Gardens of the Sun (37 page)

Captain Neves said, ‘The kid told me there wasn’t anyone else involved. That this was a private party. I had a forensic drone give this place a thorough work-over and it looks like he was telling the truth. Which should make this easier to deal with, don’t you think?’

‘Did he tell you why he killed her?’

They were standing either side of the dead girl, both dressed in long padded coats, their hands in their pockets, their breath smoking. Captain Neves had dialled down the apartment’s temperature to preserve the scene.

Captain Neves shook her head. ‘At first he said that he didn’t know what had happened. That he’d blacked out and found her like that. Then he said it was an accident. That they were playing around with the knife and she somehow fell on it.’

Loc counted the bloody little mouths in the girl’s skin. He’d popped two patches of pandorph before coming here and everything seemed bright and clear and remote. He said, ‘Some accident. It looks like she fell on that knife eleven times.’

‘More than that. He cut up her back pretty badly, too. It’s what they call perseveration,’ Captain Neves said. ‘He started, and he couldn’t stop. I found only his fingerprints on the knife, and although he washed himself afterwards, there were traces of her blood under his nails. Also scraps of his skin under her nails, no doubt from the scratches on his forearms. It looks like she put up a struggle. There’s nothing linking anyone else to the scene, no evidence that he was set up.’

‘Do we have any video from spyware?’

‘In here? No. The fellow he pays to run security for him knows his job. The place is clean. But I culled video from the city’s net, tracked him and the girl back to the club he runs. They left at two-sixteen, entered this building about thirty minutes later. Just the two of them.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Safe and secure. No one can get at him, and he can’t do himself any harm.’

‘He finally went and did it.’ Loc watched his thoughts flicker to and fro as he calculated the angles. He said, ‘You’re absolutely certain none of the locals know about this?’

‘No one knows about this but you and me, and the trooper who’s looking after him,’ Captain Neves said. ‘The kid called me. I came over and secured the scene. And then I called you.’

‘What about Cândido’s people?’

Joel Cândido, a greyly efficient career soldier, had replaced the unfortunate and unlamented Faustino Malarte as governor of Camelot. He was very keen on meetings and endlessly finessing protocols and regulations, and left the day-to-day running of the city to a cadre of civil servants and Captain Neves’s police.

‘I didn’t want to trouble Lieutenant Colonel Cândido with a silly little domestic incident,’ Captain Neves said.

‘You have a plan,’ Loc said. ‘Don’t deny it. I can see that you’ve been dying to tell me ever since I arrived.’

‘And I can see that you’re flying on that stuff again.’

‘Almost high enough to see into your mind. Almost, but not quite. So, tell me what you want to do.’

‘It’s very simple. We help the kid get past this, and then find out how much it’s worth to Sri Hong-Owen,’ Captain Neves said. ‘That’s why I haven’t told Cândido, or anyone else.’

‘Except that trooper. Can he be trusted to keep his mouth shut?’

‘She. And I trust her more than I trust you,’ Captain Neves said.

‘You should smile when you say that. Then it would be almost funny.’

‘It’s funnier if I don’t smile.’

‘It isn’t a bad plan, and it might work. Although not in quite the way you think it will. Who is she?’

‘The girl? No one in particular. A refugee from Paris, Dione, living here with her two fathers. But she does have an interesting connection,’ Captain Neves said. ‘One I think we can make use of, if we want to help the kid.’

‘The so-called resistance,’ Loc said.

‘Tell me you already knew this.’

‘She’s the right age, she’s from Paris, probably feeling resentment because of what we did, probably feeling resentment because she and her fairy godfathers can’t go home . . . Was she active or a fellow traveller?’

‘She’s never been arrested for anything, but I have files on several of her friends, so she has a file too.’

‘It’s easy to see what might have happened here, instead of what did,’ Loc said. ‘She came back here with the kid. One of her friends from the resistance was waiting for them, they got into an argument. Perhaps she was going to do the right thing and go to the authorities, tell them everything. Her friend found out, tried to persuade her to keep quiet, flew into a murderous rage when she refused. Knocked out the kid, killed the girl.’

‘Something like that,’ Captain Neves said.

‘Exactly like that. All we need now, to complete our little story, is a fall guy.’

‘Oh, I already have someone in mind,’ Captain Neves said.

‘You bitch,’ Loc said affectionately. ‘You’re enjoying this.’

‘Don’t tell me you aren’t having fun too,’ Captain Neves said, and leaned into Loc’s kiss across the dead girl and bit his lip, hard enough to bruise.

 

The young man Captain Neves had measured for the fall was the youngest of the dead girl’s angry little friends, like her a refugee from Paris, Dione. All Captain Neves had to do was snatch and drug him, have him wake up in the room with a bad hangover and blood all over him, the dead girl on the floor, troopers pounding on the door, demanding to be let in . . . It would be dealt with as a security matter, because the boy was associated with the resistance (strictly speaking he was a wannabe who’d gone to a couple of meetings and tagged a few walls, but Captain Neves planned to pin several unsolved acts of sabotage on him), so the locals wouldn’t be allowed to get near the scene or the suspect. It was too easy, really, Captain Neves said. Like shooting fish in a barrel. While she was setting it up, Loc went to talk with the repentant murderer.

Captain Neves had stashed him in the apartment pod she used for her private interrogations. It hung from a high branch of a banyan tree at the western edge of the forest that filled the tent taken over by the city’s Provisional Authority. Loc dismissed the trooper who’d been babysitting the prisoner and stood with his back to the door. The pod was floored with the usual halflife grass. A rack of fullerene bars had been bolted to one wall; a pair of steel handcuffs hung by one loop from the topmost bar. The only piece of furniture was a scarred plastic table. The tools that usually littered it had been cleared away, replaced by flasks of tea and coffee and icewater, a tray of candied fruit and savoury pastries.

Berry Hong-Owen sat on the floor by the window that capped the far end of the pod. He was dressed in paper coveralls and a blanket was draped shawl-like around his shoulders. Staring at the patch of floor between his bare feet, a shroud of lank hair half-obscuring his face. The window at his back was fully polarised and darkly mirrored everything in the pod. Loc saw himself reflected there, trim and elegant in his dark grey tunic and trousers, moving forward to stand above the kid, who shrugged when Loc asked him how he was.

‘I did it,’ he said. ‘Okay? I told that policewoman I didn’t, but I did.’

Captain Neves had shot him full of tranquilliser. His voice was an uninflected drone, like that of a very simple AI.

‘You don’t have to worry about that any more, Berry,’ Loc said. ‘It’s gone away. It’s as if it never happened.’

‘Does my mother know? Did she pay you to help me?’

‘She doesn’t know a thing,’ Loc said. ‘This is our secret. You and me against the world.’

‘If she was paying you to look after me, that’s exactly what you would say,’ Berry said. ‘She spies on me. Did you know that? Not because she cares for me. Because she doesn’t want me to have any fun.’

‘Did you have fun, with the girl?’ The thought slipped out, became words before Loc could catch it, so he hurried on: ‘You’re not the only person to get into trouble like this, Berry. We are all under tremendous stress. This is an unfamiliar and dangerous place, and the natives are by no means as friendly as they appear to be. And in any case, the girl was part of the resistance. She didn’t get close to you because she liked you. She did it because she wanted to find out what you knew, and because her friends thought you might be useful to them. She was using you. So there’s no need to feel guilty about what you did. Let’s be clear about that. She was nothing. A spy. A whore. And she’s gone.’

‘She was nice to me.’

‘Of course she was. It was her job.’ Jesus and Gaia, it was hard work getting through. Like speaking to someone at the bottom of a well.

‘I don’t remember anything. I must have done it, but I don’t remember, ’ Berry said, looking up at Loc through his greasy fringe.

He’d put on a lot of weight since Loc had last seen him. He’d been partying hard with a group of spoiled kids with fashionably nihilist attitudes who’d battened on to him because he had a line of credit and a small but useful amount of influence with the occupying force. He’d been doing a lot of tailored drugs, too, more than enough to make an elephant psychotic. Drinking heavily, as well. And according to Captain Neves he was also bulimic, bolting down ice cream a litre at a time and then throwing it up. His eyes were sunk in fat pillows of flesh, bloodshot oysters shining with unshed tears. He stank of fear: rancid butter with metallic overtones.

‘She probably drugged you,’ Loc said. ‘They do that. Give you drugs to make you talk. She drugged you, and tried to find out your secrets, and you had a reaction. What happened, Berry, it was self-defence.’

‘I liked her,’ Berry said, after a long pause.

‘You’ll get over it,’ Loc said.

Berry turned his head away. ‘What are you going to do now? Take me to my mother? Tell her what I’ve done?’

‘Is that what you want?’

Berry shrugged. ‘She doesn’t care about me. What she’ll do, is have someone tell me off, and give me more credit and send me somewhere else. Where I’ll have to make a bunch of new friends all over again.’

He was feeling remorse, but not for what he had done. Not for the girl. No, he was wallowing in self-pity, worried that it would cause him all kinds of inconvenience, stop him from having more of his kind of fun.

‘If you want to stay here, with your friends, I can help you with that,’ Loc said. ‘I can help you get over this little problem, help you get on with your life. And then, in time, perhaps you can help me.’

He said more, variations on a theme to make sure that the idea sank into the mud of Berry’s brain, told him to think it over and left the sullen man-child in Captain Neves’s care, and commandeered a tug and went to Janus to confront Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen in her lair. Not to demand any form of payment for his services. As he’d explained to Captain Neves, a demand of quid pro quo was a blunt tool you could only use once. It would be far better to tell the Professor Doctor that her son’s mess had been tidied up as a matter of simple courtesy. Perhaps it would make her more disposed to do them a favour later on, perhaps not, but it would definitely give Loc the chance to see for himself what she had been doing ever since she’d shut herself away.

Her laboratories, run by a small crew of fanatically loyal assistants, trickled out enough marvels to placate Euclides Peixoto and the oversight committees, but only her assistants knew exactly what she was doing on Janus. Loc had informants in every city in the Saturn System, men and women who called themselves his friends as long as he kept them sweet with bribes and backhanders, but they’d been unable to penetrate the fog of rumour and counter-rumour that swirled around Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen. He was pretty sure that Euclides Peixoto didn’t know any more than he did. And perhaps Euclides didn’t care, as long as royalties from the gene wizard’s discoveries and inventions continued to fatten his coffers. But Loc cared. Information was power: the only power he presently possessed.

Euclides Peixoto had rewarded Loc’s candour about the crimes of General Arvam Peixoto with the position of chief of the Office of Special Affairs, a small crew of troubleshooters who investigated every kind of problem in the interface between the TPA and the Outers, dealing with compromising or embarrassing situations, generally making sure that no scandals ever reached the light of day. It was good, necessary work, and it had enabled Loc to insinuate himself into all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies. He reported directly to Euclides Peixoto, could travel anywhere on the moons controlled by Greater Brazil. But it did not satisfy him because he knew that he was no more than an instrument of Euclides Peixoto’s will. A useful but minor servant.

He wanted to be so much more than that.

Five hundred klicks out from Janus, a security drone intercepted and challenged the tug. Loc dealt with its impertinent questions and told the tug’s pilot to surrender control, and the drone guided the tug towards the anti-saturnian side of the little moon. Drifting in above a lumpy plain overgrown with tracts of vacuum organisms, Loc spotted a fan of bright material, presumably excavated debris, but saw no other sign of the biomes and biofactories that the gene wizard was rumoured to be constructing deep beneath Janus’s icy rind.

The tug touched down neatly and lightly on a platform perched on the inner rim of a large impact crater. Loc sealed up his pressure suit and climbed out, moving with edgy care in the vestigial gravity, and one of Sri Hong-Owen’s assistants escorted him along a cableway to a dome filled with jungly greenery - not something made by Sri Hong-Owen, this, but one of Avernus’s weird gardens, abandoned long before the war. Inside, he was met by a second assistant, the androgyne neuter Raphael, who told him that the Professor Doctor was too busy to see him.

‘Anything you wish to tell her, Mr Ifrahim, you can tell me. Or perhaps you would rather make an appointment. I should warn you, though, that it may take some time to set up a meeting.’