No peace for the wicked. And last night she had been gloriously wicked.
Open Channel To NN Core.
Morning, Juliet.
Morning, Grandpa. We can't be having a crisis this early.
Not a crisis, no.
Thank heavens for that. What then?
I'm curious about something you did yesterday
Spying on me again?
No. I was just reviewing some of your data traffic. Double checking. That's what I'm here for, your safety net.
Yah, go on. She had a pretty good idea where this was leading.
You accessed one of our biochemical research labs yesterday. Using your executive code, no less. Mind telling me what for, girl?
No, I don't mind. She leaned over to the bedside cabinet and poured her tea from the silver service.
Juliet!
Oh, you wanted to know right now?
If I still had a body, I'd put you over my bloody knee, m'girl.
Grandpa, behave. Besides, I'm too big and too strong these days. And I don't fight fair, either.
You learnt that from me, Juliet. Now are you going to tell me?
She picked up her cup and saucer, and settled back into the pillows. Yah, all right. I wiped every record of the retrospective neurohormone from our memory cores, the analysis report, molecular structure, conclusions, everything. Then I sent Rachel over there, and she tipped all the remaining ampoules into the toxic waste disposal furnace. Happy now?
Bloody hell, girl. Why?
The tea was too hot to drink. She blew across the top of her cup as she marshalled her thoughts. Because I don't want something like that let loose in the world, Grandpa. It's bad enough having people like Gabriel being able to see what I might do in the future, or Greg knowing how badly I've been misbehaving just by looking at me. I don't want someone standing in this room ten years from now taking a simple infusion and being able to see what I did last night.
Hardly a simple infusion, girl.
Exactly. The Home Office have slapped a restriction order on what really happened at Greg's farm and Launde Abbey. Admittedly their main concern is the way MacLennan abused his paradigm project; if word got out that the New Conservatives had been allowing a company to research what amounts to a mind-control system there would be hell to pay. Certainly it would cost them the next election. Marchant didn't need much prodding to include the neurohormone. And there are now only fifteen people in the world who know a retrospection neurohormone is even possible. With those numbers we might just be able to keep it that way. Even if the news does eventually leak out, it would take an immense research effort to produce it again, if we ever could. Kitchener was a very clever man, not to mention idiosyncratic.
You can't fight progress, Juliet.
A retrospective neurohormone isn't progress, Grandpa. Quite the opposite. And there is already more than enough freely available technology in this world capable of being misapplied by tekmercs and others. Corporations and kombinates are going to have to start becoming responsible again. After all, we do fund ninety per cent of all the significant scientific research these days.
Lord preserve us, a global citizen with a conscience.
Somebody has to be, Grandpa. There is more to Event Horizon than making nifty household 'ware gadgets. Do you really want me to use all that influence for the bad?
Juliet, you are beautiful. I'm so proud of you.
She knew her cheeks would be reddening. Didn't care. Not this morning. Thank you, Grandpa. I am what I am because I have the best teacher in the world.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Seductress!
Yah. And proud of it.
Eat your breakfast in peace, Juliet, I've got plenty of data-work piled up for you later.
Exit NN Core.
She took a sip of tea and fired the remote at the wall-mounted flatscreen, keeping the volume low. It was the East England channel, and she was on again. Yesterday's gala reopening of the Stock Exchange. Another invitation impossible to refuse, half the companies listed were heavily dependent on Event Horizon contracts. The exchange had been operating out of temporary quarters at Canary Wharf ever since the PSP had fallen and trading became legal again. Party activists had razed the old exchange a couple of months after President Armstrong came to power. So a new purpose-built building had risen up out of the old site, one with plenty of spare data processing and communications capacity, ready for the challenge of regeneration.
Very symbolic, she thought caustically.
She watched herself walking down the main hall with the exchange officials, most of them male, and most over fifty. So boring, no conversation outside money. Esquiline had dressed her in a white dinner jacket made from a fabric which played clips of old black and white films over its surface.
Superbly unconventional, and formal at the same time. Going to Esquiline had turned into one of the best decisions she had made for a long time—if for no other reason than Esquiline's fitting team was a fantastic new source of gossip, opening up the underbelly of the social scene. According to them, Lavinia Mayer didn't even need to intervene on her behalf with the Coleman cow. Apparently Jakki Coleman's agent had read her the riot act, effectively neutering her; it turned out he had a major contract with Esquiline to fit out several of his clients. And being thrown off an agent's books for being difficult was worse than death in the channel universe. At least if you were dead, cult status repeats boosted your ratings.
Jakki hadn't said a word against her for the last three days. Julia on the flatscreen cut the ribbon to the trading floor as Charlie Chaplin waddled across her back twirling his cane. All the jobbers cheered her enthusiastically.
Now they had been fun to talk to at the reception afterwards. Most of them were under thirty.
She took another sip of tea as the scene changed back to East England's breakfast studio. The blond twentysomething female presenter in a tight sweater was lounging back on a deep settee.
"That was yesterday's opening ceremony," she gushed warmly. "And to review it, I have our fashion correspondent, Leonard Sharr."
The camera panned back to show the most effeminate man Julia had ever seen sitting at the other end of the settee, dressed in leather jeans and a purple jacket with half-sleeves, topaz handkerchief hanging flamboyantly out of his breast pocket. She bit back on her giggles.
"Leonard, what did you think of Julia's clothes?"
"I found her choice so very, very appropriate. Tatty old design, showing tatty old films, at a tatty old function. It said simply nothing to me, except perhaps: look what a disaster I am, and I'm too rich to care. Really, this simply will not do for someone of her standing. She could be such a pretty little girl if she just made an effort and wore some nice frocks."
"Arsehole!" Julia completely forgot her cup was still half full. The tea went everywhere.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The forensic team had cleared away all their polythene sheets and peeled the bar code tags off the furniture, they'd even returned the cacti to the table below the window, but somehow the room wasn't the same. Nicholas stood at the foot of the circular bed, surveying the place that had been home for a few short months. Coming here originally had been the pinnacle of his life. Now it left him totally unmoved. It wasn't that Launde Abbey was full of bad memories, rather it didn't hold any memories for him at all, good or bad. Even the ghosts had departed—Kitchener, Eleanor ...
He dropped his maroon shoulder-bag at the foot of the bed, and stared round in some perplexity. His rock band holoprints were missing. What had the forensic team wanted them for anyway?
He began opening drawers, and of course none of his clothes were where they should be. He settled for dumping everything on the bed to be sorted out later. The uniformed policeman who had driven him up to the Abbey wasn't going to hustle him along. Oakham police couldn't extend enough courtesies right now.
There had been a press conference to announce they were releasing him from custody,
that he was in no way implicated in the murder of Edward Kitchener, The reporters had clamoured for details; but apart from saying he was glad it was all over, and that he thought the police had done a good job under difficult circumstances, and no he wasn't going to sue for wrongful arrest, he didn't answer any questions. Amanda Paterson and Jon Nevin had stepped in sharpish to deflect any awkward shouted queries. And then amazingly the press had left him alone, no intrusion into his private life, no chasing after his parents or Emma, no big-money offers for exclusives. That was down to Julia Evans, he suspected. He was rather pleased he could work out that such underground pressures were being applied. The old Nicholas would have accepted their lack of interest without thought, never wondering about the fast manoeuvring and horse-trading that must have gone on deep below the surface of public awareness.
He smiled. The old Nicholas, as if he'd emerged from a chrysalis, born again. But it was true enough. The world was exactly the same, only his perception of it had altered. Matured, rather. What did they call it? Realpolitik. And his first encounter with that phenomenon had come two days ago, the morning Vernon Langley had let him out of the cell, telling him he was free to go.
Greg Mandel had arrived at the station, looking grieved and tired, and told him what had actually happened. There was a secrecy order to sign and thumbprint, and it had been made very clear he wasn't to speak to anybody about paradigms or retrospective neurohormones ever again. Officially, MacLennan had let Liam Bursken out of Stocken Hall for the night, bringing him to Launde to murder Kitchener.
Bursken was permanently incommunicado, unable to protest his innocence, perhaps not even wanting to—let the sinners believe the Lord could reach out to them through bars of steel. MacLennan was dead. Suicide, Greg said. And looking at his stony, impassive face, even Nicholas's perpetual inquisitiveness had tacitly retreated.
As the price of being vindicated, adopting that particular masquerade was cheap indeed.
He emptied the last drawerful of socks on to the bed. It was raining quite heavily again, thick clouds darkening the morning sky. Roll on April and the start of England's long summer. When he walked over to the window he could just make out the grubby grey strip of road running through the park.
Night-time, when the rain had fallen like a biblical deluge. The jeep crawling down the slope cowards the river. The vivid flash he had thought was lightning.
He shuddered and turned away.
The cacti on the copper-topped table hadn't been watered for over a week, the soil in their pots was bone dry. And he never had seen them flower the way Kitchener had told him they would.
He decided to take a couple with him. There had to be something of the old man's that would stay with him, some tangible personal memento. And he doubted he would be welcome to visit Rosette and her baby. Although you never knew. Motherhood might soften her ...
Nah. No chance.
Grinning, he picked up two of the cacti pots.
Someone knocked quietly on the door.
"Come in." He put the cacti down again, thinking it would be the uniformed policeman.
It was Isabel.
He stared dumbly at her, completely tongue-tied. The old Nicholas wasn't so distant after all.
She was wearing a lavender-coloured dress, curly hair held back by a broad black velvet band. As lovely as always. It was so painful just seeing her. Everything he ever wanted. Unreachable.
"Hello, Nick."
"Er, hello. I was just collecting my things." Nothing had changed, he still couldn't talk to her, say what he wanted. Pathetic!
"Me too. The executors are going to take over the running of the Abbey in a couple of days. Did you know they are going to open it as a sort of ashram for university science students?"
"Yes, I'd heard." He looked down at his trainers.
"I'm sorry I didn't help you with the police." She clenched her hands in front of her, fingers twisting. "We all are actually. It was so unfair on you. I don't know how I could have ever believed you were involved."
"That's all right."
"Hardly, Nick."
He risked a glance. She was looking out of the window, face composed, dispassionate.
"I did do it, you know," he said. "It was me."
"No. Your hands, but not you."
He considered that. If Isabel, someone so intimately involved with Kitchener, could accept his innocence, then maybe he was blameless after all. "Isabel?" he began.
She parted her lips in a small knowing smile. "No, Nick, I didn't love him. That was just a part of Launde, the wonder and the craziness. I was swept along like all the others. I wanted to tell you. I was going to tell you the next morning."
He hung his head.
"And what about you?" she asked. "What are you going to do next?"
"Er, I've been offered a research post by Event Horizon, actually. In Ranasfari's team at Cambridge. I think I detect the hand of Greg Mandel behind that. If Event Horizon is prepared to employ me, then I must be innocent. That's what people will think, anyway."
"Yes. That was nice of him."
"Greg's all right. Once you get round him having a gland."
"You've changed, Nick. You're stronger now. That's good."
Not enough. Not enough. I haven't! "What are you going to do?"
She smiled secretively. "I'm going to get my doctorate. At Cambridge, actually; I've been accepted by a college."
Nicholas turned bright red. He heard Kitchener's delighted mocking laughter echoing out of ... somewhere, and took a deep breath. "Isabel, I love you. And, I know I'm not much—"
She kissed him softly, silencing him. His arms went round her. They fitted just fine.
END
A Quantum Murder Page 38
