Ash (32 page)

‘So would I,’ Pritchard agreed through a mouthful of succulent food. ‘She would be very hard to replace. Especially as far as her relationship with The Boy is concerned.’

‘Yes, yes, I’m not thinking of replacing her,’ Haelstrom said tetchily. ‘It’s just the health of her special charge that worries me. What is his age now? Surely he’s no longer a boy.’

‘He’s in his late twenties,’ Dr Singh answered. ‘Strictly, I suppose we should no longer refer to him as “The Boy”. He’s been here for so long now, though . . .’

Callously Rachael Krantz said, ‘Why would anyone outside Comraich have to know of his death?’

Sir Victor Haelstrom regarded her with disdain. ‘Because each year we have to provide proof of life, as we do for all our guests at Comraich. Benevolent or expedient our guests’ patrons may be, but they are not foolish. Unless the guest’s financial arrangements are funded by their own money, each year at an affixed time, we have to show a picture of our charge holding up that day’s newspaper, the date and headline clearly visible, to the benefactor, much as kidnappers do with ransom victims. Even if, on that day, the guest is not particularly well, the set date is binding. But this, of course, is why our guests are so well looked after and kept as fit as possible. Which is why, Nurse Krantz, I find your suggestion extremely silly and without your usual perspicacity.’

Krantz flushed. ‘I’m sorry, Sir Victor,’ she said contritely. ‘I agree, it was an idiotic thing to say.’

‘Let’s hear no more of it then.’ There was no intimation of forgiveness in Haelstrom’s tone. ‘It looks like Ash will have to work very hard to produce results tonight. But then, how do we know the hauntings aren’t already bloody over? It’s only comparatively recently that they’ve begun; they could stop just as quickly.’

Dr Pritchard looked up from his meal and dabbed at his lips with a linen napkin.

Dr Singh stared across the table at his employer.

Senior Nurse Krantz looked distractedly around the room.

Senior Security Officer Babbage continued to tuck into his rolled fillets of lamb and seasonal vegetables.

And so it was left to the meek-mannered general manager, Andrew Derriman, who had hardly touched his pan-fried duck, to speak up. ‘S-Sir Victor. Can’t you f-feel it? It’s . . . it’s . . .’ His quiet, almost whispered, words fell away as he gazed around the room as if to find something tangible, something that perhaps he could point at. The others at the table also began to search the room with their eyes, but they were all looking for something that had no substance, something that was just a sensation. A foreboding.

Eventually, even Babbage stopped eating and looked up.

‘C-can’t you feel it, Sir Victor?’ Derriman persisted. ‘It’s i-in the air itself. Something dangerous. No, no, something frightening, here in this room with us. Like . . . like the building up of static just before a thunderstorm.’

Haelstrom looked at his general manager as if he’d gone mad. Then he began to feel the crackling tension too.

But it was only when a horrific scream from the far side of the dining hall froze him rigid in his chair that he felt the whole weight of the abomination about to come.

Sitting around the table that had attracted the attention of Sir Victor’s party were six people. Each was prescribed a different cocktail of medication, but the regimens of all eight had two types of drug in common.

The older members were all prescribed AICAR, which boosted the body’s ability to burn fat by fooling it into thinking it had undergone a long and beneficial workout without moving a muscle. Popularly known as the ‘exercise pill’, it was commonly used to fight obesity and muscle-wasting diseases, as well as to hold back the frailty of old age. Comraich, of course, had its own financial motive for improving its guests’ longevity, for a living guest was a lucrative guest.

Its sister drug, the official name of which was GW1516, worked similarly, and equally well, although it required just a little actual exercise to boost muscle metabolism and so was reserved for the few younger guests at Comraich.

The second common factor among the diners at that particular table was that they all took antidepressants of some kind from Prozac to Fluoxetine (much the same thing), from Efexor to Cymbalta, from Alprazolam to Oxazepam – whichever suited each resident best.

The woman responsible for the ear-piercing scream that stunned everyone in the huge dining room was called Sandra Belling. Sandra was also on a beta-adrenergic receptor blocker which helped her block out the past. She was also being tested with a new, unlicensed drug called BDNF that was supposed to flood the mind with feelings of security and safety. The drug was now being given to her in a procedure being called ‘targeted memory erasure’. Although not yet licensed in the UK, there were others at Comraich undergoing the same treatment.

Sandra had once been a seventies groupie called Fluff, a slim, long-legged blonde whose beauty had been legendary on the rock’n’roll circuit before booze and drugs and the trauma in her life had ravaged her face and body and tortured her mind. After several years bedding all and sundry, she’d finally embarked on a proper relationship with a world-famous rock star. Deeply in love, she fell happily pregnant, and nine months later the pair celebrated the birth of their daughter with a three-day heroin, cocaine and alcohol binge in a rented apartment in Paris, while the baby slept in her cot. By the time they surfaced from their doped-up alcoholic haze, the baby had starved to death.

The scandal had been suppressed somehow, thanks to the band’s overworked PR and press agent. Their manager had quickly realized the band, already deemed the ‘bad boys of rock’, could suffer the ultimate collapse in sales and profile. So the guitarist had gone back to his narcotics, booze and gigs, while Sandra had attempted suicide twice, gone back to the bottle, and had threatened to confess all to the media. She was a loose cannon, and something had to be done. Fortunately, the rock star’s lawyer had heard rumours of Comraich. A friendly High Court judge supplied him with a contact name and a deal was quickly struck. The annual fee was vast, but so was the rock star’s fortune, and so it was that Fluff found herself swiftly interned in this superior refuge. For over thirty years she’d been kept docile by pharmaceuticals and hypnotherapy. Sandra had forgotten her daughter almost entirely now, although some nights she awoke screaming and had to be sedated even more heavily. Often she would claim a tiny naked baby with no face had been crawling on the bed towards her. And her vivacity had disappeared with her memories. These days she was more like a zombie, a bloated figure with ravaged features, ignoring her fellow-diners, staring at the food on her plate.

To Sandra’s right was a stocky, heavy-set man with bushy eyebrows that almost joined above the bridge of his nose, wearing a plain grey suit, dark-blue tie and white shirt, filling his mouth with filet de boeuf. His name was Oleg Rinsinski and he’d once been a Russian billionaire and, prior to that, a senior KGB officer. After Communism collapsed, he’d seized the opportunity to make himself rich, using money he’d been bribed with to buy into his country’s lucrative aluminium industry as well as other more clandestine markets. Well versed in extortion, blackmail, violence, murder, deception and financial chicanery, his rise as a man of wealth and influence had been rapid. Before long, Rinsinski controlled most of Russia’s thriving market in aluminium and had become a leading arms dealer.

He’d considered himself untouchable. However, he had underestimated the strength of the Russian mafia when he’d been found out in an elaborate double-cross he’d arranged with a European business partner – none other than Sir Victor Haelstrom. So he’d decided to spend the rest of it in the safety of Sir Victor’s retreat.

It had been a tremendous and frightening decision for Rinsinski to make, for he had a wife and one son and, more important to him, two gorgeous Russian mistresses, neither of whom knew of the other, but who each provided particular sexual services. Yet in the end, Rinsinski had little choice: the Russian Mafia would eventually find and kill him. So he agreed to pay the price, both in financial terms and his way of life – wives or mistresses were not allowed, a rule that could never be breached, nor negotiated. Fear of death is generally greater than the pleasure of sex.

As he happily chewed his beef, what he didn’t know was that among the various, fairly innocuous tablets he swallowed each day, he was also being fed Androcur – the anti-libidinal drug. So while he still appreciated the perfect figure of, say, a woman like the psychologist, Dr Wyatt, he no longer carried the desire to ravage her. But he enjoyed the sophistication of it all, living out the fantasy of his younger days when he was building his power. He smiled to himself, meat filling his cheeks, and thought:
not bad for a Russian peasant of farming stock.

Sitting on Sandra’s left was a man with a thatch of long fair hair. Unlike everybody else, his clothes were informal: dirty jeans with holes in the knees and old, once-white trainers. He was slim, hunched and small. It was impossible to gauge his years partly because his blond hair made him seem young, while the extraordinary mess that had once been his handsome face suggested the opposite.

This was Kit Weston, three times Formula 1 world champion. Men and women alike had universally worshipped the faultlessly handsome racing driver, though for different reasons, and he had revelled in their adoration and the attention of the media. Then had come that final crash.

Always a showboater, he’d taken one on-track risk too many and ended up at the centre of a fireball. The ace racing driver had suffered eighty per cent burns over his body as well as several bone fractures. He’d been put into a ten-day coma while the physicians worked on his burns – even his lungs were scorched. Later, when they brought him out of his coma, even the world’s best cosmetic surgeons could do little to recover his film-star looks. The intense heat had so deformed his skeleton and his musculature that he could walk only in small, awkward steps, like a hump-backed toddler. Paradoxically, his yellow hair had regrown thicker and healthier than ever, like a fire-razed forest.

It had been his idea to let the public think he’d died. He couldn’t bear to face them ever again – literally, because one of his once brilliantly blue eyes had become opaque and half the skin round his mouth had disintegrated, revealing brown rotting teeth. His request to be thought of as dead had to be scrawled on paper with a withered hand, for in the crash he had bitten off his tongue, leaving only a stump.

He would really have preferred to have died. Indeed, so far as the public were concerned, he had, for he couldn’t bear to face them again. Instead, he had used his fortune to consign himself to an anonymous living hell.

Thousands of fans had attended his memorial service, the mourning crowds (and thrill-seekers) spilling out across the graveyard and into the street beyond, for there hadn’t been enough room for everybody in the little Warwickshire church where Kit had been christened and was now to be buried.

The self-absorbed person sitting next to Kit Weston was a very darkly black, rotund giant of a man with swivelling bulbous eyes and broad shoulders that seemed capable of supporting a ten-ton truck. His hair was thick around the sides and back, but had lost ground to a smooth and shiny scalp that reflected the sparkling light from the chandelier overhead. His name was Osril Ubutu, and he missed wearing his khaki-coloured uniform with its host of dangling medals and dazzling military ribbons, all of which were self-awarded, but had served to impress the armed forces formerly under his command, and the peasants in what he’d regarded as
his
country in Africa. It was said of him that he’d boiled the severed heads of his enemies and kept them in refrigerators, either as a grisly display to impress visitors or to be eaten.

He had overthrown his corrupt uncle’s government. It had been a popular move. And the uncle had been forced from his palace never to be seen again in public. Some said that his arms below the elbows, and the legs from above the knees had been chopped off, and then each tooth in his head had been pulled out with pliers – the gold ones presented to Ubutu in a velvet draw-string bag – and that the usurped head of state was left to slither around the palace courtyard, drinking from puddles after the rains, and sucking at apple cores tossed his way.

Ubutu, seduced by his own power and stolen wealth, had soon become one of the worst despots the African continent had ever known and had developed a hunger for sex that almost equalled his hunger for food. It was Ubutu’s perversions that his wives had feared the most, for at their worst extremes many of them had had been left either dead or appallingly maimed for life. Now he was in hiding, presumed dead, for fear that the now liberated people he had so savagely oppressed would reciprocate in kind.

On his arrival at Comraich he was immediately put on the routine of sedatives and then, unknown to him, put on a continuous and infinitely more potent treatment – the ‘castration chemical’ called Leuprorelin.

The last two members of this dubious company were two very elderly men who sat and whispered to each other in German. Both were in their nineties and both had used stolen wealth to flee their beloved Reich before the inglorious end to the Second World War, one said to have escaped to Egypt, the other to Chile. In fact, they had already made arrangements to journey to England well before the war was over.

Alois Brunner had been right-hand man to Adolf Eichmann, inventing mobile gas vans which were used to kill tens of thousands of Jews. Now he was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s. His hand was shaking as he lifted the spoon with its gooey contents up to his thin-lipped mouth. A globule of dew hung from the end of his nose, and the trembling of his aged head threatened to shake the dewdrop into the food in the bowl of his spoon.

His companion was Aribert Heim, just a couple of years younger than Brunner, and he, too had played his part in the horror of the last war. A former doctor in the gruesome Mauthausen prison camp in Austria, he’d been aptly named Dr Death. He’d arrived at Comraich many years after Brunner, for after the war he had fled to Egypt, taking the false name of Tarek and raising a family there. He’d eventually fled to Comraich when he’d been tipped off that Israeli Nazi-hunters were on to him. His son Rudiger Heim, left behind in Cairo, had announced his father’s death of rectal cancer in 1992 with medical records to prove it. But the Nazi-hunters hadn’t been taken in by such evidence and continued their searches.