Malhotra sucked his teeth. He seemed embarrassed to have brought up the subject.
“Your husband. Yes, of course.”
They came to Hyde Park Corner and the Wellington Arch, with its statue of a black iron chariot. Suddenly, they were in five lanes of traffic. Rain fell in front of bright red brake lights. Black hackney cabs jostled for position. Absently, Victoria touched her fingers to the side of her head, and felt her nails scrape the thick ridge of scar tissue concealed behind the curtain of her hair.
“We separated a few months ago. He moved back here.”
“But you’re from Paris?”
“Originally,
oui, c’est ca
.”
“And now you live on a skyliner? That must be exciting!”
She shrugged at his enthusiasm. A double-decker bus drew alongside, windows steamed.
“It’s okay.” She watched the rain coat the brick and stone of London: capital city of the United European Commonwealth, site of the European Parliament, and seat of His Majesty King William V. She hadn’t been back here in over a year.
Oh, Paul.
She took a long breath.
“Can you tell me something, Detective Malhotra?”
The young man spared her another glance.
“Sure, if I can.”
“How did he die?”
Ahead, a traffic light turned red. Malhotra downshifted the gears and brought the car to a standstill.
“He was murdered.”
Victoria squeezed her fists together in her lap.
“I know that. I just don’t know
how
he died.”
The light flickered to amber, then green. Malhotra let out the clutch and the Citroën’s electric motor pulled them forward. He took a right onto Brompton Road, and then a left onto Sloane Street. Victoria’s neural software tracked their progress via an online map. In her mind’s eye, a blinking red arrow marked her current position, the streets laid out in tangles around it. If she wanted to, she could zoom right in to pavement level, or right out until the world seemed the size of a football held at arm’s length. She would never be lost. As long as she had a wireless connection, she would always know exactly where she was.
“Are you sure you want to know?” Malhotra’s tone suggested he was trying to protect her. Victoria rubbed her eyes with forefinger and thumb, dispelling the map display. To hear the grisly details of her husband’s murder was pretty much the last thing she wanted right now. Yet that old journalistic instinct itched at her and wouldn’t let go. She had to know the full story, whatever the cost.
“Someone should know what happened to him,” she said reasonably. “Someone who loved him.”
The detective puffed air through his cheeks.
“All right, then. If you’re sure.” He gave her a sideways glance. “But not here. I’ll go through it all with you when we get to the flat, okay?”
They passed over Vauxhall Bridge and into Battersea. Paul’s apartment lay on the second floor of a building by the river, opposite a Renault car dealership. Malhotra parked on the dealership’s forecourt. As today was a Sunday, the business was closed.
“Come on,” he said. He led her across the road to the front of the apartment block, with its beige brickwork and chipped black iron railings. The rain dampened her hair, and she could feel her heart fluttering in her chest.
Although the cool, detached part of her brain — the part she didn’t really think of as
her
— told her Paul was dead, the news still hadn’t really sunk in at a gut level. She hadn’t assimilated it properly. Even now, as they climbed the steps to his apartment, she half-expected to find him inside when she opened the door. He’d be standing there in his kitchen, wearing one of his ridiculous Hawaiian shirts, laughing at her for being so gullible.
He couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t leave her feeling this empty and desolate. He just couldn’t.
She fingered the retractable quarterstaff in her pocket, and thought back to the moment she’d first been given the news.
S
HE’D BEEN ON
top of the skyliner when one of the Commodore’s stewards came to find her. She’d been working through her morning routine on the main helipad, practicing her stick fighting technique. The dawn breeze chilled her sweat. The retractable carbon fibre staff whirled in her hand, its weight solid and reassuring.
Left shoulder.
Right shoulder.
Block.
Parry.
Her technique mixed traditional European stick fighting with moves stolen from the Japanese disciplines of jōdō and bōjutsu. She was recording the session on her neural prosthesis and live streaming it to a laboratory near Paris, where the surgeons who’d rebuilt her could use the data to monitor the continuing integration of the natural and artificial components in her brain.
Beneath her bare feet, the skyliner
Tereshkova
ground its way across France, its nuclear-powered propellers labouring against a stiff westerly. Almost a kilometre in length, the giant airship consisted of five rigid, cigar-shaped hulls bound side-by-side in a raft formation. The two outermost hulls sported engine nacelles and large rudder fins. The three inner hulls glittered with promenade decks, satellite dishes and helipads.
That morning, Victoria had the largest pad to herself, atop the skyliner’s central hull. All was silent, save for the flap of the wind and the hum of the engines. Far ahead, an ice-cream tower of cumulus caught the sun as it stretched twelve thousand feet into the sky above Paris. Her calves ached. She’d been practising hard for an hour. Her feet were sore from slapping and twisting on the hard rubber surface. Her shoulder muscles burned with the effort of swinging her staff. Still she kept practising, pushing herself to exhaustion. The sweat flew from her with every move. The staff felt like an extension of her will. Yet, even as she threw herself into the physicality of the dance, an internal stillness remained: a part of her mind unaffected by adrenalin and fatigue.
Following her accident, surgeons had been forced to install artificial neurons, replacing large sections of her damaged brain with pliable, gel-based processors. Although the surgery had saved her life, it had left her unable to read or write. Where once she’d spent her days dashing off articles and blog posts, her brain now refused to parse written text. When she looked at a newspaper headline or SincPad screen, all she saw were squiggles, and the only way she could decode them was via a text-recognition app loaded into the gelware. The app stimulated the speech centres of her brain, so that her lips moved as she read, and she gleaned the meaning of the words as she heard herself speak them. The process was slow and often frustrating, and the app prone to mistakes.
Her hands squeezed the staff as she tried to channel her frustration into the fight.
Left shin.
Right shin.
Step back.
Pivot.
She slid forward on the balls of her feet, reached up and brought the end of the staff smacking down onto the head of her imaginary opponent.
“Hai!”
She let the swing’s momentum drop her to her knees. Sweat dripped from her forehead onto the black rubber of the helipad. Her chest heaved. She might be half machine, but the alternative was worse; and every breath a victory of sorts.
After a few lungfuls, she looked up, and saw one of the skyliner’s white-jacketed stewards standing nervously at the top of the stairwell. She straightened up and walked over to where she’d left her towel.
“Yes?”
The steward cleared his throat. “The Commodore sends his compliments, ma’am. He would like you to join him at your earliest convenience. It seems there is a message for you, from London.”
Victoria rubbed her face, and then draped the towel over her shoulder. She retracted the staff to a twelfth of its length, and slipped it into her pocket.
“Do I have time to shower and change?”
The steward glanced at her, taking in her damp hair, her stained black vest and sweat pants.
“That may be advisable, ma’am.”
And so, ten minutes later, scrubbed and combed, Victoria knocked at the door of the Commodore’s cabin, down in the main gondola, just behind the bridge. She had pulled on a pair of black jeans and a crew neck sweater. Her hair was clean but tied back, revealing the thick scar on her right temple.
“Come in, Victoria, come in.” The Commodore rose from behind a large aluminium desk. He wore a white military dress jacket, open at the neck, and a cutlass dangled from his belt.
Victoria’s legs were stiff from the workout. The Commodore invited her to take a seat. From his desk, he pulled a bottle of Russian vodka and two glasses. He filled them both, and slid one across to her.
“Drink this,” he said. He had white hair and black eyebrows, and ivory-yellow teeth that seemed too large for his mouth. Although he insisted on speaking Russian to his crew, he always spoke English for her; partly because he had a soft spot for her, and partly because he knew from experience that her grasp of the Russian language extended only as far as the phrase ‘
Ya ne govoryu po russki
’, which she was pretty sure meant, ‘I don’t speak Russian’.
She touched the glass with one finger, turning it slightly, but didn’t pick it up.
Most of the back wall of the cabin was taken up by a large picture window. Through it, she could see one of the engine nacelles on the skyliner’s outermost starboard hull. She could feel the faint vibration of the airship’s engines through the metal deck.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
The Commodore picked an imaginary speck of lint from the knee of his cavalry trousers.
“There is a call for you, from England.” He picked the phone handset from his desk and passed it to her. “But I am very much afraid it is bad news.”
A
T THE TOP
of the stairs, Detective Constable Malhotra pushed a key into the lock of the apartment door, turned it, and let the door swing open. The lights were off in the hallway. He gestured for her to go in first.
“Try not to touch anything that’s marked.” He checked his watch impatiently. He obviously had places he’d rather be.
Victoria ignored him. She hesitated on the threshold. As a former reporter, this wasn’t the first murder scene she’d had cause to visit; but it was the first in which she’d had such a personal stake. She knew that as soon as she set foot in the flat, she’d have to start accepting the truth, and admit to herself that she really had lost Paul forever.
All these months, a part of her had clung to a slender thread of hope, praying that one day, somewhere down the line, they’d be reconciled, their differences forgotten. But now, that hope was about to be cut forever. She felt a brief urge to turn and run, leaving the entire situation unresolved; but when she closed her eyes, the feeling passed. She hadn’t come all this way just to linger on the doormat with the pizza flyers and free newspapers. As Paul’s only next of kin, it was up to her accept and mourn his loss; to go through his stuff, and sort out the paperwork.
Heart thudding, she stepped inside. Her boot heels clicked on the parquet floor. Ahead, a narrow galley kitchen lay at the end of the short hallway. On her right, an open door led into a lounge. Dirty footprints showed where the police and coroners had been about their business. The air held lingering traces of sweat and cheap aftershave; and, beneath those, something organic, like the smell of a butcher’s shop on a hot day.
With her hand over her mouth and nose, she took a few paces into the room. Bloodstains darkened the wooden floor and papered walls, each accompanied by a handwritten label. Some drops had splattered the glass, and these had been circled and numbered in marker pen ink. Beyond the window, the Thames curled its way through the heart of the city, its surface the sullen hue of day-old coffee, chopped into ripples by the wind.
She pulled her eyes away from the stains. Paul’s medical qualifications hung framed on the wall above the fireplace. Beneath them, a flat screen TV lay face down and smashed on the floor, having obviously been knocked over during a scuffle. The police had covered the sofa with a plastic sheet. Before it, a dozen old virtual reality games consoles lay heaped in various stages of disassembly on a low pine coffee table. Her gaze lingered over the accompanying screwdrivers, lumps of solder and twisted scraps of wire as she remembered Paul tinkering with them, six months ago, before their separation. He’d had a thing for retro machines and, after hours in the operating theatre, he found the intricate work of restoring them calmed him.
Her eyes were drawn back to the dried blood by the window. She swallowed. At her sides, her knuckles were white.
Malhotra said, “Are you okay?”
She turned to him. They were eye-to-eye, almost touching. She could smell the fusty bonfire reek of cigarettes on his breath and clothes. She took him by the lapels of his stupid coat.
“Tell me how he died.”
The detective looked down at her hands.
“I told you, he was murdered.”
“By who?”
Malhotra took her by the wrists and gently pulled her hands free. He stepped back, out of reach.
“We don’t know.”
Victoria leaned forward. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”
Malhotra wouldn’t look at her. He scratched his cheek.
“I don’t know if I should—”
“Just tell me.”
He took a deep breath. “Okay. Your husband. You knew he was bisexual, right?”
Victoria let her arms fall to her sides.
“Yes.” Of
course
she did. She’d always known he swung both ways. For a brief moment, they’d been in love. Then after the accident, for some reason, he’d stopped swinging her way.
She touched the scar tissue at the side of her head.
“Well,” Malhotra continued, straightening his collar, “we think he might have been killed by someone he met. Someone he brought back here for, you know...”
“For sex?”
He glanced back down the hall, towards the front door.
“Um, yeah.”
“Not an intruder?”
“There’s no sign of forced entry, so we’re assuming he knew his attacker.”
Victoria turned back into the room. She could feel the two halves of her mind butting up against each other: one in a turmoil of grief and jealousy, the other calmly weighing the facts. Her gaze fell on the stained floor.