by Liz Jensen
I Skype Ashok and fill him in briefly on my abortive interview with Jonas Svensson and what followed. When I tell him about Jonas’ prognosis – not good – he puts his head in his hands. When he looks at me again, his hair is sticking out at odd angles.
‘Jesus. You’re sure earning your bucks on this one, Maestro.’
‘In the Chen file, there’s an envelope containing a specimen. I think it’s something mineral. Can you have it analysed?’
‘Sure. Might take a few days.’
‘And the suicide note?’
‘Is just some weird little drawings. I’ve sent you a PDF. Stephanie Mulligan’s got a theory. About Chen and Svensson. Want to hear it? Belinda, get Steph in here, will you?’
‘Sure,’ says Belinda, picking up the phone.
‘No. Don’t,’ I say.
‘Why?’ says Ashok.
‘It might cloud my judgement.’
‘You’re not thinking straight.’ He leans closer to the screen, but I can’t make out his expression. ‘And you could do with a shave. You’ve missed some on your neck. You need to keep it together, bud. A lot’s riding on this. Hey, Steph.’ He turns as she enters. ‘Come join us.’
If he had any idea what Stephanie has been to me, and perhaps still is, he would not be doing this.
I’m aware of the pale hair, the stark, unadorned face, the white neck, the eyes demanding contact. The small, mean breasts I have often fantasised about, against my will, and which, in combination with other things, have brought me to orgasm forty-seven times to date. I focus on her hairline. She raises a hand, smiles and says ‘Hi’. She can be very professional. By this I mean she is very good at pretending. She is popular at work. People call her ‘modest’ and ‘insightful’. I nod back. She pulls up a chair next to Ashok, who adjusts the screen so they are both visible.
‘So, Steph. I was just telling Hesketh you have a theory.’
I shift my eye line to the rim of the laptop.
‘You’ve probably thought of this yourself already Hesketh,’ she begins. ‘But here’s my take on it, for what it’s worth. What strikes me is that there’s such a big split between the men’s actions and their personalities that something’s got to be going on behind the scenes. Some kind of outside pressure.’ The connection is a bad one: her voice is patchy. ‘Chen and Svensson are what I’d call the drone type. They’re conscientious about their work and they’re loyal to their firm. They don’t fit the saboteur profile. We know that from your report on Chen, and from what Annika Svensson told Ashok about her husband.’
‘Who just threw himself under a truck, by the way,’ Ashok tells her. ‘Hesketh saw it happen. Guy’s fighting for his life.’
She pulls back slightly and her face changes. Her voice too. ‘Hesketh. I’m so sorry. Perhaps we should talk another time. You must be in shock.’
‘No. It’s a bad connection, but let’s just get it over with.’ They look at each other.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘So someone’s got to these men, and forced them into doing something that went against their nature. They felt manipulated. Like they were at the mercy of someone or something. Suicide was their only way of protesting and taking back control. Does that make any sense?’
I start sketching a new Venn on the hotel notepaper in front of me. I press too hard and the pencil lead breaks.
‘Yes. As far as it goes.’ She hasn’t mentioned the possibility that Chen and Svensson’s subconscious minds were in active rebellion against their conscious selves. I could raise the notion of dissociative fugue myself, but I’m not going to. This is my investigation.
Ashok says, ‘In the meantime, we’ve warned all our past clients that if they get any motiveless sabotage, in view of what’s happened we’re offering surveillance and counselling. Stephanie’s idea. Nice touch, eh?’
‘Sounds lucrative,’ I say. Stephanie looks away.
The careless way she stirred up my life.
Ashok grins. ‘All part of the elite service we offer. Look, Hesketh. We’ve got two clients so far. But I’ll be frank. Word’s going around, there are others. A lot. There’s some seriously weird global shit going on. I’ll send you some outlines, if I can get them. But for now just do your thing. Usual strategy: describe, process, prevent slash eliminate.’
Just as Stephanie starts to say something else the image freezes. So I say, ‘You’re breaking up,’ press End Call, download Ashok’s PDF and go offline.
I open the file. Sunny’s suicide drawings are striking. I can see why Mrs Chen refused to associate this odd legacy with her husband. I can’t picture him producing them either. Their boldness and brashness seems out of character. The three images are large and crudely executed in broad ink strokes. Freddy could have done them.
There’s a human eye with what might be rays of light shooting out of it, reminiscent of the all-seeing eye depicted on top of the pyramid on an American dollar bill.
There’s an ellipse that resembles a necklace strung with elongated beads. Their tips are spiked, like narrow bones.
And at the bottom right of the page, where an artist would put his signature, is a hand-print. The fingers are together, with only the thumb separate from the rest. The effect is that of a stop sign.
Have the police checked the fingerprints against Sunny Chen’s? His wife may have demanded it. She had insisted, after all, that the drawings could not have been left by Sunny. The jagged ellipse and the eye are large in relation to the hand. I pull the Jenwai folder back on my screen and call up the image of the smear that Sunny Chen was so keen for the police to fingerprint at the factory, yet so reluctant to discuss: the smear he later claimed he’d made himself. He’d called it ‘evidence’. I stare at it for a long time. Then I text Ashok asking for the dimensions of the original ‘suicide drawings’. If I know the scale, I’ll know if the hand-print is a normal size for a man. If it is not, then how could Sunny have made it? He said ‘they’ had pressured him, and made his body disobey his mind. And Jonas claimed ‘little kiddie trolls’ used him as a puppet to sabotage the system. He thought he might have ‘swallowed’ one. He used the analogy of a tapeworm.
They are travellers, said Sunny Chen. They go wherever they like.
They came all this way, said Jonas.
Who did? And from where?
Later that evening, I go on the net. There’s been another attack, this one in southern Spain. The culprits are twin boys, aged nine. Child Three and Child Four, as I immediately think of them, pushed their father off a stone staircase in full view of the rest of the family, who were gathered in the courtyard of their farmhouse for a meal, celebrating a younger child’s birthday. Afterwards the boys would not speak. Again, there was no apparent motive, but on the morning of the attack, they told their parents that they had woken abruptly in the night, from the same nightmare.
The father died.
I reach for a pencil and sharpen it with six turns, inhaling the scent of the long, pristine shaving that emerges. Pine and graphite. It’s very pleasing. Then I reach for a pad and start drawing.
Men attacking institutions that they love.
Children turning on their families.
Two overlapping circles, with irrational violence at the intersection.
What else connects them?
Something has lured my old mentor out of retirement. Mass hysteria is Professor Whybray’s field. Something hush-hush at the Home Office, Ashok said. He hinted at a contract. Is the old man thinking along the same lines as me?
At 8.15 I go to the hotel restaurant for dinner, where I learn the Swedish word for crayfish: kräfta. When I come back I see there’s a message from Annika Svensson. They are still operating. She’s going to fetch her son, then go to the hospital and wait. She’ll call me if there’s any news.
My upper right arm hurts where Jonas dug his fingers in. I run a hot bath, hoping to ease it. You can adjust the temperature on the taps: I set it to forty-one degrees. Steam fills the room. I slide into the sc
alding water. It’s cramped; in order to lie with my arms beneath the surface, I have to stick my legs out the other end. I inspect the bruising, exaggerated by the water’s heat and the bright lighting of the bathroom: it’s Victory Purple in the centre, and there are several shades of yellow, from Soft Butterscotch to Ochre Bisque at the edges, nudging into the green range. The pattern of the oedema is unusual. Jonas’ grip spanned much of my upper arm. But the marks – four surprisingly small blotches made by his fingers across the bicep, and a thumb-print on the triceps – are condensed into an extremely limited area.
If you didn’t know that a grown man had gripped me there, you’d think the bruising came from the clutch of a child.
CHAPTER 5
Before I go to bed, I call Ashok and update him on Svensson. As I talk, he keeps raking his fingers through his hair, which he always does when he is rattled.
‘Did you get the dimensions of Sunny Chen’s suicide note?’ I ask.
‘Yep, it’s A4.’ He shifts the chewing gum in his mouth. Numerous studies have proved gum to be a useful concentration aid.
‘Which means that the hand-print’s too small to be Sunny Chen’s. So his wife was right. Someone else made it.’
‘Well I’ll be happy to hear where that leads. Looks like a blind alley to me. In the meantime, here’s the thing. Tomorrow you’re heading for the airport.’
‘I’d prefer the train.’
‘That won’t work for where you’re going.’ He removes a wad of gum from his mouth and squishes it into a Post-it note. ‘Dubai. New case. I told you there were others. Construction industry. Guy named Ahmed Farooq. Killed himself yesterday. The client’s his employer. Eastern Horizons.’
Two thoughts cross my mind. The first is that I don’t have my Arabic dictionary. But I only voice the second. ‘At least he’s already dead.’
Ashok cocks an eyebrow. ‘No more ugly surprises, right? I hear you. Let’s hope Svensson pulls through.’
‘Tell me about the new one.’ I’m stirred.
‘Straight sabotage. Farooq removed a whole string of zeros from some vital sales agreement after it’d gone past the lawyers. Managed to screw up his company’s business across five continents. Seems totally random. Nothing in it for him. No motive. If he hadn’t killed himself he’d have gone to jail. Got a theory yet?’
‘Humans have a highly evolved neurophysiology of self-deception. Under pressure, the subconscious can take charge and force you to succumb to your true desires. The deep ones that your conscious mind rejects. Dissociation enables you to commit acts that your conscious mind won’t acknowledge. Later, you’ll turn a blind eye to what you’ve done. To deploy a metaphor.’
‘So how does that work? You’re awake, but sleepwalking?’
‘Yes. I think Sunny Chen was in a dissociative state when he sent the documents exposing Jenwai. Jonas Svensson claimed he sabotaged the bank against his will. This sounds similar.’
‘So that’s what you’re working on?’
‘Part of it.’
‘So what’s the rest?’
‘I anticipate that you’ll object to it on principle.’
‘Try me.’
Sure enough, I’ve only just begun my line of speculation when he pronounces that I am ‘barking up a seriously wrong fucking tree’. He thumps his desk for emphasis, and I see Belinda Yates jump in the background. ‘Just go there and you make some sense out of this mess that doesn’t involve . . . what d’you call it?’
‘Indigenous belief systems.’
‘Yeah them. I don’t care if you’ve got a PhD in it. Our clients are international corporations run by grown-ups. We’ve got rivals out there. So no fucking little people.’ Ashok is a child of the Age of Reason. As such, he cherishes the notion that we have cast off the superstitions and fears which dominated the lives of our medieval forefathers. ‘Got it? Don’t let me down on this one bud. You’re paid to think out of the box, but not that far. A lot’s riding on this one.’
‘When humans dare to think in new ways they are set free,’ I tell him.
‘Come again?’
‘That was Kant’s motto in the Enlightenment. But we’re not completely enlightened, Ashok. There will always be dark corners. Humans like to believe they’re rational. But the capacity for superstition is part of our DNA. It can’t be purged. All the things we fear – all the little people, if you like – are as present as they ever were. But they’re no longer external. They’ve been chased indoors. Where we can’t let them go.’
He sighs. ‘OK. But bottom line, they’re not popping up in Phipps & Wexman reports. So no Harry Potter bullshit and no goddam . . . ectoplasm. Got it?’
In bed, I scroll through the news. A headline catches my eye. In Seoul, a boy of nine tied up his grandfather, turned on the gas and left him to die in the kitchen. In Argentina, a girl of seven dropped a flowerpot from a fourth-floor balcony on to her aunt’s head, killing her instantly. A leading child psychologist is calling for an international conference on ‘this unprecedented phenomenon’. He says that before their attacks, many of the children reported vivid dreams or nightmares. Afterwards, they either remained silent, or claimed to have no knowledge of what they had done.
The Venn diagram in my head bursts into rapidly expanding life. I need to talk to Professor Whybray. He’s more of a lateral thinker than I am and less of an incurable materialist, so he’ll have gone further, and faster.
He and Freddy never met. But they’d get along.
Together we’d make a satisfying equilateral triangle.
It’s Annika Svensson who takes me to the airport the next afternoon. She has been crying again. I tell her she should not be driving, and offer to take the wheel myself, but she insists. She is going there anyway, to meet her sister Lisbet. Lisbet is flying in from Minnesota to help Annika prepare for the funeral and afterwards to sort out the family’s administrative and financial affairs in the wake of Jonas’ death. Yes, Jonas died. So today, Friday 21st September, is Annika’s first day as a widow. He survived the operation, but an hour later he suffered a catastrophic heart rupture. Technically speaking it wasn’t Jonas’ blood that flooded out of his burst aorta. It was somebody else’s, or to be more precise a mixture of several other people’s, because he’d received a transfusion.
She says, ‘I just want to know why. What it was for.’ I don’t answer because I can’t think what to say. I do believe, however, that everything must mean something. That even the most random events have significance, on some level. ‘Something happened to Jonas to make him act that way. I told you, it wasn’t him. He behaved like he was someone else. Someone . . . possessed. And he’s not the only one. I know that, Hesketh. Isn’t that why you came here?’
She must have heard rumours about other cases. ‘There are always a thousand connections when you look for them,’ I say. We’ve reached Departures. ‘The trick is to work out which to follow up and which to reject.’ She still recalls the elegant ozuru I first saw outside Jonas’ hospital room. But suffering has altered her angles and folds.
‘Please, Hesketh. Find out why all this happened.’
‘Can you try to note down everything Jonas said about why he did it? Even if it makes no sense?’
She draws in a long breath. ‘He said a lot of things. I’ll talk to my son and I’ll send you a mail.’
We say goodbye, first in English and then in Swedish. She hesitates, then plants a dry kiss on my left cheek. She turns and I watch her walk towards Arrivals.
I text Ashok.
Request Jonas Svensson autopsy report
I buy the New Scientist and while queuing for the security check, read an article about the threatened extinction of honeybees. Colony collapse disorder is affecting swarms worldwide. The repercussions of the species disappearing would be catastrophic for farming – the meat and cotton industries in particular – and wildlife. The isolation of unaffected hives is posited as one solution. While I am deep in Marie Celeste syndrome, which refe
rs to hives found inexplicably abandoned, a woman in a red coat – what Dulux, in 1984, called Carnation – comes up to me.
‘Well this is quite a coincidence,’ she says, waving a passport case. ‘I’m leaving today too.’
I look around. ‘Well so’s everyone in this queue,’ I say. ‘It’s for Departures.’
The woman’s smile looks crooked. I can’t identify the emotion it corresponds to.
She looks familiar, but I’m not good with faces. I return to the article: the group dynamics of social animals always interest me.
‘Ingrid,’ she says. I am not good with names either.
‘Hesketh,’ I say.
‘I know.’
It’s only when she puts her hand up to flick back her hair – women often do that when they’re anxious, I’ve noticed – and I see the feathered pattern of her Indian silver bangle, that I remember who she is, and smile.
‘Got it!’ I’m happy to have placed her. ‘The Swiss demographer. Wednesday. The Perfect Storm conference. Climate, Hunger and Population. You’d like a King Charles spaniel. We had sex.’
She takes a step back and her face changes shape.
‘Well, enjoy the rest of your life, Hesketh Lock,’ she says.
Then she walks away very fast towards the other queue for departures. If she’d addressed me in German, or worn the Carnation coat in the hotel, I’d have known her straight away.
‘Auf wiedersehen!’ I call after her. But she carries on walking and doesn’t look back.
There’s a five-hour stopover at Charles de Gaulle in Paris, where I’m changing planes, so I go to an airport hotel gym and run ten kilometres on a treadmill, then buy some new clothes: sandals, cotton trousers, three white shirts. In Departures I eat a meal (I choose the ‘menu gastronomique’), do forty-seven sudokus and download the new document Ashok has sent.