Ghostwalk (27 page)

Twenty-seven

I
t took me some time to open my eyes. Perhaps I didn’t want to. Somewhere in my head, somewhere in a mass of swollen flesh, my eyes were hot. The painkillers had worn off. I could hear someone else moving around in the room—that was Will, I guessed; she had promised to stay for a few days. Once upon a time. What was Will doing here? Was I now a kind of hostage? Would Lily Ridler use me to reel you in? Kit would come; Kit would know where to look for me.

I struggled to piece together the fragments of the night before as if it were as simple as waking hungover after a long party. I was lying on the sofa in the big room, covered with musty patchwork quilts that Will had dragged out from some cupboard somewhere. I opened my eyes a crack. I could still see; that was something. Will was between me and the window, her body flattened by the thin morning light. She was pulling off her nightgown over her head, unaware of my presence. A Rembrandt painting—a Saskia. Your Saskia. Arms stretched high over her head, disrobing, long limbs, white skin, blue-white in this light. Will Burroughs. Lily Ridler. Your lover in my house. No, your lover in Elizabeth’s house. No, Elizabeth’s friend in Elizabeth’s house. Will Burroughs.

I understood something of Lily’s spell on you as I watched her limbs moving against the morning, the enigma you had fallen for and been so enmeshed in. The Lily Ridler who, you said, took you into her bed in that room in Mawson Road. The eyes that were always somehow absent. She’d changed since I had seen her last. She seemed bigger, or maybe that was because, black and blue as I was, I felt smaller. Or perhaps it was because there were two facts now that I couldn’t reconcile: she had been your lover and I knew I was in her debt.

The air in the big room was thick with the smell of wood smoke, the sleep smells of two women and dried blood. My clothes were still piled on the floor near the desk—a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a scarf, and a cream cord jacket. That jacket would have to be dry cleaned, I thought. What do you say to a dry cleaner about caked blood? An accident. What kind of accident would produce that much blood?

“You awake?” she said, turning towards me, smiling, still half naked and unself-conscious, pulling on olive-coloured combat trousers over black knickers. I saw the tattoo of a butterfly on the base of her back. I imagined your fingers following the outlines of that butterfly, and then I looked away when I couldn’t say for sure whose fingers were where. The room was suddenly thick with your lovers and mine: Sarah, Antoine, Lily, Will, and then Cameron and Lydia somewhere—which edge, which fingers, whose tongue was that, whose curve of hip?

Under the pillow where I had left it, my mobile phone buzzed. You had texted me these words: “A kiss for your morning from the night of America.” I typed out a reply: “I need you to come home. I’ve been hurt. I don’t know what to do.” Then I erased each of those letters, backwards, one by one, till there was nothing left on the white screen. No, no drama. Ill-advised. I needed time, not flurries of questions and anxiety. I wrote to you as I would have done if it was just an ordinary 6th of November morning and I was playing the usual game of cat and mouse, predator and preyed upon, seducer and seduced, that game we played in which we got to change places as often as there were texts.

“I will not kiss you today,” I wrote. “Not today. You will have to find other lips to kiss.”
Mine are cut and bleeding.
Like releasing a white dove into the sky to seek you out in Florida.
Message sent.
It’s all just the same here. I am fine. Nothing to worry about.

“You won’t want to look at yourself for a bit,” Will said. “It’s not pretty. You might want to stay away from mirrors. Who was the text from?”

“Kit,” I said. “I’ve texted back that I’m full of cold and I’ll call later.”

I tried to feel the size of my face with my fingers, running my fingertips round the lids of my eyes. Those first tears hurt, so I bit the end of my tongue, hard. I could taste blood in my mouth, see it in the darkness of my sight. I could smell blood in the air.

The phone buzzed again. You were keying in words to send to me across the sea from your hotel room.

“I have just written you a fine long letter,” you replied. “So I will kiss you as often as I like. Try to stop me.”

“Will?” It was her voice I needed to stop the tears.

“Yes?”

“I can’t see very well. Do you think I should call a doctor?”

“No, not unless you want the police here. It’s just swelling. It’ll go down in a day or so. You’ll need to lie low for a bit. You have broken ribs, I think, but I’ve strapped them up as well as I can. A doctor wouldn’t do any more than that. There’s nothing else broken but your nose as far as I can tell. That will heal by itself. It’ll be OK. I’ll stay with you, I promise, as long as I can. You still sure you don’t want me to call the police?”

“No. I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I want to get whoever did this, but I don’t want the police involved. If they come here there will be questions about me being here and the book, and Cameron will have to get involved. And he’s in deep enough already.”

“You can say that again.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Listen. I’ve been sitting here thinking about it since six o’clock. I reckon you have to know now. It can’t make things any worse for you because you’re kind of at the eye of the storm. Trouble is, the storm’s moving all the time.”

“Know what?” Behind Will’s head a fine rain had begun to sweep across the garden.

“There are things you don’t know about Cameron Brown.”

So that’s how Lily Ridler began. Not by telling me that you had been her lover. In the scale of things
that
fact scarcely mattered. Lily’s Cameron Brown fitted into your skin but was not the man I knew. Beware the man who is hairy on the inside, someone said once. The rat man. The wolf man. What does a wolf skin look like from the inside?

You were right. She is—was—an animal activist. In 1998 she’d been chosen to set up a splinter group of an international animal-rights organization. Their aim was to sabotage the activities of Histon BioSciences because it had doubled its use of laboratory animals that year. She was passionate and driven. As I watched her talk, I could see how she might have made a powerful infiltrator, might have been persuaded to wrench secrets from you, allow her body to become a tool with which to blackmail you.

Lily’s entanglement began in the spring of 2001. Back then venture capital sponsors, defeated by the spiralling cost of security against animal-activist campaigns, had withdrawn money allocated to build a new, internationally coordinated pharmaceutical laboratory in Cambridge. The animal liberationists hadn’t dared to celebrate, she said, knowing that there had to be a major backlash, knowing that a war had started with that victory.

“Did you celebrate last night?” I asked bitterly. “Was I another triumph?”

“Lydia. Christ, listen to you. Are you so fucking brainwashed that you can’t see what everyone ought to be able to see? What happened to you last night, and to Emmanuel Scorsa last week, has
nothing
to do with the animal-activist campaigns. NABED has nothing to do with us. Look, use your head. What is the most important thing that animal-liberation groups have preached since the seventies?”

“Nonviolence?”

“Exactly. So why have a group of activists suddenly started to kill animals and attack scientists in the Cambridge area? Why not anywhere else? And why the change of policy, the abandonment of a policy of nonviolence to life which has defined everything we’ve done since the campaigns began? Why would we jeopardise all that now?”

“So who
is
driving it?”

“In the spring of 2001, after the plans for the Cambridge pharmaceutical lab were scrapped, a group of seven men—directors of some of the multinational pharmaceuticals and others—were summoned to a meeting in a hotel somewhere in North London. They formed an alliance, calling themselves the Coalition for Research Defence. We call them the Syndicate.”

“Why Syndicate?” Outside in the garden, the apple trees strained against a wintry wind, lashed with rain.

“Because they’re like the Mafia. Inside everything. Wired up to everything. They talk about strategies and wars on terror and—I’ve read some of the e-mail correspondence—smoking us out. To them we’re vermin burrowing under their ground, terrorists standing in the way not just of scientific advancement but democracy and even the safety of the West. The bastards are fundamentalists at heart, not cynics. That makes them more dangerous.”

“What do they want?”

“To wipe out animal activism once and for all, at any price. They’ve pretty much destroyed us in eighteen months. One member of the Syndicate, John Petherbridge, is a senior officer of the Special Branch group established by Scotland Yard to infiltrate terrorist groups. So they’ve got access to mobile phone numbers, e-mail addresses, CCTV recordings, all the information they need to bring us down. They have major financial backing from the drug companies and, we think but can’t prove, even government—or at least MI5—support.”

“This is all about drugs?”

“Christ, no. The pharmaceutical companies make big money from the drugs trade. But two of the seven men who run the Syndicate are arms dealers. One of them, Robert Marlow, is particularly dangerous. He’s funding gunrunners in Afghanistan.”

“I don’t get it. What’s the connection?”

“Between the arms dealers, Scotland Yard, and the pharmaceuticals? Biological weapons. A consortium of pharmaceutical companies is close to a big breakthrough with a chemical that paralyses the human nervous system. An immobiliser. Works just like those wasps that paralyse their victims. They’re on the last stages of the tests now.”

“How do you know? And should you be telling me all of this? Mightn’t the house be bugged or something?” Lily couldn’t hear my mockery.

“This is one of the safest places of all, because of Elizabeth. Why do you think I found my way here? Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.”

“Elizabeth? Was she a member of the Syndicate?”

“Oh, Christ no. Elizabeth never knew anything about that. She was completely lost in her world—optics, glass, light, the seventeenth century. She wouldn’t have been interested in what I do, what
we
do. She had her own villains to hunt down.”

“Villains?”

“You’ve not finished reading it yet—Elizabeth’s book?”

“Yes, OK. I know who Elizabeth was hunting down. Or at least I think I do. Where does Dilys fit in?”

“Dilys Kite? Oh, she’s OK. Just a friend of Elizabeth’s. She was round several times a week—she drove me mad. I fell out with Elizabeth when we argued about Dilys.”

“Did Elizabeth know about what you were doing?”

“Of course not. They were like a pair of old witches with their crystal balls. All caught up in the past and with the dead. They couldn’t see the dying around them, the slaughter. That wasn’t for them.”

“So what is NABED?”

“NABED is an animal-liberation terrorist organisation. They were set up in the spring of last year. They attack employees of the labs and their families. They are extremely violent. They work in cells.”

“They were established at the same time that the Syndicate launched their campaign? Spring of 2001?”

“You’re getting the picture.”

“Shit—no,” I said. “That’s completely implausible. Are you telling me that NABED is the terrorist wing of the Syndicate?”

Lily didn’t answer.

I went on unravelling, in disbelief: “That they attack their own people, just to discredit…?”

“I said—at any price.”

“But Emmanuel was nearly murdered…”

“It went wrong. We think something went wrong.”

“And you’ve been working from The Studio, all this time? Lying to me?”

“Yes, I can send e-mails from here that won’t be traced.”

“But Elizabeth doesn’t have an Internet connection.”

“My laptop has a wireless connection. There’s a transmitter on a house next door that I use. They don’t know that I use it. My e-mails piggyback on their line.”

“But why should The Studio be safer than anywhere else? How did you know that it wouldn’t be bugged?”

“You don’t get it, do you? It’s simple. Because Cameron Brown runs the Syndicate. Because Cameron Brown developed Morazapine—the chemical that paralyses the nervous system. Because Cameron summoned those men to the London hotel, because Cameron set up NABED, because Cameron
is
the Syndicate.”

We’d fallen off the edge of something solid. Neither of us spoke until Lily said, “Do you know where he is now?”

“In Florida.”

“Is that what he told you?”

What
had
you told me? You told me you’d been working with Elizabeth on cracking the code in Newton’s notebook—the alchemical purification spell. The cluster of letters that began with NABED. Not a coincidence then, just a private joke, a name for the terrorist wing of the Syndicate. Morazapine—I remembered you talking about Morazapine. You’d called it an antipsychotic drug, hadn’t you? Hadn’t you described how it worked by burst-firing some part of the brain; hadn’t you said that it kept madness at bay, that it would be a major breakthrough in the treatment of schizophrenia? Morazapine—I remembered the camels and the incense and myrrh the name had conjured, the white owl flying across the path of our car as you talked, trees branching out like arteries against the night sky. I remembered love. I remembered you. Somewhere in the hot pain inside my head, I remembered you, watching you sleep, your body against my sheets, still, watching you breathing.

After I left you, I’d listen to that song by Counting Crows, the one about trying to forget…about thinking for a time that you had. Thinking you were free. The song about how the remembering comes crashing back, like a blow to the stomach, in a spectrum of colours—“Give me your blue rain, Give me your black sky, Give me your green eyes…give me your white skin…give me your white skin…give me your white skin…” Yes, I had given myself up again. As if I had no choice. In fact, I had never taken myself back.