Johannes Cabal the Detective (13 page)

“What?
What?
Are you serious, man? The door was locked and barred from the inside. Are you suggesting that the poor man was murdered and the murderer threw the body out of the window and then himself to follow?”

“I am suggesting it, yes, but not as a serious theory, only as a possibility. There are such things as parachutes, after all.”

“Parachutes? This is a civil vessel, sir; it has no need of parachutes. And before you suggest that this remarkable murderer of yours brought his own aboard, you should understand that we are travelling in near-total darkness over wooded mountains. No one but a lunatic would attempt such a jump.”

“There are such things as lunatics, Captain.” Cabal held up his hands to forestall Schten’s increasing wrath. “Peace, sir. I do not believe for a second that this is the case. While there are certain religious and political groups that encourage a degree of fanaticism in some of their members, that they may be used as expendable assassins, they are rarely subtle. I see no reason that any such organisation should want to kill M. DeGarre and then disguise it as suicide. Miss Barrow—” He turned to Leonie, as did Schten and Konstantin, both in some surprise that a woman would want to hang around the scene of a death. She, in her turn, demonstrated some discomfort that her silence had not rendered her entirely invisible. “I understand from our conversation earlier that you have some interest in psychology. What do you make of all this? The apparent equanimity of M. DeGarre this evening? The abrupt nature of this note?”

That Cabal did not mention that her “interest” in such matters was formal and criminological was not lost on her, and so she spoke as an unthreatening dilettante.

“Well,” she started uncertainly, “from what I’ve read on cases like”—she gestured vaguely at the cabin and its window—“this, there is no standard form. Sometimes there are notes, but … well, there’s no rule that says there has to be. And when there is a note it can be anything from pages and pages long to less than you’d leave in a note for the milkman. I understand Herr Meissner’s wishing to be thorough, but there is nothing here to say this is anything but what it appears to be. And that is very regretful. I liked M. DeGarre.”

“As did I, my dear,” said Konstantin. “I think we all did. This isn’t the place for a young lady. Please, may I accompany you—?”

“That won’t be necessary, Colonel,” interrupted Cabal. “I have said my piece and perhaps demonstrated my incompetence for such an investigation. I shall leave this in the hands of the captain, who will surely do a better job of it than I. Good night, gentlemen. I am, of course, at your service if you should need me for a statement or suchlike.” He nodded curtly, to which the colonel clicked his heels, while the captain distractedly bid them farewell.

On the way to Leonie Barrow’s cabin, Cabal stared at the carpet the whole way, his hands behind his back, thinking. She looked at him, mildly amused. “If anybody saw you like that, they’d forget all about us being the ship’s lovebirds. You’re taking me, unchaperoned, to my cabin, but you look like a man with acute dyspepsia.”

Cabal was not in the mood for verbal fencing. “DeGarre, missing and, in all reasonable probability, dead.”

“Yes?”

“A suicide note. Typed.”

“Yes.”

“Brooding over a few featherlight jibes from some boy who’s barely started shaving, he types a note, removes a securing bolt from his window, and throws himself into the void.”

“Yes.”

Cabal walked in silence for another few paces. “Do you believe a word of it?”

“No. No, I don’t. That business with the typewriter—what were you up to?”

“I told the captain. A letter from that typewriter for comparison.”

“That’s something else I didn’t believe a word of. You should be careful; I don’t think the captain believed you, either.”

Cabal stopped and looked at her. “What’s this?” he said, a bitter mockery evident in his tone. “Concerned for my safety?”

“I’ve explained that once.” She kept walking, and after a moment Cabal admitted defeat in this small conflict and followed. “All I’m saying is that you should keep your head down. If you want to keep it at all. So, the typewriter.”

“The typewriter. I backspaced twice and typed the last letter in DeGarre’s note, the
m
in
them
.”

“What use is that for comparison? It would have come down in the same place as the original.”

“No. It
should
have come down in the same place as the original.”

“But it didn’t?”

“No. About half a millimetre to the right and a little more upward.”

“Which means what, exactly? That the note was typed, removed, and then replaced? Why would DeGarre do that?”

“If DeGarre did it at all. And, even if he did not, why would this hypothetical expendable assassin do it?”

They had reached Leonie’s cabin and paused by the door, speaking in hushed tones. “We believe he was murdered, then?” she whispered. “I don’t believe in hypothetical expendable assassins, with or without parachutes. Unless we can come up with a reasonable explanation of how a murderer got out of a locked and barricaded room, we’re just going to have to accept that it was suicide, no matter how wrong that seems.”

There was something of the caged animal about Cabal, she thought, as she waited for a reply. He was angry and frustrated that he had been presented with a problem that intrigued him, but that engaging that problem might lead to his exposure, arrest, and execution. She could almost feel sorry for him. But this was Johannes Cabal, a man she knew from bitter experience was more than capable of monstrous acts of violence and cruelty when necessary. Then again, he was also the man who had sent her a letter and document of such astonishing and liberating power that it had made her father—a man of great imperturbability—sit down and repeat, “Well, I’ll be buggered” for the better part of a minute.

Whatever was going on inside Cabal’s mind currently, he did not seem in the mood to share. “Good night, Miss Barrow,” he said finally, and walked away, drawing his ridiculous Oriental dressing gown tight. Leonie watched him through narrowed eyes, shook her head, and retired for what was left of the night.

C
abal got back to his cabin, closed the door heavily, dumped the horrendous dressing gown on the floor, and threw himself into his bed with a muttered expression of irritation with the world. He just wanted to go back to sleep. He did not want to become any more involved in the curious case of the defenestrated DeGarre than he already was. Indeed, if he could avoid any further entanglements he would be a happy man. A happier man, at least. He was determined to roll over, make himself comfortable, forget all about the night’s events, and go to sleep.

He managed exactly half of this list. After rolling over and making himself comfortable, he discovered that he was just comfortable enough to consider the night’s events in detail, and in so doing drove away any hope of sleep. He was in that awkward place where rationality and logic don’t quite match up, and the horrible squealing of misaligned mental cogs was driving him to distraction. Pure brute logic said the door was locked and barricaded, the window was open, and the cabin offered no hiding places, therefore the occupant of the cabin had gone out of the window. Pure brute logic overruled any silly murder shenanigans by pointing out the suicide note and the locked room, and then proceeded to wave Ockham’s razor around in a threatening manner.

Rationality, however, is a slightly different beast, or, at least, Cabal’s was. It considered the curious facts of DeGarre’s good humour at dinner, the curiosity of the misaligned suicide note, and … damn it! The chair! Cabal sat up in bed, thinking hard. Why had DeGarre barricaded his door at all? The door was already locked. Even if opening the window turned out to be a noisy operation, by the time a member of the crew bearing a master key arrived to open the door he would long since have completed his unsuccessful impersonation of Peter Pan and become an untidy mess in the Mirkarvian wilderness. To protect against or at least slow any attempt to kick the door down. Schten had dislodged the chair with a single well-placed kick, but the captain was a big man. Anybody else would have taken longer to get through, and that was what DeGarre had planned upon. There, it was satisfactorily explained. No, it wasn’t. It was overplanned. Once the window was open, it was the work of a moment to climb out into eternity. Unless he ended up dithering before the jump? No, that wouldn’t do, either. That meant he had planned for time spent dithering, which meant he expected to be unsure or at least anticipated the possibility of being unsure, in which case he was unsure of committing suicide, in which case—Cabal growled with irritation. In which case, why had he committed suicide? People don’t set out to kill themselves and then make contingency plans lest they change their minds. It was a stupid, stupid circular argument. So he returned to the point of departure. Why had DeGarre barricaded his door? Cabal looked around for a new path to follow, one that didn’t curve so alarmingly, but was to be disappointed.

He slumped back down and tried to sleep. At first, his slowing conscious mind was naïve enough to believe that his subconscious was helping him to drift off. It presented him with a vision of a limitless plane of tiles beneath a sterile white sky. The tiles were marked on each edge with a letter—
a, b, c, d
—to indicate orientation, and some mathematical symbols were scrawled across the centre. He halfheartedly attempted to read one, but the notations squirmed beneath his gaze and it seemed too much work to force them to stay still. He was fairly sure they were something to do with topology, and that was enough for him. Topology was not one of his favourite branches of mathematics. Instead, he went for a walk, feeling the reassuring touch of pure, warm shag pile scientific logic beneath his bare feet. There was little to look at except for the tiles, so he watched them pass beneath and by him as he strolled, enjoying the swirling patterns of notation on their surfaces, enjoying the regularity, and the—

Something stabbed his foot. He hopped sideways, swearing with surprise. One of the tiles was not flush with the others, and had gashed his foot. The tiles didn’t feel warm and woolly anymore but cold and hostile. His blood was scattered in scarlet drops across the offending tile, shining like rubies. As he watched, the notation joined with his blood and formed new shapes. Belatedly, he realised that the writing was not entirely topographical. It was too late now, though. All around him tiles were rising to reveal that they were in fact the top faces of cubes. All but the one that had cut him; that one grew and expanded, and he could see extra dimensionality within it, a tesseract. He tried to name its four dimensions—he felt he had to—but they came out wrong. This cube had the dimensions of height, length, width, and significance. It grew and grew until he was in its skeletal shadow, the white sky warped in its core.

Cabal awoke suddenly from a light slumber, sweating, angry, and with a phantom pain in his foot. He was angry at himself for looking and not seeing, angry at his unconscious mind’s infuriating habit of telling him things in the most obscure way possible, and angry at circumstances for putting him in this wretched situation. He could investigate the potential clue he had just perceived, but he knew that he shouldn’t.

He managed to resist his curiosity for the best part of four minutes.

It was now over two hours since the discovery of DeGarre’s disappearance and probable death. The corridors were quiet again, and the muttered conferences from his fellow passengers speculating about the night’s events had long since died away. Cabal wrapped the dressing gown around himself again and, his phantasmically injured foot still fresh in his memory, put on Meissner’s slippers.

He looked up and down the corridor, but it was silent and empty. Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he turned his attention downwards, and started walking towards DeGarre’s cabin.

The dark red carpet marked with a black pattern was not made up of a single roll at all. Instead, the ingenious Mirkarvians had used individual squares of carpet. The practicality of being able to easily replace damaged or stained sections without the necessity of recarpeting great lengths of corridor was not lost on Cabal. Nor, now, was the significance of his dream.
Tesseract
sounds a great deal like
tessellate
, at least to an overactive unconscious mind. There are seventeen groups of tessellation with translational symmetry in two dimensions; the pattern woven into the identical carpet squares used group
pmg
, which reflects in only one direction. Therefore, if a tile is placed incorrectly it breaks the pattern. The pattern was a complex one, wrought in one dark colour upon another, if one regards black as a colour. In the normal run of things, it might have been months before an error was noticed, if it ever was.

Between Cabal’s eye for order and the analytical qualities of his unusual mind, it had been discovered within a few hours. A few hours, because Cabal was positive the carpeting had been perfect before. Yet now—he stopped and knelt just around the corner from DeGarre’s cabin—one square had been lifted and replaced incorrectly. Why was that? It was obvious that the pattern had been disrupted, if only one took a few moments to examine it properly. The unmistakeable conclusion was that it had been replaced in a hurry, and there had been no time to check.

The square was well tamped down, and Cabal was frustrated to find that he couldn’t lift it. A brief trip back to his cabin and he returned with his switchblade. It was the work of seconds to insert the tip of the knife beneath the square’s edge and lift it out.

Beneath was a bed of underlay. Unlike the carpet, this seemed to be continuous. Yet he could make out a neat cut running through it close to the edge of the exposed area. Cabal lifted more carpet squares and revealed that a square section of underlay, perhaps seventy centimetres along an edge, had been cut. It didn’t look to be a hurried job and, when he lifted the loose square of underlay, he saw that it had probably been done when the flooring was originally laid. A maintenance hatch lay in the area he had cleared, a ring in its surface ingeniously flush, with only a small space to insert a fingertip and flip the ring up so the hatch could be lifted. Without a second thought, Cabal did so.