Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

‘For Mary’s sake! It’s been twenty-one years.’

‘Yes, twenty-one years, and he’s still just as dead.’

‘I appreciate that. I’d like to see someone brought to justice as much as you. But the Oxford police found nothing. Nothing! No motive, no enemy. They spent weeks trawling through every tiny little aspect of his life. And with you applying pressure they were thorough, believe me. I should know, with our gambling debt I was the prime suspect.’

‘Then you should be happy to hear, you’re not any more. Something’s changed.’

He flopped down into a chair and stared at me. ‘What could possibly have changed?’

‘It’s a new forensic technique.’ I waved a hand at the television set. ‘Aeroengineering isn’t the only scientific discipline to have made progress recently, you know. The families have developed something we’re calling genetic fingerprinting. Any cell with your DNA in it can now be positively identified.’

‘Well good and fabulous. But what the hell has it got to do with me?’

‘It means I personally am now convinced you were at the Westhay that night. You couldn’t have murdered Justin.’

‘The Westhay.’ He murmured the name with an almost sorrowful respect. ‘I never went back. Not after that. I’ve never played cards since, never placed a bet. Hell of a way to get cured.’ He cocked his head to one side, looking up at me. ‘So what convinced you?’

‘I was there at the club the following morning. I found a cigar butt in the rubbish. Last month we ran a genetic fingerprint test on the saliva residue, and cross-referenced it with your blood sample. It was yours. You were there that night.’

‘Holy Mary! You kept a cigar butt for twenty-one years?’

‘Of course. And the blood, as well. It’s all stored in a cryogenic vault now along with all the other forensic samples from Justin’s room. Who knows what new tests we’ll develop in future.’

Antony started laughing. There was a nervous edge to it. ‘I’m in the clear. Shit. So how does this help you? I mean, I’m flattered that you’ve come all this way to tell me in person, but it doesn’t change anything.’

‘On the contrary. Two very important factors have changed thanks to this. The number of suspects is smaller, and I can now trust what you tell me. Neill here has very kindly agreed that I can interview you again. With your permission, of course.’

This time the look Antony flashed at the family representative was pure desperation. ‘But I don’t have anything new to tell you. Everything I knew I told the police. Those interviews went on for days .’

‘I know. I spent most of last week reading through the transcripts again.’

‘Then you know there’s nothing I can add.’

‘Our most fundamental problem is that we never managed to establish a motive. I believe it must originate from his personal or professional life. The murder was too proficient to have been the result of chance. You can give me the kind of access I need to Justin’s life to go back and examine possible motives.’

‘I’ve given you access, all of it.’

‘Maybe. But everything you say now has more weight attached. I’d like you to help.’

‘Well sure. That’s if you’re certain you can trust me now. Do you want to wire me up to a polygraph as well?’

I gave Neill Heller Caesar a quick glance. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

Antony caught it. ‘Oh great. Just bloody wonderful. Okay. Fine. Ask me what the hell you want. And for the record, I’ve always answered honestly.’

‘Thank you. I’d like to start with the personal aspect. Now, I know you were asked a hundred times if you’d seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. Possibly some way he acted out of character, right?’

‘Yes. Of course. There was nothing.’

‘I’m sure. But what about afterwards, when the interviews were finished, when the pressure had ended. You must have kept on thinking, reviewing all those late night conversations you had over cards and a glass of wine. There must have been something he said, some trivial non sequitur , something you didn’t bother going back to the police with.’

Antony sank down deeper into his chair, resting a hand over his brow as weariness claimed him. ‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘There was nothing he ever said or did that was out of the ordinary. We talked about everything men talk about together, drinking, partying, girls, sex, sport; we told each other what we wanted to do when we left Oxford, all the opportunities our careers opened up for us. Justin was a template for every family student there. He was almost a stereotype, for Mary’s sake. He knew what he wanted; his field was just taking off, I mean…’ He waved at the TV screen. ‘Can you get anything more front line? He was going to settle down with Bethany, have ten kids, and gaze at the stars for the rest of his life. We used to joke that by the time he had his three hundredth birthday he’d probably be able to visit them, all those points of light he stared at through a telescope. There was nothing unusual about him. You’re wasting your time with this, I wish you weren’t, I really do. But it’s too long ago now, even for us.’

‘Can’t blame me for trying,’ I said with a smile. ‘We’re not Shorts, for us time is always relevant, events never diminish no matter how far away you move from them.’

‘I’m not arguing,’ he said weakly.

‘So what about his professional life? His astronomy?’

‘He wasn’t a professional, he was still a student. Every week there was something that would excite him; then he’d get disappointed, then happy again, then disappointed… That’s why he loved it.’

‘We know that Justin had some kind of project or theory which he was working on. Nobody seemed to know what it was. It was too early to take it to his professor, and we couldn’t find any notes relating to it. All we know is that it involved some kind of spectography. Did he ever let slip a hint of it to you?’

‘His latest one?’ Antony closed his eyes to assist his recall. ‘Very little. I think he mentioned once he wanted to review pictures of supernovae. What for, I haven’t got the faintest idea. I don’t even know for certain if that was the new idea. It could have been research for anything.’

‘Could be,’ I agreed. ‘But it was a piece of information I wasn’t aware of before. So we’ve accomplished something today.’

‘You call that an accomplishment?’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘I’d love to know what you call building the Channel Tunnel.’

My smile was pained. Our family was the major partner in that particular venture. I’d even been involved in the preliminary negotiations. ‘A nightmare. But we’ll get there in the end.’

‘Just like Justin’s murder?’

‘Yes.’

My journey out to Jupiter was an astonishing experience. I’d been in space before, of course, visiting various low Earth orbit stations which are operated by the family, and twice to our moonbase. But even by current standards, a voyage to a gas giant was considered special.

I took a scramjet-powered spaceplane from Gibraltar spaceport up to Vespasian in its six-hundred-mile orbit. There wasn’t much of the original asteroid left now, just a ball of metal-rich rock barely half a mile across. Several mineral refineries were attached to it limpet-fashion, their fusion-reactor cooling fins resembling black peacock tails. In another couple of years it would be completely mined out, and the refineries would be manoeuvred to the new asteroids being eased into Earth orbit.

A flotilla of industrial and dormitory complexes drifted around Vespasian, each of them sprouting a dozen or more assembly platforms. Every family on Earth was busy constructing more micro-gravity industrial systems and long-range spacecraft. In addition to the twenty-seven moonbases, there were eight cities on Mars and five asteroid colonies; each venture bringing some unique benefit from the purely scientific to considerable financial and economic reward. Everyone was looking to expand their activities to some fresh part of the solar system, especially in the wake of the Caesar settlement claim.