by Tom Pollock
She took a long, shuddering breath. I looked up at Faraday, staring huffily down from his poster as if to say, In my day we didn’t see anything wrong with electrocuting frogs.
It took me a few seconds to realise Bel wasn’t done. She was staring at me silently, rubbing her hands together, squeezing her bruised knuckles. There was something else, something she was desperate to tell me but couldn’t. The frog story had been a run-up, but she’d skidded to a halt before the sandpit. She was willing me to guess.
Bel, I thought helplessly, if I was a supercomputer capable of a trillion guesses a second, it would still take me until the sun burned out before I could brute-force the code of your mind.
Code. If she couldn’t bring herself to tell me out loud, maybe she could write it down. If she couldn’t say it in plaintext, maybe she could do it in code.
I took a scrap of paper from the bedside table and scratched out a quick Caesar shift cipher. Like any secret shared, it was a hug, a reassurance, a hand extended: a way of saying I’m here. I made the key I love you sis—ILOVEYUS and encoded my message:
You can talk to me. Whatever it is.
She stared at the note for a long time before scrawling her reply. When she handed it back to me, her eyes were full. She went to the window. I unfolded the message. It took me twelve seconds to decrypt. I knew what it would say after the fourth letter:
A-C-A-D—
I-K-I-L—
I killed someone.
NOW
Man, I hate hospitals.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m very glad they exist. The men and women who work in them set bones, measure and inject life-saving drugs, and perform emergency surgery on vital organs for nowhere near enough money and on barely any sleep; that’s heroic.
On the other hand, the men and women who work in them set bones, measure and inject life-saving drugs, and perform emergency surgery on vital organs for nowhere near enough money and on barely any sleep; HOW IS THAT NOT TERRIFYING?
Besides, hospitals are by their nature, flypaper for sick people. I’m always conscious of the possibility you could—in the worst free upgrade in history—show up with a broken collarbone and leave with Marburg haemorrhagic fever. It’s like Congratulations! You’re our five millionth customer! Now bleed from the eyes until dead.
We’ve driven through the night. Mercifully, the Vadis left their car garaged and the keys in the bowl on the sideboard (I really, really hope we get a chance to put it back). The police report on Dominic Rigby’s injuries strongly implied that every minute we delayed was another minute he might take the opportunity to die in.
As the doors whir shut behind us, the eye-scouring light and the fragrance (antiseptic, urine-soaked fabric and politely restrained desperation) tell me before I even see a sign that we’re in A&E—Accident and Emergency. Tonight seventeen casualties perch on the moulded plastic chairs, and several have a distinct “3 a.m. Saturday” flavour, including a whip of a man with dried blood covering his bald head like glaze on a donut, and what appears to be fragments of a Newcastle Brown Ale bottle still embedded in glittering constellations in his scalp. The walking wounded aren’t the ones I’m worried about, though—head injuries aren’t generally known to be infectious. It’s the others, the ones clutching their stomachs, the ones with unfocussed eyes and greasy sheens on their foreheads, that scare me. I recall from somewhere that the world-record distance for a projectile vomit is 3.62 metres and I try to maintain an invisible bubble of that radius around me. Flinching whenever someone breaks my impromptu quarantine zone, I pick my way towards the desk.
“Intensive care, please,” I ask. The hard-eyed, grey-haired woman in blue scrubs behind it glances at me.
“Ye don’ look like ye need it,” she says in a Glasgow accent you could paint the Forth Bridge with. “Jes’ take a number and we’ll get ta ye as soon as we can.”
“No, I’m not hurt,” I explain. “I’m here to visit someone.”
She stares at me. “It’s three a.m. You gonnae watch whoever it is ye’ve come to see sleep? Who are ye here to see, anyway?”
“Dominic Rigby.”
Her snappishness vanishes.
“Oh Christ, follow me.”
She leads us down the antiseptic hallways and flags down a tiny Asian woman in blue scrubs.
“Here ta’ see Rigby,” she tells her.
“Are ye his son? Are ye Ben?” The new nurse’s accent is, if possible, even thicker than her colleague’s.
I swallow hard.
“Yes,” I say.
The change is immediate. This is a woman who works intensive care. She spends her days tending gunshot wounds and draining the fluid from the lungs of kids drowning from cystic fibrosis. She must be hard-core, is what I’m saying, but on hearing my lie she pales.
“Holy . . .” she mutters. “Thank god. We’ve been trying to get hold of you for weeks, but the hospital where your mother’s staying says she’s too fragile to talk to us, and the boarding school the police had listed for you had never heard of you. Some admin cock-up, but it meant we had no idea where you’d been.”
She tails off, as if expecting me to speak, but she hasn’t asked me a question, so I don’t. I feel as though I’m barefoot and this conversation is a dark room with a floor full of thumbtacks.
“He’s only had one other visitor,” she starts up, “before he started regaining consciousness—tall black lass, Sandra . . . Brooks, I think?”
I force about a third of a smile; it’s all I can manage.
“Uh, she’s a, a family friend.”
She nods. “I was just doing rounds, and I actually think your father’s awake. He’ll be so happy to see you. He’s been saying your name in his sleep.”
She disinfects her hands with alcohol gel, indicates that we follow suit, and leads us through a pair of double swing doors.
“Sandra?” Ingrid whispers as she falls in beside me.
“Ten to one on that was LeClare,” I agree. “She was here ahead of us, so she’s found the same pattern. We need to be very, very careful from here on.”
“No shit.”
The nurse leads us into a low-lit corridor with cubicle-like rooms off it. We pass rank upon rank of metal beds, filled with people unobtrusively dying. I know, I know, we’re all dying. Men in this country live to 79 on average. That means every minute that passes, we creep around one-forty-two-millionth of the way closer our deaths. There’s a tiny clock built into every cell of brain and blood vessel, just ticking down. The fact remains, though, as I look around me, these people’s clocks are ticking down fast.
The sharp-white smell of the antiseptic floor cleaner teases a memory from my brain.
I’m lying flat on my back. Bel’s fingers trace the pulpy crater of blood and bone in my forehead and follow the saline line into my arm. I can still feel the heat of her fury, crossing the years like a supernova of a distant star.
We pause at the last cubicle on the left. Gesturing for us to wait, the nurse slips inside, then reemerges.
“He is awake, but I don’t know how long he’ll stay that way.” Her face is sympathetic, but her tone’s all business. I guess nurses, more than anyone, have to strictly ration the number of fucks they give. “He’s very, very weak. I’ve told him you’re here. Be gentle and quick, okay?”
We nod and she steps out of the way as we slip inside.
The cubicle is dimly lit by the bedside lamp, and only the edges of his injuries are visible, gleaming wetly before they bleed away into shadow and gauze, that milky-sweet smell of open burns and ointment. But it’s his shape that most appalls . . . I can’t help but stare at the sprawl of him, distended with swellings and bandages. When he sees us, his head strains back against the pillows, desperate to get away but unable to make his crippled body follow.
His eyes are stretched wide, clear in the wash fr
om the night-light. He looks terrified.
But he doesn’t look surprised.
“Ingrid?” I say quietly. “Is he surprised Ben’s not here?”
“No.”
She sounds puzzled, but I’m not. Ben’s absence from his ailing father’s bedside starts to make sense in a terrible new way. Dominic Rigby knew his son was never going to walk through this door.
The boarding school the police had listed for you had never heard of you.
“Shit,” I mutter. “Ben’s dead.”
On the bed, Dominic Rigby looks at me like I’m the one who put those burns on his chest. It takes me a second to recognise the mangled sound that comes out of his swollen jaw as speech. I lean in closer to hear him.
“Fuck you,” he wheezes with a snakelike rattle. I can hear the wretched effort in every syllable. “And your whole fucking family.”
I eye him levelly, even though the ward is pitching darkly around me. Silently, I count. See, Petey? You’ve already made it to three seconds. You can do this, no problem.
“You know who I am.” He doesn’t answer, but that’s okay. It wasn’t a question. “Who did this to you?”
“You know.”
“Mr. Rigby, tell me what happened.”
One eye rolls towards me, but he doesn’t answer. I can feel the fear coming off him and it’s not hard, not hard at all, to intuit what he’s afraid of.
“I’m not her, Mr. Rigby,” I say, keeping my tone as even and polite as I can. “But she is my sister. Look at me. See the family resemblance, and ask yourself. How hard would it be for me to convince her to come back here?”
He takes a sharp breath and then releases it in a slow hiss. Reluctantly, he starts to speak.
“She came to the house. I was working. I opened the door. She was just . . . just . . . a girl.” Shreds of disbelief still cling to his voice. “She jabbed me with something, and I blacked out.”
“Go on,” I say. He’s not looking at me anymore, and I remember how Rita and Frankie interrogated me, side by side like a comrade. I drop myself into the visitor’s chair, close but out of his line of sight.
“You woke up, where? The basement?”
His eye bevels towards me balefully, but he doesn’t contradict me.
“Pete,” Ingrid asks uneasily, “how did you know that?”
“Soundproof,” I reply shortly, my throat dry. I keep my eyes on Rigby.
“What was it like?”
“Cold. I was cold, naked.”
“You were on the floor?”
“Hanging. Wrists tied over my head, burning. My toes only just scraped the floor. My legs and back were agony. She kept pacing, around and around me for . . . felt like hours. Pain got worse and worse and worse. It became . . . I thought I was going to pass out. I begged her to cut me down, to let me go. Kept asking her ‘Why?’ No answer.”
“Did she say anything the whole time?”
“Only the last time I asked her ‘Why?’”
“What was her answer?”
“Two words: ‘Remember Rachel’ and then she . . .”
His voice just stops.
“Mr. Rigby?” I prompt him.
“She . . .”
I see his lips contort, the steel wire beneath them glints, but no sound comes out. His face goes purple with the effort. After a solid minute he falls back to wheezing. I look at the limp, helpless fear on his face. Mutely, he tugs aside the sheet and peels up the hem of his hospital gown. A puckered, tightly stitched slash zigzags up his abdomen like a seam of black lightning ripping through a storm cloud.
“The fat was white,” he murmurs. “I saw it just before the blood came out.”
There’s fear etched in every line of him, in the way he’s twisted on the bed, his jaw clamped in refusal. I get up, pull the sheet back up to his chin, and crouch beside his head.
I look into his eyes and see them widen. I can see the horror in him as I feel it growing in me. It’s like looking into a mirror, fear feeding off fear, like an infection. Every part of me is cold now, frozen by disbelief. Bel did this? The bandage across his face falls in a way that suggests his nose isn’t all there anymore. A voice shrieks in my head. Bel did this? The slashes across his chest and stomach, across the tendons in his heels so he couldn’t run. Bel did this Bel did this Bel did this. My voice shrieks in my head.
Did I ever know her at all?
The hatred in Dominic Rigby’s eyes is absolute: a thin layer of ice over a bottomless lake of fear. I count fifteen capillaries on the white of his eyeball.
“Mr. Rigby, when she said ‘Remember Rachel,’ did you know what she meant by that?”
He closes his eyes, exhausted. He nods.
“I told her, she didn’t understand, that I loved Rachel, I always loved her. I only wanted to protect her.”
I blink, and for a split second I see the police report, the pictures of a bruised face so strikingly familiar. Ben always did look like his mum.
“Protect her from what, Mr. Rigby? Tell me from the beginning.”
For eleven seconds, he doesn’t move a muscle.
“Protect her from what?” I repeat.
“Your bitch mother,” he snarls.
His vehemence shocks me, and I feel my veneer of calm crack.
“It started in April, the year before last. Ben . . .” Again his voice hits that wall, but this time he manages to push through. “He went out to some club, some rock band, Neutron Funeral.”
I freeze.
“You’re sure that was the name of the band?”
“You’d be sure too if your son never came home from their show.”
I hold myself perfectly still. In my mind’s eye, I see an ankle, white as bone protruding from a roll of carpet. All those excuses I made for not looking inside it. Had I guessed even then? Did I know?
“We called the police. They said they would investigate, but they never called us back. We called again and again; days went by, then weeks. We made posters and put them up all over London, but the next day, they’d all been torn down, even the ones near our house. All the links to the website we made were broken. We thought we were going mad.”
One red-cracked eye fixes suddenly on me.
“Do you know what that’s like? To doubt your eyes, your senses, everything you know about the most important thing in your life?”
Yes, Mr. Rigby, I know.
“We kept calling the police. We kept going to the station in person, but nobody would see us. In the end, I said if they didn’t give me something in three days, I’d be going to the papers. I gave them three days.” He sounds so betrayed. “I still thought they were on our side.
“On day two, your mother came to the house.
“My boss, Warren Jordan, was with her. He was sweating, kept rubbing his hands dry on his jacket. They didn’t sit. Didn’t even look at the tea we made them. He never said a word. It was her that did the talking.”
He pauses for long enough that I feel I have to prompt him.
“Mr. Rigby? What did my mother say?”
His voice goes flat as he recited from memory. He remembers every word.
“‘Your son is dead. His body will never be found. Any attempt to investigate his death will fail. Tell the media and they will ignore you, and you will be punished. You will not be able to work. You won’t qualify for welfare. You will lose this house. You will not be able to turn to your families for shelter or food; if you do, the same will happen to them. You will be toxic to everything and everyone in your lives.
“‘Do what is best for your family, grieve in secret, and move on. Leave your jobs; means will be made available. You both have more than thirty years to live. Don’t waste them.’
“She didn’t even look at us. Just read the whole thing out of another one of those black notebo
oks.”
I feel a chill, but I can hear Mum saying it, steeling herself to be that cold, that clinical. Still, something in that sentence catches me, like a burr. I don’t interrupt him. His voice is starting to crackle. Strands of spittle web his lips. I’m scared if he stops he won’t start again.
“Rachel started screaming at her, right in her face, but she didn’t bat an eyelid; she just stood and walked out, my boss trailing after her like a fucking spaniel.
“That night Rachel cried herself to sleep. She kept saying over and over, she can’t do this to us and get away with it. She clung to my arm and made me say it with her, and I did. Even when she fell asleep she was still saying it. ‘She can’t, she can’t.’”
“And I went into the back garden and buried Ben’s pocket knife under the big pear tree, because I knew she could.”
“So you decided to take my mother’s offer,” I surmise. “And when your wife couldn’t accept that, you hit her to shut her up.”
Dominic Rigby writhed on the bed. For a moment I could see him hanging by his wrists from a basement lintel.
“You have no idea what it was like,” he protested. “I found emails she’d sent to journalists. I tried to talk to her. I swear I tried everything, but she just wouldn’t listen; she was hysterical, out of control. I was just trying . . . I was just trying to make her understand.”
With your fists? I want to say. But like a good little interrogator, I keep my mouth shut.
“And then Warren came into my office at work,” he went on. “He was so pale. He said he’d been given a message: If I didn’t find some way to shut Rachel up, they were going to kill her.
“I lay awake for the next three nights, trying to find a way to tell her, and knowing she wouldn’t listen. I threw up everything I ate. Then I found the number for a name I didn’t recognise in her phone. When I googled it, it was some hack at the Guardian. I called Warren and agreed to for her to be sectioned.”
