The Truth About Lies

by Tracy Darnton

  I use my jolly-hockey-sticks boarding-school voice. “Thanks so much for stopping. I’m on Hanna’s Hike with Dartmeet College and I got lost and hurt my ankle. Can you please give me a lift there – it’s a few miles further down the road?” I simper. “In that direction, sorry.” I point back the way he’s come.

  “Not a problem. In you get.”

  The car doors lock reassuringly as I ease on to the safety of the passenger seat and do up my seat belt. The car pulls away. I’ve escaped. I’m safe. I let myself relax at last.

  But the driver shows no sign of turning. He’s speeding up. We pass a layby that’s the perfect place to do a U-turn.

  A passenger behind me leans forwards and places a hand on my shoulder.

  “Hello, Freya. Remember me?”

  42

  The one who remembers most wins the game.

  Scouting Games – Robert Baden-Powell

  “This is a stroke of luck. You’re not an easy girl to find,” says Professor Coleman. Her voice is cold, annoyed and extremely familiar.

  I say nothing. She has the same short black hair, neatly plucked eyebrows and thin, pinched face. She’s dressed in a designer suit with a cream blouse and green silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. My mind’s a swirling mass of memories of her, from meeting her in her office that first time, to the endless tests on the Programme, to scattering Mum’s ashes from the boat, to seeing her back recede as she left for work the day I ran away. So many. And all of those memories bring a tumbling range of emotions.

  “Callum came up trumps, in the end,” she says.

  It’s a quiet road but there must be another vehicle soon. Will they see me through the tinted windows if I wave at them as they pass? Will they realize I need help?

  “It’s all been most inconvenient,” she says. “You’ve exposed me and the Programme to unnecessary risk, Freya. Or should I call you Jess now?” Her tone is icy. “I adore what you’ve done with the colour of your hair. You look so like your mother as you get older.”

  How dare Coleman even say her name after what she did to her?

  Can I get out of a moving vehicle with locked doors? I look across at the driver. He has a bruise on his chin and a familiar tattoo on his left hand. He’s the man with the skull mask who got walloped by Lena and her broomstick.

  “I’m surprised to find you playing at being a normal teenager in the middle of Dartmoor,” she says.

  “It’s very flattering but you really shouldn’t have gone to all this bother,” I say. “I’m not coming back to the Programme. You know, the one that doesn’t exist.”

  She opens her mouth to speak but thinks better of it and her lips settle into a frown.

  The car turns off before the reservoir and bounces down a rough track. The mist lifts briefly, revealing Ryders Bridge ahead. The River Dart’s wide and rough here. I came on a canoe activity day with Hanna and Ed shortly after I joined Dartmeet and it scared the living daylights out of me.

  I picture Harrison’s route map and check my watch again. Ryders Bridge is the fourth checkpoint. Given an average walking speed of three miles per hour, the first people won’t be coming through for at least an hour. I shouldn’t have sent Dan on a wild goose chase with both our bags.

  “We’re picking up an old friend of yours here,” says Coleman. “All very Hound of the Baskervilles running around Dartmoor. How ironic that poor old Brett has had to go out in all weathers looking for you and I found you without even getting out of the car.”

  “I read your book,” I say, to buy some time. I know she’ll want to brag about it.

  “Top ten non-fiction bestseller list this week,” she says. “People are so interested in memory. We all have one, you see. Though some people’s are better than others.”

  I swallow hard. “You left a lot out of the book,” I say. “The Programme, for instance.”

  “How nice of you to take an interest,” she says. “I’ve written a second version containing all the missing information – Principles of Memory by Professor A.E. Coleman, the uncut version – in which you feature rather heavily but that is a rather limited edition. Limited in fact to the people who’ve paid for it from the start. It’s been what your generation might call ‘crowdfunded’ through specialist channels.”

  The driver pulls over on a rough patch of gravel and unlocks our doors.

  “Out, please,” says Coleman, wrapping a pashmina around her shoulders. “My techniques may be unorthodox but they get results.”

  I match the landscape to the map in my head, contemplating how far I could run before the car caught me up. Or the driver.

  She nods to the boot which is piled high with luggage. “They’re setting me up with a beautiful research facility somewhere rather warmer and more luxurious than here.”

  “Not too far away, I hope,” I say sarcastically.

  “I won’t be coming back to England. Look at the weather; it’s so melancholy.” She gestures around us at the misty moor. “Where I’m going has a much better view.”

  “Congratulations. You’ve become a Bond villain,” I say. “Are they providing a shark tank and a fluffy white cat?”

  “Hilarious,” says Coleman. “You always had such an acid tongue, like your charming mother. The short answer is that they’re giving me anything I want, and gold-plating it.” She examines my face with her piercing gaze. “I do miss our sessions together.”

  “Is that why you’ve gone to all this effort to find me?” I say.

  “Oh, Jess! Of course I wanted to say goodbye to my favourite research subject. Your brain will make my reputation and a considerable fortune.” She scans the area, no doubt looking for Brett as she carries on with her lecture. “I’ve spent years being underappreciated, filling out endless applications for research funding, grovelling to committees who don’t understand the first thing about what I’m trying to do. But finally I found private investors who could see the true possibilities in my research and point me in a particular direction to realize its full potential. And I always had you and the ultimate memory as my pièce de résistance. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “I’d like to say I was happy to help but you never really gave me the choice.”

  “There are always sacrifices along the way,” she says.

  Mum.

  “…and considerable expenses. These investors have been so useful on that front. But they want to see results, Jess, tangible results.”

  “Go ahead then, deliver your cognitive vaccine and all the paperwork to back it up. I’m not stopping you but I don’t want to be a part of it all.”

  She frowns. “It seems you were paying rather more attention than I realized. But you see, my investors are not as understanding as me. There’s a lot at stake in the development of this. I’m afraid you don’t have a choice.” She knocks on the roof of the car and the driver gets out, pulling a thin canvas case from under his seat. He stands facing us, unzipping a shotgun.

  “My investors don’t like loose ends,” says Coleman, picking a piece of fluff from her jacket cuffs. “And they certainly don’t want any evidence of what we’ve done left lying around for other people to benefit from – not after they put in all that money and I put in all that effort. It wouldn’t be fair, Jess, would it? Anyone can see that.”

  The driver polishes the gun barrel and checks the chambers.

  “So that’s why I have to take them all my research materials. They are most insistent that I hand everything over.” She tilts her head to one side. “And I’m so sorry, Jess, but that’s why we’ve had to find you. Because ‘everything’ includes you.”

  43

  Memories can be rebuilt on recall. We can aid this reconsolidation with a cognitive vaccine of tailored drug therapy. Thus, repeatedly prompting individuals to imagine an event that they never experienced can produce an absolute conviction of having lived that event in a significant number of participants. Even the exceptional ones.

  Principles of Memo
ry (Limited Edition) – Professor A.E. Coleman

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I say, in barely a whisper.

  “Be a good girl and come along quietly. It’ll be so much less fuss,” says Coleman. “Once Brett gets here, we’ll be off.” She smiles as though she’s promising me an outing. I’m guessing she’s had some treatment, maybe Botox on her too-smooth forehead and a filler in her lips. The effect is plastic and false.

  I look out across the moor in the mist, willing a hiker to appear. But there’s no one. I’m picturing the map in my head, seeing Ryders Bridge and the land around it. We’re not that far as the crow flies from where I left Mr Desai and Brett. I recall in detail Dr Harrison’s navigation briefing and that the blue tufted symbols on the map indicate marshy ground. On Dartmoor that means a peat bog. The better terrain lies across the stone bridge on the other side of the river.

  Coleman and her driver aren’t going to let me go. That much is clear. I need to improve my odds before Brett turns up and things get a whole lot worse.

  “Brett’s not going to get here by himself,” I lie. “Last time I saw him, he was blundering about with a sprained ankle.”

  Her face twitches slightly in annoyance. “You didn’t say you’d seen him.”

  “You didn’t ask. Why do you think I flagged a car down?” I say. “He’s even angrier than I remember him. He needs to work on that.”

  Coleman checks her phone then calls her driver over. The shotgun’s still casually aimed in my direction. “Give that to me. You need to go and find Brett.”

  He looks down at his neat suit and wpolished shoes.

  “Get on with it,” she snaps. “I’m not dressed for it either.”

  The driver grabs a coat and a torch from the car. He’s wrong if he thinks a torch is going to help him in these conditions – it makes the fog glow brighter when the light bounces back. He tucks his trousers into his socks. Those smart shoes are already ruined. His back soon disappears from view. The shouts of ‘Brett! Brett!’ soon fade into the gloom. He’s walking straight towards the boggy mire. Exactly where I want him to go.

  Even in broad daylight on a summer’s day bogs on Dartmoor can be dangerous. Locals stick to the high tufts of grass like stepping stones, dodging the pools of liquid peat and the deep moss, but no one would try to cross it in these conditions. It won’t be long until he gets stuck, sucked down. And if he struggles, he’ll only make it worse.

  Now it’s just me and Coleman.

  Though she does have the advantage of a rather mean-looking shotgun.

  *

  Coleman sits half in, half out of the driver’s seat. I can tell she’s not used to handling a gun. She balances it awkwardly across her lap and checks her phone again. She’s so out of her comfort zone of a clinical office in London.

  “No signal still?” I say. “That’s a pity.”

  She glares at me. It feels good to rattle her. If I’m going to lose the game, I’m not going to be a good loser.

  “So, actual guns now,” I say. “The cognitive vaccine will be used as a weapon too, by the unscrupulous. To make people hurt other people.”

  “Joining that peacenik school has turned you into a New Age hippy,” she says. “If you knew that you could act without conscience, imagine what you could achieve. No voice in your head holding you back. The world needs people like that.”

  “I think the world is messed up enough already.”

  She taps the gun in her lap. “Plenty of terrible things are done to keep us safe in our beds at night. Things which no one really wants to do,” she says. “The bleeding-heart liberals would rather pretend these things don’t go on in the name of protecting us all; but they do. I’m trying to make those things a little easier to bear. For everyone.”

  “But you’re actually hurting people. Your Rent-a-Thug hurt Lena, until she kicked his butt.”

  “That was unfortunate. Misinformation from Callum. But I’m interested that you care. You care about Lena?”

  “Of course I do,” I say. “And she has nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Except that…” Her lip twitches in pleasure. She enjoys putting forward a good hypothesis. “Except that you effectively gave her name to Callum rather than your own. You put Lena in harm’s way. Were you finding her annoying, Jess? Is that why you did such a thing?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t.” Did I really do that deliberately? Because Lena had scared me that night with the room mix-up, or been selfish once too often?

  “You sent me a book about a scientist creating a monster,” she continues. “So what about Hanna? Did you care about her, Jess?”

  “You don’t know the first thing about Hanna!”

  “But I do. I’ve done my homework in the last few days. Was that your handiwork too?”

  Partly. Maybe.

  “You may be more of a monster than you think, Jess. We all are, deep down. But now you can move on from any trauma, do anything to get what you want and still live with yourself because I can stop the memories. I can reconsolidate them for you.”

  Except that she’s wrong. It hasn’t worked.

  “You’ve pumped drugs into me, lied to me. And for what? If you thought you were creating the perfect memory – one that forgets the bad things we see and do – then you’ve failed. Big time. You staged the whole accident. You pushed Mum into the path of the car. Brett was driving. All to prove a theory.”

  She looks taken aback. “But…”

  “What? Your reconsolidation therapy not looking so effective, is it? Your brainwashing a teensy bit reversible?”

  Coleman purses her lips and I detect the first traces of doubt.

  “You can’t stop the feelings – guilt, regret, fear, love,” I say. “I can’t ever forget what part I may have played in what happened to Hanna. I don’t want to.”

  She prods me with the gun to the back of the car. She points to a large black case. “Open it!”

  I do as she asks and look inside: a laptop, memory sticks, papers. I recognize the black notebooks from her study.

  “Proof. Proper. Scientific. Proof,” she says, spitting out the words.

  “Do you think this is proof? Because it isn’t. This doesn’t prove your theory at all.” I tap my chest. “Q.E.D. Me, I’m the proof that it doesn’t work.” I grab the laptop and stamp on it before hurling it into the moor, as far as I can throw it, followed by more contents of the case. The notebooks scatter and fall on to the boggy ground. Coleman shrieks and runs after them, leaving the gun resting against the car, her expensive shoes squelching in the peat as she grabs at the cracked laptop and tries to dry it on her skirt. Mud’s smeared on her fancy clothes and splattered up her tights. Not so well groomed any more.

  “I think you forgot something in all the excitement,” I call.

  I’ve got the gun. And I’m pointing it at her.

  I take the last manuscript from the case. A set of printed A4 sheets, looking so innocuous. The true Principles of Memory (Limited Edition). It sets out the Programme, those experiments I suffered, her unethical theories, the drugs and the ultimate cognitive vaccine. I can read it myself. See her final version of the truth. I roll it and tuck it inside my jacket, taking care to keep the gun barrels pointed at Coleman at all times.

  I advance towards her. Small step by small step. I take one forward, she takes one back, like a slowmotion ballroom dance. She’s getting closer and closer to the edge of the bridge. I can see the panic in her eyes. She’s trying to judge what kind of monster she created.

  I’m trying to judge it too.

  She looks around behind her. “The boys will be back at any minute.”

  “I don’t think they will. You sent your driver into the mire. I’m the one with the map in my head, remember! I should think he’s rather stuck by now – up to his neck. A bunch of teenagers on a hike are passing fairly near him soon. If he shouts loud enough, someone might hear him.”

  She glances anxiously to either side.
>
  “Maybe you should go and look for him, as you’re so concerned,” I say. We’re all alone. Me and her. I’ve dreamed of this moment. Well, not this exact moment. I didn’t realize I’d have such a choice of ways to end this. To kill her. Shotgun, force her into a bog or make her jump off the bridge into the raging river. All of them are appealing in their own way.

  And final.

  An eye for an eye.

  Which method shall I choose?

  I click off the safety catch on the gun. “The problem with being able to remember everything, Professor, is that it can make it awfully hard to forgive.”

  “Wait!” she shouts. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “Don’t I? You’re looking rather nervous for someone who knows my brain inside out. You’re the cognitive neuroscientist! Can’t you tell what I’m going to do?”

  “You don’t know the full truth about your mother and the accident. You need to listen to me.”

  “Oh, but I do know the truth,” I snarl back.

  “Freya, Jess, I…” she splutters.

  “Isn’t this what you want? People doing terrible things with impunity?” I raise the gun, supporting the butt against the pit of my shoulder, braced for the kick when I fire it, just like I’m back in the college grounds taking out clay pigeons.

  Maybe she’s right that I can tip her off Ryders Bridge and watch her hit the rocks below and not feel any remorse. After all she’s done to me, to Mum, who would blame me? Self-defence. Self-preservation. Justice.

  Coleman raises her hands to shield her face. She looks smaller, diminished. Pathetic. A thin, nasty little woman whom I could shatter into a thousand messy pieces. She’s still pleading with me, telling me to listen to her.

  Memories of Mum and Hanna are thrashing around my head. I half-close my eyes to shut them out and squint down the barrel of the gun, finding the sight. Coleman has stopped moving backwards. She’s at the edge of the bridge, casting glances at the turbulent water below. I can see the fear in her face. Good. She deserves this. She brought it on herself. The insistent roar of the river as it crashes over the rocks fills my ears. Her lips are moving but I can’t hear her. I move closer.