Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

“That’ll be enough,” Callum said. “We’ll find a taxi to take us back to the flat…”

“They know where the flat is,” I said. “They know about you, where my parents live. They have Charlotte…”

That last one hit me all over again. Someone, somewhere had Charlotte.

“What do you mean?” Boo said.

“I mean, they had her. I saw her in the house. She was in the bedroom one minute, the next she was gone. They said I had to go with them or…”

“What?” Callum said. “How did we miss them getting her out of the house? We were parked up right outside.”

“They kept talking about some house in the country. That’s where they were taking me…Oh, my God. I’m sorry. This is my fault. They knew all this stuff, and I went…I listened to them…”

I started to shake, and Boo tightened her hold around my shoulders.

“Phone it in,” she said to Callum.

Callum made the call to someone to report Charlotte’s abduction. Boo stayed with me. Stephen came jogging along a few moments later, fast, if a little unsteady on his feet. Without a word, he reached into my pocket and took out the phone, then he stepped away from us and made a call. I just heard a few clipped words, like “cleanup” and a street name.

“You all right?” Boo asked, looking at the blood on Stephen’s face.

“I played rugby. I’ve had worse. We need to get out of here.”

“Flat’s not safe,” Callum said, coming back over. “They know the address. We could have more of them waiting for us there.”

“Right,” Stephen said. He wiped away a rivulet of blood that was creeping down his cheek. It left a streak on the side of his face.

“Does Thorpe want us to come in?” Boo asked.

“We can’t walk into an MI5 building with a missing person. Rory’s in the system now. She’ll be caught on about a million cameras, and they do use facial recognition there, so no. We need to go somewhere and lay low and regroup…”

The blood trickled down again.

“Right. I know where we can go. It’s in Maida Vale.”

24

MAIDA VALE WAS A HEAVILY TREED AND DISCREET SECTION of northwest London, just above Paddington station. Quiet and secure brick houses with walled gardens and rows and rows of identical buildings in one solid block, side by side. There were commercial streets with pink and white cupcake shops and nonchain coffee places, stores where you could buy cashmere baby blankets, imported green tea from Japan, French cookware, and jeans so expensive one could only assume that they had been hand-sewn by monks who chanted prayers for the thighs of the would-be wearers. Stephen directed the cab to a series of golden brick apartments.

“What is this place?” Boo asked as Stephen punched in a code to gain access to the lobby.

“My father’s flat. He uses it when he comes to London for work. I think he’s in Switzerland right now. I hope he is, anyway.”

“What exactly does your dad do ?” Callum asked.

“Banking,” Stephen said.

“Did he break all the money?” Boo said.

“Possibly. It’s the sort of thing he might do.”

We all crammed into a much-too-small elevator and rode to the fourth floor. Stephen led us down to one of the end apartments. He pulled back a framed photograph of a bridge that hung on the wall near the door and produced a key, which he used to open the door.

The flat was dark. The floor-length curtains were closed. He switched on just one light in the middle of the room. We were in a very tastefully, almost clinically decorated living room. There were two sofas facing each other, and between them, a long and low marble table that contained some books of art and photographs that looked like they had never been opened. There were no signs of life in the place, really. Just perfectly positioned vases and decorative bowls.

Stephen went into the other rooms, and I heard more curtains being closed. Callum, Boo, and I milled around. There was one family photograph, pushed back on an occasional table and mostly obscured by a yellow vase. It showed what was clearly Stephen’s family, and it had been taken in someone’s garden, possibly against their will. They all squinted a bit against the sun. His parents looked about how I expected them to look. His father wore a pinstriped suit, his mother a yellow dress and a very large yellow hat with a wide white band. And there was Stephen’s sister, a girl with a surprisingly wide and open grin. Her hair was chestnut brown, and she was freckled. Her arm was looped through Stephen’s. Stephen looked like he was maybe twelve or thirteen in the picture, a bit thin and very uncomfortable. He towered over his mother and sister and was as tall as his father. Even in this photo, it felt like there was something competitive about this, like his dad was standing as straight as he possibly could so his son wouldn’t reach an inch past him.

“We need to get your head looked at,” Boo said. “That’s going to need some stitches.”

“Head wounds always bleed a lot. We need to keep a low profile. I can stitch it myself if it comes to that.”

“Well, let’s clean it,” Boo said.

“You know how to stitch your own head?” I said.

“There are probably instructions online. How hard could it be?”

While Boo helped Stephen clean the wound, Callum crafted a bandage by tearing an undershirt he found in the bedroom into strips, so the top of Stephen’s head was now mummy-wrapped, with a shock of brown hair coming out of the top. Some blood was already leaching through. We gathered in the living room.

“When you were inside the house,” Stephen said, pulling his notepad from his belt, “I pulled up some basic information on the owner. Her name is Jane Quaint, born Jane Anderson. Legally changed her name in 1972. Aside from working in a shop in Yorkshire around 1968, she has no employment history. She got the house in Chelsea from a brother and sister, twins, named Sidney and Sadie Smithfield-Wyatt.”

“She told me about them,” I said. “She said they had the sight. That they were doing some kind of experiment—that they died doing some kind of experiment.”

“Sidney and Sadie committed suicide together in 1973. That’s all I found at first glance, but we can find out more about them. As for Jane, her record is clean. She volunteers time to many victims’ groups, gives substantial sums to charity. Overall, a model citizen.”

“Who runs a cult,” I said. “She said they were going to defeat death .”

“So these people wanted you because you’re a terminus?” Boo said. “Did they say why, or what they planned on doing?”

“Just defeating death . And, I don’t know, killing everyone I know if I didn’t come with them. They know where my parents are.”

“We’ll get a car on their house,” Stephen said. “Could one of you call Thorpe? Make sure that happens?”

He got up and went to the bedroom. Callum fished the phone out of the coat pocket.

“You would think he’d want to make this call,” Callum said. “He always does the talking when it comes to Thorpe.”

“Maybe he’s finally delegating,” Boo said. Then, turning to me, she explained, “We’ve been working on his control issues.”

“So many issues,” Callum said, going through the phone to find the number.

I got up and followed Stephen. He was staring into the closet at a selection of three largely identical shirts. He had removed his own bloody dress shirt. Stephen had a chest. That should not have been a shock to me, but there it was. It wasn’t as bulky as Callum’s, but it had a shape. And it had hair on it—a thin, dark line of it, right at the top, making a V that thinned out about two-thirds of the way to his waist. He immediately slipped the old shirt on, but left it unbuttoned. There was something goofily gallant about that. Like it mattered if I saw him with his shirt off.