The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “I’ll manage,” she said.

  “All right. But if you’re going to vomit, do it out in the corridor, please. We’ve cleaned enough of it off this carpet already.”

  She realized he wasn’t joking.

  An egg-shaped patch of air above the bed sparkled, then the haze spread out silently; runnels dripped down the sides of the mattress on to the floor, serpents twisting up the carved posts. Edward Kitchener materialized on white silk sheets.

  The remains of Edward Kitchener.

  Eleanor grunted in shock, and jammed her eyes shut. She took a couple of breaths. Come on girl, you see far worse on any schlock horror channel show.

  But that wasn’t real.

  The second time it wasn’t quite so bad. She was incredulous rather than revolted. What sort of person could calmly do this to another? And it had to be a deliberate, planned action; there was no frenzied hacking, it had been performed with clinical precision. A necromantic operation. Hadn’t the Victorian police suspected that Jack the Ripper was some kind of medical student?

  She glanced round. Greg had wrinkled his face up in extreme distaste, forcing himself to study the hologram in detail. Jon Nevin was looking at the floor, the window, the dresser, anywhere but the bed.

  “Yeah, OK,” Greg said. “That’s enough.”

  The faint aural glow cast by the projection faded from the walls. When she looked back at the bed, Kitchener had gone. Air hissed out through her teeth, muscles loosening. Edward Kitchener had looked like such a chirpy old man, a sort of idealized grandfather. A gruff tongue, and a loving nature.

  “How was he actually killed?” Greg asked.

  We think he was smothered by a pillow,” Vernon said. “One of them had traces of saliva in a pattern consistent with it being held over his head.”

  “So what did all the damage?”

  “Pathology says a heavy knife,” said Denzil. “Straight blade, thirty to forty centimetres long.”

  “One of the kitchen knives?”

  “We don’t know. There are drawers full of them downstairs, some of them are virtually antiques. We catalogued eighteen, and none of those had any traces of blood. But the housekeeper can’t say for sure if one is missing. And then there’s all the lab equipment, plus the engineering shop, plenty of cutting implements in those two. Blimey, you could make a knife in the engineering shop then grind it up afterwards. Who knows?”

  Greg led them all back out into the corridor. “Did the murderer leave any traces?”

  “The only hair and skin particles we have found anywhere in the bedroom belong to either Kitchener, the students, or the housekeeper and her two helpers.”

  “What about when the murderer left?” Greg asked. “Do you know the route they took? There must have been some of Kitchener’s blood or body fluid smeared somewhere.”

  “No, there wasn’t,” Denzil said, vaguely despondent. “We’ve spent the whole of the last two days in this corridor going over the walls and carpet with a photon amp plugged into a lightware number cruncher running a spectrographic analysis program-had to get a special Home Office budget allocation for that. This carpet we’re standing on has blotches of wine, gin, whisky, cleaning detergent, hair, dandruff, skin flakes, shoe rubber, shoe plastic, a lot of cotton thread from jeans. You name it. But no blood, no fluid, not from Kitchener. Whoever it was, they took a great deal of care not to leave any traces.”

  “Was Liam Bursken that fastidious?” Greg asked Vernon.

  “I’m not sure,” the detective said. “I can check.”

  “Please,” Greg said.

  He loaded a note into his cybofax.

  “What does that matter?” Nevin asked.

  “It helps with elimination. I want to know if someone that deranged would bother with being careful. A tekmerc would at least make an effort not to leave any marks.”

  “We do think the murderer wore an apron while he murdered Kitchener,” Denzil said. “One of the housekeeper’s was burnt in the kitchen stove on Friday morning. The students had a salad on Thursday night. So the stove was lit purposely, it was still warm when we arrived. But there are only a few ash flakes left. We know there was blood on the apron, but the residue is so small we couldn’t even tell you if it was human blood. It could have come from beef, or rabbit, or sheep.”

  “The point being, why go to all the trouble of lighting a fire to destroy an apron, if it wasn’t the one used in the murder,” Vernon said. “You and I know it was the one the murderer used. But in court, all it could be is supposition. Any halfway decent brief would tear that argument apart.”

  “If it was a tekmerc, why bother at all?” Eleanor asked. “Why spend all that time fiddling about lighting a fire, when they could simply have taken the apron with them? In fact why use one in the first place?”

  “Good point,” said Greg. He seemed troubled.

  “Well?” Vernon asked.

  “Haven’t got a clue.”

  “Sorry,” Eleanor said.

  They shared a smile.

  Greg looked at the carpet in the corridor, scratching the back of his neck. “So we do know that the murderer didn’t leave by Kitchener’s bedroom window,” he said. “They went straight down to the kitchen, burnt the apron, then left.”

  “If he or she left,” Vernon said.

  “If it was one of the students, then they would have to make very certain no traces of Kitchener left the bedroom, or they would be incriminated,” Jon Nevin said. There was a touch of malicious enjoyment in his tone. “That would fit this cleanliness obsession, the need to avoid contamination.”

  “Contamination.” Greg mulled the word over. “Yeah. You gave the students a head to toe scan, I take it?”

  “As soon as they were back in Oakham station,” Vernon said. “Three of them had touched Kitchener, of course, but only in the presence of the others.”

  “Figures,” said Greg. “Which three?”

  “Harding-Clarke, Beswick, and Cameron. But it was only a few stains on their fingertips, entirely consistent with brushing against the body and the sheets.”

  “OK,” Greg said. “I’d like to see the lightware cruncher that’s been wiped. Is there anything else our murderer tampered with?”

  “Yes,” Denzil said. “Some of the laboratory equipment. We found it this morning.”

  The computer centre was at the rear of the Abbey, a small windowless room with a bronze-coloured metal door. It slid open as soon as Denzil showed his police identity card to the lock. Biolum rings came on automatically. Walls and ceiling were all white tiles; the floor had a slick cream-coloured plastic matting. A waist-high desk bench ran all the way round the walls, broken only by the door. There were three elaborate Hitachi terminals sitting on top of it, along with racks of large memox datastore crystals and five reader modules.

  The Bendix lightware number cruncher was in the centre of the room, a steel-blue globe one metre in diameter, sitting on a pedestal at chest height.

  “Completely wiped,” Denzil said. He crossed to one of the terminals and touched the power stud. The flatscreen lit with the words: DATA LOAD ERROR. Above the keyboard, a few weak green sparks wriggled through the cube. “Kitchener used to store everything in here, all his files, the students’ work. He didn’t need to make a copy; the holographic memory is supposed to be failsafe. Even without power, the bytes would remain stable until the actual crystal structure began to break down-five, ten thousand years. Probably longer. Who knows?”

  Eleanor looked round the room. There was one conditioning grille set high on a wall; the air was clean but dead. She couldn’t see a blemish anywhere, the tiles and floor were spotless, as were the terminals.

  “Could the storm have knocked it out?” she asked.

  Denzil gave her a surprised look. “Absolutely not. This room is perfectly insulated; and even if the solar panels were struck by lightning there is a triplicated surge-protection system. Besides, a voltage surge wouldn’t cause this.”

 
“So what would?” Greg asked.

  “There are two things. One, a very sophisticated virus. An internecine, one that wipes itself after it’s erased all the files, because there’s no trace of it now. Second, someone who knew the core management codes could have ordered a wipe.”

  “Who knew the codes?”

  “I don’t know,” Vernon said apologetically.

  “All right, we’ll ask the students when I interview them. What about access to this room, who is allowed in?”

  “Kitchener and the students,” said Denzil. “But there are terminals dotted all over the Abbey. You could use any of them to load a virus, or order a wipe.”

  “What about someone outside plugging in?”

  “You can only plug into the lightware cruncher through one of the terminals in the Abbey,” Denzil said. “But all the terminals are plugged into English Telecom’s datanet. So you have to be inside the Abbey to establish a datalink between the Bendix and an external ‘ware system.”

  “And to get inside the Abbey you have to be cleared by the security system,” Greg murmured. “Neat.” He turned to Vernon Langley. “English Telecom should be able to provide you with an itemized log for the datanet. Check through it and see if there were any unexplained datalinks established on Thursday night or Friday morning.”

  “If it was a tekmerc operation, it was the best,” Denzil said soberly. “The very best.”

  The laboratory was virtually a caricature, Eleanor thought.

  Either that, or set designers on channel science fiction shows did more research than she had ever given them credit for. But it was a chemistry lab, not a physics one.

  The room was spacious, with a high ceiling, and the usual ornate mullioned windows, which helped to give it the Frankenstein feel. The glass-fronted cabinets were lined up along the walls. Three long wooden benches were spaced down the centre of the room. Each of them had a vast array of glassware on top, immensely complicated crystalline intestines of some adventuresome beast, plastic hardware units clamped around tubes and flasks, a spaghetti tangle of wiring and optical cable winding through it all. Small Ericsson terminals, augmented with customized control modules, were regulating each of the set-ups.

  Derizil led them to the middle bench. “Take a look at this.” He was indicating one section of the glassware, spiral tubing and retorts surrounding what reminded Eleanor of an incubator. “We found it yesterday when we started classifying the equipment.” He shot a wily look at Vernon Langley. “Recognize it?”

  The detective shook his head.

  “It’s a syntho vat. High-quality stuff, too. Well above what you find on the street; this formula is similar to Naiad.”

  “Were the students on it?” Greg asked.

  “Three of them were using it on Thursday night,” Vernon said. We took blood samples as soon as they came into the station. Harding-Clarke, Spalvas, and Cameron. But the count was low, they’re not addicts.” He sighed. “Students experiencing life, it’s a thrill for them, a little taste of adventure. I imagine bright sparks of that age could get bored very easily with this place.”

  Eleanor thought he pronounced students with well-emphasized contempt.

  “And the other three?” Greg prompted.

  “Clean as newborns,” Jon Nevin said. “Of course, all six of them had been drinking. They had wine at their evening meal, and then some more in their rooms later on.”

  “But not enough to unhinge them?”

  “No.”

  “Kitchener was taking the syntho as well,” Vernon said. “It was in the pathology report. Expanding his mind, no doubt. Some such nonsense. He was always on about that, his New Thought ideology.”

  Greg exhaled loudly. “At his age. Christ.”

  “And he encouraged the students,” Jon Nevin said disapprovingly.

  “Yeah.”

  “And this,” Denzil said theatrically. “Is something we found this morning.” He rapped at another chunk of the glassware on the third bench. It had more hardware units than the rest. “You ought to know what this is, Greg, there’s a smaller version in your head.”

  “Neurohormone synthesizer.”

  Well done. Themed neurohormones, to be precise. Makes your blanket educement look old fashioned.”

  “Kitchener was using neurohormones?” Greg asked in surprise. “Psi stimulants?”

  “Yes,” said Vernon. “Quite heavily, as far as we can determine. It’s all in the pathology report.”

  “What sort of psi themes?” Eleanor asked.

  “Ah, can’t be as helpful there as I’d like,” Denzil said. “There is a low-temperature storage vault full of themed ESP-educer ampoules. But those are a standard commercial type from ICI; he was a regular customer, apparently. However, there’s also a small batch of unmarked ampoules which I’ll send off for analysis, although we may have problems with identifying it, especially if it’s something experimental. We don’t have a large database on the stuff. As far as I know this is the first time it’s ever cropped up in a police investigation.”

  “We may be able to help you there,” Greg said. “I’ll find out if Event Horizon has any information on neurohormones.”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you know what he was using the ESP theme neurohormone for?”

  “Apparently it was part of his research, according to the students,” Vernon said. “He wanted to perceive electrons and protons directly.”

  “Get a meeting with Ranasfari set up,” Greg told Eleanor. “I want to know if there’s any connection between these neurohormones and the research work Kitchener was doing for Event Horizon.”

  “Right.” She flipped open her cybofax.

  “You will inform us, won’t you?” Vernon said.

  “Yeah,” Greg growled back.

  He tried not to flinch at the stab of animosity. Eleanor diplomatically busied herself with the cybofax file. That good old Mindstar reputation again.

  Greg ran a forefinger along a module on the top of the neurohormone synthesizer. “Is this the stuff in the unmarked ampoules?”

  “No idea,” Denzil replied. “It would be the obvious conclusion, but the control ‘ware has been wiped clean just like the Bendix. There’s no record of the formula they were producing.” He pointed at the dark grey plastic casing of the hardware modules which were integrated into the refining structure. “These units contained endocrine bioware. Very complex, very delicate. They are dead now.”

  “How?”

  “Somebody poisoned them. They infused a dose of syntho into the cells. It was all quite deliberate.”

  “The murder was tied in with his work,” Greg said quietly.

  “If this was his work, then yes.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The silver-white Dornier executive tilt-fan dropped through the cloud layer above the imposing condominiums and exclusive shopping arcades of Peterborough’s New Eastfield district and banked to starboard, heading out over the Pens basin. Julia ordered her nodes to cancel the company’s last quarter financial summaries which they were displaying behind her eyes. They would be landing soon.

  Another bloody ceremony. Wheel me on, point me at the cameras, and wheel me off again. Might as well use a cyborg.

  But it was important, a crux in company development, so she had to go.

  When isn’t it important, vital?

  She was sitting on a white leather settee in the lounge at the rear of the little plane. Alone for once. Her staff were in the forward cabin. She imagined them swapping gossip, laughing; it would have been easy to go forward and join them, or invite them back. They weren’t that inhibited around her. But it didn’t fit her mood.

  Being alone was becoming a precious commodity these days.

  It might have been her mood, the broodiness which came from anticipating the meetng later in the day, which had prompted her rather drastic image overhaul this morning.

  She had dressed up in full Goth costume, improvising with a three-thousand-pound velvet De
veraux skirt, a scarlet one, sweeping round her ankles, then black suede boots from Paris, five gold Aztec pendants hanging on thin leather straps round her neck, and a black web-like jacket from Toska’s. Her maid had darkened her hair and given it a tangled arrangement. They had argued about make up; eye wings of black mascara on her complexion would have been criminal, so in the end they settled for some strategic highlighting. She was quite pleased with the effect; it was far less stuffy, and lots more fun, than yesterday’s outfit at the spaceplane roll out. It would certainly make people take notice.

  She looked out of the window. All she could see ahead was mud; dun-brown supersaturated peat tinged with an elusive grey-green hue from the algae blooms. It came right up to the city’s eastern boundary, slopping around the ruins of the Newark district, long regular silt dunes freckled with bricks and fractured timbers marked the outline of drowned streets.

  Newark had lacked that crucial extra metre when the tide of sludge came oozing and gurgling across the Fens.

  Three parallel green lines stabbed out from the southern end of the city, the Nene’s new course, stretching into the gloomy heat haze which occluded the eastern horizon. It had been dredged deep enough to allow cargo ships to sail right into the heart of the city where a flourishing deep-water port had been built. The banks were gene-tailored coral, covered with thick reeds, intended to prevent the mud from dribbling back in, although two dredgers were on permanent duty sailing up and down the channel, scooping out the sludge which did build up, and flinging it back over the banks.

  The Nene would have to be widened soon, she knew, the volume of traffic it could carry was approaching its limit. Just like everything else in Peterborough these days. The city’s own success was turning against it, stalling further development.

  Ninety per cent of the Fens refugees had retreated to Peterborough, establishing a vast shanty town along the high ground of the western perimeter. They’d found dry, high land, and a working civil administration; it was enough, they were through with running, they sat there and refused to budge.