Finding Arcadia

by Chesterman, Simon;

  It must be Lestrange and Bradstreet. “You were careless when you went to Mr. Pratt’s house.” Arcadia tries to keep judgment out of her voice. “A truck’s dash-cam picked up your face—our face—outside his house.”

  “I see,” Moira says. “But that’s not all. Who else is joining the party, keeping a nice distance from the boys in blue? Her? Oh well done, Arky. I’m so glad I decided to let you live. This is most impressive.”

  Miss Alderman, presumably. If they are at the gate it will take them at least five minutes to get to the dormitory.

  Moira seems in no hurry to leave. “Ah the past unreal conditional—the verb form of regret. If I had wanted to, I could have made you disappear completely. I could have destroyed the entire dormitory building—though I used all of my C-4 in the bomb designed for you and the good Dr. Bell. Ah well, when you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say live and let live. But don’t forget, Arky: if this ever-changing world makes you give in and cry—say live and let die.”

  Beatles songs now, or was that Wings? Despite the homicidal tendencies, she realises that Moira would be a fascinating person to get to know better.

  “And as for poor Mr. Pratt, I suppose I could have killed him. But you see, maybe he had a drug habit all along. Maybe it really was suicide. And maybe the video footage isn’t quite as clear as your police friends think. As for you, maybe you have an airtight alibi on the video footage at the gate.” Moira gives her an ostentatious wink. “So congratulations, Arky. You passed the third test and get to live another day. Enjoy it as though it were your last—because it still could be.”

  With swift, precise movements, Moira removes the dart from Henry’s leg, putting it, the tranquilliser gun, and the revolver in her backpack before using a cloth to wipe surfaces of the room that she has touched. Even identical twins have unique fingerprints.

  Standing at the door, Moira regards the scene—Henry unconscious, Arcadia tied to the chair. The twin takes a final drink of the last drops in her bottle. “Hmm. All this might be a bit tricky for you to explain.” From a pocket she takes out Arcadia’s Swiss Army knife, opening the long blade once more. “Don’t say I never did anything for ya, Arky. Toodle-oo—and may the odds be ever in your favour!” In one fluid movement Moira throws the knife, which lands with a thud, impaled in the chair next to Arcadia’s leg but just within reach of her hand.

  When she looks up, the other her is gone.

  Two minutes later, Arcadia strides across the quadrangle to meet the police officers. “Constable Lestrange, Inspector Bradstreet, how nice to see you again.”

  “I’m afraid this isn’t a social call, Miss Greentree,” Inspector Bradstreet intones. “We need to have some serious words with you, but must first inform you that you are entitled to have an appropriate adult present when we do.”

  “Oh I’m sure that won’t be necessary. I’m not being detained or interviewed under caution, am I? You simply said you saw someone outside Mr. Pratt’s house that looked like me. How very curious.”

  “Curious indeed, Miss Greentree,” Inspector Bradstreet pivots on one foot. “For are you able to account for your whereabouts at 9:30pm on Monday last?” He appears to be modelling himself on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, unaware that pacing up and down is more effective in a Victorian drawing room than in the middle of a grassy quadrangle with the prospect of rain.

  “Why yes, I believe it was around that time that I visited the porter’s lodge here at school to check for mail. I’m fairly sure that Mr. McMurdo will attest to that—and of course there is a video camera inside of the lodge also.” It is a white lie, as she was in fact in her rooms by then. But Moira’s ability to manipulate the school video seems more likely to deflect attention.

  “Yes, well, we shall look into that presently.” Inspector Bradstreet continues to pace but seems unsure what to do with his hands. Perhaps he is wondering if he should start smoking a pipe.

  “I told you I wasn’t sure it was her…” Constable Lestrange is scratching his head—his role would be that of the good-hearted but bumbling deputy. “But if you weren’t there, lass, how did you know so much? How did you work out the blood, the movement of the weapon…” He turns to Inspector Bradstreet: “Isn’t it amazing that she could almost solve the crime without ever going to the crime scene?”

  Bradstreet is unimpressed. “That is rather the point isn’t it, Lestrange? Don’t you think it’s more than a little suspicious that she could know such details—unless she had in fact been there herself?”

  It is time to start pouring some cold water on her reputation. “Inspector,” she says, “I don’t know what ideas I have inadvertently put into Constable Lestrange’s head. From what I gather, you have a fairly clear grasp of what had happened. An abused step-child, a tragic suicide, a desperate attempt by a wife to preserve her future.”

  Lestrange is shaking his head. “No, no. You said to look for a fourth person. The wife moved the razor to make Pratt’s suicide look like he was murdered by his foster-daughter. But the suicide was really murder by that fourth person. The Rohypnol—you said to test the whisky for flunitrazepam and it was there!”

  She does her best to look embarrassed. “I’m afraid that I was simply trying to impress you, Constable Lestrange. It was an open secret at the Priory School that Mr. Pratt had something of a drug problem. I’m sure if you look further you’ll find evidence of that. He must have acquired the—what’s the popular term for them, roofies?—somehow.” Again, she is relying on Moira to leave the right trail of breadcrumbs—but her twin seems capable of that and much more.

  Inspector Bradstreet has stopped pacing and is beginning to wonder whether he is wasting his time. “We shall be sure to check up on your latest offerings, Miss Greentree. In the meantime, Mrs. Pratt has indeed pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice by attempting to implicate her foster-daughter.” He narrows his eyes, attempting to switch from English period-piece detective to American hard-nosed cop: “But rest assured, Miss Greentree, I’ll be watching. Too many people die around you.”

  He turns on his heel and walks back towards his car. “Come on, Lestrange,” he barks over his shoulder.

  The Constable nods and turns to follow, then stops. “Why were you interested in the police report about the John Radcliffe Hospital?” he asks her.

  “I have some friends up in Oxford,” she replies—another half-lie. “I wanted to check that they were OK.”

  “Well as far as I can tell it was just what the press is saying: a gas leak. Must have been a big one to evacuate the whole facility, but the danger soon passed and everything’s back to normal now. What made you think that there was a bomb threat?”

  “Oh that’s a relief,” she sighs. “I must have misunderstood what my friend said.” Keeping a bomb threat from the public might be understandable. Hiding it from the police also? “Thanks, Constable.”

  He nods again and follows Bradstreet back to the car.

  By the time she returns to her rooms, Henry is sitting up. She clears the remains of the rope that bound her to the chair, now lying in pieces after she cut herself free with the knife, and passes him some water.

  “Drink this, you’ll feel better soon.”

  He sniffs the water before taking a sip. Rubbing his head, he look out the window then up at her. “What just happened?”

  She is about to formulate a response, a deflection, another white lie, but stops. Henry has shown himself to be the only person she can depend on to be there for her—and he has suffered for it more than once. She owes him at least the truth.

  “I’ll tell you.” She meets his gaze for a moment. “But first I need to know why you came to my room just now. You saved my life.”

  “Saved your life? By getting shot?” He laughs, but it turns into a cough. He has drunk the water too quickly; she pats him on the back. Wiping his lips, he waves her ministrations away. “Arcadia, you told me to come here. One o’clock in the afternoon sharp, was
what you said at breakfast. At least I thought it was you. So again: what just happened?”

  Moira asked him to come? What plan would that serve? To threaten to kill her, but simultaneously set in motion an event that would make killing her impractical. Was that the third test?

  For the first time, she tells Henry everything. She tells him about her suspicions of her brother, about her late-night rendezvous with Miss Alderman, about meeting Dr. Bell and her discovery of Moira. She tells him what little more she knows, including Moira’s revelation that she, Arcadia, is the control in some larger experiment. Whether due to the subject matter or the etorphine, Henry sits in silence until she is finished.

  “And?” he says.

  “And what?” she replies. “I’ve told you all I know.”

  “You’ve recited a bunch of facts and some speculation, but how does all this make you feel? Are you scared, angry, frustrated—what?”

  “Of course I’m all of the above.” She realises how mechanical it sounds even as the words leave her mouth. Yet how is she meant to articulate something that she may not be capable of experiencing? “Henry, you know better than most that I don’t do emotions very well.” If there was a moment during her time at Oxford that she wondered whether she was herself a robot, Henry might be forgiven for thinking the same thing now. “What I mean is that, at the best of times, I can be a bit—distant. Six months ago, I found out that most of my life was a lie. In the past couple of days, much of what I thought I had worked out was the truth ended up being wrong also.”

  She looks down at the floor, and then at her friend. “In my life, the one thing I believed I could count on was my mind. That I could think my way out of, or through, any challenge. Yet on the most basic facts of my own life I’ve either been fooled or mistaken.”

  Henry is silent for so long that she wonders if he has drifted back into sleep. “Thanks,” he says at last.

  “For what?”

  “For admitting that you can’t do everything yourself. For recognising that you might need a hand—or a shoulder.”

  She feels a tightening in the back of her throat and picks up the water that she had earlier passed to him. They sit quietly, sharing the water, until the clock striking two reminds them that classes continue and life goes on.

  As they walk back across the quadrangle to the classrooms, there is a movement in the woods that border the school grounds.

  “You go ahead,” she tells Henry. When he pauses, she adds: “It’s Miss Alderman—or whatever her name is—in the woods. I asked her to come, because she knows more about Moira and may be able to help. It’s fine.”

  He nods and heads to class. Conjuring an air of contemplation, she herself pursues an indirect path that should look like the aimless wandering of a teenage girl—while ensuring that it intersects with the trajectory of the erstwhile substitute teacher. When they do meet up in the woods, Miss Alderman looks at her closely, saying nothing.

  “Yes, it’s me,” Arcadia says. “For reference, we spoke on the phone about an hour ago. I told you she was here, you told me to run.”

  “I see you disregarded that suggestion,” Miss Alderman replies, but relaxes slightly. A hand that was resting on the clip of her handbag returns to her side. Is she carrying a weapon? The two walk slowly along the path that leads to the river.

  “Well, of all the people who seem to know more about my life than I do, Moira was the only one willing to share.”

  “I’m sorry—I wanted to protect you from all this. I thought I could, but I was wrong.”

  “Yes, there seem to be any number of people trying to protect me. But the person you warned me about has decided to let me live—at least for the time being.” They walk on for a minute without speaking. “So I assume your name isn’t really Ronald A. Shampie?”

  “No.” Miss Alderman smiles. “Though you are getting closer.” She frowns when she notices the puncture mark on Arcadia’s school uniform and the bruise beneath. “Was that her?”

  “Yes, a souvenir from Marwell Zoo.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Moira?” Arcadia searches for the right words, an unusual experience. “Hyper-intelligent. Psychopathic or sociopathic—certainly somewhere on the antisocial personality disorder spectrum. But also grasping to connect with the world. Half the words from her mouth are quotes from books or movies. She was fascinating and terrifying.”

  The look in Miss Alderman’s eyes is hard to read. Pity? Regret?

  “You said you only found out about her recently. Yet clearly you knew something about what was happening to her. She said she escaped from something she described as a petri dish, a lab of some kind. That everything that was being done to me was merely as a control for the experiments that were being done on her.”

  Miss Alderman shakes her head. “I didn’t know anything about her until a few weeks ago. I didn’t even know she existed. She was a theory, a variable in an equation, a simulation on a computer. I can’t believe they actually followed through and—” Her voice trails off.

  “And what?”

  The snap of a twig behind her reveals the reason for Miss Alderman’s silence.

  “And created her?” Dr. Starr steps forward from behind a tree. In his hands he holds the double-barrelled shotgun sometimes used by groundskeepers to shoot wild boar that wander onto school grounds. Two cartridges, two targets?

  “You never really understood the nature of double-blind experiments, did you?” Dr. Starr says. “It means not only keeping the test subject ignorant but also those helping to administer the test itself. I’m afraid that meant that you and poor Milton had to be kept in the dark.”

  He waves the gun at Miss Alderman. “I’ll take the handbag, if you don’t mind.”

  The former substitute teacher places it on the ground and backs away. Dr. Starr opens it, gun still pointed at them, and takes out a black handheld device with a square nose—a Taser. She has not seen one before, but knows that they fire dart-like electrodes that cause an electric shock in the target, paralysing them temporarily. “Was this for me or for her?” he asks.

  “It depends on who is the bigger threat,” Miss Alderman responds. Her voice remains light but she is looking for an advantage, or a way out. “I have refills if you’d like to try one.”

  “No thanks, this will do me nicely.” He shoulders the handbag and waves the barrel of the shotgun once more. “As it happens, I have a free period now. How about we go for a nice walk in the woods?”

  The question is rhetorical. The two women walk ahead of Dr. Starr along the tree-lined path.

  Two cartridges, two targets.

  11

  BOOM

  The clouds threatening rain have passed; sunlight now filters down through the canopy. These woods and the river flowing through them were once protected by the Charter of the Forest, a companion document to the more famous Magna Carta. Eight centuries later, there are no freemen living on the land and only a handful of enthusiasts like Henry who pursue the remaining fish. A shallow grave off the beaten path might go undiscovered for weeks or months. Or years.

  A walk into the woods at the point of a shotgun has only one ending, but one should try to remain positive. What might Moira say? If Monty Python is in her repertoire then she might quote a line or two of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”.

  He cannot shoot them both at once. Escape might be possible for one, but would likely mean death for the other. They need to disarm him. Literally or metaphorically?

  “So why did you come to the Priory School, Dr. Starr?” she asks, keeping her voice even. Interesting hypothesis: the greater the frequency with which one’s life is threatened, the easier it is to keep one’s composure. Back to the task at hand, however: “Surely not just for this purpose?”

  “In fact no, not originally for this purpose,” he replies. “At first I was a rare voice that thought it might be possible to salvage things at the Priory School. Others would have simply put an end
to it all, purge the experiment and start again. Maybe I was too naïve, too trusting.”

  “What experiment? I’m just the control.”

  The barrel of the gun wobbles with Dr. Starr’s laughter. “The control? Oh, of course you’ve spoken to her. Well, I suppose she’s partly right—but I would have expected more from you, Miss Greentree. You know, I was quite fascinated to meet her in person. I taught almost an entire class with her in it, thinking it was you. Only the slight tic in her movements made me think twice. And of course her mastery of the material far surpasses yours, Arcadia. There’s no shame in that—in some areas she knows more than I do. In retrospect, I think that she was holding back to avoid showing me up and thereby revealing herself.”

  “Lysander,” Miss Alderman says, “You know you won’t get away with this.”

  “Would you prefer that I commit ‘suicide’ with a neat note wrapping it all up in a little bow? I don’t think so,” he sneers. “And in fact I will get away with this—precisely because you have helped me. You’ve done such a good job covering your tracks that no one will miss you. And as for Miss Greentree, our little friend has already shown that she can take her place. Moira—such a cute name—is unlikely to be found unless she wants to be found, at which time she will realise that it is far more efficient to resume Miss Greentree’s position at the school and her identity along with it. So you see, no one will be looking for either of you.”

  Moira might well fool her aunt and uncle, but Magnus? Henry—surely Henry would not be fooled again. She is not so sure. Her phone and the Swiss Army knife are in her bag, difficult to reach without drawing attention. They need a distraction, or help. An actual wild boar would be useful around now. In the meantime, buy time.