The Uninvited (16 page)

‘We do actually need to talk, Hesketh.’ I open my mouth to speak, but she raises her hand, indicating she’s going to continue anyway. ‘Look, if you want to begin by discussing the sabotages we can do that.’

‘It’s why you’re here. It’s the only reason we’re in the same room.’

‘But we
will
come back to it, because actually we have to.’ Perhaps she pities me. It’s a frequent mistake. People misunderstand who I am, and assume I want to be like them. I don’t. Our drinks arrive. The waiter arranges them on the table with some small dishes of nuts, olives and crisps. Stephanie thanks him and I take a large gulp of Scotch. Too much, too fast. It burns my throat.

She straightens up. ‘So. The sabotages. Ashok wasn’t very keen on your speculation, I have to tell you. As you’d expect. He talks about blue-sky thinking but . . .’ Unexpectedly, she smiles. I can’t tell if it’s genuine or what kind of smile it is. She has very regular teeth. Her lipstick is Dusk Rose.

I say, ‘Ashok doesn’t hire me to tell him what he wants to hear. He hires me to spot behavioural trends.’

She raises her glass to me and takes a sip of Chardonnay. She leaves a lipstick mark on her glass. ‘Hesketh. Please. We’re on the same side.’ I don’t know how to begin replying to this. She straightens up and sighs. ‘OK. The first thing you need to know is that there have been new cases of this, everywhere. I’m talking about motiveless sabotage followed by suicide. A Brazilian pharmaceutical company. A man and two women. Wrecked three years’ work on some wonder-drug. Destroyed the database and trashed the lab.’ I don’t say anything. ‘It wasn’t a joint suicide: they were all found separately, at different times of day. The man shot himself, the women took pills.’

More classic gender-based choices. ‘And the others?’

‘An engineer in Namibia, installing some big pipeline. Destroyed the whole project in an explosion. Then he killed himself. With a blowtorch of all things. How does that fit into anything? And Ashok’s hearing of more every day.’

I shut my eyes, focus and think it through at speed. I can’t not. I open my eyes and concentrate on the whisky in my glass as I speak.

‘With Chen it’s deforestation and with Svensson it’s futures trading and the Farooq case is about construction. Now pharmaceuticals and energy. You could argue they’re all part of the same . . .’ To my frustration, I can’t find the right word. She has weakened me.

‘Corrupt franchise?’ she smiles. I don’t smile back. The old wound is as bewildering and raw as on the first day. If I don’t focus on the puzzle, I will get overloaded. ‘If we’re looking at institutions or spheres of commercial activity that people bear a grudge against, all of these might fit. But there are other so-called bad guys. Why not them? What makes this epidemic, or whatever it is, attack one organisation and not another?’

‘Maybe it hasn’t had time,’ I say. ‘Maybe there’s a list.’

‘And whoever is orchestrating this is ticking them off one by one, as part of a crusade with no discernible message?’

I don’t want to work with her.  ‘Anarchists, possibly.’

She shrugs. ‘That makes it just plain childish.’

I say, ‘If these are just the cases that Phipps & Wexman has heard about, there’ll be thousands of others we haven’t.’

She nods. ‘Exactly. Look at it. It’s a can of worms. Which is why Ashok’s keen to move on. Clients aren’t going to pay for investigations if these sabotages turn out to be part of some mass psychosis. Or weird moral witch-hunt. Or anarchist uprising. And there are other things going on. Equally bizarre.’

‘And equally childish?’ I ask. She looks up.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Those children,’ I say. ‘Pyjama Girl. And the others. The violent children and the suicidal saboteurs aren’t two separate epidemics. They’re one. Although since it’s a global phenomenon, it’s a
pan
demic. Technically.’ She should have realised this by now. Professor Whybray will have done. She stretches out her fingers and inspects them. They are thin and plain. No jewellery.

She says, ‘Go on.’

‘Both groups commit uncharacteristic acts. They do so in a dissociative fugue state so they’re unaware of what they’re doing at the time. But when they see the consequences, they realise they’re culpable. The children distance themselves from their attacks by not speaking. While the saboteurs claim they weren’t in control of what they did. Sunny Chen said the body doesn’t always obey the mind. And Jonas said he felt like a puppet.’

Stephanie takes another sip of wine, leaving a second lipstick imprint on top of the first. The cosmetics industry should rectify that sort of thing. ‘Whose puppet?’

Why am I collaborating with her? Of all the people Ashok could have sent—

Or did she volunteer?

‘He talked about trolls. And creatures. But mostly about children.’

She takes a breath. ‘But how do they fit together?’

I grab a napkin and draw two overlapping circles. It’s a rollerball pen: the ink bleeds into the paper.

‘OK. Example. This one is children who attack,’ I point to the circle on the right. ‘Call it K for kids.’ I write in the K. ‘And this is families with adults who sabotage. Call it A. Both the K and the A circles are part of a general picture of violence.’ I draw a third circle labelled V to encompass the other two. I think of the tiny finger-marks on my arm. Stephanie is the last person I would show them to. As for the little girl in Dubai, she has no place in any diagram I could draw. ‘Dissociative fugue could fit in there too.’ I start drawing a circle called F overlapping all the others. ‘But we don’t know where the boundaries lie.’ I finish off the F region with a dotted line going through both K and A. ‘See? You can have dissociative behaviour without any of the violence, so some of F must lie in the region outside V. In Venn terms, fugue may even be the universal, enclosing everything else.’ I draw a stronger dotted line encompassing everything. Another thought strikes me. ‘But children who destroy their own families are committing sabotage too. Maybe economic and emotional destruction are one and the same circle.’ I sketch it out.

‘So this is how you work.’

‘When the problem calls for it.’

We sit for a minute, not saying anything. Then she points to the circle marked K. ‘The Home Office has set up specialised Care Units for them. Drafted an army of specialists and volunteers. The biggest one’s in Battersea. A former colleague of mine’s running it. Naomi Benjamin. Some ex-academic hotshot came and headhunted her.’

Of course. I find myself smiling. ‘I would guess that’s Professor Whybray. He’s a medical anthropologist. He’s a world expert on mass hysteria. He was my supervisor.’

Two men in a hospital ward, one helping the other ‘keep his grip’.
Your materialist focus saved me
, he said afterwards.
I needed to be with someone who wasn’t going to spin me fairy tales.

‘Well, his team’s based in Naomi’s unit in Battersea. Pyjama Girl’s there, apparently.’ She reaches in her handbag for a small red laptop, sets it on the table next to our drinks, fires it up and stabs at the keys. ‘This is just today’s news.’ She turns the screen to face me. It’s the Reuters website.
Children in Violent Killings – latest
. It takes me five seconds to skim through it. In a single day there have been eight reported murders by children in the United States, five in Korea, two in Russia, one in Latvia and another in Morocco. The children are all under ten.

The victims are mostly, but not always, family members. Last week in Egypt, it has been revealed that a boy of four stabbed his mother with a kitchen knife.

Stephanie says, ‘Naomi tells me that the kids won’t talk about what they did. The parents say they’re not the same children. A classic distancing technique. You have to agree: on the social observation front, it doesn’t get much more dynamic than this.’

I was thinking that too. But it doesn’t make us friends.

I say, ‘There’s another factor in all this. Which might have a bearing.’ When I tell her about Chen’s soy habit, and Svensson’s bottle of seawater, and Farooq crumbling a block of salt from a desalination plant into a plastic water bottle, and de Vries licking his arm, she puts down her drink and she sits very still.

‘Have you told anyone else about this?’ she asks when I have finished.

‘No. It’s only recently I made the connection.’
And it’s my investigation. Not yours
.

‘Pyjama Girl has a salt craving. Naomi told me last time we spoke. Her parents found a stash of dishwasher salt in her bedroom. If other kids do too, there could be other parallels. Let’s find out.’ She starts typing again. Her fingers fly over the keyboard like a pianist’s. She presses send and looks up. ‘OK done.’ She looks at her watch. ‘I told Naomi we’ve made some connections, and asked her to call us. With your Professor Whybray, if he’s there. In the meantime, here’s what we’ve got,’ she says, pointing at the napkin. ‘An epidemic of some kind.’

‘Pandemic,’ I correct her.

‘Involving children and adults. They attack something they care about. Be it a corporation or a loved one. And then either refuse to speak or blame a figure from their local folklore.’

‘A small figure,’ I say. ‘Child-sized. They call them trolls or ancestors or djinns or
tokoloshi
or whatever corresponds to the superstitions of the culture they grew up in. But they’re children. And then in the case of the adults they kill themselves. Having swallowed a lot of salt,’ I continue. ‘A salt craving can be a symptom of various medical disorders. Adrenal cortex diseases, diabetes, Addison’s. Nothing these people had, that we know of. And it came on very suddenly, in all the cases I’ve come across. When de Vries started licking his arm, it resembled an animal instinct. Like a sick cat eating grass. And Farooq,’ I remember. ‘The foreman said he called it medicine.’ Did he and de Vries have abnormal kidneys too? ‘So what the kids and the saboteurs have in common is that first of all, they commit dramatic acts of physical or economic violence. Secondly, they have no obvious motive. Quite the contrary in fact.’ She nods. ‘Thirdly, they won’t talk about it afterwards, except to blame children. I’m thinking of Svensson in particular. He told his wife that children were bullying him. But in general they can’t or won’t speak about it. Which implies that someone is scaring them into silence or that they’ve wiped it from their minds.’

‘That’s certainly the case with the kids,’ she says.

‘And fourthly, they crave salt. All of the saboteurs and at least one of the kids. Possibly several. Possibly all. Chen wasn’t autopsied. De Vries’ and Farooq’s results I’m waiting on. It may mean nothing, but Svensson had an extra kidney.’

I am spiralling towards a new connection, but I’m jolted away from it by the noise of the Skype ringtone from Stephanie’s laptop. She pats the seat next to her, signifying I should join her. I’m reluctant to get closer to her, but I shift across and she presses answer. Eight seconds later a woman materialises on the screen. Behind her, through a window, I can see some tiny red-clad figures milling about. Children.

She says, ‘Hi, Steph.’

‘Hi, Naomi.’

Naomi Benjamin has large breasts. And a close-cropped helmet of dark hair and dark eyes. She is wearing a vivid green sweater and a scarf of a similar green with gold stripes, and although it is not one of my favourite greens – there is too little saffron in it – the overall effect is exotic. She must be aware of my eye line because all of a sudden she adjusts her scarf to hide the view of her cleavage.

Stephanie says, ‘This is my colleague Hesketh Lock. One of our most brilliant investigators. Behavioural pattern expert.’

Naomi Benjamin nods and smiles, and two small grooves appear, bracketing her mouth. ‘Yes. Victor’s been talking about you. He’ll be along as soon as he’s finished in a meeting.’ She jerks her head, indicating the children. ‘You know, after Angola I had the feeling that nothing could faze me. But I’ve never seen kids like this before. It’s like they’re damaged in an entirely new way.’ In addition to the red uniforms, some of them are wearing sunglasses or plastic goggles: this gives them a jaunty look, as though they’re in fancy dress. I can’t make out individual faces. But I can see enough of them to gauge a pattern. ‘We’re trying to figure out how to get them back to normal. But we don’t really understand what it is we’re trying to cure. It’s a very fluid and distressing dynamic.’

‘How many?’ asks Stephanie.

‘Just over fifty at the moment, at this unit. Ours is the most advanced. But the arrivals are accelerating and I know it’s been chaos elsewhere. The Home Office has put in an order for eighty thousand more uniforms. But it’s already looking like that won’t be enough. No one’s geared up for anything like this. The managers are having to make it up as they go along. There are new press restrictions, so you won’t be hearing about any new British cases. With any luck that’ll slow it down. Whatever I tell you isn’t for public consumption.’

Stephanie says quickly, ‘Of course.’

The door opens behind her.

‘Professor Whybray!’ I call out. ‘I’m over here!’ It’s frustrating to be 3,396 miles apart because I would very much like to shake his hand. He’s more stooped than the last time I saw him. Either the colours are odd on this screen or he has a tan. But his white beard and moustache are the same. When he sees me he breaks into a smile.