The Last Murder at the end of the World

THIRTY-NINE

After unwrapping the bandages, Thea plunges her ragged hands into a bowl of scalding hot water, cleaning the blood off with a cloth. As a point of principle, she doesn’t show any discomfort, even though there’s nobody in her laboratory. Once they’re clean, she plucks a few more splinters out of her palms, and applies a clean bandage. Not for the first time, she wonders what must have happened last night to cause such curious injuries.

The light rattles, plaster dust falling from the ceiling. From the building next door, she hears the cable car shriek to a halt.

Hephaestus must be back, she thinks.

She goes to the gurney with Niema’s body on it, intending to cover the corpse before he sees it. Unfortunately, the sheet gets caught on the edge of the table, and she’s still trying to tug it free when Hephaestus comes striding through the door.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he says, shooting straight back out.

Covering Niema up, Thea follows him outside, where he’s crouched on the dusty ground, his head between his knees. Flies are swarming him in a thick haze, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

There’s a duffel bag beside him, emblazoned with the flaking logo of some ancient mountaineering brand. The angular edges of whatever’s inside are pressing against the material.

‘You okay?’ she asks.

‘Nowhere close,’ he replies hoarsely.

Thea takes stock of her browbeaten friend, struggling to find the right words to frame her sympathy. She’s always been awkward around emotion, whether trying to express it, or knowing how to acknowledge it. One of her favourite things about her friendship with Hephaestus is a strong understanding of each other’s moods, allowing them to bypass that uncertainty.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she starts hesitantly. ‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through.’

Hephaestus glances across, her face desperately trying to contort itself into an expression of sympathy.

‘You look really uncomfortable right now,’ he points out.

‘I am,’ she admits. ‘I really am. I’m sorry, Hephaestus. I’m not very good at all of this. Please don’t tell me you need a hug, or anything.’

‘I’ve got something better,’ he says, picking up the duffel bag and depositing it in front of her with a thunk. ‘We need a confession and an execution to save ourselves. I think I’ve found a way to get both.’

The zip sticks, forcing her to wiggle it back and forth, revealing a crab-like device with five articulated legs.

‘That’s a memory extractor,’ says Thea, recoiling. ‘First generation. Where did you find it?’

‘In the lighthouse,’ he says, flicking a switch on the top, causing the legs to wiggle, searching for a head to clamp onto. ‘I thought it was the one you used in the trials?’

‘That broke a long time ago. I didn’t realise there were any others on the island.’

He prods a button, causing a drill to emerge from the left side of the extractor, whirring softly. If there were a head in the helmet, the drill would bust through their skull, then release five ganglia, which would burrow into the prefrontal cortex, neocortex, hippocampus, basal ganglia and cerebellum. The extractor would then dig out every memory it could, pouring them into the gem held in a small slot at the back.

‘Enough,’ says Thea, flicking the switch off.

‘I never took you for squeamish,’ says Hephaestus, amused.

‘It’s a clumsy technology, which offends me on an aesthetic level as much as a moral one,’ she sniffs. ‘These ones are barely even prototypes. The mortality rate isn’t much lower than just being shot in the head. Why would you think one of these would help us?’

‘I want to use it on the crums,’ he proclaims.

‘Their memories have been wiped, Hephaestus.’

‘You know as well as I do that memories can’t truly be destroyed,’ he objects. ‘They can be buried in the subconscious, but not erased completely. There are scraps of last night in every one of them. The extractor can find them. If we get enough of the pieces, we might finally see the picture.’

‘You stick that on somebody’s head and nine times out of ten you’re going to kill them with it,’ she protests.

‘In less than two days the fog is going to finish the job it started ninety years ago. Do you understand that? It will eat us alive, and without us to maintain the solar panels and wave generators, there’ll be no power for the stasis pods in Blackheath. Everything we’ve done, and sacrificed, will have been for nothing. Humanity will be gone. Ellie will be gone.’

Voices echo down through the lanes, where the villagers are dressing the exercise yard for the funerals tonight. Thea can’t imagine anything worse than spending two hours listening to everybody weep and mourn, and tell their stories of a woman they never really knew.

‘Thea,’ prods Hephaestus. ‘Are you onboard with this plan, or not?’

She blinks at his face, seeing the long scar down his cheek he received while trying to protect Ellie from one of the apocalypse gangs. He never told her that story himself. Ellie did, and it was clear she was only telling half of it.

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘But you heard what Abi said about the villagers. If we start putting that thing on them randomly, she won’t raise the barrier.’

‘Our little Holmes will take care of that for us,’ he says. ‘If Emory comes up with a promising witness, we’ll bang this on them’ – he taps the memory extractor – ‘and see what they know.’

‘Holmes,’ she laughs, watching as the wind makes little tornados from dust and leaves. ‘I forgot how much you liked those stories. Genius detectives solving impossible crimes, happy endings every time. Remember how angry it made Niema? If you had time to read, she thought you weren’t working hard enough.’

‘The breakthroughs never came as easy to me, as they did to you,’ he says gruffly.

‘It was never easy.’ Bitterness poisons her tone. ‘Nothing to do with that woman was ever easy.’

She kicks at the floor with her foot. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I shouldn’t still be angry at her.’

‘Put in it the eulogy for all I care,’ he responds. ‘I loved her, but she was my awful boss long before she was your awful boss.’

He elbows her gently in the ribs, trying to change the mood. ‘How did your first post-mortem go, by the way?’

‘I vomited all over the floor,’ she admits.

‘Seems like a sensible reaction to me,’ he says. ‘Did you turn anything up, aside from the contents of your own stomach?’

‘She was stabbed once through her sternum, and I found fragments of metal in the injury to her head.’

‘I thought a wooden beam crushed her skull.’

‘The pattern of the injury doesn’t match up,’ she explains. ‘The beam was placed on her head afterwards to make it look like an accident. It would have worked if the fire had been allowed to burn the body the way the killer intended, but they got unlucky with the rain.’

‘So you’re telling me somebody stabbed her by the fountain, then bludgeoned her in the warehouse,’ he says flatly. ‘Why?’

‘Our killer was impatient,’ explains Thea. ‘Niema’s blood was swimming with medical tech. If she’d managed to staunch the blood loss from the knife wound, she could have survived the night, maybe longer.’

Hephaestus turns his head away, trying to hide his tears.

‘Anything else in the post-mortem?’ he asks, his voice cracked.

‘Nothing revelatory,’ she says gently. ‘Her last meal consisted of bread, olives, grapes and cheese, and her blood was clear of toxins. There was a little glue on her fingers, but that’s not a surprise considering she worked in a school. I did find this, though.’

She holds up a small crucifix on a golden chain. ‘It was around her neck,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know she had faith.’

‘She didn’t,’ croaks Hephaestus. ‘But she really loved the book.’

Very carefully, Thea opens his huge hand, and lowers the chain into his palm, before closing his fingers around it.

Hephaestus’s chest heaves as great sobs come rolling out of him.