The Fall (21 page)

Then, in late summer, months after her mother’s death, Joan packed up Ana’s things, her father arrived in his chauffeur-driven saloon and she was taken away. They drove directly to a London hospital. Ashby tried to make her kiss a woman with no hair and craters instead of eyes goodbye – a woman he claimed was her dying mother.

Dombrant turned the Psych Watch van through pillars that marked the drive up to the farm. Tyres crunched over gravel. The lawn had grown wild. Trees and brambles reached around the barn, threatening to lure it away into the forest.

She peered back at the green shack until it was obscured. Up ahead lay the cobbled brick farmhouse, sturdy and familiar with its wooden front door and stone pathway. The latticed windows weren’t quite symmetrical. The flint tiled roof sloped steeply; chimney stacks sitting wonkily on either end.

Home.

Dombrant cut the engine. She squeezed around her sleeping father and jumped from the van, waiting by the back doors for the Warden to open up.

 ‘Your father’s trying to help you,’ Dombrant said, eventually joining her.

‘My father only knows how to help himself to what he wants.’

‘He’s not who you think he is.’

Ana swivelled her head sideways and stared at him. She wondered what her father had done to gain Jack Dombrant’s undivided loyalty. ‘My father moved me and my mother here when I was six. Out of the way, out into the middle of nowhere because my mother was an embarrassment.’

Dombrant looked like he might come up with some sort of answer, then seemed to change his mind. He tapped in a code for the keypad that controlled the bolts in the van’s doorframe. Metal clunked as the bolt snapped back.

Ana climbed into the dark interior. Cole lay cuffed to the floor, unmoving. She put a hand on his back, rubbed it gently.

‘Cole?’ she said. He exhaled softly, but didn’t rouse.

‘He’s got a while until it wears off,’ Dombrant said.

‘So are you going to help me carry him inside?’ she asked, clambering back to the van doors and gulping in fresh air.

‘Nah.’ Dombrant dug his hands into his pockets and sauntered across the driveway to the farmhouse. She hesitated. She wanted to stay and look after Cole; to be there when he came around. But once her father woke, they’d probably pick up whatever supplies Dombrant was talking about and leave. She might never return to this place again.

She hopped down, crunched along the gravel in the opposite direction to the Warden, and headed for the barn. Over the years, the barn doors had shredded their olive green coat. An uneven brown undercoat poked through scaly gaps of paint. A strange sense of déjà vu hit her.

She scrutinised the barn. In her mind, she was five inches smaller, standing just as she was now, listening to the sound of the purring engine.

Her father used to ration the petrol – he only left a litre in the car for emergencies – so hearing the car engine wasn’t just weird that early in the morning, it felt deeply wrong. Fumes leaked under the doors. Her head spun and she started to feel sick. She reached out for the metal handle. The door was jammed. In the distance, a second engine rumbled to life. She flipped around to face the sound. Beyond the lane, through the trees by the main road a champagne gold hatchback juddered forward. A moment later it was gone.

Ana squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, trying to untangle the past from the present. Like waking from her nightmares. Except she was here.

‘Ariana?’ her father said.

She turned. He’d already woken up from the sedative, but could barely hold himself upright. He was rubbing his face and squinting a lot. His grey suit was crumpled, his blonde hair sticking out at odd angles. He probably should have been sitting, slowly recovering muscular control.

‘The morning Mum died,’ she said. ‘Was there someone else staying at the house?’

‘Someone else?’ he echoed.

‘Did you have someone else staying with you?’

As her meaning sank in, his face shifted from confusion to indignation.

‘Don’t give me that look,’ she said. ‘Was there someone else here the morning mum died?’

‘Only the housekeeper – Sandra,’ he said.

‘Sarah. Her name was Sarah. So who drove a gold car?’

Ashby’s features were mapped with confusion. He struggled to fight the hook of sleep from the sedative. Suddenly, he seemed to break through the fog. His face turned pale; so pale Ana thought he was having a delayed but deadly allergic reaction to the methohexital.

He lost his balance. She lunged to catch him, momentarily forgetting the vow she made years ago to never let him touch her. He threw an arm over her shoulder and she lowered him on to the grass. Their proximity made her writhe with awkwardness. Once he could hold himself in a sitting position, she backed off.

‘I altered the gene sequences from your Pure test,’ he said.

Out of the blue – the confession she’d been waiting to hear for years. Even though the Board hadn’t proved how he could have done it, she’d always known. But why was he telling her now?

‘I had someone hack into the system,’ he continued, ‘and enter the password I’d stolen from Evelyn Knight. They were out again before anything was detected.’

Ana puffed out air. Where was he going with this?

‘I always thought it rather odd though,’ he continued, ‘that story about some secretary from the Guildford Registry Office reading your request for your mother’s death certificate, realising your mother had committed suicide, and bringing the whole situation to the Board’s attention. I thought Evelyn must have been behind it. I wondered if she was keeping some kind of tabs on anything to do with your mother’s death.’

‘Evelyn?’

‘Evelyn Knight. The Chairman of the Board.’

‘Why would she care about Mum’s death?’

Ashby spread out his tanned fingers. After all these years, he still wore his gold wedding ring. Ana had never seen her father look so old.

‘Evelyn and I had an affair. She was pushing me to leave Isabelle. After your mother died, Evelyn thought she and I would be together.’

‘So why weren’t you?’ Ana asked coldly.

‘Your mother was the only woman I ever really . . .’ His eyes shifted to meet her stare and his voice broke off. ‘I assumed Evelyn keeping tabs on your mother’s death was some sort of fixation, or ego trip.’

‘But?’

‘I was at her place once when the sink blocked. I went to the garage looking for tools. There was a car covered over. I was curious, so I took a look.’

‘A gold hatchback?’

‘Yes.’

The Chairman of the Board had been at their farmhouse the morning her mother had died. Ana studied her father. His logic dawned on her slowly. Slowly, slowly slithering inside her, climbing up her lungs, twisting around her throat.

‘You think the Chairman of the Board killed Mum and made it look like suicide?’

‘She must have had something to do with it. What else was she doing here that morning? Why would she keep tabs on any enquiries concerning your mother’s death?’

‘You think Mum didn’t . . .’ Pain pressed against Ana’s ribcage. She’d lived with the awful weight for so long she hadn’t known it wasn’t part of her – the guilt of having let her mother down, the feeling of not having given her enough support or reason to battle on and choose life, choose her. But perhaps her mother hadn’t chosen to leave her behind, after all.

*

Ana sunk down where she’d been standing. Her knees dug into the chalky gravel. Had the Chairman of the Board been watching her all these years because she knew that Ana’s ten-year-old self had seen the gold car departing from the scene of her mother’s murder? When Ana had written to the Guildford Registration for Births and Deaths, had Evelyn Knight been keeping tabs on all such requests? Had Ana’s request made Evelyn nervous? The Chairman must have sent Board members to ‘redo’ Ana’s test and expose the fact that Ana was a Big 3. She had made sure the public found out about Isabelle Barber’s ‘suicide’. It had been the perfect way to embarrass Ashby Barber and distract Ana and her father from the truth.

‘Why didn’t Evelyn Knight tell the whole world you were lying about Mum and the cancer straight away?’

Her father sat several feet away, head between his legs. ‘By covering up what I thought was Isabelle’s suicide,’ he said bleakly, ‘I covered up the murder. I didn’t get a proper autopsy done. The police didn’t investigate. Evelyn probably couldn’t believe her luck. But when you started asking questions all those years later, the evidence against her was gone. You were the only thing left. A witness.’

Ana was finding it hard to think around the sense of loss. She was drowning in it all over again. ‘The reprieve,’ she whispered. She’d often wondered why the Board had given her a temporary reprieve that would only be extended if she joined with Jasper. But the reprieve meant the Board could come and question her any time they liked. They could ask her over and over about her mother’s death, probe her to see what she remembered. And it kept Ana in check, afraid of asking too many questions, afraid of the truth, clinging to her life in the Community. Betrayed by her father. Distrustful.

In one slick move, Evelyn Knight had isolated Ana from her father, from the Community and from her friends.

Dazed, she returned to Cole in the van. She knelt beside him and stroked his hair. It was as though the roads had merged and they all led back to Evelyn Knight. But the Chairman hadn’t succeeded in breaking her. She’d found Cole. And she wouldn’t let anyone take him away. Not the Wardens, the Board, Special Ops, her father. No one.

Feet crunched along the gravel from the house. Dombrant appeared, silhouetted against the daylight. ‘What did you say to your dad?’ he asked.

‘Why are you so loyal to him?’

Dombrant clenched his jaw. He glanced up the driveway at her father. ‘We’ve got to get moving,’ he said. ‘Wake up your boyfriend or we’ll leave him behind.’

Lifting Cole’s head and shoulders onto her lap, Ana shook him gently.

‘Wake up,’ she whispered. ‘Wake up.’

19

Evelyn Knight

They were riding in the back of a four-by-four, the boot jammed full of boxes. Dombrant drove. Ashby sat in the front. Cole’s head lolled against Ana’s shoulder. She entwined her fingers through his, squeezing hard from time to time, willing the sedative to wear off faster, wanting to shake him awake.

She didn’t know what to do. There was too much to take in. Outrage and anger twisted inside her. Her mind chewed over everything until she felt ill, but she couldn’t stop. Indirectly, Evelyn Knight was responsible for what had happened to Helen and Tamsin, as well as her mother. Someone should be making her pay.

They veered west onto the M25, a ring road that circled the outskirts of the City and linked up with all the country’s main motorways. Fields and hedges flashed past. Once they left the giant ring road, every hour in the car would take them a day’s walk from London. And the further north they went, the fewer the trains that stopped between the largest cities.

‘Are you hungry?’ her father asked, breaking open a cardboard box he’d stored by his feet. Ana’s stomach was churning, but she wasn’t sure if that was from lack of food, or the malevolence she felt towards the Chairman of the Board.

‘Cracker?’ her father offered, holding them out.

She took the whole packet. ‘What is all this?’ she asked. ‘Why did you have a car of supplies sitting hidden at the farm?’

‘I had Jack – Warden Dombrant,’ he clarified, ‘put it all together during my trial over changing your Pure test. If it had looked like they were going to find me guilty, well, I wasn’t planning on spending any time in prison.’

She nibbled a cracker, wondering if taking her with him had been part of the escape plan. Did she still care?
Yes
, she admitted to herself reluctantly.

‘How did you find us at Three Mills?’

‘This morning Jack noticed the tracker on his interface camera had begun working. It’s a back-up, only starts transmitting if the camera is detached from the projector. So we thought the interface must have been sold and someone was dismantling it for the parts to repackage and sell on. But then we saw the tracker location. Five minutes from Three Mills. I used my license to access the institution’s security cameras and when we saw a couple breaking in we thought we’d come to investigate.’

Ana finished the cracker and started another one. The dry biscuit was helping to settle her stomach. Her father handed her an open tin of kidney beans with a plastic fork. Had he packed this in the front especially for her? As their fingers touched she looked into his eyes.

‘Why?’ Her voice was tight. ‘Why did you come for me?’

He sat back round in his seat, facing forward. ‘She came to see me two days ago.’

‘Who?’

‘Evelyn. She wants you. I thought it was because she suspected you’d stolen the Advisory Committee’s recording from me. Because she knew you and Jasper had got mixed up with the Enlightenment Project. But it’s more than that. All these years I thought she was trying to get back at me, but now I reckon it’s you she’s been keeping an eye on.’

I’ve been watching you.

Why?

I’ve been waiting to see if you’re the one.

Her father’s words sprung free a dream she’d had: a nightmare with zombie people; a pixie girl with a scratched-out face. She shuddered. ‘Why would the Chairman be keeping an eye on me?’ she asked. ‘If I ever decided to tell people I’d seen her car driving away from our farmhouse the morning Mum died, who would have believed me?’

Ashby rubbed a finger across his lip. ‘Perhaps that’s one reason why she made it very public that you were a Big3,’ he said. He folded away the box of food. He hadn’t eaten anything, she noted.

She sat forward in her seat, reached out a hand and lightly placed it on his shoulder. He jerked around like she’d given him an electric shock. She hoped his strange behaviour meant, for once in his life, he’d give her a straight answer. ‘Um, Three Mills,’ she said. ‘Did people see it?’

For a moment, he didn’t respond. His eyes were fixed on the spot where her fingers had touched him. ‘They saw it,’ he said quietly. ‘Whoever was helping you, hijacked the BBC Live News channel for six minutes. We need to get you as far away from London as possible, before Evelyn discovers it was you again.’