The Uninvited (11 page)
They came all this way
, said Jonas.
Who did? And from where?
Later that evening, I go on the net. There’s been another attack, this one in southern Spain. The culprits are twin boys, aged nine. Child Three and Child Four, as I immediately think of them, pushed their father off a stone staircase in full view of the rest of the family, who were gathered in the courtyard of their farmhouse for a meal, celebrating a younger child’s birthday. Afterwards the boys would not speak. Again, there was no apparent motive, but on the morning of the attack, they told their parents that they had woken abruptly in the night, from the same nightmare.
The father died.
I reach for a pencil and sharpen it with six turns, inhaling the scent of the long, pristine shaving that emerges. Pine and graphite. It’s very pleasing. Then I reach for a pad and start drawing.
Men attacking institutions that they love.
Children turning on their families.
Two overlapping circles, with irrational violence at the intersection.
What else connects them?
Something has lured my old mentor out of retirement. Mass hysteria is Professor Whybray’s field. Something
hush-hush
at the Home Office, Ashok said.
He hinted at a contract.
Is the old man thinking along the same lines as me?
At 8.15 I go to the hotel restaurant for dinner, where I learn the Swedish word for crayfish:
kräfta.
When I come back I see there’s a message from Annika Svensson. They are still operating. She’s going to fetch her son, then go to the hospital and wait. She’ll call me if there’s any news.
My upper right arm hurts where Jonas dug his fingers in. I run a hot bath, hoping to ease it. You can adjust the temperature on the taps: I set it to forty-one degrees. Steam fills the room. I slide into the scalding water. It’s cramped; in order to lie with my arms beneath the surface, I have to stick my legs out the other end. I inspect the bruising, exaggerated by the water’s heat and the bright lighting of the bathroom: it’s Victory Purple in the centre, and there are several shades of yellow, from Soft Butterscotch to Ochre Bisque at the edges, nudging into the green range. The pattern of the oedema is unusual. Jonas’ grip spanned much of my upper arm. But the marks – four surprisingly small blotches made by his fingers across the bicep, and a thumb-print on the triceps – are condensed into an extremely limited area.
If you didn’t know that a grown man had gripped me there, you’d think the bruising came from the clutch of a child.
Before I go to bed, I call Ashok and update him on Svensson. As I talk, he keeps raking his fingers through his hair, which he always does when he is rattled.
‘Did you get the dimensions of Sunny Chen’s suicide note?’ I ask.
‘Yep, it’s A4.’ He shifts the chewing gum in his mouth. Numerous studies have proved gum to be a useful concentration aid.
‘Which means that the hand-print’s too small to be Sunny Chen’s. So his wife was right. Someone else made it.’
‘Well I’ll be happy to hear where that leads. Looks like a blind alley to me. In the meantime, here’s the thing. Tomorrow you’re heading for the airport.’
‘I’d prefer the train.’
‘That won’t work for where you’re going.’ He removes a wad of gum from his mouth and squishes it into a Post-it note. ‘Dubai. New case. I told you there were others. Construction industry. Guy named Ahmed Farooq. Killed himself yesterday. The client’s his employer. Eastern Horizons.’
Two thoughts cross my mind. The first is that I don’t have my Arabic dictionary. But I only voice the second. ‘At least he’s already dead.’
Ashok cocks an eyebrow. ‘No more ugly surprises, right? I hear you. Let’s hope Svensson pulls through.’
‘Tell me about the new one.’ I’m stirred.
‘Straight sabotage. Farooq removed a whole string of zeros from some vital sales agreement after it’d gone past the lawyers. Managed to screw up his company’s business across five continents. Seems totally random. Nothing in it for him. No motive. If he hadn’t killed himself he’d have gone to jail. Got a theory yet?’
‘Humans have a highly evolved neurophysiology of self-deception. Under pressure, the subconscious can take charge and force you to succumb to your true desires. The deep ones that your conscious mind rejects. Dissociation enables you to commit acts that your conscious mind won’t acknowledge. Later, you’ll turn a blind eye to what you’ve done. To deploy a metaphor.’
‘So how does that work? You’re awake, but sleepwalking?’
‘Yes. I think Sunny Chen was in a dissociative state when he sent the documents exposing Jenwai. Jonas Svensson claimed he sabotaged the bank against his will. This sounds similar.’
‘So that’s what you’re working on?’
‘Part of it.’
‘So what’s the rest?’
‘I anticipate that you’ll object to it on principle.’
‘Try me.’
Sure enough, I’ve only just begun my line of speculation when he pronounces that I am ‘barking up a seriously wrong fucking tree’. He thumps his desk for emphasis, and I see Belinda Yates jump in the background. ‘Just go there and you make some sense out of this mess that doesn’t involve . . . what d’you call it?’
‘Indigenous belief systems.’
‘Yeah them. I don’t care if you’ve got a PhD in it. Our clients are international corporations run by grown-ups. We’ve got rivals out there. So no fucking little people.’ Ashok is a child of the Age of Reason. As such, he cherishes the notion that we have cast off the superstitions and fears which dominated the lives of our medieval forefathers. ‘Got it? Don’t let me down on this one bud. You’re paid to think out of the box, but not that far. A lot’s riding on this one.’
‘When humans dare to think in new ways they are set free,’ I tell him.
‘Come again?’
‘That was Kant’s motto in the Enlightenment. But we’re not completely enlightened, Ashok. There will always be dark corners. Humans like to believe they’re rational. But the capacity for superstition is part of our DNA. It can’t be purged. All the things we fear – all the
little people
, if you like – are as present as they ever were. But they’re no longer external. They’ve been chased indoors. Where we can’t let them go.’
He sighs. ‘OK. But bottom line, they’re not popping up in Phipps & Wexman reports. So no Harry Potter bullshit and no goddam . . . ectoplasm. Got it?’
In bed, I scroll through the news. A headline catches my eye. In Seoul, a boy of nine tied up his grandfather, turned on the gas and left him to die in the kitchen. In Argentina, a girl of seven dropped a flowerpot from a fourth-floor balcony on to her aunt’s head, killing her instantly. A leading child psychologist is calling for an international conference on ‘this unprecedented phenomenon’. He says that before their attacks, many of the children reported vivid dreams or nightmares. Afterwards, they either remained silent, or claimed to have no knowledge of what they had done.
The Venn diagram in my head bursts into rapidly expanding life. I need to talk to Professor Whybray. He’s more of a lateral thinker than I am and less of an
incurable materialist
,
so he’ll have gone further, and faster.
He and Freddy never met. But they’d get along.
Together we’d make a satisfying equilateral triangle.
It’s Annika Svensson who takes me to the airport the next afternoon. She has been crying again. I tell her she should not be driving, and offer to take the wheel myself, but she insists. She is going there anyway, to meet her sister Lisbet. Lisbet is flying in from Minnesota to help Annika prepare for the funeral and afterwards to sort out the family’s administrative and financial affairs in the wake of Jonas’ death. Yes, Jonas died. So today, Friday 21st September, is Annika’s first day as a widow. He survived the operation, but an hour later he suffered a catastrophic heart rupture. Technically speaking it wasn’t Jonas’ blood that flooded out of his burst aorta. It was somebody else’s, or to be more precise a mixture of several other people’s, because he’d received a transfusion.
She says, ‘I just want to know why. What it was for.’ I don’t answer because I can’t think what to say. I do believe, however, that everything must mean something. That even the most random events have significance, on some level. ‘Something happened to Jonas to make him act that way. I told you, it wasn’t
him
. He behaved like he was someone else. Someone . . .
possessed
. And he’s not the only one. I know that, Hesketh. Isn’t that why you came here?’
She must have heard rumours about other cases. ‘There are always a thousand connections when you look for them,’ I say. We’ve reached Departures. ‘The trick is to work out which to follow up and which to reject.’ She still recalls the elegant
ozuru
I first saw outside Jonas’ hospital room. But suffering has altered her angles and folds.
‘Please, Hesketh. Find out why all this happened.’
‘Can you try to note down everything Jonas said about why he did it? Even if it makes no sense?’
She draws in a long breath. ‘He said a lot of things. I’ll talk to my son and I’ll send you a mail.’
We say goodbye, first in English and then in Swedish. She hesitates, then plants a dry kiss on my left cheek. She turns and I watch her walk towards Arrivals.
I text Ashok.
Request Jonas Svensson autopsy report
I buy the
New Scientist
and while queuing for the security check, read an article about the threatened extinction of honeybees. Colony collapse disorder is affecting swarms worldwide. The repercussions of the species disappearing would be catastrophic for farming – the meat and cotton industries in particular – and wildlife. The isolation of unaffected hives is posited as one solution. While I am deep in Marie Celeste syndrome, which refers to hives found inexplicably abandoned, a woman in a red coat – what Dulux, in 1984, called Carnation – comes up to me.
‘Well this is quite a coincidence,’ she says, waving a passport case. ‘I’m leaving today too.’
I look around. ‘Well so’s everyone in this queue,’ I say. ‘It’s for Departures.’
The woman’s smile looks crooked. I can’t identify the emotion it corresponds to.
She looks familiar, but I’m not good with faces. I return to the article: the group dynamics of social animals always interest me.
‘Ingrid,’ she says. I am not good with names either.
‘Hesketh,’ I say.
‘I know.’
It’s only when she puts her hand up to flick back her hair – women often do that when they’re anxious, I’ve noticed – and I see the feathered pattern of her Indian silver bangle, that I remember who she is, and smile.
‘Got it!’ I’m happy to have placed her. ‘The Swiss demographer. Wednesday. The Perfect Storm conference. Climate, Hunger and Population. You’d like a King Charles spaniel. We had sex.’
She takes a step back and her face changes shape.
‘Well, enjoy the rest of your life, Hesketh Lock,’ she says.
Then she walks away very fast towards the other queue for departures. If she’d addressed me in German, or worn the Carnation coat in the hotel, I’d have known her straight away.
‘
Auf wiedersehen!
’ I call after her. But she carries on walking and doesn’t look back.
There’s a five-hour stopover at Charles de Gaulle in Paris, where I’m changing planes, so I go to an airport hotel gym and run ten kilometres on a treadmill, then buy some new clothes: sandals, cotton trousers, three white shirts. In Departures I eat a meal (I choose the ‘menu gastronomique’), do forty-seven sudokus and download the new document Ashok has sent.
In Dubai the native population believe in djinns or ‘jinn’. A djinn is an evil spirit which taunts people and renders their lives intolerable. It can possess them without their knowledge, and cause them to behave out of character. Like Sunny Chen’s Chinese ancestors, djinns need placating and appeasing.
When I told Ashok that I considered it logical to suspect that the Dubai case would involve somebody losing their reason and blaming some kind of native evil spirit, i.e. a djinn, or a demon child, he shut his eyes and breathed out and said
oh man.
‘I am sure Farooq will have mentioned djinn.’
‘And what kind of fucked-up weirdo place does that take us, Maestro? Do we tell the client his construction empire’s spooked?’
‘No. We tell them that something caused one of their employees to regress and invoke negative childhood archetypes, and that this behaviour’s part of a mass hysterical phenomenon we have yet to fully identify. Sunny Chen. Jonas Svensson. Same pattern. In order to explain what they did in the dissociative fugue state, they conjure manifestations of indigenous belief systems. Ancestors in Chen’s case. In Svenssson’s, trolls. In Farooq’s, I predict djinns.’
That’s when he banged on the desk and made Belinda Yates jump.