Eleanor perked up. "This sounds interesting, especially with the way you're trying to crush the steering-wheel."

"Yeah, well maybe I'm imagining it's her neck. Jesus, Eleanor, you've got to meet her to disbelieve her. Tell you, how she survived life this long with that attitude of hers is a bloody mystery to me. I felt like giving her a damn good smack, but she'd probably only enjoy it." He tried to halt that line of thought. No personal involvement; the first law. Although how anybody could view Rosette dispassionately was beyond him.

"But I thought Rosette Harding-Clarke was the rich one," Eleanor said.

"Yeah, so she claims. She is also the pregnant one."

"Pregnant?"

He smiled at the surprise in her voice. "That's right. And the kid is Kitchener's, or at least she claims it is. And she believes it too, which makes me inclined to believe her. So the first thing I want you to check out tomorrow morning is whether Rosette really is as rich as she says she is. A lot of these so-called aristocrats are worse off than people drawing the dole. And we'll need a legal opinion as well, will the kid stand to inherit anything even though it's not mentioned in the will? Rosette says she won't contest it, but I would have thought the executors have some sort of obligation to provide for the child."

"Right." Eleanor pulled her cybofax out, and loaded the order into it.

After living in a two-room chalet for over a decade, the interior of the farmhouse always seemed vast. Furniture rattled around, nothing was ever conveniently near to hand.

The builders had renovated most of it before they moved in, fixing up the roof tiles, replacing the rotten floorboards, stripping out the damp plaster, installing new plumbing and air conditioning, rewiring. They were lucky to get the work done at all. England's industrial regeneration meant the building trade was in the middle of a boom; old factories were being restored, new ones constructed, housing estates were springing up across the country. There was very little spare capacity right now, certainly not for refurbishment jobs in out-of-the-way villages. But Julia's name ensured they were given top priority with the firm they hired, although even her clout didn't extend all the way down into the shady levels of subcontracting. There were still three rooms waiting to be plastered, and the conservatory was a stack of cut and primed wood sitting on the lawn, ready to be screwed together.

Eleanor had already suggested that he could put it up. As if the groves didn't occupy all his time.

But the farmhouse had definitely acquired that indefinable sense of being home, the animal refuge against a howling world. Returning to it caused a tangible wash of relief. He had half expected some reporters to be standing at the entrance to the drive.

The interior had been decorated by a London firm, their designer working in tandem with Eleanor, to give an early twentieth-century theme; the country house of Victorian nobility. Everything was light and somehow rustic, curtains and carpets in pastel shades, the furniture in delicately stained pine. Neoteric domestic systems were all built in to reproduction units. The only modern setting was the gym, filled with black and silver chromed equipment.

When they arrived back from the police station, Greg slumped down on a settee in the lounge and pointed the remote at the long mock-painting of an eighteenth-century harvest scene which disguised the inert flatscreen. The picture shivered away into a game show where contestants were hanging upside down from the studio ceiling on long bungee cords; they were bouncing in and out of large barrels filled with water, trying to bob apples with their teeth.

He stared at it incredulously for a minute, then shook his head in weary dismay. Mr Domesticity, back home after a hard day at the office, with the wife bustling round in the kitchen.

Except, as usual, his mind was full with little scraps of information from the case, all of them swirling round in a chaotic vortex, stirred by the witching fingers of inquisitiveness and intuition in the hope they would settle into some kind of recognizable pattern. His army mates had called him obsessive. Maybe it could be deemed a character flaw, but he could never let go of a problem. He had almost forgotten how involved he could become in a case. The worrying thing was, it felt good. On the chase again. That bastard who had chopped up Kitchener needed to be put away.

Eleanor came in with a couple of lagers in tall Scandinavian glasses. She took one look at the game show and switched the flatscreen off. Merry peasants and bales of hay snoozing under a sky of golden cloud reappeared.

"You weren't watching it," she said when he protested. "You were thinking about Kitchener."

He snagged one of the lagers. "Yeah."

"You said Rosette was a real bitch," Eleanor said as she sat down on the settee, wriggling her shoulders until she was nestled up snugly against him. "Do you really think she would kill the father of her own baby just for money?"

"No. Now you put it like that, I don't. Tell you though, the one thing those students did have in common was the way they idolized Kitchener. That came through loud and clear; a couple of them actually called him a second father. Instinct says it isn't any of them. But… it's funny. There are a lot of things which don't add up, certainly not if it was a tekmerc snuff operation." He put his arm round her, enjoying the warm weight pressing into his side.

"The apron," she said. "Now that is really strange."

"That's right. Like you said, why bother with it at all? I can't believe our hypothetical tekmerc used it simply to incriminate the students. First off, we actually can't implicate one of them with it. If they were going to plant evidence why not the knife, some bloodstains?"

"Too obvious."

"Maybe. But the apron isn't obvious enough. And why spend precious time starting a fire? I know covert penetration operations, Christ I've been on enough in my time, the cardinal rule is get out once you've finished, don't loiter."

"Whoever it was, they must have been there a while, though. First they had to wait until Kitchener was alone, then the Bendix was burnt, as well as the neurohormone bioware. It all adds up to a lot of time spent in the Abbey."

"Which gives them an even stronger reason to leave straight after the murder," he countered. "Every extra minute in the Abbey is one more minute when they could be discovered. And why use syntho to kill the bioware in the first place?"

"Because it's there, saves carrying a poison in with them."

"Exactly, but how did they know that? It must have been someone totally familiar with the lab set-up, and even then they couldn't have known for sure that there was any syntho available that particular night. Suppose Kitchener and good old Rosette had been infusing heavily? A tekmerc would have brought a poison, or more likely used a maser. Whatever the method, it would never have been left to chance."

"There are all sorts of other chemicals in the lab, as well as the acids, and the heaters," she said. "There was bound to be something which could kill the bioware. Pure chance they used the syntho."

"Yeah. Could be." But the junked up thought fragments refused to quieten down, he kept seeing flashes of Launde Park, the Abbey, those bloody lakes, Denzil's data-rich tour, the students' broken shocked faces. None of them connected in any way.

He took a gulp of the lager; it was cold enough to numb the back of his throat. "But that still doesn't explain the time they were in the Abbey before the murder," he said.

Eleanor gave a tiny groan.

"Sorry," he said quickly. "We can drop it for the night."

"And put up with moody silences while you're thinking about it. No thanks. But next time Julia can definitely go find someone else. This is Mandel Investigations' last case, Gregory."