Finding Arcadia Read online

  The doctors generally advise that such one-sided conversations should be kept light, but banter is not her strong suit.

  “Magnus is acting strangely. Well, more strangely than normal. He says that he has a lead into the connection between the former Headmaster and the teacher whom I knew as Sophia Alderman. You recognised her—and you were surprised to see her at school, and with me. We were supposed to talk about that, and about a lot of other things before—before this happened to you.”

  So much scarlet. So much blood. And not time enough.

  She shakes her head to clear the image and continues: “Meanwhile, I’m looking into a lead of my own. Miss Alderman and Milton once had an argument about a professor. It sounded like this person was a mentor of Miss Alderman, but some kind of rival to Milton. Miss Alderman and Milton both studied at Oxford, though it must have been more than a decade apart.

  “Today, however, we got a new biology teacher at school, Lysander Starr—” Her phone vibrates with a ping and she pauses. A text message from Magnus:

  Dear Aradcia,

  Check your reading position’s OK—Mother always warned you about your posture. Whatever they may have taught you at school, you shouldn’t read under a tree. In strong supply at Oxford, you might want to purchase a reading lamp there. Back for more later,

  Maugns.

  Hardly the most elegantly encoded message, but taking the third, fourth, and fifth words from each sentence produces: “Reading position’s OK. May have taught supply at Oxford. More later, Magnus.” Supply is another term for substitute teacher; Magnus is suggesting that Dr. Starr may well have overlapped with Sophia Alderman—under whatever name—when she studied biology herself at Oxford.

  On her phone she pulls up the website of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading and locates Dr. Starr’s faculty profile. Yet though it indicates that he has been at Reading some fifteen years, he remains an associate professor. Odd.

  “Sorry, Mother. Where was I? Yes, we have a new biology teacher, Lysander Starr. I think he’s connected to Milton and Miss Alderman, but I’m not sure how. Magnus thinks that he might have taught her at Oxford, but without her real name it’s hard to verify. Around a hundred students enter Biological Sciences each year, half of them women. Student files went fully digital with photographs only about a decade ago. For earlier records, you would have to go through the paper files; even then, there’s no guarantee that there would be enough data or a photograph to confirm her identity.”

  A formidable task, but not an impossible one. Magnus’s faith in computers is matched only by his aversion to physical activity. If she contrived to visit Oxford, however, it might be possible to get access to the hard copy files.

  “And she was an actor,” she adds. “Even if the student records don’t provide an answer, there must be some photographic record of her exploits on the stage.” Another possible path. A bad plan is better than no plan.

  “I brought my violin today,” she says, as she always does. “Would you like to hear a little music?” Pause. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  She raises the instrument to her chin and begins to play one of Mother’s favourites: Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. The music fills the small room, hard surfaces causing the sound waves to reverberate and amplify; even a pianissimo note is rich and full. It is a relief to lose herself in the music, her interaction with the world reduced to the harmonics of four vibrating strings.

  At the school concert six months ago she played the same piece. The following weekend they were going to talk; Father said there would be time enough. But there wasn’t. What might they have told her? What would she have said to them?

  As the last note fades, there is a gentle knock on the door. The nurse has been waiting until the end of the piece. How thoughtful. “Visiting hours are over, love,” he says. “And it’s time for me to move Mrs. Greentree here onto her side.”

  Yes, to avoid bedsores. She thanks the nurse and gives Mother a kiss on the cheek, promising to return later in the week. She waits, as she always does, before leaving. In case there is a flicker of recognition, of life. But Mother’s breathing remains steady. A few more moments, then she goes in search of a taxi to return her to school.

  3

  MARSHMALLOWS

  “Package for you, Miss Greentree.”

  Mr. McMurdo, the school porter, strides down the centre of Hall as students take their breakfast. It is not his job to hand-deliver items to the students—they have pigeon-holes in the lodge. But in the months since Milton’s death, the porter has been more proactive in his role, perhaps conceiving his function as pastoral as well as postal.

  Henry arrives in Hall and hesitates, evidently debating whether to sit near her or not. A smile would be too much, but she raises her eyebrows and then looks at the empty seat opposite, before thanking Mr. McMurdo for the package.

  She examines it as Henry browses at the uninspiring breakfast buffet. Cornflakes and an apple are his usual fare. She is confining herself to a cup of what may loosely be termed coffee.

  The packaging is unremarkable: a standard padded envelope purchased from the Royal Mail—traces of mud on one corner. Clayey with some limestone, but she does not have enough information to identify its origin. Her name and the Priory School’s address have been printed on a label. There is no return address and no stamp.

  “Mr. McMurdo,” she calls to the porter. “Did you by any chance see who dropped this off?”

  He turns back to her. “No Miss Greentree, but it were dropped off in the mailbox sometime after midnight ’n afore dawn.”

  She thanks him and gently feels the outside of the package. About a pound in weight, rectangular and slightly flexible. A book?

  Henry sits down opposite her. Cornflakes: check. Apple: check. Two apples? He looks at her cup of coffee for a moment before speaking. “You know, you really shouldn’t skip breakfast, it’s the—”

  “—most important meal of the day,” she finishes the sentence. “Yes, so I’ve been told.” She reaches over and takes the second apple. A small smile.

  “Who’s the package from?” he asks.

  “I’m not sure. No sender’s address and no postmark.”

  Henry takes a mouthful of cornflakes, but still asks: “So what’s in it?”

  “I don’t know. It feels like a book.”

  Another mouthful. “Are you going to open it?”

  The chances of danger are remote, but she takes the Swiss Army knife from her bag and uses the blade to slice open the end of the package. No sign of powder or any odour. Peering inside she sees that it is a kind of book. A familiar one. But only one. She removes the leather-bound notebook and places it on the table.

  “Arcadia, are you OK?”

  Yellowed pages testify to the age of the diary. Her face must have lost some of its own colour. “I’m fine,” she replies. Pauses. “This belonged to Mother. It was in the safe at home. One of three. Tied up together with a purple ribbon. The night she and Father were attacked.” She frowns. “But it was taken afterwards. After Milton had gone, someone else came back to retrieve the cameras. And they took the diaries also.”

  “What cameras?”

  Something else she has failed to mention to Henry. “Two days before Father was killed, someone broke into our house and installed tiny surveillance cameras. Sometime afterwards, after I had taken Mother to the hospital, the cameras were removed.”

  “Who do the police think put the—” He sees her expression and sighs. “Of course you wouldn’t tell the police. Why give them essential facts like that. So who do you think put the cameras there?”

  “I don’t know that either. Mrs. Pike, our neighbour, thought she saw someone break in but couldn’t give a description other than that it was some teenager. He must have been short, because she initially thought it was me.”

  She picks up the package and looks inside it. There is another sheet of paper on which a few lines of text have been pri
nted in an elegant script. She hears Henry’s breathing stop when he recognises it from the device that was strapped to him two days earlier:

  Dear Arcadia,

  Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.

  M

  No code this time: the text is familiar. But what connection does it have to the diary, and to the fake bomb?

  “Arcadia, you have to tell the police about this,” Henry says. “It can’t be a coincidence that this is exactly the same font that was used on that—whatever it was that someone strapped to me.”

  “Fair enough.” She nods, taking a bite out of the apple. “I’ll tell the police—but after I’ve read the diary first.”

  The Priory School is sufficiently small that it is rarely practical to skip classes without detection. So it is only after lunch that a free period enables her to return to her room with the diary for a proper examination.

  She has already established that it is indeed written in Mother’s precise hand, for the most part using a blue fountain pen. What would have been the title page bears only a single letter, a large swirling “A”. She catches her own breath at that. Memories of a steak knife in corkboard holding up another note from Mother force themselves into her head. She pushes them back out again.

  The next few pages are short notes—weights and measurements for the most part, but with brief additional comments here and there:

  2 March 2000—5.6kg, 58cm long, 40.5cm circ.

  Vaccinations #1. Cried at injections.

  30 March 2000—6.3kg, 61cm long, 42cm circ.

  Vaccinations #2. Less crying.

  27 April 2000—6.9kg, 63.5cm long, 43cm circ.

  Vaccinations #3. Glared at nurse the whole time.

  No crying. Nurse visibly upset.

  She was born on 6 January 2000, so these would be monthly check-ups and vaccinations, with weight, length, and—head circumference?

  The first dozen or so pages continue in this vein, ticking off milestones like smiling (“hard to tell if she’s happy or pooing”), rolling over, crawling, and then walking:

  25 December 2000—First steps! Walked to Christmas tree and tried to grab Santa’s sleigh. Pulled down tree but held onto sleigh. Still no words, not even “Ma”, though she clearly understands us.

  Observations about language recur, suggesting anxiety on Mother’s part:

  6 January 2001—First birthday. Still not speaking, though her eyes! They warned me against reading too much into her expression, but she looks straight at you. Like some sort of bird of prey. A hawk? We sang happy birthday—even Magnus sang, bless him—and she just looked from one person to the next. Like she was storing the moment away.

  Who were “they”? There are no names, but passing references point to ongoing interest in her development.

  14 February 2001—Flashcards and more flashcards. I’m sick of the blessed flashcards and know that she is too. The devil take them and their flashcards. Instead we went to the park and played on the swing. Still not speaking, but today she laughed and laughed and laughed. I don’t need to tell him that. That was just for me.

  Specific toys were introduced, with Mother dutifully taking notes on her response. A drum was a particular favourite, and a soft flat rabbit that she would drag around by the ears.

  And on it goes. The notes become vignettes, less frequent but more detailed. Outings and vacations. The purpose seems to shift also, with fewer references to “him” or “them”. A note some months later offers a partial explanation:

  6 January 2002—No more testing. Once a month I agreed to, but not on her birthday! This is getting ridiculous. She’s just a little girl. With Magnus a check-up every six months was all. Now JR would poke and prod her daily if I let them. I won’t allow it. I won’t!

  Who or what is JR? She has no memory of these tests, which must have stopped by her fourth birthday. Few people can recall events before that age. She has read that memories are still formed, but they fade with time. Childhood amnesia it is called, though the ubiquity of photography and video records now substitutes for actual memories.

  Unless the tests merely became more subtle. She flicks ahead to 2004, soon after her fourth birthday. An episode she does recall, though the details are… soft.

  23 January 2004—So today at Arky’s preschool they came in to run a test for all the four-year-olds. Something about marshmallows, they said. Harmless and just about gathering data, they said. Why he has to test all the kids I’m not sure. Perhaps as a comparison? Anyway, I insisted that I was going to be there the whole time and he said fine.

  She has read, years later, about the Stanford marshmallow experiment. Designed in the 1960s, it measures impulse control. Children who are able to resist the temptation of an immediate small reward in favour of a later, more substantial reward, are generally found to be more successful in life. They do better academically, go on to make more money, are healthier, and so on. But the test assumes that they play by the rules.

  It was the same thing they did with Magnus back when he was four. Poor boy ate the marshmallow before they’d even finished the instructions. They tried to explain that he should wait, but every time they put a marshmallow in front of him he ate it before they could tell him the game. In the end he had four marshmallows, so I guess that means that he won?

  She suppresses a laugh. The rules are simple enough. A child is placed in a room with a single marshmallow on the table. If the child can wait for fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow, he or she gets a second one. If the child cannot wait, there is no additional reward.

  Around one-third of children are able to hold out. Hidden cameras sometimes document their efforts to defer gratification, with many of these videos now available on YouTube. Some children savour the treat, smelling it, pretending to take a bite, squeezing and rolling it between their fingers or stroking it like a pet. These are the ones most likely to succumb to temptation, maybe starting with a nibble and then gorging themselves on the sugary treat.

  Others try to ignore it, averting their gaze from the marshmallow, closing their eyes, pushing it away or covering it up. They may come up with strategies of distraction, singing to themselves or simply kicking the table. These are the ones more likely to succeed.

  Magnus’s strategy, such as it was, also succeeded. But surely they should have just withheld the first marshmallow while they explained the rules. In any case, she adopted a different approach. Perhaps by this point she was already sympathising with Mother’s rebellion against the testing regime. Or perhaps Mother was sympathising with hers.

  But my Arky showed them. I’ve still got no idea how she did it. I stood behind the one-way mirror as some graduate student explained the rules and put the first marshmallow on a paper plate in front of her. Fifteen minutes, he said, and she nodded.

  They told me that most kids struggled, fidgeting about and so on. Arky just sat there, looking about the room, at the marshmallow, at the one-way mirror. Finally, at about fourteen minutes she moved, folding up the sides of the paper plate as if she wanted to hide the marshmallow from herself. She fiddled about with the plate in this way for a while until she’d built a little container for the marshmallow and then sat back once more. Waiting. Her lips didn’t curl up but I could tell she was up to something.

  When the grad student went back he congratulated her on being so patient. Then he gave a start and looked back at us through the glass. Stepping to one side so we could see, he straightened out the paper plate—on which there was already a second marshmallow.

  Arky gave a wink—I swear, she winked—and popped them both in her mouth. The grad student shrugged and ate the extra marshmallow he had brought in himself.

  She remembers hearing Mother’s laugh at the time, even through the mirror. That gave her more pleasure than the aerated gelatine and corn-syrup confection. On the drive home Mother alternated between wanting to know how she had done it and seeking to preserve the mystery.
Mother settled on not knowing, but congratulated her daughter on showing that she was not some laboratory rat.

  But is she?

  Further examination of the diary must wait, as the school’s clock strikes and it is time for physical education. She gathers her bag and walks over, but when she arrives at the sports field Mr. Ormiston, Acting Headmaster, is waiting for her. Concern on his face, though not for her. Something or someone else.

  “Is everything all right?” she asks. Clearly it is not.

  “Come with me, please,” he replies, “I’ve spoken with your teacher and you are excused for the period.” His cheek still has a smudge of his wife’s lipstick and he has changed aftershave. Old Spice? He leads her back towards the quadrangle and the staff common room, in which a familiar face is waiting.

  “Constable Lestrange,” she says. “I assume from your uniform that this is not a social call.” The police officer has stood as she entered. “Can we at least get you a cup of tea? White with one sugar, as I recall?” It is hardly her place to be offering refreshments in the staff lounge, but the impulse to do so is strong. Something else for which she should thank Mother.

  So it is Mr. Ormiston who proceeds, awkwardly, to make tea before teacher, student, and officer sit down in a Chesterfield sofa and armchairs.

  “So, how are you doing?” Constable Lestrange inquires, a little too gently.

  “Goodness,” she replies. “The news must be bad if you feel you must approach it indirectly. I’m pleased to see you too, but why don’t you just tell me what’s happened?”

  Lestrange looks at Mr. Ormiston, who shrugs. They have discussed this earlier but only agreed on the outlines of a strategy, which is now falling apart.

  “It’s about Mr. Pratt,” offers the Acting Headmaster. Then pauses.