by J. S. Monroe
Twenty minutes later, they have picked Carl up from his house in Greenwich and are on their way towards Cromer, driving down the A2 to the M25, round London and then north. Jar had rung Carl after he’d called Max and asked if he would phone in sick from work – a funny excuse didn’t seem appropriate this time.
The atmosphere is tense, the reality of what they are doing, where they are going, sinking in. Jar still can’t quite believe the implications of what he saw and read last night, or that a man had chased him down the stairwell. He’s convinced now that it was the same person who came to Gurnard’s Head to retrieve Rosa – maybe the former lab colleague that Martin mentioned in his journal, his tall cycling companion.
Jar wonders if Carl is asleep in the back as he talks through what has led to them all driving to Cromer on a rainy Wednesday morning.
‘It’s kind of a journal,’ he begins. ‘Martin wrote it as part of a creative-writing course he signed up for, practice before beginning a novel.’
‘So it could all be bollocks,’ Carl says, stirring.
‘Could be. His house has heavy security, because of his old job. Cameras everywhere. He writes about watching his guests undress in the spare room.’
‘A peeping Tom,’ Max says. ‘Old-school perv but not a psychopath.’
‘He watched Rosa take a bath,’ Jar says.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And he carried on testing animals, mice, in his writing shed. Drowning them in beakers of water, hanging them upside down by their tails with medical tape. He gave them women’s names, too: several of them were called Rosa.’
The car has fallen silent, except for the mesmerising noise of the windscreen wipers. Jar glances in the wing mirror.
‘But it was the last test that made me realise what’s been going on. Martin described how he re-created a famous 1960s experiment in which a dog is repeatedly electrocuted in a hammock. Only the “bitch” he describes wasn’t a dog. Their dog.’ He pauses. ‘It was Rosa.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Max asks.
‘It was the same experiment as in another video I found earlier, after you left.’ He turns to Carl. ‘Of a woman I thought was in Guantánamo.’
‘So what are you saying, bro?’ Carl asks. ‘That Martin worked for the Yanks? Tortured Rosa in Gitmo?’
Sometimes Carl doesn’t realise how he sounds, Jar thinks.
‘Two weeks ago, Amy gave me a diary written by Rosa. At least, I thought it was written by her. Parts of it were, for sure. The passages where she describes our time together in Cambridge. But Martin managed to get hold of it when she stayed with them once, accessed her computer, emailed himself a copy when she was having problems with the Wi-Fi. He writes about it in his journal.’
‘Which might be a work of fiction,’ Carl says.
Jar ignores him. ‘So Martin reads Rosa’s diary, about her time with me, how we met, how she struggled to get over the death of her father. Her college tutor—’
‘Dr Lance?’ Max asks.
Jar nods. ‘Dr Lance picked up on her unhappiness. He suggested she go off to a retreat in Herefordshire. Maybe he even said she could drop out of college for a year, return when she felt stronger. But there was no college counsellor.’
‘What about Karen?’ Max asks. ‘She writes a lot about her.’
‘So does Martin, in his own journal. He writes all about her strange short intake of breath before she speaks. Except he’s not writing about Karen, he’s writing about one of Amy’s old friends from university, an American psychologist called Kirsten, who came to stay.’
‘Hot Kirsten you saw on Harley Street,’ Carl says.
‘Amy was worried about my bereavement hallucinations, asked her friend Kirsten to help me. Kirsten approached you as a way to reach me, knowing that I needed persuading.’
‘She said she wanted to play jungle to her patients,’ Carl says. ‘I was duped.’
‘Amy acted with the best intentions. When I met Kirsten, I thought, wrongly, that she was really Karen, Rosa’s old college counsellor, and was trying to find Rosa too. But Karen never existed. Martin created her. Ever the aspiring novelist, he made her up, based her on Kirsten when she came to stay. He sketches out her character in his journal as a writing exercise – the short intake of breath, her blonde hair, high cheekbones – nothing to trouble the Booker Prize.’
‘But why does “Kirsten” become “Karen” in Rosa’s diary?’ Max asks.
‘Martin had always wanted to write a novel, ever since he nearly read English at Cambridge. He’d tried and failed once – I know the feeling. Then he gets hold of Rosa’s diary and has an idea. He starts to embellish it – adds bits here and there, drops in characters of his own, makes things up. It explains why you were never able to find a counsellor at St Matthew’s, let alone an American one called Karen.’
‘So Martin borrows Rosa’s diary for the basis of his big novel,’ Max says. ‘That doesn’t quite explain why he’s posting videos of her being tortured by the Americans.’
‘He’s not.’ Jar pauses, glancing again in the wing mirror. A white Transit van has been behind them for a while now. He feels for the gun in his jacket pocket, not sure if he’s reassured by its cold presence. He hasn’t told Max or Carl about it.
‘Rosa was more depressed than I realised in her last weeks, I understand that now. And she wrote about it in her diary. I don’t know how much Martin changed things, but whichever way you look at it, I underestimated her sadness.’
Not by much, Jar hopes. Martin might have added things to her diary, but Jar is sure that he took things away too, redacted their relationship, diluting the genuine love they had for one another.
‘Martin suspected this,’ Jar continues, ‘knew that suicide was at least a possibility, so he followed her when she walked out of the house that night and went down to the pier.’
‘I still don’t get why,’ Max says.
‘He saw an opportunity in Rosa – for his novel and his experiments, the writer and the scientist. His journal’s full of the need to test antidepressants on humans – stressed humans – and his frustration that regulations prevented him from doing so. Guantánamo was the perfect place for unauthorised clinical trials. Now he had a chance to conduct them in similar conditions, test all those potent antidepressants that he’d been working on. Which is why he’d been preparing his special place, a disused animal-testing laboratory that belonged to his old firm in Norwich. It’s where they went for the really bad experiments, away from the prying eyes of the protestors.’
‘Jesus, Jar. And he writes about all this in his journal?’
‘In a manner of words.’
Jar pauses, gestures for the bottle of water beside Carl and takes a sip. His mouth is dry.
‘Once he’s talked her down from the pier’s railings, he walks Rosa back to his car without being seen by the broken CCTV cameras on the pier, or the one below the hotel. He sedates her – not difficult, given his old job – and then makes an anonymous call to the emergency services, before driving her away to his lab out at the disused airfield, where she spends the next five years.’
‘Christ,’ Carl whispers.
‘And it’s there that he starts to experiment on her. Doing all those things he was never allowed to do on humans in his work. That’s why he took her. It also provides fuel for his novel, the one he has always wanted to write. He begins to embellish her diary with character sketches he’s been writing in his journal. A year later, he comes across your story on the dark web, which gives him his storyline. We know he read your article – he left a comment as Laika57. Rosa hasn’t committed suicide, she’s been taken by the Americans, been given a new life as part of a covert programme called Eutychus – a name he got from one of the comments on your article. Perfect for someone who loves spy thrillers. He includes other details from your story in the diary, too.’
‘Like the SAS,’ Max says. ‘And Todd. The bits I made up.’
‘As the years roll o
n, he feeds all these details back to Rosa, gets her to read the altered diary every day until finally she believes it. She told me as much when we met on the cliffs in Cornwall. It was another one of Martin’s mind experiments – and also provided feedback for an author worried about credibility, the ring of truth. The scientist and the writer again. So she really thinks that she was recruited to Eutychus in Herefordshire, escaped the programme and is now being held prisoner in a US airbase by the CIA. But she’s not, she’s being abused on an old Second World War airfield in Norfolk by her uncle.’
Jar pauses. Everyone is silent, waiting for him to continue. The van is still behind them, seemingly drawing closer.
‘One day, she does actually manage to escape – the day Amy called up a computer man, asking for help with her laptop. Martin is furious with her, worried by what the man might find, all those torture videos. Most are on his hard drives in the shed, but did he download some on to Amy’s laptop, before he gave it to her? Had he erased them properly, or left a trace? He panics, makes mistakes. Rosa sees her chance, breaks out of the lab, flees across the Norfolk countryside.’
‘Which is when you see her at Paddington,’ Carl says.
‘Only I don’t believe it’s Rosa. I put it down to another bereavement hallucination. But then I do finally meet her, at Gurnard’s Head in Cornwall. She’s damaged. Of course she is.’
‘Five years of being experimented on by Martin,’ Max says, ‘believing she’s being punished by the Americans for trying to leave a fictitious covert programme called Eutychus.’
‘And she’s taken back again,’ Jar continues. ‘Not by the intelligence services, but by Martin – he books out a hire car in the name of John Bingham. He can’t help himself: the name of the man Le Carré based George Smiley on. He has help, too, a big fella who shares his perversions – an old lab colleague he cycles with. I know I should have stopped him from taking her away, challenged him at Gurnard’s Head, but he had a gun and we had nowhere to escape to.’
‘The same person you saw in Starbucks, across from the office?’ Carl asks.
Jar nods. ‘And who hit me with a gun in Cornwall, and tried to kill me in a stairwell at Canary Wharf. I’m sure of it.’ Jar hesitates, swallowing hard. ‘I helped Martin find Rosa again, led him to Gurnard’s Head.’ His voice is cracking now and it takes a while before he can continue. ‘When she escaped, Martin knew exactly what to do: he had a contingency plan in case she ever broke free. He calculated that she would head for a special place – she’d written in her diary about fleeing there “if the world ever slipped off its axis”. Except she had always refused to tell Martin where it was. But I knew. And Martin knew I knew. So he sends me her diary, the one he’s embellished, gives it to Amy to hand over to me. He encourages me – me, the paranoid conspiracy theorist – to think that Rosa is on the run from a covert intelligence programme. I am easy prey, ready to believe she’s alive, unable to accept her death, even after all these years. He sends me emails pretending to be from her. Even fabricates a confidential document, “Strap 3, UK Eyes Only”, based on what he’s gleaned from hidden spy sites on the dark web. He knows that Rosa will head for our secret meeting place and that I will lead him there. Which I do.’
Jar can’t talk for the tears now.
‘So she’s been with Martin all this time,’ Carl says quietly.
Max struggles to clear his throat. ‘They do say the attacker is often known to their victim.’
‘And now he’s taken her back, to his lab,’ Jar says, trying to sound strong. ‘And we’ve got to find her.’
A second later, all three of them are thrown forwards.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Max says, struggling to keep the Land Rover on the road. ‘Friends of yours?’ he asks, looking in the rearview mirror.
Carl and Jar both turn to look behind them. The white van that Jar saw earlier is tailgating them, so close that they can see the driver. Jar recognises the man he left for dead in the stairwell. He is staring ahead, his face without emotion as the van rams into the back of the Land Rover again.
‘Nobody fucks with a Defender,’ Max says, short of breath.
‘Is it him?’ Carl asks.
‘It’s him,’ Jar confirms, turning to Max, fearing what he’s about to do. An hour earlier, and the kids would have been in the car.
‘Hold on,’ Max says, as he stamps on the brake.
A screech, accompanied by the smell of burning rubber, then everything slows down, or that’s how it seems to Jar, before a loud crack as the van runs into the back of the Land Rover. Jar’s head is throbbing, but he turns to see that the windscreen of the van has shattered in front of the driver, the top of his head pushing out through the lattice of fractured glass. Before anyone can say anything, Max has accelerated away, the van limping to a standstill amid a cacophony of horns.
91
The last dose of medication he gave me must have been stronger than usual because I’m struggling to remember the past few days. I was found, in Cornwall, and I’m now back here again. That much I do know. And I’m being punished, like the early years. Treated like an animal. But this time I know that I’m on my own. When I got out of here, there were no other prisoners. Instead, I found an abandoned office, and a tape recorder near the trap door that leads down to my ‘cell’. I pressed play and the cries began. A low moan followed by banging against bars. Six bangs.
I remember the bright sunlight, an airfield, walking across flat farmland, a campsite where I stole a floral tent, a rucksack and some money, running off like a feral child. I don’t remember getting to London, but I got a train from there to Cornwall and a bus out to Gurnard’s Head, where Jar and I agreed to meet if the world ever slipped off its axis.
And he was there. My beautiful Jar.
At least I think it was him.
92
Cromer, 2013
Suicide is such a waste. People should offer their bodies up to science instead. There’s so much we can do with them.
I’m signing off from this journal now. It’s served its purpose. I have found a voice and at last I have my main character, a living, breathing one with a past I can plunder and a future that I can shape. Before I finish, though, I should recount the night Rosa disappeared, an event that presents a writer with so many different narrative opportunities.
We had argued that night, Rosa and I. At first it was about depression, the merits of counselling versus SSRIs, but then it broadened out into a generational dispute, what I called reality-TV-show openness versus dignified reserve, blubbing versus stiff upper lip.
A asked me to apologise to Rosa, so I went up to her room and found a handwritten note next to her laptop. She had gone out for a walk, down into town – to clear her head. A few minutes later, I came back downstairs, told A. She begged me to go after her, follow her out into the night. I took the car, certain she would be heading for the pier. She’d written about it in her diary once, how she had contemplated jumping from it.
When I found her, by the lifeboat house at the far end of the pier, she was standing on the railings in the wind. An easterly wind was roughing up the sea below. I knew she would have been picked up by CCTV as she walked along the front towards the pier. But the camera on the pier itself was out of action.
For a while, I just stood and observed her, the way the wind played with her hair.
I’m not sure how committed she was to jumping, but three things could have happened next. She could have overcome her doubts and leapt into the darkness, her body carried away by the vicious riptides that circle the pier’s pillars far below like sea snakes. She could have been removed from the pier in the still of the night as part of a covert intelligence programme called Eutychus, given a new life after her death was faked. Or she could have turned to see a man in the shadows watching her, waiting to intervene.
If she took the latter course, the man would have begun with a simple, Faustian question: ‘When a man saves someone from certain death, does he own the
ir soul?’ She wouldn’t have understood what he meant. Nor would she have protested as he unpeeled her cold fingers from the metal railings, tears streaming down her confused, frightened young face. She’d just be grateful to be alive.
Slowly, they would have walked back down the pier together to the car, carefully avoiding the CCTV below the Hotel de Paris that had recorded her arrival. They would have talked some more as her shaking subsided, and then driven away, she sleepy now, warmed by a thermos of tea that tasted slightly strange, he stopping only to make a call from a payphone. To A, she presumed.
So what did she do? Which of these three narratives did she follow?
It’s time, at last, to turn to my novel. I know now that I will stay with the diary format. I even have an idea of an opening: something about contrails in the Fenland sky.
93
When did I know it was him? Year two, maybe year three. When he finally started to speak to me. At the beginning he wore a black balaclava, poked me with an electric cattle prod, said nothing. The gap in the balaclava around his mouth made his lips look feminine, despite the stubble. My medication was so heavy I wouldn’t have cared if I had recognised him. Dad knew. From the moment he met him. It was only Jar who had a blind spot. I feel so sorry for Amy. Has she suffered like me?
He won’t let me call him Martin. He’s my ‘guard’. But I address him as Martin if I’m feeling strong, which makes him mad with anger. He takes away my food, turns up the dials, forces pills down my throat that turn my fingers into writhing maggots and make the walls crush me until I cannot breathe. But I’m not going to play his games.
94
It’s a while since he was last at Amy and Martin’s house, but Jar remembers enough to be able to direct Max up Hall Road, away from Cromer’s seafront. After a mile, he asks Max to slow down as they pass under a railway viaduct. About five hundred yards further on, the road bends to the left and Jar tells Max to slow down even more. The house, he thinks, is somewhere up on the right. And then he spots it, set back from the road, at the end of a long drive, partially hidden by trees.