Approaching Zero (11 page)

The common daisy,
Bellis Perennis
, native to Central, Western, and Northern Europe. Historically known as Bruisewort or Woundwort. Kathy scrolled further down the page and took a sip of tea. This wasn’t helping at all. An herbaceous perennial (whatever that meant) with leaves of 2–5cm, which can be eaten in a salad or used as a potherb. In Ancient Rome, bandages soaked in the juices of daisies were used to treat battle wounds. Nowadays, it is used to make tea to treat disorders of the gastrointestinal and respiratory tract. Who knew?

The common daisy—
Bellis Perennis
. The less-common daisy—
Rhodanthemum
: the Moroccan Daisy.
Glebionis Coronaria
: the Tricolour Daisy. Operation Daisy: A 1981 military operation; place names across America: Daisy in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland; Lake Daisy in Florida, Daisy Geyser in Yellowstone National Park, ‘Daisy Daisy, give me your answer do’;
Driving Miss Daisy
; Daisy Duke; Daisy Duck; And the more obscure Daisy Outdoor Products, manufacturers of air guns; Daisy girl scouts; Daisy Storm; Fort Wayne Daisies, a Baseball team from the Forties; A cocktail and a doll.

The common Daisy,
Bellis Perennis
, often considered an invasive weed. Kathy had no idea of this. Daisies were summer to her. She remembered lying out on the front lawn when she was four, five, six, thirteen, eighteen, idling the time away, making daisy chains. Sometimes on her own, sometimes with Brady and once or twice with boys who always watched her hands as if she were quilting magic. Of all the practical skills loaded onto young boys, the daisy chain would always be the one that got away. How could they be weeds, though? Weeds are sharp-leaved and dull-coloured, with thorns and fury stalks and if you touch them they make you wet yourself or lose all your money or any number of wives’ tales. Daisies couldn’t be weeds. It didn’t make sense.

Kathy went to school with a girl called Daisy. She wasn’t in school for long, though, which was a shame because she really liked her. She was a striking, ginger girl and although the other kids tried to get the ginger insults to stick, they just rolled off her. The labels were a bit like calling a daisy a weed. It was all just a bit unbelievable. However, she wasn’t one of the popular girls. She sat on the same rung of the ladder as Brady and Kathy—neither popular nor unpopular: the kind of kids who just got on with life in their own little worlds without being too bothered by how society was desperately trying to categorize them. She was only in school for a term or two when they were about twelve or thirteen. Kathy hung around with her for a bit, she seemed to remember, and Brady was hilarious. She used to hide Daisy’s things—just for a laugh—her P.E. kit, money, her lunch. She took her clothes when she was in the shower once. It was all fun and games, but she left as quickly as she arrived. Perhaps her family moved house or something. She hadn’t thought about Daisy in twenty years. Why would she? But now the thought of the young girl crying because Brady had left a used tampon in her bag didn’t seem quite as funny.

Kathy took another sip of the tea and looked away from the laptop for a few moments, absorbing a burst of reality before checking her emails. She had no great expectation, it was simply habit, and she was greeted by the familiar list: one stranger who addressed her as ‘My dearest friend’ and went on to explain the terrible events that had befallen her, which would only be resolved if Kathy supplied her with her bank details immediately; a few emails from companies who seemed to think that penis enlargement was something a woman in her early thirties would find essential, and newsletters from sites that she had joined when she first started using the Internet, when she still considered a regular update to be a good thing. And then there was a familiar email address: [email protected]. She clicked the envelope icon and couldn’t wait to see what Brady had to say after her bombshell the day before.

Hey Kath,

Sorry about yesterday. You just wouldn’t believe the shit we’re facing here. I wish I could tell you about it, but you know the drill. Anyway, it means that I just haven’t got the time to talk you through what’s going on with Suri at the moment. She’s really been through it over the last few weeks, so her family are happy for her to get away and spend some time in England. I won’t tell you too much about her because I don’t want to spoil the surprise. LOL.

She’s travelling under the name Jenny Grace so put that on a board so she can find you. The money’s all taken care of so all you need to do is put a roof over her head. I’m so excited about his, Kath. She’s exactly what we’ve been looking for. Just imagine if she can get rid of all the sick fucks on your list. It’s going to be unreal. Anyway, I’ve attached her flight details. Don’t forget to delete this email. I can’t imagine that the British Army would see this as a great use of their resources.

Hugs and slaps

Brady

P.S. I’m on leave in just over a week. I know it’s been ages and I can’t wait to see you and hear all about how it’s going with Suri.

“Suri.” Kathy let the name roll around inside her mouth. “Suri.” It was a pretty name, far prettier than any English name she could think of, but she was struggling to raise excitement about the imminent arrival so she put it to the back of her mind for a few minutes and switched back to Google. A strange thought had occurred to her while she was reading Brady’s email and she wanted to see if it was a possibility.
How to block a psychic
, she wrote. This was something that she had never encountered before, but the skull daisy had appeared in her mind like a heavy curtain falling down upon the truth. Was it possible that there was a way of intentionally blocking psychics? The idea seemed ludicrous, relying as it would in this instance on someone actually knowing that a psychic would be trying to solve the case. How would someone know that, let alone have the skill to block her? And Michael Spooner clearly wasn’t psychic. She would have known. Whatever was going on was coming from outside of him. Or perhaps she was finally losing it, her skills turning on her to exclude her from the money shot, determined to leave her frustrated and ignorant.

After exactly 0.39 seconds, Kathy was faced with 2,470,000 results, of which maybe five would be relevant before the keywords were split and she came upon pages like ‘The building blocks of a mystical society by Sally the Psychic’ and ‘Chopping blocks for sale’ (the psychic part no longer featuring at all).

The opening suggestions were forums on the subject.
Can psychics read your mind without permission?
Kathy wasn’t sure if this was absolutely relevant to her research but read on anyway and wasn’t terrible surprised by the results. Yes, psychics can read your mind without being invited, as Kathy knew herself even though she couldn’t read everyone’s minds.
Psychics have open receptors and receive information whether they want to or not.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Kathy sighed.

Psychics must learn not to connect people with their dead relatives if they were abusive in life.
This was moving away from the point and then the article returned to the original question.
Protect yourself from psychic intervention by instructing your spirit guides not to talk to strangers.
Kathy was suddenly embarrassed to be a part of this psychic collective; this was the advice given to people who don’t want to have their thoughts read? Who in the real world has spirit guides to speak to? Kathy had never read a mind and been stopped mid-thought by an ethereal snow bear or an angelic presence telling her to get the hell out of this guy’s head. But then she had only read the minds of terrible people—the kind of people to whom spirit animals and guardian angels tended to give a wide berth.
Disassociate from your feelings and concentrate on building a wall between yourself and the psychic
; this was better. She already imagined that if someone knew they were being mind-read, they could alter their thoughts slightly and make them inaccessible, or fortify themselves with imagery. She felt certain that she would be able to do that, but none of this brought her any closer to the daisy skull because its presence was far stronger than a wall built to try and block a psychic and Michael Spooner wouldn’t have been capable of that anyway. It was like a malfunction in the middle of a TV show—‘Our apologies for the interruption in your viewing. We are experiencing technical difficulties and will return to your scheduled viewing as soon as possible.’ It was strong enough to mask everything going on in Michael Spooner’s head.

The next page was more interesting—Mind Defences and Mind Probes, Psychic Radar, Insanity Immunity, A Battle in the Centre of the Mind. It addressed the reader as if he or she were harboring top secret information of national importance and had to guard their brains at all opportunities from the psychics in the shadows. Reading on, it was clearly a forum for some kind of sci-fi role-play game. And then came the Psychic Block 3000, only $99 and free delivery. Kathy didn’t even click on that page. Onwards, instructions like praying, combatting depression, using a CD or tape, counting your blessing and reading a magazine seemed to feature quite heavily and inexplicably. And then Kathy happened upon a funny little website belonging to a man called Aadidev Bhat, who looked like some kind of Indian guru. From the pictures he looked at least two hundred years old, in robes, with a serene expression, peaceful stance, but with exceptionally white teeth. He immediately made Kathy feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t unusual for her to pick up vibes from photos, but her skills stretched no further than this unless she was in the same room as the man. It also wasn’t rare for her to pick up vibes about people who were seemingly good guys. The world had woken up to the idea that evil comes in all shapes and sizes and no one is untouchable anymore, so getting a bad vibe from a man who looked like the long lost brother of Ghandi didn’t faze her.

The reason that the man had featured in her search wasn’t immediately clear, so she read through a few of his pages to get a sense of who he was. He was a world-renowned healer who used unconventional means to promote health of body and mind. He was based in India and the site was written in an awkward kind of English that made the meaning difficult to grasp in places. Reading on, the reason for his inclusion in this search finally became clear: among other achievements, he was the only man on the planet who could not only block psychics from reading his mind, but also stop them from accessing traces of him in the memories of others.

“Hmmm,” Kathy said slowly and let her eyes drift away from the laptop again. She had no idea if this was relevant, but it was food for thought. Was there really a way of blocking psychics remotely? It seemed a preposterous claim, but her mind filled with the picture of the daisy skull again, for which she had absolutely no explanation. She shifted the laptop onto the sofa beside her, dragged her body off the chair, which seemed to have aged after sitting on the soft sofa for the last half an hour, and grabbed her pad and pen. She jotted down the web address and then looked around at the walls of the living room, wondering where to pin it. It didn’t particularly relate to anything currently pinned to the wall, so she gave it a space all of its own.

Then, as if her mind were working independently, she pulled her list out of her bag and began to flick through it. As happy as she had been to get it back, she hadn’t been able to face it immediately, but now she couldn’t believe she had waited so long. It was a simple manila file, which was now dog-eared and bursting at the seams with perversion, so much so that its flimsy pages were now held in place with a thick elastic band. Clearly she didn’t anticipate collecting quite as much information or she would have started with a stronger, bigger file, but either she didn’t think she would spend so long at the task or she underestimated just how many paedophiles she was facing. Her fingers wrestled each page and oddly shaped note or cutting until she reached ‘S’ and was curious to see what, if anything, she had on Spooner. What she found were her initial notes and a photo of the man in his living room, which had been taken through the window. Kathy remembered taking it now. He was a shifty man, suspicious, and she had trouble following him after she had smelt him, so she pursued at a distance and then snapped him through his living room window. His address was listed along with the words
Mostly porn,
which just goes to show that there was no way of knowing the true potential of these monsters. She had deemed him to be no great threat and now he had taken a little boy’s life. Kathy realised that her fists were clenched as she wondered just how it would all end. How could this evil ever be destroyed or was it just like the weeds—you chop down one and think that you’re getting it under control and another grows in its place?

And then there was Suri. Kathy had only considered her visit in terms of the inconvenience it would cause her thus far—having a stranger in the house. But what if Brady was right? What if Suri was the answer to her prayers? What if she could use her power to wipe out the scourge of evil, not only in the Midlands but all over the world? Could they really get away with it? Could it really be done? She looked down at her watch. With only hours before she had to collect Suri from the airport, she wouldn’t have to wait long for answers.

Chapter 11

As Kathy wrote the name on the card, the reverse of a cornflake box, Jenny Grace, her mind filled with stories: colours to fill in the vague outline that she had about her visitor. She knew that Suri was from Malaysia, or Indonesia, or somewhere around there, and she knew that she had had a difficult time, which could mean anything: she had had issues at work? She had family or housing issues? No, these felt too commonplace for a woman who was travelling the length of the world under a false name. Was she a wanted criminal? Was she in danger from terror groups stalking that region of the world (Kathy suddenly wished that she paid more attention to world affairs)? Had she started killing Asian paedophiles with her mind and now had to get out of the country? Was she stable? Would she fit neatly into the work ahead or would she take some time to adjust to it? Did she even speak English? This one was a real concern. Google was a good friend to Kathy, but she didn’t even know in which language to search for basic phrases. Would the two of them get on? This was less important. It was all about the work as far as Kathy was concerned. All they had to do was coexist; she had enough friends already.