CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER Page 13

  “Know what I kept thinking of while I was doing the research?” she went on.

  “No idea.”

  “It’s a farfetched comparison, I guess, but… Well, it made me feel like the people who had to evaluate flying saucer sightings. Remember the UFO craze?”

  “Yes, of course,” Peter muttered. “But why?”

  “Why was I reminded? Oh, because I was sifting through a mountain of evidence, determined to dismiss the lot, and kept getting stuck with an insoluble residue.”

  From one bee in the bonnet to another—is that it?

  However, withdrawing his eyes from hers with difficulty and contriving to watch the ice dissolving in his glass instead, Peter said merely, “Well, now we know there’s a chemical basis for schizophrenia—”

  She brushed his words aside with an impatient gesture. “Flying saucer equals weather balloon! Take it as read that I’ve ruled out orthodox forms of mental derangement.”

  “Then environmental contaminants. Extreme intolerance of things like permitted food-colors.”

  “There’s enough in the literature about that kind of reaction to dismiss that as well. You’re clutching at the same straws I did—flying saucer equals Venus or Jupiter! Which, incidentally, I never accepted… No, I’m perfectly serious, though I would rather not be. And before you ask, I’ve also allowed for the fact that I was raised to believe in the unique wickedness of the Nazis but learned enough history later on to compensate. Any more ideas?”

  Peter hesitated a long while before speaking again. At length, reluctantly, he said, “Well, there was a book called The Bad Seed back in—was it the fifties?”

  “You know it!” Claudia almost erupted from her seat. “I’d more or less given up hope of meeting anyone else who’d read it. You have read it? You remember it?”

  “Oh, long ago. There were these teenage girls who committed the most appalling crimes and wrote a sort of diary about them, half fact, half fantasy… Are you on to something like that?”

  “In a way.” She sipped her drink, no longer looking at him. “I was so convinced, you see, that I’d hit on the fundamental explanation for this—this hostility of the younger generation against society. The nuclear family isn’t exactly ancient, you know.”

  “You pointed that out in your book,” Peter countered drily. “You showed how it arose in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was converted into a norm after the Industrial Revolution. You said it was a suitable makeshift for its period, but in the modern age we need something closer to the tribal system we evolved with, in which every child can turn for help to ten or twenty adults, relatives or not, as easily as to its parents. You said the tradition of godparenting recognized this.”

  “And what did you think of my argument?”

  “I have reservations, but you documented it well.”

  Claudia accepted that. After another swig, she went on, “Know how the puky funders got at me? Said I was advocating group marriage, i.e. promiscuity, which is against the Word of the Lord… You don’t look surprised.”

  “Nothing about fundamentalists surprises me any longer,” Peter grunted, and at long last helped himself to his second drink. His intention was to unlock Claudia’s tongue while himself remaining comparatively sober. So far it seemed to be working, but he wished she’d get to the point.

  “If they’d only read the Bible instead of just quoting it—Sorry again. I don’t want to wander off into theology… I still believe I hit on a very important point, don’t misunderstand me. But I was naive enough to imagine it was the whole truth, a perfect solution. And also I’m scientist enough to recognize that a single exception calls a whole theory into question. Right?”

  It apparently being expected, Peter gave a solemn nod.

  “Right! Well, for a while my self-confidence was underpropped by all the letters I was receiving from desperate parents, mainly women but also quite a lot from men, saying they’d been given insight into the reason why Billy was abusing drugs and Nelly was on the streets and Sammy was in jail and… You get the picture.

  “Then”—with sudden renewed intensity—“out of the blue I received quite a different letter. For one thing, it wasn’t from a parent, but from a retired social worker, who had obviously read my book with great care and set out the best-reasoned case against my views that I’ve ever encountered.” A brittle laugh. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t, you know!”

  “What did she say?”

  “Apart from points that other people had already made—only not so elegantly—she insisted that right at the end of a career spanning forty years she had run across a case she couldn’t account for by any theory, including mine, bar the assumption of inborn wickedness.”

  “You took this seriously?”

  “Well, I’d received a good deal of hate-mail as well as letters in support, so for a moment I was inclined to throw it away. But, as I said, it was couched in such reasonable terms that I couldn’t drive it out of my mind.”

  “Did you get in touch with the writer?”

  “I tried to. Unfortunately she had died. Young—only about sixty-five. Nonetheless, what she said went on bugging me. In the end I couldn’t stand it any more. Even that single exception… So I started pulling strings.”

  She sipped her drink again and appended a sour chuckle. “Ah, what it is to have status and renown! Before the book came out I was just another college professor. Once it had spent even a week in the bestseller lists I was famous and influential! I remember when I met you the first time I was contemptuous of publicity and the media. Back then, I didn’t know what advantage I could turn them to…

  “Never mind. The point is that I found I was able to access a whole area of data that I didn’t even know existed until I started digging around. Once again I’d been naïve. I didn’t know, for example, that there were police forces like yours that routinely put not just hard facts but rumor, gossip and suspicion on permanent file. Did I say the letter I was talking about came from England?”

  “No.” Peter was leaning forward now, hanging on every word.

  “Well, it did. So, out of sheer curiosity and—what’s that vivid English-English term for being ornery?”

  “Bloody-mindedness?” Peter offered after a brief hesitation.

  “That’s it! Out of that sort of impulse, anyway, I dug around and discovered I could access some very strange records. Later on I’ll tell you exactly how, but for the moment I’ll just say they are police files. They’re—well, I guess the term would be ‘on the back burner.’ But they do open them, now and then, to attested social researchers. With the appearance of my book, I’d turned into one. Bless the growser who put my name on the list!

  “And that was how I found out that there were at least ten cases that to all appearances totally undermined my dogmatic assertions.”

  And, again, a generous gulp of whiskey. Afraid she might overdo it to the point of passing out before she finally let him in on her secret, Peter said, “Are your findings on the disk you brought?”

  Claudia had been briefly brooding. Now she roused with a start.

  “Yes! And a lot more. As soon as the power comes on again—”

  Which it did, as though she had rubbed a magic lamp.

  After a pause to make sure it wasn’t a false alarm, she rose and returned to the computer. Peter made haste to follow, for fear that she might have grown clumsy. But she appeared totally in control as she booted it and tapped a succession of commands into the board. There was a security code that took a long while and considerable accuracy to enter; she got it right first time.

  And for the next hour Peter could not tell whether he was being let in on the ground floor of the most important newsbreak of his life, or lured into the mazes of a deluded fanatic’s dream.

  In the country town of Marshmere, where many people still found it possible to maintain an illusion of prosperity despite Britain’s economic decline, Richard Gall, branch manager of the County and Co
nsolidated Building Society, was a respected figure. So was his wife Edna. He was a Mason and a member of the golf club; she was a school governor and active on charity committees. They lived in a medium-sized modern house on the outskirts of the town. He drove a Renault—distinctive but not inappropriate—and she a second-hand Mini. Their acquaintances regarded them as an ideal couple.

  Mary Gall knew different. They never quarrelled in public, but she wasn’t “public.” That was how she had come to find out that she was not her father’s natural child. During one of their recurrent rows, when she was twelve, she had heard Edna hurl the fact at Richard, reminding him of all the humiliation she had undergone—endless medical examinations, internal inspections, the final coldly clinical process that he had insisted on—and winding up with a barrage of comments about his inadequate masculinity.

  At which point the doorbell rang, and instantly they were their usual affable selves.

  Mary pondered that for a long time. At last she understood why her mother was so often moody, why she drank too much, why she smoked in spite of knowing how bad it was for her health. She had no clear idea of the “process” Edna had been obliged to undergo, but by making some discreet inquiries of the biology teacher at her school—which was not the one of which her mother was a governor—she contrived to assemble a fairly accurate picture.

  And started to plot her revenge.

  Precisely why it was so easy, she never worked out. She only knew that, quite recently, she had become able to influence her parents to the point where she could stop their quarrels in mid-spate, though they generally resumed again after she had gone to bed, where she lay listening and trembling as they traded insults.

  Gradually resolve hardened in her mind. But it was two months before she put her plan into effect, and over a year before it reached its long-awaited climax. She was a patient child; she rarely took a hasty decision.

  Especially in truly significant matters.

  She already knew a certain amount about Richard’s occupation. Her first step was to find out more, until she was sure that her idea was feasible. For a while after discovering he was not actually her father she had behaved coldly toward him, but soon enough she realized this was counterproductive, and began to play up to him. Indeed, for a time she went too far in the opposite direction, so that Edna accused her of taking sides. After a while, though, she established the proper balance.

  Then, directly after the auditors had made their annual visit to the local branch of the building society, she started asking Richard to…

  Asking?

  No, that wasn’t quite right. It was more like persuading, except it wasn’t such hard work as persuading. It was a matter of gentling herself into the proper frame of mind, finding the right words and tone of voice, and then watching the outcome. She didn’t always succeed, but she soon learned when and guessed why not, so she avoided the days when she felt her talent to be unreliable.

  At the right moment, though—wow!

  Stretching her patience to the maximum, she waited month after frustrating month before springing the trap she had set for her not-father. The temptation to hurry was atrocious, but she resisted it until three months before the auditors were due again: a gestation period.

  Thereupon she “persuaded” Richard that his family ought to own a better car. That was how the Jaguar arrived. Next came the move, on short notice and a long mortgage, to a bigger house, costing twice as much as the old one, with a tennis court in the back garden. (At this point Edna grew worried—but Mary calmed and reassured her.) Then there was the booking for all three of them on a round-the-world luxury cruise. Mary was a smidgin regretful that it wasn’t actually going to happen… Later, maybe. At the moment she was intent on her revenge.

  So there followed the expensive home computer, and the TV camera, and the state-of-the-art CD player complete with a library of records to play on it, and a brand-new Citroën to take the place of Edna’s Mini, and—and—and…

  By the time the auditors arrived half the town was asking, “How does he manage it?” By the time they departed the entire town was asking, “How did he expect to get away with it?”

  Because, of course, he didn’t. Thanks to manipulation of the building society’s financial records via his home computer, which stupidly took no account of the master records held at head office, half a million pounds of other people’s money was missing from his branch, of which two hundred thousand had vanished heaven knew where.

  And Mary.

  To the police, and later at his trial, the only defense Richard had to offer was a whimpered excuse.

  “My daughter made me do it!”

  Sitting in the courtroom at her own insistence, calm and incredibly mature of manner most of the time, Mary turned to her mother and clutched her arm, demanding, “How can he say such dreadful things?”

  Everybody heard her, including the judge and jury, just as she had intended. Though the judge reproved her for speaking aloud, it was clear he shared her attitude. He sentenced Richard to five years.

  When they reached home Edna broke down in tears, looking at the magnificence of their new house.

  “It’ll all have to go!” she whimpered. “God knows where we’ll wind up! We’re going to be homeless!”

  “No, we’re not,” Mary said composedly, dropping into one of the drawing room’s splendid brocade armchairs.

  “What do you mean?” Edna stared at her.

  “You’ve got plenty to pay off the mortgage.”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense! I’ve got the little bit—”

  “The little bit Aunt Minnie left you,” Mary interrupted. “I know! You’ve told me about it enough times. In fact it’s not so little, is it? If we decide to stay here, it will be sufficient to survive on. We can run a car, though it’ll have to be another Mini, I suppose, not a Jag—”

  “Mary, you are talking nonsense! The interest on the mortgage alone—”

  “I told you! It can be paid off!” Mary threw her head back and laughed joyously. “And at last we’re free of that horrible man who put you through such torture to have me, and quarrelled with you so incessantly!”

  Lately she had grown fond of unusual words, and taken to deploying them in conversation when the chance arose.

  “Mary!” Edna was leaning over her. “I can’t possibly repay our mortgage!”

  “But you can,” Mary sighed. “You have two hundred thousand pounds. It’s in a bank in London. In your name.”

  “What?”

  “One of these not-quite-respectable licensed deposit takers,” Mary amplified. “But I made sure it was reliable, if not respectable, before I picked it.”

  “You mean that’s where…?” Edna’s voice tailed away through a whisper to a breath.

  Mary rose briskly and embraced her mother. Her power of persuasion operated better at close quarters. She had often had to sit on Richard’s lap to make it work.

  “So what? He always said he wasn’t being paid as much as he was worth. So we can stay here if you want to, or we can move somewhere else… Are you angry with me?”

  And the power worked. A moment later Edna was cuddling her and crying, not from anger, but from joy.

  You’re watching TV Plus. In a moment, Newsframe.

  Farmers marching on London from the East Anglian dustbowl, who reached the capital this afternoon, have accused the police of politically motivated brutality. Many claim they were beaten up because they weren’t wearing the red-white-and-blue ribbons lately adopted by supporters of General Thrower.

  The Throwers themselves…

  “First I’ll explain how I established my residue,” Claudia said as the computer screen displayed a directory of the disk’s contents. “This being a whole-hog kind of evening… I originally intended to start my analysis in the States, but they’re a lot stricter over there about access to criminal records, and besides you have to deal with hundreds of separate police forces. A friend of mine in our criminology de
partment suggested I try mousing into Interpol via the British police. I didn’t expect it to work, but I had a stroke of luck. There was an international conference on police use of computers in New York, so I went to it and chatted up one of the British delegates, a chief superintendent. And he happened to have run across just the sort of case I had in mind.

  “What’s more he’d read my book. He was the right kind of cop: seriously interested in his work. I don’t know how he swung the deal, but a few weeks later I got a letter to say that he’d arranged for me to access your PNC through a filter that would automatically disguise the identity of the subjects I inquired about. At that stage, I was here.” She tapped a command and the display changed to show a table of crimes in alphabetical order. There was a number against each. Most were in the three-figure range, but a few attained four.

  To demonstrate interest Peter said, “Those are the total cases of each type of crime?” And, on her nod: “Hmm! You set yourself quite a task, didn’t you? How many altogether?”

  “Six or seven thousand. But I didn’t have to analyze them one by one. The way things had been set up, I could eliminate the cases that didn’t concern me.”

  “Using what criteria for exclusion?”

  “Oh, drug abuse, alcohol or solvent abuse, formal mental derangement—the sort of thing you already mentioned. And I set parameters for the kind of home background that conduces to violence. Want to be walked through the lot?”

  “Not unless you think it’s essential.”

  “Good. I’ve stared at this display so often, sometimes I feel I’m just not seeing it any more.” She keyed another command. Peter noticed that any effect the whiskey had had was no longer discernible.

  “One thing you’ve got to understand is that I didn’t want to find anything. I was convinced that my original idea was sound, and I was only doing this out of—well, you might say a sense of duty. Like a guy in a lab running all the experiments he can think of that might disprove his favorite theory.”