by Colin Wade
As they sat watching Holby City, Anya suddenly realised the day’s post was still on the side.
As she picked up the pile she was immediately struck by a hand-written envelope, addressed to her. She opened it up to reveal a handwritten letter.
At first, she just stared at it, trying to take in what it said. She then let out a mildly hysterical laugh.
“What is it?” said Rob.
“Superman has written to me and says my life is in danger.”
“What, let’s see that.” Rob examined the letter. “Clark Kent? This has got to be some nutter.”
“Why would he be writing to me?”
“I don’t know. How odd.”
Anya studied it a bit longer then crushed it up and threw it on the fire. That satisfying sizzle and blast of fire energy erupted in the hearth as it landed dead centre.
“You should be a basketball player,” quipped Rob.
Anya didn’t answer, just stared at the fire, not responding, rattled by this weird note.
Rob watched her. She was worried. Was this more weirdness about her past? He was not going to let this go on much longer.
15
The name on that email was haunting Clark’s thoughts. How could he possibly be involved? George Walker was clearly a greedy bastard and it was no surprise to see him apparently involved in dodgy dealings, but the other guy?
Clark had to remind himself that the evidence he found was three years old, when this man was not such a prominent figure, but now, he was one of the most powerful men in the country backed up by a family name and fortune that had undoubtedly got him where he was today.
Clark didn’t know what to do with this information. He was beginning to feel overwhelmed. Should he share it with Snap? A problem shared and all that. No, not at the moment.
He decided to follow his third golden rule. Follow the evidence trail.
The email and bank report had given him something. Girls’ names, huge amounts of cash changing hands and apparent culpability of a dodgy doctor, dodgy politician and that man.
Clark decided to delve into the life of the first girl listed on the email, Rachel Hermitage. He searched her social media presence and up until a few months before she was admitted to the clinic there were lots of pictures of her partying hard with a wide group of different people.
Well Rachel, you are clearly a party girl enjoying life to the full, but where are these pictures being taken?
He suddenly found one with her standing outside a bar with a group of friends.
Bentley’s Bar.
He quickly searched for their website.
Oxford. Now that is interesting.
He searched the public alumnae records of Oxford University. She was there. Listed as an undergraduate.
Undergraduate? So you didn’t finish uni. I guess it is obvious why.
He had a sudden thought.
Anya Novak was living in Oxford. Were they at university at the same time?
He went back to the alumnae records. Anya was listed the same – undergraduate. They were in the same year and neither finished uni.
He did a search on Anya’s social media profile. The first picture of her made him stop in his tracks. Rachel was gorgeous but Anya was something else.
My God, she is stunning. A beautiful face, an amazing body. Wow.
He looked back at the pictures of Rachel. His instincts were right. Anya was there, with Rachel, in many of the pictures.
They were friends.
Clark’s conspiracy radar was now on full alert. Had these girls been targeted as a group?
He hacked back into the Fairport Medical records. He wanted to see if they had been admitted together.
Right, Anya was admitted in September 2013. Rachel in November 2013. Shit, they WERE targeted together.
Clark pored over the rest of the social media pictures of Rachel and Anya. He realised that the closer it was to when they were both admitted to the clinic, the more drawn and spaced out they looked. Anya in particular had lost some of her gloss. In her early pictures she was a knockout but it was now obvious that drugs had shattered their lives.
He put his head in his hands. How tragic.
There was one thing that still unnerved Clark about these two girls. Why was Rachel dead and Anya still alive? Was this just another tragic moment in Rachel’s life, or something more sinister?
Clark now had the bit between his teeth. He had a strong evidence chain already and had to see if the other girls were somehow linked.
He looked at the next girl on the list. Lisa Benbridge. He found her social media profile and the photos of her, like Anya and Rachel, showed a very attractive woman. She had long, blonde hair, a pretty face and a great body.
He had printed out a number of Anya and Rachel’s social media pictures and laid them out on a table at the end of his man cave.
As soon as he saw Lisa’s picture, he knew. She was in the ones he had printed out.
“There. There. There.” He jabbed his finger at the pictures on the table, pointing to Lisa in each one.
He checked the same sources. There she was. Oxford University alumnae records – undergraduate. Same year as Rachel and Anya. Admitted to the clinic in November 2013, the same month as Rachel.
Jesus. Three out of five. Beautiful women. All friends. Targeted as a group.
Clark’s realisation that he was actually onto something real made his stomach lurch. This is what he’d always wanted. To find a conspiracy. Uncover it. Get some revenge. Make his dad proud, but the reality was something different. He was shit scared.
Every creak in the flat made him jumpy. He had watched all the films. Wasn’t this the moment when the government spooks crashed through the window, apprehended him with a black hood over his head and took him off to a secret location to torture out of him what he knew?
He shivered and turned off his computer. This was all getting a bit heavy.
16
They came again. Night five. No let-up.
*
LEX… LEXI… she could almost see the word. Where was she? The machines. Lying down. She was restrained. Was she in a hospital? It was all so clinical.
There were screens round her obscuring her view. She wrestled against the restraints. Woozy but still able to fight a little bit.
“Le… m… go!” Her speech was slurred. The full sentence wouldn’t form.
She thrashed and thrashed and thrashed.
*
The scream could have woken the dead. Her eyes bulging, thrashing about in bed. Her bed. Not the bed in the nightmare.
She looked straight over at Rob.
“What the hell?” said Rob, as he was woken by the commotion.
Anya bolted out of bed and made for the bedroom door.
Rob leapt after her. Caught her at the door.
“No, you don’t. You are not running away from this again. You damn well tell me what is going on.”
Anya looked at him with a mixture of fear, hatred and sheer panic.
“Leave me alone.”
He grabbed her tighter.
“You are hurting me.”
“Tell me what is wrong.”
“I can’t. I have lied to you.”
“I know.”
Anya looked at him with disbelief. Why was he so fucking perfect? How did he know?
“Let’s go downstairs, make a coffee and talk.” Rob’s accentuation of that last word frightened Anya. She had never seen Rob so angry.
She relented. She had nowhere to go. This was the moment. The moment when she had to tell Rob. Tell the truth.
*
The mood was strained. It was 5 a.m. and the day hadn’t started in the sky. It was still bleak and dark, much like the mood in the kitchen as Rob made coffee and Anya sat a
t the table deflated and broken.
Rob placed the coffee in front of Anya, grabbed her face tenderly and said, “I love you Anya, with all of my heart. You have made my life complete. I will not let you suffer on your own. Tell me. It’s about your past, isn’t it?”
She looked at him. Mr Bloody Perfect. She didn’t know whether to smash his face in or kiss him.
There was a short, uncomfortable silence. Anya eventually broke it.
“I am a drug addict.”
Rob’s face crumpled. “Oh my God Anya.”
“My parents died. I was in despair. I couldn’t concentrate on uni. Got in with the wrong crowd and got addicted. This is why I flunked uni.”
“But you haven’t been using since we met. Have you?”
“No, I was ‘cured’ and meeting you kept me straight. Stopped any cravings. But, these dreams, these nightmares, they are drawing me back to what happened. I am so scared.”
“What did happen?”
Anya started crying. “This is the problem. I don’t know. I have huge gaps in my memory. There is about eighteen months of my life I just can’t remember. The dreams seem to be real, like my brain is trying to recover the lost memories, but they are horrible and unsettling.”
“So, is there anything you remember?”
Anya didn’t answer. She just stared at the ground, not wanting to catch Rob’s eye.
“Anya. You have to tell me.”
She stayed silent. She couldn’t do it. Go back to those dark places.
“Anya. Come on.”
After a few more uncomfortable minutes, Anya finally spoke.
“OK. OK. I know I was admitted to a place called the Loughborough Clinic, treated and apparently cured by a creepy little man called Dr French. I was in there for almost two years but only have memories of the last few weeks before I was discharged. He claims he was treating me for my addiction the whole time but I don’t believe him. There is something wrong with that place. Something wrong with him. I don’t know what he did to me but the nightmares are horrible. I keep seeing these letters LEX. I am woozy, restrained on a bed, wires and machines attached to me and even one where he was violating me. God, it is all so horrible and not the sort of memories that seem to link to any sort of drug addiction treatment I have ever heard of.”
“Why have you taken so long to tell me all this?”
“I couldn’t make sense of it. It was scaring me. When I met you Rob it was all about looking forward, forgetting my past. Building a new life with you. I didn’t want to lie to you but I just wanted to forget.”
Rob was trying to process all she was telling him. His instincts had been right and he was hurt that she had not confided in him. It was fight or flight time.
He chose fight.
“OK. We need to deal with this thing head on. We have to be a hundred per cent honest with each other from now on.”
Anya smiled. She felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She wasn’t dealing with this alone anymore.
“Thank you, Rob. I love you.”
They refilled their coffee cups and relaxed in each other’s company for the first time in a while.
“Tell me. What do you want to do next? What would help?”
“I want to go back to the clinic and confront Dr French. We need some answers.”
“Good, that is what we will do.”
They made breakfast and then searched for the location of the Loughborough Clinic. It was in Warwickshire, about two miles outside of Leamington Spa in a countryside location. The route finder said it was sixty-nine miles away and would take about an hour and a half to get to.
“We’ll close the gallery down for the day on Friday and go up there,” said Rob. “I don’t think we should warn them we are turning up. If what you think is true, there is something dodgy going on in that place.”
The game was on.
17
Another day’s work done and Clark was finding it harder and harder to concentrate. The evidence he had found about this conspiracy was invading his every waking thought.
The name copied on the email was still constantly on his mind but he wanted to complete his research on the five girls first. Rachel, Anya and Lisa were friends and seemed to have been targeted as a group. He wanted to see if Charlotte Kay and Marjit Ahmed were in the same group.
So, Charlotte, let’s see what your story is.
He found another very prominent social media profile and her pictures showed another young, attractive woman, with bobbed, brunette hair, a sharp, angular face with a slightly fuller figure than the rest of the girls he had seen.
Hmm, another very attractive girl but I don’t think I have seen you before.
He looked at the pictures he had printed out of Rachel, Anya and Lisa. Charlotte was not in any of them.
Now that is curious.
He checked the alumnae records of Oxford University. Would she be there? Would this be a connection?
And, there you are. Four out of five at Oxford. This is not a coincidence.
But, there was an interesting difference. Charlotte had started her second year of uni before the same pattern of degradation set in. She was in a different year and a different social group.
OK Charlotte, when were you in the clinic?… Admitted in January 2014. Interesting, a bit later. A second batch?
He took the same steps with Marjit and started with her social media profile. The pictures again showed a very attractive, slim girl of what he thought was probably Indian origin.
He knew as soon as he saw her picture that he had seen her before and, there she was, in many of the same pictures as Charlotte, but not with Anya, Rachel or Lisa.
Like Charlotte she was in her second year at Oxford University and again her photo history charted the same sorry degradation into drug addiction and a complete cessation of all social media activity once in the clinic, where she had been admitted one month after Charlotte.
Well, well, well, five out of five and we do have two distinct social groups. All at Oxford and all in the clinic at about the same time.
His stomach was lurching again because one question kept bothering him. He shouted at his screen.
“What the hell happened in that clinic to get four of these women killed and why is Anya still alive?”
Clark had to take a break, to eat and replenish his caffeine levels. He was feeling scared and isolated. He had always been happy in his own company, using his virtual mates in Proton if he wanted some banter and some human contact, even if it wasn’t physical. But the reality of this, finally finding a conspiracy, what he’d always wanted, was unnerving him, taking him to emotional places he had never been. Snap would help and understand but something was holding Clark back from sharing what he had found. Was he becoming too paranoid?
He decided to try and finish the girls’ stories before he moved onto the alleged conspirators. He started to look at the ‘accidents’.
Clark looked for any public records of how Rachel died. He found newspaper reports in the local Berkshire paper referring to the car accident. The report said she had been driving down a local B-road in the late evening when her car was in a collision with an unidentified black car, thought to be a 4x4. This seemed to be based on a witness statement at the time from a driver who was about half a mile away from the accident, saw the collision but by the time he reached the scene the black car had gone. Rachel’s car had plunged into a ditch and burst into flames. She had no chance and all the witness could do was alert the emergency services to clear up the scene.
Jesus. Was this a tragic accident… or something else?
Clark trawled the papers over the weeks following the first report and despite a few half-hearted attempts by the police appealing for information about the mystery black car, the case seemed to drift off the public conscience and out o
f the newspapers pretty quickly.
Come on Rachel. Help me out here. Were you murdered and where are your parents in all this? Is no one looking out for you?
He did the same for Lisa, Charlotte and Marjit’s accidents. Looked at the public records and as he did his heart sank. His inner monologue playing out the frightening similarities. Accidents or murder?
Every accident the same. A car accident. The car leaving the road in similar circumstances with similar horrific results. A black car mentioned in some of them. No credible witnesses. A lame police investigation. Just another statistic. And, no parental appeals in the papers or on TV. What the hell happened?
He looked again at Rachel’s life. She was an only child and it appeared had much older parents. It seemed they had Rachel very late in life. Clark found death records for her father who appeared to have died from natural causes at the age of seventy. No car accident, just life. Her mother was still alive but was registered in a nursing home for dementia patients.
OK Rachel, so that is why no one is looking out for you.
Lisa Benbridge was next. She was a product of the care system. She had no parents and no siblings. They had given her up as a baby and she was moved from foster family to care home and back again. Somehow, despite this terrible start in life, she was academically gifted and had managed to excel at school and get a place at Oxford. She was a fighter but the fire that had driven her to get out of social poverty had been extinguished.
“Fucking hell,” he screamed at the empty room.
The injustice burned in Clark. If this wasn’t an accident but murder, this had suddenly got extra personal. His dad was in his thoughts again. Evil people destroying innocent people’s lives.
He looked at the last two girls, Charlotte and Marjit. They were also only children, no siblings.
It came as no surprise to Clark that Charlotte’s parents were not alive. Both seemed to have died in their fifties from a respective heart attack (father) and brain haemorrhage (mother). Tragic, but no apparent ‘accidents’.
Marjit’s parents appeared to be alive but living in India. Clark couldn’t find anything that suggested they had been to the UK to deal with their daughter’s death. It seemed from the paperwork around her death that her body had been shipped back to India for burial. He guessed they had been fobbed off and told their daughter’s death was just a tragic accident. The distance had probably put them off, especially as they got her body back home so easily and efficiently. Clark was convinced someone had made this happen quickly to avoid too many questions, leaving her parents to grieve well away from where it had all happened.