‘Frankie, I’m not seeing at all.’
‘But you identified three locations. You said you were sure. Alexander even called the police to check them out.’
‘I made it all up.’
‘What!’
‘I… I just thought, if I could buy some time…’
Frankie’s face was stiff with shock. The look in her eyes made him turn his head away. Every RV’s work included speculation and conjecture, but it was of vital importance that a viewer should not embellish what he had accessed during the ride. Never pretend. Never lie. It was a mantra that had been drilled into their heads by Mullins during basic training. Gabriel had always stuck to the code. Until now.
The words tumbled from his lips. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I can feel myself starting to cross over—the ride taking me. But then it stops. As though a door has been slammed in my face. Total block.’
‘You have to tell Alexander.’
‘No, not yet. It could still work, Frankie. I just need more time. I know I can work past the block somehow.’
‘If you won’t tell him, then I will.’ Frankie’s voice was implacable.
‘You’d betray me like that?’
‘For God’s sake, this is not about you and me! A woman may die!’
The expression on her face made him flinch. ‘OK.’ He started pulling on his clothes. ‘OK. I’ll go and see him right now.’
At the door he stopped and turned round. She was watching him and her hand was covering her mouth, giving her an alien, guarded look.
• • •
Frankie’s reaction, however, was as nothing compared to Mullins’s rage.
‘I am not surprised that you did not have the moral courage to own up to your problem earlier, Gabriel. It is always about you, isn’t it? You and your vanity. Mrs Cartwright is incidental in your scheme of things. You don’t care about her. You just care about not looking stupid.’
‘Alexander, I am so sorry.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re just sorry you had to tell me about it.’
‘Please, just listen—’
‘I blame myself. I bought into this ego trip of yours by thinking only your viewing was worthy. I neglected the team, did not give the others’ reports the same attention. You’ve lost us time, Gabriel. Time we could have spent exploring other avenues. And now we’ve lost the trust of the police as well.’
Gabriel had no answer.
‘I want you to leave.’
Gabriel left. Back at his flat, Frankie was nowhere to be seen. Without even removing his clothes, he fell into bed.
But it wasn’t until shortly before dawn that he finally started to sink from wakefulness into sleep. And as he began to drift, he felt his inner eye opening. He was about to slam a ride.
He felt the soft tug of the ride. Let go. Let go. Cross over…
He hesitated.
Let go. Cross over…
Why should he? Mullins had kicked him out. And the chances were he’d simply get blocked again. Why put himself through that kind of agony?
Let go…
No. He clamped down on the impulse, shutting his inner eye with ease. He was finished with Eyestorm. Such a relief, he thought. Such a relief to know that this part of his life was done with.
As he turned over and pulled the blankets over his head, he noticed the dark sky outside his window beginning to stain with palest light. Sunrise.
Melissa Cartwright’s body was discovered eleven hours later in an outhouse on a farm in Yorkshire. She had died in the very early hours of that morning.
Shortly after sunrise.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
‘Gabriel, wake up.’ Frankie’s hand was gently shaking his shoulder.
He lifted his head from the car seat and winced. He had fallen asleep during the drive to Oxford and his neck now had a painful crick at the base. His forehead felt numb and cold where it had pressed up against the frosty window pane.
He opened the car door and the coldness of the night air was a shock. As he stepped out, his breath left his lips in a ghostly cloud.
For a moment he stood quietly, looking at the house in front of him. With the exception of a brand-new shed in the garden, the place looked exactly as it had thirteen years ago.
Frankie slipped her hand into the crook of his arm. ‘Come on.’
As they walked up the garden path towards the front door, an outside light went on and the door opened. A tall figure dressed in a worn velvet smoking jacket, flannel trousers and Nike trainers stepped onto the porch.
Gabriel stopped walking. For a moment it was quiet. Then the man on the porch made a gesture with his hand. ‘Come in.’ He turned around and walked back into the house. After a moment’s hesitation Gabriel and Frankie followed, closing the front door behind them.
Inside the house nothing had changed either. The flocked wallpaper in the entrance hall was immediately familiar. And the living room was still stuffed with porcelain knick-knacks—winsome shepherdesses and pink-cheeked angels—and stacks of books and magazines. The low-watt bulbs inside the dusty fringed lampshades bathed everything in a tired yellow light.
But if the house still looked the same, its owner did not. Alexander Mullins had aged. His skin was raddled with fine lines. His hair had thinned considerably. He made a clicking sound with his tongue and moved his mouth and Gabriel realised with a sudden shock that Mullins was wearing an old-fashioned set of false teeth.
The eyes behind the cat’s-eye spectacles, however, were still glacial. And the voice had lost none of its upper-crust plumminess and could still sound biting.
‘Well, you’re here. What do you want?’
• • •
Gabriel left the talking to Frankie. She did a good job, listing the facts of the situation chronologically and methodically, sanitising the narrative of emotion and speculation, just as Mullins had taught them to do at Eyestorm all those years ago when summing up a case. This was one student who had taken the training to heart, Gabriel thought wryly. No sloppy asides or personal prejudices clouding the issues. Mullins should be pleased.
When Frankie had finished, Mullins turned his eyes to Gabriel.
‘So what do you want from me?’
Frankie leaned forward in her chair. ‘Alexander—’
He silenced her with an abrupt gesture of his hand.
Gabriel spoke, his lips stiff. ‘I suppose I’m looking for help.’
‘Help.’ Mullins’s voice was quiet.
Silence. Gabriel found that he had balled his hands into fists. He relaxed his fingers with an effort.
‘Well, I’m sorry, but there is very little I can offer.’ Mullins paused. ‘I have never come across an RV like this woman before.’
This woman. Minnaloushe. Fallen angel.
‘It is clear that her RV skills are exceptional,’ Mullins continued. ‘In all my years of research I have never personally encountered an RV who is able to inflict physical damage on someone else simply by using her viewing skills.’ He frowned. ‘It is truly extraordinary. I don’t know what the explanation is.’
‘The explanation is she’s a witch.’ Gabriel’s voice was harsh.
‘A witch.’ Mullins uttered the word with disdain.
Gabriel tried to keep his voice calm. ‘Yes. She is an extreme magician. She has taken her natural talent—remote viewing—and amplified it into a deadly weapon.’
‘And how did she manage to do that?’
‘Through her practice of alchemy. Of high magic.’
For a long moment it was quiet in the room. Then Mullins made a gesture with his hand as though pushing away something unpleasant.
‘I’m afraid I do not feel equipped to follow you into those esoteric realms. I suggest we deal with the facts as we know them. A remote viewer is apparently able to use her viewing skills to create an abnormal pathology in a healthy brain. I have never encountered this before and therefore I have no data to share. And no magic bullet.’
&n
bsp; ‘There must be something we can do.’ Frankie’s voice was low.
‘Well, let’s break the problem down to its basic components. Question: is there a way to deny the attacker access to Gabriel’s mind? Answer: yes. He can block the scan. Second question: is this a sustainable defence? Answer: no. When blocking, he sustains physical trauma.’
Gabriel shrugged. ‘So I’ll simply have to come up with another defence.’
‘There is nothing simple about that.’ Mullins took off his glasses, rubbing the lenses against the sleeve of his jacket. It was a mannerism Gabriel remembered well: an indication that Mullins was concentrating; focusing his intelligence on the topic at hand. He supposed he should feel grateful that the old man was at least intrigued enough by the situation to give the problem serious attention. This was what Frankie had bargained on. She had counted on Mullins’s curiosity outstripping his personal animosity.
Mullins repositioned the glasses back on the bridge of his nose. ‘Explain to me what one of these mind attacks feels like.’ He turned his cold eyes on Gabriel’s face.
‘Sensory overload. That’s what it feels like. It feels as though someone is tipping a giant huge pile of violently frenetic images and sounds into my mind. As though an avalanche is sweeping through my brain. And it happens so fast, I can’t make out anything—the information is not discrete—the images all blur together. And it doesn’t stop. It feels as though there is no end to it. And then, when I clamp down, my head feels as though it is about to explode. The pain is… severe.’ ‘Excruciating’ was probably a better description, but he knew Mullins would find such an extravagant word distasteful.
It was quiet for a few moments. ‘The memory palace,’ Mullins said slowly. ‘It seems to me the answer lies there. As I understand it, this memory palace is really a vast depository of data.’
‘Yes.’ Gabriel nodded.
‘It is my belief that she is channelling the contents of the memory palace into your consciousness by using her remote viewing skills.’
Frankie entered the conversation. ‘You mean she’s dumping everything that’s inside her own head straight into Gabriel’s?’
‘Exactly. Her mind is obviously strong enough to contain all of that data. Yours,’ he looked expressionlessly at Gabriel, ‘is not.’
A tense moment of silence. Mullins continued. ‘The obvious answer to the predicament is to destroy the memory palace. But how that is to be accomplished, I don’t know.’
‘Maybe Gabriel can scan her,’ Frankie said. ‘Enter her mind.’
‘And do what? As far as I know he is not—what did you call it?—an extreme magician himself.’ Mullins smiled without humour. ‘So what would his weapon be? He doesn’t have any information overload to dump into her mind. The flow only goes one way. The only thing that might happen is that he’ll end up getting lost inside the palace, unable to find his way out again.’
Mullins did not elaborate. He didn’t have to. Getting lost inside the labyrinth of another mind was every RV’s personal fear. Sometimes—not very often—an RV would find himself unable to sever the connection between his own mind and the host mind. That was very bad news. You could end up in a coma, stuck in the twilight world of psi space: betwixt and between. It happened very rarely, but it did happen. RVs understood the risk but because the statistical probability of its happening was tiny, it was not something they dwelled on obsessively. But the knowledge was always there. In this case, the odds of something going wrong must be very high indeed.
The bleep of a tiny alarm broke the silence in the room. Mullins touched his wristwatch. ‘Time for my medication.’ He pushed his hands down on his knees and got to his feet with difficulty. His body language made it clear that the meeting was over.
‘Alexander, if you think of anything else…’ Frankie’s voice was without hope.
‘Of course.’ Mullins’s tone was courteous but the words sounded empty.
As he opened the front door for them, he turned to face Gabriel directly. He was standing so close, Gabriel could smell the man and it was an old man’s smell. Mullins’s eyelids were sagging and a watery pink in colour. The signs of ageing were shocking, somehow. He had always thought of Mullins as omnipotent.
Gabriel had loved this man once, had craved his approval. He knew he had arrived at Mullins’s doorstep tonight with the expectation of finding salvation. Mullins would know the answer and bring an end to the nightmare. And Mullins would have forgiven him for Melissa Cartwright, the way a parent forgives a child. Unreservedly.
‘I don’t know if you’ve changed, Gabriel. I hope you have.’ Mullins worked his mouth and again Gabriel saw the outline of dentures moving against the thin lips. ‘If you’re going into battle against this woman there will be no room for infantile self-indulgence. And this time you can’t walk away.’
Gabriel flinched.
‘You were a member of a team once. But you considered yourself too strong for the team. You could have asked for help, but no, not you—you were the Lone Ranger. All that macho swaggering… and look where it got you; where it got Melissa. If you had come to the group with your problem, we might have been able to help you clear the block. But that would have been too demeaning for the great Gabriel Blackstone. And then, when you could have made amends, you didn’t. If you had allowed yourself to slam that last ride—who knows what it might have revealed? But you were sulking.
‘You’ve always winged it, Gabriel. You’ve always trusted your talent. Well, this lady is not just talented. She has a trained mind.’
A pause. ‘Frankly, I don’t think you stand a chance.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The trip back to London was accomplished in near silence. Frankie’s face was deeply fatigued and her hands gripped the steering wheel loosely.
When they stopped in front of his apartment building, she turned to Gabriel.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to stay with you? I still think you shouldn’t be left alone.’
‘I’m OK.’ He did actually feel a little better. Maybe it was wishful thinking but it did feel as though the throbbing headache, which never seemed to let up these days, was easing somewhat. Not enough for him to do cartwheels, mind you, but enough to give relief. He didn’t know why Minnaloushe was laying off, but he was grateful for the reprieve. Maybe she had given up on the whole thing. Now that, he thought wryly, was wishful thinking indeed. When was he going to accept that Minnaloushe had no feelings for him? When was he going to replace the Minnaloushe of his memories with the cold-blooded killer she was?
He glanced at Frankie. To his horror he saw a tear fall from her eye.
‘Oh, darling, no.’ He gently wiped the tear from her cheek with his thumb.
‘I’m scared. I’m so scared for you. Aren’t you terrified? You must be.’
‘We’re going to find a way out, Frankie. I firmly believe that.’ Which was a big fat lie, but this was not the time to own up to his fear. ‘Don’t cry, Frankie. Don’t cry.’
She said, eyes still brimming, ‘I’m sorry about Alexander. You were right: we shouldn’t have gone. It was a total bust.’
‘No, that’s not true. Alexander did manage to explain the mechanics of what is happening to me… even if he did it in his usual mordant style.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The memory palace. I think he’s right, Frankie. I think all this stuff Minnaloushe dumps into my brain during a mind attack is information contained in the memory palace. I never thought of it that way, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.’
‘So we need to shut down the palace.’
‘Yes. Too bad Alexander could only identify the problem, not solve it.’
‘He is still so angry.’ Frankie swallowed. ‘I never thought he’d still be so angry.’
‘He hasn’t forgiven me yet. But he’s right, Frankie. For years I’ve told myself I wasn’t to blame, but the truth is, if I hadn’t been so arrogant she might still be alive. And if only I ha
d allowed myself to slam that last ride, I might have accessed information which could have led us to her before Newts cut her. But I stopped the ride from happening because I was feeling… aggrieved.’
‘You’ve changed.’ Frankie spoke slowly. ‘And I don’t just mean this belated mea culpa. It’s more than that. I’ve noticed it these past few days. Something has happened to you—something good. You used to be heartless, in a way. Always charming, but there was an indifference in you. A coldness.’
He tried to smile. ‘Maybe you misjudged me.’
‘No. Something has happened to you which has changed you to the core. Who knows?’ She sighed. ‘Maybe we have the sisters to thank for that.’
‘So it wasn’t all in vain.’ His voice was wry. ‘I shall die a better man.’
‘Don’t you dare talk about dying! I can’t bear to lose someone else I love.’ She took a deep breath. ‘We’re not finished yet. We have one option left. What if we went to Morrighan? Tell her what we know. Ask for her help. If anyone can get through to Minnaloushe, it would be her. She may not want to believe Minnaloushe is a killer, but it’s worth a try.’
‘She’ll believe us. The diary told me that. The last entry I accessed made it clear she was having serious misgivings about her sister.’
‘So what are we waiting for?’
Gabriel hesitated. ‘I don’t want to place her in danger. If Minnaloushe thinks Morrighan has turned against her, who knows what she’ll do? I’ll have to talk to Morrighan at some point. But I want to make very, very sure she’s safe first.’
‘You’re in love with her, aren’t you?’ Frankie said suddenly.
‘Who?’
‘Morrighan. You’re in love with Morrighan. When you talked about the diary, your entire face changed.’
‘She’s a very gifted writer.’
Frankie offered a sad smile. ‘You’re such a romantic, Gabriel. I’ve always said so, despite that hard-ass swagger you cultivate so assiduously. Look at you, falling in love with a woman because she writes a diary. It sounds almost medieval. Like the chaste passion burning between a lady and her knight who can only yearn from afar.’
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