The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘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.’

  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 hard-liner. 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 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 wormholes, 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 po
ured some more orange juice out of a jug, filling a second glass and handing it to 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 Welland 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.

  The hardliner insisted on walking into town with them. His name was Joey Foulkes, and Gabriel treated him as if he were a small anxious puppy. He accepted it affably enough, grinning at Eleanor when Gabriel’s back was turned.

  The Stamford and Rutland Mercury office was a five-minute walk from the house, situated in one of the older sections of the town, Sheepmarket Square, a small cobbled square just above the river. The offices must back on to the concrete reinforced flood embankment, Eleanor realized; on one side of the building a narrow road ran right down a slope into the surging water. A fragile looking red plastic fence had been thrown along the top, with a couple of council warning signs pinned to it. Four kids had ignored them to stand a metre above the river, chucking bottles and rocks into the water.

  The building was made from pale ochre stone, like all the others in the heart of the town. The frontage was newer, a wall of copper-tinted glass showing misty outlines of an open-plan reception area behind. None of the furniture had been changed for years, and sunlight had bleached and cracked the wood varnish; the peacock-blue carpet was threadbare.

  Eleanor got an I know you look from the girl behind the desk. Her name alone was enough to get them shown directly into the deputy editor’s office.

  Barry Simms was in his early forties, an obvious full-time data shuffler. Flesh was building up on his neck and cheeks, ginger hair had been arranged in an elaborate, but doomed, attempt to disguise its own thinness. He had a quiet almost weary voice as he introduced himself.

  Eleanor put that down to ingrained resignation. At his age, if he hadn’t already made it out of a provincial news office, he wasn’t likely to now.

  ‘It’s not about our coverage, is it?’ he asked Eleanor. ‘I mean you have to expect some interest if your husband is appointed to head the investigation over the heads of the local police.’

  ‘Detective Langley is, and remains, the investigating officer, Greg was never put in over him.’

  ‘Makes good copy though,’ Gabriel said smartly.

  ‘There is the media ombudsman if you wish to complain,’ Simms said reproachfully. ‘I am obliged to provide you with his address. But I hardly think we were intrusive, certainly not after the pressure we were put under. Both our bank and the satellite company that handles our datatext transmission called us up to complain about unethical behaviour. They said we shouldn’t hound you. I don’t like having editorial policy dictated to me like that, Mrs Mandel.’

  ‘I think you and I are getting off on the wrong foot,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Guilty conscience,’ Gabriel muttered.

  Eleanor gave her a hard stare. She rolled her eyes in defeat and folded her arms.

  ‘I don’t wish to complain,’ Eleanor said. ‘I would like the Mercury’s assistance in a peripheral matter.’

  Simms perked up. ‘Is this official?’

  ‘I’m a private citizen.’

  ‘So I can report what you say? Without any hassle?’

  ‘I’ll do you a deal, Mr Simms. You help me, and if it turns out to have any bearing on the Kitchener case, I will brief you ahead of any police statement. Interested?’

  He stared at her for a moment; reporter’s desire to know warring against having restrictions imposed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I thought it was all finished anyway. Nicholas Beswick did it.’

  ‘It looks pretty certain, yes.’

  ‘So what do you want from me?’

  ‘A search through the newspaper’s files. I want to know if there have been any other newsworthy incidents at Launde Abbey, specifically in the period between four and fifteen years ago.’

  Simms looked thoroughly disgruntled. ‘Typical of my luck. Mrs Mandel, if you had come in here asking for anything else we could have obliged. But that is out. Sorry.’

  ‘Your files can’t be that confidential,’ she said. ‘I only want to see what was previously reported.’

  ‘It’s not a problem with confidentiality. You don’t understand. I want to help, but …’ He waved a hand at the Marconi terminal on his desk. ‘We no longer have that data in our memory core.’

  ‘That seems very odd.’

  ‘Not really, just unfortunate. Look, we were an actual newspaper until 2005, black ink on real paper, then we switched to broadcasting on the local datatext channel, same as all the other regional newspapers. We leave features running for forty-eight hours, but the news items are updated every three hours if need be. It’s a good system, any cybofax can receive it. We can turn over a lot of data, cover anything from stories like Edward Kitchener’s murder to the results of village flower shows, and never have to worry about capacity the way they did with paper. Any conceivable piece of information which local people would be interested in is available. Naturally, with that volume of data, everything was stored in a lightware memory.’ His jaw tightened. ‘Then some bastard hotrod went and crashed it all when the PSP fell. They actually went and left a message which said it had been done because we were part of the Party’s propaganda effort. Jesus, if they knew what we went through to get stuff past the PSP’s editorial approval officer. We might not have been out there physically fighting the People’s Constables, Mrs Mandel, but we did our bit. It’s not bloody fair! Who the hell are they to sit in judgement?’

  ‘So there’s no local record of the PSP years at all?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘No. We’ve got a complete microfiche library of newspaper issues from 2005 dating back to about 1750, some copies go back even further than that, would you believe. And we now have a triplicated lightware memory of the last four years. But there’s a thirty-five year gap between the two, and no way on earth of plugging it. It’s bloody disgusting. That’s our local history they killed.’

  Eleanor consulted Gabriel, who was frowning thoughtfully. ‘I only knew about t
he hotrods crashing the Ministry of Public Order mainframe,’ she said.

  ‘How about you, Mr Simms?’ Eleanor asked. ‘You covered the area in that time. Do you remember anything happening out at Launde Abbey?’

  ‘I was in Birmingham when the PSP rule started. I didn’t come back here until seven years ago. But no, I can’t remember anything. Kitchener himself got the occasional mention, of course. Some of the scientific papers he published were contested by other scientists. Frankly, there were more important issues at the time. We didn’t give him a lot of coverage. What type of incident were you looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She rose to leave. ‘By the way, our deal stands.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘So as a final favour, could you tell me if there is anywhere else we could go that might have records of that period?’

  ‘It pains me to say it, but you might try our rivals, the Rutland Times, or the Melton Times, possibly even the Leicester Mercury.’

  20

  Jon Nevin showed his card to the lock, and the bolts clicked back.

  ‘Thanks,’ Greg said as he walked into the cell. There was no response.

  Back to square one, he thought. He pretended he wasn’t bothered by the detective’s attitude.

  Nicholas Beswick was sitting cross-legged in the middle of his cot. He opened his eyes as Greg came in, but made no attempt to move.

  The boy had undergone a profound change in the last three days, there was no sign of the angst-burdened student Greg had interviewed at the start of the inquiry. He ordered a secretion from his gland, and examined the smooth cadence of Nicholas’s thought currents. Again there was virtually no trace of the old jittery mind.

  Maybe it was a good thing, that earlier Nicholas would have been crucified under cross-examination by a professional prosecutor. But Greg couldn’t help thinking that if the boy had changed so drastically once …

  ‘I don’t know who is the most unpopular at this station right now,’ he said, ‘you or me.’