The Mandel Files (70 page)

“Possibly,” said Greg. He explained his theory about the microlight, then went on to the contract Kitchener had been given with Event Horizon.

When he had finished even Nicolette Hutchins had abandoned her analyser module to listen. “That adds some unusual angles to our problem,” she said with morbid interest. “Nobody was thinking along those lines when we arrived, we all thought it was a murder not an assassination. And it’s too late to look for signs of a microlight landing now. There have been three heavyish rainfalls since Thursday night’s storm. They would have washed the valley clean.”

“Ever the optimist,” Denzil retorted.

She shrugged, and returned to her LCD display.

“Hell, Greg, I don’t know about a tekmerc penetration,” Denzil said. “If it happened that way, then the software they used against the security core must have been premier grade. I wouldn’t even know how to start writing it.”

Eleanor exchanged a knowing glance with Greg. “Let me have what details you have on the system,” she said. “We know someone who can tell us if it’s possible to burn in.”

Vernon Langley would clearly have liked to ask who. But she just gave him her best enigmatic smile as Denzil typed an access request on his Philips laptop.

“Here we are,” he said. “Complete schematics, right down to individual ‘ware chips, plus the layout.”

Eleanor held up her cybofax and let him squirt the data package over.

“I think the murder scene next,” Greg said.

Eleanor didn’t know about Greg, but she was picking up bad vibes from the minute they walked in to Kitchener’s bedroom. Apart from the furniture and Chinese carpet, it had been Stripped clean: there were no ornaments or clothes; the occupier’s stamp of personality had been voided. There were some funny patches on the carpet close to the door, as though someone had spilt a weak bleach on it, discolouring the Weave, adhesive tags with printed bar codes labelled each go one. More tags were stuck over the table and the dresser; the tall free-standing mirror was completely swathed in polythene.

The curtains had been taken down. Rain was beating on the window, unnaturally loud to her ears. And it was warm. She saw the air conditioner had been dismantled, its components scattered over a thick polythene sheet in one corner.

“We wanted the dust filter,” Denzil said absently. “Surprising what they accumulate.”

Langley and Nevin had followed her in. Amanda had stayed with Nicolette in the dining room. “I’ve seen it enough times,” she’d muttered tightly.

Eleanor looked at the four-poster bed and grimaced. The sheets had been removed. There was a big dark brown stain on the mattress. Three holographic projectors had been rigged up around the bed, chrome silver posts two metres high, with a crystal bulb on top. Optical cable snaked over the floor between them.

The player was lying on the carpet at the foot of the bed. Denzil picked it up, and gave her an anxious glance. There was no sign of his smile. “Standard speech, but it really isn’t pretty.”

“I’ll manage,” she said.

“All right. But if you’re going to vomit, do it out in the corridor, please. We’ve cleaned enough of it off this carpet already.”

She realized he wasn’t joking.

An egg-shaped patch of air above the bed sparkled, then the haze spread out silently; runnels dripped down the sides of the mattress on to the floor, serpents twisting up the carved posts. Edward Kitchener materialized on white silk sheets.

The remains of Edward Kitchener.

Eleanor grunted in shock, and jammed her eyes shut. She took a couple of breaths. Come on girl, you see far worse on any schlock horror channel show.

But that wasn’t real.

The second time it wasn’t quite so bad. She was incredulous rather than revolted. What sort of person could calmly do this to another? And it had to be a deliberate, planned action; there was no frenzied hacking, it had been performed with clinical precision. A necromantic operation. Hadn’t the Victorian police suspected that Jack the Ripper was some kind of medical student?

She glanced round. Greg had wrinkled his face up in extreme distaste, forcing himself to study the hologram in detail. Jon Nevin was looking at the floor, the window, the dresser, anywhere but the bed.

“Yeah, OK,” Greg said. “That’s enough.”

The faint aural glow cast by the projection faded from the walls. When she looked back at the bed, Kitchener had gone. Air hissed out through her teeth, muscles loosening. Edward Kitchener had looked like such a chirpy old man, a sort of idealized grandfather. A gruff tongue, and a loving nature.

“How was he actually killed?” Greg asked.

We think he was smothered by a pillow,” Vernon said. “One of them had traces of saliva in a pattern consistent with it being held over his head.”

“So what did all the damage?”

“Pathology says a heavy knife,” said Denzil. “Straight blade, thirty to forty centimetres long.”

“One of the kitchen knives?”

“We don’t know. There are drawers full of them downstairs, some of them are virtually antiques. We catalogued eighteen, and none of those had any traces of blood. But the housekeeper can’t say for sure if one is missing. And then there’s all the lab equipment, plus the engineering shop, plenty of cutting implements in those two. Blimey, you could make a knife in the engineering shop then grind it up afterwards. Who knows?”

Greg led them all back out into the corridor. “Did the murderer leave any traces?”

“The only hair and skin particles we have found anywhere in the bedroom belong to either Kitchener, the students, or the housekeeper and her two helpers.”

“What about when the murderer left?” Greg asked. “Do you know the route they took? There must have been some of Kitchener’s blood or body fluid smeared somewhere.”

“No, there wasn’t,” Denzil said, vaguely despondent. “We’ve spent the whole of the last two days in this corridor going over the walls and carpet with a photon amp plugged into a lightware number cruncher running a spectrographic analysis program—had to get a special Home Office budget allocation for that. This carpet we’re standing on has blotches of wine, gin, whisky, cleaning detergent, hair, dandruff, skin flakes, shoe rubber, shoe plastic, a lot of cotton thread from jeans. You name it. But no blood, no fluid, not from Kitchener. Whoever it was, they took a great deal of care not to leave any traces.”

“Was Liam Bursken that fastidious?” Greg asked Vernon.

“I’m not sure,” the detective said. “I can check.”

“Please,” Greg said.

He loaded a note into his cybofax.

“What does that matter?” Nevin asked.

“It helps with elimination. I want to know if someone that deranged would bother with being careful. A tekmerc would at least make an effort not to leave any marks.”

“We do think the murderer wore an apron while he murdered Kitchener,” Denzil said. “One of the housekeeper’s was burnt in the kitchen stove on Friday morning. The students had a salad on Thursday night. So the stove was lit purposely, it was still warm when we arrived. But there are only a few ash flakes left. We know there was blood on the apron, but the residue is so small we couldn’t even tell you if it was human blood. It could have come from beef, or rabbit, or sheep.”

“The point being, why go to all the trouble of lighting a fire to destroy an apron, if it wasn’t the one used in the murder,” Vernon said. “You and I know it was the one the murderer used. But in court, all it could be is supposition. Any halfway decent brief would tear that argument apart.”

“If it was a tekmerc, why bother at all?” Eleanor asked. “Why spend all that time fiddling about lighting a fire, when they could simply have taken the apron with them? In fact why use one in the first place?”

“Good point,” said Greg. He seemed troubled.

“Well?” Vernon asked.

“Haven’t got a clue.”

“Sorry,” Eleanor said.

They shared a smile.

Greg looked at the carpet in the corridor, scratching the back of his neck. “So we do know that the murderer didn’t leave by Kitchener’s bedroom window,” he said. “They went straight down to the kitchen, burnt the apron, then left.”

“If he or she left,” Vernon said.

“If it was one of the students, then they would have to make very certain no traces of Kitchener left the bedroom, or they would be incriminated,” Jon Nevin said. There was a touch of malicious enjoyment in his tone. “That would fit this cleanliness obsession, the need to avoid contamination.”

“Contamination.” Greg mulled the word over. “Yeah. You gave the students a head to toe scan, I take it?”

“As soon as they were back in Oakham station,” Vernon said. “Three of them had touched Kitchener, of course, but only in the presence of the others.”

“Figures,” said Greg. “Which three?”

“Harding-Clarke, Beswick, and Cameron. But it was only a few stains on their fingertips, entirely consistent with brushing against the body and the sheets.”

“OK,” Greg said. “I’d like to see the lightware cruncher that’s been wiped. Is there anything else our murderer tampered with?”

“Yes,” Denzil said. “Some of the laboratory equipment. We found it this morning.”

The computer centre was at the rear of the Abbey, a small windowless room with a bronze-coloured metal door. It slid open as soon as Denzil showed his police identity card to the lock. Biolum rings came on automatically. Walls and ceiling were all white tiles; the floor had a slick cream-coloured plastic matting. A waist-high desk bench ran all the way round the walls, broken only by the door. There were three elaborate Hitachi terminals sitting on top of it, along with racks of large memox datastore crystals and five reader modules.

The Bendix lightware number cruncher was in the centre of the room, a steel-blue globe one metre in diameter, sitting on a pedestal at chest height.

“Completely wiped,” Denzil said. He crossed to one of the terminals and touched the power stud. The flatscreen lit with the words: DATA LOAD ERROR. Above the keyboard, a few weak green sparks wriggled through the cube. “Kitchener used to store everything in here, all his files, the students’ work. He didn’t need to make a copy; the holographic memory is supposed to be failsafe. Even without power, the bytes would remain stable until the actual crystal structure began to break down—five, ten thousand years. Probably longer. Who knows?”

Eleanor looked round the room. There was one conditioning grille set high on a wall; the air was clean but dead. She couldn’t see a blemish anywhere, the tiles and floor were spotless, as were the terminals.

“Could the storm have knocked it out?” she asked.

Denzil gave her a surprised look. “Absolutely not. This room is perfectly insulated; and even if the solar panels were struck by lightning there is a triplicated surge-protection system. Besides, a voltage surge wouldn’t cause this.”

“So what would?” Greg asked.

“There are two things. One, a very sophisticated virus. An internecine, one that wipes itself after it’s erased all the files, because there’s no trace of it now. Second, someone who knew the core management codes could have ordered a wipe.”

“Who knew the codes?”

“I don’t know,” Vernon said apologetically.

“All right, we’ll ask the students when I interview them. What about access to this room, who is allowed in?”

“Kitchener and the students,” said Denzil. “But there are terminals dotted all over the Abbey. You could use any of them to load a virus, or order a wipe.”

“What about someone outside plugging in?”

“You can only plug into the lightware cruncher through one of the terminals in the Abbey,” Denzil said. “But all the terminals are plugged into English Telecom’s datanet. So you have to be inside the Abbey to establish a datalink between the Bendix and an external ‘ware system.”

“And to get inside the Abbey you have to be cleared by the security system,” Greg murmured. “Neat.” He turned to Vernon Langley. “English Telecom should be able to provide you with an itemized log for the datanet. Check through it and see if there were any unexplained datalinks established on Thursday night or Friday morning.”

“If it was a tekmerc operation, it was the best,” Denzil said soberly. “The very best.”

The laboratory was virtually a caricature, Eleanor thought.

Either that, or set designers on channel science fiction shows did more research than she had ever given them credit for. But it was a chemistry lab, not a physics one.

The room was spacious, with a high ceiling, and the usual ornate mullioned windows, which helped to give it the Frankenstein feel. The glass-fronted cabinets were lined up along the walls. Three long wooden benches were spaced down the centre of the room. Each of them had a vast array of glassware on top, immensely complicated crystalline intestines of some adventuresome beast, plastic hardware units clamped around tubes and flasks, a spaghetti tangle of wiring and optical cable winding through it all. Small Ericsson terminals, augmented with customized control modules, were regulating each of the set-ups.

Derizil led them to the middle bench. “Take a look at this.” He was indicating one section of the glassware, spiral tubing and retorts surrounding what reminded Eleanor of an incubator. “We found it yesterday when we started classifying the equipment.” He shot a wily look at Vernon Langley. “Recognize it?”

The detective shook his head.

“It’s a syntho vat. High-quality stuff, too. Well above what you find on the street; this formula is similar to Naiad.”

“Were the students on it?” Greg asked.

“Three of them were using it on Thursday night,” Vernon said. We took blood samples as soon as they came into the station. Harding-Clarke, Spalvas, and Cameron. But the count was low, they’re not addicts.” He sighed. “Students experiencing life, it’s a thrill for them, a little taste of adventure. I imagine bright sparks of that age could get bored very easily with this place.”

Eleanor thought he pronounced students with well-emphasized contempt.

“And the other three?” Greg prompted.

“Clean as newborns,” Jon Nevin said. “Of course, all six of them had been drinking. They had wine at their evening meal, and then some more in their rooms later on.”