A solitary walker with a dog peers at her, then snaps a photograph and posts it, tagging it with a query about suspicious activity at their location. The Witness immediately sends a message to say she has been photographed, and responds to his concern with thanks and a brief explanation. Modern rates of clinical paranoia have decreased significantly from pre-System levels. It transpires that many instances of the condition used to result from a horror of personal smallness; a deep, almost existential fear that the pattern of a given life had no meaning against the tide and chatter of the majority, or the vast indifference of the universe beyond. But part of what is remarkable about the System is that no one is insignificant to it. Every action; every choice, worry, question; every bold or idiotic inspiration can be acknowledged by the tranquil and endless machine. There is no silence into which the lonely fall. The System is quite genuinely interested in everyone.
The dog-walker receives his response and nods his appreciation to her. He’s handsome, in a weathered way. She marks the message for later consideration. It would not be inappropriate to ask him out for a drink, if he’s single. A conscientious fellow with good shoulders and a well-trained dog. So far, so compatible. She tells the machine to run a background check to be sure he’s not a plant. After a moment of hesitation, she instructs it to sequester the results. If he is not actually dangerous, she chooses not to pry. It hinders conversation, later, if she already knows everything about her date.
The man turns away, following his hound.
Neith likewise turns, and realises she is at the door of the house. She sees the street reflected in a window and feels a moment of consequence, the hint of a Rubicon. She reaches for it, but the inspiration, whatever it is, has gone back down into the sea of her thoughts. She pictures it tumbling away: a great fish returning to the deep.
She considers the place.
Diana Hunter lived at the end of a terrace, in a stucco townhouse which might at one stage have abutted several others of its type, but which now stands alone in a scrub garden. It observes an almost pointed distance from the other buildings in the street, so that the Inspector can imagine the ground floor lifting its crinolines and turning away from the importunate social climbing of the twenty-first-century developments. It is the last house, and beyond the scrub, the gentle slope of the hill becomes more vertiginous until a retaining wall with a chickenwire fence drops away to a disused railway line, and beyond that, the valley of the teeth.
It is not entirely uninviting. Hunter has painted it with a quirky combination of faded colours, either in deliberate subversion of its imperial mood or because she could only get so much of each one. The result is a friendly bohemian muddle like a giant jigsaw which the visitor will be invited to put together. The door is thick and wooden, a proper door for a proper house. If Neith has one quarrel with the age in which she lives, it is the fascination with laminate and plastic over the resinous, organic solidity of wood. Doors should be a part of the home that speaks of life rather than engineering. This one does, emphatically, and the front steps are well worn. There was a flow of commerce here, even recently. Diana Hunter received and trafficked.
Upon closer scrutiny there is a line of dust and scratches on the step, a mark where the door has frequently been propped open as if to admit a crowd. Village halls have such marks, not homes. And what sort of hall is outside the village? The disreputable sort? Was Hunter running a brothel here? No. That’s not the sort of thing the Witness could miss. What else gets pushed to the margins? These days, perhaps a therapist. A police station, she realises. Or a witch’s house might sit this way, on the fringes and yet accessible to those with need. A wise woman’s house.
The good door opens in silence. Neith half expected it to creak, but the hinges are freshly oiled and the door itself is hung with an admirable precision. She adjusts her sense of the late owner. An eccentric, perhaps, and certainly a grumpy neighbour, but also an organised, even painstaking person in areas that attracted her interest.
The Inspector realises she’s still standing on the doorstep.
And then, three steps inside, she stops and stands very still. She has an eerie feeling of homecoming.
*
There’s no single thing that makes the place so unsettlingly familiar. It’s not the worn green carpet which smells of age or the unfashionable darkness, the high ceilings and ornate cornicing pale over brinjal walls; it’s not the amiable clutter which she supposes is what art looks like if you don’t put it in a case. All these things, in fact, should make Hunter’s home feel close and a little spooky, but it somehow escapes that, as if the combination of anti-minimalism and shadow has created a temple here to a lost chthonic concept of interior design. The sense of homesickness is vertiginous and overwhelming. This is where she belongs, in this hallway with its many books along one wall, the Arts and Crafts silver teapot on a table in the corner by the umbrella stand. She wonders what to call the feeling and thinks: Fernweh. It’s German – the longing to be somewhere one has never been, the grief one feels at the absence of persons yet unmet.
She shakes her head – too much poetry in the flowstate – and looks around, anchoring herself in the job.
The hallway is washed in the smell of library: melancholy scholarship, paper and dust mites. There’s no trace of the shut-in old lady smell, the powder and outmoded perfume. Instead, there’s a hint of beeswax from the furniture, damp oil paint and turpentine, but above all the autodidact scent of knowledge. It is almost too much, too self-conscious, like a stage set built to house Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein. This person is bookish. Neith glances down a hallway and sees, yes, more books. The Inspector reaches to her terminal to call up the plan of the house from her files, then remembers that it won’t work, that Hunter cut this place out of the grid with a deliberate hand. She tries anyway, but the isolation is effective. She looks at the walls, wondering where the cage is – where, beneath the plaster, are the struts that catch the carrier signal. She shuts her eyes and remembers the shape: the corridor leads to a guest bathroom full of junk – although she wonders at that judgement now, wonders whether anything here is truly ‘junk’. What might the cursory eye of a young Witness constable miss, in a pile of Hunter’s uncatalogued belongings? A Titian, perhaps, stacked against a glass box full of sailors’ knots.
Neith wanders down the corridor, touching the spines. She reaches the end: a plaster bust of Shakespeare, slightly chipped, rests in an alcove. She looks down, and finds, with a sense of impish certainty, Hunter’s own works arranged in a neat line. She scans the titles, letting her subconscious mind choose which ones to dip into from the throng: The Talking Knot, Mr Murder Investigates, The Mad Cartographer’s Garden, Five Cardinals of Z and the last one, Quaerendo Invenietis. The Inspector makes a mental note that the contents of the house must be considered financially valuable and protected accordingly. She lifts her choices out of the shelf, Quaerendo on the top, and cradles them awkwardly against her chest with one arm.
She takes a moment to peer at the bust. The chip is on the ear, the damage done a long time ago, and the repair is excellent but unconcealed. She looks around again, realising that many things here are cracked or broken and subsequently remade. Windows, mirrors, floorboards and skirting boards. The spines of books. Perhaps it’s how Hunter was able to afford them: things discarded by a nation in love with the new and the glossy, and above all with things that can tell their own stories by digital report rather than by their scars. Hunter is content to infer the past from cracked glazes, from missing bronze feet and replaced glass. She is content to repair and reuse.
Was, the Inspector reminds herself. Hunter was content.
*
Leaning against the wall, the Inspector pauses to examine her prize. The cover of Quaerendo Invenietis features a golden splash that she first takes to be a bird, possibly an eagle or a condor, spread across a vivid red background. Unusually, there is no cover text, but presumably a book printed in a starkly limited ed
ition is already known to those who wish to purchase it. Under closer scrutiny, the condor design is revealed to be not a bird but a necklace or kirtle in a pattern which evokes a tentative connection with South America. Her mind wants to call it an axolotl, but knows that that is something else. A cluster of names gleaned from childhood museum visits jostle in her head: Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc. She went with her uncle, a scholar. Mazatec? No. Simpler. Quirkier. If she had a connection in here she would already know. Hunter must have lived at one remove after building the Faraday cage, a cognitive shift to an older way of being. She would have come adrift from society to some extent, merely by that choice, just as someone who never travels has a different lived experience from one who spends weekends in Barcelona. How profound was that separation? Enough that Hunter could begin to hate the country around her? Was there something in the arrest, after all?
The Inspector opens the book and finds a blank page. She tuts at this unlikely misfortune, and tries again, finding another and another, and then realises as she riffles through that this is a publisher’s blank, a proof without any text at all. Annoying. She opens the others one by one, and realises that they are the same. She feels a puff of air and wonders wryly if the spectre of Diana Hunter is sniggering at her. She puts the blanks down and looks along the shelves for less deceptive editions.
She is still looking when she feels a second puff of air, stronger and more definite. If the house were less well maintained, she might put it down to a gust of wind outside. If she were in one of the proper rooms she might not have felt it at all. But to her, here in the corridor, that brief pressure is distinctive: the compression as a door somewhere is opened and closed. Except that this is a crime scene secured by the Witness, and she is the investigating officer. There should be no one here without her direct permission.
If this were almost any other house she could check the local footage reel for the last few hours and see whether anyone has even approached the place. She considers going out into the street and doing exactly that, but if she does and there is something here that someone wants, or wants her not to have, she will have lost it. Likewise if she summons backup. She could try opening a window and leaning out. Her mind pictures this undignified and tactically disadvantageous solution and she rejects it.
Instead, she unwinds her scarf and discards it on the ground. No one trained at Hoxton would ever enter an arena of possible physical combat wearing a noose. Stepping on to the outside front of each shoe and curling the foot down on to the carpet, she moves in almost perfect silence across the corridor to the kitchen, then stops. Another puff of air. She can feel floorboards giving under the green carpet, knows that sooner or later she must come to one that creaks.
The kitchen is separated from the hallway by a bead curtain, strands of copper-coloured yarn knotted around a jumble of tiny bric-a-brac fragments: washers, curtain rings and bits of valve. She touches it. Cool and heavy. She will not be able to pass through the curtain without making a noise, so she doesn’t try. It’s empty, anyway. She drops her shoulders, listening, but does not close her eyes. It is a delusion of those unaccustomed to using their senses that the focus of one requires the abdication of another. In fact, the senses are complementary, each feeding the rest. It’s harder to hear someone if you cannot see their lips, harder to tell the difference between coldness and wetness if you cannot use your nose.
Away to her right, on this floor, she hears something. It is a noise with no shape, no name – but it is something, and she holds on to it as she lets the breath go out of her open mouth. If you hold your breath, you only hear your heart. There. Again. There is a place in her sense of sound where she can catch it. If she lets go, the bland baseline of a house in the city takes it away.
Mielikki Neith can stand still for hours. She does not get bored; her mind does not wander. She does not count seconds or wonder what will happen next. She pays attention, taking in whatever is there to be known, whatever is changing, and finds that enough. It is a trick she has learned, the projection of a quiet into which other people feel the urge to speak.
The kitchen window is open, which it should not be: a horizontal slash of glass propped up with an offcut piece of ply, the gap large enough for a thin man. For a thin woman. For a child. Perhaps that’s what this is? An enterprising local thief with terrible timing, or lovers on a dare: enter the deadhouse, get properly scared, get naked on the carpet.
Picking her way softly along the hall to the main stairs for a better place to listen, it occurs to her that the layout of the house is intended to create obstacles and obscurities. Every line of sight is occupied by an object that invites contemplation. Even now, positing a dangerous intruder, Neith finds the allure of the place distracting. The picture on the wall is positioned just so; the warmth of the oil paint gleams and invites the eye. Looking away, one finds a clutch of glossy coffee table books depicting the same tints and shadows – explanations and histories of the work. One might chase one’s tail in here for weeks, and come out wiser, and that is the intent. Neith finds it increasingly hard to believe that the woman who created this space would be revealed if she wanted to be invisible.
The faintest creak from the living room. Not a cough or a cry or the sound of a boot. And yet Neith is on her feet and ready, because that was for the first time the sound of human movement, intentional and perhaps furtive. She waits. The doorway is empty. The noise does not repeat.
Neith is armed: in a clip holster at her back there is a powerful taser. Inspectors do not generally carry lethal weapons as a matter of course, and in any case a gun is a terrible close-quarters weapon. At distances under fifteen feet – and most encounters in British housing will take place at such distances – they are too slow, and a bullet fired from even a low-powered gun at that range will continue through the target and hit other things such as bystanders and gas pipes. The taser is a compromise, but hardly a very good one because it only fires twice and has limited penetration. For backup she has a telescoping baton, a mean little thing halfway between a cudgel and a whip. Of course, if she seriously believes she is in physical danger, she should go out immediately into the open air, into the connected space of the Witness, and order assistance.
But if she does that, she may lose the opportunity to talk to someone who is shy of confiding, and in this unusual environment she cannot know who that person is without confronting them. No doubt, given Hunter’s way of being in the world, there are ways of entering and leaving this house that are discreet.
Then, too, if she calls for the cavalry and it turns out the house is infested with a mournful prepubescent looking for a library book by which to remember her teacher, it will look brutish. Bad enough for the Witness to make a mistake and cause a death, but to terrify a primary school child in the course of seeking justification for that death … no.
She is police and she is the System. She takes a calculated risk.
More beads, more curtains. Two layers this time, click-clack, the same magpie mixture of materials. A thimble, a bit of Lego, a button. The thread goes through, the thread goes around. She strokes the hanging strands, lets them clatter softly. Steps back and waits.
Is conscious of someone else waiting, with the same certainty of their own patience. Has already decided to go forwards, does not read this as an assassination. Protocol puts the decision in her hands.
She goes in.
Dim. Her eyes adjust slowly. Books and more books. Another door off to one side, another bead curtain. Hunter must have bought a job lot, but no, of course: the children make them. Play group. Indoctrination? Hardly. Just a very old, very simple training, motor skills and focus, quiet in the afternoons.
Peacock feathers on the walls (meaning: the Evil Eye. A superstition of malign surveillance. A joke? Or an unconscious choice?) and more statuary. Now she’s seeing eyes everywhere: bronzes with empty sockets glare at her, dolls gleam glassily. Carved masks wait for someone to put them on. In a glass jar, a preserved plant specimen
labelled WHITE BANEBERRY with a little poison symbol – more eyes: round white fruit with black circles for pupils, growing on red stalks. Bar none, the most alarming vegetation she has ever seen, like something from a nightmare about organ farms.
And behind the jar: a man. Or a woman. Who looks at her and says: ‘Ah. Inspector. Do sit down, won’t you?’
*
The Inspector does not sit. ‘How did you get in?’ she demands instead.
‘I’m Lönnrot,’ the other says, face still bloated by the curve of the jar so that it resembles the underside of a stingray. Neith struggles with the name, struggles grasping for an understanding of the sound as text. ‘Learn rote’. Or ‘wrote’. Not an English sound.
Evidently the disconnection shows, because Lönnrot sighs and tries again. ‘You must be Inspector Neith. No?’
‘This is a sealed building,’ the Inspector replies. ‘How did you get in?’
‘Perhaps I have a key.’
‘Perhaps you don’t.’
‘Well, then, perhaps I can’ – a too-broad smile – ‘walk through walls.’ One hand waves away boredom. ‘Regno Lönnrot. I grant you it’s a somewhat portentous name, but that is hardly my fault. One might translate it as “the kingdom of the Red Maple”. A very small demesne, alas, restricted entirely to myself. Please do relax, Inspector. The maple plant is harmless – unless one is a horse. Have you found her diaries?’ There’s a strange smell, burning and bitter – a black cigarette in the ashtray: actual tobacco. Questionable legality: this is a private house – but not, of course, Lönnrot’s house. Burglary, with aggravated smoking?
The Inspector moves, very slowly bringing the other into view. She stares – or rather, as an agent of the Witness whose closed evidentiary scene has been violated by an unsanctioned person, she observes and glowers. She cannot tell absolutely if this person is male or female. Possibly there is no perfect answer. Lönnrot is lean and elegant, with beautiful hands, the fingers narrow and presently steepled. The expression on the androgynous face is quizzical. It might be wryly appreciative, or perhaps mocking. Lönnrot wears black clothes: a black crew neck, black jacket. Black trousers. Black boots with Cuban heels. Black hair, too-white skin. Something suggestive of surgery or disease. Shoulders quite square, but slender. A pop idol, now retired; a would-be vampire; a club owner. A sociopath. A method actor. A classic Warhol image come to life. Attributions skitter across the pale face, slip away. No frame. And no data connection, because the house is a Faraday cage. For the first time in her adult life, the Inspector has no idea who she’s talking to.