The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  He looked down at Kitchener, head bowed almost reverently, then crossed himself. It took him two minutes to methodically unbutton and remove the old man’s pyjamas, folding them neatly and placing them on the armchair. When he was finished, he straddled the corpse across its hips. The tip of the knife was brought to rest just above the belly button, dullness of the well-worn metal contrasting against the now etiolate skin.

  Nicholas leant forward, pressing down with all his weight. The knife penetrated smoothly, almost up to the handle, and he began to move it forwards, up the chest, in a rough sawing motion.

  16

  It was truly a cell now. The door remained locked, even when Nicholas knocked on it. Meals, interviews, and his lawyer; that was all it opened for. And the trip to the magistrates’ court.

  The police had taken him there on Friday morning, twenty-four hours after Eleanor Mandel had tossed about on the bed in his room at the Abbey, opening her eyes to reveal abject revulsion, and rolling over to throw up on the glossy polythene sheet covering the carpet. It was the look she had given him which wounded him the most, the absolute horror, as if his very presence could contaminate her soul. And she’d been so nice to him before, so friendly, not seeming to notice his embarrassment at the shock her appearance had triggered. Girls didn’t normally treat him like that; he was either nonexistent or an object of pity, sometimes of scorn. He was secretly a little bit in love with Eleanor; she seemed so forthright, able to cope with life. She was also staggeringly pretty, even though thinking that was disloyal to Isabel.

  The words had come stammering out of her mouth as she gagged, Greg hugging her shoulders, protective and concerned. ‘He did it. Jesus, he didn’t even blink.’ She sucked down some air, wiping a sticky thread of vomit from her lips. ‘What are you?’

  That was when her mad eyes found him, their stare an almost tangible force, tightening round his throat.

  Something shivered inside him then, enervating his legs. The cold terrible certainty that she must mean him. She was accusing him!

  ‘Who?’ It was spoken by half the people in the room. He may even have joined in. He couldn’t remember.

  But she said nothing. Just glared, her ragged breathing the only sound. Then Greg’s stare was added to hers, calm and hateful, and Nicholas felt his face reddening even as the clamour of bewilderment inside his skull made him blurt: ‘What? What? What have I done?’

  ‘He did it,’ Greg told the detectives. His voice had gone husky, saddened more than anything.

  Langley had looked at Nicholas, then Greg, then back again. ‘Him?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Beswick?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake put some handcuffs on him,’ Eleanor rasped. ‘If you’d only seen what he did …’

  Greg’s arm tightened round her. She had started to tremble.

  ‘But you interviewed him,’ Vernon Langley said. ‘You cleared him.’

  ‘I told you when we started. I’d never seen that kind of mind before, didn’t know what to look for. Well, now I do. He’s completely cracked, won’t even admit it to himself. Jesus, he was fucking inhuman back there.’

  ‘No,’ Nicholas said. But nobody appeared to have heard him. ‘No. I didn’t. I didn’t do that.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Langley asked Greg reluctantly.

  ‘Yeah. It was him.’

  ‘No,’ Nicholas said. ‘No.’

  Amanda Paterson and Jon Nevin had somehow moved to stand on either side of his chair. He glanced up at them, face pleading. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Is there any proof; solid proof, I mean?’ Langley asked. ‘Can we test the clothes he was wearing?’

  ‘I can do you one better than that,’ Greg said. ‘I can show you where he left the knife.’

  ‘I didn’t do it!’ Why wouldn’t anyone listen?

  ‘It’s downstairs, in the kitchen,’ Greg said.

  ‘We checked the kitchen,’ Amanda retorted indignantly.

  ‘Not all of it.’

  ‘You two’ – Langley signalled his colleagues – ‘bring him with us, and keep an eye on him. I don’t want any sudden sprints across the park.’

  ‘I’ll stay up here,’ Eleanor said shakily.

  ‘Me too,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘OK,’ Greg said. He patted Eleanor’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be back straight away.’

  She nodded weakly, hunching in on herself as though she was freezing.

  Nicholas felt Jon Nevin’s hand on his forearm. He didn’t protest. His strangely leaden limbs needed all the help they could get to rise out of the chair. Gabriel had gone to sit beside Eleanor, the two of them with their heads together, murmuring quietly.

  In the kitchen, Greg walked straight over to the iron range. ‘It’s in here,’ he pointed to the copper bedwarmer hanging on the wall. ‘He hid it when he was burning the apron.’

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ Denzil said. He and Nicolette cleared the kitchen table, covering it with a broad sheet of polythene. They put on thin yellow gloves and gingerly took the bed-warmer off its hook. The three detectives crowded round as Denzil opened it; Nicholas couldn’t see.

  Langley turned round, his face struggling against an expression of loathing. ‘Nicholas Beswick, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of one Edward Kitchener.’

  ‘No!’

  There was a long knife in the bedwarmer, its blade snapped off at the base so that it could be wedged in the tarnished copper basin. The handle was rolling loose in the bottom. Both were stained black from dried blood.

  ‘You do not have to say anything at this time, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be used as evidence against you in a court of law.’

  His hands were jerked behind him. Rings of cold metal constricting his wrists. The snick of the locks.

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  They were deaf, immune to any words he said. They also detested him. He had never known that before. People so rarely paid him any attention at all. In the first few days after the murder, the Oakham police had treated him with a slightly puzzled indulgence, as if he was some kind of foreign animal that they didn’t know how to feed properly.

  But after Nevin brought him back from the Abbey it had been different. The word had gone out in advance. Off-duty officers had stood in doorways as he was marched through the station corridors to his cell. He’d cringed from the way they regarded him, the naked revulsion, expecting to be set upon and beaten. There had been no violence. The cuffs had been tight, though, his hands swelling and swelling until he thought they would burst. They had left them on for ages, long after his fingers had gone numb, dragging out the booking procedure.

  He had caught one glimpse of Isabel, just as he was being put into the cell. Nevin was finally taking off his cuffs in the corridor outside when she emerged from the cell she’d been sleeping in. He cried out her name, and she turned. That was when he saw her face was like all the others.

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  Her head tipped to one side, faintly nonplussed, at one remove from the world, like the times he’d seen her performing a difficult equation. There was virtually no sign of recognition.

  ‘Please, Isabel. I didn’t.’

  Her bottom lip turned down, as if it was all of no consequence, trivia. She was still utterly beautiful.

  A shove between his shoulder blades sent him stumbling into the cell as blood and feeling shot violently back into his hands. The door slammed shut, lock whirring.

  He had thought the night was bad, alone with near-suicidal confusion, the memories of the allegations. Eleanor’s desolated face, the knife with its awful scale of black flakes. Nobody would talk to him, the sergeant who brought his evening meal simply slammed the moulded tray down on the table, mute.

  Somehow, somewhere, there had been a terrible mistake. He had waited and waited for them to find out where they had gone wrong, to come back and set him free. He didn’t want an apology, he just wanted to be allowed to go.

  Gnats and small ochre moth
s emerged from the dead conditioning grille, fluttering silently round the biolum panel. The light stayed on all night. Nicholas huddled into a corner of the cell below the high window, drawing his knees up against his chest, a blanket round his shoulders, waiting, waiting—

  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 hand 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 navy-blue 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 ta
ke 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.’