by Malcolm Rose
They sat down at a table and Troy began. ‘How did you get on with Precious Austin when she was still working at the labs?’
Fern shrugged. ‘Okay, I guess.’
‘Have you seen her since?’
‘Now and again, yes.’
‘Here tonight?’
She hesitated for an instant. ‘No.’
‘When was the last time?’ Troy asked.
‘Earlier this evening, as it happens.’
Outside, engines began to rev up once more.
‘What about Oriana Skillicorn?’
‘She was with Precious. In the restaurant down the road.’
‘I’m guessing it was a major-only one?’
‘As it turns out, yes.’
‘Did you eat with them?’
‘No. I was just there. We didn’t arrange to meet. I sat with them for a few minutes – just to be social, you know. They’re a bit … ’
‘What?’
‘Prejudiced. Against outers.’
‘And you’re not?’ said Troy.
‘Didn’t you see my friends?’ She nodded towards the east stand. ‘Two majors and five outers.’
‘You’re quick to tell me that. Why do you think I’d be interested?’
‘Because you’re investigating a major versus outer thing. It’s got nothing to do with me because I like outers. Obviously.’
Troy pretended to be puzzled. ‘Hang on. You think you’re a suspect. Why?’
‘Because, as it happens, you’re questioning me.’
Troy smiled. ‘We don’t confine ourselves to suspects. Most of the time, we talk to people with useful information.’
Fern looked doubtful. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘You were a Friend to the Integrated Games. What was that all about?’
‘I thought it would be a good thing to support. I don’t know what I was going to be asked to do. It would’ve been some sort of stewarding job.’
To Troy, it seemed like an easy way to deflect suspicion by appearing to approve of the mixing of majors and outers.
Four noisy engines revved simultaneously as the next heat got underway.
Troy asked, ‘Do you come here a lot?’
‘Quite a lot. It’s really exciting. When you’re allowed to watch.’
‘Can Lexi see the sleeve of your blouse – or whatever? Just pull the coat up a bit.’
Fern did as he asked and Lexi took a photograph of the buttoned cuff.
‘What’s this about?’
Lexi said, ‘I’m going to need to see all your tops.’
‘As it turns out, I didn’t bring them all with me,’ Fern replied with venom.
Lexi ignored the sarcasm. ‘No problem. We can go back to your place.’
‘But … ’ Disappointed, she glanced in the direction of the track.
‘We’re investigating three murders,’ Troy said. ‘I think that trumps a night out with mates at speedway.’
Fern sighed. ‘I suppose so.’
SCENE 35
Friday 18th April, Late night
‘Well?’ Troy whispered impatiently in Fern Mountstephen’s bedroom.
‘There’s one here,’ Lexi told him quietly as she completed the recognition analysis on her life-logger. ‘It’s a buttoned cuff from one of her blouses and it’s as good a match as Dominic Varney’s. Both fall within error limits.’
‘And she could easily have dropped a couple of specks from the speedway track onto the card. She said she goes a lot.’
‘It’s brick granules, apparently,’ Lexi told him. ‘That means clay to me. But … ’
‘What?’
Unsure how much Fern would be able to hear from downstairs, Lexi kept her voice quiet. ‘She’s got all these outer friends.’
‘She comes across as friendly but, behind that, there’s something severe about her. Are they really friends or is she acting – like Dominic Varney?’
‘You’re not convincing me.’
‘I reckon our guy keeps a low profile. She fits. She doesn’t go to TRAPT meetings, doesn’t spray graffiti on walls, and she stays close to outers. That could all be wool she’s pulling over our eyes, so she looks way south of guilty.’
‘Huh. Having a good alibi for Sunday night keeps her profile very low.’
Troy nodded. ‘I’ve asked Terabyte to go through every bit of the Shallow End computer. All night, if he needs it. I want him to find out exactly what happened last Sunday at about eight o’clock.’
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Probably nothing. I just think we could use some Terabyte magic. For now,’ he said, ‘we need to know if she’s got a secret lab in here somewhere. With a vial, sticky tape that oozes acid, and bits of card with messages spelled out on them.’
‘I’ll send an emergency request for a search warrant to our lovely new commander. Maybe it’ll get him out of bed.’ She smiled and added, ‘I hope so.’
‘Our reason’s flimsy, but the stakes are so high he’s got to give us permission. Hasn’t he?’
Lexi shrugged. ‘We’ll see.’
The temporary commander disagreed. His message was plain. There’s far greater reason to issue a search warrant for Precious Austin’s house than Fern Mountstephen’s.
While Troy talked to Fern, the best that Lexi could do was to download the plan for the original building. And the first thing to catch her eye was that the main schematic showed a cellar.
Fern was complaining, ‘You’ve just invaded my wardrobe … ’
‘With your permission,’ Troy stressed.
‘Now you want to poke around everywhere else! Don’t you need some sort of warrant … ?’
‘That’s if we wanted to be thorough and, if necessary, break things open. We just want to take a quick look. You can give us permission to do that. You can escort us, if you want. I don’t know why you’d refuse, unless you’ve got something to hide.’
‘It’s getting late.’
Troy smiled. ‘I bet you’d still be at the speedway if it wasn’t for us.’
Fern sighed wearily and then said, ‘All right. Come on. I’ll take you upstairs again and work our way down.’
‘Thanks. It’s good of you,’ Troy replied, following her.
Ten minutes later, having peered into every room and explored her garden shed by torchlight, they were no wiser.
Lexi said, ‘There’s one place you haven’t shown us.’
‘Oh?’ Fern seemed surprised.
‘This house has a basement.’
‘Does it? Well, I’ve lived here for four years as it happens and I haven’t seen one.’ She spread her arms. ‘I mean, where is it?’
The plan of the building didn’t help. The place where there was supposed to be access to the cellar had long since been bricked up and become part of a cloakroom.
‘I think we’ve come to a dead end,’ Troy admitted. ‘Nothing else we can do unless we get a search warrant.’
Looking relieved, Fern showed the detectives to the door.
Walking away, Troy said, ‘We’ll put her under the closest possible surveillance overnight. I don’t want her to go to the toilet without us knowing.’
Lexi screwed up her nose. ‘Not a pleasant image.’ Then she added, ‘I’m going to analyse that third demand.’
Troy nodded. ‘Good. I’m going to have a think and, if I can, catch a nowhere-near-enough amount of sleep. Then … who knows?’
Lexi glanced at him. ‘You want this sorted out first thing in the morning.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Sure,’ Lexi replied. ‘It’d be good to wrap this bit up neatly for the new investigator.’
Troy’s smile was grim. ‘I’d rather hand over a solved case with nothing to do but charge the bad guy.’
Lexi shook her head. ‘I’m not sure we’re even close.’
SCENE 36
Saturday 19th April, Early hours
Saul Tingle had not left Shallow End Laboratories. He sat with
Julia Neve Nineteen in the computer room and watched the scruffy young man from Shepford Crime Central as his fingers flew across a keypad, delving deeper and deeper into the programming.
Neither of them knew enough about computers to figure out what he was doing. They had to trust him. But both of them were anxious. This man – almost a boy – could cripple the workings of the laboratories if he deleted or altered one line of the intricate operating system.
Terabyte turned round, pushed his hair behind his ears and said, ‘Any chance of a beer to keep me going? This is thirsty work.’
Julia nodded. ‘I’ll take care of it.’ She left the room.
‘You don’t have to watch me, you know,’ Terabyte said. ‘I’d probably finish quicker if I didn’t have spectators.’
‘Nervous spectators,’ Saul replied. ‘I’m here because I need to see that the system’s okay for next week. It’s vital to our safety and our entire business.’
‘I know,’ Terabyte replied as he got back to work. ‘You’ve made that point three times already. I’m treating it with respect. It’s a bit flabby, though.’
‘Flabby?’
‘Yeah. There’s the original set of instructions and hundreds of additions. Patches on patches. Really, you want to scrap the lot and start again from scratch. Keep it tight and neat. It’ll be faster and more reliable that way.’
‘I think we won’t touch it just yet,’ Saul replied. ‘Not while we’ve got … other things on our minds.’ He thought he heard a noise and he glanced at the door.
‘It self-checks,’ Terabyte told him. ‘When I’m finished, I’ll run a system-wide scan to make sure it’s as good as it can be.’
‘Good.’ But Saul still looked tense.
When Julia came back in with a large glass of dark ale for Terabyte, the unit director nearly jumped out of his chair.
‘Only me,’ she said.
Saul wiped some sweat from his brow. ‘I’m not used to working through the night. It’s quiet. Creepy.’
Terabyte downed half the beer in a single swig and then continued to delve into the complex codes.
It was an hour and a half later – just after he’d finished his third beer – when he sat back and said, ‘That’s it! I need to talk to Lexi and Troy.’
Saul jolted upright. ‘What about? What have you found?’
‘First,’ Terabyte replied, ‘I need to talk to them in private.’ He got up and left the computer room to find a place where he could call his colleagues in confidence.
Still drowsy, Troy sat on the edge of his bed and listened carefully. In Crime Central, Lexi was much more alert as she took part in the three-cornered conversation.
‘Right. I don’t know if this is what you’d got in mind, Troy, but there’s a difference in the way the lab’s computer recorded Sunday night’s raid into the high-security lab. Normally, when someone goes through all those decontamination chambers, the software enters the time and date automatically in one type of format. I’ve gone back over weeks of data and it’s always the same. When the first door opens, the time gets recorded to the nearest tenth of a second. I don’t know why – it’s not necessary – but that’s what the system does. You get an entry like 09:55:17.2. Last Sunday, the door opened at 19:58:00.0 and, on the way out, it was 20:32:00.0. Now, what are the chances that someone went in and came out exactly on the nearest minute? Not even missing it by a tenth of a second.’
Troy shivered. He had begun to suspect trickery and Terabyte’s discovery made him wish he’d checked before.
Lexi said, ‘You’re suggesting someone entered the time and date manually – to the nearest minute – and the computer filled in the missing figures with zeroes.’
‘I can’t think of any other explanation,’ Terabyte replied.
‘So the doors didn’t open at all. Someone just made it look like they did.’
‘Good work,’ said Troy. ‘Exactly what you’d expect if someone wanted to provide themselves with a perfect alibi for Sunday night.’
Terabyte laughed. ‘That’s what’s let them down. The times are too perfect.’
Without wasting another moment, Troy said, ‘Let’s find out where Blaine Twenty-Two is, Lexi. I’ll meet you there.’
SCENE 37
Saturday 19th April, Pre-dawn
Outside one of Shepford’s schools, Troy looked at his approaching partner and, puzzled, said, ‘School? At three in the morning?’
Lexi nodded. ‘I’m guessing it’s a Blossoming.’
‘I’ve heard of that.’
‘Bringing up an outer baby is a job for a nanny. Seeing them to adulthood – at the age of fourteen for us – is a job for the community. When they reach it, the community celebrates with a Blossoming.’
‘But at three in the morning?’
‘Apart from a few fifteen-minute pauses, we’re twenty-four hours a day people, remember. And we prefer to do it when most majors aren’t around. In fact,’ she said, ‘it’s probably best for you to wait here and I’ll go in and get Blaine.’
‘Majors not welcome, eh?’
‘You’d be … a distraction.’ Lexi smiled and went towards the entrance on her own.
When she brought out the technician from Shallow End Laboratories, Troy was in a hurry. Standing in the light of the school’s reception, he said, ‘Think back to last Friday. Your end-of-the-week maintenance visit to BSL4 with Fern Mountstephen. Who left the lab first? Who was first into decontamination?’
‘Er … me.’
‘So, Fern was behind you. For a while, you couldn’t see what she was doing.’
‘No. But it wasn’t long. Well, longer than normal now I think about it, but not a huge wait.’
‘Did you take anything in with you?’
‘A specially designed bag for new equipment needed in the lab,’ said Blaine.
‘Both of you had one?’
‘Yes. Why?’
Troy ignored the question. He nodded knowingly. At last, he had a mental picture of what had happened. ‘Thanks,’ he said. But before leaving, he asked one more question. ‘By the way, is Fern hot with computers?’
‘Better than me – and probably better than most majors,’ Blaine answered.
As they raced back to Fern Mountstephen’s house, Lexi said to her partner, ‘I haven’t got much on that third demand. No more impressions, but there was something that could’ve been a particle of clay.’ She paused and then turned to make eye contact with him. ‘I was worried that you’d hold me back – like a lot of majors, but … ’
‘Yes?’
‘Looks like you’ve called another one right.’
‘Maybe. Fern was the last person out of the lab on Friday. When Blaine turned his back to leave, she released some SUMP and put the vial in her bag. If she contaminated them both in the process, the poison was destroyed as they came through the cleaning stages. Then she tinkered with the computer, making it look like a Sunday sabotage while she was at the gym.’
‘Hey presto. A clever alibi.’
‘Not quite clever enough.’
‘You know,’ Lexi said, ‘there’s a chance we might just sort this out before sun’s up and we get relegated.’
‘It’s our bike,’ Troy replied. ‘We don’t want anyone else pedalling it. But what I really want is someone in a cell and that vial of SUMP back in BSL4.’
In their final few minutes before confronting Fern Mountstephen, they consulted the surveillance team. Apparently, she was upstairs in her bedroom with the light out, almost certainly asleep. They also studied the plans of her house on Lexi’s life-logger.
Frustrated, Troy shook his head. ‘There must be a way into her basement.’
Lexi nodded, thinking about the layout. Her forefinger followed the lines and angles, and came to a stop at the place that was now a cloakroom. ‘It’s still got to be here somewhere. It can’t be anywhere else.’
‘It fits. But … ’ He shrugged.
‘A false floor,’ Lexi said. ‘We’re l
ooking for a trapdoor.’
Outside Fern’s home, Lexi whispered, ‘Everything’s changed. Now the evidence has built up, we can break in if we’re sure someone’s in danger or if we can prevent a serious crime.’
Troy nodded. ‘Every outer’s in danger and killing them all’s a pretty serious crime.’
‘Agreed,’ Lexi said. ‘I don’t think we need an invitation or a warrant. We’re going in.’ Her right foot crashed into the door.
With a ring of surveillance officers outside to make sure the suspect could not escape, Troy and Lexi went in search of conclusive proof. They made straight for the cloakroom. Lexi dropped to her knees and rummaged near the carpet. It wasn’t properly fixed to the floorboards. Rolling it back, she revealed a concealed hatch. ‘Hey presto,’ she whispered. ‘No dust. Not musty. This is used a lot.’ She levered up the trapdoor with her fingernails and revealed steps descending into a black hole. She didn’t wait. She put her left foot on the first step and at once lights came on to guide her. ‘Controlled by a motion detector,’ she said.
She led the way down into a makeshift laboratory with a smooth concrete floor.
Careful not to touch or disturb anything, the two detectives recorded it all on their life-loggers. To the right was a fume cupboard. On the left, there was a long bench with various flasks, tubes, beakers, syringes and other chemical equipment. Further along was a digital camera capable of recording video. There was also a small roll of sticky tape.
‘I’ll have to analyse it,’ Lexi said quietly, ‘but it looks familiar.’
‘Looks like a trump card to me.’
In the far corner, there was a cubicle that looked like a shower unit. But it was more sophisticated. It was, perhaps, Fern’s amateurish version of a high-security lab.
Troy pointed to a piece of cardboard on a shelf next to the chamber. It was another threat.
‘Not the final piece of the jigsaw,’ Troy said, ‘but enough to convict.’
Lexi nodded, still anxious. ‘But where’s the final piece?’
‘Looking for this?’
They both spun round to see Fern Mountstephen standing on the stairs, holding up a glass vial.
‘I took the precaution of scoring the glass,’ she told them. ‘It’s weakened. Just a tap and it’ll break.’