The owner of the restaurant, Aarav Sreesanth, a fellow Brummie, hadn’t seen David Parsons, either. Aarav had come up on the eighth shuttle, was married with six kids, ran a small fleet of carts that sold partha and curry in the city, and in this little restaurant served the best damn food on the planet. He and his family had roofed over most of the cells of the adjacent Boxbuilder ruins, lived in one half and rented rooms in the other.
Vic worked his way through a plate of thalassery biriyani, chappatis, sambar, and deep-fried banana chips, watched a plainswalker stump past the long tumble of rocks where the ridge ran out. It was a big one, car-sized, the sail turbines that crested its shell flashing in the level sunlight as it headed into the playa. Just another alien in a dry red world like Mars of the old sci-fi imaginings — which was why it had been given one of Mars’s old names.
Mangala huddled so close to its small cool star that it should have become tidally locked, like Earth’s moon. One half facing the star, permanently lit and scorching hot; the other permanently dark and frozen solid. But an age ago, five million years according to magnetic traces frozen in rocks, back in the Pliocene on Earth, before Homo sapiens had turned up on the scene, someone or something had spun up the world. An unimaginable and vast engineering project. Now it rotated in 3:2 resonance, so that a theoretical observer on the surface of its star would see it turn once every two orbital revolutions. One 31-day year in light; the next in darkness. And in the five million years since it had been spun up, dozens of Elder Cultures had lived here and died out or transcended or whatever. Layer upon layer of habitation. Mystery upon mystery.
Vic flicked through his notes about the murder on his phone. The case was exactly twenty-four hours old. They knew who the victim was, who he’d come here with and where they’d been staying. But the dead guy’s friend was in the wind, and why they’d come to Mangala, who had sent them, who they’d gone to meet near the shuttle terminal, all of that was still unknown. He was pretty sure that both Danny Drury and Cal McBride were trying to hide something, but he couldn’t put either of them at the scene with the ray gun in their hands, he couldn’t figure out why they would be there, why they’d killed Redway and tried to kill, or maybe had killed, Parsons.
Most cases were either cracked quickly or went cold, their files growing fatter without yielding fresh revelations until at last they were copied into the vault, and the boxes of bloody clothing and DNA samples and all the rest were removed to the central store. Sometimes an old case was revived when new evidence turned up, or when a suspect in another case said something pertinent. Once, a woman had come into the squad room and asked to speak to a detective and confessed to the murder of a man who’d raped her five years before. But that was rare. Vic knew that if he and Skip didn’t turn up something soon, John Redway would die all over again, become no more than a number and name in the cold-case index.
He called the boy detective. Skip hadn’t had any luck either. ‘You know what really bugs me about this thing?’ he said. ‘We have two suspects, but we don’t have the first idea why Redway was killed.’
‘You probably heard that there are all kinds of questions you need to ask about a murder,’ Vic said. ‘Who did it? How did they do it? Why? What was the victim’s background and who did he know? Because most victims are killed by people they know. Man, there’s no end to it when you get started. But the most important question, the one you need to focus on, is the first. Who did it? Everything else can be used by the prosecutor to make the case, but the first thing you have to do is find the doer. And then get them in the interrogation room, and break them down.’
‘I do have a feeling about Drury,’ Skip said.
‘Arrogant son of a bitch, isn’t he? But not as tough as he likes to think he is. McBride, on the other hand, is old school all the way. You bring guys like him in, you hand them a photo of them standing over the corpse with a smoking gun in their hand, you ask them if they did it—’
‘And they deny it,’ Skip said.
‘And they say, “Get me my lawyer.” Drury, though, isn’t a street guy. And he definitely thinks he’s smarter than us. You can usually get guys like him to talk. They love to hear the sound of their own voice.’
‘He was happy to aim us at McBride, wasn’t he?’
‘There’s definitely no love lost between those two,’ Vic said.
‘It could be,’ Skip said, ‘that Drury killed Redway with a weapon McBride is known to have used because he wants to put the murder on McBride. He wants McBride out of the way, he can’t kill him because he works for McBride’s family, so he frames him. Then again, McBride has a beef against Drury, because of losing his business and house and all that.’
‘Like I said, there’s no end to speculation about the why and the wherefore. Best to stick to what you know, Investigator Williams.’
But Vic thought that Skip might be on to something. Both Drury and McBride were in the frame, but only one of them had that ray gun…
Skip said that he was going to check out the last few places on his list, then head back to the UN building and write up the interviews with Drury and McBride. ‘Will I see you there?’
‘Don’t wait up,’ Vic said. ‘I have one more call to make myself.’
17. Sea Devils
Norfolk | 8 July
Jean Simmons, the owner of the bleak little caravan park at the edge of Martham, was a stick-thin woman with iron-grey hair and a face pinched by suspicion. The kind of person who was never disappointed when the world failed her, because it confirmed her expectations. She’d lost her farm when the sea level had risen, she told Henry Harris and Chloe, had bought the caravan park with the compensation money. ‘More trouble than it’s worth, most of the time. You see how I live.’
She perched on the edge of the sofa in the living room of her spartan bungalow, dressed in jeans and a wool check shirt, sipping at a hand-rolled cigarette. She couldn’t remember much about her former tenants, she said. Sahar’s wife had died before he and his children had come to Martham. Some sudden illness, very sad. Sahar had worked on the local shrimp farm.
‘That’s what we do here. Fish and farm shrimp. And there are the visitors, of course.’
Jean Simmons meant tourists, and the gangs of volunteers who were attempting to remove invasive species and rewild the flooded coast with native plants and animals. According to her, the Chauhans had lived at the caravan site for about a year, and then Sahar Chauhan had gone away. Jean Simmons said that she thought he had taken up a new job.
‘That was three years ago,’ Chloe said.