I’M GLAD TO be back in my room after breakfast. I felt Travis’s eyes on me as I left, the tug of his neediness. I don’t think for a moment that he has anything to do with the murder, nor do I think there’s any need to hold him here for interview, but there’s something going on with him and I can’t walk past a puzzle without trying to fit in a piece or two. Besides, I never pass up a chance to irritate people like Stefan, who think they can intimidate me with their wealth. It’s petty and I’m not proud of myself, but I still enjoy it.
“There are fifteen new messages in your public in-box,” Tia tells me as I lock the door. “Would you like to review them?”
“All from journos and Web monkeys? Tia, for the last time, just put them in the shitbags folder and don’t bother me with their crap again.”
“Thirteen have been filtered and are requesting a quote or interview for the capsule event. One is from Dee Whittaker. Subject: ‘Sorry.’ Would you like me to open it?”
“No,” I say, pulling off my shoes and taking off my suit jacket. “Delete it.”
“Would you like me to notify her APA that you have deleted the message unread?”
“No, for the sake of fuck, Tia. Just butt out, okay?”
There’s a pause, and that stupid bit of my brain that anthropomorphizes Tia makes me think I’ve offended her. It.
“Why did you ask me that anyway?”
“I’m adhering to the parameters outlined in the latest update from the Ministry of Education for individuals who have been through the accelerated-learning and assimilation program. There’s a concern you shut people out too readily. Would you like me to outline the changes made in the last update?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to summarize the concerns that led to the change in your social interaction parameters?”
I pull the belt from my trousers and throw it across the room more forcefully than I intended to. “I don’t think this is the time, do you, Tia? I mean, there’s more important stuff to review than the latest interference from my psych supervisor, isn’t there? Like, I dunno, the dinner menu or—I know!—the massive fucking murder investigation.”
“You are shouting at me,” Tia says. There’s no hurt in its voice—it’s just as steady as normal; I disabled the fake-emotion option—but I still feel bad. “You are under increased levels of stress. Would you like me to schedule an appointment with your psych supervisor?”
Just the memory of that man’s voice makes me want to break something. “No. Thank you.” I draw in a deep breath, hoping it will calm me down. The last thing I need is for MyPhys to start flagging up stress symptoms outside of the expected range. I don’t want anything like that on my record during this case.
“What about the other e-mail? You only mentioned fourteen of them.”
“The remaining e-mail is from a journalist but does not mention an interview request nor the capsule. As it mentions the location of your current investigation, I have flagged it for review.”
I frown. Has the murder been sniffed out already? “Okay, show me.”
I need to talk to you urgently about the reason you’re in Devon, off the record. Don’t include this in your investigation file, otherwise we will both be at risk.
I sit on the bed. “Tia, tell me about the person who sent this.”
“Naal Delaney. Thirty-five years old, citizen of Norope. Winner of the Webben Prize for outstanding investigative journalism. Independent, writes for four Noropean news agencies, predominantly on organized crime and corporate espionage. Level-one personal data–protection license. Banned from entering Europe and any business premises owned by European gov-corp subsidiaries.”
Great. Now I have to speak to a journo for work, just when I thought I’d be safe from them for a few days at least. I have to follow this up. Delaney could simply be trying to get my attention by being deliberately obscure, but mentioning my current location—which would be hidden from any public-profile data—suggests something genuine may be behind this. Whether Delaney wanted this incorporated into a formal investigation or not, that’s what’s going to happen now.
“Did any of the other e-mails from journalists that I’ve deleted come from Delaney?”
“Yes. You have deleted three requests for an interview sent by Naal Delaney.”
“Are they still on the cloud?”
“Only the time stamp and sender address, not the contents. Would you like me to adjust your settings?”
“No, that’s fine.” I can’t afford the amount of storage space it would require to store all my junk mail at the level of privacy and protection against hacking I’d require. “How many days ago did the first one sent by Delaney arrive?”
“Six. Sent at fourteen twenty-one on Thursday, November twelfth.”
That was after Alejandro entered the country and a good couple of weeks after the rest of the journos started harassing me again. “And is . . . Hang on. Is Delaney male or female?”
“Delaney is registered as gender neutral.”
“Is ze on any MoJ watch lists?”
“No.”
“And no word of the murder has got to any of the news agencies ze works for?”
“Nothing has been reported.”
I stare at the carpet long enough for Tia to start pulling up information about the fibers and manufacturing technique. I swipe the information away. Just because some hack thinks something is urgent doesn’t mean it actually is. Delaney could have had someone tip hir off that I was here in an official capacity without knowing anything about the reason why. I’m already two days behind in this investigation. I don’t have time for journo games right now. “Tia, set a reminder for me to reply in a day, okay? Now, is the VR crime scene up-to-date with the latest files from the SOCO?”
“Yes. Would you like to enter it now?”
“Yes.”
“Please sit or recline in a comfortable space and confirm that you are not operating machinery.”
“JeeMuh, Tia, can’t we just skip this bollocks? I know the drill and you know I’m not operating anything or driving a vehicle.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not authorized to override safety checks tagged ‘critical.’”
I sigh. “I confirm I’m not operating machinery. I am not driving a vehicle. I do understand the risks of entering a fully immersive virtual environment and that prolonged use can increase the chances of heart attacks, depression, PTSD and a whole other list of side effects of which I am totally aware.”
Tia displays the list of risks and waits for me to consciously select the “I have read and understood this” box before it goes away. I lie down on the bed, wishing I was getting ready to play instead of going to see Alejandro’s dismembered corpse.
I close my eyes and for the briefest moment I wonder what Dee said in that e-mail, and then the darkness becomes bright and I am standing outside a door with a Ministry of Justice logo on it.
I’m standing in a gray corridor that looks very much like the real corridors in the depths of the MoJ headquarters. It’s only here to ease the transition into the crime scene; I could just float in darkness before entering the room but I don’t like that disconnection from reality. I know some inspectors prefer to have the building in which the crime scene is located rendered around it, but I don’t do that unless I have to. I don’t like walking through places in the real world that I’ve just been walking through in my virtual server space. I did it once, when I was a rookie, and then spent the rest of the case finding myself questioning whether I was really in the actual building every time I went back to the real crime scene. There’s no faster way to a special kind of madness when you find yourself asking your APA to confirm that you’re not in VR every five minutes.
I rest my hand on the door handle and ready myself. I will see Alejandro’s dead body in there and it will be in pieces and his head will be detached from his body. I will see the blood and the echoes of the violence done to him. It will be distressing. It will not break me.
I open the door.
Inside is a perfect replica of the Diamond Suite, recorded by the MoJ recorders less than an hour after the crime had been reported to the police. The recorders are nothing more than drones that take thousands of ultra-high-res pictures of a crime scene, enabling the MoJ AI to replicate it in detail in a virtual space like this one. The drones are perfect for the task; they fly in, don’t touch anything and don’t contaminate. Unlike the police photographers of the past, there’s no risk of them missing any details; every square inch is considered equally critical and recorded perfectly. I can zoom in, remove objects, highlight details—anything I like here. And all without the duty plod staring and offering tips like they so often do.
It’s so accurate, it’s easy to believe that I’m in the real room, aside from the fact there are no smells. They’re piloting a scent recorder and replication process at the moment, but it’s still not reliable enough to use in an MoJ investigation. I don’t think it matters in this case. I take a step farther in and shut the door behind me, glancing at the doors to the other rooms, the desk, the seating area . . . all the places my eyes can rest before I have to look at the body.
The blood on the rug is darker, slick in places where it has soaked the carpet so much that it’s coagulated on the surface. In places it mixes with the contents of his bowels, voided upon his death. I’m grateful for the lack of smell. The chair, on its side, rests to the left of Alejandro’s torso, the shirt he was wearing now missing sleeves. I stare stupidly at the top buttons of his shirt, left open at a neck that stops far too abruptly in a hacked stump.
My gaze tracks across a leg, still sheathed in a trouser leg left tattered at the top. It looks unreal, like some sort of bizarre mannequin accident. The foot is covered by a sock and I look for his shoes. They are paired and placed neatly together by the side of the desk.
There’s a constriction in my throat, the sense of something building in my chest, and it’s hard to breathe. A physical pulse of grief passes through me like a cold wave crashing through my body from the depths of my stomach, up toward my chest, threatening to burst out of me with a brutal, animal force. Then, just as quickly, it’s gone and I sag, nothing more than a strangled groan making it out of my mouth.
I force myself to look at the back of his head.
His hair is slightly shorter than when I last saw him, and peppered with gray strands that force an appreciation of how long it’s been since then. I don’t know if his eyes are open or whether there is an expression on his face. I’m not ready to look yet.
Something is missing. I walk up to the edge of the rug, inches from one of his hands. When I see the signet ring I realize that it is his left. His right arm lies past his torso, as if tossed there, at least a meter away. I see the marks in the rug that Alex mentioned and wonder where the ax is now—and where it came from in the first place.
“Open case notes, new file: ‘Interview reminders.’ Heading: ‘Manager.’ Do they have an ax in use within the hotel? Perhaps the grounds. Check groundskeeper or gardener equipment.”
“Noted,” Tia says.
It’s not the thing that was used to kill him though. He was hanged first. I look up at the light fixture, the cracks in the ceiling rose from where his weight must have pulled the cable and damaged the plaster. A short length of cord remains, hanging from the knot that secures it and ending in a frayed stump that has clearly been cut. I look around the room and check the SOCO’s notes on evidence retrieved. No noose or remainder of that cord has been found. Alex reported that one of the curtain cords was used and has made a note of the length based on the other of the pair left hanging beside one of the closed curtains.
I pull at the tie at my throat, loosening the knot, and undo the top button. In this virtual space I could be naked if I wanted to be, but I stay in the suit, in the clothes I wear when I work.
I call up the layer the chief SOCO talked about and select the voice option for the tags, and a few places in the room glow faintly. I point at the stains in the carpet, now edged in a pale blue light, and hear his voice.
“You can see the blood soaked into the carpet—I’d say at least two or three pints in this stain alone. From the distribution I believe the body was dismembered here and then the limbs thrown to the positions you see here, rather than pushed or pulled. The head was removed last, I’d wager, judging by the spatters on the face and neck, but that will need to be confirmed with the pathologist’s report.”
The remainder of the cord hanging from the light fixture is tagged. “Only the victim’s DNA has been found on the knot securing the cord to the light fixture. Of course, that could have been left when the victim closed his curtains, but from the amount of skin cells caught in the fibers, I believe the victim tied the knot and tested its strength.”
Alejandro was made to hang himself? At gunpoint, presumably? I make a note and then point to the tagged chair. “Due to the height of the ceiling and the deduced length of the cord, the victim—if my earlier assumption is correct—would have stood on this chair to tie the noose to the light fixture and also would have had to stand on the chair in order for the noose to be placed around his neck. In addition, the murderer would have had to stand on it to cut the victim down. No dirt from outside is on the chair cushion, which suggests the murderer’s shoes were very clean, were house slippers or were not worn at the time. Due to the cushioning foam beneath the upholstery, no measurable impression has been left.”
Something is niggling me but I don’t focus on it yet. I want to get all the data first. I point to tagged spots of blood and listen to the chief SOCO describing how the distribution of the blood spatter supports his idea about where the body was cut up. “In addition,” the recording of his voice continues, “it’s clear the chopping took place in a localized area, presumably after the victim’s death, as there are no blood spots elsewhere, caused by attacking a moving victim, for example.”
Last is the brown stain on the rug. “Piecing together the residue detected at the scene and the images from the recorders,” Alex’s voice says after I point at it, “reveals that the body was cut down after death, as the torso partially covers the contents of the bowels that were released when the victim died, as is common in hanging. Feces have run down the leg and dripped—”
I cut off the audio, having taken all I need from that tag already.
Something about this case feels . . . off. Usually when I look at a scene I can mentally reconstruct the murder in minutes, often sooner. Here, I feel like I have the pieces before me but I’m not confident about how they fit together.
“Tia, come and talk this through with me.”
Tia’s avatar walks round, as if she has been standing behind me the whole time. She’s dressed in a three-piece pinstripe trouser suit and flats, her skin the same olive as mine and her black hair pulled back in a bun. Her face is attractive but generic, one of the thousands of pre-generated avatars available that’s nice enough to look at, but not so gorgeous that it would be distracting. She’s too perfect to be truly realistic, but here, fully immersed in a virtual environment, she’s convincing enough for me to feel like I have an old-school police partner to bounce ideas off of. Exactly as the MoJ programmers intended it. It’s so much cheaper to have a virtual partner than an actual human being.
“Lay it out for me,” she says, pulling a line from one of the cheesy mersives I’ve played lately. “What have we got?”
“We’ve got a murder that just doesn’t feel right,” I say.
“Is this something to do with your gut intuition?” She seems just as unimpressed with me as I am with myself. I hate this nebulous shit, but nine times out of ten, that niggle in the gut is worth listening to.
“Yeah,” I say, struggling to drill down into some detail. “He was hanged first, right? Chief SOCO thinks Alejandro tied the knot up there because of the DNA residue. Now, let’s say I’m Theo and I come in here to kill him. Why the fuck would I get a curtain cord and make a noose out of it, here, in this room?”
“Why not bring one from your room?” Tia asks.
“Right. If he didn’t bring one from his room, it suggests it was unplanned. Does that mean they were talking and then Theo decided to kill him out of the blue? If that’s the case, why a noose? I mean, he must have had a gun or something to make Alejandro tie it up there and, presumably, put his head through, because the victim wouldn’t have done that willingly. But how the hell would Theo have a gun anyway? The Circle hate them, he couldn’t have brought one through security into the UK and I doubt he’d have any criminal connections good enough to obtain one or a print pattern either. Without a gun, Theo wouldn’t be able to knock him out and then, I dunno, lift him up there to kill him. That’s just craziness.”
“Tying a noose and forcing the victim to hang himself at gunpoint doesn’t match with your hypothesis about this being a crime of passion,” Tia says.
“Agreed,” I say, scratching my chin. “And the rest of it . . . Why has the body been cut up? It doesn’t even fit with being drawn and quartered. For one thing, Alejandro was dead when he was cut up, judging by the spatters and lack of evidence of a struggle. For another, there’s nothing here that suggests his genitals were removed—though I guess the pathologist will have to verify that. But by the look of his trousers, they were just ripped at the top of the thighs when the legs were severed. And there are too many . . . pieces to follow ‘quartering’ too.”
“The bowels appear to still be inside the torso,” Tia says, looking down at it. I don’t know if she’s programmed to look at the thing she is referencing, having pulled that fact from the initial report to the MoJ made by the police officers on the day, or if she has actually deduced that from what is being shown here. APAs are so good these days it’s impossible to know unless you program them. “If the murderer was trying to follow the historic technique of hang, draw and quartering, they would have removed the bowels while the victim was alive.”
“Okay, so what it looks like we have here is a forced hanging that obviously required premeditation, followed by some batshit chopping up that seems very passionate.” I shake my head. “No, it just doesn’t fit together.”
I look at the cord hanging from the ceiling and another explanation presents itself. Before it’s even settled into place I’m shaking my head for a different reason.
“What’s wrong?” Tia asks.
“Nothing,” I say, dismissing the idea of suicide. Alejandro would never end his own life. “I don’t have enough data. I need the blood-test results from the girl he was sharing the room with, for a start, and more information on Theo. He has to have been pretty fucking disturbed to do this to someone he practically worshipped. Something must have pushed him over the edge.”
“Perhaps they argued,” Tia says.
“Perhaps.” I stuff my hands in my pockets, trying to understand the last hour of Alejandro’s life. What state of mind would a man have to be in to come into his cult leader’s room, force him to hang himself and then feel compelled to mutilate the body like this with the girlfriend asleep in the room next door? If Theo drugged her, that would suggest premeditation again and I can’t make that sit comfortably against this chaotic brutality. The limbs haven’t been arranged, just tossed aside. There’s no other meaning here, no pattern left in the positioning or the blood. It speaks of someone filled with uncontrollable rage.
“Maybe it’s not Theo,” I say. “Maybe the girl did it. It would explain how she could sleep through it—in that she didn’t—and why no one went in or out of the room in the murder window. Maybe Theo heard it and ran, thinking he was next.”
“Theo has made no efforts to contact the police,” Tia says.
“Maybe he can’t handle it.” I shrug. “He could still be in shock.”
“But if this theory is correct, you are assuming Theo saw what happened to the victim,” Tia says. “As the door to this room wasn’t opened between the time the victim and Klein entered the suite and the time the cleaner discovered the body, how did Theo see what had happened?”
“Were any calls made from the room that night?”
“None,” Tia replies.
“He might have heard the latter stages through the wall,” I say, looking at the wall next to the bedroom door. “Am I right in thinking that’s the back of the en-suite bathroom in his room?”
“Yes. According to the renovation notes placed in the case file by Alex Jacobs, primary SOCO, soundproofing was placed in the walls between rooms.”
“Enough to block out loud thuds?”
“I don’t know. Would you like me to run a simulation and calculate the number of decibels any sound from this room would reach in Theo’s room?”
“Yeah, do that.”
“Assuming the sound of the body being cut is of comparable volume to a log being split by an ax, within an error range of plus or minus twenty decibels, the number of decibels reaching Theo’s room would sound like this in the minimum range.” She claps her hands and there is the softest thump, not even as loud as a normal clap would be. Not nearly enough to alert him of anything untoward. “And like this at the topmost range of permitted error.” The second clap is louder, but still not enough to wake someone. And even if he did hear it, why not come to the room and check?
“Of course, all of this is assuming the security video is clean,” I say. “Klein may have tampered with it.”
“Members of the Circle are renowned for lack of technical skills,” Tia says.
“Yeah, but some are latecomers. Klein might have been in tech before she joined them. Has the US gov-corp released her details yet?”
“A formal request hasn’t been made since the legal obstructions were removed.”
“Fuck. Then make it. I want her background as fast as possible. Theo Buckingham’s too.”
“Done.”
I need more information and none of it can be found in this room. I look at the back of Alejandro’s head, trying to force myself into going and looking at his face, like I have with every single victim I’ve ever seen. But my feet just don’t move.
“Tia. The victim’s face . . . Is it . . . Are his eyes open?”
She walks around the fallen chair and crouches down in front of it, just like I should. “Yes,” she says. “Would you like me to describe the effects of the hanging on his skin and blood vessels?”
I shut my eyes, wishing I could have done the same for him, wishing there was no need to. “No,” I say. “Exit crime-scene simulation.”