The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

Gemma and Elsie talk

 

Geoff Sullivan’s mobile was on charge next to the hob that morning. He habitually used two phones, and one of them, it seemed to Gemma, was always on charge. In the kitchen, she would often mutter under her breath something about being a slave to technology, but she did always recognise his need to stay connected at all times, so she tolerated the trailing wire, the permanent use of the cooker’s auxiliary socket and the space next to the hob which always seemed to be equally demanded by a hot pan. This particular morning, as usual, the charging phone had come to Gem’s notice just after Geoff had left for work, just before she herself disappeared downstairs to her study. She had noted out loud with some irony that it, along with its owner, had become apparently by default almost permanent features of the Pitcairn household.

Elsie, who had got up late, had been lolling around the kitchen for an hour or more, making a smoothie for breakfast using yogurt, cucumber and raw peanuts, drinking almond milk and browsing her laptop. Her iPad was also beside her, tuned in to the morning news from a station her mother had probably never heard of and played at a level just below the audible. Beside the iPad, directly in front of her on the kitchen table, was her laptop, bought recently for her by her employer in recognition of her often needing access to her files on the move, such as when on location. Her retention of the expensive new item was one of the sweeteners that Xenon media threw into the deal when they sacked her.

Her left hand switched between her two white-filled glasses, while the fingers of her right were permanently yet negotiably glued to her laptop’s trackpad, the left occasionally crossing over to allow an extended little finger to press a key. She was engrossed with what she viewed, her drinks taken blind, the rolling news in chat format on the radio ignored. It was already after eleven and she was still not dressed, still residing somewhere within the extent of her batik caftan which, when ironed was regular and almost perfectly square, but when draped around the human form, seemed voluminous, unformed, even amorphous, yet ubiquitous, falling into folds reminiscent of a Renaissance painting’s formal drapery, its highly patterned design confusing light and shade. She did not move when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs from the basement. Gemma turned the corner from the hall to enter the room at the rear of the house. She was panting a little.

“Morning, darling. Been up long?”

“Half an hour. I had things to do upstairs.”

“I had things to do downstairs. It’s time for a break. Fancy a cuppa?”

“No thanks,” said Elsie, brandishing her still half full smoothie. “Still doing your lectures?”

Gemma shrugged, raising her eyes and brows to communicate, “Don’t ask,” when in fact that was precisely what she did not want to happen. She reached across Elsie’s space to retrieve the kettle. Her daughter’s chair backed onto the gas hob where the kettle resided and was pushed slightly away from the table. It was just too close to allow easy access. Elsie did not attempt to move.

“How far have you got?”

“I’m about halfway through the course, I suppose.”

“On course?”

Her mother laughed. “I’m certainly on the course, but I am definitely not on the schedule. I was hoping to be finished by now…”

“Parkinson’s Law.”

“Sod’s Law, more like.” Gemma filled the kettle from the large brass mixer tap that habitually leaked where the swan’s neck armature connected at its base, replaced the kettle on the hob and lit the gas underneath with the snap of a flint igniter that she extracted noisily from the cutlery drawer.

“I can’t believe we are still using an antique singing kettle.”

“It works. It belonged to your grandmother.”

Elsie turned around to look at the shining deep metallic red hemisphere with black handle and sprung spout closure as it began to rattle on the heat. There were numerous dents and scratches in the purity of its original mathematically pure shape through which lighter metal showed like scars, and a line of rust where the heavy base welded with the light top. “It would not look out of place in a museum, but it probably wouldn't be a design museum.”

“They were fashionable in the sixties. The older ones used to whistle, but this one sounds a chord like a harmonica. They were the height of sophistication back then. Dad says they used to sit and watch it heat up to get ready for the sound.”

“Did they not have television?”

Gemma laughed. So did her daughter.

“The idea of the renowned Professor Edward Pitcairn and his teacher wife sitting at this table watching a kettle boil just to hear its two-tone alarm is both absurd and precious.”

“It’s about as absurd as your grandkids will find your having cucumber and yogurt smoothie for breakfast at half past eleven, dressed in an Indonesian batik.” The comment could have indicated friction, but the tone kept clear of conflict, criticism or judgment. Gemma nodded at Elsie’s laptop. “Anything interesting?”

“I just reread your black faces and Brexit piece.”

“You’re joking… Where on earth did you find that? I thought I had taken it down.” There was more than mere impatience in her voice.

“I came across it a few days ago. Someone must have re-published it on a different site and it seems to be in the public domain. Look…”

Elsie invoked a search engine and entered a few words into the box before hitting a return with a definite slap.

Gemma watched as the results from the query ‘gemma pitcairn black brexit’ listed. “Jesus… There are pages of hits… Are they all my text?”

“I’ve looked at the first page of results – there are at least three pages of hits, by the way - and every one I have seen carries the full text. The user comments are a bit tasty… You seem to have been praised and condemned by both right and left in the same measure.”

“And I bet the praise is from people I would not praise myself and the criticism is from people who think like me. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot… I didn’t realize that it was still around… I thought…”

“Mum, the Internet is permanent. Anything you publish, anything captured is forever.”

“Fossilized would be the word. Edward will be excavating it next.” Gemma’s comment was almost in passing while she reached across her daughter to scroll down the display.

“But these fossils keep changing. I’ve even found a copy of your article on an evangelical site aimed at converting Chinese people to become followers of an American Bible Belt church. It has whole phrases changed, but it’s still recognizably in the same piece. And it still has your name at the end, complete with a link back to the original on a free article site, even though the text they have published has been changed, sometimes to complete gobbledygook.”

“You’re joking!” The reaction was now visceral.

Elsie typed again, dragged her fingers across the touchpad and clicked. “Here. Look.”

Gemma Pitcairn, disinterested at first, glanced at the screen but, as seconds passed to minutes, found herself engrossed in this apparent copy of her own work which was not actually a copy, nor an edit, but an apparently randomly amended version of her text. “They’ve even kept my name at the end. And the edits don’t even seem to make sense… Why? Why would anyone bother? That is plagiarism. They don’t even seem to have edited this in a coherent way…” There was real anger in her voice. She continued to read, thoroughly engrossed. “This is disgraceful!”

“The only thing I could think of,” said Elsie, pushing back her chair towards the hob to allow her mother more space, “was that they are using your text to send clandestine messages to their supporters in China.”

“But it’s nonsense… Is it in a code of some sort?” Gemma looked up. “Darling, do be careful. The hob is on. Your dress is too close.”

Elsie dragged her chair to the side without getting up. “No. They don’t need a code. The message they want to send will be short and embedded in one or two of the phrases they have inserted, most of which are, as you say, gobbledegook. In a separate message, they send a couple of numbers to their contact. These are the line numbers of the text to be used. The contact downloads the document, strips out everything apart from those line numbers…”

“…and there’s the message…”

“Absolutely not! Anyone could read it if the text was included verbatim. What happens is that they then compare the same lines from your original text with the extract and then run something like an exclusive-or word for word. That will remove all your original text, leaving a set of words, which then assembled in a predetermined order will carry the message. To work, they have to use words which are not in your text.”

Gemma was still reading. “Such as excommunicate? Or Creator’s Church? Or rapture?”

“Most of what they have inserted will be nonsense. The message will be four or five words, that’s all.”

“It seems so crude, so easy to detect.”

“It is crude. But each character to be checked is one byte and given that there’s two times ten to the power eighteen characters of new data added to the internet every day, it is an enormous task even to try to identify the message. And, frankly, unless someone had also intercepted the message with the line numbers to be used, it would be impossible. The result would not be declared this century, at least, even with supercomputers working on it full time. And why would anyone bother? They are only Evangelical Christians., after all.” Elsie was no mathematician, but the more technical workings of the Internet had been part of her training.

Gemma was still reading her article on Elsie’s screen. She leaned further across her daughter to access the built-in mouse so she could scroll down the document. Inadvertently, the pointer hovered above a minimized word processor icon at the bottom right of the screen and the documents name displayed. She looked at Elsie and said, “Have you been studying that?”

Elsie shrugged. The kettle started to sing.

“I sent it to you because you were mentioned. You might need…”

It was a while before Elsie responded. Gemma’s kettle continued its singing boil until she lifted it off the gas, its drone fading to a reedy croak. She filled the ready tea-bagged I Love New York mug with hot water and replaced the kettle on the hob, without turning off the gas. The kettle rang out loud again before Gemma reached across to turn the hob’s control and the metal dome quietened. “I can’t relate to it, said Elsie. “It’s not as if I really know him. I have hardly seen anything of him over the years… But it’s hard to accept that in a few weeks, perhaps a day or two, he won’t be here anymore. He will be in the ground somewhere.”

“Cremated, actually. Scattered.”

“But where?”

“Islington crem. It’s up in Finchley, just by the North Circular.”

“Have you booked him in?”

Gemma paused, longer than would be needed to punctuate conversation. She was making a point. “Elsie, I don’t have a date…”

“Of course. I’m already thinking of him in the past tense.” Elsie’s experience was clearly wandering over new, previously untrodden ground.

“That was the present. Sorry. Elsie… Did you want some tea, coffee?”

“No. I have this,” she said lifting her glass with its white streaked interior. Gemma winced slightly at the sight. “I wasn’t expecting him to be worth… To be worth quite so much…”

“There’ll be death duties. Inheritance tax on his estate. We get 325K tax free and an extra 175K if we inherit the house. And half the value of the house is already mine. There’s a sliding scale in his case, because he’s worth more than two million.”

“It sounds like you have done your homework.”

Gemma shrugged. “He did all the work. He went through everything with me down to the last detail. There’s another document that he prepared with all the procedures outlined, but I didn’t send that to you. There’s no point duplicating effort, especially since none of it applies until he… until he is… but the general information had to be shared. It sounds a lot. But by the time we have paid the tax, funeral and the rest of the costs, it will not look so rosy. By the way, I intend to put a codicil on his will to give you half the house.”

“Serious?”

“He did that for me when mom died. It seems only right. And that way I will still own the same amount I have now. Things will be simpler if I were to…”

The kettle again announced its intention to sing. Gemma turned around to check the gas control and found that it was not quite completely off. It clicked this time and the kettle lulled again.

Elsie studied her mother for a while. Gemma was ready to cry. She had been on the verge of tears for a minute or more, holding the hot mug close to her stomach with two hands, still full to the brim with the tea that she had thus far ignored. Mother and daughter embraced, the mug hurriedly placed on the table, and spilling its tea. Elsie, the childless granddaughter automatically assumed the role of consoling mother. Try as she might, Elsie could not cry, but it was only confusion, perhaps naivete that kept her silent. It was several minutes before she broke the new silence they shared. “It’s been so sudden.”

“Not really, Elsie. I knew he was ill. I knew it from last year. None of us lasts forever. He wrote me a couple of letters, and I also heard from people at work, people he wrote to about the dig. He was ill, took a rest, went back to the site, got ill again, took another rest… That took us from the end of last year to March. And then he had his collapse. He stayed on Sawu, and then spent time in hospital under observation. It was only then that they ran all the tests. Apparently, they were worried he might have sustained a head injury from his fall. So, they waited. Kept him under observation. Then they did the tests. But that took him up to the time for his annual leave and the results weren’t ready, so he set off. And here we are. He got the results only after he got home.”

“None of us lives forever…” Elsie looked at her mother, but her gaze was searching her own thoughts. “Some of us should make a start…” Elsie paused to look again at the document on the screen. “Half of this,” she said, casting for a glance around to indicate this brick pile of Islington future. “I don’t even know if I’ll be living in London when…”

“When you find a job?”

“If anyone will have me.”

“They will. I almost lost my job over that stupid article… It went all the way to the vice-chancellor. In retrospect, I probably only held on because they didn’t want to offend my dad.”

“You were a bit strong. And I don’t really know why you trawled up that stuff from the past.”

“Not a nice thing to say to the daughter of an archaeologist. I got hauled over the coals big time. I was told I had dragged the university’s name through the gutter, attracted adverse publicity, and all that shit.”

“Like daughter like mother.”

“And it was all his idea,” said Gemma, nodding towards Geoff Sullivan’s mobile, on charge next to the gas hob.

Mother and daughter shared a moment of silence as they jointly contemplated the continued and current presence of this man in the room. “Do you think he’s listening in to us right now?”

“What through his phone?” asked Gemma. “It’s turned off.”

“It’s still on charge.”

“You must know more about these things than I do, but I would have thought that it had to be switched on to operate.”

Elsie shrugged. “So, it was Geoff who put you up to it?”

“No, not at all. They were all my ideas. But he did encourage me to write them down and then publish, and, if I remember correctly, it was specifically Geoff who suggested I make it available to all via an Internet article site.”

“He’s definitely not been straight with me on Uking Palace. We know something about the way he works now. We have dribbled a couple of stories his way recently, false leads, and found them boomeranging back to us.”

“What? Are you still convinced that he’s not straight?”

Elsie nodded. She was consciously using silence to emphasize her comment. “I know he’s not straight.”

Gemma looked at Elsie, newly serious. “That little ploy you suggested a week ago… Did you pursue it?”

Elsie reached across and took her mother’s hand. “I was waiting to tell you. I thought you seemed frail and kept quiet. Mom, I did as we agreed.”

Gemma was silent but concentrating.

“He took the bait. No hesitation whatsoever.”

“And so…”

“Indeed,” said Elsie. “He went off to work as normal. You left the house as we agreed and a quarter of an hour later, he was back.”

“And you went through with it?”

“Of course I did! He would have been alerted we were onto him if I had done anything else.” There was a question in Gemma’s eyes. “With a condom, of course.”

“So, he is a shit.”

“I think we already knew that mom. Let’s now say he is a complete shit.”

Gemma retrieved her I Love New York mug from the table, which had been sitting in a pool of its own slops. She reached across to the sink, took a cloth, wrung it out and mopped up the spill in a way that suggested that thought was not needed in the process, but that a little aggression might help. She similarly took an over large gulp of her tea, which was still too hot. She coughed a little and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I don’t know... I’ll have to think through what to do next. It must be something to do with me. I seem to attract disingenuous shit bags of men.”

“Is there any other type?”

“Your grandad…”

For a moment they shared a silent concentrated gaze that resulted in an unspoken agreement not to pursue the matter further. It was Gemma who continued. “I’ve known there was something wrong for some time…”

“But you did nothing…”

“He was fun to be with sometimes.”

Elsie smiled. “Like wearing a blindfold to a silent film?”

“There’s always the live piano.”

“Like a deaf person blindfolded at a silent movie.”

Gemma laughed. In the case of Geoff Sullivan, whom she had claimed in the past she never trusted, there simply wasn’t the level of emotional involvement on her part to cause pain. In a way, she looked vaguely satisfied, vindicated, having eventually been proved right, now the new victor in battle, though for some years she had been losing the war. She was, nevertheless, angry, frustrated, taken for granted, taken for a sucker.

“So, what next? Do we kick him out?”

Elsie shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Not yet… You mean I have to keep sharing my bed with a bloke who has fucked my daughter? It’s all getting rather Greek… All I want to do is avoid the tragedy. Why wait?”

Elsie finished her smoothie with a smack of the lips and the hint of a chew on the solid remnants from the bottom of the glass. It was a gesture calculated to convey a sense of confidence, an impression of her being in control of the situation that both women now clearly believed had got out of hand. “Two weeks ago, I came to you with an idea.”

“You certainly did, darling. Fancy a walk down off the street mom? And we haven’t even reached Highbury and Is before you told me you were going to screw my bloke. It’s not an everyday mother-daughter scenario, darling, let’s face it! But then I said to myself, there’s something in this. Let’s let him prove himself, I thought.”

“This is getting medieval, a bit like trial by ordeal…”

“Except that experience usually offered a choice between equally unacceptable options. In our case, it’s the two of us who have been on trial.”

“And he has tried us both.” Elsie smiled an ironic smile. “What interests me, mom, is the fact that it took you all these years to realize…”

“Oh, come on, Elsie… It’s been two years since he’s been a regular, and the regularity has never become established... I accept there were occasions before that…”

“All the way back to the Brexit referendum. That’s five years ago.”

“He is good in bed, I suppose.”

Elsie stared back. “No comment.” The two women burst into loud laughter prompted by a shared, unstated and immediately understood sense of the ridiculous.

“There’s nothing like priorities when it comes to political judgment.” Gemma was still laughing when she continued. “There was a time, Elsie, when I would have been devastated that I had been lied to, taken for granted, used and abused. Now, it’s almost as if I don’t care. It’s almost as if I am relieved that I know he’s been lying to me. I was beginning to think it was my problem.”

“And that is the reason why we should string him along a bit longer.” Elsie paused, drawing her feet up onto her chair and grasping her arms around her folded legs. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“Mind? Of course I mind!” Gemma was shouting, but also smiling.

“Careful! Your dad will hear.”

“He’s out. ‘I’m going out for a walk,’ he said. ‘I’ll be away before nine.’ And so, he is out somewhere, terminally ill, ready to…”

“Why didn’t you stop him? Put your foot down. Tell him he needs to stay in…”

“Elsie, have you ever tried to ‘tell’ Edward Pitcairn anything? And anyway, what do you say to a dying man? How about, stay in because it’s safer?”

Elise thought for a moment. “I take your point.”

Gemma continued. “He could be absolutely anywhere. He went out a couple of days ago as well, but he didn’t stay out for long. For a week or two after his diagnosis, he was still going for walks, but now he seems just to go round the corner and down to the station. He sits on a bench along Compton Terrace and watches the world go by, he says. He takes his notebook, of course, and he’s got my old phone, but if there’s a problem, he won’t be able to answer a call, will he? I’m dreading the phone call. ‘Gemma Pitcairn, we have just found your father…’ I was really reluctant to let him go. But what could I do?” The stress was on the ‘I’. “He’s in pain now. I know it. He has taken painkillers in the last few days. I even found him asleep in the middle of the day yesterday, lying on his bed, with his laptop still powered up beside him. There was a strip of pills on the bedside table, so I took a look. I think he’s walking to the chemist, but not telling us.”

Elsie looked at her mother. It was clear that Gemma thought her daughter would comment about her grandfather. She did, but not in the way that Gemma anticipated. “Anyway, as far as the Geoff thing goes, he knows already.” The mother’s face asked a shocked question.

“He heard us, Geoff and me. He had a go at me the other morning.”

Gemma’s shake of the head described a situation that was now beyond control.

“But we do have to string him along… Are you sure you don’t mind?”

Gemma readopted her raised voice. “Do I mind? Damn well sure I mind! Damn well sure I feel utterly pissed off!”

“And hence we have to get even.”

“Bleasdale.” Gemma’s non sequitur was immediate, a reflex.

“What?”

Gemma nodded. “You wouldn’t know, darling. Before your time. Back in the darkest days of Thatcher’s eighties. Boys From The Black Stuff was a television play about recession and unemployment in Liverpool. It was one of the great lines. A character called Chrissy, in bed says to his long-suffering wife, ‘My dad used to say don’t get mad, get even. Now I can’t even get mad.’ I should now amend my own version. ‘Now even I am mad.’ Edward and Penny recorded the plays – it was a series – on their state-of-the-art video cassette machine and they used to replay it at least once a week. For them, it was like going to church. That’s why I remember it so well.”

“So, because you’re mad, we get even.” Gemma and Elsie both smiled.

“How, darling?” Gemma’s voice betrayed commitment to the strategy, but complete lack of confidence in the tactic, whatever it might be. “When it comes to Mr. Sullivan, we know we are dealing with a liar, an opportunist, a freeloader…”

“But he is possibly also a professional,” said Elsie. Gemma looked confused. Her silent question prompted her daughter to continue. “I told you earlier that we had fed him with false information.”

“And that it had come back to you.”

“It did, but not directly. We had a meeting, the usual people. What we normally do is agree our position and then we publicize via social media. But what we don’t want is for everyone to go potty and put their own versions on the net. We are a bit more organized than that. So, what we do is agree time, date, focus and language. Our committee actually agrees the wording, drafts the message and designs any graphics to go with it.”

“Sounds like hours of work.”

“Mum, we are campaigners, not academics. We can actually get things done without conferences, hundreds of references and lots of talk.”

“Yes dear.”

Elsie smiled, condescendingly, licked the index finger of the left-hand and drew it through thin air to indicate a score of one being chalked up on her account. “But having agreed on the message, always in very simple language, with recognizable graphics…”

“It sounds like a Covid briefing.”

“The Tories employ professionals, mom.”

“Professionals like you.”

“Indeed. Once upon a time.” There was a hint of both regret of the past and fear of the future in her voice. “There’s no point in inviting people to discuss, to contribute, especially to differ. It’s not the modern way.”

“Dictatorial tactics, punched home by the lowest common denominator.”

“It works. Just ask the Labour Party.”

“You would get a different answer from every person you asked. That’s democracy.”

“That’s losing. And that’s my point. Simplify. Then amplify.” Elsie looked across at her mother, who was finishing her mug of tea with complete concentration. “So, we had agreed a message, text and the rest and it was handed over to me to launch it on Facebook, Twitter, the website, the blog, Instagram and the rest, all exactly the same style with the same message.”

“So, what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“I wish I understood.”

“At our committee meeting, with Geoff Sullivan not present, we did our usual thing, but we all agreed beforehand to leave all our laptops, mobile phones, tablets and the rest outside the room. We agreed that there would be a demo, just a little one, twenty people with banners, placards and the like. And we said we should invite the press. It was to be outside Hackney Town Hall on the Saturday at the end of June.”

“I don’t remember you…”

“Of course, you don’t remember my going to a demo at the end of June. It didn’t happen. That was the point. We agreed it would be a spoof arrangement. I didn’t publicize it. We had agreed. But what I did was prepare the minutes of the meeting, as normal on the day after and describe in detail all the arrangements we had decided. I then sent the minutes out, just like normal. We use a list, a contact list, including all the people we think should know, including journalists, including media people and the rest. Everyone knows that the details of our direct action will appear on Facebook and the rest of social media. So, all the message contains are the minutes of the meeting and details when people should look on Facebook to get the final instructions.”

“I still don’t understand. It’s not clear.”

“Well, Geoff Sullivan, of course, he’s on the contact list, but not on the committee. He received the minutes which described a planned protest on that Saturday morning at ten o’clock. That’s what we discussed in the meeting and that’s what I sent out and he got the message.”

“But you didn’t send out any of the usual publicity, is that it?”

“Exactly. The committee meeting was the week before. I send the minutes immediately afterwards, but normally the publicity goes out just two or three days in advance. It’s our way of minimising the chance of the opposition organising something to undermine us.”

“And this time you never put anything on the social media sites.”

“Precisely.”

“And?”

“The counter demonstration turned up.”

Gemma was rendered speechless. It took her a while to absorb the significance. Elsie let her realize for herself before continuing.

“There were young Tories. White supremacists. Neo-fascists. Self-publicists. The usual crew. But only about twenty of them. We had people watching. They turned up, made some noise, did their chanting. Then, after about ten minutes we saw a couple of the organizers - it was very clear who they were - get on their mobile phones to someone or other. They were expecting to see an Off Uking Palace demo doing its thing and, of course, they were there alone. They were becoming confused because we weren’t there.”

“Because you had not publicized the demo.”

“Precisely.”

Gemma was still unsure. There were still questions. “How do you know that it was Geoff who passed on the information?”

“Our committee, when we made the decision, was just three people. I am completely confident that they are straight and honest. We havebeen together since the start of the campaign.”

“But you sent the minutes out to your contact list…”

“In theory. Geoff received his copy as normal. But I always send those messages in the same way. I send it addressed to myself, and a blind copy to everyone else on the list, about twenty addresses. But this time, I blind copied only to Geoff.”

“So, he thought he had received the usual type of message. And couldn’t tell he was the only one.”

“Precisely.”

“And in fact, he was the only one who received the message. So, it must have been Geoff who leaked the information.”

“Precisely. There was even a little report in the early editions of the local online newspaper, which was up on the site on the Saturday morning, saying that there would be a protest outside the Town Hall. They realized their mistake soon after mid-morning, because the demonstration never happened, and they updated the site to cut the story.”

“How did journalists normally get the information on your activities?”

“Well, we assumed that they read the same social media announcements that everyone else did, after being forewarned, of course, that the messages would appear. If they were on our contact list, they had obviously received notice that the information would be appearing a few days earlier in the minutes of the meeting. At least that’s what we assumed in the past.”

“Except in this case there weren’t any announcements.”

“No.”

“So, it must have been Geoff.”

“Absolutely. And he alerted his contacts after receiving details of the meeting so they could organise. There’s no doubt.”

Gemma stood and took her now empty mug to the sink, where she rinsed it, wiped around the inside with a cloth and then set it down to drain on the plate rack. She dried her hands on the towel that habitually hung folded from the horizontal oven door handle. “Well. I suppose that’s that. No more Geoff Sullivan for me.”

“Mum, that’s exactly what we don’t want you to do. What we need to do is carry on as normal. I will offer him some more bait.”

Gemma looked shocked. “You’re going to sleep with him again? After all this? Feel free. You won’t catch him near me.”

“Absolutely not. Of course, I’m not going to sleep with him again. But I am going to offer him the bait. Let’s do it the same way as before. You tell him you have a meeting at work, so he knows you’re going to be out of the house. I’ll give him the come on just like before.”

Gemma interrupted, looking her daughter directly in the eye. “You really are a very beautiful young woman, you know.”

“I have noticed, Mum! I know how to control certain… activities. Or transactions... I get him to, let’s say, cooperate, just like before. And, at the right moment, when I give you the signal, I’ll say something like ‘Come on’ quite loudly, you come into my room and take a photo of him naked. You throw a tantrum and say you’re going to publish it on the Internet and then we both insist he tells us the full story.”

Gemma spent some moments staring at her daughter. Her expression might have communicated disbelief, but it was clear to both of them that they were way beyond the stage of being surprised by anything. “I suppose you do work in the creative industries… Do you think we will learn anything?”

“It’s worth a try. What else can we do? If we just kick him out, we have learned nothing that will be of use to ourselves or to others. Will you do it?”

“I’ll do it, but I don’t think it will work. At least we will make it clear to him that we have sussed him out.”

Gemma did not immediately respond. She looked across to the gas hob and said, “And what if he is recording all of this? What if he knows what we are planning?”

“Then he won’t take the bait, will he?”

Mother and daughter reacted instinctively to the noise. The front door opened, causing its sprung closure to squeak a loud shriek. “It needs oiling again,” said Gemma as she leaned forward across the table to open her view of the entrance hall. “It’s only Edward, back from his walk. I’ll go and see if he needs anything.”

She was already on her way out of the room when Elsie called out, “Mom, not a word, okay?”

Gemma paused and nodded. The stairs were already creaking as her father began his ponderous trek to the top floor without greeting her.