"It's a possibility, Nicholas, and you know it is."
The swift heat of belligerence faded from the boy. "Yes," he said softly. "But I don't have blackouts. And I've never forgotten a day or an hour in my life."
"OK."
"I was telling the truth then, wasn't I?"
"Yes, Nicholas. You've never suffered from memory loss."
He rose to his feet, still as undecided as when he'd walked in. "I'll let you know what happens."
"Mr Mandel. Thanks."
"You're not out of it yet."
The CID office had been deluged with another wave of entropy. There were more folders and memox crystals littering the desks. Crumpled fast-food wrappers bubbled up out of the bin, waxed kelpboard trays with congealed smears of sweet and sour sauce.
The detectives formed their usual closed-ranks knot around one of the desks beside the situation screen. Greg was given some dark speculative looks as he came in. Only Amanda acknowledged him with anything approaching a smile. Vernon Langley broke away from the group, another man following him.
"Did he admit anything?" he asked.
"No."
"Christ, that kid is a smooth one. What about your esp, did you pick up any guilt waves this time?"
"No," Greg said curtly.
"Shame about that."
"Yeah."
Vernon held up his police-issue cybofax. "I asked the lab to re-run tests on the samples Beswick supplied."
"And?"
"No trace of scopolamine, or any other drug. The boy's blood chemistry is perfectly balanced."
"OK, it was just a thought."
"I asked the lab people about scopolamine. You think Beswick made himself forget the murder?"
"It's one option, because he certainly doesn't remember. There must be a reason. What about his medical records?"
Vernon handed over the cybofax. Greg skipped down the datasheet it was displaying. There wasn't much; the usual childhood illnesses, chicken pox, mumps; a bad dose of flu when he was five; a sprained ankle at eleven. The last entry was a routine health check when he started university: again perfectly clean. Nicholas Beswick was a healthy, ordinary young man.
"Bugger," Greg mumbled.
"Anything there throw any light on the problem?" Vernon asked.
"No, not a bloody thing."
"Didn't think there was." He beckoned. "This is Sergeant Keith Willet," he said as his companion came forward. "Been at Oakham quite a while now."
Greg shook hands comfortably. The sergeant was wearing white shirtsleeves and shorts, regulation black tie in a tiny knot. He was in his early fifties, with the kind of hardened patience that said he'd just about seen it all, If he'd been in the army he would have been perfect sergeant-major material.
"You were here during the PSP years?" Greg asked.
"Yes, sir," he said. "Twenty years' service in Oakham now"
"You might have been right about Launde," Vernon told Greg. "Though I still don't see how this fits in with Kitchener's murder."
Greg looked at Willet. "You remembered something about the Abbey?"
"Yes, sir. There was a girl drowned in one of the lakes in Launde Park."
"Shit, yeah!" Now he remembered. It had been on a local datatext channel, quite a few years ago. The report had gone on to say that the police were questioning the Abbey's other residents about the accident. At the time he had assumed it was the start of a PSP campaign against Edward Kitchener.
Anything like that had interested him in those days; someone as prominent as Kitchener would have made a tremendous addition to the underground opposition. But nothing had ever come of it.
The detectives had all turned to stare at his exclamation.
Greg ignored them. "Can you remember her name?" he asked.
"Clarissa Wynne," Willet said. "She was one of Dr Kitchener's students."
The name didn't mean anything. "When was this?"
"About ten years ago, sir. Can't say exactly."
"Do you remember anything about the case?"
Willet glanced at Langley. He nodded, albeit with a trace of reluctance. Greg wondered what had been said before he arrived.
"Yes, sir, I'm afraid I do. We were ordered to shut it down, straight away, enter a verdict of accidental death. It came direct from the Ministry of Public Order."
"Jesus, the PSP wanted it kept quiet? Why?"
"I've no idea, sir."
"Was it an accidental death?"
Willet took his time answering. Greg sensed the disquiet in his mind, a real conflict raging. It was almost as though he was confessing a sin, relieved and shamed at the same time.
"The detective in charge was unhappy about the order. The girl had been drinking, but he thought it was more than student high-jinks that had gone wrong. But there was nothing he could do, certainly not launch an investigation. London said frog, and we all hopped. That was all we ever did in those days."
"Who was the detective?"
Willet gazed straight at him. "Maurice Knebel, sir."
"Ah," said Greg. Maurice Knebel was the major reason Oakham's police force had such poor relations with the local community. In the last two years of the PSP decade, when it was obvious to everyone else that the Party was faltering, Maurice Knebel had done his best to maintain their authority in Rutland, sending out the People's Constables at the smallest provocation. He epitomized the petty-minded apparatchik, blindly following the Party line, the kind who had inflicted almost as much damage on President Armstrong as the urban predators themselves. He was on the Inquisitor's top fifty wanted list. Notoriety of sorts. Nobody had seen him since the night the PSP fell. He had escaped the station minutes before the mob arrived, high on the deadly scent of freedom and vengeance. Not all the People's Constables had been so lucky.
"I didn't even know he was a genuine detective," Greg said.
"Yes, sir, started out a regular officer. He didn't go bad until later."
"How much later?"
"Sir?"
"You said he was upset about being ordered to close the book on the drowned girl. Was he a Party member then?"
"I think so. But he wasn't fanatical back in those days. He saw joining the Party as a way to promotion. It was the last three years, after he was appointed as the station's political officer, that's when the real trouble began."
"OK, fine, I appreciate your help."
"Sir." He left the CID office, visibly relieved.
"Well?" Langley asked.
The detectives were still watching him, waiting for the verdict. The psychic's pronouncement.
"Why on earth would the PSP want to hush up a girl student's death? Kitchener wasn't exactly one of their own."
"You think Kitchener killed her?" Langley asked. He thought of that white-haired old man watching Isabel undress. The picture he'd built up from all the students, Ranasfari, the worship they awarded him. A larger than life character, capable of both disgraceful roguishness and unselfish charity. "No, I don't. Let's have a look at the coroner's report. I suppose it'll be a whitewash, but there may be something in it."
Langley rubbed awkwardly at his chin. The detectives were all abruptly occupied at their work again.
"Sorry, Greg, we can't do that."
"I thought my Home Office authorization is still valid."
"It is," he said drily. "But the local coroner's office has the same problem we do. The hotrods crashed their memory core when Armstrong was ousted. There are no records left for the PSP years."
"They crashed a coroner's office? What the hell for? Coroners weren't anything to do with the PSP."
"I've no idea. Perhaps they regarded all officialdom as the same:
That familiar cold electric charge compressed his spine.
And the gland was barely active. He almost smiled, despite the worry. "No, I don't think so."
"Why not?"
"Intuition." He turned to the group of detectives. "Amanda, would you run a check through the Home Office for me?
I want to know how many other coroner's offices were burnt by the hotrods when the PSP fell."
She nodded and sat behind one of the desks, activating its terminal.
"Look, Greg" — Langley was trying for the reasonable approach—"I really appreciate your help in finding the knife. But Clarissa Wynne's death is hardly relevant."
"Two deaths in the same community, the first one questionable, the second one bizarre. They're connected, no messing."
"How? They're ten years apart."
"If I knew more about Clarissa Wynne I might be able to tell you."
"I can hardly expand the Kitchener case to cover her death. For a start there isn't a single byte on her remaining. We don't even know what she looked like."
"Yeah." He let instinct drive him. Important, the girl's death was important. "Tell you, we're going to have to rectify that."
"Not after ten years, we're not. The only person who could have told you anything was Kitchener."
"Wrong. There's Kitchener, the other five students who were at Launde with her, and Maurice Knebel. And out of all of them, good old Maurice has everything about the case I need to know"
"Knebel? You can't be serious! For Christ's sake, we don't even know if he's still alive."
"I'll find out."
He threw his hands in the air. "Sure you will. I mean, the Inquisitors have only been looking for four years, and their methods don't exactly go by the book. They wouldn't know what a warrant looked like if it pissed on their boot."
"Nobody can run from Mindstar, not for ever, not even close." Greg said it with a deliberate bite of menace, enjoying the way it halted Langley's bumptiousness in midflight.
"Greg?" Amanda waved at him from behind her desk. He could see the cube had filled with datasheets, fuzzy green script with a perceptible Y-axis instability.
"What have you got?"
"There were five other coroner's offices in England which had their records destroyed in the two months either side of the PSP's fall. Two were due to firebomb attacks, the other three were hotrod burns."
"Where were the ones that got burnt by the hotrods?"
She ran a finger down the cube. "Gloucester, Canterbury, and Hexham."
"Well spread around," he mused.
"What are you saying?" Langley asked.
"That it's convenient; four offices in the whole of the country, and one of them is Oakham's, when we know that a dodgy report was loaded into its memory core."
"You can't be serious."
Greg clapped him on the shoulder, drawing a startled look. He knew Langley would never believe in a connection. The man was too good a policeman. Facts, facts, and more facts. That's what he needed.
It's also what you need to get Nicholas off, Greg reminded himself soberly.
"You keep plugging away at Nicholas," he said. "I'll need to borrow Sergeant Willet for the rest of the afternoon."
"All right." Langley seemed relieved that was all he was being asked for. "Why do you want him?"
"I told you: to find Maurice Knebel."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The light was already beginning to fade as Eleanor drove out of Oakham along the B668, up the hill towards Burley. An advance guard of dark copper-gold clouds probing out of the north had reached the zenith of the opal sky. She wasn't in much of a mood to appreciate sunsets.
The Rutland Times hadn't been able to help. Hotrods had crashed their memory core. They had suffered an even worse data loss than the Stamford and Rutland Meteor; all of their past issues had been transferred to the core from earlier microfiche records.
She hadn't known the hotrods were so active when the PSP fell. Royan had let slip a few hints that he had been part of the pack which had crashed the Ministry of Public Order mainframe. But as a general rule the PSP had suffered remarkably little electronic sabotage during its decade in power. Maybe the hotrods had been saving themselves for the final assault. Although she found that hard to credit. They were too independent, preserving their anonymity through the faceless circuit. You could call them through the link they had infiltrated into English Telecom's datanet, but you never knew who you'd got.
The Ministry of Public Order mainframe was an obvious target for them, one final shove to a government which was already toppling. It had happened within an hour of the bomb blast that annihilated Downing Street. People had talked about a link between the hotrod circuit and the urban predators, she thought that was pure tabloid, a subconscious public desire to juggle facts into a unified conspiracy theory. The mainframe burn wouldn't have required much forward planning, the viruses already existed, but newspapers were a different proposition. To be burnt on ideological grounds their output would have to be monitored continually, victims selected. That required organization, commitment. A cabal within a cabal. There had certainly never been any word of that. Perhaps Royan could tell her.
Forewarned by her failure at the Rutland Times office, she had returned to the parked Jaguar and simply phoned the Melton Times.
"I'm very sorry, madam," the secretary had told her. "But our records of that period were erased by hackers."
"There is no such thing as coincidence," Gabriel had said quietly, as Eleanor swore at the cybofax.
"What do you mean?"
But Gabriel simply shrugged cryptically.
Then Greg had called, and asked her to drive up to Colin Mellor in Cottesmore, saying, "I'll meet you up there."
The Jaguar's wheels scattered a volley of loose chippings into the lush verges as they reached the top of the vale, rattling the big scarlet geraniums which had infiltrated the old hedgerows. Four hundred metres to her right she could see the ruins of Burley House casting a stark jagged outline against the rising velvet penumbra. A few fires were burning in the camp of New Age travellers parked in the embrace of its long curving colonnade wings, pink and blue glow of charcoal cooking grills spilling distorted pools of tangerine light. The travellers had been there for as long as Eleanor could remember, ever since the public petrol supply ran out, the wheels of their antique buses and vans rooting in the earth, tyres perished. Not that the ancient combustion engines would work now anyway.
They had raided the stately home for stones, constructing crude lean-tos against some of the rusting vehicles. A hundred metres from the road, they had tried to build a replica of Stonehenge. Still were trying, by all accounts, it changed minutely every time she went past. Not getting any bigger, but the configuration altered, as if they were still searching for the ideal pattern of astrological harmony.
Keeps them off the streets, she thought wryly. God alone knows where they were supposed to fit in to the promised land of New Conservative regeneration policies. After fifteen years of doing nothing but picking and eating magic mushrooms their brains must look like lumps of gangrenous sponge.
There was an estate of late twentieth-century brick houses on the edge of Cottesmore, ornamental gardens given over to intensely cultivated vegetable plots.
As they moved into the heart of the picturesque village she leant forwards, peering over the steering-wheel. She'd never been to Colin Mellor's house before.
"Further on," Gabriel said.
"Right." She hadn't actually expected Gabriel to come with her to the Rutland Times office. Conversation was always so difficult with Gabriel, and this time, with Joey Foulkes tagging along loyally, it was virtually impossible.
The main street had a blanket preservation order slapped on it. All the buildings had stone walls, roofs were either grey slate or Collyweston stone. Half of them used to be thatch, which had to be stripped off when the Warming started and the fire hazard became too great. Three staked goats were grazing on a wide grass verge in front of a row of cottages.
Several men were sitting with their pint pots at bench tables outside the Sun, thin rings of foam marking their progress.
"Here we go." Gabriel pointed to a wooden bar gate in a long ivy-clad wall opposite the pub.
Eleanor indicated and turned of
f. Greg was standing on the other side of the gate. He grinned and tugged at the bolt.
The house was a big converted barn, L-shaped, with a steep grey slate roof. Dull silver windows reflected the sun falling behind the pub. She drew up next to the EMC Ranger on the fine gravel park outside the front doors. There was a long meadow at the rear; she saw three or four horses at the far end, dark coats merging into the twilight.
A police sergeant she didn't recognize was climbing out of the EMC Ranger, screwing his cap ceremoniously into place.
"We only just got here," said Greg. He introduced the sergeant as Keith Willet.
The house's iron-bound front door opened. Colin Mellor stood inside, leaning on a wooden walking stick; a seventy-two-year-old with bushy white hair, wearing baggy green corduroy trousers and a mauve cardigan. A huge Alsatian nosed round his legs, staring at the visitors. Eleanor shuddered slightly at the sight of the animal. It was a gene-tailored guard hound; grey-furred, muscles sculpted for speed, supposedly owner-obedient. That was a trait which the geneticists didn't always succeed in splicing together correctly. Greg had told her that when the original military combat hounds were taken into the field some of them had turned on their handlers.
And she'd seen first-hand what the modified beasts could do to people. It had been a gene-tailored sentinel panther which attacked Suzi.
"It's friends, look, Sparky," Colin said, patting the dog's head. "They're all friends." The dog gazed round at them with big cat-iris eyes, and blinked lazily. It looked back up at Colin. Reluctantly, Eleanor thought. She could see Joey Foulkes all tensed up, hand hovering near the give-away bulge under his suit jacket.
"Well, come in," said Colin. The stick was shaken vigorously for emphasis. "Sparky's smelt you all now. He likes you." He backed into the hall, shooing the dog out of the way.
Eleanor found Greg's hand and held him tightly as they went inside.
Colin led them into his lounge. It was on the ground floor, furnished in plain teak, the upholstery a light green; big french windows gave him a view out across the meadow. Biolum globes in smoked-glass pendant shades cast a strong light. There were pictures of battle scenes on every wall; the army from the Napoleonic wars right up to Turkey.
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