The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The one person he wanted to talk to, Isabel, was further away from him now than she had ever been at Launde. She would sit in one corner of the rest room they had been assigned, her legs tucked up against her chest, peering vacantly out of the window; and he would sit in the corner opposite, just gazing at her. He was too afraid even to say good morning, because if they did talk he would have to hear about her and Kitchener and Rosette. What happened in that bedroom, how many times it happened. Even why it had happened. He couldn’t possibly stand that.

  Kitchener had been the architect of his mind. For the first time in his life he had really begun to think straight. Kitchener, with his own love of knowledge, had been the one who nurtured his talent, who made him realize his ability was nothing to be ashamed of, wasn’t freakish like people said. Kitchener was the one who encouraged him to join in the Abbey’s camaraderie.

  Kitchener had taken Isabel from him.

  Kitchener was dead.

  The world, which had been so close to becoming accessible, had eluded him once again. Which was why he said he didn’t mind the psychic asking questions; after all, Kitchener had used neurohormones. They couldn’t be bad.

  Except, now he was faced with the prospect of actually going through with the interview, it didn’t seem quite so easy.

  There was a very unforgiving quality about Greg Mandel as he sat patiently behind the desk, some weary tolerance which even Nicholas, with all his social inadequacy, could recognize. The man had the appearance of having been everywhere, witnessed every human state. Excuses would not work, not on him. Yet at the same time, he could see how receptive Greg was. It was confusing, the two almost contrasting aspects of character existing side by side.

  Nicholas dropped into the chair, not in the least reassured by the formality of the proceedings as Vernon Langley and Lisa Collier made their stiff lead-in statements for the AV recorder. There was something unnaturally creepy about someone rooting round in his mind; for a start there were so many pathetic secrets about himself, all those hundreds of failings and disasters littering his life.

  “I can’t plug into your memories,” Greg said in a palliative tone. “So you can stop worrying about the time you pinched your little brother’s chocolate bar.”

  “I haven’t got a brother,” Nicholas blurted. “Only a sister. And I’ve never stolen anything from her.”

  “There you are then, I can’t tell.”

  “Oh, right.” He felt such a fool. “How did you know I was worried about you reading my memories?”

  “Because everybody does that when they meet me. Vernon and Jon here are worried about the cash they lifted from the station’s Christmas party box, Mrs Collier is extremely worried about her dark past. But the only thing I can sense inside a brain is the emotional content. So the sooner you relax and all that worry vanishes, the sooner I can ask the questions, and the sooner you can be out of here. OK?”

  Nicholas nodded vigorously, secretly cheered by the way Lisa Collier’s disapprobation had darkened still further at the gibe. “Yes. Of course. I do want to help.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. You really liked Kitchener, didn’t you?”

  Lisa Collier had warned him never to lie to the psychic; no matter how painful any admission, he would see it, and it would be entered against him. “I did. I do. But…”

  “Isabel,” Greg said sympathetically.

  “I didn’t know about her and Kitchener. Not before that night.”

  “What time did you see her and Rosette going into Kitchener’s room?”

  “About a quarter past one.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “Went to bed.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  “Suppose so. I was thinking a lot at first. But I was asleep when I heard Rosette screaming.”

  “Before you went to sleep, did you hear anything?”

  “No!” Nicholas said hotly.

  “I meant, Nicholas, anybody walking about in the Abbey?”

  He knew he would be blushing again. Why couldn’t he ever understand what people meant straight off? Why did they always have to use baby talk to get through to him? “Oh. Sorry. No, nobody was moving round.”

  “So you didn’t hear Isabel and Rosette leaving Kitchener’s room?”

  “No.”

  “What were you doing in the time between leaving Uri’s room and seeing Rosette and Isabel?”

  “Running the Antomine 12 data through a detection program. I was looking for dark-mass concentrations.”

  “Dark mass?” Greg sounded privately amused.

  “Yes. In space. Kitchener was interested in them. He thought they might act as wormhole termini. You see, if you move a wormhole in a specific fashion it may be possible to generate a CTC directly. A non-paradoxical temporal loop would…” Nicholas forced himself to stop, chastened. He’d done it again. There was that dreadfully familiar expression of polite incomprehension on Greg’s face. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Don’t be ashamed of a gift, Nicholas.”

  He looked up, startled. But Greg was serious.

  “I go on, sometimes,” he said limply. “I don’t realize. Cosmology is interesting, Mr Mandel.”

  “I know what it’s like. My wife tells me I talk about Turkey too much.”

  “Turkey?”

  “The war.”

  It took a moment before Nicholas remembered the Jihad Legion. He had been eight or nine at the time the Islamic forces had invaded Turkey, so it was classed alongside all the other terrible incidents which childhood jumbled together. “Oh, yes.”

  “About the detection program,” Greg prompted. “Were you running it on the Abbey’s Bendix?”

  “Yes.”

  “Until when?”

  “When I saw Isabel and Rosette, quarter-past one. I couldn’t work after that.”

  “Did you use the English Telecom datanet that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I had to, the Antomine data comes direct from its mission control in Toulouse. There’s no other way of accessing it.”

  “So you only used the one datalink?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK.” Greg typed something into his cybofax. “Did you know Rosette was mildly insomniac?”

  Funny question. He couldn’t think why Greg should want to know. “No. But she was never tired at the end of an evening, when we were in a room, or if we went to the Old Plough. And she was usually first up. So I suppose, thinking about it, I knew she didn’t sleep much.”

  “Have you ever taken syntho, Nicholas?”

  “No,” he said, because it was true, so he could say it without any guilt showing. But he dropped his gaze in shame. There was an achingly long moment of silence.

  When he risked looking up, Greg was giving him a calculating stare. All his doubts about the psychic searching freely through his memories returned in a flood.

  “Let’s see,” Greg said. “You took another kind of narcotic?”

  “No,” Nicholas said miserably.

  “Somebody offered you syntho?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rosette?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you refused?”

  “Yes. I know Kitchener says there’s nothing wrong with it. But I didn’t want to.”

  “I can see the incident has a lot of connotations for you, what else happened?”

  Nicholas decided the best thing to do was just say it fast. Greg might move on to another subject. He stared unblinkuigly at his Nike trainers. The lace on the left foot was fraying. “She wanted me to go to bed with her.”

  “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?”

&
nbsp; “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 corndor 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, man-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.”

  CHAPTER 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 Thesday 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 time 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.”

  “Hmmm.” 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.”