The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘OK. I want to see their statements before I meet them. And the forensic and pathology reports as well, please.’

  ‘All right, we’ll assign you an authority code so you can access the files on this case. And I’ll take you out to Launde myself.’

  5

  Three more uniformed bobbies had been drafted in to help keep the channel crews back from the police station gate. Ribbons of sweat stained the spines of their white shirts as they shouted and pushed at the incursive horde. Eleanor drove out into the road, and turned hard right, heading down towards the railway station. The way to do it, she discovered, was imagine the road to be empty, and just go. Reporters and camera operators nipped out of the way sharpish.

  She had been right about them tracking down Greg’s personal data profile, though.

  ‘Mr Mandel, is it true you’re helping the police with the Kitchener murder?’

  ‘You don’t farm sheep, Greg, what are you here for?’

  ‘Did Julia Evans send you?’

  ‘Is it true you used to serve in Mindstar?’

  ‘Eleanor, where are you going?’

  ‘Come on, Greg, say something.’

  ‘Can we have a statement?’

  She passed the last of them level with the fast-food caravans, and pressed her foot down. The hectic shouts faded away. A smell of fried onions and spicy meat blew into the EMC Ranger through the dashboard vents.

  ‘Christ,’ she murmured. When she lived on the kibbutz she had often accompanied her father and the other men when they took the hounds out hunting. She had seen what happened to foxes, wild cats, and even other dogs when the hounds ran them down. They would keep on worrying the bloody carcass until there was nothing left but shreds. The press, she reflected sagely, had an identical behaviour pattern. For the first time she began to feel sorry for Langley, having to conduct his inquiry with them braying relentlessly on his heels.

  If she had known about them as well as the way the police would treat her and Greg, she might well have played the part of shrewish wife and told him no. Too late now.

  A quick check in the rear-view mirror showed her the police Panda car carrying Vernon Langley and Jon Nevin was following them. Langley had assigned Amanda Paterson to accompany her and Greg in the EMC Ranger. Eleanor wasn’t quite sure who was supposed to be chastised by the arrangement. Amanda was sitting in the rear of the big car, hands folded across her lap, a sullen expression on her face as she watched the detached houses of Station Road whizz past.

  So defensive, Eleanor thought, as if the Kitchener inquiry was some shabby secret she was guarding. And now the barbarians were hammering on the gate, demanding access.

  ‘You OK?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  He held her gaze for a moment. ‘How about you, Amanda?’ he asked.

  Startled, the woman looked up. ‘Yes, fine, thank you.’

  ‘Have they been like that the whole time?’ Eleanor asked her.

  ‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘It hasn’t helped when we went round the villages collecting statements. They often got the residents’ stories before we did.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘They shouldn’t have done that.’

  Eleanor drove over the level crossing and took the Braunston road. The clouds were darkening overhead, a uniform neutral veil. It would rain soon, she knew, a thunderstorm. Weather sense was something everybody cultivated these days.

  Greg inclined his head fractionally towards her, then flipped open his cybofax and started to run through the statements he’d loaded into the memory. Grey-green data trundled down the small LCD screen, rearranging itself each time he muttered an instruction.

  Devious man, she thought, holding back a smile. Among his other qualities. She could read him so easily, something she’d been able to do right from the start; and vice versa, of course, him with his gland. Greg always said she had psychic traits, although he didn’t want her to take the psi-assessment tests. Not putting his foot down, they didn’t have that kind of relationship, but heavily opposed to her having a gland. He was more protective about it than anything else, wanting to spare her the ordeal. Several Mindstar veterans had proved incapable of making the psychological adjustment necessary to cope with their expanded psi ability.

  There were so few people who saw that aspect of Greg: his concern, the oh so human failings. Gland prejudice was too strong, an undiluted paranoia virus; nobody saw past the warlock power, they were dazzled by it.

  Countless times she had watched people flinch when they were introduced to him, and she could never decide quite why. Perhaps it was all the time he’d spent in the army and the Trinities. He had the air of someone terribly intimate with violence; not an obvious bruiser type, like those idiots Andrew Foster and Frankie Owen, more like the calm reserve martial arts experts possessed.

  The first time they met, the day she ran away from the kibbutz, her father had come looking for her. He backed down so fast when Greg intervened; it was the first time she had ever seen her father give way over anything. He always had God’s righteousness on his side, so he claimed. More like incurable peasant obstinacy, she thought, the cantankerous old Bible-thumper. The whole of her life until then, or so it seemed, had been filled with his impassioned skeletal face craning out of the pulpit in the wooden chapel, broken purple capillaries on his rough cheeks showing up tobacco-brown in the pale light which filtered through the turquoise-glass window behind the altar. That face would harangue and cajole even in her dreams, promising God’s justice would pursue her always.

  But all it had taken was a few quiet-spoken resolute words from Greg and he had retreated, walking out of her life for good. Him, the kibbutz’s spiritual leader, abandoning his only daughter to one of Satan’s technological corruptions.

  She had moved in to Greg’s chalet that night. The two of them had been together ever since. The other residents at the Berrybut time-share estate warned her that Greg could be moody, but it never manifested with her. She could sense when he was down, when he needed sympathy, when he needed to be left alone. Those long anarchistic years in the Trinities, the cheapness of life on Peterborough’s streets, were bound to affect him. He needed time to recover, that was all. Couldn’t people see that?

  She always felt sorry for couples who were unable to plug into each other’s basic emotions. They didn’t know what they were missing; she’d never trusted anyone quite like she did Greg. That and the sex, of course.

  ‘Kitchener was fairly rich, wasn’t he?’ she asked Amanda.

  ‘Yes. He had several patents bringing in royalties. His molecular interaction equations all had commercial applications, crystals and ’ware chips, that kind of thing. It was mostly kombinates who took out licences, they paid him a couple of million New Sterling a year.’

  Eleanor let out an impressed whistle. ‘Who stands to inherit?’

  Amanda’s features were briefly illuminated with a recalcitrant grin when she realized how smoothly they had breached her guard. ‘We examined that angle. No one person benefits. Kitchener had no immediate family, the closest are a couple of younger cousins, twice removed. He left a million New Sterling to their children; there are seven of them, so split between them it doesn’t come to that much. The money goes into a trust fund anyway, and they’re limited to how much can be withdrawn each year. But the bulk of the estate goes to Cambridge University. It will be used for science scholarships to enable underprivileged students to go to the university; and funding two of the physics faculties, with the proviso that it’s only to be spent on laboratory equipment. He didn’t want the dons to feather their nests with it.’

  ‘What about Launde Abbey, who gets that?’

  ‘The university. It’s to be a holiday retreat for the most promising physics students. He wanted them to have somewhere they could go to escape the pressure of exams and college life, and just sit and think. It’s all in his will.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like the Edward Kitchener we hear about,’ Eleanor observed.
r />   ‘That was his public image,’ Amanda said. ‘Once you’ve talked to the students, you’ll find out that it really was mostly image. They all worshipped him.’

  The EMC Ranger started up the hill which led out of town. A new housing estate was under construction on both sides of the road, the first in Oakham for fifteen years. The houses had a pre-Warming Mediterranean look, thick white-painted walls to keep out the heat, silvered windows, solar-cell panel roofs made to look like red clay tiles, broad overhanging eaves. And garages, she noted, the architects must share a confidence about the future.

  She had been relieved when the council passed the planning application. Considering all they’d been through when they lost their homes, and the cramped conditions of the school campus, the Fens refugees deserved somewhere for themselves. After the economy started to pick up, she had worried that they would develop into a permanent underclass, resentful and resented. A lot of them had actually been employed to build the houses, but despite that and the cacao plantations the numbers of unemployed in the Oakham district was still too large. The town urgently needed more factories to bring jobs into the area. The transport network wasn’t up to supporting commuters yet, allowing people to work in the cities like they used to. She often wondered if she should ask Julia to establish an Event Horizon division in the industrial estate. Would that be an abuse of privilege? Julia could be overbearingly generous to her friends. And there were a lot of towns which needed jobs just as badly as Oakham. Of course, if the Event Horizon factory had to be built anyway, why not use what influence she had? At the moment she was just waiting to see if the council development officers could do what they were paid to, and attract industrial investment. If they hadn’t interested a kombinate after another six months or so, she probably would have a word.

  A favour for a favour, she thought, because God knows this Kitchener case is tougher than either of us expected. Julia would have to site a whole cyber precinct next to the town to be quits.

  She took the west road out of Braunston. It was a long straight stretch up to the recently replanted Cheseldyne Spinney. The turning down to Launde Park was five hundred metres past the end of the tanbark oak saplings. There was a row of yellow police cones blocking it off, tyre-deflation spikes jutting out of their bases like chrome-plated rhino horns. One of Oakham’s Panda cars, with two uniformed constables inside, was on duty in front of them. Eleanor counted ten reporters camped opposite, their cars parked on the thistle-tangled verge.

  As soon as the EMC Ranger stopped by the Panda car, the reporters were up and running. Cybofaxes, switched to AV record, were pressed against the glass like rectangular slate-grey leeches.

  Amanda pulled out her police-issue cybofax and used its secure link to talk to the bobbies in the Panda car.

  Eleanor saw one of them nod his head languidly, then they both climbed out and walked towards the cones.

  ‘Are you taking over the case from the police, Mr Mandel?’

  ‘Is it true the Prime Minister appointed you to the investigation?’

  ‘Are you Julia Evans’s lover, Greg?’

  Eleanor refused to snap the retort which had formed so temptingly in her mind. Instead she forced a contemptuous smile, thinking how good it would feel to stuff that tabloid channel reporter’s cybofax where the sun didn’t shine.

  The bobbies finished clearing away the cones and waved Eleanor on. They could have cleared them away before we arrived, she thought; perhaps it’s part of the needling, making us run the press gauntlet.

  The Chater valley was a lush all-over green, the steep walls bulging in and out to form irregular glens and hummocks. Dead hawthorn hedges acted as trellises for ivy-leaf pelargoniums, heavy with hemispherical clusters of cerise-pink flowers. The fields were all given over to grazing land, although there was no sign of any animals; the permanent grass cover helped to prevent soil erosion in the monsoon season. As they moved over the brow on the northern side she began to appreciate how secluded the valley was, there had been no clue of its existence from the road out of Braunston.

  They started to go down a slope with a vicious incline. The road was reduced to two strips of tarmac just wide enough for the EMC Ranger’s tyres, speedwells forming a spongy strip between them, tiny blue and white flowers closed against the darkening sky. Trickles of water were running out of the verges, filling the tarmac ruts. Eleanor slowed down to a crawl.

  ‘Mr Mandel,’ Amanda said. There was such a sheepish tone to her voice Eleanor actually risked glancing from the road to check her in the mirror.

  Greg looked back over his shoulder. ‘What is it?’

  ‘There was something else we didn’t release to the press,’ Amanda said. ‘Kitchener had a lightware number cruncher at the Abbey, he used it for numerical simulation work. Its memory core was wiped. I didn’t think about it until you mentioned Event Horizon’s involvement. Whatever Kitchener was working on, it’s lost for good now.’

  ‘No messing?’ Greg said. He sounded almost cheerful.

  ‘We weren’t sure if the ’ware had been knocked out by the storm or something. We didn’t really connect the two events. But if you take commercial sabotage as a motive for the murder, then it was probably deliberate.’

  ‘Do you know when the core was wiped?’ Greg asked. ‘Before Kitchener was murdered? After? During?’

  ‘No. I’ve no idea.’

  ‘What did the students say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember if they were asked.’

  Greg thought for a moment, then started defining a search program that would run through the statements stored in his cybofax. Eleanor heard Amanda doing the same thing. That was when they reached a really steep part of the road, just above the Chater itself. She put the EMC Ranger into bottom gear, and kept her foot on the brake pedal. The water channelled by the ruts was running a couple of centimetres deep around the tyres.

  ‘Are you sure about the bridge?’ she asked Amanda.

  ‘It should be passable by now. There was only a five-centimetre fall last night.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’ There was a bend at the foot of the slope. Eleanor nudged the EMC Ranger round it, dreading what she’d see. Turning round here would be difficult. Right at the bottom of the valley the river had worn a cramped narrow gully in the earth. The scarp had been scoured of grass and weeds by the recent monsoon floods, leaving a pockmarked face of raw red-brown earth. Ahead of the EMC Ranger the road had miraculously reappeared in full, grass, moss, nettles, and speedwells swept away by the water.

  The Panda car was holding back, she caught a glimpse of it on top of the final slope.

  Waiting for us to find out what the river is like, she thought, bastards.

  ‘We’re waterproof, remember,’ Greg said. He winked.

  She grinned savagely, and urged the EMC Ranger along the last ten metres to the bridge. The Chater was a turbulent slash of fast-flowing brown water, boiling over the bridge. Eleanor used the white handrail as a guide as she gingerly steered over it. Water churned around the wheels. She estimated it was about fifteen centimetres deep, not even up to the axle.

  Once they were over the river, the road turned right. Greg pulled at his lower lip, looking back thoughtfully. The smaller Panda car was edging out over the bridge, water up to the base of its doors.

  ‘Tell you, Jon Nevin was right; nothing would have got over that on Thursday night and Friday morning,’ Greg said.

  There was a lake ahead of them, a rectangle fifty metres long, draining into the Chater through a crumbling concrete channel. A small earth bank rose up behind it, sprouting dead horse-chestnut trees which were leaning at precarious angles.

  They started to climb up the slope, a dreary expanse of scrimpy, slightly yellowed grass. The road surface on this side of the Chater was even worse than the northern side. Past the end of the first lake, and ten metres higher, was a second, a triangular shape, a hundred metres along each side. It was being fed by a waterfall at the head.
A decrepit wooden fence slimed with yellow-green lichen ran around it.

  ‘Stop here,’ Greg said.

  Eleanor pulled up level with the end of the lake. She guessed there was another above them.

  Greg opened the door and got out, standing in front of the bonnet, staring at the lake. His eyes had that distant look, the gland neurohormones unplugging him from the physical universe. A world sculpted from shadows, he’d said once, when he tried to describe the way neurohormones altered his perception, similar to a photon amp image, everything dusty and grainy. But translucent; you could see right through the planet if you had enough strength. The shadows are analogous to the fabric of the real world – houses, machinery, furniture, the ground, people. But not always. There are … differences. Additions. Memories of objects, phantasms I suppose.

  And I can perceive minds too. Separate from the body. Minds glow, like nebulas with a supergiant star hidden at the core.

  The remoteness faded from his face. He gave the lake a last look, fingers stroking his chin, a faintly puzzled expression pulling at his features.

  ‘What did you see?’ she asked as he got back into the passenger seat. His intuition was almost as strong as his empathy. When they first looked round the farmhouse on the Hambleton peninsula he had suddenly grabbed hold of her as she walked into one of the small upstairs bedrooms. He couldn’t give a reason, just that she shouldn’t go in. When they gave it a thorough examination they found that a whole section of the floorboards in front of the door was riddled with woodworm. If she had just marched in she would have fallen straight through.

  ‘Not sure,’ Greg said.

  The Panda car was lumbering up the road behind them. Eleanor started off towards the third lake. The first tiny spots of drizzle began to graze the windscreen.

  ‘A microlight landing spot?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  Amanda was giving them a slightly bemused look from the back seat.