“They painted the bookcases. That’s a crime?”
DCI Bird doesn’t reply. She seems lost in her own thoughts again.
“Maybe we should arrest Harrison for painting some bookcases?” I say. I’m joking, of course, but perhaps she can’t tell. Londoners seem to have a strange sense of humor, and by strange I mean nonexistent.
“Did you say something?” she asks.
“I said maybe we should arrest Harrison—”
She shakes her head. “Not yet.”
30HARRISON
I’m not ready to face them again yet. I know the female detective doesn’t believe me, and I feel numb as she walks around my house, already weary of theirboy cop, bad coproutine. She asked me to wait in the kitchen while they went upstairs but now I wonder if I should have insisted on following them; it isn’t as though they have a warrant. Maybe I should have said no but I was worried how that might look. I don’t know what’snormalin this situation, but given they think my wife might have committed suicide, it feels very strange for them to be trespassing on my grief like this.
Unless of course thatisn’twhat they think.
I’m sure Carter suspects me of something, even if his new boss doesn’t. I wish I knew what to do, but this isn’t the sort of situation life prepares you for. So I pace around the kitchen, wondering how bad it would look if I poured myself a glass of scotch, listening to the sound of creaking footsteps up above, wondering what they are doing up there, what they are thinking, and what they might find. My patience expires when they come back downstairs and—instead of coming to the kitchen, thanking me for my time and fucking off—they disappear into the library. I can hear them speaking in hushed voices and the longer it goes on the angrier I feel. I’vereached an age where I seem to find most people deeply irritating, and nothing irritates me more than people who waste my time. It’s pretty obvious Eden isn’t in the library, this isn’t a game of bloody Clue, and the police have already taken up too much of my day. I’ve got work to do.
“Did you want to borrow a book?” I say as I walk into the room, and they both spin around as though I have interrupted them.
“No, but would you mind if we take your wife’s hairbrush?” the female detective asks, holding up a brush inside a clear plastic bag.
“Anything I can do to help,” I reply from the doorway, trying to sound calm.
“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful,” the detective replies with a wonky smile.
I’m sure she wants the hairbrush for a DNA test, but I think it looks better not to ask why. Less… guilty. The pressure of trying to act how I should is starting to get to me. I think I’m sweating. The male officer doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at me. He thinks I did something to my wife. Or he thinks I made her do something to herself. I’m not sure what Olivia Bird is thinking; she’s harder to read.
I’m thinking I want them to leave.
Nobody except me understands how important my work is right now. It can’t wait, regardless of what has or hasn’t happened to Eden. Thanatos is at a crucial stage in its evolution. My whole career has been leading up to this moment. My whole life. After years of endless research, personal sacrifice, and hard bloody work, I have finally found a big investor who also believes that people have a right to know their date of death. I can’t slow this deal down now, and I can’t tell the investors that my wife has disappeared. Nothing must get in the way of this deal, so if the police think my behavior is strange then so be it. There are bigger things at play here. It’s literally a matter of life and death.
In Greek mythology Thanatos was a god of death, the son ofdarkness and the brother of sleep. He appeared to people when the time allotted to them by fate was up, and carried them to the next world. I borrowed his name for my company for obvious reasons, and I hoped Thanatos would be my legacy. The trials are over, the license almost approved, and the new investors believe that Thanatos should no longer be an invitation-only service with participants carefully selected beforehand. Thanatos will no longer be free either. They want it to be available to everyone—everyone who can afford it at least—and if I sell my company now, I’ll make a fortune. As I should, given all the sacrifices I have had to make.
Unlike a lot of scientists, I do not have a god complex.
But I do have a problem with the way God does things.
Time is money and money is time. We should all know how much we have and be able to budget accordingly. Thanatos is what I wanted to be remembered for. I dreamed it would change people’s lives, and deaths, forever. That I’d be like Alexander Fleming, Edward Jenner, and Marie Curie, but thatmyscientific discovery would be bigger than all of theirs and the world would remember my name.
Now I’m not so sure.
The detective and the sergeant finally take a hint and start to leave. I’m not too worried about him; it’s her I need to keep an eye on.
I recognized Olivia Bird as soon as I opened the front door.
She was one of the clinical trial volunteers a few months ago, but unlike all the others, she turned up uninvited at the private clinic in London using her dead grandmother’s name. Many of our clients are approaching one hundred years of age. Centenarians were one of our main targets for clinical trials for lots of reasons. Plus, I find the closer a person is to death the more they wonder about it.
When Olivia Bird turned up at the clinic, she did not look one hundred years old. And according to our records, the client was already dead. The team immediately raised the alarm that DCI Birdhad applied using her grandmother’s invitation, and it wasmewho had to decide what to do about her. I remember watching her on a screen as she was interviewed by one of our “doctors.” Our client-facing staff are all out-of-work actors, none of them have any medical training, and they are carefully selected and auditioned. We pay them more than they can earn on-screen and we make them sign an NDA. I confess that the casting process was fun. I tell them what to do, what to say, and how to say it, like a director in their ear. They aren’t making movies anymore, but we tell them they are making history, and playing a lead role in changing the world. I shovel the shit and they spread it.
Some people—people like Olivia Bird—might question the ethics of what we do. As a rule, I have never allowed anyone working in law enforcement to be part of the program. They tend not to understand that sometimes you have to break the rules to fix things. Luckily, she still hasn’t asked the right questions, just more of the wrong ones. Strange, given her IQ. Distracted by her diagnosis I suspect. Caught in the no-man’s-land between searching for the meaning of life and accepting that life has no meaning.
I couldn’t let anyone get in the way of our clinical trials; the success of Thanatos matters too much to let that happen. So Thanatos started watching Olivia Bird from the moment she called the number on her grandmother’s letter. When she clicked to accept our terms and conditions at the bottom of the online questionnaire, we started listening to her too, via her laptop, though I doubt she was aware. People never read the small print. And when she walked into the clinic on Harley Street, I watched her every minute she was in the building and dealt with her case myself. With the help of AI, a person’s DNA, and our bespoke algorithms, we predict when a person will die. But it wasmewho had to decide whether to tell Olivia Bird the truth.
As soon as she left the building I deleted all records of her fromthe database. For a long time I never thought I would see Olivia Bird again, but here she is. In my home. In Hope Falls. Back where she started. And that’s okay, we all go back where we came from eventually, it’s nature’s way.
We’re all born with an expiration date, we just don’t know it.
