The Minders

by John Marrs

  CHAPTER 19

  EMILIA

  Emilia’s fists were clenched, both hands raised high, ready to defend herself. She scanned the hospital room, but if there was an enemy present, they were invisible. It must have been another daydream.

  Moments earlier, she had been imagining a faceless woman approaching her, armed with a knife. The blade slashed through the air, effortlessly slicing anyone who encroached on her path. Emilia had sensed the coolness of the blade against the warmth of her skin, then the heat of her blood as it seeped from a horizontal wound across her abdomen.

  Such streams of consciousness detached from reality were becoming increasingly common. And without fail, they were so vivid it was hard to believe they weren’t real. Now, she took deep breaths as she tried to rid herself of either a memory clawing its way to the surface or her interpretation of what Ted had told her—that her colleague’s psychotic state was down to Emilia piling pressure upon her. The woman had fatally attacked four of their workmates and injured Emilia. Or perhaps this buildup of anxiety was related to her forthcoming discharge that afternoon.

  A week had passed since she’d collided with a car, and the physical bruises were fading. But the bruises from what she had learned about the trigger for her mental breakdown were in full bloom. Meanwhile, Ted had tried to prepare Emilia for her return home by FaceTiming her from their house. He had guided her through every room, partly hoping to extinguish any nerves and partly to jolt her memory. She couldn’t fault his understanding.

  She had not encouraged him to visit the hospital that morning, telling him she’d be engaged with a final round of brain-imaging scans and a psychological evaluation before she was released into his care. What Emilia actually wanted was a little extra time to learn about the incident that had instigated her decline.

  She had trawled the internet with a slew of key words until she found what she was looking for.

  FAMILY OF BANKER WHO SLAYED FOUR COLLEAGUES IN KNIFE RAMPAGE BLAMES “WORK STRESS”

  By LAURA MULLEY

  A high-ranking account manager at an investment company who murdered four colleagues and injured five others has been named as Emily Shinkin.

  Oxford University graduate Shinkin, 27, entered the offices of Barnett-Vincent Brothers in London’s Bank area on Monday morning armed with a hunting knife and stabbed three men and one woman to death as they arrived at their desks.

  In a statement made last night, her family blamed the killings on “a moment of madness” and claimed their daughter had been pushed to the brink by greedy bosses who had no interest in their staff’s well-being.

  Her father, Hugo Shinkin, said: “We were devastated and ashamed to learn of our daughter’s actions and our prayers are with the families of the victims. However, we believe the blame cannot be placed entirely at Emily’s door.

  “Despite reaching out many times to both her line manager and the human resources department regarding the extreme level of pressure she was expected to work under, Emily was repeatedly ignored. They must accept their share of responsibility for this terrible tragedy.”

  I was her boss, thought Emilia. I was the one who ignored her. At least she hadn’t been named. While most people suffering from stress didn’t react in such extreme ways as Shinkin had, Emilia was nevertheless racked by guilt for something she’d sparked but couldn’t remember.

  She pulled at the waistband of her jogging bottoms, enabling her to trace the faint scar across her abdomen where she had been slashed by Emily’s knife. According to Ted, she was fortunate not to have been killed. He’d also informed her that in the aftermath of the murders, Emilia had been forced to take a leave of absence while an internal investigation was launched into her practices. However, her reaction to losing her colleagues was to fall into a deep depression. And later, when it became apparent she was being set up as a company scapegoat, she agreed to sign a compromise agreement and receive a substantial payout rather than try to fight her way back to her desk.

  But no sum of money was high enough to compensate for her culpability. Ted recalled that over the following weeks, he had grown so worried about her that he had hired a mental health specialist to visit the house and offer her treatment after her refusal to seek help of her own accord. Then soon after, Emilia simply vanished one afternoon. He had reported her to the police as a missing person, and after an anxious two months, Emilia had finally resurfaced days earlier in a London hospital after being hit by a car.

  Emilia fastened her bottoms again and conceded that perhaps Ted had been right in wanting to shield her from the truth. Perhaps this was an opportunity to start afresh rather than trying to recapture the memories of someone who had contributed to the destruction of so many lives.

  Her opinion of her husband was also starting to drift. If she couldn’t remember the past, it meant he was alone with their shared memories. He would rather she forgot about their lives before the accident than have her relive what destroyed her, which was completely selfless. Perhaps in time, even if her memory remained aloof, she could learn to love him all over again. She was slowly learning to feel safe in his company, and that must count for something.

  Loneliness was proving the hardest part of Emilia’s journey. Sometimes she watched as groups of staff or visitors sat together around canteen tables, sharing food and talking. She craved being part of something. From what Ted had recounted, Emilia had very few people to do that with in the months before her disappearance. She’d put her career above all else, including him.

  I’ve been a terrible boss and a terrible wife, she reasoned. But once I return home, I’m going to make up for it. I have a second chance to be whoever I want to be.

  Emilia suddenly decided she had spent too long cooped up inside her room. Stopping to buy a coffee from a machine downstairs, she picked a vacant seat on a bench in the empty hospital gardens.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” The woman’s voice startled Emilia.

  “Sure,” she replied, and moved along the bench. The woman put her hand in the centre of her back and lowered herself and her swollen belly slowly onto the slats.

  “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it? Are you a visitor or a patient?”

  “Patient,” Emilia replied, pointing to her plastic ID bracelet as she pulled up the sleeves of her top.

  “Same here. Pre-eclampsia. My baby isn’t growing as she should.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “They say it’s unlikely I’ll go full term; I might need a Caesarean in the next few days if my blood pressure doesn’t start dropping.”

  The two women chatted about their shared hospital experiences, from the bland food and uncomfortable mattresses to the antiseptic smell that clung to their clothes.

  “Well, I hope things go well for you,” Emilia said. “My husband’s coming to pick me up soon so I should start packing.”

  “It was nice to meet you,” the woman replied as Emilia prepared to leave. “Can I offer you a little word of advice, Emilia? Do not trust your husband.”

  “I’m sorry?” Emilia replied, sure she had misheard.

  “Your husband, Ted. He is not who he says he is. You’re not married. In fact, until you were admitted to hospital, you had never seen him before.”

  CHAPTER 20

  BRUNO, OUNDLE, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

  It’s just so . . . white . . . ain’t it?” a female Echo inside Bruno’s head began. “I tell ya, it’s like living inside a sugar cube, locked in an igloo and trapped in a fuckin’ snow globe.”

  Bruno couldn’t disagree. Every wall in the rented house had been painted the same shade of white, from the kitchen to the bathroom and even the cupboard under the stairs. The owner had never lived with small, sticky-fingered children.

  “Your Louie would’ve trashed this place,” the Echo continued. It was a new voice to him; one with a lazy, southern American drawl
. “He loved banging his stuff against the walls, didn’t he?”

  Bruno nodded. “There was something about the noise of his toys colliding against brickwork, plasterboard, or skirting boards that calmed him when he was agitated,” he said. “I was forever filling holes or touching up paintwork.”

  Bruno wanted to ask how she knew all this but refrained. His stored data was once again bleeding into his own memory and the two were sharing with one another. The Echo quietened, allowing Bruno more space to think about his son. Their four-month separation already felt like a lifetime. His chest tightened as he imagined how much upset he had caused the boy by removing himself from his life.

  “The price you pay for Louie being taken care of is that you won’t be able to see him for five years,” Karczewski had warned. “That means no attempt to communicate with him or staff at the care home. You cannot even mention him to anyone else in your next life.”

  “And if something happens to me during this process?”

  “In the event of your death during or beyond it, Louie will be taken care of for the duration of his life.”

  Bruno returned to that guarantee as the days moved into weeks and the longing to see Louie heightened. He was doing all of this for his son.

  Bruno made his way down the two-storey townhouse’s staircase. He’d picked up the keys three days earlier from a letting agent in the centre of Oundle, a market town near Peterborough which he would temporarily call home. Stringent planning laws forbade its expansion, giving it an appearance of a town trapped in time. Its narrow streets, flanked by limestone Georgian properties, were picture-postcard perfect. There was a handful of pubs, bistros, boutique shops, and galleries and a supermarket nearby that would serve his immediate needs. It would have been the perfect location for father and son.

  The property came as furnished but Bruno had made it a priority to decorate the bedroom next to his. He pinned posters to the walls, left toys scattered about the floor, and ruffled up the duvet to give it a slept-in appearance. Then he paused under the doorway and tried to imagine Louie playing in this version of the bedroom he had in their family home.

  Living here made Bruno long for the house he shared with Louie and Zoe. They moved in when it was a dilapidated Grade One listed cottage, located in a much sought-after village. The scale of renovation work had required a loan on top of their mortgage. By day, Bruno was Louie’s primary caregiver, a decision made when Zoe’s career escalated and cemented her position as the main breadwinner. By night, Bruno attended evening classes in carpentry, plastering, basic electrical work, and plumbing. Their purse strings were often drawn tight, but they muddled along without complaint. Zoe once described it as their “forever home” and neither could ever see themselves wanting to move. And then she wrecked it all.

  “Now you know how easy it is to kill, do you think you’d have snuffed her out too?” a second Echo asked. “I would have.”

  He recognised this one from coded video interviews with Harry Crooke, a soldier who had butchered young civilians to death while stationed in Iraq in the early 2000s. Had Crooke been charged and gone to trial, he’d likely have made public four high-ranking armed forces personnel who shared his bloodlust. It had been more convenient for Special Forces to spare the army’s blushes and organise his “suicide” while on remand.

  “Of course I wouldn’t have killed her,” Bruno replied. “She’s the mother of my son.”

  “Don’t believe you, mate.” Crooke shrugged. “I’ve seen you in action. You’re the same as me, you like watching the light leave their eyes. And there’s nothing stopping you from killing again because, like me, you don’t have anyone to answer to. You don’t exist.”

  Crooke was correct—Bruno was little more than a ghost. The only thing real about him was, ironically, the Echoes. There were hundreds of them, new voices appearing every day, all eager to be heard. They’d want to remind him of the coordinates of emergency war bunkers, locations of federal reserves, or the mapping of DNA sequences to create biological warfare. They were desperate to discuss cures for diseases, subliminal messages in advertisements, illegal chemicals used in water systems, and lost treasures. You name it and Bruno had an Echo with recognition of it.

  But this was not how it was supposed to be. All the facts, lies, and horrors he had learned about his country were supposed to be contained in one anomalous section of his brain. Instead, they were spilling with the ease of an overfilled bathtub. And managing them was a skill he had been unable to master. He likened it to a self-inflating car tyre that wouldn’t stop expanding. The only way to stop it from bursting was to release the valve a few voices at a time. Once acknowledged, they grew quieter. But eventually, their numbers always swelled again.

  “You only have yourself to blame; you don’t deserve to know what you know,” a third Echo whispered. This time it was a young woman’s voice, and the cold hand that entwined with his made him jump. He turned quickly to see a bloodied face. She’d been an escort who’d been raped and mutilated by a notorious sheikh stationed in London, the murder buried deeper than the victim.

  “You shouldn’t be a Minder. It’s your kid who solved the puzzle and who had the mental capacity to store all this data, not you,” she continued.

  “There were plenty of other tests I did pass to get here,” he argued. “It wasn’t as if they handed me a new life on a plate on the basis of one experiment.”

  “You cheated the programme and now it’s messing with your head. And if you aren’t careful, soon you’re going to join the names you’re targeting.”

  In Bruno’s mind’s eye, he pictured the six faces on his kill list. And he reminded himself that he would be paying the second one a visit later that week.

  CHAPTER 21

  FLICK, ALDEBURGH, SUFFOLK

  Another sparkling water?” Grace asked. Flick nodded as they waited at the bar for the landlord’s attention. “Don’t you drink anything else?”

  “I’m alcohol intolerant,” Flick explained. “To cut a long story short, my body doesn’t have the right enzymes to break down the toxins in booze, so I break out in unsightly red hives, which is so bloody annoying.”

  “Take away my gin and you might as well kill me now,” Grace replied.

  It was another in a long line of Flick’s half-truths. Months had passed since a warm, spicy rum and Coke had touched the back of her throat. After discovering the truth about her DNA Match, Christopher, she’d come to rely on it too much to smooth out the sharp edges that wounded her. But the programme stipulated no use of alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, narcotics, and most over-the-counter medications. Nothing was to enter her system that could alter the delicate equilibrium of her brain activity or impede her clarity of thought. Abstinence from booze hadn’t troubled her until tonight, when she became envious that the rest of the pub quiz team was enjoying beverage after beverage while she nursed carbonated drinks. A cigarette wouldn’t have gone amiss either, but she resisted both.

  It was approaching a month since Flick had arrived at Grace’s coastal B&B. The two had formed a friendship, spending many breakfasts and evenings together, talking or going out for drinks or sharing meals. Grace had been born and bred in Aldeburgh so her face was familiar to many. And she became the tool Flick used to build up a social life.

  Grace had recently returned to the town following her mother’s death.

  Flick knew how it felt to have your future rewritten by others.

  “It was never my plan to run a B&B,” Grace had told Flick, “but then neither was losing my mum when I was twenty-one. Sometimes when life gives you lemons, you need to fill your glass with more gin.” The new Flick was very much on board with that mindset. Although she filled her glass with sparkling water, not gin.

  While Grace was forthcoming about who she was, Flick couldn’t reciprocate. There was no mention of the restaurant she and her partners had spent seven years
building into a successful business or of the family she had turned her back on. She said nothing of a man she’d never met who’d broken her heart nor the programme that had given her the opportunity to live again. And she certainly gave no clues as to what she carried inside her head.

  Instead, Flick stuck to the script. She explained how she’d recently had a messy breakup from her long-term partner, and alluded to violence being a contributing factor. Karczewski explained that once people assumed domestic abuse had been involved, very few follow-up questions would be asked. With no reason to remain in Stratford-upon-Avon, Flick revealed how she’d saved some money, given notice on her flat, quit her job in telesales, and left to travel the country. Grace had no reason to doubt her.

  That night and on Grace’s insistence, Flick had accompanied her to the Fox & Hounds pub in Aldeburgh’s town centre to participate in the weekly quiz night. She cast her eye around the busy room, first looking for potential escape routes and then for anyone who might be offering her undue attention. Regarding every stranger with suspicion until they proved they could be trusted wasn’t a normal way to live your life. But she and normal had been estranged for years.

  Finally, after being served, they returned to Team Fish Smokers as the quizmaster read from a sheet of paper into a microphone.

  “Round three, question one,” he began in a thick east-coast accent. “Where was Diana, Princess of Wales, buried?”

  Grace’s team bunched together and whispered.