CHAPTER 10
‘How did you track the kidnapped boys to there, Sharma?’ Ella was asking. ‘I mean, is it like following a scent or something?’
‘It’s like following a trail of fear,’ Sharma said. His usually quiet voice was quieter than normal, and sombre. ‘It’s not consistent. There are breaks in between. But in places the boys would find familiar – like the local swimming pool or the gates of the high school, where one of the boys’ elder brothers go – there is an imprint, as though the boys have reached out and clutched at something that feels safe.’
Franz felt a chill go through him. He realized, more than before, that Sharma was exposing himself to suffering on a level most people took trouble to avoid.
‘So how did that lead you to Ladbroke Grove?’ Ella asked.
‘It got harder, the further away the boys were taken from their own surroundings. The police have a witness who saw a child in a car hammering on the window and mouthing something then being pulled back, but the car then went on to a roundabout and she couldn’t see which exit it took. I drove around in the police car till I got an imprint.’
‘Where was the imprint?’
‘A McDonald’s drive-thru. It must have been the last familiar sign they saw. After that, the trail disappeared. I got out of the police car and walked the streets for four hours.’
‘You’re not going back today, are you? Stay here and rest,’ Ella said.
‘They may be asleep, or drugged, Ella. If they wake up, their fear will be intense and they may fasten on to some object or some place that will help me identify where they are. I need to be in the vicinity.’
‘Can we do anything to help?’ Ella asked.
‘You can pray for me,’ he said. ‘If you pray?’
‘Sort of, sometimes,’ she said. ‘I’m not very good at it. I can ask someone else to pray for you, if you want.’
‘Please do,’ he said. ‘I need all the help I can get.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘And we’re here for you if you want to take a break. Any time.’
‘I appreciate that. Thank you.’
Ella gave a quick sideways glance at Franz then asked Sharma, ‘Do you pray, then, Sharma? What do you believe?’
‘I believe in God,’ he said. ‘One God, who is for everyone.’
‘Were you brought up to believe in God?’ Ella asked.
Franz stood up and started clearing food away.
‘I grew up asking questions,’ Sharma said. ‘My father was Hindu and my mother was Muslim. Both their families disowned them for marrying. Their love for each other was perceived as a lack of love and respect for their families and a rejection of their families' gods.'
‘Did they both go on practising their religions?’ asked Ella.
‘They couldn’t, except privately. They were both rejected by their communities. They prayed at home, in their different ways. My mother always fasted for Ramadan and both of them would take us somewhere to celebrate Diwali. Out of respect for my mother, my father didn’t keep a shrine at home but he made one in his office.’
‘And the family didn’t eat either beef or pork,’ said Ella, understanding.
‘No.’
‘It must have been hard, to see your parents rejected by their communities,’ Ella said. ‘Didn’t that put you off religion?’
‘Does anyone want coffee?’ asked Franz. He filled the kettle and the noise of the tap made the conversation pause.
‘Not for me, thank you, Franz,’ Sharma said. ‘No, it didn’t put me off religion, Ella. God is still God, whatever people do to him. It put me off prejudice. I can’t support the idea of a God who likes some of the people he made and rejects all the others.’
Ella nodded. ‘My mother was the only child of orthodox Jewish parents who wanted her to marry a rabbi. At sixteen she skived off school to go to a rock concert and found her true vocation as a groupie – starting with a forty-year old rock musician who preached cannabis and free love.’
‘Her parents disowned her?’ Sharma asked.
‘No. They constantly tried to contact her, throughout my childhood. They would have loved to have grandchildren to spoil, no matter how they had arrived in the world. No, it was her who disowned her parents.’
‘Did you ever get to know them?’
‘I met my grandmother once, after my grandfather died. My mother didn’t go to the funeral but she dropped in to visit her mother for half an hour afterwards. We were made very welcome,’ Ella said with sadness in her voice. ‘We liked her.’
‘You and your brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about you, Franz?’ Sharma asked.
They both looked towards him. He was leaning against the kitchen cupboards waiting for the kettle to boil, reading a section of the Sunday paper that Ella had left on the worktop. He had obviously switched off from the conversation.
Sharma stood up. ‘I must go,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your hospitality.’
Franz came back to them. ‘How are you getting back there, Sharma? Is the police car picking you up?’
‘No. They received a tip-off that the boys had been sighted in Battersea so they are watching a house in that area now.’
‘Is that where you’re going?’
‘No. I will go back to Ladbroke Grove. It’s where the boys are. I think this tip-off may have been made by someone associated with the kidnappers, to draw the police away from where they are keeping them.’
Franz gave a silent whistle. ‘You can be that sure?’
‘Sometimes I can’t see anything at all,’ Sharma said. ‘But when I see, I am sure. This time it is clear.’
‘Can the kidnappers do anything to hide the boys – from your seeing them, I mean?’ Ella asked. ‘You said it had gone silent, this morning. Is that because they’re asleep or drugged, as you said, and not sending out any signals for help, or could it be something the kidnappers are doing? Can someone confuse the signals, kind of?’
‘That can happen,’ Sharma told her. ‘One sign of the influence of evil is confusion. Another is apathy. The person trying to see what is happening can become tired and overwhelmed. They want to do something positive but they find they can’t think straight and they lose motivation. A lot of police investigations get dropped just when the police are getting somewhere, and the officers themselves don’t know why they’ve given up suddenly or lost interest.’
‘That’s quite scary,’ Ella said. ‘You mean, mind control?’
‘All evil is about control,’ Sharma said. ‘Control of the environment or resources, wealth, people. Even positive things, like making people feel good about themselves, can be motivated by a desire to control.’
‘Rebellion?’ said Franz.
Sharma looked at him and nodded.
‘Why rebellion – where does that fit it?’ Ella asked. ‘Rebellion against what?’
‘Against God, ultimately: people doing what they decide is a good thing, without willingness to be stopped if God has another way of doing it.’
‘But then if there’s no God there’s no rebellion,’ Franz said, ‘and people are free to make up their own minds about what is good or not, rather than being pawns in some divine scheme for them.’
Instead of answering, Sharma shook his hand and then, rather awkwardly, hugged him. ‘Thank you for your kindness, Franz. I value your friendship,’ he said. ‘And Ella.’
Ella hugged him as Franz went to fetch Sharma’s coat.
‘Sharma,’ she said, ‘will you let me give you some money? Don’t say no, out of pride.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not out of pride - Franz gave me two hundred pounds yesterday, so I’m fine. Thank you, Ella.’
The empty wallet, Ella thought. The day after he went to the cashpoint. He took out two hundred pounds and then gave it all to Sharma. She felt a mixture of relief and guilt at having doubted him. But then if there wasn’t another woman why was he going to Ireland? Without her?
‘I’ll walk with you
to the station, Sharma,’ Franz told him, coming back with both their coats. ‘And you will phone if you need anything? You’ve got your phone on you?’
‘Yes. I will ring and let you know how things are going.’
Franz let Sharma go out of the door ahead of him. He turned back and looked at Ella and knew what she wanted to ask him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If you want to. Go and see Jan and Phil and ask them to pray for Sharma, if you think it will do any good. Or even if you don’t.’
When he came back from walking Sharma to the station, Ella had gone. Franz started to wash up the plates but sleep and dizziness overwhelmed him. He sat down on the sofa in the corner and fell into a heavy sleep.
When he awoke it was almost dark and he couldn’t, for a moment, think where he was. Ella had been gone for a long time.
Franz tried not to think about her and Jan and Phil together. He thought about Sharma walking alone through dark streets in a part of London that wasn’t his home territory and about Sharma’s inexplicable mode of perception, seeing or sensing things that no one else could.
From there it was a short step to thinking about Sharma’s vision of Franz walking alone in a dark place, with some sinister figure walking behind him, who would make the wrong decisions in his name if Franz didn’t make them for himself. He stood up and switched on the lights.
To distract himself from picturing all The Healing Place’s personnel as potential stalkers and enemies, he flicked between channels on the television and when he found nothing distracting enough, he tried out a few programmes that Ella had recorded.
He watched ten minutes of the documentary she had told him about, in which hospital patients were monitored for positive responses to complementary therapies, in comparison with patients who were given none, then he fast-forwarded to the conclusion.
The doctor who had initiated the experiment had a personal interest in complementary medicine and had been keen to prove its value. She admitted to being perplexed by the results. The patients felt wonderfully relaxed, she said, but their rate of post-operative infection and complications was exceptionally high. When pushed for a conclusion, by the narrator of the documentary, the doctor said the experiment would have to be repeated, with more patients and more specific parameters. Nothing could be concluded at this stage, except that the current results had not been what she expected.
Typical waffle, thought Franz. Sitting on the fence, neither one thing nor the other. It justified his approach at The Healing Place: let people believe what they wanted. Most things could be proved or disproved to the satisfaction of those who wanted to believe or disbelieve them, and today’s scientific certainty was only certain until some newer scientific proof proved the opposite.
He thought about what Ella had told him about Luciferianism, or whatever the guy had called it. Their philosophy didn’t sound too unlike Franz’s own dislike for moral absolutes. The guy would probably try to persuade him, as most of the would-be guides did, that he and Franz were on the same wavelength and in total agreement over the fundamental principles of whatever it was.
Franz thought he might find it difficult to convince this Leroy that his own views did not coincide with his. Franz had voiced very similar views in his time, convincing rival proponents of enlightenment and health that ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ were outdated concepts and everybody had their own valid ‘truth.’
He had referred to people’s beliefs as ‘myths’ and stressed that this was in no way a derogatory term but a neutral one, while knowing that myths, by definition, were mythical and that this was a sophisticated way of inferring that truth didn’t enter the frame, in anyone’s belief system.
He did not want to recognize himself in Leroy Watson and certainly did not want to admit something as sick as satanism into The Healing Place. He had recognized something of himself in Phil, who believed that wrong and right were as different as night and day, and he had not wanted to be associated with him either, with something as personally distasteful to him as Christian morality.
He would like to know what Phil might say to this Leroy guy. It would be like listening to two sides of Franz himself arguing with each other. He wondered if he could engineer a meeting between them, while he stayed neutral and observed them. Sitting on the fence.
Sharma’s words returned to him. He couldn’t sit on the fence: he would have to make decisions for himself, if he didn’t want someone else – someone who would topple him into a place where no one could rescue him – to make those decisions for him. And Sharma had quite confidently used the words 'wrong' and 'harmful' about the decisions that other person would make.
Could the other person be the Luciferian? Or could it be Phil? But in the dream Phil had been standing on the far side of the ravine on solid ground, with Ella – not walking behind him making the tightrope shake under his feet.
He would have to decide whether to admit Leroy Watson’s way of thinking into his own thoughts and whether to let these people have a place at the next forum of The Healing Place and let results speak for themselves. If he claimed it was a religion, Franz could reject it on the grounds that The Healing Place didn't do religion. But if Watson claimed it was not a religion but an ancient alternative to it, would the seekers go for satanism?
Yes, probably, if it had another name and appealed to seekers' self-interest. After all, spiritualism, outmoded and discredited as it had been, had resurrected itself under different names and forms and was popular with those who believed it was new. Among other things, seekers who came to The Healing Place were seeking novelty.
Could Franz, with his philosophy of tolerant inclusion clearly spelled out in The Healing Place’s constitution and written policy, go against all his stated principles and keep this Leroy Watson out, on the basis of nothing more than an instinct that everything he stood for was harmful, not only to the seekers but to The Healing Place and to Franz himself?
Or would Franz give Leroy and his Luciferians a foothold in The Healing Place, in the name of his own reputation of fairness and consistency and probably cowardice? Would he say nothing and let this unknown force of evil-good-reversal into the programme of his institution and the fabric of his life, and take the consequences?
The decision was his and his alone. He would have to take it in his own name, with his own authority, or else this Leroy Watson – if he were the man on the tightrope - would force it on him, quoting Franz’s name and enforcing his own policy against him.
Undoubtedly, Franz thought, he was becoming paranoid. A trip to Ireland, even if nothing like a holiday, might actually achieve a worthwhile purpose in getting him out of The Healing Place for a while. Alternatively, he could take a real holiday somewhere else. But that would be running away. Events were catching up with him. Going with the flow this time, rather than trying to keep control, might actually take him in a direction he wanted to go.
Either that, or he would lose everything.
No, there was no other option. He would go to Ireland. Time was running out. The cracks were widening. He would make a decision and go, in his own name.
And he would tell Ella everything.
Though maybe not just now.