Part 20 (2/2)

'No,' Vap Oppat Pol said calmly. 'No, you won't.'

A terrible realization swept over Daph Yilli Gar, but before he could make sense of it his eyes were filled with . . . of it his eyes were filled with . . .

. . . Bright green light, was.h.i.+ng away the barriers that had been built up, leaving him amid the wreckage of his mind, trying to piece the bits together.

126.'Come on,' Bernice drawled, 'you cannot be serious!' She threw the mind probe down on Cwej's bed. It hung, suspended in the repulsor field, a few inches above the surface. On the screen, Forrester could make out the frozen images of Bernice and her friend the Doctor. The Doctor's mouth was open, just as he was about to deliver the words that condemned both of them as murderers.

'What do you mean?' Forrester was affronted. Suspects weren't supposed to talk to investigating officers like that.

Then again, interrogations weren't supposed to take place in the bedroom of one of the interrogating officers. After Cwej's mother had more or less forced them to eat some breakfast, she had given them the free run of Cwej's old room for their 'meeting'. She and Cwej's father had apparently left it untouched since he had left home, apart from letting the cleaning bots go over it once a month. The walls were plastered with GALAXY'S MOST WANTED simcords mixed with a smattering of sim-stars and even a couple of semi-naked viy music singers in erotic poses. Models of stars.h.i.+ps hovered on repulsor fields from the ceiling, some of them with a battery-operated short-distance warp capability.

All very telling, Forrester thought.

On entering the room, Bernice had immediately flung herself on the bed.

Cwej, after a nostalgic and faintly embarra.s.sed look around at the place where his childhood had been spent, had made for an auto-adjust chair beside a work surface. That left Forrester, much to her disgust, with a small floating armchair that fitted around her hips so tightly that it looked like a fas.h.i.+on accessory, and would only take her weight with a good deal of buzzing and quivering.

'I mean, just look at this!' Bernice waved the mind probe at Forrester. 'It makes no sense.'

Forrester cast a sour glance at Cwej, who was lounging around in his chair with his gun in his lap, flicking through a sim-book. 'Hey, hairball! Pay attention!'

Cwej looked up. 'Sorry,' he said, blus.h.i.+ng.

'Yeah, you'd be sorry if she slit my throat while you were buried in kid's stuff.'

He looked sceptical. 'You think that's likely?'

'Well there's one way to find out for sure, isn't there?'

He threw the book onto the desk and picked up his gun. 'You win, as usual,'

he muttered.

Forrester turned back to Bernice. 'That's very patently you in the memories of the underdweller. No ifs. No buts.'

127.'Look,' Bernice sighed as she hovered a few inches above the bed, 'let me get this right. Someone called Waiting For Justice, who lived down in the Undertown, was killed by someone called Annie, who also lived down in the Undertown. It originally looked like one of these motiveless murders that you've been getting, which the Doctor reckons are caused by some kind of radiation leak. You, however, think Annie's memory of the murder was implanted, and that Waiting For Justice was actually killed by the Doctor and me, on the basis that she saw us a few hours before you picked her up, even though I deny ever having seen her before. Is that a fair summary?'

'The phrase ”condemned with your own words” springs readily to mind.'

'The phrase ”faked evidence” springs to my mind. You've already admitted that the evidence has been faked once. Why can't it have been faked a second time?'

Forrester shrugged. 'What's the point?'

'The point is,' Bernice said in exasperation, 'that you were clever enough to penetrate one lot of false evidence, so the villains of the piece, whoever they are, concocted a second set to throw you off at a tangent. In the process, they decided to frame the Doctor and me for some reason which I have yet to fathom, but which probably has something to do with the theft of the TARDIS.'

'The what?' Cwej wanted to know.

'The . . . Never mind.'

'Once we start on that route,' Forrester said sceptically, 'there's no end to the levels of faked evidence we could a.s.sume. I've got a rule of thumb for this sort of thing. If there's any evidence that the evidence is faked, then I'll believe it. If not, I won't.'

'Fair enough.' Bernice stared at the image on the screen. 'There must be a clue here somewhere. Something out of place, some little thing . . . ' She bit her lip. 'Did you say that we said something?'

'Yeah. Press the CONTINUE key.'

Bernice did so, and the images s.h.i.+fted slightly. A voice drifted out of the probe: 'Bernice, we make a fine pair of murderers.'

'Your friend's voice,' Forrester said.

'No, it's not,' Cwej said, beating Bernice to the punch.

Forrester stared at him. 'What do you mean?' she said.

He blushed. 'I mean, it's not the same voice as the man we saw on Purgatory.'

'Of course it is.'

Cwej shook his head stubbornly. 'No. We've got the wrong man.'

Forrester couldn't believe what she was hearing. She'd gone out on a limb for Cwej after he'd sprung that tale about faked mind probe records and mys-128terious calls to Adjudicator Secular Ras.h.i.+d, and here he was, calmly telling her that he'd been wrong!

'It's not the Doctor's voice,' Bernice agreed. 'Listen to it.'

She fumbled with the controls, and managed to replay the sequence.

'The accent is missing, and the stress on the words is different,' she continued.

Forrester tried to remember the voice of the little man on Purgatory. Quite harsh, with an odd little roll on the R sounds. This voice, the voice on the mind probe record, was different: smoother, more tentative, with an odd little questioning lift at the end of the sentence.

'All right,' she said. 'I'm prepared to be convinced. How do you think this image got on here then?'

Bernice thought for a moment.

'I think somebody implanted this sequence in the memory of the mind probe. I think they used images of the Doctor and me they picked up from a camera somewhere, but I don't think they knew what our voices were like.

For some reason, G.o.d knows why, they chose a voice for the Doctor, but it doesn't match the Doctor's real voice.'

There was a pause as Forrester thought through the implications of that.

'h.e.l.l,' she said finally, 'this is big. We need to send a message to Provost-Major Beltempest to make sure he doesn't do anything rash to the Doctor. It would also be useful if I could hear the Doctor's voice again, just to be sure.'

She looked at Cwej. Judging by his expression, he was still a few minutes behind on the conversation.

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