The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  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 manes 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?’

  17

  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 dew-drops 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 kept 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 exorcize.

  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 shitty 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 fli
msy 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.

  But, as always, there was the knife. Here, in real time, real history. And so many peripheral details, the timing of the shower, Isabel, a possible complicity with the Randon company, the implausibility of a tekmerc penetration mission.

  Only his ineptitude had failed to spot the psychopath. And intuition. It couldn’t be him, not that boy.

  He slammed the rifle over to rapid fire, and sent a barrage of laser pulses streaking into the long grass. Rabbits toppled over, small flashes of orange flame mushroomed from the dead undergrowth. The entire warren began to flee, bounding through the grass. Half the ground seemed to be on the move.

  Fucking vegan rodents.

  ‘Greg.’

  It was Eleanor’s voice.

  He plucked the target imager’s monocle from his face, a ring of skin around his eye tingling as it peeled free. He had been leaning against the wooden bar fence around the grove for some support. Now he saw it had left smears of damp algae across the front of his jeans and black sweatshirt. He made a half-hearted attempt to brush it off, holding the rifle in one hand.

  There were three people with Eleanor, walking towards him from the farmyard. A middle-aged couple and a young girl. The woman had a heavily drawn face, sun ripened and lined; her curly brown hair flecked with lighter strands, not yet grey, but on the verge. Her ankle-length dress was a dun brown, a decade-old Sunday best, smart but fading slightly, the hem and neck fraying. Her husband – they were so obviously married – was as tall as Greg, but leaner, arms and legs sinuous, large labourer’s hands mottled with blue veins. He was in a suit, trousers with a multitude of iron creases down the front, never quite managing to fold down the same line, his grey shirt open at the neck, showing a V of tanned skin. The colour of his thinning sandy red hair was unpleasantly familiar. Greg felt his churlish anger at the rabbits grounding out, opening up a dark void inside.

  Eleanor gave him a soulful look, her hands gripped in front of her, fingers knotting in agitation. ‘Greg, this is Derek and Maria Beswick.’ She gave the girl a hesitant smile. ‘And it’s Emma, isn’t it?’

  The girl nodded shyly, her eyes wide, staring at Greg’s hunting rifle in trepidation. She was about thirteen, holding her mother’s hand. Not a pretty girl, nor destined ever to be one, Greg thought, her cheeks were too plump, a bulge of cellulite already building up under her weak chin. Her blouse and skirt looked handmade, a green and blue print, with a generous cut.

  Back when Mindstar was starting up, the specialists and generals had talked of educing a teleport faculty in some recruits. Flipping around the world, from country to country, over oceans, in zero time; just think of a location and zip you were there. Like all the rest of Mindstar’s brochure promises it had come to nothing. Which was a great pity, because right now Greg wanted to be anywhere else on the planet – a dungeon in Teheran, an African republic police cell.

  ‘We’ve come about our boy, Mr Mandel,’ Derek said. There was a lot of strain in his voice. Derek Beswick was a proud man, not used to entreating strangers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Greg said miserably. ‘It’s all out of our hands now.’ Shit, and he’d called Nicholas a wimp.

  ‘He didn’t do it, Mr Mandel,’ Maria said. ‘Not my son. Not those terrible things the channels are saying. I don’t care how upset he was over a girl. Nicholas would not do something so awful.’

  Greg wanted to shout: I saw him, I watched him do it! But he couldn’t do it, not to a woman like Maria Beswick.

  ‘I don’t understand the things Nicholas talks about, Mr Mandel,’ Derek said. ‘The physics and the cosmic phenomena things in deep space. He tries to tell us when he comes home, but it goes over our heads. We’re sheep farmers, that’s all. But I was so proud of that boy, my boy, when he got to university, a scholarship … He was going to better himself. He wouldn’t have to get up at five every morning, like me. He could make something of his life. And when he left home it was about the worst year anyone could go to university, with all the troubles and everything. But he struggled through. Then he got asked to go to Launde. Blimey, even I’d heard of Dr Kitchener. Nicholas worshipped that old man. He didn’t kill him.’

  ‘There is a lot of evidence.’

  ‘Nicholas told us you were a detective,’ Maria said. ‘That you were the best detective in England. He said that at the start you didn’t think he did it. Is that right?’

  ‘It …’ It’s not that simple! ‘Yeah.’

  The Beswicks exchanged a pathetically hopeful glance.

  ‘Please, Mr Mandel,’ Derek said. ‘We can see you’ve got the farm to tend and everything, and we’re not nearly as important as Julia Evans, but could you just keep investigating the case for us? Just one more day would help, something might turn up, something that might exonerate him. Jail would kill Nicholas as sure as a death penalty. He’s a gentle boy.’

  Your gentle son stuck a knife into the belly of a sixty-seven-year-old man and ripped him in two.

  ‘We’ll look into it for you,’ Eleanor said. Greg gaped at her.

  ‘Do you mean that?’ Emma asked, she was looking up at Eleanor, chubby face filled with apprehension. ‘Really mean it?’

  ‘Yes, I mean it. There are one or two ambiguities which need clarifying in any case.’

  Derek and Maria consulted each other silently.

  ‘Anything,’ Derek said. ‘Anything you can turn up would help. That lawyer woman, Collier, she seems to think Nicholas is guilty.’

  ‘It’s been a good year for us so far,’ Maria said. ‘Really, very good. There are a lot of our ewes pregnant, the lambs should fetch a good price in the spring. So, could we possibly pay you in instalments, please?’

  Greg just wanted to curl up and die. ‘There’s no fee,’ he managed to say.

  Maria’s face stiffened. ‘We’re not asking for charity, Mr Mandel.’

  ‘It isn’t charity,’ Eleanor said quickly. ‘We can’t accept a fee, not legally. You see, we’re still on the Home Office payroll for the Kitchener case, and we remain on it until the trial is complete. How we run the investigation is entirely at our discretion, that’s in the contract we signed.’

  Maria looked as though she was about to protest, but Derek took her hand, squeezing a warning.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘I have to get home,’ Derek said. ‘With the sheep, and all. But Maria’s got a room in a bed and breakfast house in Northgate Street, not far from the police station.’

  ‘OK, we’ll be in touch.’

  ‘What did you go and tell them that for? I can’t believe you said that!’

  ‘Calm down,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Calm down? That boy is a psychopathic killer, and you tell his parents we’re going to get him off?’

  ‘You don’t think that.’

  ‘Don’t think what?’

  ‘That he did it,’ she said patiently.

  ‘I saw him fucking do it! And so did you!’

  ‘That’s not what I said, Gregory. I said you don’t think he did it.’

  ‘I …’ He covered his face with his hands, massaging his temple. She was right. Eleanor was always bloody right, especially when it came to what went on in his mind. Bloody unfair, that was.

  He gave her a reproachful smile. ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘I had a good teacher.’

  ‘What ambiguities were you talking about?’

  ‘The fact that
your espersense didn’t catch the guilt.’

  ‘Psi isn’t perfect,’ he said automatically.

  Eleanor just looked at him.

  ‘Yeah, all right. I couldn’t miss something that obvious. But we saw him do it, though.’

  ‘We, or rather I, had a vision that he did it. That’s all.’

  ‘A vision that was backed up by finding the knife, complete with fingerprints.’

  ‘If Nicholas was framed, then of course physical evidence would be planted to corroborate the vision.’

  ‘So how did you come to have the vision if it wasn’t what actually happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. Another type of psychic who can make the images seem real? A fantasyscape artist? You tell me. You’re the expert.’

  ‘I never heard of any psi ability remotely like that back in Mindstar, not even rumours. The nearest would be eidolonics, but no eidopath could work up an image like that.’

  ‘You hadn’t heard of a retrospection neurohormone until last Wednesday.’

  ‘No, Eleanor. I just don’t believe it. It’s too complicated. The killer tried to obliterate all trace of the retrospection neurohormone, remember? He never intended for anyone to use it. So there was no way he would have some psychic on permanent standby in case we infused it to see what happened that night. Besides, I would have sensed another psychic operating at Launde, and don’t forget Nicholas saw you. That’s the real clincher. He actually confirms you went back there to witness the murder. And every event we observed that night matches the statements which the students gave.’

  ‘Everything except the murder.’

  ‘If everything else was kosher, why should the murder be any different?’

  ‘So you do think Nicholas killed Kitchener?’

  Greg thought about it, all the doubts and internal tension that had been twisting him up for the last few days. His intuition was the root, strong enough to keep goading against all logic; like a rash developing in his synapses, an itch you just couldn’t scratch. Superstition, people called it. So what it boiled down to was did he believe in his ability? In himself? ‘Oh, shit.’ He took a breath. ‘No, I don’t think Nicholas did it. I know he didn’t. But how the actual murderer pulled that stunt with him and the knife …’