The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  He was gazing at her again, quite unabashed this rime, thick hair almost occluding his eyes. “You’re nothing…” His arms jerked out from his sides, inarticulate bafflement. “You’re not what I expected, Julia.”

  “What did you expect?” she teased.

  “I dunno. You come over all mechanical on the ‘casts, like everything you do is choreographed by experts, every move, every word. Absolute perfection.”

  “Whereas in the flesh I’m a sadly blemished disappointment.”

  “No!” He bent down and picked one of the snowdrops. “You should get rid of your PR team,” let everyone see you as you are, without pretending. Show people how much you care about the small things in life. That’d stop all those critics dead in their tracks.” He broke off and gave the flower a doleful look. “I don’t suppose it’ll happen like that.”

  “‘Fraid not. Nothing is ever that easy.”

  He tucked the snowdrop behind her ear, looking pleased with himself.

  When she kissed him he was eager enough, but he didn’t seem to know what was expected. Her mouth was open to him for a long time before his tongue ventured in.

  She was struck with the thrilling thought that he’d never had a girl before. After all, it took a lot of training and devotion to reach his level of performance, a dedication which cost him every spare minute.

  Her arms stayed round him as he gave her a delighted boyish grin. He had exactly seven days left to court her, then she’d have him. And this time she would be in charge in bed, so it would be a considerable improvement on the way it was with Patrick.

  They rubbed noses Maori-style, then kissed again. This time he wasn’t nearly so reticent.

  The conservatory door was opened with a suspiciously loud rattle.

  “Julia?” Caroline Rothman called.

  Robin disentangled himself, looking extraordinarily guilty as Caroline walked round the end of the border.

  “Sorry, Julia,” Caroline said. “Phone call.”

  She wanted to stomp her foot in frustration. “Who?” Whoever, they were already dead.

  “Greg. He said it was urgent.”

  She sat down at the head of the study table, and jabbed a forefinger down on the phone button. The call was scrambled, she noticed, coming through the company’s own secure satellite link. Greg and Eleanor materialized on the flatscreen. They were on the settee in their lounge, Eleanor at right angles to Greg, leaning against him, his arm round her. Perfectly content with each other.

  The sight simply deepened Julia’s scowl. She never shared such a homely scene with any of her boys. Not that she wanted to be stuck in all evening being boring, she told herself swiftly.

  “This had better be truly astonishingly important,” she told the two of them loftily. “I’m very busy.”

  They looked at each other, pulled a face, and looked back at the camera. “Doing what?”

  They were so in tune, she thought despairingly, it wasn’t fair. “Financial reviews,” she said with a straight face.

  “Sure,” Eleanor crooned.

  What did you want?”

  “Couple of things,” Greg said. “Firstly, I want my Home Office authority reconfirmed.”

  “What? Why?”

  He gave an awkward grimace, which made her take notice. Something which could faze Greg was always going to be interesting.

  “There are some aspects of the Kitchener case which I need to review, and what I don’t need is a whole load of flak from Oakham CID right now.”

  “What aspects? Nicholas Beswick did it.”

  “It would appear so.”

  “You saw him. Both of you. You went back in time and saw him!”

  “Yeah. Well. Tell you, my intuition is playing up about this.”

  “Oh.” Greg placed a great deal of weight on his intuition. A foresight equal to everyone else’s hindsight, he always said. She wasn’t about to question that. Greg didn’t act on idle whims. But- “Just a minute, there was the knife as well.”

  “Yeah. That’s what makes this all so embarrassing.”

  “Julia, we had Beswick’s parents come to see us this morning,” Eleanor said.

  “Oh dear Lord, that must have been awful.”

  “No messing,” Greg said. “Look, Julia, just humour me.”

  She listened to him explaining his hunch about an earlier incident at Launde, and MacLennan’s idea that some form of amnesia might be responsible for shielding any guilt in Nicholas Beswick’s mind.

  Julia requested a logic matrix from her nodes, her mind condensing what she was hearing into discrete data packages, loading them in. The matrix parameters were easy to define: assign all the case information to the two suppositions, that Beswick had committed the crime and forgotten it, and that some previous incident was involved. See what fits, what supports either notion.

  “If it turns out there isn’t anything to this incident of mine, then it was probably amnesia all along,” Greg concluded glumly. “Which brings us to the second point. I’d like you to run a search program through every national and international news library to see if you can find a reference to Launde Abbey at any time during the last fifteen years.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Which was letting him off lightly, she could just imagine what Grandpa would say.

  “Julia Evans, you yanked both of us into this investigation,” Eleanor said. “We only did it for you. Just because it isn’t working out all neat and tidy doesn’t mean you’re allowed to back out. You started it, you damn well see it through to the end.”

  Why was it all suddenly her fault? She wished she’d never heard of bloody Dr Edward Kitchener. “I wasn’t backing out,” she muttered.

  Eleanor nudged Greg. “You ought to ask Ranasfari if he can remember anything happening at Launde.”

  “Good idea,” he said.

  “Cormac was there over twenty years ago,” Julia said.

  “Yeah, but he kept in touch with Kitchener.”

  “Not through the PSP decade. He was working on the gigaconductor in our Austrian laboratory. Grandpa didn’t want him mixing with the opposition. He was quite agreeable to the security regimen. You know what he’s like, no personal or private life.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll ask him anyway.”

  “Sure.” The matrix run ended. Its results waited for her, not seen, simply present in the null-space which was the axon interface. There was no solution in connection with a possible past incident, insufficient data. But the matrix had thrown up one query, though, an anomaly. “Greg, this idea that Beswick murdered Kitchener because he was so enraged about the old man seducing Isabel Spalvas, and then blanked it out later, how does Karl Hildebrandt and the Randon company connection fit in?”

  Greg and Eleanor exchanged another glance, puzzled this time.

  “No idea,” he said.

  “We don’t know for certain that Diessenburg Mercantile was involved,” Eleanor said. “It might have been a coincidence.”

  When Greg opened his mouth she laid a finger across his lips. “Coincidences do happen occasionally, you know.”

  “Yeah,” he said unhappily.

  “No,” Julia said with conviction. “You don’t know Karl like I do. He was anxious to talk with me, all to give me that one piece of advice: take you off the case. It was most deliberate.”

  “Does he have any financial or corporate interests outside the Diessenburg Mercantile bank?” Greg asked.

  “No.” She caught herself and pouted, it had been a reflex answer, she’d been scolded about that enough times by her teachers. “That is, I don’t know. He’s never mentioned any.”

  “Now I really wish I’d been there,” Greg said. “Can you arrange a meeting, some kind of party?”

  “I suppose I could invite some people round for dinner,” she sighed. “But it’s very short notice, he might suspect something, especially if you start quizzing him.”

  “Tough.”

  “I’ll get on to it,” Julia said. “Greg,
do you really think there’s a chance Beswick didn’t do it?”

  “There’s something wrong, Julia, that’s all I know.”

  “Good enough for me,” she said lightly.

  He winked.

  She stared at the blank flatscreen for a long moment after the call ended. If nothing else, Eleanor had been right. She had dragged them into it, she had to see it through. Money and power always came with the price tag of obligation.

  She pressed the intercom button. “Caroline, cancel everything for this afternoon. We’ve got work to do.”

  CHAPTER 19

  For once the afternoon remained sunny. Eleanor could actually hear the Jaguar’s conditioner humming away as it battled the humidity. Greg had taken the EMC Ranger to scoot down to Oakham police station, claiming the Jaguar would only antagonize the detectives further. Good excuse, she acknowledged a little enviously.

  She actually enjoyed driving the big car: it really was disgracefully decadent, but like Greg she always managed to feel guilty about it. There were still too many people on the breadline right now. She thought England in the nineteen-twenties must have been similar, when the barrier between the aristocracy and the workers was cast in iron, and guarded by money.

  A thriving giga-conductor based economy should break down the polarization, like the internal combustion engine before it. Funny how the cycle of achievement and decay was almost exactly a century long. Though she doubted it would happen again. Surely this time we learnt enough from our mistakes?

  The A606 into Stamford was one of the better roads, but when she reached the town and turned off down Roman Bank, a street that ran down the slope towards the Welland, she heard the familiar bass grumble as the Jag’s broad tyres fought the mushy potholes. This part of the town was strictly residential, two-storey houses with large gardens. Thick ebony stumps of horse-chestnuts jutted up from the unkempt verge, wearing skirts of cheese-orange fungi. New acmopyle trees had been planted to replace them, already four or five metres high, silver-grey leaves casting long back shadows.

  At the foot of the slope she turned left, heading towards the town centre.

  Rutland Terrace was a solid row of three-storey houses, two hundred metres long; perched strategically halfway up the side of the Welland valley to give the occupants an unencumbered view out across the storm-swollen river and the southern slope beyond. Tiny individual first-floor balconies sported overhanging canvas sun-canopies, striped in primary colours, providing a meagre dapple of shade for the recumbent residents taking advantage of the weather.

  She parked in front of Morgan Walshaw’s house, halfway down the row. Despite a sleeveless dress chosen for its airiness, she started perspiring as soon as she climbed out of the car. The river’s humidity lay over the town, pressing down like a leaden rainbow.

  The small front garden could have been laid out by a geometrician, bushes and bedding plants standing rigidly to attention. A clematis had been trained up the front wall, producing a curtain of mauve dinner-plate flowers, broken only by the arched doorway and ground-floor window.

  The black front door was opened by a security hardliner. Eleanor had encountered them at Wilholm often enough now to recognize the type. A young man in a light suit, attentive eyes, not a gram of spare flesh.

  He showed her up to the first-floor lounge. The air inside the house was still and relaxing, a coolness which came from the thickness of the old stone walls rather than modern conditioners.

  Gabriel came in from the balcony to greet her, wearing a simple silky blue and white top and skirt. Eleanor could never quite bring herself to accept the woman was the same age as Greg. Even after all the counselling, the diets, and the fitness routines of the last two years, Gabriel remained stubbornly middle-aged. And prickly with it.

  “What brings you to town?” Gabriel asked.

  “Couldn’t it just be to see you?”

  “This trip isn’t, no. And you ought to know better than trying to fool a psychic by now, even an ex like me.”

  They walked out on to the balcony and sat on the deckchairs Gabriel had set out. The fringe of the green and yellow awning flapped quietly overhead.

  “I’m here because of the Kitchener inquiry,” Eleanor said bluntly.

  Gabriel’s mask of politeness fell. “Bugger, now what?”

  “Greg’s intuition.” She told Gabriel about the Beswicks’ visit that morning.

  Gabriel folded her arms across her chest, slipping down the curve of the chair’s nylon. “If it was just the boy’s parents protesting about how sweet and harmless he is I’d be inclined to forget the whole thing, and bugger how excruciating it is. But Greg getting all worked up, that’s different. There’s a lot of people walking around today who would have been left behind in Turkey if it hadn’t been for that cranky intuition of his.” She opened one eye fully, and gave Eleanor a bleary look. “Mindstar brass actually put an order in writing that he wasn’t to use his intuition when he was assembling mission strategies. It wasn’t a recognized psi faculty.” The eye closed again, but her smile remained. “Dickheads!”

  “Greg’s sure this incident he remembers is tied in to Beswick and the murder somehow. Do you remember anything happening out at Launde Abbey in the PSP years? I can’t, but then we were kept carefully closeted away from the real world in the kibbutz.”

  “No, nothing. I was too busy trying to shut life out back then, remember?” She took a long sip from a glass of orange, staring out across the valley. Gabriel never but never touched alcohol these days, not even to be sociable.

  “I also wanted to ask you about the past,” Eleanor said. “I only saw one. There were none of these multiples which Ranasfari talked about.”

  “Ha! I wouldn’t go around putting too much store in crap artists like Ranasfari and Kitchener if I were you. They don’t know half as much about the universe as they make out they do.”

  “You don’t believe in the microscopic wornuholes, then?”

  “I’m not qualified to give an opinion on the physics involved. But I think they’re both wrong to try and provide rational explanations for psychic powers.”

  “You used to see multiple universes.”

  “No, I used to see decreasing probabilities. Tau lines, we call them; right out in the far future there were millions of them, wild and outrageous; then you start to come closer to the present, and they begin to merge, probabilities become more likely, taming down. The closer you come to the present, the more likely they get, and the fewer. Then you reach the now, and there’s only one tau line left, it’s not probability any more, it has become certainty. That’s why I’m not surprised you only saw one past, because there is only one now.”

  “Alternative futures, but no alternative past,” Eleanor said, tasting the idea.

  “The future isn’t a place, don’t make that mistake,” Gabriel said sternly. “It’s a concept. I’ve steered people away from hazards often enough to know. The future is a speculative nebula, the past is solid and irrefutable. Taken from the psychic viewpoint, anyway,” she finished glumly.

  “Then we really are in trouble, because Greg and I definitely saw Nicholas Beswick do it. I’d been hoping that I had somehow slipped sideways and seen an alternative past. That way, we would only have to explain away the knife. And it could have been a plant, a very sophisticated frame-up, those students do have high IQs after all.”

  “Even if it had been an alternative past you saw, how could you explain finding the knife where you did unless Beswick put it there?”

  “Because another student used the retrospective neurohormone and saw where the alternative Beswick put it. Does that make any sense?”

  “Not much. If alternative pasts existed, why would you always see just that one?”

  Eleanor let out a long breath. “Haven’t got a clue.”

  “Now do you see why they stopped fitting people with glands?” Gabriel asked evilly. She poured some more orange juice out of a jug, filling a second glass and handing it t
o Eleanor.

  “Yes. Thanks.” Ice cubes bobbed about as she took a gulp. “I’m going down to the local newspaper office. It’s the one which is most likely to have a record of anything happening at Launde Abbey. So we thought it would be best to give our search request the old personal touch just to make sure it’s done properly. Do you want to come?”

  Gabriel swirled the juice and slush round the bottom of her glass, staring at it morosely. “Yes. Morgan won’t be home for hours.”

  Eleanor got to her feet and stood with her hands resting on the wrought-iron railings. The Welland was a vast light-brown torrent obliterating the floor of the gentle valley, almost five hundred metres wide. Cobweb ribbons of dirty foam swirling across the surface showed her how fast the current was flowing. It couldn’t even be said to have burst its banks; there were no banks, not any more. The floodwater had swept them away years ago, as it had Stamford’s ancient stone bridge and all of the town’s riverside buildings. During the summer, the Wetland died down to a slim silver contrail; and the mudflats on either side turned as hard as steel. The kids used it as the world’s greatest skateboard park.

  “You get on well with Morgan, don’t you?” There had been a time when she thought Gabriel wanted Greg. It was only after she met Teddy that she realized all the ex-military people shared a strange kind of bond, almost a brotherhood.

  “We fit well,” Gabriel said. “He’s hopeless around the house, of course, so I’m needed here as well as in my advisory capacity to Event Horizon’s security division.”

  Which was as close as Gabriel would ever come to voicing real feelings. “I’m glad.”

  “How about you and Greg? When are we going to see some little Mandels?”

  “The farmhouse is more or less in order, and we’ve got all the groves planted now. It’ll mean a long summer with nothing much to do.”

  “Greg did all right with you, better than most of us anyway.” Eleanor turned. Gabriel was staring moodily into the bottom of her glass.

  “Thank you.”

  Gabriel grunted and swallowed the last of her drink.