by Lari Don
I knew far more about the Shaws, their past and their connection to my family than this girl could ever guess. But I hadn’t found out about them in a briefing. I’d had to find out for myself.
Ciaran Bain, 29th October
I’d been desperate to prove I could bounce back after my mistake with the mask, my thrashing by Daniel and that brutal Q&A by my mum and uncles. So when we were called for another briefing the next morning, I turned up all showered and combed and shiny.
Malcolm, the great mindreader, must have been thinking about something else, because he spluttered coffee all over his laptop when he saw me come into the briefing room.
“Bain! What are you doing here?”
“I’m working. I thought the briefing was for everyone.”
“You actually think you’re working again today, after the almighty mess you made of yesterday?”
I looked round at my cousins. “They’re working and they made a mess of yesterday as well. They took far too long to grab one puny target, remember?”
I didn’t meet Daniel’s eyes, but I sensed his growl of anger.
Mum swivelled round from her computer. “Why shouldn’t he go, Malcolm? He didn’t make a mess of everything yesterday. He did extremely well on the grab, much better than you expected, right up to his mistake with the mask. And we need everyone on this job, so we can track this undercover cop in Georgie’s supply chain, then get back to our main job. So why shouldn’t Ciaran go?”
“Because he’s a danger to himself and everyone else.”
“Nonsense. He’ll be fine on a simple job like this.”
All the fourth generation were looking at their shoes, pretending not to notice the bosses having an argument.
“No, Gill. Yesterday he wrecked an essential grab, he ran away and he fought with his family in public.”
“Yes, he ran and he fought, showing more initiative and guts than you ever give him credit for. Then when you dragged him home, he showed his loyalty by answering all your questions. He’s the most talented and sensitive reader in the fourth generation. The family needs to train him, not sideline him or destroy him.”
“Talented? He screams when he touches a target. What use is that?”
I wanted to hide under the desk. I could sense everyone’s contempt past my own burning embarrassment. But Mum kept on and on. “I am working on it. Greg is working on it. Ciaran is working on it.”
“You’re not working on it fast enough. He’s a danger to any job, however simple. He may have some talent, but he has no control. He can’t read anything important without throwing up or sobbing like a baby. We can’t draw attention to ourselves like that. Ours is a quiet subtle skill, not a performance.”
“He won’t get better without practice. Put him on this job, Malcolm.”
“But, Auntie Gillian, what if we have to terminate the target?” Daniel asked smoothly. “What if Bain goes gooey again about being close to a death?”
I stepped forward. “Bring it on, Daniel. I’ve tracked targets before. We’ve terminated targets before. I’ll do it again. I’m not questioning our methods.”
Malcolm slammed his laptop shut. “But we’re questioning your skills, Bain. Every time we set you practical tests, you fail spectacularly. Every time you fail, you put the family in danger. So you stay on base and do your homework, while we go out and earn a living. And you’re not rejoining my team until you show that you’re both trustworthy and competent. That’s my final word on the subject.”
He shouted over my mum’s protests. “I’m not wasting any more time arguing with you, Gill. You’re his mother; you can’t see what a liability he is. Come on, everyone, out to the cars. We’ll brief you on the way.”
I sensed Mum’s defeat, as she stood up and followed Malcolm and the rest out of the room. I wasn’t worth fighting for.
I kicked her chair across the floor.
Then I noticed her computer was still on. Humiliated by losing the argument, she had left without logging out. The system was still open at her high security level.
I hooked the chair back with my foot and sat down at the keyboard. But I wasn’t planning to do homework. Not official homework anyway.
I typed in: Shaw.
Just out of curiosity.
I wanted to know why a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl had created more stress for my family than any undercover cop or gang war.
I found a Shaw folder. But it wasn’t Vivien Mandeville Shaw. It was Ivy London Shaw. That made sense. Targeting a teenager was probably designed to put pressure on someone older and more influential.
I opened the Ivy Shaw folder. The first file by date was an article from an English local newspaper. Then there was an update file on tracing and tracking people called Shaw. Two Shaw Q&As: an undercover interview of the whole family, and the individual one of Vivien. Then Mum’s report on the Q&A of her only son. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read that. Vivien’s target profile, which I already knew contained no details of the wider job. And the master file: the objectives of the job.
I opened the master file.
Client: Reid family.
Budget: Fee and expenses ceiling – unlimited.
Aim: Trace and track Ivy London Shaw, née Glass. Find evidence relating to Billy Reid. Eliminate everyone who has read it and destroy all evidence.
I almost closed the file and left the room right there.
The Reid family as a client? Doing a job for ourselves?
Unlimited budget? Where’s the profit in that?
And finding evidence about Billy Reid? Our great-grandfather, the founder of the firm, the man who ran away from the circus? Billy had been dead for seven years. Why did we need to protect him now?
But if this was about family, that explained yesterday’s overreaction. I’d messed up a job that wasn’t about a client, it was about the family.
The wise thing to do would be to close the folder, go into the gym and sweat my curiosity away. I should forget I’d seen this.
But what could that schoolgirl yesterday, with her maths test and her worries about her little sister, have to do with Billy Reid, who died peacefully at home in Lanarkshire before she was even at secondary school?
I clicked the newspaper file.
It was a scanned-in feature page from the Winslow Chronicle, the folds and creases visible on screen.
There were two photos. One of a slim young black woman in an old-fashioned white coat, standing stiffly, holding a clipboard. One of a much older woman, sitting elegantly on a white metal chair in a conservatory.
She was the same woman. The first was captioned, Dr Ivy Glass, High Hall College, 1943. The other, Ivy Shaw, née Glass, at home in Winslow, 2013. The headline was:
LOCAL SCIENTIST DISCOVERS POWER OF THE MIND
Secret wartime research revealed by her family
Oh shit. We’d been exposed.
Then I looked at the date. The article was written in July, three months ago. If we’d been exposed, the authorities were taking their time getting to us.
I read the article:
Local granny Ivy Shaw is now happiest at home with the exotic Caribbean plants in her Winslow conservatory, but 70 years ago she was a brilliant young scientist helping Britain’s war effort against the Nazis.
She worked on an amazing secret government project, only now being publicly revealed, as her proud descendants discuss her original notes exclusively with the Winslow Chronicle.
Dr Shaw was a researcher at High Hall College, Cambridge, specialising in psychology and neuroscience. She worked on a top-secret project for military intelligence, investigating whether any British subjects had special mental powers that might help the Allies.
She examined mediums (who claimed they could speak to the dead), fortune-tellers (who claimed they could see the future) and psychics (who claimed they could read minds) to establish scientifically whether any of them genuinely had these powers.
“Obviously,” says James Shaw, her grandson,
“if mediums could talk to the dead, soldiers’ spirits might be able to give useful information to tacticians; and if the future could be predicted, the outcome of battles could be known; and if psychics could read minds, that would be useful in intelligence gathering.
“But,” laughs Mr Shaw, a local optician, “my grandmother proved that without a gullible audience and stage props, these carnival performers weren’t able to make more accurate guesses about the future, or about what dead people had known, than the ordinary students she used as controls. And almost all of the psychics were no more accurate about what she was thinking or what symbols she was seeing on hidden cards than the controls were. She concluded they were conmen and could be of no use to the war effort.”
The Winslow Chronicle pressed him and his keen daughter Vivien about whether Ivy found ANY people with these powers, as Mr Shaw had said she proved they were lying in ALMOST every case.
Vivien Shaw, Ivy’s great-granddaughter, who attends Winslow Academy, answered: “My nana said one man seemed to have more than average accuracy, in a negative way. One man got so many answers wrong that she wondered if he knew the right answers and was deliberately giving wrong ones. The number he got wrong was far more than could have happened at random.”
When asked who this mysterious man was, Miss Shaw couldn’t answer. “Nana says it’s her responsibility to keep the real names confidential. They all have codenames in the file, and the man she thought was covering up correct answers was called ‘Lomond’.
“She wondered if Lomond might have been interpreting body language, or even somehow detecting electrical impulses from nerve-endings in the brain, and then deliberately giving wrong answers so that he wouldn’t be recruited as a spy.
“But she wasn’t allowed to continue her research, so she never discovered the truth behind his unusual pattern of answers.”
James Shaw explains why our local liar-detector hadn’t told anyone about this wartime work before. “It was top secret, so the files were probably destroyed after the war. My grandmother only kept her own working notes.”
Vivien adds, “It’s a shame that my nana didn’t get funding to finish her research after the war. She became a biology teacher, and inspired lots of other scientists, but she never got any acknowledgement for the work she did exposing these charlatans.”
When asked if she wants to continue her great-grandmother’s work, Vivien says modestly, “I’m studying maths and science at Winslow Academy, and one day, perhaps, if you give me an MRI scanner and a few mediums and fortune tellers, I could show that the way their brains light up proves they’re lying rather than using impossible magical powers.”
Her father smiles proudly at her. Another Winslow scientist in the making.
I scrolled back up. They had pictures of the scientist Ivy Shaw, but no quotes from her. Had she died before the article was written? No, they’d have described her as “the late Dr Shaw”. Was she senile? Was she just shy? Vivien certainly hadn’t been shy on her behalf.
But the danger to my family was obvious.
The man Ivy Shaw thought might have been covering up genuine mindreading skills must have been Billy Reid.
Lomond was my great-grandfather.
I thought back to the family legends we were told as kids.
Billy hadn’t been conscripted as a soldier in the Second World War because he’d had rickets as a child, so he kept working as a fortune-teller and psychic with the travelling fair during the summer and in variety theatres in the winter.
Then he was jailed as a conman, because a scientist forced him to lie to save himself from being used as a secret weapon, and by the time he was released he’d decided he would never work for anyone else again. He wouldn’t be a bottom-of-the-bill entertainer any more, he’d use his skills to be a bodyguard and a spy.
That was how the family firm started. Billy set up a protection and intelligence firm using his own skills, and then the skills of his sons and his grandchildren.
Now some local rag was announcing that he actually had been a mindreader.
The article revealed the codename, rather than his real name. But if that codename was linked anywhere, on any report, in any notes, to the surname Reid, then the family had to get it and destroy it. Or none of us would be safe. Because we all knew that if the authorities got hold of us, we’d be handed over to scientists and treated as freaks all over again.
But Vivien had said goodbye to her nana. I knew that from her thoughts in the van. This article was three months old and I suspected her nana had died since.
If the scientist who had uncovered Billy’s secret was dead, was the danger over? Or if Vivien’s nana was no longer guarding her subjects’ privacy, had the danger only just begun?
I opened the trace-and-track file, to discover what had alerted my family.
A tabloid paper had picked up on the local article and started investigating. They’d dropped the story when they realised Ivy Shaw wasn’t going to talk to anyone. But the journalist’s initial Google searches about psychics and the Second World War had jangled our virtual tripwires, and we’d followed the trail back to the original article.
That’s why the senior readers had hurtled down to London. To track Ivy Shaw.
I was right: the file confirmed she had died of natural causes, just after the article in the Winslow Chronicle.
Mum had posed as another journalist and interviewed some of the family as soon as the senior team arrived down south.
I clicked on the audio and heard Mum’s voice, introducing herself as Louise Allan, a freelance journalist. She was using a soft Irish accent – she says the only useful things she ever got from my dad was the skill of faking different accents.
She asked the interviewees to introduce themselves, for levels on the digital recorder.
“I’m Reginald Shaw, Ivy Shaw’s son.”
“I’m Reginald’s older son, James Shaw.”
“I’m Reginald’s younger son, Vincent Shaw.”
“I’m James’s younger daughter, Lucy Kingston Shaw. My older sister Vivien isn’t here, she’s got a debating competition at school. Anyway, she doesn’t think we should talk to you, not now Nana’s dead. Did your recorder pick all that up?”
I sat back hard when I heard Vivien’s sister. There was nothing wrong with Lucy Shaw’s voice. She had a perfectly nice middle-class BBC English voice. But she sounded like a happy and alive version of Vivien. Exactly like and completely different from the terrified girl in the van.
I shivered and clicked on Mum’s transcript instead. The first part of the interview covered the same ground as the local article: Ivy came from Jamaica to study, then she did vital war work, she became a teacher, had a family, and now her family think her work should be recognised, blah blah blah…
There were also notes under each answer from Uncle Hugh, who posed as a photographer so he could act as a truth-tester. Voice readers aren’t great at reading specific thoughts, but are really strong on telling whether someone is lying.
Then I got to a highlighted section. Here Mum had asked if they knew the real names of any of the subjects.
Each of them in turn said, no, their nana never let anyone see the last few pages of her notes, the appendix with the full names.
My mum pressed them harder:
Q: Why did she forbid you to read the last pages?
Reginald Shaw: My mother was determined that the names were to be kept confidential. These are real people and no one has the right to invade their privacy.
[truth]
Q: But surely they’re all dead now?
Lucy: We can’t assume that. Nana only died this summer and some of the subjects were younger than her.
[truth]
Q: Even if you plan to keep it confidential, as your great-grandmother wished, will you read the whole report sometime in the future?
Lucy: We can’t. We burnt her notes.
[truth]
Q: That’s very dramatic! Why?
Reginald: She didn’t want anyone following it up. Some of the subjects were humiliated by what she had done. Maybe they really believed in their spirits and their powers. And some of them were charged with fraud. She didn’t want it dragged up again. My mother was angry about the Chronicle article and made us promise to burn the notes without reading them. So we promised and we burnt them.
[truth]
Q: So none of you ever read the end of the report? Might anyone else have a copy of it? Who else worked on this project?
Reginald: Her assistant, Adam Lawrie, didn’t have access to all the information. She never trusted him with her notes, she preferred to be her own secretary, to keep her own secrets.
[truth]
Q: And what about the rest of the family? Your wife, Mr Shaw, or your other daughter, did they read the notes?
James Shaw: No, my wife isn’t that interested, and I’m sure Vivien didn’t read the full report either.
[truth, but also hesitation and protective, defensive feelings]
Q: Are you sure? I’d love to speak to her, if she did.
Lucy: No, she didn’t. Viv was really keen on keeping the notes, though, because she thought they represented the truth of science. She didn’t want to burn them. She had a couple of arguments with Nana, that last week, about not wanting the notes lost forever. But Nana was so determined that Viv promised in the end. She definitely told me that she was annoyed she’d never had a chance to read the whole report, though.
[sincere, but hearsay]
Q: When and where did you burn the report?
Reginald: My mother had a heart attack the week after the Chronicle article, then passed away quietly a few days later. We put the pages in the coffin and cremated them with her. It seemed fitting.
[regret, sadness, truth]
Q: So all the pages of the report were burnt with her? How did you feel about that?
Here Mum must have held the microphone up to everyone individually, so Hugh could test the truth of their response.
