‘3.55.’
Evelyn nodded.
‘I wonder when the professor died. But I would put a bet on it being some time after 4 a.m.’
‘Why would anyone want to kill a physics professor?’ said Arnold. ‘Unless…’
‘Well, we were just about to tell him what we’d discovered,’ said Evelyn. ‘Maybe somebody didn’t want him to know.’
The five gazed at each other.
‘It’s a conspiracy,’ gasped Ranjit.
‘Ranj, this isn’t James Bond, man,’ said Arnold.
Ranjit looked around them at the blinking pure spotless room and looked back at Arnold.
‘It’s not Ranj.’
But no one else was quite so certain, and sure enough, after the bare minimum of time to get dressed, the door opened and a man entered and led them out into a pristine white lift, which immediately descended.
‘No, this isn’t at all like James Bond,’ Ranjit muttered.
A long corridor lay ahead, with doors off it on both sides. They were led individually through separate ones. Connie found herself in a small, plain office lined with astronomy textbooks. Sitting there was the man who’d addressed them in the bunker – and indeed, had been there originally on the night they’d met Professor Hirati – who introduced himself as Nigel. He was dark and smartly dressed, and looked like he spent a lot of time in the gym. Someone looking less like a Nigel Connie couldn’t imagine. He had a lot of hair on the back of his hands.
‘So,’ said Nigel, looking down at a sheaf of paperwork. ‘You’re our little Einstein.’
He had brought her a cup of coffee. She wanted not to drink it, but it smelled surprisingly good. She looked at it then back at Nigel. She was overwhelmed suddenly with the desire to call her father.
‘Are you the police?’
‘No,’ said Nigel, smiling slightly. ‘No. Seriously, you don’t like my suit?’
‘Don’t I need to speak to a lawyer or something?’
‘Why, what have you done?’
‘Nothing. Nothing!’ said Connie, feeling a ridiculous sense of guilt suddenly. ‘Nothing! What happened to Professor Hirati?’
‘Well, that’s what we’re endeavouring to establish.’
‘But I thought you were spying on everybody?’
‘Well… it happened very quickly. In our top-secret, clean facility. We don’t know… yet. But the footage was paused.’
‘But you check everyone in and out.’
‘Yes. Usually we do,’ said Nigel, looking grim. ‘This morning… this morning has been a little busier than most.’
‘Because of us.’
‘Yes,’ said Nigel. ‘Because of you.’
He leaned forward and folded his hands on his desk.
‘There’s no point telling you I’m not a bad guy,’ he said. ‘But if I can put it this way: what you have figured out, what you have learned…’
‘It’s true.’
‘We thought it might be.’
‘Christ,’ said Connie. ‘I mean, bloody hell. I mean, I’m only an academic. I’ve got nothing to do with this kind of thing. You’ve got whole teams of people who do nothing else but look for stuff like this. I’m just the maths girl.’
‘Well, turns out we needed a maths girl,’ said Nigel.
‘Are you from the government?’
Nigel didn’t answer.
‘Was he?’
Nigel shook up his papers. ‘That’s not important. It’s done now. And my job is to stop all hell breaking loose. More than it already has done.’
He put his papers down again.
‘If this gets out, Doctor,’ he said slowly. ‘You have to think. Stock markets. Looting. Jobs. Panic. Take any stupid film you’ve ever seen and multiply it by a million. People behave the way they’ve been taught to respond by films.’
‘Is that why you’ve rolled up your sleeves?’ said Connie. Nigel glanced away for a second and she noticed his lips twitch.
‘Well, quite,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry. You’re not under suspicion.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Connie.
‘We did see where you were this morning.’
Connie tried to retrace what she had done in that room in a panic. So they’d all been there in the morning… or nearly all of them.
He looked up at her. His eyes were a penetrating grey.
‘Tell me about Luke Beith.’
Afterwards, Connie worried whether her face gave her away at the very first moment: the bright red cheeks, the stuttering. She was, she realised, not entirely cut out for a life of secrecy.
‘I don’t know him,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t know anything about him.’
‘Well, you’ve been holed up 24/7 together for over a month,’ said Nigel. ‘You must have learned a bit.’
Connie shook his head.
‘He’s… he’s s’enfermé, as the French say,’ she said. ‘He’s not… he’s just closed in on himself. A little distracted. A little strange. But not really that strange in mathematician terms.’
‘Because we have very little information on him.’
Connie looked at him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He claims to have been born in the former Yugoslavia, before the war; smuggled over here when he was very young. No birth certificate, no passport. Brought up in a Barnado’s home, where nobody still works.’
‘Oh,’ said Connie, suddenly filled with pity for the quiet little boy he must have been.
Nigel regarded her shrewdly.
‘A wounded bird?’ he said. Connie shrugged.
‘He seems very… lonely.’
‘Odd? Bit of a loner?’ said Nigel, leaning forward.
‘What are you getting at?’ said Connie.
‘Nothing,’ said Nigel. ‘I just want to have a word with him, that’s all. He wasn’t with you this morning, was he?’
‘He was!’ said Connie, protesting. ‘He was! He came in the classroom. I… I had a bit of a wobble. He helped me. So. He was with us.’
‘And then he hung around?’
‘Well… I mean you were filming us, right?
‘Man, I have had some boring surveillance jobs before,’ said Nigel quietly, shaking his head. ‘Yes. We were. And he left. And then we lost sight of him.’
Connie brightened.
‘Well, obviously he can’t have come to you, can’t have come here. You’d definitely have seen him. You must have cameras all over this facility.’
Nigel cleared his throat.
‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘Not all over. We don’t know where he went. He didn’t sign in with a security pass, but, well, I assume if you wanted to do someone some harm you might not walk in the front door.’
Connie shook her head.
‘That’s not Luke,’ she said. ‘That’s not him at all.’
‘I thought you said you barely knew him.’
Connie stared at her hands and sighed.
Nigel got to his feet. He was taller that Connie had expected.
‘Come with me,’ he commanded. Connie stiffened, but found herself getting up to follow him.
They left the room and entered the corridor. The others were already waiting there, looking anxious.
‘Just tell them you’re called Spartacus,’ Arnold hissed to her as she passed behind Nigel; the rest followed in her wake, each accompanied by a serious-looking man with tidy hair. Ranjit was still chatting to his.
‘Anyway, so, you know, he doesn’t really eat, you know? And he wears the same clothes every day. He’s really weird.’
‘Shut up, Ranjit,’ said Arnold.
‘Why couldn’t you have just told us all this?’ said the one accompanying Sé. Sé gave a silent shrug.
‘Didn’t notice.’
The lift ascended three floors, above ground again, and into another startlingly white corridor. Here there were real policemen, one each on either side of an office door. The door itself was behind a thick Flexiglass el
ectronic gate. Nigel pressed his finger in a scanner to the side. A small ‘ooh’ could be heard from Ranjit. Nothing happened. He swore and did it two more times, pressing his finger very hard against it until it finally relented and slid apart, juddering as it did so.
The two policemen nodded to him respectfully, handed them all masks and pushed open the office door.
Fiddling with her mask, the bright sunlight coming through the windows came as a shock to Connie, and she blinked. The idea that outside, in the world, it was still a sunny, bright, spring day was extraordinary. Out there in the world – the world people thought was still the world – people were just going about their business, falling in love, booking holidays, eating cupcakes, falling out with their mums.
But they didn’t know. They didn’t realise.
She was so caught up that she was moments behind the others as their gasps filled the room.
‘What the actual fuck?’ said Arnold. She followed where they were looking, and she too had a sharp intake of breath. Lying curled up under a spotless white desk, with nothing on it apart from a state-of-the-art computer with a huge screen, was a body. A corpse. Connie hadn’t realised until that precise moment that she had never seen a dead body before: not her grandmother’s, nor an accident. This was the first time she had ever seen anybody dead. But she was pretty damn sure they weren’t meant to look like this.
Unavoidably curious, she knelt down.
‘Don’t go any closer,’ growled Nigel.
The body – corpse – thing was in the shape of a person. But… but it was impossible. It was translucent. Completely see-through, like a jellyfish. The skin, liquefying, dripping out… the smell wasn’t everywhere yet, but it was tactile, traceable on the air, the very taste of something beyond awful, beyond imagining; a smell that would never leave you, that would become part of you, just like you would never be able to unsee this: the drained remains of Professor Hirati.
His hair now was no longer suspiciously tinted gold, but colourless, pure white. Clothes covered most of his body, but Connie found herself utterly fixated on the veins, traced everywhere, as if the corpse were made of lace; the discernible shape of the eyeball behind the socket; the glinting, visible bones of the ear. It was like a medical lab, an exhibition – not a person.
‘How… I mean, what?’ Arnold was saying.
‘The good thing is,’ Ranjit was saying. ‘I am totally not going to be sick.’
He promptly threw up into a bin, adding to the unpleasant aromas in the room.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘What happened?’ said Connie, her voice trembling. ‘What happened here?’
Nigel shook his head.
‘As soon as the forensics guys stop having a little-girl attack and come back in the room again we might be able to find out. But at the moment I think… it appears his skin has lost all its pigmentation.’
Connie shook her head.
‘What does that mean?’
‘What makes your skin a certain colour —’
‘Could that kill you?’
‘Hey, I don’t have a pigmentation division, okay?’
‘You should,’ muttered Arnold.
‘Yeah, all right, Captain Right-on,’ said Nigel. ‘More pressing matters, yes?’
He looked at them. A couple of terrified-looking scientists, also in the white hazmat suits, began inching their way back into the room.
‘Pussies,’ said Nigel, none too quietly. Then he turned to them again.
‘Did somebody do it?’ said Evelyn.
‘We don’t know,’ said Nigel. ‘We’re also testing for pathogens. Hence the jumpsuits and the masks and so on. Now, we’ll need DNA samples, obviously.’
‘Seriously?’ said Arnold. ‘It seems to me you’ve been examining everything, including our crap, for weeks.’
Nigel stopped him with a look.
‘A man is lying here dead,’ he said, ‘on the day of the most important scientific discovery of our time. Is that funny to you, big man?’
‘No,’ muttered Arnold.
‘Good.’
Nigel looked over them as if they were a crowd of naughty schoolchildren.
‘And I really do need to talk to your colleague. I can’t imagine why that is difficult for you to get your heads around, with all your huge brains and everything.’
‘You can’t think…’ burst out Connie. Nigel opened his hands.
‘Something has happened. And a man is dead. Isn’t your job looking for patterns?’
‘The only thing Luke could murder was Debussy,’ said Arnold.
‘Who?’ said Nigel.
‘Never mind,’ growled Arnold.
Suddenly, there was a rush of people past the door and a red light went off above their heads. Professor Hirati’s computer, which one of the forensic team had been picking up gingerly, suddenly turned itself on.
‘What’s going on?’ said Ranjit. The noise of feet stampeding down corridors could be heard. Nosy passers-by were suddenly staring at their phones.
‘You know if I were running a top-secret facility,’ observed Arnold. ‘I’d probably not have all those big, flashy, red light things.’
Nobody paid any attention to him. Nigel stared at them, then glanced at his phone.
‘Stay here,’ he growled.
‘Not with the dead body thing?’ said Ranjit nervously.
‘Well, not in here. Out in… here, in one of these offices.’
‘All together?’ said one of the aides.
‘What, in case they plot a graph?’ said Nigel. ‘They’re not under suspicion. They’re helping us.’
Everyone else had turned and gone already, wherever their phones and alarms were summoning them, pulling their masks off as they went.
‘Uh, yeah,’ said Arnold as they were leaving, and they were ushered back into a different room, more like a staff room with, Connie was relieved to see, both a bathroom and a coffee machine. ‘Uh, excuse me, but seeing as someone might be feeding on, like, the academic staff, can you leave us some big guy with a fighting stick, please?’
Nigel turned around, surveyed the situation then nodded.
‘Yes. Brian, stay here.’
Brian had a thick bouncer’s neck and a slit for a mouth. He nodded importantly.
‘Are you going to lock the door?’ said Arnold.
Nigel looked at them.
‘Look. You’re not the bad guys. We’re not the bad guys. Can we just get that straight?’
‘Who are the bad guys then?’
Nigel’s eyes rolled.
‘Can you just stay here and try not to get into any more trouble?’
There was coffee, which they all partook of, and food in the fridge which nobody wanted. The idea that the little pot of cottage cheese might have belonged to the despoiled body lying a few feet away through a wall was unutterably depressing.
‘I’m having a very strange day,’ said Ranjit, pacing round the room. Connie glanced at Sé, who was plucking at his hazmat suit. As soon as he realised she had noticed him doing it, he stopped, only to start again moments later. Only Evelyn was calm, making coffee for everyone, very carefully measuring the water into the jug, running the steamer for a precise amount of time.
‘How are you so calm?’ said Connie, who had thrown water all over her face and head in the little attached bathroom and felt slightly better, if still completely shell-shocked.
‘I grew up in a civil war,’ said Evelyn simply. ‘I learned a bit earlier than you lot that the idea that you control your environment is nothing other than a ridiculous charade. You control what you can control – this is good coffee, by the way – and everything else you try and let wash over you.’
‘Like a wave,’ said Connie.
‘Man, I hope Luke shows up. For his own good,’ said Arnold, passing his hand over his bald head. ‘They know it wasn’t us. They’re going to be looking for someone to pin this thing on. Odd math geeks who can’t answer straightfo
rward questions are going to be right up their list.’
‘Could have been one of his four ex-wives,’ observed Evelyn.
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