The Medieval Murderers - The Lost Prophecies

Shiva looked at the screen. ‘Look at those rivers.’

‘We’ll all be drowned yet.’

‘No, the ice sheet’s nearly gone. The sea can’t rise much further.’

‘So the politicians tell us,’ she replied darkly. She sighed again. ‘Please, ask me what you want. The guests are out at work. I don’t want them coming back to find the police here again.’

‘Thought they would be out at this time of day. That’s why I came now. It’s mostly businessmen and officials visiting the city that you take in, isn’t it? It’s a nice house, nice view.’

She wasn’t mollified. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to be a police inspector?’ she asked.

‘Thirty-six. Older than I look. Now, I don’t want to trouble you by going over the whole ground again. I just wanted to ask what you thought of her. Miss Karam? As a guest. As a person. Your insight.’

The old woman seemed a little mollified. ‘She appeared nice enough when she arrived. Very polite. But private. Didn’t mix with the other guests.’

‘Self-contained, then?’

‘Guests have a right to be private. Though I would have liked to talk to her,’ she added regretfully. ‘Coming from so far away. I wanted to ask what the Tasman Islands were like. What it was like to fly, looking down on all the old dead places. But I could tell it wouldn’t be welcome.’ She shrugged. On screen a man in a jersey stood on the bank of a great river, a tiny dot, chunks of ice the size of houses sweeping by.

‘I may be flying myself soon,’ Shiva said, to engage her. Mrs Ackerley’s eyes lit up with interest.

‘How exciting. Is it to do with this case?’

‘No. Something else. Tell me, what did she say she was doing over here?’

‘A conference on computerized power systems. To help conserve the electricity.’ Mrs Ackerley settled back into her chair, relaxing. ‘The only real conversation I had with her was a few days later. She’d been working in her room and came down to make a cup of tea. I asked about her family. She said they were in Canada; she hadn’t seen them for years. I told her my family had lived in Brum since the industrial times.’ Pride entered her voice.

‘Did she wear a cross?’ Shiva asked. Most of the Shining Light people did, chunky wooden ones painted silver.

‘No. I would have noticed. I wondered what religion she might be, as she was-’ Mrs Ackerley flushed ‘-of colour,’ she concluded, using the currently correct phrase.

‘You said earlier that she seemed quite nice when she arrived. Did something make you change your mind later?’

‘Yes. Sam. My little dog. I know people say pets eat scarce food, but it all comes off my rations.’

‘People can be too strict sometimes.’

‘He makes a lot of noise but it’s only to protect me. He doesn’t bite. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, only one of the other guests saw what happened and told the police when they interviewed him.’

Shiva leaned forward. This hadn’t made it to the report. ‘What did happen?’

‘One evening I was in here and I heard a yelp from the kitchen. I went in and poor Sam was cowering against the wall, howling. I could see he’d been kicked. And that Parvati woman was standing against the opposite wall, glaring at him. I shouted at her that he’s only a helpless little dog. She was apologetic, said she’d been brought up in Canada and they have problems with wild dogs out there. One had bitten her once. But when I came in she’d looked angry, not frightened. I would have asked her to go but I need the money. One of the other guests heard us shouting and came down. Like I said, he told the police later.’

‘Thank you. That’s interesting.’

‘Is it?’ She fixed him with puzzled eyes. ‘If she’s done something bad enough to have the police coming here time and again, what does hurting a little dog matter?’

‘Everything matters,’ Shiva answered, retreating into his clipped official voice.

When he left he needed to think, to order what Mrs Ackerley had told him. He walked across to the lake and sat on a bench under a eucalyptus tree, out of sight of the house. Nearby, a little boy and girl stood in the shallows fishing. They wore dirty kaftans and broad-brimmed straw hats, like Tom Sawyer. Mosquitoes darted around, and he hoped the children had put on their repellent. These lakes were malarial.

Parvati Karam had been self-contained, Mrs Ackerley had said. That fitted with the information they had found on the databases. Her parents had been strongly atheist, like most people these days. Shiva’s own parents had kept up the old Hindu customs through respect for tradition rather than real belief. A loner at school, Parvati had shown great mathematical ability and had gone to university in Alberta at sixteen. The interesting thing, Shiva remembered, was that at university she had joined the dog-hunting clubs. It was not only people who had fled northwards from the deserts of the old United States but dogs too, millions of pets that had formed predatory packs, reverting to old instincts. They were getting larger, reverting to their wolf ancestry, and in the many isolated settlements they were a major problem. Hunting them was encouraged. The reports said that Parvati Karam had headed a student team, which won prizes for the number of dogs they killed. Had she gained a fear of them that had led her to kick Mrs Ackerley’s pet? Or was it hate?

The dog hunting had stood out because otherwise Parvati’s life seemed so bland. She had worked on electronic security systems in Winnipeg after graduating. Three years ago she had been converted to the Shining Light Movement, and in 2133 she had taken up a new job in New Zealand. Within the Church she seemed to be just an ordinary member, going to church, joining the party, paying a tenth of her salary to the movement. No record of any official position in Church or party, no active involvement in the campaigns against sodomy or abortion or eating pork. Yet a few weeks ago she had come up quietly behind the watchman at the Birmingham museum and expertly felled him with a blow to the back of the neck that broke it. Shiva had seen the photographs, the look of surprise on the old man’s face. She would have learned techniques of stalking and killing in the dog hunts, he realized. He wondered if she had killed the man coldly, as though he too were a dog.

Across the lake a group of men pushed a boat into the water, unfurling a white sail. They carried fishing rods. Ripples spread across the water, making tiny waves at Shiva’s feet.

‘Them blastid men’ll scare the fish,’ the little girl said to the boy. They were very alike; they must be brother and sister.

‘Na, they’ll drive ’em this way. ’Ere, I’ve got one!’ he shouted excitedly.

A struggle began with a small carp that had taken the bait and was struggling fiercely out in the water. The little boy gripped the rod tightly while his sister waded into the warm shallows, grabbed the line and began hauling in the fish.

Shiva envied their closeness. Like Parvati Karam, he was an only child. Large families had been officially discouraged since the Catastrophe, with so little good land to feed the survivors. He wondered: had her childhood been as lonely as his, had she too been driven to succeed by parents whose future she represented? Shiva had also been an outsider, a small thin dark child in the Surrey town on the edge of Thames Bay. But he had wanted more than anything to belong. He had found his way in by attaching himself to children who were natural leaders, popular and charismatic, for charisma begins early. But often those leaders of playground gangs were cruel, and Shiva had always recoiled from cruelty, perhaps because he feared them turning on him. When he was sixteen the group he hung on to attacked and robbed an old woman; the leader of the group, Starkey, had planned it carefully. Shiva watched them while they divided up the money, then went and reported the crime to the headmaster. Starkey, a promising pupil, was expelled. Shiva’s own part was kept secret; he was awarded detention with the lesser offenders to defray suspicion at his own request. His path had been decided then. Sometimes he wondered what had happened to Starkey. Perhaps he was in prison like Marwood.