The Mandel Files (59 page)

The wooden gate through the dune of brambles was swinging slowly to and fro on its hinges, and two of the ground-floor bay windows had been smashed. When he reached the front door he saw the wood around the lock was splintered; judging by the marks on the paintwork someone had taken a sledgehammerto it. There was the sound of angry voices inside.

Greg walked into the hall and ordered a low-level secretion from his gland. As always, he pictured a lozenge of liver-like flesh nestled tumour-fashion at the heart of his brain, squirting out cold milky liquids into surrounding synapses. In fact, neither gland nor neurohormones looked anything like the mental mirage, but he’d never quite managed to throw off the idiosyncrasy—Mindstar psychologists had told him not to worry, a lot of psychics developed quirks of a much higher order. His perception shifted subtly, making the universe just that fraction lighter, more translucent. Auras seemed to prevail, even in inert matter, their misty planes corresponding to the physical structures around him. Living creatures glowed. A world comprising coloured shadows.

There were twelve people in the lounge, making the small room seem oppressively crowded and stuffy. Greg recognized most of them. Villagers, that same quiet friendly bunch in the pub each night. Frankie Owen, the local professional doledependant and fish poacher, leaning on his sledgehammer, resting after a bout of singularly mindless destruction. He had set about the furniture, smashing up the Queen Anne coffee table and oak-veneered secretaire and dresser; the three-metre flatscreen on the wall had a big frost star dead centre. Expressing himself the only way he knew how. Mark Sutton and Andrew Foster, powerful men who worked as labourers in the groves, were sitting on Roy Collister behind the overturned settee. The slightly built solicitor’s clothes were torn, his face had been reduced to pulped flesh, cuts weeping blood on to the beige carpet.

Clare Collister was being held by Les Hepburn and Ronnie Kay. Greg hadn’t seen much of her since he moved into the farm, she didn’t venture out very often; an ordinarily prim thirty-five-year-old, with rusty brown hair and a long face. She had obviously been struggling hard, one eye was bruised, swelling badly, her blouse was torn, revealing her left breast. Les Hepburn had a vicious grip on the back of her head, knuckles white with the strain of forcing her to watch her husband being beaten.

And of course, Douglas Kellam, chief cheerleader, standing in the tight circle of onlookers, a forty-five-year-old with a round face, slender moustache and fading brown hair; dressed in blue trousers and white shirt, thin green tie. Smart and respectable even now, although his face was flushed from the kind of exhilaration Greg was wearily familiar with: the thrill of the illicit. Douglas was the descendant of the original Victorian toff, a master of duplicity. Perfectly suited to attending a charity dinner then going on to a pit-bull fight, watching Globecast’s Euroblue channel at night, condemning it by day.

The jeering and shouting cut off dead as Greg stepped into the lounge. Andrew Sutton froze with a fist cocked in midair, his knuckles wet with Collister’s blood, looking up at Greg, suddenly pathetic with guilt.

With his espersense expanded, the group’s emotions impinged directly into Greg’s synapses, a clamour of blood-lust and anger and secret guilt. They were feeding off each other, building up a collective nerve for the finale. It would end with a shot-gun blast, the cottage set on fire, consuming bodies and direct evidence. And the police would turn a blind eye; overstretched, undermanned, and still trying to regain public trust, to shake off the association with the People’s Constables. They couldn’t afford to be seen taking sides with PSP relics.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ Greg asked, and there was no need to force a tired tone into his voice, it came all too easily.

“The bastard’s Party, Greg,” someone called.

“No messing? Have you seen his card? Was it signed by President Armstrong himself?” He was aware of Eleanor coming to stand behind him. Her presence sparked off a ripple of severe agitation in the minds around him.

“He’s guilty, Greg. The Inquisitors said he was an apparatchik over in Market Harborough.”

“Ah.. .” he said. The Inquisitors (actually, the Inappropriate Appointee Investigation Bureau) had been set up by the New Conservative government to purge PSP appointees from Civil Service posts, where it was feared they would deliberately misuse their positions to stir up trouble in their own interest. Identifying them had turned out to be an almost impossible task, a lot of records had been lost or destroyed when the PSP fell. Nearly all the old Party’s premier grades had been routed out, they were notorious enough in their own areas for the Inquisitor teams not to need official data-work; but the small fry, the invisible Party hacks who did the committees’ groundwork, they were hard to pin down. A lot of suspect names had been leaking from the Inquisitors’ office lately. Rough justice eradicated the tricky problem of no verifiable evidence.

“An official charge has been brought against him, has it?” Greg asked.

“No,” Douglas Kellam said. “But we’ve heard. Bytes that came straight from the top.” His voice changed to a slicker, more appealing tone. In his mind there was still the hope that he could win through, a refusal to admit defeat. And nervousness that was beginning to churn up through his subconscious, like all of them, all disquieted by Greg and the infamous gland.

Sometimes, Greg reflected, an unending diet of tabloid crap could be useful. He smiled humourlessly. “Sure they did. Your cousin’s friend’s sister, was it?”

“Come on, Greg. He’s Red trash, for Christ’s sake. You don’t want him around Hambleton. You of all people.”

“Me of all people?”

Kellam squirmed, searching round for support, finding none. “Christ, Greg, yes! What you are, what you did. You know, the Trinities.”

“Oh. That.” No one in Hambleton had actually mentioned it out loud before. They all knew he had been a member of the Trinities, Peterborough’s urban predator gang, fighting the People’s Constables out on the city’s sweltering streets; the stories, fragmented and distorted, had followed him over the water from the Berrybut estate. But the New Conservatives, as a legitimate democratically elected government, could not officially sanction the massive campaign of hard-line violence which had helped rout the PSP. So Greg’s involvement had earned him a kind of silent reverence, a wink and a nudge, the only gratitude he was ever shown. As if what he had done wasn’t quite seemly.

“Yeah, me of all people,” he said deliberately, looking round the troubled faces. “I would have known if Roy was Party. Wouldn’t I?”

They began to shuffle round, desperately avoiding his eye. The high-voltage mob tension shorting out.

“Well, is he?’ Kellam asked urgently.

Greg moved forwards. Collister was groaning softly on the floor, fresh blood oozing out of the gashes which Foster’s heavy rings had torn. Foster and Sutton exchanged one edgy glance, and hurriedly scrambled to their feet.

“Do you really want to know?’ Greg asked.

“What if he is?’ Kellam said.

“Then you can call the police and the Inquisitors, and I will testify in court what I can see in his mind.”

Kellam gave a mental flinch, stains of guilt blossoming among his thought currents. Panic at Greg’s almost casual reminder that he could prise his way into minds triggering a cascade of associated memories.

“Yes, sure thing, Greg, that’s fine by me.”

There was a fast round of mumbled agreement. Greg pursed his lips thoughtfully, and squatted down beside Roy Collister. He focused his espersense on the solicitor’s mind. The thoughts were leaden with pain, sharp stings of superficial cuts, heavier dull aches of bruised, probably cracked, ribs, nausea like a hot rock in his belly, warmth of urine between his legs, the terror and its twin, the knowledge that he would do anything say anything to make them stop, a bitter tang of utter humiliation. His mind was weeping quietly to itself. There was little rationality left, the beating had emptied him of all but animal instinct.

“Can you hear me, Roy?’ Greg asked clearly.

Saliva and blood burped out from between battered lips. Greg located a small flare of understanding amid the wretched thoughts.

“They say you were an apparatchik, Roy. Are they right?”

He hissed something incomprehensible.

“What did he say?’ Mark Sutton asked.

Greg held up a hand, silencing him. “What were you doing in the PSP decade? Don’t try and speak, just picture it. I’ll see.” Which wasn’t true, not at all. But only Eleanor knew that.

He counted to thirty, trying to recall the various conversations he and Roy had had in the Finch’s Arms, and rose to his feet. The lynch mob stood with bowed heads, as sheepish as schoolboys caught smoking. Even if he said Collister was guilty, there would be no vigilante violence now. The anger and nerve had been torn out of them, sucked into the black vacuum of shame. Which was all he had set out to do.

“Roy wasn’t an apparatchik,” Greg said. “He used to work in a legal office, handling defence cases. Did you hear that? Defence work. Roy was supporting the poor sods that the People’s Constables brought into court on trumped-up charges. That’s how he was tied in to the government by your bollock-brained Inquisitors, his name is on the Market Harborough legal affairs committee pay-slip package. The Treasury paid him for providing his counselling services.”

The silence which followed was broken by Clare Collister’s anguished wail. She ran over to her husband, sinking to her knees, shoulders quaking. Her fingers dabbed at his ruined face, slowly, disbeievingly, tracing the damage; she started to sob uncontrollably.

Douglas Kellam had paled. “We didn’t know.”

Greg increased the level of his gland secretion, and thought of a griffin’s claw, rigged with powerful stringy muscles and tendons, talons black and savagely sharp. Eidolonics took a lot out of him, he had learnt that back in his Mindstar days: his mind wasn’t wired for it, which meant he had to push to make it work. On top of that, he hated domination stunts. But for Kellam he’d overlook scruples this once. He visualized the talon tips closing around Kellam’s balls. “Goodbye,” he said, it was a dismissal order. Black needles touched the delicate scrotum.

Kellam’s eyes widened in silent fright. He turned and virtually ran for the door. The others filed out after him, one or two bobbing their heads nervously at Eleanor.

“Oh sweet Jesus, look what they’ve done to him,” Clare groaned. Her hands were covered in blood. She looked up at Greg and Eleanor, tears sticky on her cheeks. “They’re animals. Animals!”

Greg fished round in his overall pockets for his cybofax. He pulled the rectangular palm-sized ‘ware block out, and flipped it open. “Phone function,” he ordered, then told Clare: “I’ll call for an ambulance. Some of those ribs are badly damaged. Tell the doctors to check for internal haemorrhaging.”

She wiped some of her tears with the back of a hand, leaving a tiny red streak above her right eye. “I want them locked up,” she said, fighting for breath. “All of them. Locked up for a thousand years.”

Greg sighed. “No, they didn’t do anything wrong.”

Eleanor flashed him a startled glance. Then understanding dawned, she looked back down at Clare.

“Nothing wrong!” Clare howled.

“I only said Roy was innocent,” Greg said quietly.

She stared at him in horror.

“When the ambulance comes, you will leave with it. Pack a bag, some clothes, anything really valuable. And don’t come back, not for anything. If I ever see you again, I will tell Douglas and his friends exactly whose mind is rotten with guilt.”

“I never hurt anybody,” she said. “I was in Food Allocation.” Greg put his arm round Eleanor, urging her out of the lounge. The sound of Clare Collister’s miserable weeping followed him all the way down the hall.

Eleanor kissed him lightly when they reached the EMC Ranger. There was no sign of the lynch mob. Nor the watching faces, Greg noted. The only sound was the bird-song, humidity gave the air an almost viscid quality.

“Are you all right?’ she asked. Her lips were pressed together in concern.

His head had begun to ache with the neurohormone hangover which was the legacy of using the gland. He blinked against the sunlight glaring round the shredded clouds, combing his hand back through sweaty hair. “Yeah, I’ll live.”

“That bloody Collister woman.”

“Tell you, she’s probably right. Food Allocation was a little different from the Constables and the Public Order Ministry.”

“They took away enough of the kibbutz’s crops,” Eleanor said sharply. “Fair and even distribution, like hell.”

“Hey, wildcat.” He patted her rump.

“Behave, Gregory.” She skipped away and climbed up into the Ranger, but her smile had returned.

Greg slumped into the passenger seat, and remembered to pull his safety belt across. “I suppose I ought to sniff around the rest of the village,” he said reluctantly. “Make sure there aren’t any premier-grade apparatchiks lurking around in dark corners.”

“That is one of the things we came here to get away from.” She swung the EMC Ranger round the triangular junction outside the church, and headed back the way they came. “You and I, we’ve done our bit for this country.”

“So now we leave it to the Inquisitors?”

Eleanor grunted in disgust.

They met Corry Furness on the edge of the village. Eleanor stopped the Ranger and lowered her window to tell him it was all right to use his bike again.

“Mr Collister wasn’t one of them, was he?’ Corry asked.

“No,” Greg said.

Corry’s face lit with a smile. “I told you.” He pedalled off down the avenue of dead trees with their lacework of vines and harlequin flowers.

Greg watched him in the mud-splattered wing mirror, envying the lad’s world view. Everything black and white, truth or lie. So simple.

Eleanor drove towards the farm at half the speed she’d used on the way in, suspension rocking them lightly as the wheels juddered over the skewed surface. The clouds on the southern horizon were starting to thicken.