A Quantum Murder

CHAPTER TWENTY

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."

"Yeah, I suppose it was. Well keep thinking about it; if anything does spring to mind get Lisa Collier to contact me at once. OK?"

"Yes."

"Right, now you're sponsored by the Randon company, aren't you?"

"Yes, they pay me an allowance, more like a salary actually, eight thousand New Sterling a year for the whole time I'm at Launde. Can you believe that much money? I sent two thousand back to Mum and Dad; they really struggled to help when I was at Cambridge, and I don't spend much at the Abbey, you see. Then there's a fund for any equipment I need for projects. Within reason, of course. But I never used any of that, most of my research was data simulations, the Abbey's lightware cruncher was enough."

"Did Randon ever ask you what Kitchener was working on?"

"No."

"So they didn't know about the wormhole research he was performing for Event Horizon?"

"No."

"What about anyone else? You obviously knew about it."

"Not very much, just that he was looking into it. Wormholes would plug very neatly into his cosmos theory."

"What is that?"

"He called it the Godslayer."

"The what?"

"Well, religion killer. Kitchener was hoping to put together a structural theory that went beyond Grand Unification. It would explain every phenomenon in the universe from psi to gravity. He said he could use it to prove that there was no such thing as God, that the universe was completely natural, and therefore explainable. Provided you had the maths to understand it."

Greg tried to imagine what Goldfinch, the Trinities' fundamentalist preacher, would make of that, and failed. It would have been interesting to watch a meeting between the priest and the physicist, though—from a distance. "Kitchener genuinely didn't care about other people's sensibilities, did he?"

"Yes, he did," Nicholas said, a shade defensively. "You never met him, he was kind to me, really encouraging. But he hated religion. He said we'd all be better off without it, that it caused too much trouble, and too many wars. He said people called him the Newton of the age, but he'd rather be the Galileo."

"And you didn't mind all this talk?" He observed the boy's thought currents boil with surprise.

"No. Why should I?"

"I take it that means you're not religious."

"Never really thought about it. Mum and Dad sometimes go to the Harvest Festival service, if they're not too busy. And I can remember going to the Christmas carol service a couple of times when I was young. But that's it."

"What about the other students? Did any of them consider this Godslayer concept to be sacrilegious?"

"Nobody ever said anything, no."

"OK. Was Kitchener working on any kind of energy generating system; like microfusion, or proton boron fusion, something new, something radical?"

Nicholas screwed his face up. "Nothing like that. He gave me a magnetosphere induction problem to solve, though."

"What's that?"

"Well, it's hardly new, but if you place a length of wire in orbit, its motion as it moves through the Earth's magnetosphere will generate an electric current. It's a simple induction principle, like a generator."

"How big a current?"

"That depends on the size of the cable, obviously."

"Yeah, right." Maybe the boy wasn't so different after all. "What I need to know, Nicholas, is are you talking about something that can power an AV player, or a city?"

"Oh. A city, definitely, or maybe a medium-sized town. Kitchener was very insistent about that. He said that we had to learn to concentrate on the practical applications of physics, abstract theory was all very well but it doesn't pay the bills. He was right, of course, he was always right. He called it his ninety-ten law. He let us study abstract theories for ninety per cent of the time, but we had to spend at least ten per cent of each week working on practical ideas. He used to set us two projects simultaneously, one of each."

"How far had you got with this magnetosphere project?"

"I hadn't done much work on it at all, I was spending most of my time on the dark-mass project. But I did confirm its basic validity. I designed a cobweb array, about two hundred and fifty kilometres across. The beauty of that is, if you give it a slight spin it will retain its shape without any additional structural material, you only need the cables themselves. I was going to work on strength of materials limits next. But…"

"I thought beaming power down from space was ecologically unsound."

Nicholas smiled vacantly. "I was going to use a superconductor cable, tethered between the Equator and geostationary orbit. That's a perfectly practical solution; the orbital tower is an idea even older than magnetosphere induction. It was originally suggested that you build it with magnetic rails and run lift capsules up and down, that way you'd never need any sort of spaceplane to get into orbit. My version was a lot simpler and cheaper, just a single strand fixed to a station that could receive power beamed to it from the induction webs, a bigger version of the communication platforms that are up there now. The superconductor would have to be held up by a monolattice filament, of course, it couldn't possibly support its own weight. It was Kitchener who suggested it as an alternative method of bringing the power down. He joked about it, he said he'd be as rich as Julia Evans if it was ever built. He gets a royalty from monolattice filament, you see. It's only a fraction of a per cent, but for a cable thirty-six thousand kilometres long, it would be a hell of a lot of money. He was really keen to see how the figures came out."

"Nicholas, how advanced is this project? I mean, could it actually be built with today's technology?"

"I don't know. It was really just a thought experiment, Kitchener tailored them to match our fields of expertise. The equations were interesting, I had to juggle so many factors, but it did look like it would come out pretty expensive. That's why I was excited about Event Horizon's new spaceplane, the way it's going to bring launch costs down. I was going to include those figures in my analysis."

"But you never got round to it?"

"No."

"Was the project stored in the Abbey's Bendix?"

"Yes, but I kept a back-up file in my terminal. It should still be there."

"Did you ever tell Randon that you were working on this idea?"

"Oh, no, I never discussed it with anybody else apart from the other students."

"So the company never really showed much interest in what you were doing at Launde?"

"They offered me the sponsorship money and a guaranteed research position, that's all. Kitchener's students have this reputation, you see. It's a bit snobby, but a lot of them have turned out to be real high-achievers."

"Yeah." Greg couldn't help thinking about Ranasfari. You couldn't get any further apart than him and Kitchener, the cold aesthetic and the glorious old debaucher. The chemistry must have been there, though; Ranasfari clearly revered his mentor. And Kitchener had spotted the potential, just like he had with Nicholas.

"It was all arranged through an agency in Cambridge," Nicholas said. "They specialize in placing graduates. I've never actually met anyone from the company itself. I was looking forward to working in France."

"Do you speak French?"

"Not very well. I've got one of those teach yourself courses on an audio memox. I'll speak it properly by the time… I mean, I would have spoken it properly by the time I finished my second year at Launde. There's only a vocabulary and syntax to memorize, that's not much of a problem for me."

"Interesting. You have a lot of confidence in your memory, don't you?"

"Yes, my recall is virtually perfect. I wasn't trying to boast," he added contritely.

"I didn't say you were."

"Kitchener said I should be proud of it. He said it was better than his."

"Have you ever had days which you can't remember? Events that are lost to you?"

Nicholas regarded him with a tinge of suspicion. "You mean like transient global amnesia?"

Greg was suddenly glad his thoughts weren't available for Nicholas to read. But he really should have known better than trying to creep up on a topic with Nicholas, especially anything remotely connected with science. "Yeah, transient global amnesia, or even trauma erasure."

"You think that's why your psi faculty didn't spot any guilt, isn't it? That I did murder Kitchener, and I just blanked it out."

"It's a possibility, Nicholas, and you know it is."

The swift heat of belligerence faded from the boy. "Yes," he said softly. "But I don't have blackouts. And I've never forgotten a day or an hour in my life."

"OK."

"I was telling the truth then, wasn't I?"

"Yes, Nicholas. You've never suffered from memory loss."

He rose to his feet, still as undecided as when he'd walked in. "I'll let you know what happens."

"Mr Mandel. Thanks."

"You're not out of it yet."

The CID office had been deluged with another wave of entropy. There were more folders and memox crystals littering the desks. Crumpled fast-food wrappers bubbled up out of the bin, waxed kelpboard trays with congealed smears of sweet and sour sauce.

The detectives formed their usual closed-ranks knot around one of the desks beside the situation screen. Greg was given some dark speculative looks as he came in. Only Amanda acknowledged him with anything approaching a smile. Vernon Langley broke away from the group, another man following him.

"Did he admit anything?" he asked.

"No."

"Christ, that kid is a smooth one. What about your esp, did you pick up any guilt waves this time?"

"No," Greg said curtly.

"Shame about that."

"Yeah."

Vernon held up his police-issue cybofax. "I asked the lab to re-run tests on the samples Beswick supplied."

"And?"

"No trace of scopolamine, or any other drug. The boy's blood chemistry is perfectly balanced."

"OK, it was just a thought."

"I asked the lab people about scopolamine. You think Beswick made himself forget the murder?"

"It's one option, because he certainly doesn't remember. There must be a reason. What about his medical records?"

Vernon handed over the cybofax. Greg skipped down the datasheet it was displaying. There wasn't much; the usual childhood illnesses, chicken pox, mumps; a bad dose of flu when he was five; a sprained ankle at eleven. The last entry was a routine health check when he started university: again perfectly clean. Nicholas Beswick was a healthy, ordinary young man.

"Bugger," Greg mumbled.

"Anything there throw any light on the problem?" Vernon asked.

"No, not a bloody thing."

"Didn't think there was." He beckoned. "This is Sergeant Keith Willet," he said as his companion came forward. "Been at Oakham quite a while now."

Greg shook hands comfortably. The sergeant was wearing white shirtsleeves and shorts, regulation black tie in a tiny knot. He was in his early fifties, with the kind of hardened patience that said he'd just about seen it all, If he'd been in the army he would have been perfect sergeant-major material.

"You were here during the PSP years?" Greg asked.

"Yes, sir," he said. "Twenty years' service in Oakham now"

"You might have been right about Launde," Vernon told Greg. "Though I still don't see how this fits in with Kitchener's murder."

Greg looked at Willet. "You remembered something about the Abbey?"

"Yes, sir. There was a girl drowned in one of the lakes in Launde Park."

"Shit, yeah!" Now he remembered. It had been on a local datatext channel, quite a few years ago. The report had gone on to say that the police were questioning the Abbey's other residents about the accident. At the time he had assumed it was the start of a PSP campaign against Edward Kitchener.

Anything like that had interested him in those days; someone as prominent as Kitchener would have made a tremendous addition to the underground opposition. But nothing had ever come of it.

The detectives had all turned to stare at his exclamation.

Greg ignored them. "Can you remember her name?" he asked.

"Clarissa Wynne," Willet said. "She was one of Dr Kitchener's students."

The name didn't mean anything. "When was this?"

"About ten years ago, sir. Can't say exactly."

"Do you remember anything about the case?"

Willet glanced at Langley. He nodded, albeit with a trace of reluctance. Greg wondered what had been said before he arrived.

"Yes, sir, I'm afraid I do. We were ordered to shut it down, straight away, enter a verdict of accidental death. It came direct from the Ministry of Public Order."

"Jesus, the PSP wanted it kept quiet? Why?"

"I've no idea, sir."

"Was it an accidental death?"

Willet took his time answering. Greg sensed the disquiet in his mind, a real conflict raging. It was almost as though he was confessing a sin, relieved and shamed at the same time.

"The detective in charge was unhappy about the order. The girl had been drinking, but he thought it was more than student high-jinks that had gone wrong. But there was nothing he could do, certainly not launch an investigation. London said frog, and we all hopped. That was all we ever did in those days."

"Who was the detective?"

Willet gazed straight at him. "Maurice Knebel, sir."

"Ah," said Greg. Maurice Knebel was the major reason Oakham's police force had such poor relations with the local community. In the last two years of the PSP decade, when it was obvious to everyone else that the Party was faltering, Maurice Knebel had done his best to maintain their authority in Rutland, sending out the People's Constables at the smallest provocation. He epitomized the petty-minded apparatchik, blindly following the Party line, the kind who had inflicted almost as much damage on President Armstrong as the urban predators themselves. He was on the Inquisitor's top fifty wanted list. Notoriety of sorts. Nobody had seen him since the night the PSP fell. He had escaped the station minutes before the mob arrived, high on the deadly scent of freedom and vengeance. Not all the People's Constables had been so lucky.

"I didn't even know he was a genuine detective," Greg said.

"Yes, sir, started out a regular officer. He didn't go bad until later."

"How much later?"

"Sir?"

"You said he was upset about being ordered to close the book on the drowned girl. Was he a Party member then?"

"I think so. But he wasn't fanatical back in those days. He saw joining the Party as a way to promotion. It was the last three years, after he was appointed as the station's political officer, that's when the real trouble began."

"OK, fine, I appreciate your help."

"Sir." He left the CID office, visibly relieved.

"Well?" Langley asked.

The detectives were still watching him, waiting for the verdict. The psychic's pronouncement.

"Why on earth would the PSP want to hush up a girl student's death? Kitchener wasn't exactly one of their own."

"You think Kitchener killed her?" Langley asked. He thought of that white-haired old man watching Isabel undress. The picture he'd built up from all the students, Ranasfari, the worship they awarded him. A larger than life character, capable of both disgraceful roguishness and unselfish charity. "No, I don't. Let's have a look at the coroner's report. I suppose it'll be a whitewash, but there may be something in it."

Langley rubbed awkwardly at his chin. The detectives were all abruptly occupied at their work again.

"Sorry, Greg, we can't do that."

"I thought my Home Office authorization is still valid."

"It is," he said drily. "But the local coroner's office has the same problem we do. The hotrods crashed their memory core when Armstrong was ousted. There are no records left for the PSP years."

"They crashed a coroner's office? What the hell for? Coroners weren't anything to do with the PSP."

"I've no idea. Perhaps they regarded all officialdom as the same:

That familiar cold electric charge compressed his spine.

And the gland was barely active. He almost smiled, despite the worry. "No, I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"Intuition." He turned to the group of detectives. "Amanda, would you run a check through the Home Office for me? I want to know how many other coroner's offices were burnt by the hotrods when the PSP fell."

She nodded and sat behind one of the desks, activating its terminal.

"Look, Greg" — Langley was trying for the reasonable approach—"I really appreciate your help in finding the knife. But Clarissa Wynne's death is hardly relevant."

"Two deaths in the same community, the first one questionable, the second one bizarre. They're connected, no messing."

"How? They're ten years apart."

"If I knew more about Clarissa Wynne I might be able to tell you."

"I can hardly expand the Kitchener case to cover her death. For a start there isn't a single byte on her remaining. We don't even know what she looked like."

"Yeah." He let instinct drive him. Important, the girl's death was important. "Tell you, we're going to have to rectify that."

"Not after ten years, we're not. The only person who could have told you anything was Kitchener."

"Wrong. There's Kitchener, the other five students who were at Launde with her, and Maurice Knebel. And out of all of them, good old Maurice has everything about the case I need to know"

"Knebel? You can't be serious! For Christ's sake, we don't even know if he's still alive."

"I'll find out."

He threw his hands in the air. "Sure you will. I mean, the Inquisitors have only been looking for four years, and their methods don't exactly go by the book. They wouldn't know what a warrant looked like if it pissed on their boot."

"Nobody can run from Mindstar, not for ever, not even close." Greg said it with a deliberate bite of menace, enjoying the way it halted Langley's bumptiousness in midflight.

"Greg?" Amanda waved at him from behind her desk. He could see the cube had filled with datasheets, fuzzy green script with a perceptible Y-axis instability.

"What have you got?"

"There were five other coroner's offices in England which had their records destroyed in the two months either side of the PSP's fall. Two were due to firebomb attacks, the other three were hotrod burns."

"Where were the ones that got burnt by the hotrods?"

She ran a finger down the cube. "Gloucester, Canterbury, and Hexham."

"Well spread around," he mused.

"What are you saying?" Langley asked.

"That it's convenient; four offices in the whole of the country, and one of them is Oakham's, when we know that a dodgy report was loaded into its memory core."

"You can't be serious."

Greg clapped him on the shoulder, drawing a startled look. He knew Langley would never believe in a connection. The man was too good a policeman. Facts, facts, and more facts. That's what he needed.

It's also what you need to get Nicholas off, Greg reminded himself soberly.

"You keep plugging away at Nicholas," he said. "I'll need to borrow Sergeant Willet for the rest of the afternoon."

"All right." Langley seemed relieved that was all he was being asked for. "Why do you want him?"

"I told you: to find Maurice Knebel."