Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

Jakki hadn’t said a word against her for the last three days. Julia on the flatscreen cut the ribbon to the trading floor as Charlie Chaplin waddled across her back twirling his cane. All the jobbers cheered her enthusiastically.

Now they had been fun to talk to at the reception afzerwards. Most of them were under thirty.

She took another sip of tea as the scene changed back to East England’s breakfast studio. The blond twentysomething female presenter in a tight sweater was lounging back on a deep settee.

“That was yesterday’s opening ceremony,” she gushed warmly. “And to review it, I have our fashion correspondent, Leonard Sharr.”

The camera panned back to show the most effeminate man Julia had ever seen sitting at the other end of the settee, dressed in leather jeans and a purple jacket with half-sleeves, topaz handkerchief hanging flamboyantly out of his breast pocket. She bit back on her giggles.

“Leonard, what did you think of Julia’s clothes?”

“I found her choice so very, very appropriate. Tatty old design, showing tatty old films, at a tatty old function. It said simply nothing to me, except perhaps: look what a disaster I am, and I’m too rich to care. Really, this simply will not do for someone of her standing. She could be such a pretty little girl if she just made an effort and wore some nice frocks.”

“Arsehole!” Julia completely forgot her cup was still half full. The tea went everywhere.

The forensic team had cleared away all their polythene sheets and peeled the bar code tags off the furniture, they’d even returned the cacti to the table below the window, but somehow the room wasn’t the same. Nicholas stood at the foot of the circular bed, surveying the place that had been home for a few short months. Coming here originally had been the pinnacle of his life. Now it left him totally unmoved. It wasn’t that Launde Abbey was full of bad memories, rather it didn’t hold any memories for him at all, good or bad. Even the ghosts had departed-Kitchener, Eleanor…

He dropped his maroon shoulder-bag at the foot of the bed, and stared round in some perplexity. His rock band holoprints were missing. What had the forensic team wanted them for anyway?

He began opening drawers, and of course none of his clothes were where they should be. He settled for dumping everything on the bed to be sorted out later. The uniformed policeman who had driven him up to the Abbey wasn’t going to hustle him along. Oakham police couldn’t extend enough courtesies right now.

There had been a press conference to announce they were releasing him from custody, that he was in no way implicated in the murder of Edward Kitchener, The reporters had clamoured for details; but apart from saying he was glad it was all over, and that he thought the police had done a good job under difficult circumstances, and no he wasn’t going to sue for wrongful arrest, he didn’t answer any questions. Amanda Paterson and Jon Nevin had stepped in sharpish to deflect any awkward shouted queries. And then amazingly the press had left him alone, no intrusion into his private life, no chasing after his parents or Emma, no big-money offers for exclusives. That was down to Julia Evans, he suspected. He was rather pleased he could work out that such underground pressures were being applied. The old Nicholas would have accepted their lack of interest without thought, never wondering about the fast manoeuvring and horse-trading that must have gone on deep below the surface of public awareness.

He smiled. The old Nicholas, as if he’d emerged from a chrysalis, born again. But it was true enough. The world was exactly the same, only his perception of it had altered. Matured, rather. What did they call it? Realpolitik. And his first encounter with that phenomenon had come two days ago, the morning Vernon Langley had let him out of the cell, telling him he was free to go.

Greg Mandel had arrived at the station, looking grieved and tired, and told him what had actually happened. There was a secrecy order to sign and thumbprint, and it had been made very clear he wasn’t to speak to anybody about paradigms or retrospective neurohormones ever again. Officially, MacLennan had let Liam Bursken out of Stocken Hall for the night, bringing him to Launde to murder Kitchener.

Bursken was permanently incommunicado, unable to protest his innocence, perhaps not even wanting to-let the sinners believe the Lord could reach out to them through bars of steel. MacLennan was dead. Suicide, Greg said. And looking at his stony, impassive face, even Nicholas’s perpetual inquisitiveness had tacitly retreated.

As the price of being vindicated, adopting that particular masquerade was cheap indeed.

He emptied the last drawerful of socks on to the bed. It was raining quite heavily again, thick clouds darkening the morning sky. Roll on April and the start of England’s long summer. When he walked over to the window he could just make out the grubby grey strip of road running through the park.

Night-time, when the rain had fallen like a biblical deluge. The jeep crawling down the slope cowards the river. The vivid flash he had thought was lightning.

He shuddered and turned away.

The cacti on the copper-topped table hadn’t been watered for over a week, the soil in their pots was bone dry. And he never had seen them flower the way Kitchener had told him they would.

He decided to take a couple with him. There had to be something of the old man’s that would stay with him, some tangible personal memento. And he doubted he would be welcome to visit Rosette and her baby. Although you never knew. Motherhood might soften her…

Nah. No chance.

Grinning, he picked up two of the cacti pots.

Someone knocked quietly on the door.

“Come in.” He put the cacti down again, thinking it would be the uniformed policeman.

It was Isabel.

He stared dumbly at her, completely tongue-tied. The old Nicholas wasn’t so distant after all.

She was wearing a lavender-coloured dress, curly hair held back by a broad black velvet band. As lovely as always. It was so painful just seeing her. Everything he ever wanted. Unreachable.

“Hello, Nick.”

“Er, hello. I was just collecting my things.” Nothing had changed, he still couldn’t talk to her, say what he wanted. Pathetic!

“Me too. The executors are going to take over the running of the Abbey in a couple of days. Did you know they are going to open it as a sort of ashram for university science students?”

“Yes, I’d heard.” He looked down at his trainers.

“I’m sorry I didn’t help you with the police.” She clenched her hands in front of her, fingers twisting. “We all are actually. It was so unfair on you. I don’t know how I could have ever believed you were involved.”

“That’s all right.”

“Hardly, Nick.”

He risked a glance. She was looking out of the window, face composed, dispassionate.

“I did do it, you know,” he said. “It was me.”

“No. Your hands, but not you.”

He considered that. If Isabel, someone so intimately involved with Kitchener, could accept his innocence, then maybe he was blameless after all. “Isabel?” he began.

She parted her lips in a small knowing smile. “No, Nick, I didn’t love him. That was just a part of Launde, the wonder and the craziness. I was swept along like all the others. I wanted to tell you. I was going to tell you the next morning.”

He hung his head.

“And what about you?” she asked. “What are you going to do next?”

“Er, I’ve been offered a research post by Event Horizon, actually. In Ranasfari’s team at Cambridge. I think I detect the hand of Greg Mandel behind that. If Event Horizon is prepared to employ me, then I must be innocent. That’s what people will think, anyway.”