The Game Changer (33 page)

‘It must be hard to lose a dad.’ As soon as Addy said it, he thought about Adam.

‘I had a pet hamster too. I missed him when he died, but I missed Dad more.’

‘Donal?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you going to let me out of here? You know where the key is, don’t you?’

‘I can’t.’ He sounded scared again.

‘Donal?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m worried about Chloë.’

The boy didn’t answer.

‘She’s younger than us, Donal. She might need our help.’

‘Other people have done bad things to her.’

‘What kind of bad things?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Was it Stephen? Has he harmed her?’

‘It’s not him. Look, I need to go. I’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘Donal, stay, I promise I won’t ask you about the key again.’

But the torchlight disappeared.

BACK AT THE APARTMENT, KATE MADE UP HER MIND that the situation couldn’t go on. She had told Adam as much driving back from the station. He wasn’t happy about it, but if she didn’t start making changes, getting away from those four walls, taking risks, when would she be able to bring Charlie home?

Standing at the large living-room window, she people-watched, seeing a number of teenage girls on their lunch break from the local school, huddled in groups. A couple were on mobile phones, others eating bread rolls out of paper bags. Most were talking, laughing at each other’s jokes. A man passed on a bicycle, wearing a sky-blue helmet and canary-coloured wet gear.

Kate’s breath fogged the windowpane, and she used her index finger to draw circles linked together, like tiny atoms under a microscope. Something was changing inside her. Although she wasn’t sure what it was, she knew there had been a shifting of perspective, and it was more than introspection or a virus. ‘You think too much,’ her mother used to say. ‘Have more fun. Stop dwelling on things.’

Hearing her mother’s voice, she thought again about Charlie coming home. Since he had left, other than a missing notebook and pen – which could be anywhere, considering how her mind had been – nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and the notes had stopped. ‘Give it a few more days,’ she heard her mother saying. ‘After that, he can come home.’

Adam had finally got the report back from the script expert. He had examined the note sent to Kate, and the letter from Amanda Doyle. Although the similarities were remarked upon, there wasn’t
enough to determine they had been created by the same person. It was a possibility, but not an absolute. Perhaps she had overreacted, allowing her fears and imagination to get the better of her. Either way, it didn’t matter now. She was going to put an end to this self-determined prison, and if nothing else happened, Charlie would come home, and that would be that.

Having read the statement at Harcourt Street, she didn’t feel like doing much of anything, and glancing at the study door, she knew she wasn’t ready to start looking at the mind maps again or make any notes. Instead, she went into the bedroom, pulling out the memorabilia drawer, already knowing what she was looking for: an old photograph album she had put together as a child. The album had been a seventh-birthday present, and it had a blue plastic cover with the picture of a chestnut horse on the front.

The first photograph had been taken at Christmas time. She was standing outdoors with a baby doll in her arms, pretending to feed it milk from a plastic bottle. The next one was of her and her mother. They were at a funfair, standing in front of the bumper cars. She had pink candyfloss in her hand. Kate pulled the photograph closer, peering into her mother’s face, wondering what thoughts were going through her mind. Was she happy, despite all the anger? Only one of the images included Kate and her father. He always preferred to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it.

The two of them were walking through town, and the man on the bridge, the one who took photographs of people coming from O’Connell Street, had taken it. They’d been to see
Back to the Future
with Michael J. Fox. Kate had been ten at the time. She took the photograph from the sleeve, the plastic making a sound like Sellotape when she pulled it back. Examining the reverse side of the image, she saw ‘26198/3’ written in pencil, probably put there by the photographer as a reference. Underneath, she saw her ten-year-old handwriting. In blue biro she had written, ‘Dad and Kate, 1986, O’Connell Street Bridge’. She wore a loose tartan jacket, with a grey T-shirt underneath, and black jeans. If her hair hadn’t been in
a ponytail, she might have been mistaken for a boy. Beside her, her father wore a long grey overcoat with a cream scarf, and a light grey trilby. Half his face was hidden in shadow, and the half that wasn’t looked happy.

She thought about a quote by Chesterton, talking about families:
When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family, we step into a fairy-tale.

To Kate, the term ‘fairy-tale’ meant the inexplicable. She wondered how anyone could look back and work out what had really happened in their childhood, or fully understand the
why
of things. In the photograph, her father looked like a proud man, someone others could depend on. But she knew, more than anyone, how his mood could change from angry to friendly at the sound of a doorbell ringing. What kind of person could switch like that? Fooling others so well that only those in the inner family circle held their breath in fear of the anger that would still be there after the visitor had gone.

Kate went back into the living room. The clatter of schoolgirls outside had subsided. She needed to do something useful if the day wasn’t going to be a total write-off. She thought about the missing-person cases again, telling herself she had to keep her mind occupied. Rather than going into the study, she picked up her mobile phone to record. ‘Heading – Cult Groupings with Narcissism.’ She cleared her throat. ‘One of the standard common denominators is group isolation, taking members to a place where they have limited contact with the outside world. Isolation feeds into the notion that the beliefs and structures of the artificial world of the group are primary. The types of individuals drawn to these groupings can vary. They attract people from different cultures, educational levels, emotional and intellectual ability, and socioeconomic ranges. Most usually have a desire for change, and to find something their current lives are unable to give them.’

She remembered a study she had done on the rise of Flower Power in sixties California. The movement had attracted young people like moths to a flame. Initially, it was all about peace, love and freedom, but over time, especially in San Francisco, a darker element had come into play, and a couple of years into the movement, as busloads of young Americans were arriving, instead of flowers in their hair they needed protection.

The phenomenon of the Manson killings, even now, was testament to that. In Kate’s eyes, it was a perfect example of how a social outcast, someone who had spent much of his early life in prison, could change the lives of others dramatically. Charles Manson had never come straight out and said he manipulated those around him. Instead, he was still adamant that what they had done, they had done of their own free will.

The two massacres of Hollywood’s elite, the first when the actress Sharon Tate and her friends were brutally butchered, the second the subsequent night at the LaBianca residence, were not drug-induced. The killers had been perfectly lucid and, in most people’s eyes, capable of knowing right from wrong. However, even a non-professional study of the lead-up to the killings could identify reasons why an unremarkable social outcast managed to turn young people seeking peace and freedom into vicious killers.

Over time, if you wipe away someone’s identity, persuade them to forget everything they have ever learned, you are left with a blank canvas, which someone can manipulate, bit by bit, substituting a particular philosophy or belief for their own. The group gradually becomes more aligned with the leader, and in Manson’s case, to such an extent that his followers would have done whatever he told them to do. All of the techniques used by Manson – isolation on that old movie set in the desert, convincing his followers that he was godlike, their guru, getting them to dress as Indians, or cowboys, or other fictional characters on a daily basis, along with drugs for periods when time disappeared – fed into their indoctrination, and loss of individuality.

On the first night of the killing spree, when Manson woke the girls, telling them to do whatever Charles Watkins, the only male killer who accompanied the girls to the Tate residence, told them to, they followed his instructions, carrying out the killings as if they were Manson himself. Psychologically, and in every other way possible, they became Manson, the elevated sense of him. He told his followers that he didn’t lie and that he would die for them, asking them if they would die for him. When asked about the killings afterwards, he said, ‘I walked with them, but they made their own choices. I told them to leave something, the same way as I would, to make a statement.’

Through manipulation, Manson had led middle-class, disillusioned young people to madness, down a path he had created and from which he had nothing to lose. The social outcast and victim became the powerful game changer, and while others moved on – hippies no longer wearing flowers in their hair – forty-six years later those, including Manson, who had carried out the crimes were still in prison. His followers had done things that, years later, they found impossible to understand. They had followed an anti-social, manipulative man who could become anyone those girls had wanted him to be. The gradual reduction of self, vulnerability, hourly indoctrination, led to an utter belief and obedience, as if to God, so that one day he could say, ‘Get up and do what I tell you to do,’ and those mind-altering methods had created short moments of evil.

Kate recalled a television interview with Leslie Van Houten, one of the killers. Leslie had been in her forties, and when asked what she had thought would happen that night, she had said, in a gentle tone, barely above a whisper, ‘I knew people would die. I knew there would be killing.’

ADDY’S MIND JUMPED IN ANY NUMBER OF directions. He thought about Donal and all the crazy stuff he had said. He thought about Aoife, too, and how much she had changed. Neither, as he thumped the wall in frustration, could he get out of his mind the idea of Chloë being in danger. He didn’t trust Stephen, and although he hadn’t met Saka or his sidekick Jessica, he didn’t trust them either.

Increasingly desperate, he contemplated the use of physical force to escape. If he attacked one of the members delivering the meals, he might manage to get to the stairs but, more than likely, not a lot further. Being trapped made him feel as though he was wearing a neck brace, especially in the middle of the night when he faced hours of isolation.

The only way he was going to get out of there was if he convinced some of the members that he had changed his ways and wanted to be part of the programme, to become
self-enlightened
. That day, those delivering the food had started talking to him, and it became increasingly obvious that they believed they were helping him; they saw his isolation as a form of therapy.

He asked thought-provoking questions about the programme, telling a couple of them how much his time alone had helped him. How it had taught him to value each moment, saying things like, ‘The most important answers are often within us.’ At first, he had worried they wouldn’t believe him, but then he became more confident, and the more conversations he had, the more he hoped he was bringing them onside. He used information given to him by one member to feed to another. One had gone as far as saying
he was now on the right path. All of which, if Addy was patient, would bring him nearer to getting out of there.

One wrong move, though, one stupid statement, and he could jeopardise everything. He put his hands to his unshaven face, then became conscious of his body odour, impossible to get away from. He had changed not only physically but emotionally, as if he had a new outer skin, as if the doubts and questions were making him stronger, more focused. The last thought he had was of Aoife, and how, if he could, he would make one final effort to convince her to drop this madness.