Dangerous Encounters

Chapter 23 The muck thickens and sickens despite the love

"Well, until it's found we won't know what's in it." 

There was a blundering noise from above, and a piece of plaster board fell past, briefly illuminated by the light from the window, and flapped onto the ground. 

"We must get a skip," I said, "I'll get them not to sky it out until we have." 

I left an order for a skip on an answering machine somewhere in Harrogate. 

Ruth and I went to Burnley on Friday morning, stopping only to pick up the guitar, at the caravan. 

As Joan Davenport had said, it was a horror as the things were packed into her van, and a nightmare when others were dumped in the skip. Ruth's presence held me sane. When they'd gone, Helen invited us to a late lunch next door. She fell under Ruth's spell, particularly when she partially eased Ken's pain and rigidity, by putting a hand each side of his head, and looking into his eyes. 

Ruth was subdued as we came back into the house. "What's the matter love?" 

"It's MS." 

"Go on?" 

"Well, I'm not a doctor, so I don't know the scientific explanation, but it's how I felt the disease. It starts with Ken's thoughts and they make him unwell. He has dark vengeful thoughts. This is what life has done to me, so this is what I'll do to my body. It's chicken and egg. 

"Enough. I'm probably wrong. Let's make music." 

I set up the keyboard in the empty sitting room, with the amplifier on the floor and two hi fi speakers on window ledges. 

With our minds twining together we found a liquid pool of musical creation. 

"Oh God, you don't know how superb that is for me," she said. 

I put my arms round her, "I do, because I feel it too." 

"All I have to do is wish a chord or a sound or a riff or an emotion even, and there it is, you play it." 

"You have a direct connection to my fingers." 

It had been four in the afternoon on Friday when we started. At seven Ruth's fingertips became too sore to continue on the guitar. At nine her voice was giving out too. 

She laughed, pulled me to her and said, "Well we've made love with our minds, what else but upstairs." 

Saturday morning we made a bacon and egg breakfast and returned to Railton House. 

Liz was in jeans and sweater. 

"We've cleared the SM room, the whips and things are burning in the incinerator. The skip's full of plaster board, timber and mineral wool, and a chopped up bed. We've revealed a nice panelled room, with two windows, and a painted and plastered ceiling. Damaged but restorable. 

"Rosemary says we can start transmitting to the computer as soon as we like. She's left a file of instructions under a password she phoned to me." 

"I found the safe code under Eve's desk drawer. There was a hundred thousand pounds in there, which I've banked apart from some petty cash, and more drugs. I think the time has come to burn them. I wanted to agree that with you, in case we need them for evidence." 

"Burn them," I said, "we've got the tapes. Did you find a way of changing the combination of the safe?" 

"No. We'll have to talk to Chubb on Monday." 

I said, "Thinking about scanning with the computer, we didn't give Rosemary a time frame. She's assumed we have a task to do, and given us the means. But we haven't thought it through. If we're going to have to use the office computer at weekends and at night, between now and Wednesday is too short. It's eleven now, thirty six hours to eleven on Sunday night. We've catastrophically run out of time. One of us is going to have to do this at Wolfenden, so that someone else can read the files into the computer here with the flatbed reader. Even then you're going to have to tell Barlow we'll miss his deadline by a mile."