The Game Changer

by Louise Phillips

  When she saw Amanda flick her short blonde hair provocatively, initially Sarah hadn’t thought too much about it, not until the two men smiled and walked over to be closer to her. She had stood there and watched them, as if she was some kind of ghost allowed to be in another person’s story. Then the men started to fondle Amanda, one from the front, and the other from behind.

  ‘Come over here, Sarah,’ Amanda had said. ‘It’ll be fun.’

  She stepped closer, but she was unsure. It was then that Amanda took her by the hand, pulling her into their inner circle. There were hands and lips moving everywhere. When one of them stroked her nipples, her breasts hardened, and all she could think of was Lily, and how her breasts were for her baby, not for them. She let out a gasp, and they must have thought it was a gasp of pleasure because they began to get undressed, smiling at her, like she was part of some game. She pulled back, but for some reason, all of a sudden, she couldn’t move. Then she watched one of them take Amanda from behind, slapping her naked thighs, telling her he knew she liked being called a naughty girl. That was when the other man approached Sarah again, only this time she didn’t let out a gasp, she screamed and screamed and screamed. She screamed until she couldn’t scream any more. She couldn’t remember how she’d got back to her room, but she recalled Amanda’s last words to her. Amanda had told her she wasn’t ready, that it was too soon, but she made it sound as if Sarah was a failure, and maybe she was. Looking down at Lily, she thought about Amanda’s words again. Maybe a failure was all she had ever been.

  Kate

  ANOTHER DAY, AND TO KATE IT FELT LIKE A REPEAT of what had gone before. This siege mentality couldn’t go on indefinitely. Adam had promised he’d call as soon as he heard back from the handwriting specialist, and she had already phoned Charlie twice. Because of the notes and everything else, on Adam’s advice she had curbed her time at Ocean House temporarily to zero, and with each passing day, she was getting more frustrated. Malcolm hadn’t phoned for two days, finally getting the message that she wasn’t going to answer, and so far, if nothing else, the dizzy spells had stopped.

  She couldn’t risk going for a run, and the only other thing capable of reducing her stress level was work. The mind maps on the study wall felt like a myriad of questions silently roaring at her.

  Picking up her mobile, she thought about phoning Adam, then thought again. If he had information for her, he’d call. If the specialist linked the notes she had received and the letter, what would that mean?

  She had made a series of notes after discussing narcissism and cult factors with Adam the previous day, and flipping open the notepad, she went to a new page and wrote – PRISONER IN MY OWN HOME, in block letters. The words stared back at her in much the same way as the mind maps looked down on her, questioning.

  Peering at the word ‘prisoner’, she thought of the cognitive studies done by the so-called academic grouping her father had been associated with. In the eighties, she knew, a number of experiments had been carried out in the US around the behaviour of individuals within a group or a controlled dynamic. In one study, experimental volunteers were divided into two fictitious groups, prisoners and guards, before being placed in a pretend prison. Although there was nothing to divide either grouping, their members chosen from similar social and intellectual backgrounds, in less than a week the study had had to be stopped. The fake guards were harassing and abusing the fake prisoners, and those suffering harassment were showing severe signs of emotional meltdown. Experimentally, none of it was real. The prisoners, although dressed to look like prisoners, had not broken the law. The fake guards, dressed in prison guard uniforms, had never trained as prison officers.

  The study examined why people who were not real prison officers, placed in a pretend prison, had abused people who were not real prisoners. Was it simply the uniform they wore or the contained nature of their environment? The answer was both, but it was far more than that. In another experiment, participants knowingly delivered a lethal dose of electrical current to others because the person in authority, the man wearing the white coat, had told them to. Later on, the participants had learned the whole thing had been staged. Nobody really got an electric shock. Although controversial, the study revealed a great deal about human behaviour. Take a person out of their normal routine, give them a new set of rules or guidelines, even those planted subliminally by people they perceive to be in authority, or deem worthy of respect, and their behaviour will alter, and not always for the better.

  She flipped over another page, and again wrote in block letters, first ‘YOU’ and then ‘WHY’. What was the motivation? Why was she a target? Stuck in the apartment, she was trapped. Had that been the plan? It seemed as if her life had become like quicksand, wanting to swallow her. She had spent enough time helping others through difficulties to know that once you start falling, gaping emotional holes appear. People can spend a lifetime trying to avoid things, but eventually they catch up with them. What felt strange wasn’t so much that it was happening to her but that someone else was pulling the strings.

  She opened the top drawer of her desk, and picked up her journal, deciding to concentrate on the good parts of her life. Charlie was a big part of it, and so, too, was Adam. They hadn’t made love in more than a week, and last night he had whispered in her ear that he missed her. She had missed him too. They had kissed long and hard, and then, like the previous day, she had burst into tears for no reason. Maybe she was pre-menstrual, or maybe, she thought, she was going out of her mind.

  When the phone rang, she jumped, and it took her a couple of seconds to regain her composure. It was Adam.

  ‘Any news from the specialist?’

  ‘Not yet, Kate, but something’s happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no easy way of saying this.’

  ‘What? It’s not Charlie, is it?’ She heard panic in her voice.

  ‘Ethel O’Neill is dead.’

  ‘What? She can’t be.’

  ‘It looks like an accident, a suspected hit-and-run. I’ll have more information later on, but in the meantime, be careful.’

  ‘You don’t think …’

  ‘Be careful, Kate, that’s all I’m saying.’

  Sarah

  SARAH AWOKE TO THE WIND HOWLING AROUND HER. Someone had closed the shutters in her room. She stood up, but as soon as she did, her head felt woozy. She staggered across the room, holding onto the wall for support, thinking that if she could reach her medication on the small table she would feel better. She must have forgotten to take her tablets. Her eyes hurt. When she put out her hand to get the pills, she missed the table completely, crashing against it instead. Everything on it, including the pill bottles, rolled around at her feet.

  She could tell something had smashed. Her legs went then, and she slipped down the wall. The closer she got to the floor, the more shards of glass she saw. She was glad Lily was safe in her cot. If she had been able to walk, she could have cut herself. Sarah knew she needed to do something to make things right, but she wasn’t sure what it was. She knew there was something she should be remembering, but her mind was stuck.

  The glass on the floor kept changing shape and colour. It turned red, and Sarah realised her feet were bleeding, even though she didn’t feel any pain. When she bent down to the glass to try to pick up the pieces, her head went funny again. The floor was a mess. There was something she was supposed to do with her tablets. She hadn’t taken them – that was why she was unwell. She could see two more pill bottles on the floor, but she couldn’t remember which tablets she was due to take.

  It was difficult to unscrew the bottle with the green tablets in it, and she kept dropping it. Her fingers were covered with blood too. She banged the bottle on the floor, but it didn’t work. It wouldn’t open, so she leaned down beside it, and somehow the top came off. She poured the tablets into her hands. They looked like coloured sweets, a mix of green and red, and when she pulled her hand closer to her face, she pu
t a load of them into her mouth. She needed water to swallow them. She knew she had a bottle of water somewhere in the room, so she tried to stand up, but she must have moved too fast, because her body started to sway again, and the room was spinning in the other direction, as if it kept changing its mind. She saw the bottle by the bed. If only she could get to it, she could swallow the tablets and everything would be okay. Holding onto the wall, she steadied herself, but it was useless: everything was moving with her, and then she was down on the floor again, dragging herself towards the water bottle.

  She could hear Lily crying. She couldn’t help her. She couldn’t move, and closing her eyes, the darkness swirled around inside her head. She remembered the water. She needed to get water. As if it was a miracle, she realised she was holding the bottle. She twisted the cap until finally it turned. She swallowed as much as she could, getting more of the tablets down. Lily was screaming. She could hear John too. He was in the room with her. He seemed taller, darker, and he was looking down at her, telling her she needed to get up. She needed to do something important. His voice wouldn’t stop, and Lily was screaming louder. Somehow Sarah crawled across the floor. She saw the tablets, lots of them, rolling around between the shards of glass in front of her. She was supposed to take her tablets. They would help her to get better. She needed to stop the room moving, so she grabbed as many tablets as she could. She put a load of them in her mouth, and some went down her throat, but then she couldn’t breathe. The tablets were caught halfway down. The bottle of water was on the red floor, lying sideways, half full and half empty. All she had to do was pick up the bottle, but it rolled away from her. She crawled after it, feeling more glass shards cut into her. She didn’t care. She needed to swallow the water. She felt the chill of the water streaming down her neck and chest. Some of it must have gone in, because the tablets weren’t stuck any more. She laid her head on the floor. John was gone because, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see or hear him. Lily was gone too, and then the room went silent, except for the buzzing inside her head, before everything went black.

  Kate

  KATE WASN’T SURE HOW SHE FELT. IT SEEMED unbelievable that Ethel was dead. Something about her, other than the dementia, had reminded Kate of her mother. Ethel and her mother had been too quiet for this world.

  Kate flicked around the television stations, more for something to do than anything else, catching part of a news report on missing schoolboy Peter Kirwan. It was the twenty-eighth anniversary of his disappearance, and looking at an old black and white photograph of him, aged fourteen, she thought of Kevin, and how he’d died, and how now his foster parents were also dead. If Ethel’s death hadn’t been an accident, was it connected? On autopilot, she walked towards the study door, but when she leaned down to take the key from under the plant pot, it wasn’t there. She looked up at the door, seeing the key in the keyhole.

  Once inside the room, her past looked back at her from the mind maps all over the wall, and as her eyes moved across the various headings and subheadings, she wondered if someone was purposely trying to draw her into something. Were they trying to create smokescreens that would cause her to look the other way, or the opposite? Keep an open mind, she told herself. Facts don’t lie. She looked at the note she had written beside Malcolm Madden’s name. ‘HE LIED’ jumped out at her. Underneath Ethel O’Neill’s name, she wrote ‘DEAD – hit & run’, and immediately thought about the possibility of more victims. If this was all interlinked, any number of motives could be at play – revenge, money, power – and there was every chance that others might have to pay a large price, including her.

  She looked at Charlie’s happy face in the silver photo frame, and she thought about herself as a child, and how she used to like her own company. In fact, she had sought it out.

  Staring at the mind maps again, she decided the best approach was to separate herself from them, to treat Kate Pearson as a separate entity, someone who was either at the centre or periphery of an investigation. She pressed the red button on her recorder.

  ‘Kate Pearson is the only child of Valentine and Gabrielle Pearson. The family were respected members of the community. They lived at thirty-seven Springfield Road, Rathmines. Valentine Pearson was a professor of literature at Trinity College, and was also an active member of various local bodies prior to his retirement in 2004, a year before he died. Both parents are now deceased.’ She stopped the recorder, thinking about the physical-abuse reports, before pressing the record button again. ‘On the outside, the family appeared normal, but there were elements of emotional and physical abuse due to the dark moods of the father, Valentine. His wife Gabrielle reported the abuse to the police on a number of occasions, but she never pressed charges. In 1988, their daughter, Kate, at the age of twelve, went missing. The girl had been with friends near Ticknock when she got separated from the main group. A local search party was organised, but she remained unaccounted-for overnight. On her return home the following day, she appearing unharmed, but she had gaps in memory. The disappearance was put down as an attention-seeking stunt, and no further investigations were made. In the same year, another juvenile from the immediate locality, Kevin O’Neill, aged fourteen, died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. Kevin was fostered by Ethel and Michael O’Neill.’ Kate switched off the recorder – making a note to ask Adam about Kevin’s surname. He had been with the O’Neills only a short time, so he had probably maintained his birth name.

  Thinking about her late mother, Kate was hesitant about starting the recording again, wondering, if her mother was still alive, what she would tell her. She had certainly kept her secrets. Kate hadn’t witnessed the abuse, but she knew her father was capable of it. Why had he changed in her teens? Why had he become a quieter, less aggressive man? People don’t change overnight, not unless something huge happens. Maybe her mother had found out something about him, which gave her the upper hand. Kate had made peace with him a couple of years before he died, but no matter how many apologies her father had made, she’d known there would always be distance between them. She had put it down to not forgiving him for his moods, but what if there was more to it? Then that sentence hit her. The one she couldn’t get out of her head a few of weeks before: The things you can’t remember are the very things your mind wants you to forget.

  She pressed record again, clearing her throat. ‘Kate had some clear and distinct memories of what happened to her prior to and at the initial point of her abduction/attack. She recalled glimpsing a man from the corner of her eye, before being grabbed from behind. Her attacker held an army knife to her throat. She remembered the smell of alcohol on his breath, and being dragged through trees. In recent memory recalls, other pieces have slotted into place. Her feet had hurt, she had lost her shoes, and her white ankle socks had become wet and muddy. Her underarms were sore from her attacker dragging her. Kate described his hands as strong, his fingers chunky.’ She looked up at the mind maps on the wall, pulling more information from them, and pressed record again. ‘In Kate’s initial recall of the incident, she escaped her attacker, and remembered seeing two men standing close to a clearing in the woodland. She believed it was because of them that she escaped, assuming her attacker thought it was too risky to take her with the men being so close.’

  Kate had never paid the two men much attention before. They were strangers, who had unwittingly been the reason for her escape. But what if they weren’t strangers? And what about that extended timeframe? Malcolm knew about it, and so had her parents, others too, but everyone had been happy for her to believe otherwise. Why? Was it to protect her, or was it to stop her finding out information that others didn’t want her to know?

  Walking over to the main mind map, she created another link, with the two male witnesses in it. She thought about the rumours surrounding Michael O’Neill, Tom Mason and her father. It was only then that she remembered the news report about the schoolboy Peter Kirwan. He had gone missing in Dublin in 1987. There was a year-long gap, but that w
asn’t much. Could that case be connected? She drew another circle with the boy’s name in the centre.

  Like a great many other people in Ireland, Kate was familiar with the case. The police had launched a large-scale search of the area surrounding Peter’s home and school, with many local volunteers offering their assistance. But the only discovery made was the red and blue scarf the boy had been wearing the day he disappeared, found by the father of one of his classmates when helping to search the park close to his home. A forensic examination of the item revealed no useful evidence. The police conducted extensive interviews, and then turned to a clairvoyant in a desperate effort to learn any information that could lead to Peter’s whereabouts. Though many sightings had been reported over the years, no one had succeeded in finding out what had become of the boy.

  She pressed record. ‘The late Valentine Pearson, Michael O’Neill and Tom Mason were members of an elite grouping believed to have carried out experimental studies of young boys and girls. It is also believed that they did so without parental permission, and the exact nature of the group is currently unclear; however, all members were male, with similar age profiles and academic backgrounds. At the time of Kate Pearson’s disappearance, as in the Peter Kirwan case, which happened a year earlier, there were rumours and theories as to why. Nothing concrete to support these rumours has been found, but DI O’Connor, of Harcourt Street Special Detective Unit, is working with the PIU on a general review of historical cases of paedophilia, as well as collaborating with Lee Fisher from NYPD 7th Precinct, Lower East Side, Manhattan, who is heading up the Tom Mason murder investigation. DNA found at the scene matches that of the late Michael O’Neill, although he had never been in the city. Ethel O’Neill, his widow, is now deceased. She died as a result of a reported hit-and-run, which may, or may not, be linked to the current investigation.’