by Paul Cornell
Even if she hadn’t been got at before going down to Docklands, she would have been sure at that moment that to restore the memories of those people to her mind was the most important thing she could do to help Quill’s team. However, got at she had been, so she had to do what she had to do now without Sefton’s help. She so wanted to talk to him, to any of them, about what she was going through. Instead, she’d made the decision to keep up her poker face, to help them as she felt called to do, but also not to risk the most important thing in her life. The power that was watching her didn’t seem to mind her helping Quill’s team. That was frightening in itself.
Her bank accounts were not direct records of the existence of the forgotten people, so presumably hadn’t been erased from all human memory. Therefore, she’d hoped they might provide her with indirect evidence of where she might have met with those people. She had been both troubled and excited to see that there were indeed two places in London where she seemed, five years ago and before, to have often been, without now remembering anything of it. Before she’d made that discovery, she’d made a few, limited, excursions to other places where she might have met people who matched those names, places to which it was not extraordinary for her to go: the Houses of Parliament; the BBC; the Inns of Court. She had walked randomly, hoping to find some clue, some smell even, that might ignite her memories. That slightly strange behaviour had been what the MI5 people had noticed. Her more fearsome watcher, however, didn’t seem to have.
One of the odd places her bank accounts said she’d spent time in was Docklands, which was obvious. If she’d known the CPT, she’d have visited their headquarters. The other . . . the other was where she was going to go today. She left her house, raised a hand to her husband, who was standing at the window, a shadow on the glass, and headed to the car she’d ordered.
She got in and greeted the driver, let him pull out of her driveway and head for the M25. She looked carefully out of the windows, then turned urgently back to him. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘we’re not going to the meeting, and you’re not going to call ahead to tell them I can’t make it. OK?’
Lofthouse strode out of Golders Green Underground station at speed, feeling as off piste as she’d ever gone, a prey animal who had got away from the hunter. She spent a moment looking around, past the bus station, with its rows of double-deckers, to the clock tower and the three-storey shops. It was drizzling; a welcome cold was on the breeze. She’d hoped to recognize something. She did not.
She found the two different cashpoints from which she had made withdrawals, in that unknown dreamtime. There was nothing memorable about them, of course. Nor was there, and this had been a greater hope, about the two restaurants where she’d paid for meals. She went inside both, looked around, was asked by staff, who bloody obviously wouldn’t remember a single customer from a single occasion five years ago, if she wanted an early lunch. She walked out in both cases without replying. She got out her map, wishing she could use her iPad, and worked out where the boundaries of the suburb could roughly be said to be. She headed north on the Finchley Road, all suburban houses and gardens. She was going to walk the leafy avenues, as far as it was possible to do so, in disciplined squares.
She had no idea what she was looking for. She’d asked James once or twice what having the Sight was like, and just from his descriptions of it, she felt blind now, blind and desperate. She was throwing the dice every moment she was here. Though she had no obligation to be there, the regular intelligence-sharing meeting she was meant to be attending right now might have already decided that it was unlike her not to show up and called her nick, who would call her mobile, which she of course had to keep switched off, and then, worried, call home. She could not, however, call the meeting to make excuses, or have anyone else in her circle call them. It was like one of those nightmares in which one was running with one’s legs bound.
She looped eastwards towards the park, and after a while realized everything was becoming more Hampstead, and turned back towards the centre again. She marched up onto Golders Hill Park and looked down on the suburb, sheltering under a tree as the rain started to really come down. Meaningless green. Suburban nothing to do with her. There was something nearby, the map told her, called Leg of Mutton pond. Surely she would remember that? She didn’t.
She went back down and headed off along Golders Green Road itself, towards Brent Cross. She was getting more and more afraid, more certain every moment that she was going to be caught. She should run to Quill, or at least to Sefton, burst in on them and say they had to help her. But no, they would only have seconds to do so, because her unexpected arrival would be noticed. She couldn’t take that risk. Every time she thought about the threat that had been made, she reeled inside at the idea of what she could lose.
Stop, Rebecca. Don’t think about the fear. Continue what you’re doing. Just a bit longer. You’re a professional and you do not allow yourself to be a slave to fear.
She stopped at a cafe in a side street and sagged into a chair. She ordered a pot of tea without milk or sugar, and left the teabag to stew while she checked out on her map which places around here she hadn’t gone to yet. Hopeless, hopeless.
‘Superintendent!’ She looked up to see a man she didn’t know, who’d just walked in carrying a greengrocer’s box full of fruit. He was smiling at her. ‘Long time no see!’ He put the box down on the counter and came over, rubbing his hands on his apron. ‘What brings you back here?’
She felt like leaping up to embrace the most welcome stranger she had ever met. She did not. She slowly stood, one hand on the back of the chair to support herself. ‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ she said. ‘You see . . . I’ve lost my memory.’
The man’s name was David, he was the owner of the cafe, and they’d had a few conversations on the subject of her work, while never really becoming friends. He’d wanted to talk to her about getting more police on foot through here. It had become a running joke between them. She’d stopped by often, until . . . Wow, it must have been five years back; how time flies, he said. He was concerned about her condition, eager to help out. It took a desperately long time to get past reassuring him that she’d had medical attention. She’d always sit in the window if she could, he said, watching the people go past. She’d always said she was here visiting friends. Nearby? He supposed they must be. She’d never said who.
‘Oh, wait a sec, come on now . . .’ David put a hand to his brow. ‘You once left your stuff here, asked me to look after it, ’cos you’d forgotten something, left it wherever you were visiting. You popped out, and you was back literally just a minute or two later.’
‘A minute? Or two?’
He laughed at that, then stifled it. ‘More like two.’
She went out into the street, looked at her watch and walked for ninety seconds at her normal fast pace. From what David had said, it didn’t sound like she’d run. That gave her a radius. Then she looked again at her map and used her fingers to make a circle. She doubted she would have been visiting a shopkeeper. The only houses within that distance were a cluster of upmarket apartments, a square of them on the map, behind the street here, set aside in their own bit of green. That sounded like the sort of place heavy-hitters like the people on that list might live. She worked out where she had to go, rushed round a corner, and now she was trying not to run.
She turned the corner and there the building was. It was a square of apartments, built round a courtyard, something of the 1920s about it. The lawn was well kept, and the trees that baffled the wind and rain were neat. Lofthouse had visited homes like these before, grace-and-favour apartments given to the great and the good, retired civil servants who wanted to live in town. There was no sign naming the place. That would have been gauche. She went to the main gate, which was open, cars parked inside. Wheelie bins of rubbish were neatly lined up beside a little pile of junk mail with a brick on top of it. There was a security office, but it was closed at the moment; this wasn’t a gated comm
unity. She still half expected to recall something, but no. The erasure had been complete.
She put a hand, as she so often had in recent months, to the charm bracelet on her wrist. This was something else that she could tell nobody about. The key on her charm bracelet. The impossible key that seemed to have a mind of its own. She was wondering if, now she was here, it would react. But no, she would have felt it by now. It wasn’t like she could shake it to get a reaction. The key was the second powerful force that influenced her life. A positive one? Perhaps you could call it that. She’d come to trust it, anyway, and now it was silent.
Stairwells were inset in each of the four walls. She chose one at random, went up it and walked the cloister-like corridors. She could see how something as scholastic as this building would appeal to someone who’d, presumably, worked in the ‘temple’ at the Docklands site. Would all of them have lived here? No, not people as large in the world as that: they would have had big lives in all sorts of places. She was looking for the home of one person. An old friend. Probably not someone, with an apartment as small as these must be, with a family living at home.
She quickly walked all four quarters, on both levels. At times she held up the key, hoping it would oblige her with a inclination in one direction or the other, but got no reaction. A part of her had hoped this building might provide the solution to another mystery: was there a lock somewhere her mysterious key fitted? Perhaps in one of these doors? It didn’t seem likely, given their relatively modern design. The key looked ancient, rounded by so many fingers, though its teeth were miraculously sharp.
She returned to the gatehouse, frustrated. Now there was a caretaker inside, reading the paper. She knocked on his window, showing him a forced smile and her warrant card. He looked alarmed as he came to the door, but she quickly calmed him. ‘Just background on a case – nothing to worry about. Could I see a list of your tenants, please?’ The proffered list didn’t include any of the names she was after; of course it didn’t: the records of them had been erased from the world, James had said. But . . . hold on.
‘There are eight corner apartments and four apartments along each side of each floor, right? So why are there only thirty-five flats on this list?’
The caretaker shrugged. ‘That’s all we have. I should know.’ He looked complacent about it when, in any normal situation, that would have been the cue for an interesting fact, a demonstration of his familiarity with the building.
Lofthouse was seized with sudden hope. She went back into the courtyard. She would walk each corridor again, counting doors this time. She headed for a stairwell, again passing the rows of wheelie bins. A thought struck her. A caretaker wouldn’t take it upon himself to spare any apartment its junk mail. What had James told her about this process of forgetting? That it seemed to leap from mind to mind across everyone who knew about the thing that was being forced out of the public consciousness. So, an automated process, once it had started up . . .
She went to the pile of letters and took the brick away. They were all from apartment 23. She ran back to the gatehouse, grabbed that list off the caretaker again, looked up and down it. No apartment 23. She returned the paper to him, but was suddenly sure there must have been one, so she took it back and examined it again. She found the names and addresses sliding away from her gaze in a way that made her eyes hurt. She couldn’t see what was being concealed, but she could just about perceive the concealment itself, now she was deliberately seeking it. She handed the list back again to a now thoroughly bemused caretaker and jogged over to the appropriate stairwell.
Lofthouse walked the corridor past apartments 22 to 25 without noticing anything strange, then swore out loud and walked back, this time making herself stand in front of each flat in turn. It was as if this power sent her brain into the mode where one is doing something one does every day, and so finds oneself thinking consciously of something else and can’t remember the familiar action in the gap. Now she purposefully walked past apartment 22 and made herself stop before she got to 24, and yes, she could feel . . . something, as she turned to look in what must be the right direction. The feeling was very powerful, now she focused on it, but it was very localized. It was like finding an enormous wind blowing through a tiny crevice, like something one read about on the science pages, a force inside the smallest spaces of the universe. She still couldn’t sense anything between these two apartments, but she was just about aware now of something buffeting her mind aside, getting between the light in her eyes and her knowledge of it. She made herself step forwards and reach out. Her hand stretched further and further into nothingness. She didn’t know what she was hoping for. It was impossible, she knew, for her to be aware of encountering a door.
The key on her charm bracelet jerked urgently. She didn’t know if that was in anticipation or warning. It was enough, though, to make her halt.
She moved quickly aside, suddenly afraid that, should she stay here too long, pushing against this power, the one who had set it here would notice.
OK, she’d achieved something. She knew where her target was. She’d known there was a hole in the world, but now she had experienced it herself. That was terrifying, but so was what had pushed her to come here. Now she had to get back to where she should be and work out her next move, work out some way to get through a door she’d couldn’t perceive.
On the way out of the apartment block, Lofthouse decided upon another experiment, to check in with the more positive of the two powers that were ruling her life. Would the key react as it had in the past, to push her in one direction or the other? Time to find out. She started to deliberately consider the idea that, having come this far, she would go no further, that this discovery had been enough. She felt the key on her charm bracelet react, and had a moment to brace herself before the wave of depression and misery hit her. She stumbled, had to put a hand on the wall beside her to steady herself. No, she thought; actually, I’m going to pursue this to the end. I’m going to get inside that apartment and find what’s hidden. The torment left her like a chemical reaction, and she breathed deeply for a moment, enjoying the rush of freedom from pain. The key was certain about what it wanted. Though she still had no idea why it wanted anything.
She made her way back to Paddington Green and arrived for the end of the meeting, saying she’d just popped in to make sure there was nothing urgent that would surprise her in the briefing notes she’d be sent later, got reassurances that this was the case, then, having thus made sure she’d killed off almost all possibility that comment would be made about her absence, exited like she’d been there all the time, switching on her iPad and phone as she did so. She had a different driver on the way back to Gipsy Hill, thank God.
She’d been expecting him to appear, but it was just as big a shock as it always was. As she was reading the Telegraph on her iPad in the back of the car, he walked into the frame of the tablet, that familiar face with a look of slight suspicion on it. A few months ago, on the face of the man himself, she’d have taken that look to be teasing, joking. Now it made her stomach tense up and her face freeze.
‘Been anywhere nice?’ he asked.
‘The regular meeting.’ The driver would assume she was using FaceTime. She knew from previous experience that others couldn’t see or hear him.
‘You don’t normally switch off your gear in the meeting.’
‘I wanted to get away from you for a few minutes. Or can’t I do that now?’ The driver would now be assuming they were having a row. She understood where MI5 had come by their suspicions, though she didn’t like their implied penetration of her security. Still, she had bigger problems.
‘You can do whatever you like, as long as you’re willing to accept the consequences.’ With a familiar little nod, he headed off the page again, and she wanted to bellow, to kick the floor, to throw the iPad aside. She did none of those things.
‘Could we stop at my house?’ she asked the driver.
The car pulled into the driveway. Loft
house got out, with as much calm as she could project, and marched to the door. She fumbled with keys, managed to get the damn thing open, stepped inside.
‘In here,’ said the familiar voice. Oh, thank God. She found him in the kitchen, the person she’d seen walk onto her iPad, the most familiar person in the world to her, her husband, Peter. He was standing in the kitchen with his hand in a pan of water, which was sitting on the hob. Now he calmly reached over and switched on the heat. ‘I wonder how long it’ll take,’ he said, ‘before this body starts feeling the pain.’ He had done something similar just before she’d gone over to see Quill’s team in Docklands – walked into her office unexpectedly, carrying a pair of shears from the garden, and put them round his little finger. Whatever had literally possessed him had quickly convinced her that it was a genuine threat, that this wasn’t some form of mental illness on Peter’s part, by letting Peter go for a few moments, resulting in her husband asking her why he was at her workplace. Then the possession had resumed. Her remaining doubts had been swept aside when she recalled the bizarre element that had entered her life already in the form of the key, that impossibility to which she’d already become accustomed.
She could see now that Peter’s brow was sweating, that somewhere inside there was the man she loved, despite this control by something alien, despite the smile on his face.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ she lied.
‘I think you’ve been thinking about doing something.’
‘I have, but I haven’t done anything!’
‘Hmm.’ He was sizing her up. He had all of Peter’s mannerisms, but she wasn’t sure if she could guess what he was thinking in the same way she could with her husband. She had come, since Quill had told her about the impossible things that he and his team had experienced, to associate this evil spirit with what Quill called the Smiling Man. Perhaps they were one and the same. He certainly kept a grin on Peter’s features most of the time.