by Tom Pollock
Ingrid looks at me sharply. “Unsolved murders? Why?”
In my mind’s eye, I see a tornado of autumn leaves, a perfect Archimedes spiral, three bodies falling, three lives taken with geometric precision.
“She said she practised.” My throat is parched.
Ingrid doesn’t question me again. I hit Return, and the form disappears, replaced by a string of results.
Ingrid peers at the screen and whistles quietly.
“Is there anything specific you’re looking for? A place, a . . . technique?”
I shake my head. “We need it all. From everywhere. Shootings, stabbings, strangulation, the works.”
I keep my voice flat, my language blunt, even though every word feels like an electric shock in my mouth. Euphemisms would be worse, though. I have to be scientific, precise. It’s the only way I can keep going. Reflected in the screen, Ingrid’s expression is starkly horrified.
“Investigating a crime is searching for a pattern,” I tell her. “It’s cryptography. It’s maths. Each body is another data point, and Bel knows that and she’ll have done all she can to keep them from being connected. She’ll have tried to make them look random . . .”
“But random’s hard to fake,” Ingrid finishes for me. She’s very pale.
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Very gently, Ingrid pushes the laptop aside and comes to sit on the edge of the table, right in front of me.
“Pete,” she says quietly. “How do you know all this?”
“I shared a womb with her,” I reply, trying to sound flippant. But she’s looking at me and I know she’s reading the truth from my face, and I make no attempt to hide it. I feel the memories pushing up through the soil of my mind like zombies.
I know this is how Bel operates, because I taught her.
Recursion: 2 Years,
6 months Ago
“Who is he?” I asked.
Bel’s voice was wrung out from crying. Her makeup had run and sweat plastered her hair to her forehead. She sounded empty as she said, “I don’t know.”
It was such a beautiful night. Summer had come early, and the vice of the day’s heat had slackened blissfully into evening. The trees cast long blue shadows over the lawn, just visible in the last of the light. I was finally off crutches, still limping but improving. I felt free.
It seems callous now, but even with Bel’s warning ringing around my skull, I still felt joyful to be led by her hand, barefoot over the grass.
That joy only faltered a little when we slipped through the gap in the fence and out onto the railway tracks. Never in a million years would I have crossed the tracks by myself. The thought of a train surging suddenly out of darkness—glaring headlights and momentum and shattering force—would have frozen me solid. But I wasn’t by myself; I was with my sister, and with her I was invincible. We picked our way between the sleepers, scrambled down the verge, and belly-crawled under the ivy-covered loose chain link on the other side into the alleyway between the tracks and the estate. I took in nine sheets of discarded newspaper, six rusting drink cans, and a roll of carpet left so long it was growing mould. So far, so familiar.
Only there was something new. Sticking stiffly out of the end of the carpet, laces dangling from a trainer, white skin stretched between bones and muscle where the scummy jean leg had ridden up over the ankle, was a human foot.
I don’t remember feeling any shock when I saw it, just a sense of inevitability. Almost a kind of relief: It’s finally happened. The worst had come. I grasped the ankle, feeling for a pulse. I didn’t find one.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I—I . . .” Bel stumbled as she started to speak, as though her lips were numb. “I was coming back from the gig. I think he was in the same carriage with me on the tube, but I’m not sure. He must have followed me off at the station—”
I interrupted her.
“Just you, or did others get off there as well?”
She frowned.
“Others.”
“How many?”
“F-five or six.”
“Was it five, or was it six?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think.”
“Five.”
“Okay, go on.”
She faltered and then picked up the story.
“They went up the road and I came under the underpass to here. I had my headphones on. I didn’t know he was behind me until he grabbed my wrist. I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go. He said he wanted my phone, my purse. He said I was pretty and I should smile, like, hey, he was mugging me, but he was doing me a favour giving me the attention, you know?”
She went quiet for a second, and then:
“He had a knife.”
A knife. I felt a spark of hope. The part of me that was still trying to piece this together in a way that left our life intact latched onto that word.
“It was self-defence,” I said. “We can go to the police, we can tell them that . . .”
But Bel was already shaking her head.
“No, Petey,” she said gently, willing me to understand. She showed me her hands; her palms were pristine. No defensive wounds. Her face was unblemished in the streetlight.
“You were afraid for your life,” I protested. She looked at the floor, and her tone hardened.
“I wasn’t afraid. I was angry. All I could think about was how tight his hand was on my wrist and how fucking certain he was, how . . . entitled, how he just knew, he just knew I was going to submit. And then I found myself thinking about Dad, and how Mum’s eyes look when she talks about him, all puffy and exhausted and . . .” She tailed off, but I knew what she meant.
“Bruised,” I said. She nodded.
“And I wondered if Dad had ever held Mum’s wrist like that. And then I hit him. I hit him fast and hard, and I kept hitting him.”
She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was staring back through the chain link towards our house.
“So he tried to use his knife, and I took it.”
Her voice cracked then, and fear flooded into it. An answering fear rose in my chest. And a welter of emotions came with it: shock—I’d never heard Bel scared before—and a pinprick of white-hot fury at the man who had reduced her to this.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
In an instant, I glimpsed our future: capital-E Empty spaces in the house and at school where she ought to have been, long drives into the middle of nowhere to a squat grey building of razor wire and concrete, Bel behind scratched Perspex, puffy faced and slurring, telling us she’s fine and me knowing she is lying because she won’t tell me the truth if she thinks it’s going to hurt me.
“It’s okay,” I told her. What else could I say? “It’ll be okay.”
She looked at me, her eyes wide and very white in the darkness.
“How?” she asked, and I needed an answer. Later, when it was too late, I’d wonder if I should have felt doubt, or guilt for the slowly stiffening corpse in its carpet sarcophagus, but at the time I just . . . didn’t. All I felt was a piercing, urgent clarity in the cool night air. My big sister needed me. After fifteen years of having my back, she needed me. I couldn’t let her down.
Bel hugged herself. She was trembling and I knew that in a better light I’d see her lips were blue; I knew exactly how that felt. She was my inverse, my opposite, but in a way that made her the same—a mirror image. Bel was scared, and so was I, but the difference was I was used to it. She might have a PhD in falling, but I was the one who’d made my home in the dirt.
I tried to think. I dragged my hands through my hair and down my face, and they came away bloody. Shit, I’d pulled the scab off my forehead.
A train rocketed past, briefly deafening, light sneaking through ivy leaves, the vacuum in its wake tugging at our clothes. When insight came, it came
so naturally. Pain surged in my brow, but it only made me feel more clear-headed. Without even thinking about it, I walled myself off from my emotions with numbers, as I’d done so many times before.
Get counting.
5 passengers exited the train with Bel, any one of whom might plausibly have been the last to see this man alive. 3 CCTV cameras between here and the station, but crucially, 0 since the overpass, which was the last juncture where he could have changed course. 6 windows in the estate that overlooked this spot, but all a long way off, and I doubted anyone behind them could have seen anything in the dark. Very few people used this trash-strewn alleyway and then pretty much only as a shortcut to and from the station. I checked my watch: 10:26 p.m. 94 minutes until the last train, and about 7 hours after that until daylight.
Bel stared at me as I hustled around the alleyway, gathering up newspaper and cardboard and laying it on top of the carpet, weighting it down with chunks of brick.
“Come on,” I said when it was as covered as I could make it. I took her hand; it was very cold. Get her through this. You have to get her through this. You have to.
“W-we’re just going to leave him?” she asked uncertainly.
“We can’t move him until the trains stop; there’s too big a risk someone might walk through.” I checked my watch again. “That gives us . . . eighty-nine minutes to look.”
“Look for what?” she asked. She sounded lost and I wished I had time to stop and explain it to her, but we were already under the fence and I was hobbling hurriedly on my bad leg. The pain and the effort were making it hard to speak. Now it was me leading her by the hand, back across the moonlit grass, back home.
There’s only one way to make sure you aren’t found, and that’s to make sure no one’s looking. If that man, whoever he was, was reported missing, they’d be searching for him. If he turned up dead, they’d be searching for his killer. We couldn’t let that happen.
We needed a fire, a fucking hot one; we needed it somewhere a fire could reasonably be expected to burn, and we had less than an hour and a half to find it.
I threw up as many proxies and IP masks as I knew how. I’d always had a vague interest in hacking, but I’d only started investing serious time in it since I’d met Ingrid (I know, I know, “teenage boy’s renewed fascination in common interest with pretty girl shocker”). Shields duly up, I flew into research. I was bathed in sweat inside my T-shirt, and my fingers kept slipping off the keys as they typed, my right hand marking them with minuscule flecks of blood from my forehead.
I started by looking for the temperature at which human teeth, the hardest, most mineralised part of the body, would burn. That gave me 900 degrees Celsius. Then I searched for fuels that would burn that hot at full blast. Whoever the patron saint of arson and perverting the course of justice was, she must have been watching over us, because methane topped the list: ordinary domestic gas. An idea formed, the beginnings of a feverish plan: an industrial accident. But could we do it without hurting anyone?
Another search found a company—Methinor PLC—which had a history of their facilities going up in flames (there are a truly terrifying number of those still merrily doing business), and a third turned up Methinor’s closest installation to us—a relay and sampling station outside Durmsley, Kent. According to Google Maps, it was only a two-hour drive away and—I actually punched the air when I read this—
Fully. Fucking. Automated.
I glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen: 10:59 p.m. One hour to go. Bel fretted and fidgeted on the bed, rolling her eyes over the posters, from maths genius to mutant and back again. I kept my head down and worked.
More digging gave me Alterax Protection Solutions, the UK security contractor that listed Methinor as one of its testimonials. A couple more clicks turned up someone’s dissertation from the marketing module of their MBA, the appendix to which contained the pitch Alterax had used to win Methinor over, including a slide on how the proposed placement of security cameras could cut down on personnel costs. Even better, as part of their deal with the Australian government after their last disaster, Methinor had made the blueprints for their facilities available on a database on a closed industry website, so engineers from other companies could point out safety concerns.
For a few precious seconds, I sat staring at the pieces of the plan I’d concocted, scarcely believing our luck. Surely this bomb-in-waiting should be better protected? But then, I realised, there was no reason for it to be. It was in the middle of nowhere, supplied nowhere strategic, and held nothing valuable. There was no obvious motive to sabotage it, and hence no motive to spend the money to secure it.
I blinked. Suddenly, more clearly than ever, I saw the network of little assumptions and compromises and accommodations that our society was built on. They were necessary fictions that made everything else work, like the square root of minus one—the so-called “imaginary” number that mathematicians had dubbed i—an impossible number that made bridges stay up and aircraft fly.
All those little compromises and mutual understandings were bones in a skeleton; society was stretched over them like a skin. Bel and I were outside that skin now, hostile foreign bodies probing it for weaknesses. The mind-set felt familiar, and I realised: it was just like checking a proof, combing the logic for the single, fatal, unwarranted leap.
By the time Bel put a hand on my shoulder and murmured, “It’s time,” I had what I needed.
I stood and was startled to find myself unsteady. My hands shook and droplets of sweat dotted the keyboard.
“You got the cling film?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The body was just as we’d left it. We dragged the coverings off it. A beetle picked its way over a patch of bloodless skin showing at the ankle. I swatted it away. The flesh under my hand felt like refrigerated meat. The night was darker now, quieter, and we worked swiftly and silently, the washing-up gloves squeaking on our fingers as we wound the cellophane wrap around and around the rolled-up carpet until it looked like a vast spliff. Just before we sealed up the part that covered the head, I gestured for Bel to stop. I felt a sudden urge to peel back the carpet, to look at this man’s face, but I didn’t. Partly, I didn’t want to see what she’d done to him—I imagined a sagging tear in his throat, drooling black where the blood had fled it, echoing his mouth—but it was more than that. If anyone ever came around flashing a picture of him, I didn’t want to recognise it. I didn’t want so much as a flicker in the muscles of my face to betray us.
“Done?” I asked when we were finished.
Bel nodded. I risked a little light from my phone screen to check for rips, but the plastic was intact.
“Bring the car around,” I said.
Mum was away at a conference until Monday, and if we were careful, there would be no telltale stray hairs or threads in the back of her Prius to indict her children for murder.
The body was locked solid and the carpet made it more manageable, but I still almost dropped it twice as I struggled under my end of it with my ungainly limping waddle. (The corpse was already an “it” in my mind, not a “him.” Never a “him”; I couldn’t have done this if it was a “him.”)
Bel slid in behind the wheel. Mum felt driving was an Important Life Skilltm, and that it was her job and “not the bloody government’s” to know when her children were ready to learn. She’d been letting us practise since we turned fifteen.
We passed the drive south in silence, city lights giving way to the near total darkness of country roads. I kept thinking: This is how it happens. This is how you become one of those faces you see on the news: square-on and sullen-eyed in the harsh light of the police camera. You can’t rely on not being “that kind of person.” No one is that kind of person. One moment, one violent, drunken stranger rearing in front of you, one loss of self-control is all it takes.
I looked across at Bel’s pinche
d face in the wash from the oncoming headlights. I thought of my daily fight for control of myself, and how often I lost. How long had it taken her to kill this man? Five seconds? Ten? I counted them out in my head:
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi, seven Mississippi, eight Mississippi, nine Mississippi, ten Mississippi.
That’s it. That’s how long it takes you to fuck up your life.
We pulled up well short of the relay station. Bel slipped out to scout, the printout of the blueprints with my hand-scrawled guesses of where the cameras would be clutched in her hand. Even then I was impressed by how silently she moved. In her wake, the darkness pressed in. I kept waiting for blue flare of police lights to rupture it. I was so tensed for the scream of sirens that if they had come, I might have broken my back with the jolt.
I thought of the body in the boot, imagined it moving, struggling inside the shrink-wrapped carpet, pushing at it like an insect inside a vast chrysalis, suffocating, choking. I fought to swallow against a gummed-shut throat. Could we have got it wrong? Could he still be alive? No. I’d felt the chill of his pulse-less ankle, and I’d felt his stiffness as we carried him. There’s a reason they call it deadweight.
Who was he? Did he have a family? Kids? I besieged myself with questions, abetted by the quiet and the dark. It dawned on me then that I could never know the answers. Any attempt I made to research him would draw a thread between us that could be followed back to me, and from me to Bel.
Still, I couldn’t help picturing his kid, a little girl maybe, tossing and turning under her duvet, unable to sleep because she didn’t know where her dad was.
Bel melted out of the dark.
“Two security guards, you said?” she whispered.
“I think so.”
“They’re both in the hut on the far side; steam on the windows says they’re having a cuppa.”
I exhaled hard, once. “Then let’s go.”
Inside the relay station, it took me seven minutes to find the condensate pump, and for every one of them I was heart-stoppingly terrified the blueprints were wrong.