"How do you feel about the murder?"
"Grief, nothing but unending black grief. The other students have all been tremendously kind and supportive, we've cried together, and we've laughed about the good times Edward gave us. You see, darling, he would have scolded us terribly if we hadn't laughed. It's the way he was. So alive, a celebration of life."
"And what about Nicholas Beswick?"
Rosette came right out of the flatscreen to stand in the cell beside him. A tall, glorious Venus; a goddess wronged and brutally vengeful. "I hope he is raped by every demon in hell."
Nicholas turned over, shuddering, and buried his head under the blanket.
He must have fallen asleep, because Lisa Collier was shaking him, her face anxious. "Are you all right?"
He blinked against the pink-white light of the biolum panel directly overhead. "Yes. Fine, thank you."
"Good. I brought you some clothes." She dropped his maroon shoulder bag on the floor by his cot. "Vernon Langley is going to start the interviews this afternoon. At least you can turn up looking respectable on the AV recording."
"Oh." Nicholas's mood damped down.
She shifted her skirt about and sat at the foot of the cot. "Now then, Nicholas, the idea of a police interview is to keep recapping the same ground until you start becoming inconsistent. That can only happen if you don't tell the truth in the first place. Which brings us to the murder, and what happened that night."
"I didn't do it."
"Nicholas, please; just hear me out. If you choose to tell the police you are guilty, we can enter a plea of temporarily diminished responsibility. Kitchener was a tetchy old man, inflicting verbal abuse for several months, you'd just found out your girlfriend was sleeping with him. You certainly had enough cause to lash out, a judge would probably be sympathetic with that, although I have to say the actual nature of the crime would probably eradicate any possibility of a light sentence."
Nicholas took a deep breath. "Mrs Collier, why will nobody listen to me? I didn't do it."
Her watery eyes were placid. The sort of gaze his mother used to rebuke him with when he was small. "Nicholas, there is a vast amount of evidence amassed against you, there is both motive and opportunity. And, Nicholas, your fingerprints were all over the knife. On top of that we have the evidence from the Mandels. I might be able to nullify their testimony, or at least blunt it slightly, the courts are still pretty hazy on interpreting psychic visions. But at the moment it adds up to a very convincing case in the prosecution's favour. I have to tell you, the way it stands the jury is going to find you guilty."
He sat perfectly still, turning the novel concept over in his mind. They, Mrs Collier, the police, the reporters, Rosette, all truly genuinely believed him guilty. Against all logic and reason, he was going to have to accept that.
"Rational discrimination," Kitchener had said once, 'that's the dividing line between savagery and civilization. We've thought ourselves up to where we are today, out of the caves and into the skyscrapers. Bodies never have mattered a toss, you are your mind."
So if you're smart, Nicholas told himself, think your way out of this, prove your innocence. Images of that night cluttered his vision again. He'd seen the girls, he'd cried on the bed, he'd heard the screaming. And that was it, the total. There was nothing new, no key out of the logic box. If he could just show he had been in his room sleeping, force them to accept that. But how?
"Will you still be my lawyer if I plead not guilty?" he asked cautiously.
The cybofax she held in her lap bobbed up and down as her hands twitched unconsciously. "Yes, Nicholas," she said slowly. "I'll still be your lawyer."
"Thank you. I want to plead not guilty."
"Nicholas, I will still be your lawyer if you admit you did it. A lot of people say they are innocent because they are too ashamed even to acknowledge their crime to their lawyer. It works against them in the long run."
"I understand. I didn't kill Edward Kitchener."
"Right." She unfolded the cybofax and touched the power stud. "Nothing like an uphill struggle."
It was the first frivolous thing he'd ever heard her say. He almost asked if she believed him, but fright that she might say no held him back. "I suppose I need an alibi," he said.
Her right eyebrow arched. "Yes. Have you got one you didn't want to mention before? We know Uri and Liz were together in his room all night. Were you with one of the other girls, secretly, Isabel or Rosette? You said Rosette did make a pass once."
"No."
"Now, don't get me wrong, I have to ask. Cecil Cameron?" The Nicholas of yesterday wouldn't have understood the question. Today he thought it was simply a logical thing to ask. "No."
"How about a channel programme, were you watching one?"
"No."
"The other students, is there a likely candidate who would frame you?"
"No. Look, I know it's not much, but Greg Mandel said I didn't do it. At least, that's what he thought after he interviewed me. Doesn't that count for something?"
"Hmm." She paused, her expression distant. "I can probably use any vacillation of opinion on his part to call his psychic ability into question. But that really isn't anything like good enough to get you off. It's the knife, you see. Have you any idea how your fingerprints did get on that knife?"
"No." And now he thought about it, really thought, the fingerprints were impossible to explain away. The murderer creeping in to his room and wrapping his hand round the handle as he slept? Unlikely, he didn't sleep that deep.
Drugged? But the police had taken a blood sample.
The first stirring of panic began to creep over his body, like immersion in a cold lake. Suppose he couldn't prove it? Suppose a jury did find him guilty?
There was a state he could sometimes reach, one where the external world became a fable, irrelevant, leaving his mind free to concentrate on problems. Like yoga, he always imagined, except yoga was for contemplating spiritually. He dealt with hard facts, that was all he knew.
"I didn't do it," he said. "Therefore somebody else did. That somebody also framed me. And they framed me in a spectacularly clever fashion. They even have me doubting. So in order to prove my innocence, we have to find them."
He knew Lisa Collier thought he was crazy. Mood changes, from retarded child to punctilious cyborg. Who wouldn't think it of him? It didn't matter, because she could never get him out, not by herself. But she was a lawyer, she had to abide by the rules.
"Yes, Nicholas," she said. "But how are you going to find him?"
"I'm not. I'm not good enough, I admit that. We need a professional detective."
"Who?"
"The best." It was so simple; sneaky, perhaps even underhand, but practical. And the last thing he could afford right now was scruples. At the back of his mind the image of Edward Kitchener nodded approvingly. He relished the endorsement. Nicholas Beswick finally twigging human emotions, what made people tick. How about that? "And I know how to get him." He gave Lisa Collier a rapturous grin, and pointed at her cybofax. "Am I allowed a phone call?"
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There was a crescent of dun-coloured fur partially obscured by the tall spires of grass on the edge of the orange grove. The picture dominated Greg's optical nerves, fed to him by his Heckler and Koch hunting rifle's targeting imager. A fan of nearly invisible pink laser light swept across his vision from left to right, producing minute sparkles when it touched the dewdrops clinging to the grass. A grid of red neon materialized in its wake. The discrimination program cut in, analysing the shape behind the tussock from the tenuous laser return, and the grid began to fold, shrink-wrapping around the rabbit. Cartoon-blue target circles materialized, and Greg shifted the rifle slightly, his finger on the trigger.