by Wes Markin
‘Yeah, I agree that he’s a colossal bell end, but it’s just not your usual style.’
‘And what’s my usual style?’
‘I don’t know. Quieter, more formal, I guess.’
‘Silent assassin?’
‘Hmmm. Something like that, although you’re not really sly.’
‘I’m fine Jake. Thanks for asking. I saw red. There were a million and one better ways to react. Lesson learned. It won’t happen again.’
‘I’ll see you back at the station.’
After Jake had hung up, Yorke acknowledged to himself that his over-the-top reaction to Parkinson was inevitable. One of his most loyal colleagues, and friends, lay critically ill in hospital. Couple that with the fact that there was an imminent threat to Proud’s life. A threat he was doing nothing about.
And why was that? Why was he doing nothing?
Is it because he secretly wanted it to happen?
He shook his head. Ridiculous. Get a grip! You’re finding issue where there isn’t one to find!
I mean, how could he do anything right now? He’d not had a second to breathe, and getting DC Bradley’s contact details, and finding Proud before Harry required a second’s breath.
It took him over an hour to reach HQ in Wiltshire. Along the way he noticed the clouds swelling and darkening; the sky looked fit to burst. While he was parking outside the long red-bricked headquarters, he answered another phone call from Topham.
‘I’m outside now,’ Yorke said. ‘You were the first person I was coming to see.’
‘Neil is still not here, and he hasn’t been in touch.’
Yorke stepped out of his car. He felt his heart flutter. ‘Okay, keep trying his mobile.’
‘I’ve phoned him again and again. This is unlike him, sir, he said he’d be here.’
The flutter in Yorke’s chest was becoming faster now. ‘What time did you last speak to him, Mark?’
‘He was just about to meet a patient. Just before one o’clock I think.’
Keeping the phone pinned to his ear by his shoulder, Yorke took his notebook from his pocket and flicked back through his notes.
Neil’s appointment with Dr Louis Mayers had been at 1 p.m.
And now Neil was missing.
Shit.
‘Okay, Mark, sit tight, I’ll be up with you in five.’
Yorke put his hands on the roof of the car. Think … think.
What would the Conduit want with Neil? Would he really have taken him from the session? To what end? There had been no connection between them until today…
Had there?
His mind was on overdrive. He could really do with a calming word from Gardner right now. She always knew exactly what to say to bring back focus.
It took him three minutes to formulate a plan.
He assigned two officers to head back to the university, and the offices in which Dr Louis Mayers would have received treatment from Neil today, to form an immediate picture of what happened after that session. Car park CCTV footage would show Mayers and Neil leaving, separately or together, and then cameras could be used to track the vehicles to their destination, if they didn’t drift into zones that had no monitoring. He also made a phone call to have Neil’s mobile phone tracked. Triangulation could be used, but that would require Neil making or receiving calls to hit towers. According to Topham, he wasn’t making or receiving calls right now, so it was a long shot.
All of this would take a considerable amount of time. Time they probably didn’t have. But at least the ball was rolling.
Following the phone calls, he approached HQ. The many windows stared at him from the long building front. It would be so easy to consider every room in this place a separate entity, but they weren’t. Every room was a part of a whole. On so many times in its history, it had worked so smoothly as one.
But not today. This whole sorry investigation was a mess of parts, not working smoothly. Each piece of this bloody puzzle circled each other, with teeth bared, unwilling to share, unwilling to unify.
Susie Long, Louis Mayers, Neil Solomon, David Sturridge, Chloe Ward.
To unify all of this – he knew he would have to go back to the source of it all.
Christian Severance.
And the secrets of his past.
16
MAYERS DID NOT have to worry about Neil waking. He’d mixed water with an anaesthetic and then, using an oral syringe pressed against the interior of his cheek, he’d squirted it slowly in. Neil’s reflexes had taken over and he’d swallowed.
Meanwhile, the concentration of the chemicals in Susie’s bloodstream had subsided slightly. Her eyes were now fully open, and she was observing her surroundings. He dragged an arm chair around to face her and propped Neil up in it.
Susie stared at Neil’s unconscious face.
‘This is Uncle Roland,’ Mayers said.
She creased her face in confusion.
‘Who is this, Susie?’ he asked.
She tried to shake her head from side-to-side to indicate that she didn’t know, but it simply flopped against one shoulder and then the other.
‘This is Uncle Roland,’ he said.
Again, she showed her uncertainty.
So, he repeated the statement and the question again and again, noticing, each time, her expression becoming less and less confused.
After pressuring her for a considerable length of time, he made one last attempt. ‘Who is this, Susie?’
This time she murmured something. It was incomprehensible, but it was enough to give Mayers cause for celebration. He smiled. Progress.
So, he pressed on. He went through this process countless times for the best part of an hour, until he was able to ask, ‘Who is this Susie?’
And she was able to reply, ‘Uncle Roland.’
Then, he gave her more of his cocktail, readying her for the final visualisation.
The first thing that Yorke did in his office was something that would surely come back to burn him. Severely. He looked up DC Wayne Bradley’s details, knowing, as he scribbled it down on a post-it note, that this search would be flagged up if Madden and company decided to trawl through his account at a later date.
But, for now, he shrugged it off. The way it was going, he was unlikely to have any time later to pursue Harry before the vigilante mission was done and dusted anyway. And, if by some miracle, he did have time, and he prevented Proud’s murder, would these not be mitigating circumstances?
Would they not be turn-a-blind-eye circumstances?
Somehow with by-the-book Madden involved, he doubted it.
Then, with the matter of Bradley’s location ticked off his list, he went to the incident room where Topham was staring at a board swollen with information.
Yorke stood back for a moment, watching Topham working from picture to picture, scribbling notes onto a pad. His colleague was so lost in thought that when Yorke came up beside him, he flinched.
Yorke knew that this was the moment he should tell his friend about Neil’s appointment with Louis Mayers AKA the Conduit, but doing so, would fling him all the way from useful to God-knows-what, and the only way to put this whole fucking thing to bed, to coin a phrase from Madden that plagued his every thought, was to have someone as useful as Topham beside him.
‘The chain belongs to Severance,’ Yorke said. ‘Always has done. From the word go.’
Topham nodded.
‘The answer is there,’ Yorke said, pointing at the soup of information dripping down the board. ‘It always has been. In Severance’s chain.’
‘So, what do we do now then?’
Yorke went back to the beginning and put a finger on a photo of Christian Severance as a schoolboy. ‘We start at the beginning of the chain, and we go again.’
Mayers had always been fascinated by how much of the real world you could alter within a visualisation. Tweaks with the lighting; manipulation of the temperature; adjustments of sound… To a certain extent, the world could be y
our playground. However, to alter the narrative of the real event was a whole different ballgame. Not only was that unethical, but it was also futile.
The patient’s mind would always fight back.
But things felt different this time. The combination of both his cocktail, and the adapted process of HASD, had led him down a promising avenue.
He still began with the basics. The tweaks. The room in which Susie witnessed her grandmother’s final moments was darker now; a slight parting in the curtains allowed a slither of moonlight for some visibility, but that was all. The window was closed, and the room was stifling hot. Finally, he crowned it with a stench; not just of sweat, but of excrement, and the foulness you’d associate with only the most death-ridden of locations – abattoirs, and places of genocide.
Mayers allowed some of the original narrative to play out: the grandmother’s shallow breathing, her fight between consciousness and unconsciousness, and the despairing uncle leaning over her. The main difference this time was that the older Susie was no longer a passive observer. She was the eight-year-old forced to endure her uncle’s actions. Mayers was overjoyed when Susie, from within this visualisation, questioned the appearance of Uncle Roland. ‘He seems different somehow. Looks different. But I know it’s him. I know it’s that … that ... murderer.’
Mayers played with one end of his white moustache, holding back whoops of delight.
She saw him. She saw Neil Solomon in place of her original uncle! It was working.
He took her through the part of the adapted narrative in which Roland readied the knife.
‘Watch him,’ Mayers said. ‘Watch Uncle Roland look down on your grandmother with hate.’
‘She’s crying,’ Susie said.
‘Yes! And what’s he saying now?
‘He’s saying: you bitch! You always made me feel so worthless.’
Mayers rose to his feet. To think, he thought, I could alter a real narrative to this extent – Adams you would stand in wonder!
‘God!’ Susie cried. ‘He’s got a knife to her throat.’
‘And where are you, Susie?’
‘I’m at the door. I was told not to come. I said I was going to the toilet. I lied.’
Mayers moved into the next part of the altered narrative. ‘But you sensed something was wrong, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, somehow I knew that he was going to hurt her.’
‘Look down at your hand, Susie, do you see the knife there? The knife that you collected from the kitchen on the way here?’
‘No … I’m confused … the knife is in his hand.’
Damn, he thought. Trying to run before I can walk!
He needed to teach her to collect the knife from the kitchen.
‘A big knife,’ he would tell her, again and again. ‘A bigger knife than him.’
Then, after that part of the narrative was ironed out, he taught her what to do with that knife. He told her again and again to ‘save her grandmother.’ He explained to her, in detail, how she could do this.
And she followed his instructions with more enthusiasm than he’d anticipated!
Mayers realised he was on the cusp of something very special. What better displacement is there? To totally eradicate the experience – as if it never happened!
He sighed when he realised, with great sadness, that the only people he would ever share this experience with were Christian Severance, Susie Long and, of course, Neil Solomon.
Anthony Morris’ mouth felt like it was full of sandpaper. Awareness came in little sparks, and it took a while before consciousness finally blazed. He had no idea how long he’d been out; it could have been weeks for all he knew. As he emerged from the swirl, his eyes homed in on a solitary strip light, which appeared to tremble. As comprehension of his predicament grew, he realised that it wasn’t trembling, it was simply swarming with flies and midges.
He sat upright against the concrete wall of what must have been a three-hundred square-foot storage unit. To his left was a steel roll-up door. Ahead of him was nothing. To the right of him was a man chained to a metal chair with his head slumped forward.
Memory came at him like a bulldozer; a disfigured man spraying him in the face with something. He gulped air and his hand flew to his mouth.
It took him a minute or two to regain composure and to acknowledge that he, unlike the other man, was not chained up.
He looked at the steel roll-up door. Even if it was locked tight, he could bang on it and scream merry hell.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll get us out of here,’ he said to the unconscious man.
When he started to stand, which was difficult as he felt weak and woozy, he noticed there was a mobile phone pinned down under his thigh. He picked it up and pressed the button. The phone was unlocked, and the image used as its wallpaper made him gasp out loud.
It was his ten-year old daughter, playing outside in their front garden, smiling at whoever had stopped to take this photo.
Together, Topham and Yorke worked methodically through Severance’s chain again. Pausing only for Topham to try Neil again, and for Yorke to get an update on Gardner.
She wasn’t out of the woods yet. Yorke looked up at the heavens – he wasn’t a religious man, but knew a quick, silent nod to the legend, be He real or otherwise, wouldn’t do any harm.
And when Yorke lowered his head back down from the prayer, his eyes settled on a newspaper clipping of Severance collecting an award for a remarkable discovery. He’d read it before, but he read it again, to confirm his sudden realisation.
Severance thanked his mentor, a man called Robert Webster, a total of three times during that acceptance speech.
Yorke acknowledged the sudden rush of blood. Robert Webster was the key to unlocking this whole sorry chain.
He picked up the phone and made the necessary calls.
The Conduit opened the front door for him.
Severance noticed the pride on his doctor’s face, and raised his eyebrows.
‘Yes, I do look rather happy, don’t I?’
Severance nodded.
‘Made a remarkable breakthrough. You could fill books with the progress I have made today. What I have shown. It’s actually quite sad that I have to go away for a while.’
The Conduit looked over Severance’s shoulder at the old Fiesta he’d driven up in; he had a hungry look in his eyes. ‘Where’s the girl? In the boot?’
Severance shook his head, and thought, enough is enough. You’ve had your fill, Doctor. No more.
The Conduit closed the door behind Severance. ‘I don’t understand, Christian, where is Anthony Morris’ daughter?’
Severance led the way to the lounge. He found some notepaper and wrote the Conduit a message: It is in hand. We don’t need her here with you.
‘I disagree. It would have been safer if you’d brought her here.’
I went to Robert’s grave first. I made my decision there. We are finished now, Doctor.
‘You’ll be finished when I tell you we’ve finished.’ The Conduit’s face flushed.
Severance maintained eye-contact with the Conduit. He’d never challenged him on this level before. It was essential that he showed no weakness.
Severance waited until the red faded from the Conduit’s face and then wrote him another message: Finished. And now I’m going. As was planned.
The Conduit sighed.
Severance noticed a phone on the sofa he didn’t recognise. He wandered over to pick it up.
The wallpaper image was of two middle-aged men he didn’t know. They had their cheeks pressed together. One was holding the camera at arm’s length to take the selfie. He noticed that there were twelve missed calls on this phone. All calls were from a Mark Topham.
Severance raised his eyebrows to express curiosity.
‘Yes, my breakthrough! You really must come and see.’
Severance nodded and slipped the phone into his trouser pocket.
Severance followed the Conduit down the st
eps to the cellar where he’d been knocked unconscious by Susie many hours earlier. He could hear movement coming from within.
The Conduit turned back to look at him. ‘Don’t worry, Christian. It is perfectly safe. I have her on a loop. Frozen in a moment. It will not stop until the drugs wear off, or she passes out from exhaustion.’
He nodded and opened the cellar door.
Christian Severance had seen and experienced many horrifying things in his time.
But never anything like this.
Information on Robert Webster came in quickly.
Like Severance, Webster had been a remarkable scientist; and, according to this newspaper article, a phenomenal mentor.
When Severance had received the award reported on in this article, Webster had been three years from retirement. He’d been around the scientific block more than a few times.
Quick Google searches unlocked more evidence that Severance and Webster had been close. Webster had referred to him, in one interview in the New Scientist, as one of the ‘most remarkable young scientists he’d ever met.’ Another more informal interview had seen Webster referring to Severance as ‘the son he’d never had.’
Yorke wouldn’t have been doing his job properly had he not considered all explanations for this close relationship, including a sexual one; however, he considered it more likely that Severance had simply found a man he could idolise, rather than a man who just wanted to exploit him. A man like Marcus Long.
After the attempt on Severance’s life, two years prior to his planned retirement, Webster had suffered a stroke.
‘Was this stroke brought on by the fact that his protégé had just had his life destroyed?’ Topham said.
‘Well, it wouldn’t have helped,’ Yorke said. ‘I guess it comes down to Severance’s interpretation of events, so I suspect it would have something to do with it.’
Further phone calls indicated that Webster had left all of his possessions to his brother, Frederick Webster, who currently resided in Australia.