Page 38 of Antihero
I stare. “Sterilised?” Paige comes immediately to the forefront of my mind. Her face turned away, the heel of her boots thumping on the moss when she told me she couldn’t have children. A ‘medical’ thing. I pull my hand off the table as it draws into a fist. Didtheydo that to her? With the intention of shipping her off to a Tregam brothel? “Okay. How… how many women?”
Spreading her hands, Marion sits back. “Hundreds? Dozens? It wasn’t exactly logged.”
“And you’re sure of this?”
“Harry’s best friend—who died first to the Wraith, by the way—was the connections man on that front.” That must be the other man found dead in his bed. Marion continues. “He picked which girls were to be sent on to the ‘homes’ once they came of age. And Frank facilitated that.” Her lips curls in slight disgust.
“Picking which ones they wanted that done to?” I press. I haven’t taken a note in several minutes. Persona be damned. Marion only nods. I wonder if she’s ever spoken these things aloud before. Perhaps the guilt of silence has been eating at her all these years. Why else would she be so candid? “Did Harry do the sterilisations?”
Marion shrugs, considering. “I don’t know. Perhaps. He specialised in something different.”
“Lobotomies,” I say flatly. I’d hoped that rumour had been just that—a rumour.
Marion meets my eyes, sensing my anger perhaps. “He was a bad man. They all were.”
“No one stopped him? He was asurgeon, claiming to be improving…” I search for the right term, “People’s brains.”
She spreads her hands. “So long as he got another practitioner to sign off on the patient, he could do whatever head treatment he liked.”
“Uh-huh. Why not divorce?”
“Us older generations, we don’t like to divorce. It makes us look bad.”
I lose a little sympathy for her. Until I consider that being married to the man is possibly the only thing saving Marion from his wrath. It would be tough for the ex-surgeon to keep up appearances if his wife was going around with a black eye.
“You’ve heard, I suppose, of Nick Pastryachi’s death?” I ask, naming the late CEO of Eternal Light, the one Paige ‘visited’ after she drugged me.
“Of course.”
“They say there was an opened safe in his home. Documents gone missing, maybe.”
Marion blinks like she didn’t know this. I had to trawl through police reports to see that detail. When she speaks, I can tell she’spurposely keeping inflection out of her tone. “The Wraith has them now?”
“Supposedly.” I spread my hands. “Any idea what might have been in them? He was CEO of the asylum. Could be something delicate.”
With a shrug, falling back into that formal-relaxed exterior she’s clearly perfected, Marion tells me, “It’s almost definitely something delicate. If the Wraith has them, you can expect a lot more murders before this is over.”
I watch her. I was hoping she’d give some indication, drop a name of who might be next. But I can see pressing for that would be too obvious. I sit up straighter and pull the conversation back to my original purpose. Even if everything I’ve learned knocks around in my brain like lead weights, needing to be analysed.
Paige is an ex-patient of the asylum. I know it in my gut. Back when she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Why wasn’t she sent to Tregam when she came of age? How did she escape that? And what has she found in Pastryachi’s safe?
I shake my head, though that does little to clear it. “Can you tell me about the charges against your husband? He seems to have a… pattern.”
She gestures as though ticking off a schedule. “Lure young women back to his hotel room, or home, or dark corner; gets handsy; don't take no for an answer; rough them around, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.”
“There were broken bones in several of the reports.”
“And those are just the reports that were made.”
“The women were very reluctant to speak to me,” I tell her. “Most of them blocked my email, and the number I was calling from.”
Marion takes a deep breath. “Harry… has a vengeful streak. He visited some of them after the failed court case.”
She doesn’t elaborate. She doesn’t need to. He roughed them up, again. I’m starting to think I should havehelpedPaige murder this guy, rather than stopped her.
“He started doing this after he was banned from practicing surgery, I take it?”
“Yes. It has occurred to me that this… violence is a substitute for that.” She won’t say the wordlobotomy. Taking their minds, damaging them. I don’t ask if he’s hurt her as well.
