Even Stranger

by Marilyn Messik

  “And who might you be?” Cornwall, eyed him with disfavour. Boris, stepped in smoothly, “He’s engaged to Stella,” he said. Cornwall knocked a cigarette out of a battered pack, lit it, coughed and muttered,

  “Blimey, well you’ve got your hands full then, haven’t you Sir? We’ll need to take your statement too.” I was tempted to make him drop his cigarette again, but Boris shook his head sharply. I pursed my lips and was about to launch into my pre-prepared story, courtesy of Rachael, when I felt my knees giving out. Cornwall showed an astonishing turn of speed and caught me round the waist as I went down, yelling across the room,

  “Stretcher over here. Move your arse!’ I read his instant and genuine concern, which was a further surprise. He didn’t trust, like or fully believe in anything he understood I could do, but he had a daughter of Isabelle’s age and his anger at the perverted little sod who’d taken her was immense. Never mind all that woo woo stuff, he was thinking, my being there and diverting attention had probably saved her life. For that, he was prepared to cut me a lot of slack.

  We’d arrived at the hospital in a rather dramatic fleet of three ambulances. Kitty and Isabelle in one, Jamie in another and David and I sharing the third, which I wasn’t that keen on, until I realised he was still processing stuff and didn’t think this was the time or place for us to talk. That was just fine, I was still doing a bit of processing myself.

  There’d been a bit of a stand-off when it came to Kat. A burly officer had been delegated to put her in the back of a police car, but having discovered, in the last frantic hours, an unexpected level of autonomy, Kat was having none of it. She jumped into the ambulance after me, planted herself firmly on the floor and did the howling thing, refusing to budge, no matter how much collar-tugging was applied. There was a swift consultation and general consensus, that for everyone’s sake, a couple of fingers would have to be put up to rules and regulations and she could travel with us.

  As we arrived at the hospital, things for the umpteenth time that evening, descended into chaos. A cavalcade of fraught family members arrived, just as our ambulances pulled in. Mrs de Freyt stumbled out of a police car, accompanied by a large, shambling bear of a man who, I gathered, was Isabelle’s father. They were both crying, and despite the paramedics’ attempts to maintain some kind of order, Isabelle hurtled out the back of her ambulance and straight into their arms. She flat out refused to get back on the stretcher, so they were all taken inside, in a sort of ungainly huddle. I’m not sure who was holding who upright.

  My parents had brought Aunt Edna and Brenda and none of them knew who to be more frantic about first, Kitty or me, although I think Kitty won by a margin, because she was old and still unconscious – luckily they didn’t know quite how unconscious she’d been.

  And then, of course, there were the Golds who, I gathered from a quick scan, had been blissfully unaware of the whole unfolding drama, until they received a frantic late-night call from my mother, heavy on panic but light on detail, informing them their son had been involved in a kidnap, people had been hurt and no she didn’t know whether or not that included David, but this was the hospital everyone was being taken to.

  Understandably, they were not a little disturbed and set off in a high state of alarm, with no clear idea as to what had gone on, nor what they could expect to find when they got there. On the way, they’d got lost several times and reversing rapidly, out of a dead end road taken by mistake, Melvyn had a negative experience with a concrete bollard, something that had never before happened to him, in forty years of careful driving. Naturally, under the circumstances, at some point Laura had recourse to the pill bag. As David and I were helped out of our ambulance, she leapt forward to embrace him, with a shriek that didn’t do much for his sore head, already re-assaulted by Kat’s caterwauling. She was firmly detached by the staff and set to one side, where I could hear her thinking balefully, nothing remotely like this had ever happened to David, before he got involved with me. She wasn’t wrong.

  What with the shock of the situation and the bollard, poor Melvyn had gone to pieces completely and was probably in a worse state than anyone. Unfortunately, by the time David and I had been seen by a doctor and were re-united with the nearest and dearest, Laura had persuaded him that one of her migraine pills might relax him a little, pointing out, the last thing needed right now, God forbid, was for him to drop dead with a heart attack. I understood he’d consented to take half a pill. However, not as inured as she, this had the effect not only of relaxing him, but rendering him so totally out of it, that my father flatly refused to let him drive anywhere.

  Much later that evening, they all eventually departed, Kat included, crammed into one car. From my hospital window, it looked as if they were attempting to make it into the Guinness Book of Records – how many agitated people can you get in a Ford Escort? I was worried about Melvyn, but didn’t seem to have much emotion left to get too worked up, after all he wasn’t my father-in-law yet and, quite frankly, the way things were going, the chances that he ever would be, were looking slimmer by the minute.

  Isabelle, was discharged too, and whisked swiftly away by her still traumatised parents. I hadn’t tried to see or speak to her, what was the point? She and her parents had no real idea who I was, nor what I had to do with anything. I was certain, from scanning her before she left in the ambulance, that Isabelle’s memory had been gently wiped, she’d no recollection of the others being in the room at all and at the same time I saw, Glory and Sam had also eliminated a lot of the horror. She’d never be able to recall in detail what was on those walls, within which she’d spent such a terrified time. Wiping, the way they had, seemed to make sense, although I’m not sure I’d have been prepared to stand and debate the ethics. But they’d made a swift decision to do it and who was I to argue? Sometimes there just wasn’t a lot of thinking time and choices had to be made and stood by.

  Kitty was, despite her vociferous protests, being kept in a bit longer. I went to see her before we left. She was surprisingly perky, although the stitched cut, running all the way down one side of her face and under her chin, confirmed she’d been in one hell of a fight. She’d have a scar, but didn’t seem that bothered.

  “Listen, dolly, my time of life, what difference is it going to make?” The abdominal wound was giving her quite a lot of pain, but a nice nurse was apparently coming along with a regular morphine injection, that worked wonders said Kitty. She couldn’t remember much of what had happened after she’d been stabbed, which wasn’t a bad thing, so I gave her the abbreviated version, which skipped the advent of the others, and moved straight on to the police arriving. I was guilt-wracked at having inadvertently involved her. I said I’d absolutely understand if, after this, she didn’t want to come back to work.

  “Not bloody likely,” she said, “I’m back like a shot, soon as they let me out of here. If you get into this much trouble when I’ve got my eye on you, what’ll you get up to, if I’m not there? You always were a bit of a liability, even when you were little. And I’m not leaving it all to Brenda.” She shifted a little in the bed and winced, “Who’d have thought,” she commented, with a touch of pride, “I’d be getting stabbed at my age?” As I kissed her and made to leave, she reached for my hand again.

  “Who was he?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “That kid.”

  “You mean Isabelle?”

  “Don’t be stupid, the young boy. I’m not so old, I can’t tell the difference.”

  “Kitty, there was no boy.” I told her. “You were unconscious for a quite a while, you must’ve been dreaming.” She frowned,

  “Funny damn dream, he was there, clear as you are now. Never mind.” She pulled me back one more time, “That David of yours.” She said, “He’s a mensch, although not so sure about that mother of his – she’s right away with the fairies. But look how he came after you, got to love th
at. You hang on to him, you hear me?” I nodded, God she’d go mad, along with everyone else in the family, if I mucked things up, but I could see there were substantial hurdles ahead to be cleared, before anybody did any walking up any aisles.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  “Are you scared of me?” I said, He gave my question the thought it deserved, and then grinned.

  “Oddly enough, no.” he said. “Should I be?”

  “No. Well, not unless I lose my temper, but I’m careful about hanging on to it.”

  “Good to know.” He said.

  Heading home from the hospital, was as good an opportunity as any, to get things out in the open particularly as I didn’t have to look directly at him while we did. The other advantage was that prior to discharge, I’d been given some hefty pain-killers, these had gone straight to my head and left me feeling slightly distanced from reality.

  As with many an event you’ve been dreading, the big reveal was slightly anticlimactic. After all, as he pointed out reasonably, he had been there and seen and heard things. And when there’s no possible logical explanation for something that’s happening right under your nose, the only thing left is an illogical one, and what I was telling him, certainly fell into that category.

  My story was coming out a little garbled, hard to know quite where to start with something like this and I wandered a bit all over the place, until he stopped the car outside a convenient coffee bar along the way, and insisted we go in, sit down and take things a bit slower. He thought it might be a good idea if I started from the beginning and worked my way along from there, which I suppose was fair enough. I won’t say he wasn’t surprised at everything that came out, including the couple of cautious demonstrations with some condiments and cutlery, but he didn’t fall over, frothing at the mouth, which I took to be a promising sign. In fact, by the time I got to the Newcombe Foundation, he was ahead of me.

  He’d done work experience, about ten years ago, on a national newspaper. He’d been shadowing Roger Simstridd, an award-winning, investigative reporter of the old school, known for sticking his – by that time – extremely florid nose into places where it was neither wanted nor welcomed. Welcomed it may not have been, but he was known for getting some uniquely angled stories on the back of his intransigence. By the time David was entrusted to his not so tender care, he was a man, somewhat diminished by whisky, regrets, 60 daily Rothmans and past glory days, but he was still a news-hound, through and through.

  He’d spent years, accumulating files on cold-war spurred, government funded, psi experiments, not just in this country but in the US, Russia and China as well. They didn’t come, said David, much more cynical or hard-boiled than Simstridd and he’d certainly started researching, with the straightforward intention of holding up for ridicule, the cash poured by governments into crazy projects. But he was nobody’s fool and over a period of time, what he dug up, turned his views – ‘arse over tit’ – as he used to say to David and he became convinced, there were things out there, that simply didn’t fit the rational parameters they should. To his gasket-blowing frustration, he was never able to put together enough to persuade his editor, they could run with impunity and not be tarred with the red-top brush. However, the number of notes, grainy photos, and speculative conclusions David had pored over in their stifling, smoky little office, had left him with a far more open mind than most.

  “But you never told me any of that.” I was highly indignant.

  “Pot and kettle.” He snorted, “And why would I have thought you were interested anyway?” I conceded the point. Strangely enough, of all the oddities I poured into his ear that day, the one he seemed to find the most contentious, was why I hadn’t told him sooner.

  “Never seemed to find quite the right moment.” I said defensively. By this time, we’d vacated the coffee bar, we’d been there a couple of hours and they were starting to look sideways at us. He re-started the car.

  “Weak excuse.” He said.

  “So,” I said, “What happens now?”

  “Well, we could do with a bath and a change of clothes. I’ll drop you home and…”

  “I meant with the engagement and everything.” He thought about it for a moment, I was glad, I didn’t want him to answer out of politeness. He shook his head.

  “Nope, doesn’t change anything from my end.” He said, “Yours?” I shook my head too, I was relieved, but wasn’t going to get gushy,

  “Probably not.” I said.

  Luckily, after things have been a bit hectic, they tend to settle down for a while, so you have a brief chance to catch a breath and gather yourself together. And so it was after the whole Jamie thing and my shamefully, long-postponed, ‘something I should mention’, conversation, which I was hugely relieved to have out of the way. Whilst still firmly of the belief I’d been brought up with, that some things are best kept to yourself, I did feel if he was going to marry me, it was only fair the poor chap knew what he was taking on.

  The Jamie incident didn’t get the same news exposure as had the encounter with the Lowbells, maybe because the body count was lower. I gave the police a brief statement, and not too many more questions were asked. David gave his account which held water, and Kitty didn’t remember much about anything after she was hurt, acerbically informing the young constable, sent to talk to her, neither would he if he’d been stabbed in the stomach. I did ask about Isabelle and her family and was told she was well, but the family had decided to move. I wasn’t surprised. Even painted over, those eyes would still be watching from the walls.

  Jamie was lying in a hospital bed somewhere. Was there anything else I could have done? Should I have tried harder, to get past the other in his head? I replayed things over and over, but each time came to the same conclusion, there’d been no chance of getting through to him. By the time that he’d been more or less taken over by something even more violent than himself, it was a straight choice – him or us. He was though a tortured soul, had been all his life, and I was painfully aware, there for the grace of God, had I not had the luck to be born into a family where hysteria was balanced by pragmatism. My feelings were in no way as ambivalent when it came to his exploiter. I’d touched that mind with mine and felt the cold, blended with the white heat of excitement, generated by violence. I hated and feared the fact that I now knew it was a continued threat.

  But the Peacock gang had clammed up on that score too. It was frustrating, when they wanted something from me, any one of them was prepared to push as hard as necessary to get it. But when I wanted to find out more, I was told the less I knew, the less risk there was. Half of me resented that intensely, the other half was relieved because I just wanted normal and was making a determined effort to get back there. I had a business to run, which was going in the right direction. I also had a wedding to plan, although to be honest, once I’d put forward a couple of thoughts and suggestions and had them soundly trampled by my mother and Aunt Edna I thought, best leave them to it, after all what did I know?

  Kitty had returned to work, against the strenuous advice of the doctors and indeed, everyone else. But as she pointed out, what did she have to lose. She wouldn’t be talked round from this rather cavalier attitude insisting she wasn’t ready to sit at home all day, dunking biscuits and staring out the window. Brenda, Trudie and Ruby were delighted to see her back, and I think she rather enjoyed being feted as a bit of a hero. As indeed did Kat who, if anything, had adopted even more of an aristocratic air, although still shivering delicately every time the phone rang.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Your wedding day is supposed to be the happiest of your life – mine may have been happy, it certainly wasn’t the most comfortable, for various reasons.

  In those days, we had our hair ‘set’ for big occasions. This was a tortuous procedure which entailed wedging both you and a large number of fat rollers, under a hairdryer where you got hotte
r and more flushed by the moment. When you were sufficiently sweat-drenched, you’d be taken out from under and the resulting, sausage-like wedges of hair, styled, before being iron-clad by chokingly copious blasts of hair spray. Tiara and veil were then riveted onto the structure with strategically placed hair grips, rendering you virtually immobile from the neck up.

  There were a lot of people crying, as they always do at weddings. My mother and Auntie Edna were sobbing, because they’d thought they’d never live to see the day. Laura Gold was crying equally hard, because she’d feared she might. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was happy, excited and nervous – all the sorts of things you’re supposed to be.

  There were just a few niggles. At first I thought it was because I was worrying I might accidentally knock someone unconscious, with my rigid hair. Then I thought it might be because of the tussle, getting my bottom into the wedding dress. Luckily, my sister, mother and aunt weren’t women easily defeated, and with some pushing, shoving and a whole lot of breathing in, I was finally zipped up. The result, even I had to admit, was a rather fetching hour-glass figure, the only problem being it wasn’t remotely mine and I was apprehensive that irresistible force and the natural laws of physics would come into their own and the zip might give up the ghost. To avoid this, I kept my breathing shallow although panting my way up the aisle, caused my father to cast anxious glances and mutter under his breath,

  “Not too late to change your mind.” But beneath everything, the natural nerves, the hair helmet, the zip and the hyperventilating – which was actually starting to make me feel a little dizzy – there was something else. It was something different, something I didn’t recognise and I do so dislike the unexpected, especially when there’s a lot of other stuff going on.