The New Girl (Downside) (24 page)

Ryan shifts out of the light from the window and crouches to look closer at the photo. Jane’s eyebrows are straw pale. The black hair must be a dye job or a wig. Why? It covers her ears,
and there may be a bandage pressing the lower lobes to her head. Maybe. He can’t make out that much detail in the postcard-sized photo, but there’s something there under her ears. What
have they done to her? What are they doing to all these kids?

Moving across to the desk, Ryan grabs the first leather-covered ledger, but it’s just filled in with hand-written numbers. There’s a blue-card folder placed squarely to one side of
the pristine desk blotter. It’s marked ‘Encounters Pilot: Crossley College, Node 2:34:731/s’. He opens it, scans a list of names and numbers he can’t make sense of.

Whatever this means, the massive amount of money changing hands catches Ryan’s eye. Duvenhage is in on something even more crooked than kiddie porn. It all makes a twisted sort of sense.
He can’t shake the feeling that he should make Duvenhage pay, but he’s got to come up with a better plan than a petty blackmail scheme. If only he had more of a criminal mind.

And what is this about Jane? What does ‘Viability Scout’ mean? Is it a foreign-exchange programme for Girl Guides or something? If Jane is a Girl Guide, it’d be just another
reason for the brats at Crossley to shun her. The poor girl is most definitely not being assimilated properly.

‘Assessment for donor viability’ for a shitload of money? What does it mean? ‘Rolling out the project in several Institutions’? Is it some sort of trafficking ring? And
would child traffickers keep such careful written records? Wouldn’t they want to cover their tracks? Ryan can’t make sense of it. Then again, he supposes, the Nazis left behind a huge
paper trail, didn’t they?

Whatever it is, there’s something not right going on here, but who can he tell? Who would believe him? Who would be able to do anything about it? He’s not about to go to the cops
about this. They’d just look at him blankly, then arrest him for whatever Tess’s father thinks he did to her. Persecuted for showing a girl some tenderness; it’s ironic.

Ziggy? He’s a lawyer in some NGO, isn’t he? He deals with stuff like this, doesn’t he? Maybe that’s his best bet. He can’t just leave things like this. He’s
got to help these kids, expose this thing.

He uses his phone to take a photo of the letter and of the lists on the pinboard and of the photo collection. Then he takes one for himself of the picture of Jane with her black hair.

He types out a message to Ziggy.
Ryan>

Come to think of it, that library volunteer woman was here the other day with Jane. Could she be in on it? What the fuck was her name? Oh, yes... Tara something. He remembers because it’s
the name of that psychiatric hospital and he thought she could probably fit in well there.

He presses send. He’s pleased with himself – Ziggy will really help, maybe stop this happening to these kids. He’s done a good thing here.

He closes the Crossley folder and places it to the side of the blotter, where it was when he came in. He’s making for the study door when he hears a thump in the passage outside. He scans
the room; there’s a built-in cupboard where he can hide and he ducks inside and closes the door behind him.

It’s dark in the closet but he feels space around him, can smell perfume and paint thinner, more of that wet-clay odour. As his eyes adjust, he notices that he’s in a large space
like a walk-in closet, lined with shelves. His phone beeps. It’s a reply from Ziggy.

from me.>

The pictures? Which pic— Oh, fuck... Duvenhage’s drive. Fransie must have made a copy. Christ, they think they’re his. The pictures of the kids’ bodies...

Oh, God, what must they think of him? Has Alice seen them? They’d never show them to Alice, would they?

But he’s not sure. Karin could use them as the ultimate poison against him. They’d never believe a word he said.

He grabs his forehead with his hands and slumps back against the wall inside the cupboard. A light comes on and dazzles him for a moment.

At first he’s not sure what he’s seeing. The shelves are lined with transparent plastic boxes. There should be shoes or jewellery on display, but in each one is a dead baby.

Ryan tries to pull his eyes away; his mind wills his body to get out, to face whatever’s outside the study door, but his hand is raising the lid of the first coffin, his fingers are
trailing over the first baby’s blue skin. It smells of cotton wool and dust, of perfume and vinegar. Its skin is as warm as the room, and smooth but slightly tacky. He presses his fingertips
into its cheek and the flesh gives slightly.

He can see the veins underneath its skin, can feel the softness of its eyelashes and eyebrows. There’s a fluff of peach down on its lip, on its jawline under its ear. She’s dressed
in a pink-striped babygrow with a smiley face and ‘Be Juicy’ printed across it.

The baby is dead. The baby is fucking
dead
.

He looks up and away from this little girl, drops the coffin lid and backs away.

He doesn’t want to count them; he doesn’t want to see any more.

He just wants to go home.

He backs out of the closet and opens the study door.

Jane’s on the landing, standing in the dark, looking at him. ‘Come and see,’ she says. ‘It’s gonna be legen... Wait for it...’ She stands there holding up one
finger.

This is all too much. Ryan must get his things and go. His head is eating itself from the inside.

‘Come and see,’ she says again. She walks a few steps down the corridor to the next closed room. The same sign on the door: ‘Trespassers will be corrected.’

‘No. I should go,’ says Ryan, but Jane opens the door and goes inside. This is the bare room he saw from the window. A shape of light falls across the brown carpet.

‘This is my bedroom,’ Jane says.

‘But there’s nothing in it,’ Ryan says. Apart from, he now notices, rows of jars stacked underneath the windowsill. Oh, fuck... Jars full of insects and the stiff body of a
rat.

‘See?’ She opens the door of a closet. Hangers with identical school dresses, the shelves stacked with neat piles of white blouses, navy cardigans and tan skirts. ‘I can go in
here,’ she says, crouching down below the dresses.

She sleeps in the closet? Jesus Christ.

She doesn’t come out, and Ryan ducks down to look for her. She’s gone.

He notices a darker space in the back of the closet. It’s a tunnel or a room. A panel’s been shifted away beside it; she’s gone through there. He crawls into the closet and
peers into the darkness.

‘I know what you do,’ she says, her voice further away than it should be. ‘I’ve seen you. It makes me... interested.’

It’s time to go, Ryan.

He shuffles on his hands and knees into the dark. There’s the feel of dry brick dust on his hands, a damp, earthy odour; the sound of scraping.

Scuffling. Is it Jane crawling further down the tunnel, or something else? He’s crawled into the tunnel now, perhaps three metres in. He hears his own breathing, nothing else.

‘Jane?’ he says softly. ‘Where are you?’

He hears a noise behind him, out in the room. He looks over his shoulder at the rich copper light from the room. A shape falls across it. The light goes out.

Jesus. Someone’s locked him in here. The tunnel’s too narrow to turn in so he backtracks on his hands and knees. ‘Jane. Where are you?’

It’s dark. He’s scrabbling backwards and the dust tunnel turns to smooth melamine. He’s back in the closet. The doors are closed; he kicks at them.

‘Hello, mister?’ Mother’s voice.

‘Let me out. What the—’

‘Why are you in here, mister? I did instruct you not to transgress on this level.’

‘I was invited in. By, by...’ He points into the closet. All he sees is the closet’s white back panel. The tunnel’s been closed up.

‘By what?’

‘By...’ Fuck it.
And what were you doing following my daughter into a closet?
‘Sorry. I got lost. I didn’t know where I was.’

‘Come. Look at this.’ This is a new voice, a man’s voice, powerful, but somehow false, like it’s been amplified electronically. The door opens and Ryan looks up, from
where he’s kneeling beneath the dresses, at Mother and the man. This must be Father, the gangster, the foreign minister, whatever the fuck he is. The man who keeps pictures of
children’s corpses and a collection of dead babies. He’s wearing a navy three-piece suit, black trainers and a grey tie. He has a massive lantern jaw and a tiny pinched nose, unreal
somehow, like a Ken doll. His little eyes squint at Ryan myopically and emotionlessly. ‘Come,’ he repeats.

Ryan has no choice but to follow him out of Jane’s room and back along the passage.

‘What is this?’ the man asks, pointing to the door to the study.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t see,’ Ryan says.

‘Here,’ says the man, pointing at the doorknob. It’s too dark, but Ryan can see enough.
Shit
. He looks at his hand where the blood from the cut has made a muddy paste
with the brick dust. Even in this light Ryan can see that the brass doorknob is stained.

‘You saw the notification?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I... I’m sorry. Let me just go. I’ve appreciated the work but can accept responsibility. You’ve been kind. I should go.’

‘You do not “go”,’ Mother says. ‘Jane has chosen you wisely. She knows that you can educate.’

‘Educate? Educate who? I don’t teach...’

‘Jane says you are forespecial with halfpints. You have no place to “go”. You will come with us. You will educate,’ Mother says. ‘You are in our debt.’

‘What? I’ve worked for the money you’ve paid me. I don’t need this. Just let me go.’

‘You purloined from my associate,’ the man says. ‘Mr Doowenharger.’

Ryan feels faint and he has to lean against the wall to avoid falling.

‘You have trespassed against notifications, you have purloined,’ the man says. ‘You have been chosen. You will come with us.’

Ryan weighs up the chance that the man has a gun against his desperate need to run, and running seems like a good idea. He takes off down the corridor and when he gets to the stairs without
being shot he thinks he’s made it.

But Jane is standing in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs and touches him with something. All his muscles stop working at the same time in mid-stride and he clatters to the floor, face and
elbows and chest and shins first. He skids along, leaving drool and blood in his wake.

Jane crouches over him and for a moment he sees her touching her fingertips to the cut on his hand. She looks at the blood with that same curiosity he saw all that time ago, sniffs it, rubs it
on her white school blouse.

That’s the first time she’s touched me, Ryan thinks, before everything goes quiet inside. Her fingers are cold.

Tara hasn’t felt this level of anxiety since... well, since it all blew up back in Jersey. Her palms are clammy, her clothes feel as if they’re two sizes too small,
and she can’t dislodge the feeling that whatever has happened to Martin is somehow her fault. If only she’d made it to the school five minutes earlier, if she hadn’t left her
phone back at the house, Martin might now be safely up in his room or sitting slouched in the lounge playing
Diablo VII
.

Stephen’s holding onto the hope that Martin’s just run away, that he’s decided to give them all a fright, but in her gut Tara knows this isn’t the case.