‘But did they actually give you any proof that they’d hacked the system? I mean, did they mention any specifics?’
It was nearly midnight. The IT security team had taken over at Grace’s workstation just as Conrad swept in and they’d been there for thirty minutes, analysing the system to see what had been going on.
Conrad had been grilling Grace for most of that time. ‘But why did they send the email to you?’ He was anxious and sweating. She’d never seen him so out of sorts.
‘I don’t know,’ she said as he read the email over again, as though he might be able to decipher some hidden meaning behind the words.
‘But they don’t actually give any details’ – he directed this to one of the IT team. ‘I mean, they don’t seem to actually know anything about the confidential files, do they?’ He turned back to Abigail and Grace and whispered, ‘This information is highly sensitive. If it gets out then I am fucked! This company is fucked!’
The IT technician carried on tapping away, impervious to Conrad’s vexation.
‘We need more security on these computers.’ Conrad was leaning over the desk, practically shouting in the technician’s face. ‘This should have been done months ago! What the hell am I paying your company for?’
He turned back to Grace. ‘My brief from the department is to get the number of offenders down, and I’ve done that. This is the most successful penal programme ever seen. Maybe we use some unorthodox methods, but it works.’
‘What do you want me to say, Conrad?’ said Grace.
But he didn’t seem to hear her. Instead, he said, ‘I’ll have to ring the Department.’
Abigail yawned as Conrad disappeared with his phone.
No one wanted the coffee Grace offered.
Conrad came back ten minutes later and looked somewhat relieved when the technician said that he couldn’t find any security breaches on confidential files, but he wouldn’t be certain until more tests were run.
Maybe the so-called hackers had lied just to cause trouble.
They’d have to wait and see.
Exhausted, Grace said she’d see them tomorrow, took the lift down to the underground car park and got into her car. She closed her eyes for a moment and leaned back against the headrest.
Shannon would probably be asleep or with Shuggie, but she needed to hear a friendly voice. She drove around until she found a public communication shell.
‘The treatment – it didn’t work,’ she said, as soon as she heard Shannon’s sleepy hello.
‘Ach, doll, I’m so sorry.’ Her face came closer to the screen. ‘Are you calling from a street-shell?’
‘Yes. Looks like the clinic computer’s been hacked. I’ve linked my shell to my phone, so I’m not sure if my phone is safe or not. They’re threatening to go public.’ Tears burned behind her eyes. ‘Which means the press will be all over us, and some of the treatments… Conrad hasn’t exactly used legal methods.’
‘There’ll be an investigation if this gets out?’ Shannon asked.
‘For sure. The protestors are going to go ballistic when they know what really goes on in there.’ Grace sniffed and then said, ‘I really thought my treatment was going to work, there were some changes in Penny’s brain, but not enough.’
‘Did she seem any different afterwards, in herself, I mean?’
‘She’s a pathological liar, so who knows? Abigail recorded her reactions. Penny cried buckets, said she was completely devastated now that she realised what she’d done to those kids, even swore she was going to start up a charity to help victims of sexual abuse. She was totally plausible, Shan, but the scans told the truth.’
‘Classic psychopathy, manipulative to the end,’ said Shannon.
‘Exactly.’
‘What did Conrad say? About the failed therapy, I mean?’
The word ‘failed’ sounded worse coming from a friend.
‘He doesn’t care if offenders get fixed or not. He was too wound up about the computer system.’
‘It won’t be safe to work there, Grace. It’s bad enough already.’
‘If this goes public then Conrad’s on his own. There’s no way a government minister is going to put their name to scandalous treatments of offenders or experimental trials, regardless of whether he condoned it or not. What happens to my work if the clinic gets shut down? If the police find Remy, what will happen to him then?’
Shannon stifled a yawn.
‘God, I’m sorry. It’s so late. I’ll let you go.’
‘Look, Grace, none of this can be sorted tonight. Get some sleep. You must be exhausted. Speak tomorrow when we have a better idea of what’s gone on with the computer.’
‘Yeah, sorry to wake you. Thanks, Shan. Night.’
Grace closed the screen then hurried back to her car in the dark, empty street. Once in, she locked the doors, let her hands slide to her lap and sighed deeply, gearing herself up for the drive home. After a few moments, she put her thumb to the dashboard ignition pad and the electric engine started up with its quiet hum. The graze on her knuckles caught her eye as she placed her hands on the steering wheel. She remembered when she’d caught her hand on the wall in the alleyway by Lottie’s, and the symbol on the wall popped into her head – a square with a triangle on top and numbers, a symbol that she knew had been important when she’d been a kid. It was just out of reach, somewhere at the back of her mind…
And suddenly she remembered. It wasn’t a triangle, but a crude drawing of an open book, face down, and the numbers represented the time. Her head exploded with memories of leaving secret messages on the wall – meetings, times, dates… their secret hideout.
You know where to find me.
Twenty minutes later, she was back in the area where she’d grown up. She left her car outside a hypermarket and made her way to the large corrugated iron perimeter fence behind the shop, which separated the car park from the railway embankment beyond. Behind the fence lay the small, derelict community library, obscured and forgotten in the no-man’s land between the fence and the trees that muffled the sounds of the trains. It was a neat, squat 1960s building with beige pebble-dashed walls and a row of narrow windows that ran around the top just below the roof. It had been abandoned long before the rise of digital books and the price of paper had put the final nail in the coffin of codices, and had provided their gang with a fort the other kids were envious of. Grace had an image of herself standing on the roof in her wellies throwing stones at would-be invaders.
She made her way around the building through the weeds and accumulated rubbish. Bushes had grown up over the years, making it more difficult to access the rear, but eventually, she found the back door, a large metal affair, covered in graffiti and bent up at the bottom corner where they had wrestled to get access as kids.
Grace pulled at the handle and simultaneously used her foot to pull at the bottom of the door, her body remembering. There was a scraping sound as the metal cried out against the concrete beneath it, and then she stepped into the darkness and stood for a moment in the silence.
Hearing nothing, she moved forward, her feet rustling through pages torn from old books strewn on the floor like autumn leaves. She switched on the light from her phone but it was feeble against the blackness that filled the corners and the spaces between the nearly empty bookshelves.
She heard the scrape of steel against concrete again and her whole body tensed, frozen, unable to move.
‘You found me, then.’
It was his voice, older, deeper, but it was Remy.
She swivelled round and there he was, his hood up, holding a cotton bag from the hypermarket, wincing against her light. She pointed it down and stood in the thick darkness for a moment. A match made a tiny explosion in the dark as Remy lit it, and then the soft glow of an ancient oil lamp, an artefact of their gang days, illuminated the librarian’s reception desk.
He pulled back his hood to reveal his face, pale like when he was about to go into a fight as a boy, his hair long, still raven dark, his jawline that of a man’s.
‘Remy… Look at you…’ He was dishevelled: black cargo pants, scuffed black trainers and a battered old army jacket. He looked like one of the many veterans who lived on the streets, used up and worn out.
‘Look at you,’ he replied, his voice low and quiet. ‘You look like that teacher in senior school, the one we used to drive mad making the humming sound.’ A smile flickered across his face, a hint of the old Remy, and she began to relax a little.
He was her friend, her brother, but was he also a psychopath? Was he guilty of those things that the justice system wanted to punish him for? Grace said Maybe, Gracie said No. Gracie won out and moments later she was in his embrace. Regardless of his tatty clothes, he smelled like soap. He felt solid, substantial, no longer the wiry boy she’d said goodbye to when she left for university.
‘The army fed you well.’ She was glad he was thriving, but also aware of his brute strength.
Whatever dam had been holding back her memories for the last fifteen years suddenly broke and she was awash with a rising tide of emotion. Her breath felt torn from her as she sobbed.
‘Hey, hey. It’s okay…’ He pulled back and looked at her, concerned, his eyes the same sea-grey she remembered.
‘I’m sorry, I’m just overwhelmed seeing you. What are you doing here? What’s been going on? Have you got any money, enough to eat?’
‘Slow down, slow down!’ He took her by the hand and led her behind the reception desk where there was a small back room. She felt as though he was leading her back into the past. Flashes of memories from twenty years ago jolted her brain as they made their way into what had once been the den headquarters. Remy had set up a small camp behind two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves: an army regulation sleeping pod, an army backpack, some clothes folded in a neat pile on a lower shelf, alongside a wind-up army lamp, a few bags from the supermarket and a small stack of books from the main library. He nodded to a couple of chairs in the corner as he sat down on the pod, but she remained standing.
‘I was out with the army in Africa for a while.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘I didn’t think you were the type for discipline.’
‘It gave me somewhere to be.’
‘Running away from someone?’
‘Something like that.’
There was still graffiti on the walls from way back. She ran her fingers along the hieroglyphs of their childhood and smiled, feeling a rising nostalgia. Her wedding ring caught the light and he nodded towards it. ‘I didn’t think you were the type for discipline either.’
Dan. He would be worried, however pissed off with her he was at the moment.
‘Give me a minute. I’d better message home.’ She took out her phone, typing instead of dictating so that Remy wouldn’t hear, ashamed somehow. Maybe her two worlds would collide, but she was determined to keep Dan and Remy apart as long as possible.
Remy pulled two bottles of water from the bag he was holding and held one out to her. She took it, brought a chair over and sat down.
‘You said you needed help. Do you need money?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Mum left me money.’ His face fell. ‘I should have shared it with you, but I was so angry when you went. You look as though you’ve been doing okay… Your house is pretty nice.’
‘You followed me?’ She shook herself. This was Remy, not some serial killer.
He shrugged. ‘Had to check you were okay.’
She pulled her jacket tighter around her.
‘Your husband, he’s tall, eh?’ He grinned but then turned more serious. ‘A journalist?’
Embarrassed, she said, ‘I don’t think you came here to talk about my husband.’
He nodded and then said, ‘Can you get me a bio-passport to get me out of the country? As I said, money’s not the issue. I just can’t get out without the ID.’
‘If you’ve been through Tier Three then you’ll already have a probation chip under your skin. They put them in when they do the tattoos. So when they scan you at the airport your image and all your details will come up. They’ll know exactly who you are.’
Most people only used bio-passports temporarily when they went on holiday as they were impossible to lose and could also be used for bank transactions, but there was still huge debate about government surveillance and civil freedom. Those happy with the transparent society retained theirs as ID cards and received huge tax breaks for doing so.
‘I managed to escape before they put the bio-chip in.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’
‘I was hoping you could get me one with a fake name.’
‘No, Remy, I don’t have access to biochips. I don’t do that kind of work and I’m certainly not going to commit fraud for you.’
He shrugged. ‘Never mind, it was a long shot. Anyway, I’ll probably never get through security with this.’ He pulled up his sleeve to reveal his Janus tattoo. ‘It’ll be ages before it wears off.’ He looked resigned. Then he said, ‘So what does your work entail?’
‘I used to rehabilitate offenders at Tier Two. People who are in need, homeless, troubled, men and women who came back from Africa.’
How ‘troubled’ was this man in front of her?
‘Used to?’ He grabbed the shopping bag and pulled out a packet of sandwiches which he tore open and began to devour. Halfway through it he looked up and paused, mouth full, and held the remaining sandwich out to her.
She shook her head.
‘Now I… I work in Tier Three.’
He lowered the sandwich and a piece of cucumber fell to the grimy floor. ‘Really?’ The disappointment in his voice burned her.
‘I was promoted recently.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Look, the thing is, Rem…’ She blushed, his nickname rolling off her tongue automatically, but feeling too intimate. ‘I’ve done a deal with my boss. You must have seen in the press that Aversion Therapy isn’t as effective as previously thought. He’s agreed that if I can make Aversion Therapy foolproof then I can use it to fix you and get you off the police wanted list.’
‘What?’
‘So you can be free.’
His expression darkened.
‘I told you the sort of help I need. I don’t need any bullshit therapy.’
‘Well, clearly you do as it didn’t work the first time, otherwise you wouldn’t have been arrested for the same crime twice.’ She was irritated now. He was judging her for trying to help when he was the one in trouble?
‘You actually choose to work there, even though you know what they do in Tier Three?’
‘Never mind me, have you got any idea what they’re going to do to you if they catch you and you go to Tier Four?’ Her voice cracked.
‘I didn’t do it, Gracie…’
Lying – one of the most obvious psychopathic traits. How had she missed this? What other traits had she not seen as they were growing up? She stood up, pulled her coat around her.
‘Oh my God, do you know how many times I’ve heard that?’
‘But I didn’t do it! I was set up.’
‘Remy, the police are looking for you. You killed a drug dealer, a deal gone wrong they said, for God’s sake. What the hell were you thinking, doing deals with drug scum? Didn’t Lottie’s death – my mother’s death – mean anything to you?’ A loud gasp escaped her lips and she covered her mouth with her hand. She felt raw and exposed. Her mum, that moment in the bed in the prison block, was a memory that she hadn’t allowed herself to dwell on for years.
‘It’s not like that,’ Remy said.
But she didn’t want to hear. ‘Lottie would still be alive if it hadn’t been for that pimp and his drugs, and you’ve been working with people like those bastards who killed our mothers?’
She remembered Harry the Box and suddenly felt guilty about buying drugs from him. It wasn’t the same, though, was it?
‘Have you wondered why all of a sudden it looks as though Aversion Therapy doesn’t work?’ Remy said. ‘It’s because there’s a gang of men called Diros and they’re—’
She was too tired for his excuses. ‘Look, Remy, whatever’s happened, you’ve been convicted of a serious crime and the only way you can get out of this is if you let me cure you properly, with a new therapy.’
‘But I haven’t done—’
A noise from the main body of the library startled them.
Grace’s ears pricked up and her whole body tensed.
Remy stood and put a finger to his lips. He picked up a thick wooden window pole which lay along one of the dusty shelves and made his way silently out of the office. Grace hovered around the door listening. Who should she fear more – whoever was in the library, or the man who’d gone out to look?
It wasn’t me, Gracie.
Psychopaths could be manipulative to serve their own needs. Was he playing her just to get something that would get him out of trouble? Christ, what was she doing here with someone she hadn’t seen since she was a kid? Someone who had killed twice! He could say it was a set-up all he wanted, but she’d seen his scan.
And scans didn’t lie.