Yours
Clive
Kate got to her feet and made a few lurching steps towards the bathroom. Paul sprang after her; she toppled and he caught her.
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘Come and sit down.’
‘No, I really am going to be sick.’
She broke away from him and completed her staggering journey to the bathroom. Crouching over the toilet, she vomited. Last night’s dinner and drinks. She spat and flushed the toilet, falling back onto the floor, her hair in her face, her mouth sour. Paul, who had been hanging behind her in the doorway, came tentatively into the room and crouched beside her. He stroked her hair gently and she grabbed him, burying her face against his shoulder.
‘What did they do to me?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t know . . .’
She pushed him to arm’s length, her face contorted with anger. ‘What did they fucking do to me? Those bastards. Leonard. He was like an uncle to me. A kindly uncle.’
‘It seems to me that Leonard was trying to protect you.’
‘But he was involved in it all.’ She clutched her head as if trying to dig out the memories that refused to be found. ‘And I don’t even know what it was. Because I was reconditioned.’
‘Let’s find out what the Pimenov Technique is.’
‘How are we going to do that?’
Paul got up and went back into the bedroom, reappearing a moment later with his laptop. ‘I checked earlier. Someone around here has wireless internet and hasn’t password protected it.’
‘Give it to me.’
‘Kate, maybe you should try to calm down a little.’
‘Don’t order me around! Who do you think you are, my husband?’
‘Kate . . .’
‘Just give me the laptop.’ She opened it up, but paused before she started typing. She looked up and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the wall. She was a mess, her hair wild, lips wet, and eyes bloodshot. She said, ‘I’m sorry, Paul. This is just such a shock.’
‘I understand.’
He got down on the floor and sat next to her, both of them leaning back against the bath.
‘I must stink,’ she said.
He kissed her cheek. ‘Hmm, more of a pong, actually.’
‘Hey!’
‘Do you want me to do the honours?’ He gestured towards the laptop and she handed it over. He Googled ‘pimenov technique’ but there were no useful results, just a load of pages where the Russian surname Pimenov. Nothing about memory or ‘reconditioning’.
‘Let me try Pimenov on its own,’ Paul suggested.
But that was fruitless too. Pimenov appeared to be the name of a contemporary Russian football player, and there were pages of results about matches he’d played in. Useless.
Kate said, ‘Try it with different words, like memory, or, I don’t know, reconditioning.’
‘Good idea.’
He typed all three words in for good measure. The first few results were rubbish, but Kate pointed at the screen: ‘What’s that?’
The link was to a site called www.allinthemind.com . Paul clicked the link, and they waited. ‘Come on,’ Paul urged, watching the blue bar creep to the right. Finally the page appeared.
‘It’s a forum,’ Paul said. ‘A messageboard where people chat about issues they’re interested in.’
‘I know what a forum is.’
‘Sorry.’
But Kate was already scanning the page for the mention of Pimenov. Paul hit CTRL-F to bring up a box so he could search the page for the word. He searched up, then down. It wasn’t there.
‘This happens sometimes. The search engine finds a page but then the page disappears before they realise it’s gone. That’s because search engines can’t crawl every site constantly.’
They went back to the search engine results page. There were two lines of text that must have been pulled from the original page on allinthemind.com.
. . . like the CIA, the KGB developed reconditioning techniques. There are reports that Pimenov, a Russian scientist . . .
. . . using a combination of LSD and hypnosis to erase the memory of undesirables, though the methods were said to be . . .
Paul took Kate’s hand. ‘It’s all there,’ he said. ‘In your head. They can’t have completely erased your memories. We know that because they didn’t want you to come back to the UK. And that’s why Sampson is after you – to stop you remembering whatever it is they tried to make you forget.’
‘About what happened to Stephen and Sarah.’
‘I know what we need to do,’ Paul said. ‘But you might not like it.’
Vernon rang the doorbell of Miranda’s house and took a step back, looking up at the bay windows with their Laura Ashley curtains. Miranda had always been a bit twee, he’d thought – not that he’d met her many times. She lacked Kate’s spunk, her vivacity, although he had always suspected that his sister-in-law had the hots for him. The times they’d met, she’d looked at him in a certain way, from under her lashes. Shame she was so wussy. It would be quite deliciously thrilling, having Kate’s sister; a great way of getting one over on his wife.
Thinking about siblings, his thought trail led on to Jack and his regret that the poor little guy didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Vernon had wanted another child – a girl, preferably – but Kate had turned frigid on him while she was pregnant with Jack and had never thawed. She had always been an ice princess. She had the lowest sex drive of any woman he’d ever been with. Coaxing her legs open was like trying to persuade a cat to go walkies. He pitied whichever man she moved onto, assuming she didn’t spend the rest of her life locked up in a lab studying creatures you couldn’t even see. He could foresee her future: she’d end up with some other boring asshole in a white coat, pouring all their passion into their research, winning some dull award and having a disease named after them.
He was lucky the marriage hadn’t dragged on any longer. It was far better to extricate himself now, while he was still young enough to enjoy life. And he was going to have his son by his side while he did so. Well, perhaps not exactly by his side – he didn’t want his style cramped too much. He had plans to send Jack to boarding school once he got him back to the States. Somewhere his mother wouldn’t be able to poison his mind and make him soft.
Vernon heard footsteps coming towards the door inside the house, causing his heartbeat to speed up. It was possible that Kate was here, and with her, Jack. At the very least, Miranda would be sure to know where they were.
The door opened and a portly middle-aged man said, ‘Can I help you?’
Vernon looked past him. No sign of Jack. He fixed the man with his most authoritative Harvard lecturer’s