Free If at First by Peter F. Hamilton Page A

making the allegations, my boss told me to give it complete priority; I guess she was scared about what his magazines and satellite channels would do to the Met if we let it slide.
    I went out to Jenson’s house with Paul and Carmen. Jesus, you should have seen the bloody place: I mean it was out of a Hollywood serial killer film. Every room was filled with stuff on Orthew; thousands of pictures taken all over the world, company press releases dating back decades, filing cabinets full of newspaper clippings, articles, every whisper of gossip, records of his movements, maps with his houses and factories on them, copies of his magazines, tapes of interviews Jenson had made, City financial reports on the company. It was a cross between a shrine and a Marcus Orthew museum. It spooked the hell out of me. No doubt about it, Jenson was totally fixated on Orthew. Forensics had to hire a removal lorry to clear the place out.
    I interviewed Jenson the next day, and that was when it started to get really weird. I’ll tell you it as straight as I can remember, which is pretty much verbatim, I’m never ever going to forget that afternoon. First off, he wasn’t upset that he’d been caught, more like resigned. Almost like a premier league footballer who’s lost the Cup Final, you know: It’s a blow but life goes on. The first thing he said was: “I should have realized. Marcus Orthew is a genius, he was bound to catch me out.” Which is kind of ironic, really, isn’t it? So I asked him what exactly he thought he’d been caught out doing. Get this: He said, “I was trying to find where he was building his time machine.” Paul and Carmen just laughed at him. To them it was a Sectioning case, pure and simple. Walk the poor bloke past the station doctor, get the certificate signed, lock him up in a padded room, and supply him with good drugs for the next thirty years. I thought more or less the same thing, too; we wouldn’t even need to go to trial, but we were recording the interview, and all his delusions would help coax a signature out of the doc, so I asked him what made him think Orthew was building a time machine. Jenson said they went to school together, that’s how he knew. Now, the thing is, I checked this later, and they actually did go to some boarding school in Lincolnshire. Well that’s fair enough, obsessions can start very early, grudges, too; maybe some fight over a bar of chocolate spiraled out of control, and it’d been festering in Jenson’s mind ever since. Jenson claimed otherwise. Marcus Orthew was the coolest kid in school, apparently. Didn’t surprise me; from what I’d seen of him in interviews over the years he was one of the most urbane men on the planet. Women found that very attractive, you didn’t have to look through Jenson’s press cuttings to know that, Orthew’s girlfriends were legendary, even the broadsheets reported them.
    So how on earth did Jenson decide that the coolest kid in school had evolved into someone building a time machine? “It’s simple,” he told us earnestly. “When I was at school I got a cassette recorder for my twelfth birthday. I was really pleased with it, nobody else had one. Marcus saw it and just laughed. He snatched one of the cassettes off me, a C-90 I remember, and he said:
State of the art, huh, damn it’s almost the same size as an iPod.
”
    Which didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Paul and Carmen had given up by then, bored, waiting for me to wrap it up. So? I prompted. “So,” Jenson said patiently. “This was 1971. Cassettes
were
state of the art then. At the time I thought it was odd, that
iPod
was some foreign word; Marcus was already fluent in three languages, he’d throw stuff like that at you every now and then, all part of his laid-back image. It was one of those things that lingers in your mind. There was other stuff, too. The way he kept smiling every time Margaret Thatcher was on TV, like he knew something we didn’t. When I asked