"OK, Julia, my staff will squirt the details to your office."
"Fine. I'll look forward to it. And thank you again, Uncle Horace."
He signed off smiling happily.
Julia pursed her lips in antipathy. She'd solved Eleanor's grouse; but there was no way she could get out of that bloody launch party now.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The interviews were the one part of the case Greg had been dreading. The word association game, watching the way minds reacted to key phrases, was chained too tightly to his army days. It intimated funereal dug-out bunkers, sweating defiant prisoners in torn bloody fatigues, the smell of gun oil and vomit, the high-voltage emotions of hatred and terror, perceptible even to non-psychics. The seemingly limitless brutality which men were capable of.
Even the interview room at Oakham police station was a party to the anamnesis; sombre fawn-coloured walls, a leaden grey desk, acutely curved plastic chairs, scuffed black door.
A rectangular conditioning grille emitted an annoying buzzing sound just on the threshold of audibility. Steely light shining through a high window was complemented by a harsh glow from two biolum panels set in the old fluorescent tube recesses in the ceiling. A wide-angle camera was mounted on the wall above the desk, optical cable running down to a twin-crystal AV recording deck.
Greg sat on one side of the desk, Langley and Nevin flanking him. He took out his cybofax and summoned up the list of questions he wanted to ask, then placed it on the desk.
Rosette Harding-Clarke came in, accompanied by her lawyer, Matthew Slater. Since the New Conservatives had been elected, anyone being interviewed by the police was entitled to legal advice, irrespective of whether they were being charged or not. The measure was intended to allay public mistrust of the dodgy practices which the People's Constables had included in police procedure.
There were three lawyers, out of Oakharn's pool of five, representing the six students. They had objected when he said he wanted to interview the students.
"You aren't an official investigating officer," Lisa Collier, a matronly fifty-five-year-old, had told him pompously. "You have no authority to conduct an interview, certainly not with co-operating witnesses, which is all the students are at this point. And I'm not having my clients subjected to a psychic privacy invasion. They have a right to silence so they don't incriminate themselves."
Greg had simply turned to Vernon Langley. "Arrange for a magistrate's hearing this afternoon. Charge all six students with suspected manslaughter." He gave Lisa Collier a thin smile. "As a specialist assigned to the investigation I am entitled to sit in on any subsequent questioning of legally detained suspects. And any evidence acquired psychically during those interviews is admissible in court."
The three lawyers had gone into a huddle, and decided not to call his bluff.
Matthew Slater slotted a man-black memox crystal into the recording deck, and sat down beside Rosette. She was wearing a black singlet of some glossy fabric, a cropped black jacket with thin white curlicues embroidered on the shoulders, and a short black leather skirt. Her auburn hair was folded in a neat pleat.
She gave Greg a fleeting glance of acknowledgement, completely ignoring the detectives behind him. The whole act informed them that she wasn't going to be intimidated.
He had to admit she was an impressive girl physically. Nor was there any hint of weakness in her emotional make up.
Langley pushed a memox crystal in the recorder's free slot, and touched the power stud. "Interview with Rosette Harding-Clarke," he said formally. "Conducted by CID advisory specialist Greg Mandel in the presence of officers Langley and Nevin."
Matthew Slater leaned forwards. "For the record, Miss Harding-Clarke's participation in this interview is entirely voluntary. She is here because of her wish to help apprehend the killer of Edward Kitchener. And therefore she reserves the right to refuse to answer any question which is not directly applicable to this topic."
Rosette Harding-Clarke stared straight at Greg, and gave him a lopsided knowing smile. "Silence wouldn't do me any good, would it?" she said. "Not with you. You could strip anything you wanted from me."
He ordered a low-level secretion from his gland. Her amusement began to impinge on his perception, it bordered on contempt. Rosette looked down on everybody from her own private Olympus.
"The reaction of your mind to questions cannot be disguised," he said.
"I can run, but I can't hide."
"Yeah. Something like that."
"If you begin to ask Miss Harding-Clarke irrelevant questions then we shall be forced to terminate the interview," Matthew Slater warned.
"No, I won't," she said. "I'm glad you are here. This case is obviously well beyond the ability of these bumbling Mr Plods. And I want the bastard caught. Too bad we haven't got the death penalty any more. So ask away. Did I do it? No. You can confirm that, can't you?" Her eyebrows arched challengingly.
"Unfortunately it's not that simple. I need to know what happened that night at Launde, build up a complete picture, so I have several questions."
"Yes, all right, get on with it then."
"Did you make any external calls that day, or establish a datalink to an outside 'ware system?"
"I made a few phone calls, sure. Just friends. I'd go bananas if the only people I had to talk to were the other students. And I was doing some work that morning, Edward had me trying to produce a more accurate figure for the age of the universe. I plugged into the Oxford University astronomy department mainframe for reference data."
"Now, that Friday morning, you were the first to find the body. Is that right?"
"Yes."
"What time was that?"
"God. It's in the statement, I must have told these oafs a hundred times."
"What time?"
"God, all right. About half-past five on Friday morning, give or take five minutes."
"And you didn't see anyone else in the corridor when you went to Kitchener's room?"
"No."
Greg tightened the focus of his espersense. "How about a presence you weren't sure about? A shadow? A noise? Something you didn't want to mention to the police because you couldn't prove it, or you thought it would sound stupid."
"No. Nothing. Nobody."
"Where were you before you discovered the body?"
"In my room."
"Was anybody with you?"
"No."
"Half-past five is a funny time to be visiting Kitchener. Was there a reason?"
She rubbed an index finger along the bottom of her nose. "So I would be there when he woke up. Edward didn't like to be alone."
"Nicholas Beswick said you went into Kitchener's room at quarter-past one that morning. Is that true?"
"Poor old Nicky. Yes, it's true. You want to know something else? I was having sex with Edward, I had been for three months. And to save you the trouble of working it out, he was forty-four years older than me."
"You had sex with him at quarter-past one?"
"Yes."
"When did you leave?"
"Isabel and I packed in about half-past two. Edward was nearly asleep by then anyway."
"Why not stay?"
"Edward snores. Silly, isn't it? But I'm a light sleeper, as well as being a virtual insomniac. I only need two or three hours' sleep each night. So out I creep after he's nodded off, then I get my head down for a while, and I'm back snuggled up beside him when he wakes. He probably knew, but…"
"So everybody would know that you left him alone for a few hours each night?"
"Every peeping Tom, yes."
"Which of the other students knew about you and Kitchener?"