I Spy

by Claire Kendal

  Martin nods when he and Maxine are a metre apart, and they both stop. The children run to play tag while he and Maxine talk. I am straining to hear them. Martin’s words are clear and loud enough for me to catch. Maxine’s voice is a quiet, cautious murmur, so different from how she spoke to her children. But I can judge from what Martin is saying that she is telling him about Jane.

  I catch a familiar name, so distinctive it makes me pause to try to remember where I’ve heard it.

  Frederick Veliko.

  Then it comes to me. Frederick Veliko is the name of Jane’s brother. Why has Martin mentioned a brother Jane barely knew, in the context of a discussion about her murder, when it is so clear that Zac is responsible for her death?

  Martin gives Maxine a final nod, waves at the children as if he is performing the part of a fond but distant uncle, and sets off, heading in the direction he came. Maxine calls out, and the children run to her side and take her hands. I need to get out of here. I hold my breath, praying they won’t climb the steps into the graveyard, as I did. They don’t. Instead, they cross the grass towards a neighbouring field. The boy breaks away and runs. Maxine and the little girl shoot off behind him, laughing as they give chase.

  I sit back on my heels, my breathing louder in my own ears than it must actually be, waiting for them to be safely out of sight. I can feel my body sag, as if I am a balloon and giant hands have popped me with a pin, so all the air rushes out of me. Slowly, I make my way out of the graveyard, slipping on the wet path and landing smack on my tailbone. The pain seems to spear through me, but my face is wet with rain, not tears.

  Then Provocations

  Two years and two months earlier

  * * *

  Cornwall, Early February 2017

  A month had passed since I bled, and I’d made it to sixteen weeks, though Zac thought I was showing symptoms of anxiety and insisted I needed to take things more gently. Secretly, I checked my underwear multiple times a day, terrified each time I looked that there would be blood. But there hadn’t been a single drop more.

  The sky was white with snow, a pair of blackcaps landed on my bird feeder, and the hospital ward I used to love was becoming a different world. It was as if the air there had changed, so the oxygen levels were barely enough to keep me going and an excess of carbon dioxide was leaving me struggling to breathe. Or maybe the problem was that I had mutated into an altered life form.

  Whenever Zac swaggered past the reception desk, he had another request, made with unimpeachable courtesy.

  ‘Can you do me a favour and find the notes for Mr Hopper, Holly?’

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d print me some labels for Mrs Walker.’

  ‘Do you know where the continuation sheets are?’

  As I visibly spun from filing cabinet to printer to desk to telephone and back again, Zac said, ‘Let me look after you. Even part-time is getting too much. You don’t have to do this any more.’

  Milly told me that the way to boil a creature alive was to increase the temperature slowly, so they didn’t realise what was happening until it was too late to get out. ‘You’re in too deep,’ she said. ‘He’s got you now – that’s why he wanted you pregnant.’

  ‘No.’ I crossed my arms.

  ‘You’ve lost all of your confidence. You’re too dependent on him, practically and emotionally. He hates for you to be out of the house. He doesn’t like you being in contact with any human being other than him.’

  ‘Stop it, Milly.’

  ‘I used to think not being loved by Fergus was the catastrophe of my life, but it leaves me free. Maybe there’s even a part of me that chose that. You make me see that being loved too much is far worse.’ And she hurried away before I could continue the argument.

  I couldn’t think clearly. I was a woman on the moon without a spacesuit to equip her for the new environment.

  On the ward, Zac was a useful and benign king, and it made me want to kill him. The nurses were his prime targets. In rare interludes of quiet, he oozed around them, bearing food and drink, which he knew was a valuable currency there.

  ‘Any drug timings which aren’t working? Anyone you want reviewed? Any cannulas?’ He knew the nurses loved that stuff, but he went further. ‘Would you like some tea or coffee? A biscuit?’

  ‘You’re pale, Holly. Your face is pinched.’ He came behind the counter, into the nurses’ station, squeezed my shoulder, and logged on to a staff computer to work on the discharge summaries that went to the patient’s GP, outlining why they were admitted, how they were treated, and any changes to medications and actions the hospital wanted the GP to take. When Zac finished the last discharge summary, he double-spun his chair.

  ‘Sorry, Zac.’ I quietly put a fresh stack of patient folders in front of him. ‘These need discharge summaries too.’

  He smiled at me, then turned that beam on two nurses who were walking by. Scarlett and Joanne witnessed his display of courtesy-despite-being-sorely-tried. ‘Thank you very much, Holly. I appreciate your keeping me on top of things.’

  Joanne flipped her hair and sucked in her stomach and smiled at him. ‘I wish all doctors were as nice as you.’

  ‘I aim to please.’ Zac watched her walk away as I answered the phone for the twentieth time in ten minutes.

  ‘Cardiac unit. Ward clerk speaking.’

  ‘Hello, Holly.’ There was no mistaking Maxine’s voice when she wanted you to. ‘I wondered if you’d had any further thoughts about the task we discussed.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I think you have the wrong ward. I am unable to help with that request, but I will put you back to the switchboard, who can assist you.’ I redirected the call, then concentrated on my computer screen as if I were working on the most important task in the world.

  When Zac finished the second batch of discharge summaries, he turned to me. ‘Anything else?’ He expected me to say no. Instead, I held out a list of the patients who needed risk assessments for venous thromboembolisms.

  His bleeper went off. He didn’t take the VTE list. ‘Those will have to wait.’ He reached beneath a pile of stationery that someone had dumped on the far side of the desk. He pulled out a journal. The cover design was a series of thin vertical lines. They were every shade of orange in the colour spectrum, bleeding from lightest to brightest. He slipped it into my hand. ‘I found this in front of the house.’

  My face went red. I felt myself trembling, my body vibrating like hummingbird wings.

  I’d filled that journal with notes about some of the cases I’d encountered in the hospital. I could be fired, maybe even prosecuted, if anybody at the hospital were to discover that I’d been compiling stories based on the patients’ histories. But the worst thing of all was the exposure and the humiliation. The journal was where I practised my observations and information gathering. It was also where I secretly wrote fiction, which I’d been doing since I faked that letter from an admirer when I was four years old.

  Thinking about it, I saw that writers really were spies. That, in truth, was why I took the ward clerk job. Because what place could be better than a hospital for finding stories of people at extremity?

  Three of the stories in my journal were finished. One was about a young mother having to choose between her own life and her unborn baby’s because the treatment she needed would poison a foetus. Another was about a father bringing a court action against the hospital for refusing to operate on his child, because his daughter’s case was medically hopeless but he couldn’t accept it. The third concerned a young doctor who, for the first time, had to break the news of a death to a family while also broaching the subject of organ donation.

  I had been looking in places I shouldn’t and documenting what was forbidden and stealing stories that weren’t mine to take. Zac had forced me out of the shadows, and though I would never be a real spy, and there was nothing in the journal to reveal my history with MI5 and Maxine, out of the shadows was a place where spies should never be. To get caught, to
be so stupid and exposed, to have others read my work when it wasn’t yet good enough – I couldn’t decide which of those things pained me the most.

  Zac gave me his fond look. ‘You’re blushing. Are you writing about me?’

  There was that bright smile of his again. It had never struck me until that moment that it was more of a sneer than a smile. I was certain he knew exactly what I’d been writing about, and that he had read every word. He’d probably made a copy of the whole thing. In fact, I was willing to bet he’d scanned it on to that laptop of his, which went everywhere with him.

  My journal was never in front of the house. I always hid it in a gap between the upper kitchen cabinets. That hiding place was completely invisible, unless you climbed onto a high stool and knew to slide a hand in, where I’d hung an open folder to keep the journal within reach and stop it from falling all the way down the crack. You’d only look there if you knew to. So how did he know?

  My voice was shaking, though I was trying to appear calm. ‘I’m sure I’ve never taken my journal out of the house.’ I felt as though a stranger had ripped off my clothes.

  ‘You know how careless and forgetful you are these days.’ He licked his lips. ‘It must be – very interesting.’

  Harriet the Spy’s nanny tells her that if anybody ever finds her secret notebook, she should apologise and lie. I was too angry to apologise but the lies were easy. ‘It’s a journal of my sex dreams about you. And my descriptions of the actual sex with you.’

  ‘We can act it out later,’ he said.

  ‘Good. I’ll look forward to tying you up.’ There was nothing Zac would hate more than losing control, though he’d once asked to do it to me and I’d said no.

  He looked completely panic-stricken. ‘You didn’t write that.’

  He was right. I hadn’t written a single word that was directly about him, and nothing explicitly about myself, either. ‘How do you know if you didn’t read it?’

  My sleep was interrupted. I told Zac it was because my bladder kept waking me up, which was supposed to happen when you were four months pregnant. But that wasn’t the whole truth. I was frightened by my lapses at work. Medical notes were going astray or ending up by the wrong bed, putting patient confidentiality at risk. Everything I typed seemed to be filled with errors. I was exhausting myself all the more, because I wasn’t just double-checking everything I did but triple- and quadruple-checking, too. I was going in early and staying late, and still I was falling further behind.

  I was practically drooping in my chair when Zac slid his own beside mine. My chin dropped onto my chest and I cupped my forehead and cheek with my fingertips. ‘I don’t remember making any of these mistakes.’

  ‘It could be you’re suffering from antenatal depression. We should mention it to the midwife, see what she suggests.’

  I looked up. ‘I’m not depressed.’ But was I? I was no longer sure of anything.

  ‘Okay. I don’t want you feeling stress about this.’ His expression stayed placid. There was no tension anywhere in his body. ‘You do know, don’t you, that lack of sleep can have a serious impact on physical and emotional well-being.’

  ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘I wonder …’ He looked around, saw that the others were all busy with patients or in offices. He put one hand on my tummy, the other on my thigh. ‘Are you worrying about your journal?’ He moved his head close, so I could smell the coffee on his breath.

  ‘Yes.’

  His voice was so low it was practically a whisper. ‘I won’t tell anyone. I’m used to keeping secrets. I expect loyalty, Holly. I won’t forgive or forget disloyalty. But I give loyalty too, and my loyalty is fierce.’ He pressed his mouth, briefly, against mine, and then he was gone.

  A few days later, after hours in front of the screen, my eyelids were growing so heavy I wondered if I was going to fall asleep sitting up. As I updated yet another patient address, and checked the accuracy of yet another transcription from paper to computer, I realised that I needed the loo so badly I couldn’t sit for a minute longer.

  When I returned, Sister was sitting in my chair. She pointed at the screen, her face tight. ‘What is this?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘What are you doing, looking at this patient’s blood results?’

  ‘I’m not. I wasn’t.’

  ‘Are you not logged into this computer?’

  She could see that I was. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Were you not using this computer?’

  ‘I was, yes. I only stepped away for a couple minutes.’

  ‘Are these not Mrs Fielding’s results?’

  ‘They are. But I wasn’t working on Mrs Fielding’s notes. I don’t understand how they got on my screen.’

  ‘This is a serious breach of patient confidentiality. You are a ward clerk. You have no business looking at this part of the patient’s file.’

  I thought again of my bright orange journal and what would happen if Sister got her hands on that. ‘But I wasn’t. I really wasn’t.’

  ‘I won’t have this, Holly.’

  Milly was hovering nearby. ‘It was me.’ Her cheeks were red. She was a terrible liar.

  Sister was searching Milly’s face, guessing that she was covering for me, but she held back from accusing her of this. She shook her head in disbelief, but said, ‘Explain yourself.’

  ‘I needed to check Mrs Fielding’s INR,’ Milly said. ‘Holly’s computer was still logged in, so I used it to save time.’

  ‘You,’ Sister said, looking at Milly, ‘had better not use anybody else’s log-in again. And you,’ she said, looking at me, ‘had better be sure to log out when you walk away from your screen in future.’ She stomped off to her office.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I started to say to Milly. The words came out in a stutter.

  But Milly just looked at me sadly, as if she didn’t believe it either. She put a hand on my cheek. ‘Go home, Angel. You’re on a half-day today and your shift finished two hours ago. You need sleep.’

  I didn’t go to sleep. At least, not immediately. The winter sky was the colour of petrol as I crunched through frozen grass across fields, guided by my torch, then along the path towards my parents’ bench. I felt like a witch, walking beneath the cold new moon in Zac’s loose dark coat, seeming to engage in a ritual as the wind lifted my hair.

  I crouched to extract the leak-proof and airtight container that Maxine had planted in the gorse three and a half months earlier. In my hand was a slip of paper on which I’d written the name Jacinda Molinero as well as Albert E. Mathieson’s details. I was so close to slipping it in, but I hesitated.

  Again, I looked up at the moon, bone white and lighting my skin with her glow. We were supposed to have an affinity, given that I was pregnant, but there was no magic in that sky. The moon wasn’t going to start talking when she never had before.

  I rose from my knees. Carefully, I stood, extracted myself from the tangle of bush, and made my way to the cliff edge. I dangled the piece of paper over the heaving sea below. But I didn’t let it fall from my fingers. Instead, I snatched my hand back and stepped away. I hurriedly returned to the gorse and Maxine’s weather-proof canister.

  I hesitated one final time, facing up to the implications of what it would mean to do this. I would be working deliberately against Zac. I would be working with intent for Maxine. I would be changing my emphatic No into an ambivalent Yes.

  I thought of Zac and my constant slip-ups at work. I could no longer repress my suspicion that he was behind them, though he would say it was my paranoia, my anxiety, my antenatal depression, that made me imagine such a mad thing. I thought also of the orange notebook with my hospital stories. There was no doubting that one.

  What I wrote in that journal was illicit and embarrassing, and I never wanted to share it with anyone. Though there was the small consolation that there was nothing about spying in the journal, and nothing about Zac himself, I still felt my face go red with
shame when I imagined him reading it. He had peered into my head and extracted my fantasies without my consent. Is that why the Goddess Diana was so angry and humiliated when Actaeon caught her bathing, naked and in disarray? Though poor Actaeon stumbled upon Diana accidentally. Zac did this on purpose.

  And for the first time he had openly threatened me. There was no doubting that one, either. If I were to do anything he considered a betrayal – and I was clear that his definition of betrayal meant anything he didn’t like – then he would expose me. He had a power over me that he gained through trickery.

  ‘No, Zac.’ I said this out loud. ‘You don’t get to play it this way.’ I slipped the paper inside, screwed the lid on, and returned the canister to its hiding place. Then I walked home, climbed into bed, and slept the sleep of the dead.

  Now Further Warnings

  Two years and two months later

  * * *

  Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019

  When I get back from Cheltenham, I am still wearing the sticky running clothes I put on at dawn. I hurry into my basement flat to shower and brush my teeth. I pull on a pair of faded jeans and a chunky cream jumper, both of which I bought from a charity shop. My hair is wet and there is no time to dry it, so I tie it in a low knot at the nape of my neck and stick a few pins in to hold it there.

  I log into an email account Maxine set up for emergency contact when I first moved to Bath. It will alert her as soon as I sign in. I find the Twitter post the stallholder showed me, and copy and paste the link into the body of an email.

  But I can’t resist looking at it myself. The photograph is bigger on my laptop than the phone, so my baby bump seems more prominent. I close my eyes like a child frightened by a scary film. My breathing is fast and jagged, and I am crying. Quickly, trying to focus on the x in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, I close the window.