The Minders

by John Marrs

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  THE TWO-BEDROOM BUNGALOW was empty and unfurnished when Sinéad signed the lease. Her and Daniel’s apartment had been overloaded with brand-new furniture and technology—the washing machine and dishwasher decided for themselves when to run their cycles and their fridge ordered its own food online. Everything she chose for her cottage was secondhand or reclaimed and Wi-Fi free. Already, it felt like the home she had always wanted.

  Sometimes she would walk over to Doon’s house for one of her wine-and-rom-com evenings, and other nights Doon would come over and they’d share a meal. She was like the mother figure that Sinéad had missed out on for more than a decade and a half. And she wondered if Doon’s loss of her only child was partially the reason why they connected. They filled a gap in one another’s lives. But their closeness made it even harder for Sinéad to keep secret what she knew about the circumstances surrounding the death of Doon’s daughter, Isla. There was so much Sinéad could reveal that would ease her friend’s guilt, but it went against all the rules. Sometimes she hated keeping secrets.

  Sinéad’s garage was as packed as her days. Inside she stored a headboard, a dining-room table, two chests of drawers, and a Welsh dresser—all objects Gail had purchased from online auctions. Sinéad gave them a new lease on life with sandpapers, chalk paints, glazes, stains, and varnishes. Then Gail sold them on and they split the profits. Sinéad, however, had no need for a wage so she donated her earnings to a neonatal baby unit at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh instead.

  The two women met every other day and Gail frequently brought her daughter, Taylor, with her, something Sinéad was struggling with. Being alone with a child didn’t sit comfortably with her, especially one with eyes that never stopped following her around the room. Taylor stared at Sinéad cautiously, almost mistrustfully, as if to say I know what you’ve done.

  However, something niggled Sinéad about Gail and Taylor’s relationship. Both mother and daughter paid more attention to her than they did to one another. Gail went through the motions of doing all the practical things a mum was expected to do, but Sinéad sensed a disconnect. Gail didn’t speak proudly of any of Taylor’s developmental milestones and she barely paid her any attention when they were together. There weren’t even any photographs of Taylor on her phone. Individually, they were small quibbles, but together, they were enough for Sinéad to question whether her friend was suffering from postnatal depression. Or perhaps Anthony was to blame; maybe he was undermining her confidence in her ability to parent.

  “Is he a hands-on dad?” Sinéad had casually asked earlier in the week as she poured Gail a coffee. Gail’s face stiffened.

  “He does his best, yes.”

  “It must be tough on a marriage when a baby comes into the equation.”

  “It’s not easy.”

  “If you ever want to—you know—talk about anything, then I’m a good listener.” Gail folded her arms, a classic act of defensiveness. Sinéad had done the same thing when friends asked questions about her and Daniel’s relationship.

  “We’re good, thank you,” she replied with finality, so Sinéad left the conversation where it was.

  That afternoon, the garage doors were propped open while a masked Sinéad sanded the legs of a kitchen table. As the sounds of heritage musicians from her youth like Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Justin Bieber played from the speakers, she paused to allow her synaesthesia to bloom. Each group of notes created primary colours that floated around the garage like helium balloons caught in the wind. The higher the pitch, the brighter the colours became. She was surrounded by reds and burnt oranges when Taylor Swift played, and light blues and lilacs when Coldplay appeared. Her world was never this colourful with Daniel in it.

  “Someone’s enjoying herself,” a voice came suddenly.

  “Jesus!” Sinéad shouted aloud, and turned her head quickly. Gail was by the doors laughing, Taylor inside a pushchair.

  “You’re such a jumpy so-and-so.”

  Sinéad laughed but there was no humour in it. Instead, she was quietly annoyed for letting down her guard. “I thought we were meeting tomorrow?” she asked as she pulled down her mask.

  “I have a wee favour to ask. Are you free to babysit for a couple of hours?”

  Sinéad flinched. “When?”

  “Now. There’s a rocking chair dating back to the 1990s that I won on eBay, but I need to collect it now from Fettercairn before the owner goes on holiday.”

  “Isn’t Anthony free?”

  “No, he’s at the restaurant.”

  An awkward gap opened up between them. Gail seemed to sense Sinéad’s reluctance but pursued her request. “She’s very good and she’ll probably sleep most of the time she’s with you.”

  “I was hoping to finish this table, though, and it can’t be very good for a baby being around all this dust.”

  “There’s no hurry, the customer isn’t expecting it until the weekend.”

  Sinéad’s mouth became dry as she ran short of excuses. “I . . . I’m sorry, I can’t,” she muttered. “I have something inside that I need to do. I’ll see you soon.”

  Sinéad left the sandpaper on the floor and walked briskly back into the house, careful not to make eye contact with her baffled friend, and closed the door behind her. At the sound of the pushchair’s wheels leaving the driveway, she took deep breaths and raked her hair with her fingers.

  Damn it, she thought. She had handled that terribly. Sinéad reached for her bag hanging from a wall hook and retrieved a small plastic bottle. As she moulded her fingers around it, all she could think about was how Gail would never have asked Sinéad to babysit if she’d known that her friend had been responsible for the death of her own baby.

  CHAPTER 29

  EMILIA

  I need to get out of here,” muttered Emilia.

  She stared from the living-room window at the rolling green hills of the countryside ahead. She caught Ted’s reflection as he rose from a sofa, and she flinched when he wrapped his arms around her waist. She could tell that he felt it because immediately he pulled back.

  “We could go out for dinner tonight if you like?” he suggested. “There’s a wonderful Thai restaurant in town we used to visit. It might bring something back.”

  “I’d like to go out by myself.” Emilia turned to face him. “I think it might do me some good.”

  “That’s not something I’d feel comfortable with, not yet.”

  Would you feel more comfortable if I were sedated and locked up? she wanted to ask, but stopped herself. She was still unaware of his motives or the danger she faced in confronting him. Instead, she swallowed her brewing frustration.

  “I have a wardrobe full of gym clothes upstairs, so I assume I used to exercise a lot. I’d like to go for a run.”

  “That’s a great idea. We have a treadmill in the gym with virtual-reality headsets and belts, that mimics settings from mountain paths to the desert. I’ll join you, it’ll be fun.”

  “No, I want to go outside.”

  “Well, there’s several acres of land you probably haven’t explored yet. You could take the dogs with you.”

  “You’re not listening to me.” She sighed. “I want to go beyond the walls, explore the area in which I apparently once had a life. I’m going stir-crazy in this house.”

  “It’s not safe for you, being out there alone. What happens if you relapse and become disorientated and can’t remember where we live?”

  “Then I’ll find someone to ask for help. And it’s unlikely to happen because I remember everything since I first woke up. Just nothing before.”

  Emilia shuddered when she thought of the room where she had come back to life. She still had no inkling where or what it was or how she had come to be there. It haunted her dreams, along with the pregnant woman’s warning that Ted was not her husband. Em
ilia had spent much of the fortnight since her hospital discharge second-guessing everything Ted had to say. She picked apart their conversations in the hunt for contradictions. And at the forefront of her mind was his reluctance to allow her to leave their property alone and what she had overheard him say downstairs.

  There were other things she struggled to reconcile with too, aside from not remembering her husband or the home they’d apparently designed and built together. At least a dozen shoes from her extensive collection were a half size too small for her feet. She was sure that she could drive yet there was no indication she owned a car. Her phone and tablet had no contacts listed on either of them aside from Ted’s numbers. She seemingly had no access to credit cards or a bank account. Even the dogs they’d bought as puppies appeared completely unfamiliar with her.

  However, Ted had an explanation for everything. He told her she had been willing to suffer for fashion even if the shoe didn’t fit, she’d lost her confidence behind the wheel after an accident so she took trains to her office in London, her electronic devices were brand-new, and he’d cancelled her access to bank accounts when she vanished. And their dogs were loyal to whoever fed them—and for the last few months, it had only been Ted.

  “All I want is to be out there on my own for a couple of hours,” Emilia pleaded. “Don’t you trust me?”

  Soon after and for the first time in weeks, Emilia was almost a free woman. Dressed in a T-shirt, running bottoms, and trainers, she pounded the woodland paths alone, and this time as she reached the rear gates, there was no one to prevent her from leaving. But outside in the open, she hadn’t run more than a couple of hundred metres along the pavement before sensing she wasn’t alone. She heard the crackling of twigs and crunching of gravel underfoot from behind the other side of the wall, as a second pair of feet, perhaps more, maintained her pace.

  Ted was having her followed.

  Furious, Emilia darted across the road that separated two stretches of woods, running between the trees and pushing her way through the undergrowth. Her calf and thigh muscles burned after weeks of inactivity but still she ran, until she was sure she had lost whoever was on her trail. Then she bent double, her hands on her knees, fighting for breath. If Ted could lie about letting her out alone, it stood to reason he was lying about so much more. It was then that she made her decision.

  She removed from her pocket the business card that the stranger had given her in the grounds of the hospital. It contained only a telephone number. Nervously, she dialled and it rang just once before it was answered.

  “Continue through the woods until you see an opening,” a woman’s voice began coolly. “Follow the bridleway until you reach the nearest village. I will be in a private dining room in the Old House at Home pub. You should be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Emilia opened her mouth to respond but the line was already dead and the number was erasing itself remotely.

  CHAPTER 30

  BRUNO, OUNDLE, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

  Bruno glanced at the ReadWell message board, studying what he’d just typed.

  @Cominius: Have any of you revisited your old life simply to destroy the people who made it such a misery? Am I the only one who resents them for making me give it up for this world? Am I alone in wanting to make them pay? Or have you too taken matters into your own hands and gone back to snuff them out? Do the Echoes follow you too? Or do they see me as weak and that’s why they haunt me?

  His finger hovered above the post button as he weighed up what the consequences might be if he posted such an incendiary message. Instead, he hit the backspace key and watched each word being erased, letter by letter.

  Bruno had discovered the unexpected aftermath of committing murder—an insatiable appetite for only the unhealthiest kind of food. It was as if his body wanted carbohydrates to replace those used in the exertion of killing. Greasy-spoon cafes serving meals dripping in highly saturated fats and massive calorific content were all he craved. But hefty taxes on unhealthy food establishments meant they were becoming few and far between. However, Bruno had located a speakeasy-style truckers’ cafe behind a garage just outside town, with a menu containing everything that was bad for him. It was his third visit in a fortnight—and each had followed a killing.

  After the lawyers came two more names on his list. They had worked under Zoe, then accused her after her death of sexual harassment. But Bruno was convinced they were opportunist liars and, as a result of their unfounded accusations, they were responsible for his separation from Louie. One died from a single hammer blow to the head in his garage, the other on the doorstep to his flat with three swift thwacks.

  Then in the early hours of that morning, Bruno erased the penultimate name. Jaxon Davies was the rugby player who had filmed Zoe and her colleague having sex inside an autonomous company car. After uploading it onto a pornographic website, he’d earned money each time it was viewed. And Bruno estimated from the number count and percentage of likes it had received that Davies had made thousands from Zoe’s public indiscretion.

  Bruno had traced Davies’s address before enrolling in the programme, as he had with lawyers O’Sullivan and Graph. He’d planned to confront him to appeal to his better nature and persuade him to take it down. Bruno hated knowing that his son’s mother was a tool used for sexual gratification. But before he had the opportunity to, Louie had solved the puzzle and Bruno’s training had started. And once he was released back into the world, Bruno no longer cared if Davies had a better nature or not.

  In the early hours of the morning, he’d hurled a rock through one of Davies’s rear windows and waited in the gloom of the garden for the confused man to appear. Moments later, Bruno beat him to death using the same hammer he’d attacked the others with. And as with the others, £1 coins were left in what remained of his eye sockets.

  On his return to Oundle, Bruno reflected on his transformation from devoted dad and widower to cold-blooded killer, and questioned if the potential for such behaviour had always been inside him, waiting for an excuse to reveal itself. Had its rise to the surface been a reaction to Zoe’s behaviour, losing the house and then his son? Or was the procedure, the removal of pain receptors and management of the chemicals that controlled his moods, to blame, knocking everything else off kilter?

  Bruno recalled how soon after his procedure, he began obsessing over the data he stored, specifically graphic accounts of hushed-up murders and contract killings. Governments, principalities, and individuals justifying bloodshed for political and social purposes fascinated him. Thousands had died for much lesser reasons than the names on the hit list he’d begun to compile, and it helped him to justify his plans. Now only one name remained.

  Following a hot shower and a change out of his bloody clothes, Bruno was refuelling with a full English breakfast and all the trimmings. It brought to the surface a memory of Zoe and him inside a diner on Las Vegas Boulevard. Each of their plates had contained a stack of pancakes so tall, they could barely finish a third of them.

  They had hired a Jeep for their honeymoon and driven from Los Angeles to San Francisco, stopping off in Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite National Park. It was the trip of a lifetime. And in their first few years of marriage, they had continued to enjoy at least three foreign breaks a year until Louie was born.

  Recent developments in prenatal testing had revealed he was likely to be on the autistic spectrum, but despite Zoe’s hesitancy, they continued with the pregnancy. It wasn’t until Louie’s second birthday that a broader extent of his condition emerged. Flights abroad became difficult as the noise and vibrations of plane engines agitated him. Unfamiliar hotel rooms scared him and he’d repeatedly hit himself on the back of his head with his fists. Music playing from speakers scattered around pools and restaurants led to screaming fits that proved too stressful for them all.

  So Bruno and Zoe stopped going as far afield, and hired campervans instead, cra
mming items familiar to Louie inside them before travelling the British Isles. Bruno didn’t care where they went as long as he was surrounded by his family. But sometimes, as the campervan drove itself from destination to destination, he’d catch sight of Zoe staring wistfully from the window at the passing countryside. He feared she hadn’t found the happiness he had.

  Later, she earned a promotion at work that saw her earnings far outweighing his, so he quit his career to be a full-time dad while she worked longer hours away from home. It bothered Bruno at the time that her absence didn’t seem to trouble her. But he chose not to bring it up. Now he wondered how many other cracks he’d papered over in their marriage.

  Bruno mopped up the remains of his breakfast with a slice of thick white bread and pushed his knife and fork to one side of the plate. As a waitress refilled his mug with tea, he withdrew a second phone from his pocket, an unregistered one he’d purchased that morning. He double-checked that he’d disabled locations, cookies, emails, and texts before using the cafe’s Wi-Fi to find the only website he planned to visit.

  He allowed an Echo, a woman with a South African accent, to walk him through his implanted data on how to bypass password encryption. Once inside the website, he accessed the interior security cameras. One by one, he made use of them all to search each room until he finally tracked down who he was looking for.

  Louie was sitting at a kitchen table in his residential care unit, mixing a bowl of ingredients. Just a glimpse of his son after six months of separation created an ache inside that pushed against Bruno’s heart. Louie appeared perfectly content as a staff member helped him to pour the contents onto a baking tray. And without being told what to do, Louie levelled it with a wooden spoon and placed it inside an oven.