Later we turned, inevitably, to the problem of money, but even in this she was optimistic. She told me that the next day, before she flew home, the theatre would be paying her the fee, and she had already arranged for it to be settled in cash, in thalers.
I said: ‘Spoder stayed for dinner this evening. I thought he would never go.’
‘Did you make him an omelette? He likes eggs.’ She was invoking a private joke: Spoder invariably said he was not hungry, but ate anything that was given him. Jo always said we should keep eggs on hand, a quick fix, an easy dish to come up with for him at short notice.
‘You left a lump of cheese in the fridge. And there were some eggs. I’ll go out tomorrow and buy some more food. I’ve enough cash for that.’
We talked until late, and when we finally said goodnight I was feeling happier than I had for several days. I went around the house, following a recent habit: making sure every window, door and screen was locked. I was irritated with myself for doing so, but I did it anyway.
I glanced at the local news headlines on TV. The financial crisis in Raba City was still the headline news. This time it was about the suspected cause of the problem, a software glitch, an attack by one or more hackers, now definitely believed to be based in Raba City or close by.
It was after midnight, but I was still wide awake. I picked up the papers Spoder had left for me, and began reading.
23
The False Inspector Harsent
The account of Det. Sjt Enver Jeksid (ret’d)
The hotel was in a side street, close to the harbour. It had three storeys and faced directly on to a square. A street carrying traffic ran on the far side of the square. Behind were some empty outbuildings and a yard where rubbish was thrown. A rambling flowering plant grew out of control over the main facade, obscuring some of the windows. Inside, the building smelled of sweat, old piss, stale tobacco smoke.
The place was a dump but it was good enough for what I wanted. I paid in advance for two nights but the guy on the desk gave me no receipt. I had checked in under the false name I was using, so I didn’t complain. He asked me to sign a register: the page he gave me was free of other signatures. I wrote in Det. Sjt Waller Alman, Dearth Police. I flashed the warrant card. The desk guy barely glanced at it: it was a fake, but a good one, good enough for his glance. Good enough also for a closer look. I had made sure of that.
I carried my bag up two flights of stairs. The lock on the room door was loose and inside only one light bulb worked. The bed smelled of other people.
I left the room and walked around the town. It was my first visit to Salay Ewwel. The night was warm but a mist drifted in from the sea and a light rain fell. The streets glistened. I stayed in the shadows of buildings, away from the streetlights. All lights were haloed by the misty fall. It was a town for sailors, drug dealers, the rootless young, the lost, the vengeful. A town to die in. I found a diner where I could eat standing. I kept my collar turned up.
I walked some more until I came to the bar that Hari Harsent ran, the one he used as a front. I clocked it from a distance, noted where the street doors were. I couldn’t go in – if he was there Harsent would recognize me. I walked past several times, peering in through the small windows, mosaics with coloured glass. I rehearsed walking away from it, looking for routes through narrow streets. Afterwards I went to a movie house, but left before the end of the main feature. I’d slept through most of it.
The next afternoon I went to the police firing range. I had to sign for the piece, show my warrant card. Again I used the name Det. Sjt Waller Alman. The woman at the desk barely glanced at the card or the signature. She issued me with the standard semi-automatic, the same as the one used by most cops, the same as the one I kept at home. The serial number engraved on the barrel was recorded against Alman’s name.
The rule was the same here as at other police ranges, and loosely applied. We were all cops. Alman was recognized as a serving officer. After training with the weapon I would be able to check it out for official use for a fixed period afterwards. I specified two days. No questions.
I paid the deposit. I bought three clips of the range ammo, then went with an instructor. We both put on eye guards. I wore white cotton gloves. The instructor fired a few rounds to check my piece, watched me take five shots, then she left me. She muttered that she could tell I was a good shot. My right shoulder is weaker now, but I had trained to the level of senior marksman. She wouldn’t know that. She was right – I’m still good.
There were guys in the lanes on each side of mine. I guessed they were also cops. The shooter next to me was a rookie. His shots were missing because of the recoil. He hadn’t yet learned how to brace. He had an instructor showing him and he was learning well. The cartridge casings from his gun flew away from him, some landing close to where I was standing. A sign on every lane said spent cases must not be touched. I saw staff who cleaned up every time a lane became empty, before the next shooter took over.
When I was finished the target was spindled back to me. I needed it to collect back the first half of my deposit. As the target arrived I turned towards it, bent down and scooped up a small handful of the rookie’s casings. I held them in my gloved hand until I had the target in the other. Then I found a natural way of sliding the cases into my pocket. There were four. I might need all of them but one should be enough.
I went back to the desk, handed in the target, picked up my deposit and left. I was wearing the gun in the holster provided by the range. I dumped the cotton gloves in a trash can in the street. The bin smelled of rotting food and some kind of sickly perfume.
I went to a shopping complex and found a place that sold cheap clothes. I bought a shirt, trainer pants with deep pockets, slip-on shoes, more pairs of cotton gloves. I had everything bagged by the assistant at the check-out. I never touched any of them, except through the wrappings.
I walked back to the hotel. It was still daylight. The room felt airless, midges hovered in a thick cloud outside the window. The rain had finally ceased in the middle of the day and since then the temperature in the streets had risen. With the window open the room was filled with the sound of cars, motorbikes, music and voices. I lay on the bad-smelling bed for two hours, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. It was crazed with hairline cracks. Sunset came quickly and darkness fell. I was calm. Everything was ready.
I took a clip of ammo from my bag and slotted it into the handle of the gun. Ten rounds, standard issue. One shot would be enough. Maybe two would be necessary.
I practised raising the weapon, clasping it between both hands, taking aim, bracing against the recoil. I had been carrying a weapon most of the time I was on the force, but had never discharged it in anger. Dearth was free of violent crime, of all crime. Like the others I went twice every month to the local firing range. Like the others I kept my gun cleaned and oiled, ready for use. But I had never shot anyone before.
What else could go wrong? The gun was prepared. I was prepared with the gun.
There would be no witnesses. Hari’s undercover deployment was temporarily in suspense, which was why I had chosen this time. I knew where he would be, what he would be doing, what time it would end.
The sound of gunfire at the moment of action? Police automatics are semi-silenced. The barrel has two baffles in an extra chamber. Official policy: weapons must not unduly alarm or disturb people near by. The discharge was loud, but not as loud as most people think a gun sounds. Hari’s combined office and sleeping room was above a music bar. There was live rock music three nights a week – this was one of the nights. I had checked the band: they were loud and used pyrotechnics in their act. Pyrotechnics make a noise too.
Clothes: I would change at the last minute. (I glanced at my wristwatch.)
The rookie’s cartridge cases I had picked up at the range: ready.
Alibi: no one knew I was on Salay Ewwel. I had travelled as Waller Alman and would fly back to Tristcontenta tomorrow under the same name. If th
e traffic copter was in use, I could blag a ride back to town in that. I was rostered for duty every day I was away from Dearth, but I had volunteered for the standby list, as everyone did from time to time. I had done this before. Patrols went out, transgressions were dealt with, the reserve was never called in. By law there had to be an extra officer on standby readiness, but the call never came.
That’s where I was: on standby at home in Dearth City. Everyone on the station would confirm it.
Mutability? The curse of every investigation on Dearth. All detectives were on their guard, because evidence could change, or could be said to have changed. We had to become experts in reading it. Dearth Island was positioned on a geological fault above several gravitational anomalies. Mutability could kick in without warning, because of local effects. Things happened. A power spike usually, but often faulty IT on some nearby corporate system, an obsolescent memory card on someone’s washing machine, a hotel door unlocked incorrectly, a personal computer loading bootleg software.
Nothing like that was a risk on Salay. There was only a single geological fault, and that was beneath the central lagoon. Gravity normal. Nothing would change. What had just happened would always lead to what would happen next. Reality could be trusted.
But I remained aware. The old Dearth habit.
I paced around the squalid hotel room. The moments dripped by like the runnels of sweat inside my shirt.
Jeksid discontinued.
I turned away from Jeksid’s account, rubbed my eyes. It was late, and my mouth was dry. Jeksid was starting to tire me. I ran a glass of cold water, wondering if I should close down for the night and read the rest of what he had written tomorrow.
Spoder had summed it up.
‘Who are these people?’ he had said, in a rare for him display of feeling. This sudden vehemence had startled me more than the remark itself. I thought he took these old incidents more seriously than I did, but at that moment he had caught exactly the same feeling as mine. Frejah Harsent in her souped-up car and uttering her implausible warnings, now this ex-policeman proud of his gun skills, going about a law enforcement job in a place where there was allegedly no crime, where he carried a weapon everywhere but had never fired it, bragging about being a senior marksman. The Dearth habit of distrusting reality, because it was believed to change.
And it was all long in the past. The Antterland twins, one of them murdered fifteen years ago, the other five years later, now this about Hari Harsent, nine years ago. Who knew anything about these people when they were alive, who cared now about who had killed them? They all seemed cut off from the flow of life, from family and lovers, even people who merely cared about them. Only the fact that they were murdered, and that the murders appeared to be linked, made them more interesting in death than they had been in life. Their fates survived in closed police files and confessions that were suddenly produced. Who are these people, and who were they?
The novelist in me – I could not help seeing it this way, because that is what I do, what I am – simply could not respond to these people. Mystery and crime novels are often thought to be entirely about plot, but in reality like all novels they are driven by character. People are depicted as having real lives, with complexities, worries and satisfactions that have little to do with the main story.
I knew almost nothing about Lew Antterland, beyond the fact he was murdered. He owned a baseball bat, he had a lot of money, he had a twin brother. (But what was his job? Where had the money come from? Was he in a relationship with a partner? Why had he moved from Dearth? Why was he killed?) His brother Dever was slightly more interesting: a small-time magician, and the likely killer of Lew. What would drive a skilled magician into murdering his own identical twin? How did he first become interested in magic, and why? Dever too had money, but it was buried in a secret trust fund. (Who later killed him? Where had the money come from?)
Frejah Harsent had been intriguing for a while, but the more I knew her the less I thought of her. She depicted surfaces of herself, not the deeper reality. She was involved in every one of the murders. This Jeksid: I had learned nothing about him that made me visualize him, see him as a person. For now, in his account, especially in his account, he came over as a set of actions and intentions in ways I had read a score of times in second-rate thrillers. No imaginative spark. A good editor would send any description of him back, saying that the character needed fleshing out more.
I looked back at the last page I had read: Jeksid was describing his familiarity with the effects of mutability, but reflecting that they would not be a problem on Salay. The people I had met from Dearth all seemed obsessed with this subject – perhaps they had a right to be. So maybe we who lived on Salay should be more sensitive to it?
Reading about mutability again had raised in me the uncomfortable feeling that I knew more about mutability than I would admit, even to myself. The long-term stability of the financial sector on Raba, much as I loathed it, was an undeniable fact of life on this island. Yet the present devastating collapse of major parts of the sector had followed soon after I played around with the software I discovered on the hotel key card.
A mutability safeguard – what was the harm in that? What indeed?
The authorities had been saying for a long time that the banks’ secure computer systems had been hacked into somehow. Was I indirectly responsible for that? Even directly?
Money and high finance were a system of belief. The price of shares rose or fell, not only because a corporation was doing well or badly, but because enough investors expected it to do well or badly. Or thought it would. Or were willing to gamble that it would. It was an activity that was purely abstract, psychological. They speculated with opportunities and options. They never saw or handled money – they just lived for the idea of it.
I was a hands-on user of money: I earned it, spent it, lost it, saved some of it. In this I was a true citizen serf. I had no belief in money unless I could see it or count it, an entirely practical matter.
The onset of mutability was a kind of belief system similar to high finance. There were practical effects and consequences (the events were real), but afterwards only the results counted, so no one believed that the process had really happened (the events became abstract).
Did my hands-on spending of my earnings, and that of hundreds of thousands of citizen serfs like me, eventually build up to such a total that our spending gained a psychological dimension in the glass and steel towers of the financial district? That my weekly buying of groceries encouraged or discouraged those who would run a pension scheme, or an insurance policy, or who were moneylenders? So that money was both real (actual spending) and abstract (a belief system)?
Feeling stiff with fatigue I went to my study and booted my desktop. When everything had loaded I looked for the icon on my desktop called Mutability Safeguard. Then I remembered I had deleted it. Only the icon had disappeared – the program was still installed. I located it, opened it and waited for it to load. I entered the password. I went to the main menu.
At the top there was a message: Salay Raba, Financial Services Protocols – Mutability Safeguards installed. Beneath that it said: Upgrade available. Install now? [y/n]
I hastily clicked on No.
I noticed another pulldown menu headed Settings. Among its many options was: Remove Salay Raba, Financial Services Protocols – Mutability Safeguards? [y/n]
I clicked on Yes.
My hard disc was humming as it worked busily. I was holding the key card from the hotel in case I was ordered to re-engage the ‘source’, but it seemed the program could be uninstalled without it. There was no sign of the slow-moving green bar at the bottom of the monitor display, glacially reporting percentages. I was yawning, my eyes were tired.
At last the message came: Salay Raba, Financial Services Protocols Uninstalled.
In the morning I ate breakfast at the long table, Jeksid’s handwritten notes lying across from me. I fed Barmi the cat. In my study I se
nt a brief email to Jo, letting her know I was up and about. I read other emails, and looked at my regular social media feeds. I did not look at any of the online news services. I did not open my bank’s website.
I returned to the kitchen/diner, sat at the long table and carried on reading Jeksid’s account from the place where I had stopped, after his unappealing image of the runnels of sweat.
Jeksid, continued:
I was ready to go. I first removed my street clothes, then put on one of the pairs of cotton gloves. I removed each garment in turn from the store’s plastic bag, cutting off identifying labels: size, manufacturer, country of origin, laundry instructions. When all the garments were ready I pulled them on over my own underclothes.
I made sure the safety catch was on, then slipped the gun into the deep pocket of the trainer pants. In the other pocket I put the four empty bullet cases I had taken from the firing range, then thrust in the rest of the cotton gloves on top. I removed my own shoes and put on the slip-ons. I glanced at my watch.
It could still go wrong.
Transgressions in Dearth City were often solved because matters ran out of the control of the perpetrator. The act of doing something wrong can break down your reserves, your sense of cool. In the heat of the moment you think nothing of impulsively punching someone in the face, but moments later, when you’ve done it and your victim is lying huddled on the floor, perhaps with blood oozing, and you know you’ve really done it because your hand is hurting where contact was made – your understanding of the violent act has changed.
Human responses, emotional and mental, cannot be controlled or predicted. Transgressors give themselves away. Their behaviour changes – some become defensive and guilty, other toughen up, act more brazenly.
The Evidence Page 23