Mrs H-W strikes back
I am really clever. Exceptionally clever, and I’m so excited and proud of myself that I’m doing daring things without Shandy and I’m going to get into that flat and find some piece of evidence that I can give Roman, because I am brave like that.
It’s 5:54 p.m. I sit in reception at Martin Elstree’s office wearing my best job interview trouser suit, which I haven’t had time to press but have managed to de-cat-hair for the occasion. I’m wearing make-up and my hair is wrapped in a silk scarf that I nicked from O’s drawer. I sit with my legs crossed and every time someone asks me if they can help me I say that I’m being taken care of, even though a stream of people are steadily exiting the offices for close of business. I’ve got to wait it out. Eventually the receptionist will have to go on some errand and I can get the keys. I saw where she put them. In her top drawer, next to her Tic Tacs, with a ton of other keys.
It’s 5:59 and I’m sure I’m going to get kicked out, when the receptionist runs out of Post-its. I hear her telling a colleague that she’s forwarding calls while she makes a run to the supply closet.
When she goes through an interior door, I waste no time throwing myself across her desk, legs flipping in the air like a surfer mounting a board. I whip the drawer open triumphantly.
The keys are not there.
Fuck.
I look in other drawers, and then other other drawers. And just when I’m about to panic and run away, I find them. They’ve fallen inside a box of tissues. I rip them out and slam the drawer shut. A hank of torn tissue floats gently to the carpet as I hurl myself out of the office and into the corporate hallway, the lift, the lobby . . . I’m out of the building.
I did it! I’ve got his keys!
I can’t run in these heels but I walk fast towards Bank Station. Got to do this fast, before I lose my nerve. I hope he hasn’t changed the door code.
Rodney, I’m going in. I have Elstree’s keys, the bastard. I’m going to check his flat. I’m afraid he’s done something to O. If I don’t come out in an hour, I’ll need rescuing.
Shandy’s unicorn says, Wait, could this be dangerous? I think you should wait.
It’s fine, he’s not home. He’s at in a meeting at work. I heard the receptionist putting his calls through to a conference room.
You shouldn’t go in there alone.
Shut up, you’re just a bot. Tell Shandy what I said.
Convoys Wharf is super-posh. They are putting up another building alongside Martin’s and there’s a lot going on outside. A tall crane looms inside the walled building site, and I see pigeons and seagulls circling around both buildings. I never would have looked twice at them before.
I’m still thinking about Sidney’s damn message.
Intrusions have been traced. They have recordings and are reverse-engineering. If intruders identified, criminal charges could be forthcoming. Pls advise.
Who are ‘They’? Would Elstree be the person asking for advice on criminal charges? But he’s an intellectual property solicitor, not a criminal lawyer.
I check the parking garage for the hog but there’s no sign of it, so I head on up to Elstree’s flat. I haven’t bothered wearing a mask or gloves. It’s still daylight. I’m going to be on video, nothing I can do about that, but if I come and go without creating a disturbance then there’s no reason for Elstree to check his video. Unless he’s instructed the flat to ping him when someone comes in, in which case I’m screwed. Also, if anyone notices the office keys are missing, Elstree can put two and two together and I’m screwed. But it’s a long way from his office across the Thames to Convoys Wharf – he can’t be here instantly.
All I have to do is get in, rescue O and get out.
‘O?’ I call. ‘Are you here? O, it’s me, Charlie. Make a sound if you’re here.’
There is no sound. I quickly search the flat in the eerie silence, but there’s no body, either. I feel deflated. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. If he has her, she’s in a warehouse somewhere or an abandoned Tube station or a boat. I just hoped, that’s all. I was sure if I came here, to the source, took the battle to Elstree instead of letting him come to me the way he has been doing all along, that I could get ahead of him.
Just being here reminds me how far behind I am. I’m standing in yet another luxury flat feeling like a Dickens street urchin. The place belongs in a Rolex ad. It’s open-plan with fantastic views over the Thames, everything white and spacious and frighteningly clean. Each piece of furniture is perfectly squared off and there isn’t a particle of dust.
He has a terrace, and that’s where I find the pigeons. I’m amazed that he’s allowed to keep them, considering the opinion most Londoners have of pigeons – but there they are, settled in their coop as the sun goes down. Their housing is modelled after a Swiss chalet – one small, twee detail in an otherwise too-cool-for-school decor.
I get hold of each of O’s birds and remove their pouches and trackers. I can’t take the birds with me, though, because I didn’t think to bring a cage. Unless I try to carry them in my backpack, which seems dodgy. Oh, fuck, I haven’t thought this through at all. Will he notice if he gets home and O’s birds are still here? I’ll have to leave it open and hope they go back to hers, or else the game is up.
I am getting panicky, but that doesn’t stop me noticing the birds are pecking at empty feed trays and their water bottle is empty, too. There is a plastic feed bin on the balcony. I open it and plunge the plastic scoop into the seed. It strikes something hard.
That’s odd.
I dig down with my hands and feel a hard, flat surface. Plastic. I find the edges and drag out a small Lucite box like the kind that crafty-types use to store beads. Aha. I blow the dust off of it, scoop some seed for the birds and retreat inside to investigate the box.
There are microdrives in the compartments.
I should grab them and run now, but I know this is the only chance I’m going to get to search this flat. What if the drives aren’t what I’m looking for and I’ve missed something really important because I grabbed the first thing I saw? I decide to whack them into the home-entertainment system and at least see what’s on them.
The system fires to life and offers me a guest login – enough to let me see what’s on the drives. But it’s disappointing. I whip through them one after the other. Everything seems to be routine backup folders. Invoices, Legal, Correspondence. I scroll down lists of suppliers, consultants, contractors. None of it means anything to me. I wish I could show it to O, who knows so much about these things. There must be some reason they were hidden in the birdseed bin.
Then I see the name ‘Haugh-Wombaur’.
Well. That’s distinctly odd. I open the file. A string of e-mails and attachments. I open the most recent.
To: Martin Elstree
Cc: Olivia Ogiyevich
From: Bettina Haugh-Wombaur
Re: Charlotte Aaron Invoice
Hi, as discussed with Olivia, please find attached my invoice for dream therapy with breakdown of hours worked. The total for my services comes to £3,481.15 inclusive of VAT. PayPal is fine. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need anything else in future.
Kind regards,
Bettina
WTF WTF WTF WTF?
I read it several times. Then I open the attached invoice, which has already been marked ‘PAID’.
Let’s just get this straight. Mrs H-W paid me a total of maybe . . . £320? Over a period of weeks. So why is O paying her ten times that for her ‘services’? What services? Farting? I can’t even.
This can’t be right. I start hunting through the other files for something that could explain what I’m seeing.
That’s when I find myself looking at my own Spacetime entries, offered to Elstree courtesy of O herself. Straight out of my supposedly secure BigSky encrypted personal system. Martin Elstree has records of all my professional dreams.
Secret Diary of a Prawn Star 1-17
Sec
ret Diary of a Prawn Star 18-39
Secret Diary of a Prawn Star 40-54
My heart stops and starts and stutters. She has hacked my earring. Elstree’s been into my dream files, right up to the most recent one. And he has been surveilling me all along, right back to before we ever met.
Of course, I knew they’d worked together. She did introduce us. But why would she share them with him of all people? Martin must be the actual Creeper, then. Did she give him the files to make it easier for him to attack me? And he had the cheek to offer to represent me!
I just can’t believe she would do this. Can’t get my head round it at all.
I Spacetime Mrs H-W.
‘Oh, hello, Charlotte. I’m about to go into the Underground.’
‘This won’t take long. I just need to know why you were paid for the work you and I did.’
There’s a pause.
‘I’m not sure I can discuss this with you. I signed a non-disclosure agreement.’
‘But you tricked me. I think you owe me an explanation.’
‘You’ll have to take it up with the party who hired me, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m taking it up with you. I know what the inside of your head looks like, so I suggest you tell me the truth.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Tell me the truth, Mrs Haugh-Wombaur.’
‘Well, Charlotte, I don’t really know why I was paid. I was told it was for a scientific study and that’s really all I know. If you want to find out more, you’ll have to ask the scientists.’
‘What scientists? Martin Elstree is not a scientist, so why was he paying you?’
‘I’m heading into the Underground now. We’re done. I’m going to block you, Charlotte, and if you try to contact me again I’ll report you to the Council for Alternative Therapies. Just a friendly warning.’
Dead link.
I’m so hopping mad that I nearly pass out on the floor then and there.
‘Report me to the Council for Alternative Therapies?’ Ranting sleepily, I stagger around the flat and then out onto the balcony. ‘What are they going to do to me, a past-life regression and toenail analysis? Ooh, I’m scared.’
But it’s like the bottom has dropped out of me. It’s all unravelling in my head now. O really did this to me. I can’t take it in.
Her words come back to me with the bite of irony:
You’re a Pollyanna.
You need tough dreams.
I’ve been trying to protect you.
How O approached me through my channel like just another ASMR client. How she convinced me I’d be helping her by moving in, so that I could feel better about the fact that she was helping me, so that I’d be emotionally bound to her. Even as she was using me as her little guinea pig.
And to think I came here half-expecting to find her a captive of Martin Elstree. They were in it together all along.
Our conversation about the BigSky study comes back to me. How I suggested that she look up the other study participants. Of course, she had done that long ago. That was how she found me. So what about the others? Who else is part of her schemes?
People are sleepwalking all over London. People are dying, and BigSky is planning to make big profit from ‘liminal programming’. As personal as this is for me, I’m not the only one. I have to find more. I have to find something that Roman can use. I have to stop this.
By now I’ve been in the flat for fourteen minutes. Knowing London traffic, I should be fine, but I get moving just in case. I switch off the home-entertainment system and am in the kitchen filling the pigeons’ water bottle out of basic decency when Martin Elstree breezes through the door and shuts it behind him smartly. He’s not surprised to see me. He walks over to the kitchen with a swinging, easy gait. He’s enjoying this.
‘Relax, relax. There’s no need for you to be afraid,’ he purrs. His voice is lovely, which makes it worse. ‘This is where you misunderstand me, Chaz.’
I know he’s calling me Chaz just to annoy me, yet I can’t suppress my reaction even though I’m aware of the pleasure he gets from it. I can see the irritation in my face reflected in his gleaming black fridge. I look into my own eyes. I’ve got to act my way through this. If he thinks I’m only here on a mission to find O, he might feel less threatened. I can’t let him find out how much I know.
‘Where is O?’ I cry, and he makes a sad-puppy face.
‘Worried about her, are we?’
‘You have O. I know you do. Just let her go. I’ll leave you alone if you let her go without hurting her. I’ll give up dreamhacking. I’ll move back to Stourbridge. Please, Martin.’
He shakes his head, taking the water bottle out of my hand and gesturing for me to step into the seating area, but I just stand there trembling. Stupid tears well in my eyes. I hate my weakness.
‘The way you talk to me, it’s like you think I’m a terrible person,’ he says, his brow rumpling with concern. ‘Please, have a seat. Can I offer you something to drink? Or are you hell-bent on the water?’
‘I was going to give it to the pigeons. I thought O was here.’
‘In the pigeon coop?’ He says it so mildly that I feel like a fool. Have I got everything wrong? No. No, I haven’t. I need to trust my instincts. I need to be like Shandy.
Shandy, help. He’s found me in the flat. He’s here. Help!
The signal sticks. He’s got a firewall up.
‘There’s no need for you to fear me,’ he says. ‘I only get rid of the people who are in my way. Nearly everyone else is safe. Plus, I’m a pretty nice guy, if you could just see that. It’s time we started cooperating instead of fighting each other.’
I wish I could laugh at him but I’m terrified. And angry. But mostly the first one.
‘It’s obvious you think I’m kind of an arsehole,’ he says genially.
‘No, of course I don’t, I’m sure you’re lovely. I have to go, I’m sorry . . . I misunderstood the situation, here’s your key.’
I fling the keys on the counter and dodge around him, sprinting for the door.
It’s locked.
Maybe I am dreaming. Maybe this is my subconscious churning up hundreds of low-budget movies to remind me of all my poor cinematic choices when I was twelve. I’ve been acting just like the stupid heroine who goes into the basement.
‘Please unlock the door. I need to leave.’
‘In good time. First we talk. Please sit down. You’re a bundle of nerves. I don’t know what you take me for. It was only a dream, that session we had. I thought you were a professional. I thought you were worldly. The way you hold my entertainment preferences against me is really quite juvenile.’
I open my mouth to answer but my teeth are chattering.
‘It’s OK, we all have our price. I’m a good tipper – you would have found that out if you had finished our first session. Now you’ve come riding in here thinking you’re going to save humanity from my depredations, but the truth is I’m just doing my job. At least I’m honest. Life is short. If I can get power, I’m going to take it. And I’m going to keep it. If desire for power is a mental illness then I don’t want to be healthy, because desire for power is the mental illness Western civilization is built on.’
I wonder if he’s practised that in a mirror. It almost makes sense, the way he says it. I’m not saying I agree with him, but I recognise what he’s talking about as a sort of truth. After all, I’ve spent my entire life reading in the news about how the arseholes win, they steal and kill and lie and get away with it, convince themselves they’re heroes. They’re given honours – ergo, they must be good guys. Plus they have yachts. (Lots of them do, I feel sure. I’ve never been on a sociopathic criminal’s yacht but I can imagine what it’s like, with the caviar and the paid women and scallops the size of saucers prepared by the personal chef, I can really picture it or did I see it in a movie? It’s true that the most powerful person I’ve ever met was the executive VP of EcoWarriors.net I temped for, and I don
’t know if you could say I really met him, but I did repair the element in his personal self-heating cafetière, though I digress. The point is, he was kind of an arsehole, too, despite being all about the polar bears.) Powerful people like this live in a private world where no one matters but the powerful, some narcissist who thinks he’s so great and by some weird mirror-neuron alchemy, everyone else falls for it, too. The Wizard of Oz. Or is that my cupboard-under-the-stairs persona talking? After all, I always seem to be on the losing team. But not all yacht owners are like Martin Elstree. Some of them are lovely, I’m sure. You can’t stop aspiring just because the top of the heap is overpopulated by narcissists, can you?
I’ll maybe need to think about this more, but now is not a good time and there may not ever be a later. I can’t win here. All I can do is give in to him, because that’s what people like me always do. It’s just too tiring to keep fighting when I’m so unsure of myself and he’s so certain of himself. It’s like I’m white paint and he’s red. I don’t stand a chance holding on to my purity. Ewwww, what an image.
‘You do feel dirty, don’t you?’ he says. ‘Look at you. You’re weighing how to deal with me and wondering if you can live with yourself if you take my offer.’
‘No I’m not.’ Even I don’t believe me, and he laughs.
‘You’re so easy to read. You think O is such a good guy? Well, she’s not. See, people with cancer can be cunts, too. People in wheelchairs can be evil, but that doesn’t fit with your worldview, does it? You’re so simple-minded, really, it’s child’s play to manipulate you.’
‘O isn’t evil,’ I snap back. I can’t believe I’m defending her.
‘Neither am I. Welcome to the real world, darling.’
I’m getting angry now and that’s warming me up. My voice still shakes but I say: ‘OK, here’s what I’ve got and it’s not much. You are trying to get me to resolve my cognitive dissonance so that I can feel like a winner. If I give in to you, I’ll have to tell myself you’re really not that bad – otherwise I’m bad by association. If I give in, I’ll have to make it all right. But it isn’t all right. And I’m not giving in.’
Sweet Dreams Page 24
