A Quantum Murder

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Friday morning was worse, thrusting him from the extreme of his solitude into the bedlam of the media madhouse.

  Oakham magistrates' court sat in the castle hall. It was a short drive around the park from the police station. Nicholas spent the whole time in the car with a blanket over his head.

  He felt the car judder to a halt. The door was opened. Shouts were flung at him.

  "Did you do it?"

  "What was your motive, Nick?"

  "Were you on drugs?"

  He tried to screw himself into the car seat. A hand like steel clamped on to his arm, pulling him out.

  "Come on son, this way, keep looking at your feet, there's no step."

  The questions merged into a single protracted yowl. He could see tarmac below his trainers, then pale yellow stone. The light changed. He was inside.

  The blanket was pulled off.

  He was in a short passage with whitewashed walls, narrow and cramped. Lisa Collier was standing in front of him, the two of them at the centre of a jostling circle of police.

  "I didn't do it," he told the lawyer frantically. "Please, Mrs Collier. You have to believe me."

  She ran a band back through her hair, giving him a flustered glance. "Nicholas, we'll get all that sorted out later. Do you know why you're here?"

  "Where are we?"

  She groaned, shooting Langley an evil stare. "Christ. All right, now, this is the magistrates' court, Nicholas. They've convened a special sitting. The police want you remanded in their custody for seventy-two hours so they can question you. You haven't officially been charged with anything yet, all right? There is no basis for me opposing the application. Do you understand?"

  "I didn't do it."

  "Nicholas! Pay attention. We're not entering pleas today. They'll just remand you in custody and take you back to the Station. There will be a lawyer present at every interview. Now do you want me to continue as your lawyer?"

  "Yes, yes please."

  "All right, now look, we're going right in. You won't have to say anything, just confirm your name when the clerk of the court asks. Got that?"

  "Yes. My name."

  "Fine. Now look, there's no way I could have the press excluded, so it's a bit of a circus in there. But they're not allowed to take pictures in an English court, thank God. Do your best just to ignore them." She looked him up and down, then rounded on Langley. "There's no bloody excuse for him turning up in this state. It amounts to intimidation in my book."

  Langley tweaked his tie. He was wearing a neat grey suit. "Sorry, we were a bit rushed for time back there. Won't happen again."

  "You're damn right it won't," she said in disgust.

  The ancient hall was so bizarre that Nicholas was convinced he'd fallen into some Alice in Wonderland nightmare. There were six thick stone pillars supporting a high vaulted ceiling; each whitewashed wall was covered in horseshoes of all sizes, ranging from the genuine article up to elaborate gilded arches a metre and a half high. Most of them had crowns on top, all were inscribed with the names of the nobles, dignitaries, and royalty who had presented them to the county.

  The court itself only took up the front half of the hall, an enclosure of tacky wooden pew benches painted a light grey, a defendant's box at the back. Behind that was an open space about twenty metres square.

  When he walked out of a small door in the front wall, handcuffed to Jon Nevin, he nearly faltered. There were about a hundred reporters. packed on to the rear floorspace. Every one of them was staring at him.

  He was led to the box facing the magistrates' bench, ever conscious of those greedy eyes boring into the back of his neck. The proceedings were short, formularized. He remembered to acknowledge the clerk, then all he had to do was listen to the police lawyer read his request from a cybofax.

  Flowery legal language, grotesquely arcane. Why did the world stick to these rituals?

  His lawyer was on her feet, saying something. Nicholas could hear the shuffling feet behind him, smothered coughs, gentle persistent clicking of fingers on cybofax keys. He could feel the curiosity they radiated, a silent demand to know, as though they had more right than the police and the lawyers.

  "Granted," said the chief magistrate, a middle-aged woman from the same stout mould as Lisa Collier.

  The officials on the pew benches were standing up, talking together in low tones.

  "Come on," Nevin said.

  Nicholas got to his feet, and halted. The reporters held still, collectively silent, expectant. Nevin was tugging insistently at his arm, equally uncomfortable at being in the limelight.

  "I didn't do it," Nicholas said. They would listen, at least. Nobody else did. "I didn't."

  There was no answer.

  He was frogmarched out by Nevin and two uniformed constables.

  The ignominious blanket, the car ride. He could hear rain pounding on the streets.

  The cell. Confinement, keeping the monster behind bars, protecting the public from his savagery. Old men could sleep safer in their beds now. This time the walls were closer together, the ceiling lower. At night they closed around his body, embedding him in cold black marble.

  * * * *

  Rosette was a natural channel star, the graceful curves of her face bewitching the camera, promoting her regality, betraying no sign of her contumacy. She was standing on the pavement outside Oakham police station, beside a long modern navyblue Aston Martin driven by a chauffeur. The front passenger door was open and she held herself poised to enter, doing the reporters a big favour by indulging them. The sunlight caught her fair hair to perfection as it fell on the shoulders of her leaf-green jacket.

  "The baby is due in seven months," she said. "I expect to have it in a London clinic. But it will definitely be born in England, Edward would have wanted that. He was a great nationalist."

  The baby was news to Nicholas. He accepted the fact numbly. There ought to have been some tiny part of him which was glad, but he couldn't find it. Was that the kind of cyborg mind which enabled people to butcher their murder victims? But if he was so insensitive, why had he fallen in love with Isabel? It was most puzzling, his mind.

  "How long had you and Kitchener been having an affair?" a reporter asked.

  "I think I fell in love with Edward when I was eight years old. I remember seeing him on a channel science 'cast. He was so impassioned about his subject, and yet he always allowed his sense of humour to shine through. He was so much more alive than any other person. It was after that I concentrated on science subjects at school. He remained in my thoughts, an unsung mentor, an inspiration. Being invited to study at Launde Abbey was a lifetime ambition."

  "He was a lot older than you, did that pose any difficulty, some tension?"

  "His mind was fresher than anybody's on this planet."

  "Do you know what he was working on when he was killed?"

  "A stardrive, darling. A faster than light stardrive. Edward was going to give us the galaxy. He believed in human destiny, you see. It was to be his gift to all the peoples of the world, so none of us would ever be restricted and oppressed again. We could spread our wings and truly blossom amid the splendour of the night."

  "It wasn't a stardrive," Nicholas said to the cell's flatscreen. Typical Rosette to go for theatrical effect.

  "A working stardrive?" Even the reporter was sceptical.

  "Oh, yes. He was studying the loopholes allowed for in General Relativity. With his genius and Event Horizon's money, I genuinely believe a starship could have been built. Now, though, who knows." Her face was haunted by poignancy. "I have a dream that one day our child will take up the banner of his father's work, and bring us that liberation Edward sought. Perhaps it is only an exiguous hope, but I believe, after all this, that it is a hope to which I am entitled."

  "How do you feel about the murder?"

  "Grief, nothing but unending black grief. The other students have all been tremendously kind and supportive, we've cried together, and we've laughed about the
good times Edward gave us. You see, darling, he would have scolded us terribly if we hadn't laughed. It's the way he was. So alive, a celebration of life."

  "And what about Nicholas Beswick?"

  Rosette came right out of the flatscreen to stand in the cell beside him. A tall, glorious Venus; a goddess wronged and brutally vengeful. "I hope he is raped by every demon in hell."

  Nicholas turned over, shuddering, and buried his head under the blanket.

  * * * *

  He must have fallen asleep, because Lisa Collier was shaking him, her face anxious. "Are you all right?"

  He blinked against the pink-white light of the biolum panel directly overhead. "Yes. Fine, thank you."

  "Good. I brought you some clothes." She dropped his maroon shoulder bag on the floor by his cot. "Vernon Langley is going to start the interviews this afternoon. At least you can turn up looking respectable on the AV recording."

  "Oh." Nicholas's mood damped down.

  She shifted her skirt about and sat at the foot of the cot. "Now then, Nicholas, the idea of a police interview is to keep recapping the same ground until you start becoming inconsistent. That can only happen if you don't tell the truth in the first place. Which brings us to the murder, and what happened that night."

  "I didn't do it."

  "Nicholas, please; just hear me out. If you choose to tell the police you are guilty, we can enter a plea of temporarily diminished responsibility. Kitchener was a tetchy old man, inflicting verbal abuse for several months, you'd just found out your girlfriend was sleeping with him. You certainly had enough cause to lash out, a judge would probably be sympathetic with that, although I have to say the actual nature of the crime would probably eradicate any possibility of a light sentence."

  Nicholas took a deep breath. "Mrs Collier, why will nobody listen to me? I didn't do it."

  Her watery eyes were placid. The sort of gaze his mother used to rebuke him with when he was small. "Nicholas, there is a vast amount of evidence amassed against you, there is both motive and opportunity. And, Nicholas, your fingerprints were all over the knife. On top of that we have the evidence from the Mandels. I might be able to nullify their testimony, or at least blunt it slightly, the courts are still pretty hazy on interpreting psychic visions. But at the moment it adds up to a very convincing case in the prosecution's favour. I have to tell you, the way it stands the jury is going to find you guilty."

  He sat perfectly still, turning the novel concept over in his mind. They, Mrs Collier, the police, the reporters, Rosette, all truly genuinely believed him guilty. Against all logic and reason, he was going to have to accept that.

  "Rational discrimination," Kitchener had said once, 'that's the dividing line between savagery and civilization. We've thought ourselves up to where we are today, out of the caves and into the skyscrapers. Bodies never have mattered a toss, you are your mind."

  So if you're smart, Nicholas told himself, think your way out of this, prove your innocence. Images of that night cluttered his vision again. He'd seen the girls, he'd cried on the bed, he'd heard the screaming. And that was it, the total. There was nothing new, no key out of the logic box. If he could just show he had been in his room sleeping, force them to accept that. But how?

  "Will you still be my lawyer if I plead not guilty?" he asked cautiously.

  The cybofax she held in her lap bobbed up and down as her hands twitched unconsciously. "Yes, Nicholas," she said slowly. "I'll still be your lawyer."

  "Thank you. I want to plead not guilty."

  "Nicholas, I will still be your lawyer if you admit you did it. A lot of people say they are innocent because they are too ashamed even to acknowledge their crime to their lawyer. It works against them in the long run."

  "I understand. I didn't kill Edward Kitchener."

  "Right." She unfolded the cybofax and touched the power stud. "Nothing like an uphill struggle."

  It was the first frivolous thing he'd ever heard her say. He almost asked if she believed him, but fright that she might say no held him back. "I suppose I need an alibi," he said.

  Her right eyebrow arched. "Yes. Have you got one you didn't want to mention before? We know Uri and Liz were together in his room all night. Were you with one of the other girls, secretly, Isabel or Rosette? You said Rosette did make a pass once."

  "No."

  "Now, don't get me wrong, I have to ask. Cecil Cameron?" The Nicholas of yesterday wouldn't have understood the question. Today he thought it was simply a logical thing to ask. "No."

  "How about a channel programme, were you watching one?"

  "No."

  "The other students, is there a likely candidate who would frame you?"

  "No. Look, I know it's not much, but Greg Mandel said I didn't do it. At least, that's what he thought after he interviewed me. Doesn't that count for something?"

  "Hmm." She paused, her expression distant. "I can probably use any vacillation of opinion on his part to call his psychic ability into question. But that really isn't anything like good enough to get you off. It's the knife, you see. Have you any idea how your fingerprints did get on that knife?"

  "No." And now he thought about it, really thought, the fingerprints were impossible to explain away. The murderer creeping in to his room and wrapping his hand round the handle as he slept? Unlikely, he didn't sleep that deep.

  Drugged? But the police had taken a blood sample.

  The first stirring of panic began to creep over his body, like immersion in a cold lake. Suppose he couldn't prove it? Suppose a jury did find him guilty?

  There was a state he could sometimes reach, one where the external world became a fable, irrelevant, leaving his mind free to concentrate on problems. Like yoga, he always imagined, except yoga was for contemplating spiritually. He dealt with hard facts, that was all he knew.

  "I didn't do it," he said. "Therefore somebody else did. That somebody also framed me. And they framed me in a spectacularly clever fashion. They even have me doubting. So in order to prove my innocence, we have to find them."

  He knew Lisa Collier thought he was crazy. Mood changes, from retarded child to punctilious cyborg. Who wouldn't think it of him? It didn't matter, because she could never get him out, not by herself. But she was a lawyer, she had to abide by the rules.

  "Yes, Nicholas," she said. "But how are you going to find him?"

  "I'm not. I'm not good enough, I admit that. We need a professional detective."

  "Who?"

  "The best." It was so simple; sneaky, perhaps even underhand, but practical. And the last thing he could afford right now was scruples. At the back of his mind the image of Edward Kitchener nodded approvingly. He relished the endorsement. Nicholas Beswick finally twigging human emotions, what made people tick. How about that? "And I know how to get him." He gave Lisa Collier a rapturous grin, and pointed at her cybofax. "Am I allowed a phone call?"

  Chapter Seventeen

  There was a crescent of dun-coloured fur partially obscured by the tall spires of grass on the edge of the orange grove. The picture dominated Greg's optical nerves, fed to him by his Heckler and Koch hunting rifle's targeting imager. A fan of nearly invisible pink laser light swept across his vision from left to right, producing minute sparkles when it touched the dewdrops clinging to the grass. A grid of red neon materialized in its wake. The discrimination program cut in, analysing the shape behind the tussock from the tenuous laser return, and the grid began to fold, shrink-wrapping around the rabbit. Cartoon-blue target circles materialized, and Greg shifted the rifle slightly, his finger on the trigger.

  The infra-red laser pulse drilled the rabbit straight through its cranium. A tiny wisp of blue smoke curled up from the five-millimetre circle of singed fur. It rolled over without any fuss.

  I hope it fucking hurt, you fur-clad locust bastard.

  Eleanor hadn't slept much for the last few nights. Snuggled up in his arms, quiet face shaded by sporadic glints of moonlight. She wouldn't voice her fear, so he k
ept his peace, and let her hold him for the reassurance she needed.

  Even he, hardened by Turkey and the inevitable propensity towards murderous fury by some squaddies, had found Nicholas Beswick's profanity difficult to exorcise.

  A rabbit was squatting on its haunches at the base of an orange sapling, wet nose sniffing the air, whiskers vibrating eagerly. Thanks to the target imager's enhancement its melancholic liquid eye was thirty centimetres across. The laser speared the shiny little vermin straight through its pupil.

  How his espersense could miss such an abominable maelstrom of insanity in the boy's unruly thoughts was impossible to comprehend. He knew minds, from the sad and pathetic to the most dangerous brooding psychotic. He could tell, instantly. Engaging Liam Bursken's mind had been a horrendous feat—there had not, could never be, any common ground with such a demented personality. But Nicholas Beswick, he was so appealing, with his timidity and rashness, a humorous reminder of Greg's own adolescent shortcomings, an amplification of all the angst and fervour so wonderfully endemic to that age group.

  I liked him.

  To be so wrong, so blind, was to invite a fundamental disbelief in his entire empathic ability. But there had been nothing, no hint.

  Two rabbits were frolicking together, a big old buck and a frisky doe. He took the buck first, then cooked the doe's brain as she quivered in confused distress.

  Fifteen down, a thousand lucky charms to go.

  Ranasfari had been badly upset. Shocked that a fellow Launde acolyte could do such a thing to his old mentor. Hiding his grief behind a flimsy gruffness, saying he was perturbed that there had been no alternates in the past. It didn't fit the theories. Gabriel had taken him home, for once subdued and sympathetic herself.

  The alternative universe notion was something Greg had clung to for a brief hopeful moment. Suppose Eleanor, untutored, on her first neurohormone infusion, had wandered sideways into one of those timelines where Hitler's grandchildren governed the world from a gleaming Berlin metropolis, where their Nicholas Beswick was certifiably deranged. That would give him the out he needed, that would mean he could carry on liking the boy.