Everyone in the courtroom fell silent as Paula Myo slowly stood up. Then a round of excited whispering broke out as she bowed to the judge and walked over to the witness stand. If she was having to take charge herself, the prosecution must be desperate.
“Murder ain’t what it used to be,” she said to Morton in a pleasant conversational tone. “It’s no longer death. Not final. Today it’s bodyloss, memory erasure, lots of euphemisms that describe what is essentially a discontinuity in consciousness. Your body can be killed, but the clinics on every Commonwealth planet can bring you back to life with a simple cloning procedure. There’s a blank decade or two, but eventually you’re walking around again as if nothing ever happened. It’s a wonderful psychological crutch to have. A lot of psychiatrists argue that it helps make our society a lot more stable and calm than before. They bandy the word ‘mature’ around quite a lot.
“So you see, murdering somebody is nothing like as serious as it used to be. All you’re actually doing is removing them from the universe for a few years. You’re not really killing them. Especially when you know their insurance will cover a re-life procedure. It would probably be an acceptable risk to remove someone who was going to ruin your plans.”
“No,” Morton said. “It is completely unacceptable. It is not a done thing, something that can be performed for convenience. Murder is barbarism. I wouldn’t do it. Not now, not forty years ago.”
“But we are agreed that your wife and Wyobie Cotal were murdered?”
“Of course.” He frowned, puzzled by the question. “I told you, remember?”
“No, you originally said you were suspicious about her disappearance, especially when it coincided with that of her lover. Feelings of unease aren’t entirely memory-based, they can’t be erased by legal or black-market editing. They are derived from the subconscious. You knew something was wrong about their disappearance.”
Morton sat back and gave her a suspicious stare.
“The Tampico alibi was a good one, wasn’t it?” Paula said.
“Yes.”
“Yes. Assuming you no longer had the memory of murdering her, neither you nor her other friends ever questioned the story that she’d left you to go there.”
“I didn’t kill her. But you’re right, it was a watertight cover-up. I had no reason to question her disappearance, especially after Broher Associates contacted me and said they were acting as intermediaries.”
“Let’s examine this again. You came back from your conference in Talansee, and found your apartment had been stripped of all your wife’s things, her clothes and possessions, and there was a message telling you she had left for good.”
“That’s right.”
“And that was enough to convince you at the time that there was nothing unusual about her leaving.”
“It was unusual, and unexpected, and quite shocking. But it didn’t make me suspicious.”
“So you knew of her affairs?”
“Yes, there had been several by then. Our marriage allowed for them. I’d had a couple myself. I’m only human, not some cold machine.”
“Did you argue the terms of the divorce?”
“No. They were all set out in the marriage contract. I knew what I was getting into.”
“What about the items removed from your apartment, did you ask for any of them to be returned?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Morton gave Madoc a quick glance. “Tara only took her own stuff.”
“You knew what was hers, did you?”
“Sure.”
“Did anybody else?”
This time the glance Morton shot at his lawyer was a puzzled one. “Excuse me?”
“I read the transcripts of all your calls and messages to Broher Associates,” Paula said. “There was never any dispute over what was removed. So tell me this: In a home where two people have lived together for twelve years, where only those two people could possibly know whose item was whose, how is it that the killer removed only her property?”
Morton’s expression turned to one of stricken incomprehension. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out.
“No criminal gang would ever know what to take to set up the alibi,” Paula said. “It would take someone intimate with the house and its contents. There were only two of you with the exact knowledge. One of them is your ex-wife, and we know she didn’t do it.”
Morton slowly lowered his head into his hands, covering his grief and confusion. “Oh, holy shit,” he moaned. “I didn’t. Did I?”
“Yes.” Paula regarded him with the kind of sympathy normally extended to the bereaved. “You did.”
The jury took three hours to deliberate their verdict. Comment on the unisphere was that they took so long in order to enjoy a decent lunch at the taxpayers’ expense. When they filed back into the courtroom and delivered their verdict nobody was surprised that it was unanimous. The electronically disguised voice from behind the curving silver glass announced, “Guilty.”
The outbreak of chatter was swiftly silenced by the judge, who then told Morton to stand. There were, the judge said, very firm guidelines laid down for such appalling crimes: the minimum was usually twice the period of life loss.
