by Eric Brown
It sounded frantic.
I hurried into the hall and pulled open the door.
“Zara,” I began.
She clutched my arm. “Richard, you’ve got to come! It’s Khal…”
She was shaking and looked shocked: that vacant, dead expression the face assumes when the brain cannot assimilate the fact of tragedy.
I found my shoes, dragged on a coat, and followed her along the snow-covered pavement.
Khal’s front door was open. Zara was explaining, “He asked me to come round. He said he had a present. I said I could only stay for a few minutes…” She broke down.
I hurried into the house.
The lounge was in disarray. An armchair had been overturned, a lamp stand knocked over. A magazine rack had toppled, sending its glossy contents avalanching across the carpet.
I did not immediately see Khalid—perhaps my eyes saw him, but my brain refused to accept the mage.
Only when I had taken in the state of the room did I notice the body.
He was lying before the hearth, on his back. In the centre of his chest—gaudy crimson on his white shirt—was a bloodstain. His eyes were open, staring glassily at the ceiling.
I was overcome with a fleeting dizziness. In my line of work I deal with bodies everyday, but I had never before witnessed a victim of violence.
Then I recalled what Khalid had said, in jest, a few weeks back about having his implant removed. I knelt, reached out, and touched his implant. It vibrated quickly beneath my fingertips.
I looked up. Zara was standing by the door, fingers to her lips, sobbing.
I moved to her and took her in my arms. “It’s okay,” I soothed. “The team at the Onward Station will know of his death. They’ll send out a ferryman and notify the police.”
The room was cold. There was no fire lit in the hearth, and the door was still open. I closed it.
“When did you get here?” I asked.
“Just minutes ago. I came straight in, and when I saw… I came straight to you.”
I recalled hearing the gunshot, perhaps ten minutes ago. I opened the door and looked out, but the snow on the pavement was a churned and slushy mess, bearing no obliging record of the killer’s footprints.
I returned to Zara. She stared at me. “Who’d do such a thing?” she asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
It didn’t make any sense at all. It was hard to think who might have hated Khalid enough to kill him—but in this day and age it was almost impossible to work out why anyone might be drawn to homicide, other than in the heat of the moment. Why kill someone when they would be brought back to life to incriminate their killer? Of course, murder was still committed—crimes of passion, incidents of hatred when the killer was barely conscious of the act…
There was a knock at the door. I opened it, expecting a ferryman or the police, or both. Instead, a tall, balding stranger stood on the front step, stamping his feet in the cold.
Zara hurried over to him. “Simon,” she said.
I looked mystified. Zara explained, “Simon dropped me off and went to park at the Fleece.”
Simon nodded to me and stepped inside. “What’s the delay—?” he began and then saw the body. He went white, then slid down the wall and slumped into a sitting position.
Zara sat next to him, quietly crying on his shoulder.
Five minutes later Dan Chester arrived, accompanied by the local constable. While the policeman called in his superiors over at Bradley, I took Dan to one side and explained the situation.
He stared down at the body. “Christ, who’d do such a thing…?” He glanced across at Zara.
“No way!” I hissed. “She came straight round to my place when she found him. She was distraught. And anyway, why would she do something so stupid when Khalid would incriminate her when he returned?”
He shrugged. “Okay, but what if she came here without intending to kill him? They argued, struggled. The place is a mess. What if Khal threatened her?”
“And she just happened to be carrying a gun? Highly bloody unlikely!”
“What about her new bloke? What if they argued?”
I recalled what Khalid had told me a while back, about the bust-up he’d had with Simon. Had Simon harboured a resentment?
“Okay,” I said, “but the same question applies. Why kill when you’ll be found out in six months? You just wouldn’t do it—not even in the heat of the moment.”
Minutes later the CID from Bradley arrived, along with a forensic team and a scene-of-crime squad.
While the forensic scientists photographed the body, a detective inspector took preliminary statements from Zara, Simon, and myself.
Later we were driven in separate cars to Bradley police station and questioned there at length.
It was almost ten by the time I returned home, changed, and made my way to the Fleece.
Ben and Elisabeth were in the main bar, with Jeff Morrow. They looked concerned when they saw me.
“Richard,” Jeff said, “what’s happening? We saw the police cars outside Khal’s. Where is he?”
Before saying anything, I bought myself a drink—a double whisky—and suggested we occupy a table beside the fire.
“What?” Elisabeth asked.
I told them what had happened that evening, from my hearing the gunshot, and Zara’s arrival, to finding Khal’s body.
“But who the hell would kill Khalid?” Ben asked, a question that I’d heard enough already and was to hear countless times again over the course of the next few weeks.
I told them about Dan’s errant speculation that Zara or Simon had pulled the trigger. “But it just doesn’t make sense,” I said, and outlined my objections again.
“You said that Khal beat up this Simon character a bit back?” Ben asked.
I nodded. “But I hardly think that’s a motive enough to kill someone.”
“You don’t know what this Simon’s like.”
“But, again, why would he kill Khal when, in six months Khal will return to point the finger? It’s absurd.”
Jeff said, “Perhaps Simon didn’t pull the trigger, as it were. He hired a hit man to do it, someone Khal wouldn’t know from Adam.”
I almost laughed at that. “This is sounding more like an old episode of Morse by the second. Look, the explanation will be very simple. Khal disturbed someone burgling the house. He picked up a poker to fight off the intruder. Intruder pulls a gun and without considering the consequences—in self-defence, he might claim—fires. End of story.”
Or so I wanted to think. But my friends’ suspicions had sown seeds of doubt in my mind.
It was a sombre Christmas. Okay, so thanks to the Kéthani Khalid would be resurrected by summer, but that didn’t remove the fact that a nasty crime had been committed on our doorstep and that the killer was still at large.
In the slow, dead period immediately after Christmas, Khalid’s murder made the national news. Reporters—the scum of the Earth, in my opinion— doorstepped Khalid’s every acquaintance in the village. They wrote lurid stories of his break-up with Zara and his affair—wholly apocryphal—with a young nurse at his hospital. I ignored every one of the skulking bastards, but did come close to punching a particularly obnoxious hack who offered me 25,000 euros for my exclusive story.
I was called into Bradley police station again to give another account of my actions on the night of the murder, and from local gossip learned that Zara and Simon had made frequent visits to the station, where they were questioned. The case was put on hold until the time of Khalid’s return in June, and gradually media interest faded away.
Life returned to normal. After the Christmas break I resumed my four-day-on, three-day-off stint delivering the dead to the Onward Station. Late at night, after a long shift, I would often look up at the winter darkness and wonder where Barbara, my wife, might be among the massed stars. I thought of Khalid, too, his resurrection and eventual return to Earth for questioning about his death.
The topic of conversation every Tuesday night for a long while was of course the murder. Doug Standish, the latest recruit to the Tuesday night crowd, and a detective inspector over at Bradley, told us that Khalid had been shot at close range, no more than half a metre away, by a single bullet from a 0.2 automatic, not that this information meant much to the rest of us. The police were no nearer apprehending his killer; if truth be known, they weren’t even working on the case, as in all likelihood it would be solved on Khal’s return.
One Tuesday in March, Jeff Morrow fuelled speculation. He joined us with his pint, took an appreciative mouthful, and said, “You recall we were kicking around the idea that Zara or Simon might have done the deed.”
“You were kicking the idea around,” I reminded him.
He nodded. “Okay, so concede for a second that one of them might have pulled the trigger. In June, when Khalid returns, the game will be up. They’ll be exposed.”
“If,” I pointed out, “they had anything to do with it.”
“And if they had, do you think they’d stay around to be incriminated?”
Elisabeth said, “Obviously not, but like Richard I don’t think—”
Jeff said, “Zara left school on Friday and hasn’t been seen since. Simon likewise. Police called round his house on Sunday and found it empty. They’ve done a bunk.”
I stared at him. “So they’ve gone away for a while, a short break. They’ll be back.”
Dan said, “They weren’t under any kind of restraint to remain in the area, Jeff. As long as they notify the police of their whereabouts every week, as far as I understand it…”
The weeks passed. There was no sign of Zara or Simon, and local gossip was rife. We tried to find out from Doug Standish if indeed the couple were in contact with the authorities, but if Doug knew he was saying nothing.
June came, and the day of Khalid’s return.
I’d made the last delivery of an early shift around four o’clock that afternoon, and I hung around until five hoping to see Khalid, maybe even snatch a word or two with him. In the event he was met by two plain clothes officers who whisked him away in an unmarked police car, presumably to Bradley for questioning.
Around seven that evening I received a phone call.
“Richard?”
“Khalid! Where are you?”
“I’m at home. I was wondering… could you call round?”
“Of course. I’m on my way.”
Two minutes later I stepped into the lounge where, six months earlier, I had seen Khalid sprawled dead, a bullet hole in his chest.
Now he stood in the middle of the room, as large as life. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, identical to the one I had seen saturated in blood; it seemed a lifetime ago, now.
We live life with a mere abstract understanding of what the implants—the symbol of our immortality—mean to us. The concept of continued life is just too vast a notion for our puny human brains to grasp. I found it hard to believe, as I stared at him across the room, that Khalid had died and been returned.
I stepped forward and hugged him. “It’s great to have you back, Khal.”
He smiled, his eyes filmed with tears. “You don’t know how good it is to be back.”
He fixed me a coffee, and we sat before the empty hearth while I brought him up to date with what had been happening in the village in his absence.
We seemed to be playing around the edges of, what we really wanted to talk about. I had the burning desire to ask him, firstly, what it had been like on the home planet of the Kéthani. Returnees rarely talk of their experiences on Kéthan, and then only in the most abstract of terms. It’s as if the desire to expound on the circumstances of their resurrections had been programmed out of them by their alien benefactors. The first returnees had been besieged by the media with offers of riches for their stories. They all refused.
Then, of course, I wanted to ask him about what had happened on the evening of his death.
After a period of silence, Khalid stared into the empty fire. He played with his coffee cup. “I had a lot of time to think about life while I was up there,” he said.
I nodded. “It must have been a profound experience. “
“We never saw the Kéthani, you know. We were schooled by human instructors, who oddly enough seemed alien themselves. Calm, centred, all knowing.”
“What was it like?”
He shook his head. “We were housed in vast domes, looking out over idyllic pastures.” This was the stock line the returnees came out with. “I suspect the landscape wasn’t what Kéthan was like at all, just some virtual scene manufactured to soothe us. I met many people. We meditated a lot, were instructed in what I can only call Kéthani-Zen.” He laughed. “And me, a good ex-Muslim!”
He paused, then continued, “I looked into myself, Richard. I saw what a shallow, self-centred person I was, before. The way I treated Zara, for instance.”
I looked away, embarrassed.
He went on, “It might have looked like the perfect marriage from the outside, but I wasn’t the perfect husband.” He smiled to himself. “In retrospect, it’s little wonder she left me for someone else.”
I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable. To change the subject, I said, “The night you… you died. Zara found you and came round.” I shrugged. “Everyone thought you’d interrupted an intruder. There was a scuffle…”
He stared at me, his gaze uncomfortably penetrating. “I’ve just told the police that I came from upstairs to find a masked man in the lounge. I picked up the first thing to hand—a poker,” he indicated the implement, standing innocently in its holder, “and went for him. The man drew a gun and fired before I could react. I told the police that I had no hope of recognising him.”
“So the killer’s still out there somewhere,” I said.
Khalid lifted his gaze and stared at me. “Except, Richard, that isn’t what happened.”
My stomach turned. I recalled meeting Zara in the supermarket, tall and elegant and quite beautiful. I wondered how she could have brought herself to kill—or cause to have killed—her husband, no matter how domineering he might have been.
Despite my objections to Dan Chester’s theory in the pub all those months ago, I knew what was coming.
“You mean,” I found my voice at last, “it was Zara or Simon?”
He smiled. “No,” he said, “but at first that’s what I’d planned.”
I stared at him. “I’m sorry? You’ve lost me.”
“I was consumed by so much rage and hatred in the months after Zara left me,” he said. “I never thought I could feel such anger towards anyone. And then I had that run-in with Simon. All I wanted was revenge. Life seemed pointless. Then it came to me, how I could kill two birds with one stone, as it were.”
I felt a growing emptiness inside me. “I’m not sure I follow…”
“I planned to come back and incriminate either Zara or Simon. I wasn’t sure which. Maybe both of them. I’d come back and tell the police that they’d entered the house, we’d argued, then they’d pulled a gun, and bang… But I learned a lot up there, Richard. I learned that I shouldn’t blame others, but look into myself and seek the causes there.”
The silence stretched. “You killed yourself,” I murmured at last. “But how on Earth…? I mean, they never found the gun—”
He silenced me by reaching behind a cushion on the sofa and handing me a torch. I stared at it. For a second I thought that this was the murder weapon, ingeniously disguised.
But Khalid was indicating the open hearth. “Look up the chimney, Richard. It’s okay, it’s clean.”
I stared at him, switched on the torch, then manoeuvred myself into the roomy fireplace. Khalid had removed the grate, and I crouched and shone the torch upwards, illuminating draughty brickwork.
“I don’t see anything,” I said.
“Reach up, behind that projecting stone.”
I did as instructed, and my hand touched something icy co
ld. I pulled, but was met with resistance. “It isn’t coming,” I said, and I knew why, then.
I pulled harder, and the icy object appeared around the brickwork. It reflected the light of the torch.
The pistol was affixed to the elasticated rope I had given Khalid the week before his death.
I ducked from the hearth, pulling the pistol after me. The rope reached the limit of its elasticity, about a metre from the fireplace.
“It’s okay,” he said, noticing my distaste as I stared at the weapon. “It was loaded with a single bullet.”
I looked at him. “You messed up the room, made it look as if there’d been a struggle. Then, when Zara was due…” I lifted the pistol to my chest. “Bang,” I said and released my grip on the weapon.
It crashed against the brass cowling and rattled up the chimney breast. “Ingenious,” I said.
“It was a measure of my anger, my immaturity, my jealousy,” Khalid said. “I’ve come to realise that now. We live and learn.” He smiled. “Or rather, in my case, we die and learn.”
I hesitated. “What now?” I said.
“I had to tell someone,” Khalid said. “Now it’s up to you. You can tell the authorities, and they’ll charge me for wasting valuable police time. I’d understand—”
I stopped him. “You’ve come to see what a mistake you made,” I said. “Nothing else matters.”
He released a long, pent-up breath. “I could kill a pint, Richard.”
We stepped from the house, turned, and hurried along the lane. Then we stopped and stared into the night sky.
High over the moors, arching into the darkness, was a bolt of pure white energy, the latest consignment of dead to be beamed from the Onward Station towards the waiting Kéthani starship.
I looked at Khalid. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”
“I considered going among the stars,” he said, “an ambassador for the Kéthani. Maybe I’ll go later, Richard. I have all the time in the universe, after all.”
I smiled.
“I’ll remain on Earth,” Khalid said, “working at the hospital. The implantation process is important. I feel as if I’m doing some good in the world. There are a lot of people out there who refuse the implants. Perhaps I can tell them something of the wonder and enlightenment I experienced up there.”