“Your father was an assistant to a mechanician in Tharsis City. You were able to pick up the skills necessary to program an automatic servant and these tools would give access to its workings. You had the motive and the means to kill Mr. Strachan, and you were clever enough to arrange an alibi, but I have you.”
There was silence in the room. Then Emily’s face twisted. “You don’t understand! He ruined my life. He destroyed everything I worked for. And then when he realized who I was, he started whistling that blasted tune to mock me! What would you have done?”
“I would not have killed him.”
Harriet stood frozen. She felt like she’d been hit over the back of her head. She was surprised she could still stand upright. Bertrand had done it. He had solved the case, all on his own. Everything she had assumed, everything she had thought she knew, was wrong. The murder had nothing to do with the smuggling gang or the package. And that meant that the people who had attacked her and were after the package were also nothing to do with the murder. The suspects in front of her were unrelated to her mission. Her real attackers could be anyone in the hotel. She was back to where she had started. Worse, she had wasted hours.
“Well done,” she said, the words feeling as dry as sand on her tongue. “You solved it all by yourself.”
“Oh no,” Bertrand said. “I wouldn’t say that. You helped. I couldn’t have done this without you.”
Harriet nodded. It was kind of Bertrand to say so, but she knew she had only tried to steer him in the wrong direction. If she had had her way, they wouldn’t have looked into Strachan’s past at all, much less the whistling. Bertrand would never have solved the case.
“Well, that’s that,” Sir William said. “Arrest the girl, Simpson, and take her back to Tharsis City immediately.”
Harriet’s head shot up. “No!” They couldn’t go back now. She hadn’t found the package. Her mission had been a failure. “Please.”
Sir William looked startled.
Reginald Pratt stepped forward. “I really can’t allow that, Sir William.”
Sir William blinked. “I beg your pardon, Viscount Brotherton?”
“The young lady has promised me the first dance tonight. If she and her brother-in-law leave now, whom shall I dance with? I am sure there is somewhere in this hotel where the murderer can be locked up until tomorrow.”
Damn you, Reginald, Harriet thought. I could have handled that. She would have found a way to stay. Now Reginald would get to claim credit. He would blame her for everything that had gone wrong. Couldn’t manage it on her own, he would say. She wanted to strangle him.
Now that the murderer had been captured, Harriet had no excuse to question the hotel guests or staff. Over the next few hours, as she prepared for the ball with the help of an automatic maid, she went frantically over the list of guests and staff in her mind. She and Bertrand had interviewed them all, but only to establish alibis for the murder. There was little that made any of them stand out. The redheaded man who had winked at her on the submersible had waggled his eyebrows and leered at her as she and Bertrand had tried to question him, and several of the guests had been offended at being questioned at all, but she could think of nothing that pinpointed anyone as a member of the smuggling gang. She knew at least two of the gang were male, reasonably young, and of average height, but what did that tell her? There were a good thirty or forty young men here who matched that description.
The automatic maid’s cold metal fingers fastening the ties on her ball gown sent shivers up Harriet’s back. The gown was green, silky, and far too tight. Harriet preferred, whenever she could get away with it, which unfortunately wasn’t that often, to dress in men’s clothing. That way she could run, climb, or fight if the occasion required it. In this thing, she would have trouble eating a pastry. She sat on the edge of the bed to allow the automatic maid to fix her hair, and suddenly realized just how tired she was. She had been up most of the previous night, and today had been exhausting both physically and mentally. She should just fall back on the bed and not get up again for a week. And why not? This mission was a disaster. She would be out of the intelligence service the moment she got back to Tharsis City.
No. She might have failed, but Bertrand hadn’t. She would celebrate for him. He had needed this even more than she had. Amy and their unborn child would now be secure. So what if she never got the chance to travel across Mars? How many people had been to a ball a hundred feet beneath the surface of the Valles Marineris?
She shook off the automatic maid’s attention, strapped her narrow, thin knife to her arm, pulled on her jacket to cover it, even though it looked absurd over the ball gown, and went to find Bertrand.
The ballroom was a domed structure made of hardened glass and steel. The water outside was illuminated by streams of photon emission globes swimming in complex patterns around the ballroom. Within the ballroom, tiny, mechanical glow-bugs darted and dived like shoals of luminescent, multicolored fish. A small orchestra at the far end had already begun to play when Harriet arrived with Bertrand.
Bertrand stared wide-mouthed in amazement at the glittering gowns of the ladies and the jackets of the gentleman which were covered in whirring machinery, but Harriet couldn’t let go of her failed mission. She had missed something, she knew it. It was scraping away at the back of her brain like a burrow-bug. What was it, though?
The hotel butler, Mr. Heathcote, announced Colonel and Mrs. Fitzpatrick. The colonel was dressed in full military regalia, his sword strapped to his side. As always, his expression was unreadable. Mrs. Fitzpatrick would have been impossible to miss from anywhere in the room. Her hat sprouted feathers that were over six feet long and shimmering with color. Harriet had no idea how Mrs. Fitzpatrick had even gotten through the doorway.
Reginald Pratt spotted Harriet from the other side of the ballroom and headed towards her, smirking.
Damn it! He looked like he was having the time of his life. He must be delighted at her failure. Had he forgotten that it was his job to step in and retrieve the package if she couldn’t? Unless he already had it. She set her jaw.
“Miss George. There you are. Just in time for our dance, I believe.”
Very clearly and very precisely, Harriet said, “I would rather dance with a slug-beetle.”
Reginald’s eyes widened in shock. But before he could say anything, Harriet grabbed her brother-in-law’s hand. “I believe it is your duty to protect me and dance with me, Bertrand. You wouldn’t want me to fall victim to anyone… inappropriate.”
Bertrand snorted. “I’ve never met anyone less in need of protection than you.” But he took her hand anyway and led her onto the dance floor.
Harriet had always hated dancing, but it was one of the skills that the intelligence service required, so she had reluctantly learned. She let Bertrand lead her through the steps while her mind worried and prodded at her problem. Assume Reginald Pratt doesn’t have the package. If he did, none of it mattered.
The package had to be somewhere in the hotel. Even at her most optimistic, Harriet didn’t believe the letters and loose papers she’d taken from Strachan’s room were it. So, not in his room, and she hadn’t been able to find anywhere else he might have hidden it. Where, then? It certainly hadn’t been on his body.
Or had it? That nagging feeling in the back of her brain flared as she thought of his body lying there. She had searched him, but what had she missed?