The Secret Prophecy

by Herbie Brennan

  “What have they done to you, Mum?” Em asked.

  “Tranquilizers. Heavy-duty. Two capsules the size of a horse pill three times a day, and they force you to take them. Makes you floppy all the time, affects your balance. Bloody buzzing in the ears as well, but think they care about that? They just want you sedated so you’re no trouble and don’t try to escape. You don’t either: I couldn’t climb onto a bus in this state, let alone find a bus stop.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “But you’re here now.”

  “Your hair’s gone gray,” Em said inconsequently.

  His mother actually managed a small smile. “Didn’t have my rinse with me, and they don’t let you buy in stuff. It’ll be fine when I get to a hairdresser.”

  You’ve only been here for four days, Em thought. A rinse wouldn’t wear out in four days. The gray had to have something to do with the drugs she was on. Or the stress of what had happened to her. He opened his mouth to say something else, but she beat him to it. “Don’t talk here, Em. There are cameras in the corridors: I don’t know how well they pick up sound, but they’re monitored, and the staff can lip-read.”

  In different circumstances it would have sounded paranoid, but he was feeling pretty paranoid himself these days. “Okay, Mum,” he murmured.

  “We’ll go to my room,” his mother said. “No cameras there, and I can’t find any bugs.”

  Her room was small, but tastefully furnished with a bed, a couch, two chairs, a built-in wardrobe, and a compact writing desk. There was even a bathroom en suite, shower, and loo. He was about to say something as they walked in, but his mother put a finger to her lips and led him straight through into the bathroom. She turned on every tap and the shower, then leaned forward until her lips were close to his ear so he could hear her above the sound of gushing water. “I couldn’t find bugs, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I think we should be okay now so long as we keep our voices down.”

  “Mum,” Em said, “what’s going on here?” Before she could answer, he added, “Do you know this Mrs. Harlingford person? The one who had you sectioned?”

  She shook her head. “No, not at all. But she’s obviously one of them.” She spat the final word fiercely.

  He wanted to ask who them was, but more than that he wanted to make sure Mum hadn’t brought this on herself somehow. All his old suspicions came flooding back as he said, “Mum, you didn’t make a scene, did you? In a shop or somewhere? You weren’t drinking and this woman happened to come past?”

  She gave him a withering look. “Look, I never saw her in my life before, not until she turned up at the university. She was trying to get into our home, Em. And she had the committal papers with her. Signed by a doctor I’ve never seen in my life either. And by Alexander Hollis, who didn’t examine me for anything since I picked up that foot fungus eighteen months ago. He never examined me! That man was a friend of your father. I swear, Em, I’ll never forgive him for what he’s done.”

  Em took a deep breath. “And he wasn’t concerned about . . . how you’ve been lately?”

  He expected her to go off the deep end, but she only shook her head. “This has nothing to do with my drinking or a nervous breakdown or any of the things they’re saying.” She stopped. “Look, I can’t keep standing up. These drugs . . .” She flipped down the cover of the toilet seat and sat down. Suddenly she looked very small and very lonely.

  “What’s going on, Mum?” Em asked again.

  “They killed your father!” his mother blurted. “I know I should have told you before, but you’re only a child, Em. I know you think you’re grown up, but you’re really just a boy, and I wanted to protect you. I thought I could handle it—or maybe handle it along with your uncle Harold; but I’m not sure he really believes me, and anyway, he’s useless when it comes to anything practical. But I can’t hide it any longer. You need to know, Em. And you need to believe me. For your own safety, you need to believe me.”

  “I believe you, Mum,” Em said to reassure her, then discovered it was true. After everything that had happened, what had seemed incredible before suddenly seemed reasonable. Or at least possible. “But I want you to tell me everything.”

  “I wish I knew everything,” his mother murmured.

  “All right,” Em said. “Start with Dad. Why do you think he was murdered, and how?”

  She looked up at him. “There’s so much I don’t know. Your dad was a harmless soul. A bit dull even, to tell the truth, but I loved him. He never got mixed up in anything bad; he just wasn’t the type. All he was really interested in was history. Sometimes I think he lived in the past. He was very steady, stuck to his routines. But about a month before he died, all that changed. He got excited about something.”

  “What’s this got to do with his death?”

  “It’s very difficult to think straight with the drugs they’ve been giving me, hard to order my thoughts; but I’ll be as clear as I can. You’ll just have to be patient with me.”

  “Take your time, Mum,” Em said, even though his impatience was clawing inside him.

  His mother closed her eyes, then rubbed her face briskly with both hands as if trying to clear away the effects of her drugs. She looked back at Em soberly. “He had a visitor. A well-dressed, middle-aged man, graying hair, quite distinguished. He said he was from Oxford—a visiting scholar who wanted to discuss the Renaissance. Edward saw him in the study. But I’ve never seen a scholar as well-dressed as that. And if he were a scholar, why didn’t he meet your father at the university? The thing is, after the visit your father was frightened.”

  “What about?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. Actually, he denied being frightened at all; but after eighteen years of marriage, I can tell. Any woman could.”

  “What was the man called, the one who came to see him?”

  “Kardos. Stefan Kardos. It sounds Hungarian to me, but he didn’t have a foreign accent. I thought he was English. Very well-spoken. He could easily have come from Oxford. Anyway, I never found out what the visit was really about or why it frightened your father, and quite soon after that he became ill.”

  “We’re still a long way from murder,” Em said. He caught his mother’s expression and added hurriedly, “Sorry.”

  “You remember that in the first few days, he ran that very high temperature? He got very delirious in the night when I was sitting up with him. Talked a lot, though I don’t think he even knew I was there. Very confused, of course, not making much sense; and I only caught parts of it. At first it was about Nostradamus and some prophecy, then he kept saying they were coming to get him. At one point he kept repeating ‘Themis’ again and again.”

  “That’s Greek, isn’t it? What’s it mean?”

  “She was a Greek goddess. I looked it up.”

  “Bit outside Dad’s speciality,” Em remarked.

  “I told you he wasn’t making much sense. Your father was very ill at that point and very confused; but the one thing that came through loud and clear was that he was terrified, and he believed there was somebody out to get him. This happened over a couple of nights, maybe three; but then his temperature started to drop and he stopped raving, and after that we all thought he was getting better. Even the doctor said he was over the worst of it.”

  A sudden thought occurred to Em. “That was Dr. Hollis.”

  “Yes, that was Dr. Hollis.”

  “One of the doctors who signed the papers that got you in here. You don’t think he harmed Dad . . . ?”

  “No, I don’t. I couldn’t believe that. I still can’t, even after what he did. But anyway, your father had another visitor.”

  “He had lots of visitors,” Em said. “Once he started getting better. Most of the faculty came to see him at one time or another. It cheered him up.”

  “This was a stranger like Mr. Kardos. I assumed he was another scholar. He called in with a packet of papers he wanted your father to look at. And some grapes.”

  “Oh,” Em said. H
e had no idea what this was adding up to, but it was certainly adding up to something. “What was his name?”

  “I can’t remember. I had something in the oven, and I was distracted. He told me his name all right, but . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t know. The thing is, he was alone with your father for fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  “But he couldn’t have killed him,” Em protested. “He was still alive after!”

  “The grapes were poisoned,” his mother said flatly. “He was getting better, and that bastard gave him poisoned grapes. He was eating them the night before you found him. I asked him where he got them, and he said this man Grannell brought them.” She stopped abruptly, a look of shock on her face. “My God, I’ve remembered! That was his name: Grannell. Christopher Grannell. From Oxford, like Stefan Kardos. I couldn’t remember before, but that was definitely the name he gave me.”

  “Back up a minute, Mum,” Em said. “How do you know the grapes were poisoned?”

  She looked at him with a pleading expression on her face. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Your father was getting better. His temperature was back to normal; the doctor said he could get up for a little while just as long as he didn’t overexert himself. He should have been back to teaching by the end of the week. Then he’s visited by two complete strangers in a matter of days and dies after eating grapes one of them brought. Of course he was poisoned!”

  “Did he eat all the grapes?”

  “No, but he wouldn’t need to, not if it was a strong poison. He might only need to eat one.”

  “What did you do with the grapes that were left?”

  His mother stared at him for a long time before answering. “I threw them out,” she said eventually. The stare turned fiery. “I didn’t know they were poisoned, did I? How could I know? I was shattered by your father’s death. I never even dreamed it was murder at the time; it was only later that I started to put two and two together: your father’s nervousness, his secrecy, the two strangers, his sudden death. You don’t believe any of this, do you?”

  Em took a deep breath. “Actually, I do. There have been some very freaky things going on, Mum. Remember the break-in where they rifled Dad’s study? Well, there’s been another since you’ve been locked up here, and this time they rifled the whole apartment—Uncle Harold showed me. And why are you here anyway, in a psychiatric clinic? You’re not mad and you haven’t done anything, so why are you here? Then there were the strangers at Dad’s funeral. You were a bit out of it and probably didn’t notice them.” What he meant was drinking, but thought it kinder not to say so. “But one of them was carrying a gun. A handgun in a shoulder holster.”

  His mother’s jaw dropped. “A shoulder holster?” Em knew how she felt. Nobody in Britain carried handguns in shoulder holsters. That was something you only saw in Mafia movies. Somehow a shoulder holster was even more shocking than poison. Which was, of course, the reason why he’d chosen not to believe he’d really seen it.

  “He followed me to France,” Em said. “The man with the gun.”

  Somehow his mother seemed to shake off the effects of her drugs, stood up, and gripped his arms; but this time she wasn’t holding on to him for support. “You were followed by a man with a gun?” she gasped. “Oh God, oh God!”

  “It’s all right, Mum. He might not even have had the gun when he followed me. I only really saw it at the funeral.”

  “It’s not all right!” his mother told him savagely. “There’s something dreadful happening here, something I don’t understand at all. You need to get out of here, Em. You need to get out fast. This clinic is mixed up in the whole thing, I’m sure of it. You have to get out. And then you need to lie low. When I get out, I’ll find you—you can leave word with somebody—Tom perhaps; we can trust him. There’s money; I told you that. We can leave the country and hide.”

  They can keep you here for months, Em thought. “Mum,” he said, “if they were planning to do anything to me in the clinic, they’d have done it by now.” The only problem was, he didn’t know who they were. He didn’t know what they were after, or why they were posing a threat.

  “No they wouldn’t,” his mother said. “That would attract too much attention. But they’ve put me out of harm’s way, and now they’re obviously after you. They know you’re here, so they can track you when you go; and the longer you stay here the more time they’ll have to put things in place. Get out now, get away and lie low. Tell Tom where you’ll be so I can find you. Go now.” She stared earnestly up into his face. “And for God’s sake, make sure you aren’t followed!”

  Chapter 15

  Em stole a bicycle. He’d never done anything like that in his whole life, never taken so much as a candy bar; but he was desperate and the bicycle was there, leaning against a gate by the edge of a path that wound away from the side of the clinic. He was fairly sure he hadn’t been followed when he left the clinic, mainly because his mother had made him climb out through a window; but if she was right about the cameras, it would only be a matter of time before somebody discovered he had gone. He planned to be a long, long way away before that happened, longer than he was likely to manage on foot.

  In less than a minute he was among the trees, and eventually found the perimeter fence. He abandoned the bicycle conspicuously, hoping it might be found quickly and returned to its rightful owner, then scrambled over the fencing and reached the main road. He didn’t want to risk the bus stop; but a van driver pulled over on his first attempt at thumbing a lift, and luck was with Em big-time, for the man was headed almost exactly to the place he wanted to go.

  Unlike many of the faculty, Tom Peterson did not live on campus. Just four years ago, shortly after his marriage break-up, he’d bought himself a nineteenth-century rectory on four acres of grounds just on the edge of town. Em, who’d been here before, slipped through a side gate, avoided the driveway, and stuck to the shrubbery until he came within sight of the house. He stopped and switched on his mobile phone.

  Tom himself didn’t seem to be there—no sign of his car, which he usually parked to one side of the front door—but Em had hopes someone else might be. He thumbed the number she’d given him in France.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asked when Charlotte answered.

  “Yes, of course, E—”

  “Don’t mention my name,” Em cut in hurriedly. “I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk,” Charlotte said. She sounded a little miffed, probably because he’d cut her off.

  “Not over the phone.”

  “Are you all right?” Charlotte asked.

  “I’m fine,” Em said. “Can we meet?”

  “When?”

  “Now. Soon as possible.”

  “Where?”

  “You remember Sam’s Diner, the place we went with your dad on the way back from the airport?”

  “I know the place you mean. I remember where it was. You had a revolting doughnut, right?”

  “Yes. I mean, it wasn’t revolting, but I did have a doughnut. Can you meet me there in an hour?” She’d have to leave now if she was to meet him there in an hour.

  “Yes, I suppose so. Is this about the man—you know, the one we saw near the Louvre?”

  “Might be,” Em said. “Your father’s not there, is he?”

  “Not where?”

  “Where you are now,” Em said cautiously.

  “I’m at home.”

  “He’s not at home, is he?”

  “No, he isn’t. Do you want me to ring him?”

  “No, don’t do that,” Em said quickly. “Just come to meet me. Without ringing anybody.”

  “Know what, Mr. I-Don’t-Want-You-to-Mention-My-Name? You are getting seriously weird in your old age.” She hung up.

  Em stared at his phone for a moment, then dropped it into his pocket and waited. He watched from the cover of the shrubbery until Charlotte emerged from the front doorway and locked the door carefully behind her. She marched down the driveway, frowning. />
  “Pssst!” Em hissed as she drew closer.

  Charlotte started visibly, and one hand went quickly to the little bag she was carrying. Em stepped out from the cover of the shrubs.

  She relaxed at once, but the frown actually deepened. “What do you think you’re doing? I nearly Maced you!”

  Em blinked. “You don’t carry Mace, do you?”

  “Standard issue for girls my age in California. Never mind the interrogation. What are you doing here? Why aren’t we meeting at what’s-its-name’s like you said?”

  “Sam’s Diner. That was just to throw them off,” Em told her. “In case my phone calls are being monitored.” That was something else he’d have to do: get himself a different mobile phone. She was looking at him with an exaggerated expression of astonishment. Despite everything, he smiled at her. “How do you fancy Ropo’s? I’ll fill you in on everything over a cup of coffee.” He remembered something and added, “Provided you buy the coffee.”

  “I’ll buy the coffee,” Charlotte said.

  Ropo’s was a trendy coffee bar much favored by teenagers, where young couples could go to cramped, two-person booths and hold hands. Em and Charlotte were in one of them now, drinking frothy mochas. Any hand-holding was conspicuous by its absence. Charlotte watched his face closely as he finished his story. “Wow,” she said softly, “this is way crazier than what happened in Paris!”

  “Yes,” Em agreed. Except that what happened in Paris was part of what happened when he came home; he was sure of it.

  “What are you going to do?” Charlotte asked. “You can’t let them take you into care.”

  “No, I can’t,” Em said. “That’s the main thing. If they get their hands on me, I’ll never find out the truth about my father’s death.”

  “Well,” said Charlotte briskly, “you can’t go home; that’s for sure. They might even be waiting for you there now—the Social Services people. What about moving in with your uncle Harold?”