Khal’s front door was open. Zara was explaining, “He asked me to come round. He said he had a present. I said I could only stay for a few minutes…” She broke down.
I hurried into the house.
The lounge was in disarray. An armchair had been overturned, a lamp stand knocked over. A magazine rack had toppled, sending its glossy contents avalanching across the carpet.
I did not immediately see Khalid—perhaps my eyes saw him, but my brain refused to accept the mage.
Only when I had taken in the state of the room did I notice the body.
He was lying before the hearth, on his back. In the centre of his chest—gaudy crimson on his white shirt—was a bloodstain. His eyes were open, staring glassily at the ceiling.
I was overcome with a fleeting dizziness. In my line of work I deal with bodies everyday, but I had never before witnessed a victim of violence.
Then I recalled what Khalid had said, in jest, a few weeks back about having his implant removed. I knelt, reached out, and touched his implant. It vibrated quickly beneath my fingertips.
I looked up. Zara was standing by the door, fingers to her lips, sobbing.
I moved to her and took her in my arms. “It’s okay,” I soothed. “The team at the Onward Station will know of his death. They’ll send out a ferryman and notify the police.”
The room was cold. There was no fire lit in the hearth, and the door was still open. I closed it.
“When did you get here?” I asked.
“Just minutes ago. I came straight in, and when I saw… I came straight to you.”
I recalled hearing the gunshot, perhaps ten minutes ago. I opened the door and looked out, but the snow on the pavement was a churned and slushy mess, bearing no obliging record of the killer’s footprints.
I returned to Zara. She stared at me. “Who’d do such a thing?” she asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
It didn’t make any sense at all. It was hard to think who might have hated Khalid enough to kill him—but in this day and age it was almost impossible to work out why anyone might be drawn to homicide, other than in the heat of the moment. Why kill someone when they would be brought back to life to incriminate their killer? Of course, murder was still committed—crimes of passion, incidents of hatred when the killer was barely conscious of the act…
There was a knock at the door. I opened it, expecting a ferryman or the police, or both. Instead, a tall, balding stranger stood on the front step, stamping his feet in the cold.
Zara hurried over to him. “Simon,” she said.
I looked mystified. Zara explained, “Simon dropped me off and went to park at the Fleece.”
Simon nodded to me and stepped inside. “What’s the delay—?” he began and then saw the body. He went white, then slid down the wall and slumped into a sitting position.
Zara sat next to him, quietly crying on his shoulder.
Five minutes later Dan Chester arrived, accompanied by the local constable. While the policeman called in his superiors over at Bradley, I took Dan to one side and explained the situation.
He stared down at the body. “Christ, who’d do such a thing…?” He glanced across at Zara.
“No way!” I hissed. “She came straight round to my place when she found him. She was distraught. And anyway, why would she do something so stupid when Khalid would incriminate her when he returned?”
He shrugged. “Okay, but what if she came here without intending to kill him? They argued, struggled. The place is a mess. What if Khal threatened her?”
“And she just happened to be carrying a gun? Highly bloody unlikely!”
“What about her new bloke? What if they argued?”
I recalled what Khalid had told me a while back, about the bust-up he’d had with Simon. Had Simon harboured a resentment?
“Okay,” I said, “but the same question applies. Why kill when you’ll be found out in six months? You just wouldn’t do it—not even in the heat of the moment.”
Minutes later the CID from Bradley arrived, along with a forensic team and a scene-of-crime squad.
While the forensic scientists photographed the body, a detective inspector took preliminary statements from Zara, Simon, and myself.
Later we were driven in separate cars to Bradley police station and questioned there at length.
It was almost ten by the time I returned home, changed, and made my way to the Fleece.
Ben and Elisabeth were in the main bar, with Jeff Morrow. They looked concerned when they saw me.
“Richard,” Jeff said, “what’s happening? We saw the police cars outside Khal’s. Where is he?”
Before saying anything, I bought myself a drink—a double whisky—and suggested we occupy a table beside the fire.
“What?” Elisabeth asked.
I told them what had happened that evening, from my hearing the gunshot, and Zara’s arrival, to finding Khal’s body.
“But who the hell would kill Khalid?” Ben asked, a question that I’d heard enough already and was to hear countless times again over the course of the next few weeks.
I told them about Dan’s errant speculation that Zara or Simon had pulled the trigger. “But it just doesn’t make sense,” I said, and outlined my objections again.
“You said that Khal beat up this Simon character a bit back?” Ben asked.
I nodded. “But I hardly think that’s a motive enough to kill someone.”
“You don’t know what this Simon’s like.”
“But, again, why would he kill Khal when, in six months Khal will return to point the finger? It’s absurd.”
Jeff said, “Perhaps Simon didn’t pull the trigger, as it were. He hired a hit man to do it, someone Khal wouldn’t know from Adam.”
I almost laughed at that. “This is sounding more like an old episode of Morse by the second. Look, the explanation will be very simple. Khal disturbed someone burgling the house. He picked up a poker to fight off the intruder. Intruder pulls a gun and without considering the consequences—in self-defence, he might claim—fires. End of story.”
Or so I wanted to think. But my friends’ suspicions had sown seeds of doubt in my mind.
It was a sombre Christmas. Okay, so thanks to the Kéthani Khalid would be resurrected by summer, but that didn’t remove the fact that a nasty crime had been committed on our doorstep and that the killer was still at large.
In the slow, dead period immediately after Christmas, Khalid’s murder made the national news. Reporters—the scum of the Earth, in my opinion— doorstepped Khalid’s every acquaintance in the village. They wrote lurid stories of his break-up with Zara and his affair—wholly apocryphal—with a young nurse at his hospital. I ignored every one of the skulking bastards, but did come close to punching a particularly obnoxious hack who offered me 25,000 euros for my exclusive story.
I was called into Bradley police station again to give another account of my actions on the night of the murder, and from local gossip learned that Zara and Simon had made frequent visits to the station, where they were questioned. The case was put on hold until the time of Khalid’s return in June, and gradually media interest faded away.
Life returned to normal. After the Christmas break I resumed my four-day-on, three-day-off stint delivering the dead to the Onward Station. Late at night, after a long shift, I would often look up at the winter darkness and wonder where Barbara, my wife, might be among the massed stars. I thought of Khalid, too, his resurrection and eventual return to Earth for questioning about his death.
The topic of conversation every Tuesday night for a long while was of course the murder. Doug Standish, the latest recruit to the Tuesday night crowd, and a detective inspector over at Bradley, told us that Khalid had been shot at close range, no more than half a metre away, by a single bullet from a 0.2 automatic, not that this information meant much to the rest of us. The police were no nearer apprehending his killer; if truth be known, they weren’t even working on the case, as in all likelihood it would be solved on Khal’s return.