The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [23]
Lisa grit her teeth and said nothing.
The paramedic tut-tutted again over the various wounds before reaching for a tube of sealant. “You’ll never get the stain out of that tunic,” she observed. Her own uniform, unlike Judith Kenna’s, was made of ultramodern fibers that were presumably as expert at mopping up blood as they were at mopping up sweat and tears.
Lisa tried to take the criticism as stoically as she was taking the treatment, although the anesthetic effect of the sealant couldn’t offer much protection to her self-esteem. In the hope of deflecting the censorious gaze of Judith Kenna’s eyes from her hand, she said: “On the other hand, if the kidnappers were just guessing where Morgan might have kept his backup wafers, they probably wouldn’t have contented themselves with raiding my place. If Morgan had found something recently, they might have been more likely to look for it at Stella Filisetti’s place.” She was fishing, to find out whether Kenna knew whether or not Morgan had been screwing his research assistant. When Kenna didn’t bite, Lisa added: “Unless, of course, it was Stella who told them my flat was the more likely hiding place.”
“How well do you know Stella Filisetti?” Kenna was quick to ask.
“Hardly at all,” Lisa admitted. “I’ve only met her a couple of times. Morgan never told me anything about her, except for a few passing remarks about her radfem sympathies.”
“Some of the nicest people I know are radfems,” the chief inspector commented mildly. “None of them pose any threat to national security.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that he disapproved,” Lisa said swiftly.
“You have radfem acquaintances yourself, I believe,” Kenna added.
Lisa had to stop herself from asking the chief inspector where that tidbit of information had come from. Instead, she said: “I’ve known one or two.” Her first assumption was that Kenna must be talking about Arachne West—but then she remembered that she had had more recent and much longer-enduring contact with another proud wearer of the label, and wondered how significant the chief inspector’s choice of the word “acquaintances” had been. Arachne West had almost qualified as a friend once—but Helen Grundy never had.
If Helen was numbered by Kenna as one of those radfems who were “among the nicest people I know,” Lisa thought, that might go a long way to explain why she was so down on Mike—and why she might disapprove so strongly of Lisa’s having taken Mike in for a while after Helen threw him out.
“All done,” said the paramedic brightly. “None of the cuts is bad enough to need syntheflesh—just peel off the sealant in three or four days. How’d you do it?”
“Somebody shot a telephone receiver out of my hand,” Lisa said laconically. “It could have been worse—at least the shooter waited until I’d taken it away from my ear.”
The young woman grinned as if it were a joke, then went back to join her partner.
“Is Stella Filisetti a suspect?” Lisa asked the chief inspector.
“We’re treating everyone as a suspect until we know otherwise,” Kenna replied predictably, “including your friend Sweet. Security people usually have ways of accumulating information on people with whom they come into regular contact.”
“He’s another casual acquaintance,” Lisa said. “But it would take a master of disguise to seem that stupid if he were actually the criminal mastermind who planned all this.”
Kenna was still watching her closely, speculatively, if not actually suspiciously. The chief inspector was obviously not convinced that Morgan Miller hadn’t entrusted her with a precious backup wafer, perhaps containing the secret of the Ultimate Weapon of Biowarfare. Lisa realized that it might not be easy to persuade Kenna that the burglars had simply made a mistake—understandably enough, given that she couldn’t quite convince