I WAKE BEFORE my alarm, surprised to have got any sleep at all. I don’t feel rested though and stagger to the shower as Tia combs the news feeds for any keywords related to the case.
The shower area is about the same size as my entire kitchen. Tia has already updated the settings for the room to comply with my preferences and the shower starts running as soon as I enter the bathroom.
“How long before premium rate kicks in?” I’m tempted to treat myself to an extra minute.
“There’s no limit on water usage,” Tia replies. “It’s included in the room price.”
I stand under the showerhead and let the hot water pummel my scalp. Nothing about the murder has reached the press. Yet. I check the case folder as I wash my hair.
Somewhere between reminding myself of the details and sorting tasks by priority, I realize I haven’t heard the sound of Alejandro’s voice since I left the Circle. He’ll never say anything again. The thought hits me so hard I have to slap my hand against a tile to steady myself. An awful, churning grief builds and I lock it down as swift as I can, as I learned to do so well when we were being hot-housed. These emotions won’t serve me now. I can’t let a moment of nostalgia cloud this investigation and add years to my contract. I ask Tia for a summary of overnight case developments and listen as I rinse the shampoo away.
By the time I’m rinsing the shower gel from my body, I know how the next few hours are shaping up. The SOCO is going to meet me in the restaurant downstairs with a preliminary report in half an hour. All of the guests—except one—who checked out in the murder time window have been tracked down and the unchipped ones are being interviewed as I shower. The prime suspect, Theo Buckingham, remains at large.
If he were chipped we’d have him by now, but he’ll still be picked up by the end of the day. There are just too many cameras, either embedded in buildings or in people’s retinas, for him to remain at large for any longer than two days. Even if he manages to disguise himself, his first transaction will be picked up and flagged as priority information to the manhunt team.
He’s a US resident—and not widely traveled, according to the file the US gov-corp sent overnight—so it’s unlikely he’ll have any criminal connections sophisticated enough to give him a means to pay for food and travel off-grid or under an alias. He can’t buy anything without using his thumbprint, thanks to being here under a visa and unchipped. There’s a flag on the system, so the MoJ AI will be alerted as soon as his thumbprint-authorized purchase pings the visa-tracking system. Eventually he’ll either try to buy something in a moment of stupidity (which is surprisingly common) or he’ll try to steal something. Either way, as soon as he goes near anywhere that sells or serves food, he’ll be picked up on camera anyway. He’s probably already been recorded dozens of times. Like all criminal investigations, it’s simply a matter of knowing where to look in the mountain of data. If those legal assholes hadn’t put themselves in the way, there would be a lot less to comb through now.
Once I’ve checked in with the SOCO I’ll interview Klein and see what she noticed during the time Alejandro was sharing the suite with her. I’m hoping she’ll be able to fill in the blanks in terms of motive, having traveled with Buckingham too. Milsom said she was treated for shock when the cleaner and the manager discovered the body the next morning. I need to understand why she didn’t raise any alarm during the incident itself. My first guess is a sleeping tablet, but still, someone being violently murdered next door should have woken her up; most legal drugs for insomnia trick the brain into going to sleep, not staying so deeply under that you can sleep through a man being hacked to pieces next door. Could Buckingham have drugged her? If that’s the case, there’s more planning involved in this than a crime of passion would suggest.
I check the case file and see that the doctor called to treat her took a blood sample that has been withheld from processing by the legal crap. I put in a request for it to be screened for drugs and add a priority tag, and dress for breakfast.
“Would you like to review the mail in your public in-box?” Tia asks.
“Later,” I say. “Delete any that are in the ‘Journalist shitbags’ folder.”
“Those messages have only been filtered. Would you like to review the contents first?”
“No,” I say, and pick up the key to my room. “There’s nothing they can say that would interest me.”
“Deleted,” Tia says, and I smile at the thought of their little electronic hooks being blasted away. I’m not a fish to be caught with promises of truth or money. I think of Dee, manage the flash of anger, and lock my door behind me.
—
THERE are more people than I expect there to be in the restaurant at seven a.m., and every single one of them stops eating or talking to stare at me when I walk in. If I’m still here this time tomorrow, I’ll order room service.
A waiter greets me as everyone realizes they’re all staring at me and return to their conversations, some with another person actually sitting across from them at the table, others with a person eating somewhere else. A couple of them are staring at the space above the empty seat opposite them, their chips projecting an image of their conversational partner sitting at the table with them. I’ve never been able to bring myself to do that, even though these days everyone is used to people looking like they are children having a tea party with imaginary friends. I hate conversation over food and regret setting up a breakfast check-in with the SOCO. This is work though, and I just have to deal with it.
I give the waiter a polite brush-off, slightly freaked out by the enforced in-person interaction. It’s so much noisier here, what with several unchipped guests actually talking to each other and asking the staff questions usually handled by APAs.
Tia picks out the SOCO for me, a man already giving one of those awkward waves made redundant by the bio Tia flashes up for me. The dark circles under his eyes make me appreciate the poor five hours of sleep I managed to get. I head over, studiously ignoring conversations about the capsule and someone saying they recognize me from somewhere before being rapidly shushed into silence by their companion, probably thanks to the MoJ warning flashing up.
The SOCO is called Alex Jacobs and he’s a small man, one who looks like he might have overcompensated in the gym for his lack of height and then let himself go in his fifties. I see from his profile that he’s very experienced, has multiple positions on various procedure advisory boards and is a member of a chess club. No gamer score; both of our bios are set to professional information only, and as we’re effectively of equal rank Tia isn’t pulling more. I wonder what kind of stuff he plays when he’s not in the mood for chess. I get the feeling he’s not a shooting-alien-robots kind of guy.
“Good morning,” he says, and stands to shake my hand. “I ordered coffee. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” I say, and sit down. “Want to sort out the food before we get to business?”
We both choose a full English breakfast from the menu that has been printed out on an actual card instead of appearing as an option to select via my APA. My stomach rumbles as the waiter writes our order down on a small notepad with a pencil. It looks like a theater prop. I’ve only ever seen a waiter do that in mersives. In fact, I can’t remember the last time a waiter took my order. Usually they just turn up with the food a while after Tia has put my order in.
Alex is staring at the notepad too, shifting in his seat as if he’s worrying that he has some important line to deliver or plot to introduce in a play he didn’t sign up to act in. When the waiter goes he looks relieved and drains his coffee cup.
“You get to stay here, then?” he asks.
“Yeah. Weird place.”
“There are worse kinds of weird,” he says, and looks away, then upward, and I know he’s accessing notes. “Okay. You know what I’m going to say first.”
“Something about why the hell weren’t you allowed in there earlier? I know, I know. Believe me, I’m just as pissed off.”
“I’m not going to give you a hard time about it,” Alex replies. “I heard about the lawyers. Okay. So we’re on the back foot. The blood soaked in and dried but the patterns are still there. Some interesting stuff on that front. I’ve added it as a layer to the recording files, fully tagged. I’ve been told you prefer to examine the details of a scene in VR.”
“I’ll look around the room itself too.”
Alex nods. “I’ve prepped an AR layer for in situ use too.”
“What about DNA?”
“Nothing unexpected. Matches with the girlfriend, the victim and the bloke who was in the room next door . . .” His eyes flick up and right again. “Theo Buckingham. There was a hair from the hotel manager near the door, as expected because she contaminated the scene, and some cells from the cleaning staff in the corners. We had to hunt for that though. They keep the place very clean. There might be more DNA on the body, of course, under the fingernails and so forth.”
“The pathologist should be sending in preliminaries this morning,” I say as our breakfast arrives.
“I think an ax was used to chop the body up,” Alex says, starting on the pile of scrambled eggs with an enthusiastic stab of his fork. “There are marks in the carpet and the rug. I tagged those too, of course. If it weren’t for the soundproofing, it would have been heard in the room below. There was a renovation in the hotel a decade or so ago and they put it all in then. That soaked up the blood and bowel contents too, otherwise the manager might have had some distressed calls. They still might have heard a few thuds though. Takes a good wallop to get through bone and—”
I lay my fork back down again and he notices the way I am pressing my lips together, trying not to let the nausea overwhelm me.
“Sorry. Thought you’d be pretty used to this stuff.”
“I knew the victim.”
To his credit, Alex looks appalled. “Crikey. Sorry. I had no idea. And the MoJ still assigned you? That’s . . . a bit cold.”
I don’t offer any comment, electing to sip some water rather than explain why I had no real choice in the matter. The food looks delicious and the smell was divine before my stomach turned. The bacon has been cooked to perfection, the eggs look light and fluffy and the mushrooms gloriously dark and succulent. I will never forgive myself if I push this to one side.
“Anyway, it’s all tagged on the new layer,” Alex says quietly. “And you can always ping me if you have any questions. Anytime.”
He changes the subject then and I allow myself a few deep breaths. The visceral reaction to this case disturbs me. I thought it had been trained out of me. I suppose there isn’t enough training in the world for when this shit is personal. I’ve got to get a handle on it though; I can’t act like a fucking rookie every time some detail comes up about his body. The body. I resolve to return to my room as soon as breakfast is over and just look at all the details until the shock is out of my system. I need to desensitize myself before the pathologist calls in.
The SOCO is a boring man, all too happy to chatter away as long as I nod and make the right kind of grunt in the right places. His total lack of need for any kind of articulate response is glorious. My stomach settles and the food is even better than I’d hoped for. It’s all I can do to not moan in pleasure at each mouthful. How the people around me manage to chat at the same time as experiencing this astounds me. Philistines.
No. Privileged. This is the quality of food they’re accustomed to.
Alex gets a message as he’s starting the last sausage and makes his apologies. My hope that he’ll leave it behind is dashed when he plucks it off the plate with a wink and walks out. I can’t help but respect the complete absence of fucks he has for the appalled faces around him as he leaves, taking a bite of it like a kid at a carnival.
The empty chair he leaves behind is a welcome sight. That was one of the daily irritations of life in the Circle: communal eating for every meal.
“You’ll get used to it,” Dad had said as we stood in the doorway to the hall filled with long tables and benches. “You probably shouldn’t have been eating by yourself all the time before anyway. This is better for you.”
“Why?” I was eight years old, thousands of miles from home and the most important possession I owned had just been taken from me. His knowing what was better for me seemed ludicrous.
“It’s good to be social,” he said. Like he’d forgotten the fact he hadn’t left the house for more than two years before Alejandro turned up, and had barely spoken to me the whole of that time.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone.” The people sitting at the tables looked weird. Their hair was strange, their clothes, the sound of their voices. A lot of them were speaking English and I still wasn’t comfortable talking in anything except Spanish. Other than a few babies, the other children looked at least ten years older than me. That was a relief though; I would have been forced to sit with another child my age, as if a shared age would make it an easy or pleasant interaction. “I just want to talk to Bear.”
“We talked about that. He isn’t good for you. Don’t you remember what Alejandro explained to us about the chip inside it? That bear was made to record everything about you so bad people could use it to sell you things and tell you what to think after putting a chip in your head.” He tapped the top of it so hard it hurt. “You need to forget about that bear and talk to real people now.”
That’s when I started to cry.
“Excuse me.”
I blink away the memory, disturbed by how vivid it was after so many years of distancing myself from that time. There’s a man standing next to my table.
“You’re the policeman investigating the murder, aren’t you?”
He’s in his twenties, far too tanned and handsome for me to take seriously as anything other than a model or actor, and dressed in the latest fashion of a high collar, slim-fitted shirt and fat, luxurious tie-cum-cravat. His trousers are narrow enough in the leg to show off his sculpted calf muscles, and the toes of his boots are so pointed they look ridiculous. His voice has had any sort of regional accent trained out of it.
Tia flashes up a notification that this guest’s face is being matched to the identity profiles of the unchipped guests. A second later a name floats next to his perfectly coiffed auburn hair: Travis Gabor, twenty-nine years old, resident of London.
“Yes,” I say, once his name has come up. “But you should know that—”
“Good,” he speaks over me, eyes flicking back to the entrance of the restaurant. “So you’ll need to interview the guests who aren’t chipped, right? Like in Marple 2070?”
“Yes, but—”
“I need you to interview me last,” he says in a whisper, after leaning down to fill my nose with expensive aftershave. “It’s absolutely—”
“There you are!” A man’s voice rumbles from the door to the restaurant. It isn’t that he shouts; it’s just one of those voices deep and naturally loud enough to cut through anything.
Gabor stands straight too quickly and runs a hand through his hair, whatever product he used making it fall back into exactly the same place as before.
“You need to understand that anything you say to me is being recorded and can and will be used as evidence in this investigation, should it become necessary,” I’m finally able to say as Gabor gives a reluctant wave to the man on his way over, making the wedding ring he’s wearing glitter and catch my eye.
Tia informs me of the other man as he marches toward us, glowering. Stefan Gabor, a billionaire with a financial empire so vast and complex people make both fictional and investigative mersives about it. Nothing else is visible in his profile, and Tia informs me that her attempt to drill down to anything more than just his name has resulted in an automatic notification from his legal department that a formal request will have to be made.
I hate dealing with these people.
No, I hate dealing with people, but the rich ones are the worst.
I look for a family resemblance but can’t find it in the jowly man in his forties; the only thing they have in common is the tan. It seems that Stefan is happy to wear his wealth around his waistline as well as in his expensive suit. He’s dressed far more conservatively than Travis is, the only flash of ostentatiousness in the form of a diamond tie pin with a rock as big as a sugar cube, and a glittering wedding ring. I make the connection about half a second before Stefan’s hand cups Travis’s right buttock and squeezes hard enough to make a tiny squeak slip from Travis’s throat.
“Ask him, did you?” Stefan’s voice is so low I can feel it in my stomach, like a bass beat in the car. Before Travis has a chance to answer, Stefan looks at me. “I take it you told him how ridiculous he’s being?”
I pause, fully expecting Stefan to answer both questions without any need for my input. Men like him sail through life having a dialog with only themselves, punctuated by minor interruptions from others.
Stefan continues. “I told him it isn’t anything like that ridiculous Marple game and that he doesn’t have to stay here to be interviewed.” His hand squeezes tighter and Travis stands on tiptoes, jaw clenched. “I think he wants the attention. I’m sorry he wasted your time, Officer.”
“Inspector,” I correct, just for the hell of it. I look at Travis, past the tan and the absurd hair, and see the desperation in his eyes as he stares down at me. “Actually, I would appreciate getting a statement from Mr. Gabor.”
“That isn’t necessary,” Stefan says, releasing his grip on his husband’s arse so he can fully concentrate on the onslaught he’s about to give me.
“As the SDCI in charge of this investigation, and in accordance with the Noropean law and with the endorsement of the Ministry of Justice, I am the only person in this room who decides what is necessary and what is not.”
“It’s not convenient for us to stay another day,” Stefan says, reddening.
“I can stay and you go back to London, darling.” Travis’s voice is higher, more strained than when he spoke before. “I wouldn’t want to be any bother. And I could do with a couple more days here, to rest.”
Stefan’s upper lip curls downward. “You’re better now.” He pauses, frowning. “I can leave Frostrup here to—”
“Don’t be silly. You need Frostrup more than I do.” Travis reaches over and fiddles with the tie pin. “You worry too much, darling. I’ve got the ’pad and the headset. I can ping you every hour if you’re worried.”
Stefan looks back at me. “Can’t you take a statement in the next hour?”
“I’m afraid not,” I reply truthfully. “It would be this afternoon at the earliest.”
“I’ll speak to the commissioner about this, over dinner,” he says, and I smile.
“You do that, and please pass on my regards to her.”
Stefan walks away and the waiter who has been lurking nearby, nervously waiting for an opportunity to seat the Gabors, shows him, with some relief, to a table on the far side of the room.
Thank you, Travis mouths before Stefan clicks his fingers toward him in irritation.
I watch the man-poodle return to his master before I return to the last mouthfuls of my breakfast. Everybody is on a leash. Some are more obvious than others.