Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (19 page)

And poor foolish Diana was enough of a fangirl in her chosen hobby to squee at this news . ‘No! Really? Seriously and really?’

‘Oh my
dear
girl,’ said Joad, deadpan, looking through the window again. ‘You have no idea. He’s more dangerous even than his reputation suggests. Do you know
what? We had him!’

‘Had him?’ repeated Eva.

‘What – arrested?’ asked Dia.

‘Arrested
and
imprisoned.’

‘I had no idea!’ gasped Diana. ‘That’s not data available in any of the usual locations.’

‘And I’ll thank you to keep it that way. Leak it, and I’ll trace it back.’

‘Ms Joad!’ said Diana, genuinely affronted.

‘Of course,’ Joad continued, without pause and without altering her murmurous monotone. ‘You are your MOHmies’ daughter. You understand the importance of informational
hygiene and secrecy and,’ she lifted her right hand, as if testing the gravity, flipped the hand over, and concluded, ‘all that bag and baggage.’ The hand came down again.
‘I feel confident that I can tell you this, in confidence. We
caught
him. He was working under an alias of course, and was tried and sentenced for a minor crime – sent out to an
asteroid called Lamy306, a long long way away, in a distant orbit. He was supposed to serve eleven years. It took us six months to realise our mistake – a lamentable lag, really. But then we
realised what we had –
whom
we had, I mean –
him
, in other words,
Jack Glass
himself. So we hurried on out to Lamy306 in four ships to pick him up. Do you know what
we found?’

‘He was dead?’ asked Eva. ‘Suicide?’

Joad moved her head smoothly about on its frictionless neck and directed her gaze upon the sister. ‘Certainly not. He wasn’t. All his
fellow prisoners
were. Or – traces
of them. Mutilated. Carved into,’ and she gave this next word a peculiarly lubricious intonation, as if it chimed with some part of her inner being: ‘
chunks
.’ She all but
licked her lips. ‘Their bodies were gone, but their blood was all over the walls.’

There was a silence. Cicadas tut-tutted distantly in the fields.

‘Bad luck for them,’ said Eva, eventually, trying not to flinch as Joad looked hard at her.

‘Indeed.’

‘At least you recaptured
him
,’ asked Diana.

Joad swivelled her head back. ‘We did not. He wasn’t there. Somehow he escaped. Alas.’

Both daughters took this in, and a beat later both spoke at the same time, ‘how is that possible?’/‘How could he?’ They stopped. Diana said: ‘He wasn’t there
in the first place. Is that it?’

‘It’s a proper locked-room mystery,’ said Joad. ‘How did he escape from one of the best-locked rooms in the entire solar system!’

‘He must have had help,’ said Eva. ‘A friend must have cracked the encryption, worked out where he was serving his sentence, and sent a ship out to pick him up.’

Joad shook her head, a series of short tight shimmers from left to right. ‘The Gongsi in question has AIs surveilling all its many prison asteroids. Naturally, it saves money by
surveilling them from a distance, and by AI. That means that,
had
a ship come to rescue him, they wouldn’t necessarily have been able to do anything to stop it.
But
they would
at least have recorded footage of the rescue, and could have used that as the starting place for investigation and recapture. The footage of Lamy306 is uninterrupted, complete, and a perfect blank.
Grainy, and low-res, but complete. The quality is enough to have picked up anything so prominent as a sloop energy drive or any other kind of propulsion exhaust. No ship visited.’ She looked
slowly from sister to sister. ‘Quite apart from anything else – how would Glass’s contacts have known which asteroid to visit? Your family’s expertise in data protection
ought to tell you that encrypted data is not so easily cracked. And there are hundreds of thousands of possible locations. No. Nobody rescued him.’

‘He never went,’ said Diana. ‘That’s the solution – which is to say, that’s the trick. The trick with
locked-room mysteries
, at any rate. You –
we – are supposed to believe that the murderer either broke into or escaped from an impossible-to-enter-or-exit space. But that’s never what happens.’ She blushed. ‘What I
mean is: if it’s impossible for Jack Glass to have escaped from this asteroid, then . . . well, he didn’t escape. That’s what impossible means, after all. And
that
means,
he never went in the first place; somehow the authorities were fooled into thinking that he
had
gone. He was never there. The other prisoners all murdered one another.’

Joad nodded. ‘But, my dear, his DNA was found in the innards of this asteroid, along with everybody else’s. Oh, he was there. He was inside the impossible-to-escape room for a while
and then – suddenly – mysteriously – one might almost say
magically
, he vanished. Pff! Teleported right out of there.’ Abruptly, Joad laughed, a crow-like sound.

‘He
must
have had a ship.’

‘There was no ship.’

‘Nobody can just – teleport,’ said Diana. ‘There’s no such thing. That’s magic, not science. There is a rational explanation. Even if we haven’t deduced
it, right now, it will be there.’

‘He has no legs,’ said Eva, suddenly.

‘Quite right!’ barked Joad, delighted. ‘Did you pull that out of your bId, my dear?’

Eva shook her head. ‘I don’t want to look into his bId entry. It surely contains horrors and I’m a . . . touch squeamish about such things. I just remembered. That’s one
of the things that everybody knows about him,’ She looked at her sister. ‘I prefer the inanimate to the animate. It’s more . . . manageable. Physics, chemistry,
iDynamics.’

‘Where
you
, my dear,’ said Joad, angling her head a little to the side and regarding Diana like a velociraptor. ‘You prefer the human stuff – hmmm? What we hear,
up amongst the Ulanovs, is that your MOHmies have high hopes for you when it comes to
personnel management
. Problem-solving and investigation with a skill-spin in
people
,
yes?’

‘I suppose I prefer the animate to the in,’ said Diana, warily. ‘For Eva it’s the other way about.’

‘So
that’s
your fascination with whodunits, is it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Don’t be alarmed, my tender morsel,’ said Ms Joad. ‘The Ulanovs, whom I represent here, have no problem with the Argents training up a next generation of information
experts. But you can’t blame us for being curious as to how that training is
going
. The divide is as neat as MOH sculpting would lead us to expect. A hard-body problem girl in you,
Eva, and a soft-body problem girl in you.’

‘How did he
lose
his legs?’ asked Eva, unable to leave the gruesome image alone.

‘Nobody seems to know for sure. Oh, there are various theories,’ said Joad, airily. ‘Get the better of your squeamishness and pull his details from your bId and you’ll
see.’

‘It’s common enough, in the uplands,’ Diana pointed out.

‘Indeed it is, soft-body girl!’ said Joad. ‘And why not? If you never plan on coming down the well, then you won’t miss them. Legs are of little use in zero gravity,
after all. Some people go so far as to have them deliberately amputated – or to sell them. People will sell anything if they’re poor enough.’

‘The fact that he
has
no legs,’ said Eva, ‘rather suggests he’s an uplander-only kind of fellow.’

‘That’s a reasonable assumption to make, I suppose,’ said Joad, indulgently. ‘Though some of his victims have been murdered at the bottom of gravity wells. Glass
isn’t his real name you know. People call him Jack because, well, it’s a serial killer-y name. As for his surname, well. We’re not entirely sure what his real surname
is
.
It may be Prytherch. I don’t know what sort of a name that’s supposed to be. Do you know how he acquired the name
Glass
?’

‘How?’

‘He acquired that surname for reasons to do with his –
work
. It’s how he kills, our Jack-the-Ripper of the spaceways. It was the same with the victims in Lamy306; he
killed them all and cut their bodies up with sharpened
slivers of glass
.’ Ms Joad was looking directly at her.

Her black eyes. Oh! Totally shiversome, Dia thought. Then she thought: maybe Eva
is
more squeamish than I, but – oh!

‘They say he has hey-ho murdered more than a
thousand
people,’ said Diana, with a touch of awe in her voice.

‘Or a million,’ said Joad. ‘Depending upon which story you believe. What is certain is that his murder rate has reduced recently. Until his spree on Lamy306, in fact, he
hadn’t killed in quite a long time! Of course, it is getting harder for him. We are
making it
harder for him. After Lamy306 we disseminated his DNA details to every policeperson,
civvie and personnel checker in the System. With that, no legs and a bad reputation, he’s starting to sore-thumb
stick out
. Each new murder is a risk for him. He can no longer be, eh,
gratuitous
. My belief is that when he murders, now, it is only for a very good reason.’

‘And
has
he?’ Diana asked. She could not keep the eagerness from her voice. ‘
Has
he murdered again?’

‘My love, why else do you think I am here?’

The two girls looked at her. ‘You don’t mean to suggest—?’ began Eva.

‘It’s
not
possible,’ Diana said, loudly, at the same time.

There was a moment’s pause.

‘And
one
of the remarkable things about Mr Glass,’ said Joad, with a serious face, ‘is the knack he has for
making the impossible happen
. Indeed, indeed, indeed.
Escaping Lamy306! Well, I am still chasing him, and I have reason to believe that he has his sights set upon your precious selves, my dears.’

‘No,’ said Dia.

This was the wrong thing to say – not just the word but the tone. Joad turned her eyes upon Diana. They were black in the way that tsunami water is black as it washes through the ruined
town, black because it has churned up the living and the dead. They were the colour of hope liquidised into despair. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, with a formal chill.

‘Please, eh, forgive me for
contradicting
you,’ said Diana, sweat tickling her upper lip. ‘But, if we all remain cool and chilly for a moment, you’re saying our
servant was murdered
by Jack Glass
. You’re saying that
the famous Jack Glass
came here and murdered our servant?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ said Ms Joad, sombrely.

‘And then – what? Then he left?’

‘Since he’s no longer here,’ said Joad, ‘Yes. Your security people have searched the whole estate of course. The police have searched the surrounding
territory.’

‘But –
why
?’ asked Diana. ‘Why would he come here, go to the bother of breaching our security only to kill a
servant
? Why not us?’

‘I’m not saying,’ noted Joad, her smile returning, ‘that he has finished.’

There was a moment of silence.

‘But why
us
?’

‘Oh, my dear thing! Your sister, with her attention wholly focused on those anomalous supernovae, I might expect her not to know! But you? Surely you’ve deciphered what the hidden
thing is – the thing that
nobody
is talking about, and that the Polloi don’t even know exists, but the thing everybody who
knows
is
secretly
talking
about?’

‘What?’ asked Diana, flushing with embarrassment. ‘What is it?’

Joad looked at the guards, and replied. ‘FTL of course! A thing worth killing for. Something the possession of which will give the owner unprecedented power and wealth. A
functioning
faster-than-light technology.’

‘But,’ said Diana, again. ‘What’s that got to do with
us
?’ Even as she asked this, she knew the answer. Because the Argents’ reputation was based on
their knowledge-wealth, their skill at finding things out. If anybody knew about a mysterious new technology it would be them.

‘Never mind
why
,’ said Eva, with a single horizontal fold in her clear, beautiful brow. ‘I want to know
how
he is supposed to have done this.’

‘Of course my wonder child,’ said Joad. ‘You
would
be more interested in practical hows than fiddly human whys.’

‘I’m serious,’ said Eva. ‘There is unbroken surveillance of the servants’ house – of the whole estate. For the entirety of the relevant period nobody entered
or exited the house.
How
did your infamous Jack Glass get inside the storeroom to bash the servant’s head with that big hammer?’

‘The how
is
an interesting question, isn’t it?’ said Joad. ‘The who has been answered, so the how remains.’

‘How did he get on the island, never mind anything else. How did he get down to Earth, through all the security checks? How did he even know we are here?’

‘All good questions,’ said Joad.

‘And
how
did he get inside a locked house without being noticed by any of the surveillance systems?’

‘You might ask: how did he get out of Lamy306?’ Joad replied. ‘I don’t know. But he did.’

‘What
evidence
do you have that he killed our servant?’

‘You’ll have to believe me. I can’t tell you exactly how I know. You’ll understand that there are levels of secrecy within secrecy. I shouldn’t even, strictly
speaking, have dropped those three little letters into the conversation.’

‘FTL?’ said Diana, again. ‘Why? Why come down here, sneak inside the servants’ house, bash out his brains – for FTL? I don’t, I
don’t
understand,
I don’t
understand
.’

Ms Joad rose, smoothly enough, but with a slight wibble of her leg muscles inside their crawlipers. ‘It is a puzzle, I agree. I’ll admit the how baffles me as much as it does anybody
else. But you can surely work that out! After all, your MOHmies have the highest regard for your problem-solving abilities, my dears. The highest regard.’