I caught Farrell’s eye and he had the grace to nod.
I opened my mouth to speak, but she said, ‘Not here,’ and we set off for her office where I repeated my request to be allowed to check his background, credentials, anything they had on him.
‘You don’t have to,’ she said bitterly. ‘I can tell you everything you need to know about Alexander Knox.’
Having said that, she fell silent again, staring at her desk. We sat quietly. You couldn’t rush her. After a while, she looked up and said with a half-smile. ‘If you want this chronologically, it’s hard to know where to begin.’
‘We’re the guests,’ I said. ‘We’ll start if you like.’
I gave her almost everything. Knox. The Red House. His lack of background. The coincidence of the surnames. She listened in complete silence, her face was expressionless.
Eventually, silence fell again. We waited. I made myself be patient. There was more here than I knew.
She pushed herself back from her desk a little and clasped her hands in her lap. In a voice carefully devoid of any emotion whatsoever, she said, ‘Dr Alexander Knox is our missing Director.’
Chapter Thirteen
At first, I couldn’t grasp it at all. I had wild ideas of him being cast adrift in time, making a home and a life for himself with The Red House. But no, St Mary’s was only just up the road. He only had to bang on our door. Was he suffering from amnesia perhaps? Being propelled precipitately through time can sometimes do funny things to the human brain – and it’s not as if the brains at St Mary’s were particularly normal to begin with. Then, because the mind assigns strange priorities, I thought – I didn’t escape from The Red House at all. He let me go. Oddly, this made me hate him more than ever.
Everyone was looking at me, obviously having reached the correct conclusion long before I did.
‘He ran away,’ I said slowly, trying to imagine how the unit would feel if Dr Bairstow had abandoned us when we fought Ronan at Alexandria. I remembered how, when we were planning the mission to rescue the Chief, he had said he wouldn’t abandon St Mary’s; how his first duty was always to his unit.
Still no one spoke. I stopped talking and did a little more thinking.
‘No,’ I said eventually. ‘He sold you out. Ronan had so few men your kitchen staff could have dealt with them. Knox gave them information; entry codes, security protocols – everything they needed to get in, grab the pods, and get out. But Knox underestimated his own unit, though. Hawking was defended almost to the last man, buying you the time to get the pods out of his reach. Seeing it all go wrong, Knox disappeared with… Number Seven … and the wherewithal to start a new life. In our time. What a bastard.’
Chief Farrell stirred. ‘Actually, I think it’s worse even than that. It’s maybe no coincidence he’s not far from St Mary’s. I’ve often wondered about Sussman. He loved you. He hated you as well, at the end, but in his own way, he loved you. There never seemed any good reason why Sussman did what he did, but suppose Knox got to him. Suppose Knox got to Barclay. Not to destroy St Mary’s, but Barclay did an awful lot of damage in the four months she was Director.’
This just got worse and worse. Davey Sussman, my one time partner, had pushed me off a cliff in the Cretaceous Period. He’d subsequently come to a bad end. A very bad end. Maybe he had been working for Alexander Knox. And Barclay, who had left four men to die; who had sacked me and whose performance as Caretaker Director had nearly finished St Mary’s. Had she been working for Alexander Knox? With Ronan? Suddenly, it was all coming together.
Dr Bairstow had sent us to The Red House in all good faith. Knox could probably hardly believe his luck when we turned up. I felt hot with shame when I realised how easily he’d manipulated me. In less than one hour he’d thrown me off balance and caused me to question the fundamentals of my own life. He’d gone straight for my weak spots. That I was still at St Mary’s was a miracle. That the Chief was still there was only because the Boss refused to accept his resignation. Knox wasn’t Ronan – he didn’t kill – what he did was even worse. How much damage had he quietly done to St Mary’s over the years? And I bet he’d provided a base for Ronan and his crew whenever required. In fact, that was an interesting point. Who worked for whom? Knox was clever – Ronan was ruthless and driven. Which of them called the shots? I remembered the ravine outside Alexandria and the good people who had died there. A slow burn started deep inside.
I looked up. Everyone’s faces said the same.
I said, ‘What do you need?’
She said, ‘Co-ordinates. An idea of The Red House layout. As much information as you can give me. And a date when the two of you have unbreakable alibis.’