brandishing a laser-sword and charging down the gangplank of a spacecraft. Unlike the other Morrigan May books, it was one I had seen in shops… indeed, indeed, huge displays of them. I was about to say that it must have been a stress on a writer to work on two so contrasting projects, when Glade went on: “Y’know, the tragic thing was, she was never the same after her accident.” He indicated the area of wall with her personal photos. “Back then,” pointing to shots of a slightly younger Megan in obvious fancy dress, Vampirella, Magenta from “Rocky Horror”, “She dressed up, but she knew it was a game. Later, this… madness!”
He was indicating a group photograph, Megan in the centre of smiling thirty- somethings clustered round a motorcycle. All wore bike-gang gear, but the black leather had been replaced by white. May said defensively: “White Riders. Well, Megan was obviously a pillion rider. They wanted to get magic and spirituality away from the Satan-idiots on one side, and the china teacup set on the other.”
Glade ploughed on: “It’s as if the real Megan died in the accident. As if her damaged brain wasn’t her real self. The real Megan did not believe in Magic.”
The words came into my mind then, like a strobeflash, that if her mind was dead, he had only killed her body. That hadn’t been the part of her he needed, or not officially.
Intuition wasn’t something I liked to rely on, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s all one has. I realized that when the thought came, when Glade spoke, I had been looking at a
I said: “Well, at least something can be salvaged. Just think of the publicity: ‘Healer Author met mysterious, Marilyn-like death.’” I looked at Glade and tapped the blue file. “I’m sure the publishers can edit her book up from these notes. And the TV, there’ll be out-takes from other shows she did, all these stills. She didn’t
“But that’s madness! Publish the ravings of a demented, braindamaged…” He strode toward the desk as if meaning to grab the blue file and run with it. I held it up and said: “You’d like to destroy this, wouldn’t you! I should think that’s why you came back! To destroy it, that and the tape!”
He made a grab at it, but I was bigger than him, and held it over my head. I feared he would have a go at me, and I might need to bring it down sharply as a weapon, but he just stood there breathing heavily and shaking with anger. May was staring, totally bewildered: I noticed Monique slide silently to the phone. I said: “You remind me of an Evangelical Christian I once treated.” He opened his mouth and I cut him off: “He wouldn’t learn Yoga or anything similar because it was Hindu, Pagan, Unchristian, and therefore of the Devil!”
“There’s no Devil!” he said. “There’s no Christ. There’s no proof of any of the things she was asserting in that bloody book!”
“That’s what you told her on Tuesday, but she wouldn’t listen. Brain-damaged. That was what she’d been, since she had her accident and stopped being your student.”
“She was my best ever student! She should have been a scientist… not this! The real Megan would never have…”
“That’s what you thought, when she wouldn’t listen to you on Tuesday and crashed out on her pills. You lay down on the couch. You tried to sleep, but you were just thinking, watching TV. Looking through the
“Then it came to you. You grabbed the remote and recorded the strobe, recording it over whatever was in the video. Maybe you didn’t know then if you were going to do it. But the next day she was still ignoring what you said. She wasn’t your student any more,
“I don’t suppose it made it more difficult, watching her convulsing, wetting herself, brain-damaged and no longer a scientist. You turned off the video, and as soon as she came to, you said: ‘You’ve had a fit, you must have forgotten your pills!’ Of course, by then she’d forgotten she
“You began to clean up. You got her out of her jeans and pants and put them in the washing machine. You didn’t know it was broken.
“You got Megan into bed. You didn’t take her top off. I don’t know if you realized she usually slept nude… it was one detail that wouldn’t have mattered if you hadn’t had the call from work. You made the mistake of calling back from here. Something important, was it?”
He stood silent for a second. I guessed he wasn’t used to lying about killing, or to killing itself for that matter. In the end he said: “It was a serious problem. Contamination caused by a spillage. One of my students had made a total lash-up.”
“Even your students make lash-ups. Now it was your turn to panic. You had to get back to the lab and not say where you’d been. You rushed off and the door locked behind you. Later, you realized you’d left the doctored tape in the machine, other odds and ends like the joss sticks. You came back saying it was for your notes. My guess is you came back several times when no one was here.”
He looked terrified. I can only say, he didn’t look like an innocent man. All he could say was a cliche, especially for him. He said: “You can’t prove any of this…” but as he said it, not actually denying his guilt, Edwin May charged at him, sending him flying. He crashed into the desk, smashing it and knocking the
All he would say later was repeat: “There’s no proof.” I thought it ironic, as well as sad. Morrigan May had gone from a world in which proof, or at least disproof, was considered possible. She had dared to go into a world where there was no proof of anything. And he had followed her.
THE SECOND DRUG by
The great Bosendorfer piano responded eagerly to Abel Chase’s practised hands, its crashing notes echoing from the high, raftered ceiling of the music room. Beyond the tall, westward-facing windows, the January night was dark and wind-swept. The warm lights of the college town of Berkeley sparkled below, and beyond the black face of the bay the more garish illumination of San Francisco shimmered seductively.
The sweet tones of the Guarnarius violin bowed by Chase’s confidante and associate, Claire Delacroix, dashed intricately among the piano chords. Clad in shimmering silver, Claire offered a
