Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “Did you celebrate last night?” I asked bitterly. “Was I another triumph?”

  “Lydia. Christ, listen to you. Are you so fucking brainwashed that you can’t see what everyone ought to be able to see? What happened to you last night, and to Emmanuel Scorsa last week, has nothing to do with the animal-activist campaigns. NABED has nothing to do with us. Look, use your head. What is the most important thing that animal-liberation groups have preached since the seventies?”

  “Nonviolence?”

  “Exactly. So why have a group of activists suddenly started to kill animals and attack scientists in the Cambridge area? Why not anywhere else? And why the change of policy, the abandonment of a policy of nonviolence to life which has defined everything we’ve done since the campaigns began? Why would we jeopardise all that now?”

  “So who is driving it?”

  “In the spring of 2001, after the plans for the Cambridge pharmaceutical lab were scrapped, a group of seven men—directors of some of the multinational pharmaceuticals and others—were summoned to a meeting in a hotel somewhere in North London. They formed an alliance, calling themselves the Coalition for Research Defence. We call them the Syndicate.”

  “Why Syndicate?” Outside in the garden, the apple trees strained against a wintry wind, lashed with rain.

  “Because they’re like the Mafia. Inside everything. Wired up to everything. They talk about strategies and wars on terror and—I’ve read some of the e-mail correspondence—smoking us out. To them we’re vermin burrowing under their ground, terrorists standing in the way not just of scientific advancement but democracy and even the safety of the West. The bastards are fundamentalists at heart, not cynics. That makes them more dangerous.”

  “What do they want?”

  “To wipe out animal activism once and for all, at any price. They’ve pretty much destroyed us in eighteen months. One member of the Syndicate, John Petherbridge, is a senior officer of the Special Branch group established by Scotland Yard to infiltrate terrorist groups. So they’ve got access to mobile phone numbers, e-mail addresses, CCTV recordings, all the information they need to bring us down. They have major financial backing from the drug companies and, we think but can’t prove, even government—or at least MI5—support.”

  “This is all about drugs?”

  “Christ, no. The pharmaceutical companies make big money from the drugs trade. But two of the seven men who run the Syndicate are arms dealers. One of them, Robert Marlow, is particularly dangerous. He’s funding gunrunners in Afghanistan.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the connection?”

  “Between the arms dealers, Scotland Yard, and the pharmaceuticals? Biological weapons. A consortium of pharmaceutical companies is close to a big breakthrough with a chemical that paralyses the human nervous system. An immobiliser. Works just like those wasps that paralyse their victims. They’re on the last stages of the tests now.”

  “How do you know? And should you be telling me all of this? Mightn’t the house be bugged or something?” Lily couldn’t hear my mockery.

  “This is one of the safest places of all, because of Elizabeth. Why do you think I found my way here? Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.”

  “Elizabeth? Was she a member of the Syndicate?”

  “Oh, Christ no. Elizabeth never knew anything about that. She was completely lost in her world—optics, glass, light, the seventeenth century. She wouldn’t have been interested in what I do, what we do. She had her own villains to hunt down.”

  “Villains?”

  “You’ve not finished reading it yet—Elizabeth’s book?”

  “Yes, OK. I know who Elizabeth was hunting down. Or at least I think I do. Where does Dilys fit in?”

  “Dilys Kite? Oh, she’s OK. Just a friend of Elizabeth’s. She was round several times a week—she drove me mad. I fell out with Elizabeth when we argued about Dilys.”

  “Did Elizabeth know about what you were doing?”

  “Of course not. They were like a pair of old witches with their crystal balls. All caught up in the past and with the dead. They couldn’t see the dying around them, the slaughter. That wasn’t for them.”

  “So what is NABED?”

  “NABED is an animal-liberation terrorist organisation. They were set up in the spring of last year. They attack employees of the labs and their families. They are extremely violent. They work in cells.”

  “They were established at the same time that the Syndicate launched their campaign? Spring of 2001?”

  “You’re getting the picture.”

  “Shit—no,” I said. “That’s completely implausible. Are you telling me that NABED is the terrorist wing of the Syndicate?”

  Lily didn’t answer.

  I went on unravelling, in disbelief: “That they attack their own people, just to discredit…?”

  “I said—at any price.”

  “But Emmanuel was nearly murdered…”

  “It went wrong. We think something went wrong.”

  “And you’ve been working from The Studio, all this time? Lying to me?”

  “Yes, I can send e-mails from here that won’t be traced.”

  “But Elizabeth doesn’t have an Internet connection.”

  “My laptop has a wireless connection. There’s a transmitter on a house next door that I use. They don’t know that I use it. My e-mails piggyback on their line.”

  “But why should The Studio be safer than anywhere else? How did you know that it wouldn’t be bugged?”

  “You don’t get it, do you? It’s simple. Because Cameron Brown runs the Syndicate. Because Cameron Brown developed Morazapine—the chemical that paralyses the nervous system. Because Cameron summoned those men to the London hotel, because Cameron set up NABED, because Cameron is the Syndicate.”

  We’d fallen off the edge of something solid. Neither of us spoke until Lily said, “Do you know where he is now?”

  “In Florida.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  What had you told me? You told me you’d been working with Elizabeth on cracking the code in Newton’s notebook—the alchemical purification spell. The cluster of letters that began with NABED. Not a coincidence then, just a private joke, a name for the terrorist wing of the Syndicate. Morazapine—I remembered you talking about Morazapine. You’d called it an antipsychotic drug, hadn’t you? Hadn’t you described how it worked by burst-firing some part of the brain; hadn’t you said that it kept madness at bay, that it would be a major breakthrough in the treatment of schizophrenia? Morazapine—I remembered the camels and the incense and myrrh the name had conjured, the white owl flying across the path of our car as you talked, trees branching out like arteries against the night sky. I remembered love. I remembered you. Somewhere in the hot pain inside my head, I remembered you, watching you sleep, your body against my sheets, still, watching you breathing.

  After I left you, I’d listen to that song by Counting Crows, the one about trying to forget…about thinking for a time that you had. Thinking you were free. The song about how the remembering comes crashing back, like a blow to the stomach, in a spectrum of colours—“Give me your blue rain, Give me your black sky, Give me your green eyes…give me your white skin…give me your white skin…give me your white skin…” Yes, I had given myself up again. As if I had no choice. In fact, I had never taken myself back.

  With what are you embroiled, Lydia Brooke?

  “Morazapine is an antipsychotic drug,” I said slowly. “He told me about it.”

  “Yes, it was to start with. But Cameron also discovered its paralysing effects, which he tested and strengthened in his lab.”

  “He would never have set out to—”

  “Make a formula that would be used in a chemical weapon? No, of course not. But once he put in a fund-raising bid to a company he knew had links to arms dealers, once he’d taken the huge research grant they gave him and the new lab, research assistants, and lab equipment, and the
nomination for that international award in neuroscience, he’d given away any control he might have had about the future uses of that formula—”

  “He was weak,” I said and then, hearing myself defend you like that, I snapped, fragmenting into a thousand pieces. “Get away from me,” I said suddenly, into the darkness of the room, as tears began to sting my face. “Get out. I can’t hear any more.”

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” Will said, quietly. “I’ll be down in the garden by the river if you need me.”

  “Don’t come back,” I said. “Don’t come back.”

  “I’m taking your mobile and the landline handset with me,” she said. “So you don’t try to call anyone. I’ll be back in an hour. I’m taking your keys; mine don’t work in the lock anymore.”

  Twenty-eight

  I wasn’t afraid of what she might still tell me; I had to stand and face it. Despite my injuries, I could have walked away that morning, taken the side door and the path through the garden to the gate in the wall, without Will seeing me. I could have called you on your mobile from the pay phone in Landing Lane, reached you in Florida, or wherever you were; I could have left you a message. Or simpler still, I could have phoned the police and told them where to find Lily Ridler.

  So why didn’t I? Because I was curious, and it wasn’t a benign kind of curiosity, it was something dark and ravenous—ravens scavenging over a corpse, dark, urgent, and visceral. For years I’d ignored my endless small suspicions about your words and explanations; I hadn’t wanted suspicions enmeshed with love. Yes, I knew you had lied, to me and to Sarah, serially and compulsively, all the time we’d been lovers. Lied, not only as a way of keeping the affair going, not only as a means of controlling a life that had become fractured into multiple secrets, but also because you had forgotten the difference between truth and lies, and recently you had come to lie when you didn’t need to, badly. You’d left the Volvo at Trinity and walked to The Studio, you said. I drove to the Trinity car park an hour later. It wasn’t there. You were visiting a friend in Nottingham for the weekend, you said. I found the receipt for the hotel in Munich in your wallet. You were driving back to the lab, you said. I watched a dark unmarked car pick you up from Landing Lane.

  So I didn’t leave The Studio. I walked up and down in the undulating, shoaling light, talking to you. When Will came back an hour later, I said, “You’ve made a mistake. He could never be caught up in all of this.”

  “He is.”

  “I’ve known him for so long…”

  “I know. And you’ve been lovers for years. Don’t tell me. He’s too kind to be involved in anything so violent. He has children. Pets. He reads Rilke, makes love to you. Look, people are complicated. Your Cameron runs NABED; he orders animals to be mutilated and people attacked to discredit us, all in the name of the freedom to experiment on animals. He thinks he is doing the right thing, of course. He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t. I’ve heard tapes of one of the Syndicate meetings. He thinks he’s doing what’s necessary to defend what he calls civilisation and civilised values. Some civilisation, eh?”

  “Do you know how long we’ve been lovers?”

  “Yes. That sort of information is easy to come by. It’s that kind of war. You have to know where your enemy’s weak spots are.”

  “So that’s why I was attacked last night.”

  “I told you. We are a nonviolent organisation. What happened to you last night has nothing to do with any animal-liberation group.”

  “But everything to do with NABED?”

  “Yes.”

  “But if NABED is the terrorist wing of the Syndicate and Cameron Brown is one of them, he would have known I’d be attacked last night. He would have sanctioned it.” Did you? Could you have done that?

  “No, not necessarily. There are things happening in the group—allegiances are breaking down. Petherbridge is especially dangerous. I would always have said that you’d be the safest of all. Cameron—they—wouldn’t go that far. And you being attacked would expose him too—expose you as his lover. Think what the press would do if they got hold of that story. That’s a hell of a price to pay, to lose you and his wife at once.” Yes, I could see that.

  “So it doesn’t make sense.”

  “It only makes sense if there’s some kind of internal battle going on. Cameron is having to fight for his corner. I’m sure the attack on you last night was meant as a warning to him. And that’s not good, because he’s been acting as a brake in the last few months, questioning some of their decisions, opposing others. Now that the testing stage is almost complete, he’s being kept out of certain decisions. He no longer knows everything. But he’s still the only one who knows how the formula works or how to develop it. They wouldn’t have it without him. He’s the linchpin for everything, but not for much longer. With the tests almost complete, he’s making himself dispensable.”

  “What’s to be done?”

  “There’s nothing for you to do. You don’t even have to believe anything I’ve said. You can put it all down to paranoia. We have to sit it out. If I’m right, they’ve used you to send their message to him.”

  “What if the message doesn’t get through?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, if I don’t tell the police and if I put off seeing Cameron when he gets back from America—until my face has healed, that is—then there’s no need for him to ever know. Then the message won’t reach him.”

  “But you have no idea what that will do.”

  “It’ll throw a spanner into the works. Might stop whatever’s happening, or slow it down?” I was clutching at straws.

  “Best thing you can do is to finish the book and then move back to Brighton. Get out of the cross fire. It won’t go on forever. But it is going to get worse before it gets better. Especially now.”

  I didn’t see Will again after she left The Studio that day. I didn’t see her again until the court case. I tried to speak to her during the time they held her at the Parkside Police Station, but they wouldn’t let me. I wanted to ask about you and her, but I never did because there was never the time, nor could I have found the words.

  That last morning, as she left The Studio, heading north again, she gave me a brown envelope.

  “You won’t like me for this,” she said. I had to squint to see the writing, but I recognised the shape of Elizabeth’s handwriting before I could read the letters. The envelope was addressed to Will Burroughs at an address in Chesterton.

  “She posted me this the day before she died,” Will said. “See—the postmark is the sixth of September. There’s a note. It simply says, ‘Dear Will, sorry to be oblique but I wonder if you might keep this in a safe place for a few weeks. It’s a draft of something. A precious piece. I’ll let you know when I need it back. It’s the only copy, so keep it carefully.’”

  “Have you opened it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “It’s a chapter of The Alchemist. It’s called ‘The Crimson Room.’”

  “It can’t be called ‘The Crimson Room.’ That’s not possible. My chapter’s called ‘The Crimson Room.’ Have you read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has anyone else read it?”

  “Only Emmanuel Scorsa.”

  “Emmanuel Scorsa. The neuroscientist in the hospital? How the hell?”

  “He’s one of us, works undercover like me. He’s been working at the Histon lab for a year or so. When he first came to Cambridge, I had to brief him about the layout in the lab. I’m the only one who knows—I worked inside that unit for six months before Cameron took the job there. Emmanuel came to The Studio sometimes at night after Elizabeth died because we thought it was safe. Then you arrived.”

  “But why did you show him? Were you lovers?”

  “No, we weren’t lovers. There are rules about that, for Christ’s sake. I showed him the chapter because after Elizabeth died I didn’t know what to do. Everything and anything was possible—I
started imagining even more conspiracies.” She paused, uncertain how much to say. “I knew Cameron very well once, as part of my work. When Elizabeth died, some of my people were saying that Cameron was behind it…but that made no sense because he and his mother were so close. He talked about her all the time. I couldn’t believe…”

  So Lily’s relationship with you had become emotionally “complicated,” despite everything you stood for.

  “No, you were right,” I said. “That’s unthinkable.”

  “They pulled me out for a bit when I got sick. I started to see things here at The Studio—strange lights. My vision got weird. I think I must have had a bit of a breakdown.”

  “And what did Scorsa say?”

  “Not much. He told me to bring the chapter here and leave it somewhere safe. We both knew it was pretty incendiary stuff, though those ideas and theories Elizabeth had about alchemy and murder were also weirdly plausible. I couldn’t see the point of all that energy, really. Elizabeth’s obsession. You know: a whole ten years given over to uncovering a network of alchemists and then ending up with a theory about a grubby little set of murders in Cambridge. Pathetic, really. Think what that energy and intelligence might have done for us. Do you know how many animals we kill to eat in this country alone every year?” she said, opening her eyes wide.

  “I couldn’t even begin to guess,” I said.

  “Eight hundred million animals, every year. Doesn’t that just do your head in?”

  “So it’s been here all the time.”

  “What? The chapter? Yes, I stuck it behind some of the books in the big bookcase. I didn’t want Sarah finding it when she was clearing out the house. It’s yours now. Better late than never, I suppose. I just thought it might make your job a bit easier if I gave it to you. Make it easier for you to leave Cambridge.”

  “But why didn’t you give it to me before?”