The Happier Dead (29 page)

With MRT, that was no longer true. A rational act of evil could be separated completely from its mental consequences. With this idea of morality as a gentleman’s agreement between the sane, he could not fault Miranda’s logic; with MRT you could be reincarnated without sin.

As for her offer, all the outcomes would be aligned with their desserts. The guilty man would be punished, although only others would know his true guilt, and even they would lose the knowledge as they passed through MRT. Oates would have to live with the abandonment of his family only as long as he remembered it, and after that he would be free and his family would be rich. He remembered the feeling he had had in the carpark after his interview with Morrison, that to be really safe you had to cut away the people you loved. He heard Lori’s voice in his mind asking him,
what good has all your remembering done? When someone’s gone, they’re gone, and you can’t do yourself or them any good.
To be free of Anna, that was something. To be free of Anna, and all of the pain he had stored up for himself by his choices – his terror for his children, his love for his wife. All the violence he had done, all the people he had killed would wash away. He could let himself go, once and for all.

No. Oates could not fault Miranda’s logic, not with the tools of his own philosophy. He simply knew it was wrong. It was an article of faith. For almost the first time in his adult life, Oates thought back to the chapel he had attended with his father as a child.

“Superintendent John Yates, Miranda, Charles Golden, I am arresting each of you on suspicion of perverting the course of justice and corruption in public office. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something you later rely on in court.”

John laughed at him, and sat down on the window ledge. Oates felt the absence of the gun at his thigh, the armour sitting too light on his leg. Miranda wasn’t done with him.

“You haven’t asked the most important question, Detective Chief Inspector.”

“And what’s that?”

“You haven’t asked – why you?”

“You had to get someone.”

“But there were a dozen men of your rank and experience available. Why you?”

Oates glanced over at John, and saw that his eyes were fixed on the floor. The fact that his superior was unwilling to meet his eye filled him with a profound unease, almost a premonition.

“Maybe you thought I was dumb enough or drunk enough that you could run rings round me.”

Miranda shook her head. Charles was grinning.

“What then? Come on then. What?”

“We knew this moment might come,” Miranda said. “We discussed with John the personnel files of the men in his command. We were looking for someone whose life had become unbearable to them. We needed someone in pain. Someone who would understand the true significance of forgetting.”

“Dead daughter? Drink problem? Starting to crack?” Charles said. “That’s our man!’”

John still couldn’t look him in the eye. “I’m sorry, Rob. I really thought… I know how much it hurt, when Anna passed on. I really thought that maybe it would help you.”

As they stood facing one another the sky outside the window flickered, and went out. At first, Oates thought that he had fainted, that the moment had proved too much for his damaged mind to take, and he had simply blacked out. Then Charles said, “oh!”, and the faint little cry provided him with some affirmation that the experience was shared.

Oates clung to that certainty. The room was plunged into absolute darkness. There was a scream from the courtyard, and the sound became strangely twisted as if it came from the bottom of a great chasm. None of them spoke, but Oates heard the sound of movement. He tried to move towards it, but it took all his courage to inch forward. The absence of light was so complete that the atmosphere around them seemed to have a physical weight. The external world was compressed to nothing more than the millimetres of air flowing around the hairs on his skin. Oates was blinking rapidly, and with each blink the continuing fact of his blindness instilled a mounting sense of panic.

This state of affairs lasted for perhaps thirty seconds, after which he became aware of a cold ring of dawn mounting from the ground visible through the window.

Slowly, rising from the earth, up the walls and along the great dome of the roof, the concentric circles of emergency lights began to wink on one set at a time. Dimly, first, but expanding rapidly, the light swelled to alleviate the claustrophobia. The relief however lasted only as long as it took Oates’s eyes to become accustomed to the new light. In place of the sunshine of a moment before, a halogen glare now bathed the room. He walked over to the window, threw the old lead casement back, and gazed out at the sky.

Without the visual baffle of the hologram on the dome’s interior, the sides were suddenly much nearer than he had imagined. Not only the sky had gone, but whole chunks of buildings which he had assumed were real, along with vistas of trees and distant spires and the hazy depths with their implied freedoms. In place of that pastoral vision rose the gunmetal walls of the dome itself. What remained of Avalon was almost more changed than that which had simply vanished. The warm sandstone of the older buildings, given a flesh-like softness by the summer sun, became suddenly grey and institutional in the cold new light. As that light now came from the entire circumference of the dome and from above, shadows were banished or cast in strange and conflicting multiples, and the river which had glittered moments before became a dead mineral vein in the earth. The starlings nesting in the eaves of the buildings rose as one from their roosts, and flew frantically in an escalating spiral around the walls.

“What the hell is going on?” John said.

Oates turned back to the room, and saw to his relief that even Charles looked shocked.

“I don’t know,” Charles said. “It has to be some kind of attack. The power supply hasn’t gone down, or we’d still be in the dark. Someone’s hacked into the weather programming.”

“How could that happen?” John asked.

“I don’t know! The Mortal Reformers, the perimeter fence is down in fifty places. If they could get a device through the outer shell of the building–”

There was a sound of screaming deep in the earth. The room shook, the burnished bronze lamp in the ceiling began to sway gently. Just as Oates had pictured Miranda that morning as a classical goddess sitting in this room, the associations echoed down to the present moment, and the scream made him think of the titan Atlas, shifting the world on his shoulders.

In the weird, flat light of the halogen rings, the calm strip of the river began to shake and churn. A couple who had been reclining in a punt at the beginning of the disaster clung to the edges of their craft as it rocked in the new turbulence. The sound from the earth reverberated from the metal walls, bouncing up and down the curved insides of the spa walls. It was not just the visual effect which had been disturbed, but whatever technology served to regulate the acoustics of the dome had also been corrupted. Rather than sounds being carried away into the open air, they collided weirdly within the hollow space, and, finding their escape blocked, returned to the ground. That was why the first scream in that initial moment of darkness had seemed so terrible. Charles’s eyes widened as he stared at the portion of the river visible from the headmaster’s study.

“The turbines… they’re turning the wrong way. They’ll flood the whole bloody school!”

“Where’s Miranda?” John said.

“She was just here…”

Oates knew who had made the noises in the darkness. Miranda had taken the opportunity to escape. She had slipped past them, and down the stairs. He strode over to the door, and looked down into the empty hall. There was no sign of her. Her disappearance made him irrationally afraid. Because she was not in his sight, he suddenly felt her everywhere. This was her world, and whilst she was invisible he was at her mercy.

The students had begun to exit their buildings, and to congregate in the middle of the grey courtyard, the late risers blinking sleep from their eyes. Oates could feel not fear, but indignance, fear’s precursor amongst a rich clientele. Indignance at a service paid for and not delivered. It was also outrage at the fact that they had made themselves ridiculous – Oates remembered the seductive effect of the sunshine and the cool water on his wrist.

“Right, you two, stay here.”

“I’m not in the business of taking orders from you, Inspector,” Charles said.

Oates strode back across the room, and punched Charles in the stomach. His fist sunk into the soft belly bulging over the trouser top, and caused the PR man to double over as the wind escaped him in a lunch-flavoured whoosh. As he bent coughing, Oates took his arm and wrenched it backwards. He unclipped the cuffs from his belt, and fastened one around Charles’s wrist. John looked at him, too shocked for the moment to react, and when Oates took his hand there was no resistance. The second after the tell-tale click, he wrenched it away, but by then it was too late. His fate and Charles’s were linked at the wrist.

“You can guard the suspect, sir.”

“Give me the keys, Detective Chief Inspector,” John said.

Oates turned his back on them, and made for the door.

“DCI Oates… Give me the fucking keys, you little prick,” John screamed, and lunged at him.

The Superintendent moved with a speed of which his physique gave no warning, and he would have taken Oates by surprise, had it not been for his tether. Charles was on his knees by the window, and the sudden yank of the metal handcuffs sent him sprawling on the floor. The torque popped something in the old policeman’s arm. Oates experienced an extraordinary moment of clarity as the enraged snarl of his superior’s face hurtled towards him, pulled up by a sudden pop.

It always makes a man look stupid, the second of incomprehension that precedes the recognition of pain, because the observer’s understanding has outrun that of the protagonist. Oates knew the moment he heard the sound that John’s shoulder was out, but it took a few seconds for John’s body to admit the disaster to his mind. It was that moment of superior understanding which freed Oates from any vestigal fear he might have felt in the usurpation of John’s authority. It gave him no pleasure, but here was absolute proof that he could know more about his boss than his boss knew about himself. John might be more clever, but in his moment of fear he had forgotten himself. Oates knew him more clearly. He knew him for a criminal.

When the screaming was under control, he relocated John’s shoulder. By this time Charles had recovered, and he helped to hold the Superintendent down. Oates had originally intended to lock the two of them in the headmaster’s lodge, but when he looked out of the window he could see that Charles’s warning about the flooding had not been idle. Water was pouring into the court, not just from the doors adjacent to the river, but from every direction, as if the toilets and the drains all over the artificial school were backing up. Charles indicated he had to get to the control room to try to reverse the damage, or failing that to evacuate the guests in the induction facility. Oates refused to give them the keys, but allowed the two of them to leave cuffed together to see what good they could do fighting the chaos engulfing the spa. He set out to find Miranda.

H
E SEARCHED THE
rooms in the headmaster’s lodge. She had left no trace. He was coming back downstairs to the hall when he noticed the water leaking in under the old oaken door. The door had a step up that was at least eight inches above the level of the courtyard. He was standing there when his earpiece began to chirp in his breast pocket. He slipped it into his ear. The voice whispered, “
Love of my life, love of my life.”
It was Lori calling. At first he was nonplussed; the dome should have blocked out the signal. Then he realised that the jamming of radio waves must have been controlled by the same mechanism as the accoustic baffle and the imagery. The shell of the egg was becoming permeable to every brand of external influence.

“Hello my love. Is everything alright?”

“Yes, I’m just calling so you won’t worry.”

“Have you found a place to park up? Are things alright out there? It’s madness in here, I can tell you.”

“Oh, no we’re inside now. Some nice men came and picked us up.”

“Which men?”

“Some of those men in blue overalls, the groundskeepers. They said they’d been sent.”

“Where are you now?”

“Is everything alright Rob?”

“Everything’s fine. I just want to come and get you now.”

“Only your voice sounds funny.”

“I’m a bit out of breath, that’s all. Where are you?”

“We’re in that big gatehouse. Isn’t it strange, with the echoes? And there’s water coming in everywhere. I think we were best off outside.”

“Are you all together?”

“Yes. Well, Harry’s upstairs. He needed the toilet.”

“Is there anyone with him?”

“Your friend Miranda said she’d go with him and show him the way. They’ll be back down in a sec.”

“Have you still got the gun my love? Only I need to know where it is at all times. It’s not supposed to be out of my holster.”

“Oh Rob, I’m sorry, I didn’t think. The groundskeepers took it off me when we came in. They said it wouldn’t be allowed inside. It’s in a locker at reception, and they said we could pick it up on the way out. Rob?”

“I’m here.”

“I made sure to stay and see they locked it away. I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”

“Alright love.”

“Is that okay?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. You stay put, I’ll come and get you.”

“Did you sort it out then?”

“What?”

“Rob! That bloke who murdered the financier.”

“Yeah, that’s all sorted.”

O
ATES STOOD FOR
a moment with his gloved hand pressed to his mouth. Miranda had taken Harry, and he himself had been the agent of his family’s danger. He shook his head, and tried to reassure himself. Whatever reason Miranda might have for bringing them within the spa, she could not really mean to harm Harry. She was ruthless and amoral, he knew that from her own account of Prudence Egwu’s murder, but she displayed those qualities in the context and on the scale of commerce. The heads of major companies didn’t hurt little boys. Wherever she had taken Harry, she would still be wearing her business suit.