Burning Secrets (16 page)

Chapter 37

D
ANIEL WAS SO
astounded that for a second or two he froze, unable to trust the evidence of his own eyes. But there she was again, quite unmistakably, caught in that tiny visible strip of room, and heading directly towards him as though intending to check out the contents of the wardrobe for herself.

He was about to call out to her when the office door opened again. There was an electric silence – the sort that flows between people recovering from an unpleasant surprise – then Daniel heard Mrs Ivory say, “Helen! What are you doing here?” Her voice was polite, professional and without a trace of warmth.

Daniel shrank back inside the wardrobe, thanking God that he hadn't chosen that moment to emerge.

“I assume you haven't come to ask for your job back. I know that you gave me false references, although I've no idea why. That's quite a serious offence.”

“Quite serious,” said Helen. “But not as serious as some other things.”

“I've no idea what you're talking about. You've committed a criminal offence. I don't know why the police didn't pick you up at the border,” said Mrs Ivory. Her tone was still smooth, but she sounded slightly less assured.

“Let's ask them, shall we?” said Helen, moving towards the telephone, out of Daniel's line of vision. “Give them a call.”

There was a click of the door closing. “I'm a busy woman. You've got two minutes to tell me why you're here, and then I'm going to have you removed from the premises.”

Helen gave a snort. “Who by? Kenny? He's your loyal slave, isn't he? He's the one who searched my cottage, went through my things. I could smell the chlorine.”

“What do you want?” Mrs Ivory's voice was cold but unafraid.

“I want to know why you're doing it. I know what you're doing to the kids here, that you've been medicating them for years, you and Narveng, but I just don't get why. What's in it for you? At first I thought it must be money. But you live in an average house, drive an average car, don't own any property. You haven't even had a holiday in eight years.”

“What are you – some sort of journalist?” said Mrs Ivory in a tone of deepest disgust. “The thing with journalists is that you're so corrupt you imagine everyone else has the same grubby morals.”

“You're very self-righteous for someone who's been deliberately poisoning children.”

“That's a lie. Do you think I would risk a hair of these children's heads?”

“There are risks in any drug. Especially one that's untested.”

“It wasn't untested. I took it myself for three years. I was one of the first volunteers.”

“Why?”

“Because I had nothing to lose. You've never had a child, have you, Helen?” She went on without pausing for a reply, “Well I have. And I lost her. She took her own life at fifteen. I tried everything to keep her, but she wouldn't stay.”

“I didn't know that. I'm sorry.”

“She'd tried every pill for depression you can name, but they made her paranoid or dopey or fat or sick, so she stopped taking them. If Compound K had been around ten years ago she might still be alive. And if what I've done here saves just one young life, then it will be worth it.”

“But you can't go round drugging healthy people without their consent!” Helen protested. “One of them might have had a violent reaction to it. Someone could have died.”

“That's why I took it myself first. And I'm still taking it. About six months after Hilly died I read an advert in a science journal asking for volunteers for a drug trial, and I thought: what have I got to lose? If it kills me, so much the better. But it didn't kill me. It saved me.”

“And Narveng never paid you a penny for any of this?”

“They paid me for that initial trial – like all the volunteers. I gave it to The Samaritans. I told you, I'm not interested in money. I've got no one in the world to spend it on. I don't even spend the money I earn.”

“And then, after that, you decided to test it out on a whole school? Was that your idea or Narveng's?”

“Mine. The school wasn't like it is now. The buildings were crumbling, there was vandalism and graffiti, the children weren't achieving. They were miserable. And there were so many teenagers like Hilly, at the mercy of their emotions. You know how vulnerable teenagers are; tormented by their hormones. Like that new girl at The Brow – what's her name – Louie.”

Daniel, who had been listening with a growing sense of amazement, nearly stopped breathing.

“She reminds me so much of my Hilly. She's got scars all the way up her arms from stubbing out cigarettes on her own skin – can you imagine that? But that's what they're like: they can't handle these violent changes of mood. I thought if we can just get them through that brief dangerous time, think of the benefits to themselves, their families, the whole community . . . ”

“But Emma,” Helen's voice was incredulous. “Most people navigate those years without any serious problems. You can't medicate them all on the off-chance that you might save a few.”

“Why not? You've seen them. They're happy. They love school, they love home. They love the island. They don't want to leave.”

“But it's not real happiness. It's a
chemical
happiness,” Helen protested. “And you say there are no side effects, but there are. They've got no feelings. They can't appreciate music or art or beauty, because they can't feel the sadness in it.”

“You want them to feel sad? That's perverse.”

“And they've got no ambition. They're happy to sit around all day smiling and eating that bloody Leaf ! You know, at first I thought Leaf
was
the drug, but when I started researching I realised it was just another side effect. Compound K screws up your sense of taste – it makes sweet things taste bitter and bitter things addictively sweet.” Daniel gave such a jolt of surprise at this that for an awful moment he thought he had given himself away. But the women's voices flowed on, uninterrupted.

“I admit it takes away your appetite for sugar, but that's surely a good thing. Leaf is actually very nutritious.” Daniel could hear the smile in Mrs Ivory's voice. As he listened to these revelations, he kept remembering things that had struck him as bizarre in his early days on the island: dozens of students crawling around the field scavenging for Leaf; the café that sold only coffee and a bitter lemon drink; the woman at the cinema who said they were the first young people to buy ice cream in years. All these details had seemed odd at the time, but he'd never worked out the connection.

“In fact Leaf has turned out to be very useful,” Mrs Ivory was saying. “Because all the time the students keep eating Leaf, I know the drug is still working, and they are still taking it.”

“Maybe I can accept that you haven't done this for personal gain. But it's still wrong. It's still an assault against every single one of those kids,” replied Helen.

“I love the students at this school. You just want a good story – you don't care what happens to them as a result. What we've got on this island is special. It's a perfect society; people are contented and fulfilled and safe. Everyone looks after everyone else. There's no poverty, no crime—”

“There is crime!” Helen said, her voice rising in frustration. “
You're
the criminal!”

Mrs Ivory ignored this interruption. “If you run this story, and turn the island into a media circus, it will destroy this community. You want to take me down, but if you do, you'll bring everyone else with me. All I'm asking for is two months. By then the trial will have been running for five years and will be complete.”

“You must be insane. I'm not inclined to give you two more minutes in charge of this school. And what exactly have you got to bargain with?”

“You're not in a strong position yourself, Helen. You don't have any actual evidence against me. If we called the police out now, it would be you they'd arrest, not me. The most senior police officer on Wragge is a governor of the school. Do you think he's likely to believe the ravings of someone he already knows has used fake references to obtain a job? After your hasty departure, I've got to tell you your reputation took a bit of a bashing around here.”

“I'm not interested in involving the police. All I ever wanted to do was uncover the truth.”

“We're more alike than you think, Helen. We're both on a kind of crusade.”

“There's no comparison.”

“Except, of course, you intend to make money by selling your story.”

“You may not have been paid yourself,” Helen retorted, “but I bet it was Narveng who put up the millions for the swimming pool and the pavilion and all the other new buildings over the last few years.”

There was the silence of a remark hitting its target.

“Just two months. And then I'll tell you whatever you need to know about Narveng.”

“Aren't you afraid of what they might do to shut you up?”

“Helen, I'm not afraid of anyone or anything. I told you before: the worst thing that can happen to a person has already happened to me. I've nothing left to lose.”

Hearing this, Daniel felt his sympathies oddly divided. He was supposed to be on the side of Helen, and exposing the truth, and yet it was hard not to feel sorry for Mrs Ivory too. Helen herself must have felt something similar as when she spoke the hardness had gone from her voice. “There's still one thing I can't work out. How did you get the drug into them, day after day?”

“Come with me,” said Mrs Ivory. There was a scrape of metal as she swept her bunch of keys off the table. “I'll show you.”

The door swung closed on their receding footsteps and at last Daniel was alone.

He tottered out of the wardrobe, racked by cramp and dazzled by the daylight. He collapsed on to one of the visitors' chairs and massaged his knotted muscles. His head ached and he had a rampant thirst.
Helen's here now; let her deal with it
, he told himself. But in another corner of his mind lurked the uneasy thought that it wasn't over yet.

As if to confirm this, fire alarms began to wail all over the school, ripping into the silence of morning lessons. Within seconds there was a rumble of feet as students began to stream along the corridors, down the stairs and out on to the field.

Chapter 38

D
ANIEL WATCHED THE
evacuation through the window, as the alarm continued to peal through the empty building. The students were milling about and staring back at the school with a mixture of excitement and panic. Teachers were herding them away from the building towards the ruined pavilion, barking instructions, and marshalling classes into orderly lines so that registers could be taken. The lab technicians and support staff stood in a huddle, shivering without their coats. The deputy head appeared with a megaphone and, through a storm of feedback, began to tell everyone to leave the premises without re-entering the building. There was no sign of Mrs Ivory.

Daniel opened the study door, half expecting to smell smoke, but there was instead the musty smell of damp. He walked towards reception, wondering whether to make his escape through the car park or try and find Helen. The carpet felt strangely wet and mossy underfoot, and as he reached the lobby he almost slipped on the thin film of water covering the polished floor. He looked up at the ceiling for a leak, but there was nothing dripping from above, and beyond the windows the sky was blue. A distant sound of footsteps made him glance down the corridor leading past the science labs. One of the doors opened and Mrs Ivory emerged. In one hand she was holding a small sharp knife, which she wiped casually on the sleeve of her jacket before disappearing into the next room. Daniel shrank back against the wall to avoid being seen, his mind whirling in confusion and fear.

Mrs Ivory was clearly mad and dangerous and had probably killed Helen while he dithered. Why else would she be stalking the corridors with a knife, and Helen nowhere to be seen?

Daniel stepped out of the shadows, water lapping at the toes of his shoes, just as Mrs Ivory came out of the furthest lab. If she saw him she gave no sign of it, but hurried on her way, around the corner and up the stairs. A moment later he could hear running feet above him and classroom doors banging.

He followed after her, and peered into the first lab, his heart quailing at what he might find. But instead of Helen, he discovered the source of the flooding. The water cooler in the corner had been slashed. Water pumped rhythmically from a three-inch slit in the clear plastic casing, spreading around the benches and under the door in a thin glassy layer.

It was the same in every classroom, as Daniel tracked Mrs Ivory's hectic progress around the school. All the water coolers had been sabotaged, their contents forming tributaries which merged in the corridors into thin streams and ran down the stairs. The siren had stopped and the building seemed to resound with the aftershock of sudden silence.

Daniel caught up with Mrs Ivory in the pool block, in the same changing rooms, he now realised, where she must have followed him to retrieve the bag with the Narveng logo he'd found on the beach. She must have been astonished to see him carrying it around school.

She was jabbing the knife into a water cooler as he came in. It made only a small puncture so that the water emerged in a fine jet that arced across the benches and hit the opposite wall. Irritably she plunged the blade in harder, yanking it back and forward. A curtain of water flopped out over her feet. Daniel could see that the hand holding the knife was covered with blood, and for a split-second his courage failed him. But at that moment she looked up and saw him. There were bright spots of colour on her cheeks, as though she had a fever.

“Daniel,” she said, distractedly. “You shouldn't be here. Didn't you hear the alarm?”

“Where's Helen?” he said, without taking his eyes off the knife and the bloodstained hand that gripped it. “What have you done with her?”

“Helen? You're not in this with Helen?” She looked genuinely let down, hurt even. “I knew she must have had help, but you never crossed my mind.”

Daniel shook his head. “I didn't want to get involved in any of this.” That will be on my gravestone, he thought. “We came here to get away from trouble, but I always seem to find it.”

“Well, I won't pretend I'm not disappointed,” said Mrs Ivory, sounding for a moment as though she was an ordinary headteacher and he an ordinary pupil, in her office for a ticking off.

“Where's Helen?” he said again.

“Oh, look what I've done,” Mrs Ivory said, ignoring the question as she examined the deep clean cut across her palm. “The plastic on these canisters is lethal. Only one more.” She strode out of the changing room towards the pool and up the stairs to the viewing gallery, her high heels echoing on the tiled floor in the vast cavernous room. The last water cooler was in the corner of the gallery. She slit it open and rinsed her injured hand in the outwash.

Daniel, unnerved by her bizarre behaviour, followed at a cautious distance. She had left a trail of bright red splashes on the clean floor. At the fire-exit door she turned. “Give my love to your sister. I only wanted to help her. You must believe that.”

“But you didn't give her any choice,” said Daniel, with sudden indignation. “You'd no right.”

“Can you honestly look me in the eye and say you prefer her the way she was?” said Mrs Ivory in her kindest voice.

Daniel thought of the old Louie, with her mood swings and tantrums and days of deepest gloom. It was her personality, and without it she was nothing. He held her gaze firmly. “I want her back the way she was.”

Mrs Ivory acknowledged this with a sideways dip of her head. “Don't think too badly of me when I'm gone,” she said.

Daniel felt a sudden chill at the finality of her words. She was standing very close to the balcony edge and for a moment he thought she was going to throw herself over on to the tiles below. But instead she produced her key ring from her pocket and began working away at the keys with shaking fingers, trying to detach one from the other. “I don't think I'm going to be welcome around here any more,” she said, with a crooked smile. “And I've really no desire to spend any time in prison. So . . . ” she shrugged. “I think it's best if I just . . . disappear.”

“You can't just disappear. Not on an island,” said Daniel. “And where's Helen? What have you done with her?”

“You want Helen; you find her,” she said. “Here's the key – all you've got to do is find the lock.”

She seemed to be holding it out to him, but as he took a step towards her she tossed it over the balcony, high into the air. He watched its inevitable trajectory, as it rose and then fell into the deep end of the pool, making a neat splash before sinking gracefully to the bottom. And when he looked up the fire-exit door was swinging open. She was gone.