The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  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, axtempt 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 the 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”

  CHAPTER 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 be 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.”

  Nicholas favoured him with a sly smile, a welcome from one conspirator to another. “It’s me. You only irritate them. I disgust them.”

  “Yeah. Wha
t you did this morning was a bit over the top, wasn’t it? Sending your sister as well as your parents. You upset Eleanor, you know.”

  “Exactly how many qualms should a condemned man own? I need you, very badly. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to reach you.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. He’s changed so much, attitude-wise. If he’s done it once, could he do it twice? That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Greg grinned, and pulled the single wooden chair into the middle of the cell, straddling it saloon style, with his elbows resting on its back. “You really have got a brain in that head of yours, haven’t you?”

  “Not good enough to think me out of here.”

  “That’s a fact, and no messing.”

  “But you’re going to work on the case again, aren’t you? Mum said you were. She came back at lunchtime, her and Emma. I didn’t know my parents were going to bring Emma with them. She’s a lovely girl, we get on really well. Can you think how they’re going to treat her at school after this? God!”

  Just for a moment the old Nicholas peeped through, insecure and desperate.

  “Yeah. I’m still on the case. There are a couple of ambiguities that are bothering me. But, Nicholas, if I clear them up and you still look guilty, an army of weeping relatives isn’t going to bring me back.”

  “I understand. I’m grateful, really. You’re the only hope I’ve got. Lisa Collier is just going through the motions.”

  “OK. Tell you, the way it is, Vernon Langley and the prosecutor are going to nail you with that knife we found. Everything else is circumstantial, and I’m sure Lisa Collier will do her utmost to crush any testimony Eleanor and I provide for the prosecution. But that knife… I’m still not entirely convinced you didn’t do it. I saw you.”

  Nicholas brightened. “I had one idea: a doppelganger, a tekmerc who underwent a total plastique reworking to look like me. If one of the others had seen him walking about in that guise they wouldn’t have thought anything of it. And I never used to say much, so they wouldn’t expect him to talk to them. Just blush and walk on, that’s what I normally did.”

  “Yeah, plausible. Except Eleanor and I watched you go back to your room after you hid the knife and burnt the apron.”

  “Oh.”

  “I want to ask you some more questions. Do you want to get Lisa Collier to sit in?”

  “No. I don’t think I can dig myself any deeper in, can I?”

  “There is that. OK, first: did Kitchener ever mention an incident that happened a few years ago?”

  “What incident?”

  “That’s my problem. I remember seeing some news item about Launde maybe ten or so years back, but I can’t remember what it was.”

  “No, nothing comes to mind. Kitchener always had so many complaints about the past, people he knew, politicians he’d argued with, the other professors back at Cambridge, that kind of thing. His entire life was one giant collection of incidents, really.”

  “Yeah, I suppose it was. Well keep thinking about it; if anything does spring to mind get Lisa Collier to contact me at once. OK?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right, now you’re sponsored by the Randon company, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, they pay me an allowance, more like a salary actually, eight thousand New Sterling a year for the whole time I’m at Launde. Can you believe that much money? I sent two thousand back to Mum and Dad; they really struggled to help when I was at Cambridge, and I don’t spend much at the Abbey, you see. Then there’s a fund for any equipment I need for projects. Within reason, of course. But I never used any of that, most of my research was data simulations, the Abbey’s lightware cruncher was enough.”

  “Did Randon ever ask you what Kitchener was working on?”

  “No.”

  “So they didn’t know about the wormhole research he was performing for Event Horizon?”

  “No.”

  “What about anyone else? You obviously knew about it.”

  “Not very much, just that he was looking into it. Wormholes would plug very neatly into his cosmos theory.”

  “What is that?”

  “He called it the Godslayer.”

  “The what?”

  “Well, religion killer. Kitchener was hoping to put together a structural theory that went beyond Grand Unification. It would explain every phenomenon in the universe from psi to gravity. He said he could use it to prove that there was no such thing as God, that the universe was completely natural, and therefore explainable. Provided you had the maths to understand it.”

  Greg tried to imagine what Goldfinch, the Trinities’ fundamentalist preacher, would make of that, and failed. It would have been interesting to watch a meeting between the priest and the physicist, though-from a distance. “Kitchener genuinely didn’t care about other people’s sensibilities, did he?”

  “Yes, he did,” Nicholas said, a shade defensively. “You never met him, he was kind to me, really encouraging. But he hated religion. He said we’d all be better off without it, that it caused too much trouble, and too many wars. He said people called him the Newton of the age, but he’d rather be the Galileo.”

  “And you didn’t mind all this talk?” He observed the boy’s thought currents boil with surprise.

  “No. Why should I?”

  “I take it that means you’re not religious.”

  “Never really thought about it. Mum and Dad sometimes go to the Harvest Festival service, if they’re not too busy. And I can remember going to the Christmas carol service a couple of times when I was young. But that’s it.”

  “What about the other students? Did any of them consider this Godslayer concept to be sacrilegious?”

  “Nobody ever said anything, no.”

  “OK. Was Kitchener working on any kind of energy generating system; like microfusion, or proton boron fusion, something new, something radical?”

  Nicholas screwed his face up. “Nothing like that. He gave me a magnetosphere induction problem to solve, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, it’s hardly new, but if you place a length of wire in orbit, its motion as it moves through the Earth’s magnetosphere will generate an electric current. It’s a simple induction principle, like a generator.”

  “How big a current?”

  “That depends on the size of the cable, obviously.”

  “Yeah, right.” Maybe the boy wasn’t so different after all. “What I need to know, Nicholas, is are you talking about something that can power an AV player, or a city?”

  “Oh. A city, definitely, or maybe a medium-sized town. Kitchener was very insistent about that. He said that we had to learn to concentrate on the practical applications of physics, abstract theory was all very well but it doesn’t pay the bills. He was right, of course, he was always right. He called it his ninety-ten law. He let us study abstract theories for ninety per cent of the time, but we had to spend at least ten per cent of each week working on practical ideas. He used to set us two projects simultaneously, one of each.”

  “How far had you got with this magnetosphere project?”

  “I hadn’t done much work on it at all, I was spending most of my time on the dark-mass project. But I did confirm its basic validity. I designed a cobweb array, about two hundred and fifty kilometres across. The beauty of that is, if you give it a slight spin it will retain its shape without any additional structural material, you only need the cables themselves. I was going to work on strength of materials limits next. But…”

  “I thought beaming power down from space was ecologically unsound.”

  Nicholas smiled vacantly. “I was going to use a superconductor cable, tethered between the Equator and geostationary orbit. That’s a perfectly practical solution; the orbital tower is an idea even older than magnetosphere induction. It was originally suggested that you build it with magnetic rails and run lift capsules up and down, that way you’d never need any sort of spaceplane to get into
orbit. My version was a lot simpler and cheaper, just a single strand fixed to a station that could receive power beamed to it from the induction webs, a bigger version of the communication platforms that are up there now. The superconductor would have to be held up by a monolattice filament, of course, it couldn’t possibly support its own weight. It was Kitchener who suggested it as an alternative method of bringing the power down. He joked about it, he said he’d be as rich as Julia Evans if it was ever built. He gets a royalty from monolattice filament, you see. It’s only a fraction of a per cent, but for a cable thirty-six thousand kilometres long, it would be a hell of a lot of money. He was really keen to see how the figures came out.”

  “Nicholas, how advanced is this project? I mean, could it actually be built with today’s technology?”

  “I don’t know. It was really just a thought experiment, Kitchener tailored them to match our fields of expertise. The equations were interesting, I had to juggle so many factors, but it did look like it would come out pretty expensive. That’s why I was excited about Event Horizon’s new spaceplane, the way it’s going to bring launch costs down. I was going to include those figures in my analysis.”

  “But you never got round to it?”

  “No.”

  “Was the project stored in the Abbey’s Bendix?”

  “Yes, but I kept a back-up file in my terminal. It should still be there.”

  “Did you ever tell Randon that you were working on this idea?”

  “Oh, no, I never discussed it with anybody else apart from the other students.”

  “So the company never really showed much interest in what you were doing at Launde?”

  “They offered me the sponsorship money and a guaranteed research position, that’s all. Kitchener’s students have this reputation, you see. It’s a bit snobby, but a lot of them have turned out to be real high-achievers.”

  “Yeah.” Greg couldn’t help thinking about Ranasfari. You couldn’t get any further apart than him and Kitchener, the cold aesthetic and the glorious old debaucher. The chemistry must have been there, though; Ranasfari clearly revered his mentor. And Kitchener had spotted the potential, just like he had with Nicholas.