‘Monday. We’ve been looking for you, Professor. There’s–’ Kyle stopped himself. If this was not some sort of act – and the man certainly looked confused – then Lambert might not take the destruction of his prized artefact well. Interrogation could come later. ‘Why don’t you come with me. We’ll get you checked out by a meditech and we’ll go from there.’
‘I need to get home. My wife, she’ll be worried.’
‘Medical check first. If they say you’re good, then we’ll get you home.’
~~~
‘I’m fine, Candide,’ Lambert said. His wife was fussing over him. That was natural, of course, but he did not want to be fussed over. ‘Well, I’ve lost most of a day, but I’m fine.’
‘We were so worried, Lambert,’ Candide said. They had been married for almost twenty years now and Candide was just as beautiful as the day they had met on the grounds of this very school. Her auburn hair shone in sunlight and her green eyes sparkled when she laughed. Right now, she was worried. Relieved that he was back, certainly, but worried by his loss of memory. ‘We were very worried when daddy didn’t come home last night, weren’t we, Beth?’
Bethany, their eight-year-old daughter, nodded. She was an intelligent girl who would probably end up attending SAS2 eventually. Both her parents had the talent; currently, she was too young to show signs of it. Children under about ten rarely had the mental equipment to perform any kind of sorcery. She took after her mother in looks, which Lambert had always considered a good thing. He was not ugly but snagging Candide had been the luckiest thing to ever happen to him.
‘She’s been very quiet,’ Candide said. ‘I think she was really worried about you.’
‘I’m back now. Nothing to worry over.’
‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can get you?’
Lambert closed his eyes. ‘Really. I’m fine. A little tired, that’s all. Tired and confused. But, in the morning, I’m sure I’ll be back to normal.’
‘Perhaps we should go to bed a little early tonight.’
Opening his eyes, Lambert smiled at her. ‘I think that would be a very good idea.’
Quietly, Bethany got up from where she was sitting on the floor across the room from her father and set off toward her bedroom.
235/5/20.
Bethany made her way from her room to the lounge, and then she went through into the kitchen. No one else was up, it seemed, but she could manage to make herself a bowl of cereal without any trouble. There was also juice in the fridge, so she was set. Her mother would usually make lunch for her, but she could manage in the school cafeteria.
She was eating her cereal when Lambert poked his head in through the door of the small kitchen. ‘Ah, you’re up,’ he said, smiling at her. Bethany nodded an answer. ‘Your mother is having a lie-in. Do you need anything?’
Bethany shook her head.
Lambert moved further into the room and looked down the kitchen to where his daughter was sitting in the nook at the end. ‘Are you okay, Bethany?’ he asked. ‘You’re being very quiet.’
Bethany took a drink of juice, then swallowed. ‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re back.’
He smiled at her and turned around. ‘I’ll see you tonight, after school.’
‘Did you forget? I’m staying with Adaline tonight. It’s a sleepover.’
Lambert paused. His shoulders shifted, tightening. ‘Oh. Yes, of course. You have a good time with Adaline.’
‘I will.’
As soon as he was gone, Bethany poured her half-eaten cereal into the waste disposal, following it with the remainder of her juice. Then she left the house. She did not want to be in it any longer, though she hated leaving her mother alone with the man who had come back to them. She was not sure who that man was, but she was sure that he was not her father.
~~~
‘They said he was just tired and maybe a little dehydrated, right?’ Courtney asked.
‘That was the diagnosis,’ Kyle replied. ‘Bed rest and a meal was all that was needed. They mandated a rest day today, but that was just to be sure. I didn’t figure him for a flight risk, so I escorted him home.’
The couple were walking through the staff residential area of the school, on their way to Lambert Stenger’s house. The residential region was a bit of a mixed bag as far as architecture went. Closest to the more academic parts of the school, there were several apartment blocks for single faculty and staff, and also housing the majority of postgraduates. They provided something of a screen for what was generally called the Estate, a small town of cul-de-sacs with various types of family homes arranged a bit like a tree spreading out from the ‘planting bed’ of the blocks. Luckily, there were pedestrian walkways which provided shortcuts between branches; walking to any given part of the Estate along the roads would have been a chore. Compared to the academic, almost utilitarian look of the school, the Estate was like a quaint suburban neighbourhood.
‘I’m not criticising your decisions,’ Courtney went on. ‘I’m just making sure we’re good to go talk to him now.’ Having missed a lot of lessons the day before, Courtney had decided to interrogate Lambert about his missing time and the destruction of the artefact at lunchtime. She had not wanted to wait until after school.
‘Should be. And that’s it.’
It was a single-storey house rendered in off-white. A broad window at the front showed an apparently empty lounge. There was a front door set under a portico which Courtney headed for.
‘No signs of life,’ she commented as they approached.
‘His daughter’s at school,’ Kyle said. ‘His wife should be at home.’
‘Yeah, his daughter’s at school.’ One of the reasons that Courtney had not wanted to wait until lessons were over was the message she had received from Joslyn Harris, the vice principal. It had been a little vague, but basically it had come down to Bethany Stenger being convinced that the man who had come home the night before was not her father. Bethany had, apparently, been rather vague herself, but she had said one thing which made her story seem a little more reasonable: she had told that man that she was having a sleepover with a girl called Adaline and he had claimed to remember that. There was no girl in her class called Adaline and no sleepover had been arranged. The kid was smart for an eight-year-old. ‘Okay, let’s take this easy at first and we can get more hard line if something seems wrong.’
‘I’ll follow your lead.’
Courtney pressed the doorbell button and waited.
It took a couple of minutes for the door to open. Lambert Stenger looked quizzically at Courtney and then he spotted Kyle just behind her. ‘Oh, hello again,’ he said. ‘What brings you back here?’
Courtney answered him. ‘I’m Courtney Martell Garavain, Professor Lambert Stenger, captain of the School Security Force. We’d like to ask some questions about what happened to you. There are some things you should be aware of. Your insight on some of those things would be very valuable.’ The truth was that the SSF had the right to question even senior faculty members when working a case, so Courtney could have forced this, but having the subject’s cooperation made things go more smoothly.
‘It’s not really a good time… But I suppose it’s best to get this over with quickly.’ Lambert turned, heading back into the lounge and leaving Courtney and Kyle to take care of the door. ‘Please, ask me anything you want.’
Courtney walked into a lounge which was clearly a family room. Comfortable sofas, a large entertainment screen on one wall, a coffee table which had various books on it, many of them meant for a child, though Lambert’s own book, in hardback, was there too. Physical books were always going in and out of fashion. Currently, most people preferred reading on their ketcoms; Lambert obviously believed in the power of the physically printed page. There were no toys which suggested that Bethany was the kind of kid who enjoyed more mental forms of entertainment, or a mother who religiously cleaned up after her child. Of the mother in question, there was no sign.
There was something a little odd that Courtney picked up on right away but could not quite place. A scent. It sat right on the edge of Courtney’s perceptions and made her feel a little disquieted. She glanced at Kyle, but he seemed not to have noticed anything out of place, so she ignored the feeling in favour of talking to her subject.
‘I’ve read the report, Professor, but it would be useful if you could go over what you remember of the last thirty-six hours or so. Perhaps you’ve remembered something which could be important. You were in lab one twenty-six, working on the new artefact. Is that correct?’
‘Yes.’ Lambert sat down on one of the sofas. He was dressed in jeans and a dress shirt. His feet were bare, and the shirt had been done up wrong as though he had put it on in a hurry. Courtney got the sudden impression that maybe they had interrupted his getting reacquainted with his wife and that the scent was… No… No, that was not it. ‘It’s a fascinating piece, though I suspect it will turn out to be relatively mundane in nature. Just finding something which has been working for so long… It could teach us much.’
‘So I’ve heard. You said that you woke up in a storeroom in the Magical Sciences Building and have no recollection of how you got there. Do you remember anything odd before you woke up? Something in the lab?’
‘Let me see…’ Courtney watched as he considered his answer. He was looking pale, aside from the dark rings under his eyes. If he was supposed to have got a good night’s sleep, it seemed like he had failed. It looked, actually, like he had not slept in two days. If he had been unconscious in a storeroom for eighteen hours of that, surely he would be more rested.
‘I was working on the scans of the artefact,’ Lambert finally said. ‘I wanted a more detailed scan of part of the interior, so I used the imaging radar. I recall that I was going to go home as soon as that scan was done. And then I was in a cupboard surrounded by rolls of toilet paper and bottles of cleaning products. I felt lightheaded, confused. I went outside, thinking that I needed to go home. And that was when Kyle Maynard found me. I’m afraid I have no recollection of anything more than that. Do you think I was attacked? Is that why I suddenly blacked out?’
‘That’s a possibility.’ Courtney paused, deciding how to continue, and that scent kept stabbing at the edge of her mind, demanding attention. She pushed it away. ‘Professor, we’ve reviewed the security recordings for the period when you blacked out. It appears that you destroyed the cameras in the lab, probably with Concussive Force.’
‘What?!’
‘There’s no one else on camera and you leave the lab about thirty minutes after the cameras were destroyed. You appear on several corridor cameras, heading for the basement. Coverage down there is far from complete. A search failed to discover you, there or anywhere else on campus. You vanished for almost eighteen hours.’
‘But–’
‘During the thirty minutes you remained in the lab, it was trashed. Various pieces of equipment were destroyed, including the imaging radar unit and several computers. Most of the artefacts in the room were not damaged, but the new one was smashed.’
‘No! That artefact was– Wait, you think I destroyed it?!’
Something was not right. There was something about his outrage which looked… He looked like he was having fun. And that scent kept coming back to insist that Courtney pay attention to it. What was it? Something with a hint of meat in it. Slightly rotten. There was a metallic edge to it. Coppery… ‘We don’t know, Professor,’ Courtney said, her mind more focused on what her senses were telling her than on her words. ‘We have no evidence one way or another, but you did destroy the cameras.’
‘I did no such thing. I would never–’
‘Where’s your wife, Professor?’ Kyle asked. It was, Courtney figured, a ploy to derail Lambert’s outrage.
‘Candide? She went out. Shopping.’
‘Really? Because her ketcom is here. She’d have a lot of trouble paying for things without it.’
‘She must have forgotten it. I’m sure she’ll be back any minute, embarrassed at having left it behind.’
It looked so natural, but Courtney’s blood ran cold as Lambert made his explanation. Then again, it was not what she was hearing that was disturbing her. It was what she was smelling. She knew what the scent was. The more private rooms were at the back of the house. The bedrooms. Courtney bolted toward the corridor that led back into the house. Bethany was convinced that this was not her father…
‘What are you doing?!’ Lambert called from behind her. ‘You can’t go back there!’
Courtney slammed a door open. A child’s room. Bethany’s. It was painted pink, though a rather adult shade of pink, maybe orchid or amaranth, or some other name for a slightly darker shade of a girly colour. There was a chair, of the straight-backed and wooden variety, out of place near the door. It would have been perfect for wedging under the door’s handle to bar the door.
‘You can’t go back there!’ Lambert repeated. His voice was closer. He was following.
Turning, Courtney strode toward the door at the end of the corridor. That seemed a likely place for the main bedroom.
‘No! Stay out of– What?! What are you doing?’
She did not look, but Courtney guessed that Kyle had restrained Lambert. Kyle’s idea of restraint generally involved rank thirty Telekinesis and some form of remotely executed wrestling hold.
Slamming open the door of the bedroom, Courtney took in the scene. For a second, all she could do was take in the scene because her mind was refusing to entirely accept it. Just for a second; she was planning to be an investigator in the ASF and she figured things like this would eventually become part of her life. She was not expecting it to be so soon, however.
The room’s décor was bland, off-white walls, maybe a shade of pale yellow. One wall was a huge window, though the shades had been closed and the room would have been in darkness if the overhead light had been off. The shade had been removed from the light, presumably to make the room brighter, so the scene on the bed was starkly clear.
The bed sat against the wall on Courtney’s right, the footboard facing the window. It was an old-fashioned design with the head- and footboards made like iron fences painted white with gold knobs on each corner post. Candide Lambert was tied to the bed, her arms stretched out to the corner posts of the headboard, her ankles taped together and then tied to one of the posts at the foot. There was a wad of cloth stuffed into her mouth and then tied over with what might have been the belt from a robe. Livid bruises covered her body, only obscured by the blood which had oozed out of various cuts. Her auburn hair was matted and stuck to the pillow, and a lot redder than it should have been. Her eyes were closed, but Courtney could see her ribcage moving. She was still alive, if that was actually a good thing.
Courtney pulled out her ketcom. ‘This is Captain Courtney Martell Garavain, SSF. I need medical technicians and additional SSF backup to the Stenger Mendel house immediately.’ Without waiting for a response, she turned to stare down the corridor at Lambert, who was currently struggling against invisible hands which had him jammed up against a wall with his right arm twisted up behind his shoulder blades. Courtney had, on occasion, felt the grip of Kyle’s Telekinesis spell and she knew that nothing human was going to break out of it. ‘Lambert Stenger Mendel, I am arresting you on charges of assault and destruction of school property and anything else I can think of before you’re handed over to the ASF for trial!’
She looked on, horrified, as Lambert smiled down the hallway at her. He smiled. ‘You can have him,’ he said. Then the smile collapsed, Lambert’s face went entirely slack and his eyes became unfocused. For a couple of seconds he just blinked, still pressed against the wall by Kyle’s spell. Then the blinking became more rapid and he seemed to reacquire awareness of his situation. ‘W-what? What’s going on? Where…’
‘Oh no,’ Courtney snapped, marching toward him. ‘You don’t get to pull that twice. After what you’ve done to your wife,
I’m going to print off the entire legal code so I can throw it at you.’
‘Candide? What’s happened to Candide? Where’s Beth?!’
Disgusted, Courtney turned her back on him and set off toward the bedroom to record the scene and see whether there was anything she could do for Candide before the medics arrived. ‘Kyle, get this piece of shit out of my sight!’
~~~
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t believe it,’ Melissa said. ‘Lambert Stenger is simply not that kind of person.’
‘Agreed,’ Rochester said.
‘I’m just reporting what I was told,’ Mitsuko said, her hands raised to prevent more vehement denials. Or perhaps to say, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’ They were in Mitsuko’s apartment. The intent had been to determine whether the day’s homework required a mass study session, but Mitsuko had just read Courtney’s report and, since Lambert was their metaphysics teacher, she had told Nava, Melissa, and Rochester about it.
‘The facts,’ Mitsuko said, ‘are that Professor Lambert Stenger was caught on camera destroying property. The security cameras in the lab, to be precise. Obviously, that means there’s no record of him trashing the lab and destroying the artefact.’
‘Why would he destroy it?’ Melissa asked. ‘When he showed us around the lab, he was as fired up about it as I’ve ever seen him about anything. He was excited to be working on it.’
‘Currently, he claims that he remembers nothing about the destruction of the artefact, or the lab, or going home and… He’s denying the assault charges regarding his wife.’
‘May I see the report?’ Nava asked.
Mitsuko considered for about half a second. ‘Okay. Just don’t tell Courtney I let you see it.’
‘Excellent. Blackmail material.’ Nava took Mitsuko’s ketcom from her before the words had sunk in and flicked the screen to make it scroll to the top of the message. She began to read.
‘A-anyway…’ Mitsuko actually seemed a little worried that Nava might not be joking. ‘The Stenger Mendels are both in secure rooms in the infirmary. Sedated. Lambert Stenger has been diagnosed with physical exhaustion. They’re suggesting that he hasn’t slept since he vandalised the lab. Candide Lambert’s wounds were severe, but she’s been healed of those. The physical ones. Mentally, she’s a wreck, hence the sedation. Her husband of twenty years spent the entire night and half the day torturing her. She hasn’t been coherent enough to make a statement yet.’
Death's Handmaiden Page 26
