“I mean the scuff marks, you idiot,” Floyd said affectionately as he indicated two scratches in the carpet, spaced about the width of the wireless set. “I don’t know if they’re recent or not. I noticed them when we here last night—the carpet was rucked up, as well—but I didn’t put two and two together until now.”
“And now you’re thinking…?”
“I’d say they were caused by someone dragging the wireless away from the wall.”
“They must have been in a hurry to make such a messy job of it.”
“My thinking exactly.” Floyd patted Custine on the back. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”
“Can’t hurt.”
“Make sure that door’s bolted. I don’t want the old man coming back in and seeing us fiddling with the wireless. That’ll really put ideas into his head.”
“It’s secure,” Custine said, after checking the door.
Between them they heaved the wireless set away from the wall, taking care not to add any more scuff marks to the carpet. It was a job for two people, and Floyd didn’t doubt that he would have had a difficult time of it had Custine not been there. “Look,” he said, when they had the wireless a clear half-metre from the wall. “Three screws on the floor and some wood shavings, suggesting that they were ripped out of the back of the wireless, for some reason.”
Custine peered over his shoulder, holding a handkerchief to his face against the dust. “Someone’s fiddled with it,” he said.
“In a hurry, too.” Floyd pulled aside the thin wood backing of the wireless, which was hanging loose, attached by only one screw. “It wouldn’t have taken five minutes to unscrew the back, but whoever did this obviously didn’t have time to find a screwdriver. They must have poked something into the gap and levered the backing away just enough to get at the innards.”
“Good thing I have a screwdriver, then,” Custine said and went to fetch his briefcase. Custine always kept a set of locksmith’s tools handy, no matter what case they were working on.
“Now see if you can get that backing off,” Floyd said.
Custine removed the remaining screw and the plywood backing dropped free, revealing the guts of the wireless.
“That’s… interesting,” Floyd said.
“Here,” Custine said. “Let’s turn it to the light. I need a better look.”
They angled the contraption until the open back was facing the balcony windows. A shaft of morning sunlight speared the room, crisscrossed by specks of dust, and fell upon the exposed heart of the wireless, gleaming back from a bird’s-nest tangle of wire, glass valves and enamelled parts. Practically the entire volume of the wooden cabinet was crammed with electrical components arranged in a looping, knotted jumble of intestinal complexity.
“That’s like no wireless I’ve ever seen,” Custine said. “It looks more like some mad piece of modern art, something you’d waste good money to stand in front of, stroking your chin and looking thoughtful.”
“Maybe she was a spy after all,” Floyd replied.
“But what is this thing? What was she making?”
Floyd turned off the wireless, then gingerly pushed a finger into the mess of wires, being careful not to disturb anything. Some of the wires were loose, he noticed: their bare metal ends sparkled in the daylight, and he could see nubs of solder where they had been ripped free from the larger electrical parts.
“It looks insane to me,” he said. “But you know more about these things than I do. Does any of this make sense to you?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘make sense,’ ” Custine replied. “I recognise most of these parts, certainly. Smoothing condensers here… a pair of decoupling capacitors there… standard valve heaters over here… and this, I think, is a two-gang tuning condenser. It’s all common stuff, frankly; the oddity is seeing so much of it in such a little space. But she wouldn’t have needed access to any specialist supplies: a few dozen wireless sets and she would have had everything she needed.” He smiled. “Apart, of course, from a degree in electrical engineering and a very steady hand with a soldering iron.”
“Maybe neither was a problem for her. After all, if you can train a spy to learn a code, you can train them to make things.”
“So you seriously think Susan White made this contraption?”
Floyd looked at his partner. “Her or one of her associates. I see no alternative explanation.”
“But why did she need to make it at all? If she was a spy, couldn’t she have brought her own wireless equipment with her?”
This question troubled Floyd as well, but he had no satisfactory answer. “She must have been worried about being discovered,” he suggested. “If she came into this country via official channels, she’d have had to go through customs.”
“But aren’t spies supposed to have secret compartments in their luggage, that sort of thing?”
“Still too much risk of being discovered. Better to have some kind of coded shopping list of radio parts and instructions on how to put them together.”
“All right.” Custine stood up and leaned against the wall, one finger tapping his moustache. “There are clearly still some things we don’t understand. But let’s at least consider what might have happened. Susan White arrives in Paris as a foreign spy and finds a room for herself. She now needs to keep in touch with her compatriots—whoever and wherever they might be.”
“Or else she needs to listen in on someone else’s signals,” Floyd said.
Custine conceded Floyd’s point by raising a finger. “That’s also a possibility. Whatever the reason, she assembles this receiver, starting with a simple wireless set. She might even have been using it when she was disturbed. The intruder killed her by throwing her over the balcony, just as Blanchard suspected. Then they noticed the wireless, or had already seen her using it. Clearly they wanted to destroy it, but they couldn’t remove it from the room without drawing attention to themselves. And perhaps they—singular or plural—had very little time before they had to leave the room. After all, there was a dead body on the pavement.”
“And a smashed typewriter,” Floyd added.
“Yes,” Custine said, sounding less confident. “I’m not quite sure where that fits in. Perhaps they used it to bludgeon her.”
“Let’s just assume the killer was in a hurry for now,” Floyd said.
“Whoever it was had just enough time to pull the wireless away from the wall, jimmy open the back and get their hand inside. They did what damage they could, hoping to render the wireless inoperative. Doubtless if they’d had more time they would have done a more thorough job of it, but as it is, it looks as if they only wrenched a few wires loose and left it at that.”
Floyd pulled aside one knot of wires, wishing he had a torch. “We need to make this thing work,” he said.
“What we need to do,” Custine said, “is hand this whole matter over to the relevant authorities.”
“You think they’d take it any more seriously now that we have a broken wireless to show them? Face it, André: it’s all still circumstantial.” Delicately, Floyd picked out one of the bare-ended wires and searched for its counterpart. “If we could fix this…”
“We don’t know whether the murderer took anything out of it.”
“Let’s assume they were in too much of a hurry, and let’s also assume they didn’t want to be caught with anything on them that would link them to this room.”
“It’s not like you to be so optimistic.” Custine frowned, moved to the door and placed his ear against it. “Hang on—someone’s coming up the stairs.”
“Let’s get this thing back against the wall. Hurry!”
Floyd held the cover loosely in place while Custine secured it with a few turns of one screw; the others would have to wait. Behind them, the door rattled as someone tried the knob.
“It’s Blanchard,” Custine hissed.
“Just a moment, monsieur,” Floyd called, while the two of them inched the cumbersome wireless
set back into place, scraping and rucking up the carpet in the process.
The landlord knocked loudly on the door. “Open, please!”
“Just a moment,” Floyd repeated.
Custine moved back to the door and unlocked it, while Floyd stood in front of the wireless, doing his best to smooth the carpet back into place with the heel of his shoe. “We felt it best to lock the door,” Floyd said. “Didn’t want any of the neighbours poking their noses in.”
“And?” Blanchard asked, stepping into the room. “Did you find anything?”
“We’ve only been here five minutes.” Floyd gestured at his surroundings, wishing that he had not chosen to stand so close to the wireless set. “There’s a lot to work through. She was a busy little beaver, Mademoiselle White.”
“Mmm.” Blanchard observed them both through narrowed eyes. “The point is, Monsieur Floyd, that I had already deduced as much based on my own observations. It is fresh insights that I seek, not things I have already worked out for myself.”
Floyd moved away from the wireless. “Actually, I need to ask you something. Did you ever see her up here with anyone else?”
“I never saw her with anyone else the whole time I knew her.”
“Never?” Floyd asked.
“Even when I followed her towards the Métro station, I did not see the exchange take place.”
Floyd remembered Blanchard telling them how he had shadowed Susan White while she struggled towards the station with a loaded case. Floyd had forgotten that detail until now: it was in his notebook, but not at the forefront of his mind. Now that he suspected that she had been in contact with fellow agents (unless, as Custine had said, she was using the wireless to intercept someone else’s transmissions), he began to develop a vague idea of how she had worked. She was a foreign agent in an unfamiliar city, and for much of the time she was acting alone. Perhaps she received orders and intelligence through the modified wireless. But she could not be totally alone in Paris, or else the handover in the Métro station could never have taken place. So there must be other agents out there, from the same side as her: a small, loosely organised web of them spread across Paris, who kept in contact via coded radio transmissions. And unless the radio transmissions were originating from very far away, there must be someone in the area sending those orders.
Floyd felt a weird sense of vertigo: a combination of fear and thrill that he knew he would not be able to resist. It would pull him deeper, and it would do what it would with him, whether he liked it or not.
“You do think she was murdered, don’t you?” Blanchard asked him.
“I’m coming around to the idea, but I’m still not sure whether we’ll ever know exactly who did it.”
“Have you made any more progress with the documents?” Blanchard persisted.
Floyd had left a note with Greta the night before, saying that he would pay her a visit later today. “There might be something in them,” he said. “But look, Monsieur Blanchard, if she gave you those papers for safekeeping, then she must have felt that her life was in danger.”
“Which is exactly what I have been saying all along!”
“The point is, if the murder was premeditated, then it might also have been well executed. No loose ends, nothing to lead to the killer. Don’t believe those dime-novel mysteries: the killer doesn’t always make a mistake.”
“If you believe that sincerely, then we may as well conclude our contract now.”
“It’s too early for that,” Floyd said. “I’m just saying that at some point we might have to give up.”
“Give up, or retreat in the face of danger?”
Custine coughed before Floyd could say anything he might regret. “We really shouldn’t take any more of your time this morning, monsieur,” he said smoothly. “We have a lot more to do in this room, not to mention the parallel lines of enquiry we should be pursuing.”
Blanchard considered this and nodded politely. “Very well. Monsieur Floyd, at least your associate still appears to consider the case solvable.” For a moment, his attention seemed drawn to the disturbed area of carpet in front of the wireless, and a flicker of comprehension troubled his face. Then he turned and left them alone.
“I can’t help liking the old coot,” Floyd said, “but I do wish he’d get out of our faces.”
“It’s his money. He just wants to make sure that it’s being spent wisely.” Custine paused and dug into his toolkit again, before shaking his head. “I was hoping I might have something in here I could use to splice those wires back together, but I don’t. I’ll need to return to the office.”
“You think you can fix it?”
“I can try. If we assume that nothing has been removed, then it’s only a matter of reconnecting the broken wires.”
“They all looked the same to me,” Floyd said, peering through a narrow gap in the balcony curtain. Five storeys below, the mid-morning sun had turned the wet street into a sparkling mirror. He watched passers-by stepping between puddles, and then something caught his eye.
“Of course they do,” Custine said. “Nevertheless, there should be a manageable number of permutations. If I haven’t got anywhere by the end of this afternoon, I doubt that more time will make any difference.” Custine waited a moment. “Floyd? Did you hear a word of what I just said?”
Floyd turned from the window. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re thinking about Greta again, aren’t you?”
“Actually,” Floyd said, “I was thinking about that little girl standing across the street.”
“I didn’t notice any girl when we arrived.”
“That’s because she wasn’t there. But now it looks as if she’s watching this room.”
He let the curtain slip back into the place. He’d had enough of a look at the little girl to make him doubt that she was the same one they had seen coming out of Blanchard’s apartment the evening before. But there was still something about the way light fell on her face that made him want to look elsewhere.
“You don’t seriously think a child has something to do with this murder, do you?” Custine asked.
“Of course not,” Floyd said.
They took the stairs down to the Mathis. By the time they reached the car, the watcher was gone.
EIGHT
Auger’s shuttle hauled away from the Twentieth Century Limited and aimed itself in the general direction of Mars. She pressed her face against the glass of a porthole, feeling the vibration in her bones as the shuttle stammered its steering jets in rapid, chugging sequence. Though she had little idea of where she was being taken—or how her task fitted into the story Peter had told her—she was still glad to leave the clapped-out old space liner. After five days, its charms had worn perilously thin, with even a guided tour into the ship’s bowels to view the last working antimatter engine in the solar system providing little more than an hour’s mildly diverting (and frankly terrifying) entertainment. Mars at least was ripe was possibility, and she felt a tingling sense of anticipation as the planet’s butterscotch face loomed larger. It wasn’t just lack of funds that had kept her from visiting Mars before. She reckoned there was something ghoulish about the tourists who did make the trip; some morbid craving to revel in the horror of what had happened to the planet. But now that she had been sent here on someone else’s orders, it was difficult not to want to see it for herself.
The Scoured Zone began south of the Hellas Planitia and reached as far north as Cydonia, encompassing all of the crater-pocked uplands of the Arabia Terra. Between the poles, the rest of Mars was dusted in shades of brittle blue-green: vast prairies of hardy, gene-tweaked vegetation laid down over a hundred years earlier. Canals, etched across the surface with laser precision, were twinkling back ribbons of reflected sunlight. At the hubs and junctions of the irrigation system, Auger made out the off-white sprawl of cities and townships, the tentative scratches of roads and the lines of tethered dirigibles. There were even a few wispy streaks of cloud and a handfu
l of hexagonal lakes, clustered together like cells in a beehive.
But between Hellas Planitia and Cydonia nothing grew, nothing endured, nothing lived or moved. Even the mindless clouds exhibited a wary disregard for that whole area. It had been that way for twenty-three years, since the last days of the brief but bitter war that had erupted between the Slashers and the Threshers over rights of access to Earth.
Auger barely remembered the war. As a child, she had been cosseted from the worst of the news. But it really hadn’t been all that long ago, and there was still a sense that certain scores had yet to be settled. She thought of Caliskan, losing a brother to the Slashers in the battle to reclaim Phobos. The war must have seemed like yesterday to him. How could he accept Slasher involvement in Earth so readily, after what they had taken from him? How could he be so cold, so political?
Another series of manoeuvres followed, smoother this time, and then—quite without warning—Auger found her view of the Scoured Zone obstructed by the illuminated, machine-lined walls of a docking bay sliding slowly past. Beyond the bay, glimpsed for an instant, was a curving, airless horizon of very dark rock.
She had been misinformed about Mars. It had never been her destination.
The welcoming party on the other side of the airlock consisted of eight men and women in USNE military uniform, accompanied by two snake robots.
“I’m Aveling,” said the tallest, thinnest man in the group, observing Auger with pale aluminium-grey eyes. He had a ruined voice: a slow, parched rasp that she had to strain to understand. “You’ll be taking orders and instructions from me for the duration of your mission. If that’s a problem, get over it now.”
“And if I don’t get over it?” she asked.
“We’ll put you on the first ship back to Tanglewood and that unpleasant little tribunal you should be facing.”
“Only with half my memory missing,” she said.
“Correct.”
“If it’s all right with you, I’ll try the taking orders thing for now, see how that works out.”
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