‘Oh, thank you.’
‘I’m known in some circles as a very spiritual man.’
‘Are these circles getting the help they need?’
‘Do your exercises,’ Tubman replies as he shows her out. Quite without precedent, he wraps her in the brief embrace of a worried mother before shutting the door.
*
The Inspector takes the lift, three floors up, and follows the blue line on the floor to the interview rooms. Walking past the first four, she lets herself into the empty fifth and switches on the light. Always before, she has walked this building with a kind of ambient pride, but not now. Now it is a crime scene, and the bad act – she has begun to know that it was bad, even granting that Hunter courted it – stains the walls and the air. Her unease deepens as the warm, bright illumination of the interview room rises at the touch of her fingertip on the switch. The empty chair in the centre of the room – ergonomically adjustable and fine-tuned to the most emotionally reassuring contours for the great majority of the population – has acquired for her a predatory quality recalling an old laboratory experiment called Wire Mother. In the Wire Mother test, mice were conditioned to consider a razoredged structure as a parent – which they did, taking food and rewards for proximity and becoming accustomed to the inevitable injuries. Analysis revealed that, after a while, their brains came to consider the abuse as a something like love.
The Inspector sighs, recognising the tracery of Hunter’s reactions to this room, laid across her own. She takes a steadying breath. The phenomenon is known to agents of the Witness as frosting, as on a cake, and scientific opinion is that it does not exist. Identification is inevitable, but change in the structure of the self is not. She is not Hunter. Hunter is not Neith. One is alive, one is dead, and the only connection between them is a recording, no more conscious than a wax cylinder. She is here for a reason, a driving purpose: find the truth, share it, exact justice. That is all she needs to regain a sense of who she really is.
She lays her fingers on the touchscreen. Every direct neural interview is recorded from an external perspective as well as the inevitable internal one, so that accidents and delays can be better understood. The information becomes part of the public record, but is not freely accessible. As with other sorts of restricted knowledge, anyone may apply for permission to review it, but must provide a quorum of voters with a sufficient reason for their interest. Permission is not normally withheld except in cases of simple prurience. In this instance, the matter is sub judice, meaning that it will only be freely available after the Inspector has completed her investigation, although an oversight group, randomly selected from individuals deemed sensible and solid, can be convened to require access to all her files in an emergency. Agents of the Witness are afforded a measure of independence in their work in line with what is colloquially known as the Van Riper Principle: give a job to your best, and then let them do it without looking over their shoulder.
The Inspector could perfectly well observe the process anywhere, of course, but since she is here anyway, she chooses to watch the file here, in the place where it all happened.
Defying her physical aches, she lowers herself into the subject’s chair in the middle of the room. Immediately, the central screen lights, and when she shuts her eyes the paused playback is laid over her senses. The Inspector sighs resignation: archival footage, stored at only moderate fidelity, always feels like polishing a tooth.
She starts the recording, her point of view shifting to that of the Witness itself, of the archival cameras recessed into the walls and ceiling of the room. A moment later Hunter is lifted, unresisting, into the space presently occupied by the Inspector’s body.
Neith darts between crucial moments in the decision chain that culminated in Hunter’s death. She begins to see how it must have happened. She watches technicians flag, then set up little nests of jackets and shoes on the floor, then go off-shift and be replaced. The timers on various screens go from contented green to warning yellow to klaxon red, then into a mid-range blue that signifies a sort of conceptual bewilderment. This is the colour no one ever thought would be displayed when the software was written, and it has no established semiotic message at all. The Inspector fancies that someone, back down the line, chose blue to signify ‘we’re all completely at sea now’.
As time goes by in the recording – as she zooms and slows, steps out of the flow and then back into it – the faces change, but the centre of everything remains the same: Diana Hunter, silent and still in her chair.
It is an illusion of ease. Hunter was worn out and burned out, with no reserves and battered by the constant artificial stimuli in her brain. Her blood was flooded with stress hormones her exhausted organs could not properly process. She had not slept. Humans need sleep, but it was not in the protocol for a direct neural interview because it had never been a problem before. Neith tries to imagine nearly a day and a half fighting inside her own brain against an enemy who could not be beaten or evaded: a war of attrition in which Hunter was both the beleaguered defender and the battlefield.
It makes no sense. What could Hunter possibly have to hide, that she would endure this, if not for ever, at least for just long enough? Surely no one is so wretchedly ornery as to die out of spite? She had a good life, a nice place to live. For social contact she had her neighbours, bartering and making trades off the grid, upcycling and retooling. She had her school for miniature refuseniks, the local kids to whom she read moderately inappropriate stories. Neith, indeed, remembers some of them from her own childhood: harmlessly wicked value-inversion jokes about kindly monsters and nasty knights. Diana Hunter was angry and formerly successful and where she was not loved she was mostly left alone. Why would she bother to hold out?
It was enough time for a family to flee. Enough for friends – co-conspirators – to disappear. But no one has. No one is missing. No one is out of place, out of pocket, even out of breath. No one, particularly, seems sad. The world continues along its path as if Diana Hunter never existed – and isn’t that a sorry statement of a life’s end?
So some dark purpose, then, and this resistance long enough for comrades to change the codes, the target, the means. Long enough for them to strike!
Not that they have.
This new figure, masked, she identifies as Smith. His body language is familiarly imperious. He dickers with the specialist in charge of the interrogation, apparently wishing the other man to leave altogether, then accepts him with ill grace as a flawed amanuensis. After a certain number of hours there’s a great medical flurry of intervention, a sudden crash. An emergency door opens and the crash team enter, resuscitate her, then she crashes again and they actually open her head to install a bypass tube for blood and then a chitosan interface chip to allow the System to connect parts of her brain that are no longer able to link themselves. The computer is not only keeping her alive, it is thinking with her: machine–substrate processing. It is both expensive and intensive, like using jet engines to power a wooden windmill. Hunter is unconscious, and then she sleeps. Then, nothing: a simple resumption of business as usual. Again the unprotesting body becomes the centre of a regular, slow procession of persons.
It occurs to the Investigator that as she lives through what was happening inside Hunter’s mind, she is constructing a mirror of her. Just as Hunter invested masks with life, so Neith, alive, shapes herself to the other woman the way a transplanted face, hanging on the muscle and bone of the patient, takes on her identity. In fact the symmetry is perfect: the mask of Mielikki Neith looks back into the eyes of the corpse.
*
The archive footage runs its course, and the Inspector watches it in accelerated time, not expecting anything of consequence. It’s not as if someone will suddenly break into the room and shoot her. She will die under sedation.
But Neith will watch anyway. It is her case.
It has always been the argument against coercive interrogation, even back when that meant torture: if the
clock is already ticking on the bomb, then the terrorist need only be brave for exactly that long. What would you suffer, what would you endure, if you knew as the rack tightened that you need only last a day to save your family, serve your god, win your cause?
Conversely, what if Hunter had no secrets at all? If she was just desperately, furiously, pathologically ‘private’? Could she have held out for this ugly record for no other reason than cussedness, and called it victory?
That would be a grim sort of answer. How long was it, finally? Another hour? A half day? Neith queries the Witness again. And stares at the answer on the screen.
Not thirty hours, and not thirty-five either. Not forty-five. Not even fifty.
Neith looks again. She must have misread. She has not.
Diana Hunter was interrogated for 261 hours.
Mielikki Neith knows her mouth is open in a comic-book rendering of shock. She does not for the moment know how to close it. She feels cold and sick. Her hands are shaking.
Two hundred and sixty-one hours. She divides by twenty-four. Easy: 240 is ten days, which leaves 21 hours. She can feel Constantine Kyriakos nodding, his head heavier than hers, neck and back proportionately bulkier. When she rolls her face to the ceiling, she cannot understand, for a moment, why the flesh at the nape does not fold like a button accordion.
Almost eleven days.
And she cannot help but think, hot on the heels of that impossible number, that eleven days under interrogation is a sort of execution. At the very least, malfeasance. She copies the whole file, redundantly, to her investigation’s evidence server.
She told Keene this was how it was. She knew already. And yet this is something more.
You will say: ‘Did they murder her?’ Lönnrot told her.
The Inspector now begins to see that she might.
*
As the gloom of the winter afternoon gives way to actual dark, the Witness reminds Mielikki Neith that she has pledged this evening to leisure, on pain of Pippa Keene’s disapproval. The Inspector, in the tradition of obsessive crime-fighters, resolves to make a virtue of necessity.
There is no band called the Fire Judges playing regularly anywhere in London – or for that matter anywhere in the world – but Neith’s searches do locate the Duke of Denver, a former pumping station on the Thames, which hosts live music. Good, then. It will be, by all available accounts, an enjoyable evening’s entertainment. She walks south, reviewing the news of the day. Narrow focus is a bad habit; crime does not operate in isolation from the wider world.
Text and images scroll, translucent, across her glasses – openings and closings, celebrity gossip, top ten lists on one side, global stories on the other. Her preferred version of the Monitoring Bill is under siege, assailed both by those who want the technology rolled out as widely as possible and by a surprisingly numerous rearguard of precautionary sceptics advocating for the ‘essential and irreducible biologicality’ of the received human body. Irked by the suspicion that this wording means whatever anyone wants to read into it, but indicates at the same time some vague disapproval of such things as surgeries, prostheses and vaccinations, she looks at the detail of the story. The numbers are still solid. Fine. A few steps later, she cancels out of the feed. Normally she likes the ubiquity of information flow, but abruptly in this moment she feels the need to operate in a white space: to sink down into the slow textlessness of her heartbeat and her stride.
A timeless quarter hour later, she arrives at the Duke of Denver. The back room looks out over grimy wooden pilings, either a vanished pier or some ancient attempt at silt management, and in this unpromisingly damp performance space a quintet by the name of Core Rope Memory are making music, and doing it well.
The Inspector drinks Scotch, and listens. Core Rope Memory are a physically attractive bunch – the lead, in particular, is a perfectly tousled thirty-something who goes by the stage name Break – but once you hear them that’s barely important.
She lets her gaze dwell on Break’s fingers as they move across the fretboard, the curve of muscle moving in the deep V of a poetically unbuttoned white shirt. Mostly, barely important.
Once, a long time ago when she was still a student, the Inspector travelled to the island of Santorini and scuba-dived among the ruins on the shallow floor of the Med. The sea was utterly clear, and she found herself unable to remember that it was composed of water. Her mind insisted that she was flying rather than swimming, that she was leaping weightlessly and impossibly between the stones of fallen temples, that the particoloured fish must be birds or insects. In this fugue state she was darting back and forth, laughing into her regulator with a clear, clean joy, when she felt a kind of electric shrugging. Her ears popped and her whole body growled and buzzed as if touched by a high-voltage wire. She heard a noise that came from inside her, transmitted through water into her skeleton and lungs and sounding there, audible in her ears by their connection and proximity to the source. She was played upon, and overcome, floating to the surface to stare at the bright Greek sun and a perfect sky. The noise came again, a different note, and finally again one last time like a harmony, and then was gone.
After she had floated for a while, she heard the guides calling and saw them hurrying towards her in a Zodiac, and she waved and climbed aboard, still entranced by the vastness of the chord.
‘Earthquake,’ the guide said, as they headed for the shore. ‘Big one, in the caldera. You okay?’
She was, she said. It had been beautiful. He gave her a worried look and took her to the first aid station on the beach to check for narcosis, the bends, and half a dozen other things she didn’t have. Finally they let her go, and she wandered up and down the shore, picking her way between topsy-turvy sun loungers and wrecked sunshades, ducking in and out of beach bars looking for someone to talk to, someone who would understand her sense of dimming joy and tragic separation. In the noise, she had been complete.
She couldn’t find anyone else who had heard it, then or later, and eventually abandoned the idea as a dream brought on by some transmitted impact in the ocean.
Played by Core Rope Memory, Bach’s Musical Offering to Frederick the Great is the first thing she has ever heard that touches the moment, or touches her in the same way.
‘Frederick and Bach were a little bit at war, and a little bit in love,’ Break murmurs, contralto, between sets. ‘Frederick was all about the new music and Bach was the defining master of the old.’ Long fingers touch lightly at the keyboard, stroke out a brief lament which somehow harks to the last piece. ‘And in the public duel between them, Bach was beaten! Never happened before. Man, he was angry. Can you even imagine? The old master, publicly spanked by a young king who was into the contemporary equivalent of boybands. The best in the world, unable to respond to his opponent’s casual suggestion that he improvise an impossible fugue. This one …’ Rippling notes, curiously out of touch with one another, as if two different patterns of sound were somehow fused – and then Break does something and the little tune becomes sprightly, even mocking. ‘But Bach wasn’t having it. Oh, hell no. And in the ensuing battle of wits and scholarship, the elder statesman of Learned Counterpoint kicked his feudal master’s arse!’ Laughter. More rippling music, as if incidental. ‘While Freddie was whooping it up, Johann Sebastian was brewing a musical potion the likes of which no one had ever seen or even thought of. Working for a total of two weeks on a piece now reckoned to be one of the most complex and remarkable examples of its kind ever devised.’ Now the music stops, and Break leans away from the instrument and towards the audience, towards – it seems to her – Neith in particular, though she knows that this is the performer’s illusion, that everyone in the room is catching the glint of those eyes, the quirk in the full mouth, and thinking it’s just for them. ‘Take that, Freddie.’
After a moment, the fingers touch the keys again, and Break pantomimes surprise. ‘The Canon per tonos, for example, returns upon itself a full tone higher than it begins, inviting
the player – that’s me – to continue the piece upwards, ever upwards, to another realm of expression, to the Celestial City, to the far reaches of ultrasound and the image of the human body’s interiority, to music which could only be played in solar plasma.’ He snatches his fingers from the keyboard as if burned, blows on them. Laughter. He resumes, more sedately. ‘It’s cyclical, forever trending upwards, like the alchemical symbol for fire. It is therefore sometimes known as the “Eternal” or “Heavenly Canon”.’
Without really meaning to, she does something she has never done before, running a location ping on Jonathan Jones. Not far away. Alone. Reading and drinking wine over a bowl of gnocchi in a place she has never heard of. It must be new. The reviews say it is excellent. Jones has not yet added his own opinion, which is heavily weighted with acquired respect.
She realises she has made quite a bold move, like the sudden hinge point of a casual contact where the hand is not withdrawn. There is no going back to where they were, to the pretence of disinterest. If she does not reach out to him, after this, she will look flighty. She wonders if he has a flag set, and whether he is thinking the same thing, pondering whether he should pre-empt her.
‘I’m in the Duke of Denver,’ she says, and sends the message. She wonders whether she should add ‘hungry’, but he will know that. He will check her itinerary and deduce it. Perhaps he will order something for her.
Break grins to the room. ‘The album is called Catabasis for the Masses. Be careful when you write that down. Your autocorrect will change it to “databases”.’
Databases. Catabasis. The Inspector grimaces. For the first time in recent memory, she has the flickering sense of her work interfering in something important. Keene would be thrilled.
Jonathan Jones observes teasingly that the bar snacks at the Duke are not said to be its finest feature.
Break is talking again. ‘The Musical Offering is not just a composition, it is a challenge! It’s a lecture series, a very polite feudal fuck you, and a statement of identity. And it’s something else.’ A high note hangs for a moment. ‘Bach didn’t give Freddie the full score. What he actually handed over was a kind of compressed version – implicate music. If Freddie wanted to know what Bach had laid on him – if he wanted to know for sure whether he’d been answered, and someone like Freddie can’t take another bloke’s word for it – he had to educate himself in the old geezer’s understanding. Exactly what he’d never bothered to do. The Musical Offering takes Freddie’s gambit and turns it on its head. In order to counter Bach’s riposte, Frederick had to educate himself in all the things Bach thought a king ought to know, and thereby become the man Bach desired him to be. Old bastard quite literally changed his enemy’s mind – to make it more like his own. Seek and ye shall find, Bach tells Frederick. Quaerendo invenietis.’