The mission had taken a day to set up. Naturally, Julia had wanted to send the police in, all legal and above board. She hadn’t quite grasped what they were up against. Someone -some organization? – methodical enough to guard against the remotest chance of a query being raised about the death of a girl ten years in the past. Paranoia or desperation – either way, they had it in massive quantities. And they didn’t shy away from positive action to eliminate threats. Even with the channels working themselves into hysterics over the Scottish reunion question, a police operation on a A QUANTUM MURDER 315 scale large enough to successfully arrest a single man in Walton would attract wide newscast coverage. The Black-shirts would resist the police incursion, there would be riots, sniper fire, a lot of people hurt. After that, leaks would be inevitable, and Julia’s name would be foremost among them. His way was much quieter, safer. Reducing the risk until it focused on just two people. He would have been happier if Eleanor had shouted at him, put her foot down, told him he was being macho stupid. At least he would have been able to shout back, or argue, vent a bit of feeling. Instead she had stuck to being silent and sorrowful. Which made it harder. Which put him on edge. Which wasn’t good. Gabriel had been reassuringly scathing, but that had taken on the quality of a ritual, she trusted his intuition almost more than he did. Morgan was frankly sceptical about the whole notion. And Greg had to admit even he was having trouble seeing how Clarissa Wynne’s vaguely suspicious drowning could be connected to Kitchener’s murder. With the cocoon of fog acting like a mild form of sensory deprivation his thoughts were free to roam through wilder realms of possibility, fantasy equivalents of Gabriel’s tau lines. But even among the more fanciful possibilities he conjured up there really was no getting round that memory of Nicholas walking so calmly into Kitchener’s bedroom. Maybe the ambiguity he felt so strongly was focused on the boy’s motive? Everyone assumed Nicholas had murdered Kitchener because he was overwrought over Isabel. But there was the question of the method. Maybe Launde ha±boured some dark secret instead? Yeah sure. Ghosts and ghoulies and bumps in the night, he told himself mockingly. Secret monsters would be too easy. Somebody wiped all those cores. Three and a half years before Nicholas Beswick ever set eyes on Launde Abbey. He gave up, pushing the load into the future and squarely on Maurice Knebel’s shoulders. Alarmed at just how much he was coming to depend on the absconded detective 316 PETER P. HAMILTON to provide him with answers when they finally came face to face. One thing, there was no going back. There never bloody was; his character flaw.
His guido put him seven hundred metres out from the city’s easterly shore, height one hundred and fifty metres. Closing fast. Fog split around the leading edge of the wing, re-forming instantly behind the trailing edge. A slick coating of minute droplets was deposited on the leathery membrane, streaming backwards and shaking free in a horizontal rain. The photon amp was boosted up to its highest resolution. He still couldn’t see anything. ‘Virtual overlay,’ he told the guido ‘ware. Translucent green and blue and red petals flipped up into the retinal feed from the photon amp. He looked out across a city built from frozen laserhight. Morgan’s people had built the virtual simulation up from the afternoon’s satellite passes. Accurate to ten centimetres, more comprehensive than any memory in the city council’s planning office data cores. A flood of neutral pixels darkened and hardened below him, resolving into a solid black plane. He felt the illusion of space opening up around him again. Tremendously reassuring. He just prayed that the simulation’s alignment was correct. The shoreline buildings of the Gunthorpe district formed a flat abrupt wall of dimensionless green dead ahead. It was the only eastern district to expand since the Warming; a quirk of fate had placed it alongside a low triangular promontory jutting a couple of kilometres out into the basin. The fields and pastures which had survived the deluge had been swiftly covered in blocks of flats. iWo hundred metres off the promontory’s tip was a patch of spiky indigo waveforms, as though an iceberg had endured the Warming and sought shelter in the basin. It was Eye, a village still in the process of being subsumed by the sluggish I A QUANTUM MURDER 317 currents of the mire, reduced to an erratic formation of mud dunes and crumbling brick walls. The guido ‘ware printed a trajectory graphic for him. A tunnel of slender orange rings snaking away from him, round the north side of the urbanized promontory, and curving down to touch Walton. Greg swung himself to one side, lining up the ghost wing in the centre of die tunnel. Orange rings flashed past silently.