S.O.S (15 page)

“Dev? Dev are you in there? Why is this door locked?” Dev's father's vice was stern and demanding. The door handle rattled. Dev sprang to his feet.

“Dev, is your mother right? Who have you got in there? She was talking about a girl and a priest. Dev, open this door please.”

Unable to be defiant, Dev opened the door to his father. He stood sheepishly with Molly behind him and his dad fixed Molly with a look of such disapproval that she had half a mind to confront him. But she didn't. Dev looked mortified, and the last thing he needed was more trouble with his parents.

Quickly she darted round Dev.

“Excuse me, Mr Pathmajaren, I should get home,” she said and she slipped away down the stairs, avoiding all eye contact.

Molly did not enjoy the walk home. She would never admit it to anyone but she was afraid of the dark. Keeping to the well-lit pavements of the main streets she made her way home, her heart beat thumping in her chest, exhausted by her constant turning around and checking of the shadows behind her.

When she got there, she found the whole house lit up. She opened the front door, fumbling with her keys in the porch light. Her entrance was registered by voices in the kitchen and then her mother, who she had imagined would be in bed, came into the hall and asked Molly to come in to the kitchen. Usually a mess, it was now spotless; her mother had had a cleaning frenzy. Molly glanced down at her watch. Crap; it was past midnight and she'd been gone since seven that morning. She looked at her mother who had clearly been crying. She then looked at the tall, thin woman who she recognised from the other day.

“Molly,” the woman from CAMHS said, her clipped manner overlaid with some kind of false warm tone. “Your mum has been really worried about you. Can you tell us where you've been?”

Molly glared furiously at her mother who avoided her eye.

“Molly, do you know where you've been?”

There it was again, fake warmth, a creepy tone of patience in the woman's voce Molly thought. She took a breath.

“Of course I know where I've been,” Molly replied. “I've been with my friend Dev, my boyfriend and if you don't believe me you can call him.” Molly held out her phone. No-one took it so she went over to the sink to run herself a glass of water. At this point it seemed her mother could bear the tension no longer.

“I've been so worried about you Molly!” she cried, her eyes a film of tears. “You disappear for hours and hours on end, no calls, no texts, refusing to talk to me at all about our life and then I find...”

“Find what?” Molly said. Her voice was icy. Her mother had been in her room, she knew it and she knew what was coming.

“Those drawings...” Sandra Sharp said, “Those terrible drawings.”

Molly shook her head. “My art,” she said, “the drawings of my friends?”

Molly watched the look on her mother's face. She felt pleased to have shocked her, to be in control here.

“Why won't you tell me what's wrong?” her mother said. “These friends? Are they hurting you?”

Molly shrugged. “Nothing hurts me, how can they? They're dead. And so will we all be, if the world keeps spinning the way it does now and we can't get rid of the energy, the dark matter. You can ask Dev, he knows, but nobody else does, no one will listen and nobody cares.” She found herself babbling now, her voice rising. ”Of course the light and the voices are all connected, that's what the priest says, but we can't find the connection, we...”

This was too much for her mother to bear, who let out a terrified squeal of pain for her daughter which cut Molly off.

“Oh Molly stop it, stop it!” she cried, “I can't bear to see you like this!”

Molly sighed and turned towards the hall and the stairs and the solitude of her room. Her mother had betrayed her again, had refused to simply talk to her daughter, to listen and had been snooping and calling in the authorities.

“Mum,” she said calmly. “I am fine, honestly. I'm going to bed.” And she turned and walked out of the kitchen.

In the silence she left behind Sandra turned to the woman from CAMHS.

“Thank you,” she said, “for being here. I know it's late, but I think you had to see that, witness it for yourself.”

The woman nodded.

“I don't know what to do,” Sandra said miserably, “what, what can I do?”

The woman considered the question, cleaning her glasses on the front of her jumper to stall for time.

“Perhaps a stay in hospital might be helpful – a proper assessment.”

Sandra seemed even more disturbed by this than anything else. She began to cry.

“What, have her committed?” she said through her tears.

The woman merely nodded, confirming that her worst fear for her daughter had come true.

*

In his hotel room, bent over his laptop, the assassin trawled through the police firewall with relative ease. Not the most complicated defence he had encountered; compared to the system used by the Korean secret police, this was child's play. It didn't take long to crack the algorithm before he was inside, with access to every file that the London Metropolitan had at its disposal.

His laptop was not the only complex piece of equipment he was armed with. Quickly he uploaded the DNA samples that he had collected from the crime scene and watched as the files flicked past with lightning speed, trying to find a match among the criminal records. A short while later the computer blinked; it had found a match. The assassin scrolled down the file, instantly memorising the man's details before clicking on the link to known associates. The files of two other men scrolled up on his screen and he memorised their details in turn.

Please with the outcome, he left his PC and prepared to sleep for a while. On a job he rarely took more than four hours at a time. As he showered and changed, his phone bleeped, alerting him to updates on the databases on his PC. He crossed to the table which was now his work station and looked at the screen. NHS records were the easiest to access – too little investment in technology had left their databases ridiculously open to hacking. He noted an update from CAMHS, which was unusual only in that it had been uploaded so late at night. God, there were so many problems in a city like this.

He was about to delete it when he caught the words
'light'
and ‘
dark matter'
. He stopped and brought the file up, enlarging it on the screen. Someone was having delusional fantasies about lights and dark matter and she apparently had been hearing voices. The assassin clicked through the file and brought up the name and address of the young person. He felt no sympathy, just an odd curiosity. He marked the file for update alerts and closed it again. Probably nothing at all, but he was a consummate professional and even ‘nothing' deserved monitoring; you never knew what ‘nothing' might just uncover....

It was early. The young man awoke and immediately sat up. He was used to waking fully alert. The PC bleeped with an update and he stood, going straight to the screen to check it. Someone else had been looking at the incident report for the gang fight on the estate. The assassin checked it – one person had accessed it, not too much of a problem. He printed out the file from the screen and then opened it. This was child's play and he wondered why such an important police department hadn't taken more care to secure their system. He added some notes to the file and then closed the incident. Unless they were over staffed and under worked, with time on their hands – impossible in a city police force – then anyone going to the file would see it as closed and dismiss it. No-one would have the time or the energy to investigate the sudden dismissal of a case.

He stood and took the hard copy of the file over to the window. He leafed through it memorising the names and addresses of the people involved. There was only one sure way to find out the truth and that was to extract it, in whatever way was required.

*

North Korea

Travelling in a state that was somewhere between half death and complete death was easy providing the transport was in place. Arriving at Sunan International Airport, via Bejing, had been relatively easy for Zack; board the plane, sit and wait. But on arriving in Korea, he knew that getting to where he wanted to be was going to be difficult. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was not an easy place to navigate for a living person, let alone a dead one, Zack thought. He didn't even know if he was doing the right thing. During his searches that night in the British library he had stumbled across some film footage from You Tube: an interview with a Red Cross worker who had talked about poverty in rural Korea and mentioned one case of a snake bite and a narrow escape from death owing to lack of medicine and care. Apparently the ex-soldier had believed that he'd witnessed a miracle, a flash of white light and that was what had saved him. He had been pensioned off by the People's army on account of it. On the strength of that one film, Zack had made his way from Berlin to Bejing and then to North Korea and now he was beginning to regret the decision.

He wandered round the airport, trying to think of ways to get to where he wanted to be, although he wasn't quite sure where that was. He had come across reports of secret weapons tests in a rural part of North Korea, but he didn't read well and he couldn't make sense of the map. So, he sat at the exit to the airport and watched a group of tourists as they collected their luggage. Their bus was waiting at the exit to the airport and not knowing what else to do; Zack followed them out and boarded the bus with them. Half an hour later he was on his way to a hotel with the party, stuck at the back of an old bus – the only seat available – staring at the wide open streets of Pyongyang – the DPR of Korea's glittering, (and only) city.

*

London

Molly and Dev were sitting in the British Library side by side looking through a book on astronomy. Ever since the kiss the night before Molly had been waiting for another one, but nothing had been forthcoming. Dev flicked through the pages, the small thought that had flashed into his mind the previous night still not anchored, still bobbing about in his vast ocean of a brain and he just wasn't able to make sense of it. He was preoccupied, even when Molly put her head on his shoulder he simply patted the top of it, like she was a dog, and carried on looking. She stood up at that point to have a wander round and stretch her legs and she took her phone out to scroll down her messages. She'd heard nothing from Zack and she missed him. That was it, the simple truth, she missed a ghost. She really was losing it.

Walking the aisles she couldn't help thinking about him, about his surliness and his solitude; it seemed to bounce off him in waves. She hated the way he impersonated her voice, in a whiney way, that made her sound spoilt, but there was something about the way that he did it that was spot on. She smiled. They thought she was mad, creating imaginary friends, hearing voices. Suddenly Molly stopped dead in the centre of one of the aisles and chewed her finger nail. Maybe she was mad. She strode back to Dev and slumped down next to him. Maybe they were right and she was mad – maybe...

“You OK?” Dev asked. He could sense her mood; it hung round her like a cloud.

“Fine,” she snapped. She sat there, arms folded across her chest and her chin down. She sighed a few times and finally he looked up at her.

“Molly, what is it?”

“Dev, maybe I am mad. Maybe the people from CAMHS are right, maybe I should go and see someone and get myself checked out. I mean, I walk around like some massive shipwreck most of the time, unable to...”

“Shipwreck!” Dev suddenly said. He snapped his fingers. “SHIPWRECK! That's it! Ships! It's a ship!” He pulled her in to him and kissed her smack on the lips. “Molly,” he said, breaking away from her, “you are not mad, you are a genius!”

Molly looked at him bewildered. “What...”

Dev began rifling frantically back through the pages of the book. “The stars, they make the shape of the Argo Navis! It's a ship. Here! Here!” The elusive thought was finally pinned down, nailed to his IQ. He found the page he needed and they both looked down at a complex, ancient drawing of constellations in the shape of a ship.

“Pyxis, the one at the church, that's the nautical box, or the Mariner's compass. Puppis, the picture on your phone from Berlin, that makes up the stern of the boat. Vela, the constellation on the housing estate, that's the keel. They're all part of a bigger constellation called Argo Navis! There's one more, Carina, that's the sails of the boat. Look – here!” Dev took out his notebook and began drawing the shape of the boat – similar to the arc that he'd drawn a few days ago and abandoned.

He stopped drawing and held the image out to her. “That's it Molly, that's how they're linked – they are all stars that form the Argo Navis ...”

“Except Carina – we haven't got that one.”

“No but...”

Molly looked at him. “Isn't this a bit far-fetched Dev?” she suggested. Now she knew why she missed Zack; she missed his cynicism, his down to earth attitude. He loved to throw cold water on the flames of Dev's imagination. “I'm not sure that you've got it right. If Zack were here he'd say...”

Dev pulled his shoulders back a little at the sound of Zack's name. “Zack?” he questioned. “Zack is a ghost Molly.”

“Yes, but he is quite practical and I'm not sure...”

“Hello? Zack is a ghost Molly – he's dead. He's not real!”

Molly chewed her nail again. “He feels kind of real to me Dev.”

Dev shook his head. “Well real or imaginary, I think that's what these symbols are all about; I think that they make up the Argo Navis.”

“OK...” Molly was still unconvinced. “And the Argo Navis is...?”