Proximity

by Jem Tugwell

  Jesus. I dropped my hands onto my knees and gulped air to stop myself throwing up. Mary wasn’t chopped up like Alan Kane, but somehow, he had seemed less real cut into pieces. Mary was whole and hanging. A leather belt cut across her neck and her head hung at an unnatural angle. Her painted toes brushed the floor.

  I shut my eyes, but I could still see her purple bloated face. I shook my head to try and clear the image, but I couldn’t. Mary still floated in front of me.

  The forensic sweep was in full flow, so I had to stay in the hall and wait as the drones buzzed around, landed on things, swabbed them and photographed the whole room.

  ‘The forensic checks and data gathering are complete,’ said the forensic controller finally. ‘It’s all yours.’

  I forced myself upright and leant against the door frame as the drones left the room a few inches above my head.

  I could see Mary’s taped ankles and wrists.

  You have to go in there.

  It took all my strength to push my foot over the threshold and into the room.

  Mary’s blood was smeared around her nose, which was bent at an unnatural angle. Tape covered the lower part of her face. I couldn’t look into her glassy eyes. The rest of her face was a dark, red mess.

  I stepped through the bathroom doorway and cringed as I accidentally bumped the door, which caused Mary to bang against it. The belt holding her up had nails driven through it and into the door to take her weight.

  This obviously wasn’t suicide or even an accident. This was a cold-blooded and callous murder, and Clive had been the last person to see her.

  He couldn’t explain it as a crime of passion. He would have used a knife or heavy object. Something that came to hand. This was cruel and deliberate. The open shirt and knickers done for humiliation. I felt I didn’t know Clive at all. How could he be capable of this?

  I shuffled backwards to avoid confronting the thought that flashed through my mind: Better Mary than Mum.

  ***

  I called Bhatt and she answered immediately. ‘Well?’

  ‘You’ve seen the drone images, ma’am?’

  ‘Yes. Is it as bad as it looks?’

  ‘Worse, ma’am.’ I was struggling to keep my voice even.

  ‘Take your time, Zoe,’ Bhatt said in a kinder voice than I thought possible.

  ‘She has a broken nose and has been hanged. She’s all taped up. There’s no way she could have done it herself.’ I sobbed.

  Bhatt waited in silence, giving me a chance to recover.

  ‘It looks like she was left on her tiptoes with the belt tight around her neck. She only died when her strength failed. She must have been terrified and in agony. The bastard left her to die.’

  ‘Who was there?’ Bhatt asked, but I knew that she knew the answer.

  ‘Only Mary. The signal trace shows that Clive left before she died. He must have strung her up and then left her.’ How could he?

  I cried then, sobbing and gasping, the tears rolling down my cheeks as I imagined Mary’s last minutes. The pain and desperation. The final inevitable panic. Her white knickers caught on the tape by her ankles could almost be a flag of surrender.

  Again, the guilty thought: Mum’s OK, but it could have been her.

  I sniffed, rubbed at my wet cheeks and tried to stand up.

  ‘Zoe, are you OK?’ Bhatt was still connected and must have heard all my weakness. Shit. This wasn’t the way to impress her.

  ‘I’m OK, ma’am,’ I said, but I knew that I wasn’t.

  ‘The evidence says that Clive strung her up and left her to die,’ Bhatt said.

  ‘Yes.’ It seemed completely out of character, but the iMe signal didn’t lie – not in Clive’s case. There’s no way he could get around the technology. He didn’t have a Suppressor and certainly couldn’t make one.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ Bhatt said. ‘I was a guest at their wedding. Mary was lovely.’

  Bhatt’s tone hardened. ‘Get over to Clive’s. I’ll meet you there. I’ll send Uniforms and full forensics. We’re going to put him away for a long time for this.’

  48

  DI Clive Lussac

  Colours wheeled and morphed into crazy shapes that turned in on themselves, twisting and writhing like a pit of multicoloured snakes. One minute I was being carried on a cloud, the next I was walking through a field of corn, hand in hand with Sophia, with the sun warming my neck.

  I watched a dark spot in the distance getting closer and turning into a black cloud. All my secret fears were in the cloud. The cloud buzzed with terrifying intensity as it chased me. The cloud turned into black flies as big as my hands, swarming around me. I turned to run but I was stuck to the ground. The corn was twisted around my legs and held me tight.

  I glanced at Sophia. She was backing away from me. I reached and called for her. She mouthed my name, but I heard Bhatt’s voice. Sophia’s face morphed and whirled into Bhatt’s. The flies pressed down on me.

  ***

  I woke with a start and tried to open my eyes. I could feel something heavy on my chest.

  My eyes seemed to be stuck together. I panicked, rubbing my hands against them to free them.

  It didn’t work. I needed to use my fingers to push my eyelids open but, when I looked around, I thought I was still in the dream. Bhatt stood over me, and a big black fly tramped around on my chest.

  I shut my eyes and reopened them, but the scene remained the same.

  I was in my flat and Bhatt was at the end of my bed. She looked at me with such disgust that it confused me. Zoe stood next to her, but it wasn’t the normal, happy Zoe. This was some angry, shaking, furious version of her, and what scared me was that the violence was directed straight at me.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ I croaked. My throat was dry and hoarse.

  ‘Be quiet, Inspector,’ Bhatt said. ‘We’re not finished.’

  Inspector? She never called me that.

  The fly on my chest moved again, and my brain finally rationalised it for what it was. A forensic drone. It shuffled over to my wrist and extended a long, clear probe. The probe touched my wrist, with the end sitting on a vein. With a flash of silver, a needle shot down the tube and I felt a prick of pain as it went through my skin. The tube filled red as the drone took a sample of my blood.

  A buzzing to my left dragged my eyes from the drone. A second drone was in the bathroom, hovering over the sink with its blue scanning laser tracking over the handles and walls. It crabbed to the right, approaching the wall slightly above the taps on one side of the sink. The laser snapped off, and the drone extended a DNA probe and touched the wall with it. It stayed like that for a few seconds and then retracted the probe and sped into the bedroom to hover by the door. The one on my chest joined it, waited for four others, and then they flew out of the room in formation.

  I looked at Zoe. Hoping for some flash of understanding, but she glared at me.

  What have I done?

  I could see the glow of Zoe’s HUD change as she read something. She shook her head and spat the word, ‘Bastard.’

  Bhatt looked at her and Zoe said, ‘The DNA from his sink is a match to Mary’s blood.’

  What were they talking about? Why would Mary’s blood be in my sink?

  I couldn’t make sense of Bhatt’s words: ‘Clive Lussac, I am arresting you for the murder of Mary Lussac…’

  ***

  They had left me in Interview Room One for the last hour.

  I couldn’t have killed Mary. Even after the divorce and everything else, I still cared about her.

  I tried to use my HUD, but it was disabled. Everything I tried resulted in my little red Buddy shaking his head and waving a finger at me. The banner he rolled out flashed ‘Access Denied’.

  I’d done it enough times to people and watched their reaction. The young ones took it the worst. They had never really been without the constantly connected world in their head. They looked more scared of being offline than charged with whateve
r crime they had committed.

  I had to sit there and wait.

  ***

  After what seemed like a lifetime, the door opened.

  Zoe came in, her suppressed anger visible in her clenched fists. She was followed by DS Martin Adams and the duty solicitor dressed in a shiny suit. Martin and I had worked together over the years – Bhatt must have forced him to help – bad back or not. He wore a sheepish I don’t really want to be here grin as he hobbled to the desk with one hand pressed at the small of his back to ease the pain.

  Chairs scraped back on the floor as Zoe and Martin planted themselves opposite me – a wave of suppressed hostility in the simple actions. The solicitor sat next to me. Zoe leant forward, elbows on the table, glaring. Martin fidgeted in his chair, unable to get comfortable. He went through the procedural preliminaries, and then Zoe said, ‘Why did you murder Mary?’

  I didn’t say anything. I heard the words, but my brain couldn’t process an answer. My blank eyes looked back at them.

  ‘Are you refusing to answer?’ Zoe said.

  There had been such emphasis on the word murder. She made it sound like a terrible, cold-blooded death.

  ‘It wasn’t me. Whatever happened, I wasn’t there.’ I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out.

  Martin laughed, and Zoe rolled her eyes in disbelief.

  ‘Clive, come on,’ he said. ‘You of all people couldn’t have said that, could you?’

  How many people had I laughed at over the years for saying exactly that? It was a stupid defence with iMe knowing where everyone was, but what else could I say?

  ‘Look, I remember getting home and starting to get ready to go out last night, then I remember waking up with drones and police in my bedroom.’ As a defence, I knew how pathetic it was. ‘I can’t recall anything in between.’

  ‘Really?’ Zoe said. ‘Really? That’s your story?’

  She blanked the wall in the room and threw up the floor plan of my empty flat.

  ‘This is just before you got home yesterday evening. After I dropped you off,’ Zoe said. ‘You say you can’t remember but we can show you exactly what happened.’

  She said, ‘Play, fifteen,’ and the time stamp in the corner of the wall started counting forward in fifteen second intervals.

  A signal dot appeared at my door.

  ‘Pause,’ Zoe said.

  She touched a spot in front of her face: the signal dot on the wall pulsed once and an ID window popped up with my details.

  ‘Do you agree that is your signal, Clive?’ Martin said.

  What else could I say but, ‘Yes?’

  I watched the display wall and my signal moving on it in brain-numbed shock as Zoe talked me through my arrival, washing, getting clothes from the wardrobe, sitting on the bed a while, and then leaving.

  Her face glowed red with anger as she talked me through the car stopping outside the restaurant.

  I couldn’t believe that I was late for my date with Sophia and then driven off. That date was going to be special.

  Zoe stopped the signal with me outside an apartment block. ‘Do you recognise this address?’

  My mouth went dry. Oh shit, no. It couldn’t be.

  ‘I didn’t… I wasn’t…’ I tried, but it would be the same lame denials. ‘It’s Mary’s building.’

  No. No. No, repeated in my head as I watched on.

  ‘This is where you punched Mary,’ Zoe said. ‘There is blood splatter on the floor. Then you went to find her tools and came back and dragged her to the bedroom. Then… then…’

  Zoe stopped and gulped and couldn’t go on. She shook her head and concentrated on her breathing.

  Martin touched Zoe on the back to comfort her. ‘Do you want a break?’ he said.

  She shook her head and Martin picked up the story. ‘You got into bed together.’

  Mary would never have done that, I thought. Once, but not now. There’s no way she did that voluntarily.

  It wasn’t going to help me if I vocalised my thoughts, so I said nothing.

  Next, my signal and Mary’s went to the bathroom door. Her signal stayed in the bedroom and I stood close in front of Mary.

  ‘What did you do there?’ Martin asked.

  I shook my head and shrugged. I only had a gaping black hole in my memory.

  I looked down at the table, not sure where else to look. Definitely not at Zoe. I couldn’t take the disgust in her eyes.

  The colour of the reflection in the tabletop changed, and it made me look up at the display wall. I stared at the image of Mary, hanging and broken. Her eyes, the eyes I had gazed lovingly into for so many years, bulged. All the life in them gone.

  I heaved and threw out a violent and noisy jet of vomit, which pooled an acid yellow on the concrete floor. The stench of it filled the room.

  I hadn’t done that. I couldn’t do that. Not to Mary. Could I? Had I blacked it out? Was I that sick?

  ‘Recognise your work?’ Martin said, his hand over his nose to block the smell out. ‘Some pervy experiment?’

  ‘No. No,’ I said with the taste of vomit in my mouth.

  ‘Could Mary have done that to herself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who else is there? Who is the only person who could have done it to her?’

  ‘Don’t answer that,’ the solicitor said, but I had to face it: the data allowed only one answer.

  ‘Me.’

  49

  DI Clive Lussac

  I was doomed.

  They dumped me back in my cell and left me to stew. Left me to come to terms with my inevitable guilt. But I couldn’t have left Mary there, fighting the cramp and pain in her calves and toes, the muscles eventually failing and her body weight tightening the belt that last, terrible bit.

  I knew I didn’t do it, but the evidence was all there: the signal trace and a speck of Mary’s blood on my wall from when I had washed her off my hands. What other conclusion could a jury make?

  I sobbed and sobbed. Part grief for Mary, part fear for what would happen next.

  I needed to work it all out. I thought of Suppressors and encrypted signals. I thought about Mary, replaying the good times and glossing over the bad. Were my instincts about Art right? How did Esteban fit in? How did Mary’s murder link to Karina and Alan? I bounced the formless thoughts around. Grasped at stupid ideas, then crushed them. I was helpless in here.

  I spent all the desperate, dark hours of the night trying to work how to prove it wasn’t me.

  ***

  After the lunch they gave me congealed next to my untouched breakfast, I made a lot of noise, screaming and shouting until they agreed. Now I was back in Interview Room One. The vomit was gone, but it had etched a light grey stain into the floor. The smell was worse now: a heady mixture of vomit and disinfectant that stung my eyes.

  Zoe and Martin were in their seats. Their noses crinkled against the smell as they tried not to think about the content of the airborne particles hitting their sinuses. I knew Bhatt would be behind the wall watching everything.

  Last night should have been a pleasurable first date with Sophia. It was meant to lead to a second date, not to me in prison for the violent murder of my ex-wife. It would be a brutal way to spend the rest of my days.

  I had one chance before they processed me and I disappeared into prison for the rest of my life.

  ‘Well. What did you want to say?’ Zoe said, with no diminishing of her hostility.

  I took a breath. They might laugh at my brilliant idea. Martin would be too cynical but maybe I could convince Zoe. I needed her to save me.

  I had rehearsed what I wanted to say, but the pressure of my one chance chased the words from my mind.

  My mute mouth gaped half-open. They must have seen me as a gormless fool.

  They shook their heads and started to rise.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  They resettled, and I found my missing words.

  ‘Please, Zoe, Martin,’
I said, and glanced at the wall. ‘Chief Superintendent, please take a minute and look at me. You all know me. You know I couldn’t do this.’

  They stared back at me. This wasn’t working.

  ‘OK, OK… Forget that.’

  Here goes nothing.

  ‘Just do your job properly. Look and think and do some real police work instead of believing iMe.’

  They bristled at the insult but didn’t start to get up.

  ‘I didn’t do it, so there are two things you need to do.’

  I paused for effect.

  ‘Number one,’ I said. ‘I must have been drugged. Your drone took a blood sample. Get it analysed for any drugs that would knock me out.’

  Now the key point. The one I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of before. Finally, in the bleakness of the cell with tears on my face and dried vomit on my shoe, my old detective’s brain had started working again.

  It was the answer to everything. It explained Karina and Alan and Mary.

  ‘Number two,’ I said.

  50

  DC Zoe Jordan

  ‘Number two,’ Clive said. ‘What’s the opposite of a Suppressor?’

  He wore a pained expression, like he was willing us to know what he meant and not understanding why we weren’t in perfect sync with him.

  I didn’t get it, and it must have been obvious on my face. Martin said nothing.

  ‘OK, look at it this way.’ His tone reminded me of my algebra teacher explaining simultaneous equations for the tenth time. ‘Remember when we used a Suppressor and went off-grid. No one knew where we were.’

  ‘Yes, of course I remember,’ I said.

  ‘All of our suspects had signals when Karina and Alan went missing and again when their bodies were found, didn’t they?’

  ‘Not Esteban,’ I said.

  ‘OK, not Esteban.’ He seemed exasperated at the interruption. ‘But all the others. Yes?’

  I said ‘yes’ to let him finish his argument. I would pick it apart at the end.

  ‘And the killer had to wear a Suppressor to abduct Karina and dump her body. Otherwise, we’d know he was there, yes?’