"Not through the PSP decade. He was working on the giga-conductor in our Austrian laboratory. Grandpa didn't want him mixing with the opposition. He was quite agreeable to the security regimen. You know what he's like, no personal or private life."

"Yeah, but I'll ask him anyway."

"Sure." The matrix run ended. Its results waited for her, not seen, simply present in the null-space which was the axon interface. There was no solution in connection with a possible past incident, insufficient data. But the matrix had thrown up one query, though, an anomaly. "Greg, this idea that Beswick murdered Kitchener because he was so enraged about the old man seducing Isabel Spalvas, and then blanked it out later, how does Karl Hildebrandt and the Randon company connection fit in?"

Greg and Eleanor exchanged another glance, puzzled this time.

"No idea," he said.

"We don't know for certain that Diessenburg Mercantile was involved," Eleanor said. "It might have been a coincidence."

When Greg opened his mouth she laid a finger across his lips. "Coincidences do happen occasionally, you know."

"Yeah," he said unhappily.

"No," Julia said with conviction. "You don't know Karl like I do. He was anxious to talk with me, all to give me that one piece of advice: take you off the case. It was most deliberate."

"Does he have any financial or corporate interests outside the Diessenburg Mercantile bank?" Greg asked.

"No." She caught herself and pouted, it had been a reflex answer, she'd been scolded about that enough times by her teachers. "That is, I don't know. He's never mentioned any."

"Now I really wish I'd been there," Greg said. "Can you arrange a meeting, some kind of party?"

"I suppose I could invite some people round for dinner," she sighed. "But it's very short notice, he might suspect something, especially if you start quizzing him."

"Tough."

"I'll get on to it," Julia said. "Greg, do you really think there's a chance Beswick didn't do it?"

"There's something wrong, Julia, that's all I know."

"Good enough for me," she said lightly.

He winked.

She stared at the blank flatscreen for a long moment after the call ended. If nothing else, Eleanor had been right. She had dragged them into it, she had to see it through. Money and power always came with the price tag of obligation.

She pressed the intercom button. "Caroline, cancel everything for this afternoon. We've got work to do."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

For once the afternoon remained sunny. Eleanor could actually hear the Jaguar's conditioner humming away as it battled the humidity. Greg had taken the EMC Ranger to scoot down to Oakham police station, claiming the Jaguar would only antagonize the detectives further. Good excuse, she acknowledged a little enviously.

She actually enjoyed driving the big car: it really was disgracefully decadent, but like Greg she always managed to feel guilty about it. There were still too many people on the breadline right now. She thought England in the nineteen-twenties must have been similar, when the barrier between the aristocracy and the workers was cast in iron, and guarded by money.

A thriving giga-conductor based economy should break down the polarization, like the internal combustion engine before it. Funny how the cycle of achievement and decay was almost exactly a century long. Though she doubted it would happen again. Surely this time we learnt enough from our mistakes?

The A606 into Stamford was one of the better roads, but when she reached the town and turned off down Roman Bank, a street that ran down the slope towards the Welland, she heard the familiar bass grumble as the Jag's broad tyres fought the mushy potholes. This part of the town was strictly residential, two-storey houses with large gardens. Thick ebony stumps of horse-chestnuts jutted up from the unkempt verge, wearing skirts of cheese-orange fungi. New acmopyle trees had been planted to replace them, already four or five metres high, silver-grey leaves casting long back shadows.

At the foot of the slope she turned left, heading towards the town centre.

Rutland Terrace was a solid row of three-storey houses, two hundred metres long; perched strategically halfway up the side of the Welland valley to give the occupants an unencumbered view out across the storm-swollen river and the southern slope beyond. Tiny individual first-floor balconies sported overhanging canvas sun-canopies, striped in primary colours, providing a meagre dapple of shade for the recumbent residents taking advantage of the weather.

She parked in front of Morgan Walshaw's house, halfway down the row. Despite a sleeveless dress chosen for its airiness, she started perspiring as soon as she climbed out of the car. The river's humidity lay over the town, pressing down like a leaden rainbow.

The small front garden could have been laid out by a geometrician, bushes and bedding plants standing rigidly to attention. A clematis had been trained up the front wall, producing a curtain of mauve dinner-plate flowers, broken only by the arched doorway and ground-floor window.

The black front door was opened by a security hardliner. Eleanor had encountered them at Wilholm often enough now to recognize the type. A young man in a light suit, attentive eyes, not a gram of spare flesh.

He showed her up to the first-floor lounge. The air inside the house was still and relaxing, a coolness which came from the thickness of the old stone walls rather than modern conditioners.

Gabriel came in from the balcony to greet her, wearing a simple silky blue and white top and skirt. Eleanor could never quite bring herself to accept the woman was the same age as Greg. Even after all the counselling, the diets, and the fitness routines of the last two years, Gabriel remained stubbornly middle-aged. And prickly with it.

"What brings you to town?" Gabriel asked.

"Couldn't it just be to see you?"

"This trip isn't, no. And you ought to know better than trying to fool a psychic by now, even an ex like me."

They walked out on to the balcony and sat on the deckchairs Gabriel had set out. The fringe of the green and yellow awning flapped quietly overhead.

"I'm here because of the Kitchener inquiry," Eleanor said bluntly.

Gabriel's mask of politeness fell. "Bugger, now what?"

"Greg's intuition." She told Gabriel about the Beswicks' visit that morning.

Gabriel folded her arms across her chest, slipping down the curve of the chair's nylon. "If it was just the boy's parents protesting about how sweet and harmless he is I'd be inclined to forget the whole thing, and bugger how excruciating it is. But Greg getting all worked up, that's different. There's a lot of people walking around today who would have been left behind in Turkey if it hadn't been for that cranky intuition of his." She opened one eye fully, and gave Eleanor a bleary look. "Mindstar brass actually put an order in writing that he wasn't to use his intuition when he was assembling mission strategies. It wasn't a recognized psi faculty." The eye closed again, but her smile remained. "Dickheads!"

"Greg's sure this incident he remembers is tied in to Beswick and the murder somehow. Do you remember anything happening out at Launde Abbey in the PSP years? I can't, but then we were kept carefully closeted away from the real world in the kibbutz."

"No, nothing. I was too busy trying to shut life out back then, remember?" She took a long sip from a glass of orange, staring out across the valley. Gabriel never but never touched alcohol these days, not even to be sociable.

"I also wanted to ask you about the past," Eleanor said. "I only saw one. There were none of these multiples which Ranasfari talked about."