The Happier Dead (4 page)

With the tension in the room dissipated, the remainder of the talk flowed quickly. Days within the spa passed on the double – a single day to night cycle was twelve hours. Oates glanced out the window at the moon, which had risen appreciably. They were not to talk to any of the students. They were, as far as possible, to avoid looking at any of the students in a way inconsistent with their roles as police officers at the freeze date. This was particularly important for any student they might recognise as a celebrity or politician who had come to prominence after the freeze date.

If there was a need to interview any student, they would first consult with Charles or ‘el grande generale’ Miranda (whose identity Charles confirmed by favouring her with an elaborate bow), and a member of the college staff would be present. They could not use earpieces or any other radio device to communicate with anyone outside St Margaret’s, as the dome insulated the interior from all external signals. They were to make no reference to the surrounding external geography of the Great Spa, or the winter season.

“Of course, all these rules only apply to any conversation you have in an open space within St Margaret’s, or a conversation you have in front of a student. If you’re chatting amongst yourselves then there’s no issue.”

W
HEN
O
ATES HAD
first seen Miranda, he felt the vague uncanniness which was his primary reaction to the new-young. He had not come across them very often, since the kind of people able to afford the Treatment were not the sort with whom he and Lori regularly mixed, or indeed the sort who had much to do with the police. His main experience of them had been a brief secondment with the Royal Protection Squad as a young detective, when he would see them come and go – Arab princes and foreign diplomats flanked by bodyguards.

Most chose to be returned to a state somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, but Miranda had taken this to the extreme; the girl before Oates was biologically no more than eighteen or nineteen years old. She had a thin waist, shiny hair, brow untouched by lines of grief, concern or concentration. She looked like a work experience student, somebody’s niece shadowing for the day in the office. Her attractive presence filled him with the need to make conversation, to defuse any lingering sexual tension by asking her how her exams were going, or what she was doing for the summer, something to fix them both in the formal attitude of receptive youth and disinterested age. Yet in her manner there was all the assurance of earned authority.

She had sat at the back of the room during Charles’s little piece, and several times, whilst the portly man sweated and worked the bellows of his charm, Oates had noticed him glance nervously over the heads of his audience, looking for the silent approbation behind them.

When the talk was done Miranda walked to the front of the room and waited for the men to fall silent. It was impossible to deny the certainty of her expectation. Six rowdy constables who had been singing and joking moments before went quiet, and when she spoke she did so in a voice so low that the men strained forwards in their chairs to hear it. She thanked them for their attention and for the cooperation she was certain would be forthcoming, and reiterated that all the facilities of St Margaret’s were at their disposal. Oates half expected her to finish with a clipped ‘dismissed’, but when she was done speaking she simply sat back down in the chair behind the desk, and it was Charles who came forward to guide them to the room where the murder had taken place.

“Not you, Detective Chief Inspector Oates,” this slip of a girl said, raising her voice over the rustle of rising bodies, “I would be grateful if you could remain behind.”

The command was so peremptory that had it been made by a man, Oates would have walked right past him. Issuing forth from that girlish physique however, he simply obeyed. As they filed out, he saw some of his more junior colleagues smile and nudge one another. Bhupinder lingered by the door and looked back at him, though whether he was being supportive, or simply hoping to be included in what he imagined to be the grown-ups’ conversation, Oates could not have said. He guided Bhupinder towards the door with a nod, and Charles held it open. Oates and Miranda were left alone in the schoolroom. From outside could be heard shouting, and the explosion of youthful laughter, as one person chased breathlessly after another through the shadowy stone cloisters.

“I
WANTED TO
apologise for the manner of your greeting.”

“No harm done.”

“We will get to the bottom of the confusion, but you came in by the service entrance rather than the front, and it appears the guards in the gatehouse saw your car and understood you were already period appropriate.”

Oates thought of his rusted Ford; it had been almost fifteen years since he had bought it, second hand. The thought made him smile. Clearly for all the historical accuracy and scientific sophistication of the spa, they were unprepared for the intrusion of the genuinely broken-down and old-fashioned. The Met had given Oates a robocar, but it was forever in the shop, and he didn’t much mind. As far as he was concerned, a car should have a steering wheel, and he hated sitting in the front seat with his hands in his lap whilst a computer did the driving.

“Do you have any questions for me in private?” she said.

“About the case? There are some things I need to see to before we begin speaking to witnesses.”

“About St Margaret’s.”

During Charles’s talk, Oates had been examining the desk at which he sat. It had the look of good old oak, impregnated with youth and boredom, scented with dust. Someone had scratched their name with the tip of a compass into the wood. Had it been a student, or one of the designers of the Great Spa straining for authenticity? It occurred to him that the figures he had seen carved into the banister posts of the stairs were not old headmasters at all. There were no old headmasters of St Margaret’s. On an impulse, he asked her: “You could build anything in here, right?”

“How do you mean, anything?”

“I mean you could build, I don’t know, somewhere far away. The Cayman Islands. Or ancient Greece if you wanted. Why this?”

“When we began our market research, we asked people to remember the place where they had been happiest. And we quickly discovered that their references were more specific in time than in place. Generally they remembered the point in their school days where they enjoyed the maximum freedom with the least responsibility as their best, often coinciding with their first romantic and sexual experiences. There was also a more general nostalgia for the period immediately prior to the swift technological advances of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We sought to evoke a generic space that would appeal to the majority of our market. Over seventy per cent of the 5,000 people to whom the government granted Treatment licences in the last year were of American or western European origin, between the ages of seventy-five and eighty, with an education completed to secondary school level or above. There were too many variations in educational background to produce a completely tailored experience. We can’t take everyone back to their own schooldays. So we sought to create an archetype of the English schooling system as it existed between 1970 and 1980.”

“My school wasn’t anything like this.”

“Yes it was.”

“I haven’t seen anyone pregnant. Nothing’s on fire.”

Miranda smiled politely. He had the feeling she was attending him with a fraction of her intelligence, whilst the remainder devoted itself to some purpose beyond his understanding. It was a feeling which put his back up.

“Your school may not have been exactly like this one, but your experience of that school would correspond with the experience you would have here, and over the duration of your stay you would begin to align your personal history more closely with your current experience. People share a cultural memory, and a bias towards the idea of a pre-technological ‘golden age’. St Margaret’s is a composite, an archetype, designed to invoke that cultural memory to supplant and replace the personal.”

“I should be getting on.”

“I thought if you could understand a little of what we are doing here, it might facilitate your investigations.”

“It would facilitate my investigations if I could see the crime scene.”

Miranda smiled crookedly. “You think this is a leisure facility for the idle rich?”

This was pretty much exactly what Oates understood of the Great Spa, though he might have expressed it in less polite terms. The implied subjectivity put him on his guard; he had no intention of being rude to this woman, or giving her or her paymasters (or for that matter his own) any cause for complaint. He stayed silent.

“Are you familiar with the myth of Tithonus?” she said.

“Yes.”

He enjoyed the effect of this remark. In addition to the natural pleasure which anyone might feel at confounding a low expectation, he could see that Miranda was irritated with herself at having been seen to underestimate him.

“And what do you remember of it?” she said, in a schoolmasterly tone.

“Eos was the greek goddess of the dawn. She wanted Tithonus, a mortal man, for her lover. She asked the gods to grant him eternal life, and they did. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth, and he grew older and older with her forever, until he went weak and senile and she locked him away in a room to wait for the end of time.”

“Very good. I asked your Superintendent for an intelligent policeman. Some people would say that’s an oxymoron, but I see he has been as good as his word.”

She smiled at him again, apparently thinking he would be flattered by the assertion that he was less of an idiot than the calling to which he had given his adult life implied. He understood then the extraordinary usefulness of Charles to this institution. How would his men be likely to behave if it had been Miranda who had given them their welcome?

Despite his satisfaction, Oates felt a fraud. Miranda had chosen the one academic area of which he had a passing knowledge. When he was a kid he had loved classical myths the way some kids loved space or dinosaurs, and the stories and names had stayed with him long after the rest of his limited education had emigrated from his memory. He wanted to make this clear to Miranda, in case she later discovered he had left school at seventeen and thought he had intentionally concealed it, but she continued before he could think of some way of disclosing it without sounding chippy.

“The whole of human culture has been driven by the desire to deny the fact of death. At this very moment, the world is polarised between two great forces. One the one hand, we have consumerism, and on the other religion. Consumerism allows us to deny death by purchasing a series of products endlessly associated with youth and health. Religion might appear to be the antidote, but serves the exact same purpose, telling us that death is not really death but a doorway to more life. All this death denial has fostered the most cruel abuses in human history, because when you deny the fact of death, you can avoid a proper consideration of the taking of life. We at Nottingham Biosciences have now cured death, or at least ageing. But we’ve found there’s a certain... Tithonus Effect. Only the ageing takes place on the inside.” She tapped her skull for emphasis, with a perfectly manicured finger.

The discussion had somehow turned into a lecture. Consciously or not, Miranda had come to stand behind the lectern, and her diction had taken on the pleased, emphatic quality of the academic gambolling in her own field. He was the sole pupil, held back in class on a sunny afternoon. He had never been particularly well-behaved at school, and it was amazing how the positioning recalled in him, for all his conciliatory intentions, a childish desire to rebel.

“I always knew it must be very stressful to be immortal and rich, but I never knew it was boring too. I suppose I should count myself lucky.”

“What we are trying to do here is no mere exercise in leisure. This is a treatment centre for the last untreatable illness. This is a hospital for those for whom the world holds nothing new. If we can succeed here, we will truly have conquered death, and fulfilled the dearest dream of man.”

“And who’s the winner if you manage it?”

“Who benefited from the development of vaccines, or antibiotics, or radiotherapy? Humanity is the beneficiary of scientific advancement. Think of the effect on the environment, if people no longer felt the compulsion to reproduce to ensure the continuance of their genes. Think of the peace we might achieve, with no more need for God.”

It was an answer forged in the press conference, grand words purged of all controversy. Pare down the truth of something to a sentiment so lofty, it was impossible to disagree with it. He was on the point of arguing with her, when his interrupted sleep and irritation drove him back into the arms of sarcasm.

“Are you a fan of The Beatles?”

“Why?”

“It sounds a lot like one of John Lennon’s songs. Imagine.”

She smiled tightly. “Imagine indeed. What we have here is a unique opportunity. An amazingly high percentage of people occupying the top positions in engineering, finance, politics and the creative industries come to us, the finest minds not only of our own generation, but of the one before. If we’re going to understand what it is to be youthful in the soul, it will be through this place. The physical environment, the psychic atmosphere of the school is important because of the state of mind it engenders in the guests. In order to make them feel young, we remove from them their responsibilities. All these managing directors and MPs and movie stars, no one can ask them to make a single decision for a blissful four weeks. And our clients study for the duration of their stay here, both for the accuracy of experience, and for the rejuvenating effects of new knowledge. And we study them. Do you see how important it is to preserve the atmosphere?”

“One of those clients has been murdered. I’m sorry if that interferes with the atmosphere, but my job is to find out who did it.”