Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (26 page)

‘Maybe I shouldn’t tease you. I am a shocking tease, I know,’ she said. ‘But you don’t mind?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘You love it, actually.’

‘Well—’ he started to say.

But before he could contradict her she added: ‘you love
me
, at any rate?’

‘Naturally I do, Miss,’ he said, in a formal voice.

‘Oh that’s the CRF speaking! If you were a free agent, you’d hate me. And anyway I’ve
much
more pressing things to worry about than that. I have to solve this
murder! A real-life murder!’

Iago didn’t say anything; he didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. But Diana knew him well enough. ‘Don’t take that tone, Iago,’ she said.

‘Indeed not,’ he said, mildly.

‘My MOHmies are counting on me. They
know
I can solve it. Of course they love Eva, but I’m their
clever
daughter. I’m their
people-canny
daughter. They
need me to be that. The future of the family depends upon me being that. This is my chance to prove it, really to prove it!’

‘Proof,’ said Iago, neutrally.

‘So,’ she said, sitting up straighter. Gravity was slightly less of an oppressive horror today. A few days more and she’d be gambolling about like a fawn. She hated to agree
with her MOHmies, but they were right. A few daily hours in a centrifuge wasn’t a patch on the total immersion of Earthly gravitational life. ‘So – what
do
you
think?’

‘What do I
think
, Miss?’

‘Go on – sit down. You’re always standing about! It’s a kind of showing-off you know. The rest of us have to sit down. You should too.’

‘Should I be blamed for having unusually strong and healthy legs?’ said Iago, with a twinkle in his eye. But he sat himself down nonetheless: cross-legged, on the sand. It brought
him down to her level, which was better.

‘The police believe the murderer to be one of the other servants,’ Dia said. ‘So do you.’

‘I do?’

‘Of course you do! It’s the most obvious and plausible inference. But maybe
who
isn’t so interesting as
why
. And there are various whys. For example: why should
the murderer be the most obvious person? We might as well say the butler did it.’

‘Indeed, Miss.’

‘No – I
say
, no: it is something more unexpected than that. Believe me, I know how
these things
work. Who knows them better than I? And don’t say Anna Tonks Yu,
of the famous family Yu, who is my rival and my deadly and bitter enemy. Don’t say her!’

‘Her name shall never pass my lips, Miss. I only meant to point out that we’re not in the Ideal Palace now.’

‘You think the solution is banal and obvious, do you?’ she asked.

‘I only think that real life may not be as . . .
narratively satisfying
as a mystery written specifically for the IP. By a process of elimination, and since nobody else went into
the house – discounting the theory that Jack Glass teleported magically into the storeroom – the murderer must have been somebody already inside. There were twenty servants in the
house, and nobody else. Practically, it would have been an easy thing. One of them invites Leron into the storeroom at the back of the house. On some pretext – let’s say, to fetch a
piece of equipment.’

‘Or offering him sexual
intercourse
,’ said Diana. She loved being able to startle Iago with little improprieties like this. He was so stuffy and proper!

‘Possibly that,’ said Iago, with a frown. He cleared his throat. ‘At any rate, we can imagine him going into the room, the murder scene. But straight away there are problems.
The hammerblow that killed him was delivered from the front.’ Iago touched a point on his own tall brow, near the hairline. ‘The business-end of the hammerhead struck him right in the
middle. As you’ll know from the autopsy, on your bId, a splinter from the tree-wood handle was found in his nose.’

‘Ow, ow, ow,’ she drawled, in a bored voice.

‘Of course splinters of tree wood in his nose,’ said Iago, ‘was the last thing on his mind. Indeed, by the time of the
follow-through
of the blow, which is what
we’re talking about here . . . well, at that point he no longer had a mind to have a last thing on. If you see what I mean.’

‘If you’re trying to shock me with the grisly descriptions of vioh-
lence
,’ Diana told him, ‘then you’ll have to try harder than that.’

‘My point is this: the hammer is heavy. Leron was facing his murderer, looking straight
at
his killer. He did this, whilst they lifted a massy hammer
all the way up
and
brought it crashing
down
into his face. Why? Why didn’t he duck out of the way? Or try to wrestle his assailant? Or do anything except what he did do – just stand there,
gawmping.’

‘Is that even a word?’ Diana said. ‘Alright – that is a puzzle, I grant you. And there’s another difficulty. Which again, clog-clever Iago, you raised
before.’

‘Miss?’

‘All nineteen suspects came down at the same time as Eva and me. Before that, most of them had never set foot on Earth in their lives! You saw what they were like when they all came
spilling out of the servant house – staggering and tumbling, barely able to walk. Not a one had even
begun
to acclimatize to a full g. How could any of them so much as
lift
that
heavy hammer? Let alone bring it down with the force and precision to smash poor old Leroy’s brains in.’

‘Leron,’ said Iago. ‘You think this fact alone proves the innocence of all the servants?’

‘Le
ron
, that’s right. Yes, I think that. It’s their physical incapacity,
and
the fact that they were all vetted, for
crying
out as loud as you
like
!
These were hand-picked handservants; they went through more layers of vetting and psychological profiling and checking than anyone else in the whole system. How could a
murderer
slip through
that net? I mean it literally and actually and honestly: how could somebody with a history of violence, or with murder in their heart, end up as the personal handservant of Eva or
myself?’

‘Hard to see how,’ Iago agreed.

‘Never mind dosing our servants with high levels of loyalty drug. We check them rigorously physically and psychologically. You told me you were involved yourself. My MOHmies sign off on
our handservants personally don’t they? – I mean, the handservants assigned to Eva and myself?’

‘Certainly they do,’ said Iago. ‘I personally liaised between the vetting teams and your parents, Miss.’

‘You
personally
did – and yet you still think that one of them is a murderer!’

Iago looked at her, and then dropped his gaze.

Dia pressed on: ‘None of those servants could lift that weight, Iago! And you saw for yourself, the gardening robot hadn’t been activated in years. But an Earth native
could
lift the hammer. As for why Le
ron
didn’t fight him, or try a silly-old-runaway. Maybe
he
was too crushed and discombobulated and disoriented by the heavy gravity – eh?
He’d never been downbelow before either, after all.’

‘No native Earthling emerged from the house, Miss,’ Iago pointed out. ‘And the house was searched thoroughly after the murder happened: no native Earthling was
found.’

‘Doesn’t that just suggest our murderer had a really good hiding place inside? Maybe he waited there all day – until the moment was auspicious for him to slip away?’

‘How could he do so, without alerting the House AI?’

‘I don’t know.’

Iago pondered. ‘And why would a native Earthling want to smash in the head of a servant who’d never even set foot here before?’ he asked.

‘Ah,’ said Diana, knowingly. ‘Motive! I’ll come to that. But first, here’s a thing: why choose a hammer? I mean: think of all the ways our murderer could have
killed her-or-his victim. Why a hammer?’

‘We can’t argue with its effectiveness,’ Iago noted. ‘It proved more than capable of ending Leron.’

‘You’re not taking the force of my observation. Why choose such a
big heavy
hammer – if not to give the impression that the murderer must be a big heavy person? A strong
person, acclimatized to Earth gravity? You can’t deny that’s the impression it gives.’

Iago said nothing.

‘I had a dream, the night after the murder,’ Diana went on, meditatively. ‘I dreamt I was a spaceship, about to fall
like a hammer
into the sun itself – and the
sun was Leron’s skull. I was the hammer.’ She thought about this. ‘The odd thing is, I was covered with fins. Wings in space. Vanes and fins and wings.’

‘Curious,’ said Iago, neutrally.

‘Anyway, I was called FTL,’ said Diana absently. ‘Fins and vanes and wings,’ she added, as if it were a charm. ‘Fins. And Wings. I need to sleep, Iago.’

‘Here, Miss?’

‘No. Take me back to the house. This killing gravity. I can only get a proper dream-sleep in a gel-bed.’

‘Very well, Miss.’

As Jong-il and Berthezene came down from the rocks, she said to Iago: ‘could a servant hide murder in their hearts and pass unnoticed through our selection processes?’

‘No, Miss,’ said Iago. ‘They couldn’t.’

‘You’re sure? The human heart is a mysterious chamber, after all.’

‘They couldn’t do it. We have the most rigorous selection processes in the whole system. You really think your MOHmies could put you at any risk? Of course not. I personally assure
you.’

‘Well,’ said Dia, sinking into the seat of the car. ‘That rather suggests my theory is correct – don’t you think?’

‘You are the information problem solver, Miss,’ said Iago, smoothly. ‘Not I.’

She looked at the sky. Blue, and blue, and blue.

‘I want to go home,’ she said. She was feeling sleepy. Some dreaming would help her sort through her theories and come to some conclusion.

She couldn’t be bothered to strap her crawlipers back to her legs, so made her way back to the car by leaning on Iago’s shoulder. For an old man, the muscles of his arm and shoulders
were certainly pretty toned.

When everybody was inside, the car climbed gingerly back up the rocky slope and settled itself back on the road. Acceleration tugged in her gravity-weary torso like a blanket settling over her.
Her eyelids felt deliciously honeyed and heavy.

On the way home they drove past a procession: a dozen or more people, the woman at the front carrying an iCon of the Virgin – the local goddess. Hymns were being sung.
Diana could hear nothing, of course, through the perfect seal of the car windows; but she could see their mouths working. And they walked with a slow, deliberate step, on their way to, or perhaps
on their way from, a church, and a service, and prayers. The iCon of the Virgin was fashioned, of course, in the likeness of Dia’s MOHmies. Which is to say, in the likeness of Diana herself.
It was only moderately uncanny to see her image there. They weren’t worshipping
her
, of course. They were worshipping the Platonic form of her, the embodied goddess. Still.

The car swept past, and away.

‘I’m getting the impression,’ Iago prompted, gently. ‘That you have already solved this mystery.’

‘You think you know me,’ Diana replied, frowning. ‘You don’t really know me.’ In her head, the mantra: fins and vanes and wings.

‘Of course,’ said Iago.

‘It’s a lot of contradictory data,’ Diana replied, sulkily. ‘And I
know
what you’re going to say. You’re going to say: it’s what is supposed to
make me special, my ability to see a straight path through the sorts of data self-contradiction and iChaos that baffle AIs. But AIs don’t have to
sleep
.’

‘The Model-F ones do,’ put in Berthezene, irrelevantly.

‘A man is murdered,’ said Diana, her eyes closed, her head jiggling gently from side to side in time to the motion of the car. ‘The facts aren’t the problem. The
interlocking
contexts
are the problem.’

‘Contexts?’ prompted Iago.

She was on the event horizon of sleep; but held herself, just, on the waking side. ‘Interlocking and incompatible contexts. Situating the murder in the context – let’s say
– of servant life; of the attitudes and mores of shanty globe existence; of larger Solar System politics up-to-and-including treachery against the Ulanovs themselves, and planning revolution
and so on . . . and Ms Joad didn’t come all the way down here for the hell of it, after all.’ In her head the nursery-chant of it went round and round:

She should see that Iago believed her to be asleep. So she spoke up again, just to surprise him. ‘But there are the
other
contexts of Argent MOHfamily dynamics,
and our relationship to the Ulanovs. But also the contexts of faster-than-light travel, of all the
random
things. And, for all I know, the context of Eva’s
champagnely
exploding
supernovae too – though it’s hard to see how they have anything to
do
with it. Doodly-oh. But, I guess, the context of
physics
, yes. Not to mention Jack Glass. Not all of
these contexts can be relevant to the solution of the mystery. Not
all
of them. The challenge is knowing which ones to discard.’

‘So – you have an answer?’ said Iago.

Diana opened one eye, and looked at him. ‘Of course I do,’ she said, sourly. ‘How do you think I got my reputation as the Solar System’s number one mystery and whodunit
solver?’

Iago did his one-eyebrow-raising thing again. ‘And?’

‘My dear Iago, the information is all there, and you’ve seen all the clues I have.
You
ought to be able to solve this murder just as I have done.’

‘My skills, Miss Diana,’ said Iago, going all Jeeves-formal. ‘Lie elsewhere.’ His silly-old feelings were hurt, maybe, so Diana pulled herself more upright in the seat
and said: ‘don’t be like that, ee-aa-oo,
please
don’t! You are an
invaluable
member of the team, you really are. When I’m running the family I shall keep you
on as a functionary or gardener or potboy or something. But I am the one bred by my MOHmies to solve mysteries. Aren’t I?’