Blind Needle Read online

  ‘Know what? What do you mean?’

  Susan said quickly, as if to the general assembly, ‘We can’t let him go, he’s too dangerous. Ray!’ she rapped out to him, loitering on the edge of the carpet.

  Ray jerked into life – a reflex response to the sharp command – and lunged at me. I swung the heavy mahogany door and hit him in the face with the edge of it. Something cracked loudly. He yelled in agony and staggered backwards, crashing into one of the cabinets with the cut-glass animals, toppling it. I ran into the hall to a cascade of splintering explosions.

  The front door was the nearest and quickest escape but I couldn’t take the risk that it might be locked. I ran past the staircase and down the passage and through the door and into the fluorescent bright kitchen. The gleaming surfaces and white appliances shocked my vision: I blinked and hesitated, thinking wildly of dragging the huge refrigerator across the quarry tile floor to barricade the door, which wouldn’t have taken more than ten minutes.

  After the harsh brightness of the kitchen the garden was black as a tomb.

  I ran blindly at full tilt, and dazzled by the darkness narrowly avoided smashing into a tree, seeing its black solid shape at the last possible second and swerving round it. I slithered on the damp grass, barely managing to keep on my feet, which was a mistake, because by staying upright the low thick branch caught me in the dead centre of the forehead and put me down as quickly and effectively as a short left jab from a heavyweight’s glove.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1

  ‘I’ll give him the skull-and-crossbones. That’s what they put on dangerous stuff when they dump it – yeh, red skull with black cross-bones, right across his back.’ Wayne pushed the slide control with his thumb and the shrill whine ascended the scale to a thin screech, like the point of a steel nail being dragged across a blackboard.

  The fat boy uncoiled the cable with a twist of the wrist. He placed his bandaged arm on my shoulder, using it as a rest for the hand doing the artwork. ‘Eyes down for a full house.’

  ‘Make the bastard have it,’ said Ray through his bloody handkerchief. ‘Make the bugger scream.’

  The needle dug in. My flesh shivered. If I tried to move, attempted to evade it, the pain intensified as the needle snagged and tore. I couldn’t move my arms, they were strapped to the chair. All I could do was hang my head and shut my eyes, feeling the jab-jab-jab as the needle scrawled a burning arc across my back. Wayne hummed, happy at his work.

  ‘The tape,’ the blonde woman said. ‘Ask him about the tape.’

  ‘As if I didn’t have enough on my plate,’ Benson grumbled. ‘I’m trying to run a business. Why didn’t he keep out of it?’

  ‘I hope that’s a dirty needle you’re using,’ Ray said.

  Their disembodied voices weaved through the crawling pain. The track of the needle felt aimless, malicious, puncturing my skin for the fun of it; Wayne probably wasn’t using ink at all, and there was no pattern or design. Just enjoying the raw jab of the dry needle for its own sake. My head ached terribly – as if the pulpy grey brain tissue was inflamed and seeking to squeeze through the orifices of my skull.

  ‘Ask him about the tape,’ Susan said.

  Wayne pressed on, setting my back on fire. ‘You can’t beat job satisfaction,’ he breathed, his breath warm and foul.

  ‘There’s just no gratitude any more,’ Benson said sadly. ‘People are too damn selfish. You do your utmost, offer them chances, opportunities – you give them work, for God’s sake – and they think you’re trying to screw them.’

  ‘He should never have got out,’ the blonde woman said with extreme irritation. ‘What does that old fool Morduch think he’s playing at?’

  ‘Britain used to be the sick man of Europe, but not any more,’ Benson said. ‘Hard work and profit and enterprise aren’t dirty words like they used to be. Lean and fit, trim the fat, that’s the watchword today. This is the latter half of the twentieth century. You’ve got to keep abreast of technology, can’t let the grass grow. The Yanks, Nips and Krauts have had it all their own way for far too long.’

  A cold wind blew from somewhere.

  ‘This is a grave setback, I hope you realise that,’ Dr Morduch said. ‘We don’t expect gratitude but we do expect cooperation. Everything is for your own good, we thought that was understood.’

  His tone was sad too, reproachful, as if to imply that a patient’s recalcitrance was an insult to him personally.

  ‘People are too damn selfish nowadays,’ Benson said.

  ‘Make the bugger scream,’ Ray said through his crusted handkerchief.

  Dr Pitt-Rivers tutted and shook his head. Long straggling strands of reddish hair hung down either side of his face. His drooping moustache, a paler shade than his tangled gingerish mop, gave him a mournful, hangdog look. He wore a safari jacket with bulging pockets and a woollen tie in a loose, careless knot, the collar points of his green shirt faded and wrinkled with wear and washing. His teeth, which he tried to keep hidden behind the drooping moustache, were brown, inward-sloping, congenitally bad. He sighed. ‘Our resources are stretched as it is.’

  ‘Indeed they are,’ said Dr Morduch, flicking invisible dust from a chair with his pocket handkerchief. He sat down, Dr Pitt-Rivers folding his tall, gangling, crumpled form into the chair beside him.

  It was a bare, functionless room with hard upright chairs and a wooden table with a formica top. There were two pictures on the emulsioned walls: a Eurasian girl with a green face and large dark liquid eyes, and a herd of elephants trampling the veldt through billowing clouds of ochre dust. The room contained nothing else, no filing cabinets, no phone, no hatstand.

  Frowning, Dr Morduch touched the small, precise knot in his tie, patterned with tiny blue rosebuds. The dome of his head seemed to thrust itself through his white hair, the glimmer of pink scalp beneath. He laced his manicured fingers together and put them on the table in front of him where he could keep an eye on them.

  ‘Have you nothing to say for yourself?’

  ‘Whatever I say you’ll think I’m mad.’

  Dr Morduch winced slightly and lifted his hand. ‘We don’t employ such terms in behavioural psychotherapy, you should know that by now. You’re not mad, any more than I am, or Roger here. You suffered an emotional shock, the death of you wife, for which you blame yourself, with a consequent loss of self-esteem and personal worth, leading to a feeling of estrangement from the community, believing yourself to be superfluous and of no value. You entered a state that a lay person would regard as a deep and prolonged depression, but which we term “externality”. That is to say, the patient feels himself to be at a distance, separate, isolated from his fellow man. He ceases to function as an integrated member of society, loses his sense of purpose and identity, and becomes – or feels himself to be – alien, externalised. You understand what I’m saying?’

  There was a silence. Dr Pitt-Rivers took a naked Polo mint from one of his bulging pockets and slipped it under his moustache.

  It seemed as if time had stopped. We all waited for something, anything, to happen – the millenium, an event to jerk us onward.

  In a subliminal instant, quick as a lightning flash, I saw the bare jagged arms of a tree reaching across a starfield. The cold wind blew.

  ‘We can’t expect him to fully understand,’ said Dr Pitt-Rivers in an aside.

  ‘Of course not. I don’t expect it.’

  ‘He’s been off the medication.’

  ‘That shouldn’t make any difference. If anything it should sharpen his recall.’

  ‘Well – I think it has. Don’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps. Yes,’ said Dr Morduch cautiously. ‘But possibly to the detriment of self and in favour of the regressed memory. He has a choice, you see, and he’s chosen the other.’

  ‘Another sign of extended externality?’

  ‘More than likely.’

  ‘At the moment his strongest feeling is probably one of guilt,’ Dr Pitt-Rivers s
peculated aloud. ‘Is that an accurate assessment of how you feel?’ he asked me hopefully, raising his eyebrows and smiling, while keeping his mouth closed.

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  Lying bastard

  ‘Well, at least, that’s progress of a sort, I suppose,’ said Dr Pitt-Rivers with a smile of quiet satisfaction.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Why yes, I should have said so. Getting him to admit it.’ He sucked hollowly on the Polo mint.

  ‘He may not be telling the truth.’

  ‘Why should he lie?’

  Dr Morduch pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger, a mannerism which seemed to indicate that he had a wearisome duty to perform.

  ‘Don’t you remember – the two selves in opposition, one past, one present? He renounced his previous self, cast him out, in a wilful act of externalisation. The invented second self was therefore free of all blame – had done no wrong – while the previous self was made to carry the burden of guilt.’ Dr Morduch gave a small shrug. ‘When the facts don’t accord with one’s wishes and desires one constructs, or borrows, an alternative reality and a new set of facts to fit it.’

  ‘The plot to kill his wife, tamper with the brakes …’ Dr Pitt-Rivers tried to fathom it out. ‘What about that? True or false?’

  ‘No, I butted in. ‘That wasn’t me. I didn’t do it …’

  You little sly

  Lying bastard

  You know

  Damn well

  It was you

  ‘It wasn’t,’ I said. ‘I loved her!’

  In a pig’s eye

  You loved her

  You wanted rid

  And you did it

  ‘Disentangling fact from fiction in cases like this is a minefield,’ said Dr Morduch, his face hollow and austere. ‘Who can say? The plot to kill her exists in the same frame of reference that incorporates the invented other self. It all depends which form of reality he chooses to believe in.’

  ‘Another manifestation of externality.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But I didn’t kill her,’ I said. ‘Benson did.’

  ‘And who is this Benson?’ inquired Dr Morduch indulgently.

  I floundered. I couldn’t answer. Benson was somebody I didn’t know, had never met. I knew only that he lived in Brickton. And that he and Susan had had an affair, of course.

  There was another lull, another empty period of timelessness in which the cold wind blew, as if the actors in the scene had forgotten whose line came next. It happened to be Smith’s.

  Stop lying

  Murdering Bastard!

  You killed her

  I know

  Because I was there

  I saw

  You do it

  And for that

  You will pay

  With your life

  I tried to move, to get away, but the restraining straps held me fast. They chafed my wrists. I twisted and bucked. I shouted, ‘Let me out, please, he’s coming for me, let me go!’ and the blonde woman who was called Susan said, ‘What was that? What did he say?’

  ‘First self?’ said Dr Pitt-Rivers, slipping a Polo mint under his straggling moustache.

  Dr Morduch nodded. He said wearily, ‘And I had such high hopes. Better ring for the orderly and prepare an injection.’ He chewed his lips. ‘When did this personality regression start, I wonder? Before Holford arrived at the Clinic or after?’

  ‘Is it important?’

  Go on

  Tell them

  ‘I won’t,’ I screamed, ‘because it isn’t true.’

  Confess it

  Cleanse yourself

  ‘I won’t confess to something I didn’t do!’

  ‘It might be, it might be,’ said Dr Morduch, musing. ‘Tampering with his food was the first indication of contra-identity fixation. You want to destroy the self, but naturally the self objects, rebels. So you switch horses in mid-stream, as it were, and fixate on something, or someone, external, which transfers the guilt and relieves the pain.’

  ‘But he’s never blamed Holford for his wife’s death – has he?’ asked Dr Pitt-Rivers, blinking, crunching the mint, getting lost.

  ‘No. At least not to our knowledge. All right, orderly, take him back. Roger, will you go along with him and calm him down. Up the dose or he’ll disturb the entire unit.’

  ‘Of course.’ Dr Pitt-Rivers rubbed his palms together. ‘Nothing better than a man in love with his work.’

  The needle dug in, deep. It hurt me.

  ‘Make the bastard have it,’ Ray said. ‘Make the bugger scream.’

  ‘The tape. Ask him about the tape,’ Susan said.

  ‘Why didn’t he keep out of it? All I’m trying to do is run a business,’ Benson said plaintively. ‘As if I didn’t have enough on my plate. There’s just no gratitude any more.’

  My back felt cold and wet. My head throbbed. If I refused to tell them where the tape was they would continue to torture me. But if I told them they would kill me. By not telling them I would ensure that the agony went on and on. The fat boy and his mindless malicious scrawling.

  Dig deeper

  Deeper

  Deeper

  Deeper

  ‘He wouldn’t have done anything with it anyway,’ Benson said derisively. ‘His sort never carry out their threats. They agonise but they never do a thing. You never get anywhere by just thinking about it.’

  ‘Another candidate for the mud,’ Wayne chuckled.

  ‘Ask him about the tape,’ the blonde woman said.

  ‘Why can’t we all pull together?’ Benson asked forlornly. ‘There’s no place for strife in a modern market economy. In some ways the Nazis had the right idea. They knew they were up against it and they transformed their country by a massive effort of will. There’s no reason why we can’t do the same, given the right incentive.’

  The cold wind blew.

  2

  I shivered and opened my eyes. The moon was a cold hard veined balloon balancing on the branches of a tree. My overcoat was sucking in moisture from the misty damp grass. There was the raucous clamour of dogs. I raised my hand and gingerly touched my forehead, which was swollen and inflamed. Demons with bells were on the rampage: the echoes of the slamming blow still ringing inside my skull. I levered myself up, then dropped flat to the earth again as silhouettes tumbled through the bright rectangle of the kitchen door and merged into the greyness of trees and shrubbery. I saw a nimbus of light around the woman’s silvery blonde cap of hair. She was stabbing her finger, pointing frantically – ‘The gate! Watch the gate!’

  Figures ran off.

  ‘Turn Sheba and Che loose.’

  ‘What? Are you mad?’ Benson halted indecisively in the trapezium of light sprawling across the gravel. He looked back at her. ‘For God’s sake, you know what’ll happen. They’ll tear him to pieces.’

  ‘You’d rather he got away, would you?’

  ‘There – who’s that!’ Benson said suddenly.

  ‘Me,’ a voice called back, crashing about. ‘Gaz.’

  ‘Get across to the churchyard wall,’ Susan said. ‘If you see him, shout.’ Gaz crashed away through the shrubbery, cursing.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’ Ruth Benson said.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody—’ Benson began and checked himself. ‘Get inside, Ruth. We’ll take care of this. Fetch me a torch.’

  I turned over onto my stomach and crawled behind the tree. Benson came forward, peering left and right, his elongated shadow reaching over the gravel and across the grass to where I lay. He crept onto the grass, crouching a little. Like a child playing Hide and Seek I concealed my face inside my folded arms and pressed the insides of my legs together to keep within the shadow of the tree trunk. I could hear the whisper of his shoes in the grass and the wheezing rasp of his smoker’s breathing. Footsteps ran nimbly across the gravel, and I heard Ruth Benson say, ‘Here you are,’ followed by a click as Benson switched on the torch – t
he metallic snap so close and loud that I thought he must be standing directly above me. But when I raised my head the torchbeam was dancing away over the grass to my right.

  Ruth Benson had returned to stand with the blonde woman in the spill of light from the kitchen door. I squirmed nearer to the tree. Benson was behind me now, moving through the trees, the torchbeam making systematic sweeps. I had only to lie completely still, hidden in shadow, and let the circle of searchers widen and spread and ebb into the outer darkness; then if I waited for the right moment I could approach from behind, pick the weakest spot and slip through. That was the plan. But it wouldn’t work while the blonde woman and Ruth Benson remained where they were, less than ten yards away.

  I rolled onto one elbow and squinted over my shoulder to where the beam flashed over the grass. Benson was almost at the churchyard wall. I heard the snatch of someone’s voice say, ‘… can’t have got this far,’ and Benson muttering something back, which sounded gruff with anger or fear or both. Very slowly I drew my legs up and hunched myself into a kneeling position. The blonde woman had wandered round towards the front of the house, keeping an eye on Benson’s progress, and Ruth Benson drifted after her, clasping and rubbing her upper arms as if chilled to the bone.

  In one slow, stealthy movement I brought my leg up and put my foot flat on the ground and eased myself erect. For a minute I just stood there, swaying, as wave after wave of dizziness and nausea swept over me, pressing my hands for support against the smooth bark of the tree trunk. My head throbbed atrociously. My forehead was running with ice-cold sweat. I sucked in air, breathing deeply and evenly, and gradually the dizziness receded.

  Wits collected, I tensed and got ready to run …

  And just at that precise moment, as luck would have it, a passing car slowed to take the bend in the road next to the church, its headlights slowly raking through the trees and exposing me as in the beams of searchlights.

  The blonde woman was very quick and quite fearless: she saw me and charged straight at me, eyes glittering in fury, shouting at the top of her voice and waving her arms. Benson and Gaz came running through the trees. From another direction Ray appeared, Wayne panting and puffing behind him. I tried to ward Susan off, but it only took Gaz a matter of seconds to get his favourite hold on me, arms behind my back and locked in the crook of his elbow, his thick wrist hard against my Adam’s apple. Ray’s one-dimensional shadow circled round, darted forward, and kicked my shin. As in my concussive delirium he was holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose.