OxCrimes Page 10

  The pneumatic drill stopped again – and at that moment, Johnny heard the sound he had been waiting for for the last two, three, four hours … it was impossible to know how much time had passed when he couldn’t even see the shape of his watch, let alone the numerals. Someone was trying to put a coin in the slot! At last, someone else wanted to use the toilet!

  Johnny had taken off his jacket and shoes and unbuttoned his shirt and he felt the damp material tugging at him as he pushed himself off the floor and onto his knees. The coin had fallen into the slot! Would it activate the door?

  No. But whoever wanted to use the toilet was still on the other side. Johnny slammed his palms against the metal wall, doing his best to summon up what was left of his voice.

  ‘Help me! Help me!’ he rasped. ‘Please, help me! The door’s broken. I’m stuck inside!’

  He swung his hand in an arc, sweeping it over the floor, and found one of his shoes. He held it and used the heel like a hammer. Whoever was on the other side must hear him. The drill was still silent. The nightmare had to be over.

  On the other side of the wall, a fair-haired man in his twenties, smartly dressed in designer jeans and t-shirt was looking at the slot in frustration. He was not alone. He was on his way to a restaurant with his boy-friend, a handsome black man similarly dressed and about the same age. The two of them had walked across the river from the mansion flat they shared in Battersea when one of them had been, as he put it, caught short. They had argued briefly but had actually been chatting quite amicably when they came upon the convenience.

  ‘What is it?’ The black man was standing on the edge of the pavement with his back to the builders. He and his partner were both architects. They were on their way to meet a potential new client.

  ‘I put the coin in but it isn’t opening.’

  Inches away, Johnny Maslin pounded at the wall with his shoe. ‘Please! Call the police … !’

  ‘Those things are horrible anyway. You’ll just have to wait until we get to the restaurant.’

  ‘What about my pound?’

  ‘Help me! Please!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Derek. Let’s just get there, shall we?’

  The black man set off again and with one last, rueful look at the door, set off after his friend. He caught up with him at the corner of Fulham Road. ‘You could have waited for me,’ he signed, mouthing the words.

  His boyfriend had lip-read what he said and signed back. ‘We’re going to be late.’

  The two of them hurried away. A short while later, the drill started up again.

  Mrs Hourdakis, the Greek Cypriot cleaner, had just been leaving when the policeman arrived. There hadn’t been very much to do in the house today but that was often the way and she had stayed there the full three hours. The policeman, who had introduced himself as Detective Inspector Stephen Cloth and who had shown her a warrant card just like they do on television, seemed a nice enough man, in his thirties but with prematurely grey hair like that American actor, George Clooney. She had made him a cup of tea in the kitchen while she answered his questions. She had worked for Mr Maslin for three years. She hadn’t seen him for a while because the two of them seldom met … he left messages for her on a pad in the hall. She had let herself in with her own key. Yes, of course the detective could have a look around. Mrs Hourdakis wasn’t too happy about that but she had always been nervous of the authorities and thought it best not to argue. Did she have a key to the garage? No, she didn’t. But then she remembered the spare set in the utility cupboard and the two of them went back through the kitchen together.

  Cloth opened the door that interconnected between the kitchen and the garage and turned on the lights. And there it was, sitting in front of him, the Audi Spyder, a beautiful car whatever you might think of the wastefulness, the extravagance and the sheer egotism that it represented. Not to mention the environmental considerations. Cloth’s wife did voluntary work for Greenpeace and he knew what she would have to say about this. Well, Mr Maslin wouldn’t be driving it again for some time. Cloth took in the crumpled bonnet, the grille, the bloodstain. What were you thinking of, Mr Maslin, driving away like that? Yes, you were in trouble. But your lawyer would have kept you out of jail. A hefty fine and maybe even some community service. But now …?

  ‘You have no idea where Mr Maslin is?’ he asked.

  The cleaner shook her head. She had seen the blood. Her eyes were fixed on it.

  ‘Do you know where he keeps his passport?’

  Another shake of the head. She seemed too shocked to speak.

  Cloth hadn’t seen it on his brief tour of the house. He took out his phone and dialled the office. He would have to get forensics down here and eventually the cars would be removed. But first things first. Someone in the office – a creative type with green spectacles and mauve braces – had mentioned a second home in the south of France. He supposed he would have to put out an alert on the airports and probably Eurostar too. Stupid bastard. Didn’t he know there was nowhere to hide in the world any more?

  The phone connected. ‘Cloth here,’ he said. ‘I’ve found him. At least, I’ve found the car. But I don’t suppose he’s too far away.’

  Less than a quarter of a mile from the house, Johnny Maslin took one final lungful of his own stink and closed his eyes. It would have made no difference to what he could or couldn’t see. He had simply exchanged one sort of blackness for another although the second would be his for eternity. And so he remained, unmoving, stretched out in front of a toilet bowl filled with filth and an Armani tie.

  He lay there for six weeks.

  Summer turned to autumn. The trees in Fulham looked their best, scattering red, brown and golden leaves over the pavements. The workers had finished their pipework and gone. The road was back in pristine condition with a neat suture of black tar. It was still quite warm and many of the residents had complained to the council about the unpleasant smell that had begun to permeate the area and, although someone had come in to look at the drains, nobody had yet been able to discover the source. Finally, someone had thought about the public convenience that had been out of order all this time and, one Monday morning, a white van drew up and a woman got out. Maria Onyango didn’t usually work at weekends – at least not for Fulham Council. With a family to support in Uganda, she had several cleaning jobs; in hotels along Park Lane, in private homes and this. It had been six weeks since her accident and she was glad to be back at work.

  ‘How long?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Twenty minutes…’ Maria replied. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh my God! The drain is blocked. Why didn’t they send someone out?’

  Her broken hip had healed but it was still causing her trouble. Taking her mop, her cleaning liquids, a new roll of paper and of course the special key that would open the toilet, the Hammersmith & Fulham Council Environmental Health (Mobile Unit) Sanitary Worker limped towards the door.

  WALTER MOSLEY was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and made his name with a series of novels featuring Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the city’s Watts neighbourhood. He started writing at thirty-four and says he has written every day since, publishing more than forty books in genres including mystery and afro-futurist science fiction, as well as non-fiction politics. He lives in New York.

  The Sin of Dreams

  Walter Mosley

  July 27, 2015

  ‘So who’s paying for all this?’ Carly Matthews asked.

  ‘There are a few investors,’ Morgan Morgan replied. ‘A man who owns the largest cable and satellite provider in China, a so-called sheik, the owner of two pro-teams in the US, and a certain, undefined fund, that comes to us via the auspices of the White House.’

  Morgan gestured broadly. Behind the milk chocolate brown entrepreneur Carly could see, through the huge blue tinted window, thirty-two stories down on centre city LA. The San Bernardino Mountains stood under a haze in the distance. The summer sun shone brightly but
still failed to warm the air conditioned office.

  ‘Government money?’ she asked.

  ‘Not exactly,’ the director of New Lease Enterprises replied, looking somewhere over the young scientist’s head.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Someone close to the president has called together a small group of billionaires and shared with them the potential of our research. He has also, unofficially, given NLE’s holding company, BioChem International, access to the justice department and three constitutional experts.’

  ‘What does the justice department have to do with neuronal data analyses?’

  Morgan Morgan, executive vice president and principal director of NLE, gazed at the twenty-three-year-old postdoctoral student. Her pleasant features and youthful expression belied the razor-sharp mind that, his advisors assured him, her published articles so clearly exhibited.

  ‘What business does a black hip-hop promoter from the Motor City have running a subsidiary of a biological research company?’ Morgan asked.

  All the fair-skinned blonde scientist could do was raise her eyebrows and shrug.

  ‘The only reason I’m here,’ she said, ‘is because my former professor, Dr Lawson, asked me as a favour to him, to meet with you. I’m in the middle of three very important experiments and I have to be back by no later than nine o’clock tonight.’

  ‘What reason did Rinehart give you?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘Dr Lawson told me that I would be amazed by what you had to say. It is for that reason alone I left Stanford to come down here.’

  ‘I paid Rinehart three hundred and seventy thousand dollars to say that to you. One hundred thousand for his second family in West Virginia, two hundred to cover gambling debts in Atlantic City, and seventy to end the annoyance of a blackmailer who has been collecting money from him for twelve years.’

  Young Dr Matthews tilted her head and peered blankly at the ex-hip-hop manager and impresario. For a full minute she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘Well?’ Morgan asked, managing not to smile. ‘Are you amazed?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t see why Dr Lawson would want me to come down here to learn about his, his indiscretions.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Morgan allowed. ‘I’ve already told you that the work we’re doing has to do with the transmigration of the human soul. Our work in that field is truly astonishing.’

  ‘What’s astonishing is so much money being spent on this rubbish,’ she said.

  ‘Two years at Oxford, right?’ Morgan pointed at her and smiled, knowingly.

  ‘Yes, but, why do you ask?’

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said with an almost boyish grin. ‘Americans don’t really use that word even though it’s a very good one.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to dig up dirt on my mentor or to listen to your opinions on the nationality of language.’

  ‘No,’ Morgan said, ‘you are here because I paid your mentor good money to make sure you came.’

  ‘And the question is why?’

  ‘The same reason the board of directors of BioChem International opted to give me a free hand in this soul business – sales.’

  ‘Sales?’

  ‘We have, as I’ve already told you, all the theoretical and technical knowledge to read and therefore copy the contents of a human brain into electronic data storage and from storage back into that mind, or another. But because of the complexity and mathematical nuances of this process there isn’t enough memory in our facility to contain even a fraction of a normal adult’s experience and intelligence, learned and inherited instincts, and conscious and unconscious memory – at least that’s what the experts tell me. The amount of data attached even to a simple phrase in a human’s mind could take up trillions of bytes in memory. The experience of a single day would fill up every storage device the defence department has.’

  ‘Oh,’ Carly said, the light dawning behind her eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ Morgan agreed, nodding. ‘If realised, your macro-molecular studies trying to simulate DNA development would give us a way to store information that is only just a thousand times the capacity-size of the human brain and naturally compatible with human physiology. If we could harness your bio-storage methodology with our neuronal I/O systems we could combine them with the cloning process to transfer the human soul from one body to another.’

  ‘But, Mr Morgan, what you have to understand is that I do not believe in a soul.’

  ‘No,’ the director agreed. ‘You don’t. But you’re an American citizen aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You believe in the freedom of religion do you not?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And all religions believe in the human soul.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So if I offer to sell a customer a new, younger version of himself then he has to believe that it is not only his consciousness but his actual soul that will inhabit the new body.’

  ‘But it isn’t,’ Dr Matthews argued. ‘Even if the new body contained his memories when the old body dies the origin, the sense organs that recorded and experienced those memories will die with it.’

  ‘But what if we copied Mr X’s memories into the macro-molecular computer your research postulates, talk to Mr X in that form and then copy those memories back into his old body?’

  ‘His brain will remember the experiences his mind had as a machine.’

  ‘Yes,’ Morgan said happily. ‘We copy him back and forth a few times like that and then, with no warning, move these memories into the new body. His mind, his experiences, and his thoughts will be indistinguishable from the three storage units he’s experienced. Therefore the new man and the old man will be the same – exactly.’

  ‘It’s kind of like three card monty,’ Carly said.

  ‘Kind of,’ Morgan said, pursing his lips and shrugging slightly.

  December 3, 2019

  Dr Carly Matthews was remembering this first meeting as she sat in the witness box in a pine and cherry wood California state courtroom seven blocks east of Morgan Morgan’s former office.

  ‘You believed that Mr Morgan was a huckster,’ Ralph Lacosta, the prosecuting attorney said. He was a short man in a black suit that seemed to call attention to his small stature. He wore glasses like Carly did. At their last meeting, in preparation for her testimony, he had asked her out for dinner.

  ‘Objection,’ Melanie Post, the defence attorney said. ‘Leading the witness.’

  Melanie was buxom, around forty, and Carly found her intimidating though she didn’t know why. The defence lawyer never raised her voice or bullied a witness. It was something about the way she looked at and listened to people – with unrelenting intensity.

  ‘Reword, counsellor,’ a seemingly bored John Cho, the presiding judge advised.

  The judge was sixty-nine Carly knew from Wikipedia’s newly instituted public official bio-repository. He had presided over some of the most important murder cases in recent years and had survived three bouts with liver cancer.

  ‘How did Mr Morgan impress you when you first met?’ Lacosta asked Carly.

  ‘He told me that he planned to migrate souls. I thought he was joking.’

  ‘You didn’t believe him?’

  ‘He was a music producer who was all of a sudden at the head of the subsidiary of a major medical corporation. That alone was ridiculous.’

  ‘But you went to work for him the day you met,’ Lacosta claimed. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Five million dollars.’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘He paid me five million dollars and promised over a hundred million in capital to design and build a macromolecular computer for New Lease Enterprises. He also offered to let me retain copyrights and patents on the theory and the physical device.’

  ‘And you accepted?’

  ‘I didn’t believe in the existence of a soul but to have the funds to build a new bio-based computer system was too good to pass up.’

>   ‘And did you accomplish this goal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did NLE’s other researchers manage to copy the contents of a man’s mind, completely, from a human brain into an analogous synthetic construct?’

  At the defence table, over Lacosta’s left shoulder, Carly could see the co-defendants: Morgan Morgan and a young man named Tyler Edgington Barnes the fourth. Morgan reminded her of her father. Not her biological dad but Horace Granger, the black man that married her mother after Thomas Matthews had abandoned them.

  ‘Miss Matthews,’ Judge Cho said.

  ‘I cannot say that the data transfer was complete,’ Carly said. ‘But the responses from the various I/O devices on Micromime Six were exactly the same as the subjects gave with their own bodies and minds.’

  A woman in the courtroom began to cry. That, Carly knew, was Melinda Greaves-Barnes, seventy-six-year-old self-proclaimed widow of Morgan Morgan’s co-defendant.

  ‘So you communicated with these synthetic memories?’ Prosecutor Lacosta asked.

  ‘Yes. For many months, in over a hundred test cases.’

  ‘And where were the original patients while you conducted your experiments with the synthetic device?’

  ‘In a medically induced coma. That, that was the only way we could assure an even transfer of information, by lowering the metabolism to a catatonic state.’