Free The Gordon Mamon Casebook by Simon Petrie

the glass or through his peripheral vision. And the wrestler’s training would surely have been to check out any possible disturbances around him. So why hadn’t O’Meara turned to face his foe? Gordon had gone all through the other tile-cams’ footage, the man had not even tensed as the fatal impulse was applied to his so-broad back. He’d just gone quietly to a horrible death.
    It made no sense.
    Yes, there were clues; but Gordon preferred his clues to be neatly numbered, and divided into ‘across’ and ‘down’. Puzzles that you could solve through a thesaurus, or a scrabble dictionary, without fear of deadly hazard. Crossword clues never led to anyone dying by violence, except maybe sometimes at the highest, most competitive levels.
    A burst of laughter from the lobby disrupted his concentration. He emerged to investigate. The four guests, still excluded from their own rooms, were playing charades. The laughter had been initiated by Ali Bai’s attempt at an Elvis Presley imitation. Gordon shook his head, mired in frustration.
    Impersonation . Something clicked. He went to find Belle.
     
    * * *
     
    “What d’you mean, offline? Is this the same fault that took out our comms link?”
    “Don’t think so,” Belle replied. “The security scanner’s topside, at Skytop Embarkation. The comms fault’s local, and Sue thinks she’s just about got that sorted.”
    “Huh? So Sue’s chief cook and radio operator now?”
    “Yep. Her promotion came through last week.”
    Gordon grinned, wondering how long it would take Sue to discover that the company ‘promotions’ didn’t actually equate to an increase in income, just in responsibilities. “But—they just let passengers board anyway?”
    “They still checked them. Visual, biometrics, random pat-down body searches, sniffers for drugs and weaponry. Just no X-ray or subdermal radar imagery. They haven’t reported any problems.”
    No , thought Gordon. Just an escaped killer and a mystery death . But it was all starting to make sense. “So, this affected our module?”
    “Sure. It went offline two hours before we decoupled. You think there’s a connection?”
    “Belle, I’m sure . This is Haier’s doing.”
    “Haier? But how? There’s been no-one of remotely his description passing through Embarkation at all today. The police sound clear on that, it’s one aspect of his disappearance they’re totally puzzled over.”
    “I’m not surprised. They wouldn’t have recognised him in his spacesuit.”
    “But Gord, the spacesuit’s one of ours. And it hasn’t been off-station. Ever.” Belle stared at him, as if to find the answers in his face. “And if it’s Haier, where is he? ”
    “That,” replied Gordon with the theatrical affectation he knew so annoyed others around him, “is a matter of some gravity.” And he went off for another look at the obs deck vent shaft.
     
    * * *
     
    The murder, including O’Meara’s counterintuitive lack of response to perceived danger, now made complete sense. But the problem of the space-suit’s vanished occupant remained. Gordon stared through the hatchway, baffled by the empty duct’s featurelessness. He’d checked all the patch-cams’ playbacks. Nothing.
    Where had it gone?
    Slowly, it occurred to him that all might not be as it seemed. A false panel somewhere in the ducts might mask another exit. He’d checked the shaft’s dimensions by laser rangefinding, but a carefully-placed solid panel, where a grille should exist, might well have escaped his attention. He asked his handheld to load a VR tour of the shaft system, as per the lift module specs, and mentally prepared himself to squeeze through that bloody opening one more time, to play spot-the-difference.
    He didn’t need to resort to contortions. The difference was staring him in the face.
    Cunning. Ingenious, even.
    Just as in any crossword, there was one vital clue from which everything else would cascade.
    This was it. He extracted a