Ely turned back to look at the camera situated above the door. For reasons of privacy there was only one in each unit. Though it was mounted on a moveable bracket, remotely operated by the Controller, it usually pointed straight ahead. This one was turned to face the wall.
Ely walked over to it, reached up and carefully moved it to face back into the room. The bracket was broken.
“That has to be deliberate,” he murmured.
“Ely, come in,” Vauxhall said.
“Vox, have you found out when the door opened?”
“Yes. Three a.m. shift-time.”
“And which door? Night-side or day-side?”
“Night-side. The day-side door didn’t open between the time the previous occupants left the shift before, and when Simon and Beatrice Greene left for school a few hours ago.”
“Well, now we’re getting somewhere. So, who came in?”
“No one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I say. No one came in. I’ve got no one registered moving around within fifty yards of the unit at that time.”
“Well, did the door open at any other time?”
“No, just at three a.m.”
Everyone wore a wristboard. Everyone. It was the only way of accessing the Tower’s server, and through it the elevators, the printers, the food-bars, the workstations in the Assemblies, and the lesson materials in the classroom. Wherever a person went, their wristboard went, and that meant a citizen’s movements were always tracked. There were no exceptions.
“Check again,” Ely said. “The killer had to open the door to get into the room. The door opened at three a.m. So that had to be the killer.” Just in time he stopped himself from turning that last sentence into a question. He did not want Chancellor Stirling thinking he was uncertain.
“I’ve checked and rechecked,” Vauxhall said. “The door opened, then closed. A few minutes later it opened and closed again. But no one came in.”
“Well, obviously someone—”
“I mean we’ve no data,” she interrupted.
“How long, exactly, between the door closing and then opening again.”
“Three minutes forty seconds.”
“I see,” Ely said. He looked between the door and the pods.
“Is there anything else?” Vauxhall cut in on his thoughts.
“Yes,” he said, as he opened the door to the unit and stepped outside. “Start timing.” He walked back inside and mimed rotating the pods. Then he mimed forcing the lid open. He didn’t mime the next part, but imagined leaning over and forcing a blade down with all his strength, then ripping it up and down again onto the throat of the second victim. Then he mimed closing the pod, rotating it and walked back over to the door.
“How long was that?” he asked.
“Two minutes fifty-eight seconds,” Vauxhall replied.
So it was possible. Ely felt some relief at that.
“And you say you’ve got no record of anyone entering the room?” he asked.
“No.”
He wondered whether it was worth checking the worker’s visor feeds from the previous evening. He decided it wasn’t, not yet. Someone who was being that meticulous in their preparations would have thought to take the visor off.
“And no one in the corridor outside?” he asked.
“I told you—”
“And no alarms went off either?” he interrupted.
“No, Ely, I—”
“Well,” he said, interrupting her again, “it seems clear enough. The killer has a way of disconnecting the alarms, and some way of stopping the system tracking their movement.” The idea was unnerving. “But I bet they can’t make themselves invisible. Check the cameras in the hallway outside. One of them must have caught the killer.”
“Fine.” She clicked off.
He began to track the camera along the floor and walls. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but it would look more decisive than just staring at the bodies. He needed time to think. There were so many questions, so many possibilities. In his experience, crimes were easily solved. They only ever required checking the system to log a citizen’s position, and then checking the cameras to confirm the evidence against them. The implication of their being no record and no alarms sounded was so far beyond his experience that he found the notion terrifying.
With nothing else upon which to draw inspiration, he turned his mind to the old movies he loved so much. Fourteen of them dealt with murders, all of resistance fighters in The War. In those, the killers were always depicted as having some form of psychological defect. That couldn’t be the case here. Psychosis had been bred out of the population. Those who exhibited deviation in later life were sent for rehabilitation. Of course, it was Ely’s responsibility to spot those deviations. Clearly, he had failed.
Two bodies. Two victims, he had to remind himself. Except when he looked at them he saw the loss of fourteen shifts per week, fifty-two weeks per year. It would take nine months and seventeen years before they could be replaced.
The number ‘90,764 hours’ came up on his display. He hadn’t realised he’d been talking out loud. Add to that the two felons on the way to the hospital and the one on her way to the prison, and that worked out at over a quarter of a million hours lost to Tower-One in just one night. And that was before taking into account the extra resources that replacing personnel demanded. That gave him an idea.
“Vox?”
“Yes, Constable?”
“Were there any transports from the other Towers last night?” he asked.
“The one you ordered to take those workers to the hospital has just left. Before that there was one that collected food to be shipped to the launch site. That was… thirty hours ago.”
“Right. But you’ve got the airlock feed? Could anyone have left the Tower unnoticed?”
“The nurses were there during transfer.” Since the Re-Organisation, and since they were rarely busy, the nurses were responsible for the transfers of people and materials to and from Tower-One. “They would have noticed. Why?”
“I’m just reducing the number of possible suspects,” Ely said. The killer had to be someone from Tower-One. That was a start.
Next, he decided to eliminate the obvious. He brought up the records for the two children. Both were in class, both were busy transcribing notes on how to repair hydroponics systems. He opened their activity logs. The daughter, Beatrice, had woken first. She’d showered, printed her clothes for the day, and ordered breakfast from the food-bar. She’d selected the purple flavour, he idly noted. She’d then waited whilst her brother showered, dressed and ate. Together they’d gone to queue for the elevator to take them up to the classrooms. Again, he noted how close they were. It was unusual, but the more he learned about the Greenes the more unusual they seemed.
He checked the records for the pods. Both children had slept through the entire night. Considering their current activity, he decided that they weren’t involved in the crime.
He went back to check the records from the previous evening. The children had met their parents in Lounge-Three, what was now called The King’s Arms. It was a popular place for families, partly because it kept them away from the increasingly resentful gaze of those workers who were single. They had eaten, talked – and again Ely wished that the microphones were still on – then gone onto Recreation. The children had completed four and a half hours, then gone to loiter in one of the corridors with some other children. The parents had completed five hours before going to join them. The family had returned to Lounge-Three, talked for another hour, and then gone to queue up, twenty minutes early, for Unit 6-4-17. And as they waited, they kept on talking. Ely wondered what they had talked about.
It wasn’t the children. Nor had the parents had any contact with anyone else the previous evening that might have precipitated such a violent end. He brought up the messages that the parents had received over the past week. He was surprised by how few there were. They were mostly the usual newsfeed articles and political broadcasts that filled Ely’s own inbox each shift. By law each candidate, even in a race with such a foregone conclusion as this one, had to communicate directly with the electorate. The same law required that each citizen read or watch each message. Judging by the length of time the message was open, and how long it took to scroll down the page, the Greenes actually had read them, or diligently pretended to.