He was cheerful and easy-going, and seemed smart enough, but Vic believed that he was inexperienced and had been promoted too far, too fast. Most murder police were seasoned and cynical. They needed to be, because they had to deal with the worst thing one human being could do to another. Skip was too quick to jump to conclusions, to take things and people at face value.
But he had answered the phone. It was his case. He had to decide where to take it, and Vic had to throttle back his impulse to take charge or give unwanted advice.
Now Skip switched on his torch and ran its light over the body, staring at it as if trying to force it to yield its secrets by sheer willpower. The secret was that it was dead, and didn’t care. It was up to Skip to care. It was up to him to speak for his dead.
At last, he clicked off the torch and said that there was no sign of gunshot or stab wounds.
Vic said, ‘That you can see. I had a case a few years ago, a guy lying dead in the street, not a mark on him. I couldn’t find anything, the crime-scene techs couldn’t find anything. It was like he had dropped dead from a heart attack. Then they rolled him, and a bullet fell out of his ear.’
‘If this bloke was shot, he managed to put up a struggle first,’ Skip said, gesturing at the trampled vegetation around the body. It was a dense tangle of thick wires, knee-high, springy as pubic hair. What they called wiregrass, although it really wasn’t much like grass. The cuffs of Vic’s trousers already bristled with friable fragments. The area around the body had been crushed and flattened. Broken stems gave off a sharp, not unpleasant smell, a little like mentholated mouthwash.
‘You can check any pockets you can reach,’ Vic said. ‘But don’t roll him. Leave that for the techs.’
‘I know,’ Skip said mildly. He squatted beside the body and felt inside the thin jacket, then reached into the front pockets of the trousers with scissored fingers.
‘Watch for needles,’ Vic said.
‘A guy dressed like this won’t be a skin-popper,’ Skip said, another assumption he shouldn’t have made, and pulled out a wallet, holding it up between ring- and forefinger. He showed Vic the items it contained. A credit card issued by the Petra City Bank in the name of John Redway. A fat fold of plastic notes, UN scrip, in a money clip. Several business cards: John Redway, consultant, Cybermat Technologies Inc, an address and telephone number in London. And a key card from the Hotel California.
‘So I was kind of right,’ Skip said, as he dropped the wallet into an evidence bag. ‘Our Mr Redway is a newbie, all right, but a corporate newbie. A legitimate businessman who fell into bad company. This is just the kind of place for a clandestine meeting. Or a shakedown. No cameras. There was an argument, our guy got himself shot, and the bad guys bailed when they saw the security guard coming.’
Vic didn’t say anything.
Skip said, ‘So what’s wrong with that picture? What did I miss?’
‘I don’t think you have enough to make a picture,’ Vic said.
‘We should definitely check where he was staying.’
‘We can do that once the techs arrive.’
‘I called them again,’ Skip said. ‘They’re still caught up in that bar killing, checking everyone who was in it for blood spatter and whatever. Might be another hour.’
‘Our friend isn’t going anywhere.’
Vic cast around, found tyre tracks in the vegetation cutting away towards a string of Boxbuilder ruins at the top of the slope. He stared off in that direction, then walked back to the road, where Skip was interviewing the security guard.
She had been walking the perimeter fence when she’d heard what sounded like fireworks, her dog had started to bark, and she’d glimpsed a van bucking away across the heath. She thought it was white; she didn’t know its make.
Skip went through this twice, with gentle patience. When he was finished, Vic asked the guard how many scooters she’d seen.
The woman gave him a suspicious look, as if he’d asked her a trick question. ‘Just the one. Over there by the poor man.’
Skip and Vic walked a little way off down the road. Skip said, ‘What was that thing about how many scooters?’
Vic showed him the tracks. ‘There are two sets. These must be the van’s. And these are a scooter’s. I’d say one was chasing the other.’
‘You think our man had a pal?’
‘I think we should follow the tracks, see if the people in the van caught up with the guy on the scooter.’
Skip drove slowly over the bumpy ground, wiregrass scraping the underside of the car, while Vic leaned out of the open window and called out directions. The tracks cut past the Boxbuilder ruins, curving back towards the highway to the city, disappeared when the vegetation petered out into a broad stretch of stony sand. They got out of the car and cast around, but if there had been any tracks in the sand the wind had erased them. Several warehouses stood a little way off, strung along the highway. Sunlight burning off the flat land beyond. The shuttle looming over everything.
Back in England, in Birmingham, they’d have had a full squad of police and specialists at the scene, access to a network of traffic cams that watched every centimetre of the road system, and drones imaging everything in HD and infra-red and ultraviolet, sniffing for DNA and trace chemicals, following the spoor of the scooter and van like bloodhounds. Here on Mangala, they had to make do with a couple of investigators using their eyes and instincts, the promise of a cursory examination by overstretched techs, and more questions than answers. Such as: did the guy on the second scooter get away, or was he lying dead somewhere out there?
Vic said, ‘We might be able to call in some uniforms tomorrow, have them search the area.’
‘I hope he escaped,’ Skip said. ‘And I hope he has the good sense to come in and tell us what he saw.’
‘He was most likely involved in a criminal enterprise. Good sense doesn’t come into it.’ Vic turned from the cut of the wind, stared up at the shuttle’s enormous exclamation mark.
He said, ‘This guy gets a ticket to ride an alien spaceship to another world. He’s here two days and gets himself whacked. If I were him, I’d ask for a refund.’
5. Midnight Flit
London | 5 July
The Jackaroo avatar stood on a dais made from an upturned plastic milk crate and a circle of silver-painted plywood, confronting a cluster of tourists taking turns to be photographed with it. Black suit, white shirt; black tie, white gloves; a Hallowe’en mask of gold-tinted plastic gleaming under a bowler hat. When one of the tourists dropped a coin in the cardboard box in front of the dais, the avatar gave a stiff robotic parody of a bow.
Other costume artists stood along the path at the edge of St James’s Park. Mickey Mouse. Superman. Batman. Super Mario. A generic Disney Princess.
Phone and tablet flashes stuttered as the avatar removed his bowler hat to reveal a shaven head painted gold and a headband with two springy antennae that terminated in gold-painted ping-pong balls.
Chloe walked on through the shade of a row of young gingkos, replacements for plane trees blasted and burned by the Trafalgar Square nuke. A photograph of the trees all aflame was one of the iconic images of the atrocity, like the refrigerated trucks packed with the dead and parked nose to tail along South Carriage Drive in Hyde Park, or the Union Jack fluttering from the jib of a crane elevated above smoking ruins. Chloe hadn’t seen any of that at the time. She’d been in school in Walthamstow, had been evacuated with her classmates and everyone else in the long transect of East London threatened by the radiation plume, had ended up in a holding camp outside the ring of the M25. That was where her brother had found her a week later. She remembered that she’d flinched away from him when he had stooped into the tent she shared with five other girls. This strange gaunt unshaven stranger suddenly becoming her brother, gathering her up into his arms and both of them howling. Neil had hitchhiked down from York, where he’d been at university, walking the last ten miles cross-country to avoid army patrols and checkpoints. His first and last big adventure.