by Eric Brown
‘Vandita . . . ?’
‘We can’t talk here. Come with me.’
She stood and gripped Rana’s hand, pulling her along the street to the steel pillars of the bridge. Rana’s mind raced through the possibilities. She wondered if one of the kids had done something wrong, which might explain the girl’s anxiety.
Vandita kicked off her plastic sandals and climbed on to the timber platform, squatting on a mattress and not meeting Rana’s gaze. Three candles provided fitful illumination. The other children had not yet arrived home. Rana removed her boots and sat cross-legged before the girl. She reached out and took her hand.
‘Vandita, please, what’s wrong? I’ll do everything I can to help. You know that.’
The girl was clasping her hands around skinny shins.
Her eyes finally focused on Rana. ‘Last night, Rana, someone I know ... he saw a terrible thing.’
‘Tell me,’ Rana said.
The girl remained silent.
‘Do I know him? Does he live here?’
Vandita shook her head. ‘He lives near the spaceport, in the old scrapyard. But last night he was somewhere else, in a rich area. He saw something and told his friends, and I found out.’
‘Tell me what it was, Vandita. What are you frightened of?’
The girl looked pained. ‘This boy, I know him only slightly. He won’t be happy if police are involved.’
‘What was he doing in the rich suburb last night, Vandita?’ She squeezed the girl’s hand. ‘I can guess, but tell me.’
‘He was stealing - robbing a house.’
‘And he saw something, but was too scared to tell the police because of what he was doing? Vandita, if you tell me what he saw, I’ll ignore the fact that he was burgling a house, ah-cha?’
Vandita shrugged unhappily. ‘He won’t like me telling you.’
‘There’s no need for him to know that it was you who told the police. Now...’
For long seconds Vandita looked at Rana, and at last she whispered, ‘He was robbing a house in the Raneesh district—’
Rana stopped her. ‘Raneesh?’ She was aware of her hammering heartbeat.
Vandita nodded. ‘He was coming from the house when he heard two men talking on a pathway nearby. One of the men tried to run, but the other man fired a laser at him. The man fell over and the other man fired again, at his face. Then the man walked away. After a few seconds the boy followed the man, perhaps a kilometre, and saw him go into a house. Then he left quickly and went home to the scrapyard near the spaceport.’
Rana swallowed. She tried to marshal her thoughts.
‘Vandita,’ she said at last, ‘do you know where the killer lived? Did the boy say?’
Vandita shook her head. ‘I didn’t talk to the boy. A friend of his told me. He didn’t say where the killer lived, but the boy saw the house he went into.’
Rana was nodding. Shiva . . . after all the work she’d done, all the complex reasoning, she might solve the case thanks to the testimony of a chance eye witness.
‘Vandita, this is important. Can you tell me the boy’s name? I swear to you that I won’t tell him who told me. You’ve no reason to be afraid.’ She paused. ‘You’ve got to tell me. We’ve got to stop this man killing again.’
Vandita nodded. ‘Ah-cha. The boy is called Ahmed Prakesh. You will find him in the old Tata scrapyard.’
Rana reached out and stroked the young girl’s cheek. ‘Vandita, you don’t know how important this is. I’ll see you later.’
Rana left the makeshift dwelling beneath the Howrah bridge and took a taxi to the spaceport. She considered contacting Vishwanath about the latest development, but decided against it. She would have to be very careful in her dealings with the boy. The presence of more than one police officer might provoke Ahmed to flight. She would handle this interview herself.
The Tata scrapyard was a vast area of tangled carbon-fibre parts neighbouring the spaceport. The mammoth carcasses of decommissioned spaceships reared against the lights of the port, arranged like the exhibits in some forgotten museum. Rana paid the taxi fare and squeezed through a rent in the polycarbon fencing. In the glaring overspill of the spaceport halogens, the scrapyard was transformed into a landscape of dark shadow and highlighted carbon fibre. Rana walked between the sliced and sectioned remains of ships that had once proudly made their way through the void, sad chunks of machines bearing the faded livery of lines long defunct.
She halted, stood quietly and listened. The only sound was from the port itself, the roar of a tug as it hauled a spaceship across the tarmac to a blast-off pit. The noise faded, replaced by silence. To her right, Rana detected the faint sound of music. When her eyes adjusted to the dark shadows, she made out movement - the figure of a young boy or girl, running towards the source of the music, no doubt to tell his or her friends of Rana’s intrusion.
Rana walked towards the bulbous shape of a derelict space-tug. The music stopped. Rana imagined a gang of street-kids, holding their breaths, watching each other in alarm.
She ducked through the entrance hatch of the old tug. Before her, half a dozen big-eyed urchins sat around the bulky shape of an ancient radio. A defective glow-tube provided stuttering half-light. A drooping stick of incense filled the old cargo hold with a sickly sweet stench.
Rana squatted on her heels and looked about the group of boys and girls. She smiled at the chubby, frightened face of a small girl. ‘Amita? Is that you?’ she asked in Hindi.
The six-year-old smiled timorously. ‘Officer Rao,’ the girl said. ‘We thought it was a security guard!’
Rana smiled. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me, Amita?’
She glanced around the group, trying to detect the boy called Ahmed from his guilty expression. The difficulty was, their suspicion of the police gave them all expressions of guilt.
Amita looked at her friends. ‘Officer Rao works with children,’ she explained. ‘Last year she gave me rupees for a new dress.’ She glanced at Rana, smoothed her palms down the front of a dirty blue smock, and smiled proudly.
‘Who are your friends, Amita?’ Rana asked.
‘This is Nadeen, and this is Sumar, and Kal, and Ahmed, and Ashok . . .’
Ahmed ... a tiny boy in shorts and a ripped T-shirt that once upon a time might have been white. He was no older, Rana thought, than six or seven. He stared at Rana, a rabbit mesmerised by a cobra.
Rana nodded. ‘The thing is, you see, I came here hoping that you might be able to help me. I have a hundred rupees to give to anyone who can tell me something.’ She paused and stared at the children. Their eyes bulged at the thought of so much money. ‘Last night a terrible murder was committed in the district of Raneesh, three kilometres south of here. A man was shot dead with a laser.’ She glanced at Ahmed. He was staring at the ground. ‘I need information about this killing. I need to know where the killer lives, so that I can lock him up and stop him from killing again.’
The children looked at each other. One or two glanced furtively at Ahmed. The others, clearly not in the know, looked disappointed that they would be unable to claim the rupees.
‘If anyone can tell me where the killer lives, they can have . . .’ She reached into her pocket and counted out five twenty-rupee notes, laying them one by one on top of the old radio. The children stared, transfixed.
Rana picked up the notes and slipped them back into her breast pocket. She stood up and said, ‘I’ll be waiting outside. If anyone can tell me what I want to know, come and see me and I’ll give them all the rupees, ah-cha?’
She looked around the group of staring faces one last time, before ducking out of the old spaceship and standing, heart hammering, in the dazzling glare of a halogen spotlight. She could hear the frantic babble of high voices from inside. Then silence.
A minute later, appearing timidly like some hibernating animal fearing the presence of a predator, Ahmed emerged through the hatch. He stood shivering in the humid night before Rana, staring up at
her with massive eyes.
‘I . . .’ He could hardly speak for fear. He gulped ‘I know someone who saw the killing,’ he stammered. ‘The boy . . . my friend, he told me where the man lives.’
Rana knelt and took his hand. ‘Can you remember what your friend said?’ she asked. ‘Can you remember where the man lives?’
Ahmed nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘Ah-cha. My friend said he lives on Allahabad Marg, near Raneesh.’
Rana nodded. ‘Can you remember the number of the house?’ Allahabad Marg was a long street that stretched for over a kilometre through the exclusive western suburbs.
The boy looked crestfallen. ‘No . . . my friend, he cannot remember.’ He brightened. ‘But the house, it’s strange. It looks like this.’ He moved to the flank of the tug and, in the dust that covered a domed engine nacelle, drew the shape of the house with his forefinger.
Rana watched the collection of odd shapes appear in the dust, a series of almost semi-circular cowlings. It was not exactly an architect’s scale drawing, but she recognised the shape. In the rich suburbs it was fashionable to have one’s house styled in polycarbon after famous world buildings.
This one, she knew, was the old Sydney Opera House.
She felt her stomach tighten in excitement. From her breast pocket, along with the rupee notes, Rana took the dozen pix of the computer-aged Madrigal laser killer.
‘Ahmed, did the man look anything like any of these men?’
She showed him the pix one by one.
Ahmed frowned and shook his head. ‘I think he had a thin face, and silver hair.’ He stopped, realising his mistake, and looked up at Rana. ‘I won’t be arrested?’ he pleaded.
‘Ahmed . . .’ She took his fingers and kissed them. ‘I promise you that nothing will happen, ah-cha? Look, here are the hundred rupees.’
He reached out, slowly, and took the red notes. He held them before his eyes as if disbelieving his luck. Then he darted back inside the ship, chattering excitedly to his friends.
Rana slipped the pix back into her pocket. So the killer was thin-faced, with silver hair. It could still be the Madrigal killer, she realised, though prematurely aged. He might even have been in disguise.
She resolved to go immediately to the house on Allahabad Marg that looked like the old Sydney Opera House. She would claim that she was conducting routine enquiries, question the man about the recent killing in the area, and assess his reaction.
As she left the scrapyard and made her way to the spaceport taxi rank, she wondered whether correct procedure would be to contact Vishwanath first. But, she reasoned with herself, he had given her permission to follow her own initiative. For the past two weeks she had conducted her own interviews, followed her own hunches. Why should this case be any different?
As she climbed into the taxi and gave her destination, she found it hard to believe that soon she might be confronting the man known as the crucifix killer.
* * * *
16
Bennett woke by degrees, his memory returning in disordered fragments. For some reason he recalled the ruin of the alien temple first, and then the crash-landed starship. Only then were these images superseded by the events of the night before: Ten Lee and Mackendrick’s capture, the blow to his head and what he had overheard before passing out.
He opened his eyes, expecting a renewal of the pain, but he felt only a dull throbbing where he’d been struck. He was in a wood-panelled room, fragrant with a scent like that of pine. He was no longer lying on the floor but in a comfortable bed. He sat up and stared down the length of his body. He was wearing clean undergarments, not his own. His flight-suit was folded over the back of a chair next to the bed.
There was no guard in the room with him, no interrogator.
He swung himself out of bed and pulled on his flight-suit. He stood and walked to the end of the room and stared through the floor-to-ceiling picture window.
The view was spectacular in its alien beauty. Tenebrae was half risen, its equatorial diameter spanning the entire length of the near horizon. Its opal light spilled over the terraces that marked the various levels of the valley like contour lines. A hundred domes sparkled like beads of dew made monstrous. Above them, lining the far side of the valley, was a forest of wind turbines. As he absorbed the scene he made out the tiny figures of people working on the narrow, stepped fields, and vehicles making their slow way up the switchback track that climbed from the valley bottom.
Only then, as if in reaction to the idyllic scene before him, did he recall what he had heard the night before. He recollected the voice that had wanted them dead, the other, patriarchal voice that counselled less severe measures. Well, he was relieved that the patriarch had won the day, but something was not right on Penumbra. They had matters they clearly wanted to keep hidden, and would even consider murder to do so.
He turned at the sound of a door opening, expecting a colonist. Ten Lee peered through, her face brightening when she saw him. She padded across to Bennett, pressed her head to his chest and held him in an uncharacteristic embrace.
‘Joshua, we didn’t know what happened to you! The attack was so sudden.’
She pulled her head away and looked up at him, frowning at the bruise on the side of his head.
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘I followed you here.’ He smiled. ‘So much for my attempt to free you.’
She looked up at him like a frightened child. ‘They were human, Joshua. I’m sure they were human.’
‘Colonists,’ he said. ‘They crash-landed.’
‘They told you?’
‘I . . .’ He paused and considered telling her about his discovery of the liner. ‘Later, Ten. Where’s Mackendrick? We need to talk over what happened.’
‘In the middle room, along the passage.’
She took his hand and pulled him from the room and along a corridor. She knocked on the next door and pushed it open.
Mackendrick was in the process of zipping his flight-suit. He looked up as Bennett and Ten Lee entered, came forward without a word and embraced him. He felt the wiry old man in his arms, emotion constricting his throat.
‘Thank Christ you’re okay, Josh!’
‘The feeling’s mutual,’ Bennett said.
Mackendrick saw his bruised head. ‘What happened, Josh?’
Bennett sat on the bed between Ten Lee and Mack. ‘I followed you here. Someone saw me and gave me this.’ He fingered the bruise. ‘Before I passed out I heard them talking. They didn’t know who we were, or rather they thought we were terrorists.’ He looked from Mack to Ten. ‘Something’s going on here. They talked about killing us, but decided against it. Instead they’re going to destroy the ship and keep us here - they said they need scientists. They’ll offer us places in their community.’ He told them what he’d overheard, the mention of people called Quineau and Klien, the cryptic line about their not finding out.
‘Who are Quineau and Klien?’ Ten Lee asked.
‘I’ve no idea. They didn’t say. I got the impression that Quineau had left Penumbra to tell Earth what was happening here, and that Klien had tried to follow and kill him. I think they assumed we came here because of Quineau.’
Mackendrick was staring through the picture window at the bulk of the gas giant lifting itself through the morning sky.
‘We’ll tell them we crash-landed in the mountains north of here, okay?’ he said. ‘We’ll say the ship was destroyed. That way they might not look for it. We’ll make no mention of trying to get away from here.’
‘And what is our story when they ask why we came to Penumbra?’ Ten Lee asked. ‘They might be suspicious. If they think that this fellow Quineau sent us . . .’
Mackendrick considered, and said at last, ‘We’ll tell them a version of the truth, that we were on a survey/exploratory mission, charting the arm. They should have no reason not to believe us.’
‘And then?’ Bennett asked.
‘Then we try to find out what’s going on.’ He
looked from Bennett to Ten Lee. ‘You don’t want to run back to the ship at the first opportunity, do you?’
Bennett was the first to reply. ‘I don’t want to be stranded here, Mack. The longer we hang on, the more likely they are to locate the Cobra.’
‘Not if we tell them that we crashed in the mountains,’ Ten Lee said.
‘But the grass of the plain shows our tracks. All they have to do is follow them back to the ship.’
‘There was a storm last night,’ Mackendrick told him. ‘Our tracks would’ve been obliterated. I say we hang on, find out what’s going on here. Ten Lee?’
She nodded, her expression serious. ‘I too think we should wait and investigate this place.’