by Jane Adams
‘We’ve replanted the orchard,’ she said. ‘Kept what old trees still gave fruit and grubbed out the rest. We’ve replanted with old varieties, apples, pears, plums, and of course it’s all organic. We grow most of our own vegetables. You should see the size of the freezers Irene’s got in the cellar.’
‘Irene does most of the cooking then?’
Mitch laughed. ‘Irene knows most. She supervises and the rest of us work on a rota.’
‘How many live here? Irene mentioned fifteen for lunch.’
‘There are twenty-two altogether. Some have jobs away from home and we have ten children on the site. The youngest was born here. Elaine went into labour early and didn’t quite make it to the hospital.’
‘You still believe in all that then? Work, hospitals, doctors . . .’
Mitch laughed at him. ‘Oh, George, what do you think we are here? The Prophet teaches that we should take the best of the old, the best of the new and keep knowledge alive and growing.’
George smiled at her. ‘I don’t know what you’re like, Mitch. You’ll have to teach me.’ He paused, looking obediently at the old roses that Mitch assured him would be spectacular in June. ‘You do seem happy though,’ he conceded.
‘And will you tell my father that?’
‘I can tell him. He won’t believe me. He feels it, you know, not seeing you. And he’s drinking rather more than is good for him.’
‘I’m sorry for that. I truly am. But they could see me any time. They could drive over, just as you did. Stay for lunch, spend time meeting the others. I’ve told them that, but they just won’t come here.’
‘Knowing your father, does that surprise you?’
Mitch shook her head. ‘George, I call them twice a week. I write. I tell them what I’m doing here. I tell them about my work, but they won’t come here and I don’t want to go home.’
‘Afraid they might convince you to stay if you did?’
‘A bit of me is afraid they might force me to if I did.’
‘Force you?’
‘Oh, come on George, don’t go all innocent on me. They wouldn’t be the first desperate parents to pay a fortune for someone to deprogramme their kid. But I’m not a kid anymore. I’m my own person and I’m happy here.’
They walked in silence through the formal gardens at the back of the house and George commented on how well tended everything was.
Mitch nodded. ‘We’ve got a couple of very gifted garden designers on the team. They take outside projects too and the rest of us are rostered for weeding, grass cutting and the rest. I just do my basic couple of hours a week, but those more into gardening choose to do almost all of their duty time in the gardens.’
‘Duty time?’
She grinned at him. ‘A place like this doesn’t run itself and in the conference season it’s really hectic. This time of year, though, it belongs to the family and it’s really peaceful.’
‘The family? You think of these people that way?’
‘Yes, I do. I love my parents, George, but I’ve always needed more affection than Dad knows how to give. And Mum, well, I’ve never really known what to make of her and the feeling’s mutual, you know that.’
Knowing Mitch’s parents, George felt he couldn’t argue. ‘They love you,’ he said finally.
‘I know they do. I know.’
There was a moment of discomfort between them. George let it sit for a while and then asked, ‘How many work outside?’
‘Most of us, at least part-time. There are a handful of people who concentrate on running this place day-to-day and they do the bulk of the cooking, but we’re all expected to help and we have a couple of part-time staff for the pre-school kids. We used outside help till we got our own trained. The older ones go off to school as usual. In the summer, when people come for meditational retreats and such, we run a crèche and hire staff as we need from one of the agencies.’
‘And you? Your father said you’d given up your job.’
Mitch laughed again. ‘Which job? As of a week ago I was working as an analyst at a biochemical company in Peterborough, but I’ve just landed something much better.’
‘Oh?’
‘Next month I’m off to Cambridge. I’ve got a research fellowship. Pay’s not good but it’s the first step on a really big ladder. Biotechnology, exactly the field I trained for.’
‘I’m happy for you, Mitch, I really am. Will that mean you have to move away?’
‘I’ve got lodgings for the week with family friends of Bryn and Irene. People they knew before they came here. And yes, we do still keep in touch with non-members. I’ll drive back at weekends. The community is helping me to buy a car. It’s a cut in wages, so I won’t be able to contribute as much, but everyone’s so pleased for me.’
‘And there’s no problem with you moving away like that? Aren’t they worried you might not come back?’
Mitch stopped walking and turned to face him. ‘Look, George, I know you’re here with the best of intentions, but listen to me. This isn’t some closed-door cult. When we join this chapter, or any of the others around the country, we make a commitment to the community and yes, most of what we earn goes into the community.’
‘Ah. I wondered when we would get to the money side.’
‘Enough, George. We all get to keep a good portion of what we earn. Families get to keep more, of course, because their kids need things that the community can’t provide. School trips, fashionable clothes, all the growing-up things that kids need these days. We keep our private bank accounts and have the freedom to spend our own money any way we please, and when we need something extra, like I need a car, the community helps with it.
‘We’ve no other commitments. No food to buy or rent to pay. But the most important thing is this. If I woke up tomorrow morning and decided this wasn’t for me, there’s a gate over there to which we all have keys and I could pack my stuff and go. I wouldn’t even have to say goodbye if I didn’t want.’
‘Can you be sure of that?’
‘Yes. Yes, I can. Two people left last year. I can give you their addresses if you like. I still write to both of them and they write back. We don’t want people here who can’t give 100 per cent of themselves. As the Prophet says, not everyone can make the grade. There’s still work for people to do, even on the outside.’
‘And those who don’t fit in any longer, Mitch? Are they told to leave?’
She shook her head vehemently. ‘It isn’t like that,’ she said. ‘People make up their own minds if they want to stay or go.’
‘But not everyone can join in the first place, can they? What’s the selection procedure? How was it decided, for instance, that you belonged here?’
‘The Prophet spoke to me,’ Mitch said softly, ‘and I listened to what he had to say.’
* * *
George spent the afternoon at Sommers House and left only after the evening meal was over and he was told gently that the meeting time that followed was a private affair.
‘You are more than welcome to stay,’ Bryn told him. ‘Feel free to wander round the house or the gardens until we finish. We meditate together for about an hour and then discuss any business that the chapter might have.’
‘Chapter?’ George enquired. It was the second time he had heard the community spoken of in that way.
‘Like the Hell’s Angels.’ Mitch grinned at him. ‘Yeah, I know, bad joke, though Bryn ought to own up that he was the first to make it.’
Bryn smiled back at her. ‘The Prophet says that we are chapters in the book of life,’ he said. ‘That we all fit together to make the full story.’
George decided he would leave. It was a long drive home and he felt he ought to call in and see Patrick on the way. He told Mitch so.
‘Tell them what you’ve seen here,’ Mitch said. ‘That I’m happy and I’m working hard at my career. That I’m not brainwashed or locked away, and that we’d all love it if they’d come over.’
As George d
rove away, most of the community stood waving on the step, the children chasing after the car until their parents called them back.
He could understand why Mitch wanted to belong here. It was, in its way, the perfect solution for her. A place to belong with enough freedom that she could feel in control of her own destiny and enough restriction to make her feel secure.
He doubted Patrick would see any of it that way. Like George, Patrick had seen too much of the world not to be wary of perfection.
Chapter Five
It was dark by the time Ray reached Mallingham and parked in a side street close to St Leonard’s Church. St Leonard’s was Victorian Romanesque, with a rounded apse and an ugly 1960s hall tacked on the side, reached through the vestry. When Ray had first visited the church it had been surrounded by narrow terraced streets, but now it stood alone, the final outpost of what had once been a community but was now merely a central island in a sea of rubble.
The vicarage had been demolished the year before, Ray remembered reading in the papers. There had been a general protest about its destruction. Victorian, like its church, but with an interior remodelled in the Art Nouveau style, complete with a spectacular stained-glass window above the main staircase and a depiction of the four seasons in decorated tiles on the oak fire surround of the drawing room.
Ray had been there once with the friend he had come to see. The local protest had at least meant the rescue of some of the more spectacular décor. It had been bought by a local reclamation yard and Ray had amused himself imagining the stained glass and nubile young women representing spring and autumn decorating the hall of some modern semi.
Inside St Leonard’s the oak pews were gone, together with the pulpit and the altar. The space that had once been occupied now yawned empty. A handful of volunteers were sorting clothes and stuffing them into bin liners. Martha, they told him, was in the hall and he should go on through.
The church hall had once been a community centre, used for youth clubs and pre-school playgroups. A new leisure centre had been built about a mile away and now those groups had migrated to it, leaving only the bare basketball hoops and the scuffed markings of the court on the stained floor. Two of the windows were still painted with Disney animals and the walls were stained with tiny, grubby handprints and fingerprints of red paint. The smell in the room reminded Ray forcibly of school dinners — how many years ago . . . don’t even ask — the faint scent of cabbage that lingered long after the vegetable and the peculiar odour of stale gravy mingled with the richer saucy aroma of baked beans.
Martha was serving, her customers lined up beside the trestle tables. She didn’t have room or permission to sleep them here, but Ray knew that she often bent the rules when the one small local hostel was full. Martha had a single-mindedness that was difficult to resist. It had been almost a year since he had last seen her. He had been in hospital at the time and too sick to take much notice of her being there, but she had come because he needed friends in his time of crisis and he had been drawn here tonight for much the same reason.
The notice of Harrison Lee’s death in the local paper had brought the memories back with a painful exactitude that only someone who shared them would understand. He knew that Martha would have felt the same and that she would have need of him.
There was no surprise when she saw him, only a quick smile that lifted her face from the ordinary. She had changed her hair, Ray noticed, had it straightened — relaxed, didn’t they call it? — and it was fastened at her neck by a coloured slide.
‘I need someone to pour tea, Ray,’ she called out to him. ‘Rowena, set him on, will you, darling? Your hands all right for that?’
‘I’m sure I can manage,’ Ray said.
Rowena smiled at him uncertainly, her gaze taking in the scarred face and awkward hands, clearly not quite comfortable with making him work. But she sorted him out with the tea urn and then went back to serving, glancing anxiously at him from time to time as though the task might prove too much.
It was twenty minutes before Martha had finished and beckoned him away.
She led him through into a small office behind the vestry. It was empty but for an old table and a couple of wooden chairs. A telephone stood on the desk beside a card index file and a framed photograph. The walls were plastered with pictures. Children, the elderly, men and women of every age between. Some had brief descriptions written beneath and locations, where and how they had last been seen. Each had been given a number relating to the index file. Ray had been only a sergeant when Martha first began this project with nothing more than a telephone and a handful of index cards, but it was no surprise to him that she was still involved. Once Martha got the bit between her teeth no one could stop her.
She knew why he had come.
‘I’m glad he’s dead,’ she told Ray. ‘But what he stood for isn’t dead. It just goes on getting stronger. And now their so-called Prophet’s supposed to be coming over for another lecture tour this summer. He should be banned from the country, Ray. Him and all his sort.’
Ray nodded, more in sympathy than agreement. ‘There’s nothing to connect him to Harrison Lee and what he did,’ he said softly.
‘Nothing but what they’re both a part of. That so-called religion of theirs. You know as well as I do, Lee would have taken over from Morgan if the law hadn’t caught up with him. Daniel Morgan killed himself rather than face the music and he named this Martyn Shaw to take over from him. That speaks for itself.’
Ray felt that he had to defend Shaw. ‘And the new organization has done everything it can to separate itself from the past, Martha.’
‘Others have died. You can’t deny that.’
‘When Lee was arrested, yes.’
‘They weren’t the only ones. Two suicides last year. Morgan poisoned their minds and you can’t tell me this new one hasn’t done the same.’
Ray sighed but knew it was no good arguing. Martha had every reason for hatred and nothing he could say or do would alter that. Morgan had been insane. There was no real doubt about that. He’d believed in his own power, talked about raising a new . . . what had he called it? Something like a messiah but that wasn’t the word he used. Ray couldn’t recall now. Lee had been involved in Morgan’s schemes, though there had been signs of a split between them. It had never been clear what this was about and Lee had never elaborated.
‘He still has his followers,’ Martha said quietly.
‘Who? Morgan?’
‘No. I mean that creature Lee. They keep separate from the rest. Pretend not to believe in this Shaw, but it’s all one.’ She looked up at him and her dark eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m afraid it’s all going to start again,’ she said. ‘Who knows what Lee told his people to do once he was dead. He vowed, Ray. Vowed in court that he’d come back and finish things.’
Ray pulled her close and held her tight. ‘He’s dead, Martha. What more can he do now?’ But his gaze fell on the framed photograph sitting on the desk. The picture of a nine-year-old boy with a bright smile and tight, close-cropped curls. Ray stared at it and knew that there were scars not even time could heal.
* * *
Katie was not unhappy at home, nor did she want to upset her foster parents. She had lived with them since a month after the explosion and, to her, Guy and Lisa Fellows were Mum and Dad, and their son, Gavin, only in fact a few months younger, was her brother.
She had, naturally enough, thought a lot about the events that had taken place before, but for the most part they were misty and vague and full of an unease that, even as a teenager and far removed in time, she found uncomfortable to dwell upon. She had become part of the Fellows family to such an extent that no one really talked about the time before. That people meeting the family for the first time assumed that she and Gavin must be twins, being so close in age. Assuming too that Katie, like Gavin, must be deaf, as the natural language used between them was almost always sign.
This had been a major factor in Katie’s settling wi
th the Fellows. Even eleven years on, Katie still did not like to speak. It wasn’t that she couldn’t, it wasn’t even that she didn’t want to communicate, as the lively signed conversations she had with her family testified. And it wasn’t that she felt she had secrets to hide that might be prised from her if she began to talk. It was more fundamental than that. Someone long ago had told Katie to be silent and Katie found it hard to break that commandment.
Sometimes, in the quiet of her own room, she practised. She would look into the mirror and force her lips into the shapes the words should make. It was a private ritual she had gone through ever since she had come to live with the Fellowses and one she wished with all her heart that she could share. She had an innate sense that it was important to keep alive her ability to speak, even if she rarely used it. The command had been in place, iron-bound and immutable, until the dreams began and everything in her life turned upside-down.
And now Katie could resist this new command no longer. There was someone she had to find. A new threat had arisen that she knew instinctively was linked to the events of eleven years before and a return of the old fears that had once visited her nightmares and woken her, screaming with terror.
On the night of 21 February Katie ran away from home. She didn’t want to go and she didn’t know why she was being made to leave, but the utter compulsion was far too much for her to resist. Earlier that day she had found for the first time that permission had been given to break the silence and the knowledge was terrifying in its implications. ‘He’s coming back,’ Katie had told her mother, ‘coming back.’ But she was unable to name the man whose face she saw, his features painted so clearly on her mind’s eye that she did not even need to close her eyes to see. Something bad was about to happen and Katie had to stop it, though how she could even begin to convey that to her mum and dad was beyond her.
Instead, she crept from their house a little after midnight, leaving behind a letter that explained as best she could, together with an apology for borrowing the £50 emergency money that her father always kept in the house. There was only one solution that Katie could see. She had to follow the dream, and in the dream she had seen the face of a second man, more elusive and fragmentary, his image sitting stubbornly at the edges of her consciousness as though the other one, the one she feared, was trying to push him away.
