The Mandel Files (95 page)

“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 poured 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 Wetland 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, 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. What 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.”