"You owe me fifteen."

"Can we go for sixteen?"

He rolled his eyes dramatically. "You don't want to meet another actor, do you? Some of my guests still ain't talking to me after that party."

There was a warm tingling in her cheeks at the memory. She was sure she hadn't been as tipsy as everyone said. "No, Uncle Horace," she said firmly. "Definitely no more actors. Do you remember Greg and Eleanor Mandel?"

"Sure, who could forget Eleanor? Greg seemed like a nice guy, on the level. Psychic, right?"

"Yes. We asked him to assist the police working on the Edward Kitchener murder case."

He frowned, fleshy wrinkles deepening around his eyes. "You're involved with that?"

"Event Horizon had a research contract with Kitchener. Right now I'm praying that isn't the reason behind his death. Greg will find out for me."

"I see."

"But the press are giving him a hard time."

"Now come on, Julia."

"I don't want them to stop reporting the case," she said hurriedly. "If they could just lay off badgering Greg. He didn't want to take the case in the first place. And you know he doesn't play the political game, he's too honest. The last thing he needs is the press jumping all over him just for doing his job."

Horace Jepson sighed resignedly. "All right, Julia. I'll tell the editors to go easy."

"Uncle Horace, you're an angel."

"And I'd like you to come to a programme launch party next month." He started typing on a keyboard out of the camera's field of view. "Dreamicind Nights, it's called, a ten-part fantasy drama. It's gonna be big, Julia. This summer's ratings winner."

"I'll be there. Promise."

"Cliff is gonna be organizing it," he said hopefully.

Her contented expression never wavered. She was proud of that self-control. "That'll be nice. I haven't seen him for ages." Clifford Jepson was Horace's son from the first of his four marriages. Julia couldn't stand the sight of him, he had his father's drive without any of his father's charm. It made him come over as brattishly domineering. The trouble was, Uncle Horace had them down as the perfect match, with himself as Cupid.

"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."