Find Me

by J. S. Monroe

  ‘Drive on,’ Jar says. ‘If we park somewhere along here, I can walk back up.’

  The plan is for Jar to call Max and Carl once he’s established that it’s just Amy at home. Martin should be out on his bike, according to his journal, as he is every day at this time. Jar will ring the front doorbell, and in the unlikely event that Martin does answer, he will explain that he’s come to say goodbye, make up some story about going abroad, moving on with his life, finally putting Rosa behind him now that he’s read her diary and come to terms with her death.

  ‘It’s a long walk to the pier,’ Max says as he pulls over, a few hundred yards beyond the house. He sounds tired, Jar thinks, after the three-hour drive up from London.

  ‘Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour.’ Jar tries not to think of Rosa setting off down the road on her own in the dark that night, Martin following at a distance in his car. There’s a path for most of the way but not the first quarter of a mile. ‘I’ll call you,’ he says, getting out of the Land Rover.

  ‘Martin could be hostile,’ Max says. ‘His friend was.’

  ‘He won’t be here – he’ll be out cycling.’

  ‘I think I should come with you, bro,’ Carl says. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘I’ll ring.’

  Five minutes later, Jar knocks on the front door.

  ‘Who is it?’ a voice calls out, after Jar hears a chain being put on the door. It’s Amy.

  ‘It’s me, Jar.’

  The door opens a few inches, still on the chain, and Jar smiles at Amy. She’s looking terrible, worse than he’s ever seen her: dark eyes, heavy make-up, a vacant half smile.

  ‘Is Martin in?’ he asks.

  She shakes her head. ‘On his bike.’ Her voice is vague, dreamy.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  Amy takes the door off the chain and lets Jar into the hall. Jar notices her fingertips are black as she closes the door behind them.

  ‘I read it, after I sent it to you.’

  Jar nods, not sure how much to say, trying to establish what she now knows about the man she’s shared a house – her life – with for the past twenty years: the cameras in the guest bedroom, the lab out at the airfield, the learned helplessness experiments. At least she hasn’t seen the video, might not have suspected that the trussed-up ‘bitch’ was Rosa.

  ‘Tell me it’s fiction,’ she says, walking into the kitchen. Jar follows her. It’s not even teatime, but there’s a half-empty glass on the sideboard, an open vodka bottle nearby. There are some charcoal sketches on the table – cross-hatched, violent images – and balls of screwed-up paper on the floor.

  ‘Did you read it all?’ Jar asks, glancing again at the drawings.

  ‘Of course I did.’ She pauses. ‘He let her jump that night, didn’t he? Down at the pier.’

  She’s fallen for the journal’s crude obfuscation, Jar thinks, chosen to buy in to the wrong narrative. He wonders how much medication she’s taken. Her voice is weak, her sentences trailing off. ‘He let my Strelka die, too.’

  ‘We can talk about the journal later,’ he says.

  ‘Kirsten knew,’ Amy says. ‘She suspected him of having cameras in the guest room.’

  ‘Martin writes about an old lab, out at a disused airfield,’ Jar interrupts, worried by Amy’s state of mind. ‘We need to find it. I think it’s where he goes on his bike ride every day. Do you know where it is?’

  Amy pauses, her eyes focusing on Jar’s, more alert now. ‘I think I might.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m a Strava widow, Jar. He’s out on his bike for three hours every day. When he gets back, he goes down to his shed, downloads the route, his times. The airfield will be on his computer.’

  Jar is already calling Carl. ‘Thank you, Amy.’

  *

  Max is keeping watch outside the shed with Jar, holding a pair of bolt cutters they found in a nearby outhouse. They have severed both padlocks and the main door is open. Carl is inside the back room, working fast on the computer, helped by Amy, who has come alive, energised by the hunt.

  ‘Have you found it yet?’ Jar calls.

  ‘Give us another minute,’ Carl says. ‘He’s got a lot of security on here.’

  Jar looked in briefly on the back room, but the sight of the TV monitors, the desk, Martin’s computer, the roll of medical tape next to a paperweight unnerved him, brought Martin’s journal to life. He needs to keep it together for what he fears lies ahead. It was also very dark in there, even with the door open, the room lit by a red lightbulb.

  ‘We’re in,’ Carl says. ‘Now we just need to see where he’s been pedalling. People compare times on Strava for particular routes, stretches of road.’

  Jar glances at Max and goes back into the shed, leaving Max outside. His worry is that Martin might return at any moment.

  ‘Looks like he’s been taking the same identical route every day for years,’ Carl says, going through the data.

  ‘Where’s the airfield?’

  ‘Other side of Holt, right here.’ Amy points at a map on the screen. ‘I know where that is.’

  ‘Fifty-five minutes and forty seconds away, cycling at an average speed of sixteen miles per hour,’ Carl adds. ‘He leaves here at the same time every day: 1 p.m. – like clockwork.’

  ‘And returns at 4 p.m.,’ Amy says.

  Jar glances at his watch. ‘He’s still there.’

  ‘I’ll show you the quickest way,’ Amy says.

  95

  I’ve got so used to the pale, diffuse light down here that when the ceiling lightbulb exploded into life today, I thought it was lightning. But the light has stayed, yellow and artificial and as bright as fire, and it’s burned a plan into my mind. I know now what I must do.

  The light reminded me of when we lived in Pakistan. ‘Dim-dum’ – that’s what our cook called it when the power was weak and flickering. Then one day we were connected to a private-generator powerhouse, the current surged and all the lightbulbs popped like firecrackers.

  I walked over to the cell door, my chains just allowing me to reach the light switch. I flicked it off and then on again, looking at the light. Power.

  Someone has connected the mains power.

  ‘Do you remember that time you touched the bare wire in the garden?’ I turn to see Dad behind me, examining the plug socket on the wall. He was always good at DIY. ‘If we’d been connected to the powerhouse, you would have died,’ he continues. ‘Volts, current, resistance, remember?’

  All I can recall, apart from Dad trying to explain the physics to me (I was only five at the time), is being given a glass of lemon water afterwards by the gardener. Dim-dum had saved my life.

  I turned the cell light off again, my plan already formed.

  ‘Sounds like you were lucky to live,’ Jar says, emerging from the shadows and standing next to Dad.

  I always wanted them to meet.

  They seem relaxed in each other’s company, leaning against the cell wall together, arms folded. The two men I love more than anyone in the world.

  ‘Thank you, babe,’ I whisper, ‘for coming to Cornwall, for being here now.’

  ‘Your dad’s a good man,’ Jar says.

  ‘He’s a charmer, this one,’ Dad replies, nodding at Jar. ‘Your mother would have liked him.’

  I closed my eyes, happy at last, and opened them again. They were gone, but the light is still burning.

  96

  Jar, Max, Amy and Carl sit in silence, looking across the wide expanse of the disused airfield, surrounded by pine trees and the vivid yellow of rapeseed fields. Amy showed them a back route and, as they drove, Jar broke it to her as gently as he could that Martin might be holding Rosa at the airfield. He didn’t want to say too much – she’s too fragile – but she wasn’t completely surprised. Although it never referred explicitly to Rosa’s capture and torture, Martin’s journal had prepared the ground. Jar also mentions Kirsten, says he knows that she had his best interests at heart, and promises
to be more open-minded about therapy in the future.

  Max has parked the Land Rover next to a long row of abandoned poultry sheds, down a track and away from what was once the main runway. They ignored a sign that said ‘Private Property: No Unauthorised Persons Beyond This Point’ and drove around an old barrier where cars had once had to stop to have their wheels cleaned with antiseptic spray. Jar wonders what had come first: the intensive poultry units or the secret animal-testing laboratory.

  ‘They look like something out of Belsen,’ Max says, nodding at the poultry sheds. Jar had had the same thought: low grey huts with grain silos at each end, rising up like sinister chimneys.

  ‘According to Strava, the lab should be over there,’ Carl says, pointing to a clump of pine trees on the far side of the airfield, more than half a mile away.

  ‘In his journal he writes about leaving his bike by the southern perimeter,’ Amy says. Her voice is quiet but strong. ‘If we can find the bike…’

  Jar stops, struck by the reality of what lies ahead of them all. What will they do when they find the bike? Confront Martin? He feels for the gun in his jacket pocket. He’s never fired one before. It would be so much easier to call Cato, but this is his time now. He has waited five years for such a moment and he’s not going to let anyone else get in the way. He knows, too, that some dark corner of his soul wants to confront Martin with no authorities about.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be calling your police friend?’ Max asks, reading Jar’s thoughts. ‘Leave this to them?’

  ‘After,’ Jar says. ‘We’ll call him after.’

  *

  ‘You look so helpless today.’ He smiles.

  I glance down at my naked body, the chains around my sore ankles and wrists, trying to focus on the plan.

  ‘A picture of helplessness,’ he says, holding my chin in his fingers as he turns my head from one side to the other. Sometimes I have spat in his face, but not today. Today I will do whatever he says.

  He’s talked to me a lot about ‘learned helplessness’, claiming it’s the key to unlocking the neurobiology of clinical depression. ‘Debility, dependency, dread’ – that’s another thing he goes on about.

  If I believe I have no control over what he does to me in the harness, I will begin to think I cannot influence any traumatic aspect of my life or environment. But I do have control, ever since I saw the light, ever since Jar and Dad met each other down here. They have given me strength, shown me a way out.

  *

  Max brakes when Amy spots her husband’s bike, partially hidden in the trees, on the far, southern side of the airfield. The location couldn’t be more remote, Jar thinks, out of sight of the main road. The nearest house, in a hamlet beyond the airfield, must be more than a mile away.

  ‘There should be a Nissen hut nearby. Let’s leave the car here,’ he says, turning to Amy. ‘I think you shouldn’t come any further.’

  ‘Call the police,’ Amy says. ‘Please.’

  ‘We will, I promise,’ Jar says, hugging her. ‘As soon as we’ve found him.’

  The three of them climb out of the Land Rover, closing the doors as quietly as possible and leaving Amy on her own. She has a phone with her and will call Jar in an emergency. Max is carrying the bolt cutters he used on Martin’s shed door. If Jar is right, they will need them again. There are no buildings in sight, but there is a strip of old concrete on the far side of the trees where the bike has been hidden. Jar gestures for the others to stand still and listen. The only noise is the sound of the wind in the pine trees: plangent, restless.

  Jar walks over to the bike and looks around, trying to see if any undergrowth has been trampled. An abandoned white facemask catches his eye, lying beneath some brambles.

  ‘I think there’s a building over there,’ Max says, pointing further along the perimeter. ‘Green roof.’

  Jar looks and can’t see anything at first, but then he spots the distinctive curve of a Nissen hut, partially hidden by trees, about five hundred yards away.

  They walk towards it, hugging the edge of the trees, Jar first, followed by Max, breathing heavily now, and Carl, who has fallen very quiet. A second later, they all jump, a pheasant rising up from beside them, cackling loudly.

  ‘Jesus,’ Carl says. ‘I hate the countryside.’

  The bird frightened Jar too, but he tries not to show it. Max is right, he thinks. They should have rung Cato. He tells himself to concentrate on what lies ahead. Rosa is fewer than a hundred yards away from them now, alive, he hopes to God, but there’s a chance they might be too late.

  *

  It’s the moment we’ve both been waiting for: when he releases the shackles from my legs and arms. He beams with pride as he stands before me, key in hand.

  ‘For those of us interested in learned helplessness,’ he says, bending down to unlock my ankles, ‘the absence of any desire to escape is a sign of success, proof that Seligman was right.’

  He rises to his feet, close to my naked body, and frees my wrists, letting the chain drop to the floor like discarded clothing. ‘Can you imagine how exhilarating it must have been, that first time, when the dogs just stood there, electricity coursing through their limbs? They were able to leap free of the pain, but they chose not to. They had given up hope, felt unable to control their environment. The dogs were depressed!’

  He laughs as he says these last words and then slaps me hard across the face, watching for a reaction in my eyes. I stare ahead, trying to block out the stinging in my cheek.

  ‘Good girl,’ he whispers.

  ‘Keep your wings folded,’ Dad says, appearing behind him. Jar is there, too. I can see the butterfly, resting on a sail bag in the sunshine.

  We have been here before, many times. In the early days, when Martin took me upstairs, showed me the open door, the countryside, he was right: I didn’t want to escape. Today is different. It’s the first time he has unchained me since I ran away to Cornwall, and he wants to prove that he is in control again, that we are back on track with his experiments. The pain he has inflicted on me in the past week, my punishment for escaping, has been the worst I can remember, but he can’t break me, not with Jar and Dad here.

  ‘You know what to do,’ he says, nodding towards the table where he has placed the car battery and electrodes.

  To celebrate my submission, my return to a state of learned helplessness, he wants me to prepare the instruments for my own torture. I have been expecting this – he’s asked me before. I go over to the table as he checks the harness, tugging on the ceiling chain. I don’t have long. Moving quickly, I disconnect the wires from the car battery, slip them into the left and right holes of the mains plug socket on the wall and press the switch to on as quietly as I can. He won’t notice what I’ve done unless he’s looking. With the sunpipe blocked off and only candles for illumination, which is the way he likes it on these occasions, the light is poor.

  I come back to the harness, holding the other end of the wires, and place them on a small table that he always puts below the harness. I take care not to touch the electrodes together, or allow them to touch my skin. In a moment, he will ask me to climb into the harness and clamp the electrodes on to my body – different places, depending on his mood. I fear the worst today. First, though, I must apply conductive paste. We both know the routine. He opens the tin of paste, twisting the lid as he looks me up and down. Does he know something’s wrong? That this time the electricity in the electrodes is enough to kill me?

  ‘Volts, current, resistance, remember?’ Dad says.

  ‘I never did get physics,’ Jar adds, under his breath.

  I look up but they have both gone. I am on my own now and know what I must do.

  *

  They walk around the back of the Nissen hut first, peering in through a window at what looks like a derelict office. There are no obvious cameras, no sign that the building has been anything but abandoned for years. As they stand in silence again – listening for what? Rosa’s screams? – J
ar notices something in the undergrowth, a few yards away from the building. It’s an old car battery. Then he spots another, and another. There must be at least a dozen of them. Heavy to carry on a bike, Martin has clearly only bothered to bring them this far – no point ferrying them back afterwards, once they’ve served their purpose. Jar’s angry now. He feels Carl’s hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Carl says.

  *

  I tell myself I’m doing this for all the animals that he has ever tortured, but I know I’m doing it for me, for Dad, for Amy, for Jar.

  ‘Put on the mask,’ he says. ‘You forgot the mask.’

  He passes me the black leather face protector with stitching across the mouth, one that I have worn on so many occasions, trying to bite into its leather to ease the pain.

  I swing around in the hammock, arms and legs hanging down freely below me, as I secure the mask with ties at the back of my head.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asks, as if I’m struggling to put on a coat.

  I shake my head. The mask is on. All that’s left now is for me to reach down for the electrodes below me. Normally, once I have picked them up, he kicks away the table like a hangman’s stool and I attach them, ready for him to turn on the car battery.

  ‘Ready?’ he asks.

  I nod again, struggling to breathe in the mask. My heart is racing. The moment has come. I hear myself praying.

  ‘It’s a new battery, fully charged,’ he says. ‘Should be quite a tingle.’

  *

  The main door of the Nissen hut is locked, as Jar had suspected, but there is a pile of wood stacked up at the front, along with some old agricultural equipment, and Max and Carl are already walking over with a large log. Jar takes one end from Max and with Carl they swing it back between them and launch it at the door, close to the lock. The noise reverberates across the airfield. There is no turning back now. They wield the log again, and again, until the door finally splinters and Max kicks it in.