by Tim Weaver
‘Okay.’
‘And then first thing tomorrow, go and buy the cheapest phone and SIM card you can find and call me on that.’ My eyes returned to the school. ‘One thing, though: I need you to keep this whole spyware stuff just between the two of us. I don’t want you mentioning it to anybody.’
‘Okay,’ he said again.
‘That means anybody. Dr Russum too.’
Especially Dr Russum.
‘Is that all right?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
‘I don’t understand who would do this to me.’
‘I don’t know either,’ I said to him.
But as my gaze shifted back to the school, and I thought of Naomi Russum and how she’d been at her office, I wasn’t really sure if I believed that or not.
13
I spent the next few hours trying to trace the origins of the spyware using old contacts of mine from my newspaper days. All I got was dead ends. The spyware might not have been sophisticated but its origins were well masked. After that, I left the pub I’d set up in, returned to Russum’s office building and watched it for an hour, trying to establish its rhythms and behaviour.
The lights remained off pretty much the entire time, on every floor except the first: through the windows on that one, a security guard sat at a desk playing games on a handheld console. Every thirty minutes, he’d get up, do the same route on each floor, the lights flickering into life as he passed under them, before returning to the same desk. A minute or so later, all the lights snapped off again.
I made my way along the alleyway, checking for any signs of life from adjacent buildings, and then, picks in hand, started working on the clinic door. It took a couple of minutes of frustration before I felt the familiar click, before the door bumped out from its frame and into the darkness of the foyer. Once it did, I waited, crouched, listening for an alarm, movement, footsteps.
It was silent.
I took the stairs, drifting past the door for the first floor. When I checked my watch, I saw that I had about twenty-five minutes before the security guard started doing his rounds again. That meant I’d have to work fast and be ready to leave inside twenty minutes if I didn’t want to meet him on the stairs.
Once I’d picked the door into the reception area, I grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and used it to keep the door propped ajar. Lights flicked on above me. I kept low, trying to prevent myself from being seen from the street. In Russum’s office, more lights popped into life, so I dropped both sets of window blinds and turned to face the room.
Going to her computer first, I slid in at the desk and powered it on. While it was booting up, I checked the drawers and started going through a cabinet behind me. I didn’t find anything relevant. Pushing it closed, I returned to the PC.
As quickly as possible, I searched through the computer. She was using the default mail client, but I couldn’t get into it because, although I knew what her email address was, I had no password. I didn’t waste time trying to find a workaround and pushed on, opening up a folder full of scans – medical reports, patient information – and then another one covering sessions she took and presentations she was giving: transcripts, notes, papers she’d written and essays she was planning.
I couldn’t find anything on Richard Kite.
I kept going, but there wasn’t a single mention of him in any of the folders I clicked on. I did a system search, thinking I must have been looking in the wrong place, but the search came back with zero results. It seemed to confirm what my gut had been telling me: something was going on. She’d been treating him for eight months, she’d actively gone out of her way to help him, she’d made journeys back and forth to Dorset, but there was no mention of him anywhere.
Then something else caught my eye.
On the right-hand side of the screen was a .m4a audio file. I’d looked at it a couple of times without its filename registering with me because Russum’s desktop was so packed full of other folders and documents. But I noticed it now: 261016.
The filename was today’s date.
I double-clicked on it and it started playing. There was a faint hiss and the sound of a door opening. Voices, too dull to make out at first, and then gradually becoming clearer as they got closer. It was Russum and me talking. We were coming back from the front desk, getting louder as we returned to her office. I heard her shuffle in at her chair and then I heard myself chatting politely.
She’d recorded our conversation.
As the audio file continued to play, I tried to figure out why. For whose benefit? Hers? Someone else’s? I couldn’t check her email to see if she’d forwarded it on to anyone, but that seemed the most likely endgame.
Switching off the computer, I headed for the filing cabinets on the far side of the room. They were locked and the keys weren’t anywhere obvious, so I had to get the picks out for a third time. As I slid the top drawer of the first one open, I found reams of patient files inside and felt a pang of guilt – not for Russum, but for the patients whose privacy I was about to shatter. I checked my watch again, saw I had ten minutes, and returned my attention to the drawer – but the sense of guilt didn’t disappear. These were people’s lives. Their vulnerabilities, their fears, their secrets. I could feel the betrayal, every bit of it, because in the years after Derryn died, it could easily have been me in here.
Every person’s notes were in a grey suspension file, each one fixed to a runner, a tab on top listing their name and a number. They were in alphabetical order, this cabinet covering M through to Z, so I immediately sprung the lock to the second cabinet and found files covering surnames from A to L.
I found Richard about halfway in.
Pulling the folder out, I took it across to the desk. Even before I’d looked at it, something didn’t feel right, but I didn’t realize what until I had the file open.
It was virtually empty.
It contained a top sheet where Russum had listed everything that Richard Kite could remember about himself. It included all the things he’d told me, from the few memories he maintained, to him remembering how to swim. Where there should have been things like age, date of birth, medical history and employment, the boxes had been left blank. I’d expected that, but not what I found next. Beneath the top sheet, where I expected to find copious notes about their sessions, the hypnotherapy he’d been given, there was absolutely nothing.
No notes at all; just a series of photos.
I flicked through them. They were of renowned historical figures, celebrities, world monuments and famous buildings. I remembered what Richard had told me about his sessions with Russum: We go through photographs to see what I remember, who I’m aware of, and who I’m not. She’d been doing it in an effort to narrow down his age, where he was from and brought up. So where were her conclusions? Where were all the notes?
I went back to the cabinets and picked out another patient at random. The file was thick. I put it back and tried another. Exactly the same. In all the others, Russum had done her job – she’d asked questions and tried to dig away at answers; she’d written up conclusions, whole transcripts in some cases. It didn’t take much effort to see the difference between Richard’s file and the rest of the files in the cabinets. Those were all maps of the human experience; his was an incongruent parade of celebrities. Yet he’d been deliberately sought out by Russum. She’d called him up and offered to help him. She’d worked for free. I thought she’d seen him as a meal ticket – but, given that Richard’s phone was being monitored, I started to wonder if it was more calculated than that. Was the treatment she’d been giving him an elaborate cover for something else?
I paused there for a moment, looking down at what constituted Richard’s file – a single piece of paper and a gallery of faces and locations – and then checked my watch and saw that I had three minutes before I needed to get out. I started gathering up the photos from the file and placing them back inside.
It was of a woman in her early thirties, blonde hair, green eyes, sitting on the edge of a park bench somewhere. The photograph had been closely cropped, so that only her face, her shoulders and the tops of both arms were visible – but I could see the slats of the bench behind her, trees a few feet further out, and then the blurred figures of families and couples beyond that. Right on the edge of the shot there was something else too: a sliver of grey, breaking above the treeline.
The BT Tower.
It was Regent’s Park.
Setting the picture aside, I went through the others again, looking for any that seemed similarly out of place, and I found a second photograph of the woman, exactly matching the other one. Same bench in Regent’s Park, same pose, same angle on the BT Tower in the background. Why would Russum have two identical photographs of the same person?
I put the two pictures side by side and then kept searching the others, but all I found were figures from history and pop culture, and landmarks I instantly recognized; and not only that, they were all professional photographs, either cut out of magazines or newspapers and photocopied on to thin sheets of card, or printed directly off the Internet using a high-quality laser printer. The celebrity pictures all had that high-level sheen; the landmarks were picturesque, perfectly lit.
The matching photographs weren’t.
It wasn’t that the picture was bad necessarily, it just clearly wasn’t taken by a pro: the colours were slightly washed out and there was a minor movement blur on her left side. When I looked at her more closely, trying to work out if she was someone I just hadn’t seen or heard of before – a YouTube star, a pop singer – I figured she was probably too old to be making walk-throughs of videogames on the Internet, even in her early thirties, and despite a pair of silver hoop earrings she was quite plain, a little coy, which made me doubt that she was a singer or an actress either. So who was she? And what was she doing in Richard’s file?
I grabbed my phone, took a series of shots of the two photographs side by side, and then returned everything to the filing cabinets.
I was running ninety seconds late.
Checking that everything was exactly as I left it, I headed out of the office, on to the landing and paused. Four floors below me, I could hear movement: the dulled sound of footsteps; a door opening. I grabbed the fire extinguisher, placed it back where I’d found it and gently pushed the clinic door shut until it clicked.
I headed down a floor and then stopped.
Backing into the shadows of the stairwell, I looked down through the centre, banisters circling back and forth, and watched the security guard emerge on to the first floor, one hand on the railing.
He was coming up.
I stayed where I was, watching his hand move, his wedding ring chiming against the metal railing. When he got to the office on the second floor, he ran a card through a reader and the door fanned out towards him. I waited for him to go inside, waited for the door to suck shut, and then I moved, taking two steps at a time. I crouched as I passed the door he’d gone through and, by the time I got to the foyer, I could hear him above me again – the door, the railing, his footsteps.
I didn’t move until he entered the third floor.
Once he did, I exited the building for good.
The Brink
The first time the girls went up into the hills together was two months before Penny turned nine. It took them a while to pluck up the courage, but then their curiosity got the better of them and they crept out of the house after dark, when their parents thought the two of them were asleep, and they followed one of the trails up to the top. It turned out that Beth wasn’t making it up: at the end of one of the routes, there actually was a fence. Penny wasn’t good at measuring heights, didn’t really understand feet and inches, but it was at least as tall as her stepdad, Jack, maybe taller. But about a minute after they arrived, they heard a weird noise coming from the other side of it, and it was enough to send them running all the way home again.
Eventually, though, they went back, and because the second time wasn’t as scary as the first, they decided to go a third time, and a fourth, and each time they stayed a little longer, until five minutes became thirty, and thirty became an hour.
Every time they went back, they heard and saw a little more. Sometimes, they swore they could actually spot something moving out there. The wind would still, the clouds would drift apart, and moonlight would blanket the headland like a pale gauze, revealing the sea of long grass that surrounded them, and the fence that marked the boundary between where they were and the marshland beyond it. From the inside of a hideout they’d found – an old concrete pillbox – the movement on the other side of the fence only ever appeared as flickers, as brief flashes, and always way off into the distance, in an area that Jack – and, as time went on, pretty much everyone else in town – referred to as the Brink.
And that was the thing: they could have made sure that there was something out there – or not – if they’d gone further than the pillbox, if they’d gone up to the fence, or even, in a feat of bravery, over it and on to the other side. Yet, if Penny had become more fearless every time they’d crept out of the house after dark to return here, if all the science books she’d read had argued that there could be nothing in the grass and the bogs beyond the fence – no monsters, or ghosts, or giant animals – the more time that went on, the more often they returned, the more doubts would continue to nag at her.
‘Si Rickles reckons they found an arm near the fence once,’ Beth said on their eighteenth visit. Si Rickles was an annoying kid from their school whose dad was a sergeant in the police force. When Penny – ten by that time, mature for her age, independent – argued against it, questioning why it wasn’t in the newspapers, or why no one in town was talking about it, her sister said, ‘Dad reckons all the people would stop wanting to come here if they found out, so no one talks about it.’
If that seemed unlikely to Penny, other things were more difficult to dispute. One time, when they finally lost count of how often they’d been up there, the two of them were hunkered down inside the shelter, looking out at the grass that ringed their hideout, when they heard the soft suck of something out in the marshland.
They glanced at each other, skin glazed white in the spill from the torch, uncertain about what they’d heard. They stared out at the bogs, talking in hushed whispers to one another. They told each other that, if the sound came from anywhere, it came from the Brink; they were safe on this side of the fence, it wasn’t anything to worry about. Yet, their sense of unease lingered. It didn’t help that it was ten o’clock at night, the entire headland pitch black, so even as they shone their torch out through the embrasure on the pillbox – the window – they couldn’t see very far. They couldn’t see what part of the bog the noise came from.
And then it came again.
This time it sounded exactly like a foot pressing into the peat and lifting out again. Or a paw. Or a claw. And whoever – or whatever – it was, it was close, much closer than before. They whispered to each other that if it was as close as it sounded, it should have been right on top of them, on this side of the fence. They should have been able to see it. But it didn’t help. When you were children, the blindness of the night held no logic.
‘I’m scared,’ Beth muttered, her voice cracking in the silence.
‘Me too,’ Penny replied, taking her sister’s hand.
‘I mean it. I’m really scared, Pen. I want to go home.’
‘I know. I know you’re scared.’ She looked at her sister. ‘So am I.’
That night, they ran faster than they’d ever run. They burst through the rear door of the pillbox and carved a path down the hill, back towards the dots of light that marked out the town. By the time they got home, breathless, terrified, their hearts thumping like fists on a door, they could see their parents through the windows at the front of the house, getting ready to go to bed. The two girls s
crambled up the trellising and in through the bedroom window they’d left ajar, and then they lay under the covers, chests still beating out a rhythm, and pretended they were asleep. As the silence pressed hard against their ears, they whispered to one another that they would never go back.
They’d never go back to the Brink.
But then they did.
It took three months. By then, time had repaired some of their anxieties. Penny spent twelve weeks walking to and from school, talking them both around, and the more they talked, the braver they became. They were going to go back. There was nothing up there. There was nothing stalking the grassland. There was nothing beyond the fence but landmines buried deep in the earth – and maybe not even that if Penny’s stepdad was to be believed.
Even so, the first time they returned, they were scared. The night they ran, the night they heard movement out in the bogs, trailed their thoughts as they went back to the pillbox. It stayed with them on the second visit too, on the third, on the tenth night they returned, on the twentieth. In truth, it never really went away.
Sometimes the fear made them see shapes out there in the long grass: what could have been the flick of hair, or the curve of a leg or an arm; what could have been fingers, bone white under the moon, or eyes, tiny pinpricks of light dancing in them. On those occasions, they’d hold each other’s hands, Penny trying to be courageous, trying not to show how frightened she was even though her muscles were as rigid as iron. Frequently, they were terrified, but they were fascinated by the Brink too, by the idea there might be something out there. They were drawn to it, obsessed by it.
They never talked to their friends at school about going out after dark, because they didn’t want it getting back to their parents. There didn’t seem to be any actual rules to say that you couldn’t go up to the perimeter fence, to the place where the pillbox was located. You just weren’t allowed to go beyond it. But, gradually, over time, Penny and Beth heard the people in the town talk about the Brink more and more. It became a subject of discussion in shops, in the school playground, out in the streets when people passed each other. Jack would go with other men up into the hills to make sure the fence was still secure, that no one could accidentally wander into the minefield, or that an animal couldn’t squeeze through again like Mr Sankle’s dog had. Penny and Beth would ask Jack about what was out there, about the bombs and the idea of there being something else – something worse – living in the Brink, but Jack told them as long as they never went up there, they wouldn’t ever have to worry about it. He’d cuddle them and tell them he loved them, and that there were some things in this world that children shouldn’t have to think about. Penny asked him what he meant by that and he just laughed, but she thought she saw something else too. The same thing she saw in Beth’s face when they were out at the pillbox sometimes; the same thing Beth saw in her.
