The Happier Dead (21 page)

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“If you’re interested you should come along some time. We’re open to all, not just the new-young. The Treatment is a message to us to try and build His paradise here on earth. Get a head start on the New Jerusalem. It’s Him saying, I’ll be here soon, I’m on my way, get out the bunting and the paper cups!”

“How do you do that?”

“Small things. Some charity work, some trips to schools. Inviting promising young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to come and work here, and other companies like it in the City. I’m sure you make your own contribution to building a better London.”

“I wanted to ask you a few more questions about what you heard on the night of the murder.”

“Oh yes?”

Oates flipped his notepad, and waited with pen poised.

“I did try to tell your colleague everything.”

“I know that, Mr Rajaram.”

“Chris, please. I’m happy to be a witness you know. In court or anything. Diary permitting, obviously.”

“Thank you.”

“So, do you just want me to tell you again, or what?”

“Tell me again.”

“Okay. As I told your colleague, I went to dinner in halls, and I came back to my room around 9:30.”

“9:30pm Spa time?”

“Yes.”

“Was that your usual routine?”

“I wouldn’t say I had a usual routine. I’d only arrived at St Margaret’s about a week before.”

“Was it your first time?”

“Yes.”

“You were in the other centre for the first fortnight?”

“Yes.”

“Did you bring Mrs Rajaram with you?”

“No.”

“Why? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Not at all. She wanted to spend some time with the children.”

“So you came back to your room alone?”

“All alone.”

“What did you do?”

“Read a book.”

“What book?”

“Uh… Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
. Does it matter?”

“For homework?”

“No.”

“For pleasure?”

“Yes.”

“And what time did you call Hector?”

“I’m sorry, who is Hector?”

“Hector is the male prostitute you paid to steal documents from Prudence Egwu’s house shortly after he was found murdered.”

Chris bounced on his chair. Oates folded his notebook shut.

“I’ll be honest with you, Mr Rajaram. Chris. I don’t think you killed Prudence Egwu. I think that you might know why someone would want him dead. I think that the touchcard records will show you exiting St Margaret’s to make a phonecall very shortly after the discovery of Prudence Egwu’s body. I think that you have probably been very careful in your communications with Hector to date, doing everything in conversation via an intermediary with nothing written down or recorded, but this one time you will have been aware of the opportunity and the need to move fast, and I would guess that overcame your natural caution. I’ve got Hector’s phone in my pocket with the call log. As I said, there’s a lot of guesses in there. If they’re wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about. But if they’re right then the sooner you tell me the whole story, the sooner I can be out of your office.”

“I’m afraid I can’t say anything further without a lawyer.”

“You can do that. I can’t formally interview you without your lawyer if you want one. But what I can do is arrest you. And I can do it now, and I can call up a few other officers in uniform from downstairs, just to make sure we all get safely to the patrol car.”

Oates sat back, and allowed the image of Mr Rajaram being escorted in handcuffs past the smart receptionists and the kind of lawyers who won’t settle for anything less than full reliance to sink in.

“It’s amazing how hot the press are on this Avalon murder. Still, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? I think they’d be very interested to hear that a director of a rival company was helping us with our inquiries.”

Chris opened his mouth to speak, a look of outrage gathering momentum in his brows. Oates knew exactly what was coming. There was a class of British men and women to whom the police force was a dog chained in the yard, trained to bark at strangers only. They were the same people who were always amazed when they were arrested for being caught with cocaine, who were offended when they got towed for parking on double yellows. Question whether they thought the law should apply to everyone the same, and they would look at you like an idiot for asking. Apply the law to them, and they were amazed.

Then Chris closed his mouth again, and the rage vanished. He smiled at Oates, and stood up. There was a bowl of fruit on the desk, and he picked from it three oranges. He stayed standing behind his desk, and began to juggle them.

“Do you know where I learned to do this? On a company bonding weekend Human Resources sent me on. Circus skills. Me and the rest of the board, and some of the senior execs. Total waste of money, but now I know how to juggle.”

“I’m not interested in the theft of some documents, Mr Rajaram.”

“Chris.”

“You’re not even under caution. I’m interested in who killed Prudence Egwu. Just tell me what you know and I’ll be gone.”

“Alright. I don’t know who killed him. And I don’t know why anyone would want him dead. Look, we’ve had Hector working for us for some time, but I only saw Prudence Egwu at St Margaret’s by accident. When I saw him I arranged for one of my employees to contact Hector and to tell him to go ahead, that the house would be empty for at least a month. And it would have been fine, only I came back from afternoon classes to find that someone had killed poor Prudence, and there were police all over the spa. I knew they would search his house eventually, and would take things as evidence. There might never be another chance to get the data. So I called up Hector myself, and told him it had to be now. The rest of it, everything I put in my statement, it’s all true. I saw that guy going into his room at about 3am, and I heard a scuffle. I have trouble sleeping you see–”

“We understand that Prudence Egwu was reconstructing his brother’s research.”

Chris became guarded once again. He was waiting to discover how much Oates knew.

“Specifically, his research into the Tithonus Effect.”

“You’re aware of it? Well, it’s bad. And it’s becoming more pronounced. The human soul has its own trajectory you see, independent from the body, and independent from the faculties of intellect. The Treatment can restore and preserve your brain function at the level of a healthy twenty-year-old, but it can’t re-invigorate the soul. When you cease to be excited by and take pleasure in life, you begin to have to do more extreme things to achieve stimulation. Also your capacity for empathy diminishes. We have seen some extremely bad cases here from clients who have received the Treatment from Nottingham, some of them bordering on psychopathy. When you consider the positions of power generally occupied by the new-young, you can see the danger.”

“And Capability was working on a cure?”

“Capability Egwu suffered from this very badly. As a key developer of the Treatment he was one of the first to experience it, and also consequently one of the oldest men alive. I knew him very well, Inspector. He was a member of our church. He was an extremely active philanthropist, and he contributed a great deal to the lives of ordinary Londoners. But he also suffered from the depression which often seems the dark companion of genius. The Tithonus Effect exacerbated that depression and made him quite unstable. There were others in the church closer to Capability than I was, and I came to understand from them that Capability was working on a cure for the Tithonus Effect. From what we can tell he was very close to the completion of his research when he disappeared.”

“And you wanted that research for yourself?”

“Not for myself, exactly.”

“But you paid Hector to steal it.”

“We became aware that Prudence was making progress into his brother’s disappearance. We made him a very fair offer for anything he could recover of Capability’s work, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

“And you don’t like hearing no. Hector says he sent you a sample of what he stole from Prudence Egwu. A couple of pages from one of the files.”

“That is correct.”

“What was in them?”

“It was a joke. A prank of some sort.”

“So tell me the joke.”

“It was a series of articles about something called Sudden Accent Syndrome. When people get a bump on the head, and wake up speaking with an Australian accent. Or they get hit by a car and then they only speak French, or German or something.”

“Can I see these articles?”

By way of answer, Chris rose from his desk and walked over to a large metallic chest of drawers in the corner of the room. His quick fingers danced the code, and he pulled out a couple of pieces of paper.

“You thought it was a joke, but you didn’t throw them away.”

Chris shrugged. He scooped a stapler off the corner of his desk with a flourish, and neatly clicked the corner of the pages together, before setting them on the desk in front of Oates. His movements still held a residue of the Great Spa, a kind of physical exuberance which was oddly incongruous with his suit and the office setting.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Oates asked.

“Like what?”

“Earlier today I killed a boy. He had a gun and I shot him. The girl he was with knew I’d been to see Hector. Do you know anything about that?”

“No, Inspector. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that.”

“He knew he was going to die. The boy. I found a card in his pocket, dated today, saying he was going to die.” Oates hadn’t meant to say anything further. Vocalising what he had seen on the card, it sounded unreal. He was acutely aware that if he had heard someone else saying it, he would think they had cracked. Chris, however, merely nodded and looked thoughtful.

“Well, if something like that happened to me, I would assume it was a message. Have you taken life before? Do you feel guilty?”

He did feel guilty, horribly guilty, and tired. Not just for the boy in the shopping mall, but for a lifetime of violence. He had killed six men that he knew of, maybe more he didn’t, tracers fired in the night that might have punctured some frightened stranger on the other side of the shifting line. At the time each one had seemed, not justified exactly, but normal. In the course of something he should be doing. The thing was, though, that over time his views of what was normal, of what was right had changed, but the deaths had stayed the same. The dead never changed, they just hung around at the edge of your conscience, waiting for a gap to open up so they could come in and trash the place. Oates stood up to leave, and Chris came around the desk to shake his hand.

As their flesh touched, Oates felt the urge to crush his fingers, to slam his face into the desk, and there was another problem. His taste for violence hadn’t gone away, it was his capacity to deal with the after effects that had worn out. He was like an alcoholic with a damaged liver. All of these thoughts coalesced around the man opposite as their hands clasped.

“Something I’ve always wondered,” Oates said, not letting go of his hand. “How do you act like you do, if you really believe in God and the Bible and all that stuff?”

“What do you mean?”

“Stealing. Lying. Just making money, even.”

“This may be difficult for you to believe, Inspector, but I have devoted a great deal of thought to that very question. Jesus is no fan of monopolies. It does us no good. We would have taken this technology, and we would have opened up the market. Lowered prices, democratised the process, maybe even brought the Treatment within reach of the average consumer. And my conscience tells me that is something God would approve of.”

Somewhere at the edge of perception, there was a scent that made Oates’s soft palate tense up. He felt the pressure of the other man’s proximity, and remembered Casey telling him the new-young smelt different.

“So you would have given it away for free?”

“No, not for free. But cheaper than our rivals.”

The two men gazed at one another. Chris’s eyes were open and honest, and he did not look away.

Oates had encountered the same guileless sincerity in professional criminals. When he had first joined the police, he had conducted himself under a false premise; that other human beings are basically similar to you. He thought of criminals as people who had buried the guilt which their crimes would have inspired in Oates had he committed them. If something was buried, it could be dug up, and he had considered that process of excavation to be part of the job.

Later, he had to accept that some people were simply incapable of recognising their own guilt. It had driven him mad, as a young officer. He had longed for the moment of catharsis, when the impact of remorse finally broke through upon the conscience of the perpetrator. He carried the suffering of the victims of the crimes he investigated inside himself, and he wanted to pass the knowledge of that suffering on to the criminals. But some of them refused to accept it, so slowly it built up inside him, silting up the channels of his faith in man.

Chris was the same. The truth of his nature sat between them like a bill in a restaurant, and if he wasn’t going to pick it up, Oates would have to. He could never force Chris to see himself as he really was. You could drag him by his hair and his chin to the mirror, and he would see only a victim of brutality. It was Oates’s consciousness of that sense of victimhood thirsting for justification which helped him to rein in the anger that had threatened to overwhelm him. He let go of Chris’s hand.

“You’ll be hearing from us about the break-in,” he said, turning aside to pick up his raincoat.

“I understand. ‘As you sow, so shall ye reap.’ Listen, Inspector, I don’t know your first name.”

“Oates is fine.”

“Well, Oates, would you do something for me?”

He went to rummage in one of the drawers of his desk. Oates waited in front of his chair, his coat folded over his arm. Chris thrust something into his hand.

“Take this. I’ll pray for you.”

It was a leaflet for The Church of the Present Resurrection.
Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die – John 11:26.
It was conceived as a genuine act of charity, and in that assumption it became an act of violence. Chris Rajaram wielded his sincerity like a bludgeon.