The truth was, the corporate police didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They’d taken his phone and his wallet on arrival, but beyond that basic security measure, they appeared to be making it up as they went along. They weren’t used to holding executives for anything more serious than drunken affray or the occasional white-collar accounting misdemeanour. Most of their duties went the other way - investigation of crimes and apprehension of suspects where the victims were corporate but the criminals were not. Anyone of that stripe who made it to custody alive would be summarily handed over to the conventional police so that grubby business of state law enforcement could be set in motion.
Here, the victim was corporate but so was the offender.
Say what?
Murder, they were saying, but hell, don’t these guys off each other on the road practically every month.
That’s different.
It was confusing for everybody. In the ensuing vacuum, Chris was accorded a status somewhere between cherished celebrity and dangerous lunatic. The first role at least, he was learning how to play.
The days inched along, like slow, bulky files downloading.
He got meals in his cell at three appointed times daily, delivered on a tray by two uniformed officers, one of whom watched from the door while the other set down the food on the desk. An hour after each meal, the tray was removed by the same team, but only after all items of cutlery and crockery had been checked off on a palm-pad. Both men were friendly enough, but they never let the conversation get beyond pleasantries and they watched him warily all the time.
Impotence was two clenched fists and a fizzing wire through the head. Lopez, Barranco, the NAME account. Nothing he could do.
A different team, also all male, escorted him out of the cell for an hour’s exercise after breakfast and lunch. They marched him along well-cared-for corridors and down a stairwell that let out to an internal quadrangle. There was a profusion of plants and trees planted in shingle beds, a complex step-structured bronze fountain and a high, angled glass roof covering a third of the open space. His escort left him alone in the quad, closed the doors and watched him from a glassed-in mezzanine gallery above. The first couple of times, he paced back and forth aimlessly, less out of any real inclination than from a vague sense of what was expected of him. Once he realised this, he stopped and spent most of his allocated hour sitting on the edge of the fountain, lost in the noise it made, knotted, hopeless plans to save Joaquin Lopez from the arena, and daydreams of driving the Saab.
When it became apparent he wasn’t leaving any time soon, he got clothes. Three changes of good-quality casuals in dark colours and a dozen sets of cotton underwear. He asked the woman who came to fit him how she wanted him to pay, cash or cards and she looked embarrassed.
‘We bill your firm,’ she admitted finally.
He got no visitors, for which he was obscurely grateful. He wouldn’t have known what to say to anybody he knew.
Between meals, the hours stretched out. He couldn’t remember a time when less had been expected of him. One of his warders offered to let him have some books, but when the promised haul arrived, it consisted of a bare half-dozen battered paperbacks by authors Chris had never heard of. He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.
He was asked if he wanted paper and pens and said yes, reflexively, then didn’t know what to do with them. He tried to write an account of the events leading up to Philip Hamilton’s death, as much as anything to get it clear in his own head, but he kept having to cross out what he’d written and start further back. When his first line read my father was murdered by an executive called Edward Quain, he gave up. Perhaps inspired by the novel he was trying to read, he wrote an imaginary brief for the NAME account set five years into a future where Barranco had taken power and instituted wide-ranging land reform. It also seemed very far-fetched.
He started a letter to Carla and tore it up after less than ten lines. He couldn’t think of anything worth telling her.
The week ended. Another started.
Shorn came for him.
He was on morning walkabout, cheated of his usual seat at the fountain by a persistent, heavy drizzle that drenched the exposed patio area and kept him penned under the glass roof. His escort had obligingly dragged a bench out from somewhere for him, and now he sat at one end of it and stared out at the curtain of rain falling a half metre away.
The plants, at least, seemed to be enjoying it.
The door to the quad snapped open and he flicked a surprised glance at his watch. He’d only been there twenty minutes. He looked up and saw Louise Hewitt standing there. It was the first time he’d seen her since she shot him with the stungun. He looked back at the rain.
‘Morning, Faulkner. Mind if I sit down?’
He stared down at his hands. ‘I guess they’ll stop me if I try to break your neck.’
‘Try to lay a fucking finger on me, and I’ll stop you myself,’ she said mildly. ‘You’re not the only one with karate training, you know.’
He shrugged.
‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’
He felt the bench shift slightly as she lowered herself onto it at the other end. They sat a metre apart. The rain fell through the silence, hissing softly.
‘Liz Linshaw says hi,’ Hewitt told him, finally.
It jerked his head around.
‘Well,’ she amended. ‘That’s paraphrase. Actually, she says, you fucking bitch, you can’t hold him without charges this long, I want to see him. She’s wrong about that, of course. We can hold you pretty much indefinitely.’
Chris looked away again, jaw set.
‘We don’t plan to, though. In fact, your release papers should come through some time tomorrow morning. You can go home, or back to that expensive hotel fucknest you’ve been maintaining. Want to know how come?’
He locked down the urge to ask, to give anything. It was hard to do. He was hungry for detail from outside, for anything to engage the frantically spinning wheels in his head.
‘So I’ll tell you anyway. Tomorrow’s Thursday, you should be out by lunchtime at worst. That gives you the best part of a day before you drive. We’ve posted for a Friday challenge, it’s traditional at Shorn. Gives everyone the weekend to get used to the result.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about, Hewitt?’ The insolence shrouded the question enough that he could justify breaking his silence. ‘What challenge?’
‘The partnership challenge. For Philip Hamilton’s post.’
He coughed a laugh. ‘I don’t want Hamilton’s fucking job.’
‘Oh yes, you do. In fact, you issued a formal notice of challenge just before you killed him. Citing unprofessional conduct over the NAME account, ironically enough.’ She reached into her jacket and produced a palm-pad. ‘I can show you it if you like.’
‘No thanks. I don’t know what shit you’re cooking up, Hewitt, but it won’t start. You know the policy, you told me yourself last week. No partner-employee crossover.’
‘Well, yes, granted your actions were unorthodox. But, as you know, our senior partner is a big fan of policy-making by precedent. He’s agreed that we can blur the distinction in this case. Apparently, he’s had you in mind for partner status for quite a while. You or Mike Bryant, of course.’
And then it all came crashing down on him, like a slum clearance he’d watched as a kid. Explosions ripping through what he thought was solid from one side to the other, clean straight lines of structure tipping, curtseying and dissolving into a chaos of tumbling rubble and dust while a huddled crowd watched. He couldn’t see the resulting wreckage clearly yet, but he sensed its outlines.
‘Mike won’t drive against me,’ he said without conviction.