The Mandel Files (79 page)

“Right.” Eleanor pulled her cybofax out, and loaded the order into it.

After living in a two-room chalet for over a decade, the interior of the farmhouse always seemed vast. Furniture rattled around, nothing was ever conveniently near to hand.

The builders had renovated most of it before they moved in, fixing up the roof tiles, replacing the rotten floorboards, stripping out the damp plaster, installing new plumbing and air conditioning, rewiring. They were lucky to get the work done at all. England’s industrial regeneration meant the building trade was in the middle of a boom; old factories were being restored, new ones constructed, housing estates were springing up across the country. There was very little spare capacity right now, certainly not for refurbishment jobs in out-of-the-way villages. But Julia’s name ensured they were given top priority with the firm they hired, although even her clout didn’t extend all the way down into the shady levels of subcontracting. There were still three rooms waiting to be plastered, and the conservatory was a stack of cut and primed wood sitting on the lawn, ready to be screwed together.

Eleanor had already suggested that he could put it up. As if the groves didn’t occupy all his time.

But the farmhouse had definitely acquired that indefinable sense of being home, the animal refuge against a howling world. Returning to it caused a tangible wash of relief. He had half expected some reporters to be standing at the entrance to the drive.

The interior had been decorated by a London firm, their designer working in tandem with Eleanor, to give an early twentieth-century theme; the country house of Victorian nobility. Everything was light and somehow rustic, curtains and carpets in pastel shades, the furniture in delicately stained pine. Neoteric domestic systems were all built in to reproduction units. The only modern setting was the gym, filled with black and silver chromed equipment.

When they arrived back from the police station, Greg slumped down on a settee in the lounge and pointed the remote at the long mock-painting of an eighteenth-century harvest scene which disguised the inert flatscreen. The picture shivered away into a game show where contestants were hanging upside down from the studio ceiling on long bungee cords; they were bouncing in and out of large barrels filled with water, trying to bob apples with their teeth.

He stared at it incredulously for a minute, then shook his head in weary dismay. Mr Domesticity, back home after a hard day at the office, with the wife bustling round in the kitchen.

Except, as usual, his mind was full with little scraps of information from the case, all of them swirling round in a chaotic vortex, stirred by the witching fingers of inquisitiveness and intuition in the hope they would settle into some kind of recognizable pattern. His army mates had called him obsessive. Maybe it could be deemed a character flaw, but he could never let go of a problem. He had almost forgotten how involved he could become in a case. The worrying thing was, it felt good. On the chase again. That bastard who had chopped up Kitchener needed to be put away.

Eleanor came in with a couple of lagers in tall Scandinavian glasses. She took one look at the game show and switched the flatscreen off. Merry peasants and bales of hay snoozing under a sky of golden cloud reappeared.

“You weren’t watching it,” she said when he protested. “You were thinking about Kitchener.”

He snagged one of the lagers. “Yeah.”

“You said Rosette was a real bitch,” Eleanor said as she sat down on the settee, wriggling her shoulders until she was nestled up snugly against him. “Do you really think she would kill the father of her own baby just for money?”

“No. Now you put it like that, I don’t. Tell you though, the one thing those students did have in common was the way they idolized Kitchener. That came through loud and dear; a couple of them actually called him a second father. Instinct says it isn’t any of them. But... it’s funny. There are a lot of things which don’t add up, certainly not if it was a tekmerc snuff operation.” He put his arm round her, enjoying the warm weight pressing into his side.

“The apron,” she said. “Now that is really strange.”

“That’s right. Like you said, why bother with it at all? I can’t believe our hypothetical tekmerc used it simply to incriminate the students. First off, we actually can’t implicate one of them with it. If they were going to plant evidence why not the knife, some bloodstains?”

“Too obvious.”

“Maybe. But the apron isn’t obvious enough. And why spend precious tune starting a fire? I know covert penetration operations, Christ I’ve been on enough in my time, the cardinal rule is get out once you’ve finished, don’t loiter.”

“Whoever it was, they must have been there a while, though. First they had to wait until Kitchener was alone, then the Bendix was burnt, as well as the neurohormone bioware. It all adds up to a lot of time spent in the Abbey.”

“Which gives them an even stronger reason to leave straight after the murder,” he countered. “Every extra minute in the Abbey is one more minute when they could be discovered. And why use syntho to kill the bioware in the first place?”

“Because it’s there, saves carrying a poison in with them.”

“Exactly, but how did they know that? It must have been someone totally familiar with the lab set-up, and even then they couldn’t have known for sure that there was any syntho available that particular night. Suppose Kitchener and good old Rosette had been infusing heavily? A tekmerc would have brought a poison, or more likely used a maser. Whatever the method, it would never have been left to chance.”

“There are all sorts of other chemicals in the lab, as well as the acids, and the heaters,” she said. “There was bound to be something which could kill the bioware. Pure chance they used the syntho.”

“Yeah. Could be.” But the junked up thought fragments refused to quieten down, he kept seeing flashes of Launde Park, the Abbey, those bloody lakes, Denzil’s data-rich tour, the students’ broken shocked faces. None of them connected in any way.

He took a gulp of the lager; it was cold enough to numb the back of his throat. “But that still doesn’t explain the time they were in the Abbey before the murder,” he said.

Eleanor gave a tiny groan.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “We can drop it for the night.”

“And put up with moody silences while you’re thinking about it. No thanks. But next time Julia can definitely go find someone else. This is Mandel Investigations’ last case, Gregory.”

He flashed her a smile, squeezing her tighter. “No messing.”

“So what about the time?” She sipped at her own lager.

“Why wait until Rosette and Isabel left Kitchener? A tekmerc wouldn’t care about snuffing them as well, in fact it would even be beneficial from the mission’s point of view. Less people to spot him leaving, raise the alarm.”

“But they were a complication, Greg. Killing three people in one room would be risky. Certainly one of them would manage to shout.”

“Maybe. But it would mean he had to wait somewhere inside the Abbey for hours. No tekmerc would do that, the exposure risk is too great. And in any case, it implies he knew Rosette would leave Kitchener alone for a while.”

“Everyone knew she was an insomniac.”

“Her friends, yes. But how would anyone else know?”

“Good question.” She leant forward and rescued her cybofax from the coffee table. “There’s a couple of other points. Amanda Paterson and I spent the afternoon chasing up English Telecom.” She started reading the data on the cybofax screen. “The only datalinks from the Abbey on Thursday were the three we’ve accounted for: Nicholas and CNES, Rosette and Oxford University, and Kitchener himself, he was plugged into Caltech, over in America. On top of that there were twenty-one phone calls made from cybofaxes; two of them were Mrs Mayberry’s, the housekeeper, one of her helpers made another, then Rosette made nine, Cecil made a couple, so did Liz, Nicholas and Isabel both made one each, the other three were all Kitchener’s.

Amanda and another detective are calling the numbers and confirming the calls were vocal. We thought someone could have plugged a cybofax into one of the Abbey’s terminals, the bit rate would be substantially lower, but you could still use it to squirt a virus into the Bendix.”

“Yeah, assuming it was done on Thursday. There’s nothing to prevent you from loading the virus a month ago, and putting it on a time-delay activation.”

She gave him a disappointed look. “We had to start somewhere.”

“Yeah, sure. Sorry. But nobody’s going to remember a phone call from a month or half a year ago.”

“I know, but what else can we do?”

“Nothing, it was only ever a very long shot, closing off options. I can’t see anyone wanting to wipe the Bendix until after Kitchener was dead, not if the object was to destroy his work. To wipe it when he was alive would be counterproductive, he would be able to recreate his equations or whatever, and you’d alert him to the security problem. And if it was loaded a month ago, how did they know the timing, or when the students would stop accessing it. No, I’m sure it must have been done from within the Abbey after he was killed, that’s the only scenario that makes sense.”

“You’re probably right. Anyway, while Amanda was running down the phone calls, I checked with RAF Cottesmore about the weather conditions on Thursday. There were winds up to a hundred kilometres an hour locally that night, some gusts reached a hundred and twenty. Here is their squirt.”

“Bugger.” He put down the lager and looked at the meteorological data which the cybofax was displaying. The purple and blue cloudforms of the weather radar image were super-imposed over a map of Rutland; pressure and wind velocity/direction captions flashed across it.

“Can you fly a microlight in that?” Eleanor asked.

“Not a chance. Even high level would be risky; low level with the microbursts you’d get in the Chater valley, impossible.”

She rubbed his arm. “Couldn’t they just bike in and out?”

“It’s four kilometres to Launde from the A47 by the straightest possible route, eight there and back. The trip there would be in the middle of a hurricane, with a diversion round Loddington to be sure they weren’t sighted, and carrying enough gear to melt through the security system. You wouldn’t catch me trying to do it.”

“But it could be done?” she persisted.

“Theoretically, yeah, an inertial guide would place you within a couple of centimetres. But that terrain, well, you saw it.”

“Yes.” She gave him back the glass of lager, and curled her legs up, resting her head on his shoulder.

He felt the kiss on the bottom of his jaw, then she was rubbing her cheek against his. Up and down, slowly. “You’re all tensed up,” she murmured in his ear. “You won’t solve anything like that.”

For a moment he thought of pulling away. But only for a moment. Besides, she was right, he wouldn’t settle it tonight.

The bedroom overlooked the reservoir’s southern prong, a long dark stretch of water with its wavelets and gently writhing curlicues of mist. Walls and furniture were silky white; vases, picture frames, curtains, sheets, and the bedposts were all coloured in shades of blue; the oaken floorboards smoothed down and waxed until they resembled a ballroom floor.

None of that really mattered, not the surroundings, just the bed, with Eleanor. Clad in black silk and lace, naked, provocative, sensual, demanding, submissive, thick red hair foaming down over her shoulders. She possessed a myriad sexual traits, combinations ever-changing, making each time different, unique.

The only light came from the bonfire on the opposite shore, a distant orange glimmer, barely enough to show him her outline. He undid the bows and buttons of her nightdress, licking at the flesh which was exposed tasting the salt tang of damp skin, the heat of arousal.

Embraced by the warmth and folds of shadow he had learned to cast off reticence, taking his lead from her. Eleanor didn’t care, wasn’t ashamed. Maybe rampancy was a gift of youth, or just part of her nature. So he was free to lose himself in the feast of sensuality, the feel of her body. Long powerful legs wrapped round him, big breasts weighed down his hands. He sucked on an erect nipple, caressed her belly. A tiny neurohormone secretion showed him her body’s reactions, which action brought the greatest rapture. The material world faded to dream silhouettes, revealing Eleanor’s nerve strands alive with neon-blue light, her naked excitement. He slid inside her, a drawn-out penetration accompanied by her fervid groan, and joined her at the centre of that blazing animal euphoria.

But afterwards intuition, or possibly plain confusion, played hell inside his skull and he couldn’t let go of the case. He lay back on the crumpled sheeting, hands behind his head, staring up at the shivers of firelight on the ceiling. Snapshots of Launde, the students, Kitchener, police reports, they all chased across his consciousness in endless procession, sharp-edged and insistent.

“So much for my prowess,” Eleanor grumbled softly.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“No.”

“Sorry.”

“This really has got you bothered, hasn’t it?” She sounded more concerned than annoyed. “You were never so intense about a case before, at least not since I’ve known you.”

He rolled on to his side, his face centimetres from hers.

Warm breath gusted over his cheeks. “Tell you, what I don’t understand, what’s really got me beaten, is why bother?”

“What do you mean?”

“What is the point of murdering an old man in such a grotesque fashion? Even if one of the students had murdered Kitchener, it wouldn’t be like that. You’ve read the statements, what happened when they found him. They were having fits. And I don’t blame them, that hologram was bad enough. I’m bloody sure I couldn’t do it, not like that. A maser beam through the brain, quick and clean, yes. But who could do that to someone else? Like Cecil Cameron said, it was one sick fucker.”

“Sick enough for you to perceive with your espersense?”

“I would have thought so. That’s one of the reasons I want to visit Liam Bursken tomorrow, so I know what mental characteristics to look out for.”