The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The third lake was a slightly larger version of the second. She could see the ruins of a small brick building situated halfway up the earth bank on the far side. She thought it might be an ancient ice-house. A flock of Canada geese were grazing round the thick tufts of reedy grass which flourished around the shore.

  ‘I’m sure I remember reading something else about Launde Abbey,’ Greg said. ‘Or maybe it was on a channel newscast.’

  ‘I can’t remember anything,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘It was a few years ago. I think. Seven or eight, maybe more.’ He didn’t sound very convinced. ‘What about you, Amanda? Have there been any other incidents up here?’

  ‘No, not that I can recall.’

  ‘What sort of incident?’ Eleanor asked.

  He gave her an abashed grin. ‘Can’t remember. Definitely something newsworthy, though.’

  ‘And it’s connected to the Kitchener murder?’ she asked.

  ‘Lord knows. I doubt it, not that long ago.’

  Launde Abbey was another hundred and fifty metres past the third lake, set in a broad curving basin that seemed to have been chiselled into the side of the valley. A wooden fence marked the boundary of the parkland. The EMC Ranger rattled over a cattle grid, and the grass magically reverted to a shaggy verdant green. Large black tree stumps were scattered about, each one accompanied by a new sapling – kauri pines, giant chinquapins, torreyas – healthy replacements that relished the heat, turning the park back to its original rural splendour. Tarmac reappeared under the tyres. Eleanor turned off the road which disappeared over the brow of the basin, and drove down the loop of drive to the Abbey.

  She was somewhat disappointed with what she saw. She’d been expecting some great medieval monastery, all turrets and flying buttresses: reality was a three-storey Elizabethan manor house, built from ochre stone, with a broad frontage and projecting wings. The roof of grey-blue slate was broken by five gables, a row of solar panels capping the apex. There were two sets of chimney-stacks, one on each wing; three cream-white globes were perched amid the southern wing’s stacks, weather coverings for the satellite dishes. Climbing roses scrambled over the stonework around the porch, scarlet and yellow blooms drooping from the weight of water they had absorbed, petals mouldering.

  It backed on to a copse of high straggly pines, most of which had survived the Warming, their depleted ranks supplemented by some new banyan trees.

  Two unmarked white vans and a Panda car were parked outside, belonging to the police crime scene team that had been combing the Abbey for clues since Friday. Eleanor drew up behind them. It was raining steadily and they made a dash for the porch.

  A constable was waiting just inside, he saw Amanda and waved them all through. The interior was vaguely shabby, putting Eleanor in mind of a grand family fallen on hard times. The elegance still existed, in the furnishings, and decor – the staircase looked exquisite – but it had been almost neglected. Clean, but not polished.

  Vernon Langley and Jon Nevin came in, shaking the rain from their jackets.

  Langley took a breath. ‘I forgot to mention it before, Mandel,’ he said. ‘But the Abbey’s lightware memory core has been wiped.’

  ‘So Amanda told me,’ Greg said drily.

  Eleanor kept her grin to herself. One to the good guys.

  ‘I see.’ He straightened his jacket. ‘Well, we’ve set up shop in the dining room, if you’d like to come through.’

  There was very little of the dining room table left visible. At one end the forensic team had set out their equipment, a couple of Philips laptop terminals and various boxy ’ware modules which Eleanor guessed were analysers of some kind, although one looked remarkably like a microwave oven. The rest of the table, about three-quarters, was covered in sealed polythene sample bags. She could see clothes, shoes, books, hologram cubes, a lot of kitchen knives, glasses, memox crystals, small porcelain dishes, candlesticks, even an old wind-up type clock. Some of them looked completely empty. Dust, or hair, she thought.

  She was still puzzling over why they’d want to seal up a potted cactus when Vernon Langley introduced Nicolette Hutchins and Denzil Osborne, a pair of forensic investigators who had stayed on to continue the in situ examination. They had been drafted in from Leicestershire, part of a ten-strong team which the Home Office had ordered to the Abbey. Both of them were wearing standard blue police one-piece overalls. Nicolette Hutchins was in her forties, a small woman, with a narrow, slightly worn face, her dark hair wrapped in a tight bun. She glanced up from one of the modules she was engrossed with, and held out her hands. ‘Excuse me for not shaking.’ She was wearing surgeon’s gloves.

  Denzil Osborne had the kind of build Eleanor associated with ex-professional sportsmen, muscle bulk which was starting to round out and sag. He must have been in his late fifties, with a flat, craggy face, and receding blond hair tied into a neat pony-tail. He had a near permanent smile, showing off three gold teeth, a flashy anachronism.

  He shook Greg’s hand warmly. Then his smile broadened even wider when he took Eleanor’s.

  ‘And I’m very pleased to meet you.’

  The play-acting made her grin. His genuine welcome was a refreshing change from the rest of the investigating team.

  ‘So, you were in the Mindstar Brigade, were you?’ Denzil asked Greg.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I was in Turkey, Royal Engineers; worked with a Mindstar Lieutenant called Roger Hales.’

  Greg smiled. ‘Springer!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We called him Springer because it didn’t matter what kind of booby trap the Legion left behind, Roger could always spot it and trip it,’ Greg explained to Eleanor. ‘He had one of the best bloody short-range perceptive faculties in the outfit.’

  ‘Saved my arse enough times,’ Denzil said. ‘Those mullahs were getting plenty tricky towards the end of that campaign.’

  ‘No messing,’ Greg said.

  ‘I was chuffed when I heard they were bringing you in. Our Nicolette here doesn’t believe what you blokes can do.’

  ‘I do believe,’ she said, not looking up from the analyser module. ‘I just get bored with hearing about it day in day out. You’d think Turkey lasted for a decade the number of stories you tell.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry, Greg won’t bore you today,’ Denzil said. ‘Far from it. Today is the day when this investigation gets moving again. Right, Greg?’

  ‘Do my best.’

  ‘You need something to fixate on?’

  ‘No. I need data.’

  Denzil’s eyebrows went up appreciatively. ‘Intuitionist?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK, what do you want to start with?’

  ‘The security system,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘No problems with that,’ Denzil answered. ‘It’s all top-grade gear. Fully functional.’

  ‘Could an intruder melt through it, and then back out again, without leaving a trace?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Hell, no, it’s built by Event Horizon; a customized job. Low-light photon amps, windows wired, internal-motion sensors, IR, plus UV laserscan. Unless your identity and three-dimensional image is loaded in the memory core you couldn’t move a millimetre inside the building without the alarm screaming for help. And it’s got a secure independent uplink to Event Horizon’s private communication satellite network as well as the English Telecom West Europe geosync platform. Why? You think somebody got in here?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Greg. He explained his theory about the microlight, then went on to the contract Kitchener had been given with Event Horizon.

  When he had finished even Nicolette Hutchins had abandoned her analyser module to listen. ‘That adds some unusual angles to our problem,’ she said with morbid interest. ‘Nobody was thinking along those lines when we arrived, we all thought it was a murder not an assassination. And it’s too late to look for signs of a microlight landing now. There have been three heavyish rainfalls since Thursday night’s storm
. They would have washed the valley clean.’

  ‘Ever the optimist,’ Denzil retorted.

  She shrugged, and returned to her LCD display.

  ‘Hell, Greg, I don’t know about a tekmerc penetration,’ Denzil said. ‘If it happened that way, then the software they used against the security core must have been premier grade. I wouldn’t even know how to start writing it.’

  Eleanor exchanged a knowing glance with Greg. ‘Let me have what details you have on the system,’ she said. ‘We know someone who can tell us if it’s possible to burn in.’

  Vernon Langley would clearly have liked to ask who. But she just gave him her best enigmatic smile as Denzil typed an access request on his Philips laptop.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Complete schematics, right down to individual ’ware chips, plus the layout.’

  Eleanor held up her cybofax and let him squirt the data package over.

  ‘I think the murder scene next,’ Greg said.

  Eleanor didn’t know about Greg, but she was picking up bad vibes from the minute they walked in to Kitchener’s bedroom. Apart from the furniture and Chinese carpet, it had been stripped clean: there were no ornaments or clothes; the occupier’s stamp of personality had been voided. There were some funny patches on the carpet close to the door, as though someone had spilt a weak bleach on it, discolouring the weave, adhesive tags with printed bar codes labelled each one. More tags were stuck over the table and the dresser; the tall free-standing mirror was completely swathed in polythene.

  The curtains had been taken down. Rain was beating on the window, unnaturally loud to her ears. And it was warm. She saw the air conditioner had been dismantled, its components scattered over a thick polythene sheet in one corner.

  ‘We wanted the dust filter,’ Denzil said absently. ‘Surprising what they accumulate.’

  Langley and Nevin had followed her in. Amanda had stayed with Nicolette in the dining room. ‘I’ve seen it enough times,’ she’d muttered tightly.

  Eleanor looked at the four-poster bed and grimaced. The sheets had been removed. There was a big dark brown stain on the mattress. Three holographic projectors had been rigged up around the bed, chrome silver posts two metres high, with a crystal bulb on top. Optical cable snaked over the floor between them.

  The player was lying on the carpet at the foot of the bed. Denzil picked it up, and gave her an anxious glance. There was no sign of his smile. ‘Standard speech, but it really isn’t pretty.’

  ‘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 enjoymen
t 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.