‘I think we can make things more interesting than that.’ Ruby sipped her wine. ‘I want to play the Candybox game. If I lose you take the fuel.’
‘What’s the Candybox game?’ Margaret asked.
She didn’t want Ruby to play, that much was clear. Somehow Ruby must be different from the players Margaret usually picked. They must be more eager for Margaret’s approval. Or maybe they were more susceptible to Margaret’s intimidation. Perhaps Margaret preferred players who were too scared to shoot. She enjoyed their humiliation.
What could Ruby do – other than show vulnerability, which she refused to do – to make Margaret play?
She could attack Margaret’s vanity.
‘Are you too frightened to play with me?’ Ruby asked.
‘The very idea,’ Margaret said. ‘You’re really not like Barbara, are you? You’re not like her at all.’
‘Are you going to play or not?’
A long pause followed. ‘All right. Do you know the venue?’
‘Yes. I’ll see you there at eight.’
‘Seven. I won’t spend my whole evening waiting for you.’
‘Nor I for you.’
Ruby hung up. She didn’t have fifty bricks of atroposium, of course. But she wasn’t intending to lose the game.
53
OCTOBER 2018
Odette
The firearms examiner had been shooting into the Candybox, as Odette requested.
‘We’ve fired a hundred bullets, over the course of an hour,’ said the examiner. ‘The Candybox used an atroposium briquette, size B12. Eighty bullets rebounded immediately. The other twenty successfully dematerialised. None of them have rematerialised yet – we’re keeping the Candybox in an isolation room to manage the bullet discharge safely. The bullets will rematerialise after forty-eight days, eight hours and ten minutes. We know because we’ve already received a call on Beeline to tell us.’
‘That’s fantastic,’ Odette replied. By counting back from Margaret’s death, they could work out when the fatal bullet was fired into the Candybox, and set up surveillance for that date. Forty-eight days before Margaret’s death would be the nineteenth of November. ‘I had an additional query, if that’s OK. Does firing a gun sterilise the bullets?’
‘Not necessarily, no. Obviously some germs may die off due to heat and deceleration but it’s quite easy to transfer bacteria by firing a bullet. In fact, there’s an entire field dedicated to bacteria ballistics.’
‘And – I hope you don’t mind a follow-up question – if there were bacteria on a bullet, just ordinary everyday bacteria, and the bullet was fired into a Candybox – would the radiation encourage an overgrowth of macromonas?’
‘That’s certainly a possibility.’
It stood to reason that playing Candybox roulette would be associated with macromonas outbreaks. If you liked playing high risk games fuelled with atroposium, you probably didn’t implement hygiene protocols. Odette returned to the other macromonas cases she’d unearthed in case they included Margaret’s fellow roulette players. Of the people who died, Barbara Hereford seemed the most likely participant, because she knew Margaret. But she couldn’t be Margaret’s murderer; she died in August, well before 19 November.
None of the other macromonas deaths matched names on the Conclave’s staff lists – but perhaps they’d had contact with a time traveller who was carrying the bug. In an attempt to identify vectors for the infection, Odette requested a list of residents and staff from the old people’s home. She also requested patient and staff lists from the hospital, in the week of the nurse’s death. Finally she cross-referenced the lists with the Conclave’s own staff lists, and yielded two historical hits. The first was Veronica Collins, a resident at the old people’s home who had joined the Conclave as an interpreter in 1982. The second was Julie Parris, a hospital patient who had commenced work as an environmental conservationist in 1993. Both women had resigned in the past twelve months. Odette telephoned each of them. She said she had some questions about hygiene breaches, and would like to interview them as soon as possible.
*
Veronica Collins came to the Conclave that very morning. She was a bright-eyed woman with a dowager’s hump, her face lightly liver-spotted. No one would imagine her as a gun fiend. Odette eschewed the interview rooms for their conversation. They went instead to the gardens, as Odette believed Veronica might open up more in relaxed surroundings. They scattered seed for the birds.
‘It’s a while since I took a trip without the other residents. The activities there run like clockwork. Normally we play golf on a Thursday. The nurses hire a coach to the course.’
Odette apologised for keeping Veronica away from her game.
‘I don’t mind. Glad to break up the routine, actually. It’s always good to have new ears for my old tales.’ Veronica replaced the cap on the tube of millet. For a while she talked about the kind of assignments they’d given her at the Conclave, before Odette steered her towards the topic of Margaret. Had they got on? Odette asked.
‘Up to a point.’ Veronica gave a short, sardonic laugh. ‘The thing about Margaret was – if you were in her group, she was clannish. She never let you forget that time travellers were different from everyone else. We were special. But we also were terrified of not being special any more. The prospect of readjusting to normal life, if you have to quit time travel, is really daunting. It made us put up with extraordinary things.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘You know. Encouraging people to carve themselves up in those time machines? Did you go along with that? No? I wish I hadn’t. The weird pranks and assaults. And that thing where she shows you a little cache of your relatives in the morgue? Seeing those pictures really did a number on me. Is it any wonder I got totally neurotic about bad things happening to my family? But I was so desperate to be a time traveller I took the initiation stuff as the price of admission. And what’s really unpleasant is that those rituals do bond you together, once you’ve been through them. The suffering becomes something you’ve all shared, and that makes it harder to leave. For years I didn’t have the strength to quit.’
‘Was there a particular incident that prompted you to resign?’
‘Hmm? No… I wouldn’t say that, not at all. When I was young I said I’d never leave. But I realised gradually I had to go.’
‘The thing is, Veronica,’ Odette said slowly, ‘we’ve been tracing hygiene breaches back to games of Candybox roulette.’
Veronica dropped the tube of millet.
‘That wasn’t me!’ She put her hand on her chest. ‘I never fired – I never…’
‘Fired what, Veronica?’
‘The gun – during Candybox roulette.’
‘Tell me about Candybox roulette.’
‘It was one of Margaret’s sick games. Games – oh, for years she made me play games – she said I couldn’t stay at the Conclave if I didn’t let her recondition me to stop fearing death. It wasn’t shooting to begin with – that was at the very end. And it was the final straw for me. I’d endured it for years but that Candybox roulette game was the worst.’
‘Did you fire the gun into the Candybox, Veronica?’
‘No! No, you must believe me. Margaret fired, and the bullet rebounded. She made me pick it up and swallow it. But I never fired the gun myself.’
Odette sensed she was lying – from fear, or perhaps shame. She needed to check whether Veronica was alibied for the day in question.
‘When did you play this game?’
‘I didn’t fire, you must believe that. We played the game last year. August, it must have been.’
‘You’re sure about the date? It wasn’t November?’
‘November?’ Veronica looked blank. ‘No. I was in Canada that month, with my niece.’
‘Send me the details of your ticket payments and your niece’s contact details.’
‘All right. All right. May I go now?’