‘Good morning, Luke, good morning, Phoebe,’ he said.
Both shot him a cursory glance as if he was some minor irritation, then looked back at the screen.
‘Like any breakfast?’
Luke raised a hand, signalling with it for him to be quiet, to stop distracting them. John stared at him, unable fully to take this in. His three-year-old children were sitting in front of the television, at six o’clock on a Sunday morning, utterly engrossed by a man talking about halogen gas.
He backed out of the room and went through to the kitchen to make some coffee, deep in thought. Just how bright were they? Had it been them accessing his computer and taking over his previous chess game with Gus Santiano – and beating him?
They were going to have to let the psychologist carry out tests on them, for sure. And he was going to need to discuss with Naomi about sending them to a special educational facility. There must be places that were not residential, where they could just take them each day, and still have a family life with them outside of that – doing fun family activities with them, such as learning about the molecular structure of halogen gas together.
He filled the kettle and switched it on. Then he spooned some coffee into a mug, and took a bottle of milk out of the fridge. Something felt strange; it seemed too quiet in here, a sound was missing. There was a distinctly unpleasant smell, he suddenly realized, as well.
Bad meat.
He wrinkled his nose, opened the fridge door and sniffed. Just fridge smells – nothing bad in there, nothing that had gone off. He closed the door, sniffed harder, puzzled. He checked the freezer door as well, putting his nose close to the trays, but there was nothing bad there either.
The kettle rumbled louder, then clicked off. He poured boiling water into the mug, added milk and stirred it.
Then, turning round with his mug in his hand, he saw it.
The mug slipped from his fingers, hit the floor and shattered, spraying china fragments and scalding coffee everywhere. But he barely noticed. His eyes were riveted to the floor, to the two sheets of newspaper that had been placed beside the guinea pigs’ hutch.
On one sheet of newsprint, amid a stain of dried blood, Fudge was laid out on his back, paws in the air, his midriff slit open from his neck to his tail, his internal organs placed in an orderly row beside him. On the other sheet of paper, Chocolate lay similarly opened up and eviscerated.
For an instant, his thoughts wild and ragged, John wondered if a cat had somehow come into the house and done this. But walking over, and peering closer, he realized that theory was a non-starter. A small pile of coiled intestines lay beside each; their kidneys, livers, pancreas, hearts, lungs, were laid in matching rows. The tops of their skulls had been removed with surgical precision, and their tiny little brains placed beside their heads. Some of the organs had been cut in half very cleanly, and the intestines sliced open in sections.
He turned away in revulsion, feeling very distressed, his mind in turmoil. Such sweet little creatures, so friendly, it had been such a treat to watch Luke and Phoebe playing with them, kissing them, caring for them. Who the hell had done this?
Who on earth would have wanted to do this?
The inevitable was in his mind, but he was refusing to accept it. He just wanted to clear this up, get rid of it before Naomi saw it; she wouldn’t be able to handle this. He didn’t want Harriet seeing it either, nor Naomi’s mother. No one.
Opening the cupboard under the kitchen sink, he pulled a black bin liner off a roll, opened it out, then carefully picked up each of the news sheets in turn, holding his breath against the smell from the intestines and stomach, folded the paper and placed it in the bag. Then he knotted the bag, took it outside, put it in one of the dustbins and replaced the lid securely.
Back inside, he was shaking. He cleaned up the mess of coffee and broken china as best he could, then went over to the living room and opened the door. The television was switched off and so were the lights. The twins weren’t there.
He went upstairs to see if they were back in their bedroom, and when he reached the top, he noticed a glow of light from the box room. Walking swiftly down the landing, he pushed open the door. The children’s new computer was on, and he saw a web page was up on the screen. He knelt to take a closer look.
It was a page from Gray’s Anatomy, the dissection bible of all medical students. It illustrated a section of a kidney that had been cut open, with a list of points for observation during a postmortem.
82
John went for a run, feeling very distressed, trying to think clearly and make some sense of what had just happened. Should he have grabbed hold of the children, taken them down to the dead guinea pigs and shaken sense into them? Would it have done any good?
And, just what the hell had driven the children to that website? And to do what they’d done?
It was a clear, cold morning. Frost glinted in the early sunlight and glazed puddles crunched beneath his running shoes as he made his way along a rutted cart-track up into the hills.
Halfway up he stopped for breath and looked back down across the vast sweep of the valley, at the farmhouses, roads, lanes, the clock tower of a stately home on the ridge of a far hill. It was half past seven on a Sunday morning, and most people hadn’t risen yet; there was a stillness in the air, almost preternatural. Somewhere, a long way off, he heard the bleat of a sheep. Then just as far off, the bass lowing sound of a cow. High above him up in the sky he could see the vapour trail of a jet heading out towards the Channel.
He could see their own house, looking tiny, in a direct line between himself and the village church. Everything looked tiny from here. Like some kind of toy-world. Miniature fields, miniature sheep, cows, miniature houses, barns, cars, roads, lamp posts, traffic signals, steeples. So small, so insignificant.
Guinea pigs were small and insignificant, too. Their internal organs were tiny, little specks, some of them, you really had to look quite hard to tell what they were. And yet…
No life was insignificant. There were insects you might kill, like mosquitoes, because they were a threat – or a wasp in your babies’ bedroom, or something dirty and uninvited, like a cockroach, and there were wild animals you had to kill because they were a threat to you or your farm, or those you had bred for food and you were going to eat them.
But to kill them out of curiosity?
Sure, in labs. Fruit flies, mice, frogs, all kinds of creatures were dissected in the name of education, in the name of medical research. In order to learn, creatures were killed all the time. That part he had no problem with – not that he had ever liked seeing anything dead, but there was an arguable reason there.
And in truth, casting his mind back to his own childhood, there had been a time as a young boy when he had shot at wildlife with a catapult. Then one day he’d hit a sparrow and killed it outright. He’d watched it drop from its perch onto the grass. He’d rushed over to it and saw beads of blood in its beak. Held its warm body, tried to make it stand up, moved its wings, trying to make it fly away and be better. Then, crying, he’d put it back up in the tree to keep it safe from the cat. Hoping it might get better and fly off.
But it was still there the next morning, cold and hard, like feathers glued to a small rock. Ashamed, he’d carried it into the woods, scooped out a shallow grave with his bare hands and placed a stone and leaves on top of it.
It was normal for children to kill animals, he knew that. It was part of growing up. One of the rites of passage. Probably something to do with the exorcizing of dormant hunter-gatherer genes. But could he have ever killed a pet? Something he’d nurtured, cared for, cradled in his arms, played with, hugged and kissed goodnight, the way Luke and Phoebe had with Fudge and Chocolate?