The Rapture (21 page)

'To Kiddup, right? come on. Everyone knows about that place. They'll test anything on you there. It's a fucking pharmaceuticals laboratory. If I don't drown first, I'll die in there, you know that. You can't let them do it. And it's happening soon, this thing, I told you. October the twelfth. Maybe sooner. After the thunder comes. It's building up, I saw it. Nothing can stop it.'

I take a deep breath. 'So why didn't you tell Frazer Melville?' I can barely say his name.

She shrugs. 'No point. He already knows.'

I flush. Of course he does. I feel dumb, muddled, coshed. 'How could you tell?'

'I felt it in his blood. He and that woman '

'What woman?' My sharpness betrays me but I'm past caring.

She smiles her mean smile. 'I could smell her on him. So could you.' I feel a queasy inner slide, like the yawn of a trombone. 'They've got something going together. And you're out of the picture.' Unsummoned, a graphic image rears: the woman's legs high in the air, his torso above her, his pelvis plunging into hers. Then they roll over, his buttocks working, still doing it. Buttocks I have grasped. Her astride him, rocking. Bethany grimaces theatrically. 'Woah, steady on, Wheels. Porn city.'

I blink the image away. 'OK, so what's happening at this place you drew?'

'I don't know. Ask him. But we have to get somewhere safe.'

'Where would that be?'

'I dunno. Up a mountain. You've got to help me.'

'I'm going to find out more. I'm doing what I can.'

'Alone? Look at you. You're a spaz. You don't know anyone. And no one will believe you anyway. It's Joy McConey all over again.'

Is there menace in her voice, or am I imagining it?

'I'm not alone. Frazer Melville's working on it too,' I say. It's as hopeless as it sounds. And his name still sticks in my throat, like something I once ordered in a restaurant and regretted deeply. 'You have to trust him.' That phrase again. So half-baked you could cry. And soon I will. She looks at me and snorts in derision.

'Jesus, Wheels. You're becoming totally fucking unhinged. Why should I trust him, if you don't?'

I have no response to that. Except to acknowledge that a nai've and stubborn part of me is in militant denial. A horrible truth is staring me in the face. And all I can say to it is, no. Go away. I don't believe you. I can't. I won't.

* * *

Dr Sulieman once gave me a piece of advice which was as powerful as it was simple: when in doubt, be practical. Deciding to heed this, because it has worked for me in the past, I arrive home with a mission.

The evening the physicist carried me up to his office up two flights of stairs like a sack of veg and we looked at Bethany's notebooks, I saw her Moonscape with Machinery through the prism of Freud. But I recall now that the physicist was thinking along altogether different lines. He said:
Some kind of mining operation
. What if that interpretation is closer to the truth than my own, instinctive one? It's as well to bear in mind that therapists operate within the same matrix as people who write soap operas. As Freud is supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. What if the sketch that I interpreted as a penis invading and ejaculating inside a horizontal, submissive body turned out to be something else altogether? Bethany mentioned icy temperatures, and scaffolding, and a platform, and the seabed, and a bad smell. What can you mine for underwater that's frozen cold?

I make coffee and switch on my laptop. Within a few minutes I have encountered the word clathrate. Clathrate meaning cage. A clathrate, also known as a gas hydrate, is a thin coating of ice that has developed around a gas molecule, forming a shell. But it isn't the unfamiliar word, so much as the accompanying diagram that snares me. Because unlike most cages you think of, this one, which is associated with ocean-bed mining operations, bears a shape familiar to me from Bethany's artwork.

A hexagon.

When I learn what is trapped inside these ice hexagons, I put my hand to my neck and note its heat.

Methane.

At what point did the physicist make the connection between Bethany's drawings and the most dangerous greenhouse gas of all? Many times more powerful than carbon, I learn that there are millions of square kilometres of it locked frozen on to the sea floor, all around the world, in the form of a crust. I imagine vast swathes of dirty sub-zero champagne. Water pressure and cold temperatures are what keep it down there. Without those, it would shoot to the surface in huge sheets, like polystyrene, and burst into flame. It is so volatile that until recently, there was no serious discussion about harvesting it for energy purposes. It was too dangerous. I type in 'methane' again, but this time - on a hunch - team it with 'catastrophe'.

There are thousands of references.

I take a sip of coffee.

Choosing the most easily decipherable headings, I swiftly discover that a massive cataclysm involving sudden sub-oceanic methane gas is not just a theoretical possibility, but a dramatic part of geological history. Twice in the distant past, the planet's atmosphere has been microwaved - resulting in the devastation of most of life on Earth. One of the main culprits was methane. The first, and worst, event took place two hundred and fifty-one million years ago, at the end of the Permian era. The second extreme warming disaster heralded the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Following a vague instinct, perhaps to do with its relative closeness in prehistoric time, I type this abstruse era in, and add the word 'research'.

At which point, after scrolling through hundreds of links, I come across an image that startles me. It shows a geo-palaeontol-ogist, a specialist in the so-called PETM, who has worked extensively analysing foraminifera, fossilised micro-crustacea in mud cores hauled from the deep. In the photo the geo-palaeon-tologist, who is bundled in a thick anorak and red woolly hat, is proffering, in a gloved hand, a large white lump that resembles a snowball. The snowball is on fire. The flame is pure and orange, blue at the edges. The caption reads,
Frozen methane is known as the ice that burns
. The woolly hat, out of which blonde strands of hair emerge, is partially covering the left side of the geo-palaeon-tologist's face, but you can tell that the sight of the flaming white lump delights her. She could be in love with it.

The geo-palaeontologist's name is Dr Kristin Jons dottir. She is Icelandic.

When I consider Iceland, which I seldom do, I think of geysers, financial meltdown and fishing crises. But from now on I will think of other things, closer to home.

Because the blonde-haired Kristin Jons dottir, PhD, expert on the contents of prehistoric oceanic mud, has a bone structure, and a tilt to the head, and in particular a pair of legs that I recognise.

I take another sip of coffee, and note that my hands are shaking. I lay them flat on the table and wait for them to calm.
When in doubt, be practical.
Returning my attention to my laptop, I shift the focus of my research to the personal. I begin with a potted biography that tells me that the woman I now fervently hate was born in Iceland, has a first-class degree from Edinburgh University and another from Reykjavik, and has worked in the United States, South America, Indonesia, Namibia and Russia.

Evidence of high intelligence, and virulent ambition.

The night I first met Dr Frazer Melville, he emerged from the banqueting hall of the Armada Hotel in Hadport, wiping his face with a napkin because he was hot. He saw I was struggling to reach the guest-list on the wall, and he came and helped me. It seemed an innocent coincidence: here was a scientist with whom I might discuss Bethany's case. We abandoned the reception and went for a quiet dinner. And I talked about Bethany. Later, I introduced him to her. But looking back, what if he already knew about Bethany, and sought me out as a conduit to her?

What if his lover, Kristin Jons dottir, had sent him?

I skim through the titles of her publications, which include the riveting 'Abiotic Forcing of Plankton Evolution in the Cenozoic', 'Biogeographic Sedimentology and Chemostratiagraphic Recognition of Third-Order Sequences in Resedimented Carbonate', 'Recovery after the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Extinction Event' and 'Size Distribution of Holocene Planktic Foraminifer Assemblages'. Her interests are listed as 'Foraminifers and their influence on the global carbon cycle, ocean acidification as a tool to investigate cryptic species, and biotic recovery after extreme events'. I don't understand half the vocabulary, or know what I am looking for, so perhaps it is no surprise that after printing out one of Kristin Jons dottir's contributions to
Micropaleontology
Today and absorbing four tightly written pages about the pitfalls of sediment assessment, I decide to take the bull by the horns.

It doesn't take long to trace her, via a friendly man in a research laboratory in Reykjavik. He tells me that his colleague Kristin is currently on a field trip in the UK. Sure, he can give me a mobile number. And he does. I must say hi to her from him. I promise I will.

The phone rings four times before she picks up. The connection isn't good. She says something in Icelandic which sounds like a question. Politely, I apologise for speaking English, and introduce myself as Gabrielle Fox, a friend of Frazer Melville's. But I do not keep the upper hand for long. Her accent is lilting, her tone gently regretful.

'I'm sorry, Gabrielle. I know exactly who you are. I have heard about you from Frazer. But I have nothing to say to you.'

'But I need to know -'

She says bluntly, 'Forgive me for doing this, but goodbye, Gabrielle.' And she hangs up. The blood rushes to my face. When I call back, the phone has been switched off. I feel more humiliated than I have ever felt in my life.

But I feel other things too. Because a sick, insistent part of me is visiting a place I thought I would never visit again.

Over the next two days frustration, depression, anger, self-pity and self-loathing dominate. In the evenings I imbibe excessive quantities of alcohol and in the mornings I feel even more terrible. One night I call Lily. She recounts her love woes and I make friend-and-also-therapist suggestions but don't talk about what is happening with me, because I am not ready, and I am not ready because I am too proud, and I am too proud because I am me. The loss is mine and I know it, and so does Frida Kahlo, at whom I throw a balled-up pair of socks and miss, which compounds my rage. The person I hate most of course is myself.

I, too, have been the other woman. Alex always said his wife didn't suspect our affair. She was too trusting, too complacent about her role in his life, too busy with her career and the kids to spot the telltale signs: the late nights at the office, the work trips abroad where alien time-zones colluded in the alibi, the scent of fresh soap after a long day. But if she had, and she had telephoned me and introduced herself, I have no doubt about what I would have done. I too would have said, 'I'm sorry. I know who you are. But I have nothing to say to you.' And I too would have hung up.

Bethany remains in St Swithin's under observation, with two psychiatric nurses with her at all times. To take my mind off what has happened, I work extra hours because five staff are off sick. The physicist does not call me, but why should he, now that he has what he really wants, and wanted all along: the information he was after, and a fellow-scientist he can fuck? I go to Oxsmith at seven in the morning and come home twelve hours later, exhausted. When I have a spare moment, I sleep. One day, slightly drunk, I call the physicist's numbers - all three - but get no reply. His mobile is switched off. I do not leave messages. I feel abandoned.

But somehow, a tiny twist of hope remains, like a persistent virus I can't shake off.
Today never happened.

What did he mean?

I'm emptying my dishwasher when the phone rings. It's a terse and furious Dr Sheldon-Gray. I picture him in his righteous pink shirt, the phone clamped to his ear. 'Bethany Krall has disappeared,' he announces. 'From the hospital. Last night.' Something inside me changes pressure at great speed. When I ask for details, the word he uses is
abducted
. 'As in, someone got her out.'

Today never happened
. I close my eyes to steady the vertigo.

'How?'

'Whoever took her caught the nurses off guard. Kelly was having a cigarette, Mike claimed he was using the bathroom but was in fact making a long phone call. Someone dressed as a surgeon walked in, woke her up, put her in an overall with a cap and a mask, and off they went. Two bloody doctors, one a child, strolling out to the car park cool as you please. I've seen the CCTV footage. Bethany even turns and gives the camera the finger. It's a disgrace. Any clues?'

I am shocked, but there's a curious heave of excitement too: even a kind of skewed triumph. Bethany must surely be better off with people whose motivation is altruistic, than at the end-station that is Kiddup Manor. I tell my boss that I am horrified, but that I know nothing - and nor can I imagine who might be behind it, short of somebody as demented as Bethany herself. Apparently fobbed off for now, Sheldon-Gray says he has more calls to make, and hangs up without saying goodbye.

But I have not escaped scrutiny that lightly. Ten minutes later, the doorbell rings and I open it to find a young policeman, his fiercely accessorised car parked next to mine. Mrs Zarnac is leaning out of the upper window in what might be her notion of an erotic nightdress, unable to contain her glee. 'I heard it on the radio!' she calls down. 'That Oxsmith loony girl, she yours? You hear she run away?'

'Let me give you five minutes to get ready,' says the policeman. 'And we'll head down to the station for some paperwork and an interview with one of the detectives on the case. If that's OK with you, madam.'

Somehow, the madam makes it a more serious matter.

A field trip to south-east Asia. Capable of thinking on your feet.

With the young policeman hovering in the doorway, I search in my handbag for my lipstick. It's one thing to lie - blithely - to one's boss, but perjury and the perversion of justice are a somewhat tougher call, given that they can you get slapped in jail for it. In the hall mirror, I apply the first coat, and check my teeth for smudges. But if I report my suspicion that Frazer Melville is involved, how would the hollow triumph of putting my ex-lover behind bars affect Bethany's fate, and that of a world threatened by methane gas? I apply a second coat.