Tomorrow’s World (12 page)

She so obviously believed what she was saying that I'd no difficulty believing her when she said it.

I was more certain than ever that Doug MacDougall hadn't killed himself because I couldn't imagine him hurting anyone, let alone his daughter, in this way.

Changing tack slightly, I said, “Your father was as easy to get along with as anyone I've ever met, but do you know if he had any—”

She clutched at the words before the last of them was out of my mouth. “Do you think someone might have…”

“It's just a routine question.” That wasn't quite true, and I felt bad about misleading her. If anyone deserved to know the truth about Doug MacDougall it was his daughter.

It would be easier to tell her more of the truth if Perfect Paula wasn't there, so I turned to my partner and said, “Could you get Annie a drink of water, please?”

Paula looked bemused by the fact
I
was telling
her
what to do, albeit politely. But she nodded. I handed her my credit card, and said, “Charge it to this.”

As soon as Paula left the classroom I said to Annie, “Look, the case is officially closed but I find it hard to believe there isn't more to it than meets the eye, so I'm trying to cover every base.”

“I appreciate that more than you can realize. Do you really think he might have been…”

“I honestly don't know what to think. Except that things aren't quite what they seem.” I saw a hundred questions forming in her mind. Since I probably didn't have answers to any of them, I pre-empted her by asking my own: “Can you think of anyone who'd have wanted to harm your father?”

“No. You know what he was like. He made friends, not enemies.”

“Did he ever mention problems with the shop, a deal gone wrong, anything like that?”

She shook her head. “He was never going to be well-off, but he wasn't in it for the money. I think the sort of issues you're hinting at stem from greed, and my father wasn't a greedy person.”

“Sorry to ask this, but what about his private life? Could there have been a spurned lover or a jealous husband with a score to settle?”

“Again, he was too taken up with his plants. After Mum died he wasn't interested in anyone else. It maybe sounds hard to believe, but that's the way it was.”

“I can believe it,” I said.

“When Dad wasn't in the shop he was prospecting for plants to stock it with,” Annie told me. “I always thought he'd die of something related to the amount of time he spent Outside.”

The door opened, and I changed to a more neutral subject: “If you don't mind me asking, how do you cope with those kids?”

“With great difficulty, but it brings out the best in me in a way an easier job wouldn't. My instinct is to shut myself away, but my spirit would end up as wasted and deformed as my arm if I did that. So I force myself to face down my fears—and I can feel good about myself for doing so, draw strength from my biggest weakness.”

Paula set a glass of water down in front of the teacher.

“Thanks,” Annie said. And then she looked at me and said, “I really appreciate this.”

I knew she wasn't talking about the glass of water, and that was when I realized I couldn't let things lie. Until then my persistence had been down to a desire to honor Doug's memory and make a point to Perfect Paula—and the truth was academic to Doug because he was dead, while the thing with Paula was petty.

Now that I'd met Annie, finding out the truth about Doug MacDougall wasn't academic any more. There was a person's happiness at stake—a person who very much deserved to be happy—as well as points in a trivial game.

Which made it all the more galling that I'd asked all the questions I could think of and wasn't any further forward after hearing the answers.

It wasn't until I was on my way out that one last question occurred to me. I have to admit I felt like Lieutenant Columbo, one of my favorite Olden Days TV detectives. His catch phrase, delivered as he was about to exit stage left, was, ‘There's just one more thing.' I resisted the temptation to say that and launched straight into my question: “Can you think of anything out of the ordinary involving your dad over the last few days? Anything that struck you as unusual or puzzling?”

She thought long and hard. I'm used to people being obstructive; I don't often see them trying desperately to help, like Annie MacDougall was. However, her efforts produced nothing more than a sigh and a shake of the head.

“Give me a call if you do think of anything,” I told her.

She nodded.

I didn't expect to hear from her again. I certainly didn't expect to hear from her so soon; I was following Paula out the door when Annie did a sort of reverse Columbo on me, saying, “There is something, now that I think about it.”

I stopped in my tracks.

“It's probably nothing.”

Usually people are right when they say that, so I didn't get too excited. But occasionally they're wrong, so my pulse quickened a few beats and my voice was hoarse as I turned and said, “Yeah?”

“The day before Dad died he mentioned having read something ‘remarkable.' I can't remember exactly how he put it, but he said it had changed how he thought about a whole lot of things; how he thought about life.”

“Did he sound frightened?”

“The opposite: excited, in a good way.”

“Do you know what it was he'd read?”

She shook her head. “Sorry. I get the feeling it must have been hard copy, though, because when I asked him about it he said he'd give me a read of it, like you'd say if you were talking about an Olden Days book or magazine rather than an ebook or something on the system database. In fact, now I think about it, why would he say that if he knew he was going to… If he'd intended—” she couldn't finish the question.

I couldn't think of an answer. I turned to Paula, and saw she couldn't think of one, either.

“Is that any help at all?” Annie asked hopefully.

Given how little we had to go on, anything was a help. Rather than put it like that, I nodded. “Remember, call me if you think of anything else,” I said.

I paused after closing the door behind me, and watched Annie MacDougall through the clear panel. She clutched the glass of water like it was all she had in the world to hold onto.

As I walked down the corridor I said to Paula, “Thanks.”

“What for?” she asked, puzzled.

“Not sneering at her.”

My perfect partner stopped, and said, “Do we really seem so awful to you?”

And all I could answer her with was silence.

I TRY TO LEAVE WORK BEHIND WHEN I GET BACK TO my apartment each night, but sometimes a case grabs hold of me and won't let go. Doug MacDougall's death was falling firmly into that category.

I started reading a travel article in a bid to relax and unwind, but my mind wasn't on it.

Soon I was sitting at my desktop computer screen, clicking through the digital images of Doug's apartment and trying to spot whatever it was he'd been reading the day before he died.

But there weren't any magazines lying around, and all the books were in the bookcase. I'd taken a close-up of the shelves, and that was the image I kept coming back to. The only lead I had was most probably in one of those books. Unfortunately I had no idea which book it was in, let alone what page it was on. Most of the spines were cracked and stained by water or faded by sun, making the titles difficult to read, so I rerouted the computer display to my wallscreen.

Staring at the giant image of books whose titles told of a world so different from my own, it wasn't long before I was thinking of Jen and her passion for what was left of that world, the natural world—and how her love of it and my love of her had been responsible for her death.

Because that was too painful to think about, I turned my thoughts back to the line-up of cracked and timeworn spines that lined Doug's bookcase and filled my wall. I was hoping one of the titles would leap out at me. But instead of inspiration all I felt was frustration and a gutting sadness at how much had been lost. I remembered reading in a book like the ones I was staring at that over 400 species of tree were recorded in a single hectare of rainforest back in the Old Days, and there were too many different kinds of flora and fauna to count; the best estimate was 10 million. And now all of that had been replaced by shifting desert sands or scrubland that barely supported any wildlife at all. I thought about how the change from one state to another had happened, about how people had believed nature was infinitely resilient and adaptable—and didn't realize they were wrong until it was too late. I thought about how one species after another suffered from one thing after another: from overexploitation and habitat loss, from the pollution that accompanied industrialization, and the climate change resulting from pollution.

The consequences had been deceptively innocuous at first: spring arrived a week or so earlier, and fall came a little later, and on the surface there was no harm done. But, if you scratched beneath the surface… Jen explained it to me by a single example: the longer summers gave more time for insects to breed, so more leaves of a particular kind were eaten, and the trees that relied on those leaves for life died off—and so one species was quietly lost here, another there.

And then, as the climatic tipping point Annie MacDougall had talked about was reached, the delicate balance of life all over the planet was disrupted with catastrophic consequences. Melting ice floes forced everything from polar bears to penguins into ever smaller areas, until eventually they'd nowhere left to go.

Southern temperate species were driven ever further south by warmer climates until there was no more land left for them to walk upon.

Alpine plants and the populations they fed and sheltered were forced higher up mountains until they ran out of rock to cling to.

Lush forests were turned to sere scrubland.

Coastal fringes were eroded and inundated.

Oceans became watery deserts as the currents that circulated nutrient-rich waters failed; coral reefs became bleached skeletons that crumbled in the superstorms.

All over the world, species were compelled to seek new habitats, and in each of them the delicate balance of predators and prey developed over thousands of years was destroyed in a decade or two, resulting in the extremes of extinction and plagues of pests.

And now more than half the plant and animal species were gone, and most of those that remained were on the way out. Habitats had been simplified, losing their richness and color; the wild was replaced by a wilderness almost wholly lacking in wonder. Only traces of it remained, hanging on precariously in the relics of old natural parks, nature reserves and places too extreme to have been profitably exploited during the Old Days. Such natural relics were tended with awesome devotion by volunteers whose vicarious guilt and shame, curiosity and sense of wonder led them to recklessly disregard the consequences to their own health in a bid to right the wrongs of past generations and leave something for those to come.

Awesomely devoted volunteers like Jen.

I felt a lump in my throat and a hollowness in the pit of my stomach, and I can't say how much of it was due to what happened to Jen and how much of it was down to what had happened to the world.

I forced my eyes to focus on the bookcase and my mind to focus on the conversation I'd had with Annie MacDougall, and tried to connect one with the other. No matter how hard I concentrated, it wasn't happening. I don't quit easily, but there came a point when I felt like I could look at that photo forever and not find out anything more from it than the titles of the volumes in the bookcase.

After a sigh that was part weariness, part frustration, I switched off the wallscreen and took my evening shower. Like every other shower in the community it's set on a pulse program to save water. The first time you hit the start button you get twenty seconds of warm spray—enough to let you work up a lather with some shower gel. The next time you press the button you get twenty seconds to wash off the lather. The Ecosystem controls the water temperature according to your personal profile; Numbers like slightly cooler water, just like they prefer cooler rooms. It also goes by the time of day and the shift you work. If you're having a start-the-day shower, the rinsing phase ends with an invigorating cold pulse; but, if you're through for the day, the shower ends with a hot pulse to relax your muscles and make it easier to sleep. As my shower came to an end I thought about what it must have been like in the Old Days, before water and the energy to heat it were rationed. I imagined how good it would be to stand under those relaxing needles of hot water without worrying about them going off at any moment, letting them wash over every muscle in your body until all the kinks were gone.

Back in the real world, the relaxing needles of hot water disappeared before the kinks in my muscles.

By the time I'd toweled off I still wasn't any more relaxed in mind than I was in body. I knew if I turned out the light I'd lie awake, thinking over the MacDougall case and not getting anywhere. Experience told me the best thing to do was read until my eyelids went together, then I'd sleep as soon as I dimmed the lights. I squatted down in front of my bookcase, trying to make up my mind what to read. Like Doug's bookcase, mine is filled with volumes picked up on scavenging trips Outside—thanks to the shortage of paper, printed books have long been a thing of the past. The titles on my shelves are quite different from those I'd seen on Doug's, however. My bottom shelf houses pulp detective novels, while the middle one is full of photo-books by the likes of Robert Capa and Sebastiao Salgado. Their masterly images give credence to the old saying that a picture can be worth a thousand words. Every page is a window into the past, and I can look through some of those windows for hours.