The Truth

by Peter James

  There was little traffic going the same way; more was coming from the opposite direction, heading into London. A massive truck blattered past, blinding Kündz with spray and shaking the limousine with its slipstream. He increased the speed of the wipers.

  Mr Sarotzini had said nothing about last night, and Kündz presumed that this meant that he did not know he’d disobeyed him. All the same he was nervous that Mr Sarotzini might say something.

  He had woken feeling low this morning; and deeply uneasy. Instead of feeling elated about John Carter, he felt flat. He did not understand why. He felt dirty, as if he needed a bath, except that he had already had a shower. It would be different when he saw Susan again. Then he would feel fine.

  But he was scared of Mr Sarotzini’s mood today. It was bad, far worse than yesterday. He could not ever remember Mr Sarotzini in such a black mood. He was scared of what Mr Sarotzini might instruct him to do to Susan.

  ‘Last night, Stefan,’ Mr Sarotzini said.

  Kündz stiffened, saying nothing.

  ‘Last night, when Susan Carter telephoned me for the second time.’ Kündz watched him in the mirror, nervous that Mr Sarotzini was going to question him about John. The banker was looking out of the window, stroking his chin, taking his time before he continued. ‘She explained to me, Stefan, that she wanted to know she could trust me to come alone. That is why she put me to the test yesterday.’

  The ominous tone in Mr Sarotzini’s voice increased Kündz’s anxiety.

  ‘She saw your face, Stefan. As you were driving away the creepy little priest, Doctor Freer. She saw your face.’

  Kündz knew this. He had seen hers too, he had seen that flash of recognition. ‘Yes, it was a mistake,’ he answered.

  He could deal with it. When he saw Susan, he would be able to explain and she would understand. He was just a shitty little priest, vermin. He was history.

  ‘Too many mistakes, Stefan. I think your love for this woman is clouding your judgement.’

  The harsh, scolding tone of Mr Sarotzini’s voice sent a chill through him. Before he could respond, Mr Sarotzini continued, ‘You are making mistakes all the time, Stefan. I am losing count of the number you have made just recently. You allowed Susan Carter to flee to the United States. You allowed the priest, Doctor Freer, to be alone in that room with Verity. And now you have disobeyed my instructions. You did not go straight home to your flat in Earl’s Court last night, you went to the Carters’ house.’

  Kündz froze. He connected with Mr Sarotzini’s eyes in the mirror, then stared ahead once more at the road. How? How? How?

  Then he realised, and another much deeper chill coursed through him. Of course. The nanny. Mr Sarotzini had not permitted him to select a nanny himself; he had told him that the choice of the nanny needed to be random. But there was nothing, nothing in Mr Sarotzini’s world that was ever random.

  Mr Sarotzini had put the nanny there not just to look after Verity. She was there to spy on him.

  ‘Susan Carter is dangerously unstable, Stefan. She has reminded me over the telephone of the promises I made to her husband that there would be no more killing and that there would be no more bugging. She is making threats to harm the baby, to kill herself and the baby. She says that if she ever sees you again, she will kill Verity.’

  ‘I will explain everything to her,’ Kündz said, trembling. ‘I will calm her down, she will understand.’

  ‘I cannot take this risk, Stefan.’ There was a terrible finality in Mr Sarotzini’s voice.

  Kündz drove on in silence.

  ‘You have brought about this situation, Stefan, and I will give you the choice of how you deal with it. Either you will kill Susan Carter or you will have to stay away from her for ever.’

  ‘I cannot kill her,’ he said quietly.

  They were approaching a slow-moving van Kündz pulled out to overtake, but a stream of cars was coming in the other direction. He pulled back in.

  ‘Then you will stay away from her for ever.’

  ‘My duty is to teach Verity the Truths,’ Kündz said.

  ‘Verity has been born with the knowledge of all the Truths, Stefan. This is what makes her special. This is what makes her unique. She will require no one to teach her these. As she grows older she will simply know them. They will be second nature to her. As will many other things.’

  ‘You promised me I could have Susan for ever.’

  ‘The Twenty-seventh Truth states that nothing lasts for ever. It is the law of entropy. Disorder naturally increases with the passage of time. Not even promises last for ever, Stefan.’

  Kündz drove on in silence. He tried to imagine killing Susan and he could not. He tried to imagine living without ever seeing her again. He could not.

  Without his protection, what would happen to Susan? She was too free-spirited, too strong-willed. One day she would anger Mr Sarotzini again.

  And then?

  Claudie’s screams echoed inside his head.

  He pulled out again to see beyond the van. In the distance a large truck was approaching. There was time, just time, if he accelerated hard.

  But he swung back in again. Then, looking at Mr Sarotzini in the mirror, he said, ‘I have failed you. I am impure. The Fifth Truth states that “The only purification is eradication.”’

  Kündz swung the steering wheel hard over to the right. The Mercedes veered out from behind the van straight across the oncoming lane.

  Straight into the path of the oncoming truck.

  Susan, my love, this is for you, this is how much I love you, so much more than you will ever know.

  Kündz heard Claudie’s screams once more. Then, for the first time in his life, he heard Mr Sarotzini’s scream.

  And that was worth everything.

  The massive truck hit the limousine broadside, sheering off its roof then dragging the mangled wreckage along for two hundred yards beneath its wheels, before slithering off the road on to the verge and coming to a halt in a wide ditch.

  Seconds after the driver jumped clear from his cab, the petrol from the Mercedes’ tank exploded in a ball of fire, taking the truck up in flames with it.

  Epilogue

  Ting … ting … ting … ting … ting …

  The noise was driving Susan nuts. She had a copy-edit deadline of the end of the following week for an anthology of Fergus Donleavy’s writings, and she had been working all weekend on it. The book had been her idea and she’d persuaded Magellan Lowry to commission a bright science journalist – who, some years back, had coincidentally written a profile on Euan Freer – to put it together.

  It had been a slow process, a five-year labour of love, but she felt she had done Fergus justice with it, and it would be a fitting tribute to the man.

  Ting … ting … ting … ting … ting …

  She could hear it through the ceiling. That damned gerbil, Buzzy – they’d bought it for Verity as a fifth birthday present a fortnight ago. It was going round and round on the treadmill in its cage. And she could swear, sometimes, that Verity encouraged it. Every time Susan settled down to work, the gerbil started its goddamn aerobics.

  She was wrestling with a difficult section of the book. One of Fergus’s many thoughts on the theories of time. She remembered trying to get her head round this passage once before, when she’d been working on the manuscript of the last book Fergus had written, which had been published posthumously. It had had good reviews, but had not been the brilliant best-seller she’d hoped for. But she was consoled by the knowledge that Fergus would have preferred it that way: good reviews from his peers had always meant more to him than his sales figures.

  Time is a curve, not a straight line. Linear time is an illusion; we exist in a space-time continuum.

  Sometimes she hoped that was true, that time was an illusion, and that people did not simply die and cease to exist; that everyone who had ever existed still did exist. But that hope had its flaws. She wanted Fergus still to exist. And Harvey Addison. But n
ot Mr Sarotzini.

  She kept the newspaper cutting of Mr Sarotzini’s death in a drawer of her desk: it was a constant reaffirmation to her that he really was dead. It was a small article, just a few column inches, stating that a Swiss banker, Emil Sarotzini, and his chauffeur, Stefan Kündz, had been killed when their Mercedes had collided with an articulated lorry on the A413 in Buckinghamshire.

  She had been a little surprised, but not disappointed, that no obituary of Mr Sarotzini had appeared in any newspaper.

  Ting … ting … ting … ting … ting …

  She looked at her watch. Four p.m. John would be back from golf in an hour, and they’d have to get going soon after that. He was playing with Archie Warren, who had now recovered fully from his stroke and was fine, although he’d been advised never to play squash again.

  Ting … ting … ting … ting … ting …

  Exasperated she looked up at the ceiling and shouted, ‘Verity! Shut that bloody thing up!’

  Almost immediately, the noise stopped. Silence! Sweet, precious silence!

  Not that Verity was a noisy kid: on the contrary, she was almost worryingly quiet at times. A loner, she wasn’t good at mixing with other children, preferring her own company sitting up in her room reading voraciously or playing on her computer. The teachers at her school said she was advanced for her age – probably, the head had explained, the advantage of being an only child with a literary mother.

  She and John had been trying for three years now for another baby, but so far without success. They’d had all kinds of tests and there was nothing wrong. It just hadn’t happened. Yet.

  There was something Susan carried in her heart, which was that she wanted, more than anything, to believe that John was Verity’s father. Sometimes, although John didn’t like to talk about it, she sensed when she saw him talking to Verity, or playing with her, that he, too, believed it himself. And, as she had constantly told herself, it was possible.

  Even though Verity had been born a month premature, she’d been a good-sized baby and had surprised everyone by how strong she was. Maybe she had been conceived a month earlier than everyone had thought, and John really was her father.

  Every few months she had a strange recurring dream, in which Mr Sarotzini was sitting beside her bed. He would smile sadly at her and say, ‘Susan, the Twenty-eighth Truth states that sometimes it is better to believe than to know.’

  There was something else Susan carried in her heart. It was the memory of a conversation she’d had in her room in the clinic with Mr Sarotzini soon after Verity had been born. He had said to her, Look at your daughter, look at her, look at Verity. Is she evil? Is she corrupt? Is that how she has been born? Is that how you view her when you look at her, hold her, suckle her? An evil, corrupt monster? Is it, Susan?

  She believed, fervently, that Verity was born pure and innocent, the way all babies were. How they grew up and changed was as much due to the moulding they received from their parents as from their genes. If she and John could show Verity enough love and care and warmth and humanity, then they could overcome whatever bad genes Verity might have inherited. They could destroy whatever it was Mr Sarotzini might have had planned for her.

  That was why she had decided never to have a nanny and only to work freelance from home. She wanted to be there for Verity. She wanted to be the best mother it was possible to be.

  Shortly after five, she heard the sound of the front door opening, the rattle of golf clubs, the thump of the bag being dumped on the hall floor. Then John came limping into her office, looking sunburned and gorgeous, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Hi,’ he said.

  His limp was permanent but, fortunately, his only legacy from the savage attack on him in the house. The doctors had said it was the quick action of the nanny that had saved his life. The police never found the assailant, neither did they ever come up with a motive for the attack. John’s memory of the man was hazy but his description was enough for Susan to be pretty certain who he had been. She had told John she thought he was one of Mr Sarotzini’s henchmen, but she never told him about her night in the WestOne Clinic.

  ‘Hi, hon,’ she said. ‘How was the game?’

  ‘Good, I played well.’

  ‘Did you win?’

  ‘Lost on the eighteenth – it was all on the last putt and Archie sank a blinder. I just want to have a quick shower. Are we going?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She looked at him testily.

  ‘Sure, no problem, I’ll get ready. Where’s Verity?’

  ‘Upstairs. She was playing with her computer, that new Endangered Species game of yours.’

  ‘Is she enjoying it?’

  ‘Uh-huh, I guess so.’ Susan found it hard, sometimes, to know what Verity was thinking.

  ‘She ought to be outside on a day like this.’

  ‘So should I.’ Susan smiled. ‘Guess I’m not setting her a good example. I’ll go get her ready.’

  Susan went upstairs and along the corridor to Verity’s room. The door was closed as usual. She went in, and saw Verity, in dungarees and a T-shirt, sitting in front of the computer screen. She was studying something intently, her face framed by her long red hair, her mouth puckered in concentration as she tapped the keyboard, then moved the mouse across the pad. Susan heard the trumpet of an elephant. ‘How you doing, hon?’

  Verity raised a hand, signalling her not to interrupt. ‘I’m moving elephants to a new watering hole.’

  Susan walked over to the gerbil’s cage and peered in. ‘Hi, Buzzy, you were a noisy little –’

  The gerbil was lying motionless on its side on the floor of the cage.

  Susan shot a glance at Verity. Christ, had she noticed? She opened the cage door warily, because Buzzy had sharp teeth and had bitten her nastily a week ago, and touched the little creature lightly with her finger.

  It was rigid.

  Verity was still absorbed in her game. Susan picked up the gerbil and held it in the palm of her hand, studying it. She frowned. The head was at a strange angle. When she touched it, it was loose, as if it was only attached by skin and not bone. Then she saw blood in its mouth and over its tiny incisors.

  A cold slick travelled down her spine. ‘Verity,’ she said, her voice several octaves higher than normal. ‘What’s happened to Buzzy?’

  ‘Buzzy’s dead,’ Verity said, nonchalantly, moving her mouse again and tapping more keys.

  ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘He was annoying you so I broke his neck. It’s the best way to do it.’ She leaned forward to peer more closely at something on the screen.

  Susan was unsure how to handle this. ‘You killed Buzzy? You killed your pet? I thought you liked Buzzy.’

  Verity shook her hair away from her face. Then she stared at her mother levelly and said, ‘The only true pain is to hurt the thing you love.’

  ‘What?’ Susan said, in amazement.

  Verity turned back and resumed her game.

  Susan walked over to her, and put an arm around her shoulder. ‘What did you say, hon?’

  Verity turned back towards her, breaking free of Susan’s arm with a ferocity that startled her. ‘Leave me alone!’

  ‘It’s nearly half past five, you have to get ready for church.’

  ‘Not going to church. I don’t want to go to church. We go every week and it’s boring and I don’t want to go any more.’ She burst into tears and began screaming, ‘Donwannago! Donwannago!’

  John came into the room. ‘What the hell –?’

  He stopped as he saw the gerbil in Susan’s hand. And the look of steel in Susan’s eyes.

  Susan knelt down and, with her free hand, pulled the computer’s plug out of the wall socket. Then she stood up, grabbed Verity by the neck of her T-shirt and yanked her out of the chair.

  ‘We’re just getting ready for church,’ Susan said, brightly.

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Orion

  This ebook fir
st published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Peter James/Really Scary Books Ltd 1997

  The moral right of Peter James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 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, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

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