David Kessler - Mercy

But the survival instinct is linked more closely to the emotions than the cognitive faculty. And so every footstep, creaking door or distant voice disturbed him. But it didn’t undermine his resolve. Indeed, quite the contrary. The violent attack had made him all the more determined to find something that could help to save the life of Clayton Burrow.

He didn’t know if his father had retrieved the other two platters of the hard disk from Jonathan, but at this stage there was no time to get them. For this reason he had spent the last hour or more scouring recovered files on the one remaining platter. He had looked for word processing files initially, reading just enough text to determine if a file showed any promising signs before moving on to the next.

But that had proved fruitless. So he had been pleasantly surprised when he found an MP3 file. Because of its size, it was spread over several sectors and it was painstaking work recovering it little by little using the scanning tunneling microscope. But he had persevered.

The MP3 file itself was simply called “I cannot be.” That was enigmatic enough to have caught his attention, but that alone would not have justified the amount of work that he was putting into recovering this audio file when the clock was ticking so loudly.

The reason was that every audio file, in addition to the music or speech itself, was also accompanied by a sort of mini-file containing something called “metadata.” Metadata was a set of fixed pieces of information about the audio file, like artist, year, genre, comment. And this one stated in the comment section: “Poem about Daddy.”

The nursing station in the ward at the Finchley Road Medical Centre was coming to life as patients woke up. But the office staff had not yet arrived, so the calls were still being diverted to the nursing station when Juanita rang again. Nurse Michaels answered.

“Is Susan White there?”

“Look, I’ve already told you she’s off duty. She finished at two in the morning and she’s probably asleep. I don’t know if you know this but we work bloody hard here.”

“I know and I’m sorry. But this is really important. I wouldn’t be calling all the way from America if it wasn’t.”

“All I can do is leave her a message for when she’s next on duty, which’ll probably be in just over two hours.”

“No, wait! There’s something I need you to do.”

“What?” asked Nurse Michaels, through gritted teeth.

“Did Susan White go home?”

“Yes, a few hours ago.”

“Does she live nearby?”

“Yes.”

There was a heavy sigh at the other end of the phone.

“Okay, now listen, I wouldn’t normally ask you to do this, but, like I explained before, we have a client who’s going to be executed in just over ten minutes unless we can save him. From the information she’s given us, we think we may be able to save him. We just need some urgent paperwork. And she seems to be the person who knows where it is.”

“But like I said, she’s not here.”

“I know, and what I want you to do is call her. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t a matter of life and death. Get someone else to cover your post if necessary.”

“Leaving my post isn’t the problem! I can’t just wake her up because someone calls up from America and tells me about someone on death row.”

“She’d want you to do it!”

“What do you mean?”

“She tried to help us before. I think she even sent us something. But we have a problem with our fax machine. We need it to be sent again.”

“I thought you said last time you called that it was the Chief Administrator who sent it?”

“Well he must have authorized it. But I think she was the one who actually sent it. The point is she’d want to help us. She was trying to help us. She probably doesn’t even know that we had a problem with our fax machine. If she knew, she’d probably be over in a flash.”

“Look … how do I know that you’re not just bullshitting me?”

“I can’t prove it. I mean, if you turn on your TV to CNN or Eyewitness News you’ll see about the impending execution. Either you take my word or you don’t. But we have client whose life depends on your decision.”

The nurse thought about it — but only for a moment.

Jonathan Olsen was sitting in front of the TV screen glued to the report about the impending execution. He was beginning to wonder if he had done the right thing, giving Nat the pass to witness the execution. He had waited years for the chance to see the look on Clayton’s Burrow’s face as he breathed his last breath. It was poetic justice — the bully who had beaten him up when he was younger and had subjected his sister to years of mental torture, finally getting what he deserved.

In a way it eased his conscience about his father. He hadn’t intended to kill him. But in retrospect, that was poetic justice too. His father had also been an abuser, even if his abuse had been borne of his own guilt and suffering.

He wondered what Alex would do with the knowledge. It wasn’t directly relevant to Dorothy’s fate, but, now that Alex knew, the knowledge was out there. Of course they couldn’t prove anything. Whoever had set things up to make it look like suicide had done too good a job for that. The authorities could hardly re-open the case now.

The thing that troubled Jonathan more was that he had been too close to Dorothy. She had blamed her mother for turning a blind eye to Edgar’s abusive behavior and, after that day with the mirror, had never spoken to her again.

But was she being fair?

Certainly their mother should have done more to rein in her husband’s excesses. She wasn’t some old-fashioned 1950’s housewife who greeted her husband with a hot dinner as soon as he came home from work. She had a duty to protect her daughter.

But looking back on it now, it was never quite so clear-cut. Edgar Olsen had been an extremely forceful personality and he could be a holy terror when roused. Esther had tried to encourage Dorothy to act in a way that would placate Edgar. And when that failed, she tried to persuade Dorothy to stop. But Dorothy had a mind of her own. And their mother was definitely a junior partner in the practice. She was also constantly being put on the defensive because of her infidelity. Although technically it wasn’t infidelity. The one-night stand that had brought Dorothy into the world had taken place before the marriage.

But that hadn’t prevented Edgar Olsen from using it as a bludgeon against both Esther and Dorothy. When it was Esther he was angry with, “whore” was the epithet that he threw. And when Dorothy crossed him, he called her a “little mamzer” — the Jewish word for a bastard. Edgar Olsen loved to lash out verbally and cause pain to others to numb himself to the pain of guilt that he felt over the death of his three-year-old son.

But Jonathan now felt guilty about his unquestioning alliance with Dorothy.

Was it right to punish his mother? Was it right to snub her?

Unlike Dorothy, he had continued to speak to Esther after the incident with the mirror, but always coldly and without emotion.

The phone rang. It jolted him. He sensed that this was no ordinary call. It was something special. Perhaps it was the time that alerted him. No one would call him at this time in the ordinary course events. And yet it was too early for the execution.

“Hallo?”

“Hi is that Jonathan Olsen?” asked a man’s voice.

“Yes, it is,” he said nervously.

“My name is Rodrigo Alvarez. I’m calling from the Idylwood Care Center.”