The Minders

by John Marrs

  Charlie nodded his agreement and glanced at Vicky’s cousin Alix. He caught her staring at him and she looked away quickly.

  Soon after he’d agreed to a double date with Alix, Vicky arranged dinner for the four of them at a restaurant. Charlie was finely attuned to the body language of others and specifically micro-expressions, which were often hard to fake. The way Alix held his gaze with her rich, chocolatey eyes or tilted her head as he spoke were signs of her attraction to him.

  She might have ticked every box if he had still been the old Charlie. But back then, he’d lacked the backbone to have ever asked her out. Now, his confidence wasn’t a problem, it was ambivalence. He no longer had “a type” because he felt no attraction to anyone. However, for the purpose of the double date, he went through the motions of paying her attention, showing interest in what she had to say, and asking about her life. Being involved with someone wouldn’t hurt in his pursuit of the appearance of normality.

  “Andrew tells me that you’ve just moved into a new place in Salford?” said Vicky. “Alix has a flat only a few minutes away from you.”

  “I’m renting a room in a house with a couple of lads from the IT department,” he replied. “So far so good.”

  “Have you been in Manchester long?” asked Alix.

  Charlie relied upon the well-rehearsed story he and Karczewski had concocted that he’d been born to armed-services parents on a military base in Aldershot, and for much of his childhood, the family had frequently moved around Europe.

  “That must have been tough when you were little, leaving your friends,” Alix said, with genuine sympathy.

  “It wasn’t always easy,” he admitted. “Just as I got used to one place, we were off to somewhere else. But you adapt quickly when you don’t know any different.”

  “Where are your family now?”

  “Retired from the forces and living in Australia. They emigrated a few years back.”

  “Didn’t you want to go with them?”

  He pointed to his pale arms. “With my skin tone? I’d be burned to a crisp within an hour.”

  “Alix, tell Charlie about your job,” encouraged Vicky. Her inflection suggested Charlie might be impressed.

  “I work in a nursery,” she said, almost shyly. “It’s not that exciting.”

  “She’s great with kids,” added Vicky. “You should see her; she has a natural way about her. Very maternal.”

  “Babe, chill,” Andrew muttered, and Vicky side-eyed him.

  “I’m just pointing out that my friend is a very nurturing woman.” She turned quickly to Charlie. “What about you, Charlie? Do you want kids?”

  “Not tonight, no,” he joked.

  “But eventually?”

  Again, he returned to the script. “If I met the right person, then yes, it’s something we’d discuss.”

  “Have you done the Match Your DNA test?” Vicky continued. Alix’s eyes bored into him.

  “No, I haven’t,” he lied. “I prefer to let things develop organically, rather than chemically. But it’s completely up to the individual, isn’t it? How about you, Alix? Have you taken it?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “But my Match is an eighty-eight-year-old great-grandfather in central Pakistan.”

  When Andrew let out a laugh, Vicky nudged his ribs with her elbow.

  “It’s okay,” Alix continued. “I can see the funny side of it too; the one person I’m supposedly biologically made for is pushing ninety. We have one another’s contact details but neither of us got in touch.”

  “You never know, Alix, he could be a millionaire at death’s door looking to leave all his money to a beautiful young bride,” teased Andrew.

  “I’ll take my chances elsewhere.” She briefly glanced at Charlie. “I’ll leave it to fate to decide who I should be with.” When Vicky cleared her throat pointedly, Alix corrected herself. “Okay, fate and Miss Matchmaker over there.”

  The evening and the conversation flowed and Charlie was aware he should have been sitting on cloud nine. But even when they gave each other a peck on the cheek goodbye and arranged to meet at the weekend—this time just the two of them—he didn’t leave with the expectation that this was the start of something new and exciting.

  Back in his flat-share bedroom, Charlie lay on his back on the bed, his hand in his underwear, touching himself as he imagined peeling off Alix’s clothes and slowly working his mouth around her body until, finally, they made love. He became aroused but try as he might, he couldn’t climax. His erection was a biological reaction to physical stimulation and nothing else. Had he not touched it, his penis would have remained motionless. Alix didn’t arouse him because no one did. And he was neither annoyed nor disappointed by it. Only curious as to how far he would need to push himself to feel anything again.

  CHAPTER 35

  SINÉAD, EDZELL, SCOTLAND

  I owe you an apology,” began Sinéad.

  Hovering awkwardly on Gail’s doorstep, Sinéad looked towards the small posy of wildflowers she’d picked that morning on a woodland walk. Now, it felt like a childish gesture.

  A week had passed since the friends had last met. Twice, Gail had appeared at Sinéad’s house, and on both occasions, Sinéad had hidden behind the kitchen door and ignored the bell. Eventually she recognised that she was allowing history to repeat itself. She was isolating herself and treating Gail in the same way she had handled her friends after marrying Daniel. She’d even ignored a visit from Doon in case they too had been discussing her.

  “Can I come in and explain, just for a few minutes?” Sinéad asked. Gail hesitated before stepping to one side. Sinéad followed her into the kitchen where they’d chatted over mug after mug of flavoured tisane teas. Gail offered Sinéad her usual seat at the island and filled a mosaic-patterned teapot from the boiling-water tap. Gail laid the flowers on the draining board.

  “Last week . . . when you asked me to look after Taylor . . .” Sinéad began. “I wanted to, I really did, but I just couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Sinéad considered modifying her backstory but this was her story. This wasn’t a secret she was keeping for national safety. Her brain was too crammed with the lies of others to make up more of her own. It was time for honesty.

  “Before I came here, I was married,” she began, her line of sight now directed beyond Gail and into the garden. “We weren’t a good combination and it was only after I escaped him that I fully appreciated just how toxic our relationship was. But a couple of years after we married, I fell pregnant. By then, I’d already suffered several miscarriages, and when you’ve been through something like that more than once, you automatically assume the worst. Only this time, the worst didn’t happen.”

  Sinéad paused and felt the warmth of her friend’s hand rest on her arm. She heard Taylor’s light breathing quietly coming through a baby monitor. Sinéad’s throat tightened.

  “Lilly was born at six forty-seven a.m. in hospital on a Monday morning after twenty-eight hours of labour. She was our—she was my—little miracle. A wee thing at four and a half pounds, she was just perfect. Then five weeks to the day after coming into the world, she left it.” The words snagged as she said them.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Gail. She pushed back in her chair and stood behind Sinéad, wrapping both arms tightly around her shoulders. Sinéad recalled that in the immediate aftermath of Lilly’s death, no one had offered that same comfort. Not Daniel, not the paramedics, nor the police.

  However, the sound of the front door opening brought a premature halt to their conversation. The women fell silent until Anthony appeared in the kitchen. As he caught sight of his wife’s guest, his face dropped. Its recovery wasn’t fast enough to fool Sinéad. She had seen it many times before in Daniel’s expression. She was not welcome and she doubted if any of Gail’s friends ever were.

 
“I didn’t know you were expecting guests,” he began.

  “She wasn’t, I was just passing by and thought I’d drop in,” Sinéad replied.

  “Is . . . everything all right?” He directed this towards his wife.

  “Can you give us a few minutes, please?” asked Gail.

  “Why?”

  “We’re in the middle of something.”

  Anthony’s posture straightened, as if assuming he was the topic of conversation. Gail continued the deadlock before offering Sinéad an apologetic glance and leading her husband out of the kitchen and into the lounge where their daughter was sleeping. The door closed, but Sinéad couldn’t help but hear their conversation through the baby monitor.

  “I’m not allowed in my own bloody house because she’s here?” Anthony hissed.

  “We were discussing something personal . . .”

  “And so were we this morning until you decided that we weren’t anymore and walked out. What could she have to say that’s more important than us trying to sort out our problems?”

  “Please, not now, Anthony.” Gail sounded weary, as if this was a frequently traversed argument.

  “What have you told her about us?” Anthony pressed.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t want you talking about our issues with a complete stranger.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of making my own decisions without needing your approval first,” Gail countered.

  “So my opinion doesn’t count? But when does it in this bloody house?”

  Gail muttered something Sinéad couldn’t quite hear before, without warning, there came the unmistakable sound of a slap. Sinéad’s eyes opened wide.

  Anthony had just hit his wife.

  Sinéad’s immediate reaction was to burst into that room and put her combat training to good use, breaking the hand Anthony had used to hurt her friend with. But Karczewski’s words repeated in her head. “Don’t put yourself in situations you don’t need to be involved in,” he’d warned. “The more you risk your own safety, the more you risk the programme.”

  While Daniel had fallen short of physical abuse, he’d made up for it by slowly chipping away at her morale until it had been completely eroded. Could she really stand idly by and watch another woman suffer at the hands of a bully?

  The programme comes first, she reminded herself. You have to walk away.

  Reluctantly, Sinéad had little choice but to listen to her gut. She quietly opened the back door and made her way across the garden, taking a shortcut over the fence and through the field of towering wind turbines, growing angrier and angrier at her inertia.

  Arriving back at the cottage, Sinéad turned on the radio to quieten her shame, jabbing at buttons until she found a classic pop station. She turned the volume up as high as the dial allowed. The colourful notes that usually surrounded them were notably diminished. She hadn’t seen so many dull greys, blacks, and browns floating around a room in a long time.

  She also fretted about baby Taylor living in a house where domestic violence was the norm. That made her thoughts return to Lilly. She still recalled with clarity every pore in her daughter’s beautiful face.

  She hadn’t been the easiest of newborns. The first week had passed without issue; she fed little and often, slept on and off for around eighteen hours a day, and only cried when her belly craved warm milk. But by the middle of week two, the routine Sinéad was beginning to take for granted began to fray. Lilly cried with alarming regularity, for hours at a time and for no apparent reason. Nothing pacified her; not cuddles, food, dark rooms, park walks, fresh nappies, or the vibrations of Sinéad’s moving car. Convinced she was sick, twice Sinéad insisted their GP examine her daughter, but he found nothing medically wrong.

  By the third week of little to no sleep, an exhausted Sinéad begged a reticent Daniel for help. Instead of offering much-needed support, he questioned why she wasn’t able to understand her baby’s needs when other mothers could. He also reminded her that because she was breastfeeding, there was little he could do to assist. Finally, he convinced her that mother and daughter might settle more easily if they slept in the nursery.

  It was Daniel who had found his daughter’s lifeless body that New Year’s morning. Lilly was still in the crook of her mother’s arm, face up and with Sinéad’s nipple in her mouth. Sinéad awoke to the sound of Daniel yelling and grabbing the baby from where she had fallen asleep in the armchair feeding her.

  Unable to comprehend what had happened, Sinéad begged paramedics to bring her daughter back to life as they carried out chest compressions on her tiny frame. But it was too late. A fast-tracked coroner’s report revealed that Lilly had likely choked to death on her exhausted mother’s milk.

  “I don’t care what the inquest rules: we’ll tell everyone it was sudden infant death syndrome,” Daniel said. “We don’t need anyone knowing you killed her.”

  His words cut deeply. He insisted that Sinéad register the birth and death alone, suggesting it might help her to accept her culpability. But Sinéad was already well aware of what she had done. And following the funeral—a private ceremony with just the two of them in attendance—he point-blank refused to talk about his daughter again.

  But the accidental death of a child, especially at the hands of a parent, became all-consuming. There were no support groups for women like her, no online forums she could join to talk about her guilt. She trawled the internet instead, bookmarking news stories about family members who had mistakenly killed their children in other ways. It was a scab she couldn’t stop picking at. Over and over she read about grandparents running over their grandchildren in vehicles, accidental drownings in baths and pools, medication overdoses, and babies forgotten about and left inside cars during heat waves. She was no better than any of them.

  Her compulsion to pick at her eyelashes began in the aftermath of Lilly’s death. Each time she assumed she could feel no more pain, she would pluck at them to remind herself there was always more pain to be felt if she dug hard enough. What started deliberately soon became a habit, and she would stare at her reflection every morning and evening, scanning for regrowth. The deeper the root, the more the sting, and the more satisfaction she felt. She was not alone, she discovered; many people were compelled to do it, often in response to stressful situations. The NHS’s website even gave her condition a name—trichotillomania.

  The grief following Lilly’s death eased over time but the guilt did not. Daniel’s unwillingness to try to ease her burden resulted in her continuing her preoccupation until eventually, her eyelashes gave up and stopped growing back. He told her many times that without them, she resembled a reptile that was ready to cry at any given moment. Part of it wasn’t far from the truth, because her eyes were constantly weeping as she no longer had a barrier from dust, grit, or pollen when she blinked.

  Sinéad begged Daniel to sell their apartment but he refused, his compromise being that while they were out for the day, he’d arranged for a removals company to take away Lilly’s cot, changing table, wardrobe, Moses basket, clothes, and soft toys. No keepsakes remained.

  For months, Sinéad scoured local charity shops hoping but failing to find anything that had once been touched by her baby. Even now, miles away from home in Edzell, she struggled to pass a charity shop without taking a quick glance through the window at the baby clothes hanging up on the rail.

  CHAPTER 36

  EMILIA

  The recorded voice memo came from a withheld number and appeared soon after midnight. Emilia turned down the volume of her phone and pressed it against her ear, just to be sure Ted couldn’t hear anything from his suite next door.

  The caller was male and his accent was British, but he possessed no regional accent. She was sure that it was synthetic. Such computer-generated voices were near-perfect in their diction but were let down by their intonation. Emilia, however,
could spot the devil in the detail, even if she didn’t know how she had acquired such a skill.

  “Nine p.m. tonight at the Paquis Lighthouse” was all the voice said. She went online for directions.

  It had taken all Emilia’s powers of persuasion before Ted allowed her to join him on his forthcoming business trip. He’d claimed prolonged travel might have a negative effect on her health so soon after her car accident, so she had sought written approval and a fit-to-fly certificate from an independent medical consultant to prove him wrong. It meant Ted had little excuse not to book her a ticket.

  By breakfast, their commercial flight from London’s Luton Airport to Switzerland’s Genève Aéroport had landed. And once Emilia and Ted had bypassed the usual customs channels and been escorted by airport security staff to an awaiting autonomous vehicle, they were en route to their Lake Geneva hotel. Ted’s attention was diverted towards the contents of his tablet and the programme of meetings as Emilia nervously prepared her part of the plan.

  “Don’t you get fed up of being watched all the time?” she asked, turning to look at the car behind containing his security personnel.

  “Sometimes,” he replied. “But it’s part and parcel of my job.”

  “Which is what exactly? Because every time I ask you what you do, you fob me off with partial answers.”

  “That’s unfair. Biochemical engineering is a sensitive subject in this day and age, especially in the direction the world is moving right now. Information is no longer safe and can easily fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Of course I do, but governments need to be assured that what I know is protected.”

  “You work for our government?”

  “I go where the work takes me. And if that means being shadowed by the two giants behind us, then it’s a small price to pay.”