“Curtis got the synamorphesterone for you?”
She nodded.
“Through Kawahara, I imagine. A liberal supply as well. He was dosed to the eyes the night you sent him to see me. Did he suggest spiking the clone before the Osaka trip?”
“No. That was Kawahara.” Miriam Bancroft cleared her throat. “We had an unusually candid conversation a few days before. Looking back, she must have been engineering the whole thing around Osaka.”
“Yeah, Reileen’s pretty thorough. Was pretty thorough. She would have known there was an even chance Laurens would refuse to back her. So you bribed Sheryl Bostock with a visit to the island funhouse, just like me. Only instead of getting to play with the glorious Miriam Bancroft body like me, she got to wear it. A handful of cash, and the promise she could come back and play again some day. Poor cow, she was in paradise for thirty-six hours and now she’s like a junkie in withdrawal. Were you ever going to take her back there?”
“I am a woman of my word.”
“Yeah? Well, as a favour to me, do it soon.”
“And the rest? You have evidence? You intend to tell Laurens about my part in this?”
I reached into my pocket and produced a matt black disc. “Footage of the injection,” I said, holding it up. “Composite footage of Sheryl Bostock leaving PsychaSec and flying to a meeting with your limousine, which subsequently heads out to sea. Without this, there’s nothing to say your husband didn’t kill Maria Rentang chemically unassisted, but they’re probably going to assume Kawahara dosed him aboard Head in the Clouds. There’s no evidence, but it’s expedient.”
“How did you know?” She was looking into a corner of the conservatory, voice small and distant. “How did you get to Bostock?”
“Intuition, mostly. You saw me looking through the telescope?”
She nodded and cleared her throat. “I thought you were playing with me. I thought you’d told him.”
“No.” I felt a faint stab of anger. “Kawahara was still holding my friend in virtual. And threatening to torture her into insanity.”
She looked sideways at me, then looked away. “I didn’t know that,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged. “The telescope gave me half of it. Your husband aboard Head in the Clouds just before he killed himself. So then I started thinking about all the unpleasant stuff Kawahara had to play with up there, and I wondered if your husband could have been induced to kill himself. Chemically, or through some kind of virtual programme. I’ve seen it done before.”
“Yes. I’m sure you have.” She sounded tired now, drifting away. “So why look for it at PsychaSec and not Head in the Clouds?”
“I’m not sure. Intuition, like I said. Maybe because chemical mugging aboard an aerial whorehouse just didn’t seem like Kawahara’s style. Too headlong, too crude. She’s a chess player, not a brawler. Was. Or maybe just because I had no way to get into the Head in the Clouds surveillance stack the way I could with PsychaSec, and I wanted to do something immediate. In any case, I told the Hendrix to go in and survey standard medical procedures for the clones, then backtrack for any irregularities. That gave me Sheryl Bostock.”
“How very astute.” She turned to look at me. “And what now, Mr. Kovacs? More justice? More crucifixion of the Meths?”
I tossed the disc onto the table.
“I had the Hendrix go in and erase the injection footage from PsychaSec’s files. Like I said, they’ll probably assume your husband was dosed aboard Head in the Clouds. The expedient solution. Oh, and we erased the Hendrix’s memory of your visit to my room too, just in case someone wanted to make something of what you said about buying me off. One way and another, I’d say you owe the Hendrix a couple of big favours. It said a few guests every now and then would do. Shouldn’t cost much, relatively speaking. I sort of promised on your behalf.”
I didn’t tell her about Ortega’s sight of the bedroom scene, or how long it had taken to talk the policewoman round. I still wasn’t sure why she’d agreed myself. Instead I watched the wonder on Miriam Bancroft’s face for the full half minute it took her to reach out and close her hand around the disc. She looked up at me over her clenched fingers as she took it.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said morosely. “Who knows, maybe you and Laurens deserve each other. Maybe you deserve to go on loving a faithless sexual maladjust who can’t deal with respect and appetite in the same relationship. Maybe he deserves to go on not knowing whether he murdered Rentang unprovoked or not. Maybe you’re just like Reileen, both of you. Maybe all you Meths deserve is each other. All I know is, the rest of us don’t deserve you.”