Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (44 page)

‘Then – where are they?’

‘Where didn’t we look?’ Iago asked.

They went round the house again, opening every container no matter how small or impossible it was in terms of fitting a human being inside. It occurred to Dia that they had not looked inside the
still-empty vegetable trays. It was just-about conceivable a person – a very thin person – might have squeezed themselves into one of these narrow pallets; but Sukarno, Iago and she
opened every one, and the only thing inside was blackponic pseudosoil.

Two hours later it was clear that the only people inside the bubble were the five of them.

‘Run the RACdroid back further,’ Diana said. ‘It must have recorded the murder itself. It may well have recorded an image of the murderer.’

Sukarno did so. Images zipped rapidly backwards through a strange scene: human beings – they themselves – disappearing through the front door. The house empty and quiet in their
absence. Then they all re-emerged, backwards, and began nipping up-down, back-forth, left-right, apparently taking nets and sponges of bloody rubbish and scattering it at every coordinate in the
globe. Then they came together, and separated, floating randomly about the place. Iago leapt away from Mahyadi Panggabean and grasped Diana. Then he leapt to the door, and abruptly the whole scene
was furious Brownian-motion and chaos. ‘Slow it down,’ suggested Iago. ‘
That’s
the blow-out – right there.’

‘Sir?’ said Sukarno.

‘Run it back to just before the murder, and then play it forward?’

The image spooled back, and froze. There they all were, motionless: Bar-le-duc in the middle, looking lugubrious and complacent. There was the hint of a smile at the two edges of his long mouth;
like serif on a font. His right hand was a little forward, his left hung by his side. He was looking directly at Iago. Behind him, over by the wall, Sapho was clearly visible: arms folded,
floating. Diana was close beside Iago. And Iago had his head slightly to one side, a sceptical expression on his face – listening to Bar-le-duc. He had his arms loosely by his side, fingers
unclenched, ten centimetres at least away from his body. And, finally, Bar-le-duc’s four minders were visible, at various places around the sphere. Mahyadi Panggabean was on the side of
Sapho; Sukarno on the other side of the globe. And the two other men, whose name Dia had never known, and who she would now never meet, stood nearer the door.

Sukarno played the scene on. This was the moment of death. Bar-le-duc vanished in a spreading cloud of dark red. It happened instantaneously – no breaking apart, an immediate transition
from a solid to a gaseous state. It was bewildering. And everything inside the house was chaos; bodies thrashing and hurtling, leaves and droplets of blood swooshing in every direction.

‘Stop,’ said Iago. ‘Run it back. Go through it more slowly.’

Sukarno did so. He took the image back to the initial conditions; and then ran it forward. Again, Bar-le-duc vanished without intermediary condition into a blast of red mist. ‘He was
hit,’ Iago said, ‘with a great
deal
of force. Or perhaps with a very focused beam of heat. Can we make it slower yet?’

‘I’ll slow it as much as the device allows,’ said Sukarno.

There was something hypnotic in watching events over and over again. The transition from a living, coherent organic being to a disorganised mess. Mortality focused into an interstitial blip.

The third time through, events took so long to unfold that Diana began to grow bored. Certain things were evident, however. Somebody had fired the shot that caused Bar-le-duc’s violent
death, it was none of the seven other people who were clearly visible on the recording – Bar’s four bodyguards, Iago, Diana and Sapho were all in plain view, and doing nothing, as the
thing happened. One of the bodyguards did have his weapon out, but it was angled away from Bar-le-duc, and it was clear to see that it had not been discharged.

They watched, and it happened again. The wall cracked open and simultaneously Bar-le-duc’s torso began to dissolve into red. The image froze.

‘High-velocity projectile’, noted Iago. The Iago in the recording was still looking sardonically at the face of Bar-le-duc, entirely unaware that anything was amiss. That is how
instantaneously it had happened. Even Bar-le-duc himself – weirdly, horribly – seemed blithely unaware of what was happening to his own midriff. His face was calm, even as his belly was
mashed and evaporated, as if his end had overtaken him more quickly than his nerve impulses.

The recording moved on, and the red cloud ate up the whole of Bar-le-duc. A moment later and the facial expressions of Iago and Diana changed, both together, to startled disgust. Diana watched
Iago’s: there was no faking that flinch; he was as surprised by this horrible event as she had been herself.

‘Check the thicket,’ Iago suggested. ‘We ought at least to be able to see a muzzleflash.’

‘I can’t see anything in the bushes,’ said Sapho. ‘Movement, or muzzleflash, or anything like that.’

‘Me neither,’ confirmed Sukarno.

Diana’s scalp was tingling. Something was amiss. ‘Go back,’ she told Sukarno.

He pulled the image back in time, slowly, slowly; and the cloud of red shrank down to reveal Bar-le-duc’s head and feet; and then his arms and hips. ‘Try to stop it at the exact
moment the projectile hits him,’ she said.

Moving the image a little further back, the cloud of red shrank further, tightening, and focusing on one point just below his diaphragm. This red shrank away, and at the very moment Sukarno
halted the image.

‘There,’ said Diana.

‘But,’ said Sukarno, looking. ‘How can that be?’

They were looking at a recorded image of Bar-le-duc the tiniest possible fraction of a second
before
he had been shot. Nobody was visible in the bushes on the far side of the globe. The
other seven human beings present were all hanging in space, doing nothing. Bar-le-duc had not yet been shot. He was on the very verge of being shot, like Zeno’s hare at the limit point of
overtaking the tortoise. Yet, clearly visible – a faint red line linking his solar plexus to the wall beside the door. And that wall already breached.

‘That’s why we found nobody in the thicket,’ said Diana. ‘Bar-le-duc was shot from outside after all. There’s the trajectory of the projectile.’

‘It looks like a focused energy beam,’ said Sukarno.

Iago looked at the image. ‘But
how
?’ he asked.

‘Somebody followed you – a ship. Who knows the location of this house?’ Dia asked.

‘I do,’ Iago insisted. ‘I’m the only one.’

‘Then you followed yourself,’ said Sapho.

Diana shook her head. ‘Bar-le-duc found you. If he did, somebody else
could
. A ship, standing sentinel, outside. It saw you were in danger, and acted to remove that threat –
by killing Bar-le-duc.’

But Iago was shaking his head. ‘But that doesn’t explain how did the damage outside end up bent the wrong way? The rips in the plasmetal of that spaceship bend
out
, not in.
And – why didn’t the bullet punch straight through the far side of my house? What happened to it?’

‘How to explain the disappearing bullet,’ said Diana. ‘That
is
a challenge, yes.’

6

The Disappearing Bullet

Iago had decided they all should eat. ‘A problem is rarely solved on an empty stomach,’ he announced, opening a storebox and heating some vegetables.
‘There’s some wine somewhere,’ he said, to Sapho. ‘And you can use the showerbag fully clothed or naked – if the former, it will clean your clothes too, although it
won’t get you
quite
so clean. There’s only one bag, though, and using it on all of us will overload it, I suppose. This is supposed to be a one-person house.’

‘So none of us gets perfectly clean,’ said Sapho. ‘So what?’

Sapho folded the bag around Mahyadi Panggabean up to his neck. This left the bandages undisturbed whilst it cleaned his body. Then the four others took turns in the bag. Iago went last, when the
device was dirtiest and partially clogged, so he wasn’t washed very efficiently. But everybody looked better afterwards than they had done before.

Mahyadi Panggabean drank an entire globe of juice. Everybody else sipped wine and ate packets of heated noodles.

It was Sapho who broke the silence: ‘What does it
mean
?’

‘It means our searching through the shrubbery was a wild comet chase,’ said Diana. She sighed. ‘The shooter was never inside this house to begin with. The image shows the
trajectory of the bullet between the wall and Bar-le-duc’s body
before
it hits him – that blurred dark-orange line. The shot came from outside.’

‘To repeat myself:
if
that’s true,’ noted Iago, ‘then how are the ripped edges of the wall bent outwards? Why was Bar-le-duc’s ship forced
away
from
the house by the projectile that destroyed it? And most of all –
what happened to the bullet
? You saw the force with which it vaporised poor old Bar.’

‘Maybe it was a miracle,’ said Sapho, in a small voice. ‘Ra’allah sometimes intervenes to punish the wicked.’

‘Let us put miracles to one side,’ suggested Iago. ‘By way of explanation. A projectile capable of ripping an entire sloop into rags of spaceship metal; and turning a human
body into red steam – such a projectile fired from outside the bubble into its interior
could not
vanish into thin air. It must have continued through, punched a second hole in the
opposite side of the globe and gone on its way. This did not happen.’

‘I can’t explain it,’ conceded Diana, looking unhappy. ‘But look at it this way: we have to choose between a disappearing bullet – or an entire disappearing human
being.’

‘Entire human being?’

‘The person we were searching the thicket for!’ said Diana. ‘Theory A is a disappearing bullet. Theory B is Person Unknown killed Bar and then themself vanished into thin air.
Ockham’s razor suggests the former is less of an affront to logic than the latter.’

‘Ockham’s razor,’ scoffed Iago. ‘The most ridiculous use of metaphorical steel in the history of thought.’

Diana shook her head. ‘Oh we mustn’t let go of logic. Logic is all we have. The RACdroid shows that none of
us
killed Bar-le-duc. We’re all hanging right there, doing
nothing, as he gets blown apart before our eyes. There
is
nobody else inside the sphere. We’ve searched it thoroughly. The only
logical
conclusion is that the murderer was never
inside this globe.’

Iago looked steadily at her. ‘There’s another possible explanation you’re not considering,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘What if the recording is in error?’ he said. ‘I believed Bar-le-duc when he said this RACdroid was kosher. What if it isn’t? What if it is some kind of rogue? Perhaps
its data has been falsified entirely, or more likely some algorithm inside the droid has distorted its data somehow. In that case . . . well, in that case, the contract I agreed with Bar-le-duc,
just before his death, would have no legal force.’

Diana sniffed dismissively. ‘I’d forgotten about the silly contract,’ she said.

‘You should not forget about it, Miss Diana,’ said Iago, sternly. ‘It is the legal guarantee of your continuing freedom. You should not be so quick to rubbish it.’

There was a silence.

‘Surely it should be easy to tell,’ Sapho put it, wiping her mouth on a rectangle of smartcloth, ‘whether the RACdroid is a rogue or not?’

‘It
looks
kosher,’ said Iago. ‘But I’m no expert. On the other hand, I know somebody who is.’ He stretched his spine, lengthening his legs and arms. Then he
rubbed his face. ‘We have to leave this place anyway,’ he went on. ‘It is no longer secure. We have to go – Diana, and Sapho.’

‘I won’t be sorry to leave this place,’ said Diana. ‘I would sleep easier without the reek of blood in my nostrils.’

Iago grunted agreement.

‘Sir?’ said Sukarno, looking mournful. ‘I concede that it is the large amount of CRF in my system that prompts me to this – but I beg of you to consider taking Mahyadi
Panggabean and myself with you as well.’

‘No,’ said Iago. ‘We cannot. You must stay here, until you are retrieved. I will inform the authorities of your location. But if things are they way I suspect them to be
– well, the authorities will soon be here anyway.’

‘I understand sir,’ said Sukarno, his eyes shiny. Away to the left, Mahyadi Panggabean began to sob quietly.

Sapho and Iago loaded the
Rum
with various supplies. Diana did not help. She parted some of the vegetation and looked out through the transparency. All that black; the
luxurious mess of stars. Then the bubble turned and the sun appeared and the stars withdrew their horns into their black shells.

Watching the sun move sideways across the sky, she tried to let her mind tune in to the hidden rhythms of the problem. The sunlight was bright yellow-white, except for the central belt where
there was the vague hint of a very pale green. The blackness all about. The nourishing void, the devouring void.

Concentrate
, she told herself. But the problem seemed trapped between two impossibilities – the disappearing murderer on the one hand, the disappearing bullet on the other. A true
solution would have to dissolve one or other impossibility, but it wasn’t obvious which was the more tractable. She let her mind drift. The
suddenness
of Bar-le-duc’s demise. The
misty, fine red line. How might one make something disappear?

Explode it. Atomise it.

They hadn’t searched for Bar because they’d been convinced he’d been turned into droplets.

She felt the tingle in her gut. This was – something. The little hairs on the back of her neck shivered.

What if the two problems – the disappearing person, the disappearing weapon –
cancelled one another out
? It was not clear to her how this might be; but she had that sense that
the solution to the mystery lay along this line . . . somehow.