A Quantum Murder

CHAPTER TWO

Nicholas Beswick looked out of his mullioned window, watching a near solid front of thick woolly clouds slide over the secluded Chater valley. It was mid-afternoon, and the storm was arriving more or less on time. The warm rain began to fall, a heavy grey nebula constricting oppressively around the ancient Abbey.

His room faced west, giving him a good view out over the long gentle slope of grassy parkland which made up that side of the valley. But the brow was no longer visible, in fact he was hard pressed to see the road slicing through the park outside the front of the building, beyond the deep U-shaped loop of the drive. Mist was struggling to rise up from the grass, only to be torn apart by the deluge of hoary water.

There would be no swimming in the fish lakes this evening, he realized ruefully, no opportunity of seeing Isabel in her swimsuit. The daily swim had become an iron-cast habit for the six students; Launde Abbey didn't have any outdoor sport pitches or indoor games courts, so they clung to whatever activity they could make for themselves with a grim tenacity.

The lack of facilities had never bothered him. He had been at the Abbey since October, and he still found it hard to believe he had been admitted. Launde Abbey was looked upon as a kind of semi-mythical grail by every university physics student in England: the chance to study under Dr Edward Kitchener.

Kitchener was regarded by most of his peers as the Newton of the age, a double Nobel Laureate for his work in cosmology and solid-state physics; his now-classic molecular interaction equations had defined a whole range of new crystals and semiconductors, which could be produced in orbiting microgee factories. The royalty payments from the latter work had made him independently wealthy before he reached forty, which also kicked up the embers of envy among his colleagues whose work tended more to the intellectual. Nor did it help that he was slightly unconventional in the way he approached his subject matter; at his level of theorizing, physics verged on philosophy. He considered he had a perfect right to intrude on the country of the mind, to develop new aspects of thought processes. It had led to some fierce disagreements with the psychology establishment, and he didn't always confine his arguments to the pages of respected journals—critics were often subjected to an open tirade of abuse and scorn at scientific conferences. Then twenty-two years ago, after nearly twenty years of ill-tempered confrontation with his fellow theorists, he had, with characteristic abruptness, resigned from his position at Cambridge and retreated to Launde Abbey to pursue his theories without carping interference from lesser minds, his brilliance and loud vocal intolerance of the dry, crusty world endemic to academia creating a media legend of Bohemian eccentricity in the process.

When psi-stimulant neurohormones were developed, seventeen years ago, he awarded them an unqualified welcome, saying they gave the human mind direct access to the cosmos at large, presenting physicists with the opportunity to perceive first-hand the particles and waveforms they had only ever seen on screen and in projection cubes. Even after it became clear that neurohormones couldn't produce anything like the initial over-optimistic results predicted, he never lost his conviction. Psi, he contended, was the greatest event in physics since relativity, exposing hitherto unquantifiable phenomena. Simply defining the mechanism of psi in conventional terms was enough to fascinate him, a rationale which would tie up nature and supernature, something beyond even the elusive Grand Unification theory.

This tenuous goal was one to which more and more of his time was devoted. But every year he invited three degree students into his home for an intensive two-year session of lectures, research and intellectual meditation.

And childish tantrums, Nicholas had discovered, at first to his embarrassed surprise, and then with secret amusement. Even the most brilliant of men had character flaws.

Launde Abbey wasn't just about profound reasoning and scaling new heights of metaphysics. The human dynamics of six young people cooped up with an increasingly crotchety sixty-seven-year-old was weird. Fun, but weird.

Nicholas could now see a tributary network of steely rivulets coalescing on the grassland, trickling across the road and running down the slope into the first of the three little lakes to the north. The rain was incredibly heavy, and Globecast's news channel said it would last for six or seven hours. The River Chater at the bottom of the valley would flood again; it was probably up to the rickety little bridge already.

There was some sort of vehicle crawling along the road, heading down towards the river. He frowned and peered forward, nose touching the chilly glass. It was a rugged four-wheel-drive Suzuki jeep. Probably the farmer who leased the park's grazing rights checking to make sure he'd rounded up all the sheep and llamas.

Lightning burst across the valley, ragged sheets of plasma ripping the gloom apart. It revealed the small powder-blue composite geodesic dome sitting like some baroque technological sentry on the brow of the valley. Nicholas could see a couple of the hexagonal panels were missing. The gravity wave detector which it housed was now long abandoned. In the height of summer sheep used the dome for shade.

Another bout of lightning erupted overhead, vivid blue-white forks lashing down, giving him the impression that the sky itself was fracturing. One of the flashes was bright enough to dazzle him and he jerked back from the window, fists rubbing the blotchy purple after-images from his eyes.

Thunder rattled the glass. The farmer's vehicle had gone. Humidity was steaming up the windows.

Nicholas abandoned the monsoon with a reluctance rooted in a perennial child-awe of the elements. He turned on the conditioner to cope with the rampant humidity, punched up some Bil Yi Somanzer from his music deck, then retreated back to his desk. His room was on the top floor of the Abbey, a large L-shape, with old but expensive furniture. It had a small private bathroom at one end. The bed was a large circular affair, easily big enough for two, which often made him think of Isabel on sleepless nights. There was an array of large globular cacti in red clay pots on a copper-topped table below the window: he was mildly worried that he wasn't watering them properly, there had been no sign of the flowers Kitchener told him to watch out for.

He hadn't brought much to the room himself, a couple of big rock band holoprints, his music deck, reproduction star-charts, some reference books (paper ones); his clothes didn't take up half of the drawer space in the solid oak chest, and the wardrobe was almost empty. He had been too nervous back when he arrived to bring much in the way of personal possessions, unsure what liberties Kitchener would tolerate—after all, the Abbey was nothing like student digs. Of course, now he knew the old boy didn't care what the students did in their rooms, or at least claimed he didn't.

Bil Yi's Angel High thumped out of the speakers, drowning the sound of the storm in howling guitar riffs. Nicholas activated his desk-top terminal; it was a beautiful piece of gear, a top-of-the-range Hitachi model with twin studio-quality holographic projection cubes. He used the keyboard to access the CNES mission control memory core in Toulouse and requested the latest batch of results from the Antomine 12 astronomy satellite platform. A map of gamma ray sources began to fill one of the cubes, and he called up his frequency analysis program. It was a marvellous sensation, being able to punch a data request into any public-access memory core on the planet without having to worry about departmental budgets. Back at the university, a request like this one would need to be referred almost back up to the dean. Kitchener's data costs must be phenomenal, but all his students had to pay for were their own clothes and incidentals.

His subroutines jumped into the second cube, and he started to integrate them. Kitchener might or might not ask how his gravity-lens research project was progressing at supper but he wanted to be ready with some kind of report. The old boy simply didn't tolerate fools at all, let alone gladly. That fact alone did wonders for Nicholas's self-esteem. He knew he was bright, his effortless formal first at Cambridge proved that: but the downside was the trouble he had trying to fit in to the university's social scene; he had always preferred his studies to the politics and culture-vulturing of his fellow students. Bookish eremitism was all right at university, you could get lost in the crowd and nobody would notice, but it wasn't possible at Launde. Yet Kitchener had agreed after a mere ten-minute interview, during which Nicholas had mumbled virtually every answer to the old boy's questions.

"We can sort you out here," Kitchener had said wryly, and winked, 'there's more than one type of education to be had at Launde."

Nicholas had experienced the unsettling notion that Kitchener had perceived the sense of destitute isolation which had clung to him for as long as he could remember.

After he got in to Launde Abbey, money ceased to be a problem for the first time in his life. His parents had always been proud of his university scholarship, but they hadn't been able to contribute much to his grant; they were smallholders, barely able to feed themselves and his sister. He went to Cambridge a month after the People's Socialism Party fell; the country was in complete turmoil, jobs and money were scarce. He scraped through the first year working as a fast-food cook grilling krillburgers in the furnace heat of a cramped McDonald's kitchen for six nights a week. It wasn't until halfway through his second year that the economy stabilized, and the New Conservative government began to prioritize the education department. But after he graduated and then received that golden invitation, sponsorship for the two-year sojourn had been ridiculously easy to find. Eight medium-sized companies and three giant kombinates had made him an offer. In the end he settled for accepting the money of Randon, a French-based 'ware and energy systems manufacturer, mainly because it was coupled with the promise of a guaranteed research position afterwards.

All of Launde's graduates tended to enjoy a privileged position later in life; Kitchener did seem to have a knack for spotting genuine potential: they formed one of the most elitist old-boy networks in the world. It was all part of the price of spending two years isolated in the middle of nowhere. Nicholas didn't mind that at all; after his appalling first year at Cambridge, he thought it was quite a bargain.

Supper at Launde Abbey was held at half-past seven prompt each night. Everybody attended, no matter how engrossed they were with their work. It was one of Kitchener's house rules. He didn't lay down many, but God help the student who broke one of them.

Nicholas had a quick shower then put on a clean pale-blue T-shirt before he left his room at quarter-past seven. It was dark outside, the wind soughing plaintively as it slithered around the chimney-stacks.

Uri Pabari and Liz Foxton were coming out of Uri's room, a couple of doors down from Nicholas's. They were talking in low, heated voices as they emerged into the corridor, some sort of argument. Both of them looked belligerent, faces hard and unyielding.

An awkward grin flickered over Nicholas's lips. He hated it when people argued in the Abbey; cramped together as they were, everyone else always seemed to get dragged in. It was doubly excruciating when the argument was a personal one. And he had enough experience to recognize a personal argument between Liz and Uri. It didn't happen often, but when it did…

They caught sight of him, and the sibilant words stopped. There was a moment's hesitation during which they held some invisible negotiation, then Uri's arm was round her shoulder and they walked towards him. He waited, trying to hide his trepidation. They were both older than him; Uri was twenty-four, Liz twenty-two, in their final year at Launde.

Out of all the students at Launde, Nicholas felt closest to Liz. She wasn't quite as stilted as him when it came to other people, but she was one of the quietest, always giving the impression of thoughtful reserve. She was half a head shorter than him, with a pleasant round face, hazel eyes, and shoulder-length raven hair. Tonight she wore a simple fuchsia one-piece dress, its skirt coming just below her knees, something indefinably American about its cut.

By contrast, Uri was perpetually easygoing. The ex-Israei had a dark complexion and a thick mass of curly jet-black hair that reached his shoulders. His build was stocky, yet he was the same one-metre-eighty height as Nicholas, a combination which made his varsity rugby team welcome him to their ranks with open arms. Recently he had piled a couple of kilos on around his waist, which Liz had started to nag him about during meals. He was in jeans and a bright-green rugby shirt.

"Missed your swim?" Liz asked as the three of them walked down the stairs.

Nicholas nodded. "Yes, but I managed to catch up on some of my datawork."

"No formal graduation exams, no last month sweat and panic… That's the thing about this place." She grinned, mimicking Kitchener's waspy tone. "You know whether or not your mind can work, it's not up to me to tell you."

The Abbey's rooms were divided into two distinct groups: the formal ones, which had been maintained in a reasonable degree of the original style despite the privation of the PSP decade which followed the physical and economic chaos of the Warming; and the rest, which were turned over to Kitchener's lifelong pursuit of quantifying the entire universe: the two laboratories, a compact heavily cybernated engineering shop, the computer centre, Kitchener's study, a small lecture theatre, and a library with hundreds of paper books. The dining room was definitely one of the former; its gold-brown wooden panelling had been immaculately preserved, and the Jacobean fireplace never failed to impress Nicholas. It had been furnished with a long Edwardian mahogany table, polished to a gleam; the fragile-looking chairs around it were upholstered with dull rouge leather, covered with a web of ochre cracks. Nicholas was always terrified he would split one of the antique masterpieces when he sat on it. Above the table, biolum chandeliers emitted a bright, slightly pink, light.

Cecil Cameron was lounging in one of the chairs, the last of the second-year students. A rangy twenty-four-year-old with frizzy blond hair, cut short. He was using his kinaware left hand to open a bottle of white Sussex wine, chrome-black metalloceramic nails shining dully every time he twisted the corkscrew. The hand's leathery skin had a silver sheen, which Cecil said he had chosen in preference to flesh-tone. "Why bother going through life being boring? If you're enhanced, then flaunt it." He claimed he'd lost his forearm in an anti-PSP riot. True or not, and Nicholas wasn't entirely convinced, Cecil exploited his hand and the interest it earned him quite shamelessly to his own advantage.

Kinaware was still rare (and expensive) enough to draw attention wherever he went. Not that the six students got out much: a weekly trip to the Old Plough in Braunston, the nearest village; an occasional foray into Oakham. Cecil was forever bitching about the confines of the Abbey, and worked a little too hard on projecting his boisterous image. But Nicholas had to admit he was a first-rate solid-state physicist.

"Don't look so eager, proles," Cecil drawled. "The storm means Mrs Mayberry isn't here. Our lord and master sent her home after lunch. So it's cook it yourself night tonight."

Nicholas and Uri let out a groan.

"So why aren't you cooking it?" Liz asked.

Cecil flashed her a smile. "I always find the female of the species is so much better at that kind of thing."

"Pighead!"

"Go on, admit it, did you really want to taste my cooking? Besides, I looked in a minute ago, little Isabel is coping just fine."

"Isabel's cooking supper?" Nicholas asked. He hoped it had come out sounding like an innocent enquiry.

Cecil's smile broadened. "Yes. All by herself. Say, Nick, why don't you go and see if she wants a hand, or anything else?"

Nicholas could hear what sounded like a chuckle coming from Uri. He refused to turn and find out for sure. "Yes, all right," he said.

Liz was giggling by the time he reached the door into the kitchen. Well, let them, he thought; he didn't mind the steady joshing the others gave him now, it was all part of a day at Launde Abbey. Funny what you could get used to if it went on long enough.

Isabel Spalvas had arrived at the same time as him, a mathematician from Cardiff University. At first he didn't even have the nerve to meet her eyes when they were talking—not that they talked much, he could never think of anything to say. But mortification at his own pathetic shyness eventually bullied him out of his shell. They were going to be under the same roof for two years, if nothing else he could talk to her as if she was just one of the boys, it was often the simplest approach. That way at least they'd be friends, then maybe, just maybe…

The kitchen had a long matt-black cast-iron range running along one whitewashed plaster wall, with a set of copper pots and even an antique bedwarmer, hanging above it. A wicker basket stood at the end, piled high with logs, but for once the fire was out. The big square wooden table in the middle of the room was covered in dishes and trays; there was a mound of wet lettuce leaves drying out in a colander next to a collection of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and chives.

Isabel was busy carving a joint of ham. She was the same age as Nicholas, twenty-one, about a head smaller, with sandy-blonde hair that was arranged in a mass of tiny curls just brushing her shoulders. The way she was bent over the table meant the strands obscured her face, but he could visualize her features perfectly, at any time. Almost invisible lashes framed enchantingly clear ice-blue eyes, pale freckles decorated the top half of her cheeks, the lips were narrow. Nicholas was fascinated by the dainty features, how expressive they could be: fearsomely intent when she was listening to Kitchener, beaming sunlight smiles when she was happy, when the students got together for their evening meetings in one of the rooms. She laughed most at Cecil's jokes, of course, and Rosette's acid gossip; Nicholas never had been able to master the art of perfectly timed one-liners, or even rugby club style stones.

He paused for a second, content just to look at her, for once without all the others nudging and pointing. She was wearing tight, faded jeans, and a sleeveless white blouse, with Mrs Mayberry's brown apron tied round her waist. One day he'd have the courage to come out and say what he felt to her face, say that she was gorgeous, say that she made the whole world worth living in. And after that he'd lean forwards for a kiss. One day.

"Hello, Isabel," he blurted. Damn, that had come out too loud and gushy.

She glanced up from the joint. "Hi, Nick. It's going to be salad tonight, I'm afraid."

"You haven't done all this yourself, have you? You should have said, I would have helped. I did some cooking when I was at Cambridge. I got quite good at it."

"It's all right, Mrs Mayberry prepared most of it after lunch. You didn't think she'd trust us with it, did you? I'm just finishing off. Do you think this'll be enough?" She wagged the knife at the plate of meat she had cut.

"Yes, fine. If they want any more, Cecil can cut it."

"Hmm, that'll be the day."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"Take the trays through, would you."

"Right." He grabbed the one nearest to him, piled high with plates and dishes.

"Not that one!"

Nicholas put it down with a guilty lurch. The plates threatened to keel over. Isabel put her hand out hurriedly to stop them.

"Those are the plates from lunch, Nick," she said with a tinge of reproach.

"Sorry." How stupid, he raged silently. He knew the heat he could feel on his face was a crimson blush.

"Try this one," she said in a gentler voice.

He picked up the one she indicated, and turned for the door, feeling totally worthless.

"Nick. Thank you for offering to help. None of the others did."

She was giving him a soft smile, and there was something in her expression which said she understood.

"That's OK, any time."

Nicholas and Uri were setting the places when Edward Kitchener and Rosette Harding-Clarke came in at twenty-nine minutes past seven. He saw the old boy was in his usual clothes, baggy white trousers, white cotton shirt, cream-yellow jacket with a blue silk handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket, and a tiny red bow tie, which always made Nicholas think a butterfly had landed on his collar. There was still an air of the tiger left in Kitchener, age was not a gift he accepted gracefully. He was reasonably slim, carrying himself with undiminished vigour; his face was a long one, with skin stretched thinly around his jaw, scratchy with stubble; a crew-cut of silver hair looked almost like a cap.

Rosette Harding-Clarke walked beside him, taller by ten centimetres, an athletic-looking twenty-three-year-old, with soft auburn hair, styled so that long wavy strands licked her back well below her shoulder-blades. Her presence alone intimidated Nicholas. She had arrived along with him and Isabel, with a degree in quantum mechanics from Oxford, but her aristocratic background gave her a self-confidence which he found daunting. He had suffered too many casual put-downs from her social clique at Cambridge not to flinch each time that steel-edged Knightsbridge voice sliced through the air. She was wearing dark-grey tweedy trousers and a scarlet waistcoat with shiny brass buttons, the top two undone. And nothing underneath, Nicholas soon realized. He prayed he wasn't blushing again, but Rosette could be overpoweringly sexy when she wanted to be.

Kitchener and Rosette were arm in arm. Like lovers, Nicholas thought, which he privately suspected was true. It wasn't only Kitchener's attitude towards his fellow physicists which caused conflict in his earlier years. Tabloid channel 'casts were always sniping with rumours of him and female students. And how Kitchener had lapped that up, relishing his media-appointed role as the notorious roué! There had even been a statement, shortly after he bought Launde Abbey, that he was only going to invite female students to become his tyros, providing himself with a harem of muses. He never had, of course, it was always a fifty-fifty split, but which member of the general public made the effort to discover that? The legend remained solidly intact

"Anybody been watching the newscasts?" Kitchener asked after he sat in the cahrer's chair at the head of the table.

"I've been correlating the gamma ray data front Antomine 12," Nicholas said.

"Well done, lad. Glad somebody's doing something in this slackers' paradise. Now what about that little problem I set you on magnetosphere induction generators, hey, have you solved that yet?"

"No, sorry, the gravity lens idea was fascinating, and nobody else has been tabulating the data the way I am," Nicholas offered by way of compensation. He ducked his head, unsure how it would be received. The topics for research were always set by Kitchener, but sometimes the old boy displayed a complete lack of interest in the answers. You could never work out what he was going to press you on, which could get disconcerting. That aside, Nicholas reckoned he'd learnt more about the methodology of analysing problems in the three months he'd been at Launde Abbey than in his three years at university. Kitchener did have the most extraordinary insights at times.

"Bloody typical," Kitchener groused. "How many times do I have to tell you delinquents, the abstract is all very well, but it makes piddle-all difference to the human condition. There's no bloody point in me teaching you to think properly, if you can't use those thoughts of yours to some benefit. The way this clapped-out world is limping along, a clean source of fresh energy would be like manna from heaven right now. A wealthier world will be better able to support eggheads chasing metaphantoms. It's to your own advantage. God, take me, unless I'd come up with those molecular interaction equations—"

"You could never have bought Launde," Uri and Cecil chorused, laughing.

"Little buggers!" Kitchener grunted. He glanced down at the plate Isabel put in front of him, and started to poke around distrustfully with a fork. "And don't giggle, lad," he said without looking up, "only bloody women giggle."

Nicholas clamped his mouth shut, and concentrated on his plate. From the corner of' his eye he could see Isabel laughing silently.

"I was watching the newscasts this afternoon," Kitchener said. "It looks like the Scottish PSP is about to fall."

"It's always on the verge of collapse," Cecil protested loudly. "They said it wouldn't last six months after our lot got kicked out."

"Yes, but Zurich has cut off their credit now."

"About time," Liz muttered.

Nicholas knew she had lost her mother when the PSP was in power in England. She always blamed the People's Constables, but thankfully never went into details. His own memories of President Armstrong's brutish regime were more or less limited to the constant struggle to survive on too little food. The PSP never had much authority in rural areas, they had had enough trouble maintaining control in the urban districts.

"I hope they don't want to link up with us again," Cecil said.

"Why ever not?" Rosette asked. "I think it would be nice being the United Kingdom again, although having the Irish back would be pushing the point."

"We can't afford it," Cecil said. "Christ, we're only just getting back on our own feet."

"A bigger country means greater security in the long run, darling."

"You might as well try Eurofederalism again."

"We'll have to help them," Isabel said. "They're desperately short of food."

"Let them grow their own," Cecil said. "They're not short of land, and they've got all those fishing rights."

"How can you say that? There are children suffering."

"I think Isabel's right," Nicholas said boldly. "Some sort of aid's in order, even if we can't afford a Marshall plan."

"Now that will make a nice little complication for the New Conservatives during the election," Kitchener said gleefully. "Trapped whichever way they turn. Serves 'em right. Always good fun watching politicians squirming."

Conversation meandered, as it always did, from politics to art, from music to England's current surge of industrial redevelopment, from channel-star gossip (which Kitchener always pretended not to follow) to the latest crop of scientific papers. Cecil walked round the table, pouring the wine for everyone.

Isabel mentioned the increasing number of people using bioware processor implants, the fact that the New Conservatives had finally legalized them in England, and Kitchener declared: 'Sheer folly."

"I thought you would have approved," she said. "You're always on about enhancing cerebral capacity."

"Rubbish, girl, having processors in your head doesn't make you any brighter. Intellect is half instinct. Always has been. I haven't got one, and I've managed pretty well."

"But you might have achieved more with one," Uri said.

"That's the kind of bloody stupid comment I'd expect from you. Totally devoid of logic. Wishful thinking is sloppy thinking."

Uri gave Kitchener a cool stare. "You have few qualms about using other enhancements to get results."

Nicholas didn't like the tone, it was far too polite. He shifted about in the chair, bleakly waiting for the explosion. No one was eating, Cecil had stopped filling Rosette's glass.

But Kitchener's voice was surprisingly mild when he answered. "I'll use whatever I need to expand my perception, thank you, lad. I've been a consenting adult since before you were shitting in your nappies. Being able to discern the whole universe is the key to understanding it. If neurohormones help me in that, then that makes them no different to a particle accelerator, or any other form of research tool, in my book."

"Neat answer. Pity you don't stick to neurohormones, pity you have to expand your consciousness with shit."

"Nothing I take affects my intellect. Only a fool would think otherwise; Expanded consciousness is total crap, there's no such thing, only recreational intoxication, it's a diversion, stepping outside your problems for a few hours."

"Well, it's certainly helped you overcome a few problems, hasn't it?" Uri's face was blank civility.

"I always thought bioware nodes would be terrifically useful if you want to access data quickly," Rosette said brightly.

Cecil's hand came down on Uri's shoulder, squeezing softly. He started pouring some wine into Uri's glass.

Kitchener turned to Rosette. "Use a bloody terminal, girl, don't be so damn lazy. That's all implants are, convenience laziness. It's precisely the kind of attitude which got us into our present state. People never listen to common sense. We shouted about the greenhouse gases till we were blue in the face. Bloody hopeless. They just went on burning petrol and coal."

"What kind of car did you use?" Liz asked slyly.

"There weren't any electric cars then. I had to use petrol."

"Or a bicycle," Rosette said.

"A horse," Nicholas suggested.

"A rickshaw," Isabel giggled.

"Perhaps you could even have walked," Cecil chipped in.

"Leave off, you little buggers," Kitchener grunted. "No bloody respect. Cecil, at least fill my glass, lad, it's wine not perfume, you don't spray it on."

Nicholas managed to catch Isabel's eye, and he smiled. "The salad's lovely."

"Thank you," she said.

Rosette held her cut-crystal wineglass up to the light, turning it slowly. Fragments of refracted light drifted across her face, stipples of gold and violet. "You never compliment Mrs Mayberry when she cooks supper, why is that, Nicky, darling?"

"You never complimented Mrs Mayberry or Isabel," he answered. "I was just being polite, it was considered important where I was brought up."

Rosette wrinkled her nose up at him, and sipped some wine.

"Well done, lad," Kitchener called out. "You stick up for yourself, don't let the little vixen get on top of you."

Nicholas and Isabel exchanged a furtive grin. He was elated, actually answering back to Rosette, and having Isabel approve.

Rosette gave Kitchener a roguish glance. "You've never complained before," she murmured in a husky tone.

Kitchener laughed wickedly. "What's for dessert, Isabel?" he asked.

The storm began to abate after midnight. Nicholas was back in his room watching a vermiform pattern of sparkling blue stars dance through his terminal's cube like a demented will-o'-the-wisp. The program was trying to detect the distinctive interference pattern caused by large dark-mass concentrations; if there was one directly between the emission point and Earth (a remote chance, but possible), the gamma rays should bend around it. Kitchener was always interested in the kind of localized spatial distortions such objects generated. His program was using up a good third of the Abbey's lightware cruncher capacity. The kind of interference he was looking for was incredibly hard to identify.

He had thought about making a start on the magnetosphere induction problem, but the dark mass project was much more interesting. It was worth enduring another of Kitchener's tongue-lashings to be able to see the results as they came in from orbit. Dark-mass detection was well down the priority list of CNES's in-house astronomers, it was exciting to think he might actually be ahead of them, up there at the cutting edge. Nicholas Beswick, science pioneer.

He had been in Uri's room for most of the evening after supper, along with Liz and Isabel. It had been a good evening, he reflected; they'd chatted, and the flatscreen had been tuned to Globecast's twenty-four-hour news channel with the sound muted. And it really did look like the Scottish PSP was going to be overthrown at last. There was rioting in Glasgow and Edinburgh and the assembly building had been firebombed, the flames soaring impressively into the night despite the heavy rain. They had watched the text streamers running along the bottom of the flatscreen and talked, drinking another bottle of Sussex wine. The others never seemed to mind that he didn't say as much as them, he was under no pressure to venture an opinion on everything.

They had packed up around midnight, or at least, he and Isabel had left Uri and Liz alone.

He shut Uri's door, thinking that for once he might find the nerve to ask Isabel into his room.

She stood on the gloomy landing glancing at him expectantly.

"It was a nice evening, thanks," he said. Pathetic.

Her lips pressed together. It was her solemn expression, the one that made her look half-tragic.

"Yes, I enjoyed it," she said. "Let's hope there's a new government in Scotland tomorrow. Liz will be over the moon."

"Yes." Now, he thought, now say it. "Goodnight," he said meekly.

"Goodnight, Nick."

And she'd walked off to her room.

Surely if a girl liked a boy she was supposed to show it: some small word or deed of encouragement? But she hadn't actually discouraged him. He clung to that. If it hadn't been for the fact he could never keep his mouth shut Nicholas might have asked Cecil for advice. Cecil never had any trouble chatting up girls when they visited the Old Plough.

The clouds above the valley were disintegrating, pale beams of moonlight probed down through the tattered gaps. Nicholas looked up from the cube, watching them shiver across the undulating parkland. After the uniform darkness of the storm they seemed preternaturally bright. Trees and bushes imprinted on his retinas, ragged platinum silhouettes which vanished almost as soon as they were revealed.

A face looked back at him through the glass. It was a Woman, probably not much older than him; her features were slightly indistinct, misted somehow, but she was certainly attractive, with thick red hair combed back from her forehead.

All he did was gawk for a second, his thoughts shocked into stasis, a gelid fingertip stroking his spine. Then he realized her spectral image must be a reflection. She was standing behind him! He yelped in panic, and jerked round in the chair, a thousand-volt current replacing his normal nervous impulses.

There was nobody there.

He twisted back to stare at the window. There was no face.

Slowly, his shoulders were trembling faintly, he let out a long sigh. Idiot! He must have been dozing, dreaming. The clock on the bedside cabinet read quarter-past one.

Too late, Nicholas, he told himself wanly. Besides, since when did beautiful women ever come stealing into your bedroom in the middle of the night?

He cancelled the gamma ray search program. That was when he heard somebody talking on the landing outside, two people, voices murmuring softly. The chilly breath of static washed down his back again; but he was wide awake now. He frowned, concentrating, filtering out the intermittent patter of residual rain on the window. He knew one of them was Isabel, by now he could have plucked her voice out of hell's bedlam.

Curiosity warred with dread, he wanted to know what she was doing, he was terrified of making a fool out of himself. But if he didn't go to the door quickly, the chance to do either would be lost. In the end it was the thought of having to live with not knowing, spending days wondering while his over-active imagination summoned up grotesque scenarios, which propelled him up out of the chair.

He turned the brass door handle, already trying to think of an excuse. I was just going to fetch something from the library, my toilet's blocked… Feeble.

There was only a single biolum globe illuminating the landing, its weak pink-white lambency disfiguring the familiar corridors and twisting the proportions of the stark wooden chairs outside each door. Long serpentine shadows dappled the walls, veiling the vague figures depicted in the dusty hanging tapestries behind a crepuscular fog.

The two girls had their backs to him, walking with a measured companionable pace towards the stairs. They stopped as soon as the bright fan of light from his room splashed out into the landing, and slowly turned towards him. Rosette was wrapped in a jade-green silk kimono, embellished with fantastical topaz griffins. She was obviously riding some kind of high, he'd seen enough of that at Cambridge to tell; black sun pupils, dawdling movements. Probably Naiad, a sophisticated derivative of street-syntho, guaranteed no bad trips, no cold turkey. The vat in the lab downstairs was elaborate enough to produce it.

Isabel was still in her jeans, held up by a braided leather belt she'd fastened with a big loop tucked back into her waistband. She had taken off her blouse, leaving just a plain black bra to cup her high, exquisitely shaped breasts.

Nicholas stared at her with lightheaded dismay, the kind of sensation he got whenever his father butchered spring lambs. The scene and all it implied was too macabre, too lascivious to take in. In the gloom behind the girls he could see the red-headed woman again, all of her this time. She was tall and broad shouldered, wearing some kind of jacket with a long skirt. He blinked, dizziness forcing him to grip the door to stop himself falling. His skin was ice cold, needled with hot beads of sweat. He thought he was about to be sick. The world buckled alarmingly, sight and sound dissolving under a suffocating wave of heat. He was hallucinating, he was sure of it, the only explanation, trapped in a terrifying loop of nightmare. When his vision shimmered back into focus the phantom woman had gone. But Isabel and Rosette were still solidly, undeniably present.

A corner of Rosette's mouth lifted in a lazy chaffing smile, as if she was glad he'd interrupted them. "Adults only, Nicky, darling," she said in a throaty voice. "Sorry."

He looked at Isabel, a long, anguished appeal that this wasn't happening. All she did was give a minute shrug, a gesture of almost total indifference. It was a blow which hit him harder than the first shock of discovery.

He stared in abject misery as they continued silently down the landing, Rosette's feet unseen inside the kimono, giving the impression she was gliding above the carpet. Isabel had her shoulders square, lean bands of muscle shifting pliantly below the flawless skin of her tapering back.

They walked all the way past the stairs, along to the north wing, swallowed up in the gloaming. Then orange shone out of the door Rosette opened. Kitchener's suite of rooms.

She didn't even glance back to see if he was watching before she closed the door behind them.

Why? He couldn't understand it. She wasn't on drugs. She wasn't suffering from delusions. She was always so levelheaded. Not like him, having fantasy women and the agony of sexual treachery running loose in his brain, twisting his mind up until he could barely think.

Nicholas clawed at his sheets, petrified the red-headed woman would materialize again, hoping in some perverse way that she would. Nothing made sense any more.

Why? Was it a price the female students had to pay for admission? But he would have heard, the ones that refused would have run screaming to the tabloid channels.

The moon had set now, leaving cold starlight to kiss the valley. He could hear lost gusts of wind swirling round the eaves, gurgles of water from the overflowing lakes.

Why? She didn't have to do it. Not with Kitchener. Not with Rosette. So she must want to. Why? Why? Why?

Nicholas snapped awake, his head rising off the pillow in a reflex jolt. What had woken him? He was still in his T-shirt and jeans, waist button undone. The duvet was a crumpled mess below him.

It was like every nerve fibre was shooting distilled trepidation into his brain. He knew it was going to be bad, very bad.

The scream assaulted his ears. Female. Powerful and utterly wretched. Dragging on and on, enough to leave a throat raw and withered.

He rolled off the bed fast. There was just enough pre-dawn light leaking through the window to see by. The scream stopped as he reached the door, then started up again as he pulled it open.

He looked about wildly. Orange light was shining down at the far end of the north wing. He could see Rosette kneeling brokenly in the doorway to Kitchener's suite, clinging desperately to the wooden frame.

Getting to her was a confused blur. His feet pounding. The other doors opening. Pale anxious faces. That unending, spine-grating scream.

Tears were streaming down Rosette's face. She was shaking violently.

He rushed past her and saw the bedroom for the first time. The curtains were still shut and tinted biolum globes shone from the middle of bulbous paper-moon shades that hung from the ceiling. The furniture was supremely tasteful, a dark antique dresser, matching wardrobe, Chinese carpet, full-length mirror, a porcelain-topped table below the window, brass ornaments on the mantelpiece, monk chest. The centre-piece was a large four-poster bed with an amber canopy.

Edward Kitchener was lying on the snow-white silk sheets, at the middle of a deep scarlet bloodstain spreading to the edge of the mattress. He felt the intolerable pressure of his own scream building in his chest.

Kitchener's head was intact, showing an almost serene peacefulness. But the body… Ripped. Torn. Squashed. The ribcage had been clawed open, pulped organs spread across the bed.

Nicholas's scream burst out of his mouth. The roaring in his ears meant he couldn't even hear it. He was vaguely aware of the other students crowding in behind him.

His leg muscles pitched him on to the floor, and he vomited helplessly on to Kitchener's superb Chinese carpet.