The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘November the third.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No! She thought … She thought it was funny.’

  ‘Yeah; I can imagine, I’ve been introduced to Rosette. So you knew syntho was available at the Abbey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you know where the vat was?’

  ‘In the chemistry lab.’

  ‘You were the first person to arrive at the bedroom after Rosette screamed, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you see anybody else in the Abbey, apart from the other students?’

  ‘No. Well …’ Nicholas tugged at the front of his sweatshirt. It seemed to be constricting around him; his skin was very warm. Both detectives were studying him keenly. This was all going to sound so incredibly stupid, they really would think he was backward now. ‘There was a girl,’ he said reluctantly.

  Greg’s eyes had closed, his face crinkled with the effort of concentration. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was earlier. When I saw Isabel and Rosette. She was a ghost.’

  Nevin let out an exasperated groan, leaning back in his chair. ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  Greg held up a hand, clicking his fingers irritably to silence him. ‘You said: girl. How old?’

  ‘About my age. She was tall, very pretty, red hair.’

  ‘How do you know she was a ghost?’

  ‘Because I saw her outside first. Then she was in the corridor behind Isabel and Rosette.’

  ‘You mean she was out in the park?’

  ‘No. Right outside my window. I thought it was a reflection in the glass at first.’

  ‘Your room is on the second floor, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why she couldn’t be real. I think I imagined her. I was very tired.’

  ‘Have you ever seen the combat leathers which army squaddies wear?’ Greg asked. ‘They are a bit like biker suits, only not so restrictive, matt-black, broad equipment belts, and there’s normally a skull helmet as well.’

  ‘Yes, I think I know what you mean.’

  ‘Was this girl wearing anything like that?’

  ‘Oh, no. She had a jacket on, that was quite dark, but it was just an ordinary one; I think she was wearing a long skirt, too.’

  Greg opened his eyes, and reached up to scratch the back of his neck. ‘Interesting,’ he said guardedly.

  Nicholas studiously avoided eye contact with the two detectives.

  ‘Hardly relevant, Mandel,’ Langley said.

  Greg ignored him. ‘Have you ever seen her before?’ he asked Nicholas.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about other ghosts, or visions?’

  He hung his head. ‘No.’

  ‘What time did you get up that morning, Nicholas?’

  ‘Half-past seven.’

  ‘OK. It probably was just fatigue.’ He sounded satisfied. ‘A lot of squaddies used to suffer from it in Turkey; amazing what they thought they saw after two or three days without sleep. There; told you I talked too much about my old campaigns.’

  Nicholas smiled tentatively, it didn’t seem as though he was mocking.

  Greg yawned and squinted at his cybofax. ‘When was the last time you washed?’

  ‘Lunchtime, just after the lawyers finished briefing us about you conducting our interviews.’

  Nevin’s face split into a huge grin.

  ‘No, Nicholas.’ Greg was labouring against a similar grin. ‘I meant last Thursday. When was the last time you washed prior to the murder?’

  Blood heated his cheeks and ears. ‘Just after seven o’clock. Before I went down to supper.’

  Nevin frowned and pulled out his cybofax. He muttered an order into it, and scanned the screen.

  Greg had turned to watch him.

  ‘Must have been later than that,’ he said in a low tone.

  Langley took the cybofax and looked at the data on display.

  Greg joined them, the three of them put their heads together, talking quietly.

  Nicholas squirmed unhappily. He wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong this time. At least Greg hadn’t accused him of lying.

  ‘What sort of wash?’ Nevin asked.

  ‘A shower. We’ve all got showers.’

  He pointed at the cybofax screen. ‘There, see? The back of his hands are as clean as his legs.’

  ‘Yeah, but the particle accumulation on both is quite well established,’ Greg said.

  ‘That doesn’t mean …’

  Nicholas stopped listening. He remembered the body scan they gave him when he arrived at the station. It was in a white composite cubicle, similar to a shower. A sensor, like a brown bulb the size of his fist, had telescoped down from the ceiling on the end of a waldo arm, and slowly spiralled round his naked body. He had imagined it sniffing like a dog. Then there had been the blood tests, the urine sample; his clothes taken away for examination, finger- and palm-prints recorded.

  ‘Did you wash later on?’ Greg asked. ‘After supper?’

  ‘Yes. My hands, a few times. I went to the toilet; and we were eating peanuts in Uri’s room, they leave your hands sticky.’

  ‘The time is wrong,’ Nevin insisted.

  ‘It’s not tremendously reliable,’ Langley said grudgingly. ‘We can’t contest anything with those results.’

  ‘What is it?’ Nicholas asked, pleased that he had found the courage from somewhere.

  ‘The amount of dirt you were carrying on Friday morning is rather low, that’s all,’ Greg said. He closed his eyes. ‘Tell me again, what time did you have a shower?’

  ‘After seven, about quarter-past. We have to be down for supper at half-past, you see.’

  ‘And you didn’t have another shower later?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s telling the truth.’

  ‘Is there a point of contention?’ Lisa Collier asked.

  Greg and Langley both looked at Jon Nevin. The detective gave the cybofax screen one last scan, then snapped the unit shut. ‘No.’

  10

  Maybe it was the rain, a relentless heavy downpour, which had cleared the reporters from the pavement outside the police station, or maybe the prospect of incurring Julia’s wrath had put the fear of God into them. Whatever the reason, when Greg drove out of the station gates late on Tuesday afternoon, there was only a handful of camera operators in plastic cagoules left to watch him go.

  ‘Thank heavens for that,’ Eleanor muttered beside him. ‘I thought they’d put down roots.’

  He turned up Church Street, and flicked on the headlights. The sun hadn’t quite set, but the solid clouds had smothered Oakham in a grey penumbra. Raindrops emitted a wan yellow twinkle as they slashed through the beams.

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘You had a word with Julia, then?’

  ‘Absolutely. You know, it’s still hard to associate the girl we know with this demon-machinator billionairess all the channels carp on about. I mean, the Prime Minister couldn’t call off reporters like this. They’d all race up to the top of the nearest hill and start screaming about oppression and press freedom.’

  ‘No messing. But then Marchant doesn’t own the launch facilities which boost the broadcast satellite platforms into geosync orbit.’

  ‘There is that.’

  Greg glanced over at Cutts Close; lights were shining in all the caravans, dark figures shuffled across the grass. They hadn’t actually retreated then, just regrouped ready for tomorrow.

  He nudged the EMC Ranger up to thirty-five kilometres an hour. The rain had driven most of the traffic off the roads, leaving a few cyclists pedalling home, faces screwed up against the spray. His neurohormone hangover was ebbing, it wasn’t as if he had to strain for the interviews. The Launde students had been co-operative, a welcome change from the hideously antagonistic mullahs in Turkey.

  ‘What did Julia say about analysing the themed neurohormones?’ he asked.

  ‘No problem, we should have the answer some ti
me tomorrow. The courier came and picked the ampoules up while you were doing the interviews.’ Eleanor gazed blankly at the deserted stalls in the market square. It was the empty expression she used whenever she was more irritated than she wanted to admit. ‘I had to threaten to call the Home Office for clearance before he authorized their release.’

  ‘Who, Denzil?’

  ‘No, one of the detectives in the CID office.’

  ‘Oh. Tell you, I think Vernon is softening, and Jon Nevin isn’t far behind.’

  ‘Great.’ The tone was biting.

  ‘Nothing pleasant in life ever comes cheap.’

  She let her head loll back on the support cushioning. ‘No. As you always tell me. So how did you get on with the students? Are they all innocent?’

  He grinned at the double meaning. ‘I’m pretty certain none of them killed Kitchener. Although God knows enough of them had the motive. He’s actually slept with all of the girls.’

  Eleanor gave him a sideways look. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yeah. Sixty-seven years old; now that’s the way I’d like to go.’

  ‘Humm.’ Her lips pouted disapprovingly. ‘Which of the students had a motive?’

  ‘Isabel Spalvas. She wasn’t actually sleeping with Kitchener against her will, but it’s bloody close. Nicholas Beswick. I feel kind of sorry for him. Nice kid, but a bit naïve, head in the clouds type; you know, bright and stupid at the same time. He’s head over heels in love with Isabel, although I doubt he’s even kissed her yet, they’re certainly not lovers. Finding her with Kitchener that night was a monumental shock, but he adored the old man too. Uri Pabari might have had a motive if he’d known Liz Foxton had slept with Kitchener.’

  ‘But he didn’t know?’

  ‘I didn’t ask him; I’ll have to check.’ Greg sagged mentally at the prospect. ‘And if he didn’t know, he will after that kind of leading question. Bugger.’

  ‘I thought you said none of the students did it. What’s the point of asking Uri about that?’

  ‘Psi isn’t an exact science. I can’t get up in court and give absolutes, you know that, and I’m bloody sure the lawyers do. All I can ever say is that I haven’t perceived them giving me false answers. But suppose somebody had an overwhelming motive to kill Kitchener, they might just be able to conceal their guilt from me, because they don’t feel any. Certainly not if I ask them directly. So I creep up on the fact, by checking the peripheries. They can’t lie about everything and get away with it, I’ll catch them eventually.’

  ‘OK, so are there any other students who have a plausible motive?’

  He kept his eyes firmly on the road. ‘One. It’s a possible money motive. That belongs to our Miss Rosette Harding-Clarke. Although if anyone at Launde Abbey was due to be murdered, I would have put money on it being her.’

  Eleanor perked up. ‘This sounds interesting, especially with the way you’re trying to crush the steering-wheel.’

  ‘Yeah, well maybe I’m imagining it’s her neck. Jesus, Eleanor, you’ve got to meet her to disbelieve her. Tell you, how she survived life this long with that attitude of hers is a bloody mystery to me. I felt like giving her a damn good smack, but she’d probably only enjoy it.’ He tried to halt that line of thought. No personal involvement; the first law. Although how anybody could view Rosette dispassionately was beyond him.

  ‘But I thought Rosette Harding-Clarke was the rich one,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Yeah, so she claims. She is also the pregnant one.’

  ‘Pregnant?’

  He smiled at the surprise in her voice. ‘That’s right. And the kid is Kitchener’s, or at least she claims it is. And she believes it too, which makes me inclined to believe her. So the first thing I want you to check out tomorrow morning is whether Rosette really is as rich as she says she is. A lot of these so-called aristocrats are worse off than people drawing the dole. And we’ll need a legal opinion as well, will the kid stand to inherit anything even though it’s not mentioned in the will? Rosette says she won’t contest it, but I would have thought the executors have some sort of obligation to provide for the child.’

  ‘Right.’ Eleanor pulled her cybofax out, and loaded the order into it.

  After living in a two-room chalet for over a decade, the interior of the farmhouse always seemed vast. Furniture rattled around, nothing was ever conveniently near to hand.

  The builders had renovated most of it before they moved in, fixing up the roof tiles, replacing the rotten floorboards, stripping out the damp plaster, installing new plumbing and air conditioning, rewiring. They were lucky to get the work done at all. England’s industrial regeneration meant the building trade was in the middle of a boom; old factories were being restored, new ones constructed, housing estates were springing up across the country. There was very little spare capacity right now, certainly not for refurbishment jobs in out-of-the-way villages. But Julia’s name ensured they were given top priority with the firm they hired, although even her clout didn’t extend all the way down into the shady levels of subcontracting. There were still three rooms waiting to be plastered, and the conservatory was a stack of cut and primed wood sitting on the lawn, ready to be screwed together.

  Eleanor had already suggested that he could put it up. As if the groves didn’t occupy all his time.

  But the farmhouse had definitely acquired that indefinable sense of being home, the animal refuge against a howling world. Returning to it caused a tangible wash of relief. He had half expected some reporters to be standing at the entrance to the drive.

  The interior had been decorated by a London firm, their designer working in tandem with Eleanor, to give an early twentieth-century theme; the country house of Victorian nobility. Everything was light and somehow rustic, curtains and carpets in pastel shades, the furniture in delicately stained pine. Neoteric domestic systems were all built in to reproduction units. The only modern setting was the gym, filled with black and silver chromed equipment.

  When they arrived back from the police station, Greg slumped down on a settee in the lounge and pointed the remote at the long mock-painting of an eighteenth-century harvest scene which disguised the inert flatscreen. The picture shivered away into a game show where contestants were hanging upside down from the studio ceiling on long bungee cords; they were bouncing in and out of large barrels filled with water, trying to bob apples with their teeth.

  He stared at it incredulously for a minute, then shook his head in weary dismay. Mr Domesticity, back home after a hard day at the office, with the wife bustling round in the kitchen.

  Except, as usual, his mind was full with little scraps of information from the case, all of them swirling round in a chaotic vortex, stirred by the witching fingers of inquisitiveness and intuition in the hope they would settle into some kind of recognizable pattern. His army mates had called him obsessive. Maybe it could be deemed a character flaw, but he could never let go of a problem. He had almost forgotten how involved he could become in a case. The worrying thing was, it felt good. On the chase again. That bastard who had chopped up Kitchener needed to be put away.

  Eleanor came in with a couple of lagers in tall Scandinavian glasses. She took one look at the game show and switched the flatscreen off. Merry peasants and bales of hay snoozing under a sky of golden cloud reappeared.

  ‘You weren’t watching it,’ she said when he protested. ‘You were thinking about Kitchener.’

  He snagged one of the lagers. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You said Rosette was a real bitch,’ Eleanor said as she sat down on the settee, wriggling her shoulders until she was nestled up snugly against him. ‘Do you really think she would kill the father of her own baby just for money?’

  ‘No. Now you put it like that, I don’t. Tell you though, the one thing those students did have in common was the way they idolized Kitchener. That came through loud and clear; a couple of them actually called him a second father. Instinct says it isn’t any of them. But … it’s funny. There are a lot of
things which don’t add up, certainly not if it was a tekmerc snuff operation.’ He put his arm round her, enjoying the warm weight pressing into his side.

  ‘The apron,’ she said. ‘Now that is really strange.’

  ‘That’s right. Like you said, why bother with it at all? I can’t believe our hypothetical tekmerc used it simply to incriminate the students. First off, we actually can’t implicate one of them with it. If they were going to plant evidence why not the knife, some bloodstains?’

  ‘Too obvious.’

  ‘Maybe. But the apron isn’t obvious enough. And why spend precious time starting a fire? I know covert penetration operations, Christ I’ve been on enough in my time, the cardinal rule is get out once you’ve finished, don’t loiter.’

  ‘Whoever it was, they must have been there a while, though. First they had to wait until Kitchener was alone, then the Bendix was burnt, as well as the neurohormone bioware. It all adds up to a lot of time spent in the Abbey.’

  ‘Which gives them an even stronger reason to leave straight after the murder,’ he countered. ‘Every extra minute in the Abbey is one more minute when they could be discovered. And why use syntho to kill the bioware in the first place?’

  ‘Because it’s there, saves carrying a poison in with them.’

  ‘Exactly, but how did they know that? It must have been someone totally familiar with the lab set-up, and even then they couldn’t have known for sure that there was any syntho available that particular night. Suppose Kitchener and good old Rosette had been infusing heavily? A tekmerc would have brought a poison, or more likely used a maser. Whatever the method, it would never have been left to chance.’

  ‘There are all sorts of other chemicals in the lab, as well as the acids, and the heaters,’ she said. ‘There was bound to be something which could kill the bioware. Pure chance they used the syntho.’

  ‘Yeah. Could be.’ But the junked up thought fragments refused to quieten down, he kept seeing flashes of Launde Park, the Abbey, those bloody lakes, Denzil’s data-rich tour, the students’ broken shocked faces. None of them connected in any way.

  He took a gulp of the lager; it was cold enough to numb the back of his throat. ‘But that still doesn’t explain the time they were in the Abbey before the murder,’ he said.