TWENTY

Lisa had no watch to tell her the time, but it was obviously too late now to do the run into what had once been the Bath city center in ten minutes. The morning rush hour was already well underway. The onboard computer, roused from quietude by the parking offense she’d committed on North Road, logged six more manifest offenses and four instances of contributory negligence. Its muted voice was still beeping plaintively about parking regulations when she abandoned it, but she figured she made it to the Recreation Ground Mall within a couple of minutes of the deadline she’d been given.

Lisa didn’t expect that her tardiness would make any difference; Helen’s imposition of a time limit was a meaningless gesture, born of the desire to pretend that she still had some degree of control over the situation. Lisa left Mike Grundy’s mobile in the car, having switched it off after the call to Helen.

She was not surprised to discover that Salomey was a clothing shop, specializing in ultrasmart costumes for ultrasmart women. A notice on the automatic door informed customers that THIS IS A WOMEN-ONLY SHOP, but that wasn’t unusual nowadays. The special intimacy of smart fabrics had given birth to a new modesty, and had brought a backlash in favor of privacy that had drawn many new kinds of social boundaries.

The Real Woman who watched Lisa from the purchase desk as she crossed the smart-carpeted floor to the dressing room looked completely out of place. Even if she hadn’t been so powerfully built, she would have stood out simply because she didn’t look as diffident as the younger sales assistants obviously fighting boredom while they waited for opening time. A clock on the wall told Lisa that the time was now eight thirty-five.

The woman waiting in the dressing room wasn’t a bodybuilder, but that didn’t detract from the frank hostility and meanness of her gaze.

“Strip,” she instructed.

Lisa peeled off the smartsuit supplied by the Swindon police. She braced herself for yet another dose of censorious advice about her style sense, but was pleasantly surprised for once. The one-woman reception committee gave her naked body the once-over with some kind of sweeper before handing her a brand-new outfit. It was a smart, dark-red one-piece, far more expensive and stylish than anything she’d ever have dreamed of buying. Had she not been so ruthless in excising all twentieth-century cliches from her vocabulary, it would have made her feel like mutton dressed as lamb.

The woman to whom she’d given her old one-piece took it away. It was another, even younger woman who came in to peel back the carpet, exposing the trapdoor set in the floor of the room.

“You got me dressed up like thisand you want to take me down into the sewers?” Lisa asked, feigning astonishment.

“You can walk through a sewer in a Salomey outfit and come up as lovely as a bird of paradise and as fresh as a golden rose,” the woman told her, straight-faced. “It says so in our catalogue.”

“That’s a relief,” said Lisa as she lowered herself into the opening, searching with what seemed to her to be stockinged feet for the rungs of the ladder. “In my day, birds of paradise still existed in the wild, and freshness standards were set by daisies—but everything’s artificial these days.”

It transpired, however, that the well beneath Salomey did not lead to the sewers at all. It led to a dimly lit, stone-clad tunnel that extended in a southeastern direction. To begin with, the tunnel was conspicuously clean and obviously new, but its storeroom-lined walls gave access within a hundred meters to brick-lined spaces of an ancient cast.

Lisa remembered the days when permission had first been granted for the construction of the mall, and she tried to recall the controversies that had raged around the project. There had been a convent on the north side of North Parade Road, she remembered. Deconsecrated and sold off by the cash-strapped Church Commissioners, it had briefly become the site of a rescue dig by archaeologists from the university before its crypt had been abandoned as a supposedly untouchable enclave within the stockholding cellars. Once out of public sight, the place had obviously fallen prey to the combined forces of economic convenience and the new privacy.

“The crypts of a nunnery overlaid and overlapped by a shopping mall,” she said to her guide. “You brought Morgan Miller to face the feminist inquisition in the cellars of a bloody nunnery.” This, she thought, was a decision that had Arachne West’s stamp on it.

“Quiet,” her guide instructed, although the command was pointless. If Lisa had still been carrying some kind of bug, the people listening in to it wouldn’t have required any verbal cues to help them figure out where she was.

The doors in the various sections of the cellar complex were far more modern than the brickwork that contained them, and they bore fancy combination locks. The guide conducted her through two of them before coaxing open a third. She waited outside to close it again once Lisa was inside, but Lisa wasn’t entirely convinced of the impregnability of the inner sanctum to which she was admitted. There was probably more than one way in, and there were probably too many people who knew the codes.

There was no sign of ancient brickwork inside the cosy cell. Its walls had been coated with some kind of artificial plastic, a pale green in color. Against one wall there was a semicircular desk; its generous size took up slightly more than half the available space, effectively reducing the rest to the status of a short, curved corridor. There was yet another inner room on the far side, similarly secured with a certified-unhackable double lock.

There was no one seated behind the desk to monitor the various screens mounted therein, but Arachne West was sitting on top of it. She was still bald, of course, but now that she was in her late forties, the baldness looked almost natural. What didn’t look natural was the velvety-black Salomey outfit she was wearing. It should have been highly polished synthetic leather, Lisa thought, or some kind of paramilitary uniform. Arachne wasn’t so much mutton dressed as lamb as lion dressed as kitten, but the effect was just as false.

“My mother always told me it was dangerous to talk to policemen,” the Real Woman said, “but kids never listen, do they?”

“The advice was bad,” Lisa told her. “You should have ignored it entirely. Where’s Helen?”

“I told her she ought to try to make a getaway before she’s installed on top of the ‘Most Wanted’ list. It was good to have the excuse—she’d become a liability since we had to make it clear to her that she wasn’t running the show anymore. So why was Mama’s advice bad?”

“If you’d come to me when Stella and Helen first persuaded you that Morgan had something worth stealing,” Lisa told her, “we could have avoided every sad act of this ridiculous farce. I could have talked to him for you.”

“You’d been talking to him for thirty-nine years,” Arachne pointed out. “I was on your side to begin with—I thought Stella and Helen might be letting personal matters affect their judgment—but in the end, I didn’t think I knew you well enough to know for sure which side you’d be on when the chips were down. You never let me get that close. You always kept me at arm’s length.”

“I was never convinced that you didn’t have designs on my body,” Lisa said. “What clinched the crazy deal? What’s this proofStella thinks she has of my complicity with Morgan’s allegedly unholy schemes? You must have figured out after you bugged my belt that I don’t know a damn thing.”

“You had your ovaries stripped, and the eggs frozen,” the Real Woman told her unhesitatingly. “There didn’t seem to be any reason for you to do that unless you were in on Miller’s grand plan. Stella had her own account of why he gave up on the dogs, which seemed plausible enough to those of us who remembered the old ALF riots. Did you know that Helen Grundy was the social worker responsible for the woman convicted after the riot at the East Central campus way back in ’15? Do people still say it’s a small world, or is that too twentieth century? Pure coincidence, of course—but that’s the whole thing in a nutshell, isn’t it? If you stick around long enough, the coincidences accumulate. Nobody can tell anymore what’s significant and what’s not. Once the dogs were off the menu, Stella said, Miller had to use mice or human embryos. She reckoned that your eggs might be supplying him with raw material as well as giving you the chance to save up for the big payoff. As for the bugged belt—you might have been running a double bluff. People who know they’ve been tagged can turn the leak to their own purposes, if they’re clever enough. You’re a cop, after all. You’re paranoid, I’m very paranoid, Stella and Helen are extremelyparanoid. When the whole world turns paranoid, everybody begins to see things that aren’t there—especially conspiracies.”