by Tim Weaver
I went to Chrome. Under History, there was a record of every site that had been visited over the past week. Beyond that, there was no browsing data at all, meaning that Marek must have deliberately wiped it clean, presumably at semi-regular intervals. It was annoying, but not fatal: even going back a week, I could see enough – not least that, over the course of the past two days, Internet activity had been focused on me and trying to dig up dirt on who I was.
I could see media headlines about cases I’d taken on that had blown up and spread, bleeding into the mainstream. I saw pages titled WAPPING PIER: POLICE INTERVIEW INVESTIGATOR and SNATCHER TASK FORCE PLAY DOWN ROLE OF INVESTIGATOR. If I clicked on the second story, I’d find a picture of myself, bleached by a camera flash, on the steps of a police station, because I’d read that story before. I’d see me half turned and shielding my face as I came out of my house. Further down his History, there was also evidence that Marek had been on – and returned to – my website, a basic landing page that simply listed who I was and what I did, together with my contact details.
In order to go any further, to attempt to get into his Gmail account, or to explore some of the less obvious links in his History, I knew I’d have to log into the hotel’s Wi-Fi. If he was watching iCloud, which he would be, he’d then instantly know where I was. If he was still at the school, that might give me an hour. If he was at my house, I probably only had thirty minutes before he came through the doors of the hotel. Or he might not even come for me as his first option: he might just start erasing the MacBook’s contents remotely. Yet, if he was going to do that, he could have started doing it the moment I left the school. What seemed more likely was that he wanted to find out where I was before he did anything else.
I tried to work fast, connecting to the hotel’s Wi-Fi before following the link to Marek’s Gmail inbox. It was an instant dead end. He’d logged out properly from Gmail, presumably the last time he used it, so the username and password boxes were blanks waiting to be filled. I kept going, checking out some of the other links, most of which were irrelevant, and then came to another URL, repeated over and over, that I didn’t recognize: http://rt.me.com. I selected it and discovered it was a Red Tree intranet page.
The design was deliberately dialled down: white, except for the Red Tree logo in the corner and another set of username and password tabs in the centre. This time I’d got lucky. Marek hadn’t had the chance to log out properly before I’d swiped the laptop from his office.
I hit Return and the intranet loaded in another, almost identical page except this one had a line of six links running down the middle. Preparatory School. Senior School. Fees. Notices. Contact. Staff.
I clicked on them in order.
Preparatory and Senior led me to a system, like a grid, where parents could get an overview of what their kids were up to in lessons and out on the sports field, as well as the homework they were being set. Fees was where money owed to the school could be settled up: it was a secure payment page, with options for a name, card number, an expiry date and the card’s verification code. Notices was just a list of school updates, Contact a single window to send an email in, and Staff was a white page with the school’s logo in the corner, and another username and password box. Again, the computer had remembered Marek’s login information. When I accessed it, I found an internal instant messaging service.
It was made up of two panes, the left one a long, thin window with a series of names in alphabetical order. It had automatically selected the first name on the list – a man called Andrew Abraham. Because of that, in the bigger, right-hand pane, there was a picture of Abraham and a tab with a small amount of personal information. He was a geography teacher.
I started checking other photos, going through them one by one, and found Jacob Howson. Soon, I noticed something else too: in the corner of each of the staff profiles, above the photograph of the staff member, there was a green clickable button. It said: EXPORT CHAT.
I was staring at a physics teacher called Marc Davies-Peters, so used him as a guinea pig, clicking the button to see where it took me. Instantly, a .txt file began downloading to my desktop. When it was finished, I opened the file. A moment after that, I realized what I had here: it was a record of every conversation that particular member of staff had had on the club’s IM. And not just who they’d chatted to and when, but the actual contents. Every message, every word, saved on to a server. It meant Marek could monitor all staff conversations.
I backed out of the profile page for Davies-Peters, inched down the list and found Naomi Russum. I found Marek too.
In his photograph, his eyes were a dark blue, the colour of a deep ocean, and he’d swept his hair back from his face, into a small ponytail, revealing a scar at the arc of his forehead. I’d put him as late thirties the first time I met him, and I could see in his face, in his skin, that I’d been right. But there was a weird disconnect between his face and eyes, as if his eyes were older, someone else’s, aged by the things he’d seen and done.
Just then, the MacBook started to slow, the cursor flickering as I tried to move it in the direction of the .txt files I’d downloaded for Marek and Russum.
Shit.
Marek was trying to remote-erase the laptop.
Grabbing a USB stick out of my holdall, I stuck it into the MacBook and saved both .txt files and as many of the documents and JPEGs as I could, just in case. It seemed to take an age, the load bar crawling from left to right as the computer continued to slow. At one stage, it looked like it had stopped altogether and was about to lock me out. But it didn’t. The load bar jumped into life for a second time, and then shortly after that it was done.
I yanked out the stick, pocketed it, scooped up Marek’s laptop and my holdall and made a beeline for the toilets. In one of the cubicles, I shut the door and started hauling the lid off the cistern.
I dumped the MacBook inside.
It made a splash as it hit the water, the toilet’s float rod bending as I forced the laptop past it. Water spilled out over the top and on to the floor, but then everything settled and the MacBook stayed below the surface, at the bottom of the tank.
Replacing the lid on the cistern, I headed out to my car, got back on to the Bath Road and did a four-mile loop to the south of the airport where there was another faceless hotel. I set up in the foyer, with views of the main entrance, and transferred everything from the USB stick on to my own laptop.
After that, I opened up the .txt files.
They contained the conversations that Marek and Naomi Russum had both had on the Red Tree instant messaging service; and it turned out that they’d had a lot – and mostly with each other. Something else became pretty clear very quickly too: they really only talked about one subject.
One person.
And that was Richard Kite.
33
Marek’s style was terse, his language deliberately opaque, and it built an even clearer picture of him. There was never going to be any confirmation on the system that he was the one who had murdered Penny Beck – his language in the IM chats was too precise – but you could almost feel people squirm when they had to talk to him.
Russum was the same.
I looked for conversations between the two of them in and around the time of Penny’s death – basically any hint about why she was killed and who carried out the act. There was nothing. However, repeated in both text files was a conversation between Marek and Russum that had taken place over the course of seven consecutive weeks, starting in early March; a month and a half after Richard Kite had appeared out of nowhere in Hampshire.
AMarek How did the first session go today?
NRussum He doesn’t remember anything.
AMarek Nothing?
NRussum He has one quite clear memory about a beach. He says he can remember looking out at it from a window, possibly as a kid. He remembers some sort of children’s TV show as well.
AMarek What else did he say about the beach?
NR
ussum Nothing.
AMarek And the children’s TV show?
NRussum Same.
AMarek All the stuff he told the newspapers last month – that’s as much as he remembers?
NRussum Yes.
AMarek If he remembers any more, I need to know.
NRussum Yes. You’ve made that perfectly clear.
It was obvious that Russum had accessed the messenger from her place of work, or her home, somewhere other than the school, otherwise they’d surely have had the conversation in person. It was also obvious why she might prefer to do that. She didn’t like him. She didn’t want to be in the same room as him.
Other things stood out too. She was reluctant, seemed not to like being asked to keep an eye on Richard or the idea of lying to him; and, from Marek’s side, there was clearly a concern, not just that Richard would remember his past, but that he might remember more about the beach and the TV show. Why was Marek so worried about those things coming back to Richard?
Where did they lead?
The only thing that really made sense in terms of the intro to the TV show was if it was local programming – a regional news show, or something specific to an area of the country – because, that way, it would help investigators to narrow down their search. But I’d already trawled a database of local TV news intros, including stills of title cards, and when I did it again now I got the same result: nothing that matched Richard’s description of the TV mast.
Their next conversation was a few days later. It became apparent that Russum had just finished another session and was immediately reporting back.
NRussum No change.
AMarek No new memories?
NRussum No.
AMarek Did you put him under?
NRussum It isn’t an anaesthetic.
AMarek So did you?
NRussum Yes.
AMarek And?
NRussum It was unsuccessful.
AMarek Meaning what?
NRussum Meaning, he didn’t respond.
AMarek You do realize what’s at stake here for you, don’t you?
I paused, eyes on that final line.
What did it mean? What was at stake for Russum if she didn’t do what Marek asked of her? Could it be something as coarse as her life?
I kept reading.
NRussum Why are you making me do this?
AMarek You don’t need to worry about it.
NRussum Why do I keep having to show him a picture of Corrine Wilson?
AMarek It doesn’t matter.
NRussum I want to know why.
AMarek IT DOESN’T MATTER. All you need to know is he represents a risk to us.
NRussum But what sort of risk?
AMarek He’s dangerous.
NRussum That seems unlikely.
AMarek You don’t know anything about him.
NRussum He doesn’t seem dangerous to me.
AMarek I don’t fucking care what you think. You got a shitload of money so you could go away and start that clinic of yours. Unless you want me to take that money back, you’re going to stop asking questions and do exactly what I ask.
There it was: the reason Marek had been able to move Naomi Russum into place. He’d helped get her business off the ground. She was in debt to him. If he called in his investment, the Aldgate Clinic went down the toilet and all that she’d worked for, all the prestige, the plaudits, the acclaim, would be gone in a flash. She didn’t know what Marek’s real interest in Richard Kite was, just as I didn’t yet, but she must have realized that, if Marek was involved, it wasn’t going to be anything good. But he had her in a noose, so she chose not to ask any more questions.
He turned the screw again a few weeks later.
AMarek What happened today?
NRussum This is immoral. I hate it.
AMarek That wasn’t the question I asked.
NRussum He has no idea what’s going on.
AMarek Just do your job, Naomi.
NRussum You’re not the one that has to face him every week.
And then, several weeks later, a bomb dropped:
NRussum I’m doing what you asked. I hope you’re happy.
AMarek I am. It’s for the best.
NRussum Is it?
AMarek Yes.
NRussum Then why do I feel like shit?
AMarek How far did you go?
NRussum I put him under and started discussing the TV intro he remembers. But it will take time. It has to be done gradually and carefully. We could be talking months. We could be talking years. We also talked about the beach. I suggested it might be a river with a city on the other side.
I could barely even process what I was reading.
Russum had looked me in the face and lied about how many times she’d used hypnosis on Richard. She’d told me she’d used it twice, both times right at the beginning, citing it as ineffective – but from the transcript, it was clear that she had still been using it almost three months after he first started seeing her. It was clear she was going to keep on using it too.
But that was far from the worst thing she’d done.
I thought of the phone conversation I’d had with Reverend Parsons about Richard’s memories; about that one incongruous period when Richard remembered the beach differently. He said the sea wasn’t sea at all, but a river, Parsons had told me, and on the other side of the river was a city. He said he could picture big buildings, and long roads, and cars, and traffic. The new memory had lasted a few days, a week, little more than that. Yet it had added to the sense of confusion, unbalanced Richard, made him doubt even the small fragments of recall he still had. And the reason he was so confused, why he couldn’t seem to pin down his exact memories of the beach and the TV intro, why whole new ideas like the city were suddenly coming out of nowhere, was because, during sessions with Russum, the rug was constantly being pulled out from under him.
Established ideas vanished, or were altered; new ideas were added. She was eating away at the anchors he still had, the pillars of his past.
She was planting false memories in his head.
34
What was a memory and what was a lie?
I took a moment, anger humming beneath my skin.
Russum had talked about the dangers that hypnosis – in the hands of an amateur – could pose for the patient: the wrong line of questioning, an ungainly delivery, even a stray word. She was no amateur, quite the opposite, which only made her more irresponsible. Even if she’d made it clear to Marek that she hadn’t wanted to go down this route, that it went against everything she believed in, even if she knew – deep down – that there was no way Richard was dangerous, she’d done it anyway.
And the consequences of what she was doing were huge. It might be the reason I wasn’t able to find a trace of the TV show intro anywhere, or why the beach he’d looked out at as a kid was proving so hard to locate or identify – because tiny, important details were being altered or added while he was under hypnosis. For all I knew, he may have recalled new, significant details in the time since he was found; he may have sat down with Russum and told her about them. But if he had, they were lost now, buried or destroyed by Russum, before new, bogus ones were passed to her, like some stage direction, by Marek.
What seemed indisputable was that a secret – or some knowledge of what it might be – was buried inside Richard Kite’s head. Doctors, the police, the media, Reverend Parsons, me – we’d tried to lever his memories to the surface. We’d tried to pull them into the light in order to give him his life back. But Marek was busy manipulating Russum – blackmailing her – into making sure that never happened. Ultimately, he wanted Richard’s recollection narrowed because what lay dormant behind his eyes was big enough to bring Marek down.
I read on, deeper into the IM transcript. After a while, a thought came back to me, one I’d had a couple of times already: If he’s such a threat, why hasn’t Marek just taken care of Richard like he took care of Penny Beck? With Richard dead, there wa
s no danger of him compromising them; no danger of him remembering details about his past, about who Marek was and what he’d done. Why even go to the trouble of trying to manipulate his memories through hypnosis?
Because Richard was known, and he had a support network. He had people looking out for him who wouldn’t stay quiet if he just got up one day and disappeared – unlike Howson had after Penny vanished. He had Parsons and the charity Starting Again on his side. He’d been all over the newspapers and Internet in the southern counties for those first few months, and although the coverage had died down, journalists would still know who he was and be interested in big new twists in his story. Couple that with the fact that the police investigation into his case, although stalled, was still active, and it got complicated for Marek. When Penny disappeared, she did so in relative anonymity; if Richard went the same way, red flags would go up at Hampshire Police and in the media. That was why Marek had got Russum involved, why he’d manoeuvred her, and why he threatened her if she didn’t do what he asked.
I called Richard’s mobile.
He picked up after four rings. In the background, I could hear the hum of traffic. He said that he and Howson had got to Folkestone and were on their way to a place that Howson’s friends owned. I told him to keep me updated, and then started pressing him again: on the things that Naomi Russum had been talking about in their meetings, on what he recalled of the hypnosis used on him, and about whether he ever remembered coming into contact with the school, or the people that worked there.
