Chapter Text

The Observer Effect

Part I — The Unconnected Dead

Professor Adrian Vey believed that most human beings misunderstood causality because they had been taught to read their lives backwards.

An event occurred. Something preceded it. Therefore the preceding thing caused the event.

A marriage failed because of the affair.

A company collapsed because of the fraud.

A man died because another man hated him.

Vey considered this primitive.

He taught probabilistic cognition at St. Cyprian's College, an old university institution which had survived three wars, seven reorganisations and several attempts to turn its philosophy department into rentable conference space. His speciality lay somewhere between decision theory, cognitive psychology and the more respectable edge of quantum cognition.

His students frequently misunderstood this.

"So you're saying consciousness creates reality?"

"No," Vey would reply.

He usually waited until someone began writing before continuing.

"I'm saying the question you ask determines which reality becomes available for description."

That sounded profound enough to survive on social media.

His actual argument was considerably more technical.

Human beings, Vey taught, were not stable collections of preferences waiting to be interrogated. Asking a question changed the mental state from which the next question would be answered. Context mattered. Order mattered. Observation mattered.

A person asked whether they trusted the government before being asked whether they feared crime would produce statistically different answers from someone receiving the questions in reverse order.

AB was not necessarily BA.

His lectures were excellent.

His papers were widely cited.

His departmental colleagues disliked him.

And during his thirteen years at St. Cyprian's, eleven people had died.

The twelfth was called Daniel Crewe.

Crewe was fifty-four, divorced, moderately overweight and employed as regional operations manager for a commercial refrigeration company.

At 6:42 on a wet Thursday morning, a woman walking a spaniel found him lying beside a drainage culvert approximately three miles outside the city.

There had been violence.

Not theatrical violence.

No arrangement of the corpse.

No symbols.

No missing fingers, ritual wounds, quotations from obscure religious texts or other conveniences beloved by detectives in television dramas.

There was simply a dead man.

Detective Inspector Imogen Rook arrived at 7:31.

By eight-fifteen she already disliked the case.

"Wallet?"

"In his pocket."

"Phone?"

"Found nearby."

"Car?"

"Half a mile down the road."

"Robbery?"

"Doesn't look like it."

"Sex?"

"Nothing obvious."

"Drugs?"

"Too early."

Rook crouched beside the covered body.

"What was he doing here?"

Detective Sergeant Peter Lyle looked towards the fields.

"Walking?"

"At six in the morning?"

"People do."

"In February?"

"Some people are idiots."

Rook stood.

Rain collected along the shoulders of her coat.

There was nothing especially remarkable about the landscape. Hedge. Road. Mud. Culvert. A few houses in the distance.

A place selected because it meant nothing.

That bothered her.

Three weeks later the investigation had produced precisely the kind of information which looked impressive when printed on large sheets of paper.

Crewe had colleagues.

Crewe had enemies.

Crewe owed money.

Crewe had been sleeping with somebody who was not his former wife.

Crewe occasionally purchased cocaine.

Crewe had once punched a man outside a pub in Worcester.

Crewe had complained repeatedly about his neighbours' parking.

Every discovery briefly reorganised the investigation.

The girlfriend became important.

Then she wasn't.

The dealer became important.

Then he wasn't.

An employee Crewe had dismissed became extremely important for approximately forty-eight hours.

Then CCTV placed him in Newcastle.

Each promising line generated another set of questions.

Each question produced answers.

Each collection of answers changed what the police thought the case meant.

And every time they approached something resembling a narrative, it collapsed.

Rook began to imagine the investigation as a maze which rebuilt itself behind them.

Then Detective Constable Hannah Mellor found the photograph.

It was seventeen years old.

A university open day.

Daniel Crewe stood among perhaps sixty people beneath a banner reading:

ST CYPRIAN'S — THINKING ABOUT THINKING

Near the back stood a much younger Adrian Vey.

Nobody thought anything of it.

There were sixty people in the photograph.

Thousands had attended events at St. Cyprian's during the previous twenty years.

Crewe himself had never studied there.

The connection was logged.

Then forgotten.

The thirteenth death occurred in April.

Louise Gerrard.

Thirty-one.

Occupational therapist.

Found dead inside an empty rental property.

Again, no obvious robbery.

Again, no persuasive sexual motive.

Again, an immense cloud of ordinary human complication.

An abusive former boyfriend.

A workplace grievance.

An insurance payment.

An argument with her sister.

An online dispute about dog breeding.

Rook found herself staring at the case-management system late one evening.

There were 1,806 recorded entities connected to Crewe.

There were already 742 connected to Gerrard.

People.

Businesses.

Addresses.

Vehicles.

Telephone numbers.

Websites.

Bank accounts.

Clubs.

Schools.

Hospitals.

Social-media profiles.

Each victim existed at the centre of an almost limitless network.

Modern investigations produced too much information.

That was the secret nobody mentioned.

The difficulty was rarely finding connections.

The difficulty was deciding which connections deserved to exist.

Lyle appeared beside her desk holding two coffees.

"Anything?"

"Everything."

"That bad?"

Rook pointed at the screen.

"Crewe and Gerrard had both been in Bristol within three months of their deaths."

"So have approximately nine hundred thousand other people."

"They both owned Volkswagens."

"Millions of people own Volkswagens."

"They'd both visited Amsterdam."

"Stop."

"They'd both used the same supermarket chain."

"Horrifying."

Rook accepted the coffee.

"There is a connection."

"There doesn't have to be."

"I know."

That was what frightened her.

Louise Gerrard had also visited St. Cyprian's.

Not as a student.

She had attended a public lecture nine years previously.

The event had been called:

THE QUANTUM SELF: CONTEXT, CHOICE AND THE ILLUSION OF CONSISTENCY

Speaker:

Professor Adrian Vey.

Attendance:

approximately four hundred.

The discovery meant almost nothing.

Which was why Rook wrote it down.

By June there were fourteen dead.

The newest victim was Samuel Parr, seventy-two, retired solicitor.

His death initially appeared to be natural.

It was only because Parr's daughter objected to the speed with which the death certificate was issued that anyone looked more closely.

That examination produced another murder investigation.

Rook began constructing a private database.

She didn't tell the superintendent.

She didn't tell Lyle.

She called it WEAK LINKS.

The principle was simple.

Most criminal investigations strengthened associations.

Phone contact.

Financial transaction.

Shared address.

Witness statement.

DNA.

Rook did the opposite.

She recorded connections that were too weak to be useful.

Attended same event.

Used same railway station.

Subscribed to same magazine.

Visited same museum.

Worked in same building ten years apart.

Had common acquaintance.

Mentioned same book.

The database became ridiculous.

Then something happened.

St. Cyprian's appeared again.

Samuel Parr had attended a continuing-education seminar twelve years previously.

The lecturer had been Adrian Vey.

Three victims.

Three university events.

Different years.

Different subjects.

No personal correspondence.

No identifiable relationship with Vey.

Rook printed the results.

Lyle read them.

Then he looked at her.

"You've got three people who attended lectures."

"Yes."

"How many lectures has this man given?"

"Hundreds."

"How many people attended?"

"Thousands."

"So statistically—"

"Yes."

"—this means nothing."

"Yes."

"Do you think he killed them?"

Rook stared at the three photographs.

"No."

It was the correct answer.

She hated herself for giving it.

Professor Vey killed number fifteen on a Tuesday.

He chose her because she was carrying a yellow umbrella.

There was no other reason.

This mattered enormously to him.

Motive, Vey believed, was the psychological equivalent of leaving fingerprints.

People imagined murderers were caught because of forensic science.

Usually they were caught because they wanted something.

Money.

Sex.

Revenge.

Control.

Recognition.

The desire produced the pattern.

The pattern produced the suspect.

Vey wanted nothing from the woman with the yellow umbrella.

He did not know her name.

He did not dislike her.

Had circumstances arranged themselves differently, he might have held a door open for her.

The absence of meaning was precisely the point.

Later, in his office, he drank tea while marking undergraduate essays.

One student had written:

The observer changes the system simply by observing it.

Vey drew a red line through the sentence.

In the margin he wrote:

Careful. This formulation is dangerously imprecise.

He smiled.

The woman's name was Nadiya Bell.

She worked in insurance.

The police discovered seventy-six plausible reasons somebody might want her dead.

Her brother had borrowed money from organised criminals.

Her employer was investigating financial irregularities.

Her former partner had threatened her.

She had recently complained about a neighbour.

She had witnessed a road accident.

Her cousin was involved in a custody dispute.

Within four days the investigation possessed enough suspicious material to support six mutually incompatible theories.

Rook watched them grow.

Then she watched them fail.

It was becoming familiar.

Every victim contained enough history to manufacture their own murderer.

That was when Rook understood the shape of the problem.

Someone wasn't hiding evidence.

Someone was exploiting evidence.

Six months before Nadiya Bell died, Maria Vale had delivered a lecture at the Royal Historical Institute entitled:

QUANTUM PSYCHOLOGY: A SHORT HISTORY OF VERY BAD METAPHORS AND THREE SURPRISINGLY GOOD IDEAS

Rook found the recording at two in the morning.

She intended to listen for ten minutes.

She watched all ninety-three.

Maria appeared behind a lectern wearing black and looking mildly irritated by the title of her own lecture.

"Quantum psychology," she said, "has committed the useful crime of being interesting enough to attract intelligent people and vague enough to attract almost everybody else."

The audience laughed.

Maria continued.

She separated Wilson from quantum cognition.

She separated quantum cognition from quantum consciousness.

Then she spoke about investigation.

That was what made Rook sit forward.

"Classical reasoning encourages us to imagine that facts possess fixed significance. They don't. Their significance depends upon the informational state into which they are introduced."

A diagram appeared behind her.

A series of circles connected by lines.

"Suppose police discover that a murder victim once attended a lecture given by Professor X. Meaningless."

The audience murmured.

"Suppose a second victim attended another lecture by Professor X."

She added another line.

"Interesting."

A third.

"Potentially significant."

A fourth.

"Now Professor X has a problem."

Maria turned towards the audience.

"But imagine Professor X understands this process."

She erased the diagram.

"What would an intelligent adversary do?"

Someone answered from the front row.

"Remove the connection."

"No."

Maria smiled.

"Much easier to create thousands of competing connections."

Rook stopped the video.

Rewound.

Played it again.

"Much easier to create thousands of competing connections."

Maria continued.

"Information does not have to be hidden to become invisible. It can be submerged."

Rook felt something cold move through her.

On another screen sat the investigation database.

Thousands of names.

Thousands of links.

Thousands of perfectly legitimate facts.

She telephoned her superintendent at 2:17 a.m.

Maria Vale arrived at St. Cyprian's two days later.

Rook had expected an academic.

Instead she got a woman who entered the incident room, looked at the evidence walls for perhaps four seconds and said:

"You've organised these chronologically."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because that's when the murders happened."

"That answers when they happened."

Maria removed her coat.

"It doesn't tell us how the murderer thinks."

Lyle gave Rook a look.

Rook ignored it.

Maria walked along the photographs.

Crewe.

Gerrard.

Parr.

Bell.

And ten earlier deaths which might—or might not—belong to the same series.

Maria stopped.

"What links your first four?"

"St. Cyprian's."

"No."

"They all attended events involving Professor Vey."

"No."

Rook frowned.

Maria turned.

"They all became connected to Professor Vey because you investigated them."

Silence.

Lyle folded his arms.

"I don't understand the distinction."

"You are treating connection as something discovered."

"What else would it be?"

"Something created."

Maria took a marker.

On the whiteboard she wrote:

VICTIM → INVESTIGATION → CONNECTION

Then underneath:

CONNECTION → INVESTIGATION → SUSPECT

"You're assuming the second sequence," she said.

Rook stared at it.

Maria tapped the first.

"What if this is what he is controlling?"

Lyle laughed once.

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"You're already saying 'he'."

"A grammatical convenience."

"You think someone's manipulating the investigation?"

"I think someone understands how investigators assign significance."

Maria looked again at the wall.

"And I think you're asking the wrong question."

Rook had heard enough academics say this to dislike the phrase instinctively.

"What question should we ask?"

Maria looked at the dead.

"Not what connects them."

She drew a box around the word INVESTIGATION.

"Ask what made you notice each connection."

That afternoon Professor Adrian Vey received an email informing him that police consultants were examining several historical university events.

He read it twice.

Then searched Maria Vale.

He found the lecture.

He watched sixteen minutes.

Stopped.

Started again.

Watched another twelve.

Something unfamiliar occurred.

Professor Vey became interested.

Not frightened.

Interest was considerably more dangerous.

At 18:06 he opened a notebook he kept locked inside his desk.

Fifteen names occupied fifteen lines.

Beside each was a single sentence.

Not motive.

Not method.

Not memory.

Just the condition under which the individual had entered his attention.

Daniel Crewe:

Asked the wrong question after a lecture.

Louise Gerrard:

Red shoes in the second row.

Samuel Parr:

Mispronounced Kierkegaard.

Nadiya Bell:

Yellow umbrella.

He turned to a new page.

For some time he considered what to write.

Finally:

Maria Vale — observed the observer.

Vey closed the notebook.

For the first time in thirteen years, the game had changed.

And somewhere across the city, without knowing it, Maria had just become part of the experiment.