‘Of course,’ Linder said. ‘She’s worried sick about you.’
‘Then you won’t mind putting her mind at rest. Just tell her I’m safe, and I’ve left the hive. Can you do that?’
‘Consider it done,’ Linder said. They were crossing a deep channel of lichen-encrusted brick, along which some thick tarry liquid flowed sluggishly into the distance, their footsteps ringing on the metal mesh bridge spanning it. ‘Is there anything else?’
‘I doubt it,’ Sitrus said, the half-contemptuous smile back on his face. ‘You’re already sticking your neck out more than you’re comfortable with.’
‘I’ll decide what I’m comfortable with,’ Linder snapped. For the last year he’d been living outside the shadow cast by his friend, and he’d forgotten how annoyingly superior he could sometimes seem.
‘Good for you.’ Sitrus stopped walking, and looked at him appraisingly in the light from a nearby glow-globe. They’d reached a nexus of tunnels, half a dozen radiating from the circular chamber they found themselves in. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. ‘There are plenty more like Milena, you know. Desperate, with nowhere to turn, and I can’t help them anymore. But if you’re willing to take the risk, you could.’
‘Me?’ For a moment Linder was too stunned even to speak. When he forced the syllable out, it sounded more like a strangulated gasp than an intelligible word.
Sitrus nodded. ‘You could give them their lives back, Zale.’ Then he shrugged. ‘Somebody’s life, anyway. It’s got to be better than the one they have now.’
‘Falsify records?’ Linder felt nauseous at the very idea. ‘No, I couldn’t.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you could.’ Sitrus gave him the look again, and a flare of resentment took Linder by surprise. It had been like that for as long as he could remember, Sitrus taking it for granted that he lacked the guts to follow where he led.
‘Suppose I was able to help,’ he said, surprising himself almost as much as Sitrus, judging by the unfamiliar expression of astonishment on his friend’s face. ‘How would I go about it?’
‘You’d have to go through me,’ Sitrus said. ‘At least to begin with. I’ve got the contacts in place, and the Dispossessed trust me.’ He looked at Linder appraisingly again. ‘No offence, Zale, but these are damaged people, who don’t give their confidence easily. You’ll have to earn it.’
‘None taken,’ Linder said, before honesty compelled him to add, ‘I’m not promising to do it, Harl. But I will think about it.’
‘That’s all I can reasonably expect.’ Sitrus clapped him playfully on the back. ‘You’re a good man, Zale. I know you’ll make the right choice.’
‘I hope so.’ Linder coughed uncomfortably. ‘When I do decide, how do I let you know?’
‘Ask Milena to hang something red from the second-floor balcony. When I hear it’s there, I’ll arrange a meeting, and we can discuss the details.’
‘Something red. Right.’ Linder nodded.
‘Good.’ Sitrus turned away, then paused, and indicated one of the tunnel mouths facing them. ‘Head down that way for about three hundred metres, and you’ll find a green access hatch. It opens into the tertiary storage area of the scriptorium.’ Then he smiled again, the familiar mocking expression returning to his face. ‘So you would have had time for that caffeine you were thinking about after all.’
Then he was gone, only the fading echo of his footsteps remaining.
‘I’m a little disappointed,’ I said, strolling into Linder’s cubicle unannounced. ‘I thought we had an agreement.’
‘An agreement?’ he responded, setting aside the hardprint he’d been annotating, with a deliberation which made it plain my visit was less of a surprise than I’d hoped.
I nodded, taking up my former position against the door. I didn’t think he’d make a run for it, but there was no harm in closing off the option. ‘To inform me if you heard from Harl Sitrus. I could count on it, apparently.’
‘As you can see,’ he returned, ‘I’m rather busy. And I don’t recall agreeing to speak to you immediately.’
‘Fair enough,’ I conceded. ‘I should have emphasised the urgency of the matter. But you don’t deny you spoke to him this morning?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he returned levelly.
‘And the substance of the conversation?’
‘Was personal.’ The fractional hesitation was enough to betray that he was holding something back, but they always do at first. ‘He asked me to reassure Miss Dravere that he’s safe and well, which I agreed to do.’
‘How kind.’ I shifted the focus of the questions. ‘And did you discuss the charges against him?’
Linder nodded, reluctantly. ‘We did. It seems I owe you an apology.’
‘Accepted, of course,’ I assured him. ‘So he admitted it?’
‘He told me he’d falsified a few records. As you can imagine, it came as rather a shock.’
‘I imagine it did,’ I said, trying to sound sympathetic. ‘And was he any more specific than that?’
‘He said he’d been giving the identities of people killed in the war to destitute refugees. I can’t condone it, but he does seem to have been acting out of a misguided sense of altruism.’
‘Then it seems he’s been a little selective with his recollections,’ I replied, wishing there was somewhere else to sit. ‘Did he mention how we got on to his activities in the first place?’
Linder shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘That didn’t come up in the conversation,’ he admitted.
‘No,’ I said, ‘somehow I didn’t think it would. It was when a man named Werther Geist returned to Kannack a couple of months ago, after an absence of nearly three years. Geist’s quite wealthy as it happens, with interests all over Verghast, and the last anyone heard of him, he was visiting Vervunhive. So of course he was listed among the missing.’ I paused, groping automatically in my pocket for a packet of lho-sticks, before remembering I was definitely giving them up again. Probably a bad idea to light one up surrounded by a million tonnes of paper anyway. ‘The thing of it was, he left a couple of hours before the Ferrozoican attack, and ended up in Hiraldi, where he got mobilised along with a whole bunch of the local auxiliaries. And once the security situation eased, he got kicked back into civilian clothes again. Are you with me so far?’
Linder nodded. ‘So when he returned to Kannack, he found another Geist already living in his house?’
‘Got it in one,’ I told him. ‘But the thing is, they could both prove they were the genuine Geist. In the end we had to run a genetic comparison to find out who the imposter was.’
‘Which I take it you did,’ Linder said, sounding genuinely interested.
I nodded. ‘The really interesting thing was who he turned out to be. He was a refugee, right enough. But from Ferrozoica.’
I watched Linder’s face crumble. He shook his head. ‘That can’t be right. Harl would never help one of them.’
‘But he did. I can show you the transcripts if you like.’ In the end I did, just to prove the point, but I could see at the time he believed me. ‘Once he realised we were going to turn the case over to the Inquisition, our suspect got positively voluble. Laid out the whole thing for us step by step. What Sitrus was doing, and how much he charged for the privilege.’
‘How much?’ Linder was getting angry again, but it didn’t seem directed at me this time.
‘Ten per cent of the assets the new identity had access to. Seems like a bargain to me,’ I said.
‘And how many ten per cents do you think he collected?’ Linder asked, his voice thickening.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I admitted. ‘I suspect his lady friend was one, but I can’t prove it.’
‘Then why haven’t you arrested her?’ Linder asked.