Six months ago he had been patrolling the Recreation Room. She had just finished five hours on one of the machines. Ely knew it was five hours, he’d checked afterwards. She’d approached him and held out her visor. “I don’t need it anymore,” was all that she’d said. He’d taken it, more out of confusion than anything else, and then she had walked off before he’d thought to question her.
He’d ordered extra passive medical screenings, set up the system to monitor her activity on the social network, and had personally checked to see if she posted anything to the other-net. She hadn’t. His hourly checks became daily, then weekly and then, when there had been no hint of deviation whatsoever, he had forgotten her. She seemed to have gotten on with her life, and according to the records, she had done it happily despite being cut off from the full array of shared experience that the visor enabled.
He checked her work records. They were exemplary. So too were her husband’s. He wore a visor, but had that same low level of social activity as his wife. Both had voted for Cornwall during the last election. Both were registered to vote for him again. That meant nothing. The current polls showed almost ninety-nine percent of Tower-One had already pre-registered their vote for Cornwall to be Chancellor.
Both victims had a low criminal probability. Ely knew that couldn’t be correct, so he checked it again. But no, hers was at three percent, her husband at five percent. They should have had one of the highest in the Tower.
He glanced down, then away again quickly. He found it hard to look at the bodies. He’d seen corpses before. In the event of a death, he and the nurses received the same alert. But he’d never seen them like this. He looked back at the wounds. The blood hadn’t spread far, just pooled around their necks. Was that normal? He tried to remember his training, five years before.
He’d followed Arthur for a few days, learning how to use the display, how to monitor the other-net, and what to do if he found evidence of sedition. Then there had been a few hours on how to apprehend a felon. That had mostly consisted of the older man repeatedly throwing Ely halfway across an empty corridor. Most of the time had been spent learning how to complete the paperwork. Ely didn’t think there had been any discussion of what to do if there was a murder. The only words of advice he remembered that even approached relevance were ‘be thorough’.
He checked that his camera was recording. It was and had been since he’d entered the room. He tracked slowly up and down the bodies, checking that he had captured every inch of the pod. Then he turned around, recording the rest of the room. Nothing appeared immediately amiss, but the system would analyse everything he recorded. It was far more reliable than his eyes and would identify anything he overlooked. He turned back to the bodies. There would have to be an official report.
“The victims are Mr Alphonse Greene and Mrs Finnya Greene,” he said, keeping his voice low and solemn, “Their throats have been cut. By a sharp blade. Probably pressed down against their throats.”
Was that right? He leaned over the pod. Yes. There wasn’t much room. The sides of the pod were too high for anyone to reach in and slash. How much strength would that have required? The blade had sunk to the bone, nearly decapitating the victims. It was the wrong question, he realised. The important one was why hadn’t the killer just stabbed his two victims? He thought he had an answer.
“The method used was probably chosen due to the type and shape of the weapon,” he said. And that seemed right. It didn’t help him identify what that weapon had been, though.
“Both murders had to be committed quickly and in quick succession,” he added. Once the pod lid was opened, the machine was turned off. At most, it took only a minute for someone to wake, but surely no one could sleep whilst their spouse was being murdered next to them. “The killer acted quickly,” he repeated.
He turned to look at the pictures on the wall. The family seemed genuinely happy, genuinely close. That was unusual. He turned back to the pod, but not to the bodies. The couple’s two wristboards, and Alphonse Greene’s visor, were still in the slot on the pod’s side. Why had there been no alarm? Whilst awake, each citizen’s position, health, and activity were monitored through the wristboard. Whilst they slept it was monitored by the pod itself. The moment that their vital signs dropped an alarm should have been sounded.
An alarm should have sounded when the door was opened, for surely it must have done when the killer came in to the room. The pods could be opened during the night, but only from the inside. In which case the worker’s supervisor would be alerted, and their productivity monitored during their next shift. The only way to open it from the outside was to use the emergency release that he had just used. In that case Control would be alerted, and the pod would be unusable until the whole unit had been reset.
He turned slowly, looking around the room. Alerts should have been sent when the food-bar was unused, when they failed to print off their clothes for the day, or use their three minutes each of hot water.
“Control.” The word caught in the back of his throat. He took a breath and spoke again. “Control, can you confirm whether there were any alarms sounded for Unit 6-4-17 last shift?”
“I don’t remember any alerts last shift, except for that brawl.”
“Can you check?”
“Fine… No. No alerts for that unit, but you would have received them if there were.”
He’d known that, but Ely had hoped that somehow the fault lay in his own wristboard.
“Why?” Vauxhall asked, “What’s the problem?”
Ely took another breath.
“Mr and Mrs Greene are dead.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “There’s nothing registering on my system.”
“This wasn’t natural causes,” Ely interrupted. “This was murder.”
There was a sharp intake of breath followed by a moment’s long silence.
“Murder?” Vauxhall asked.
“No question. Haven’t you got the feed from the camera in the room?”
“I’ve got the feed, but the image is blank,” she said.
Ely remembered that he’d found the same thing when he was outside, but he’d been distracted by Mr Durham.
“I’m trying to rotate the camera,” Vauxhall said, “but the image is still blank. Is the lens covered?”
“Just look at the image from my visor.” He waited. “Vox? Can you see them?”
“I do,” she said, her voice stilted. “Alright, what do you want me to do?”
That was a good question, and one Ely wished he could have asked her. He couldn’t, not when everything he said and did was going to be scrutinised by Chancellor Stirling for the slimmest reason to dismiss him.
“We need to work out when this happened. No alerts were sent, but the pod was still opened.” He glanced at the two doors to the unit. “Someone had to come in here. Find out when.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Just get started,” he replied, evading the question.