The Gordon Mamon Casebook (5 page)

“Look, to be honest, Gramacek, a pardon’s all well and good, but you don’t have much of an alibi. You’re one of only three people awake on the ship who could’ve murdered Captain Kurtz, far as I can see, with an M.O. almost identical to a set of previous murders in which you’ve been implicated. Put yourself in my shoes …”

The crewman cracked his knuckles. “You accusin’ me, Mr. Mambo? I’ve been framed once already, for something I didn’t do, don’t fancy that again. I
didn’t do it
, and I bets when you analyse them you’ll find it won’t be
my
prints on the murder weapon.”

Gordon bit his lip. He didn’t want to let on that he didn’t yet
have
a murder weapon, nor any prints or material clues. Just a corpse and a blood-soaked bandage.

“Look,” continued Gramacek. “Suppose I can’t blame you for trying. But it
weren’t me
. It weren’t Edie, and I don’t believe it were Rusty neither. Dunno who that leaves, maybe we got us a stowaway. But I
really resents
the accusation, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Real bad taste.” Fingers interlaced, he flexed his hands, like someone preparing for unarmed combat. Wiry, Gordon decided, appraising the other’s physique. Plenty of muscle, evenly distributed. Much more than a match for a paunching hotel employee, who didn’t exercise anything except his console fingers.

“Of course, you’re entitled to presumption of innocence, same as anyone,” said Gordon uneasily.

“Just maybe a bit more suspicion than most, right, Mr. Mamba?” Gramacek stood up from the bed he’d been sitting on; Gordon took an involuntary step backwards, but the other was, it appeared, only interested in picking up a couple of outfits off his clothing canister. Pyjamas. Then he turned to the reluctant detective. “Three hundred years asleep. Been meanin’ to ask you, do you reckon the blue, or the green-and-white?”

* * *

“Cassie?”

“Yes, Mr. Mamon?”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“Obviously, I must answer truthfully. Lying would be a breach of Second Law.”

Yes, but aren’t you claiming that assisting me would violate First Law, in your interpretation?
There was no point in pursuing that line of debate. Either Cassie would tell the truth, or she’d lie, and Gordon would have to figure out which for himself. “I’m done interviewing for now. Is there a room I can use for an office?”

“Nobody’s using the captain’s quarters right now …”

“Isn’t there
somewhere else
? This ship’s immense.”

“Yes, but a lot of it’s fuel tanks, antimatter and the like. You do know I’m antimatter-powered?”

“Yes, I’d heard. Look, I
can’t
use a crime scene for my office. Can’t you find somewhere else?”

“I can guide you to dorm 3Z, you can sit on one of the cryobooths. Sorry, best I can do. And by the way, you’ll need to wrap this up in the next six hours.”

“Six
hours
?” Gordon hoped he wouldn’t be here that long—Fairdig’s would probably be closed by the time he finished here, but still … it seemed an unreasonable limitation. “Why?”

“Orbital dynamics. I must launch in six hours, or I’ll miss the orbital slingshot sequence we need to boost towards Shangvanatopia. We’d have to wait another thirty-three years before Venus, Jupiter and Saturn are aligned again—or buy another few hundred tonnes of antimatter, and the Church can’t afford that.”

Great. “Believe me, I don’t want to hold you up, but I still have a job to do. Anyway, before you show me to this dorm, can you direct me to the cafeteria? I need to eat.”

* * *

The barn-cavernous cafeteria—three thousand people, Gordon reminded himself—was empty save for Sister McPhaillia, seated eating at a distant table. He approached.

Steak. Cut, Gordon noted, with a serious-looking steak knife.

That
was the closest he’d seen to a potential murder weapon.

“Where’d you get the knife?”

“That cupboard over there, under the bench. Help yourself.”

“Anyone can take one?” The cupboard was still open.

“Sure. Why? You hungry?”

“No. Well, yes, but …”

“Look, anyone can get cutlery, anytime they want—but they can’t leave the cafeteria with it, if that’s what you’re thinking. Security. Like the Parable of the Lone Shark and the Hired Mussel.”

“What’s to stop them taking it out?”

“Try it.”

Gordon did.

When he’d convinced himself the klaxon hadn’t actually caused his ears to bleed, he sat across from McPhaillia and waited while the internal ringing faded to a tolerable level. “What’d you say?”

“No need to shout. I said, there’s a chip in the handle, activates an out-of-bounds alarm. So there’s no way it could be used for a murder in the captain’s quarters.”

“You could still kill someone with it
in
the cafeteria,” Gordon noted.

“Suppose so, but the food’s not
that
bad.”

It would have been a lot of effort to transport the dead Captain from the cafeteria to her quarters; and the quantity of blood in Kurtz’s room, plus its absence from the sparkling-clean cafeteria and the corridors between, strongly suggested she’d died
in situ
.

But if a cafeteria knife hadn’t caused Kurtz’s downfall, what had?

“Where’d you get the steak?” There was nothing resembling a fridge, nor a pantry.

“Replicator.” She pointed to a freestanding shape he’d originally identified as an industrial oven. “Like some? I’m not sure I can finish. It’s 60% real beef, very good …”

“Uh, thank you, no. Not right now. That replicator—can it replicate anything?”

“Only Church-sanctioned foodstuffs. 60% is the highest for meat products, and believe me, anything less than sixty, you don’t want to touch. Fruit, vegetables, cereal, juice—it’s really very versatile, and quite authentic. Someone today even dialled up a melon, I found it in the corridor just on the way back from the Captain’s room. The shell of it, I mean—someone must’ve eaten the melon pulp. I was kinda curious, but melon gives me hives—”

“Why didn’t you mention this in your interview?”

“I didn’t think a minor medical condition seemed relevant.”

“No, I mean the
melon
. In the corridor.” Gordon was missing something, but he had no idea what. Hadn’t ‘melon’ been among the food particles the handheld’s severed-gullet-cam had identified? “How close to Captain Kurtz’s room?”

“Like right outside, just a couple of steps. Are you suggesting the Captain was killed by a melon?”

Gordon pictured the wound that had riven Kurtz’s jugular. “No. But this is something that could, in some form, be evidence. It makes me wonder what else I may have missed. What did you do with the melon?”

“I binned it, of course. The Church doesn’t condone littering with food scraps—you know, the Parable of the Necessary Weevil—and the thought of leaving it out for three hundred years …”

“This bin here?” Gordon asked, crossing to a waste container stationed opposite the replicator.

“No, a wall-mounted one way back along the corridor. Don’t think there’s anything in
that
one.”

Gordon had lifted the bin lid, anyway. Damn, he hadn’t thought to check the garbage. How many bins did this ship have, and how would he search them all in the intervening five-and-a-half hours?

Sister McPhaillia was wrong about the kitchen bin being empty. It held a large quantity of melon pulp.

Now what did
that
mean?

* * *

Down to one hour forty, and Gordon was wasting time; but sometimes, he felt, wasting it was the best use to make of it. Especially when a crossword was involved.

Seated on a casket, one of over a hundred in dorm 3Z, cold, almost freezing to the touch. His buttocks required thawing; and, fittingly, his leg had gone to sleep. Still, shouldn’t be too much longer. Just one clue to finish:

Absolute reversal on eating (8).
Second letter ‘e’.

One clue left, and he was stumped.

(Wasn’t Gordon an anagram of ‘drongo’?)

One hour thirty. He racked his brain. He’d found the melon shell, in the first bin upslope along the corridor from the Captain’s quarters. It was, when you looked into it, just a melon shell, and spoke nothing of the indescribable violence with which Kurtz’s life had ended. A wasted effort, on his part, to have looked for it. Just an empty shell, a husk … it didn’t help, to put Flange, or McPhallia, or Gramacek into the frame, nor to exclude any of them. None of them had anything approaching a decent alibi; but as to motive, or means …

One hour twenty-six. This casket was
cold
. Idly wondering just
how
cold, he switched his handheld from crossword to environment-monitoring. A menu offered thermal imaging. Gordon stood up. In infrared, the casket was deep blue, shading to a pale yellow-green at the thermal indentation of his buttock-print on the lid. All of the other caskets were similarly blue (but unadorned, of course, by the imprint of the Mamon backside), except for one of them. That one showed as a neutral green. Warm.

Gordon thought back to Flange’s suggestion of someone irregular on board—a stowaway, but it could just as well have been a sleeper-that-wasn’t. He went over to the warm casket. Empty.

Something clicked in his mind, and he raced out into the corridor. This ship was a rabbit warren, but he thought he could find the clinic from here.

One hour nineteen. Nobody in the clinic. He thought to remember there’d been mention of a final pre-launch check in the ship’s automated control centre.

He did a quick inventory of the clinic, comparing it against the handheld’s image taken during the interview with McPhaillia.

There
. Three cryobooths, where previously four had stood.

He had it. Solved. He felt a rush of satisfaction, as the last piece of the puzzle fitted into place. It was always a relief, a sense of renewal, to see that he hadn’t lost his touch.
Negation
.

Of course.

Now he just had to solve the
murder
, and he’d be done here.

* * *

Thirty-five minutes. This was going to be tight. Gordon bundled his awkward load into the crook of his left arm, hoping he didn’t spill anything, while he palmed the door override. The door sloughed open.

The control centre was crowded, it wasn’t designed to hold four, but then, the ship was fully automated. Cassie, in effect, was the pilot. Everyone else, crew included, were essentially passengers.

Nobody looked pleased to see him, but that was typical. And nobody here, he suspected, would thank him for what he was about to do.

“Cassie,” he called.

“Here,” she replied. Dead ahead this time.

“Can you open an external comm link, to hotel security, please? There probably won’t be anyone present, let alone sober, but there should at least be an answerphone or something.”

“Complying,” Cassie responded. ‘Does this mean you have an announcement?”

“Perhaps,” said Gordon. He still wasn’t sure of this himself, he hadn’t had time to allow things to crystallise in his mind. But—thirty-two minutes.

“Can we make this quick, please?” asked McPhaillia. “I’ve still got to freeze three people, myself included.”

“I don’t believe time is going to be an issue, if that’s any reassurance,” Gordon said. “Incidentally, how
do
your caskets get from the clinic to the appropriate dorm?”

“Cassie pilots them, of course,” the medic replied. “They’re all motorised.”

“So that explains how, last time I checked, one of the four had been moved from the clinic to the dorm to which Cassie directed me. You want to explain your motivation there, Cassie? Like maybe you were trying to muddy the water, by getting me to think there was an extra person awake on board?”

“I did say I wouldn’t
lie
to you, Mr. Mamon. I didn’t say I wouldn’t move the furniture. Beyond that, I don’t wish to discuss it.”

“Never mind. Aha. My handheld informs me that my case summary has been squirted back to hotel security. So if you were thinking of severing that comm link, it’s too late to try now. You’d only make matters worse. For you.”

Twenty-nine minutes.

“Mr. Flange. A question.” The engineer looked, aghast, at Gordon and the items he’d placed on the floor between his feet. “Don’t worry, nothing too confrontational, not yet. Just a simple matter of ship’s anatomy. Can you point out to me, please, on that diagram,”—there was a ship’s schematic on the control cabin wall—“where the antimatter’s stored?”

The engineer indicated the series of large cylindrical tanks strapped around the ship’s living quarters module. “Here. Well, the ones in blue are antimatter. Yellow are normal matter, to satisfy the fuel mix.”

“Only half of them, then? Still, that’s a very large amount of antimatter, must have cost a fortune—”

“We
know
the antimatter’s expensive, Mr. Mallow,” Gramacek interrupted. “But the Church insisted that no unwholesome propulsion methods was to be used for our travelment. No good can come of something which starts bad.”

“Like the Parable of the Stool Pigeon and the Bum Steer,” agreed McPhaillia.

“Yes, of course, and I’m sure you’re all very grateful for the long hours Mr. Flange has put in on researching and overseeing construction of this starship. The tanks, by the way, Mr. Flange—are they full?”

The engineer was perspiring now. Twenty-five minutes. “Of course they’re full,” he snapped.

“Why do you ask?” asked Sister McPhaillia.

“Well, I did some quick research of my own. It turns out there are two basic types of antimatter-driven starships, for a payload the size of this living module. One type has tanks pretty much the size of those on the
Harkness
; but the other looks like this.” Gordon held up his handheld. “I’ve highlighted the tanks for your benefit.”

“That
can’t
be right,” said Gramacek. “Those tanks is
tiny
!”