then heads toward the gates. Tia opens them ahead of us and I turn to look back at the ground-floor window behind us. Sure enough, the building manager is watching us, probably wondering why a police protocol opened the gates a few minutes ago. I give him a wave but it isn’t returned. Sour old bastard. The sooner he’s replaced by something with a good-manners subroutine, the better.

“Nice place,” Milsom says as we leave the courtyard and the din of London’s sprawl comes crashing in, no longer held at bay by the noise suppressors built into the perimeter.

I just nod. I’m too tense to cobble together some small talk. I need to get to work.

A car from the Ministry is parked down a side street, sleek, compact and ubiquitous. It’s one of the hybrid models with both automated and manual driving capabilities. I don’t hold a license for the latter, not that it would make much difference; Milsom would never let me drive anyway.

Her APA unlocks the car as we approach and I put my bag in the boot as she gets in. I savor the last few moments of silence as I walk round to the passenger’s side. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a pool, taking a deep breath before diving in. I open the door, plunging in.

“Automatic, social,” Milsom says to the car’s AI, and the engine starts. There’s a pause as she does something with her APA and a map is projected onto the windshield. I see a red line snaking across the south of England from East London to Devon. Milsom approves the route, the map is replaced by a translucent pale blue line projected to appear as if it overlays the tarmac ahead of us, and we snap our seat belts into place so the car will pull away.

Once we’re moving, my seat slides back from the dashboard, swinging round to face Milsom’s seat, which is doing the same. The rear bucket seats are folding away to make more space now that the car knows there are only two passengers. The windscreen is on my left now, her chair slightly closer to it so we both have room to stretch out our legs.

“I’ll keep this as a verbal briefing on the way to Devon,” Milsom says. “I know you get travel sickness if you do too much AR.”

“I might have to face forward when we get to those rural roads,” I add.

The car has taken us to a main road and the traffic is thick, all the bumpers mere centimeters from each other as the Met Traffic System manages the individual car AIs set to a compulsory automatic status. It’s nearly midnight, and it’ll be a couple of hours before this is all cleared through and the Met TS will let people drive manually again.

Milsom is calling up data, seeing things that I cannot. I look past her shoulder to the car next to ours. Four men—maybe two couples, from the way they are acting—are all facing each other, playing some sort of game that’s apparently hysterically funny. Tia thinks I’m interested in them and pings their AIs. All four are set to public and social, and I hastily set my own to private as I skim their details. I’m not the least bit interested but am grateful for the brief distraction.

“The victim was found in a room at the Moor Hotel, in the living-room area of the largest suite there.” Milsom’s voice snaps my attention away from them and back into the car. “The victim.” That’s what he is now. It stings, but I wrestle it into place. Easier to use that than Alejandro or even Casales. The first tiny bit of distance I can get. “It’s a five-star place, very exclusive, and prides itself on being old-fashioned.”

“In what way?”

“Human staff, even the cleaners. Some other quirks you’ll see when we arrive.”

“Who found him?”

“A woman sharing the suite with him, someone from the Circle that traveled with him from the States. Selina Klein. The lawyers have prevented us from getting her background.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “On what grounds?”

“Potential of religious persecution.”

“And why the fuck has the Ministry not blown that bullshit out of the water?”

Milsom frowns. “I know our people are working on it. All indications are that the lawyers are being deliberately obstructive. Everyone knows we have the right to investigate a murder committed in our country in the manner we see fit. But the Europeans are throwing their weight around, as well as the Yanks. I know he’s high profile, but they’re taking the piss.”

“The Europeans too? On what grounds? There’s no way there can be any jurisdiction bollocks going on here. He’s not even a citizen anymore.”

“That’s what I thought,” Milson says. “They claim he’s still legally a citizen of Europe and they’ve sent a bunch of lawyers willing to prove it and slow everything down as much as they can. It’s because of the Circle though, let’s face it: it all comes down to money. They have so much property all over the world, particularly Europe, it’s no surprise the legals are sniffing about. The only good thing about it is that they’ve got all the guests, employees and their ISPs bound by a gag order, so we won’t be harassed by the press as soon as we arrive.”

I nod. “Good to hear. Hopefully they’ll all be too distracted by the capsule to go sniffing around police contacts.”

Milsom nods in agreement, but we both know the media vultures will be circling long before we want them to be. “We’ve managed to secure assurances that Klein will not leave the hotel, nor will any of the other guests that need to stay, until we give the go-ahead.”

I can see why they would have to secure that for Klein: as a member of the Circle she won’t be chipped. “Why not just pull the data from the other guests’ APAs?”

“Several are unchipped. There’s a Brit who had to have hers removed on medical grounds a few months ago. Like I said, this place is old-fashioned and caters very well to those without personal APAs. The rich ones anyway.”

“You said the lawyers have kept the SOCOs out too. Is . . . his body—”

“The parts have been removed,” she says quickly. “No international laws can stop that or stop the recorders going in. Which they have. The virtual scene is ready for you once we’re out of the car.”

“But no actual people have been in there.”

“No police. The scene’s already been contaminated. The hotel manager, for one, and a cleaner have been in there—thankfully they had the sense to not clean the mess up, but they trampled through the room to get to the bedroom.”

“Why?”

“The woman, Klein, was hysterical. Let me take you through what we know from the start. The victim and two traveling companions—Selina Klein and Theodore Buckingham—checked into the hotel eight days ago. Casales secured a standard room and the Diamond Suite for a two-week stay with the option to extend. He shared the suite with Klein and the room was for Buckingham. Apparently he didn’t know how long he was staying, because no date was set for the return flights. For five of those eight days the victim was in London, and the other two at the hotel. We don’t know what Casales was doing in London yet, for obvious reasons. He returned to the hotel on Sunday afternoon, they all dined together in the restaurant and Casales and Klein retired to their room at ten p.m.

“At approximately nine thirty a.m. on Monday morning, one of the cleaners was working in a room down the corridor and heard screaming coming from the suite. He rang down to reception and called for the manager, who came at once. They let themselves into the room after knocking a couple of times and entered the crime scene. The cleaner rushed straight out of the room and vomited in the hallway after seeing the state of the body. The manager crossed the room to the bedroom, as Klein was standing in the doorway, screaming. She managed to push Klein back into the bedroom and shut the door before Klein collapsed.”

It didn’t sound like the kind of crime a woman would commit. Something was missing—that much was clear. How could a man be murdered and hacked into pieces while a woman slept next door? Had she left at some point later that evening, to come back and discover the body in the morning?

“The local police were called, as was an ambulance,” Milsom continues. “Klein was treated for shock, and the local bobbies secured the scene as best they could. They piped it through to the Ministry at ten-oh-one a.m. By ten twenty-three a.m. a memo came through from Number Ten to the Ministry, instructing that other than securing the scene, having it recorded and removing the body parts to a nearby morgue, no further investigation was permitted to take place without express permission. Not even a postmortem.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

“Once, but not for a murder. Back in the late thirties there was a break-in and suspected burglary in London. In the first twenty-four hours there were more lawyers on the scene than coppers, apparently.”

“For a burglary? Where? One of the Ministries?”

“No. Cillian Mackenzie’s pied-à-terre in Mayfair. The Euros were convinced sensitive documents were there, ones owned by Lee Suh-Mi. She was a European citizen so they felt they could wade in. That’s the trouble with all these bloody lawyers. They build in the loopholes when they’re on the right gov-corp committees so they can exploit them later.”

Just the sound of Lee and Mackenzie’s names makes the muscles in my lower back knot up. “Has anyone said why there’s all this crap for this case?”

“The Yanks are arguing that as the Circle is based in the States and the victim had a religious visa, they are obligated to ensure the investigation proceeds with proper attention to their wishes. The fact he’s worth billions of dollars probably has something to do with it too. The Euros are saying that as the victim was actually a citizen of Europe, they have to represent his family and ensure the investigation proceeds with proper attention to their wishes.”

I can hear the frustration in her voice, and I share it. “Still doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “How can it be against their wishes to catch the one who did it? Their delays are only going to make that harder.” I pause, remembering what she’d been like when I said I’d take on the case. The relief. “Wait. The delay was because they were arguing about who would head this, and they settled on me?”

She nods.

“The Yanks know I don’t believe in any of that cult shit, don’t they?”

Milsom swipes away something from her personal display and looks at me properly for the first time since the briefing began. “You know what they’re like. How can they trust us godless Brits to treat this with the sensitivity it needs? You were in the Circle, you left but it wasn’t acrimonious. They think you’ll be sympathetic and that you’ll know how to treat the grieving. The Circle aren’t the most cooperative people in the world.”

“Don’t I know it.” I try not to imagine what they’ll all be like when they get the news. I try not to think of my father, weeping. I fail.

“Now, we know you’re too professional to let any history with them interfere with the job, so no complaints from our end on that front.”

I don’t say what I’m thinking. It would be unwise to respond to what lies beneath those words, but I know it. They know I won’t risk doing anything less than the cleanest, deepest investigation I’m humanly capable of. I can’t risk anything less than that, as their property. I’m prepared to extend my contract in order to eat proper food and live in anything bigger than a broom cupboard, but not for sloppy work.

Sometimes I try to imagine the day my contract ends. It’s getting harder. I’ve added more than fifteen years to it already, between paying for my flat and buying fresh food over the years, and there’s likely to be more added if the food prices keep going up. The last time I asked Tia to check, I’ll be in my mid-eighties when I’m free again. I’ll never have children—I’ve made peace with that now—but maybe one day I’ll be able to live somewhere with a garden. I’ll be old but skilled enough to still have some consultancy work to pay for the space to grow real food. Hands in the dirt again. Doing something real. No people around. Yeah, that’s the dream. Strange how the things we rail against and hate in our youth can be the things we crave as we get older.

“The Euros,” Milsom continues, “feel you are uniquely placed with regard to your history with the Circle, but they also like the fact you used to be a European.”

Until the Ministry officially bought my citizenship—and my rights—from them. I keep that bitter thought to myself.

“It helps that you and the victim were born in the same region of Spain too.”

“Neither of us have lived there for more than thirty years though.”

Milsom’s shoulder twitches into a dismissive shrug. “As long as it matters to them, I’m not going to raise that. I’m just glad they actually managed to reach an accord. Otherwise we would have ended up with some god-ugly compromise, probably a multinational team and multiple agencies. At least this is tidy.”

I nod, making sure that my expression remains neutral, just like Dee taught me all those years ago: “Never let the fuckers see how you feel.” What I’d mistaken for tact and a mote of caring about my emotional state was simply a way to soften me up and keep it off the record so they could spin any line they liked if I had turned it down. I can’t figure out if I’m more pissed off with Milsom for the manipulation or myself for thinking that she cared. There was no need to handle it this way; they could have forced me. But the Ministry prefers to keep our relationship as polite as possible, no matter how sordid its foundation. Nobody does emotional distancing from reprehensible behavior better than the British, after all. Besides, they need me to be one hundred percent engaged with this case. No doubt there will be more scrutiny than normal, and normal is bad enough.

“It’s going to be a tough one,” Milsom says.

“I can handle it,” I say, and I’m not bluffing. In all honesty there’s a part of me actually looking forward to this. A brief moment of concern that I’m some sort of sick bastard passes when I realize it’s the puzzle part of my brain that’s getting excited, which was identified as one of my most profitable qualities and was honed by the hot-housers. It’ll come down to attention to detail and logic, the things I feel most comfortable with. “What resources do I have?”

“Grade-A expense allowance, most of which will go on that hotel on the days you stay there,” Milsom reads from a note in her visual field. “Priority-one access to the Met AI, the Norope AI and an open channel to the US FBI AI, along with a human contact there and in Europe. The details are with your APA now. The visa for your trip to the States is already being processed, as is the one to Europe.” At my frown, she says, “He wasn’t chipped. Depending on what you find, you may need to work up a deep background with a bit of legwork, particularly in the States. It’s not like we can just ping an AI for the Circle.”

I’ll have to go back there, the one place on Earth that I swore I would never step foot in again. I suck in a breath between my teeth as a sinking dread settles in my stomach. I’ll have to see my father again.

“Get some rest,” Milsom says. “You’re not going to get much once we arrive, and I have a stack of pendings I need to deal with.”

I agree and ask the car AI to shift my seat into a resting position. Tia sends my personal preferences to it, and it swivels around to face front again as Milsom’s turns in the opposite direction until she is facing the rear window, giving her more space to move her arms about in communication with her APA in silent mode.

The traffic is easing the farther we get away from the center, and I see the car with the four-man party in it pulling away as its lane increases speed. One of them, a black guy with a shaved head and a neck thick with muscle, smiles at me as our eyes meet accidentally. I wonder where he is going and Tia tells me instantly, reading the destination from his social profile. I close my eyes, thinking of my old life in which little social mysteries were nurtured like fragile seedlings, safe from the trampling of overzealous APAs.