Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (28 page)

The man running through the olive grove, a little while earlier, when the day was hottest and exercise hardest. Why was he in such a hurry?

Diana was in her room. She made a small window in her wall for a while; a porthole looking up at the plastic immensity of blue sky (blue! . . . such a
strange
colour for
sky, when you came to think of it – such a weirdly thin dilution of the natural black). She widened the porthole, made it a wider picture window, and turned the sound up. It was late
afternoon now. Korkura heat-haze and stillness possessed the scene. The only sounds were the distant breath-sounds of surf on an unseen beach, and the languid fizzle of cicadas hidden in the grass.
Nothing moved. The sky looked like a screen. Two chopsticks of white were drawn upon it, converging towards the apex as two scramjets flew towards the same point, or at least appeared to do, from
Dia’s perspective. Even in the climate-balanced calm of her room she somehow
felt
the heat.

She deleted the window and settled into her gel-bed.

Sleep came straight away.

She dreamed of Iago. This was an odd thing: she rarely dreamt of any of the servants. She was standing on a small green hill: Earth, to judge by the gravity, but a colder and rainier latitude
than Korkura’s. The grass was trimmed neat, but the stalks had enough movement left in their abbreviated bodies to respond to the invisible pressure of the wind. All around were green fields,
and to the left a wide expanse of blue-green woodland, like a cloud nestling flat against the ground. It was cold. The sky was white and grey, and the air in her nostrils smelt of rain. She knew,
somehow, that this hill had once sported a tall tower, now ruinous. When she looked down Dia could see the stumps of granite brick only partly buried in the turf: the remnants of what had once been
a mighty structure.

Iago was standing a few metres from her. ‘Where am I?’ she asked him; and then, without waiting for his reply she asked: ‘what are you doing here? I
never
dream of
you.’

‘Asking the dream to interpret the dream is liable to lead to a short circuit,’ he replied, in his croaky old voice.

Beside him was a RACdroid, its metal body gleaming dully in the winter light. ‘Why have you brought a RACdroid? Are we going to witness a contract, you and I?’

‘You passed the test. Your sister didn’t. You are to be sworn in as the official heir of the Clan Argent.’

‘You haven’t even heard my solution!’ she said. Then: ‘it’s a shame for my sister.’

‘We must hope she accepts her shame,’ Iago said, mysteriously.

‘I didn’t mean shame in that sense!’ Then: ‘ruins. Here – and you. Why am I dreaming about ruins?’

‘It’s all in the way a question is phrased, isn’t it?’

She tried again. ‘Alright.
What
is ruined, that I should dream about it?’

‘That’s better!’ he said, and she experienced a mild shock of annoyance at his condescending manner.

She looked up. The sky was filling with storm clouds: imperial purple, darkest blue and black. They were great chunks of cloud, moving like solid objects, like portions of architectural masonry.
They moved in with more-than-natural speed.

Then Iago said something unexpected. ‘The stars are ruined. There is no warning, they are rent in pieces and hurtle out faster than the light they shed.’ What a strange thing to say!
The storm-clouds wholly filled the sky now. The quality of light changed.

‘Their own light,’ she said. Raindrops began to plummet, heavy as metal. The turf generated a surroundsound drumming noise. Dia had a flash of insight: the raindrops were, each of
them, little hammerheads; and every strand of grass was a human being; and – ¡
flash
! – what was that? Lightning! So it came again – ¡
flash
! – and
Diana looked across to Iago. Her face was wet and her flesh was shivering with cold. Soaked! She could hardly see him through the semiopacity of the rainfall. A lightning flash, its brillianting
fishbone structure visible for a microsecond, but living on spectrally on the retinas. Each flash was the inexplicable death of a star.

‘
What
is ruined?’ Iago was saying, shaking his head as the rainfall bounced off his pate and droplets swarmed down about him like a mist. ‘We are.’

You must understand: Dia was not used to having this kind of dream. Frankly it unnerved her. What made things worse is that she was
forcibly woken
in the middle of it by somebody else
– and this was an
unprecedented
invasion of her privacy. She came out of sleep snarling, wheeling her arms in an attempt at fighting off this monster, this violator. But gravity was
too debilitating, and her blows bounced feebly off the chest of whoever was rousing her.

‘Miss! Miss Diana!’

‘How dare you,’ she gasped, her mouth dry. ‘Interrupt my dreaming! I need my dreams to process my data—’

‘Miss, we have to
go
.’

It was Jong-il. Even as her fury buzzed in her head she knew that something must be very wrong. ‘Jong-il,’ she croaked. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s not safe for you here, Miss,’ said the bodyguard, helping her out of the gel-bed. ‘We have to leave now.’

Her rage drained away. ‘Do I have time for a wash,’ she snapped, ‘—or must I run away with specks of
gel
sticking to me?’

‘Please, Miss, Miss, be quick,’ Jong-il urged.

She was: the wash took only moments, and fitting the crawlipers moments more. ‘Are we actually under attack?’ she asked, as she followed Jong-il out of her bedroom. Iago was in the
hall outside, looking (despite the absence of rain) distractingly like her dream version of him.

‘I’m afraid so, Miss Diana,’ he said. ‘I apologise for waking you, but it is imperative we leave Korkura right away.’

‘Who is it?’

‘That’s a little unclear: either Clan Aparaceido, or perhaps Clan Yu, using Aparaceido ordnance.’

‘Is it war?’

Iago shook his head. ‘I doubt that. It may be, of course; but I believe it’s much more
likely
to be an opportunistic strike. They chanced upon information that identified you
and your sister as being here, on this island. They’re acting on it in the hope that they can take you both out. That would inconvenience your parents greatly.’

‘It would inconvenience me more,’ Diana retorted, drily. ‘Is it certain? Is it happening now?’

‘Not now. But our intelligence says it will happen within the next twelve hours.’

‘Odds?’

‘Our best intelligence is: point five seven.’

She nodded. It was certainly good enough reason to evacuate the island. ‘Where’s Eva?’ she asked.

‘You and she will leave separately,’ said Iago. ‘Your parents are adamant about that. They can’t risk you both in one craft at the same time.’

It made sense. ‘Then let me say goodbye to her, and let’s get on with it,’ she said.

The three of them went along to Eva’s room, and the two sisters embraced. Both were wearing the same expression: sober, but focused. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be Hastings to
your Holmes,’ said Eva. ‘It was petulant of me.’

‘It hardly matters,’ said Diana. ‘And it’s Mycroft. Hastings goes with Poirot.’

‘So you worked out who actually killed the handservant?’ Eva asked.

‘You were right,’ said Diana. ‘It was another one of the hand-servants. Who else would it be?’

‘Hah!’ Eva laughed. ‘So did I pass the test after all? A touch ironic, in the circumstances.’

‘It’s more complex than that,’ said Diana. And then: ‘what do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Only, maybe I should do more of these murder mystery thingies? I could challenge you for your crown. You and that girl you have that crush on, the one you’re so secretive
about, who also plays them. What’s her name?’

Diana winced, and looked away, and Eva suddenly understood. ‘Never mind,’ she said, wanting genuinely to console her MOHsister. ‘Danger is
good
for us. It’s like
gravity – if you live your life wholly without it, you grow feeble. We’ll be alright.’

But Diana was blushing. ‘Will you permit me to apologise to you?’

Eva considered this gravely for a while. ‘Alright.’

They embraced again. ‘Love makes you do reckless things,’ said Dia. ‘I know,’ said Eva.

‘We
must
leave, Miss,’ said Jong-il, leaning in. ‘I am miserably sorry, but it must be.’

‘We have ballistic craft here on the island, of course,’ murmured Iago. ‘But a direct launch – given that the enemy probably knows where we are – would be too
dangerous. We have half a dozen plasmaser installations on the Mediterranean coast, and it would be safer to go up in a car. Miss Eva and Jong-il will go down to Tobruk, and ride up from there.
Miss Diana, Deño and I will ride up on an Italian plasmaser a little later.’

‘I don’t see that a plasmaser car is any harder to shoot down than a ballistic craft,’ said Eva.

‘It isn’t.’ Iago nodded once to acknowledge the correctness of Eva’s observation. ‘Indeed,’ he added, ‘it is larger, and travels more slowly, making it
quite a lot easier to shoot, actually. But the car will be full of valuable cargo and also of many other people, so shooting it would be unambiguously an act of war. Shooting a private ballistic
transport would be a different matter. More deniable; easier to explain away if need be. We do not believe the aggressors here – whichever Clan it is – wish actually to declare
war.’

And Eva had no more questions. She left immediately with Jong-il.

10

Gravity or Guilt?

Diana was anxious to go; but she accepted that she had to wait until her sister was well away. So she went outside and sat in a recliner on the main lawn, whilst Berthezene
took up a discrete position twenty metres away, with his gun out. She felt impatient, but she didn’t feel afraid. Had being under constant guard blunted her capacity for feeling fear? She
regarded the future blithely enough, certainly.

She saw Eva’s plane zip away, skimming low over the tops of the olive trees with a muffled whiffling sound, leaving the orchard threshing behind it in its turbulence.

Gone.

It was late in the afternoon. Iago brought Diana a glass of iced water and a selection of fruit pieces. ‘I saw Eva go.’

‘Your parents do not want both of you in the air at the same time. It’s only a precaution. When Miss Eva is on the ground at Tobruk and we have confirmation that the plasmaser car is
ready, we will leave.’

‘How long?’ she asked.

‘Not long,’ he replied. ‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Can we be sure who has betrayed us?’

‘We cannot be
sure
,’ he said.

She sipped the water, and ate a piece of apple. Its texture was firmly spongy, wet, flavoursome. She had another piece. ‘I know you think it was me,’ she said, shortly, not looking
him in the face. ‘Contacting Anna, I mean. I know you think that’s what has . . . brought this about. But you ought at least to entertain the
possibility
that somebody else is
responsible. Quite apart from the servants we brought down here with us, there must be thirty people on this island who know we are here. Any of them could have betrayed us.’

‘They are all dosed heavily with CRF. This makes them rather dopey, robs them of initiative, makes them rather emotional, all of which isn’t ideal in terms of actually – you
know:
running
the place. But it means they could never consciously
betray
you.’

‘Unconsciously, perhaps? By accident?’

‘We have the place locked down, as far as all forms of communication go. Nobody could accidentally betray the location. It would have had to be done deliberately.’

She thought about this for a while, and ate a particularly sweet piece of pear. How beautiful that taste! The piece was the colour, and shape and (for all she knew) the true flavour of the moon.
She stared westward, over the sea. Clouds were starting to gather near the western horizon as the effortfully reddening sun bogged further and further down in the sky.

‘What about those two policepersons? The ones who came in, after Leron was found murdered? Of course we had to follow the letter of the Ulanov law, and of course we could not deny access
to properly constituted policeperson authority. But they weren’t handservants, were they? They could easily have got a message to the others.’

Iago shook his head. ‘They are also both dosed on CRF, perfectly loyal to the Clan.’

‘Really?’ Thinking back, they
had
seemed rather slow, initiativeless individuals. CRF would explain that. ‘Doesn’t it take a week or so to work on the
brain,’ she asked? ‘Even at high dose?’

‘Yes. But both the individuals in question were dosed in advance.’

‘Goddess! Really? What – better safe than sorry, is it?’

He looked at her, seemed to be gauging her reaction, and then said. ‘It hardly matters, now, Miss.’ She knew he was referring to the message she had smuggled out. Once again she
blushed. Then she tried to compose herself.

‘I’m a fool,’ she told him, feeling her own words stinging her – though they were the truth. ‘Not yet sixteen – but that’s no excuse. If I misjudged
Anna . . . then, well—’ She trailed off.

‘You were in love,’ said Iago, simply.

Diana’s pressed her lips tight together, and clenched her hands, and stared back at him. But it was the truth. It was the idiotic and humiliating truth. It was the glorious, beautiful
truth. She unclenched her hands and laid them on the table. Opened her mouth and sucked in a deep breath. ‘Nice use of the past tense, there, Iago-go-go.’

‘Love is a – complicating emotion.’

‘Complicated, did you say? It is certainly that.’

‘Complicating,’ repeated Iago.

‘We’ve a little time,’ Diana said. ‘Bring me up that hand-servant girl, Sapho.’

Iago looked sharply at her. ‘Why?’

‘I have some more questions for her.’

‘I thought you said you had solved the mystery of the dead handservant?’

‘So I have. But there are one or two little details that I haven’t yet slotted into place in my mind. You know me, ear-gah. I like to tidy all the loose ends away. I like to cross
the “t”s and dot the lower-case “j”s.’