“Just keep me company for a while.”
“I liked the last planet we visited better than this one.” She matched her steps to his and he looked down and focused on the comforting cadence of her voice. “Those orange flowers were lovely. Is the country of Sea Monster connected somehow to Baltid Athens?”
“No, this is a different matter. I can’t begin the job for Jolly just yet.”
“Now that would be a comfortable place to live.”
He lifted his head and took in the shiny purple brick of the castle just in front of him. “It’s unusual, at least. I’m afraid you’d better go now.”
“I’ll see you again soon, Reese.” She vanished, the bright particles that made up her physical form fading to nothing.
Reese headed into the ostentatious building and reported to Beja, the housekeeper who had interviewed him the previous afternoon. She had green fur and a tail, along with spindly legs that he had discovered she rarely used since her race had the ability to teleport themselves from once place to another. He didn’t know whether they used their minds or some kind of technology to do it but it was a wonderful ability he was distinctly envious of.
“I’ll give you a tour of the staff areas and then introduce you to Ariel, the head gardener, who you’ll work for,” she said, his translator changing the series of terse sounds she made into words. It would do the same for him, working with his appearance unit to make it seem as if he was speaking the native language of humans on Ocean, but Beja wasn’t giving him a chance to get a word in at the moment. She seemed in a hurry to impart as much information as possible in the briefest time but she had around fifty members of staff to organise each day, so he didn’t take it personally. “Don’t enter the main part of the house unless Ariel or I order you to. The family don’t like to see people they don’t know wandering about in their personal spaces.”
“No, of course, particularly after what happened to Kass du Lissin.”
She looked about with round eyes before fixing him with a disgruntled look that was slightly cat-like. “If you want to stay here more than an hour you must never talk about the death. That’s a condition of your employment.”
That made his job more difficult but he enjoyed a challenge. “Whatever you say, Beja.”
She teleported over to a door and waited impatiently for him to walk the distance to it. She opened the door and gestured inside. “This is the kitchen. You will collect meals and drinks from here and take them to consume in the staff dining room here.” She indicated the next door. “From now on you will enter the house only through this back door.” She teleported over to it and then back again before he could move. “I have an office there and there are staff toilets there.” She pointed to one door and then another. “Do you have any questions before we go outside?”
“If a member of the du Lissin family comes outside I don’t want to insult them by not knowing who they are. Could you tell me a bit about the family?”
“You must have heard of them where you grew up. Didn’t you say it was Sandune, the next town from here?”
She had a good memory. He searched his mind for an excuse. “I had a brother who teased me by making up stories. I’m embarrassed to admit it but I don’t know what’s real and fake about them. Of course, Ember du Lissin is the head of the family and there are two separate businesses: the seaweed business and the export company. That’s about all I’m sure of.” Nick had told him this much last night and the family was apparently publicity-shy since there were no holo-photos available of them anywhere, a problem he quickly intended to fix with the cameras he had on him.
She made a rattling noise which he guessed was the equivalent of a put-upon sigh. “There are two children of Ember du Lissin: Mer, who is married to Keat and has one young child of her own and Norla, who isn’t married. There are two children of Kass du Lissin: Arwyl, who is married to Pos and has two children, and Bop, the only male child. You will come to recognise them all soon.”
“Thank you. That’s useful.” He repeated the names to himself to memorise them.
She took him through the back exit and introduced him to Ariel, who turned out to be human, then left them alone. “It’s about time we had more help out here,” she said. Finding out he had never done any gardening before, she bombarded him with information about what plants grew in the salty freezing conditions and the work he would be expected to do in the large grounds. When she paused, he asked her about the du Lissin family.
“The more money people have, the less good sense they show,” she said obliquely, watching the five other gardeners silently working. She was hidden beneath countless layers of clothes but the face that looked up at his from beneath the wool-lined hood of her coat suggested she was around thirty with luminous eyes in what would otherwise have been a plain face.
“I suppose there’s a lot for the family to deal with right now,” he said.
“That’s their business and I’m sure they’ll sort it out.”
That was an odd way to refer to the aftermath of a murder. She left him to shovel fresh snow off the driveway and he did this until a robicle approached, its giant form towering over its surroundings as it plodded forward, metal legs taking huge strides that moved it from the other end of the street to just outside the arched front door in seconds. Reese moved out of the way, deliberately getting nearer to another gardener so he could ask, “Who’s that?”
The man, who looked too old for outdoor labour, glanced up as a woman in a suit was lowered out of the giant robot transport. “Solicitor. First of the day but she certainly won’t be the last.”
Reese didn’t know much about handling large sums of money – although he’d like to one day – but he didn’t think that a Will would need this amount of legal advice. Unless there wasn’t a Will. Or unless it didn’t say what everyone wanted it to say. “So why do the family need so many solicitors?”
The old man frowned at him. “If you want to keep your job, don’t ask and definitely don’t ask me as I don’t want to be searching for somewhere new to work at my age.”
Wow, these people had been thoroughly warned off the subject, but why? Hadn’t there been a funeral? Surely that couldn’t have been kept quiet or, if it hadn’t taken place yet, it couldn’t be put off indefinitely, even with these glacial temperatures to keep the body frozen. What could the family gain by delaying letting out the news and, if Nick’s people had already been informed by the planet’s government, wasn’t everything already known? There must be something left to hide and it had to do with the solicitor who was currently entering the arched castle doorway.
“You planning on doing any work?” the old man asked sourly and Reese grinned at him and stepped back out onto the driveway with his shovel.
The female solicitor left three hours later but, by that point, two more had arrived. Ariel, the head gardener, then reappeared and let him off his pruning duties to go and get some lunch in the kitchen. He perked up as she said this, partly at the thought of being somewhere warm and partly because he might have better luck getting information out of the indoor staff.
He walked to the back doors and let himself into the kitchen. A cook and several helpers were busy chopping vegetables, mixing ingredients, frying, roasting and manually washing dishes. Clearly none of the family’s wealth was spent on kitchen equipment or a dishwasher.
“Who are you?” the cook asked, identifiable by his universally known outfit of white tunic and trousers and white hat.
“Reese Zail Kintore. New gardener,” he said and pulled off a glove to stick out his hand.
The man looked him over doubtfully but then reached out and shook hands, his grip strong. He was maybe fifty years old with salt and pepper hair and a mouth that was a long thin line. He was taller than Reese’s five foot eight, which wasn’t all that unusual, and had a cybernetic enhancement over his right hand which Reese wouldn’t have been able to tell from normal flesh if he hadn’t touched it. “Sand Ganby.” When Rees
e’s mouth twitched the man added, “Yes, a lot of the people on this planet have silly sea-related names but I don’t think you have much to laugh about, Reese Zail.”
“True enough.”
The man gestured to the other side of the kitchen. “Help yourself to some food and you can go and sit down in the staff dining room next door.”
“Thanks.” Reese smiled at the other workers, who were eyeing him curiously, and walked over to where trays, dishes and cutlery was piled up along with bread rolls, some kind of grey fatty spread that he ignored, cheese, fruit and a selection of drinks. The fruit looked too fresh to have grown in this climate so he assumed it was imported from off-world. Having filled up a plate, he leaned against the counter and said, “This food looks good.”
One of the younger assistant cooks paused in chopping herbs to look round at him and grin. “It isn’t hard to please gardeners. Anything warm tastes good when you’ve been outside for hours.”
“You’re not wrong there.” He took a sip of his drink, which turned out to be disappointingly fake-tasting coffee substitute. “How long have you worked here?”
“A couple of years.”
“Are there always so many visitors?”
“All the family have been in an uproar since...” He broke off and cleared his throat. “I mean, it’s been busier than usual for the last five weeks.”
Five weeks. That must have been when she died. They certainly must have already had the funeral then. He stepped nearer to the man. “I suppose a lot of police officers have been calling.”
“None. We...”
“The staff dining room is the next room over,” the head chef reminded him, gesturing with his head just in case Reese still didn’t take the hint. “Stop bothering my people. They have too much work to do to stand about gossiping.”
“Okay.” Reese gave them both a cheery smile and put his mug down on the tray with the plate of food. He picked it up and carried it out into the corridor, using his elbow to nudge open the door to the left of the kitchen.
Dominating the room was a table large enough to seat the entire staff of fifty people, although there were currently only three people there now. He greeted them, walking down one side of the room to take a seat nearby. Two of them had seats opposite each other while the third was four places away. He introduced himself and found out that two of them were cleaners and the third was a valet.
“I didn’t know there were jobs like that in the galactic era,” he said to the woman sitting apart from the others.
“There is on Ocean,” she said with a shrug. “Wealthy people like to feel looked after.”
“So which one of them do you work for?”
“Arwyl.”
That was the daughter of the dead woman, he remembered. “She must be having a tough time at the moment.”
“No more than the others, although they’re all pecking each other like a species of gull.”
Reese guessed that this sentence had lost some of its meaning in translation but he perked up at the suggestion that Arwyl wasn’t grieving too much. “She wasn’t close to her mother?”
“Oh, well, I don’t know...”
“Weren’t you warned?” one of the cleaners said, leaning towards Reese. “You can’t ask about anything like that.”
“Why is it such a big deal?” he whispered back.
“It’s all about money, isn’t it?” the valet responded in an equally hushed tone.
They all started as the door opened and a young man came in. He saw them and glanced behind him. “Is something wrong?”
The new arrival made the staff fall silent and, despite Reese’s attempts to coax more information out of them, that was all he learned that was useful. He managed to take a few photographs while he spent the afternoon chopping logs and pruning, with no one about to question or even to provide a bit company, and he was glad to get away from the castle at the end of the day and return to Nick at their hotel.
Chapter Ten
NICK PULLED the woolly scarf over his face and left the hotel. He knew he was taking the risk of being imprisoned again but he couldn’t sit about while Reese was out doing all the work. The town wasn’t too crowded – he didn’t think there could be more than a thousand people living here – and consisted mostly of three different races: humans, aliens with green fur like the solicitor he had met at the castle and aliens with mottled yellow, orange and brown skin that seemed to avoid the other races.
He asked a male green fur alien for directions to the du Lissin business, self-conscious about the way his translator spoke aloud to interpret his words for the alien. He might as well have written on his forehead ‘I’m here illegally so come and arrest me’.
The man gave him a doubtful look, furry face wrinkling, but answered, “Do you want the offices and warehouses for the seaweed business or the export business?”
He thought about what to say. Kass du Lissin had been in charge of the second business so it made more sense to go there. “The export business.”
The man gave him a complex series of instructions and then vanished, reappearing at the end of the street before disappearing again. Nick found his way to a series of large warehouses, only getting lost once along the way. He saw a human heading in the same direction and asked her, “Is this where the murder took place?”
She frowned. “No one died here.”
“Then Kass du Lissin was killed at her home?”
She hesitated. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
He got a similar response from two other people and gave up this approach. It was strange, though, as in his experience people were full of gossip over such cases, wanting to work out for themselves who might be the guilty party.
His phone pinged and he saw that Reese had sent him a couple of holo-photos of family members. Perhaps Nick could achieve something useful here after all. He had glimpsed a couple of younger women with Ember du Lissin at the castle and the family dressed expensively, unlike their employees. He hung about, trying not to look too suspicious or to freeze completely, and about an hour later he saw Ember du Lissin arrive with one of the other women he had seen. At around lunchtime he saw a well-dressed man and woman arrive. He guessed that the man might be Kass’s son and maybe a girlfriend or colleague. He took pictures of everyone.
Once they left it went quiet again and, unable to bear the cold any longer, he headed back through the shops and stalls, which had the feeling of stepping back in time, with cloth and raw fruit and vegetables being sold. He even saw humans and aliens paying for goods by bartering their own produce. He paused at a stall that sold a variety of sweets. The cold weather seemed to have given both him and Reese strong appetites, not that he knew how much Reese normally ate, just that he kept his body in good condition. Really good condition. Sharing a room with him last night had been distracting and was increasing his interest in Reese, who was such a dynamic, friendly person that Nick – who tended to feel reserved around people he didn’t know well – was looking forward to spending more time with him.
The stall owner asked Nick what he wanted, returning his thoughts to the present. “Do you take GaFs?” he checked, getting out his Galactic Finance Card.
The man nodded and Nick picked out some sweets he hoped Reese would like. “Have you heard any interesting news about the du Lissins lately?” he asked the seller as he paid for them, his translator conveying his words to her in its usual barely comprehensible way.
“No.”
He tried again. “The main families don’t get along well, do they?”
“They would be happy if the others left the business or corporation but some of them like slash admire each other.”
Left the business? Left was another way of saying went out, he reasoned – went out of business. That made more sense. Damned cheap translator. “What sort of person was Kass du Lissin? Was she liked in town?”
She gave him that wary look again. “The du Lissins employ people slash populace from
nearly half the families in the town. It does not matter if we like slash admire them. We owe them our assistance and loyalty.”
She turned away to serve someone else and he wandered off, thinking about what she had said. The people here knew something but they weren’t talking about it because they depended on the du Lissins. That must be the main reason why everyone was being so cagey, not because they were scared of the du Lissins, or not entirely.
He raised his head and looked directly into the eyes of one of the slimy-skin slavers who had captured him and Reese. He froze and they stared at each other, recognition slowly forming in the alien’s gaze.
Cursing his bad luck, Nick reacted slightly more quickly. He turned, dodged round the sweets stall and picked up speed, running through the street, which was filled with half-melted snow, sending icy water cascading upwards with every step. If he slipped again – as he had the last time – he knew it would all be over and he would end up back in that disgusting prison cell.
Behind him, he heard the alien shout, perhaps to its colleagues, and then he heard the slaver’s pounding steps right on his heels. Nick could only sprint in short bursts, impeded by the stream of people moving in different directions and he had to hope that the slaver was similarly slowed down and wouldn’t grab him at any moment although, with eight legs, it had more manoeuvrability. Racing round two mottled aliens who were standing talking, he turned a corner and pushed open the first door he came to, hoping the slaver would go past without seeing him.
He found himself in a small cafe that offered no hiding place and, after a second’s hesitation, he hurried past the tables to get to a dim corridor he could see, ignoring the objections of the person behind the counter. Spying a way out, he jogged up to the back door. He turned the handle but it didn’t budge. He heard the front door to the cafe open and the slaver’s voice, asking about a fugitive, and, knowing he was running out of time, he shook the door, looking for how to unlock it but if there was a key it wasn’t here.
No One Likes Humans Page 4
