‘I was too young to realize what was really happening, but a few days before the operation I started getting very clear visions. I knew with absolute clarity that if I went in for surgery there was a good chance I wouldn’t survive it. As I said, the odd flash of precognition. I told my parents, but of course they didn’t understand. I was only seven years old after all. They knew I was prone to flights of fancy, as my mother liked to call them. So the operation went ahead.
‘The procedure was routine. The surgeon operating had performed hundreds of tonsillectomies; he could have probably operated them with his eyes closed. But this time it went wrong. In the final stage of the operation, complications developed with the anesthetic. My heart failed and for several minutes they had to fight to revive me. For those minutes I was clinically dead. They brought me round, of course, but things were never quite the same again.’
‘In what way?’ Jane said. He had never told her this before.
‘It was as if my powers shifted up a notch. The precognition intensified; I started displaying signs of telekinesis, and I also started to see and hear people who were supposed to be dead. The visions were very clear, and sometimes very frightening.’ As he pulled out a cigarette and lit it, Jane noticed his hands were shaking. He blew a plume of smoke up at the ceiling. ‘My mother was something of a crank. She belonged to a Spiritualist church and used to go to regular meetings. When she realized what was happening to me, she called in the church elders, who confirmed that her son really was something very special. After that she embraced my new powers with something like an evangelical zeal. Suddenly she had something of value to offer her church; a currency that she could use to raise her standing, so she started to take me along to the meetings.
‘Not long after that the circus began. Slowly at first; she’d get me to give clairvoyant readings to the other members of the church and, though I say so myself, I was pretty damned accurate.
‘But it was my father who saw the potential for making money out of it. He’d always been something of a wheeler and dealer, always on the lookout for a way to make a buck. He was like that up to the day he died, and I think even then, with death staring him in the face, he was still looking for some kind of angle on it; some way to turn it to his advantage. Well, to him I was like the proverbial goose laying golden eggs. And the next ten years were a blur of séances, readings, palmistry…you name it, all organized by him. Thanks to me they lived very well for a decade. The money poured in and I became something of a celebrity. TV talk shows, radio interviews. Little Bobby Hinton, the psychic wonder.’ He didn’t try to disguise the bitterness in his voice.
‘Hinton?’ Jane said.
‘Carter’s my mother’s maiden name. I adopted it when I decided I’d had enough of living under a microscope. I grew to hate being treated like a performing seal. I knew instinctively that I’d been given this ability for a higher reason and I was sure it was not to be prostituted.’ He paused. ‘Christ, that sounds pompous, but that was genuinely how I felt.
‘When I hit seventeen I left home. My father was very ill by then, and I knew he wasn’t going to last much longer. Mother had been uncomfortable with the commercial side of things for a long time — it didn’t sit well with her religious beliefs — but she was too afraid of my father to say anything. He was a bully, and he had a terrible temper. When I told her I wanted to leave home she was upset, but supported my decision. It was tough for her, knowing that her husband only had a short time to live, but she put her feelings on the back burner for my benefit. I’ll always be grateful for that.
‘I left home, changed my name, and set about finding ways to use my gift to help others rather than turning a profit.’
‘So what happened next?’ Jane said, probing deeper. In the years since they’d first met she’d never known him to open up like this. She was seeing a completely different side to Robert Carter; a softer, more vulnerable side. It made a refreshing change.
‘I’d had enough of England so I went to America. I’d heard about a research center in Kansas dedicated to exploring psychic phenomena in a totally scientific way. It was an antidote to all the Spiritualist mumbo jumbo. When I arrived I met others with powers similar to my own, and I had a chance to talk about them, to explore ways to use them. For the first time in a decade I stopped feeling like a freak, a sideshow turn. The three years I spent out there were the happiest time of my life.
‘I’d heard of Simon Crozier, and was aware he’d recently taken over for Sir George Logan at Department Eighteen. Walt Whitney, the director of the Institute, was a friend of Crozier’s and put my name forward as a possible candidate for the new regime. The picture Whitney painted was very attractive so I flew back to England to meet with Crozier. I can’t say I liked him — still don’t — but the idea of the place intrigued me enough and I found the invitation hard to resist. It was everything I’d been looking for. I knew there were only a handful of people in the world who had the same kind of psychic range as me, and so did Simon Crozier. Of course, by inviting me to join the Department, he was pandering to my ego and I let him. But for a long time, working there, I felt I was doing something worthwhile with my life.’
‘Until Sian disappeared.’ Jane began to understand why it had hit him so hard.
‘Yes.’ He ground out his cigarette.
‘And as I said before, you can’t blame yourself for that.’
Carter swallowed the dregs of cold coffee. The bitterness of the coffee was mirrored in his words. ‘That’s the problem, you see. I can and I do, because I knew something terrible was going to happen that day. Just as clearly as I knew I was going to die on the operating table when I was seven years old. I knew even before I entered the house that there was something awful waiting just over the threshold. Something that would change my life forever. But I thought that what ever was going to happen would happen to me. I just didn’t foresee it happening to Sian. I should never have taken her along. I should have gone alone.’
Jane said nothing. She got to her feet abruptly and walked to the door.
‘Going?’ Carter said. ‘You’re probably as disillusioned with me as I am with myself.’
‘It’s a long drive back to London.’ She paused, her hand on the latch. ‘Yes, I’m going, but no, I’m not disillusioned with you. Quite the reverse. I shouldn’t have come here. It wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t fair of Simon to ask me.’
‘When do you leave for Scotland?’
‘There’s a briefing first thing Thursday morning, then we’re flying up to Aberdeen.’
‘I see.’ He lit yet another cigarette. ‘Why did you and David split up?’
The question jolted her. ‘I can’t even begin to get into that one,’ she said.
‘It was the job, wasn’t it?’
She hesitated, and then nodded her head sharply.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It has a habit of ruining lives. Take care, Jane.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and let herself out of the house. As she walked to the car, a single tear seeped out from her eye and rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away impatiently with the back of her hand and got in behind the wheel, then drove away from the cottage without looking back.
She’d gone no more that five miles when her cell phone rang.
She punched a button. There was a brief silence, then Carter said, ‘Where are you?’