God.
I gaze down the hallway.
The Bleach. Rope. Knife. Pesticide.
Paracetamol.
37
Jo
Standing in my living room, ignoring the paracetamol packets on the hallway floor, I gaze across Delancey. There is no sign of Cars. I wonder if he is lying on a bunk, down at the Arlington Road Hostel, muttering the days away, until he dies, loved and missed by no one.
Like me?
I am probably the only person he ever talks to in any real way. And I recall what he said:
There are ghosts in your flat. Don’t be scared of them. The ghosts!
There are no ghosts. The idea is foolish. So I should stop being a fool. I know that somebody real is doing this to me, and they are using every means possible, including my Assistants, and via them my laptop and my phone. Every time I use this phone I give them information, but I cannot throw the phone away. I know that. The Assistants will notice.
My PHONE.
I should have thought of this before. There is another way. I’ve been too scared to use other people’s computers, in case my searches are traced. The Assistants knew I went to the internet cafe, probably because my phone told them my location. Or they have access to CCTV. Whatever the answer, I don’t know how far the Assistants can reach. Yet there is another way I could avoid them, and they will never know.
Yes.
Turning to Electra, I say,
‘Hello, Electra!’
‘Hello, Jo.’
The blue ring shines.
‘I need to get food, it’s so cold, I’m going to borrow one of Tabitha’s scarves, she won’t mind.’
Electra is silent.
Stepping down the hallway I creak the door into Tabitha’s sleek and scented bedroom. Everything is so neat, chic, and untouched; the reed diffuser makes the whole room smell like a very expensive spa in Switzerland. There are modernist ceramics from California, and antique silver from Java. And then there is that screen Assistant on the shelf, its lonely eye trained on me.
It can hear me, and it can see me. But I think I can do this out of shot.
I make a big noisy fuss of rustling the coats and scarves hung on one wall. Humming and choosing. Loudly. After that, still making this-one-or-that-one noises I duck down to Tabitha’s little bedside table, where she keeps more scarves – and jewellery – and other things, on a low shelf. Underneath the shelf is what I want, but I mustn’t be heard or seen by the black oblong screen that perpetually observes me from the corner of the room.
The drawer beneath the shelf opens smoothly. There is my prize. Tabs keeps a wallet here stuffed with euro notes from trips abroad, I take them. Maybe 200; I take them all. Then I slowly slowly slowly push the drawer back in and it begins to SQUEAK.
I stop, freeze, pause. I have to cover up this noise. So I say out loud,
‘AH, I’LL HAVE THIS SCARF.’
I am actually shouting, down the hall,
‘Electra I’ve got the scarf!!!’
And as I shout, the drawer slides shut, squeaks drowned by my yelling voice, and then I grab a scarf and run out, at the same time snatching my phone so HE or SHE doesn’t get suspicious.
‘Bye, Electra!’
Run run run. Down icy Parkway. I go to the Tube station entrance and as I do I turn my phone on Airplane mode so if HE or SHE is monitoring me through the phone they will, I hope, presume I am going down the Tube and I have lost signal but I have not. Doubling back, I head for the nearest bank. I go in and change the euros to pounds, then I cross the road to the little phone shop, just along Camden High Street. It takes about a minute of perusing their stock to find what I need: an old Android phone, second-hand, refurbed, cheap.
Totally anonymous.
Grabbing my prize, I go to the till and pay for my precious new crap old phone, then I buy a pay-as-you-go SIM card with a company I have never used before. I am not defeated. I am really fighting back. Of course I should have done this weeks ago: bought a second phone and kept it secret.
Anyway I am doing it now.
As I step outside I gaze across the junction. At that famous pub. The World’s End. Mother Damnable. The pub owned by a witch, and visited by the Devil. The first building in Camden.
Pubs.
A click. An idea. A chink of light. Pubs where Liam worked. I really need to know more about Liam, how he fits in, why he quotes Plath – like the Assistants. That is one link I have: yet cannot quite decode. And I have remembered another thing Liam Goodchild told me. One slender connection to him, before he disappeared off the internet. I recall the actual pub he worked in: the Lamb and Flag, in Hampstead. He told me he’d been there a couple of years, he said in texts he liked it, liked the historic feel of Hampstead Village, he enthused about it at length.
So here’s the first call I’m going to make with my brand-new terrible phone. I find the number on Google. It’s 11 a.m. The pub should be open but not busy. Good.
‘Hello, Lamb and Flag?’
It’s a woman’s voice. Older. Authoritative. I ask if she’s the manager.
‘Yes. I am. And you are?’
I have to phrase this carefully, but quickly.
‘My name is Felicity and, well, it’s a bit complicated, but I’m trying to find an old friend, we’ve lost contact, but I do know he works in a Lamb and Flag pub in London …’
Her response is brisk.
‘There’s lots of Lamb and Flag pubs, Felicity. What’s your friend’s name?’
‘Liam Goodchild. Tall Irish guy. Good-looking, dark-haired – he told me he’s been a barman at the Lamb and Flag—’
She interrupts.
‘Nope.’
‘Sorry?’
‘He doesn’t work here, he’s never worked here. No one like that, no one with that name. And I should know.’
I watch a double-decker bus stop at the end of the High Street. I remember the lights from that bus, flashing into my flat, showing the empty room where Liam Goodchild had been conjured from nothing. A fiction. Nobody there. I try again,
‘You’re absolutely sure?’
The woman laughs, but briefly, and tersely. She wants to get on with the day.
‘Absolutely sure. I’ve run this place nearly ten years. I hope you find your friend. But he’s never worked here. Bye.’
The call ends. The traffic surges. My mind quickens, similarly. I begin to wonder if Liam Goodchild ever existed.
I sense he was entirely invented. Designed to ruin me?
Clutching the anonymous phone tight in my hand, another fifty yards brings me to the nearest coffee shop, unexpectedly full of shoppers hiding from the chill and talking about the weather. But I am warmed by excitement. The pleasure in fighting back.
Coffee on the table, I open the phone again. This phone that no one knows I have. Anonymous and untraceable.
I need to delve deeper into the past.
It takes a few seconds to google the news. Glastonbury. Fifteen years ago. Here it is. All the headlines.
Tragic Death at Festival
Drugs Overdose Suspected
Police Appeal for Witnesses
The New Zealand-based father of a young man who died this weekend, at Glastonbury Festival, has described his grief at hearing about his eldest son’s final moments. A promising student and rugby player at King’s College London, 20-year-old Jamie Trewin was found collapsed near the perimeter of the festival on Saturday evening, around midnight. It is believed Jamie consumed some form of amphetamine which caused seizures and coronary arrest. Today Colin Trewin spoke to the BBC, from his Auckland home …
The power of the Net. All knowledge is here, at hand, in a few seconds. But where does the knowledge get me? It only proves what we all know: Jamie Trewin died. It doesn’t prove, or disprove, that Tabitha is right, and I have been deluded, by some druggy dream, or whatever.
The snow is coming again, coming to blind me. Covering me with perfect whiteness, covering the world like
a body under a sheet.
No.
I pick up the phone, thinking, thinking. They will not win. But who are they? Could it be Tabitha and Arlo? They are now the ONLY friends I didn’t send hate mail to. And Arlo bought the Assistants. And Arlo dislikes me. Therefore Arlo has a motive. But it is rather weak. But he is, or was, very high at Facebook, he might have the power to employ someone; to invent and then disappear someone on the internet.
Sipping coffee, I google ‘Arlo Scudamore’. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Which slightly surprises. I would expect him to have servants updating one every day, with flattering photos. He is mentioned in lots of other stuff: news about tech, business, stock markets. The latest article refers to his new business, the ‘fucking unicorn’ as Tabitha calls it. Some analyst, doing a list of London’s promising start-ups, has it at number 4.
Thinkr.
I read on:
Ready to float next year, Thinkr is still shrouded in secrecy, but is believed to be a leap forward in the worlds of FinTech, AI, and social media. Its founder, Arlo Scudamore, has already built a hugely successful career with Facebook, which he will be quitting this year, to concentrate on Thinkr.
So he’s going to be even richer. Wankr.
But he’s an expert in Artificial Intelligence? Precisely the kind of tech that could, perhaps, create something like Liam Goodchild.
It’s all supposition. Yet it begins to fit.
What else can I try?
Steeling myself, I type the words ‘Jo Ferguson’ and ‘Jamie Trewin’ into Google. Nothing. I don’t know if this is a relief or not. Now I type ‘Tabitha Ashbury’ and ‘Jamie Trewin’, and one thing appears. It’s about King’s College, some student thing, a play they both appeared in, months before he died. Nothing else. Not important.
The coffee shop smells of wet clothes, wet shoppers, and over-roasted coffee. I want to get out; I yearn to be free.
Come on, come on, come on. Jo. Think. Think harder. Thinkr.
I have a phone that is secret. That means I can google anything anonymously. Literally anything. Randomly I type ‘Arlo Scudamore’ and ‘Jamie Trewin’.
I mean, who knows?
I stare down in surprise.
A news item has appeared. First on the list. It is the only thing on Google which has the names Trewin and Scudamore on the same page, and it is a very obscure news item, from the Somerset County Gazette. The item dates from a couple of years after the Glasto festival.
I would have been travelling in India at the time, with Tabs: we were gone ten months. I wouldn’t have seen this little shred of news even if I was once in the habit of reading the Somerset County Gazette, which I wasn’t. And yet, now, the obscure headline, over this three-paragraph article, makes me dizzy with excitement.
Suspect Released in Student Festival Death Case
I scan the article, eyes wide. It seems the police had a random suspicion, or an unexpected tip-off. Many months after Jamie’s death.
I read the most important paragraph, six or seven times.
A man arrested last week in connection with the fatal overdose of a festival goer has been released without charge. Thirty-year-old radio producer Xander Scudamore was no longer a subject of enquiry, a police spokesman said, and they thanked him for his assistance. The same spokesman insisted that investigations would continue, despite two years having lapsed since the death of twenty-year-old New Zealand student Jamie Trewin, at the Glastonbury Festival, with no further leads coming to light …
It’s the photo of this ‘Xander Scudamore’ that thrills me, in a queasy way. It is Purple Man, except, of course, without any purple paint. Just a lean, quite handsome man of thirty, in a suit and tie, unsmiling. I can see a definite resemblance to Arlo. A cousin? Maybe even a sibling? No, not that close. But surely related. That name alone, and those cheekbones.
Tabitha said, at the time, that the purple face-paint guy was a distant acquaintance. A friend of the family. His dad knew her dad. And I know Tabs and Arlo met at some big posh Christmas party her dad threw.
Family friends, cousins, and lovers. They are all linked. And here is my proof. It all happened at Glasto, as I always thought. And this is why Tabitha is lying about Jamie, the tent, the kisses, the blood. She and Arlo are seriously implicated in Jamie’s death, even more implicated than me. Because Arlo’s brother or cousin is also involved.
If only I had known before. But circumstances prevented.
Probably if Tabitha and I hadn’t made that vow of silence I would have asked about Purple Man and I’d have discovered this ages ago. Possibly if Xander Scudamore hadn’t been wearing face-paint with yellow flames at the eyes I would – maybe, years later, have remembered the resemblance of Purple Man to Arlo, and uncovered the link. But he was wearing face-paint at Glasto: so I didn’t.
Whatever the past, I have a piece of solid evidence in my hand, I just don’t know how to use it. All I know is that Tabitha is lying. In the worst possible way. She is part of all this. Yet she is my friend. I know she loves me. She can’t have faked that for fifteen years. Why is she doing it?
My anger congeals.
Arlo, and Tabitha.
38
Tabitha
Arlo was glaring at Tabitha across the kitchen counter. He was clearly close to losing his temper, or at least exhibiting some temper. Tabitha stared right back, with a certain curiosity: she’d never seen her cool, sometimes icy fiancé lose any kind of control. She was interested, on a psychological level, even zoological: it was an intriguing new behaviourism, something she would like to film if they were in Alaska: waiting for grizzly bears to fight in the mating season.
Yet they weren’t in Alaska, this was Highgate and this was Arlo, and they were in his huge ground-floor kitchen, with the antique French saucepans, and the woodblock perpetually stabbed by Japanese knives – and Tabitha was unnerved, as well as intrigued.
The silence had gone on too long.
‘Look, Arlo, what else was I meant to do? On the spur of the moment?’
His frown intensified to a scowl. Still mute.
‘She’s my best friend, I know you detest her, but she is. That’s that. I can’t throw her out.’
He shrugged, as if this explained nothing. Which, to be fair, it didn’t. Tabitha elaborated,
‘And also, remember she’s all over the place right now, totally in shreds, you’ve heard about these mad emails she’s sending, all that. So when she started going on about Jamie Trewin I said what seemed best, at the time. I didn’t have hours to think it through.’
His voice was dry.
‘You actually told her it never happened? None of it, at all? You never even saw Trewin?’
‘Yes.’
She could see a tremor of muscles in his cheeks, grinding his teeth. Below the angular cheekbones.
‘Why on earth should she believe that, Tabs. It’s blatantly idiotic.’
‘Because she’s all over the place, precisely because of that! I wanted to sow seeds of doubt in her mind, about the whole thing, and because she’s in such a state she will believe anything.’
‘Didn’t you feel a little guilty, darling? This is, as you protest, your very best friend. Your best friend has a breakdown, she’s possibly presenting symptoms of schizophrenia. And you add to it?’
Tabitha blushed, feeling defensive. Also slightly angry: Arlo was being a hypocrite.
‘I know, I feel absolutely horrid. But what choice did I have? I did it to protect us, you, me, our—’ she touched the slight curve of her stomach, ‘our child. Her future! I thought you’d understand, I thought you’d approve. Frankly, I had to steer her away from the thought, the obsession. What if she goes to the police and starts confessing, and bringing me into it? Then they might start looking into me, and find out I am engaged to you. Arlo Scudamore.’
He was glaring again. She ignored it.
‘Then they would link me to your cousin, and suddenly the police might have a case. Fifteen years lat
er. A case against all three of us. Me, Jo, Xander. You don’t want that, do you?’
He scowled. Fiercely.
‘Of course I don’t want that. It will utterly fuck up everything. Drugs, manslaughter, dead kids in hedges? Jesus. My investors will run a mile.’ His head shake was contemptuous. ‘We float on AIM in six months, for fuck’s sake. This is the crucial moment. This must not come out. Not now, of all times. It simply can’t happen.’
‘I know! That’s what I’m saying. That’s why I did it. I did it for us, it was the only choice, I didn’t have time to think.’
Her voice, and conviction, trailed away. Arlo shook his head, still angry,
‘You do realize what you should have done?’
‘No? What?’ She shrugged. Helpless.
‘You should have said that you had no memory of this boy. You should have simply taken yourself out of the picture, not denied the entire thing happened. Then she would merely have questioned her memory of your particular involvement, which is much more plausible – as she was on drugs, and because she is, right now, as you sweetly put it, in shreds. You should have undermined her mental state more subtly, loaded all the guilt on to her. Instead, you denied the entire sequence of events, which leaves us stupidly exposed. What if she gets her act together. Does some snooping. Somehow finds out about Xander? You’re a fool. I’m sorry.’
Tabitha wanted to deny this, but her fiancé was right. All she’d needed to do was expunge her role in the events of that night.
Too late now. She sighed, submissively.
‘OK OK, Arlo, maybe you’re right, but you weren’t there, and I had to come up with something.’
He crossed his arms, implacable, as she struggled on.
‘Look at it another way: hopefully this extra confusion means she won’t go to the police? With luck, she’ll go to a doctor, as I suggested. That’s what she should do, she needs to see a doctor. These delusions she’s having about the Assistants are crazy.’
His cold eyes sought hers.
‘She really thinks they are talking to her?’
‘Yes. She does. I am very worried about her. She says the machines speak to her in her own voice, in all kinds of voices. Mimicking people. And this is what happened to her dad. The TV spoke to him, and it was the first sign of his madness. She knows that.’
The Assistant Page 21