“How young?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Do you have many children?”
“Yes, I do. Very many.” Bancroft smiled faintly. “When you have leisure and wealth, bringing children into the world is a pure joy. I have twenty-seven sons and thirty-four daughters.”
“Do they live with you?”
“Naomi does, most of the time. The others come and go. Most have families of their own now.”
“How is Naomi?” I stepped my tone down a little.
Finding your father without his head isn’t the best way to start the day.
“She’s in psychosurgery,” said Bancroft shortly. “But she’ll pull through. Do you need to talk to her?”
“Not at the moment.” I got up from the chair and went to the balcony door. “You say she barged in here. This is where it happened?”
“Yes.” Bancroft joined me at the door. “Someone got in here and took my head off with a particle blaster. You can see the blast mark on the wall down there. Over by the desk.”
I went inside and down the stairs. The desk was a heavy mirrorwood item — they must have freighted the gene code from Harlan’s World and cultured the tree here. That struck me as almost as extravagant as the Songspire in the hall, and in slightly more questionable taste. On the World mirrorwood grows in forests on three continents, and practically every canal dive in Millsport has a bar top carved out of the stuff. I moved past it to inspect the stucco wall. The white surface was furrowed and seared black with the unmistakable signature of a beam weapon. The burn started at head height and followed a short arc downwards.
Bancroft had remained on the balcony. I looked up at his silhouetted face. “This is the only sign of gunfire in the room?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing else was damaged, broken or disturbed in any way?”
“No. Nothing.” It was clear that he wanted to say more, but he was keeping quiet until I’d finished.
“And the police found the weapon beside you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you own a weapon that would do this?”
“Yes. It was mine. I keep it in a safe under the desk. Handprint coded. They found the safe open, nothing else removed. Do you want to see inside it?”
“Not at the moment, thank you.” I knew from experience how difficult mirrorwood furniture is to shift. I turned up one corner of the woven rug under the desk. There was an almost invisible seam in the floor beneath. “Whose prints will open this?”
“Miriam’s and my own.”
There was a significant pause. Bancroft sighed, loud enough to carry across the room. “Go on, Kovacs. Say it. Everyone else has. Either I committed suicide or my wife murdered me. There’s just no other reasonable explanation. I’ve been hearing it since they pulled me out of the tank at Alcatraz.”
I looked elaborately round the room before I met his eyes.
“Well, you’ll admit it makes for easier police work,” I said. “It’s nice and neat.”
He snorted, but there was a laugh in it. I found myself beginning to like this man despite myself. I went back up, stepped out onto the balcony and leaned on the rail. Outside a black-clad figure prowled back and forth across the lawn below, weapon slung at port. In the distance the power fence shimmered. I stared in that direction for a while.
“It’s asking a lot to believe that someone got in here, past all the security, broke into a safe only you and your wife had access to and murdered you, without causing any disturbance. You’re an intelligent man, you must have some reason for believing it.”
“Oh, I do. Several.”
“Reasons the police chose to ignore.”
“Yes.”
I turned to face him. “All right. Let’s hear it.”
“You’re looking at it, Mr Kovacs.” He stood there in front of me. “I’m here. I’m back. You can’t kill me just by wiping out my cortical stack.”
“You’ve got remote storage. Obviously, or you wouldn’t be here. How regular is the update?”
Bancroft smiled. “Every forty-eight hours.” He tapped the back of his neck. “Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the PsychaSec installation at Alcatraz. I don’t even have to think about it.”
“And they keep your clones on ice there as well.”
“Yes. Multiple units.”
Guaranteed immortality. I sat there thinking about that for a while, wondering how I’d like it. Wondering if I’d like it.
“Must be expensive,” I said at last.
“Not really. I own PsychaSec.”
“Oh.”
“So you see, Kovacs, neither I nor my wife could have pulled that trigger. We both knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill me. No matter how unlikely it seems, it had to be a stranger. Someone who didn’t know about the remote.”
I nodded. “All right, who else did know about it? Let’s narrow the field.”
“Apart from my family?” Bancroft shrugged. “My lawyer, Oumou Prescott. A couple of her legal aides. The director at PsychaSec. That’s about it.”
“Of course,” I said, “suicide is rarely a rational act.”
“Yes, that’s what the police said. They used it to explain all the other minor inconveniences in their theory as well.”
“Which were?”
This was what Bancroft had wanted to reveal earlier. It came out in a rush. “Which were that I should choose to walk the last two kilometres home, and let myself into the grounds on foot, then apparently readjust my internal clock before I killed myself.”
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“The police found traces of a cruiser landing in a field two kilometres from the perimeter of Suntouch House, which conveniently enough is just outside the pick-up range of the house security surveillance. Equally conveniently, there was apparently no satellite cover overhead at that precise time.”
“Did they check taxi datastacks?”
Bancroft nodded. “For what it’s worth, they did, yes. West Coast law does not require taxi companies to keep records of their fleets’ whereabouts at any given time. Some of the more reputable firms do, of course, but there are others that don’t. Some even make a selling point of it. Client confidentiality, that sort of thing.” A momentary hunted look crossed Bancroft’s face. “For some clients, in some cases, that would be a distinct advantage.”
“Have you used these firms in the past?”
“On occasion, yes.”
The logical next question hung in the air between us. I left it unasked, and waited. If Bancroft wasn’t going to share his reasons for wanting confidential transport, I wasn’t going to press him until I had a few other landmarks locked down.
Bancroft cleared his throat. “There is, in any case, some evidence to suggest that the vehicle in question might not have been a taxi. Field effect distribution, the police say. A pattern more in keeping with a larger vehicle.”
“That depends on how hard it landed.”
“I know. In any case, my tracks lead from the landing site, and apparently the condition of my shoes was in keeping with a two-kilometre trek across country. And then, finally, there was a call placed from this room shortly after three a.m. the night I was killed. A time check. There’s no voice on the line, only the sound of someone breathing.”
“And the police know this too?”
“Of course they do.”
“How did they explain it?”
Bancroft smiled thinly. “They didn’t. They thought the solitary walk through the rain was very much in keeping with the act of suicide, and apparently they couldn’t see any inconsistency in a man wanting to check his internal chronochip before he blows his own head off. As you say, suicide is not a rational act. They have case histories of this sort of thing. Apparently, the world is full of incompetents who kill themselves and wake up in a new sleeve the next day. I’ve had it explained to me. They forget they’re wearing a stack, or it doesn’t seem important at the moment of the act. Our beloved medical welfare system brings them right back, suicide notes and requests notwithstanding. Curious abuse of rights, that. Is it the same system on Harlan’s World?”