by J. S. Monroe
‘I also like to think that he toned things down – between us,’ Jar says, with an optimistic smile. He’s already suggested to her that Martin altered their relationship in the diary to imply that there was less love between them.
‘You know I’d never end it with you like that,’ she says, linking an arm in his. He hopes she’s right: it’s a belief that has kept him going for the past five years.
They are at the end of the harbour wall now, watching as a second small boat, laden with mackerel, passes through the narrow gap beneath them.
Jar has had to accept that Martin wrote the suicide note to him, leaving it in her drafts email folder on the laptop in her room. He was duped into believing they were Rosa’s words, the ones that he had learnt by heart. I just wish I didn’t have to leave you behind, babe, the first true love of my life and my last. It was the use of ‘babe’ that had tricked Jar. He feels such a fool. Martin, the aspiring writer, had learnt to mimic other people’s voices.
He had also made the silent phone call on Rosa’s old phone (which the police found in his shed) and used it to send Jar the emails, pretending they were from Rosa, when Jar was searching for her in Cornwall. He had hacked into Jar’s work email account, too. Martin had become adept at spoofing IP addresses in the last months of his job, when he was pushing the boundaries of human trials in his quest to develop a next-generation antidepressant and posting the results anonymously online.
But he had left the surveillance of Jar (around London and down to Cornwall) to others. According to Cato, Martin’s lab-technician friend had once worked for a bailiff and knew a few tricks.
Jar glances at his watch. The time has come.
100
Dear Jar,
I hope you are both coping with all the media attention and that Rosa is making the best recovery she can in the circumstances.
I am sorry I haven’t been down to Cornwall yet to visit you both, or replied to Rosa’s sweet letter. It’s taking longer than I thought to come to terms with what’s happened. I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me – Rosa is the only real victim here – but my guilt is almost unbearable. All I can say, as I tried to explain to the police, is that I wasn’t alive to the world. The doctor said I was lucky not to have died on the prescriptions Martin was giving me. I didn’t realise that the ‘sleeping pills’ were in reality a strong – and illegal – benzodiazepine. I was cutting down on the minor benzos, wondering why I didn’t feel much different. My senses had been blunted, to put it mildly – I was ‘emotionally anaesthetised’, as my GP put it (he was appalled when he discovered that he’d failed to notice the illegal benzo Martin had been administering). But I should have known, asked more questions, challenged Martin.
One day soon I hope to be strong enough to come down and join you both in Cornwall, walk the coast path with Rosa, go on the same walks I used to take with Jim, when Rosa was a little girl. In the meantime, I’ve been clearing out the house. I can’t carry on living here. It’s not just the traces of Martin, it’s the police, too, who have been through everything, from top to bottom, even my knicker drawer.
They missed one thing, though, and I’m sending it to you now, as you’ll know what to do with it better than me. It’s a letter that I found when I was clearing out Martin’s books in the sitting room. It was tucked into a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, one of his favourites. I don’t know who it’s from, whether it’s even genuine. Martin seems to have lived in a fantasy world for much of the last five years. But I think it’s important.
The address is Langley, Virginia, where even I know the CIA has its headquarters, and it’s typed. It’s not addressed to Martin, or signed by anyone, but it’s a personal thank you letter, that much is clear, for sharing his professional expertise in the war on terror.
I remember he did travel to America, on a number of occasions, and it would have been in the years immediately after the awful events of 2001, but my memory has never been good. I could try to find out, if it helps, dig out his old passport, look at the visa stamps. I’m not sure where he kept it, though.
I hope this hasn’t complicated things further. My mind is in such a mess already, I can’t begin to work out its importance, if it has any.
It was painful, but I read your friend’s article, of course, and watched every bulletin on the news. I didn’t recognise the kind man I married as a student more than twenty years ago, who promised to help with my anxieties, and I still cannot fathom how he could have been so wickedly cruel to my own niece. Sadly, the media won’t leave me alone, but security here in the house is good, of course. A small irony.
Destroy the letter to Martin if you want – do whatever makes your life easier. You and I always felt our darling Rosa was alive, but there’s no satisfaction in being proved right. The shame and disbelief that a man I once loved could have done this will live with me for the rest of my life.
All my love to you both,
Amy
101
It’s 9.05 a.m. when Jar notices the black car. They are back on the harbour wall with two more mugs of tea and an extra cardigan for Rosa – she feels the cold a lot more since her incarceration. The car enters the village slowly, nosing around the sharp right-hand bend and on to the narrow road in front of the deli. After disappearing for a minute, it reappears as it enters the car park below them.
‘Definitely not a local,’ Rosa says idly. They’ve played a game in recent weeks, trying to guess whether people are born-and-bred, blow-ins, tourists or journalists. It’s not hard, but they have sometimes been wrong. Not today, though.
The car comes to a halt. The driver sits there for a while – Jar knows he’s had a long journey through the night – and then steps out of the car. He looks up at the two of them, sitting on their favourite bench on the harbour wall. He doesn’t raise a hand like the fisherman, but he nods an acknowledgement of sorts in their direction.
‘Do you know him?’ Rosa asks.
‘Not yet.’
‘Has he come to talk to me?’ Rosa links her arm through his for reassurance. ‘You know I don’t want to talk to anyone.’
‘Why don’t you go back to the house,’ Jar says, squeezing her arm against his. The man rests one hand on the roof as he makes a call on his mobile, looking around him like a tracker finding his bearings from the sun.
‘Is everything OK?’ Rosa asks.
‘Everything’s fine now. He’s just come for a chat. With me.’
*
‘Thank you for sending Cato the letter,’ the man says, sitting down on the bench next to Jar. The man, Asian, early thirties, is wearing a cotton shirt and chinos. ‘He forwarded it to us.’
‘It’s a fake, right?’ Jar asks, more in hope than anything. ‘Just like the other document.’
Jar knows now that nothing is ever black and white. This man wouldn’t have driven all this way, from London to Cornwall, if it was just a fake.
‘The honest answer is that we don’t know yet.’
‘For sure it is.’
Ever since the typed letter from Langley arrived with Amy’s own handwritten letter, Jar has been telling himself that it’s not real, that it’s just Martin being delusional. But when the man who’s now sitting next to him rang him late last night, giving no name, saying only that he would be with Jar by 8 a.m., the old fears came tumbling back, keeping Jar awake until dawn.
‘You know I can’t comment,’ the man says.
‘Why have you come here then?’
Jar tries to remember the wording in the letter, the oblique suggestion that Martin had some sort of connection with the CIA.
‘We need to talk to Rosa.’
‘She’s not ready.’
‘She seemed happy enough to talk to your journalist friend. And to Cato.’
It’s true, Jar thinks. Rosa had opened up to both men, but he doesn’t want Rosa being interviewed by the intelligence services. It’s not relevant or necessary. Max had mentioned MI6 in his article
– along with Herefordshire and the SAS headquarters – but only in terms of Martin’s perverted spy fantasies, to explain how an animal-research scientist had kept Rosa incarcerated for five years, tricking her into thinking that she’d been recruited by the CIA at Cambridge and then punished – tortured, Guantánamo-style – for trying to escape from a covert programme. (Max had specifically not mentioned Eutychus by name – he wanted, he said, to keep his powder dry just in case more evidence ever came to light on the dark web.)
‘We have no evidence – beyond this letter – that Martin ever worked for the CIA or had any connection with it.’
‘So what if he did?’
‘There would be implications for Rosa’s disappearance five years ago and her subsequent incarceration.’
‘What sort of implications?’
‘Her disappearance would become a matter for the intelligence services rather than the police.’
‘Because Martin might or might not have once worked for the CIA, which might or might not have once run a covert programme that doesn’t exist?’
Jar is pleased with how unlikely the scenario is beginning to sound. It hadn’t been like that at four o’clock that morning.
‘Is Rosa remembering any more about her imprisonment?’ the man asks.
‘The altered diary has confused things. That and the industrial quantities of medication Martin tested on her.’
‘We’re particularly interested in the early years, when she first disappeared in Cromer.’
Jar shakes his head in disbelief. ‘Martin was a scientist. A sick pharmacologist who fantasised about working at Guantánamo. Nothing more.’
‘That’s what we want to clarify.’
‘Sure to God he wished he did work for the CIA. All that torturing in Guantánamo. Home from home. But he didn’t. He worked for a contract research organisation in Norwich – until they fired him, for cruelty to humans.’
‘Post 9/11, the West turned to the most unlikely people to help with the war on terror. A Big Pharma research scientist with an interest in learned helplessness might just have appealed.’
Jar studies the old stones in the harbour wall beneath his feet, trying to draw comfort from their longevity, their resilience through centuries of storms and gales.
‘Will you do one thing for me?’ the man continues.
Jar looks across the harbour towards the village. Rosa is at the window of the net loft now, standing in the big double windows, looking down at them on the wall. The man follows his gaze. They both stare up at her in silence.
‘Her father was a good man – we all miss him.’ He pauses. ‘When she starts to remember what really happened, call me.’
He hands Jar a plain white card with a single mobile number.
‘Rosa was kept for five years against her will in a basement on a disused airfield in Norfolk,’ Jar says quietly. ‘She was imprisoned there by an uncle who despised her, despised women in general, even more than he despised animals.’
‘I hope you’re right, Jar. For everyone’s sake.’
Jar watches the man walk over to his car, key the ignition and drive away, this time up Raginnis Hill. When he’s out of sight, Jar looks back at the net loft window. Rosa is still standing there, looking out to sea. Jar closes his eyes, breathes in the fresh salty air, and opens them again.
What’s in that beautiful, damaged head of yours, he thinks. What dark secrets do you unknowingly keep?
She raises a hand and gives him a distant wave.
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Acknowledgements
About J.S. Monroe
An Invitation from the Publisher
Acknowledgements
The character of Martin, a psychopharmacologist, is, of course, entirely fictitious. Thankfully, I know of no one who shares his view that “Big Pharma missed a trick at Guantánamo”. In 2014, however, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published a report on torture and the war on terror that revealed the disturbing role played by psychology in CIA detention and interrogation programmes post 9/11. According to the report, two former US Air Force psychologists used “learned helplessness”, a theory first developed by Dr Martin Seligman in the 1960s, to justify a controversial CIA technique known as “enhanced interrogation”.
Dr Seligman, now a leading self-help author and advocate of positive psychology, told The New Yorker in 2015 that he was shocked and mystified to discover how his research had been used by the CIA. He was “grieved that good science, which has helped many people overcome depression, may have been used for such a bad purpose as torture”.
In the course of researching this book, I read a number of original papers concerning early experiments on rodents and dogs, including Dr Seligman’s 1967 canine tests, as well as more recent papers on stress, depression, learned helplessness and human trials:
On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man, by Dr Curt P Richter (Psychosomatic Medicine, 1957)
Failure to Escape Traumatic Shock, by Martin E Seligman and Steven F Maier (Journal of Experimental Psychology, May 1967)
Depression: a New Animal Model Sensitive to Antidepressant Treatments, by RD Porsolt, M Le Pichon and M Jalfre (Nature, 1977)
The Tail Suspension Test: A New Method for Screening Antidepressants in Mice, by Lucien Steru, Raymond Chermat, Bernard Thierry, and Pierre Simon (Psychopharmacology, 1985)
Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis Buffers Stress Responses and Depressive Behaviour, by Jason S. Snyder, Amélie Soumier, Michelle Brewer, James Pickel and Heather A. Cameron (Nature, 2011)
Redesigning Antidepressant Drug Discovery, by Professor Florian Holsboer (Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 2014)
The dark web, by its very nature, poses a number of terrifying challenges for the ingenu, and I couldn’t possibly have written this book without The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld, by Jamie Bartlett (Windmill Books, 2015). His BBC Radio 4 programme, Psychedelic Science (2016) was equally invaluable.
I’d also like to thank: Will Francis, Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon, Jessie Botterill and Kirby Kim at my literary agents, Janklow & Nesbit; Laura Palmer, Madeleine O’Shea, Nicolas Cheetham, Lucy Ridout and the Head of Zeus team in London; Liz Stein, Emer Flounders, Jena Karmali and the MIRA team in New York; Wiebke Rossa at Verlagsgruppe Random House in Germany; Jon Cassir at C.A.A.; J.P. Sheerin; Giles Whittell; Nic Farah and Nadine Kettaneh; Louisa Goldsmith; Lisa Beale and Helen Gygax; The Gurnard’s Head near Zennor; Mark Hatwood at the Harbour Gallery in Portscatho; Len Heath; Discover Ireland (@gotoIrelandGB); Adrian Gallop; Nick K.; Stewart and Dinah Mclennan; Polly Miller at the Gallery Norfolk, Cromer; Dr Raj Persaud; Rufus Lawrence; Andrea Stock; The Lullaby Trust; Mike and Sarah Jackson for use of “top hut”; and most of all Felix, Maya and Jago, who kept me going with their encouragement and joie de vivre; and Hilary, the love of my life, to whom this book is dedicated. Without her wisdom, humour, patience and love, it would never have happened.
About J.S. Monroe
J.S. MONROE read English at Cambridge, worked as a freelance journalist in London and was a contributor to BBC Radio 4. Monroe, the author of five other novels, was also a foreign correspondent in Delhi for the Daily Telegraph and was on its staff in London as Weekend editor.
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First published in the UK in 2017 by Head of Zeus, Ltd.
Copyright © J.S. Monroe, 2017
The moral right of J.S. Monroe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781784978051
ISBN (XTPB): 9781784978068
ISBN (E): 9781784978044
Jacket design: Anna Green
Jacket images: © Shutterstock
Author Photo: Hilary Stock
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