Perfect People

by Peter James

  ‘Terrorizing? That’s ridiculous!’ Naomi said.

  The playgroup coordinator nodded. ‘Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’ve been watching them myself all the time today, and I have to say that their behaviour is rather antisocial. They went straight to the computer the moment they arrived here, and they wouldn’t let any of the other children near it. Whenever another child tried, either Luke or Phoebe snarled at them so fiercely it made most of the other children cry. I’m afraid it was the same last time. They simply won’t share, or seem to accept that other children have a right to play with everything, too.’

  ‘I’ll speak to them,’ Naomi said. ‘They’ve got to learn not to be selfish – I’m really sorry about this, I’ll—’

  Pat Barley shook her head. ‘I’m sorry – the situation is that two mothers didn’t bring their children in today because Luke and Phoebe were going to be here. Several of the other mothers have said they will have to stop bringing their children.’ She looked very embarrassed, suddenly. ‘I’m really very upset about this, I know it’s a terrible thing to do, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to remove them from this playgroup. Perhaps you should try them in an older group – really, they’d fit in with five- or even six-year-olds. I’m awfully sorry, but they won’t be welcome here again.’

  64

  Naomi watched their faces in the mirror repeatedly as she drove home. Buckled into their child seats, Luke and Phoebe sat in silence. Every time she looked, two pairs of eyes were looking back at her. She was finding it hard to concentrate on the road.

  ‘Mummy’s not very pleased with you,’ she said, shaking inside with a whole mixture of emotions. ‘They said you weren’t nice to the other children. Is that true, Luke? Phoebe?’

  Silence.

  She eased past two cyclists in the lane. ‘Luke?’ she said, more sharply. ‘Phoebe? I’m talking to you to. I asked you a question. I expect an answer, yes or no?’

  The silence in the back of the car continued. She turned into the drive and drove up to the house, braking sharply, angrily, by the front door. She got out of the car. ‘You want to play games? Right, you sodding well play them.’

  She shut the car door, hit the central locking button and marched to the house. In the shelter of the porch she looked at the car. The rain was still lashing just as hard, and through the side window she could just make out the motionless figure of Phoebe.

  Then she went into the house and slammed the door. You can bloody wait out there. See how you like it when it doesn’t go all your way for once. Going to have to knock some manners and decent behaviour into you two, before you start growing into a couple of extremely unpleasant little people.

  She hung her wet Barbour on the coat stand, picked the parish magazine up off the doormat and walked slowly towards the kitchen, in too much of a mist from her thoughts to read it. She put water in the kettle, switched it on and spooned coffee into a mug, then sat down and cradled her head in her hands, wondering what to do.

  Expelled from bloody playschool. Shit.

  She rang John, and got his voice mail. ‘Call me,’ she said. ‘We have a problem, I need to talk to you.’

  The kettle boiled and clicked off. She remained where she was, thinking, trying to figure out what to do. Take them back to the behavioural psychologist, Dr Talbot, who thought they were so smart? They had to find someone to help them, this was a situation that—

  The phone started ringing. Hoping it was John, she stood up and grabbed the receiver off the wall. ‘Hallo?’ she said curtly, aware of the anger in her voice and not caring.

  A pleasant, rather earnest-sounding male American voice said, ‘Is that the Klaesson household?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d like to speak to Mrs Klaesson.’

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’

  ‘Mrs Naomi Klaesson?’

  She felt the tiniest prick of unease. After a moment’s hesitation, she said, ‘Who is that, please?’

  ‘Am I speaking with Mrs Naomi Klaesson?’

  ‘I’d like to know who you are, please.’

  The phone went dead.

  Naomi stared at the receiver for some moments, her anger fast curdling into a knot of dread in her stomach. She pressed down on the cradle, then released it, listened for the dial tone and punched out one-four-seven-one. Moments later she heard the automated voice:

  ‘You were called today at fifteen-eleven hours. We do not have the caller’s number.’

  She remembered that John had a caller-ID device in his study and she went through to look at it. A red light was flashing on the top and she pressed a button to bring up the display. On the tiny LCD screen appeared the words:

  15.11 INTERNATIONAL

  A shiver rippled through her.

  It felt as if some terrible ghostly tendril had reached out across the Atlantic and gripped her soul.

  Am I speaking with Mrs Naomi Klaesson?

  Who the hell are you? What did you want?

  Disciples? Disciples of the Third Millennium?

  Hurrying back to the hall, she grabbed the car keys, ran out of the front door, pressed the central locking button, ran over to the car and pulled the rear door open.

  Luke and Phoebe weren’t there.

  For an instant, time stopped. She stared dumbly at the empty child seats. Then, terror-stricken, she looked round, eyes darting everywhere, at the barn with the double garage doors, at the house, at the shrubs swaying crazily. ‘Luke!’ she screamed. ‘Phoebe!’

  Rain pelted down on her.

  ‘LUKE!’ she screamed again, louder, even more panicky. ‘PHOEBE! LUKE! PHOEBE!’

  She ran over to the cattle grid and stared down the long expanse of empty driveway. A white plastic bag flapped, trapped in brambles in the hedgerow. No sign of either of them. She turned in despair back towards the house. ‘LUKE! PHOEBE!’

  She ran, stumbling, down the side of the house, then all the way around on the wet, boggy grass, screaming out their names.

  Then she stood, frozen with fear, soaking wet, by the back door to the kitchen.

  They had vanished.

  ‘Please, God, no, don’t do this to me. Where are they? Please, where are they?’

  She ran back into the house. The phone was ringing. She dived into John’s study and grabbed the receiver. ‘Yeshallo?’

  It was John.

  ‘They’ve vanished!’ she shouted at him. ‘I had a call from someone and they’ve vanished. Oh Christ—’

  ‘Hon? What do you mean? Vanished?’

  ‘THEY’VE VANISHED, JOHN, THEY’VE FUCKING VANISHED. I LEFT THEM IN THE CAR OUTSIDE THE HOUSE – OH GOD—’

  ‘Naomi, hon, tell me, what do you mean? What do you mean, they’ve vanished?’

  ‘THEY’VE DISAPPEARED, YOU STUPID MAN, THAT’S WHAT I MEAN. VANISHED. SOMEONE’S TAKEN THEM.’

  ‘Someone’s taken them? Are you sure?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’ve vanished.’

  ‘When? Where – I mean – where have you looked?’

  ‘EVERYWHERE!’

  ‘Have you looked in the house?’

  ‘THEY WERE OUTSIDE IN THE CAR, FOR GOD’S SAKE!’

  ‘Check the house. Have you checked the house?’

  ‘Noooo,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Naomi, darling, check the house. Have a look around the house. I’ll stay on the line. Just check all the rooms.’

  She ran into the drawing room. Then upstairs along the corridor, water running down her face. Their bedroom door was closed. She pushed it open, and stopped in her tracks.

  Luke and Phoebe were sitting contentedly on the floor, absorbed in a tower they were building from Lego bricks.

  She stared at them with a mixture of relief and total disbelief.

  ‘I – I’ve – found them,’ she said. ‘They’re OK. I’ve found them.’

  ‘They OK?’

  Backing out of the room she said, quietly, ‘Fine. They’re fine.’

  ‘Where were
they?’

  Feeling confused, foolish, she said nothing. Had she brought them in, taken them to her room and forgotten?

  No way.

  ‘Where were they, hon?’

  ‘In their room,’ she snapped. ‘In their bloody room.’

  ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘Luke and Phoebe? Oh yes, John, they’re fine, they’re absolutely fine. They’ve been thrown out of playschool, now they know how to get out of my car all by themselves, and they refuse to say a bloody word to me. If that’s how you define all right, then yes, they are all right. Our designer babies are all right. They’ve obviously been born with all right genes.’

  ‘I’m cancelling my meeting and coming home, hon. I’ll be there in half an hour.’

  ‘Go to your meeting. Don’t cancel that. We have enough problems. Go to your meeting.’

  ‘I can come straight home.’

  ‘Go to your bloody meeting, John!’ she shouted. ‘Your children don’t need you. They don’t need me. They don’t need anyone.’

  65

  John sat on a chair in the children’s room, preparing to read to them as he did every night. Over the past few weeks he had read them The Gruffalo, Pooh Bear stories, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, and various Mister Men stories.

  They just lay silently in their cots, eyes open; he had no idea whether they were listening. And they never gave any reaction when he finished.

  After he had kissed them goodnight, he walked heavy-heartedly downstairs and mixed himself a drink in the kitchen. Naomi was on the phone to her mother.

  A strange thought suddenly crossed his mind. Were the children punishing them for what they had done? For tampering with their genes? He dismissed that, instantly. Then he took his drink through to his den and sat down in front of his laptop, and watched a dozen new emails appear.

  One was from his chess opponent, Gus Santiano, in Brisbane.

  Damn. It must have been a week at least since the man’s last move. Guiltily, he opened it.

  You bastard! Where the hell did you come up with a move like that from? Have you been taking some tablets this past week? Having coaching? Getting some personal help from Kasparov? I concede, mate. Your turn to open the next game.

  John frowned. Had the man been drinking? His last move had been a defensive pawn against an early king’s bishop attack. What on earth was he talking about? Was Gus Santiano playing with another opponent somewhere else and got them confused?

  He emailed him back, saying he didn’t understand.

  To his surprise, ten minutes later he got a reply, with an attachment.

  You must have early Alzheimer’s, John. These are the moves you’ve sent me this week.

  John opened the attachment. To his astonishment, there were six emails from him to Santiano, dated daily during the past week, each giving a fresh move, as well as six replies.

  Impossible! There was no way he could have done this without remembering, absolutely no way.

  He called up the chessboard program, and keyed in the instruction for it to go sequentially through this latest game. The moves Gus Santiano had attributed to him were smart, he could see that clearly. Very smart.

  But he hadn’t made them.

  He double checked the emails again. All of them had been sent from him, from this computer. But no one else used this computer; and it couldn’t have been Naomi, she didn’t play chess.

  Baffled, he pulled an olive out of his drink and chewed on it, thinking. Six moves. Was it a hacker? Possible, except he didn’t leave the computer online either here or at the office.

  He did a search through his Sent Items box, and sure enough, found each of the emails. Next, he highlighted one and checked the source. It showed the email was sent from this computer at 2.45 a.m. last Saturday. The next one was sent at 3 a.m. on Sunday. The next at 2.48 a.m. on Monday. The following three at similar times on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, today.

  Am I going nuts? Sleepwalking and playing chess?

  He swallowed down most of the martini in one gulp. But the usual buzz he got from the drink didn’t happen. In the middle of the night someone was using his computer, playing chess for him. Either it was a hacker or—

  He looked up at the ceiling. Oh, sure, John, your two-and-a-half-year-old son and daughter are creeping downstairs in the middle of the night and playing chess, beating the pants off a semi-finalist in last year’s Queensland open chess championship. Explain that?

  He couldn’t. He didn’t have any explanation. He was baffled.

  66

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you – but on top of everything else, I had a strange phone call this afternoon,’ Naomi said hesitantly. ‘Probably nothing.’

  John chewed his mouthful of cod; as with almost everything she touched in the kitchen, Naomi had cooked it to perfection. Trying to keep one ear tuned to the television news, he replied, ‘What kind of strange? By the way, this is delicious.’

  ‘Thanks, it’s a new recipe I’m trying out. You don’t think the mushroom sauce is too rich?’

  ‘No, it’s delicious. Who was it that called?’

  ‘Someone from the States, asking if this was the Klaesson household – and if I was Naomi Klaesson. A man. Then he hung up,’ she said.

  John looked at her; she had his full attention now. ‘When was this?’

  ‘About three o’clock his afternoon.’

  ‘He didn’t give a name?’

  ‘No.’

  John’s eyes went to the window; unease, like silt in a disturbed pond, rose inside him. ‘Three? Do you have any idea where he was calling from?’

  ‘I checked the caller ID. It just said international. Why?’

  He was calculating in his head. East coast time. Central time. Pacific time.

  Yesterday, in the office, he’d received a similar call. A young man with an American accent had asked if he was speaking with Dr John Klaesson. When he’d replied that he was, the line had gone dead. He’d had a colleague with him in the office at the time and although it had bothered him a little, with the distractions of work he hadn’t given it any more thought.

  Now, suddenly, it was bothering him a lot.

  His call had come at 2.45 in the afternoon. West coast time, that would have been 6.45 in the morning. East coast time, more probably 9.45. New York, perhaps? Anywhere. A reporter trying to following up on the Dettore story? Perhaps. Hopefully it was no more than that.

  Except a reporter would have called back.

  He toyed with the fish, cutting off another piece, pushing it around in the sauce, wondering whether to tell Naomi. He decided that after her distressing time at the playgroup this was not the moment to tell her about the phone call. Nor was it the moment to tell her about his most recent chess game against Gus Santiano. Instead he asked, ‘How much has Phoebe grown in the past year?’

  ‘Two and a half inches,’ she said.

  ‘Which is the same as Luke, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how many periods has she had?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘The pills seem to be working,’ he said.

  ‘So far.’

  ‘Yes. So far. Which means they might go on working. OK? And if they go on working, she’ll keep growing normally. Right?’

  A reluctant nod.

  ‘Let’s be optimistic.’

  After the meal John went back into his den. He’d never bothered setting up a password for his laptop before, but now he went into the control panels to create one.

  When he had finished, he returned to the chess program, made his opening move for the next game with Gus Santiano and sent it. Then he settled down to work.

  At a few minutes past midnight he shut his computer down, then went into the kitchen and listened to the baby monitor. The only sounds were the rhythmic breathing of sleep. He crept upstairs and tiptoed along the corridor to Luke and Phoebe’s room, opened the door and peered in.

  He could see them both, in th
e weak glow of the Bob the Builder night light, fast asleep. He blew them each a kiss, closed the door and went to his bedroom. Naomi was asleep, with the bedside lamp on and a book open on the duvet. She stirred as he entered.

  ‘Wassertime?’ she asked sleepily.

  ‘Just after midnight.’

  ‘I was dreaming – you and I were being chased by Luke and Phoebe; they were in a car and we were on bicycles; they kept telling us they didn’t want to hurt us because they loved us, but if we didn’t pedal faster they would have to run us over.’

  He leaned over and kissed her. ‘Sounds like a classic anxiety dream.’

  ‘It was spooky. I kept telling them, You’re our children, you’re meant to love us, you’re not supposed to run us over.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  ‘They just giggled.’

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ he said softly. Then he removed his clothes, put on his dressing gown, went through into the bathroom and brushed his teeth.

  But when he came back into the bedroom, instead of getting into bed, he took his torch from the drawer in his bedside table, switched off Naomi’s lamp and made his way, as silently as he possibly could, back downstairs and into his study.

  There, just by the light of his torch, he unfolded the sleeping bag he’d taken out earlier from the linen cupboard, climbed into it and curled up on the tiny sofa.

  At five in the morning, after a few hours of very fitful sleep, and suffering painful cramp, he abandoned his vigil and went up to bed.

  67

  The Disciple was happy. That fear in the infidel woman’s voice had felt so good. Be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long. Proverbs 23: 17.

  Her fear was still flowing through him, energizing him like fuel. It gave him strength, power; it was so good he was tempted to call her again and release some more from her, let that flow into him as well. But that would be greed; and greed was a sin. God had been good to him, leading him to where the infidels lived. He must not reward Him with indulgence.