Out of Sight Out of Mind (10 page)

Madison locked her car, turning quickly as a shiver went down her back. A young woman who was unloading flat-pack furniture from the car in front, while a small, blond boy looked on, shot her a startled glance. Madison pulled herself together.

She’d had the creepy feeling that someone was watching her for a couple of days now. And it was getting stronger. She didn’t know why she was feeling it. There was no one here, except the woman and the child. There never was any one. With a sigh she shouldered her bag and went to lend a hand with the boxes.

She knew where she’d find Jay. Where she always found him at this time of the afternoon. In the small, exclusive gym provided in the basement for the use of the residents. Since he’d discovered that the gym manager was a trained physio, waiting for the chance to use his skills, he’d haunted the place – when he wasn’t in the lab. Madison’s mouth twisted. She was poking around in his mind, filling his body with unhealthy chemicals. When she wasn’t doing that he was down here, slogging to get himself in shape. Or walking. He did a lot of walking.

She reached the door and stopped. Jay was sweating in the embrace of some machine, all pulleys and leavers and shiny chrome, the purpose of which she didn’t even
begin
to understand. The throb in her breasts, and further south, had her mouth twisting even further, with self-disgust. How big a cliché was that, getting a hum from watching a guy working out? It was so cheap.
Still gets you hot though, doesn’t it?

Leaving her lust at the door – some hope – she strode over to the machine, dredging up scientist, not hormone-fuelled female, to appraise what she was seeing. Jay was still favouring the injured shoulder, but in the weeks that had passed since their encounter in the alley it was visibly healing and strengthening. You could tell, just by watching the way he moved. Another thought that she didn’t need to explore, with its hot trails of awareness.
Do not go there
.

Seeing her, Jay let the machine come to rest. She handed him a towel and a bottle of water, watching approvingly as he drank. The column of his throat, head back, as the liquid went down.
Grrr
. The brief vest top and sweats clung to his body, gleaming and prime in the strong lights of the gym. He rolled out of the monster’s clutches. With a gigantic effort Madison hauled her mind back to the envelopes in her bag. It was just the blast of ice water in the face that she needed.

‘You have something?’ Jay had picked it up from her face – the way she stood – what?

‘The private investigator’s report, and the voice analyst’s.’

‘Ah.’ He exhaled. ‘Do we need pizza for this?’

‘It’s already ordered.’

Madison tipped the delivery man and closed the door. Jay had the folders spread over the table. He looked up, face bleak.

‘Basically, nothing.’ He flipped the investigator’s report. ‘No missing person matching my description. No one saw or heard anything at Paddington. Or anywhere else. And the voice stuff, it’s inconclusive – maybe London, maybe the West Coast of America.’ He dropped the folder to put the heels of his hands into the sockets of his eyes and emerged blinking ‘This stuff is good, thorough. There’s just nothing there.’

Madison pushed a pizza carton and a half-full glass of red wine towards him. He picked it up, then paused. ‘Should I be having this – the drugs?’

‘In the circumstances I reckon it’s allowed.’

She knew how she’d felt in the investigator’s office when he’d gone through the report with her. She suppressed a small pang of guilt that she hadn’t included Jay in the visit. She’d had to know first what the report contained. Alone.

She’d had time to come to terms with her disappointment. For Jay this had to be a thousand times worse. They’d both been hoping – more than either of them had admitted, she realised now. But for her, along with the disappointment, there had been something that had felt like relief. The investigator hadn’t turned up anything positive, but he hadn’t shown Jay up for a fraud or a liar. Which meant she could still continue to work with him. She didn’t want to give him up. Didn’t want him to walk out of her life.

This whole thing was stirring up a complex mix of emotions she didn’t have time to examine. All this and lust, too?
Hell’s bells
.

‘I didn’t call off the investigator. He’ll still keep digging,’ she said.

‘Is it worth it?’ Jay leaned forward. ‘And the programme. Are we making any progress at all?’

‘Of course we are.’ She heard the over-cheerful, hearty note in her voice and tried not to cringe. ‘I have a good picture—’ she began more cautiously.

‘But you can’t get in,’ he interrupted. She heard the urgent desperation, and the steel under it. ‘In fact we’re going backwards. That first day, when you went inside my head, you said I spoke to you.’

‘You still don’t remember that?’ Madison had begun to wonder if she’d imagined it, but she’d been so sure.

‘I was pretty beat up, everything is a bit blurred. But if we did it once, then we have to be able to do it again.’ He bent towards her, urgency in every muscle of his body. ‘I want you to step everything up. Stronger, harder, deeper.’ Something flickered in his face. She could feel her own face tingling as other connotations of his words painted graphically in her head. ‘The answer is in my mind. It’s the only place to look. You have to use whatever it takes to dig it out.’

‘Got any blood, darling?’ Jonathan asked as he put his head round the lab door and gave Madison his best vampire leer.

‘Since when were you the errand boy for the blood samples?’ She looked up in surprise.

‘Since the regular delivery man rang up about ten minutes ago to say he has a flat tyre, somewhere the other side of Amersham.’ Jonathan came all the way into the room and hitched himself on to the workbench, swinging his legs.

‘Mitch is taking his opportunity while he can.’ Mitch was Jonathan’s Head of Section. ‘He isn’t happy with the quality or the turn round time he’s been getting back from the regular testers, so he’s trying that new place. Which is why I’m here, touting for custom. Cheaper by the dozen.’

‘Okay, why not?’ Madison glanced at her specimen tray, knowing that all it contained were some phials of blood she’d just taken from Jay. Left too long, they could deteriorate, and she was sticking enough needles into him as it was. ‘All yours.’

‘I thank you.’ Jonathan hopped down to take them. ‘Mitch thanks you.’

‘Go on. Take your blood and go.’ She flipped his arm, before putting the padded envelope in his hand. Her weekly report on Jay was underneath, waiting to be filed. She picked it up. Another long line of negative results that made her stomach plummet. She still hadn’t got them back to that first day when Jay had spoken to her. Had she imagined it, because she wanted to?

‘Jonno,’ she spoke as her friend reached the door, ‘hypothetically speaking – have you ever encountered a case of a natural? Someone you can communicate with?’

‘Someone
you
can communicate with, you mean? I don’t do the mind stuff, remember?’ Jonathan shook his head. ‘Anyway, I’ve never heard of it. It simply doesn’t exist.’

‘But isn’t that what we’re about? What we’re here for?’

‘Holy Grail, sweet pea. You’re looking for ways to build links into ordinary subjects. You think you’re
communicating
, with someone who just walked in off the street, and you’re on the way to the nice, cosy room with the soft walls.’ He flapped a hand. ‘Oh, yeah I know the theory – that we all have latent abilities, just waiting to be tapped or enhanced. And I agree with it, to a point, or I wouldn’t be here. But a natural? A subject able to communicate, straight off? Just swimming around out there, in the gene pool? Mad, think about it. You’re the slickest thing in the mind department that this place has, and how long did it take you to refine your talent until it was usable?’ He nodded when he saw her face. ‘You get a connection, any sort, it’s going to need work. Right out of the box, it’s not what you’d call communication. Not straight away. Even I know that, and I’m not a mind bender.’ He slanted her a searching look. ‘Is this about your hot hobo?’

Madison grimaced. ‘Do you spend hours thinking those up? And it’s
hypothetical.
’

‘It’s the hobo,’ Jonathan said, with certainty. ‘You’re stretching, Mad. The possibility of finding a natural is as likely as Mitch scoring with Nicole Kidman, next Saturday night. It’ll never happen.’ Concern wiped the amusement from his face. ‘However much you want it. There’s such a thing as getting too close to your subject, sweet pea.’

‘I know.’ Madison swept her hair back from her face. ‘It’s just that—’ She trailed off, unable to put what she felt into words.

‘We all have dreams. And he is a dish. I’d want to communicate with him too, but it’s just a myth. Listen to Dr Jonathan now. Keep working with him to build whatever it is he’s got, but keep your objectivity.’ He gave her a hug and left.

Madison stared at the door. Objectivity. That was the thing. Except that every time she looked at Jay all her scientific sense had an increasing tendency to leap out of the window. Which left her just with – sense – as in sense of attraction, the man/woman kind. She’d been too long without a man and her hormones were raging. There’d been too many nights lately when she’d lain awake, thinking about Jay, in bed, on the other side of the wall. With a groan she went back to her results charts. Jay’s mind was her concern. Not his body. She was nest building. Recreating Neil in a man who just happened to be handy. The thought brought her up cold. She couldn’t risk that all over again.

Not your fault
.

‘And how would you know?’

She was doing it again, talking to the voice inside her head. With that, and the prickly feeling that she’d had for weeks now, that someone was watching her, Jonathan was right about that padded cell. Jay was her subject, not her playmate. She had responsibilities. When people got too close to her, they got hurt. Jay had already been hurt plenty.

Jay walked along the pavement, deep in thought. Another week had passed, another programme of drugs, another negative result. They were running out of options. Madison was still optimistic, still willing to keep trying. She hadn’t given up on him, so he wouldn’t give up on her.
What the hell choice do you have, anyway? Back to the street?

The beer cans and the DVD from the hire shop clanked together in the supermarket carrier. Paid for with Madison’s money. He was a kept man. A gigolo, without the sex
. You wish.

He squelched that one down, in a heartbeat. He wanted to be able to repay Madison, somehow, for all she was doing for him – the money, a place to live, the work in the lab, even though that seemed to have stalled. He needed to be able to do something for her, something she’d like.
Not that
.

He grinned, reluctantly. There had to be something.

He took the steps to the apartment block two at a time. A glance at the small glass-covered pigeonholes behind the front desk told him that Madison had mail, but Scott was nowhere in sight.

He found the concierge at the back of the building, at the service door, lugging bags and pots and crates of bedding plants into the service lift. Jay took a corner of what looked like a bag of small pebbles, and helped him drag it inside.

‘What is all this?’

‘Woman in number 503.’ Scott was panting. ‘For her balcony; she likes to make it like a garden up there.’

‘Garden.’ Jay looked consideringly at the contents of the lift. ‘You think you could get some more of this stuff, for Dr Albi’s place?’

‘Yes.’ Scott looked puzzled. ‘When do you want it?’

‘How about this afternoon?’

‘You sure about this?’ Scott gazed uneasily down at the bags of compost and nest of pots that the garden centre had just delivered. ‘If I have to let you into the penthouse, I want to be sure that Miss Albi’s okay about it. Maybe we should call her?’

‘No.’ Jay was already considering what he was going to do with the planted strips of flowers and ivy he’d picked out, with help from the girl at the garden centre. ‘I want it to be a surprise.’ He looked up. ‘She’s letting me stay at her place, rent free. This is a way of repaying her.’

‘Oh.’ Scott’s face cleared. ‘Like kind of a present?’

‘Exactly.’
Paid for with the angel’s own money, but what the hell.

‘That’s cool,’ Scott approved. ‘Who’s going to get mad over a present? You want to take the stuff in now?’

Jay sat back on his heels, looking at his handiwork. The three large containers, which had already been in place on the balcony, were filled now with climbing plants. Jasmine, covered with small, white star-shaped flowers, giving off a delicate, heady scent, and something with spreading green leaves, serrated like fingers. The label said it was a passionflower. The pale yellow and purple bloom in the picture looked exotic, but the girl at the garden place had assured him it would flower in the warmer weather. He’d fastened a trellis behind the pots, so the plants had somewhere to clamber.

Two tall conical planters, in matching matt black, held variegated grasses. The green and white mounds felt like velvet when he ran his hand across them. There were more containers, two plain and one patterned, with a rich silver grey glaze, full of lily bulbs. He’d filled out the tops of all the pots with ferns and ivy and white geraniums. It looked good.

He wiped his muddy palms on his jeans and began to collect the empty bags and packets. It had been satisfying, to do something with his hands. He studied the calluses on his fingers. Was that how he’d earned his living, planting things, or making things? He reached down into the blackness in his mind, but there was nothing there. Why was he surprised? Why did he keep trying?

Because if you don’t, then you’re trapped in this limbo. Forever.

‘Jay?’ Madison closed the door of the apartment behind her, frowning. ‘Are you in here?’ she called, louder, crossing the hall to the open door leading to her sitting room.

‘Out here.’ He appeared at the entrance to the balcony.