by Peter James
‘I can’t wait thirty-two days. I’ll be in a white tunic in my own clinic.’
She smiled, fleetingly, then looked serious once more. ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up. Over seventy-five per cent turn up within the first thirty-two days.’
‘And the other twenty-five per cent? What happens about them?’
She stared him back in the eye and said nothing.
Chapter Seventy-one
Outside in the sun, Lara’s husband, Oliver, in a Homer Simpson apron, was prodding sausages on the barbecue. The rest of them were sitting at the wooden table in the shade of the giant willow; Alice aged two, Leonora, four, and Jake, almost six were all laughing at a joke. Lara was laughing too.
Happy. Cloudless sky, total stillness. Beyond the hedge an oceanic field of ripening wheat swayed away into the distance. Alice was still chortling after the others had stopped.
‘I’m in love,’ Amanda announced.
They all turned towards her, smiling warmly, urging her to go on, to tell them more.
‘I’m incredibly in love. I’ve never felt this way before, ever, I’ve found a man who –’
Her voice sounded strangely disembodied, as if she were eavesdropping on herself. Then, like a sharp focus pull, something changed. The sunlight was fading away, blotted up by the darkness.
Amanda became aware of the hard, lumpy mattress beneath her, and with it the fear returned as she opened her eyes into the horizonless darkness that was now her world.
She lay still, wondering what the time was. Was it night? Day? Morning? Afternoon? There must be a way to calculate the time, she thought, but how?
She badly needed to urinate.
Last time she had woken, she had aligned the mattress in the direction of her latrine bucket, and, stiff from lying down, she crawled forward slowly, then halted as she heard a faint scratching sound.
Jesus. A rat?
Something touched her face, a mosquito or a midge, some insect, she slapped it hard, savagely, heard the slap echo around the chamber.
She reached the bucket, which stank of earlier urine. After relieving herself, she sponged her face and arms from the wash bucket. As she dried herself, standing up to stretch her legs, she felt a little more clear-headed.
And now she could feel, acutely, the silent presence of the two corpses in the next-door chamber. One was a woman; she hadn’t had the courage to check the other. A woman editor had gone missing a few weeks back; she’d been in the papers, on television, a pleasant-looking woman, with short brown hair, of about thirty. Was it her?
Had they all been kidnapped by some monster like Fred West or the man who skinned people in Silence of the Lambs?
Then she stiffened as she thought she heard the scuff of a foot.
Her brain raced with a plan that had been forming earlier, that she would stand by the door next time he came in, and slip out in the darkness behind him.
Another option was to hit him when he came in, but what with? There was nothing here. A mattress, plastic buckets, paper plates, paper tray, plastic jug. Nothing heavy enough to bring a man down, not even a full plastic bucket would guarantee that.
Then, suddenly out of the darkness, came Michael’s voice. ‘Hallo, Amanda. How are you?’
She spun round in deep shock. ‘Michael?’
Silence.
‘Michael?’ she said again, afraid she had imagined it.
‘Hallo, Amanda, how are you?’
It was Michael. A cold, detached Michael; it was his voice, but it was as if some other personality was speaking it.
The room stank of urine. Messy thing, rolling around in its own filth. This was disgraceful; it needed to be punished for the state of this room.
Thomas, brandishing a cattle prod, watched her through his goggles. Such clear green vision! He could see every reflex. She was standing with her back to the wall, staring in the wrong direction, staring at where he had been just a moment ago.
‘Take your clothes off, Amanda,’ he said, still mimicking Dr Michael Tennent’s voice.
‘Keep away from me.’
‘Would you like my choo-choo inside you?’
Even more nervous now. ‘Keep away from me.’ She raised her voice. ‘Michael, keep away!’
Silently, he took a step towards her, then another. ‘Where would you like me to begin hurting you, Amanda?’
‘I thought you loved me, Michael,’ she said, in a choking voice, and took a step forward from the wall, thinking she was moving away from him. But silently, on his trainer shoes, he stepped sideways until he was in front of her once more. And she did not realise it but she was looking right into his eyes.
With immense satisfaction he jabbed the cattle prod as hard as he dared into her stomach and fired the electrical charge.
The sudden, ferocious stabbing, winding pain, followed by a juddering that ripped through her body, sent her tumbling backwards against the wall with a gasp of shock and agony.
There was another fierce pain, this time in her chest. Her whole insides were pinched tight then sprang free, then pinched tight again, then sprang free again, as if she were plugged into an electrical socket that was being switched on and off. The pain moved to her thigh, then to her face, each time the agonising constriction, then release. Screaming again, arms protectively over her head, she rolled across the floor, trying to escape, crashed into a wall, barrelled through the buckets, begging him to stop. ‘Please! Pleeeeaaaasssseeeee. I’ll do anything. Tell me what you want. Ooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.’
Then silence.
An eternity of silence. She lay still, waiting for the next pain. But it did not come.
A floodtide of nausea burst through her. She vomited.
Chapter Seventy-two
Marj was on the line. She phoned in every week, without fail, hoping to get through to Michael, with yet another nugget she’d hauled out of the collective works of Jung or Freud to test out on him.
The small studio felt more cramped than ever tonight. He couldn’t get far enough away from the microphone, the damned foam bulb was in his face, angled aggressively towards him like some bird of prey that was about to peck out his eyes.
Chris Beamish, the producer, sat in the control room on the other side of the wide rectangle of soundproofed glass, watching him. Why? He never normally watched him, just screened the callers and left him to get on with it.
And behind Beamish, the studio technician, also bearded, was farting around with some Dexion shelving, which Michael was finding irritatingly distracting. The previous occupant of this studio had stuck about a dozen yellow Post-it notes to the console top and these were disturbing him too. He tried to avoid them but his eyes kept being drawn down to them to escape Beamish’s stare. ‘Virtual Reality?’ one said. ‘Artificial Life? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck, then it probably is a duck.’
Michael pressed the microphone switch and, trying not to sound too weary, said, ‘Good evening, Marj from Essex!’
‘Good evening, Dr Tennent. I wonder if you could enlighten me on Jung’s acausal connecting principle?’
‘Certainly, Marj, what’s bothering you about it?’ he said, a trifle facetiously, but this was lost on her.
‘Well, I’m not sure I understand it,’ she said, in her deadpan voice. ‘I’m worried that events may be happening in my life for reasons I don’t understand.’
Michael looked at the clock on the wall: seven ten. Eighteen minutes before the commercial break. Time for Marj and one more caller. He would make his own announcement after that. This was a big subject Marj had bounced on him, and he was trying to think of a succinct sound-bite to cut through it. ‘Do you ever have coincidences, Marj?’
‘All the time.’
‘Jung believed in meaningful coincidence. I seem to remember he once said that coincidences were God’s calling cards.’
‘I like that!’ she said.
‘You’re aware of Jung’s collective unconscious theory, Marj?’<
br />
‘I won’t say I understand it but, yes, I am aware of it.’
‘Jung had several personal paranormal experiences, Marj. These confronted him with events that seemed inexplicable in terms of normal physical or psychological causes. Therefore he felt that normal causality was insufficient to explain these events and he began to term them acausal. Is that clear?’
‘Ermmm, no, not really. Didn’t he fall out with Freud over the nature of coincidence?’
Michael tried to bring the focus back to Marj’s own personal problems, but she held him pinned to the attitudes of Freud and Jung for the remainder of the session.
‘Hope that’s clarified it for you Marj,’ he said finally, killing her call with relief, glad to have muddled through that one, although from his producer’s bemused expression, he knew he hadn’t done brilliantly.
On the small computer screen to the side of his console he could see there were six callers waiting. They were listed by their first name and the area where they lived. If they had called previously, ‘Reg’ appeared in brackets beside their name, so Michael could welcome them back.
Top of the list now was a peculiar name. Nadama from North London. Next, below her was Raj from Ealing. Then Ingrid from Notting Hill Gate, and Gareth from Ickenham.
He pressed the switch and said cheerily, ‘Hallo, Nadama from North London!’
Through his headphones, in a quavering, terrified voice, he heard Amanda. She said, ‘Michael?’
In joy, he almost shouted, ‘Amanda? Where are you? Are you OK?’
‘Michael,’ she replied, ‘I’m scared. I don’t like this game. Can we stop playing it, please?’
He saw the strange look on Beamish’s face, but he didn’t care. He had Amanda on the line. He gave Beamish a frantic signal to cut live transmission, to go to music, anything.
‘What game? Game? I’m not playing any game, Amanda. God, are you all right? Thank God you’ve called, I’ve been going out of my mind. Where are you?’
‘Keep away from me.’
The ON AIR light was still on. He gave Beamish another frantic CUT signal. An almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgement, then the light went off.
She sounded terrible, there was an unnatural edge to her voice.
As gently as he could he said, ‘Amanda, please, I don’t understand. What’s happened? Why are you upset?’
‘Keep away from me.’ She raised her voice. ‘Keep away!’
This was freaking him out.
‘I thought you loved me, Michael. I thought you loved me,’ she said.
Wild thoughts banged through his head. Had Brian got to her and said something venomous? ‘Amanda, listen to me, tell me what’s happened. What have I done? Has someone said something –’
The line went dead. She’d hung up. The name Nadama disappeared from the screen.
Nadama. Jesus. A crude anagram. He looked up. Beamish was gesturing at him in despair. Then his voice on the intercom. ‘Mike, for God’s sake, what are you playing at?’
Michael stared back at him numbly.
‘One minute to the end of the news, then you’re back on air.’
‘Can you trace that call?’ he replied.
‘Forty seconds.’
‘Trace that fucking call!’ he yelled.
‘I’ll do what I can, OK? Twenty seconds.’
Michael hit the button, and Raj from Ealing was live on air.
Chapter Seventy-three
Michael.
She tried to get her head round it as she lay in the dark silence, surrounded by the smell of her own vomit – and could not. She was in so much pain it was hard to think clearly.
How could someone who had seemed so sweet and lovely be capable of doing this?
Michael was smart; he might be insane but he was smart. He would know that releasing her could never be an option.
She thought back to that night they had spent together, in some other universe, in some other time-frame, how safe she had felt in his arms, how she had wanted nothing else but to lie there making love with him for ever. And she was remembering now that chilling look on his face when she had been holding Katy’s photograph. The grip of his hand on her arm.
Christ, I was a fool to ignore that.
She should have bailed out then and there. In those few brief moments, his dark side had been plain to see. But she had chosen to ignore it, deluded herself that it was a manifestation of grief, nothing more.
She felt a terrible, cold, falling sensation of dread inside her. How would anyone ever find her? She could imagine Lulu and Michael talking on the phone. Michael feigning concern, giving all sorts of advice, telling her how happy they had been together and acting distraught.
Everyone would believe him. Michael was above suspicion. No one was going to come and find her. Her only choice was, somehow, to get out by herself.
Where am I?
She tried to think back to those brief precious moments when the light had been on. Some kind of man-made chamber. Sterile. Modern. From the total absence of light, and complete silence, she guessed underground.
A bank vault? Possible. Some kind of disused command post, built during the Cold War, when every county in Britain had fallout shelters for key civil servants and emergency services? It wouldn’t be hard for someone like Michael Tennent to know the whereabouts of such a place and even to have access.
She could be anywhere in Britain, she thought.
How long since he’d been gone? An hour? Two hours? Got to find a way to measure time down here.
The screws of the vent grille were about the diameter of her little finger-nail. Her thumb-nail fitted snugly into the groove. She needed a screwdriver.
Painfully, she got to her feet, found the wall, and fumbled her way around the chamber until she came to the open doorway into the second chamber. As she stared ahead, tiny flecks of light came out of the darkness at her. Shapes moving. Shadowy figures swirling. Her imagination running riot, she stepped back a pace, goosebumps covering her skin.
They’re dead, they’re not up and walking about. They’re dead, Amanda.
Dead.
You’ll be just like them if you don’t do something. Remember survivors. Survivors stay calm, they put their fear into another compartment, they think logically, they are utterly determined to live.
Keeping contact with the wall, she made her way through into the second chamber, until her left foot suddenly struck something solid. Even though she’d been searching for it, actually touching one of the corpses froze her in her tracks.
It was some while before she had sufficient courage to kneel down. Close to the cadaver’s skin, the acrid reek of formalin was almost unbearable. She put out her hands and felt nylon. A stockinged ankle. Hard, like a piece of furniture, not human flesh. Thin ankle strap. Small flat shoe, a woman’s shoe.
The heel was solid, it might come in useful, she logged it mentally, then moved her hands up the leg. Reached a skirt. Cotton and viscose mix. Then a blouse, cotton. No belt. Moving up the body was horrible, feeling the arms, the bare flesh like cold, hard rubber. Down the left arm to the wrist, and she came to a watch, a slim metal watch on a leather strap. But the dial wasn’t luminous, it was of no use to her.
Now the worst bit. Up to the face. A light, tentative touch with her fingers then she waited, plucking up the courage to explore further, trying to feel the contours of this woman’s face, to get some clue about her age, what she looked like. She explored higher, feeling her hair now. Short, layered cut.
Like the missing editor had. Tina Mackay. She remembered the name now: a name that for the past couple of weeks had been in the nation’s consciousness.
Tina Mackay, have I found you?
She moved away, shaking uncontrollably, her eyes streaming from the formalin, her throat tight with fear.
Down on her knees now she groped with her hands for the second body and then had to fight hard to keep control of herself when she found it, when her hands touched fa
bric and the hard motionless shape inside it.
A jacket. Shirt. Tie.
She drew back, hesitated, then touched the body again. Felt the tie. Polyester. Then the shirt, that was polyester also. A belt. Trousers. A wide, robust belt with a hard metal buckle. Good, this was good.
She explored upwards to the neck, then the face, the soft stubble on the chin. Definitely a man although his face felt free of wrinkles, and there was only such soft stubble. Maybe he was young, early twenties?
Had any young man been in the papers, missing, in his early twenties?
She felt inside the jacket pockets for anything that could be useful, but they were empty. He was wearing loafer shoes and they had good, hard heels also. Now she worked her way down his right arm, feeling for a watch. Please have some kind of digital watch with a light source.
There was no hand at the end of the arm. Just scabby, cauterised flesh.
She dropped it in shock.
Then she leaned across, found his other arm, traced down the length of that, and found the scabby stump at the end of that, too.
Michael, what did you do to him? What did you do to her? What are you going to do to me?
Fighting back more tears, she removed his belt and shoes, then hurriedly returned to her own chamber.
Kneeling in a corner, she examined the belt and buckle with her fingers, the smell of leather reminding of the outside world, of shops, of the interior of cars, finery, the handbag department at Harvey Nichols. She brought the belt up to her nose, pressed it to her nostrils and breathed in the luxurious smell.
I’m getting out of here. Somehow. I’m going shopping in Harvey Nicks. I’m going to walk by the ponds on Hampstead Heath. I’m going to drive my car under the blazing sun with the roof down. I’m going to hold my nephews and nieces in my arms. I’m going to drink cold wine and smoke a cigarette.
She craved a cigarette now.
Focusing again, she gripped the belt hard in her right hand, pulled back the buckle, leaving the spike out, gripped the buckle hard against the belt with the spike between her fingers. Then she rotated her hand to the right, and to the left. Easy. She had a good, firm grip.