The evening light was fading as Grace arrived home from work. Finding Dan was out, she took the opportunity to study the files on her work shell. She knew she had to prepare for the next day, but Remy’s voice was still ringing in her ears. She still hadn’t set a password. She made a mental note to do it later.
Sitting upright on the edge of the sofa, she typed his name with trembling hands. She needed to find out what had happened the first time he had been arrested.
Her breath caught in her throat when his police mugshot came up on the screen. He’d been sent to Tier Three for a violent assault the previous year – on a man called Alfie Bullock.
Grace immediately recognised the name but he was more commonly known as ‘Bulldog’. He was a pimp and a drug-dealer, exactly the same type of man who had been responsible for Lottie’s death – although not directly responsible – Remy’s mother hadn’t died by her pimp’s own hands, but as a result of the drugs that he’d forced on her in an effort to make her vulnerable so he could control her.
From a quick scan of Bulldog’s records, Grace could tell he manipulated women in the same way. Was that why Remy had attacked Bulldog?
Why the hell hadn’t Remy claimed mitigation? If the court had known about his background, then he might have been sent to Tier Two to deal with his childhood trauma and the loss of his mother. But there was no record of his past in his case notes.
Remy’s bio-results showed nothing out of the ordinary: no high levels of testosterone, no PTSD, no drugs, prescribed or otherwise. His chemicals were balanced, no neurological damage, so there was nothing they could do at Tier Two to help, heal or rehabilitate.
More recently, it appeared that he’d viciously attacked a drug dealer in a transaction gone wrong. The dealer had died. Remy had already been through Tier Three and so was heading for Tier Four.
He’d made a run for it.
It didn’t make sense to Grace. Why would Remy deal in drugs, something that had killed both their mothers, something that they both detested? Yes, street fighting and occasional stealing had been part of his repertoire, but never drugs.
But Grace knew herself how much could change in fifteen years.
She scrolled down and saw Remy’s brain scan that had been done during his treatment at Tier Three.
It wasn’t a clear image, but certain areas were lit up that suggested psychopathy.
She stared at it for some moments, a cloud of shock and denial crossing her mind.
Remy – a psychopath?
She was getting tired, and she needed to prepare for the next day, so she turned her attention to the case of Robyn Cooper.
Stealing foetuses.
Whatever she did, Grace had to hold it together tomorrow in the clinic. She didn’t want to be under Abigail’s scrutiny any more than she already was. She couldn’t afford to let her complex feelings about babies be triggered out in the open. It was too personal, too painful. She’d worked very hard to protect herself, building veneer upon veneer of shielding – education, money, marriage – all the things that would bury her past deeper with each layer.
Robyn Cooper wanted a child but couldn’t keep it.
It was too close to the bone for Grace.
In the spring after she and Dan had married, she’d suspected she was pregnant. Used to being independent for so long, she’d said nothing to Dan and gone to have her scans alone, telling herself it was so she could present Dan with the good news in the knowledge that all was well.
But the genetic screening had told a different story.
Her baby boy carried two key genes which combined could lead to a violent and aggressive nature. A very high chance the doctor told her. After tests, she found out the genes were from her side. She hadn’t known her father. Had he been violent? Her mother had never spoken of him and when she’d asked Lottie it had been a dead end.
Grace had seen the effects of this genetic cocktail in her work and in her own life – what happened to people who couldn’t control their violent instincts. She’d seen them giving and taking beatings, controlling girls on the streets, thriving in organised crime, dying in street fights.
She knew that genes could lie dormant. The life she could give a child would be very different to the life she’d grown up in. But she also knew that genes could be triggered by events that would be beyond her control; random, unexpected events, which might have led to her boy hurting someone – or worse, killing someone – and ending up in the Tier System. The gun loaded the genes, but the environment pulled the trigger.
Like Remy.
The moment she’d found out, all her experiences and anxieties crowded her like journalists outside a courtroom, and she knew she couldn’t face the what-ifs.
The doctor’s advice merely reflected the attitude of society: get rid of violence before it becomes a problem. So many women in her position did the same, for the benefit of all, they were assured.
Out of fear, and under pressure, Grace had terminated the pregnancy, choosing to protect her son by never letting him live, curing violence in society with violence in the womb.
It had broken her heart and she’d pushed it deep down with all her other sorrows.
Now, she was afraid she’d never escape the hand her genes had dealt her. Yes, she knew they’d made leaps and bounds in genetic treatments, but they still struggled with certain problems. There would be risks, and personal cost, and the probability of losing more children.
She couldn’t face it. She lied to Dan about not being able to get pregnant, shut down her desire for a child and paid the price in guilt and loss.
Just as this thought crossed her mind, Dan came in.
Grace grabbed one of the mustard yellow cushions from the sofa and clasped it to her chest.
‘I’m glad you’re still up.’ He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead before flopping onto the sofa next to her. ‘Any info about Kilgannon?’
‘I’ve spent this evening going through his files.’ That was partially true. She held out the shell as though she was holding a holy book and about to swear an oath. ‘I can’t find anything unusual about the treatment they gave him at Tier Three. It’s all there. The right amount of psychotropics, the visual-audio therapy, the emotisonics, the usual drugs in the usual doses, although I’m looking into those in more detail as there’s some I’m not familiar with. According to the records, everything was in place for a successful treatment.’
He looked disappointed. ‘So what went wrong?’
‘Abigail seems to think Myriam messed up, possibly misread a brain scan. Maybe Mikey was an incurable after all.’
‘That doesn’t explain the post office attackers reoffending. Unless Myriam misread those scans too. Are you sure she knew what she was doing?’
‘She seemed really competent. Did you find anything on the Payback attack?’ Had Abigail said anything to Conrad after she heard Grace talk to Dan on the phone in the bathroom? If she had, he hadn’t pulled her up on it.
Dan became animated again. ‘You were right. One of my police informants told me the gang had a guy tied up in one of the old warehouses on Penhaligon Road.’
After the day she’d had, Grace wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this.
‘Did the police get to him in time?’
Dan shook his head. ‘Castrated, bled out, like the other victims.’
‘Oh my God.’ She sat up straight.
‘Get this – it was a married couple who did it. The police think the wife was attacked years ago and that’s how they got into the gang.’
‘A married couple? How do you know? Have they been caught already?’
Dan nodded. ‘They found her phone at the scene.’
‘Stupid mistake, to leave something like that behind,’ Grace said.
‘I thought the same.’
‘Do you know if they’d already been treated at Tier Three?’
‘Police say there’s no record of it. It’s the leading story on the NewsFlex website.’ His eyes were shining.
‘That’s so sad. That poor woman. I mean, I don’t agree with what she did, obviously, but to have been raped and then do something like that, and then to be sent to Tier Four.’
‘They’re not going to Tier Four.’
She snapped her head round to look at him. ‘But they’ve been knowingly part of a serial crime. Offenders who get involved with serial crime are automatically sent to Tier Four.’
‘They were found dead this morning in their car, down by the river. Suicide pact. Rumour has it Payback hack into police websites and communications. Maybe they knew the police were onto them.’
It all seemed so fast, so over and done with.
‘And they killed themselves rather than going to Tier Four,’ Grace said, more to herself than Dan.
‘Yeah, I don’t get that one either. I can’t imagine Tier Four is so bad that it’s worth killing yourself over. Although if you listen to the conspiracy theories…’
If she didn’t do something, Remy would be in one of those white beds, a place where death seemed preferential. Hearing his voice on the phone earlier had shaken her, threatening to fracture the layer of ice beneath which she kept her old life hidden. For a split second, she felt that the whole of her history – Remy, Lottie, the street life – was going to spill out and she would tell Dan everything, her history transparent.
But she couldn’t tell him about Remy and her past. It would be too strange to bring it all up now. He would know she’d deliberately hidden it from him. There would be too many questions.
And she couldn’t even tell him about her present – the new confidentiality agreement Conrad had made her sign, and the fact she would lose her job loomed. But worse still, if she told Dan about Tier Four and the horror of what she’d seen, then it would be all over NewsFlex, and then what would happen to Janus? To all the good work done there at Tier One and Two?
No, the only way she could help Remy, if she could help him at all, was to keep all that she’d seen and heard and felt in Siberia to herself – bide her time until Remy was found and brought to Janus and she could somehow intervene before he was put into biostasis.
Was it possible? Could she get to him first, help him somehow?
‘Are you okay?’ Dan asked, concern knitting his brow.
‘Yeah, yeah, fine.’
Dan began to chat about one of his leads, but the words weren’t going into her brain.
Instead Grace’s mind was swamped with the images and sights from Siberia, the sexless, corpse-like bodies, the tubes and screens and the faint antiseptic smell. A permanent chemically induced sleep with their own horror stories being pumped into their brains 24/7. Maybe the death penalty was better than what they were going through. At least if they were dead they’d get some peace.
She remembered Mikey Kilgannon’s lips moving as he lay in cerebral torment, his body as tranquil as at a chapel of rest.
The emotion suddenly clawed at her and she gave an involuntary sob.
Dan stopped talking and put his hand on her arm. ‘Look, I know something’s not right. What’s going on?’
She coughed and shook her head. ‘I’m fine, I just… I’ve had a tough day. Conrad’s on my case. I’m sad about Mikey, just seeing him lying there with the others…’
Shit. It had just slipped out.
He homed in on her now.
‘What, you saw Kilgannon? But he’s in Tier Four! What the hell were you doing there? It’s not safe… all those violent and homicidal criminals.’
How was she going to get out of this now? He would hound her until he had the truth. He suddenly stopped talking as if to give himself a moment to rewind what she’d said.
‘Hold on a minute. What do you mean, lying there with the others?’
‘Oh, just leave it, Dan. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘What are you saying? We’ve all seen the footage,’ he insisted. ‘The inmates exercising in the yard, tutors in the library, pottery classes, for goodness’ sake…’
For a moment she wavered between telling him everything and telling him nothing.
‘I didn’t mean that – it was just a slip of the tongue.’ But she could tell from his expression that he didn’t believe her.
‘You’d tell me, Grace, wouldn’t you?’
Would she?
‘There were rumours that something weird was going on, but I wasn’t sure if they were coming from people who wanted to bring the Tier System into disrepute. It’s just like any other secure prison, isn’t it?’ he asked, his eyes narrowed.
Her thoughts turned to the child that should have been, how maybe, at some point in the future, he might have ended up at Tier Four. And Remy – what might happen if word got out about Siberia? Those who were looking for tougher punishments might approve but the human rights crowd would be outraged.
‘Yeah, of course, just like any other secure prison.’ She could hear the weariness in her own voice.
Dan lay back on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, his mouth slightly open – in full journalist mode.
He sat up suddenly and turned to her. ‘If there’s anything going on, Grace, the public needs to know.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘I know when you’re holding back.’
‘Do you?’ she said offhandedly.
‘Look, just tell me. You said you were going to leave work anyway. This is as good a time as any.’
‘Dan, just leave it!’ she snapped. ‘I’ve signed confidentiality forms. I don’t want to lose my job. I’ll walk away when I’m ready. I’m not going to be a sacrificial lamb for your career.’
‘Jesus, Grace!’ Dan sat upright and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘You think you’re better than me because you’re a bloody psychiatrist and I’m just some hack. My career is important too, whatever you think.’
‘What the hell? Where’s this coming from?’
This seemed to enrage him further. ‘We agreed you’re going to leave work anyway to have a baby, so what’s the problem? My job is just as important as yours.’
She stood up and hurled the cushion back onto the sofa.
‘You’d be happy for me to lose my job so you look good, wouldn’t you?’ Dan and his bloody ego. ‘Selfish bastard.’
Dan laughed. ‘Oh, I’m the selfish one?’
She walked out, ignoring his protests, and headed up the stairs.
Once in the bedroom, she sat on the edge of the bed for some time contemplating the road ahead of her. If she ignored Dan’s demands, would it cause a small tremor in their foundations, or a greater quake which would throw their relationship off the rails?
If she told him, it would be the highpoint of his career.
If she kept her mouth shut she might have some time and space to help Remy.
Or she could tell Dan everything, let him have his glory, lose her job, and let Remy undergo biostasis.
There was a choice to be made – Dan or Remy?