Spare Me the Truth: An explosive, high octane thriller (The Dan Forrester series)
Page 38
‘I have no memory of Laura,’ he said. Which was true. He went on to tell her about his meeting with Bernard. Bernard had shown him a photograph of Joe’s wife, her raven hair and lithe, dancer’s body, but no memories emerged. When Dan had pressed him, Bernard had been expressly cautious about Dan’s personal history, but he’d intimated that Dan had a talent for befriending women and using pillow talk to access their secrets.
Dan recalled the anxiety he had felt in his dreams, his continual search for something important, and Bernard had looked at him long and hard before he said, ‘Do you think you suspected Joe was Cedric? That you thought by getting close to his wife you might find the evidence we needed?’
And that was when the final jigsaw pieces fell into place.
He looked into Bernard’s eyes and when he spoke, the truth resonated like a bell inside his heart, his soul. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Now, he looked at Jenny and she looked back.
‘You’re serious?’ she said. ‘You carried on with her all that time because you were using her to spy on Joe?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you think that excuses you?’ Jenny’s expression was incredulous.
‘No.’ He took a breath. ‘But that was before. This is now. I have to collect my things.’
‘No, wait.’ A look of panic crossed her face. ‘Stay with me. We can work it out.’ She stepped forward and instinctively, he stepped back. ‘Please, don’t go,’ she begged.
‘I have to,’ he said. ‘We both need to think about where we go next. What you want from me. Whether I can live with the fact that you lied to me for so long about so many things.’ His tone hardened. ‘Why did you leave me struggling to find out about my past?’
‘Because I love you!’ she cried. ‘Can’t you imagine what it was like for me when you couldn’t remember Laura any more? When you couldn’t remember that you were thinking of leaving me? My God. Why would I want you to remember?’
The pain in his heart spread to his lungs until he had to fight to draw breath. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’
He walked into the house. Climbed into the attic and retrieved a suitcase and two holdalls. He packed indiscriminately, unable to concentrate.
When he walked back outside it was to find Poppy sitting in the back of the car, expression expectant. Jenny stood to one side, motionless. Her skin was ashen.
Dan put the suitcase on the back seat and stuffed the holdalls alongside.
Jenny said, ‘Where will you go?’
‘London,’ he said.
‘But you can’t teach high-performance driving in a city.’
He said, ‘I’m not doing that anymore.’
She blinked.
‘There’s a vacancy with a company in Mayfair.’ He closed the car’s rear door. ‘DCA & Co. They’ve already said dogs are welcome in the office.’
‘Not MI5?’ She looked genuinely baffled.
He stared at her. ‘You really think they’d take me with my messed-up memory?’
‘I guess not,’ she whispered.
He walked to the other side of the car and opened the door, climbed inside. ‘I’ll come and see Aimee at the weekend.’
She nodded.
He drove down the mountain steadily, careful of his new passenger in the back. Trees flashed past. Stretches of moorland. The sky was blue-black in the distance but across the valley fields were bathed in bright sunshine. Rain spattered on his windscreen. A blast of wind rocked the car.
Moods of the countryside. Dark and light. Shade and clarity.
He was driving from a past he now knew. Sorrow and shame. Betrayal and perfidy. Hope and redemption. Liberation, compassion.
He saw it all now. In this moment on the mountain with only a handful of possessions and with his eyes wide open.
He saw it all.
At last.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. However, the story of Dan Forrester being given an amnesia drug is based on real-life research. On 1 July 2007 I saw an article by the Telegraph’s science correspondent Richard Gray, which sparked the idea for this novel. In it, Gray stated, ‘Researchers have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memories while leaving other memories intact.’
He went on to write that, ‘In a new study, revealed in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, psychiatrists at McGill University, in Montreal, and Harvard University, in Boston, used an amnesia drug to “dampen” the memories of trauma victims.’
The researchers used propranolol, a non-selective beta-blocker used to treat hypertension in patients with heart problems.
Browsing the Internet further I came across: http://www.livescience.com/7315-drug-deletes-bad-memories.html
Here I read that ‘similar research led by Professor Joseph LeDoux has been carried out at New York University on rats; scientists were able to remove a specific memory from the brains of rats while leaving the rest of the animals’ memories intact. An amnesia drug called U0126 was administered’.
Great, I thought. A memory-erasing drug!
But when I looked closer it became clear that most of the research was actually looking at erasing fear from memory. Not quite the same, but who am I to split hairs when creating a story.
I guess it will only be a question of time before fiction becomes fact and an amnesia drug becomes available. In my view the downside of such a drug would be that it could be taken on a whim. Upset after a broken relationship? Pop a pill. Angry at your boss after a bad day? Pop a pill. However, the upside is that severely traumatised victims of crime or war could find a life-saving tool to help them return to a relatively normal life.
Regarding electromagnetic (radiation) weapons, these are very much a reality. Technologies for stimulating the brain and controlling the mind have a dark side that military and intelligence planners have been keen to exploit for decades. Whether or not the UK Government has a non-lethal weapons programme is debatable; however there is a wealth of scientific literature, including official US Government sources showing that such non-lethal weapons capability is being developed in the West. MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) is a directional non-lethal microwave sound weapon that bypasses human ears and eardrums to create an uncomfortably high noise in the skull. MEDUSA is developed by Sierra Nevada Corporation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Chief Constable Jacqui Cheer, Cleveland Police, for her generous sanction of my research, and Sergeant Stephen Williams-Reader, Stockton Neighbourhood Police, for giving me such a great tour of his home town and advising me on numerous aspects of policing.
Thanks also to Inspector Kevin Robinson, West Yorkshire Police (retired), for his in-depth insight into police analysis; Paul and Ruth McGrath, Cleveland Police (retired), whose incisive knowledge on police procedure I couldn’t have done without; Dr Michael Seed, who I called on for his expertise not just in weaponry but also in biology and pharmacology; Joseph Coventry, whose keen interest in the science behind this story inspired me to write it.
Dr Ashish Bhatia and Dr Rebecca Bhatia have been immensely helpful, sharing what it is like to be a GP and responding to my inquisition with equanimity, as well as coming up with some great creative ideas.
Special thanks are due to Anthony Weale and Dudley Ankerson for a terrific brainstorming session right at the start. Thanks to Juliet Coombe for providing the title. Also to Rachel Legg, practice nurse; Liz Kolovos, defence project negotiator; Susan Opie, critical reader.
Thanks also to the team at Zaffre Publishing for their enthusiasm right from their start, especially my extremely talented editor, Joel Richardson.
I owe a massive thanks to my wonderful agent Rowan Lawton who not only appears to have a boundless store of energy but the invaluable ability to think outside the box.
Lastly, as is customary in such matters, I must declare that any mistakes are mine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Becker, R., The Body Electric: Electromagne
tism and the Foundation of Life (New York, 1987).
Begich, N., Controlling the Human Mind: The Technologies of Political Control or Tools for Peak Performance (Alaska, 2006).
Begich, N., Earth Rising II: The Betrayal of Science, Society and the Soul (Alaska, 2003).
Brodeur, P., Currents of Death (New York, 1989).
Duncan, R., Project Soul Catcher: Secrets of Cyber and Cybernetic Warfare Revealed (Kempton, Ill., 2010).
Lin, J. C., Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications (Springfield, Ill., 1978).
Mind Control Publishing, The Encyclopedia of Mind-Control: Strategy, Natural and Man Made (2012).
Owen, S. and Saunders, A., Bipolar Disorder: The Ultimate Guide (Oxford, 2008).
Smith, J., HARRP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy (Kempton, Ill., 1998).
Websites
Bill Christensen, ‘New Drug Deletes Bad Memories’, LiveScience, (published online July 2007)
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/ website of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program
Richard Gray, ‘Scientists find drug to banish bad memories’, Telegraph, (published online July 2007)
David Hambling, ‘Microwave ray gun controls crowds with noise’, New Scientist, (published online July 2008)
Peter Phillips, ‘US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights’, Mind Justice, (published December 2006)
http://www.navysbirprogram.com/NavySearch/Summary/summary.aspx?pk=F5B07D68-1B19-4235-B140-950CE2E19D08
Useful websites on bipolar disorder
Bipolar UK is the national charity dedicated to supporting people affected by bipolar:
Mind is a mental health charity which provides information on bipolar:
Bipolar Support provides information and support for bipolar patients and their loved ones:
About the Author
CJ Carver is a half-English, half-Kiwi author living just outside Bath. CJ lived in Australia for ten years before taking up long-distance rallies, including London to Saigon, London to Cape Town and 14,000 miles on the Inca Trail. CJ’s books have been published in the UK and the USA and have been translated into several languages. CJ’s first novel, Blood Junction, won the CWA Debut Dagger Award and was voted as one of the best mystery books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly.
www.cjcarver.com
By the same author
The Indian Kane series
Blood Junction
Black Tide
The Jay McCaulay series
Gone Without Trace
Back with Vengeance
The Honest Assassin
Other novels
Dead Heat
Beneath the Snow
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Zaffre Publishing
This ebook edition published in 2016 by
Zaffre Publishing
80-81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE
www.zaffrebooks.co.uk
Copyright © CJ Carver, 2016
The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-7857-6033-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7857-6034-1
This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
Zaffre Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Publishing Fiction, a Bonnier Publishing company
www.bonnierpublishingfiction.co.uk
www.bonnierpublishing.co.uk
If you enjoyed Spare Me the Truth, why not read CJ Carver’s CWA Debut Dagger Award winning novel – available now in ebook
BLOOD JUNCTION
Journalist India Kane’s trip to the Australian outback takes a horrifying turn when she arrives in the town of Cooinda to find that her best friend Lauren is missing.
Seemingly no one knows what has happened to her, but it’s not long before India finds herself arrested for a double murder that she didn’t commit, caught up in the dark past of a small town hiding a devastating truth – one that could destroy a family, a friendship, and a nation.
A powerful and compulsive thriller about a woman on the run from a brutal killer, as well as from her own past.
And follow on with the rest of the backlist – also available in ebook . . .
BLACK TIDE
India Kane is back in a dark and dangerous quest for justice.
GONE WITHOUT TRACE
Jay McCaulay is on a trail of murder, corruption and evil that leads to the very heart of London.
BACK WITH VENGEANCE
Jay McCaulay finds herself once again entangled in a web of lies.
THE HONEST ASSASSIN
Jay McCaulay was the only witness to an assassination and is determined to discover the truth.
DEAD HEAT
When the plane Georgia Parish is on crashes, it soon becomes clear that it was no accident.
BENEATH THE SNOW
When a young scientist vanishes in the Alaskan wilderness, her sister joins the search and finds more than she bargained for.