The help, then, housekeeper, maybe.
Voronov holds up his ID and Isabel does the same.
‘We’re from the PJ,’ he says. ‘I’m Inspector Voronov and this is Inspector Reis. We’d like to speak to Mr and Mrs Soares. Are they home?’
The woman takes a step back, hand fluttering to her chest. ‘Of course, please.’ She gestures them inside. ‘If you wait here, I’ll call Mr Soares for you.’
They step inside and Isabel closes the door behind her. Saying that the hall is spacious would be an understatement. The housekeeper’s steps echo on the stone flooring as she walks away and disappears through another arch further down the hall.
Isabel looks around. Everything is perfectly in place. She wonders if people in this house are allowed to sneeze.
The sound of a man’s voice comes from somewhere deeper inside the house. Isabel stands up straighter, calming herself and waiting. It isn’t every day that you come face to face with someone who openly hates your kind.
The housekeeper returns, and she’s followed by Bento Soares.
Even at home relaxing, Soares looks ready to welcome guests. He’s dressed in a dark blue polo shirt and beige chinos, thick salt and pepper hair combed carefully into a side parting and a clean-shaven face. Shoulders straight, grey eyes focused, he walks to them in sure strides to stop in front of Voronov.
‘Inspectors. Let me be blunt. I don’t appreciate you interrupting my day.’
‘Mr Soares,’ Isabel greets him. He doesn’t offer her his hand and she’s happy to let it slide. She wants to touch him about as much as he wants to touch her. ‘We apologise for barging in.’
‘Then why are you?’
Isabel reminds herself that no matter how much she detests the man, they’re here to inform him that his son is dead.
‘I’m afraid it’s about your son,’ Voronov says, ‘is there a place where we could speak privately?’
Soares says, ‘Follow me.’ He doesn’t wait to see if they follow, leading the way to a set of sprawling stairs that take them up to the second floor of the house. The corridor is dotted with balconies. It’s all very pretty. Curtains blowing in the breeze, windows and balcony doors open. It turns the corridors cold, and the house itself is unnaturally quiet. Isabel wonders where everyone else is.
‘Will your wife be joining us, Mr Soares?’ she asks.
Bento Soares looks at Isabel over his shoulder, not stopping. ‘My wife is away at the moment.’
‘I see.’
Soares stops outside a set of open doors and motions them inside. He closes them behind him and makes his way to the desk, settling himself behind it, then gestures towards the two seats across from it. ‘Please,’ he says.
When they’re settled, Soares glances from one of them to the other.
‘Why is the PJ sending two inspectors to see me? And why would my wife need to join me? Your investigation isn’t related to me, or,’ he pauses there and spears Isabel with a look, ‘my son.’
Isabel doesn’t respond.
Voronov gets straight to the point. ‘Your son’s body was discovered in the early hours of this morning.’
Isabel watches, tense; ready to catch whatever slips out.
It’s as if the muscles of Soares’ face ice over. His eyes become distant.
He stands and walks over to the cabinet on the far side of the room. He opens it and just stands there.
‘Mr Soares?’ Voronov asks.
Soares jolts. Then he takes out a decanter and a glass, pours in the amber liquid. When he walks back over, the smell of whisky wafts in the air. He sits back down.
As he takes a gulp, he stares Voronov down. ‘I’d offer you a drink, but you’re on duty. But I can call for something with a little less kick, if you prefer?’
Isabel keeps her face expressionless. ‘Mr Soares, do you have any other children?’ she asks.
‘Two daughters.’ He downs the rest of the whisky and sets the glass down with a thump. It’s heavy and expensive like everything else in the room.
‘Sir, we’re going to need you to come with us, so that we can confirm the identity.’
The flash is quick, so quick that Isabel is overwhelmed by it, like an explosion of glass that she can’t guard against. She manages to stifle her gasp, fingers tightening on her pen as the emotion spears into her.
It’s only a few seconds but it feels like it’s an age before the room comes back into focus. She’s still holding her pen tightly. The ink has bled on the paper where the point digs into the page. She looks up. Voronov is calm next to her, still watching Bento Soares. But Bento is watching her, a peculiar expression on his face.
‘Feeling okay, Inspector?’ he says softly, but something has shifted in the room.
‘Fine. Thank you.’
‘Are you sure it was my son you found?’ he asks, not looking away.
Isabel thinks of the mess that was found in that classroom, of the way that they’ve lost yet another person and still haven’t got a clue how the killer even managed to get near the victims.
‘Yes,’ she says and out of the corner of her eye she sees Voronov shoot her a look.
‘Will you come with us and make an official identification?’
Bento blinks at Voronov. ‘Julio is dead,’ he says.
Neither of them reply.
‘No.’ Bento puts his hands on the desk and stands. ‘No. Not until I see it with my own eyes. Show me.’
‘We’ll take you now,’ Voronov says.
Isabel is already striding to the door, phone in hand, calling ahead to let the morgue know they’re coming.
Bento insists on following them in his own car.
When he’s in the same room as his son’s body and sees his face, the streak of grief is blinding, and Isabel has to step back from it. It feels too much like being cleaved in two. And there’s a discomfort there too, that she feels from seeing a man she considers hateful displaying such human emotion.
It’s something she’s not ashamed to admit she hadn’t wanted to see.
She stands quietly by the door with Voronov as Bento Soares stands over his son’s body and his shoulders shake, proud head lowered. But he doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t have to.
Isabel feels it all.
Chapter 37
THEN
Underneath Isabel’s hat, her hair sticks to her head.
The windows on the bus are open but it’s still boiling inside.
Isabel looks up from her seat at the back of the bus. All the other kids are shifting around in the heat too, but they’re quiet, like her, and she wonders if they feel the same ache that she has brewing in her stomach. She wants to go home.
Isabel shoves up her hat to scratch at her head through the tight plait Tia worked her hair into that morning. Thinking about it . . . hurts.
Isabel’s mum usually does her hair every morning, always when Isabel is brushing her teeth after getting dressed for school. On the weekends, she always sits down on the floor in the living room to watch TV and her mum does her hair while they watch TV together. But Dad had come last week and Isabel had heard them talking; her parents’ voices had been loud hissed words that she couldn’t quite make out from where she sat with Rita at the kitchen table, the chamomile on the pot in the stove perfuming the room.
Later, her dad had helped Isabel finish her homework. Mum hadn’t looked at either of her children. She had got a chopping board out, wrapped an apron around her waist and gone to the fridge to start preparing dinner.
Isabel’s dad had asked her if she’d like to take a walk with him. He’d bought her an ice cream at the café. He said her mum wasn’t well and that it might be better for Isabel to stay with Tia Simone and Sebastião for a little while.
When Isabel had asked if Rita was coming with her too, her dad had wrapped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her into his middle. ‘She’ll come on the weekends,’ he’d said.
Isabel likes staying with Tia and Sebastião but
Rita hasn’t stayed over yet.
The bus jerks and jostles around her as it rolls over a bump on the road. Isabel looks up and freezes.
They’ve reached the gates of NTI. The last time she’d been here was to do her first test, a month ago. But what she’d seen as her class bus had rolled up to the gates had been nothing like this.
In front of the gates is a crowd of people, spread all along the length of it. Isabel stares, half rising off her seat, clutching at the one in front of her to see. The other kids are doing the same and the bus, which had been completely quiet until now, fills with questions and unease. Isabel can hear the bus driver swearing.
‘Okay, I need everyone to stay calm.’ The lady escorting them is Ms Pontes, a representative of the NTI who is meant to oversee their session today, to shepherd them from the affinity test that determines what kind of ability they have to the one that measures their classification. Isabel had been allowed to stay in the room with her dad while Dr Carvalho explained what would happen next.
When they leave here today, they’ll all know what they are. Isabel already knows her affinity. She’s never been able to move things. She wonders which of the other kids around her will be a telepath like her. Which will be telekinetics.
She wonders if their parents, too, had sat them outside a room and had hushed conversations with emotions so strong Isabel had felt them like a pain in her chest.
Right now, Ms Pontes is giving them a wide smile that Isabel doesn’t believe. Ms Pontes has her back to the wide front windowpane of the bus, head hunched to keep from hitting it on the roof, hands gripping the tops of the seat so hard that it looks like her fingers are punching through the upholstery. ‘Everyone please sit down; we’ll be through to the testing centre soon. Remember that we’ll need to line up in alphabetical order.’ She smiles through all her words, a wide stretch of her lips, but she’s speaking through her teeth.
Isabel looks over Ms Pontes’ shoulder.
The group of people have pickets, large white signs waving in the air in time to the shouts. There are so many voices yelling at the same time that it’s hard to hear what they’re saying, but Isabel doesn’t need to. She’s heard those words before, hissed across a street at a passer-by walking with hunched shoulders, steps speeding to get away, or aimed at the supermarket cashier as someone switches queues.
Words pop out from the signs and Isabel’s eyes eat them up, each one making the ache in her stomach worse.
Unnatural.
Unholy.
Aberrações.
Vicious slashes of red make up the words, angry block capitals that scream their presence against the white of the page.
Isabel’s staring so hard her eyes sting. Her own hands are clenched where they’re braced over the top of the seat above her. She can’t make her knees bend, can’t make herself look away. She just skips from sign to sign to sign.
They need to be stopped!
They will take over our world!
What about our privacy?
They can control you!
She thinks about her parents. She thinks about their hushed conversation behind closed doors. She remembers the ice cream melting in her hand, dark brown and sticky, making her hand smell like chocolate as her dad sat beside her and explained she’d be staying with Tia for a while.
She thinks about how her stomach ached the same way that it does right now, but now it’s so much worse because Isabel thinks that maybe the conversation she hadn’t been able to hear coming from the kitchen had used some of the words she sees being waved at her now.
‘Isabel, please sit down. We need to think of safety first and you all need to be in your seats. Okay? Sit down, please.’
Isabel’s knees are stiff and she drops her gaze as she forces them to give until she’s sitting down again.
Ms Pontes turns to speak to the driver. She’s got her phone in her hand and she’s dialling.
The boy sitting next to Isabel has his head down.
‘They don’t like us,’ he says.
Isabel stares straight ahead and doesn’t say anything.
Chapter 38
Bento Soares agrees to give them access to Julio’s apartment, something Isabel is thankful for because she wasn’t looking forward to having to do battle just to get inside and check the place out.
So the next morning she and Voronov are there first thing.
Julio Soares’ apartment is about a thirty-minute drive from the university. The building has a concierge at the front, and they’re shown to Julio’s apartment by an immaculately dressed lady. ‘I’ve been instructed by Mr Soares to wait here while you look around.’
‘No problem,’ Isabel says.
Voronov steps inside and Isabel follows.
A quick look around reveals an open-plan kitchen and living room, a large bedroom with en suite bathroom, and a study. There’s a veranda that overlooks a small park set between the apartment buildings and when Isabel looks over the edge there are kids running around and teenagers clustered on the benches, loud laughter bouncing up between the buildings.
Isabel comes back inside and takes in the space.
‘I expected more books,’ she says, and wanders back over to the study.
There are two shelves above his desk. The desk itself is messy, papers left in disarray, an unwashed mug of what was once maybe coffee but is now caked and looking like it’s about to come to life all on its own. Isabel leafs through some of the papers, skimming over the notes. Julio’s handwriting is a lot more legible than Gil’s, large and clumsy looking.
There are no pictures on his desk. Some books are stacked haphazardly on top of each other and there are two leather-bound journals, one set on top of the pile of books and the other open and facing down, a pencil peeking out from beneath it. She flips it over, flicking through the pages quickly, but they seem to be just general notes.
‘Seeing anything interesting?’ she calls out.
‘No.’ The wooden floor groans under the weight of Voronov’s steps. ‘You?’
‘It’s messy,’ she says, ‘but significantly more understandable than Gil’s work desk.’
They keep looking through the room, going through desk drawers and the bookcase, but don’t find anything of note.
‘I’m going to take a look at the rest of the place,’ Isabel says and after getting a nod from Voronov, who continues looking through the papers on the desk, she slips out and follows the elegant corridor away from the living room and wanders into the bedroom.
The shutters in the room are down and the bed is unmade. Everything is decked out in shades of blue. Two suit bags hang from the top of the closet and a pair of battered-looking trainers are discarded beneath the armchair by the window.
The en suite is mostly tidy, smelling vaguely of cologne. There’s a used towel on the floor by the sink and the laundry basket is full. She comes back out into the bedroom and surveys the whole room. There are some books on the bedside table and bottles of cologne litter the top of the chest of drawers. Nothing that stands out.
She looks inside the top drawer of the bedside table. She finds some pens, a small notebook, a half-empty box of condoms and small bottle of lube. Nothing out of the ordinary for a healthy single man.
Turning back to the closet, she leaves the suits where they are and opens the other wardrobe instead, eyes sweeping the contents there. She spies a black shoebox tucked into a corner and half under a scarf that has been dumped there unceremoniously. She kneels to take a quick look. When she takes the lid off she pauses.
Inside there are a stack of empty envelopes still in their packet with the university logo on them, and a handful of other university-branded stationery. But beneath that is a brown leather notebook. Isabel tugs it out. At the top right-hand corner is a label that’s been stuck onto the leather; it says: Patient 2, Notes 2.
There are only a couple of lines of writing on the first page. Isabel flips back through pages of notes, some of which slip into sho
rthand here and there. Julio’s writing changes, sometimes slanting, tighter together and crowded, like he rushed it, and in other parts scrawling, as if he’d been thinking each and every word through as he’d written them on the page.
Isabel brings the notebook up closer to her face.
It’s an entry dated only a month ago and a section of it catches her attention.
Test conducted 12th October confirms increase in level from the last retesting. Level increase unclear due to subject’s category duality. Have begun designing tests to isolate the separate ability categories and measure each individually—
Isabel stares down at the notes. Category duality.
What? Category . . . as in affinity?
‘Isabel?’
—discord within the group. GDS unconvinced of subject’s stability and no longer wants to continue with study, showing concerns that subject can no longer continue to function without a Guide. I proposed assigning a new Guide at our meeting – GDS against this decision. Cited subject as too unstable. CA shows concerns but is willing to continue monitoring subject – I share her reluctance to discontinue monitoring of Patient 2. This is new ground. If we’re able to find a way to isolate the two categories and measure this, it will enable us to develop targeted tests that might let us catch the presence of secondary abilities—
She sets the shoebox down and rises from her crouch. ‘Voronov, read this.’ She holds it out to him and is surprised her hand is so steady. ‘Tell me I’m misunderstanding what that’s saying.’
GDS is clearly Gil dos Santos and CA is probably Célia Armindas. Was this the privately funded project Armindas had referred to?
Voronov stays quiet as he reads through the page but his expression gets stonier as he tracks the words. ‘He’s talking about a Gifted who is both,’ he says, and looks up, his expression for once open, ‘both telepath and telekinetic? That’s possible?’
The Colours of Death Page 21