I WASH MY face and try to disentangle what needs to be done next from my sense of dread. I may not even be allowed back on the case. After that meeting, my gut instinct is that they’re going to give me enough extra time to satisfy the Europeans but not nearly enough to finish this to my satisfaction. I need to prioritize.
Theo’s death has the feel of a staged tableau. All the props point to suicide but are slightly off. The whisky, plausible enough for use in suicide but too special to have been bought in Ashburton on the way to the cottage, from a distillery that doesn’t have any of its products licensed for printer replication. The painkillers, again so plausible, but why take paracetamol and ibuprofen when there’s a bottle of Tylenol in his wash bag? I need to get the suicide note compared with an example of his handwriting, but whether it matches or not it won’t give me much more to go on. The only thing I can be certain of is that Theo knew what happened to Alejandro that night; otherwise he wouldn’t have checked out in such a state. What I don’t know is how much of a part Theo played in his leader’s death. It will take time to work out what happened to Theo in that cottage and I’m not prepared to spend it when Alejandro’s death is still unresolved. I don’t even know if he committed suicide. Even though Theo’s note confessed to killing him, how would he have forced Alejandro to hang himself? The only weapon associated with Theo is the ax, and that’s hardly the most effective tool to threaten someone into a noose.
I don’t even know whether Theo went into Alejandro’s suite within the murder window. This is ridiculous.
“Tia, send a note to the MoJ specialist data team saying the hotel-cam results are needed as soon as possible, as the case has become time sensitive.” I sigh, hearing my own words. All of the things they examine are time sensitive. “No, dump that. Send a note to Tim Halliday in Data Retrieval and—”
“Tim Halliday no longer works in the Data Retrieval department,” Tia says. “Would you like a list of current employees at your pay grade and below?”
“Have I worked with any of them before?”
“No.”
“Don’t bother, then.”
Fuck.
I leave the bathroom and go to the bedroom window. The wind is easing now and one of the gardeners is picking up twigs and detritus from the ornamental garden. I wonder if he enjoys his job. Can he derive satisfaction from tidying something that will just get covered with shit again the next time a storm goes through? Maybe he’d prefer to manage the kitchen garden they have on Mars, safe beneath the dome, where none of the violent storms can disrupt perfection.
Would I be happier down there, raking leaves? Maybe I was wrong to shine as bright as I could in the first phase of hot-housing. Maybe I should have ignored Dee’s advice, kept my head down and been sold into menial servitude instead of this fucked-up social twilight of having everyone think I have status and authority when I’m nothing but a slave. So few people serve out indentured contracts at my pay grade, it wouldn’t even occur to them that I’m one of those unfortunates they only hear about in the most sanitized terms.
All this time I’ve been working so hard to make as much of a life for myself as I can, my only choices reduced to the food I put in my mouth, and all along Alejandro was raking in that money, living in luxury hotels, free to do as he wanted.
I hate him just as much as I ever did. It doesn’t smother the need to solve this though. That conditioning runs too deep. Was I always like that or was it trained into me? I push my palm down in front of me, imagining the emotions pressed down below it, leaving clarity behind. The question of the uniport charger bothers me the most. I need to know why Theo wanted to use one.
Selina. I need to talk to her.
I grab my jacket and the room key, lock the door behind me and go down to her room. Riley is back on door duty and straightens up as I approach. I nod as he gives me a brisk summary about the psych-support officer visit and then I knock on the door.
“Come in,” Selina calls, and I enter.
The curtains are pulled back now and she is out of bed, still in nightdress and hotel dressing gown. At least she looks like she’s showered. She’s sitting at the dressing table, scrunching handfuls of her damp, curly hair in a towel.
“Is it Theo?” she asks, twisting round to face me. “Have you guys picked him up?”
“We have an idea of where he is,” I say. I don’t want to trigger any more crying, not when I need her to be clearheaded. “I wanted to ask you about something he brought with him to the hotel.”
She puts down the towel and tightens the cord on her dressing gown. “Sit down if you like,” she says, waving over at one of the plump chairs. “What kind of thing?”
I sit on the edge of the cushion, leaning forward. “Something that would need a uniport charger.”
She smirks. “Not Theo. Surely you know that we don’t have personal consumer tech in the Circle. It causes too many distractions from the real—”
“So you didn’t see him using anything at all that could need one?” I don’t need to hear Alejandro’s indoctrination spewed back at me right now.
She shakes her head.
I think back to the interview with the cleaner and Tia helpfully pulls up a list of bullet points extracted from the interview for the case file. They float over the carpet as I look down, checking that my memory is correct. Yes.
“The first morning you were here at the hotel, Theo asked a member of staff where the uniport charger was in his room.”
Selina looks genuinely surprised. “I can’t think why. He didn’t even use any tech before he came to the Circle. At least, I don’t think he did. Oh. No, maybe I’m getting him mixed up with Nick. Yeah, Nick’s family were like the Amish; Theo’s were just bigots. Either way, none of us brought anything like that with us.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yeah, I went through security with him. He brought clothes and books—that’s all. The guy at customs said he hadn’t held a paper book for years. Philistine.”
I lean back and press my palms together. This missing piece feels significant. There has to be a reason. “He didn’t buy anything in Bath or at the Stonehenge center?”
“Nothing that would need a charger. He bought some touristy junk in Bath and a couple of books. I bought some chocolate and tea for some people in the Circle who are Brits, and a book about Stonehenge from the shop there.”
So he didn’t acquire something later. I’ll review his transactions to confirm, but I see no reason for her to lie. “Did he go out anywhere without you or Alejandro?”
She shakes her head. “No. When Alejandro was here Theo was always nearby, and when he went to London we were together every time we left the hotel. I guess he could have gone out without me at some point—there was time—but he wasn’t the most curious guy on the planet. He was happy enough to stay here.”
Then why ask for a charger when they arrived? Assuming he had tech on the morning he asked, the only logical explanation is that he obtained something between customs and arriving at the hotel.
“Did you have much time in the Chicago airport after checking your bags?”
“About an hour.”
I sit forward again, feeling a flicker in my chest that I’m closing in on something. “There are shops there. Did Theo buy anything that he might have put in hand luggage?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Were the three of you together for the whole of the wait?”
She looks up at the ceiling. “No. Alejandro wanted to go to the walk-in clinic there. He said he hadn’t been sleeping well and that the trip was only going to make it worse, so he got some pills to help him sleep and cope with the jet lag. I went with him—I hate airports and didn’t want to be left with Theo—and Theo said he was going to have a walk around before being cooped up in the plane.”
“How long were you at the clinic?”
“About half an hour. There were a few people ahead of us.”
I stand so quickly, she starts. “Thanks. That’s very helpful.”
“When will I be able to get my bag back? I’d like to get dressed.”
“Soon,” I say, heading for the door. I pause with the handle in my hand and look back at her, sitting on the dressing-table stool, looking utterly lost. “I’ll come back and see you as soon as I can. I’m sorry about the delay. Sit tight. It won’t be long now.”
You’ve got one hour to come up with something to convince me there’s a case to pursue.
Milsom’s message arrives while I’m jogging down the corridor back to my room, having instructed Tia to liaise with the US gov-corp’s AI and pull camera footage from the Chicago airport departure-lounge shopping area in the time frame Theo would have been walking around, along with his transaction history. I need both to prove it was actually him buying whatever it was and not a fraudulent transaction.
An hour is a ridiculous compromise. Were it not for this new lead, I’d still be waiting for the full postmortem on Alejandro, the report on the cam footage and any developments in tracking down the drugs in Theo’s “suicide,” unable to make any real progress at all.
But now I have something. I know it. All right, Milsom, I’ll show you just how good I can be.
The data comes in as the door to my room shuts behind me. Milsom wasn’t lying when she said they’d arranged an open channel; I was expecting at least a little bit of resistance.
“Okay, Tia,” I say, pulling off my shoes and lying on the bed. “Open case notes, new file: ‘Theo in Chicago airport.’ Put the transaction and camera footage you just got from the States into it and put the transaction data on a virtual printout for the board in my case space.”
I go through the tedium of the preimmersion checks as fast as I can and then I’m in my space on the MoJ server, standing in front of the board I made in my personal incident room. A new piece of paper is pinned to the bottom and I pull it free from the virtual drawing pin.
Theo made two transactions while Alejandro and Selina were at the clinic. The first was for a bottle of Tylenol. The second was for two RV 314 Pro items bought from a consumer-electronics store. Bingo.
I use the time stamp from the transaction to narrow the search in the camera footage, and within fifteen minutes I have a detailed account of Theo’s movements in the airport shopping area and irrefutable evidence that he bought two tiny cameras with built-in microphones, small enough to be hidden easily. They’re marketed as being perfect for home security, as they’re too small for burglars to see and therefore disable. It’s ridiculous; most burglars use scramblers that disrupt the camera data sent to the local node on shoddy Wi-Fi connections, but my guess is that most people buy these things for spying on lovers rather than home security. And that’s exactly what I think Theo wanted them for.
I know the cameras are no longer in the Diamond Suite; the SOCO team would have found them with the standard equipment used to detect anything that connects to a local node, from a chip in someone’s head to a camera’s data feed. If Theo placed them inside the suite to spy on Alejandro and Selina, he took them with him before he left.
“Tia, pull up the marketing info and technical specs for this camera model and put them on the board for me.”
A new sheet of paper appears. I pin the transaction summary into a new location and pluck the technical specs from their pin. The store he bought these from sold a dozen different models. What was it about this particular camera that caught his eye?
Scanning the dry specs, I realize I’m approaching this the wrong way. Theo wouldn’t have known a thing about cameras. It could have simply come down to how the box looked. The security camera in the airport shop is at the wrong angle to look at the stock as Theo made his selection; all it shows is the side of Theo’s head as he dithers in front of the display, pulls a couple of packets from the shelf and then takes them over to the payment station for people who aren’t chipped and don’t have a personal device that can handle a transaction. He looks just like any other middle-aged man trying to hide his bald patch, having chosen a lifestyle that prevents him from learning about all the ways that baldness can be fixed now. There’s the briefest thought that I’m watching a man who is now dead. I don’t allow myself to dwell on it.
“Tia, pull the spy-camera stock list from the Chicago airport store and show me the packaging for each of the models on the wall over there, like they’d be displayed in a shop.”
The blank wall on the other side of the room is replaced by a generic store display, populated with the different models sold by the Chicago airport shop. It’s not perfect; there’s no way to know which models they put at eye level and which they put at the bottom, hoping to influence sales, but it will have to do. I walk over to it, letting my eyes drift from one box to the next. Each one is a riot of color and bioplastic, shouting about the virtues of the tech that is too small to see without bright concentric circles printed on the packaging around them or luminescent arrows pointing to the transparent dots that can be stuck “ANYWHERE!” while being “100% RELIABLE!” and producing “PERFECT RESOLUTION TO ZOOMS OF 1,000%!” It makes me feel tired just looking at them.
It doesn’t take long to see what the chosen model has over most of the others: two mini screens that allow footage to be watched live or recorded without the need of a personal chip. I swipe away the other cams that don’t offer that feature, leaving the ones Theo chose and one other pack. Both contain the cam dots with built-in mics and screens that can be placed up to fifty meters away. The one he chose has a couple of boasts on the front that are missing from the other. “No chip? No problem!” and below that: “No need for personal cloud storage!”
I pick up the packet and turn it over, looking at the claims in more detail. There’s an interface through the screen for the unchipped and free cloud storage of up to one terrabyte with an automatic backup facility.
I grin. With any luck, that free storage allocated to the cams Theo bought will still have everything he recorded on there. It’s just a matter of tracking it down.
It would be much easier to go through the US FBI contact, but I hesitate before instructing Tia to connect us. In that awful meeting, the American made it clear they didn’t want the investigation to go on. If they catch wind of what I could be about to dig up, they might block it before it gets to me.
“Tia, track down the details about this cam company. See if it has any Noropean connections.”
“The parent company is partnered with a Noropean company that provides the cloud storage bundled with the camera.”
“Perfect.” It’s time to throw my weight around.
It takes longer for me to find the right person to speak to than getting him to release the data to me. It’s a simple-enough matter, as I already have the individual camera sales information and the location of the local node through which the data was sent to the cloud storage. Theo just skipped through the options to protect that storage at the setup stage, probably not even fully understanding what it was, and mercifully was too upset and clueless to remember to go and delete it all when he fled from the hotel. It’s just been sitting there in the cloud the whole time, not even password protected.
Once I have control of the account and Tia has made a copy to my secure MoJ account and put a second copy in the case file, I make sure the data trail is in place to prove provenance, and then delete the unprotected data. I don’t want that employee to get curious and have a peep during his lunch break. It’s happened before; a few years ago, footage of a club where a killing spree took place was uncovered by a security-firm employee, who then released it online. When he was prosecuted for failure to release sensitive data to the MoJ, the reason he gave was wanting to make something go viral. It hadn’t even occurred to him that the grieving relatives could be distressed, let alone all of the other problems it caused.
Footage of Alejandro’s hotel suite in his final days would probably be the only thing that could go viral enough to stop the world from talking about that bloody capsule. I won’t let that happen though.
“Tia, trash the shop-display mock-up and project the footage from Theo’s cams onto that wall. And give me a comfy chair, please.” I don’t care that she’s just going to trick a set of neurons into firing; I want to feel as relaxed as possible when I watch this.
A large brown leather armchair appears so fast I don’t register the exact moment I start to believe it’s there. I sit down, aware of a reluctance to open the file, just for a moment, before instructing Tia to find the cam data from ten p.m. on Sunday night.
“Play the footage from both cams side by side,” I say, and clasp my hands tight together. “How long until I need to report to Milsom?”
“Ten minutes, twenty-five seconds.”
The plain white wall in front of me turns into a screen with a vertical divide. I look at the left-hand side first. There was a camera in the main room of the Diamond Suite; as far as I can tell Theo stuck it to the door frame of the main bathroom, about waist height. I imagine him leaning against it with studied nonchalance, probably in conversation with Alejandro, hands behind his back as he pressed it home. Against the white paint of the door frame, such a small translucent dot would easily be missed by the resident guests as well as the cleaning staff.
The desk is in full sight, along with the sofa and chairs and part of the sideboard that hides the tea-making facilities and minifridge. The door to the bedroom is out of shot, as is the main bathroom and door out into the hotel corridor.
On the right-hand side, the cam footage is showing the bedroom that Selina and Alejandro shared. Neither of them are in sight of either cam, presumably not yet returned from dinner. Tia is displaying the time stamps for me in the bottom right-hand corners of each feed and both are ticking away the seconds. Theo managed to position the dot slightly higher on the door frame into the bedroom, and I imagine him pretending to lean, perhaps, sticking the second dot in place during a conversation or a moment when the other two were distracted.
Why do this? Did he spy on Alejandro every trip they made together? If that was the case, surely he would have just reused the equipment. Then I remember Selina mentioning them going through security together. Perhaps he had to dump the cams every time so he didn’t have to find a way to hide them at the Circle and get them through customs without Alejandro spotting them.
“Tia, I want you to identify the other flights Theo made with Alejandro over the past three years and check those times and dates against his transaction history. Did he buy spy cams on any other trips?”
“There are no records of Theo making any purchases of consumer tech over the past three years at any airports.”
“Any time at all over those years?”
“No transactions of consumer tech found within the dates provided.”
“Is this the first trip that Alejandro made with Selina?”
There is a pause of a couple of seconds as Tia pulls data I haven’t requested before. Again, I’m grateful for the open channel to the States. “Yes. Selina Klein has not traveled on any domestic or international flights since a flight from New York to Albuquerque, New Mexico, three years, two months and five days ago.”
She has to be the reason for Theo’s behavior. Was it a voyeuristic thing? A dark extension of an obsession with Alejandro? Or did he have something for Selina and wanted to see the way she behaved in private? Perhaps it was as simple as a sad man wanting to see an attractive woman’s underwear.
Working that out at this point will be difficult, and right now I don’t have the time.
“Tia, fast-forward until there’s movement on the left-hand cam.”
The time-stamp speeds forward until 10:08 p.m., when a figure crosses the main room in front of the camera. It’s Alejandro.
I thought I was ready to see him again.
It feels like the core of my body has been turned into paper and then scrunched into a ball. A thousand unspoken conversations that I’ve imagined having with the man on the screen tumble through my mind like rubbish being tipped out of an industrial waste bin. And then it hits me, right in the chest: the simple, immovable, undeniable fact that I will never be able to heal the wound between us and it will go on existing, outliving him and eating at me, until the day I die too.
“The food here is so good,” Selina says moments before she walks into shot, and it’s enough to pull me back to this chair that doesn’t really exist and the job that so definitely does. There’s the sound of the door into the suite closing behind her and she stops, right in the middle of the shot on the far side of the room, looking at the back of Alejandro as he leans against the desk. He hasn’t said a word yet and I find myself bracing for the sound of his voice. “Headache again?” she asks, and rests a hand on his back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and I wish he were saying it to me. That was all I wanted to hear for so long, and it’s on a fucking video being spoken to someone else.
“What for?” Selina asks, and Alejandro turns to face her.
He’s still handsome, perhaps more so; something about the salt-and-pepper hair that lends him more gravitas. His hand twitches forward, as if he’s about to reach out and touch her but thinks better of it. “I . . . I haven’t really been myself and it’s not been fair on you. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel . . . insecure.”
Selina pulls off a chiffon scarf, something I wouldn’t associate with someone from the Circle, and lets it pool on the desk next to Alejandro. “I’m gonna ask you something and I want you to be straight with me, okay?” He nods and she stands straighter, as if readying herself for battle. “Do you want us to stop being lovers? Is that what this is all about?”
He looks at her as if . . . as if he knows she’s got a terminal illness or something, as if he knows something tragically sad about her that she is utterly unaware of. “I’m not like your husband. There isn’t anyone else.”
“I thought you were with someone in London.”
“Not like that.”
“Like what, then?”
“Nothing like that.”
“You didn’t answer my question.” I can hear the strain in her voice. She is so in love with him and he seems painfully aware of that. It isn’t reciprocated. He cares for her, that much is obvious, but it’s not love in the way she would want. I don’t think he’s capable of focusing his passions onto just one person. Was not capable.
“This isn’t the time to talk about it.”
“So when is?” She’s trying so hard to be patient when she’s so desperate for something, anything, to indicate there’s something real between them that might survive the crisis. How many people have I seen look at him like that? I know the bitterness of that place, that desperation.
“You look tired. I’m . . . I’m tired too. It isn’t the right time for this conversation.”
There is such a weight behind his words, as if he is having to force them from his lips with the bellows of his lungs, pushing them out through strength of will. There used to be such an energy to him, such vibrancy, it was impossible to be in a room with him and not feel it too. Was he depressed? Ill? Something was very wrong.
“I’m gonna take a bath,” Selina says, and I want to shout at her and make her turn around and press him to talk. It’s a purely selfish desire. I want the mersive story options to pop up and let me choose to pursue the conversation rather than backing off. I want to make her ask the questions raging inside of me. But this is just a messy, dissatisfying slice of reality that has already happened. She walks away from him.
“Five minutes until Milsom’s hour expires,” Tia says, and I sit up, rubbing my hands over my face to break the spell that the magic of voyeurism has cast upon me.
“Speed it up,” I say. I could report to her with just the news of this footage, but I want to go to her with something so fucking compelling there won’t be any debate about the case staying open.
At double speed, Selina undresses in the bedroom as her bath fills with expensive water. I’ve never had a bath in my life. Even at the Circle the only option was a water-conserving shower. She’s clearly making the most of her stay.
In the main room of the suite, Alejandro stays in front of the desk, arms crossed, staring at the carpet. Once Selina leaves the bedroom and goes into the en-suite, he closes the door to the bedroom and goes back to sit at the desk and rest his head in his hands. He’s pale and more inwardly focused than I ever remember him being. There’s a moment when his features crumple, and I adjust the playback speed and rewind back to the moment his face changed.
He is starting to weep.
My own throat tightens and I put a hand over my mouth, feeling like his distress is somehow leaching into me. Something terrible must have happened. In London? Some part of me, deep down, is frightened by this display of vulnerability in a man once god-like. If life can batter someone like Alejandro into the state he was in that night, what hope is there for the rest of us?
I still love him. Underneath the rage, the injustice, the betrayal, there is still that bright core of adoration he planted so deep inside. I want to touch his shoulder, make him look up at me like I looked up at him when he found me hiding in a storeroom, sobbing over the remains of Bear. My father had torn him open in front of me, pulled out the data chips and circuits housed inside and stamped on them as I’d screamed.
My father was a murderer. I was hysterical, clutching fake fur and stuffing and shattered silicon, mourning the death of my only friend. Bear hadn’t just been something to cuddle. Its AI had kept me alive when the printer broke down back at the house in Spain. It had tried to get the authorities to come, identifying my father’s neglect as harmful to my health, but the state was breaking down and everything was in chaos. “Don’t worry, Carlos,” his soft little synthvoice had said. “Even though the nice people can’t come to help, we can fix the problem together. Tell me what happens when you try to print your food.”
I’d been eating nothing but an oily slop with lumps of powder for days and it was making me ill. Bear talked to the house AI when it became apparent the printer’s usual diagnostics had broken down, and made it order replacement parts. Printer renewables were one of the few things still being delivered, as critical as water supply, with provision enshrined in basic human rights. Bear sat on a stool, watching as I opened the box I’d found on our doorstep, and told me how to fix it. I tried to share the bread I printed with him once it was fixed and he’d made sounds of enjoyment, the tiny motors in his mouth mimicking chewing.
After Alejandro came and spoke to my father, somehow bringing him back into the world, I clung to Bear when the house was emptied, in the taxi to the airport, on the plane as my father shivered and stammered in the seat next to me. I hadn’t let go of him until the day we arrived at the Circle and he was taken from me.
It took me two weeks to find where my father had hidden him. It took two minutes for my father to realize where I was and destroy him.
Alejandro’s hand on my shoulder made me look up into eyes that were filled with love and sadness. “Come outside, Carlos,” he said. “Bring him with you. Let’s find a place to lay him to rest and I will tell you a story under the stars.”
“Just us?”
“Just us.”
A movement on the screen pulls me away from the memory of him. Alejandro has calmed enough to wipe his cheeks and lean back in the chair. He looks up at the ceiling and then at the curtains. His lips are thin, pressed together by the decision being made, the one I can see in his eyes. The one that invites death in.
“Four minutes,” Tia says, and I realize my hand is still clamped over my mouth, as if I’m unknowingly trying to keep something trapped inside. I force myself to take a deep breath and look away from the screen.
“Pause footage.”
I don’t want to watch anymore. I know what he’s going to do and I can’t bear the thought of sitting here, separated by an impenetrable barrier of time and space, to witness his suicide. But there is no choice here. I will have to make a full report. I will have to form a clear narrative and be ready to answer questions. But I know that I’ll never be able to unsee what I’m about to and I need a moment to compose myself.
“Three minutes.”
Fuck.
“Open a channel to Milsom.”
“Are you about to amaze me, Carl?”
“I hope so, boss. I’ve managed to retrieve spy-cam footage recorded in the victim’s suite in the murder window.”
There’s the briefest pause. I clutch at the sense of her being surprised and I let the tiniest feeling of triumph bloom from it.
“Well, what does it show?”
I shake my head. She had been waiting for me to expand upon it. Milsom could never really be shocked into silence. “I’m still reviewing it. It took most of the hour to get it.” If I tell her now that it looks like it was suicide, loose ends or not, she’ll shut it down within another hour. “I need an extension.”
“Make a full report as soon as you can. I’ll expedite the data analysis on the hotel and cottage local nodes, and I understand the pathologist is wrapping up now too. You should be able to put it all together by early evening.”
I look at Tia’s time display; in the incident room it’s presented as a wall clock. “I’ve got another five hours, then?”
“Let me know if you need longer,” she says, and I feel the pressure easing slightly. “But the sooner this is wrapped, the better.”
There’s no encouragement, no acknowledgment of this breakthrough. She’s still angry at me but I don’t think it’s black-mark levels anymore. “I’ll do my best,” I say, and she ends the call.
Alejandro is frozen on the screen ahead of me, his face still turned toward the curtains. I make a note of the time stamp and enter a bullet point alongside it: contemplating suicide? Perhaps making the notes I’ll need for the report is the best way to pull myself back and look at this with a bit of professional distance.
Who the fuck am I kidding?
“Resume playback.”
I watch him get the sleeping pills from the bedroom, return to the other room and put the kettle on. He stares at the bottle as the water comes to the boil, perhaps wondering if it’s an easier route to take, perhaps still making up his mind. He prepares the tea for Selina and pours in the contents of three capsules.
He takes the cup into the bedroom, sits on the bed and waits for her to come out. He seems calmer now. He manages a smile for her when she emerges wrapped in a towel, water steaming off her skin, which is pink with heat.
“I made you some tea,” he says, handing the cup to her. He watches her drink, thirsty from the heat of the bath, and takes the cup from her. As she dries her hair he puts the cup in the en-suite, out of her sight.
“Perhaps we could go for a walk together tomorrow,” she says, when he comes back into the bedroom. When he doesn’t reply, she goes over to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. After a beat he returns the embrace, his face turned away from the camera, hers obscured by his arms. He kisses her hair, her hands run down his back and she kisses his lips, but her attempts at kindling some passion between them are soon ended by him breaking away.
She stands there, clutching the top of her towel as he pulls back the sheets.
“You look tired,” he says. “Why don’t you get into bed?”
She lets the towel drop, standing in front of him naked for a moment, but his eyes resist the pull of her body. Silently, she slips between the sheets, her eyelids already looking heavy. “I am pretty tired, actually,” she says, yawning.
He sits on the edge of the bed again, tucking her in paternally. She reaches toward him and he takes her hand, kisses it tenderly. “Good night, Selina,” he says as her head sinks into the pillow.
In less than a minute she is out cold. He presses his fingers against her neck, checking her pulse, before holding the palm of his right hand just above her mouth and nose to feel her breath. Satisfied, he leans over and kisses her once on the lips. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, and turns off the light.