"We wanted the dust filter," Denzil said absently. "Surprising what they accumulate."
Langley and Nevin had followed her in. Amanda had stayed with Nicolette in the dining room. "I've seen it enough times," she'd muttered tightly.
Eleanor looked at the four-poster bed and grimaced. The sheets had been removed. There was a big dark brown stain on the mattress. Three holographic projectors had been rigged up around the bed, chrome silver posts two metres high, with a crystal bulb on top. Optical cable snaked over the floor between them.
The player was lying on the carpet at the foot of the bed. Denzil picked it up, and gave her an anxious glance. There was no sign of his smile. "Standard speech, but it really isn't pretty."
"I'll manage," she said.
"All right. But if you're going to vomit, do it out in the corridor, please. We've cleaned enough of it off this carpet already."
She realized he wasn't joking.
An egg-shaped patch of air above the bed sparkled, then the haze spread out silently; runnels dripped down the sides of the mattress on to the floor, serpents twisting up the carved posts. Edward Kitchener materialized on white silk sheets.
The remains of Edward Kitchener.
Eleanor grunted in shock, and jammed her eyes shut. She took a couple of breaths. Come on girl, you see far worse on any schlock horror channel show.
But that wasn't real.
The second time it wasn't quite so bad. She was incredulous rather than revolted. What sort of person could calmly do this to another? And it had to be a deliberate, planned action; there was no frenzied hacking, it had been performed with clinical precision. A necromantic operation. Hadn't the Victorian police suspected that Jack the Ripper was some kind of medical student?
She glanced round. Greg had wrinkled his face up in extreme distaste, forcing himself to study the hologram in detail. Jon Nevin was looking at the floor, the window, the dresser, anywhere but the bed.
"Yeah, OK," Greg said. "That's enough."
The faint aural glow cast by the projection faded from the walls. When she looked back at the bed, Kitchener had gone. Air hissed out through her teeth, muscles loosening. Edward Kitchener had looked like such a chirpy old man, a sort of idealized grandfather. A gruff tongue, and a loving nature.
"How was he actually killed?" Greg asked.
We think he was smothered by a pillow," Vernon said. "One of them had traces of saliva in a pattern consistent with it being held over his head."
"So what did all the damage?"
"Pathology says a heavy knife," said Denzil. "Straight blade, thirty to forty centimetres long."
"One of the kitchen knives?"
"We don't know. There are drawers full of them downstairs, some of them are virtually antiques. We catalogued eighteen, and none of those had any traces of blood. But the housekeeper can't say for sure if one is missing. And then there's all the lab equipment, plus the engineering shop, plenty of cutting implements in those two. Blimey, you could make a knife in the engineering shop then grind it up afterwards. Who knows?"
Greg led them all back out into the corridor. "Did the murderer leave any traces?"
"The only hair and skin particles we have found anywhere in the bedroom belong to either Kitchener, the students, or the housekeeper and her two helpers."
"What about when the murderer left?" Greg asked. "Do you know the route they took? There must have been some of Kitchener's blood or body fluid smeared somewhere."
"No, there wasn't," Denzil said, vaguely despondent. "We've spent the whole of the last two days in this corridor going over the walls and carpet with a photon amp plugged into a lightware number cruncher running a spectrographic analysis program—had to get a special Home Office budget allocation for that. This carpet we're standing on has blotches of wine, gin, whisky, cleaning detergent, hair, dandruff, skin flakes, shoe rubber, shoe plastic, a lot of cotton thread from jeans. You name it. But no blood, no fluid, not from Kitchener. Whoever it was, they took a great deal of care not to leave any traces."
"Was Liam Bursken that fastidious?" Greg asked Vernon.
"I'm not sure," the detective said. "I can check."
"Please," Greg said.
He loaded a note into his cybofax.
"What does that matter?" Nevin asked.
"It helps with elimination. I want to know if someone that deranged would bother with being careful. A tekmerc would at least make an effort not to leave any marks."
"We do think the murderer wore an apron while he murdered Kitchener," Denzil said. "One of the housekeeper's was burnt in the kitchen stove on Friday morning. The students had a salad on Thursday night. So the stove was lit purposely, it was still warm when we arrived. But there are only a few ash flakes left. We know there was blood on the apron, but the residue is so small we couldn't even tell you if it was human blood. It could have come from beef, or rabbit, or sheep."
"The point being, why go to all the trouble of lighting a fire to destroy an apron, if it wasn't the one used in the murder," Vernon said. "You and I know it was the one the murderer used. But in court, all it could be is supposition. Any halfway decent brief would tear that argument apart."
"If it was a tekmerc, why bother at all?" Eleanor asked. "Why spend all that time fiddling about lighting a fire, when they could simply have taken the apron with them? In fact why use one in the first place?"
"Good point," said Greg. He seemed troubled.
"Well?" Vernon asked.
"Haven't got a clue."
"Sorry," Eleanor said.
They shared a smile.
Greg looked at the carpet in the corridor, scratching the back of his neck. "So we do know that the murderer didn't leave by Kitchener's bedroom window," he said. "They went straight down to the kitchen, burnt the apron, then left."
"If he or she left," Vernon said.
"If it was one of the students, then they would have to make very certain no traces of Kitchener left the bedroom, or they would be incriminated," Jon Nevin said. There was a touch of malicious enjoyment in his tone. "That would fit this cleanliness obsession, the need to avoid contamination."
"Contamination." Greg mulled the word over. "Yeah. You gave the students a head to toe scan, I take it?"
"As soon as they were back in Oakham station," Vernon said. "Three of them had touched Kitchener, of course, but only in the presence of the others."
"Figures," said Greg. "Which three?"
"Harding-Clarke, Beswick, and Cameron. But it was only a few stains on their fingertips, entirely consistent with brushing against the body and the sheets."
"OK," Greg said. "I'd like to see the lightware cruncher that's been wiped. Is there anything else our murderer tampered with?"
"Yes," Denzil said. "Some of the laboratory equipment. We found it this morning."
The computer centre was at the rear of the Abbey, a small windowless room with a bronze-coloured metal door. It slid open as soon as Denzil showed his police identity card to the lock. Biolum rings came on automatically. Walls and ceiling were all white tiles; the floor had a slick cream-coloured plastic matting. A waist-high desk bench ran all the way round the walls, broken only by the door. There were three elaborate Hitachi terminals sitting on top of it, along with racks of large memox datastore crystals and five reader modules.
The Bendix lightware number cruncher was in the centre of the room, a steel-blue globe one metre in diameter, sitting on a pedestal at chest height.
"Completely wiped," Denzil said. He crossed to one of the terminals and touched the power stud. The flatscreen lit with the words: DATA LOAD ERROR. Above the keyboard, a few weak green sparks wriggled through the cube. "Kitchener used to store everything in here, all his files, the students' work. He didn't need to make a copy; the holographic memory is supposed to be failsafe. Even without power, the bytes would remain stable until the actual crystal structure began to break down—five, ten thousand years. Probably longer. Who knows?"