"Look, Greg" — Langley was trying for the reasonable approach—"I really appreciate your help in finding the knife. But Clarissa Wynne's death is hardly relevant."

"Two deaths in the same community, the first one questionable, the second one bizarre. They're connected, no messing."

"How? They're ten years apart."

"If I knew more about Clarissa Wynne I might be able to tell you."

"I can hardly expand the Kitchener case to cover her death. For a start there isn't a single byte on her remaining. We don't even know what she looked like."

"Yeah." He let instinct drive him. Important, the girl's death was important. "Tell you, we're going to have to rectify that."

"Not after ten years, we're not. The only person who could have told you anything was Kitchener."

"Wrong. There's Kitchener, the other five students who were at Launde with her, and Maurice Knebel. And out of all of them, good old Maurice has everything about the case I need to know"

"Knebel? You can't be serious! For Christ's sake, we don't even know if he's still alive."

"I'll find out."

He threw his hands in the air. "Sure you will. I mean, the Inquisitors have only been looking for four years, and their methods don't exactly go by the book. They wouldn't know what a warrant looked like if it pissed on their boot."

"Nobody can run from Mindstar, not for ever, not even close." Greg said it with a deliberate bite of menace, enjoying the way it halted Langley's bumptiousness in midflight.

"Greg?" Amanda waved at him from behind her desk. He could see the cube had filled with datasheets, fuzzy green script with a perceptible Y-axis instability.

"What have you got?"

"There were five other coroner's offices in England which had their records destroyed in the two months either side of the PSP's fall. Two were due to firebomb attacks, the other three were hotrod burns."

"Where were the ones that got burnt by the hotrods?"

She ran a finger down the cube. "Gloucester, Canterbury, and Hexham."

"Well spread around," he mused.

"What are you saying?" Langley asked.

"That it's convenient; four offices in the whole of the country, and one of them is Oakham's, when we know that a dodgy report was loaded into its memory core."

"You can't be serious."

Greg clapped him on the shoulder, drawing a startled look. He knew Langley would never believe in a connection. The man was too good a policeman. Facts, facts, and more facts. That's what he needed.

It's also what you need to get Nicholas off, Greg reminded himself soberly.

"You keep plugging away at Nicholas," he said. "I'll need to borrow Sergeant Willet for the rest of the afternoon."

"All right." Langley seemed relieved that was all he was being asked for. "Why do you want him?"

"I told you: to find Maurice Knebel."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The light was already beginning to fade as Eleanor drove out of Oakham along the B668, up the hill towards Burley. An advance guard of dark copper-gold clouds probing out of the north had reached the zenith of the opal sky. She wasn't in much of a mood to appreciate sunsets.

The Rutland Times hadn't been able to help. Hotrods had crashed their memory core. They had suffered an even worse data loss than the Stamford and Rutland Meteor; all of their past issues had been transferred to the core from earlier microfiche records.

She hadn't known the hotrods were so active when the PSP fell. Royan had let slip a few hints that he had been part of the pack which had crashed the Ministry of Public Order mainframe. But as a general rule the PSP had suffered remarkably little electronic sabotage during its decade in power. Maybe the hotrods had been saving themselves for the final assault. Although she found that hard to credit. They were too independent, preserving their anonymity through the faceless circuit. You could call them through the link they had infiltrated into English Telecom's datanet, but you never knew who you'd got.

The Ministry of Public Order mainframe was an obvious target for them, one final shove to a government which was already toppling. It had happened within an hour of the bomb blast that annihilated Downing Street. People had talked about a link between the hotrod circuit and the urban predators, she thought that was pure tabloid, a subconscious public desire to juggle facts into a unified conspiracy theory. The mainframe burn wouldn't have required much forward planning, the viruses already existed, but newspapers were a different proposition. To be burnt on ideological grounds their output would have to be monitored continually, victims selected. That required organization, commitment. A cabal within a cabal. There had certainly never been any word of that. Perhaps Royan could tell her.

Forewarned by her failure at the Rutland Times office, she had returned to the parked Jaguar and simply phoned the Melton Times.

"I'm very sorry, madam," the secretary had told her. "But our records of that period were erased by hackers."

"There is no such thing as coincidence," Gabriel had said quietly, as Eleanor swore at the cybofax.

"What do you mean?"

But Gabriel simply shrugged cryptically.

Then Greg had called, and asked her to drive up to Colin Mellor in Cottesmore, saying, "I'll meet you up there."

The Jaguar's wheels scattered a volley of loose chippings into the lush verges as they reached the top of the vale, rattling the big scarlet geraniums which had infiltrated the old hedgerows. Four hundred metres to her right she could see the ruins of Burley House casting a stark jagged outline against the rising velvet penumbra. A few fires were burning in the camp of New Age travellers parked in the embrace of its long curving colonnade wings, pink and blue glow of charcoal cooking grills spilling distorted pools of tangerine light. The travellers had been there for as long as Eleanor could remember, ever since the public petrol supply ran out, the wheels of their antique buses and vans rooting in the earth, tyres perished. Not that the ancient combustion engines would work now anyway.

They had raided the stately home for stones, constructing crude lean-tos against some of the rusting vehicles. A hundred metres from the road, they had tried to build a replica of Stonehenge. Still were trying, by all accounts, it changed minutely every time she went past. Not getting any bigger, but the configuration altered, as if they were still searching for the ideal pattern of astrological harmony.

Keeps them off the streets, she thought wryly. God alone knows where they were supposed to fit in to the promised land of New Conservative regeneration policies. After fifteen years of doing nothing but picking and eating magic mushrooms their brains must look like lumps of gangrenous sponge.

There was an estate of late twentieth-century brick houses on the edge of Cottesmore, ornamental gardens given over to intensely cultivated vegetable plots.

As they moved into the heart of the picturesque village she leant forwards, peering over the steering-wheel. She'd never been to Colin Mellor's house before.

"Further on," Gabriel said.

"Right." She hadn't actually expected Gabriel to come with her to the Rutland Times office. Conversation was always so difficult with Gabriel, and this time, with Joey Foulkes tagging along loyally, it was virtually impossible.

The main street had a blanket preservation order slapped on it. All the buildings had stone walls, roofs were either grey slate or Collyweston stone. Half of them used to be thatch, which had to be stripped off when the Warming started and the fire hazard became too great. Three staked goats were grazing on a wide grass verge in front of a row of cottages.