Her room had been about the size of the one she was in now. Through its window was a view of a smooth, very English lawn bordered by ash trees. Occasional twinned piercings in the turf indicated where croquet hoops had been fixed, but this game, being outwardly genteel but actually vicious, had been found too reminiscent of Service life to be a soothing pastime, and the hoops and mallets were disposed of. Those perfectly circular wounds in the lawn remained, a grassy stigmata just barely visible, and maybe they’d heal themselves, and maybe they wouldn’t . . . There was no end to the spirals of thought that could catch you; carry you away like Dorothy in her tornado, and drop you into a brighter land where logic eased its grip. The sober world, on the other hand, remained bleached of colour. Even the lawn, even those ash trees, were grim and grey and lifeless. Well, of course the ash trees. Why else were they called that?
But in the absence of colour, new sounds arrived. The voices turned up that first week. It was as if a small crowd of people, forever out of sight, had an awful secret to impart to Catherine all at once, so what reached her was an unbroken mutter of syllables, never approaching clarity. They were her secret sharers, and from the start she had known they existed only in her own delirium, and that the secret they were desperate to share was that she would fall and break at the next opportunity. There was no sadness or triumph in this. It was simply what was bound to happen: ultimately she’d be waved away from this hospital-like seclusion and rejoin the world of noise and lights and sharp edges, where the first thing she’d do would be to open a bottle and jump in.
She’d clung onto this as the first real hope, during those early days. She could stand all of it—the cure, the recovery; the effort demanded of her to regain her pride and her knowledge of who she could be—provided oblivion remained a constant possibility. Even now, most mornings, that thought woke with her. The voices had disappeared in time, and the effort to become herself once again had succeeded in the sense that it remained her daily struggle, but she’d never entirely forgotten them; rather, she’d bundled them in rags and stowed them in the lumber room of her mind. This was not an accepted recovery tactic, but it had worked for her, so far.
And so lost was she in this memory that she gave a small cry when the door rattled, as if her long-ago voices had assumed corporeal form, and were arriving now to take her away.
“You all right?”
This voice was Bailey’s.
Catherine composed herself, and stood. “I’m fine.”
He undid the padlock and let himself in, a manoeuvre complicated by the tray he was carrying. On it were a cardboard-packed sandwich, an apple, what looked like a flapjack tightly wrapped in cellophane, its price-sticker visible, a small bottle of water, a 25-mililetre bottle of Pinot Grigio, and a plastic beaker.
“Thought you’d be hungry,” he said.
He laid the tray on the bed.
Unable to take her eyes from it, Catherine gestured numbly towards the window. “There’s a bus out there.”
“I know.”
“Why is there a bus out there?”
Even to her own ears, she sounded like she was reciting phrases from a teach-yourself-English book.
“The people who own this place, that was their tour bus, I think.”
“They have a band?” Images of an ancient movie swam briefly into focus. Pinot wasn’t her favourite wine, but its sudden appearance had displaced previous pleasures.
Bailey laughed. “They ran a tour company. Ferrying folk round local sights?”
“I don’t even know where we are.”
“No, well. Everywhere’s historical, isn’t it?”
Catherine said something else. She wasn’t sure what.
Bailey said, “Went bust, I suppose. This place used to be a farm. Now it’s a holiday let. Next stop, it’ll probably be a youth hostel.”
“How long are you going to keep me here?”
“Not long.”
“This isn’t going to end well,” she said. “You’re messing with serious people.”
“Ben and the colonel, they’re serious too.” He nodded at the tray before turning to go. “I brought you some wine. Little treat.”
“I noticed.”
“Better drink it before it gets warm.”
He opened the door, making the padlock key do a little dance between the index and second fingers of his left hand as he did so.
“Bailey?”
“What did you call me?”
“The others are soldiers, but you’re not. Are you?”
He didn’t answer.
Seconds later she’d have heard the
The long-ago voices remained silent.
“You’re kidding,” Lamb said.
Nothing about Tearney’s demeanour suggested she was kidding. “It seems that Mr. Monteith’s scheme was hijacked by someone in pursuit of, ah, a particular world view.”
“He’s batshit crazy, you mean.”
“That would appear to be the case.”
