“Pink?”
Ortega shrugged again.
The ground jet beached about ten metres away and shuddered to a halt, ripped-up gobbets of wet sand splattering down around it. When the storm of its arrival had died, a hatch was flung back and a black-clad, helmeted figure clambered out. That the figure was a woman was abundantly clear from the form-fitting flight suit, a suit that ended in boots inlaid with curling silver tracery from heel to toe.
I sighed and followed Ortega up to the craft.
The woman in the flight suit jumped down into the shallow water and splashed up to meet us, tugging at the seals on her helmet. As we met, the helmet came off and long coppery hair spilled out over the suit’s shoulders. The woman put her head back and shook out the hair, revealing a wide-boned face with large, expressive eyes the colour of flecked onyx, a delicately arched nose and a generously sculpted mouth.
The old, ghostly hint of Miriam Bancroft’s beauty this woman had once owned had been scrubbed out utterly.
“Kovacs, this is Leila Begin,” said Ortega formally. “Ms Begin, this is Takeshi Kovacs, Laurens Bancroft’s retained investigator.”
The large eyes appraised me frankly.
“You’re from offworld?” she asked me.
“That’s correct. Harlan’s World.”
“Yes, the lieutenant mentioned it.” There was a well-designed huskiness to Leila Begin’s voice, and an accent that suggested she was unused to speaking Amanglic. “I can only hope that means you have an open mind.”
“Open to what?”
“The truth.” Begin gave me a surprised look. “Lieutenant Ortega tells me you are interested in the truth. Shall we walk?”
Without waiting for a response, she set off parallel with the surf. I exchanged a glance with Ortega, who gestured with her thumb but showed no signs of moving herself. I hesitated for a couple of moments, then went after Begin.
“What’s all this about the truth?” I asked, catching her up.
“You have been retained to discover who killed Laurens Bancroft,” she said intensely, without looking round. “You wish to know the truth of what transpired the night he died. Is this not so?”
“You don’t think it was suicide, then?”
“Do you?”
“I asked first.”
I saw a faint smile cross her lips. “No. I don’t.”
“Let me guess. You’re pinning it on Miriam Bancroft.”
Leila Begin stopped and turned on one of her ornate heels. “Are you mocking me, Mr Kovacs?”
There was something in her eyes that drained the irritable amusement out of me on the spot. I shook my head.
“No, I’m not mocking you. But I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Have you met Miriam Bancroft?”
“Briefly, yes.”
“You found her charming, no doubt.”
I shrugged evasively. “A bit abrasive at times, but generally, yes. Charming would do it.”
Begin looked me in the eyes. “She is a psychopath,” she said seriously.
She resumed walking. After a moment I followed her.
“Psychopath’s not a narrow term any more,” I said carefully. “I’ve heard it applied to whole cultures on occasion. It’s even been applied to me once or twice. Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnected from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.”
“Mr Kovacs.” There was an impatient note in the woman’s voice now. “Miriam Bancroft assaulted me when I was pregnant and murdered my unborn child. She was aware that I was pregnant. She acted with intention. Have you ever been seven months pregnant?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“That is too bad. It’s an experience we should all be required to go through at least once.”
“Kind of hard to legislate.”
Begin looked at me sidelong. “In that sleeve, you look like a man acquainted with loss, but that’s the surface. Are you what you appear, Mr Kovacs? Are you acquainted with loss? Irretrievable loss, we’re discussing. Are you acquainted with that?”
“I think so,” I said, more stiffly than I’d intended.
“Then you will understand my feelings about Miriam Bancroft. On Earth, cortical stacks are fitted after birth.”
“Where I come from too.”
“I lost that child. No amount of technology will bring it back.”
I couldn’t tell if the rising tide of emotion in Leila Begin’s voice was real or contrived, but I was losing focus. I cut back to start.
“That doesn’t give Miriam Bancroft a motive for killing her husband.”
“Of course it does.” Begin favoured me with the sidelong glance again, and there was another bitter smile on her face. “I was not an isolated incident in Laurens Bancroft’s life. How do you think he met me?”
“In Oakland, I heard.”
The smile blossomed into a hard laugh. “Very euphemistic. Yes, he certainly met me in Oakland. He met me at what they used to call the Meat Rack. Not a very classy place. Laurens needed to degrade, Mr Kovacs. That’s what made him hard. He’d been doing it for decades before me, and I don’t see why he would have stopped afterwards.”
“So Miriam decides, suddenly, enough’s enough and ventilates him?”
“She’s capable of it.”
“I’m sure she is.” Begin’s theory was as full of holes as a captured Sharyan deserter, but I wasn’t about to elaborate the details of what I knew to this woman. “You harbour no feelings about Bancroft himself, I suppose? Good or bad.”
The smile again. “I was a whore, Mr Kovacs. A good one. A good whore feels what the client wants them to feel. There’s no room for anything else.”
“You telling me you can shut your feelings down just like that?”
“You telling me you can’t?” she retorted.
“All right, what did Laurens Bancroft want you to feel?”
She stopped and faced me slowly. I felt uncomfortably as if I had just slapped her. Her face had gone mask-like with remembrance.
“Animal abandonment,” she said finally. “And then abject gratitude. And I stopped feeling them both as soon as he stopped paying me.”
“And what do you feel now?”
“Now?” Leila Begin looked out to sea, as if testing the temperature of the breeze against what was inside her. “Now I feel nothing, Mr Kovacs.”
“You agreed to talk to me. You must have had a reason.”
Begin made a dismissive gesture. “The lieutenant asked me to.”
“Very public-spirited of you.”
The woman’s gaze came back to me. “You know what happened after my miscarriage?”
“I heard you were paid off.”
“Yes. Unpleasant-sounding, isn’t it? But that’s what happened. I took Bancroft’s money and I shut up. It was a lot of money. But I didn’t forget where I came from. I still get back to Oakland two or three times a year, I know the girls who work the Rack now. Lieutenant Ortega has a good name there. Many of the girls owe her. You might say I am paying off some favours.”
“And revenge on Miriam Bancroft doesn’t come into it?”
“What revenge?” Leila Begin laughed her hard little laugh again. “I am giving you information because the lieutenant has asked me to. You won’t be able to do anything to Miriam Bancroft. She is a Meth. She is untouchable.”
“No one’s untouchable. Not even Meths.”
Begin looked at me sadly.
“You are not from here,” she said. “And it shows.”