FROM THE WARMTH of the lobby I watch Milsom and the two Ministry lawyers drive off, and my guts relax again, feeling like they drop lower in my abdomen by centimeters. Finally I can get started.
“Only the one bag?” Nadia asks, looking at the small case that is probably less than hand luggage for most people, and I nod. “I’ll show you to your room,” she says, unhooking a key—that’s actually made from metal—from its place on the wall behind reception. She smiles at my disbelief. “A lot of people are surprised by this.”
“What if I lose my key?”
“The door can still be opened by your chip. ‘So what’s the point of the key?’ you might ask.” She rounds the desk and comes to my side, gesturing toward a lift in the corner of the lobby. “Romance.”
“I don’t understand.”
She presses the button to call the lift. “The romance of a bygone age.” She dangles the key from its weighty brass fob, catching the light. “I think we lost something in the rush toward ease and speed and convenience. Something up here.” She taps the side of her head. “And here.” She places the same hand over her heart. “The sense of physical security provided by a key one can hold in one’s hand when staying somewhere unfamiliar is very powerful.”
For the first time, something of this place makes sense in its intersection with Alejandro. He was always talking about that kind of bullshit. He never admitted that having a neural chip made thousands of everyday things easier. How many times did he say that the modern world was forcing people to lose the art of connection? The art of connection? Bollocks. Only a privileged twat could say something like that. JeeMuh, if we still had to investigate every murder with unchipped police—and unchipped perps—it would take months. Only people in little bubbles of wealth and comfort have the luxury of thinking that way. Alejandro lost touch with what the world is like for most people a long time ago.
I follow the manager into the lift and she presses the button for the third—and topmost—floor. The interior is all brass and mirrors, gleaming just as much as the lobby did, not a speck of dirt in sight.
“Breakfast is served between seven and ten a.m. on weekdays, eight until eleven at weekends. All of the food is locally sourced, ethically and sustainably produced and prepared by hand by our chefs.”
I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t enjoy this place too much.
“There’s room service too,” she adds. “Available twenty-four hours a day.”
Of course, Tia could pull this information from the local node, but this is all about Nadia filling the silence with something safe. A world-famous man has been murdered in her hotel and she doesn’t want to talk about it with a detective in a lift. She’s so poised and her portrayal of serenity in the provision of comfort for others is so convincing that I wonder how hard she works to maintain it. I suspect I would learn more from a conversation with her outside of the hotel and her princely domain, when she has to work with unfamiliar scenery and unreliable stagehands. I’d at least learn more about what she’s really like.
That’s how I’d play it if she were a suspect, but right now she isn’t. There are some proprietors who would relish the opportunity to create something that would draw clients with a taste for the macabre to their establishment. She isn’t one of them. This place is too polished, too perfect and too comfortable in the illusions it already sketches for its guests to need anything else. The questions I have for her can wait until morning.
With a bright ping the lift stops and the doors open. A wooden plaque on the wall opposite provides directions for rooms “1–6,” “7–12” and the “Diamond Suite.” I look in its direction as we step out into the corridor and see police tape across the door. A bored-looking constable straightens as he sees me and gives a curt nod, which I return. Every couple of years there’s a debate about whether a human police officer really needs to be posted outside a crime scene. It’s only at the most serious that they’re posted and it’s just a matter of time before it’s phased out altogether. I’m glad to see him, even though the poor bastard’s feet must be killing him and he must be bored senseless with his chip in duty mode.
“I hope you don’t mind being on the same floor,” Nadia says, following my gaze. “I moved all of our guests onto the floor below, you see. We had room, with it being out of season. Thankfully.”
“It’s fine,” I say, glad that no one else will be snooping around as they go to and from their rooms.
“I’ve put you at the far end.” She gestures for me to walk with her in the direction opposite the crime scene. “The local police left a bag for you. I’ve taken the liberty of bringing it up to your room.”
“Thanks.” That’ll be the paper suit and shoe covers left by the SOCO in the hope that all the legal nonsense resolved itself before they came back in the morning.
The walls are horizontally divided by a thin strip of painted wood that Tia unhelpfully tells me is a dado rail, with blue flocked wallpaper covering the lower half and cream paper the top half. The light fixtures are small chandeliers benefiting from the high ceiling, and the carpet is a thick, deep blue with a spring to it. It looks newly refurbished, no worn patches on the carpet down the central strip, no scuffs on the walls and no chips in the paintwork. There’s no sound save the padding of our shoes against the pile and then, when we get to the end of the corridor, the wind gusting outside the window.
“There was an awful storm last night,” she says as she unlocks the door of room 12. “It still hasn’t blown itself out.”
The room is larger than the footprint of my entire apartment. I see a bathroom through a partially open door on the left-hand side and, in addition to the sofa and two armchairs, everything else I’d expect to see in a hotel except for the usual black screen that makes up part or all of one of the walls.
There’s a four-poster bed I feel embarrassed at the thought of sleeping in, and a huge window with a padded seat below it covered in cushions. Somber oil paintings of Dartmoor are counterbalanced by thick gilded frames, and the wardrobe is more ornately carved than anything functional has any need to be.
“If you want a screen,” she says, “there’s one retracted into the ceiling. Just press the remote control by your bed or your APA can ping the local node with hashtag ‘screen twelve.’”
Remote control? I put my bag next to a chest of drawers that looks like it could be worth more than the car I arrived in and pick up the slender rectangle of black plasglass. I haven’t held one of these since I was a child. At my touch a series of buttons ghost into view, waiting for a fingertip to make contact with one of them. There’s one to call down to reception, the remote control doubling as an external mobile phone for guests who aren’t chipped.
“If there’s anything you need, please don’t hesitate to contact reception at any time, day or night.”
I put the remote control down. “Actually, there is something. Has the key to the Diamond Suite been given to the policeman outside it?” Even though I know it can be opened by my chip, I don’t like the thought of a physical key being anywhere else.
She nods. “Yes, and the spare one too.”
“Thanks,” I say, and she smiles again. Her face must ache by the end of the day.
“I hope you can enjoy your stay, despite the circumstances,” she says, and leaves after placing the key to my own room on top of the chest of drawers.
The door shuts with a muffled clunk and I’m alone again for the first time in hours. I was tired before Milsom arrived at the flat. Dozing in the car has done nothing except knot some muscles in my neck. My eyes are starting to feel gritty, and I look at the bed, resisting the urge to test how soft it is. If I sit down I might not get up again.
“Tia, download the case file from the MoJ. And grab all the data from the hotel node for the entirety of the victim’s stay and the time since his body was found up to now, and stick it in a subfolder called ‘Hotel local data’ in the case file.”
I clench my fists at the thought of the time wasted so far. The murderer is probably long gone. I hold on to the fact that it’s hard to stay hidden for long without extensive preparation, and from what I know of the murder, it doesn’t seem like a professional hit. My money is on stalker or crime of passion, but as I know next to nothing so far, that could easily change.
I need to understand why this happened to the man I once loved more than my own father.
I’m torn between getting deep into the data and seeing the crime scene for myself. It’s a purely psychological need; there’s nothing there that I won’t be able to review virtually, thanks to the recorders. On some base level, I need to believe this has actually happened. And I want to see it before the SOCO arrives and deploys a forensic team. I look up who the local one is and see that he’s already been pinged. He and the team will be here within the hour, and my mind is made up.
“Okay,” I say to both Tia and myself. “Let’s give you some stuff to do while I check out the room. Pull information on all the guests who checked in either just before or during Alejandro’s stay. I want a separate list of those who checked out between ten p.m. on the night of his murder and when the hotel was locked down by the local police the next morning.”
“You should sleep,” Tia says after confirmation of my orders scrolls past on the left-hand side of my vision. “Your cognitive processing will be reduced and reaction times slowed should you stay up without—”
“Shush,” I say. “I’ll get some sleep—don’t worry. I just want you to be doing something useful while I’m asleep.”
“I have already completed the tasks you assigned.”
“Good. Has the MoJ assigned me a dedicated case space on the server?”
“Yes. Confirmation came through zero-point-zero-three seconds after you signed the contract. Would you like me to port over your preferred settings and load the case information into it?”
“Yeah. Render a full VR mock-up of the crime scene from the recorder data. I’ll look at that in the morning. Show me the list of checkouts in the window between murder and lockdown.”
There are seven names and one leaps out instantly: Theodore Buckingham, one of Alejandro’s traveling companions. He checked out at 5:03 a.m., only seven hours after the last time Alejandro was seen alive by anyone other than Klein. Tia has also flagged pending requests from the local police to intercept the seven people, which were blocked by the MoJ, stating that no action could be taken without the contract being in place.
“It’s in place now, you bureaucratic fucks,” I mutter, and resend the local police requests with my own appended and an additional note to get a manhunt team onto Buckingham as priority. Odds are that one of those seven people is the murderer—probably Buckingham, seeing as the vast majority of murder victims are killed by people they know—and he is now outside of my reach. “Tia, how often are requests from local police blocked by the MoJ?”
“If you’re more specific I can—”
“In murder cases with the request being the location and potential interception of individuals placed in the vicinity of the crime.”
“This has only happened on three occasions.”
“Which cases?”
“You don’t have the grade clearance for me to be able to dig down. Would you like me to send a request to Milsom?”
A cold, heavy stone is forming in my stomach, no matter how much I try to keep myself from leaping ahead and forming conclusions before I have all the data. All of this stinks of obstruction at a high level. Everyone knows how critical it is to move fast, and everyone in that room downstairs knew that every minute they argued, the perpetrator was getting farther away.
“Would you like me to send a request to Milsom?” Tia repeats.
“No,” I say.
I need to work the case like any other, and not just because the MoJ has my balls in a vice. I need to work out what happened to Alejandro and why, and keep my casework clean as a whistle. But there’s another investigation starting here and I need to keep that locked away in my own thoughts, away from Tia and anything else that could form a data trail.
I suck in a deep breath through my nostrils, aware of the tension building in my body. I can’t let this suspicion interfere with my job here. I hold my palm level with my chest and slowly move it downward, imagining the churning in my stomach being smoothed away by the motion as I breathe out.
I will learn the details. I will work the case. I will identify the murderer.
Then I remember Dee taught me that when I nearly broke in hot-housing. I shove all thoughts of her aside. I can’t be distracted now.
“Tia, pull the data from the corridor cams on this floor between nine thirty p.m. and nine thirty a.m. on the night of the murder. Isolate any footage that contains people and show me those sections with a time stamp.”
All public locations have to be recorded by law, including the corridors of hotels. There are discussions about whether individual rooms in hotels should also be declared as public spaces, but there’s still far too much resistance from higher-ups in the gov-corp who depend on hotels for their love affairs. It’s the reason why there’s been a resurgence in rooms with interconnecting doors: easier to sneak someone in from the room next door without risking being caught on camera in the corridor.
Moments later Tia has the footage ready. There’s a few seconds of Alejandro going to the Diamond Suite with Klein, followed by Theo Buckingham, who goes into the room next door. The footage jumps to 5:03 a.m. the following morning, when Theo Buckingham leaves his room with a small wheeled case. The next person seen in the corridor is one of the kitchen staff leaving a breakfast tray outside of room 9 at 7:00 a.m. “Tia, I want you to send the data from the hotel node to the MoJ AI to check for signs of tampering, especially of the corridor cam footage.”
“Done.”
It’s almost three in the morning, but I know I can’t go to sleep until I’ve seen the room myself. I open the bag left for me by the local police and pull out a pair of gloves from a box inside. I see a few paper suits in cellophane and the proof-of-tampering seals are reassuringly green. I dig out a pair of shoe covers and then hesitate over one of the suits. No, I’ll just look from the doorway. It’s too bloody late to do more than that and I want to be fresh tomorrow.
I physically lock the door of my room behind me, thinking about what Nadia said about the feeling of holding a real key. I turn it over a few times in my palm, feeling the weight of the brass fob as I drop it into my pocket.
When I pass the lift a warning flashes across my vision. If I wasn’t expecting it I might have missed a step. Restricted zone ahead. Your movements are being recorded by the Ministry of Justice.
For anyone else in the hotel—apart from the copper—the message would continue to scroll across the bottom half of their vision until they walk away again. For me, thankfully, it stops, having satisfied Tia that it is active and all is as it should be.
“Good evening, sir,” the constable says.
Tia flashes up his bio next to his head with a brief career summary. Five years on the force, clean record, probably promotion within two years. Wife and two children. Impressively high gamer score on the Mars game I was playing earlier. Bastard. I’m glad my profile will be locked to him and he won’t see how pathetically low mine is in comparison.
“Good evening, PC Radley. All quiet up here, I assume?”
“Yes, sir. They cleaned up some vomit in the hallway out here—the one who found the body threw up, you see. I said it was okay to do that, as it was outside of the scene.” He pauses, nervous that I’ll disagree, then continues when he sees I don’t mind. “The hotel owner and a cleaner went to room twelve earlier, to get it ready for you. Other than that no one’s been up here since the guests were cleared off this floor. Do you want to go inside?” He’s looking for a paper suit, worried he’ll have to say something awkward.
“I just want to look from the doorway. The SOCO should be here in the next half hour with his team.”
Radley steps aside and pulls the tape off as I put on my gloves and shoe covers. I instruct Tia to switch on the lights in the Diamond Suite and also unlock and open the door so I don’t have to touch anything. There’s a solid clunk from the door as the lock is opened from within and the door opens just a crack.
“Would you like me to present an enhanced view of the room in line with the coroner’s record of the body?” Tia asks.
“Give me a minute to look at it normally first,” I say, and press on the door, near the hinge in a place where most people don’t touch, to push it open.
The smell hits me before anything else, the residual stink left behind by bowels voided upon death. Radley walks away a couple of steps, making out as if he’s stretching his legs a little, giving me privacy perhaps, but probably just getting away from the stale air seeping out of the doorway. I give myself a moment to get used to it and then push the door farther open.
At first all I see is the bloodstain, the shock of it making everything else fade into the background. Alejandro’s blood. Most of a large Persian rug in the center has had its vibrant colors obliterated by a dark brown stain, as has a good portion of the cream carpet around it. I see dried droplets of blood on one of the walls and a few on the sofa cushions.
After a few moments I blink and start to see the whole room. It’s effectively a living room–cum-study, with a door to the bedroom on the left, which is open. I can see a four-poster bed in there with rumpled sheets and some clothing on the floor. There’s a bathroom off to the right of the living room and probably an en-suite off the bedroom too.
It’s huge and sumptuous and a world away from what I’d expect Alejandro to choose for himself. The Circle was against technology—against being chipped in particular—so I can understand his choice of hotel to a certain extent. But the luxury is jarring. Why come to this hotel and sink himself into a lifestyle he ridiculed and railed against?
In the Circle I knew, the one I endured, it wasn’t just a rejection of invasive technology; it was all about simple living. Simple living to the point of discomfort. We lived in dormitories with hard beds and drafty windows that rattled in the winter storms. We wore clothes made with wool and cotton we grew, spun and wove ourselves, a simple sweater taking hours and hours of effort when one could be bought for a negligible amount of money. Even the sheets I slept on had been spun and then woven by someone in the Circle. Alejandro always talked about how knowing who made the things we used and wore was somehow better than convenience. He was under the impression that spending hours toiling away like it was the fucking dark ages was a way to stay connected to the difference between need and want and to teach ourselves about the true value of something.
This room is filled with all the unnecessary luxuries and conveniences of modern life that would have made the Alejandro I knew launch into an epic rant. What changed? Is the Circle just as different now? Or maybe this is proof of what I’ve always suspected: everything he said in the Circle was bullshit and every chance he got, he came and stayed in places like this.
A chair is on its side next to the rug. There are no other signs of a struggle. Tia, determining that my minute is up, overlays the images of the various body parts as recorded and then recovered by the coroner. I take in a leg, an arm and then my eyes settle upon the back of Alejandro’s head, severed at the neck and resting on one side near the desk, over a meter away from his torso.
Sweat breaks out on my forehead and my pulse races as I swallow down a sudden rush of saliva. I’ve seen horrific things in reality, in AR and in mersives, but never done to someone I knew. Never to someone I once loved. I hold my breath, forcing myself not to vomit, not in front of that copper.
I can feel myself pulling back, almost like I am physically stepping away. The rush of emotions is being pushed down before I even have time to name them all. My professional defenses and years of training are kicking in, forcing me to look for details instead of the whole while the rest of me, the man who knew the victim, recedes along with the urge to throw up.
“Tell the SOCO I’m in room twelve if he needs to see me urgently. Otherwise I’ll be with him at seven a.m. and I’ll buy him breakfast.”
“Right you are, sir,” Radley says, replacing the tape after the door swings shut on its weighted hinges.
I get back to my room and before I have a chance to take off the gloves I think of the space between the head and the torso, the way the neck just . . . ended in nothing, and then I’m heaving into the toilet.
Fuck.
I pull off the gloves, clean my teeth, take off my shoes and get into bed fully clothed, in case the SOCO is a belligerent bastard and thinks I should lose just as much sleep as he. I wonder how Dee is before remembering that I’m angry with her. I try to think about killing aliens on Mars, about what I’ll have for breakfast, about how soft the bed is. The constant stream of crap acts as a buffer long enough for my body to calm down and fall into a restless sleep.