Sympathy for the Devil (42 page)

‘We’ve probably got less than a minute before the emergency generators kick in,’ she called back to Huw. ‘Follow me.’

Catrin ran across the dark hallway and up the flight of stairs. The banisters were thick, knotted with elaborate carvings. The shapes of the carvings snagged on her jeans, but within seconds she’d reached the upper landing.

Through the open door she saw the silhouette of a man with a shaven head. Running down into his collar were the leads of earpieces, his head was bobbing to a trance-like beat. He rose from his seat, moving with muscle-bound steps across the room.

His arms outstretched in front in the dark, he was feeling his way to a door in an inner wall. As he half turned, she recognised him as the man they had sat next to in the canteen, the table-watcher.

‘He doesn’t exactly look on the ball,’ Huw whispered at her shoulder. ‘But we’ll need to move fast, get out before he returns.’

The emergency power had come on in the stairwell. On the desk were monitors, several baggies, over-full ashtrays and crumpled twists of silver foil. The monitor opposite the chair was showing footage from a porno webcam, in grainy black-and-white, pale limbs pulsing in a staccato rhythm across the screen.

The screen was partly hidden by the coils of a water pipe. Huw shifted it out of the way. His head was bowed now over the image on the screen. Catrin approached until the image became clearer.

A man and a woman were lying on a black, plasticated sheet, their bodies shiny with oil. The man was bending over some attachment on the back of the woman, who was out of shot. He wore a black leather mask and on his chest was a tattoo, a raven’s beak. Strands of grey hair came out of the back of the mask. She knew immediately the man was Jones.

In the lower left-hand corner of the screen was a digital clock which showed that what they were watching was happening in real time. Emerging from off-screen, hands were pushing the woman’s buttocks wider apart. Further up her back was a black shape, another raven. The rest of it was covered with welts and bruises. As they skewed to one side of the bed, the sweat-matted hair that hung down over the woman’s face parted for a moment. Catrin caught a glimpse of young bruised eyes, half senseless, staring vacantly out ahead of her.

Then they moved out of view. Catrin was left looking at the empty, ruffled sheet, the heavy wooden panelling around the bed carved with satyrs.

‘That girl,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen her before.’

‘In one of the misper searches?’

‘No, more recently.’ It didn’t take her long to get it. It had been on the BDSM site, one of the girls among Fransis’s contacts. She recognised the features from photos of several of his other contacts. He’s been using the same girl, she thought, to model for the profiles he’d invented, just altering the make-up and camera angles: that was clever – safer than scanning images from other sites.

‘That’s Jones’s girl, I’d bet on it,’ she said. ‘His willing sub, his accomplice.’ The camera stayed on the elaborate carvings around the bed. Some showed warped grotesque faces, ancient deities, horned beasts. In the background was a larger space, almost in darkness. From some points deeper in came a flickering that might have been an arrangement of candles on the floor. Catrin felt she was looking at something familiar.

‘Let’s see if we can find that place on other cameras. That way we can get a sense of where he might be,’ she said.

Huw sat in front of the bank of screens, his hand on the control that worked the cursor. Each of the eight screens divided into grids of eight smaller pictures, so they now had sixty-four distinct views of the complex above their heads. Most showed stretches of empty corridor, half-lit hallways and landings, the storerooms and yards they had passed through earlier. Occasionally orderlies could be seen crossing the empty spaces, sweeping torch beams along the passages and into ventilation shafts.

‘They’re out looking for us,’ Catrin said.

On one screen were images of the wards she’d just visited. Huw scrolled through several of the first ward, then the others lower down. The men in their dressing gowns were still slumped in front of the television. The rest of the images showed the outside of the clinic, seemingly endless shots of barbed-wire fences and black wooded hillsides.

‘There’s nothing else here.’ Huw moved back to the original shot. Unlike in other cameras, the lens position was fixed. The subdivisions in the screen merely showed the same flickering space. It was windowless, empty, just the old panelling, the bed in the centre as in a film set, the cave-like space receding into blackness.

He slid the cursor down the sidebar until he found the zoom function. The image of the panelling expanded and a small section of the wall now filled the entire screen.

Under the surface of the paint Catrin saw tiny craters and crevices, but she could not see a single hair or speck of fluff on the dark surface.

‘It looks like the place has been washed down,’ Huw said.

Huw moved over to the stack of DVD-R players beside the desk.

‘All the players have been disconnected,’ he said. ‘They’ve upgraded from DVD to DVR. That means there are no discs, no coaxial cables, everything’s stored digitally on a hard disc that could be miles away, secured behind passwords.’

‘But those cameras in the empty ward aren’t motion-sensitive.’ Catrin had got up from the desk, moved out of the sightline of the doorway. ‘They’re continuous. So anyone watching from here might have seen what’s been going on there.’

Outside the door they heard heavy, stumbling movements. She pointed urgently to a pile of cardboard boxes behind the door. As one, they rose and hid behind them. The orderly was entering much the way he had left, his arms feeling ahead of him in the dark, his movements slow, unsteady.

But he wasn’t completely gone. He’d noticed that the link to the old panelled room had been replaced by images of the empty cell. He lurched over towards a glass case on the wall.

As the man reached the panic button, Huw came at him from behind, a length of cable pulled tight between his fists. He wrestled the man down onto the floor, the wire cutting across his windpipe. The man couldn’t move, he couldn’t cry out.

He groped blindly for the button. But Catrin pushed him back, her boot slamming hard in the centre of his chest.

‘It must get lonely up here all on your own,’ she said.

The orderly was gasping for breath as Huw tightened the wire round his throat. Catrin kept the weight of her heel on his chest.

‘So you’ve been a bad boy, jerking off over Jones in action. Bet you’ve been enjoying that.’

She used the tip of her boot now to raise his head, so that he faced the screen image of the bed. At first the man didn’t seem to want to understand. He had opened his eyes wide, was pulling his head away from the screen, as if there was something there they couldn’t see.

‘What has Jones been doing in there?’

The man let out a high, screeching sound. Huw pulled the cord, silencing him, then gradually released it to give him air. His head was shaking from side to side, then abruptly he grew stiller, his eyes blinking rapidly.

‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. His voice was strangely high, reedy, like air blown through a broken pipe. ‘The camera gets turned off sometimes, then afterwards the room has been cleaned up.’

The man started to lose consciousness. He sank back into Huw’s lap. Catrin kept on scrolling through the different cameras. There were only more images of empty corridors and the black hillsides.

‘Where is Jones?’ she asked softly.

The man’s head lolled to one side; he was breathing weakly through his mouth, unevenly. ‘No one knows that,’ he whispered.

‘Don’t worry, we believe you,’ she said. ‘But where did you last see Jones heading on the other monitors? The man isn’t invisible, he must have appeared somewhere.’ She put her lips close to his ear.

His lips were moving but it took a moment for the words to form.

‘Up the top.’

He was out now, his pupils staring blindly up at the ceiling. She slapped his face, but he wasn’t coming round. She let him slump back into Huw’s arms. They could hear noises down in the stairwell. Huw pulled the man under the pile of boxes behind the door, nudging them forward with his feet until they covered his body.

Catrin felt Huw drawing her close to him, so the weight of his body was shielding her as he moved towards the door.

9

The footfalls behind them died away as they ran outside. What light there was came from the sickle moon, hanging like a gash in the blackness. Each time Catrin lost her footing, Huw pulled her upright again, keeping her moving into the woods.

Somewhere up ahead lay the escarpment. It was barely visible in the dark, but she could just make out its outline jutting out from behind the trees. There were glimpses of a clearing between clusters of hazel and holm oaks. Steps had been cut into the earth and covered with rough planks of wood. Catrin looked back now, noticing a sunken area at the edge of the clearing, above which the land rose steeply. Lights had fanned out behind them from where the clinic lay hidden in the mist, but were not moving forward.

‘Why aren’t they coming after us?’ she whispered.

Slowly Huw moved into the open space ahead. No pathways led to the place, yet it seemed to have been preserved from the encroaches of the surrounding woodland. She could see a series of objects lying among weeds that had grown up through the shale. Most appeared to be small buckets, the sort that children might play with in a sandpit, though there was no sand anywhere in sight. Others were in simple symmetrical shapes, stylised crosses and waves and stars, their bright colours dulled by the mud.

But Huw was no longer looking towards the play area and had raised a hand up to her mouth. Following his line of sight along the ridge, Catrin saw a figure partly hidden by the trees. He was no more than thirty yards away, head bowed in a play of torchlight. He was holding small binoculars, the type bird-watchers use. But there were no birds visible in the dark sky, nor could any calls be heard; only the wind and the insistent patter of the rain.

She edged through the trees towards the figure. The man was not moving away, just standing still, silently beckoning to them. As Catrin got closer she saw he was wearing green farmer’s weatherproofs, and around his neck a string of furs and small bones. She recognised him as old Tudor, and was sure now that he had been the one who was watching them earlier from the rocks outside the inn.

Huw rushed past her and pinned the man down. ‘You’re one of Jones’s people –’ his words seemed spat out with anger – ‘you’re a lookout, aren’t you?’ In the faint glow of the moon Catrin saw dried mud on the man’s forehead and his grey, uneven teeth. He looked frightened but said nothing.

She eased Huw away and touched the man’s arm softly. ‘We heard about your daughter,’ she said and lowered herself slowly. ‘I’m sorry. She looks a lovely girl in those photos.’

She thought she saw tears welling up in his rheumy eyes. ‘She wasn’t my daughter,’ he said softly, ‘but I brought her up as my own. Her mother was a traveller, a wild child. I looked after her girl when she was off doing whatever she did, until one day the girl just disappears.’

‘Her name?’

‘Caris. She took my surname. Mower.’ He was glancing into the trees.

Catrin followed his stare, but saw nothing. Around them there were no sounds other than the drumming of the rain and the muted hum of the wind. The old man was gazing out into the darkness as if he had already forgotten they were there.

Gradually a realisation struck her, one that had sat half formed at the edge of her mind ever since they had visited the shop in the woods. ‘Your daughter – you came back here to look for her, didn’t you?’ Old Tudor leant back on his heels so as not to disturb the branches in front of them. He said nothing but he nodded fractionally. She thought of the girl the doctor had mentioned seeing from a distance with Jones, of the girl they’d just seen with Jones on the screen. The old man seemed to smile at her, the moonlight filtering behind him through the branches.

She moved closer. ‘Caris, she’s the one the orderlies spotted with Jones, isn’t she?’

There was fear in his eyes. He squatted low on the ground, motioning for Catrin to do the same. His gaze was on the clearing now, the coloured shapes floating in the black pools of rainwater, the steps no more than a dim smudge against the trees.

‘This place,’ she said, ‘what is it?’

‘It took me a while to find out,’ he said.

Some of the star-shaped and other objects had begun to roll in the wind, back and forwards on the sodden ground. Huw glanced nervously towards the ridge above them.

‘Spit it out,’ he said, ‘we don’t have much time.’

The man stared intently into the mist. ‘It’s Jones,’ he said quietly, ‘sometimes I’ve seen him here, and sometimes children playing.’ Catrin kept her eyes on the man. ‘The children are always silent. They play with a straw doll or old-fashioned toys. One wears some kind of costume, with feathers on the arms.’

Old Tudor had spoken in a measured, calmly emphatic tone. Catrin felt Huw touching her sleeve. He was looking down to the edge of the clearing, scanning from side to side. ‘But that’s what you said you’d seen them doing all those decades ago,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’ She watched for hesitation, any tell that he was lying, but she couldn’t see one.

‘So how do you explain it?’

He shrugged. ‘I took some photos, but they came out badly. I sent them round to universities, asked them if they recognised anything.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. But then a few months later a graduate from Aber calls me, says he’s found a picture that looks like mine. It was from some academic psychological journal from the early Seventies.’

Huw glanced at Catrin, then looked closely at the old man. ‘But how could that be?’