Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

The words had come shimmering out of her mouth as she gagged, Greg hugging her shoulders, protective and concerned. “He did it. Jesus, he didn’t even blink.” She sucked down some air, wiping a sticky thread of vomit from her lips. “What are you?”

That was when her mad eyes found him, their stare an almost tangible force, tightening round his throat.

Something shivered inside him then, enervating his legs. The cold terrible certainty that she must mean him. She was accusing him!

“Who?” It was spoken by half the people in the room. He may even have joined in. He couldn’t remember.

But she said nothing. Just glared, her ragged breathing the only sound. Then Greg’s stare was added to hers, calm and hateful, and Nicholas felt his face reddening even as the clamour of bewilderment inside his skull made him blurt:

“What? What? What have I done?”

“He did it,” Greg told the detectives. His voice had gone husky, saddened more than anything.

Langley had looked at Nicholas, then Greg, then back again. “Him?” he asked incredulously. “Beswick?”

“For Christ’s sake put some handcuffs on him,” Eleanor rasped. “If you’d only seen what he did…”

Greg’s arm tightened round her. She had started to tremble.

“But you interviewed him,” Vernon Langley said. “You cleared him.”

“I told you when we started. I’d never seen that kind of mind before, didn’t know what to look for. Well, now I do. He’s completely cracked, won’t even admit it to himself. Jesus, he was fucking inhuman back there.”

“No,” Nicholas said. But nobody appeared to have heard him. “No. I didn’t. I didn’t do that.”

“Are you sure?” Langley asked Greg reluctantly.

“Yeah. It was him.”

“No,” Nicholas said. “No.”

Amanda Paterson and Jon Nevin had somehow moved to stand on either side of his chair. He glanced up at them, face pleading. “I didn’t.”

“Is there any proof; solid proof, I mean?” Langley asked. “Can we test the clothes he was wearing?”

“I can do you one better than that,” Greg said. “I can show you where he left the knife.”

“I didn’t do it!” Why wouldn’t anyone listen?

“It’s downstairs, in the kitchen,” Greg said.

“We checked the kitchen,” Amanda retorted indignantly.

“Not all of it.”

“You two,” Langley signalled his colleagues-”bring him with us, and keep an eye on him. I don’t want any sudden sprints across the park.”

“I’ll stay up here,” Eleanor said shakily.

“Me too,” Gabriel said.

“OK,” Greg said. He patted Eleanor’s shoulder. “I’ll be back straight away.”

She nodded weakly, hunching in on herself as though she was freezing.

Nicholas felt Jon Nevin’s hand on his forearm. He didn’t protest. His strangely leaden limbs needed all the help they could get to rise out of the chair. Gabriel had gone to sit beside Eleanor, the two of them with their heads together, murmuring quietly.

In the kitchen, Greg walked straight over to the iron range. “It’s in here,” he pointed to the copper bedwarmer hanging on the wall. “He hid it when he was burning the apron.”

“Don’t touch it,” Denzil said. He and Nicolette cleared the kitchen table, covering it with a broad sheet of polythene. They put on thin yellow gloves and gingerly took the bed-warmer off its hook. The three detectives crowded round as Denzil opened it; Nicholas couldn’t see.

Langley turned round, his face struggling against an expression of loathing. “Nicholas Beswick, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of one Edward Kitchener.”

“No!”

There was a long knife in the bedwarmer, its blade snapped off at the base so that it could be wedged in the tarnished copper basin. The handle was rolling loose in the bottom. Both were stained black from dried blood.

“You do not have to say anything at this time, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be used as evidence against you in a court of law.”

His hands were jerked behind him. Rings of cold metal constricting his wrists. The snick of the locks.

“I didn’t do it.”

They were deaf, immune to any words he said. They also detested him. He had never known that before. People so rarely paid him any attention at all. In the first few days after the murder, the Oakham police had treated him with a slightly puzzled indulgence, as if he was some kind of foreign animal that they didn’t know how to feed properly.

But after Nevin brought him back from the Abbey it had been different. The word had gone out in advance. Off-duty officers had stood in doorways as he was marched through the station corridors to his cell. He’d cringed from the way they regarded him, the naked revulsion, expecting to be set upon and beaten. There had been no violence. The cuffs had been tight, though, his hands swelling and swelling until he. thought they would burst. They had left them on for ages, long after his fingers had gone numb, dragging out the booking procedure.

He had caught one glimpse of Isabel, just as he was being put into the cell. Nevin was finally taking off his cuffs in the corridor outside when she emerged from the cell she’d been sleeping in. He cried out her name, and she turned. That was when he saw her face was like all the others.

“I didn’t do it.”

Her head tipped to one side, faintly nonplussed, at one remove from the world, like the times he’d seen her performing a difficult equation. There was virtually no sign of recognition.

“Please, Isabel. I didn’t.”

Her bottom lip turned down, as if it was all of no consequence, trivia. She was still utterly beautiful.

A shove between his shoulder blades sent him stumbling into the cell as blood and feeling shot violently back into his hands. The door slammed shut, lock whirring.

He had thought the night was bad, alone with near-suicidal confusion, the memories of the allegations. Eleanor’s desolated face, the knife with its awful scale of black flakes. Nobody would talk to him, the sergeant who brought his evening meal simply slammed the moulded tray down on the table, mute.

Somehow, somewhere, there had been a terrible mistake. He had waited and waited for them to find out where they had gone wrong, to come back and set him free. He didn’t want an apology, he just wanted to be allowed to go.

Gnats and small ochre moths emerged from the dead conditioning grille, fluttering silently round the biolum panel. The light stayed on all night. Nicholas huddled into a corner of the cell below the high window, drawing his knees up against his chest, a blanket round his shoulders, waiting, waiting-

Friday morning was worse, thrusting him from the extreme of his solitude into the bedlam of the media madhouse.

Oakham magistrates’ court sat in the castle hall. It was a short drive around the park from the police station. Nicholas spent the whole time in the car with a blanket over his head.

He felt the car judder to a halt. The door was opened. Shouts were flung at him.

“Did you do it?”

“What was your motive, Nick?”

“Were you on drugs?”

He tried to screw himself into the car seat. A hand like steel clamped on to his arm, pulling him out.

“Come on son, this way, keep looking at your feet, there’s no step.”

The questions merged into a single protracted yowl. He could see tarmac below his trainers, then pale yellow stone. The light changed. He was inside.

The blanket was pulled off.

He was in a short passage with whitewashed walls, narrow and cramped. Lisa Collier was standing in front of him, the two of them at the centre of a jostling circle of police.

“I didn’t do it,” he told the lawyer frantically. “Please, Mrs Collier. You have to believe me.”