Amelia
Merryn sits down again, her expression calm. ‘One of the fishermen found the boat, Anne. They told Father. They had to tell Father. He was in charge of everything, back then. He was born in this house, you know. Although it was very different at that time. A proper working house. His father was the Father, then. His mother lived with the other mothers, and they all shared the care of the children. They were self-sufficient, in every way. No one came onto the island. No one went away. But then the authorities on the mainland decided to send someone over. Said it was to check on the children.’ She picks up a strawberry and rolls it around in her hand, before popping it into her mouth. She chews with her mouth open, strawberry juice running down her chin.
Amelia looks away. She tries to catch the eye of one of the staff, but they keep their eyes fixed ahead. They won’t get involved with this.
‘Some of the children were quite . . . ill,’ Merryn continues. ‘I suppose you’d call them deformities, or disabilities. Some of the illnesses had been passed down over many generations of Fathers. And my Father’s Father . . . well, he was quite mad. Mine, despite his strict adherence to the rules, was mostly kind. To me, certainly. To some of the others, not so much. But when they found the boat man, they traced a path back until they found my den.’
‘How? He was lying at the bottom of the cliffs, next to his smashed boat . . . you didn’t even go near him. How could they have thought it was anything to do with you? Why didn’t you tell them about me?’
She waves a hand, dismissing Amelia’s questions. ‘No one knew anything about you. You were long gone.’
Amelia still doesn’t understand. But there’s something more pressing that she wants answered. ‘What did your father do to you?’
Merryn laughs, a sad, broken laugh. ‘He punished me, of course. Kept me locked up. Said he wanted to help me atone for my sin. For the only true sin that Father believed in was the taking of another’s life, and that, of course, is what I did. He’d decided that it was true, and there was no point in me denying it.’
‘But . . . no,’ Amelia says. ‘I pushed him. I left him.’
Merryn smiles. ‘Maybe it’d be easier if you just watch.’ She taps the side of her head and a screen appears behind her. She doesn’t turn round, but moves a little to the left, making sure that Amelia has a clear view.
The memory picks up where it left off in the other room. The last part that Amelia watched with James. Amelia as a girl, running down the hill back to the village, stumbling, half blinded by tears. Arriving at the shop, and hesitating . . . before she turns away, shoulders shaking with all the crying, and heads back to the beach.
‘I don’t understand,’ Amelia says. ‘How can you have my memory in here? I don’t have the tracker—’
Merryn shakes her head. ‘It’s not your perspective though, is it? You were being watched. I’ve already told you . . . Jago saw the whole thing, didn’t he?’
James. She still can’t take it in.
Then the view cuts back to the cliff. Strands of short, straggly hair flip against her face as the view pans around quickly. A hand pushes a couple of overgrown branches out of the way, before the view tilts down the cliff, right over the edge – showing now the thing that Amelia couldn’t have seen from her own vantage point back at the top. A steep, snaking path, overrun with grasses, all the way down to the rocks. A gull circles ahead, swoops down and opens its beak wide with that whooping warning cry.
This is George’s memory.
Amelia feels as if she’s experiencing this through a virtual reality simulator. She’s in George’s head, seeing through her eyes as she walks down the path, slowly, carefully, holding herself low, keeping close to the inside of the cliff face to keep out of the whirling wind.
She rounds the bend in the path and finds herself on the rocks, where she scrambles hand over foot, to reach the boat man, who is still half on, half off the flat rock. His hair moves gently with the waves, his hand draped over the rock, flipping upwards as the water clutches it, slapping back down as the waves diminish and retreat into the sea.
She makes it across the rocks to the man’s body. She bends over, the wind grabbing her hair again, whipping it across her face. She takes his hand and pulls, with some difficulty, flipping the man onto his back. She bends closer, puts an ear close to his face. And then the man’s hand moves. It reaches for her and she pulls away as his mouth opens in a cry. She falls back onto the flat rock, arms smacking down, breaking her fall as the man grabs at air, tries to turn himself over. Tries to grip onto the rock. The back of his head is dark and wet, with water and blood and matted hair. She crawls away, running her hands across the smaller rocks wedged into the shale at the foot of the cliff.
‘Oh God . . .’ Amelia says, tears springing into her eyes. ‘He was still alive.’
She blinks, before fixing her gaze back to the projection of George’s memory. The man is almost on his knees when she finds the rock, grips it tight.
She gets to her feet as the man tries to get to his, but he’s injured from his fall. His leg buckles under him, probably broken . . . and he lets out a cry of frustration, which turns into a scream as she lurches forward and brings the rock down on the back of his head.
Again.
Again.
Amelia flinches, almost feeling the force of the blows juddering up her arm as they rain down – the tightness in her fists as she grips the rock.
Then the man slumps into the water again and she scrambles away, tossing the rock into the roaring sea. She turns, stumbles. The bottom of her T-shirt gets trapped and she yanks it hard, ripping it as she manages to pull it away. Then she looks up, finding the cliff path once more, takes a deep breath, and runs as best she can against the steep incline without a backwards glance.
The scrap of T-shirt. So that’s how the fisherman knew that George had been there?
Amelia hadn’t even realised she was crying, but now she wipes away tears with the backs of her hands. The screen is frozen in place, showing the broken man lying on the rock.
‘You’re a monster.’ She says it under her breath, her eyes still fixed on the screen.
Merryn taps the side of her head again and the screen vanishes. ‘Maybe.’ She shrugs. ‘I guess I was born that way. You can’t have generations of inbreeding and fail to display some undesirable traits. At least I was physically normal – that’s how I’ve always consoled myself.’
‘You could’ve left . . . run away . . .’
‘I did, eventually. Although I had to wait until I was sixteen, and they had to send me to school on the mainland. I taught myself all I could from books, while I was locked away – and I got myself into college and then university using a fake name.’
‘But I assume Merryn Hicks is your name? Why did you change it back?’
‘I had to. So I could apply for ownership of the island. They took all the other descendants away, and Jago was already gone – so when Father died, it was only me who could lay claim. Only me who wanted to. You’d been fascinated by the island and the lighthouse, and I wanted to turn it into something nice for you.’
Amelia feels sick. ‘Wait, what? You did this for me? But you didn’t even know me. You don’t know me—’
‘You were a friend to me that day, Anne. I told you this. I didn’t want you to go through life feeling guilty for something you didn’t actually do . . . but I couldn’t find you. Not at first.’
‘Not at first?’ Amelia feels goosebumps sliding all over her arms. ‘When did you find me?’
‘I found you via your university applications. That was one of the first systems I accessed—’
‘Accessed? You mean hacked . . .’
‘Yes, but I wasn’t doing it to cause trouble for anyone. Not like those idiot boys in their bedrooms bringing down banking systems and blackmailing people when they find their profiles on extramarital dating sites. I mean, I could do all that, but it’s pretty pathetic, is it not?’
&n
bsp; ‘So what did you do?’
Merryn grins. ‘Once I saw where you’d been accepted, I made sure you were given the full maintenance grant. Plus a few extras that I was able to swing here and there. Nothing too ostentatious. I didn’t want you to get suspicious and question it with anyone.’
Amelia closes her eyes. ‘I did notice the extra payments. And I couldn’t understand how I got the full grant, when I hadn’t even applied because I didn’t think I was eligible. I said something about money to my grandmother, and she answered quite cryptically – so I just assumed it was her. I knew she’d set up a trust fund for me when I was little . . .’
‘Your grandmother’s payments were about fifty quid a month,’ Merryn says. ‘Nice for a few drinks in the union bar and the occasional fancy burger at the weekend, but nothing more than that. But I made sure you’d never get into debt.’ She lays a hand on Amelia’s arm. ‘I was pleased that you never went to the bank and asked them about it. I understood that in some way you probably knew.’
‘What?’ Amelia’s eyes fly open. ‘How could I have known that you were . . .’ She bats Merryn’s hand away. ‘Don’t touch me. Stay away from me. I can’t . . . have you been monitoring me all this time?’
‘Of course I have. I’ve been looking out for you. Things have been hard, despite all the honourable work you’ve done, haven’t they?’
Amelia sighs. She has nothing else to say to this woman. She’s completely insane, and she’s been spying on her, manipulating her life since she was eighteen years old – after one chance meeting one summer when they were children. There is no way to rationalise it. All she can do now is try to get out of here alive. But she can’t tell what Merryn’s endgame might be. Does she want her to stay on the island with her? She looks away. She doesn’t want to engage with this lunatic any further.
‘Did you know you’d found Father?’ Merryn says.
Amelia shakes her head. ‘What are you talking about?’ A horrible sick feeling starts to roll over her stomach. ‘Found him where?’
‘He wasn’t old when he died. He was strong. He might’ve lived another twenty, thirty years. He might have become Father to others. I couldn’t have that. Like I said, the other families had been taken away to the mainland to start new lives. Safe lives. It was only me and my mother left, but there was always the possibility that Father could lie his way into starting a new family. I couldn’t let him hurt anyone else.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I told him I wanted to meet him, here. In this house.’ She raises her hands, gestures around the room. ‘I told him I wanted to know all about the old ways, about where he’d come from, about how life was before the authorities moved everyone across to the other island and burned this place down.’ She laughs sadly. ‘He agreed. I think he was still convinced that the old ways were the right ways. That his “family” had been wronged.
‘I brought him here, and I killed him. It was simple, actually. I knew after the boat man that I could do it. That I could switch my brain to a different place and kill without remorse. Besides, I did them both a favour. The boat man and my father. I left his body out on the hillside, let the birds do their work. I knew no one would come here and find him. I came back a couple of years later to start work on the house, and I had one of the staff scatter the bones around the island. It gave me a little thrill when you held a piece of him in your hand. Powerless. Nothing left of him but bones.’
‘You need help, Merryn. You’ve suffered terrible trauma.’ Amelia shakes her head. ‘What’s happened today is terrible, of course it is. But I don’t think you know what you’re doing . . . or what you’ve done. Your family history, everything that happened to you . . .’
Merryn stands up, shaking her head in exasperation. ‘I thought you would get it. I thought if I could just get you here, then . . .’
‘Then what? That I’d understand? You killed six people today. People who had no reason to die.’
‘They did terrible things, Anne. If you do terrible things, then you must be punished. You know that. You’ve punished yourself enough over the years, and for what?’ She laughs, but it sounds hollow. ‘You didn’t even kill the boat man.’
Amelia stares at her. ‘I was there. I pushed him . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Merryn pulls the tub of cheese straws across the table. Offers it to Amelia.
She shakes her head. ‘Jesus. No. I’m not touching anything that’s been on this table. I saw what happened to the others.’
Merryn nods. ‘I knew you’d be safe, if it came down to this. I read your dietary preferences questionnaire that I sent out with the invitation. No dairy.’ She takes a bite of a cheese stick. ‘These really are good, you know. You don’t know what you’re missing.’ She shoves the rest in her mouth, then starts on another. ‘Jago’s pathetic “I don’t eat” thing presented a problem, but it gave me a chance to try out my new toy. The tasering was quite a thrill. I’m on Prototype III, by the way. I have a chip embedded in my skull. I’ve been monitoring my own brainwaves and I’m close to achieving what I wanted. To remove chunks of memory without affecting the flow of everything else. So close. Such a pity. All the data are safely stored though.’ She grins, taps the side of her head again. ‘All linked to your own biometrics, of course.’ She takes another bite of the cheese stick, then looks down at the remaining piece, turning it over between her fingers. ‘I modified a cyanide analogue. Normally it’s instant death with that stuff, but I was able to tweak it. Lost a few rodents along the way, but I don’t think anyone is crying over a few dead rats . . .’ She coughs.
Amelia looks on, horrified. ‘Merryn, no . . . don’t do this . . .’
Merryn coughs again, and a spray of spittle shoots out of her mouth. Her face is already turning pink. ‘Too late.’ She continues to cough. ‘There was always a Plan A and a Plan B.’ She falls forward, grips the table. Manages to twist her head to the side. Her eyes are bulging now. ‘Plan A was the one where you thanked me for being a friend . . . where you told me you wanted to stay here with me.’ White foam spurts out of her mouth. ‘Plan B is the one where you need to deal with it all alone.’
Amelia throws herself forward, grabs Merryn by the chin. ‘Merryn, no,’ she says again. ‘Please, you must have an antidote for this. I don’t know what you mean. Deal with what? I don’t know what you want me to do.’
Merryn smiles one last time as her head falls backwards, her eyes rolling up into white. ‘Goodbye, Anne.’
Amelia
Emily, one of the waitresses from earlier, appears, carrying a tray with a bottle of brandy and several glasses. Following close behind is Harvey. He gives Amelia a brief smile, then picks up the bottle and twists the cap, breaking the seal. He pours a large measure into each glass, then sets the bottle down. He slides a glass towards her, but she ignores it. Does he think she’s stupid enough to drink anything else these people are offering?
Harvey picks up a glass and drains it, then refills it. The other staff members, who have been slowly filing into the room, follow his lead. Amelia looks at them all – at the relief on their faces, at their shaking hands – and decides that maybe, just maybe, they are not all the same as their boss.
She picks up a glass and takes a tentative sip. The liquid burns her throat, seems to do something to her head immediately. It’s harsh, but then it calms down. And she calms down along with it. ‘I suppose you’re in charge now?’
Harvey offers a small laugh. ‘Nope.’
She glances around at the other staff. They look exhausted, and Amelia wonders how long they’ve all been here, carrying out Merryn’s deranged plans.
She turns back to Harvey. ‘Who is in charge, then? Is there someone else I haven’t met yet? Someone else who’s been hiding behind a screen?’
He shakes his head. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet?’
She takes another sip of her drink, then another. Harvey leans forward and refills her glass. When she doesn’t respond,
he lays a hand on her arm.
‘It’s you, Amelia. It was always going to be you.’
She shakes her head. ‘What? No. God, I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t want to know anything more about it. I want to go home and forget all of this ever happened.’
‘You know if you stay, you can work on that.’ He gestures at the staff. ‘They’re serving drinks and clearing up the mess tonight, but these people are scientists, Amelia. Every one of them has been trained by Merryn. Every one of them has the capability to carry on the work. Well, almost . . .’
She looks around the room at the tired, pale faces. ‘What do you mean, almost?’
‘You hold the key now, Amelia. Merryn left strict instructions. You need to take her place. You need to authorise the research. If you don’t, it has to be destroyed.’
She swallows. She doesn’t want this responsibility. If all the things that Merryn claims to have developed are true, then there is a huge amount of good that could be done with her knowledge . . . and bad, of course.
‘You don’t have to decide now,’ he says. ‘There’s a package for you. Take a look on the way home. Or when you get home. Think about it for a while. We’ve got enough to be going on with at the moment, sorting everything out here.’
‘The police will help with that though, won’t they?’ she says.
Harvey shakes his head. ‘We can’t do that, I’m afraid. That’s the one thing we do need to enforce. We can deal with it all, but you need to stick to the terms of the non-disclosure agreement. You can’t tell anyone what happened here.’
‘But . . . but . . . James? And Tiggy? And Giles and Lucy and Brenda and Scott . . . they didn’t deserve this. You can’t just make them disappear.’
Emily walks over to her, carrying a box. She holds it out to Amelia, gives her a smile. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers, then turns and walks away. She sits back on one of the sofas with the others, and none of them says any more.
The Last Resort Page 24
