She hurried to the stairs—no point trying to be furtive in a house where every floorboard creaked—and flew down them. She grabbed her father's walking stick by the coat rack and burst into the lounge.
Nick was over by the holovision set. Two of him. One, a grainy head and shoulder shot floating two feet off the ground. A woman reporter was talking in the background.
"Police have yet to confirm that this is the same man they held for questioning last night but informed sources . . ."
Nick muted the commentary. He looked dazed. "They've just found a tongue and a pair of ears on my desk at college."
Nick stared at his grainy image. At least one of him was smiling. The unsmiling one held his head in his hands. He'd been stitched up so tight the join was seamless. Body parts at home, body parts at work. Who needed a confession? There was a trail of blood running through every building he frequented.
And they'd be looking for his van. He'd have to keep to the unmonitored roads away from the street cameras. And switch off his phone.
"Come on," said Louise, pulling him to his feet. "Have you disabled your van's GPS transponder?"
"What?" said Nick, confused.
"The security tracking device. If you haven't disabled it, all the police need is the van's code and they'll know exactly where we are. Have you disabled it?"
He shrugged. "How would I do that?"
"Never mind," she said, pushing him towards the door. "We'll take mine. You follow me in the van. I'll find a quiet place away from here where you can dump it. I know where all the local cameras are."
"You do?" He started to feel inordinately dense. He hadn't thought about transponders or how easily he could have been tracked. The police might have started already. His van was outside now, pinging its whereabouts into the ether.
And did he infer correctly that Louise's pick-up had had its security transponder disabled?
Louise ran upstairs and returned with a battered suitcase. "Come on," she said. "I thought you were in a hurry."
He followed her out, hanging back while she locked up. "Why would you disable your security transponder?" he asked.
She smiled at him as she walked past. "You're not the only one with secrets."
Nick followed Louise to a lay-by on the outskirts of a large village five miles away. He parked the van, locked up and ran to the waiting pick-up.
"You'll have to tell me where we're going," said Louise.
"Head for Devon. Back roads all the way."
Louise drove, navigating a circuitous route along twisting country lanes, single-track roads and barely metalled farm tracks. Several times they had to turn back. A major road up ahead or a large village. After half an hour, Louise hit the brakes. Hard. The pick-up screeched to a halt.
"What?" shouted Nick.
Louise nodded to a flashing red light on the pick-up's dashboard. "Camera up ahead," she said, already throwing the pick-up into reverse.
Nick clung to the edges of his seat as the vehicle swung into a quick three-point turn. "You have a camera detector? Aren't they illegal?"
Louise didn't answer. She looked straight ahead. "I think there was a left turn about a half mile back."
"Lou, why do you have a camera detector?"
"You don't want to know."
"Yes, I do."
"No, you don't." She pointed to a junction ahead. "There. That should get us past the village."
On they went, criss-crossing the county out of Oxfordshire, through Berkshire and into Wiltshire, taking any small road heading south or west. Navigating by the sun, knowing that if they switched on the pick-up's computer it would give away their location in an instant. Nick ducked down, obscuring his face as a line of oncoming traffic approached. He pretended to read a book on his lap, covering the side of his face with his left hand.
Time stretched. More traffic, more about turns, more anxious minutes. Anything could be happening back in Oxford. The police could have raided his house, issued an arrest warrant, started a nation-wide hunt. If only he could find out.
He tugged at his wrist-phone. If he switched it back on he could call up the news, see if they'd found his car, made the connection to Louise . . .
And give his location away. A simple triangulation of the phone masts. The police would know his position to the nearest centimetre. Enough to set up a perimeter, roadblocks, a search grid for the surveillance drones.
He sank lower in his seat, peered into the sky, listened. Were the drones already airborne? Were the police waiting to see where he went?
Nothing. Nothing that he could see. He opened the window and stuck his head outside, turning in his seat to check behind. Still nothing. The sky was clear except for a handful of ivory coloured cumulus clouds.
"What are you doing?" asked Louise.
"Looking for drones," he said, ducking his head back inside. "Couldn't see any."
An hour later they pulled over by a farm gate to switch seats—Nick's turn to drive. They crossed the county border into Devon soon after. Only an hour or so more to go.
The mood began to lighten. They were almost there. Oxford was miles away, they'd avoided every camera and hadn't seen a single police car. Maybe the murder wasn't such a high-profile case? Maybe Nick had already been cleared of any involvement?
"Is there any food at this place we're going to?" asked Louise.
"Plenty," said Nick. "No need to stop to stock up on anything."
"What kind of place is it?"
"It's a clinic. One of those private homes for the confused children of the very, very rich. You know, the kind of place where you pay someone else to look after your teenage delinquents once they've burnt and bombed their way out of all their other homes."
"And you've got a room there?" She sounded surprised.
"Two actually. The owner's a friend and I rent an apartment—well, a couple of rooms—over the garage."
"Why?"
"Research."
"Into teenage delinquents?"
"No."
"Into what then? Ghosts?"
He turned to look at her. Could he tell her? Or would she be just like the others?
"Let's just call it blue sky research into an interesting aspect of Higher Dimensional Theory."
"Which you couldn't do in Oxford?"
He searched for the right words. A part of him just wanted to come straight out with it. Another part held back.
"Let's just say I needed somewhere I'd never be interrupted. Which is why we're going there. No one else knows about it."
"What about the clinic staff? If your face is all over the HV . . ."
"No one'll see us arrive. There's a back way to the garage. And the apartment's set back from the house. We'll have the pick-up locked away and be inside before anyone notices."
Nick drove up to the garage annexe and jumped out. Louise shuffled across into the driver's seat while Nick unlocked the door to the end garage. She peered over at the main building. A Victorian rectory by the look of it—three floors of solid grey stonea two storey annexe forming an L at one corner and ending in a garage block. She eased the pick-up forward as Nick raised the door then accelerated into the garage.
The door to the apartment was at the end of the block. Nick had it open by the time Louise joined him.
"It used to be the housekeeper's flat," said Nick as he thumped up the stairs. So much for keeping quiet, thought Louise, wondering how far noise would carry in an old place like this. "Then it became a store room, then it became my research lab."
Nick turned left at the top of the stairs and started pushing boxes and clutter aside. Louise watched from the hallway. The room was a mess. Cardboard boxes, packaging material, tripods, papers, electrical equipment. Everything scattered over the carpet like a random archipelago of clutter. In the corner was a bed. Unmade. She peeked into the other rooms while Nick cleared a space and set up the HV. More chaos. Another room that looked the twin of the first and a kitchen, with three large boxes of what looked like food. God knows what the sell-by dates would be. It looked like someone had returned from the supermarket, dumped the shopping on the kitchen table and left.
At least she couldn't smell anything—other than the usual stale mustiness of a room that hadn't known an open window for months. She poked through the first box of shopping. Pasta, tins of tomatoes, vegetables and soup. And a supermarket till receipt dated five months ago.
Music sounded from the HV in the other room. A short burst she recognised as the introduction to BBC News. Louise checked the second box of groceries—breakfast cereal, tins of ready meals, baked beans—then walked through to join Nick.
"They've found the body parts at my house," he said.
But they hadn't found his van. Or made the connection to Louise.
At least, no one had said so.
"Look at that," said Nick gesticulating at a wild-eyed head shot of himself rotating double life-size above a small island of bare carpet. "I look like Rasputin . . . after he'd been poisoned, shot, beaten and drowned."
Louise smiled. There was a resemblance. The long straggly hair, the wild look. "They do say the camera never lies."
"Then they've never heard of editing. I never looked like that in my life."
But there was one slice of luck. The murder was moving down the news schedules. A celebrity sex scandal and a drugs cheat sports star had knocked it off lead spot. Maybe by tomorrow it would be old news.
"Is there any mention of Pendennis?" asked Louise.
Nick checked. Nothing on the news channels for over a year.
Louise watched as he widened the search, trawling the groups, the forums, the web, looking for anything written in the last two days. "Someone might have heard something and posted to a forum," said Nick. "Maybe one of the warders at Upper Heywood developed a conscience."
Louise didn't say anything. All the doubts she'd held in check during the car journey began to resurface. What if Pendennis hadn't escaped? What if Nick was wrong? She'd abandoned everything—her animals, her home. All for what? Nick's insistence that Peter Pendennis had escaped. The only proof being a gruesome murder that someone was trying to frame Nick for.
Or so Nick said. She watched him as he stabbed a remote at the HV. What did she really know about him? He was a professor who studied ghosts and looked like Rasputin. He seemed harmless enough but . . . who could tell? You heard so many horror stories these days. Killers whose own wives hadn't thought them capable of hurting a fly. How could she—a person who'd only known him a few days—really know what he was capable of?
Guilt. It crept up on her. What was she doing? Doubting a man she'd put in danger. Without her, Nick would never have met Pendennis. She'd brought them together. It was her fault. She should never have accepted Ziegler's invitation in the first place.
Rage. At her own stupidity, at Ziegler, at Pendennis, at John Bruce and the world. Why? Why? Why?
Text and images flashed and scrolled before her. The few recent hits Nick found were dead-ends. Kids listing their top ten favourite serial killers and extracts from weird song lyrics.
"The government might have blocked access to all the relevant files," suggested Nick.
Louise shook her head in disbelief. If she heard one more conspiracy theory . . .
Then she had an idea.
"I'll phone Ziegler," she said. "He owes me." Her hand reached instinctively for her ear. "If I ask him to let me talk to Pendennis he can't refuse."
Nick looked incredulous. "Of course he can. And the moment you phone you give away our location."
"I'll drive somewhere else and make the call."
"It's too risky. You might be seen. The pick-up might be seen. And it's not only the police who are looking for us."
"You don't know that!"
He rolled his eyes. "We've been through this . . ."
"You've been through this."
Out came the resentment. The feeling that she'd been railroaded into leaving everything she held dear, her voice rising in both volume and pitch.
"You're not listening!" hissed Nick. "Pendennis has escaped . . ."
"You don't know that!"
"But I can find out."
"How? By searching the net?"
"No, by . . ."
He stopped mid-sentence and looked away.
"By what?" she pressed.
He looked uncomfortable. He took a deep breath. "Look, there's something I've got to do first. But as soon as I've done it I'll tell you."
Louise shook her head. She was not going to be fobbed off.
Nick held up his hand. "I'm not stalling. I really do know a way. But there's something I've got to show you first."
Nick loaded the data cube of Pendennis he'd brought from Framlingham Hall.
"It'll take about fifteen minutes to finish the processing but . . ." He paused while he tapped in a series of commands into a box attached to the HV system. "In the meantime, take a look at this."
A half life-size image of Pendennis strapped in a chair flashed into life. Louise jumped. It looked so real, the image so sharp, floating there a few feet distant. She wanted to look away but felt drawn. At least his face was turned away. And the image was frozen. She wasn't sure if she could stomach looking into those eyes again.
"You'll note I've tuned out Ziegler and everyone else in the room," said Nick. "I'll tune out the chair next but I need you to see something first."
He shifted position, kneeling down to tweak at a control box—one of the many sleek black boxes stacked either side of the HV unit.
"What you're seeing now is a three dimensional representation of Pendennis and the chair. The three physical dimensions. Let's call them x, y and z. Now, thanks to the wonders of science—and some pretty amazing programming—how would you like to see the same picture from the higher dimensions?"
He paused, expectant, like a father on a Christmas morning waiting for his son to open his special present—a working model of a spaceport, the one with all the extras and the programmable docking module.