My priority that morning was to return to the publisher the page proofs I had completed reading. With the recycling of mail finished, I glanced through the proofs one more time, saw nothing else that needed attention, and put them with a short note into a padded envelope. I went immediately to the local mail office and sent them by priority service. They would be a day or two late arriving, but I always suspected that publishers, knowing well the forgetful ways of authors, announced a tighter deadline than was strictly necessary.
Afterwards I took out my notebook and made a few notes about what had happened when Spoder and I went to Sekonda. I was determined not to be any further involved in old murder mysteries, but I have long followed a policy of jotting down odd experiences. Ideas for stories are not always immediately obvious. Something I saw or noted or remembered from that day might be useful eventually.
In the afternoon I opened the computer document containing the first draft of my current novel, and read through it. It had been going well before my trip to Dearth, but with the extra days away from it all I could see now were examples of poor writing, weaknesses in the story and the characters.
I had been concentrating too closely on the creation of a feeling of threat, the background, and the working out of a plot. The characters looked unconvincing to me. I intended it to be a book about the psychological motive for murder, with four lead characters, all with complex and innocent lives, any one of who might turn out to be the killer. But with fewer than a hundred pages written it seemed to me that the outcome was already going to be obvious to the reader. I needed to close in on the book again, concentrate on it, rethink the structure of the plot, lay false clues, re-imagine the characters as well as the circumstances.
I knew I had been distracted not only by being away, but by too much puzzling over the Antterland murders. They were irrelevant to me, as Jo had reminded me.
After several hours of frowning unhappily at what I had done I took the decision to scrap everything and start again. I dreaded having to undertake the extra work, and I disliked the idea of an inevitable delay in delivering the completed book, but I knew it would pay off in the end. I had worked out what I thought would be a better way of tackling the book.
Within a couple of hours I knew I had made the right decision. I was soon working smoothly and, I hoped, well. Then, with about ten pages rewritten, I noticed a coincidence, a fragment of memory. I kept thinking about the short time I had spent on Dearth and the annoying enigma of mutability, the physical changes that were allegedly real at the time they occurred, but forgotten soon afterwards. The essential irrationality of that had always nagged at me.
Then it suddenly struck me that what I was doing to my novel draft was similar to what I knew of mutability.
The original text, the first draft, was forced into changes by my rewriting them. Once I had written them the new version seemed so natural, so organic to the book, that not only were they an improved version, I could no longer remember what my original draft had said. The outer perception of material reality, the inner perception of change without memory – as Frejah had tried to explain it to me.
The result was still only a first draft and would have to be revised before I sent it in as a finished manuscript, but I was confident that even with the extra work the overall delay would be slight. I worked on, encouraged by the thought. Hadn’t Frejah said that Salay Raba was an island with incipient mutability? Well, then.
Re-interpreting the phenomenon of mutability in this way, as something I could understand, I began to muse about the possibilities of writing a story about it.
Jo arrived home while this was going on. To break off from work to be with her was something so constant in our relationship that it was ordinary, not an interruption at all. The next day she departed for the long trip to Muriseay, and I continued with the draft.
I worked for a week, enjoying being in the house alone, cooking for myself, looking after the cat, taking my daily swim from the beach across the road from the house, and communicating with Jo by internet every evening. It was the kind of stable, productive existence I most relished. I did not mind being alone – I liked company, I liked solitude. They were pleasures of different aspect.
Spoder telephoned me again. I had not expected to hear from him, and to be frank I was not particularly pleased to do so. He always distracted me. It was the first time we had been in contact since the day we had been finally released by Ketty from the locked magic museum, emerging hot, bothered and soaked in perspiration.
‘Sir, did you ever wonder,’ he said without preamble, ‘what our man Willer did with the money he stole from his brother?’
A few seconds before the telephone rang I had been trying to write a long and probably over-complicated sentence. No problem – it happened all the time. I was realizing, halfway through, that it was too long and over-complicated, but to write it properly I had to finish it. After that I would go back and break it down into two or perhaps three shorter sentences. Then – Spoder.
It took me a few moments to focus on what he was talking about. A scattershot of events, motives and Willer/Waller, baseball bats and locked rooms. I had to pull back from what I was doing. I dredged around in memory for the names that were easier to identify. Lew? The other was called Dever? One killed the other, one of them was known as Willer, the other as Waller. I could not at first remember which. They had presented a fascinating puzzle at the time but they were not real people to me.
I had made notes. There they lay in my notebook, possibly of use one day.
A delaying tactic: ‘How is your ankle, Spoder?’
‘It turned out it was only a sprain. I took off the bandage yesterday, and the ankle feels sore but usable. But about the money—’
‘Can this wait, Spoder? I’m working at the moment. Come over here tomorrow?’
‘It was you who knew about the money.’ Spoder had no sensitivity to the fact that because I sat around all day staring at a computer monitor I was actually working. He went on in the same rush: ‘There was no mention of Lew Antterland’s money in the police file, and then five years later Dever was killed. Once again nothing was said or recorded about the money.’
‘Maybe money wasn’t involved.’
‘There must have been a huge sum.’
I reached across to the computer and saved the document I was working on.
‘Couldn’t it have been spent?’ I said. I was at last starting to connect with him. ‘Five years went by. Money doesn’t last forever if you’re determined to spend it.’
‘There’s been no sign of spending, though,’ Spoder said. ‘I’ve been doing some old-fashioned enquiries. Dever, the magician, was running that theatrical show for children, in a rundown amusement park. Not the sort of extravagant lifestyle some of those people in Ocean Domaisne enjoy. You’ve seen what his place was like. I made a routine search for his will, in case he had written one. In fact he had, and because all wills are published a copy of it can be viewed online, same as everyone else’s. According to that he left most of his estate to the amusement place, Bonnzo’s Holiday Park. It didn’t amount to much.’
‘Maybe he made the will before he stole the loot from his brother.’
‘No – it was drawn up about a year before he, Dever, was killed. Like his brother, of course, Dever had been born into vassalage, but after he was moved to Salay Hames he was reduced to serfdom. Nothing was changed by becoming a self-employed magician. The Salay seigniory actually places magicians under the category of Mountebank. He lived in a trailer at the back of the park. He owned a car but it was in need of major repairs. He owned the usual stuff people buy for themselves, but nothing wildly extravagant and nothing close to that. He seems to have bought several pieces of magical apparatus. Those cabinets, for instance. I’ve discovered that large magical apparatus is usually built to order and is expensive, but I suppose the cabinets would be an affordable business investment to a working magician. Dever’s biggest asset was the bu
ilding, the museum. He left that as an entire bequest to the park. Apart from that he owned almost nothing.’
‘So he must have done something with Lew’s money. How much was it?’
‘No way of knowing. Lew died fifteen years ago. The police know zilch about it.’
‘So if we assume it was worth stealing, it must have amounted to a lot,’ I said.
‘Yes. That’s what I’m thinking.’
‘Could Dever have kept it as cash, and then lived on it?’
‘He made enough from his magic shows to cover daily expenses. He didn’t need to spend the money he stole. What I discovered is that his actual main source of income was a trust fund. It was paid to him every month by one of the clearing banks on behalf of a financial house in Raba City.’
‘Is that where he stashed it?’
‘I don’t think so. It’s a beneficial trust, the sort of thing you can’t set up for yourself but has to be funded by someone else. I can tell you it is known as an Anonymous Mutable Beneficial Annuity, or an AMBA. I’ve tried to find out how he became involved in it, where the money originally came from, but that sort of fund is shrouded in deep secrecy. The payments are made through a protective network of holding companies, handling agencies, offshore fund managers and service regulators. Have you ever heard of an AMBA?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I know almost nothing about high finance. I’m a writer – I’m a low finance user.’
‘Because of the secrecy I’ve been trying to investigate how they work,’ Spoder said. ‘How do you join an AMBA, for example? What do they invest their money in? Why are they never advertised? And so on. I called a few banks and was stonewalled. They know nothing, they say, even when I managed to get through to higher levels of management. There’s no information about them online, except a few comments on random sites, mostly asking the same questions I was thinking of. The whole point of AMBA funds seems to be that they are surrounded by watertight secrecy and security. No one but the beneficiary knows where the money came from.’
‘Any idea what they mean by a mutable annuity?’ I said, having noticed yet again the re-surfacing of the word that had recently drifted into my life.
‘I think it means something that changes.’
‘I think you’re right,’ I said. ‘So how does this affect the murder of Dever Antterland? And for that matter, of Lew?’
‘The killer wanted the money, knew it was there. Presumably the killer was in on the secret – perhaps even he was also funded by an AMBA. Maybe even the same one? What’s odd is that the money doesn’t seem to exist. The cash you say that Dever stole from his brother doesn’t show anywhere, and even today, ten years later, there’s no sign either that Dever was robbed, or where his and Lew’s money might be.’
‘Presumably, when Dever was killed the capital invested in the fund went to whoever he left his estate to?’
‘No, and that’s the key to the problem. The money ceased to exist. The investment died with him.’
Throughout this conversation I was staring at the screen-saver on my computer. The fact that it had appeared was a clue to how long Spoder had been talking to me. I was being drawn into the Antterland murders again. I felt restless, felt my time available for my novel was slipping away. My document with the novel was saved – I shut down the computer.
‘What sort of amount are we talking about, Spoder?’ I said again. ‘Thousands of thalers? Millions?’
‘Yesterday I was talking to a former colleague who works in the Serious Fraud department. She said no one with an AMBA has less than millions.’
‘This colleague – did she give any idea about how the fund works?’
‘She had heard of them, but she said no one in the department had any actual experience of one. She’s a cop. She wasn’t stonewalling me.’
I was tiring of the conversation, becoming irrationally and perhaps unfairly irritated by Spoder’s continued interest in a subject that, after all, I had started him on.
‘So where does this leave us?’ I said.
‘I think that if we could trace whoever killed Dever, that would lead us—’
‘Spoder, I think we should drop it.’
‘Yes, sir. But if you don’t object I’m going to follow it up a little longer. I think we are uncovering something really big.’
After Spoder hung up I stared at the dark computer monitor, then rebooted.
I worked hard on my novel for another five days, and by intensive redrafting I soon reached the same part of the story I had been writing before I went to Dearth. I had completed a roughly equal number of revised pages, but the content of the book was now so different that there was hardly any equivalence. Mutability of literature turned out to be an effective spur to rewriting. I was satisfied the four main characters were fleshed out. They all knew of each other but their lives remained separate. There was a looming sense of danger, but it was not focused individually on any one of the four.
Although I had already mentally picked out who my murderer was eventually to be, exposed climactically in the final pages of the novel, their tracks were carefully blurred with those of the other three.
One of those might or might not turn out to be the victim – I had yet to decide.
Unexpectedly, I felt myself easing off the novel again. Once I was through the intensive period of recovery and rewriting, my afternoons relaxing on the patio deck outside my study gradually grew longer. I watched more TV in the evenings. I still kept up a daily output of new pages but I knew I was cruising, not driving hard.
One afternoon, as I passed through the bedroom in search of a book, I noticed the key card I had inadvertently kept when I left the hotel in Dearth City. It was on the bedside table, partly covered by the base of my reading lamp. That’s where I had put it earlier when emptying my pockets. I knew the hotel wanted it back. I kept meaning to look up the address and return it. I had seen the card every day, but had never got around to doing the necessary search. It felt low on my priorities.
I picked up the card, intending to do something with it at last, but as I held it and turned it over in my fingers I saw something I had not noticed before.
The top of the card, the laminated side, was familiar: it had a computer chip embedded in the centre, slightly towards one end. This presumably was what was read by the key mechanism in the hotel door. An arrow lightly engraved in the shiny white surface indicated the direction in which the card should be pressed into the slot.
But there was a second chip, or several more, buried on the underside of the card. These were less prominent, nano chips, visible as a tiny thin strip of serrated metal bonded into the plastic. The strip was less than a centimetre long.
I took the card to my study, where I discovered two new emails had recently arrived. I tossed the card on the desk while I read the messages. I replied to one of them, then picked up the card again.
My desktop computer, which I had purchased the previous year, had a card reader built into it. Never having found a need for it I had never investigated it. The longest slot was designed to take a card of five and a half centimetres, the standard width of debit and credit cards. Out of idle interest I took the hotel card and pressed it into the reader.
Nothing happened for a few seconds, but the signal light for the solid state disc drive indicated it was in use.
The screen changed to a pleasant pale blue, with the message: Enter preferred language. The first choice was Archipelagian Demotic. I clicked on it.
Next: Enter your Social Level.
I frowned, made a growling noise, rapped my fingers on the desk. I was tempted to pull the card out of the reader then and there. This was the enquiry I was habitually unwilling to answer. Who needs to know that, and why? What difference does it make to any damned software program? It was one of those intermittent reminders of the archaic and undemocratic social system which ruled our lives, and which most people ignored.
I pressed Return, to see if I could bypass the query. It retu
rned.
There was a list of ‘social level’ options, the twelve familiar ones that allegedly defined the hierarchy of the Archipelagian society:
Serf, Citizen Serf, Villein, Squire, Vassal, Corvée Provider, Cartage Provider, Demesne Landed, Knight, Manorial Landed, Baron, Seignior.
In the anonymity of my office, and still grumbling, I was briefly tempted to pick one of the higher levels. I let the highlight bar hover over Manorial Landed, curious to find out what if any privileges would be given to those of such an elevated position. But then years of what I grudgingly admit must have been social conditioning kicked back in, and I clicked on Citizen Serf.
I knew my place. I never gave it a moment’s thought, but I clearly knew what I was and where I was ranked. Forever a citizen serf! A writer, a humble scribe!
Another screen appeared. Enter Password.
This was the moment when, with hindsight, I should have ejected the card from the reader and rebooted the computer. Getting beyond a password was always an irritant, even though in practice most corporate passwords are banal and simple to guess. That evening it merely added to the aggravation and annoyance.
Staring at the screen I typed: plaza
The password was demanded a second time. I typed plazahotel
The password was demanded a third time. I typed dearthplaza
I was in.
Enter numerical location within ‘dearthplaza’. After a moment’s wondering, then some thinking, I typed my former room number: 627
Now I was really in. The screen cleared to be replaced by the same pale blue, this time without message and without horizon. It was tempting to stare at it, imagine being drawn down into its limitless expanse.
A new message appeared. It said: Installing temporary files. Do not remove the source. My hard disc signal light began flickering at great speed.
Sense and computer experience finally returned to me in force. With a feeling of mild panic I jerked forward in my seat and jabbed anxiously at the eject button on the card reader. The card popped out.
The Evidence Page 16
