Headcase by Jack Heath

Author:Jack Heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

I have six sisters—two older, four younger. All our names end in Y—but I alone have wed. What am I?

On the inside, the hypobaric chamber was cramped. It was only about ten feet long and six wide. Wall-mounted gauges and pipes crowded in from all sides. The floor was a steel grid, the kind they use to make catwalks. I felt less like I was on a spaceship and more like I was in a submarine. The two mechanical claws I’d seen before were hanging from the centre of the low ceiling, at about eye level for me. One held a long, white feather. The other held a purple bowling ball. I liked bowling. It was one of very few sports you can do with only three fingers.

Zara hadn’t talked at all on the drive back to the museum. She’d been happy earlier today, when she was pulling apart my theory, but now she had a sullenness I couldn’t explain. It was as if being happy had made her angry, like she wasn’t used to it. Maybe she was bored. Or pissed off that my theory was starting to seem plausible—she hated being wrong.

Finally she spoke. ‘What are we looking for, exactly?’

‘Blood,’ I said. The same thing I was always looking for, pretty much.

‘If you’re right, and if Cho suffocated in here, why would there be blood?’

‘His eardrums burst, and he was coughing up bits of his lungs. You’d think there would be something.’

But looking around the chamber, there was no sign or smell of blood. Maybe Cho’s death hadn’t been as grisly as I’d been fantasising. Or maybe …

‘The killer came back,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They dumped his body on Mars, and then they came back the next day to mop up his juices.’

‘Juices,’ Zara repeated, looking amused. ‘Why the following day?’

‘It just makes more sense. If you’re caught scrubbing the inside of the chamber during the day, you could say you dropped a vial of Laurie’s fake blood or something. If you’re caught cleaning the chamber at night, that’s much harder to explain. Which means we’re looking for someone who left late on Tuesday and came to work early on Wednesday—they wouldn’t have wanted to risk anyone else finding the mess. They’re going to be hard to find, though, since you erased the security videos.’

‘All right, all right,’ Zara said. ‘Let’s not play the blame game.’

There was a red emergency button next to the door, surrounded by yellow and black tape. It was marked CANCEL DECOMPRESSION. I pointed at it.

‘Why didn’t Cho push the button?’ I asked.

Zara frowned. ‘Maybe he didn’t hear the siren. Ear plugs, or something.’

‘It would be deafening, surely?’

Silence fell. The chamber deadened all sound from the rest of the building.

‘Let’s find out,’ Zara said finally, and walked out. Before I could work out what she meant, she was already closing the door.

‘Hey!’ I tried to push the door open, but it was too heavy, with too much momentum. It would have cut off my four remaining fingers if I hadn’t snatched them out of the way in time.

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