“Good,” said Amy, “at least he’s up.”
Harper checked her watch—it was gone 1 p.m. Amy knocked on the peeling wooden door.
After a while, there was the shuffling of feet and the tell-tale darkening of the spyhole which showed Harper that they were being observed from within. Then, the door opened a crack. Half of a bearded face, one lens of a pair of spectacles. A section of a tricksy smile. All accompanied by a waft of sickly smoke. The man coughed productively into his fist before he said anything.
“Amy, babe. It’s good to see you.”
He seemed about to open the door wider when he caught sight of Harper. A frown, then a flash of recognition, of fury.
“Hello, Mr Jones,” said Harper.
“What is this?” said Gideon, pushing the door further shut so that he was peering through a gap no more than a centimetre wide. “Amy?” His voice was high-pitched, like a child’s. How could you, he seemed to ask.
“Darling,” said Amy, “it’s OK. She’s a friend.”
“You’re friends with a copper? You never said.”
Harper stepped away in the direction they’d come. “Look, Amy, I don’t think this is going to work. Why don’t we just go?”
Amy said, “No, it’s fine, honestly. Hang on a second.”
She leaned towards Gideon and mumbled something Harper couldn’t hear.
“Well, if you’re sure,” he said, throwing a suspicious glance towards Harper. “I suppose I could. Not for her, though. For you I will.”
“That would be marvellous. We’d be so grateful. Wouldn’t we, Joanna?” Amy gave Harper a hard nudge with an elbow.
“I’m sure you’re a very busy man, Mr Jones. Don’t put yourself out on our account.”
“He doesn’t mind one bit, do you, Gideon?”
There was some hesitation, but then after another phlegmy cough, “That’s right,” he said, “I’d be happy to help. There is one thing, though—could you both come back in half an hour? I have some friends here.”
“I don’t mind,” said Amy.
“No, I’m sure you don’t, but let’s just say that my friends might not want to meet your friend, if you know what I mean.”
“It’s just a social visit,” said Harper, “I’m not on duty. I don’t want to know about whatever it is you’re all doing in there. As long as I don’t see it, I don’t care.”
“Fine,” said Gideon, “shut your eyes then. I’ll get rid of them.”
Harper turned her back on the doorway. The back garden was as wild as the front, apart from a roughly circular section of undergrowth that had been cleared. In the centre of the clearing was the blackened remains of a campfire, surrounded by a ring of logs to sit on. Just over the hedge could be seen the top of the neighbour’s children’s trampoline net. On the other side, creepers climbed the high wall. Vehicles could be heard beyond it, rushing down the hill towards the city centre.
Harper pretended not to listen as three sets of feet scuffled past her out of Gideon’s house and around to the front. She turned her head and caught a glimpse of the back of them: black-hoodied, fat-trainered types in the kind of voluminous trousers that never seemed to go out of fashion with a certain set of students. Once they’d gone, she turned back towards the house, where Gideon had swung wide the kitchen door and was standing back to let them in.
“Sorry about the state of the place,” he said to Amy.
Gideon was bald on top, and what hair he had left was gathered into straggly dreadlocks of varying lengths at the nape of his neck. He wore a collarless shirt of rough yellow cotton and loose black trousers with pockets and elasticated cuffs. Barefoot on the sticky vinyl floor, he gave off that oily, herbal smell that Harper associated with those shops that sold silver skull jewellery and joss sticks.
“Do you guys want some tea?” He rummaged around near the window and unearthed a once-white plastic kettle, then held it dangling from a hand as if he’d never seen it before.
“No, thanks,” said Amy.
“I’m sure there’s some milk here somewhere.”
When he opened the fridge a bad, cheesy stench wafted out and the two women exchanged a glance. Amy gently closed the fridge, assuring Gideon they weren’t in the mood for tea. Harper couldn’t believe these two knew each other, that Amy had once lived here. The man’s surly, generally unwashed appearance made Amy’s neat, charming, carefully made-up self shine even more brightly. She stood in that large, grimy kitchen like a rose growing in a landfill site.
Harper followed Gideon and Amy through to the front room, where she immediately put a hand over her eyes.
“Whatever you have in that plastic box, Gideon, get it out of here now.”
“Oh, Jesus, sorry.”
Harper waited while Gideon hastily removed the container in which there was something that resembled a bright green brain, to somewhere Harper did not have to see it, think about it, or arrest him for it. That amount of marijuana would put him away for a year or more, and right now Gideon was far more useful to Harper if he remained a free man. Though she was perfectly willing to reassess this opinion at any time, should the need arise.
“So, Amy my Amy, what’s up?” said Gideon, folding his thin frame into one of his huge armchairs. The couch on which Harper sat had once been blue, but the arms were now brown and tacky to the touch. She perched, unable to relax. Amy stood a short distance away.
“Well, Joanna and I, we’re having a little problem, and neither of us have the specific skills required to sort it out,” said Amy. “I immediately thought of you, but of course at the time I had no idea that you two had any history together.”
“It’s fine,” said Gideon, his eyes on Amy, “I don’t hold grudges.”
“I knew you’d say that,” said Amy. “I told her you were a good sort.” She turned to Harper. “Perhaps you can explain to Gideon what it’s about?”
“I have a CCTV tape, and an audio recording. I need someone with technical expertise to analyse them for me.”
“From a criminal case? Why don’t the police nerds look into it?”
“The boss doesn’t know I’m here. This is kind of a side project,” said Harper. “Off the books, so to speak. Can I really trust you not to tell anyone?”
“Sounds like exactly my kind of thing,” said Gideon, “a police officer coming to me with some secret bits of evidence they want me to take a look at, that the rest of them don’t know about. Of course I won’t tell anyone. This is what I live for, the mainstream going underground, undermining their own, seeking out what’s hidden. Ha. Show me.”
Gideon opened his laptop and pushed the flash drive that Harper handed him into the USB port. Very soon the screen opened on the maternity ward, the nurse intent on the keyboard, the picture green and slightly fuzzy.
“There,” said Harper, “those shadows. That’s what I’m interested in.”
“OK,” said Gideon, “what do you want to know?”
“Are they real—as in, did the camera capture them happening in the room, or are they a mistake, some sort of damage on the file?”
Gideon watched the section again. The three shadows swam across the floor at the corner of the screen. He zoomed in, played it again.
“It looks like it might be both.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look,” said Gideon, “see how the shadows follow each other? And just there,” he paused the tape, “you can make out the shape of a foot.”
He zoomed in further. The image was pixelated on one side, but the other was the rough shape of a bare human foot. Harper’s pulse began to race.
Gideon went on, “The cameras jump at the slightest vibration, causing the images to skip a few seconds, or add trails to the images they capture. That’s what’s happened here.”
“But there are no figures here, just shadows. And a disembodied foot. Jeepers.”
“It’s ghastly,” said Amy, rubbing her bare arms as if she were cold.
Gideon wat
ched the section again, frowned. “I can’t be sure of course, but the shadows there look like glitch trails. As if someone, or more than one person, walked through the screen, and at that exact moment the tape jumped, then cut back in and just caught the trails. I love it. It’s so creepy. Can I have a copy?”
“No,” said Harper. “How can you check if that’s what happened?”
“It’s tricky. The lost section is impossible to recover, because the tape hasn’t recorded it. But if there was something else in the picture that was moving, you would see a jump there too, proving that a second or two is missing. This is so great. It’s brilliant when this kind of thing happens. I’ve used CCTV glitches as visuals at parties.”
“What if there’s nothing else moving in the image? How can we check?”
“How about we zoom in on the nurse’s fingers?”
And there it was. On the screen Anthea Mallison lifted a hand from the keyboard to take a sip of tea. Then the tape jumped, her hand was back on the keyboard and the shadows drifted by. A second or two was missing. Now she’d seen it, it was obvious. But it wasn’t evidence, not if the lost moment was unrecoverable.
“What are you looking for, anyway?” said Gideon.
“An intruder. Someone that a patient said was there, but no one else saw.”
“Awesome.”
“Not for her.”
“The Matrix did this, you know that, right? There’s something they don’t want you to know.” Gideon pulled out his tobacco tin and started rolling a few pinches into a liquorice paper. “Can I get a copy if it’s just for the collection? I wouldn’t share it around.”
Harper gave him a look that he understood meant he ought to give up asking for a copy. What was he gibbering about, The Matrix? Wasn’t that a film? These people were full of conspiracy theories. It was the drugs that did it.
“What did the nurse say?” said Gideon, tapping her image on the screen. “She was there.”
“She said she didn’t see anything.”
“Huh.” Gideon placed the cigarette between his lips and flicked open his lighter. He touched the flame to the tip of the chocolate-brown cylinder and inhaled.
Amy went over to the window and opened it. “Sorry, darling, I can’t bear it these days. No, don’t put it out, I’ll just stay over here.”
If Gideon was right about the glitch trails, it meant there was someone on the ward that night. So why didn’t anyone see anything? Why didn’t the nurse see it, if the someone was right there? Harper thought about the trampled nettles in the bushes opposite Lauren’s window. That time, Patrick hadn’t seen it either. There was a darkness to this, something unknown, the tang of evil.
“What about the intruder?” said Gideon. “I mean, what happened to the patient?”
“I’m not sure I should discuss it with you. I’m sorry.”
Gideon shrugged, turned to Amy. “She’s no fun, is she?”
From the window, Amy said, “How about the other thing, Jo-Jo?”
“There is another thing,” said Harper, “an audio recording. It’s fuzzy, I can’t make out the words on it. Do you think you could sharpen it up?”
“Of course,” said Gideon, “my speciality. If you’ll go through to the lab.”
They climbed the stairs, long since stripped of their carpet and showing several generations of paintwork where many feet had worn through the layers. Gideon led them into one of the four bedrooms, which had been transformed into a music technology suite. It was lined with sound-insulating foam and filled with all manner of gadgetry: keyboards, a huge mixing desk, electronic drum pads, black boxes and racks of hi-fi type equipment, all of it a mystery to Harper. Right in the centre were two computer screens. Gideon took a seat in the swivel chair and pressed four or five buttons to boot the system up.
“Won’t be a moment,” he said as the studio came alive around them, with blinking coloured lights and the hum of several tiny electronic fans. Above the desk there was a square hole in the wall fitted with a thick glass panel through which the neighbouring bedroom could be seen—or what would have been a bedroom, had it contained a bed. Instead there was a drum kit in there, a set of record decks and a selection of guitars hanging on the wall.
“This is also, of course, highly confidential,” she said to him. “I really don’t want you talking to anyone about this.”
“You can trust me,” said Gideon, and in that moment she was surprised to find that she believed him.
She sent the mp3 file of the 999 call to Gideon’s email account and he played it through the huge speakers mounted in the upper corners of the room. Lauren’s terrified voice exploded at them, cutting through Harper painfully in the split second before Gideon reached for the fader to bring the volume down. Even at a low level, the recording was chilling.
“My twins, my babies, they’re safe in here with me but she’s trying to unlock the door from the outside. She’s trying to take my babies, don’t you understand? Help me.”
Gideon caught Harper’s eye, shocked, sickened. He paused the recording.
“That poor woman,” he said. “She sounds terrified. But what needs cleaning up? It seems clear enough to me.”
“It’s not this bit. It’s towards the end. You’ll know when you hear it.”
They reached the hissing section and Gideon started to work. He cut and copied it into his computer so that the screen showed a fat waveform with jagged peaks where the louder parts were. Still the words were incomprehensible, but Gideon was undeterred, in his element. He twiddled knobs, applied filters and processed the audio so that the fuzz was reduced. Eventually, words emerged. The three of them listened in silence.
“Play it again,” said Harper, the blood draining from her face. Gideon pressed the space bar on his keyboard and the voice came through once more.
“Did you hear that?” said Amy, reaching for Harper. “Did you?”
“What did you hear?” said Harper to Gideon, needing to check, to make sure, that it wasn’t just because of what they thought they knew already.
“I’m not sure I know,” said Gideon. “Part of it sounded like, ‘Remember their names.’ ”
“What then?” said Harper. “What did the voice say the names were?”
“Well, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Just say what you think you heard,” said Amy. “Please.”
Gideon said, “Did it say, ‘Their names are Bishop and Selver’? Like, the rivers?”
Harper tried to swallow the lump that had risen in her throat. “Yes, that’s what I heard too.”
Those unlikely names that Victoria had told them at the nursing home: Bishop and Selver, the two rivers that fed the New Riverby reservoir, the man-made lake that rose up a hundred years ago to drown the village of Selverton. The River Bishop that ran along the length of the valley, passing through the park, by the place the twins were taken. And the Selver that swirled into the reservoir, its new mouth since the walls went up, never again emerging to reach the sea.
In Harper’s head, Lauren spoke quietly. She’s from the water, that woman. Where the two rivers meet.
“What does it mean?” said Gideon.
“I don’t know yet,” said Harper, her voice reduced to a whisper.
“You have to go back to see Victoria,” said Amy.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
On the journey across the city, Harper had too much time to think about why Amy had declined to come with her to talk to Victoria again. The two of them had walked back to the car together, Harper assuming they would both be heading to the nursing home. But when they’d got in and shut the doors, Amy asked to be dropped off at the Mail offices.
“What, you’re not coming?”
“I have an appointment with an interviewee tonight. I can’t miss it. Deadlines, you know.”
Harper had sensed something dishonest in the exchange. Not lies, exactly, but Amy was holding something back. The two of them had travelled in silence until Harper pulled up ou
tside the huge grey building in the centre of town. Then, Amy leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Harper felt a small thrill, but it seemed conciliatory somehow. She wasn’t being kissed for the sake of it; Amy was making up for something. Something she’d done, or something she was about to do?
Amy said, “You have to promise you’ll tell me what you find out, the very moment you do. Send me a message, don’t ring—I might have my phone on silent.”
“Who are you meeting?”
“It’s no one you know.” And there was the lie, shining like silver. A squeeze of the knee, and she was gone, leaving a cloud of perfume in her wake. Harper could taste it, bitter at the back of her throat. She opened the windows wide to let it out.
* * *
It seemed that Victoria hadn’t moved at all. Harper knocked lightly on the open door but the woman didn’t turn around. Then she said, “Hello, Mrs Settle,” but there was no response.
She moved across the room and positioned her chair so that she could sit right in front of the older woman, blocking her view of the TV. Victoria didn’t flinch; she looked right through Harper, that faint smile on her lips.
“My mum’s about your age,” she said, thinking, it must be so sad for the children, to be forgotten by their mum. The woman’s eyes were blank; she didn’t appear to know that Harper was there.
“Tell me about the woman who tried to take your babies.”
Something flickered in Victoria’s eyes, and the smile faded. Still she didn’t speak.
Harper said, “The thing is, I think whoever did it has come back. There’s a woman with baby twins, and someone took them and hid them in the woods. The mother’s very sick, and everyone thinks she did it herself. No one believes what she says, that there was someone else involved. But I do. I think it was the same person who tried to take your babies. You have to help me find them.”
Victoria’s eyes widened, and her fingers clutched at the arms of her chair. “Where are the boys? Where’s Robert, and Vinny?”
Little Darlings Page 25