‘Did you try and kill Victor, Edgar?’ Lucy says, her voice steady.
‘Of course I fucking didn’t. Keep your nose out of my business,’ he says to her with a snarl. ‘You know nothing about me and Victor. Nothing at all.’
She’s never seen him like this. It’s given her a completely different view of him, the wolf emerging from the academic, left-leaning sheep she thought he was. It’s a thought that makes her blood run cold.
Edgar keeps ranting. ‘He couldn’t just leave it to me. He wouldn’t trust me when I told him to leave it alone. He thought that Marie needed to be kept in prison for longer, to be punished more. Like I didn’t know that already. What does he think I was doing?’
Rachel explodes at this point. ‘What the fuckwereyou doing, Edgar? I saw the fucking list. Flowers, whisky. Chocolate. That doesn’t look like you were spoiling her. That looks like you were putting her up in a fucking hotel.’
Edgar looks astonished for a moment, before he starts to laugh, peals of cackling that ring through Lucy’s head. Any minute, it’s going to explode. Then he stops, stands with his hands outstretched in front of them. ‘You want to know what I was doing? I’ll show you what I was doing. Wait here.’
The women freeze. Edgar stamps out of the room, up the stairs, up the metal ladder to the loft. A few moments later, the stamps happen in reverse.
‘Had a good look around in there, did you?’ he says.
‘What did you expect me to do?’ Rachel says.
‘It’s exactly what I’d expect you to do. You missed these, though.’
Lucy looks down at the handwritten notes, squinting to read them spread out on the kitchen table where Edgar’s thrown them.
Effects of starvation. In order to explore this, no food was delivered for a period of three weeks . . .
Scylla is distressed by drunkenness – plan to deliver alcohol to Charybdis to see what effect this has . . .
Lights on and off all night, extreme discomfort observed. . .
Charybdis in a state of deterioration due to excess alcohol. Further supplies to be delivered to see what effect this has.
Lucy looks up again, blinking. Confused. ‘What the fuck? Who the fuck are Scylla and Charybdis?’
Edgar’s mouth twists. ‘Homer’s mythical monsters. Don’t you think they’re good names for two real-life monsters?’
‘A classical allusion,’ Rachel says, her voice withering. ‘How cute.’
‘Give that here,’ Anna says, taking the papers from Lucy. She skims through them, disgust showing on her face. ‘What is this, the Stanford Prison Experiment?’
Lucy breaks in. ‘You weren’tlooking afterthose women. You were fucking with them. Those notes are observations.’ She frowns. ‘All those screens upstairs. You were watching them. The whole place must be wired up with CCTV.’
Edgar starts to clap his hands. ‘Now you’re catching on,’ he says. ‘This was no holiday camp.’
‘That’s appalling,’ Lucy says. ‘You’ve betrayed everything you said you believed in.’
He starts to laugh again, stops, the sound breaking into a sob. ‘If it’s any consolation, the idea was pure to begin with. There was something about the power of it, though. After my mother died . . . I told you it changed everything. I said that to you in the car. I don’t know. The idea of what she meant to me, how good a mother she was – I couldn’t stop thinking about it, comparing. Marie killed an expectant mother. Janice killed all three of her own children. You talk about betrayal, but what about what they betrayed?’
‘So you took it on yourself to punish them?’ Lucy says.
He reaches into his inside pocket and pulls out a notebook, its black cover mottled and torn. He waves it at the women. ‘Yes, and I’d do it again,’ he says. ‘Look at this. I’ve read it now, cover to cover.’ His voice has a strange emphasis to it, though Anna can’t work out why. ‘Cover to cover. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You read this, then tell me what you think.’ He pauses. ‘She’s going to come for me,’ he says. ‘For all of us. It’s only a matter of time.’
‘What do you mean?’ Rachel says. ‘How is she going to do that? Don’t you have cameras trained on them, watching every move they make?’
‘All the cameras are down. I’ve no idea what’s happening. Or where Marie is.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Deadly serious. The experiment has collapsed. I’ve got no way of finding out now what’s going on. For all I know, she’s on her way here right now. She might even have arrived already. I have no idea where she is.’
With that, he leaves the room, slamming the door behind him.
