by SJI Holliday
I go up the steps and into the shop. The woman from earlier is hurrying around the aisles with a basket balanced on top of her tartan shopping trolley, as she always does. Except she seems to be talking to herself, muttering something. I can’t quite make out the words. She’s going even faster than usual, rushing around, throwing things into her basket willy-nilly, her list seemingly abandoned. I follow her around, keeping a safe distance. She glances around again, and I try another smile. She practically runs to the till.
‘You’re quick today, Mrs Maybold,’ Mary says.
I stay hidden behind a display stand of cereal, jams and hot chocolate. I poke my head around, just slightly, and as I do the old woman rubs her arms again.
‘Can’t stop, lots to do today.’
I step out into the aisle, giving Mary a clear view. She looks up from the till, and her eyes scan the shop. A brief wash of concern passes over her face and then her usual smile returns.
‘Don’t suppose there’s any news on the girl, is there?’ Mrs Maybold says, stuffing things into her tartan trolley.
Mary looks alarmed. ‘Not like you to ask … What brought that on?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’ She shrugs. Puts her purse back into the little pocket on the back of her trolley. ‘Something just made me think of her today.’
Mary crosses her arms; her expression is pinched. ‘You know I don’t believe she’s run off, Phyllis,’ she says, conspiratorially. ‘She wouldn’t do that. Not without telling me.’
The old woman nods. ‘I agree. It would surprise me if she’d done that, right enough. Anyway, I really am in a rush today.’ Phyllis Maybold grabs her trolley and darts out the shop before Mary can say anything else.
The door closes behind her with a bang, as if a gust of wind has caught it, knocking the doorstop clean out of the way. It’s one of those little wooden wedges. Sometimes they just move, if there’s a vibration on the floor, like if a lorry has trundled past on the main road. But there are no lorries today. Mrs Maybold’s rushing around has probably dislodged it, but Mary looks uncomfortable.
She staring straight at me now. She wraps her arms around her chest, rubs herself warm, as if she too has felt an unexpectedly cool breeze. Her eyes are wary.
I take a few steps towards her. ‘Don’t be scared, Mary. It’s me. You’re right, you know. Don’t let them stop looking for me. Please. I haven’t run away. You know I haven’t.’
‘Oh Angela, I do miss you. I wish you’d come to me. I’m here for you, wherever you are.’ Mary closes her eyes, places her hands on the counter. A single tear runs down her face, dropping onto the pile of newspapers on the counter beneath her.
She can’t see me. It hits me, almost like a physical slap, even though I can’t feel anything anymore. I thought at first that maybe she just wasn’t ready. But now I realise the truth. She’s a fraud. She’s no more of a psychic than I was. I want to be angry, but I’m not. It just helps me to understand her. She is even more like me than I thought. All she wants is to feel it. All she wants is to believe that something else exists. Because if there is nothing but this life, then what hope is there that we will ever have something more?
41
Ali
Ali is still sitting on the edge of the bath. The water doesn’t seem to be cooling at all, and when she tries the cold tap again, still nothing comes out of it. She picks up her dirty clothes from the floor and puts them back on.
She can hear the sound of Jack snoring through the bathroom door. Bloody Jack. She envies him right now, him and his oblivion. Maybe she should just give in, take some of the medication herself. Maybe the pair of them can just drift off together. This wouldn’t be such a bad place to die. She does wonder if there is any point in going on. What are they going to achieve now? The game is well and truly over. Unless…
Unless she adds a new player. She sits down on the floor, leaning back against the bath. She stares out of the window, watches the cloud formations. The fat puffy ones like marshmallows; cumulonimbus? Is that what they’re called? They drift slowly by, as if they’re on a conveyor belt, forming weird shapes and turning them into animals as they go.
She sighs. Life could have been so simple … but simple was never enough for her.
She has always had to take risks, push things too far. Taking the drugs from the hospital had been such a thrill. She wasn’t even sure at the time that she would do anything with them, but walking out of there that day with a bag stuffed full of illegal, unlicensed drugs was the most thrilling thing that she’d ever done; and she’d done a lot of things.
Jack had done a lot of things.
It turned out that he never really did need much persuading, except for when things took a darker turn than even she hadn’t fully expected. He’d been genuinely upset after the escalator incident, once it came back to him a few days later, as a horrific, sweaty night terror. She tried to convince him that it didn’t happen, but he didn’t believe her. He said that he wouldn’t play her game anymore. That it wasn’t the game for him.
She kept telling him, over and over … nothing really bad happened; that guy had been fine. People fall down escalators all the time. He was drunk. There are signs all over the Tube stations telling you not to run. It happens, it was an accident.
But of course she knew that it wasn’t, and deep inside his muddled head, he did too.
The first time they killed someone was a surprise in many ways. She remembers when she first had the feeling … the urge that came over her as she drove along that road late one night. Saw him standing on the verge, his homemade cardboard sign asking if someone could, please, take him to Leeds, with a smiley face drawn on beside it. That real smiley face of his own. He was so happy when she pulled over … and she really thought about doing it herself, there and then. But she came to her senses, sped off again, Jack screeching in her ear. Asking her what she was doing. She caught the man’s furious face in the rear-view mirror, smile gone, two hands raised, middle fingers pointing to the sky.
She laughed so hard she had to pull in at the next services to calm down. Had to rush to the toilet before she wet herself. All the time, Jack fuming at her, berating her. Angry. She waited until he went off to the toilet himself, before emptying one of the capsules and stirring the powder into his coffee.
She debated this with herself many times over the course of her work. Should he be fully aware that he was taking the drug, or did it have to be a secret, so that he had no idea that it was a drug that was helping him to do the things that she wanted him to do? They still had to be things that he wanted to do, deep down, didn’t they? She was still working on her theory. Still trying to work out if she truly believed that true coercion was real.
She wanted to believe that free will always prevailed, somehow, but when drugs were added to the mix, who knew? This was the whole basis for her research. Could someone be completely controlled? Could they become willing participants in risky, dangerous acts? Was it possible to make someone evil? In some ways the drugs complicated things more than she expected. She wasn’t sure that she could entirely prove her theory at all – but the experiment evolved. That was what happened in science, wasn’t it? It was still an important piece of research – and besides, the addition of the drug did make it much easier for her to manage.
Further research revealed that the drug acted faster when mixed with hot liquid. She hadn’t actually done that before. She had sprinkled half of one over his dinner one night, but she’d never put it into a hot drink in case it deactivated the ingredients. But as she read more and more about the mode of action, it seemed that hot liquid might be a good base for it after all.
That first night, by the time they got back to the car, he said he was feeling tired and a bit strange.
‘I might just have a lie down in the back for a minute,’ he said. ‘I think that coffee has done something to me. You know what I get like sometimes.’
He climbed into the back seat, and Ali climbed into th
e front. As they drove out of the car park and back onto the motorway she said, ‘Jack, are you awake?’ and he grunted something unintelligible in reply.
‘I’m going to pick someone up, and I want you to do something for me. There’s a pack of dishcloths down the side door. Take them out. Once I pick someone up, you need to do it.’
‘Do what? What are you talking about?’ His voice was slightly slurred, and she was worried that she’d given him too much. That he wouldn’t be able to do it.
‘You know what. What we talked about before. I’m going to pick someone up, and you’re going to kill them for me. Aren’t you Jack?’ Another grunt. He sat up. ‘I don’t remember saying that.’ His voice was thick with confusion.
‘Lie down … you need to lie down. You need to be asleep when they get in, and then when it’s time you get up and they fall back a little, like they’re about to have a nap. Then you’ll lean over the seat and you’ll hold the cloth over their face, stuff it in their mouth and hold their nose. Keep doing it until they stop moving. You know what we agreed. You said you would do this for me. Don’t try and pretend you’ve forgotten. Come on Jack … After that, we’ll stop at a hotel up ahead. You know what I’ll do to you once we get there don’t you?’ She gave him her best seductive voice. She was already turned on, just thinking about it. She knew he would be too, he just didn’t know it yet.
She could see the figure up ahead. They’d obviously come down from the last slip road, walked as far as they could along here, then given up. It’s a man. She’d hoped the first one would be a woman, just because it would have been easier, but then again, this guy wasn’t very big. If Jack did what he was meant to, it would happen quickly.
She indicated left and pulled in to the layby where the man stood, waiting. Headlights shone in his eyes and he raised a hand, lowered his cardboard sign. She’d already read where he wanted to go, and knew he wasn’t going to get there. She almost felt sorry for him, but the feeling quickly passed. He was about to become part of an important experiment. Before she opened the door she glanced around at Jack one last time. ‘You need to be ready. Don’t let me down, Jack.’
‘I won’t. I’d never let you down, Ali.’
The door opened and the young man climbed into the car. She grinned at him. ‘I’m Ali,’ she said. ‘That’s my husband Jack in the back. Don’t worry about him, he’s sleeping off a hangover.’ She rolled her eyes for good measure, then indicated right and pulled back onto the road.
‘Jarold,’ he said. ‘Just travelling around the UK for a bit, ran out of cash. Gonna head back up to Edinburgh, bit by bit…’
‘Well, we’re only going as far as Newcastle,’ she lied. ‘But I can drop you there and you’ll find someone else for the last leg, I’m sure. Someone waiting for you up north, is there?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah, just fancy getting up there for the festival. Plenty of stuff happening, you know. No one waiting for me. Free as bird I am.’ He laughed easily and she felt a lurching in her stomach. Wrong place, wrong time, Jarold.
‘Here, do you want a drink of this? Sorry, I lost the lid … Don’t worry, my mouth’s pretty clean,’ she laughed, and offered him the bottle of Coke she was holding in her right hand. She’d dissolved a couple of capsules into it earlier, when Jack had been in the toilet.
‘Sure,’ he said. Smiled. Took a sip.
‘Finish it,’ she said. ‘I’m done.’
He’d smiled again, drank the rest of the bottle. It only took a few minutes to kick in. The gas and the sugar seemed to make it work quicker, too.
‘I’m just going to have a quick nap,’ he said, groggily, rubbing his face. The bottle dropped from his hand.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror, just as Jack slowly sat up. His face a picture of pure concentration. He was holding a white cloth in his hands. They made eye contact, and Ali smiled.
Ali leans back against the bath, smiling at the memory.
42
Smeaton
Smeaton is worried. He knows that there is something wrong. The villagers are right. He needs to go to the police about Angela. The note, despite sounding like her, just doesn’t add up. She’d been trying to warn him about Ali and Jack, and he had dismissed her concerns. Mary is worried too. She doesn’t believe that Angela has just gone off somewhere without telling anyone. She’d never even mentioned any desire to go travelling, being happy enough to listen to Smeaton’s tales from around the world – even if most of them were completely made up.
They all agree that it’s just not like her. Despite all her little quirks and eccentricities, all Angela really wants is to be part of a proper family. Smeaton sits down at his desk and opens his laptop. He takes the small mobile router out of his drawer and plugs it in. He rarely uses the internet, and he knows the device won’t be charged. None of the residents have internet access and that’s how he prefers it. He tries as much as possible to stay offline himself, to stay away from the real world, with all the madness that is happening out there right now. He knows he’s burying his head in the sand somewhat, but it worked for his parents and it’s working for him. If he can be happy here, why worry about the rest of the universe as it falls apart?
The problem is, this is meant to be a safe place, and now it is falling apart too.
He waits a moment for the wi-fi connection on his laptop to find the router. It doesn’t always work first time, as if it knows that it is not an important item. It’s important today though, because he’s going to do something now that he should have done right at the start. Angela had asked him. She asked him if he had checked out Ali and Jack’s stories, or had he just taken everything at face value. He has to admit now, to himself if no one else. That that’s exactly what he did. Fool.
He opens up his email program, and after a moment it refreshes and a bunch of new emails appear. Most of them are junk. Despite not spending much time online, he still seems to find himself added to various mailing lists and in receipt of copious spam and nonsense. There are a couple of emails in there from people enquiring about Rosalind House; he will deal with those later. He makes it clear on the website that people should not expect a fast response by email, but he purposely does not include the phone number because he does not want to have to deal with those things on any immediate level. If people want to live here, they have to realise that the pace is very different. If they can’t handle that, they’re not likely to fit in. It’s the first of his tests.
It had been luck – or as some might think destiny – that he had been online when Ali’s first email had popped up. He’d opened it straightaway, something about the subject line intriguing him. She had introduced herself politely and concisely and told him that she knew that this wasn’t the way things were meant to work, but they had just had such a run of bad luck that they needed to get away. She offered him money, and despite his belief that Rosalind House should not be one of those places that relied on the residents’ funds to make it work, he could hardly turn it down. The boiler was on its last legs. And they needed funds to complete the ornamental garden, so that they could try again with opening it to the public. He’d have found the money in time, but Ali’s offer had come on a day when he’d felt like things were piling up, becoming impossible. He’d accepted the offer gladly.
A big mistake now, he realises.
He can’t bear to read the emails again. Some of Angela’s scepticism has already invaded his thoughts, and he can’t really believe anything that he has already read. He does, however, remember enough of the details to do some investigation of his own.
He opens a browser window then pauses, his hands hovering over the keys. Who first? Ali or Jack? He has a feeling that Jack will be more straightforward. The man’s mood swings and the fact that he has been confined to bed for the last few days, barely seen anywhere, confirms what Ali had said about him taking medical retirement due to stress. Maybe it is really as simple as that.
Maybe it isn’t.
He types
Jack’s name into the search bar. Then deletes it, changes it to Detective Inspector Jack Gardiner. He immediately gets plenty of results, and just looking at the first ten, he thinks he’s got what he needs. He clicks open the first one, an article from the Evening Standard, one of the London newspapers. The headline reads ‘Baby Z Detective Inspector Leaves under a Cloud’. Smeaton sighs. He rubs at his face; his eyes feel tired suddenly. As if they are already worried about what he’s going to read next. He skims the article with a sense of relief. Mistakes made, vulnerable child put at risk, mental-health issues, unusual behaviour, falling asleep at work, suspicions of drug misuse unfounded, union rep, medical retirement … blah, blah, blah. Nothing there that he doesn’t already know. Jack, it seems, is clean.
He tries Ali next, adding nurse after her name in the search box, hoping that it will throw up nothing apart from her bio on the website for the hospital where she used to work. But it throws up more than that: it turns out she was involved in a clinical trial that was cancelled due to the medication causing serious side-effects, and the whole thing was pulled by the pharmaceutical company. She was the clinical nurse in charge of the trial at her hospital, one of the main investigative sites, and she had made a statement about it. The side-effects reported ranged from dizziness and confusion and narcolepsy, to extreme paranoia, psychosis and in three cases, suicide.
Something about this gets Smeaton’s senses tingling; a drug that resulted in sleepiness and confusion? And her husband suffering similar symptoms, leading to him being removed from the police force? Smeaton is worried that he is adding two and two and making fourteen. Is he just seeing what he wants to see now? Is he looking for a problem when one doesn’t exist? He clicks back to the main search, scrolls down further. Clicks onto the next page, and there it is: a link to an abstract for a proposed academic paper. A poster from a psychology research conference. The paper is about the psychology of coercion and control, an exploration of the works of Dr Henry Baldock and several others. Ali is listed as one of the key authors. This was her research, then – the official research. But did that lead her to commence another experiment of her own? An experiment with only one trial subject…