A smattering of laughter. Neith does not join in.
Damn.
Quaerendo Invenietis: Diana Hunter’s last book, and the formal title of Athenais’s false scroll. A biblical injunction – or an invitation to a detective. In her nostrils the faintest trace of sandalwood and star anise – not here, in the room, but in her head, and associated somehow with Lönnrot. Yes. She can smell the absurdly clean black cloth, the bland absence of human scent on too-pale skin.
She thinks of Jones, and the implicit direction of their dialogue: dinner. An actual meeting.
But now Break is saying it again: catabasis. Promisory lips, wine-dark, quirked like Lönnrot’s. You are a woman traversing the skins of an onion. She feels Bekele’s mouth, old and young both at once, shaping his vision of the universe in five concentric spheres – a very simple onion, she supposes. Both notions might be represented in music by Break’s ‘Eternal Canon’, from Bach’s Musical Offering, the work intended to change Frederick’s mind – not to persuade him but to educate him. To make him think like Bach. To change his connectome, as it were. Oh yes. This is where Lönnrot intended her to be, watching pieces of Hunter’s puzzle align like one of Bekele’s fivefold paintings – five parts to a whole, each claiming to embrace all the others.
She looks around, half expecting the weird white face to be hosting the show or tending bar, half seeking a small but powerful explosive device tucked under a table. A few seconds later she feels her terminal vibrate in covert emergency alert, and nearly jumps up to clear the room. Glancing down, she finds a red box on the screen: PROXIMATE OFFICER ALERT, meaning that she is the nearest investigator of the Witness to the scene of a serious crime and has been assigned the case. She feels a prickle of annoyance at the idea of taking on new business, and at being so rudely jerked from Break’s musical ministrations.
– You need to come immediately.
The Witness very nearly sounds tense. She wonders if the synthesised voice has been adjusted to convey urgency.
‘So I see.’
– The System will reimburse you for this evening’s performance. Traffic flow has been pre-empted and a vehicle has been retasked for your use.
‘What’s on the card?’
Again, the Witness seems reluctant, even daunted by the answer.
– There has been a murder. Oliver Smith is dead.
For one moment the Inspector allows herself to stop, and be completely still. She can hear the hooting outside, and a huffing pair of executives are climbing out of what was until a few seconds ago their taxi. The Witness is assuring them another one will be along shortly to continue their journey, and thanking them for their cooperation in that particularly bland iteration of its audio interface that presages a warning to stop breaching the public peace.
Proximate officer.
Now she knows why Lönnrot wanted her here, at the Duke of Denver. Or one reason. Nothing is only one thing, she reminds herself.
– I will reply on your behalf to Mr Jones.
Dear Dog-walker, I hope you are as patient as you seem. ‘No, that’s all right. I’ll do it.’
Twenty minutes later she is standing in the cold, seeing a real-life corpse on the tarmac of a tunnel under the Thames.
*
London has always rested on a honeycomb of passages and voids, and each iteration of the capital seems to need more space beneath the earth. Even as other cities reach skyward or outward, London burrows down into the dark. Eight tunnels now run beneath the city in a grid, north–south and east–west, called respectively the ‘Warp’ and ‘Weft’ routes. These are the main roads that make transport within the overpopulated hub remotely possible; without them the city would freeze. This one is Weft 3, a favoured commuter journey from Oxford into the heart of the City. It is nearly seventy miles from one end to the other, and when first constructed required its own dedicated police and emergency unit, though many of these functions have now been subsumed by the Witness. In the event of a power outage – which is therefore engineered to be many times less likely than a direct meteor strike – the atmosphere inside would become lethal in a matter of minutes. It is a self-contained world and the tunnel must be lit dynamically or else the rhythm of the pools of shadow and illumination can induce pseudo-epilepsy in weary drivers. It is almost never closed. Today will be a very bad day for the capital’s commuters.
The Inspector does not need to show a badge to pass through the crowd. Human nature being what it is, and the System being at least aspirationally open and public, there is always a crowd of onlookers at major scenes, but they make room for her because everyone knows she is an Inspector of the Witness. She wishes fleetingly that they wouldn’t, and wonders how much of their helpfulness is really respect and how much is a trace of fear.
She steps through the cordon, and feels her mouth open in the classic cartoon circle, then hurriedly closes it and starts to hum ‘Jerusalem’ because it’s the first thing that comes to mind. Of the various ways to operate your biology according to your conscious desires she has learned here and there, one of the most useful is the knowledge that it is physiologically difficult if not impossible to vomit while humming.
Oliver Smith’s body is, to put it delicately, dispersed. But a less bloodless assessment – and nothing about this, surely, could be called bloodless – would be that it has been torn apart by wild beasts.
The uniformed officers are watching her, and the Inspector realises – she does not work as the first responder all that often, though of course she knows perfectly well how to do it – that they are waiting for her instructions. She puts some iron in her spine and opens a channel to all of them. ‘Attention, please. This is Inspector Neith! Push the cordon back ten metres in every direction; I want all of you using the assisted recognition program, and anyone who pings with any kind of violent or narcissistic profile, I want them tagged into the file and I want full watch for every second of their day and night for a week in any direction. Hold pending further inquiries. I repeat: keep all of them. Dump everything to the case folder, we’ll sort it later, but I don’t want to have trouble putting my hand on someone down the line. All right? Move!’
There’s a gratifyingly immediate response. Good. She looks back at Smith and realises she has been given a green light to go through his entire life. She opens a channel to every on-call investigator. ‘Murder, priority. The deceased is Oliver Smith, a senior employee of the Turnpike Trust. I’ll need someone over at their office to collect everything from his desk. Dump all his files to the case folder at the same time. We’ll need the last month of his life to the absolute granular limit. If he goes out of range even for five minutes I want bounced sound, reflected-image facial analysis, whatever we can get, and I want it immediately. The Trust is a private entity with government contracts. I’m issuing a blanket order, right now, for anything you think is significant. If they quibble, roll over it and apologise later. I don’t imagine they’ll want to share, that’s something for the legal department to be troubled by, but use your overrides the way you’ve always wanted to and blame me. Understood?’
Confirmation appears in her glasses like the city catching fire. Men and women of her service, moving to do their job. She feels a little whisper of pride. This is how it should be, the unequivocal function of a justice machine.
A traitorous part of her insists that, in a moment, she must run a dream check.
‘At this time I am officially connecting the murder of Oliver Smith to my existing case and folding them together under the case name GNOMON. All inquiries to me direct. No release of information without reference to me personally, and I will defend that order to any quorum up to the national level. I repeat: default no release. It is possible that this is the most important case you will ever work on. Any of you. Be proud today. Be fearless. Do your job well.’ To the Witness: ‘Meaning: catabasis.’ Because you don’t stop looking at a slim, complex clue just because someone dangles a fat, distractingly obvious one in front of
your face.
– The mystical journey of Orpheus into the kingdom of Hades, and by extension any voyage into darkness. Greek, kata: against, down; basis: the place on which you stand. Literally, a pedestal. Therefore ‘catabasis’, a journey down beneath the place where we stand.
And here is Smith, dead in a tunnel. Tragic, but he was a villain.
She feels her heart lift in savage anticipation of answers, at last, and takes a moment to tamp down on the sense of restoration that is surging in her. Hold on, hold on. There is work to be done. She can’t rely on this, she’s been handed it, though of course hands leave prints. The case has cracks in it, yes, but it is not cracked. Not yet. Settle. Use that fire. Use it, and win.
She turns back to the grim remnant on the ground. And did those feet in ancient times, mmmhmm hmmhmmHMM HMMMMM HMMMHMMM …
Smith has been cut, gouged and finally torn apart, or possibly scissored. It is something she could have lived her whole life without ever doing, staring down into the tubular ruin of a chest cavity. She looks around, and finds Trisa Hinde. She starts to nod, then remembers that this won’t necessarily mean anything obvious to Hinde, or might mean any one of several things and the spread of options will probably be annoying. She murmurs ‘Hello’ instead.
‘Exsanguination,’ responds Hinde.
‘Yes,’ the Inspector says.
‘Although I’m not ruling out shock, either.’
‘No.’ Because one wouldn’t. ‘Weapon?’
Hinde shrugs, annoyed, and makes a swirly gesture with her hand to indicate bad reception or a data snafu. ‘You try.’
The Inspector doesn’t, not yet. She looks around first, at the disposition of the parts. Perfectly centred, each in its own pool of light. Unshifting light, not dynamic, not now. The traffic is stilled and the lighting algorithm has recognised a special circumstance and reverted to a static posture. Once, as a child, Mielikki Neith read a story about an old man who lived in the forest and was kind to all the animals, and when he eventually died the forest was silent and dark for a year, so that the people of the town believed it cursed, until the old fellow’s daughter, hearing of the darkness in her father’s favourite place, came home and chose to be married in a sunlit clearing in the heart of the wood and occupy his home with her new husband, and the whole forest rustled and awoke, and the birds and the flowers bloomed once more. It is almost as if the tunnel itself is taking note of Smith’s death and honouring its dead with its own version of that silence.
She breathes in, and out, and tries to see the scene as text.
When she looks again, she sees not illumination but the spotlights of a stage. The pools of light are not coincidental but painstaking – and surely Diana Hunter’s injunction that the word should imply pain staked rather than pains taken has been obeyed here. This is agony and unthinkable fear written in blood across the grey surface of the road. It is a display, a victory procession. This crime is not a crime – or rather, its criminality is a side issue, the envelope in which the message is delivered. It is a code, and death is just a convenient vector.
The Inspector feels a chill. If Hunter sacrificed herself to make a point, and Smith was the instrument of her self-destruction and Smith is now dead, then whose message is written here? Smith’s employer? His confederates, warning one another to stay true and quiet or face the consequences? Or is this Hunter’s work, planned before her arrest and now playing out? In which case, who else is on her list? Smith’s assistants in the Hunter interrogation? She puts a movement hold on anyone with strong professional connections to Smith: his whole first degree of separation. Report for immediate debriefing.
Then, with a jolt, she hears the words in her head: Catabasis for the Masses. Shit, she hadn’t really acknowledged the second part. Catabasis, yes, fair enough, here we are. But none of this is for the masses. Is everyone going on this journey into death, in Lönnrot’s perception? Should she be looking for a gas attack? A biological weapon? Orpheus came home, but Eurydice did not: should she be worrying about something that targets two X chromosomes? Or is it just a brute 50 per cent kill rate?
No. She doesn’t believe it. She tells the Witness to go to maximum sensitivity for traces of biological, chemical or radiological weapons, moves the whole network to a state of higher terror alert, but acknowledges she’s doing so as a precaution and fires the query to Counter-terror for immediate consideration. She lets her gut unknot, soothes her heart back down into her chest. Terrorism of that sort is not Hunter. It’s not Lönnrot. The former would be appalled by mass killing, the latter would be bored.
We’re all going on a journey together, into the underworld, and Smith is our conductor. Our ferryman. Is that it?
He was Hunter’s, that much is clear.
So, then: what journey? With a sinking feeling she looks over at Hinde and then down at the wounds again. Does it make any sense to call them wounds when there is in any individual sample more wound than corpse? Smith is not wounded: his wounds are lightly touched with the remnant of Smith.
She looks over at Hinde, who scowls: don’t waste my time.
Neith queries the Witness for probable cause of death, suspecting she knows what she will hear and hoping she is wrong.
– Shark attack, the Witness says, forty-two miles inland. And then, almost apologetically, Anomalous.
Yes. Both impossible and obviously true. This was not a shark attack, here, in the dry air of the tunnel – and yet the Inspector can see the unimpeachable reality of it. The shark followed Kyriakos on to dry land, became a white-skinned woman with very dark hair. Then it crashed the economy. It never killed anyone. At least, not yet.
She needs to watch the rest of Hunter’s memories, and soon.
For now, the Inspector shades the corners of her eyes as if peering into a letterbox. ‘Show me.’
The real world fades away as her terminal projects fullscreen directly into her eyes, and she feels another twinge of nausea, this one inspired not by viscera but by the shifted viewpoint which does not accord with her body’s awareness of its size and position. The feed is telling her she is fifteen feet tall, looking down on the tunnel with binocular eyes set nine inches apart: mantis vision. The first time accessing full feed while standing, many people fall over. The Inspector is not a rookie. She lets her weight sit in her heels, requiring minimal correction to her posture, and separates her sense of where she is from what she sees. It’s just a trick. You learn to use your brain in a new way.
Smith’s car is alone in the tunnel, moving precisely one kilometre per hour under the limit. Somehow or other he is the only one here: a caprice of traffic flow. Neith hopes he found that interesting.
Then the car slows and stops. Smith doesn’t seem to know why. (Picture-in-picture: there’s a dashboard camera looking up at him.) He huffs, irritated, and makes a call for assistance. The System asks him to remain in the car and assures him that other traffic will be warned or diverted. It’s a standard message, and Smith relaxes.
Then, little by little, as nothing happens, he grows concerned. He looks around and evidently sees nothing, hears nothing. Neith, recalling her recent moment of midnight fear and the image of Lönnrot’s hand reaching out to her from the mirror, feels a spasm of sympathy. Smith, too, seems to be having that unpleasant mammalian response to silence and occlusion: the itchy and unwelcome sense of an invisible watcher.
There’s always a watcher, of course. That is the promise of the System. You are never alone, never unprotected. You need never be afraid of the dark.
The Witness cuts away from the interior of the car. The tunnel remains empty, white-green lights burning. Then, as the control algorithm confirms that no other vehicles are now inbound, the lights begin to dim: power-saving measure. The tunnel goes from a bilious artificial daytime to a cool silver nitrate dusk.
Smith twists in his seat. He must know he is safe in the car. He could not be more accompanied if he were in the middle of a ballroom. Well, the Inspector amends, h
e is actually not safe, but unless he knows something specific about this situation, he should assume that he is. Just as the Monkey King never left the palm of the Buddha, so Oliver Smith is even now held in the arms of his electronic mother, as safe as anyone in the world.
He tries to make an outgoing call and can’t. There’s no signal – the microwave booster must have been powered down at the same time as the lights. Smith toggles the connection repeatedly and starts looking over his shoulder. So far as the Inspector can observe, he has at this moment no reason to fear attack, nor to suspect that such an attack, if it comes, should come from behind.
For these few instants he is more alone than is generally possible for anyone in the System. Would Hunter have found this restful?
Some distance down the tunnel, just as Smith turns frontwards once more, one of the lights goes out completely. Smith says in what must be some sort of understanding: ‘Oh God,’ and now his face is not nervous but actually terrified. Whatever he knows, he knows without a doubt, as a mouse knows the presence of an owl.
Another light goes out. ‘Oh no. Oh shit. Shit!’ Smith’s voice is rising and tightening. The Witness posits, based on expression and cadence, that he is reviewing causalities and options and cannot locate any that please him. In what is estimated with 98 per cent certainty to be desperation without the rational expectation of survival, he releases the seatbelt, lunges into the back seat for his coat. This is a strange thing that people do when they are about to run for their lives, but have not yet actually begun. The Inspector has seen it before: the residual obedience to convention. As soon as it gets in his way he will discard the coat, will briefly wish he had not brought it before he forgets even that much in his flight, but in this first instant he cannot imagine leaving his vehicle without his wallet and keys. The mundane part of his life insists that, having escaped from horror and survived, he will want a drink and access to his home, and how will he get these things without his effects? It is the same stupid impulse that kills passengers in air crashes, as they open the overhead locker before exiting a burning plane.
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