The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  He told himself he still had a day left. Perhaps something would turn up tomorrow, something that would either confirm or disprove once and for all that the incident at the Amadeus had been a shared suicide rather than a joint homicide/Xenocide.

  13. Quaver

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, however, Parry made no further progress on the case, and all that turned up was Dr Erraji’s full report which, for all its depth of detail, shed scant new light on the matter. The medical examiner was now able to state that the Foreign clothing found with Daryl Henderson was genuine. A sample of the robe subjected to vaporisation in an acetylene flame had emitted the light-wavelength signature unique to Foreign cloth. As for the criminalists, they had uncovered a multitude of fingerprints all over the room, superimposed and subimposed, partial and latent and complete, far too many to make sense of. The only fingerprints on the gun, however, were those of the deceased.

  The transcript of the medical examiner’s postmortem monologue little improved Parry’s understanding of the case, even though he read through the text several times. He had not perused such a document in quite some time, but it came back to him quickly enough – the dryly macabre terminology of forensic pathology, that dark necrotic fustian. There they all were, his old friends autolysis, serology, and the triumvirate he used to refer to blackly as the Mortis Brothers – Rigor, Algor and Livor.

  For all its precision and detail, however, the transcript left him none the wiser as to the state of the mind that had inhabited the dead Siren’s dissected body. Erraji was unable to penetrate Henderson’s motives with his scalpel and his bone saw. He could make Y-incisions but not why-incisions.

  By afternoon’s end Parry had made up his mind once and for all to deem the deaths suicides. In a report on the investigation that ended up being ten pages long, he outlined the conversations with Professor Franchetti and Viola d’Indy that had helped him arrive at this conclusion, and he suggested that Quesnel might consider using the term shinju in her press statement, as it offered a factual, if somewhat exotic, precedent. Throughout, he was at pains to employ the most cautious syntax he could, entwining countless ifs and maybes and perhapses into the text until it ended up a veritable cat’s cradle of caveats and conditionals. He was sure the commissioner would take the hint and phrase her statement similarly.

  Three e-messages from Quesnel came through to his work board while he was putting the report together. The first was a polite nudge: “Any time you’re ready with that report, Jack, fire it my way.” The second was a sharp dig in the ribs: “I’m looking forward to seeing that report real soon, Jack.” The third was nothing short of an order: “The report, Jack. Now.” When that one arrived, Parry knew he had probably about quarter of an hour before Quesnel came down and visited him in person. Quickly he applied the finishing touches to what he had written, trimming away excess adjectives, honing, paring, tightening.

  The report lay ready on the screen. He summoned up Transmit mode and inputted “Internal/Quesnel”.

  The Send icon was highlighted. Parry’s forefinger hovered over the Enter key.

  Even now, when he could not afford to hesitate, he had misgivings. A vague, deep-seated unease, something that was almost a presentiment of unwelcome consequences, kept his finger from descending. He told himself he was being daft. He told himself he was being paranoid. What was the worst that could happen? Somehow, somewhere down the line, he would be proved wrong? He had covered his backside. He had given himself a sizeable margin for error. Maybe that was what was troubling him, the very elasticity of the report’s wording. There was something a bit snaky and evasive about his refusal to commit a definite, unqualified assertion to the page. Maybe he should have greater confidence in his opinions.

  But there was no time to rewrite, no time to revise. What was done was done. Should anything negative come of this, he would simply have to live with it.

  His finger stabbed down.

  14. Reveille

  THE MECHANISM OF the musical box lay spread out on the black velvet cloth like stars in the night sky, spangled constellations of cog wheels and damper wires and gearing and springs and screws. Close by, also on the living-room table, the musical box itself rested with its lid open, displaying its eviscerated interior. Next to it a pair of plastic figures – a dancing couple, each no taller than a matchstick – lay on their sides, locked in a ballroom embrace. When the musical box worked, the figures rotated together and, once every revolution, the male dancer would raise the female dancer aloft. As he did this, her legs, which were attached by pins, would quiver as if in delight.

  It was a Sunday afternoon. Parry’s father was hunched over the tabletop, bow-backed, frowning, a man intent. He and his son were alone in the house. Where Mum and Carol had gone, Parry had no idea. Out somewhere, he supposed. Shopping, he decided.

  Outside, visible both through the front windows and the glass doors that gave onto the back patio, there was dreary, insistent rain. The rain must have been falling for days, because the patio was awash, the rear lawn had become a swamp, and the branches of the cooking-apple tree were drooping and dripping heavily. There was time in the tick of the rain on glass, like a clock gone wrong, quarter-seconds passing at irregular speed. Parry could also hear, distantly, the shouts of a crowd, and a rumbling as of something immense and mechanical, something hideously huge, approaching.

  “You see, Jack?” said his father, not looking up, pointing to the musical box components with a pair of tweezers.

  Parry moved closer to the table.

  “You see what I’m talking about? Anyone can do it. It’s easy. Taking apart is easy. A few twists of the screwdriver and it all comes to pieces.”

  This was his father’s spare-time hobby, mending novelty musical boxes. He advertised in the local paper and in a specialist magazine that dealt with clockwork memorabilia, and from all over the country they would be sent to him, frozen and silent in padded parcels: ballerinas and alpine chalets and merry-go-rounds and trains on circular tracks and beer steins that played tunes when you lifted their lids, all of which, for a surprisingly modest fee, because he loved the work and would have done the work for love, he would make turn and tinkle and ting once more. He had a job on the production line at a nearby car plant, but when he wasn’t taking part in the assembly of automobiles, he would be disassembling and reassembling musical boxes. He would scrub rust off the chromatic tines of the comb with wire-wool; make sure the pinned brass barrel revolved properly; oil and if necessary replace the mainspring and the fan governor. With tiny elven tools grasped in his coarse car-builder’s hands, he would restore voices to these toys that had been struck dumb by age or corrosion or neglect. He was self-taught, having served an amateur apprenticeship on a wristwatch he had owned as a boy, dismantling it out of curiosity and forcing himself to figure out how to put it together again. It was rare that he received a musical box so broken that he could not repair it.

  “The difficult bit,” he told his son, “is rebuilding.”

  When is this, Parry wondered. How old am I?

  “That’s the trick of it,” his father went on. He was wearing his close-work spectacles. Their steel rims glinted in the dull postmeridian light. Their lenses flashed with reflected silver. His bald scalp glowed like polished pink marble. “Construction is always harder than destruction.”

  Somewhere nearby, a telephone was trilling. A fruity electric burble.

  “You might be able to see all the pieces,” Parry’s father said, waving a hand across the velvet cloth, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can fit them all together correctly.”

  The phone was still ringing. Someone ought to get it, Parry thought. Maybe I should.

  Still in the living room of his parents’ old house, where there was gold-on-white fleur-de-lys paper on the walls and where the back garden was now knee-deep in rainwater, Parry reached out an arm. He reached out an arm because he had realised that the phone that was ringing was the bedside extension in hi
s apartment in New Venice and it was early morning and he was still asleep, and as he fumbled for the receiver, his father and the wet Sunday afternoon and the dismantled musical box began to fade as though retreating down a long tunnel, hollowing into oblivion. Then Parry was sitting up in bed with the receiver to his ear, and the voice at the other end belonged to Sergeant Shankar from his district. Shankar and Avni alternated on the midnight-to-morning shift, each taking three days on, three days off.

  “Captain, so sorry to disturb you.”

  “What time is it, Ranjit?”

  “Coming up to six. You had better get down to the Ponte da Ponte.”

  “Why?”

  “A body, sir. A floater.”

  15. Bridge Passage

  THE SKY WAS overcast, the air warm and clammy like an infection. Rain had been forecast, and Parry could tell that, when it came, it would be one of those tepid, tiresome subtropical drizzles that wavered in and out of existence all day long.

  The concept of rain triggered a vague, dim inkling of a memory – something to do with the dream which Sergeant Shankar’s call had interrupted. But almost as soon as he had swung his legs out from under the bedcovers Parry had forgotten what the dream was about, and he knew that trying to remember now would be futile, not to mention a waste of mental energy, in which resource he was distinctly lacking at this early hour.

  He was standing at the midpoint of the Ponte da Ponte, which spanned one of New Venice’s subsidiary canals. Below, a pair of FPP officers in a launch were recovering the body of the drowned woman. She was floating belly-up, her face canted backwards below the water’s surface and her limp arms slowly wafting as though, pathetically, she was attempting to swim. Trapped air bloated her skirt, which pulsed like a jellyfish, revealing brief, unerotic glimpses of underwear. She was tethered in place by the buckle of one of her shoes, which had snagged on a clump of kelp that was flourishing on the bridge’s central pile.

  With the aid of boathooks the two FPP officers succeeded in disentangling her, then pulled her towards them and, with a shivery, inexpert roughness, hauled her into the launch. She rolled aboard, slithering over the gunwhales and fetching up at the officers’ feet with no more grace or dignity than a haul of fish. Face-down, drenched and slippery, her legs crossed, her arms akimbo, her hair in Medusan tangles, her head twisted at an ugly, ungainly angle, she lay. Her flesh was mottled pink and grey, the two colours together reminding Parry of poached salmon. Her skin looked fibrous and swollen, like sodden blotting paper.

  On the banks of the canal and on the balconies of the hotels that rose on either side, there were onlookers, perhaps a dozen of them all told. Their expressions, as far as Parry could make out, were of frank fascination. None of them was being furtive in their interest. None of them was flinching in horror. Perhaps they felt that because the drowned woman was dead she could not be offended by their stares. One onlooker – a stocky man on a ninth-floor balcony, wearing nothing but a pair of mauve Y-fronts – was even filming the event with a palmcorder. That would be something to show the folks back home, Parry thought sourly. Here’s us lounging by the poolside. Here’s us at Crystal Beach. Oh, and here’s a corpse being pulled from the water. And here’s us having cocktails at the...

  Shankar approached Parry along the bridge. He was a tubby Hindu with cottage-loaf cheeks and eyes that were tawny shading to orange. His face looked pale, which Parry put down to either the weak dawn light or the gruesome nature of the business that had brought them here, most likely a combination of the two.

  “Her neck is broken, I think,” Shankar said.

  Parry nodded. “She must have fallen.”

  “Or thrown herself.”

  “Or thrown herself.” Parry spoke the words distantly, dismissively. He was keen to believe that the woman’s death had been nothing more than an accident. She had slipped from a bridge, or stumbled off a boat, or been perched on the balustrade of a balcony and inadvertently overbalanced. Fate alone had been responsible. No human volition had been involved.

  “From some considerable height, I would say,” Shankar added, peering up at the overshadowing cliffs of hotel as though by some sixth sense he might be able to pinpoint the very spot from which the woman had plummeted. Parry, by contrast, looked down, scanning the torpid turquoise waters of the canal, as if an answer were more likely to be found where the woman had finished up.

  As carefully as parents putting a child to bed, the FPP officers in the launch draped a tarpaulin over the body.

  And then Parry heard Shankar utter a soft, surprised “Oh.”

  He glanced round at the sergeant, raising first his head, then an eyebrow.

  Shankar was holding up a hand, pointing. “I may be mistaken, sir, but isn’t that...?”

  “Isn’t that what?”

  “Look, sir.”

  Parry followed the line of Shankar’s finger. He needed spectacles for reading, there was nothing wrong with his long vision.

  “You mean that bloke with the palmcorder?” he said, and tutted. “I know. Some people.”

  “No, sir. One floor down from him, four balconies along to the left.”

  Parry tracked accordingly. He squinted.

  “I can’t see what you’re referring to.”

  Then he could.

  Through the balustrade of the balcony that Shankar had indicated, Parry made out was what looked like a pile of discarded laundry. It might have been a swimming towel that had been hung up to dry on the balustrade and slithered off ... except that the material was golden and, even on this grey morning, glistered.

  “Which hotel is that?” Parry asked, in a low, hard voice.

  “The Debussy, sir.”

  Three minutes later Parry and Shankar were in the lobby of the Debussy, demanding a master key-unit from the concierge. Two minutes after that they were up on the eighth floor, moving swiftly along a corridor, counting doors as they went. The odd-numbered rooms to their left were those with a view of the canal and the Ponte da Ponte. So intent were they on locating the correct door that when a thickset man in a hotel bathrobe came sauntering past with his hands behind his back, they paid him little attention. Parry noted the man peripherally and thought there was something faintly familiar about him, but he had more important things on his mind.

  They reached the seventh door from the end of the corridor – the door which, by their reckoning, belonged to the room on whose balcony they had spotted what appeared to be a Foreign robe. The room was number 879.

  “Get ready to apologise,” Parry said to Shankar. “We may be about to wake some poor bugger up.” He knew, though, with a dull, aching certainty, that the room itself would be empty and that the remains of its erstwhile Foreign occupant were lying outside. And the drowned woman? Had she, too, been in this room? Something – some instinctive dread – said she had.

  He knocked. No reply from within.

  The key-unit chirruped and the door opened.

  Inside, there was Foreign-scale furniture and hotel-perfect tidiness.

  The curtains were open.

  On the balcony lay the Foreign robe.

  And on the room’s dressing table there was a small evening-bag with a long thin strap, the kind a woman might carry to a gala function or a nightclub. Parry picked it up and opened it. It contained lipstick, a powder compact, a panty-liner in its paper packet, a passport card, and an old-fashioned velvet drawstring purse in which there was both an IC card and a few Foreign jewels.

  Parry had only caught a brief glimpse of the face of the drowned woman, but as soon as he saw the photo on the passport card he had no doubt.

  The drowned woman and the woman in the photo were one and the same.

  16. Interpretation

  AT FIRST, PARRY was suffused with a deep and grating sense of injustice. That this should have happened twice in his district within the space of a few days was outrageous – a personal insult, almost. He felt like someone whose home has been burgled and then, while there
are boards still up on the broken window, burgled again.

  These feelings soon subsided and his professionalism reasserted itself. He looked again at the passport card.

  “Dagmar Pfitzner,” he said. “German citizen. Age 38.”

  “A Siren?” said Shankar.

  “Hard to believe otherwise. One of those rare Sirens who carry personal effects on them. Bet you anything she’s registered, too. When it comes to being law-abiding, the Germans can teach us all a thing or two.”

  Parry returned the passport card to the evening-bag, then went to the windows, which were wide open. He stepped out onto the balcony in order to inspect the Foreign remains. The individual items – robe, mask, gloves – were identical to those at the Amadeus but strewn in a different pattern. One of the gloves was stretched out flat on the balcony tiles, as though the Foreigner had been reaching for something when it died. The other was tangled in amongst the folds of the robe. The mask lay in one corner, and Parry pictured it rolling there like a head severed by an axeman, fetching up on its side to face the blank wall.

  Grasping the balustrade rail, he glanced over. It was a straight drop to the canal, fifty metres or more. Down there the FPP launch was pulling away from the Ponte da Ponte with its cargo of dead human. The boat was small enough for him to have blocked it from sight with a hand held out flat.

  As he watched the launch chunter off, he heard a disturbance within the room behind him. Shankar was addressing someone loudly: “Please, sir, I must ask you to leave. This is a crime scene. You are not allowed to do that in here.”

  Parry turned.

  The man Shankar was talking to was the man they had passed in the corridor, and now Parry realised why he had seemed familiar. He was also the man who had been filming with a palmcorder from the floor above, the man with the mauve underpants. He had the palmcorder in his hand now, and it was trained on Parry and the Foreign garments. Shankar was tapping the man’s shoulder and continuing to remonstrate with him, but the man blithely kept on filming, panning between Parry and the Foreign remains, adjusting focus with a twitch of his forefinger.