Blue Remembered Earth

‘Something. I don’t know what.’ After a moment he added, ‘I might need to go back into space myself. There’s a job . . .’ He closed his eyes. ‘It’s related, but I can’t say much more than that. I might have to break into family property.’

‘Is that why I’m here? Because I can be useful to you?’

‘You know me better than that.’

‘Perhaps.’ She was silent for a few seconds. ‘Well, as it happens, I just quit in Lagos. Bad day at the office.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. Nearly got spiked. Figured it was time to bail out, before we hit something really nasty. And for what? A dickhead of a boss? Bank accounts from a hundred years ago, the tawdry blackmail secrets of the rich and famous?’ She looked cross-eyed and appalled, as if she’d just picked something repulsive out of her nose. ‘Frankly, if I’m going to die on the job, I’d rather it was for something more interesting than century-old scandal fodder.’

Geoffrey considered the Winter Palace.

‘I’m afraid century-old scandal fodder may be the best I can offer instead.’

There was a silence. The airpod made a tiny course adjustment. Once in a while another one zipped by in the other direction, but aside from that they had the night sky all to themselves.

‘You want to talk about what happened,’ Jumai said after a while, in not much more than a whisper, ‘it’s all right with me.’ When Geoffrey was not immediately forthcoming, she added, ‘You said they found him near the elephants, that there’d been an accident.’

‘Something out there got him. But it wasn’t elephants.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t know. Something else. Memphis knew his way around the herd. Elephants didn’t do this.’

After a while she said, ‘It must have been quick.’

‘That’s what the doctor thought. He couldn’t have had any warning, or he’d have . . . protected himself.’

‘I’ve never seen anyone do that.’

‘I have,’ Geoffrey said, thinking back to the day they had found the death machine, and Sunday had nearly died. ‘Once, when I was little.’

It was during breakfast with Jumai the following morning that the thought struck him, the one that, in retrospect – and given his ideas about the cousins – he might reasonably already have entertained. Perhaps, on some unspoken level, he had indeed done that. But he had not come close to voicing it to himself at the level of conscious assessment. And now that he had, now that the thought had pushed itself into his awareness like a rhino charging into daylight, it was all he could do to sit in stunned wonderment, awed at what his mind had dared to conjure.

‘What are you thinking?’ Eunice asked.

‘I’m thinking it would be a good idea if you fucked off.’

‘Geoffrey?’ Jumai asked.

He was staring past her, through the window, out to the trees beyond the border wall. Eunice was gone.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said distractedly. ‘It’s just—’

‘It was a bad idea me coming here, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s not it,’ he said.

But in truth it was disconcerting, having Jumai back at the household, but them not sleeping together. Doubly so in that Memphis was not around. Time and again his thoughts kept plummeting through the same mental trapdoors. Memphis should hear this. Memphis will know. What will Memphis have to say? And each time he caught himself and swore that that would be the last time, and each time he was mistaken.

They’d slept in separate rooms, and met in the east wing for breakfast. The household staff vacillated between subdued discretion and the putting on of brave faces, acting as if nothing had happened. This grated on Geoffrey until he realised he was doing exactly the same thing, smiling too emphatically, cracking nervous little half-jokes. They were all simply trying to do what Memphis would have wanted, which was to keep on with business as usual exactly as if nothing had happened. They were all overdoing it, though.

‘You don’t have to apologise,’ Jumai said. ‘You’re bound to be upset by what’s happened. But if this is making you feel awkward, me being here, I can leave at any time.’ She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. ‘It doesn’t prevent me working on that, um, commission.’

‘Honestly, it’s not you,’ Geoffrey assured her. ‘I’m glad to have some company. It’s just . . . there’s a lot going on in my head.’

Like the ghost of his dead grandmother, bothering him from beyond the grave. Like the possibility that one or both of the cousins had killed Memphis.

There it was, stated as unambiguously as possible. No pussyfooting around that one.

The cousins killed Memphis.

He’d hoped, upon erecting this suspicion, to be able to knock it down immediately. Bulldoze the rubble away and forget about it. Until that point he hadn’t hated the cousins, after all. Or at least if there were degrees of hate, his was on the mildly antipathetic end of the spectrum, repelled by their manipulative gamesmanship, sickened by their avarice, disgusted by their attachment to family above all else. But not actually despising them. Not actually wishing pain upon them. Most of the time.

But the idea that they might have killed Memphis, or made his death probable . . . well, when framed so plainly, why exactly not? The cousins bitterly regretted bringing Geoffrey in to help them, that was clear. Since his return