A Quantum Murder

  And she'd seen first-hand what the modified beasts could do to people. It had been a gene-tailored sentinel panther which attacked Suzi.

  "It's friends, look, Sparky," Colin said, patting the dog's head. "They're all friends." The dog gazed round at them with big cat-iris eyes, and blinked lazily. It looked back up at Colin. Reluctantly, Eleanor thought. She could see Joey Foulkes all tensed up, hand hovering near the give-away bulge under his suit jacket.

  "Well, come in," said Colin. The stick was shaken vigorously for emphasis. "Sparky's smelt you all now. He likes you." He backed into the hall, shooing the dog out of the way.

  Eleanor found Greg's hand and held him tightly as they went inside.

  Colin led them into his lounge. It was on the ground floor, furnished in plain teak, the upholstery a light green; big french windows gave him a view out across the meadow. Biolum globes in smoked-glass pendant shades cast a strong light. There were pictures of battle scenes on every wall; the army from the Napoleonic wars right up to Turkey.

  "Before anything else," Eleanor said to Greg, "I've got some bad news for you. The Stamford and Rutland Mercury, the Rutland Times, and the Melton Times all had their memory cores crashed by the hotrods. The circuit said they were too sympathetic to the PSP. So there's no record of any incident at Launde Abbey."

  Greg clamped a hand on each forearm, and kissed her warmly. "The hotrods crashed the coroner's office as well," he said. The pleased tone confused her momentarily.

  Colin eased himself delicately into a manor wing chair.

  Eleanor hadn't seen him since the wedding last year, and even then she'd only had a few words. She thought he looked a lot frailer.

  "Now then, Greg," Colin said. "What's all this about?"

  Eleanor listened to Greg summarizing the case. Somehow she couldn't draw much comfort from the enigma surrounding Clarissa Wynne's death. Greg's intuition had been right. As usual. But the entire sequence of events was becoming equivocal, shaded in a formless grey murk seeping out of the hinterlands, eroding facts before her eyes. It was sadly depressing.

  Greg was in his element, of course. And Gabriel, although to a lesser degree.

  Right at the centre of her mind was a tired little girl who wanted to say: 'I saw Nicholas do it. That's an end. Let's leave it.' Why do adults always have to be so bloody noble and resolute?

  "Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to erase every trace of Clarissa Wynne," Greg said. "Not to mention expense. Hotrods don't come cheap, and they've burnt three newspapers plus a coroner's office; maybe Oakham police station was part of it, maybe not. But the fact remains, every last hard byte on the girl has gone. All we're left with is personal memories. And precious few of them."

  "What about the international news libraries?" Colin asked.

  "I checked with Julia," Greg said. "They all have files on Kitchener, of course. None of them mention Clarissa Wynne. It was a local matter, and as far as anyone knew an accidental death. Not important enough. Although Globecast's Pan-Europe news and current affairs office think there might have been some kind of hotrod burn against their memory cores. Several file codes relating to that period were scrambled. But they can't actually find anything missing, so there's no way of proving it."

  "I doubt they could help anyway," Eleanor said. "If there had been any suspicion that Kitchener was implicated in that girl's death, it would have been headline news the world over. I'd say the PSP's cover-up worked pretty well."

  "Yeah," Greg admitted.

  "Which is where I come in," Colin said. There was a cheerful smile on his pale face.

  Eleanor had the notion he was terribly grateful to be asked. Eager to show he could still pull his weight, not let the side down. Except it was so painfully obvious his health was decaying rapidly. His heart, she guessed.

  "If you could," Greg said. He flashed her a shamefaced look. "There's no better tracker."

  "Certainly can," Colin said proudly. "The map room's down the corridor." He pressed both hands against the chair, struggling to rise. Joey Foulkes came forward to help him, but he shook off the young hardliner with exaggerated self-reliance.

  * * * *

  The map room was a plain white cube, three metres to a side, windowless. It put Eleanor in mind of Kitchener's computer room. Sparky wasn't allowed in.

  The biolum panels came on to show a circular flatscreen mounted on one wall. There was a single 'ware module on the floor in a corner.

  Colin gave a voice command to the 'ware, and a map of England appeared on the flatscreen. He stood in front of it, both hands pressed on the bulb of his stick, and looked the outline up and down, nodding in satisfaction. "It's there, Greg, I can still do it, by God!" His voice was a weak growl.

  "That's why I came," Greg said. "Nobody else in your class."

  She could detect a tremor in his voice. When she looked his eyes were dark with pain. She fumbled for his hand.

  "Talk to me, young Keith," Colin said.

  Willet twitched uncomfortably. "What about, sir?"

  "This dreadful Maurice Knebel chap, of course. I need your mind's image of him to work on."

  "Sir?"

  "Tell us about an incident you remember," Greg said. "A station cricket match where he got caught out. What did he wear? Bad habits, good habits. What sort of food did he eat? Who were his friends?"

  "Yes, sir. Well, there was one suit which he always wore, this would be around the time of the Wynne girl's death I suppose. Brown and grey, check, it was. Used to get some stick about it."

  Eleanor filtered out what the sergeant was saying. It was almost unfair to make someone so stolid and reliable relate trivial tales from the past.

  Colin had become preternaturally still. His stare had developed that distance of all gland users, seeing at ninety degrees to the real universe.

  The old man had been a major in an English army infantry regiment at the time when the Mindstar Brigade was being formed. He was fifty-five and due for imminent retirement when the blanket service psi-assessment tests gave him the excuse he needed to extend his beloved commission. Mindstar hadn't intended to take anyone his age, but his farsight rating was one of the highest they recorded. Fortunately his ESP faculty had almost developed as it was intended.

  Willet was droning on about Maurice Knebel and his fondness for Indian food when Colin leant forwards and deftly pressed his open palm against the flatscreen. The map image shifted instantly, expanding the area around his hand. It was centred on Peterborough, she noticed with a start. The vivid featureless turquoise of the Fens Basin had bitten into a third of the screen.

  Willet had stopped talking.

  "Keep going," Colin instructed.

  "Sir. Curries were his favourite ..."

  Eleanor could see a lone yellow dot in the basin, just east of Peterborough. Prior's Fen, she realized. Colin must keep the map scrupulously updated. He had spent most of the PSP years in France, charging kombinates a small fortune for his services. "Too old to join the fight against Armstrong," he had told her bitterly.

  He touched the map again. This time Peterborough jumped up to occupy half of the flatscreen, leaving a ten kilometre band of countryside visible around the outside.

  Willet flashed Greg a despairing glance. Greg gave him a fast gesture: carry on.

  "The woman he was living with left him when he was appointed station political officer. There was talk of him and one of the appararchik women on the town's PSP committee ..."

  "Here," Colin said. His forefinger touched the map in a positive jab. A district turned a shade lighter, its scarlet boundary line flashing insistently. He stood right up against the screen, face coated in a backwash of artificial blue and yellow radiance, deepening the folds of flesh. "That's where he is. I can't get any more precise than that. Not from this distance."

  Eleanor could feel a groan of dismay building in her gullet. She was afraid to let it out in case it sounded too much like a whimper.

  "Figures," Greg said. "He's PSP,
where else would he be perfectly safe right now?"

  Colin's forefinger was pointing at Walton.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Greg's existence had collapsed to a flimsy universe five metres in diameter. Night-time flying was always bad. But night-time and fog, that was shit awful.

  He was hanging in a nylon web harness below a Westland ghost wing, gossamer blade propeller humming efficiently behind him. The photon amp band across his eyes bestowed an alien blue tinge to every surface, the glow of electron orbits in decay. A column of neat chrome-yellow figures shone on the right-hand side of his vision field: time, grid reference, altitude, direction of flight, power levels, airspeed. The guido 'ware placed him eight hundred metres high, two kilometres out from Peterborough above the Fens basin.

  Prior's Fen, and the Event Horizon security division tilt-fan which had ferried him and Teddy out there, was twenty minutes behind, isolated by treacherously fluctuating walls of stone-grey vapour. The loneliness which had insinuated itself into his thoughts in that time was total, tricking his brain into finding shapes among the grey-blue desolation, the grinning spectres of nightmare clamouring in on an unwary mind.

  He used to be able to put his feelings on hold for missions, concentrate on details and their application to the immediate.

  It was the army way, training and discipline could overcome every human frailty given time. But he'd lost it. Leaking slowly out of his psyche during endless sunny days beside the reservoir, smoothed away by Eleanor's kisses.

  Now he could feel the unfamiliar and enervating stirrings of panic as the wing membrane murmured to itself in the squally air. His sole link to reality was a slim microwave beam punching up through the cloying seaborne mist to strike Event Horizon's private communication satellite in geosync orbit. Directional, scrambled, ultra-secure.

  "You there, Teddy?" The modulated question slicing upwards, hitting the satellite's phased array antenna, splitting like a laser fired at a fractured mirror, bounced straight back down. Two beams: one received at the Event Horizon headquarters building in Westwood, the second targeted on another ephemeral five-metre bubble somewhere in the vast emptiness behind him.

  "Where the flick else?" Teddy's gruffness carried a trace of anxiety which Greg was learning to recognize from his own voice.

  "Hey, you remember when we used to get paid for this?"

  "Yeah. Nothing fucking changes. Weren't no fun in them days, neither."

  "True. OK, I'm one and a half klicks from the east shore now, starting to descend. Morgan? Any air traffic yet?"

  "Negative, Greg," Morgan said, his voice sounding muffled in Greg's earpiece. "There's some tilt-fan activity in New Eastfield, but the fog has shut down ninety per cent of the city's usual movements."

  That was one shiver of joy, he didn't have to worry about colliding with low-flying planes. "Roger. Going down." He shifted his weight slightly, feeling the angle of the slipstream change. The fog density remained the same. According to Event Horizon's Earth Resource platforms it was a belt ninety kilometres wide, extending westwards almost all the way to Leicester. They had watched it boil up out of the North Sea through most of the afternoon. Perfect cover.

  * * * *

  The mission had taken a day to set up. Naturally, Julia had wanted to send the police in, all legal and above board. She hadn't quite grasped what they were up against. Someone—some organization?—methodical enough to guard against the remotest chance of a query being raised about the death of a girl ten years in the past. Paranoia or desperation—either way, they had it in massive quantities. And they didn't shy away from positive action to eliminate threats.

  Even with the channels working themselves into hysterics over the Scottish reunion question, a police operation on a scale large enough to successfully arrest a single man in Walton would attract wide newscast coverage. The Black-shirts would resist the police incursion, there would be riots, sniper fire, a lot of people hurt. After that, leaks would be inevitable, and Julia's name would be foremost among them.

  His way was much quieter, safer. Reducing the risk until it focused on just two people.

  He would have been happier if Eleanor had shouted at him, put her foot down, told him he was being macho stupid. At least he would have been able to shout back, or argue, vent a bit of feeling. Instead she had stuck to being silent and sorrowful. Which made it harder. Which put him on edge. Which wasn't good.

  Gabriel had been reassuringly scathing, but that had taken on the quality of a ritual, she trusted his intuition almost more than he did. Morgan was frankly sceptical about the whole notion. And Greg had to admit even he was having trouble seeing how Clarissa Wynne's vaguely suspicious drowning could be connected to Kitchener's murder.

  With the cocoon of fog acting like a mild form of sensory deprivation his thoughts were free to roam through wilder realms of possibility, fantasy equivalents of Gabriel's tau lines. But even among the more fanciful possibilities he conjured up there really was no getting round that memory of Nicholas walking so calmly into Kitchener's bedroom. Maybe the ambiguity he felt so strongly was focused on the boy's motive? Everyone assumed Nicholas had murdered Kitchener because he was overwrought over Isabel. But there was the question of the method. Maybe Launde harboured some dark secret instead?

  Yeah sure. Ghosts and ghoulies and bumps in the night, he told himself mockingly. Secret monsters would be too easy. Somebody wiped all those cores. Three and a half years before Nicholas Beswick ever set eyes on Launde Abbey.

  He gave up, pushing the load into the future and squarely on Maurice Knebel's shoulders. Alarmed at just how much he was coming to depend on the absconded detective to provide him with answers when they finally came face to face.

  One thing, there was no going back. There never bloody was; his character flaw.

  * * * *

  His guido put him seven hundred metres out from the city's easterly shore, height one hundred and fifty metres. Closing fast. Fog split around the leading edge of the wing, re-forming instantly behind the trailing edge. A slick coating of minute droplets was deposited on the leathery membrane, streaming backwards and shaking free in a horizontal rain.

  The photon amp was boosted up to its highest resolution.

  He still couldn't see anything.

  "Virtual overlay," he told the guido 'ware. Translucent green and blue and red petals flipped up into the retinal feed from the photon amp. He looked out across a city built from frozen laserlight.

  Morgan's people had built the virtual simulation up from the afternoon's satellite passes. Accurate to ten centimetres, more comprehensive than any memory in the city council's planning office data cores.

  A flood of neutral pixels darkened and hardened below him, resolving into a solid black plane. He felt the illusion of space opening up around him again. Tremendously reassuring.

  He just prayed that the simulation's alignment was correct. The shoreline buildings of the Gunthorpe district formed a flat abrupt wall of dimensionless green dead ahead. It was the only eastern district to expand since the Warming; a quirk of fate had placed it alongside a low triangular promontory jutting a couple of kilometres out into the basin. The fields and pastures which had survived the deluge had been swiftly covered in blocks of flats.

  Two hundred metres off the promontory's tip was a patch of spiky indigo waveforms, as though an iceberg had endured the Warming and sought shelter in the basin. It was Eye, a village still in the process of being subsumed by the sluggish currents of the mire, reduced to an erratic formation of mud dunes and crumbling brick walls.

  The guido 'ware printed a trajectory graphic for him. A tunnel of slender orange rings snaking away from him, round the north side of the urbanized promontory, and curving down to touch Walton.

  Greg swung himself to one side, lining up the ghost wing in the centre of the tunnel. Orange rings flashed past silently.

  * * * *

  Morgan had wanted to send one of his security division hardliners alo
ng on the penetration mission. Greg turned him down politely, hoping he wouldn't make an issue of it. They were tough and well trained, but there was a world of difference between corporate clashes and all-out combat. He needed someone he could rely on totally.

  Back in Turkey, Greg had been in charge of a tactical raider squad when they were cut off and pinned down in a mountain village by Legion fire. Half of the men had wanted to make a break for it, but Greg made them stay put. Teddy was in charge of the back-up team.

  He had spent the next three hours cowering under a dusty sky as bullets thudded into the sandstone walls of dilapidated hovels, and mortar rounds fell all around. Time had stretched out excruciatingly, but he never let go of that tenuous trust in his huge sergeant.

  Teddy had eventually turned up in their ageing Belgian Air Force Black Hawk support helicopter, flown by a shaken, terrified pilot. Greg didn't learn until much later how Teddy persuaded the man to fly into the heart of a grade three fire zone. There would have been a court martial, except the pilot refused to testify.

  Eleanor's right, I do dwell on Turkey too much.

  But he was bloody glad it was Teddy in the second ghost wing.

  The orange circles took him round the north of Gunthorpe. Here the basin mud had surged along a slight depression between Walton and Werrington, engulfing roads and buildings. It was only a metre deep, but the relentless pressure eroded bricks and concrete, exploiting every crack and crevice.

  Foundations were eaten away, day by day, year by year, cement pulverized, reinforcement prongs corroded, bricks sucked out. Roofs had collapsed, the abraded walls sagged then fell. Even now the piles of rubble were still being assaulted from below, dragged down by the unstable alluvial substratum, a pressure that wouldn't end until the entire zone was levelled. Weeds and reeds choked the rolling mounds in a mouldy mat of entwined tendrils. The satellite image had shown the whole area crisscrossed by paths worn by adventurous children, glimmers of metal detritus peeking through the limp foliage.

  The virtual simulation had shaded it in as a lightly nicked pink desert.