‘No, I want to go outside.’
‘Well, there’s several acres of land you probably haven’t explored yet. You could take the dogs with you.’
‘You’re not listening to me,’ she sighed. ‘I want to go beyond the walls, explore the area in which I apparently once had a life. I’m going stir crazy in this house.’
‘It’s not safe for you being out there alone. What happens if you relapse and become disorientated and can’t remember where we live?’
‘Then I’ll find someone to ask for help. And it’s unlikely to happen because I remember everything since I first woke up. Just nothing before.’
Emilia shuddered when she thought of the room where she had come back to life. She still had no inkling where or what it was or how she had come to be there. It haunted her dreams, along with the pregnant woman’s warning that Ted was not her husband. Emilia had spent much of the fortnight since her hospital discharge second-guessing everything Ted had to say. She picked apart their conversations in the hunt for contradictions. And at the forefront of her mind was his reluctance to allow her to leave their property alone and what she had overheard him say downstairs.
There were other things she struggled to reconcile with too, aside from not remembering her husband or the home they’d apparently designed and built together. At least a dozen shoes from her extensive collection were a half size too small for her feet. She was sure that she could drive yet there was no indication she owned a car. Her phone and tablet had no contacts listed on either of them aside from Ted’s numbers. She seemingly had no access to credit cards or a bank account. Even the dogs they’d bought as puppies appeared completely unfamiliar with her.
However, Ted had an explanation for everything. He told her she had been willing to suffer for fashion even if the shoe didn’t fit; she’d lost her confidence behind thewheel after an accident so took trains to her office in London; her electronic devices were brand new and he’d cancelled her access to bank accounts when she vanished. And their dogs were loyal to whoever fed them – and for the last few months, it had only been Ted.
‘All I want is to be out there on my own for a couple of hours,’ Emilia pleaded. ‘Don’t you trust me?’
Soon after and for the first time in weeks, Emilia was almost a free woman. Dressed in a T-shirt, running bottoms and trainers, she pounded the woodland paths alone and this time as she reached the rear gates, there was no one to prevent her from leaving. But outside in the open, she hadn’t run more than a couple of hundred metres along the pavement before sensing she wasn’t alone. She heard the crackling of twigs and crunching of gravel underfoot from behind the other side of the wall, as a second pair of feet, perhaps more, maintained her pace.
Ted was having her followed.
Furious, Emilia darted across the road that separated two stretches of woods, running between the trees and pushing her way through the undergrowth. Her calf and thigh muscles burned after weeks of inactivity but still she ran, until she was sure she had lost whoever was on her trail. Then she bent double, her hands on her knees, fighting for breath. If Ted could lie about letting her out alone, it stood to reason he was lying about so much more. It was then that she made her decision.
She removed and unfolded a business card from her pocket that the stranger had given her in the grounds of the hospital. It contained only a telephone number. Nervously, she dialled and it rang just once before it was answered.
‘Continue through the woods until you see an opening,’ a woman’s voice began coolly. ‘Follow the bridleway until you reach the nearest village. I will be in a private diningroom in the Old House at Home pub. You should be there in fifteen minutes.’
Emilia opened her mouth to respond but the line was already dead and the number was erasing itself remotely.
Chapter 30
BRUNO, OUNDLE, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
Bruno glanced at the ReadWell message board, studying what he’d just typed.
@Cominius: Have any of you revisited your old life simply to destroy the people who made it such a misery? Am I the only one who resents them for making me give it up for this world? Am I alone in wanting to make them pay? Or have you too taken matters into your own hands and gone back to snuff them out? Do the Echoes follow you too? Or do they see me as weak and that’s why they haunt me?
His finger hovered above the ‘post’ button as he weighed up what the consequences might be if he posted such an incendiary message. Instead, he hit the backspace key and watched each word being erased, letter by letter.
Bruno discovered the unexpected aftermath of committing murder – an insatiable appetite for only the unhealthiest kind of food. It was as if his body wanted carbohydrates to replace those used in the exertion of killing. Greasy-spoon cafes serving meals dripping in highly saturated fats and massive calorific content were all he craved. But hefty taxes on unhealthy food establishments meant they werebecoming few and far between. However, Bruno had located a speakeasy-style truckers’ cafe behind a garage just outside town, with a menu containing everything that was bad for him. It was his third visit in a fortnight – and each had followed a killing.
After the lawyers came two more names on his list. They had worked under Zoe, then accused her after her death of sexual harassment. But Bruno was convinced they were opportunist liars and as a result of their unfounded accusations, they were responsible for his separation from Louie. One died from a single hammer blow to the head in his garage, the other on the doorstep to his flat with three swift thwacks.
Then in the early hours of that morning, Bruno erased the penultimate name. Jaxon Davies was the rugby player who had filmed Bruno’s wife Zoe and her work colleague having sex inside an autonomous company car. After uploading it onto a pornographic website, he’d earned money each time it was viewed. And Bruno estimated from the number count and percentage of likes it had received, that Davies had made thousands from Zoe’s public indiscretion.
Bruno had traced Davies’s address before enrolling in the programme, as he had with lawyers O’Sullivan and Graph. He’d planned to confront him to appeal to his better nature and persuade him to take it down. Bruno hated knowing his son’s mother was a tool used for sexual gratification. But before he had the opportunity to, Louie had solved a puzzle and Bruno’s training had started. And once he was released back into the world, Bruno no longer cared if Davies had a better nature or not.
In the early hours of the morning, he’d hurled a rock through one of Davies’s rear windows and waited in the gloom of the garden for the confused man to appear. Moments later, Bruno beat him to death using the same hammer he’d attacked the others with. And as with theothers, £1 coins were left in what remained of his eye sockets.
On his return to Oundle, Bruno reflected on his transformation from devoted dad and widow to cold-blooded killer, and questioned if the potential for such behaviour had always been inside him, waiting for an excuse to reveal itself. Had its rise to the surface been a reaction to Zoe’s behaviour, losing the house and then his son? Or was the procedure, the removal of pain receptors and management of the chemicals that controlled his moods, to blame, knocking everything else off kilter?
Bruno recalled how soon after his procedure, he began obsessing over the data he stored, specifically graphic accounts of hushed-up murders and contract killings. Governments, principalities and individuals justifying bloodshed for political and social purposes fascinated him. Thousands had died for lesser reasons than the names on the hit list he’d begun to compile and it helped him to justify his plans. Months later, only one name remained.
Following a hot shower and a change out of his bloody clothes, Bruno was refuelling with a full English breakfast and all the trimmings. It brought to the surface a memory of Zoe and him inside a diner on Las Vegas Boulevard. Each of their plates had contained a stack of pancakes so tall, they could barely finish a third of them.
They had hired a Jeep for their honeymoon and driven from Los Angeles to San Francisco, stopping off in Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park. It was the trip of a lifetime. And in their first few years of marriage, they had continued to enjoy at least three foreign breaks a year until Louie was born.
Recent developments in prenatal testing had revealed he was likely to be on the autistic spectrum, but despite Zoe’s hesitancy, they continued with the pregnancy. It wasn’t until Louie’s second birthday that a broader extent of his condition emerged. Flights abroad became difficult as the noise andvibrations of plane engines agitated him. Unfamiliar hotel rooms scared him and he’d repeatedly hit himself on the back of his head with his fists. Music playing from speakers scattered around pools and restaurants led to screaming fits that proved too stressful for them all.
