Kiss Me First (34 page)

In the early days of our correspondence, I – Tess – had sent Connor the standard email describing Sointula, how it was full of ‘alternative’ types and so on.
It’s got this really amazing atmosphere, I think it must be on a leyline. I feel so happy here, like I can think and breathe properly for the first time.

And Connor’s reply had been along the lines of:
But why Canada? At least before you indulged your hippy tendencies somewhere served by easyJet.

At the time, I thought little of it. Now, I snapped into focus. I started by looking at the list of destinations served by the airline but that didn’t help: Granada was one of dozens in Europe. After another hour of fruitless Googling, I concluded that I had no option but to email Connor and ask him what he knew about this hippy place he referred to.

The prospect of communicating with him again produced a rush of adrenalin, similar in intensity to how I had felt seeing him in the flesh. I couldn’t help thinking back to before, when despite the fact we wrote to each other dozens of times a day, I’d still receive a stab of pleasure when an email arrived from him; there was the feeling that we were members of a tiny club that was impossible for others to get into, that only we knew the rules of. For a moment, I experienced such desire to be innocently back in that time that tears came to my eyes. Then the memories of his betrayal and the lack of feeling he displayed at our meeting in Temple came swarming back. I tried to concentrate on them, so that anger and hurt would harden me up.

Previously, of course, I had communicated with Connor through Tess’s email account, but that was no longer in operation. Meanwhile, my own email address was in my full name and I didn’t want to reveal that. So, the first thing I did was set up a new, anonymous account. I spent a while thinking of a suitable name: it had to be attention-grabbing, as there was the risk he’d write off an unknown recipient as spam. I considered [email protected], but thought he might not open it if he knew it was from me, so decided to use the name of a female singer he had told me he liked when he was a teenager: Carol Decker.

The subject line was
Hello again
and my tone was businesslike, devoid of any reference to what had passed between us.

No, this is not really Carol Decker. This is Leila, Tess’s friend. We met a while ago near your office. Now, I need your help. I am conducting some research into the possible whereabouts of Tess for the benefit of her mother, Marion, and I would like you to elaborate on a reference you made in an email to Tess during the summer. The email referred to a ‘hippy’ place she had once visited that was reachable by easyJet. What was this place?

His reply came forty minutes later.

I have no intention of entering into a protracted exchange with you, so I won’t comment on the immense irony of your noble mission to help Tess’s mother find her daughter. But for what it’s worth: years ago, when we were together, Tess mentioned that she had spent the previous summer at some hippy commune in the Alpujarras. Skinny dipping in the river, getting stoned around the camp fire, communing with Gaia and earnest Frenchmen, that sort of thing. I don’t know the name.

OK?

Do not contact me again.

So exciting was this information, I didn’t feel too hurt by Connor’s hostile tone. The Alpujarras were, I knew from my research, near Granada, and a Google search revealed only one long-established commune in the region. Half an hour later, I had booked my plane ticket.

Then, it had all added up. I felt so sure that she had gone there; that the commune would hold the clue to her death. But it’s come to nothing. Yes, a couple of people there thought they might have seen Tess last summer, but they weren’t positive. That’s not good enough. And even if I had ascertained for certain that she had been there, there was still the mystery of where she went when she left; where she died. I am no closer to finding her body.

I now feel embarrassed for having embarked on this mission; for not anticipating the obstacles. All I can be pleased about is that I didn’t tell Marion that I was coming out here, so she will not have had her hopes raised and then dashed.

We’re in the air now, finally. I had to put away my laptop while we ascended, and when I looked out of the window, for a moment all I could see below was white, as if the clouds had dropped out of the sky. Then I realized it was the greenhouses, a patchwork of white plastic obscuring the land from the mountains to the sea.

Saturday 29th October, 2011

I’m writing this from my desk on Albion Street. It’s 2.10 a.m. on Saturday morning and I’ve just heard Jonty come in. He’s been out at a Halloween party, dressed as a news reader with a cardboard box over his head painted to look like a TV and a square cut out to show his face. He claimed that he was only going to talk in bulletins all evening, but I can’t imagine that lasted too long, knowing him.

When I came back from Spain I was convinced that he would have gone. It wasn’t a rational fear; after all, he hadn’t left when he found out about what I’d been up to, so there was no reason why he should have done so now. But still, I pictured myself opening the front door and my suitcase wheels bumping over his keys on the mat. His room would be empty, reduced back to just a single bed, the walls pockmarked from where he had taken down his pictures, the two holes in the plaster where he’d tried to put up that shelf, nothing else left of him. My suspicions appeared confirmed when I found the front door double-locked, but then as I entered the hall I saw his duffel coat hanging on the banister, and relief flooded through me like a tap had been turned on.

After twenty minutes, he returned. I was at my desk, re-attaching my laptop to the mains, when I heard his key in the latch and then, seconds later, the door to my room flung open.

‘Oh bollocks,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be here for when you got back.’

He gave me an awkward hug – I found it awkward, I mean – and then proceeded to bombard me with questions about my trip. To my surprise, I realized that I did actually want to talk about it, so we went and sat outside. Jonty liked using the flat’s ‘unofficial’ roof terrace; he had found two chairs in a skip and arranged them on the lumpy tarmac. At first I was reluctant to go out there, but when I did, it was nicer than I expected. The view extends beyond the rubbish tip below; you can see the neighbour’s back garden, almost entirely taken up with a vast trampoline, and balconies of the flats opposite, some of which had been cheered up with flower pots. Anyway, we sat out there and I told him about the trip – everything except for the bit about Synth and mum and the police.

Two months have passed since then. Now, I’m sitting here, gazing at the screen, trying to concentrate. Jonty’s blundering around – I’ve just heard the toilet flush – and attempting not to disturb me but I suspect he’s drunk. I’ve made an important discovery tonight but my thoughts keep straying to things that are totally irrelevant. What was the party like? Why do people get drunk when it makes them act like idiots and then feel terrible the next day? What would it be like to go to a party with Jonty?

I have the urge to go out and ask him about his evening, and tell him what I’ve discovered tonight. He’s bound to be interested, as he’s followed the story so far. But the flat is silent now. He’s probably fallen asleep on his bed fully clothed. I hope he’s remembered to take the box off his head.

So, I’ve just found out the answer to something that’s been bothering me for a while. Actually, it’s two things: where Tess and Adrian met, and where Tess was during that missing three months in the first half of 2008. But the answer for both is the same. A residential psychiatric clinic in West London called the Zetland Centre, colloquially known as ‘the Zetty’.

If I hadn’t heard that nickname I probably would never have worked it out. Since coming home I haven’t made much progress with my investigations, but tonight the Google alert on Adrian’s name delivered an item of interest. In a newspaper interview, a man claimed he had once shared a room at a clinic with the ‘evil Internet predator’ Adrian Dervish. Except that wasn’t what he, Adrian, was called then; he said his name was Stuart Walls. And apparently he didn’t have an American accent then, either. He told this man he was from Worcester, which is in the middle of England.

Stuart Walls from Worcester. I could understand him taking on a pseudonym to run Red Pill, but why also assume a different nationality? It seemed an unnecessary risk, as someone who knew a lot about American accents might have listened to his podcasts and detected a false note in all those ‘hey there’s and ‘shucks’.

Maybe the risk was the point.

Anyway, in the interview, this man described Adrian keeping him up all night with his plans for world domination and never changing his jumper, and he happened to refer to the clinic as ‘the Zetty’.

The name rang a faint bell in connection to Tess. I went back through my notes and found that in 2008 the phrase cropped up in her emails. I hadn’t been able to work out what it meant and Tess had said she couldn’t remember when I asked her during one of our question sessions, so, as I had considered it a low-priority matter, I put it to one side. My best guess was that it was the nickname of a short-lived boyfriend or friend. You see, she sometimes did that – put ‘the’ in front of someone’s name for no discernible reason.
Shall we ask the Jack if he can DJ?
she’d write; or
Sounds like the kind of crap the Big Mel would come out with
. The unnecessary definite article – it was one of her habits.

So now my theory is this: after a suicide attempt at the beginning of 2008 Tess had been admitted, voluntarily or otherwise, to the Zetland Clinic, where she had stayed for around ten weeks. And during that time she had met Adrian, another patient. They had stayed in touch – by phone, I suppose, as I never found any emails between them – and three years later, by which time he was running Red Pill, she had asked him to help her to die. Or perhaps he had offered. Maybe the other people, like Randall Howard’s ‘Mark’, met Adrian there, too.

Obviously, I can understand why Adrian wouldn’t want me to know about ‘the Zetty’ – but Tess? She was hardly reticent, and had freely told me about other suicide attempts and breakdowns and unsavoury sexual encounters. Why not admit she had been to this clinic? I can’t believe she had genuinely forgotten. Or maybe she had. Maybe it had been a particularly bad period and she had blocked it out. I suppose I’ll never know.

They still haven’t found Adrian. To be honest, my interest in his whereabouts is fading. The last time I properly thought about it was a month ago, spurred by something Jonty told me. He had just had dinner with his sister and her new boyfriend who was, in Jonty’s words, a ‘conspiraloon’. ‘He banged on and on about how Obama had been behind the whole banking crisis, that it was a false-flag operation,’ he said. ‘I wanted to bury my head in the couscous.’

I remembered a throwaway remark of Adrian’s when we met on the Heath that day, about how easy it would be to make up a conspiracy theory about Obama and banks. I was curious enough to Google, and indeed a site came up that was devoted to that particular line of thought.

In 2008, two momentous events occurred. Barack Obama became the most powerful man in the world, and the global economy went into meltdown. Coincidence?
Really
? . . .

The site consisted of little more than a hastily thrown-together homepage, and, beyond an anonymous email address, there were no details about the person behind it. This, of course, wasn’t surprising if it was Adrian. The only possible clue was a quote at the bottom of the page – ‘The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me’ – by Ayn Rand, Adrian’s heroine. But that’s hardly conclusive evidence. And even if I did have proof that Adrian was behind the site, I wouldn’t tell the police. I don’t want to have anything more to do with him, but neither do I want to cause him to be found.

In his absence, Adrian has been variously diagnosed by the media as both a ‘narcissistic psychopath’ and suffering from ‘antisocial personality disorder’. I thought the latter didn’t sound that bad – in fact, it sounds like something I could have – but I looked it up and it’s actually quite serious. ‘A persuasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.’ ‘Deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.’

Adrian would have rejected any such labelling. He didn’t believe in mental illness. He spoke about the subject in several of his podcasts: doctors, he said, pathologized perfectly normal reactions to life in order to make money and control unruly members of society. I listened carefully to his argument and I subscribed to it too. After all, that’s why I helped Tess: because I believed that her desire to end her life was a legitimate feeling, not to be denied or smothered with drugs.

But I thought then that Adrian was
rational
. That was the point. If I knew he had been diagnosed with a mental illness before he had told me that mental illness didn’t exist, would I have listened to him in the same way?

I suppose I’ll never know for sure. All I do know is that I don’t regret what I did. It may have been Adrian who got me into it in the first place but after that, during all those weeks of preparation before check-out, it was just me and Tess. However dismissive Marion was of me, I really do believe I knew Tess better than anyone else in the world and, aside from that single, understandable moment of fear on Skype that one evening, she never wavered in her long-held desire to disappear from the world. I helped her achieve that.

Not that a resolution has been reached with Tess; or, rather, not in the way I had been planning when I started writing this in Spain. I know nothing more concrete about her movements after check-out than when I got off the plane in Malaga in August. Her body has not been found. But now I have what I think is a pretty good theory.