Alchemist (51 page)

‘I've been feeling scared today,' Monty confessed.

Conor read the anxiety in her face, reached a hand out across the table and clasped hers. He had not planned to feel this way at all, had not reckoned on falling in love with her. ‘Look,' he said, ‘I don't know what's going on, but we'll get to the bottom of it.' He squeezed her fingers firmly.

‘I must be sounding pathetic.'

‘No, you'd be very odd if you weren't upset by what's happened.' He smiled. ‘Listen, whenever I feel down, there's
some Robert Frost that I say to myself. He's my favourite poet.'

‘Tell me?'

‘
People are inexterminable – like flies and bed bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices – that's us
.' He raised his eyebrows.

Monty smiled and squeezed his hand back. It felt as solid as mahogany.

North London, 1951

Half past the hour, and on the hour; that was the timetable.

Hilda Judd closed her front door and hurried down the garden path to the gate. Half past the hour and on the hour. A black saloon car lurched down the road in fits and starts, rings of thick grey smoke belching from its exhaust. Two small boys barged past her playing tag.

‘Manners!' she shouted after them, furious, but her words fell on deaf ears.

It was raining hard. She wore a mackintosh buttoned to the neck, a rain hat with the tapes tied beneath her chin, and galoshes. In her left arm she clutched her handbag.

She had two minutes, according to the hands of the kitchen clock. God would delay it, if she asked Him. She closed her eyes for a moment, murmured a prayer, then hurried to the end of the block where she turned right, walked past a row of brick façades that were all that remained of a terrace hit by a V2 in 1945.

Sharp needles of rain struck her face and she stiffened her cheeks against them. A red OXO van crossed the intersection ahead of her, weaving and jigging along the tramlines. She heard the clatter of a bell and speeded her pace anxiously, wondering what was wrong with herself recently. She was never late for anything, had never missed the start of a Church
mission meeting in twenty years. Now, not only was she in danger of being late, but she had forgotten her Bible.

Forgotten her Bible!

It lay on the kitchen table and there was no time to go back for it; she knew it was there, had been going to slip it in her bag and she could not believe she had left without it.

Forgive me, God
.

She felt a sudden panic, could picture her travelling copy of the Good Book with its brown leather cover and gold embossed lettering, could see its fine pages as light as silk lying beside the shopping list and the crystal vase of flowers.

Daniel had made her forget it, she decided. God would punish him for this. There was something wrong with the boy. Ever since his father's death he had been strange, as if there was something malignant inside him. A cancer of the soul. It was grief, she liked to think in rare moments when she was feeling charitable; but she wasn't convinced. He had developed an insolence, an aloofness, as if he was somehow superior to her. He just smiled when she was angry at him and walked away. Sometimes it seemed even as if he felt himself superior to God, beyond the Good Lord's reach. And that had to be knocked out of him.

Knocked right out of him.

If she didn't do it, God would, and God was too busy to be bothered with ungrateful children. Every day she promised God she would step up Daniel's Bible readings, set him specific hours for prayer, and punish him with beatings when he was disobedient. She had asked God for his help in this task, but the help was not coming through.

Week after week she felt sapped of energy, confused, forgetful, clumsy. It was the boy's fault. Every time he came into the kitchen she would break a glass or a dish. Last night she had dropped a full gravy boat on the floor. It was because he made her angry, she knew; just the sight of his face set the furies raging inside her.

Yet he accepted his thrashings without a murmur. And the less he protested, the more vicious with him she became.

She reached the end of the street and her mouth contorted into a tight circle as she saw the High Barnet tram approaching.
Not going to get to the stop in time; it was a way off and on the far side of the road. She heard the smooth rumble of the wheels and the erratic ping of the bell.

Daniel. His face suddenly burned into her thoughts as if it had been pressed through the flesh of her brain with a branding iron. Her head felt as though it would split open in agony. ‘Daniel!' she gasped, startled and disoriented, suddenly clutching her head in her hands.

A voice whispered in her ear: ‘Prayer!'

It was Daniel's voice. Then again, more loudly: ‘PRAYER!'

Images of the street all around her began to fragment like reflections in the shards of a smashed mirror. She turned around on her own axis.

‘Are you all right, missus?' a stranger's voice said. A helping arm reached out towards her.

‘Leave me alone, get your hands off me!' she screeched back. ‘I have to get the tram! God is my guide, God is my saviour!'

She stumbled, began to run. A klaxon beeped fiercely and a taxi swerved to avoid her.

‘God is with me!' she called out. ‘God will stop the tram!'

‘PRAYER!' Daniel's voiced hissed intently, like burning, melting flesh.

A shadow slid across the wet tarmacadam in front of her; chromium glinted; another klaxon sounded.

‘PRAYER!'

A bell clattered.

‘PRAYER!'

Someone shouted.

‘We are all equal in God's eyes, Daniel,' she said loudly and broke into a run. ‘He
knows
, Daniel. He
sees
you, stupid child. He
knows
you are evil!'

Had to beat the tram. Had to. God would help her beat it. Bearing down, a shadow, streaks of rain, wiper swinging through its arc, the driver's face behind the glass beneath his peaked cap. The Church mission, could not be late.

‘I am never late!' she announced to the world.

‘PRAYER!' Daniel's voice was a command now. Her son
was so strong, had grown so big, only seventeen years old but he was a man, a grown man now with a penis as big as her –

Oh God, what am I thinking? Forgive me, God, Almighty God forgive me
…

‘PRAYER!'

She outstretched her arms, clasped her hands together, praying as she ran. ‘Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done –'

The toe of her rubber boot struck something, pitching her forward. The tarmac rushed up, thumping her hard in the midriff. She lay, momentarily stunned, her arms still outstretched, hands pressed together, and continued the Lord's Prayer in a breathless whisper.

‘In earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And–'

A shout momentarily distracted her, then she continued. ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.'

There was another scream, louder, more desperate. The ground was trembling now. She was aware of the shadow bearing down, but she had to finish the prayer.
Had to
…

The voice that came through into her head was her son's voice again.

‘O LORD SATAN! I COMMAND YOU TO TAKE AWAY FROM MY MOTHER THE POWER TO PUT HER HANDS TOGETHER IN PRAYER
!'

The pain tore her mouth and her eyes open. She heard the squeal of brakes, the grating slither of metal sliding on metal. It felt for an instant as if a filleting knife had scooped out all her internal organs. A shock wave pulsed through her like the cutting of a surgeon's knife.

Cutting through her wrists.

Blood jetted in uneven spurts like water from an airlocked tap. Then the pain shot from her guts to the ends of her arms. She cried out in agony. It was as if white hot pokers had been pressed against her wrists. The pain went as fast as it had come, and was replaced with complete numbness.

She could see her hands, one to her right, the other to her left, upside down, at impossible angles. Blood was dribbling
from both of them. They looked like toys, made of waxwork, joke-shop hands. They must be models someone had dropped in the road, lobbed from the open window of a tram as a sick trick.

The metal in front of her eyes had stopped moving now. Someone was screaming hysterically behind her. Someone else was retching. Hilda Judd tried to move her hands, to put them together in prayer, to lever her body up. But all that moved, slowly and raggedly, were the two bloody stumps of her wrists.

Thursday 24 November, 1994

Monty was woken by a sharp, metallic chime, followed by a click, then a whirring sound. As she opened her eyes, momentarily confused, she saw a square of green-grey light. Then she remembered she was at home, with Conor. He was sitting up in bed with his laptop computer in front of him.

‘What are you doing?' she asked.

He tapped a key without replying, and a moment later she heard the sound of a modem dialling. Then he leaned over and kissed her tenderly. ‘Just need to check something. I plugged into your phone socket – hope you don't mind?'

The clock in the top right corner of the screen said 3.55 a.m. She watched curiously as he slid a finger around the mouse pad and tapped another key, opening the incoming mail section of an electronic mailbox. Then her eyes widened in amazement. Repeated all the way down the left-hand column was the word ‘Maternox'.

He opened the first eMail. It was a sales report. Monty read the sender's name:
[email protected]
. (D. Smith, Sales Director, Bendix Schere Australia Ltd). It was addressed to
[email protected]
. Alan Lowe, who she had met, was the Group Sales Director, and based in the Bendix Building.

On the next line beneath these two addresses, Monty read the letters: bcc:
[email protected]
.

The initials ‘bcc' usually stood for ‘blind copy', and ‘Eumenides' rang a bell from her Greek mythology. ‘Where did you get this Maternox stuff from?' she asked.

‘Bendix Schere very kindly mail it to me.'

‘Oh yes?' She caught the humour in his eyes.

‘Sure, except they don't know they're doing it.'

‘Eumenides?' she said. ‘Is that you?'

‘Uh huh.'

‘Wasn't she one of the Furies in Greek mythology? One of the three merciless goddesses of vengeance?'

‘No, it was a name people used for the Furies. It actually means “the Kindly Ones”.' Conor clicked on another eMail message and read through it; it contained statistics from Germany showing monthly comparative sales of the percentage market share of Maternox on a trend analysis. Conor closed it and opened another.

‘So, you have an eMail box at this company – Minaret?'

Conor frowned in concentration.

‘Couldn't the Bendix boffins trace it?'

‘Be very hard – they could only do so by a fluke and I've set up a couple of trip wires.'

‘Trip wires?'

‘If anyone in the Bendix system tumbled this, it would send me a warning signal and at the same time trash the contents of the mailbox.'

She smiled approvingly, feeling very wide awake now. ‘So you're not just a pretty face, are you, Mr Molloy?'

He dug a finger into his cheek and his brow furrowed deeply. ‘You know your mythology, right?'

‘A little. I'm a bit rusty.'

He angled the screen more towards her and pointed at a word.

‘
Polyphemus
,' she read.

‘Remember who he was?'

‘Yes, one of the Cyclops.' It took a brief moment before the penny dropped. ‘Christ!' She leaned forward and read the short message. It said simply:

MEDICI FILE
: Password change. Note existing password expires midnight tonight
GMT
. Replace with: poly
phe^mus
.

It was signed:
B. Gunn, Director of Security
.

Conor picked his cigarettes off the bedside table, shook one out and lit it. ‘So is that name a happy coincidence? Or have we just lucked into the jackpot?'

‘I thought we'd decided we didn't believe in coincidence any more,' she said.

‘Yup, you're right. That's exactly what we decided.'

Conor had searched his car without success for his missing glove. He must have dropped it somewhere, although he could not for the life of him think where. He had not left the office at all yesterday, and was almost certain he could remember taking his gloves off there and stuffing them into his coat pocket.

He hung up his coat, then sank heavily down on his chair and leaned back for a moment, collecting his thoughts.

It was ten past eight, a little late but just about respectable. It had taken a supreme effort of willpower to drag himself out of bed straight after making love to Monty again that morning. He now felt very tired, but was fuelled with elation both from the night he had spent with her and from his discovery. He was dying to make use of the password he had acquired, but that would have to wait until tonight. It would be foolhardy to attempt anything here.