Birdkill

by Alexander McNabb

  ‘Fuck you.’ She acted on sheer impulse, the gesture itself futile and childish, but she struck out at him with the tools at hand. She flung the expresso cup at him and he ducked, his reflexes pin-sharp. The little cup smashed into the window behind him and starred it. The remains of her coffee splashed across the grey suiting and she exulted in the ruin of his wealthy businessman’s uniform.

  Mariam grabbed her bag and strode out, kicking the door shut behind her. She ignored the startled Koyuki in her little black dress. Striding through the entrance hall with its looted treasures, she tried to ignore the hot tears stinging her eyes and streaking her cheeks.

  SIXTEEN

  A Death in the Family

  Mariam sat in the waiting room of the Mayview Clinic, her bag across her knees. There was a mild antiseptic smell in the air mixed with some sort of artificial pine scent. It reminded her of the cleaning materials aisle at the supermarket.

  The walls were pastel pink, the woodwork all picked out in white. There was a table with leaflets about fertility and ante-natal care, different forms of childbirth and helpful notes for Dads. She was alone. The clinic hadn’t seem terribly busy and had given her a walk-in appointment straight away.

  She had told them she wanted to talk about pregnancy. Yes, she had insurance. Would Dr Foster himself be available? Oh, lovely.

  She had a reasonable dossier on Bill Foster, a lot of it derived from the citations on his Wikipedia page. He was ex-army, exemplary service record. Came out in his early forties and went into general practice at Queen’s, obtaining his CCT in obstetrics. Somehow fell into enough money to buy a Harley Street practice lock stock and barrel. Never looked back. His partner was Lawrence Hamilton, but the Mayview website made no mention of that in its meagre ‘about us’ section.

  Mariam picked up her mobile. For some reason she couldn’t get Dr Foster went to Gloucester out of her head. She messaged Robyn.

  A fresh-faced young nurse came in, shapely in her blue uniform and curly-haired. She had little blushes on her cheeks and would make a nice doll, actually, if she’d only been porcelain. ‘Ms Shadid? Mr Foster will see you now.’

  Of course, a consultant. We’ve moved beyond being a mere ‘Dr’. Mariam slung her bag over her shoulder and followed the girl, who was wearing nice, sensible flat shoes. She’d have hated nursing. The hours, the patients.

  ‘In here, if you please.’ Mariam steeled herself to meet Foster and found herself staring at a blood pressure meter on a trolley. ‘Take a seat.’ She read Mariam’s hesitation. ‘We do triage on all first time patients, particularly if they’re not a referral. This will only take two seconds.’

  Mariam sat and submitted to the indignity of being strapped up and having her finger clamped. The thing hissed and she felt the pressure around her arm increase in waves and then release with a long exhalation.

  ‘That’s lovely. Just get your height and weight.’

  She jotted notes on a clipboard, smiled at Mariam and led the way out and down the corridor. She knocked on a door to the right and beckoned Mariam in.

  Foster looked older than Mariam had thought he would, his hair was thinning on top, brushed over and quite white. His upper lip protruded slightly and his chin was tucked back, which made him look a little weak. His eyes were heavy-lidded, a fleshy nose completing the sense of a man with Appetites to sate. Perched on that nose was a pair of rimless half-lensed glasses.

  She was wondering how women would give this man their trust when he smiled and held out his hand and all became clear. His face lit up and she was aware of a sense of benevolence and care about him. She took his warm, dry hand and felt herself squeezed gently, a man holding back his strength out of deference to her femininity.

  ‘Good afternoon, Ms Shadid.’ The deep voice was melodious. ‘Please, take a seat.’

  ‘Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.’

  ‘That is no problem at all. We sometimes have cancellations and I always appreciate the serendipity of being able to turn that little frustration into a convenience for a patient.’

  His almost Dickensian formality seemed odd in the clinical modern environment of his consulting room. There was a green bed on its wheeled frame, a strip of paper laid out on it. A curtain was tied back, the railing on the ceiling bisected the room. His desk was paperless, a screen and keyboard on it. There were no charts, notices or warnings on the walls. It was a room fit for purpose and devoid of personality. Foster lit it up.

  ‘A friend recommended you to me. Pamela Oakley.’ No sense in wasting time, Mariam thought with a mental grin.

  He put his chin in his hands and stared at his screen, which was showing a picture of a lighthouse nestled in orange-hued desert sands. ‘Do you know, I pride myself on remembering every single one of my patients and that is a name I could honestly not recall.’

  ‘She had a lovely baby boy here, Martin. Seventeen years ago.’

  He removed the glasses, leaving little red welts either side of his nose. He breathed on the lenses, rubbing them on his tie as if they were obscuring his view of the past. ‘Truly, I do apologise, but I don’t remember her.’

  ‘She’d have been here at about the same time as Ellen Wilson and Mavis Dillon. Only Pamela survived the experience. The other two didn’t. Surely you’ll remember them. They died in your care.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘You saw something like forty women brought here by Lawrence Hamilton and every one of them failed to leave because you killed them. You’re the biggest medical mass murderer since Dr Crippen.’

  Foster leaped to his feet. ‘This is outrageous. Get out!’ His white-tipped fingers splayed on the desk.

  ‘I have all their records, Mister Foster. Do you have a message for their families? Do you feel any remorse about the way you removed those children’s “carriers”?’

  The word hit him like a smack in the mouth. ‘You’re raving. What do you want?’

  ‘The truth. That must seem mundane to you. It’ll come out in court, so you might as well tell me now. How long have you been feeding babies to the Odin programme?’

  He gulped for air, the blood draining visibly from his angry, puce face. It was a startling transition. He staggered, his eyelids fluttering. He recovered his composure to Mariam’s relief. She’d thought he was having a heart attack. He drew a long, shuddering breath.

  ‘The what programme?’

  ‘Too late, Bill. Your reaction sort of gave the game away. How long has Mayview been delivering Odin children?’

  He reached for the telephone handset and she leaped forward and slammed her hand down on his. In that instant she understood she was stronger than he. The realisation dawned in his eyes. She stood over him and pushed him back into his chair. She sat on the edge of his desk.

  ‘Tell me. How long?’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell you. I don’t know of any programme. Or the women you’re talking about.’

  ‘You and Lawrence Hamilton have been working together to take the children of Odin soldiers to the Hamilton Institute. Your programme is being funded by the Ministry of Defence, augmented by contributions channelled through General Tom Parker’s right wing group of lobbyists and ‘concerned citizens’ who happen to all work in high ranking positions at State. Those contributions include American public money derived from grants made through the Department of State’s intelligence programmes. Odin has been operational for two decades and more. And the blood of tens of people, if not hundreds, is on your hands. Because it’s not just about these poor women, it’s about the prisoners Hamilton used to experiment on in Lebanon. And it’s about the innocent civilians brutally murdered by soldiers out of their minds on your cocktail of Odin drugs. Soldiers with so little compassion they’d murder defenceless people. They’d rape, execute and even eat their victims. You’re blown, Bill. It’s all over. The papers are all over the story, I’m just the first of hundreds of reporters who’ll want to know how you could kill all those poor yo
ung mothers. And how you could go on doing it, knowing about all the other carnage your insane experiments were feeding.’

  His face sago-grey, Foster whispered. ‘No. It wasn’t like that. It isn’t. We… I…’

  Mariam softened her voice, trying not to enjoy her pursuit of this man but feeling the thrill of landing her fish. ‘How did the mothers die, Bill? Did you use anaesthetic or did they die begging for mercy?’

  He snapped at her. ‘I’m not a bloody monster! Nobody was hurt or tortured.’

  ‘They died peacefully, then, at least.’

  He shook with febrile fury. ‘All of them. Smiling. And they were all better off than they were when Lawrence found them.’

  She retreated, giving him more space. ‘But surely, the field trials should have told you things were going dangerously wrong.’

  His head flicked back and he shot her a furious glare. ‘Wrong? They were a brilliant success! Men staying in peak form three nights in a row? Soldiers able to perform beyond known human limits, able to concentrate and maintain focus when our best Special Forces teams pitted against them were flagging and incoherent? One rogue unit isn’t failure! Why do you think the programme’s being continued? Because it’s a brilliant success and we’re finding new resources inside the human mind nobody’s even dreamed of!’

  That was it. All she needed. She couldn’t believe how easy it had been, was tempted to push for more and yet the feeling that the slot machine had paid out three times in a row and it was time to walk away was in her. There was spume at the edges of his mouth, he was almost glassy-eyed, his lips twitching. She slipped off the desk, playing a hunch. ‘I’m going. You might just be right, I don’t know. This has been a waste.’

  ‘You see? You’re wrong. We haven’t just succeeded with Odin, we’ve gone beyond it. We can make a better world for everyone with this work.’

  ‘Quite. Thank you for your time, Dr Foster.’

  He was gripping the arms of his chair, his face averted from her as Mariam backed out of the consulting room wondering quite what forces were attacking the lost mind she was leaving behind.

  She closed the door behind her, pulled her handbag onto her shoulder and strode up the corridor as if she didn’t have a care in the world. By a miracle she remembered to reach into the bag and hit the ‘off’ key on her mobile, pulling the tiny bud of the microphone off her lapel and curling the cable into the bag as she passed the peachy-faced nurse.

  ‘Thank you, nurse.’ She smiled as she headed for the exit with all possible seemly haste. The relief as she burst into the cold air of Harley Street was glorious. She had to suppress the urge to punch the air. She wheeled right and ran straight into the solid chest and outspread arms of Clive Warren.

  ‘Mariam! What the hell?’ His hands were on her shoulders, but he left his grip loose.

  ‘Clive. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I had the feeling you might turn up. I came down on the off-chance.’

  ‘Really? Where are Tweedledum and Tweedledee?’

  ‘I gave Jake and Simon the day off. I reckoned you wouldn’t appreciate the attention if they followed you after you stormed out.’

  ‘Damn right. Now if you’d just stop manhandling me…’

  He withdrew his hands from her arms, holding them palm-up in mock surrender. ‘Look, I’m sorry about the kidnapping thing. I simply didn’t see it like that, thought you trusted me more than that. It was supposed to be fun, whisk you off to meet Prince Charming, you know?’

  ‘I’m not big on trust right now, Clive. People are dying.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’

  She almost snapped out her first thought, there is no us but stopped herself. She liked Clive Warren, parts of him at least. She found him attractive, without a doubt. And yet she intensely disliked the slick looter of Iraqi antiquities she had encountered earlier that day at his office. She didn’t know whether to love him or hate him. His eyes were gentle on her and the bustle of the street was lost as she battled the urge to throw herself into those strong arms. Fight cliché with cliché. ‘I’m sorry, Clive. I just need a little time.’

  Mariam tore herself away from him and raced blindly up the street, her bag banging against her hip. She rounded the corner into the bustle of Marylebone Road and pulled up at the pedestrian crossing. She stabbed the button and almost immediately the lights changed, traffic lining up to let her cross. Only having crossed the road did she allow herself to look back, but he hadn’t followed her. She had wanted him to, truth be told. Grief welled up in her, another fine mess, Stanley. She wiped her eyes with her cuff and turned right to head for Regent’s Park.

  She ventured into the park, checking for followers but it was quiet and nobody came through the ornate black and gold gates behind her. She picked a bench and sat herself down, scanning the parkland around her for any likely sign of pursuit. It was only now she realised she had nowhere to stay. But that was fine. She could find a place for the night. Her car was at Clive’s. A part of her was already telling her to go back and pick it up, but she knew what that really meant: she wouldn’t be able to walk away a second time.

  Once this was over, maybe. But not now. Not with this over her head. She wanted to trust him. Checking around her once again, she headed off in search for a Starbucks where she could hunker down and start working on her story.

  Robyn spent much of the day barricaded in her apartment, caught in a state of lassitude and dressed in her baggy flannelling trousers and Minnie t-shirt. She tried reading her Boccaccio but for once it failed her and she found the tortuous language irritating. She scrolled through the Daily Mail and then, for balance, the Guardian. Both had little of interest to offer. Buzzfeed was shrill, io9 irrelevant. Bored Panda. Bleh. She snapped shut the lid of her notebook and wandered over to make herself another coffee. She’d lost count of how many she’d drunk.

  She considered going for a drive, but the stark memory of watching her life’s blood pour onto the pavement outside a pub repelled her. She sat on the orange cushion by the open fire, gazing stupidly at the red scratches on her wrists. She was desperate to go out, but she didn’t want to see anyone. Least of all Simon Archer. She could see him looking down at her hands and asking her if everything were all right.

  And it wasn’t all right. She was scared, of the ghosts in her mind and the strangeness around her. The two threatened to come together, to detach her from all reality and leave her adrift in her own nightmares, disconnected from the world and floating in an otherness made up of flickering projections and insane visions. She felt the seeds of her own annihilation inside. Something questioning and destructive kept driving her to the brink, making her stand on the overhang with her toes curled over the sharp edge, dislodged pebbles arcing out to fall to the endless depths. The urge to peer over just that little bit more to gaze into the Void, to feel what it’s like when your balance shifts to commit you to the fall. The point where there is no way back and your decision is made. The journey through the rushing air, exultation before the final embrace.

  The thought of cliffs brought the white tower to mind. It called to her. Robyn sluiced her coffee down the sink and went upstairs to dress.

  The wind was bitterly cold and there was rain in the air, the clouds foreboding. The tufts of seagrass rustled and the sea itself was battleship grey, the waves flecked with white caps. She reached the tower and sheltered in its leeward side, her back to the ivy on the wall. She daren’t go near the cliffs, the urge in her mind too strong to trust.

  She had never thought to try the door before. The urge to do so now hit her. She wandered around, her hand brushing the ivy leaves whipped by the heavy gusts. The wrought iron handle twisted in her cold fingers. The door’s creak echoed in the dark space, lit from above by deep-set windows.

  She stepped inside, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. There were dried leaves on the floor and they whispered with the access of wind she brought with her. The door slammed behind her.

 
There was a thick beam across the width of the tower above her. Something hung from it and Robyn tried to look away because she knew what it was and it was turning slowly, suspended by its neck. She stepped back, sobbing ‘No’ repeatedly under her breath as Jenny Wilson’s chalk-white death mask faced her, wide-eyed and broken-necked. The light from the window shone on it, the blue lips and bulging orbs.

  Robyn felt for the door handle behind her, mesmerised by the slowly twisting corpse above her. The ground below the girl was wet where she had voided her bowels in death.

  Robyn span to grasp at the door, clawing for the handle. The wind stung her face, tears blinding her as she ran across the moorland towards the school buildings coddled in their woodland. Her breath rasped in her throat, her legs thumped the ground.

  She only realised she was screaming when Simon Archer ran out to her, other members of staff poised uncertainly behind him. He caught her and wheeled around to cushion her pell-mell impact, taking her weight and holding her as she cried out in fear and abrogation.

  ‘Robyn! What is it?’

  She didn’t have the words. Deprived of the consolation of movement, she collapsed in his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. He was warm and smelled of coffee. She sobbed into his jacket as he brushed her hair away from her face. ‘Robyn?’

  She steadied herself and pulled back to face him. ‘In the tower. It’s Jen-Jenny Wilson. She’s dead. Hang-hanging from the beam.’

  Archer turned to David Thorpe, who was hanging back with the other teachers and Nigel the caretaker. ‘David, come with me. Heather, take Robyn and get her a drink. Nigel, keep the kids away from here for now until we see what’s happened.’

  Heather stepped forward, gingerly putting her arm around Robyn, who was gulping in air and trying not to snivel. Robyn turned to watch Archer and Thorpe hurrying uphill towards the tower on its promontory.