The Mandel Files (88 page)

“If Gabriel’s precognition is any example, we’ll need to do this at Launde Abbey itself,” Greg said. “You’ll have a job trying to focus on the temporal displacement of a location outside your immediate area. Right, Gabriel?”

“Right.”

“OK, two points. Well, three, actually. I’ll use my empathic ability to monitor your attempt, or at least try to. I want you fitted with a somnolence inducer; that way if anything does go wrong I’ll sense it and simply send you off to sleep until the neurohormone wears off.”

“Good idea,” Eleanor said. She seemed relieved Greg was taking it seriously.

“Gabriel, I’d like you there as an adviser. You too, Doctor, if it’s no trouble.”

“I will be happy to attend,” Cormac Ranasfari said stiffly.

“Finally, we can’t really exclude Vernon Langley or his team, I suggest we don’t try. But I want him to bring Nicholas Beswick with him.”

“Why?” Julia asked.

“You’ll see tomorrow. Or at least, I think you will.”

CHAPTER 15

An agitated fleece of cloud was stretched over the Chater valley the next morning, an easterly wind scattering meagre curtains of drizzle across the slopes of Launde Park. The water flowing over the bridge was down to a couple of centimetres when the EMC Ranger splashed over it. Greg drove up past the series of lakes, hopeful that this time he might remember. Disappointed once more.

Maybe Vernon would have pulled something out of the police records by now.

Eleanor sat in the passenger seat, gazing out at the desultory stone-grey drizzle. She had been silent for most of the journey, his espersense revealing the pensive timbre of her thoughts, although she was careful to keep a neutral expression on her face.

He turned off down the loop of drive towards the Abbey.

“You know exactly what I’m thinking,” he said. “Which means there’s no point in my saying it. So I’ll say it anyway. I didn’t really want you to do this, and if you want to pull out I won’t stop you.”

She leant over and gave him the briefest of kisses. “So why the dramatic about-face yesterday?”

“Because.. . Well, you’ll see in a minute.”

“Sounds intriguing. Is it going to make me change my mind?”

“No. Quite the opposite, actually.”

She gave him another of her penetrating stares, then turned back to the window.

One thing, he was going to be bloody glad when this was over, and no messing. When the snap of intuition had hit him in Julia’s study yesterday it was tough not to simply say it out loud. Then this morning he had lain on the bed with belly muscles cold and hard in anticipation as he watched her getting dressed.

She had gone through the big chest of drawers taking out a couple of blouses along with her underwear; then she’d started rummaging around the racks in the wardrobe. Three skirts were removed, and she went through the usual procedure of comparing them in the thin light coming through the window. He’d never noticed before how long it all seemed to take. In the end she had slipped into a lime-green blouse and a full-length cotton flower-print skirt, with a walnut-coloured fleece-lined sweat jacket that came down over her hips.

“Good enough for you?” she had asked tartly when she zipped the front of the jacket up.

“Sure.” He hadn’t realized how obvious his stare had been. The two white vans belonging to the forensic team were parked in their usual places outside the Abbey, three police cars from Oakham and a blue Ford which had brought Gabriel and Ranasfari, were drawn up alongside. They were the last to arrive, as he’d intended.

Eleanor pulled her jacket hood up and allowed him to take her arm as they walked to the front door. The roses along the Abbey’s façade looked very scraggly now, sodden and beginning to rot. A uniformed bobby standing in the porch gave a quick salute as they hurried in out of the damp.

There were a lot of people milling around in the hall, the familiar figures of the CID team; Gabriel and Ranasfari standing together along with Ranasfari’s bodyguard. The physicist was in earnest conversation with Denzil Osborne. A couple of uniformed bobbies made up the complement.

Greg spotted Nicholas Beswick standing at the foot of the stairs, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, his elbows sticking out at awkward angles, avoiding eye contact, trying to go unnoticed amid the hubbub of small-talk. The affection he felt at the sight of the boy was spontaneous; he wanted to go over and put a hand on his shoulder, reassure him everything was going to be all right: there was something oddly appealing about someone so timid.

He watched Nicholas very closely as Eleanor greeted the others in the hall. The boy turned round to see what was going on, full of reluctance. Then he caught sight of Eleanor. His brooding expression twisted into shock then outright fright. Both hands lurched upwards, almost as though he was warding off a punch. “You!” It came out as a mangled yell. He took an instinctive pace backwards, and tripped on the bottom step, sitting down jarringly.

Everyone in the hall froze, staring at him. Colour began to rush into his cheeks.

Greg went over and offered him a sympathetic arm. “She was your ghost wasn’t she?” he asked gently.

Nicholas struggled to his feet, still staring thunderstruck at Eleanor. “Yes, but look, she’s real now. She’s alive.”

“No messing. Allow me to introduce you; this is Eleanor, my wife.”

Nicholas gave him a wild trapped look. “Wife?”

“Let me explain,” he said kindly.

“About time,” Eleanor grumbled in his ear.

“You knew all along,” Eleanor said, she was hovering between anger and bemusement. Undecided.

“I guessed all along,” Greg temporized. And Lord preserve us if she decides on anger.

They were sitting on the circular bed in Nicholas’s room. All the furniture was still in place, but swathed in plastic sheeting, embargoed by the forensic team, although there had been no need for the wholesale dismantling exercise which had occurred in Kitchener’s room.

Nicholas had claimed the chair behind the desk, the translucent plastic rustling at each tiny movement. He had shrugged off his reticence as Greg explained his hunch about the ghost and the retrospection neurohormone. Asking questions, making observations. Almost behaving like a regular person.

Ranasfari was sitting on the window-seat in a virtual trance State. One hand stroked the stonework absently. Greg wondered what ghosts Launde had conjured up for him.

Gabriel had listened to him explain with a smile blinking on and off. She had assumed that knowing air of elder sister tolerance he remembered so well.

Vernon, Amanda, and Denzil were grouped together in mutual confusion, attentive but saying little, swapping moody, baffled glances.

“You are saying this looking-back notion has already worked?” Amanda asked.

“No,” Greg said. “Just that the retrospection neurohormone will work. I had some reservations at first, you see.”

Eleanor’s hand squeezed his leg playfully. “You wait till I get you home, Gregory.”

“But... Oh, I don’t know.” Amanda’s arms flapped in expressive dismay. “You really think this drug is going to let you look back and see who murdered Kitchener?”

“She has pervaded the correct tau co-ordinates,” Nicholas said. “I saw her. Dressed exactly as she is now.”

Amanda’s eyebrows shot up.

Probably never heard him speak unless he’s been spoken to before, Greg thought.

“So what would happen if Eleanor doesn’t take the neurohormone?” Gabriel asked. Her whole attitude was pure wickedness. “We know it works, so why don’t we give it to someone else? Vernon here, he’s a likely lad, and it is his investigation.”

“Behave,” Greg said. The others wouldn’t be able to tell how serious she was. Gabriel took some getting used to. He’d known her for close on sixteen years, through the good times and the bad, and he wasn’t sure he really understood her. Made for interesting company, though.

“Perfectly legitimate question.” She affected injured innocence. “Nicholas says he saw her, so what would happen if she doesn’t go?”

“You and your paradoxes,” Eleanor muttered.

“Nothing would happen,” Ranasfari said. “As I explained yesterday, quantum mechanics eradicates any inconsistency. The ghost which Nicholas witnessed originates from a universe in which Eleanor will infuse the neurohormone. There are others in which she does not.”

“Another me,” Eleanor said wonderingly.

“This version does me fine,” Greg said. But there was an image in his mind he couldn’t shake free; a million Eleanors saying yes and infusing the neurohormone, another million pandering to Gabriel’s whim, and refusing. Universes torn asunder. And never the twain shall meet.

Eleanor smiled at him, hand gripping tighter.

“Well what’s it going to be, then?” he asked.

“Oh, I’ll infuse it, of course.” She looked at Nicholas, her smile turning impish. “I’m sorry I’m going to startle you last Thursday night.”

“That’s all right.” His eyes shone adoringly.

Greg had the uncomfortable thought that Eleanor and Nicholas were actually both the same age. Only chronologically though, an evil voice said inside his mind.

Eleanor lay down on the bed and let Denzil fit the somnolence induction loop round her head. A pearl-white tiara with a coil of cable connecting it to a slim oblong box of blue plastic. It reminded Greg of the neural-jammer collars at Stocken. The technology was the same.

“You should be able to reach down the landing into Kitchener’s bedroom without any trouble,” Gabriel said. “I could tell what was going to happen to a general area about a kilometre across. Or if I fixated on a person, I could track him three or four days into the future even if he went to Australia.”

“She used to fixate on a lot of men,” Greg told the room at large. Nicholas started to giggle.

“Bugger you, Mandel.”

“I’ll be happy if I can just manage to find the Abbey last Thursday,” Eleanor said.

“You did,” Nicholas said. “Or you do, I don’t know which.”

“Shall we just get on with it,” Eleanor said.

Greg could feel the nerves building in her belly. “OK.” He sat beside her, plumping up a pillow, then took her hand. Her grip was strong, in search of reassurance, of a rock of stability.

Denzil handed him the somnolence induction box. There were three buttons and a small liquid-crystal display on the front. A colunm of black numbers changed occasionally below a row of symbols he didn’t recognize.

“I’ve preset it,” Denzil said. “Press this button and she should be under in five seconds.”

“Right.” He rested his forefinger lightly over the button. Hoping to God he wouldn’t have to use it.

Gabriel held up an infuser tube. “You want me to do this?”

“Please,” said Eleanor.

Gabriel bent over her, face sober and professional, and pressed the tube to her neck, just over the carotid.

“Keep your eyes dosed,” Gabriel instructed. “You’ll be seeing enough visions without trying to untangle optical images as well.”

Eleanor’s eyes closed and she clamped her jaw shut, facial muscles hard as stone. Greg ordered a secretion—gland thudding away like a second heartbeat—and joined her in the country of the mind.

Eyes closed, blockading the sleet of photons into the brain’s reception centre, a tide of starless night engulfed him. Eleanor’s mind rose silently into the void, a gas-giant as seen from one of its innermost moons. Vast and heavy. Thought currents swirled, individual strands showing pink, white, and ochre-red, like meandering stormbands, curling round each other to produce complex interlocking vortices. Stains of trepidation bled up out of the deeper psyche, dissolving into the surface thoughts, quickening the rhythm.

Relax, he told her.

The mind’s superficies quaked in surprise, sending out distortion ripples.

Greg?

Yeah. Why, who did you think?

Just remember this is all new to me.

I haven’t experienced this sort of affinity many times, myself.

Oh. Greg? I think I can see the bedroom. My eyes are still shut, aren’t they?

He snatched a fast look. Yeah, they’re shut. He let his own mind relax into passivity, a pure receiver. That eerie phosphorescent cloudscape lost cohesion, filming over with watery streaks of alien colour. When he studied them closer they resolved into walls, furniture, people, himself. He was still sitting on the side of the bed. Gabriel was stuck in a ridiculous posture; mouth open, hands captured in mid-gesture.

You are smiling, Eleanor said.

I’ve just seen me as you see me. It’s interesting.

The room is all still, like a hologram.

Yeah. Now, what I want you to do, very slowly, is hunt round for a watch, and just imagine yourself sliding towards it. Got that?

No problem.

The perception focus shifted, they curved out and upwards, an eagle in flight, heading for Gabriel’s wrist. Her watch was a plain silver band with dry scarlet numbers flush with the surface, as if they were floating on a lake of mercury.

Nine forty-seven, Greg read. About eight minutes ago. OK, now can you see anything around the fringes of the room?

Like what?

A lack of definition, something like the blurred multiple you get right at the edge of a mirror.

No. Nothing like that.

OK Pull back from the room, the opposite of when you zoomed in on the watch.

Ah, yes.

The image flowed, rushing past so fast he thought he could feel the wind of its passage. Yet the walls, the furniture, the fittings, they all stayed in the same place. Darkness fell, siphoning out every shade of colour. In the night sky outside the window, stars traced sparkling arcs across the heavens, flickering in and out of existence as blankets of cloud churned past at supersonic speed.

Very good, he told her drily, but can you stop?

The vertiginous motion slowed. Halted. It was dusk, a paltry smattering of rain leaking from bleak clouds. The room was deserted, its frost of plastic sheets glimmering a dirty indigo.

Up?

Inside, you know?

Stop. Right away.

Bloody hell, said Eleanor. There was a dazed quality to her thoughts, almost like giddiness. I did it, Greg. The past!