The Happier Dead (28 page)

John glanced over to Miranda. She gave the slightest of nods.

“About twelve months ago someone called us saying they’d seen Capability working right here in Avalon,” John said. “Working in the staff canteen. As you yourself realised, the involvement of Minor in the original investigation into Capability’s disappearance created the potential for embarrassment. It was enough to make me take a personal interest in the case. I came down here to speak to Ali Farooz, and he flatly denied being anyone other than who he was. His paper trail was in order. I could see a resemblance, an uncanny resemblance really, between Ali Farooz and Capability Egwu, so I could quite see how the woman who called us had made a mistake.”

“It’s amazing how backwards the field of reconstructive surgery is,” Charles said. “It had a rather illustrious start in military hospitals after the First World War, but by the turn of the twenty-first century it had become really no more than a way of fending off old age. The Treatment rather blew that out of the water. We did our best with Ali’s face, his nose and so on, we destroyed every photo we could find of Capability, but there’s only so much one can do.” There was a defensiveness in his attitude, and from the way Miranda stared stubbornly out of the window, Oates sensed he was trying to score points in an old argument.

“I took a routine swab for saliva to tick the box,” John continued, “and I thought nothing more of it. Before the results had come back, I got a call from Charles here. He explained the situation and between us we came to an arrangement.”

“I thought you said one lifetime was enough.”

“Oh, more than enough,” John said. “But that’s exactly what he offered me. One lifetime. And then another. And another.”

“But why did Prudence have to die?” Oates said. “Even if he worked out where his brother was, why did you let him in?”

“That was as much a surprise to us as to you, Inspector,” Miranda said. “We had been keeping an eye on Prudence for some years. We were aware of him digging around. Indeed Charles here was especially tasked with oversight of his activities.”

“You can’t protect against that sort of thing,” Charles said. “No one can. Clearly as grand fromage it’s your right and privilege not to risk chipping a nail on the practicalities–”

Miranda held up her hand palm out, and Charles pulled the sides of his cat’s cradle wide apart. The elastic quivered, stretched white between his fingers. Oates thought that he might storm on, like some rogue musician striking up a solo in defiance of the conductor’s final gesture. But the new influence which Charles had wielded all afternoon was in abeyance, as the focus of events had turned away from the periphery of the spa and back to its dark heart. He simply shut up, and went back to fiddling. John gave a little cough of embarrassment, and actually chanced a private smile at Oates, as if the two of them were partners, the last refuge of reason in this topsy turvy world.

“For whatever reason, Prudence was able to conceal from us the extent of his success,” Miranda said. “We’re still not quite sure how much he knew, but he clearly identified Capability’s location, and had pieced together something of the process with which he had engaged. He further succeeded in undergoing the Treatment under a false name, and in gaining access to St Margaret’s under the same alias.”

Oates thought back to the register – Prudence Egwu’s name had been the last one appearing on the matriculation book, and Grape had not been able to find him registered as a guest. If Prudence Egwu had snuck in under an alias, they must have stuck his name down as soon as they realised who he really was. It must have taken them time to update their computer records.

“And then Ali just killed him?” Oates said. “I mean, what, Prudence confronted him and claimed to be his brother? You don’t kill someone for that.”

Miranda seemed displeased by the question. Charles continued to play with his toy. Even John took a momentary interest in the boards between his shoes. Oates intuited that they didn’t really know. Whatever had happened in that room in the boys’ quarters, it was still at least a partial mystery, and the unknown element threatened them. It was Miranda who answered.

“Our theory is that Prudence made Ali realise who he used to be. He showed him photographs, and personal effects – the album, his trunk, that knife – and it broke through the protective layer of the MRT. You can’t really delete the past you see, you can only replace it. It’s like painting over the colour in a room. If you strip the new paint off, the old stuff’s still underneath. You must understand, Capability wasn’t very happy with the person he used to be. He was prone to depression, a condition which the Tithonus Effect markedly exaggerated. He also had substantial… doubts. About the Treatment, about the morality of our business. Everything. Towards the end of his last life, we were concerned for his mental stability. He was spending more and more time in church. His research into MRT had become entirely personal. He viewed it as his salvation.”

“It was a bloody good thing he volunteered to play guinea pig,” Charles said. “When you’ve got Mortal Reform t-shirts appearing on stage at Glastonbury, the last thing you need is the chap who worked on the invention of the Treatment coming out and saying the whole thing’s evil, or he wants to die, or he’s seeing Jesus and Buddha at the end of his bloody bed.”

“Thank you, Charles,” she said, but this time he wouldn’t be silenced.

“For the last year or so I had to do all his interviews by telephone. Just me and a bloody voice modulator, and what the hell do I know about telomeres and stem cells, I had to get the
New Scientist
chatting about my love of golf and walking the coastal paths of East Anglia.”

“That’s quite enough,” she said. “We believe that Prudence somehow broke through the layer of new memories, and reminded Capability of his first life That involved almost a hundred years of information, identity, emotion and experience dawning upon his mind in the space of a few seconds. The process triggered a psychotic episode, the results of which we all witnessed.”

“And you, what… you reprogrammed him after? His research was destroyed.”

“Oh, Inspector. Don’t let yourself down now,” she smiled. “The scrap, the scraps recovered by Prudence’s plods may have been destroyed. But I worked with Capability for eight years before he became Ali, and I’ve been studying his progress ever since, refining the process, getting it right.”

“We’re a hop, skip and a jump from bringing MRT to market,” Charles said. “It’s going to blow everything else completely out of the water. You sign out of everything, every responsibility you’ve ever had, every memory, you really get another go at being young. Not just pretending, I mean the real thing. As part of the package, we’ll hold your funds in trust for you. You will be looked out for throughout the whole of your life. A long lost Auntie will die, and leave you a fortune. If you ever buy a lottery ticket, you’ll win. Our team of financial advisers will continue to manage your funds for you, and our lifestyle monitors will find a way of getting all your lovely lucre into your bank account without so much as a raised eyebrow. You give us a power of attorney, and just when you hit twenty-seven years old, bang! We send in our team and you go through the whole thing again, and again, and again. Just think, you’ll be young, and lucky, and rich forever!” He raised his hands above his head, and pulled them slowly apart, drawing a slogan in invisible lights. “
With Nottingham Biosciences, you can take it with you!
How’s that for a strapline?”

“We haven’t settled on a marketing strategy yet,” Miranda said, and Charles dropped his invisible billboard.

“So after you realised what had happened,” Oates said, “you had to clean up a bit to protect your science project.”

“If you must put it like that.”

“I hate to throw a spanner in the works, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me back to London.”

Miranda stood up from her position by the window, and took a step towards him.

“We are going to offer you something,” she said. “But I want you to understand before you hear it that you will not appreciate the true worth of this offer at this time in your life. You are a father, are you not?”

Oates nodded. He had known this moment must be coming ever since the beginning of their confession. And yet now that it was here, he felt afraid.

“I want you to picture those moments in communicating with your children when you tell them something that your experience has shown you to be true. You are aware that without the context of that experience, with indeed an immediate context of personal experience which may demonstrate the opposite, your children will not believe you. But fortunately you are the parent and so it is not essential that they believe you, because you can command them to do the thing that you know to be right, secure in the knowledge that one day they will also come to a vantage point from which they will perceive the truth upon which you acted. That is the relationship between myself and you, Inspector, with one crucial difference; I cannot command you to do anything. I must simply ask you to believe that as much as you may kick against it, what I am about to tell you will, with the lapse of time, become your truth.”

As Miranda spoke, her words contrived to seal the two of them away from the rest of the room, and the rest of the world. Her will settled upon him in a focused beam, and what had been up to that point a conversation between a number of participants became a duologue.

“I understand what you are saying. And I know what you are going to say. And the answer is no.”

“We can make you young again.”

“I don’t want to be young.”

“I think that is a lie. And believe me when I tell you, if you do not yet want to be young, that means that you are not yet truly old. You may not fear the reaper, Inspector, but you should fear the Zimmer frame. Failing eyes, false teeth, weakness in your limbs, your penis flaccid, desire outpacing performance in every contest. And then finally to feel nothing, your thoughts getting slower, confusion settling over everything, to depart from the world in mind and soul whilst the body sits in some plastic covered seat in the day room.”

“What’s the bloody alternative? Have the Treatment and MRT, and then one day I see Lori on a street corner, and I take an axe to some bloke on the pavement?”

“Capability was the first patient. He is… imperfect. We have been working on the revised version for half a decade. If it really makes a difference to you, I will go first. As soon as we have passed on my knowledge sufficiently for the program to be running, I will be undergoing the process myself. I’ve had to work on this almost alone up to this point, because of the risk of industrial espionage or interference from the government. You cannot imagine how lonely I have been. How desperate I have been to bring the process to the point where I can undergo it. But none of that matters now.”

“And I’ll be hopping on board. And so will John,” Charles said, breaking in upon their duel. “From here to eternity!”

Oates was grateful for his intervention. Miranda’s voice was a mesmerising thing. The rhythms of her logic beat down on the brain. She tried to continue in the same vein, without acknowledging the interruption.

“We can discuss the best means of minimising the impact to your family. Perhaps arrange for your death in the line of duty. We would make a substantial cash contribution to their welfare. They would discover you had taken out a life insurance policy some time ago naming them as the beneficiaries. You would be giving them a start in life far in advance of anything you could hope to achieve otherwise.”

“Capability. Ali. He really doesn’t know he killed his brother?” Oates said, playing for time.

“He doesn’t even know he has a brother. He was catatonic after the incident but we were able to subject him to an emergency MRT procedure prior to notifying the police. After that Charles offered him the Treatment to become an Eddy. We have been refining MRT for some years, and it involves periodic repetition for Capability. That is no longer the case with new subjects. We think he may be aware of the process on some subconscious level – I believe you’ve seen his diaries. It’s as if he is trying with some part of his mind to resist the memory grafts. Editing those diaries has become a rather more painstaking process for us than the actual manipulation of his mind.”

“Does he fight you? Does he... are you making him forget?”

“We act on the basis of Capability’s original consent. He is no longer in a position to give informed consent, as he lacks the information to understand the process, though not, I hasten to add, the intelligence. As I am sure you will have detected in your discussions with Ali, his intelligence remains as lucid as ever. The point is we can’t explain it to him without explaining to him who he was, and that really is a dangerous business. As you have seen. You should remember though that the process is necessarily voluntary, in that you have to want to believe the new life with which you are presented in order to accept it. We could no more force MRT on someone than we could make them fall in love. It only works if you are weary.”

“And what do I have to do?”

“Nothing other than what you were asked to do this morning. You bring Ali down to London. We think that with the riots, the press attention will slip away from him over the next few days, and he can have his trial in relative peace. We get him a decent barrister as an act of compassion on behalf of the company, and he gets a ten year sentence. He serves five to parole, not long enough for anyone to realise he hasn’t aged inside. Then he disappears again, this time for good. With our MRT program fully up and running, we can send him anywhere in the world.”

“We’re not asking you to put away an innocent man here, Rob,” John said. “I wouldn’t do that and I know you wouldn’t either. The only person in the world who will think he’s innocent is Ali himself, and he’ll be wrong.”

Oates opened his mouth to denounce them, and said nothing. His conception of right and wrong had always been founded on conscience. By that logic if conscience could be wiped clean, the rightness or wrongness of an act could be time-limited. He understood now the idea that had so horrified Lara in the tunnels. Every man was a story he told himself, and the sane and rational mind only allows for a certain amount of poetic licence – you can shift details, change the order of events quite substantially, but there comes a point where the facts of an event cannot support any further alteration without being demolished and rebuilt from scratch. At that point, you have to choose between the truth, with whatever shame and guilt such truth implies, or embrace psychosis. No rational man would choose to be mad, and so the conscience would have to bear the burden of guilt.